In this perspective, man was a noble participant in God’s creative unfolding. In his alienation from God the least happy of creatures, man could yet play the central role in repairing the riven state of creation and restoring its divine image. The Logos had descended into man so that man, by participating in Christ’s passion and now containing the Logos himself, could ascend to God. Because Christ had freely given himself to man and fully experienced the humiliation and weakness of the human condition, he had given to man the capacity to share in God’s own power and glory. Hence there was no limit as to what man’s future in God might become. In the doctrinal formulation of the fourth-century theologian Athanasius, the ideal of human deification found in Paul and John was made explicit: “God became man in order that we become God.” In the light of the evolutionary deification heralded in the New Testament, all the historical traumas and devastations, the wars and famines and earthquakes, the immeasurable sufferings of humanity, were comprehensible as the necessary birth labor of the divine in man. In the new light of Christian revelation, mankind’s labors were not in vain. Man was to bear affliction, Christ’s cross, so that he could bear God. Jesus Christ was the new Adam who had initiated a new humanity, evolving new powers of spiritual awareness and freedom that would be fulfilled in the future—but the divine was already gloriously immanent and active in man and in the present world.
Dualistic Christianity
Paul warned, however, that the exultant element in Christianity, though valid in itself, could easily lead to negative spiritual consequences should its stress swing too far away from Christ and toward man, away from the future and toward the present, away from faith and toward knowledge. Such a distortion he perceived, and hastened to correct, in certain “enthusiasts” or proto-Gnostics among the early Church congregations he had helped found.
In Paul’s eyes, their beliefs and moral behavior revealed the dangers of a too-exultant interpretation of the Christian message, which could thereby degenerate into a sinful overestimation of the self, an irresponsible indifference to the world and its still-present evil, and an inflated elevation of personal spiritual powers and esoteric knowledge over love, humility, and practical moral discipline. Christ had indeed commenced a new age and a new humanity, but these had not yet arrived, and man deceived himself if he thought anyone but God could effect that sublime transfiguration whose full reality still lay ahead. The world was pregnant with the divine and was in the throes of labor, but it had not yet given birth. Although Christ’s activity was already present in man, Paul’s own persecutions and personal sufferings (his “thorn in the flesh”) were evidence that fulfillment lay in the future, and that the true way of glory was the way of the cross. One must suffer with Christ to be glorified with Christ.
Paul especially combated the enthusiasts’ tendency to lose what he regarded as the proper balance between the religious aspirations of the individual and those of the larger Christian community. For to lose that balance was to lose the essence of the true Christian gospel. Their assertion of an already realized personal redemption in a world that clearly remained unredeemed could lead to spiritual elitism, to licentiousness in behavior, even to denial of a future collective resurrection because personal resurrection was already deemed present. Human hubris, rather than divine compassion, was the effect of such teachings. It was necessary for man to know his limits and his faults, and to put his faith in Christ. For the present, the true Christian’s mandate was to labor with his fellow believers in building up a community of love and moral purity worthy of God’s glorious future. Joy in what had already been experienced through Christ was in order, but so too was moral rigor, personal sacrifice, and humble faith in the future transformation.
Thus Paul taught a partial dualism in the present to affirm a greater cosmic unity in the future, lest a premature claim of redemption now preclude the greater salvation of the world later. These corrective teachings by Paul were supported as well by the religious vision contained in the three Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. As a group, and in contrast to the Gospel according to John, these narratives tended to emphasize Jesus’s humanity, his historical life and suffering, and the satanic dangers of the present time prior to the apocalyptic end time, with less of the Johannine sense of Christ’s spiritual glory already suffusing the present age. The perspective expressed in the Synoptic Gospels therefore encouraged an intense anticipation of divine activity that would relieve the trials of the present time, and suggested a more critical opinion of man’s present spiritual position. Such a view lent itself to a dualism between the present world and the coming Kingdom of Heaven, and between God’s omnipotence and man’s helplessness. That dualism, however, was mitigated by God’s gift of the Spirit to mankind, and would soon be overcome altogether with Christ’s Second Coming.
Yet, paradoxically, that dualism was enhanced and given a different significance by certain elements of John’s Gospel, the last of the four Gospels to be written (near the end of the first century), and the most theologically developed. Since the Second Coming did not arrive as soon as the first-generation Christians had expected, the dualism that had an anticipatory form in the Synoptics took on a more mystical and ontological dimension under the influence of John’s Gospel. The Johannine vision was permeated by the theme of light versus darkness, of good versus evil, a cosmic division that was readily applicable to a dualism between spirit and matter which concretized and reinforced the distinction between Christ’s transcendent kingdom and the world under Satan. Although John’s “realized eschatology”—his teaching that the salvational end of history was already being actualized in the wake of the resurrection—affirmed man’s present participation in Christ’s glorification, this was increasingly understood as a spiritual participation that transcended the material world and the physical body, which thereby became irrelevant to the redemptive process and even inhibitory. Such a mystical and ontological dualism was supported and amplified by the Gnostics, as well as by the Neoplatonist stream within Christian theology, and was further confirmed by the continued historical delay of the Parousia. But while for the Gnostics esoteric knowledge was thought to mediate that transcendence, and while for the Neoplatonists mystical illumination could do so, for the larger mainstream Christian tradition, which had anticipated the Second Coming as the necessary solution, that mediating role would be fulfilled by the ongoing sacramental Church.
Thus John’s Gospel affirmed a present unity of Christ and believer, but at the expense of an implied ontological dualism. Moreover, despite the fundamental Johannine proclamation that “the Logos became flesh,” the sheer magnitude of luminous divinity possessed by the Christ of John’s Gospel—portrayed there in glory as the exalted Lord from the beginning of his ministry—seemed to far transcend the present potentialities of all other human beings, and consequently tended to highlight the spiritual inferiority and darkness of the natural man and the natural world. It would be the Church that would fill that gap, as the numinous representation of Christ’s continuing presence in the world and the vehicle of humanity’s sacramentalization. The Johannine Christ was opened to man’s being in a mystical way: those who obeyed his commandment of love and who knew him as the Son could participate in his unitary relationship with the transcendent Father. But this special relationship was viewed in contrast with the rest of those who were “of the world,” thereby establishing another division—as the Gnostic elite were distinct from the irredeemable majority of mankind, or the enlightened philosopher was distinct from the unenlightened, or, most broadly for the Christian tradition, those within the Church were distinct from everyone outside it. This division sustained and strengthened that tendency throughout the Old and New Testaments to view salvation in terms of an elect minority of believers who alone were dear to God, and who would be gratuitously saved from the masses of a mankind that was by nature opposed to God and destined for damnation.
It was this general trend—an unusually potent and dura
ble compound of the anticipatory view of redemption found in the Synoptic Gospels, Paul’s moral admonitions, and John’s mystical dualism, with all these combined with the continuing impact of pre-Christian Judaic themes, the delay of the Second Coming, and the requirements of the developing institutional Church—that encouraged the other side of the Christian vision, the character of which in the long run would significantly redefine the primitive Christian message. With a moderate shift or intensification of emphasis, the same Gospels and Epistles that together proclaimed the exultant Christian message could lend themselves to another synthesis of strikingly different hue, especially as the historical context changed and cast a different light on the revelation. At its root, this understanding reflected a heightened sense of the divisions of existence—between God and man, heaven and earth, good and evil, the faithful and the damned. Here was stressed the corruption to which both man and this world had succumbed and, in consequence, the transcendent divine activity necessary to save human souls. On this scriptural foundation, and on the basis of their own experience of the present world’s negative condition and their own spiritual longing, devout Christians focused their attention more exclusively on the future and the unworldly, in the form either of the promised Second Coming or of a Church-mediated redeemed afterlife. In either case there resulted a pronounced tendency to negate the intrinsic value of the present life, the natural world, and humanity’s status in the divine hierarchy.
Only God’s intervention could save the righteous remnant of mankind, an intervention that in the first generations after Christ was expected to take the form of an apocalyptic irruption that would end history. Such an expectation was possibly encouraged by Jesus’s own words concerning the imminence of such an event, although he was also reported to have discouraged calculations concerning its precise timing or details. In any case an urgent anticipation of the end time was then widespread among Jews and other religious sects critical of the evil contemporary world. But after several generations had passed without such an apocalypse, and especially after Augustine, salvation was seen less in such dramatic historical and collective terms, and more as a Church-mediated process that could occur only through the institutional sacraments, and could be fulfilled only when the soul left behind the physical world and entered the celestial state. Such a salvation, like that of the apocalypse, was perceived as due entirely to God’s will rather than to human effort, though it required that the believer during this lifetime strictly conform his actions and beliefs to those sanctioned by the Church. In both instances, man’s positive role was diminished or negated in favor of God’s, this world’s value was diminished or negated in favor of the next, and only a scrupulous conformity to specific moral principles and ecclesiastical regulations could preserve the believing soul from condemnation. The struggle with overwhelming evil was of paramount concern, making the authoritative activity of God and Church mandatory.
On such a basis most Christians, and the ongoing Christian tradition in the West, while acknowledging in principle much of the exultant unitary conception, in practice subscribed to a form of Christianity that was more static, circumscribed, and dualistic. The cosmic dimension of primitive Christianity—humanity and nature as the progressive bearer of Christ, history as an emergent process of the birth of the divine in the world—was attenuated in favor of a more dichotomized conception. In the latter view, the ideal Christian was conceived as an obedient and relatively passive receptor of the divine, whose presence could be fully known by the human soul only in a radical break from this world—variously understood as taking place through an externally effected apocalyptic Second Coming, through ascetic monastic withdrawal from the world, through the sacramental mediation of an unworldly or anti-worldly Church, or through a fully transcendent, extramundane salvation in the afterlife.
In this sense it could be said that much of Christianity was still waiting for its redeemer—not unlike Judaism, though now with a more afterworldly emphasis. Here the spiritual significance of Christ’s Second Coming, or Christ’s coming to the soul after death, tended to outweigh that of his first coming, except as the latter initiated the Church, provided teachings and a moral example, and brought hope for a future salvation. As regards the first coming, the suffering and crucified Jesus, bearing humanity’s guilt, tended to displace the triumphant resurrected Christ, bearing humanity’s liberation. For the world itself appeared to have undergone little essential change or divinization. Indeed, it had crucified God when he had become man, thus further defining its sinful fate. Humanity’s hope lay in the future, in God’s transcendent power, in the afterworld, and, for the present, in the bulwark of the Church.
Thus all the “immanence” of God’s Kingdom was now contained in the Church. Yet that Church was perceived as decisively against the world in which it existed, or rather with which it was forced to coexist. On a deeper level, the immanent dynamism of the “new man” and “new creation” that had characterized the primitive Christian awareness was here transformed into an eager longing for an afterworldly newness, a radiantly celestial future, an entirely transcendent illumination. The present world was an alien stage, the relatively static context into which man had been placed at creation and within which he was to work out his salvation via the Church. That salvation, in turn, would consist in man’s being taken up by Christ into heaven, where his earthly imperfections would be left behind. As destitute and depraved as was the present world, so much the more exalted would be the happiness of the redeemed condition in paradise. Painfully aware of their own sinfulness and the world’s grave defects, most faithful Christians conscientiously devoted their efforts to preparing for such an afterworldly salvation, spurred by the belief that only a few elect would be saved, while the vast majority of corrupt mankind would meet perdition.
In this perspective, the idea of human deification became either meaningless or blasphemous. The human contribution to the salvational enterprise was limited, and the nature of that salvation was defined less as assimilation to God and more as ecclesiastical justification and inclusion in God’s heavenly court. The believing Christian was not so much made divine like God as he was made righteous in God’s eyes, freed from his personal and hereditary guilt. Here the Christian concept of man’s nobility and freedom as God’s greatest creation, made in God’s own image and exalted by Christ’s uniting of divine and human, was largely overshadowed by the sense of man’s unworthiness and absolute spiritual dependence on God and the Church. Man was an intrinsically sin-permeated being who had willfully set himself in opposition to God. Hence his will was impotent against the evil within and outside him, and his salvation lay solely in the possibility that God might mercifully overlook the believer’s culpability, viewing his own Son’s death as atonement, and save the believer from the damnation that, like the rest of mankind, he genuinely deserved.
Because God’s action alone was spiritually potent, human pretensions to heroism of the ancient Greek type could be viewed only as reprehensible vainglory. It is true that for many primitive and later mystical Christians, one could participate in the heroic to the extent that one directly participated in Christ, the indwelling principle of universal divinity. Such a view often underlay the testaments of martyrs in the early Church. Yet to later mainstream Christianity, that ultimate heroism typically lay beyond human capabilities altogether. In this perspective, Christ was an entirely external figure, whose historical manifestation in Jesus was unique and whose divine heroism was absolute, in comparison with which human beings were at best indebted creatures, at worst wretched sinners. All good came from God and was spiritual in origin, while all evil derived from man’s own sinful nature and was carnal in origin. Here the ancient dualism was virtually as absolute as before the birth of Christ, and the tragic image of the crucifixion served to reinforce the sense of schism in the universe between God and man, and between the present life in this world and a future life in the spiritual world. The Church alone could bridge that gre
at hiatus.
The existence of these two radically different though intertwined modes of experiencing Christianity reflected a similar dichotomy within the Jewish faith, the continuing influence of which in this respect constituted an additional factor in the evolving Christian world view. The highly developed Judaic sense of the divine and its potency was complemented by an equally acute sense of the profane, the idolatrous, and the insignificance of the merely human. Similarly, Israel’s special relationship to God, and special historical responsibility for carrying out its mandate to renew God’s sovereignty in the world, gave it a consciousness not only of its unique spiritual importance, but also of its all-too-human failure and guilt. In the spirit of Zoroastrianism’s cosmic dualism of good and evil, but with the historically consequential difference that it was man’s fall that caused the cosmic fall rather than vice versa, the biblical tradition placed on man’s shoulders a moral responsibility of universal dimensions. God’s Chosen People were both exalted and burdened by their special role, and God’s image varied accordingly.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 18