In all cultures and civilizations, all the torments of the human spirit ultimately merge into one gigantic effort to overcome death and mortality, and to ensure immortality and life, to ensure it at any price.
…Does it not, however, induce us all to ask the question: from where did this yearning and longing for infinity in all directions come into the human spirit?
The whole of man’s spirit - through knowledge, through sensation, through the will, and through life - wants to be infinite, and this means immortal. The hunger for infinity, the hunger of immortality is the ancient, metaphysical hunger of the human spirit.
…It is obvious that material nature could not have endowed man with this yearning for infinity, because it is itself finite and does not have this yearning in itself.
..the yearning for infinity, for immortality, is found in the very essence of the human spirit. Created in the image of God, the whole of man shares this yearning. For God-likeness is that within a human being which yearns for the infinite truths of God in all worlds. Inside the human spirit, this Godlikeness drives man to saturate himself with yearning for God and to reach for all the infinities of God.
…man was created as a potentially Divine-human being which, guided by a Godlike soul, had the task of adapting itself to God in every way, and thus actually making itself into a Divine-human being, i.e., a being in which man is ideally united with God and lives in His divine, infinite perfections. But instead of saturating all his material life with the Godlikeness of the soul, man separated his spirit from everything that is of God within himself, and set out through the mysteries of this world without God, i.e, without his natural guide - and to this world he has come across unbridgeable chasms and terrifying fissures.
With the first rebellion against God, man to a degree succeeded in driving God out of himself, out of his conscience, out of his will, and so is left with pure humanness…with pure humanism.
Yet in spite of all this, man was unable to completely expel from himself the Godlike traits of his spirit; they remained to manifest themselves even in his humanism in the form of a yearning for infinite progress, for infinite knowledge, for infinite improvement, for infinite existence. Consciously and unconsciously, in all the struggles which man has conducted in his humanism, he longs to regain the Godlikeness he has lost.
…only the God-man fully expiates all the torments of the human spirit made sick and godless by humanism. He alone satisfies all the hungers of man’s Godlike being:
…The most essential ontological requirements and needs of man’s being are satisfied once and for all in the person of the God-man Christ.
…He is something more vital to man than anything else- so vital that the all true God Himself, the Lord Jesus proclaimed that He is the “one thing needful” (Luke 10:42).Why? Because He has solved the problem of God and man the most perfectly, the most naturally, the most fittingly, and the most logically.
He…thereby also showed us man in his sinlessness, immortality and perfection.
…For nothing is more human than the Lord Christ, Who personifies in Himself the most ideal perfection of all that is truly human, truly manlike.
Only in the God-man Christ is man elevated to the highest level of perfection…
For no one has ever glorified human nature or humanity to such an extent as the God-man. In His divine-human person, the greatest justice possible has been done to man…man is immeasurably magnified, exalted and glorified by God.
Christ the Lord has given human nature grace-filled powers to be able to come to perfection in divine good and to overcome sin and evil to the point of final victory over them.
The problem of truth was solved by the appearance of absolute divine truth within the confines of human nature.
…Only when illuminated by the light of the God-man Christ does the world open to us the crown of its being, and within this its true meaning and value. This the Savior also said of Himself: “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12;9:5). In the God-man and in His light man has truly penetrated and perceived the true meaning of the world.
…whatever is not of Him, is not the Truth. Outside His Divine-human Person, the Truth is ontologically impossible.
…the God-man is Life and the criterion of Life. Everything that is not of Him is mortal.
Christ the Lord established Himself alone, His Divine-human person, as the Church; hence, the Church is the Church because of the God-man and in the God-man.
He is the Church itself in its Divine-human pleroma, for the Church is nothing other than the God-man Christ extended into all the ages: “Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age”
Because of Him, - the one, united, and indivisible God-man - the Church is forever one, united and indivisible....For He, as the God-man, holds the entire body of the Church in the indivisible union of grace, truth and life.
Compassionately lenient toward sinners, the Church has always been inexorable and decisive in condemning and rejecting all those who have in any way denied, rejected or distorted the God-manhood of Christ the Lord.
He became man while remaining God, so that as God He might give human nature divine power, which would lead men to a very intimate, Divine-human union with God This divine power of His ceaselessly works within His Divine-human Body, the Church, uniting men with God through a grace-filled, holy life.
When the Church confesses the God-man she thereby confesses genuine, true, integral, Godlike man. For outside the God-man, there is no genuine man.
Only with all the saints…can one truly and correctly believe in the God-man Christ. Only by living with all the saints in catholic unity of faith, can one be a genuine Christian, a genuine follower of the God-man Christ; in fact, life in the Church is forever catholic, forever in communion with all the saints. Therefore, a true member of the Church vividly senses that he is of one faith with the apostles, the martyrs and the saints of all the ages: that they are eternally alive, and that all of them are simultaneously filled with one and the same Divine-human power , one and the same Divine-human life, one and the same Divine-human truth. There is no catholicity outside the realm of the Church, for only actually living within the Church creates in man a sense of catholicity of faith, truth and life with all the members of the Church of all times.
When he examines his spirit, the Orthodox Christian says to himself: my spirit is nothing unless I fill it and perfect it with the Holy Spirit.
In Western Europe, Christianity has gradually transformed into humanism…
In both Papism and Protestantism man has replaced the God-man as both the supreme value and the supreme criterion…In actual fact, the first radical protest against the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church should be sought in papism, not in Lutheranism. In this first protest is also found the first Protestantism…. One could say that Protestantism is the vulgarization of papism, but bereft of mysticism, authority and control.
…What tragic illogic: to appoint a vicar and representative for the omnipresent God and Lord.
Thus, there took place the dis-incarnation of a sort, a disincarnation of the incarnate God, a dissolution of the Divine-humanness of the God-man. .. This replacing of the God-man with man proved practical in the perceptible replacing of Christian Divine-human methodology with human methodology, sometimes excessively human. Hence Aristotle’s philosophical primacy in scholasticism, hence the casuistry and inquisition in ethics, hence the papal diplomacy in international relations, hence the clerical parties in politics, hence the papal state, hence the pardoning of sins by decree…
Hence, one cannot be a Christian without belief in the God-man and His Divine-human Body - the Church, to which He left His entire wondrous Personality. The salvation-bearing and life-creating power of the Church of Christ is to be found in the eternally-living and omnipresent personality of the God-man. Any replacing of the God-man with some man and any selecting out of Christianity of only that which is reduced to man’s individual taste and intellect, transforms Christianity into a superficial and helpless humanism.
By acknowledging the God-man, we indirectly acknowledge the Christ-likeness of man, the divine descent of man, and thereby also the divine value and inviolability of man’s personality…In fact, the struggle for the God-man is the struggle for man. Not humanists, but men of Divine-human faith and life are struggling for true man, God-like and Christ-like man.
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