Читать книгу 1 John - L. Daniel Cantey - Страница 5

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

The sentry, decked out in full colors and bearing the seal of his king, gazed at the old man from across the doorway. The latter squinted at the visitor. He stood leaning over his cane, his face wrinkled, his hands hardened by labor.

“I do not mean to impose on you, sir, but the hour is late, I come from another land, and I seem to have lost my way. Will you show me hospitality by allowing me to stay for the night?”

“Of course. Please come in,” said the old man, who was overjoyed to entertain a guest affiliated with wealth and station.

After dinner the two fell into conversation. The old man asked about the royal way of life, its comforts, its delicacies, and its esteem. He also asked about the customs of the distant land, trying to discover how they differed from his own. For much of the night the man prodded the sentry to divulge all he could about his affairs, and the guest obliged.

The sentry then inquired about the old man’s way of life. “I have lived humbly,” replied the man, describing the difficulties and joys of the peasantry. “Now I am old, burdened by fatigue and wounded flesh, stooped with an injury that follows me like a shadow of death. But I am most troubled by the loss of my sight, which has faded in recent years and makes my getting around more dangerous. I wish that I could see with the clarity of my youth. I could at least then enjoy the world around me and make my way more safely.”

The sentry smiled. “I believe that I can help you with this desire of yours,” he said. “My king employs many sorcerers, and they have lately developed a weapon meant to counter death and suffering and empowered to give life. I carry this weapon with me as a part of my errand. Would you like to see it?”

The old man responded skeptically that he would like to behold this weapon, if its powers were true. The sentry then removed a cloth from his blouse, unwrapping it to reveal a double-edged dagger. Its blade gleamed in the firelight, and its handle was gilded and studded with gems. The old man held it up to his face, noticing an inscription that he could not make out. It reads, “To conquer death, and to achieve life immortal,” said the sentry in answer to the old man’s curiosity. “Would you like to use it, regaining the powers of sight that you once had, and escaping the danger of your condition?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “What must I do?”

“It is simple,” replied the sentry. “Take the dagger and apply it to that part of your flesh that is ailing, making a deep wound so that the blood flows, and the power of the dagger will so transform the wound that it will shortly heal with a greater strength than the body had before the defect. In your case, as you wish to repair your sight, you must strike your eyes. You will lose your sight for a few moments, but soon afterwards it will be restored and you will see with the eyes of youth.”

The old man hesitated, doubting the promise of the sentry. Would he really gouge out his eyes in order to see? “I sense that you do not believe,” said the visitor. “Have you not heard of the resurrection of the one called Christ, who overcame death by dying and rising from the grave? He suffered greatly in order to bring life to mankind, and it is his power that animates this dagger. If you wish for it to heal your infirmity, you must die to what you see by purging your eyes. Only after you have wiped away the vision of death will you receive life.”

The old man had heard of the resurrection, though his faith in it had waned. Trusting that power anew, he took the dagger in his hands. “I will do it,” he said. “Good,” responded the sentry. “You must puncture each eye with a powerful stroke, leaving nothing to sight. The purgation must extend to all that you see.”

Closing his eyes and bracing, the man tightened his grip on the dagger and drove it into his eye. He shrieked and fell forward onto the table. “Again!” cried the visitor. “You must strike the other eye! Resolve to do it and you will see again!” Straightening, the old man gathered his courage and plunged the dagger into the other eye, cutting off his sight entirely. All was dark, and blood poured over his face. “I see nothing!” he burst out to the sentry. “Strike again, and harder!” exclaimed the guest, “The blade must penetrate all the way through!” And so the old man, bewildered and enfeebled, thrust the dagger into his eyes again and again, yearning for new sight in spite of his pain. After many strokes he dropped the dagger and fell to his knees.

“I am lost!” he cried. “The devil has deceived me and I have succumbed, and my blood witnesses against my pride! What do I have left but to grow old in darkness and die without sight?”

“Indeed,” said the other, now standing over the old man, his eyes glowing and his teeth blackened and gnarled. “But are you not at least saved from the sight of your ailing flesh?” And he vanished with the dagger, leaving the old man to himself.

In the first beginning “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The Word, the Son and Second Person, dwelled with the Father in eternity. This dwelling-with alone fails to sum up the interpenetration of Father and Son, for the Word was God, one in substance but different in person from the Father. The Father is an eternal and immutable person, a mystery subsisting in the fulfillment of its requirement, being as he ought to be and without possibility of improvement. In his fulfillment the Father transcends his form in the begetting and procession of persons, reaching out from a life perfect in its singularity to a mutual dwelling-in in which law ascends into love. The Trinity means the internal outpouring of a perfection in being so magnificent that it abides in a shared and personal celebration of that perfection. The love between Father, Son, and Spirit consists in the origin of the latter two in and from the Father and the unbroken harmony between the three. An untarnished obedience within the singularity of the substance and an irrepressible joy in that obedience within and among the persons, the transfiguration of the rhythm of conformity into a differentiated union, is the oneness of the God who is both three and one. God exists in the plenitude that seals Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with bonds so impregnable that by the divine will they extend into the creation of being from nothing.

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created all that is as one God, the Father giving being, the Son bestowing law and life upon being in its form, and the Spirit sealing creation in communion. Yet one cannot parse the roles in the creation as if the persons stepped forward in distinction from one another and acted individually. God acted as one, so that the giving of being means the giving of form and communion: He creates no being that does not imply the destination of and growth toward form, limit, and unity, or in a word, toward nature.

What, then, of the formless matter that had yet to take shape, the waters over which the Spirit breathed when the earth was formless and void? As created by God, formless matter possessed an intrinsic vector toward form, with Christ present in it as He is present in all things. As created from nothing, and like all created natures after they receive their shape, this matter also possessed mutability, the possibility and freedom by which matter could advance toward form or shrink from it, in this case remaining in a state of formlessness. When the Spirit breathed over that which was formless and void, the inclination toward form had yet to distinguish its drive toward nature from the mutability. The inclination existed at such an embryonic state that it equaled and did not yet surpass the pure possibility of change. Thus matter’s freedom from form, not a freedom bereft of a drive toward form or of form annulled, not an empty and directionless matter, but a matter pregnant toward form as if having a will and desire for it, but not yet possessed of the power to assert that form over the mutability.

“Let there be,” says the Father, and the Word creates, elevating and limiting the matter destined for but lacking definition into the defined and the natural. In the Son who is the life of all things being created from nothing rose from indifferentiation into law, receiving grace. Formless matter gathered into particular beings, each receiving its nature as it received its law, molded by the beneficence of God into its particular beauty. Now being inseparable from law as way of being, now life inseparable from way of life. The tree receives a way of being with bark, leaves, and seeds, and in some instances fruit, and this is its law; likewise the fish receives its fins, scales, eyes, and the motion of swimming as its law; the leopard receives its paws, fur, tail, and skill to strike without warning by the same principle. These ways of being, bequeathed and instilled by the creator into the natural world in the words “let there be,” entail that creation was as it ought to have been, that God shaped each nature by a particular design and that each nature conformed to the design. This is the righteousness of the natural world and individual natures, their adherence to the way of being specified for each part and for the whole, nature’s living in the law that God decreed for it in the Son.

God fashioned man with a law unique and unparalleled in the physical order, a single law manifest in two, one being and one way of being in body and soul. The soul has its own law and way of being, its particular inscription toward life and fulfillment, and likewise for the body. The two laws are one for one man, a law that on one hand mandates the shape of the flesh, its ears, eyes, hands, and feet, and all the characteristics that identify the body as man’s body. The manifestation of these characteristics is the activity of man qua body, his visible and intrinsic obedience to the law by which he is what he is as a body. The same single law dictates a way of being for the soul, a law fit for it as the higher element in man’s nature. God molded the soul to contemplate him, intending its focus on his love so that the soul should orient both its own nature and that of the body toward harmony with the creator. The more the soul turns toward God, persisting in the contemplation of and obedience to him, the more it abides according to the law that defines and fortifies it as a soul, while man equally abides according to the single law that is his life as a man.

At its creation, the law of man’s nature established both the limits of body and soul and the mutual limitation between body and soul. The body discovered its limit in the boundary of the flesh, the acknowledgment of the space it does not occupy gained through physical feeling and encountered as an imposition. Then another, more profound limit confronted the body: though created good and without sin, God did not create it incorruptible. The body faced its finitude in the possibility of death, a potentiality necessitated by the freedom in which man might turn back toward nothingness, disobeying God. The soul likewise discovered its limit: as to origin, created by God; as to power, licensed to rule creation only under the rule prescribed by God; as to knowledge, allowed to know only what God saw fit for it to know. The soul knew that it is not the body and that its connection with the body does not entail confusion between the one and the other. The two abided as one in their respective limits, their definition the logical prerequisite for nature’s unity. This is the law of man, that his elements in their mutual limitation and solidity should interpenetrate, grounding his singularity. The soul thus understood the body as its link to the physical world and the lower limit to which it bestows life; it simultaneously encountered the law of God, the origin, rule, and knowledge prescribed for the soul by him, as the upper boundary. Beyond this, the soul faced the possible limit of death not in a physical perishing but in the life turned away from God.

Body and soul originally existed without confusion, division, or separation, with man enjoying the image of God in which law abides in and ascends toward love. In the rhythmic conformity of the powers of nature to the will of God and nature’s design man both dwells in God and finds his being at rest in God and his neighbor. The soul’s being gathered into God parallels its union with the body, its submission to the higher limit elevating it in the same overlapping harmony by which the soul grasps the body as its instrument and dedicates that instrument to life. Completely attuned to his intended way of being, man abides in the obedience that is joy and the joy that is love, a worship that humbly and gratefully desires God’s lordship at the same time that man discovers in that lordship the mercy that is law poured out and giving birth. This grace invigorates man’s appreciation of nature and his interpenetration as a nature, fortifying the elements in their solidity and giving them weight. Man seeks God above all and as Master, Creator, and King, yet he cannot enjoy God’s grace without giving thanks for his nature, he cannot know God without knowing body and soul as God’s creation, he cannot love God without loving body and soul as God’s handiwork and possession, practicing peace with his fellow men. So the divine nature bestows its likeness upon a unified man, filling man’s nature in its fulfillment, and men live in the finite divinization that is beatitude.

But man could fall, he could relinquish the divine image and descend toward formlessness. Though bolstered by the grace of God he was not totally secure, and the possibility of descent attended to him as a creature corruptible and free. He could disobey the law of his nature and the divine law that would lift that nature to incorruption, abdicating his purpose as the prize of God’s creation. A necessity intrinsic to both his finitude and his capability for communion with God, man’s freedom is the limit upon the law of his nature in which he, as a spiritual being, encounters the formlessness of possibility. There lies his mutability and, as that mutability annuls its contingency in acquiescence to law, the affirmation of God as a merciful lord and man as a blessed slave. Man’s freedom is embedded in the law of his nature and is meant to validate it in his active reception of the divine love, but in freedom also lies the threat, the chance that man could abdicate the image and fulfillment in which soul and body are married in God. There were therefore in the first man’s nature these three aspects: the physical body as the lower element, created without sin but capable of death by physical disintegration; the soul as a higher element beyond disintegration other than its alienation from God; and the mutability attendant to both, the possibility of a life in incorruptible form or its opposite, the life tending toward corruption and death.

The devil seized upon man’s mutability, tempting and deceiving him with the knowledge of good and evil. In the tree of the knowledge of good and evil man encountered his soul’s upper limit, acknowledging the lordship of God and the right order of creation as well as the penalty for breaching that order. Should he eat of the tree or even touch it man would die, rending the fullness of the image of God from his nature at the same time that nature grows despoiled. “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw . . . that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.”

In eating the fruit the soul acquired a wisdom beyond its limit just as it turned from God, abandoning the orientation that is its life. Deceived by the serpent, the soul misunderstands the defect that upends the peace of nature by grasping emptiness as though it were fullness, as though the life apart from God possessed significance because the soul had ascended toward the place of God. The soul does not see, it is fooled in the belief that it can rise beyond its limit without simultaneously falling, as though the illegitimate ascent did not entail descent. The serpent says, “Rise without falling!” So it conceals the essentially dialectical character of the demonic, of the disobedience with which it entices the soul. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is a delight to the eyes and desirable for wisdom, but that wisdom belongs only to God and to those spiritual beings to whom he deems fit to grant it. For man to embark upon the rise, to arrogate a wisdom beyond the form of his nature in the hope that it will elevate his capacities and augment his fullness, is the deception. It begins the alienation of man from both God and his neighbor, and from his life as a man.

The soul abdicates its law when it eats of the tree, forfeiting the solidity and rule of its being as shaped according to God’s will. Simultaneously rising above and falling below the measure of its integrity, the soul grows more like God with respect to the content of the mind but farther from him in the loss of the ontological knowledge of God’s presence. In the fall man trades the knowledge of God for God’s knowledge, appropriating a modicum of infinity as though he could contain an illicit likeness to God within his finitude. The soul expands but it also contracts, transgressing its created form from both directions, surging beyond its limit in the knowledge that would judge good and evil at the same time that man feels this knowledge as a loss of being and as distance from the divine love. In the divorce from its nature the soul relinquishes what abides for the dialectical transition between greater and lesser, jettisoning the stability of being that is according to its law for being which is both itself and its opposite, an ascent that approximates divinity necessarily accompanied by the descent which recognizes the upward reach as a crime. The soul’s new existence is finally punishment, tending toward nothing inasmuch as the finite’s theft of the infinite results in its dissolution qua finite, the death of distance from God. Sin therefore means the diminution of being in which man no longer looks to God, no longer trusts, obeys, loves, and worships God, replacing God with a nature divided and estranged, an object at once of love and of hatred, a life he cherishes and despises and which he wants to imbue with meaning despite its despair. Man would think that he has become like the God who is immutable Form, but he has sacrificed what form he possessed. He thinks that he has risen in the likeness of He who Is, but this very rising portends his descent toward what is not.

The descent corrupts the whole creation, turning birth into a cry of pain and the search for sustenance into combat against thistles and thorns, demanding that the body return to the dust from which God shaped it. But the curse thundered upon the body means more than physical demise; it means the body’s release for a life of rebellion as well. Once the good and God-pleasing instrument for the soul’s acquisition of life, the body remains that good and God-pleasing instrument, but at the fall the reins change hands and it is redirected under a law unto death. In its sin the soul oriented the whole man away from God, carrying the bodily nature with it into the rise that falls, entangling the body in the dialectic in which the appearance of divinity achieved and form grasped whispers the penalty of humanity lost and form dissolved. The body draws its life from the soul and imitates its habit, embarking after the fall upon the dialectical greater-lesser by scoffing at the soul’s governance and rising in annulment of bodily limits. The lower element pursues the pleasures of this world as though possessed of its own mind, hoping for meaning in worldly delights, but every grasping inasmuch as it implies the surpassing of the body’s limit cannot but evaporate in the hand that seizes it. Food rots in the mouth that chews, comforts leave man stale and vapid, and should he come to the remarkable place where he knows no bodily inconvenience, gratifying every desire with ease, man there finds his body reduced to invisibility and no longer relaying the meaning stamped upon his being. The rise of the body foreshadows its fall, the ascent dialectically mediates erosion, the unhindered bodily appropriation of this world facilitates the liberation of man from both body and world.

The soul enraptured by the semblance of divinity and the body enslaved to lust, both married to the dialectic of finitude disintegrated through infinity seized, means that each loses the solidity of its measure. Rightly formed, body and soul interpenetrate as grounded in the integrity of definition, each element fortified within its limit and bearing out that fortification in the mutually supporting harmony of grace. The infinitizing dialectic dissolves the limit of both body and soul, undermining the internal stability of the elements and poisoning their intermarriage. That which reaches out toward the infinity of an impervious form suffers toward the infinity of form annulled, the endless possibility of form without its achievement. What was solid, distinct, and particular devolves into what is liquid, amorphous, and obscure. The union that was without confusion yields to the indistinguishable permeability of fluid with fluid. Man melts down so that he can no longer endure, no longer withstand the forces that would drag him to the pit, no longer counter the temptations that exploit the malleability of his being.

Man experiences the confusion of body and soul as an alienation in which each part illicitly communicates its properties to the other. The body desires rule over man and would live as though immortal, seeking pleasure without end, undermining the soul as if the latter were the element destined to die. The soul unwittingly authorizes this venture, for in grasping the infinite it turns away from both God who is its life and the body that lives through it, willing a world apart from finitude, without physical feeling, a world in which the body forgets death. This confusion of properties entails separation between body and soul as two elements so distorted by infinity that they lack the cohesion necessary for fellowship. Body and soul know nothing each of its own limit and thereby of its complement, and though they flow freely into one another their nearness only exacerbates the distance between them. That nearness, that joining in division, is the war of soul against body or spirit against flesh. In this combat the infinity sought by the soul alienates it from the finitude of the body and puts the body to death, while the infinity sought by the body means its revolt against the soul and the relegation of the latter to despair. The mortality of its turn from God characterizes the soul as it increasingly strives after infinity absorbed in the finite, the same infinity that promises the body a life without inconvenience, want, and death. The soul thereby becomes the instrument of the body, the element apparently destined to die while the body appears immortal, with both parts drowning in the deception that this is life abundant. Each hastens toward death as man descends into a constant and irregular aggression, his attempts to regain definition marred by the homogeneity in which both soul and body are negated. At the consummation man trades his nature and the divine image for privation’s power, dissolving in an unfeeling hopelessness in which he has only enough of the soul to apprehend the loss of the body.

This is the vector of man’s mutability in the wake of the fall and as corrupted by sin, a scattering dedicated to the dialectic of disobedience and seeking the confusion and alienation of soul and body. The scattering is that dialectic embedded in man’s nature, the power of privation seeking the disfiguration of form. Whereas in his body and his soul man retains definition, particularity, and differentiation after the fall, existing to some extent according to the pattern of nature and thereby possessed of some righteousness, the scattering would, at its summit, pervert the way of being by which man is a specific creature into the dialectical contradiction in which he is at once a thing and its opposite. Rather than a finite creature located within the specificity of God’s order, the scattering would unmake man into the universal-particular, a being tied to a place without boundary or locale; rather than a creature blessed with an appropriate knowledge of his world and his God, the scattering would reduce man into an omniscient ignoramus, combining a seemingly endless knowledge of his world with blindness toward the God to whom that world testifies; rather than a creature ascending in the love of his natural form and the God who fashioned it, the scattering would so curse man that his love of nature conceals his hatred of it, that because he loves nature as though it were infinite he infects its finitude with his own thirst for death. At the extreme, at a point not dreamed of at the fall, man appears to cherish and even divinize the natural world while he despises and destroys it, constructing another in its place. The greater power the scattering gains within the nature of man, the more he relinquishes that nature and slides into contradiction and indefinition, left with the name of man but not the substance, a man only in appearance, a seeming.

From his throne God saw man’s tendency toward formlessness and how it would doom his beloved, he perceived the groaning of man and his world under disorder and demise. If the fall had not occurred, God would have sent the Son as the most perfect grace and communion between God and man and an exemplar of the love meant to join them. After the fall he sent the Son for this reason but also for another, condescending in Christ to make right what sin had stained and direct toward life what sin would carry into perdition. Man’s being was beset by the infraction of his rise and his inclination to repeat it, an urge toward disobedience plaguing his nature and subjecting it to death. Christ came so that the fall following the rise, the death that had become man’s negative knowledge of the law of his being, might become his path to life. It is the love of God that through the Son he should transform the curse of bodily demise into the means for new life, that God the Son should address the dialectic of rise and fall by beginning with the downward vector, emptying himself and becoming man, even suffering a heinous death, and taking up that fall so that it becomes the preliminary for a rise to eternal life. That is the beauty and mercy of God, that the sinless lamb should grant life to sinners, calling them to bear the cross toward life on the other side.

The incarnation is the great mystery, the pivot on which the universe turns. Whereas the dialectic of perdition pretends a finite man who seizes a lasting and impervious infinity, thinking that he could grasp the divine and absorb it into his limit, and whereas this grasping produces the opposite effect by erasing man’s finitude in an abyss of possibility, the dialectic mediating destruction through the promise of a higher, divinized life—against all this and as its inverse Jesus Christ empties the divine nature and takes on flesh so that the infinite descends and conceals its nature in the finite. Through this descent Jesus rises glorified and honored to the throne above all thrones, while he restores man to life through faith in him. The dialectic in which the finite arrogates the infinite is contradiction and impossibility, but that in which the infinite empties itself and is incarnate in man is the mystery.9 When the infinite mediates its glory through the finite, this is the love of God and the salvation of man; when the finite seeks its glory as mediated through the infinite, this is the death of man and the destruction of faith. In the latter man rejects obedience to the descent in which he, following his Lord, would be lowered in order to rise, choosing instead the ascent destined for perdition, the rise that is inevitably a fall.

The dialectic of salvation stands behind John’s second beginning, that “which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched,” the message that Jesus Christ came as fully God and fully man. In order for the Physician to accomplish salvation for man he must become man in all aspects except submission to sin, joining both soul and body with his divinity. A Christ who does not take on the soul cannot redeem that part of human nature nor nature in its entirety, nor can a Christ who does not take on the body redeem that part of human nature nor the whole. Jesus came that man might come to know the grace by which God cures soul and body of sin, reversing man’s depravity by wiping away the punishment for past crimes and directing him toward theosis. Arriving in body and soul, the Second Person dies in the most inexplicable manner, magnifying the miracle of incarnation with the end of resurrection and restoring his humanity through the divine life. Thus the Christ opens the door so that every man who places faith in him might imitate the descent, casting off pretensions to infinity in favor of the love in which man is known by God and in which death succumbs to life. Body and soul return to and edify one another, man comes to know his nature as blessed, and the image of God convalesces unto eternal health.

Having come as the unity of God and man, Christ also came with the power of resurrection. This way through death to new life is love, the perfected unity of law and grace, the command that is eternal life and whose end is sacrifice and compassion. For in harmonizing law and grace Christ requires what appears as the greatest severity just as he replenishes what is taken away. The command is to die, but its implication is to live again. This resurrection, this love, is the taking of life resolved in a greater life being given. The cross is the first and lesser aspect of this dynamic in the Son, the mystery in which the infinite and immutable God, in its union with man, somehow perishes. In this death God integrates the denial of life into life beyond measure, overwhelming the horror of death and reconstituting it as a law unto renewal. The cross has no meaning apart from that renewal. Otherwise Christ’s death is only death, only God dying pitifully. But love accomplishes the retrieval in which God conquers sin and invites man into heavenly communion, the life which draws man through absence and into fullness. On the other side of death comes exaltation, the glorification of the Son as Risen and as having completed the purpose of the Father, the promise to man of blessing beyond the curse.

The Christian’s path of salvation imitates the fall and rise of his Lord, engaging in death in the hope of the life beyond. “Love others as I have loved you,” Christ commands, pushing the disciple into and through inconveniences and sufferings, requiring him to be submerged in them. The disciple’s facing death in the likeness of his Lord means the assimilation of non-being into his being, standing against its force as imposed upon him in the sensible recognition of mortality. Man gains in being by enduring what transience throws at him, enduring his own transience and striving to live on the other side of it. Getting to the other side is not a hit-and-run affair, not a strike against one’s mortality followed by flight from it in the name of grace, but a tarrying with mortality in order to be engulfed in it. This is the call and command of Christ: in his name endure your mortality. For his love and his glory, die to sin and abide beyond death.

Through this way of being Christ bestows the fullness of soul, the weight of gravitas and the joy of misericordia. Man finds, as he abandons the world and pursues the soul, that the Spirit of God descends from on high as a welling up within. The soft emptiness of sin recedes, and in its place he matures as a man of sharpened stone on the one hand and as a well of compassion on the other. Gravitas chastens him against the lassitude in which being slips imperceptibly away, while misericordia calls him to comfort the suffering of others. Are you a man of grit, able to bear harsh treatment, public scorn, the blows of nature and ill fortune? Good! But know that men do not rest in God apart from their rest in one another, and know also that the giving of rest is intrinsic to your nature. Without a properly guided pathos, without a sense for suffering and a willingness to be humbled before one’s brother as one feeds him and visits him when sick, one’s grit amounts to Stoicism, not salvation. Are you a man of sensitivity, feeling the suffering of others and empathizing with them, shedding tears for the neighbor’s tribulation? Good! But know that without the heaviness of gravitas, without restraining one’s passions, man does not follow the way of God but turns being toward non-being, indulging a proud sentimentality. Salvation requires and grace provides both the steel and the pliability, both the resistance and the empathy. By grace man delves into law, even into death in the name of Christ, and dwelling there he rises by grace into what abides. Love rushes over him and he finds that rather than being consumed as an object for its nourishment, he is nourished.

Salvation through the Christ faced enemies within the first generations after his resurrection, including the Docetism that threatened John’s congregation and provoked his first letter. Docetism claimed that Christ did not come as a man of flesh, asserting that he came to save man but not with a real body and therefore not as a real man. Those who saw him might have believed him to be a man and to inhabit a body, but Docetism rejected this appearance as a seeming. All that one could ascribe to Christ’s bodily life the docetists dismissed: the body to be torn down and rebuilt in three days was a chimera, Christ the bread from heaven came as spiritual bread only, the one who walked on water did not do so with human flesh, the one who bore the nails and hung on the cross neither endured this pain nor later rose as a body. In this way Docetism denied the emptying of the divine nature and the taking on of full humanity at the heart of Christ’s redemption, insisting that the infinite could not perform the mystery in which it descends into the finite and cleanses man’s faults.

This denial presumed the division of the world into two realms, positing a strict duality between the material and the spiritual. Docetists considered the material realm as flawed and abased, outside of redemption and a divine mistake, whereas they regarded the spiritual as pristine and exalted, the locus of knowledge and salvation. In man’s spirit resided the divine spark that called him to a higher existence, a spark in which the body had no part but contradicted in its materiality. The docetists applied this duality to Jesus Christ with the consequence that they could not understand him as truly God and truly man, for a divinity of spirit could not stand contact with the flesh. The heterogeneity of the realms would not allow that God could assume the profanity of the material and remain God. In this way the dualism of spirit and body intervened and perverted Christ’s incarnation in the docetic mind, separating Christ from flesh and confining him to spirit. The docetists discarded the Christ of flesh and bone, full humanity as well as full divinity, and in his place affirmed an ethereal being. In this manner they lost what was preached from the beginning, that Christ came as fully man in order to redeem men and bring them to eternal life.

The church overcame the old Docetism, vanquishing it with other ancient heresies that threatened fellowship within Christ’s body. Yet with the passing of centuries another Docetism has emerged, a New Docetism of profound and subtle strength, a recapitulation of the infinitizing dialectic cloaked under the promise of exaltation here of the church and there of man, an enemy whose power has unfolded over millennia and whose bloodlust goes unchecked. The original Docetism denied the dialectic of salvation that is the Son incarnate, refuting the notion that the divine could be joined in a single person with the finite, at once remaining infinite and saving sinners. The New Docetism, the inverse of the old, affirms the dialectic in which a finite man ascends toward the infinite as though he could both contain divinity and remain in the particularity of finitude, as though this ascent does not eventuate in formlessness. By the New Docetism man leaves off the law of form and definition in order to dedicate his energies to his disintegration, and this in the belief that he is rising as man, that he is fighting the good fight of justice, peace, and progress.

The New Docetism has swallowed the history of the West, undergirding the long story of conflict between church and kingdom on the one hand and man, state, and society on the other as a single dialectical progress in which form rises and falls with the boundlessness of law. For the New Docetism is above all the dialectical abolition of the law by which God shaped man according to nature and would elevate that nature to incorruption, a devertebration of church and kingdom in parallel with the internal decay of men. Docetism annuls the law as natural and divine, giving rise to the scattering as the principle of man and his environment until it has pummeled both into existence as a set of contradictions, a flurry of changes set against everything opposed to their continual transitions. Like its predecessor, the New Docetism thrives upon the implication that its object is not substantial or tangible, and therefore no longer real. It would devolve man and his world into a vapor without body or soul.

In a breathtaking and unperceived stroke, Docetism long ago twisted the meaning and glory of Christ to its purposes. The spirit that would flatten man’s fortitude does so under the banner of gospel and grace, righteousness and justice and mercy, while disemboweling his world in the name of the kingdom of God. Docetism has not only found room for Jesus Christ within the infinitizing dialectic, but at the turning point in its maturation Docetism proclaims the Christ-Idol as the pulse of its movement. All that precedes the cataclysm known as the Reformation is Docetism’s determination to corrupt the name of Christ by confounding the gospel of life with the scattering. The grace of Christ there merged with the structureless infinity of being divested of law and thereby of form, decapitating the divine aspect of the law and initiating in earnest Docetism’s attempt to infinitize the natural realm. Rather than he who takes up death and transfigures it into life for those who perdure in his name, Jesus Christ became the license by which man annuls the law until death becomes his way of life.

For the Protestant adherent of the New Docetism, the gospel speaks of Christ overcoming sin and death at the cross. There the docetic believer assumes that his iniquity will be conquered because Christ has conquered it, there the docetist claims to see blessing secured because evil has fallen. But Docetists, whether Catholic, Protestant, or secular, do not understand their own logic, they do not perceive that the liberation that they have preached and sung for centuries means not freedom from sin, death, and the law as their crier, but freedom from the law and thereby from the acknowledgment of sin and its penalty. The law and its giving of form Docetism secretly identifies as sin, redefining as enemies the institutions and nature expressive of that law and responsible for man’s limits. With shocking mendacity Docetism defines the graces given to keep sin at arm’s length as death-dealing and strives to liberate itself from them. Docetic man therefore works to remove the mediations that guard him from violence, laboring until they are destroyed and envisioning the destruction as a final liberation. Docetic man deceives himself by believing that in destroying the mediations he will confront a reality in which sin and death have no part. This reality without the mediations is death, for upon dismissing his protections the combat comes hand-to-hand. The life beyond death of which docetic man might dream comes not into and through death but to death. At the end of his striving against the mediations he perceives evil lodged within himself and prepared for carnage. Rather than being swallowed by love, docetic man is enveloped by hatred.

The deprivation of man’s form has arrived at the most recent and thus the most urgent of the crisis points embedded in Docetism’s history. He flutters as the confusion of higher and lower, repudiating nature and limit in favor of the infinite. Man has seen eternal life, hearing it and touching it with his hands, but rather than this life descending from eternity in Christ it has ascended in earth lifted to heaven. Docetic man has abandoned contact with the ground, rejecting natural existence and its submission to and envelopment in death-unto-life, each generation having pulled the ground further from beneath its children. Man at his most prominent now abides in the clouds, high above in his cities, looking out over the millions. He flies from place to place, forgetting time and location, plucking his life out from locale, season, and rhythm. The typical docetic man partakes in a lower but no less devastating habit of flight, floating a few feet above the ground thanks to engines that distort his consciousness and erode his soul. He neglects dawn and dusk, sun and moon, living by the artificial command that there be light or its absence. He forgets heat and cold as if these did not compose the natural world, constructing a world without discomfort, without feeling, and finally without conscience. Replete with marvels, delights, and magic, this world covers him in darkness and fuels his pride.

Docetic man feels the descent intrinsic to this ascent in his internal ruin, his yearning for the meaning that he hoped to acquire by unwittingly obliterating all meaning. Though he does not know how to conceptualize it, docetic man senses that his way of being is not and that he exists as war. He senses that he is both an accomplice to and a cry of revolt against the evisceration of his nature. Docetism has reduced him to this cry, whose intensity reflects the ease with which his world invades and passes through his being—as well as his surrender to this invasion and his taking up its cause. Everywhere docetic man believes that he will receive fulfillment through release, that transgression and the eradication of boundaries will rescue him from emptiness, but he does not understand that expenditure is the undoing of the form by which he preserves his significance. He strives upward and outward in his pride as if he could absorb the whole earth, believing that then he would no longer wander, no longer be violated. This externalization tightens his shackles, divorcing his divinity from the interiority proper to it. Surveying the modern city, man bows before the altars he has erected in the name of alienation. Concrete and steel stand surrogate for the soul, capturing the natural longing for God and reversing its potency, parading the allure of man undifferentiated and deprived of law.

What shall save docetic man from the morass into which he has fallen, or from the consummation that looms ahead? What shall heal him of the pride that charms him to descend deeper into his blindness? Man will never find resurrection in what terminates in death, he will not escape his fluidity in what intensifies the stream. Let him, then, comprehend his darkness and its rule over him, that though it purports to save him from death Docetism has stolen the vision that gathers him into life. Let him therefore, and more importantly, see again that which was from the beginning, the Word of life that was with the Father and has appeared in Jesus Christ. Like the incarnation, what is here seen can be heard and touched. It is a life that, in addition to being formed in the truth, is also a way. With this new sight man apprehends the way as love, from God who created all things in and for love, given to man whom he loves.

9. The ancient councils and biblical wisdom stand behind what I say about the Christ, and I have no desire to contradict or transgress these sources. If the reader should have any confusion regarding my words on this subject here and throughout this book, I ask that he keep this intent in mind.