Wisdom’s Fire, Radiant and Unfading. Part VIII: From Adam to the Theotokos

Part VII-1 Part VII-2

What was wounded by sin, human unity,
Did not overcome the plan of Divine Sophia:
Seeds of truth sowed by the divinity,
Brought forth the greatest of fruit: Holy Maria.

Sophia is entirely justified in her children.
The righteous of humanity, such as Abel, Job,
Moses, Jeremiah, Siddhartha, Socrates, and John,
All point to the coming of Christ on the earthly globe.

Created Sophia has continuously sought for the holistic unity and perfection of creation. Sin brought chaos, division and suffering into the world. Two significant events in the history of creation have been the falls from grace by angels and by Adam. The effects of the first were meant to be corrected by humanity; created Sophia, working in cooperation with the Divine Sophia, brought about the creation of humanity – and humanity was meant to act as a priestly mediator, uniting the spiritual and physical realities with God, correcting the damage done by the angelic fall. Instead, humanity also turned its back on God:

And as it were becoming insolent through satiety, he preferred what appeared delightful to the fleshly eyes to the spiritual beauty and considered the filling of his stomach more valuable than spiritual enjoyments. And immediately he was outside of paradise and outside of that blessed way of life, becoming evil not by necessity but from thoughtlessness.[1]

Because of the place humanity had in the great chain of being, Adam’s fall further wounded creation, causing even more chaos and suffering in the world. Neither created Sophia nor Divine Sophia were done with creation; and more importantly, neither were done with humanity. Both sought, in their own way, to help heal humanity, to raise it back up so that it could perform its priestly duty. “We know, however, that the Fall of Man could only postpone and not annul his vocation.”[2] Created Sophia, of course, was unable to perfect humanity – created Sophia knew she had to open up and wait for the response of Divine Sophia; but every response Divine Sophia gave, created Sophia used, leading to improvements not only in humanity, but to the rest of creation as well. Created Sophia could only use what Divine Sophia gave, but created Sophia would do so quite effectively. She knew something of God’s plans; she could guess at God’s intent to divinize creation through humanity, and so she set out to follow through and to help make this possible. But she knew it would take more than her doing; she did not know what Divine Sophia would do (the incarnation), but she knew she had to push and direct creation so that, when Divine Sophia engaged the world, the world was prepared. The history of humanity before the incarnation is the history of that preparation. It was the time in which humanity was educated, learning what it needed in order to properly appreciate the incarnation:

Because man fell before his fall was well equipped with knowledge and power, God promised a time of the law of nature in which he should be conquered by ignorance. Afterwards man knew his ignorance but as to his power there remained a pride about which it is said that he who acts does not lack power, but he who orders lacks it. Then, God added a law, teaching with moral precepts and prescribing ceremonials so that when man came to knowledge and knew his impotency, man fled to divine mercy and sought grace which was given to us before the coming of Christ. [3]

It was also during this time that we find humanity was slowly worked upon by God, where a special portion of humanity, Israel, was taken and used by God, to slowly work upon and develop a righteous branch in which the incarnation could take place. “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets;  but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Hebrews 1:1-2 RSV). The author of the Hebrews, looking to the past, understood that the history of Israel was tied to the Gospel. God spoke in various ways by the prophets; the prophets preached righteousness to the people, especially to those in charge of the people, pointing out the connection between social injustice and sin. The prophets worked for the righteousness of Israel.

Nonetheless, God, being a God of love, did not abandon others, but also sent people to them, preparing them for the gospel as well. Jesus was the expectation of the gentiles as much as he was the expectation of Israel, though how they expected him, and what they expected of him differed because of the more different way God worked with them. Philosophy, as St Clement of Alexandria pointed out, could be said to have been given to the Greeks by God. Therefore, philosophy should be respected, even if philosophers themselves engaged it imperfectly and held false opinions:

Accordingly, before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. “For your foot,” it is said, “will not stumble, if you refer what is good, whether belonging to the Greeks or to us, to Providence.” For God is the cause of all good things; but of some primarily, as of the Old and the New Testament; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring “the Hellenic mind,” as the law, the Hebrews, “to Christ.” Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.[4]

The parable of the sower was seen as indicative of God’s work in the world:

Listen! A sower went out to sow.And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold (Mark 4:3-8 RSV).

God had planted seeds of truth throughout the world. They were taken in by various peoples, leading them to better themselves as long as they followed what God had given to them—where it was taken up, where it was good ground, something good came of it. This is not to say, later, there could not have been any regression; clearly, as in the history of Israel, so in the history of the world – humanity could slip away from the good God had given them and fall into grave error. The truth, in one form or another, was given out to the world, and those who followed it were understood to be followers of Christ, even if they lived in history before the advent of Christ:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably.[5]

Nicholas of Cusa in his work De Pace Fidei picks up this notion and points out how God sent to the world, to the different nations prophets, law givers, and religious leaders who helped establish great spiritual rites. They were, in a sense, teaching one and the same religion, because all that had been given to them was from the one Truth:

You will |all| find to be everywhere presupposed not a faith that is other but a faith that is one and the same. For among the countrymen of your own language-groups, you who are not present are called wise – or, at least, |are called| philosophers, or lovers of wisdom.[6]

Of course, we must understand that their comprehension and knowledge of that religion was imperfect, and it was only in the incarnation can the fullness of truth be revealed. Indeed, much of what was revealed in the nations outside of Israel was sown on bad soil.[7] Wherever there is wisdom, wherever there is truth, there the Word is present.[8] Thus, the spiritual progress of humanity, found throughout the world with its great philosophical and religious treasures, must in some way connect humanity to the Word, preparing them for the advent of Christ. Divided, humanity started forming new bonds of unity: from families, to tribes, to cities, to nations, humanity was forming itself along treasures given to them by the Word:

While the disintegrated and scattered elements of the spiritual and natural body of humanity were thus re-assembling under the action of the historic Word into the partial unities of rudimentary churches and states, the soul of mankind, repeating at a higher level the stages of the cosmogonic process, was developing its efforts to enter into an ever more intimate union with the Spirit of the eternal Wisdom.[9]

They were stages of reintegration, where fallen humanity was shown it cannot remain divided against itself, but must rather once again form a united, integral humanity:

Spiritual energies are held back hereditarily and accumulate, and diverse clans represent as it were condensers of these energies. From the outside it can even seem that they determine entirely by themselves the individualities that come under their influence. On the contrary, owing to the principle of pre-established harmony, they are themselves determined by those who bring energies with definite qualities into the world in their free self-determination, but who find for their realization an appropriate means or body for their own incarnation.[10]

It is for this reason we can find various means of grace offered to the different peoples of the world. Israel was given a special portion of grace, was given special rites which helped reinforce the righteousness God desired to be formed in their midst. But others, too, were given grace by God: God loved humanity and did not abandon them.[11] Of course,  this was a mixed affair. Bonds which united two people could be used to reject others, and the truth which was given to one was often used to ignore the truth given to another. Because the truth was planted in imperfect spiritual soil, it was often tarnished and corrupted. Aspects of truth given to one nation or another were cut off from what was given to other nations, allowing it to be perverted and turned upside down. Demonic powers and selfish authorities limited themselves and the nations under their control to the truths and limited aspects of the truth and good given to them, leading to great spiritual holes capable of being used for great spiritual corruption and evil.[12] Nonetheless, the desire for a religious faith was itself a good:

It is agreed upon, therefore, by the general consent of all mankind, that religion ought to be undertaken; but we have to explain what errors are committed on this subject. God willed this to be the nature of man, that he should be desirous and eager for two things, religion and wisdom. But men are mistaken in this, that they either undertake religion and pay no attention to wisdom, or they devote themselves to wisdom alone, and pay no attention to religion, though the one cannot be true without the other. The consequence is, that they fall into a multiplicity of religions, but false ones, because they have left wisdom, which could have taught them that there cannot be many gods; or they devote themselves to wisdom, but a false wisdom, because they have paid no attention to the religion of the Supreme God, who might have instructed them to the knowledge of the truth. Thus men who undertake either of these courses follow a devious path, and one full of the greatest errors, inasmuch as the duty of man, and all truth, are included in these two things which are inseparably connected.[13]

Often spiritual truths given in one generation became encased with secondary rot, leading to new spiritual leaders overturning earlier spiritual traditions with some new, greater application of truth, with the greatest example of this being the work of the Buddha in India:

For a moment India through its ages had acted as a national organ of the universal soul of mankind, in perceiving the vanity of natural existence and freeing itself from the bonds of blind desire. The thought and feeling that possessed Buddha and his disciples when they affirmed that the Absolute is not anything, that it is none of all the things that exist in Nature, was in fact a universal act of the soul of mankind, which was bound to pass through this negative truth before conceiving the positive idea of the Absolute.[14]

What made the Buddha so great was his inward turn, and his demonstration of how our suffering was, in effect, our own fault: it was founded upon our egotistical desire to control the world, to seek our pleasure for ourselves without understanding the consequences of our actions. His religion was the apophatic religion, of monasticism and self-denial, and it is in this sense a “negative religion:”[15]

The negative religion – the universally-historical expression of which is expressed by Buddhism – understands the unconditional beginning as nothing. It is indeed nothing, for it is not something, it is not any definite, limited being, or a creature among other creatures – for it is above any definition, because it is free from all. The freedom from all being (the positive nothingness), however, is not the deprivation [loss] of being (the negative nothingness). The actual, positive freedom of an entity presupposes its dominion, a positive force or power, over that from which the entity is free. Thus, for instance, one cannot say about a child that he is free from passions or that he is above passions – he simply does not have them (and in this respect he is below them); only he can be considered to be free from passions who has them but holds them in his control, who dominates, but is not dominated by, them.[16]

Nonetheless, even in this apophatic development, we must not forget the truths of the past and the full revelation of truth in Christ:

The difference in the stages of religious revelation does not at all imply untruths in the lower stages. The reality of the physical sun reveals itself in different measures to the blind, to the one who sees, to the one who is armed with a telescope, and finally, to the learned astronomer who possesses all the scientific means and aptitudes.[17]

Buddhism, and its monastic discipline, has opened the way for humanity to transcend itself, to overcome itself in order to attain unity with the divine. It is following universal truths in its own unique fashion; it provides to us Christians a great tradition which must not be rejected, insight which we must equip ourselves with, if we want to attain the fullness of truth. The Church is the pillar and ground of the truth, and so religious truths, wherever they are found, must fit in with the Church and not be denied by it.

While we must acknowledge that God was at work with people outside of the Covenant of Israel (as even Scripture indicates with all kinds of holy pagans being mentioned in the Tanakh),[18] we must also see that there was something special being done by God with Israel. Israel was chosen as the vessel for the incarnation, and so Divine Sophia, working with created Sophia, set Israel aside and slowly developed the Israeli people, and a family line, in which righteousness could be accumulated and lead to the point in history when the incarnation could take place. St Symeon the New Theologian sees Israel as a kind of “rib” taken from Adam, set aside, and lifted up so as to produce the second Adam, Christ:

When He had thus scattered them throughout all the earth, He assigned an angel guardian to each portion. Now, consider with me exactly how all things are foreknown by God and predestined from the beginning of the world and of the ages. For, because He had fore-ordained their recreation in a new birth, God, when He took the one portion, the rib, from the one body of Adam, and after He replaced the part taken with flesh, He built up the rib into a woman, just so, after borrowing this portion from Adam’s body and replacing it with other flesh, what He had borrowed became His portion and was no longer reckoned as belonging to Adam’s body. Instead, it was the Lord’s portion, outside of Adam’s body, although it had been taken from him and was akin to him. Therefore, He did not assign an angel as guardian to this portion but, in the manner of a tutor for a son or like a general for a people or an army, He gave them the Archangel Michael. God, however, remained their protector and overseer, and so He called them “Israel,” that is, the intellect which contemplates God[19]

The genealogies of Christ are, in this fashion, an outline of the process through which a perfected humanity was slowly recreated; just as before Adam, the evolutionary processes were used by created Sophia in order to produce humanity, so the social processes were used by created Sophia to help lead to an accumulation of righteousness in humanity so that human purity could be restored. Obviously, as with the first case, so with the second, God’s work was needed in order to approve and supplement the work of created Sophia: the immaculate conception, a grace given to the Theotokos, was outside of what created Sophia could accomplish; with the immaculate conception, Divine Sophia accepted the work created Sophia had done. “The summit of human ascent in the stock of ancient Adam, which was impaired by original sin, is reached in the Mother of God.”[20]

The family of Christ, therefore, is a holy family; his ancestors are the holy ancestors, venerated every year before the Nativity of Christ. The Theotokos is the greatest woman who ever lived, while there were no men born, through the natural processes of procreation, greater than John the Baptist:

In harmony with the firm and clear consciousness of the Church, John the Forerunner already approaches such personal sinlessness. The most holy Virgin Mary, the all-pure and all-immaculate, possesses such sinlessness. Only by virtue of this sinlessness was she able to say with her entire will, with her whole undivided essence, behold the handmaid of the Lord, to speak so that the answer to this full self-giving to God was the descent of the Holy Spirit and the seedless conception of the Lord Jesus Christ. The smallest sin in the past or the present would have broken the integrity of this self-giving and the power of this expression. This word, decisive for the whole human race and the entire world, was the expression not of a given moment only, but came out of the depths of Mary’s unblemished being. It is the work and the sum of her life.[21]

Created Sophia, cooperating with Divine Sophia, directed humanity in producing two remarkable humans, each representing something special about humanity, and both, in their uniqueness, nonetheless do not point to themselves but to Christ, who was to restore Adam and allow humanity fulfill its mission in creation. Mary, the Theotokos, the one who was to be the Mother of God, had a destiny above all others, higher than all of the angels, while John was but to be the messenger, an angel of the Lord – indeed John, in his own fashion, unites the angelic realm with the human:

His nature represents a mystery that cannot be fully fathomed in this age. But it has been manifested and partially unveiled. Was this union of the angelic and human worlds accomplished at his birth, or is it a consequence of his heavenly glorification? There is no answer. But one can consider it established that the boundary between these two worlds was abolished at the moment of the Incarnation, and this abolition was one of the consequences of the Incarnation. These worlds were united in the person of the Forerunner, who thereby became not only a being who, as an angel, surpassed man, but also a being who, as man, surpassed angelic being. Therefore, his presence before God is loftier and closer than that of any other created being, whether angelic or human; and he approaches the place where only the Mother of God, “more venerable than the cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the seraphim,” abides. No one but the Mother of God stands closer to the Lord than the Forerunner.[22]

John’s angelic nature, Bulgakov points out, explains his placement on the iconostasis (as well as the wings found on his icons).[23] He, like the Theotokos, finds himself on the eucharistic chalice, indicating his own special status with the eucharist.[24] Mary provides the world Christ’s human flesh – flesh of her flesh is taken up and becomes the flesh of the Godman. John, on the other hand, represents the unity of the heavenly hosts with the earth, of humanity with the angels. As the whole kingdom of God surrounds us in the celebration of the eucharist, John’s presence on the eucharistic chalice presents to us the fullness of the divine kingdom, of angels and humanity humbly rejoicing before the throne of Divine Sophia.  One could say what the Buddha represented and pointed to was the work and mission of the Baptist, who represents the summit of humanity before Christ: “The Forerunner no longer as a life of his own. He is entirely the friend of the Bridegroom, entirely outside of himself.”[25] We must make ourselves less, we must overcome ourselves, die to ourselves in the world in order to find ourselves by the side of Divine Sophia in the heavenly kingdom. Those who humbled themselves, those who died to themselves, were the ones who became the greatest of humanity. This is as it should be because humanity, itself in the image of Divine Sophia, must follow through with the kenosis found in Divine Sophia in order to share in the glory of Divine Sophia. The history of humanity before Christ was the history of spiritual growth and preparation for the Christ, for the Godman who can do that which Adam could not, that is, heal the world from the corruption of sin. It is to the incarnation, and its Sophianic element, which we must now turn.