Becoming Truly Human

As someone who came into the Anglican tradition relatively recently, I continue to be thrilled by what I discover in our catholic heritage. This is not to say that I previously had no exposure to catholic truths, such as those expressed in the Nicene creed; however, there is a sea of tradition that I simply was not aware of before becoming an Anglican. One such area that I discovered early on was the patristic emphasis on deification. Like so many, my gateway into the church fathers was St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Like so many, my gateway into the church fathers was St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Share on X When I first read him say “He was made man that we might be made god,”[1] I was confused. I knew that I was supposed to agree, but I had no way to understand such a (seemingly) provocative statement. How could the same man who so vigorously defended the homoousion of the Son of God to separate Him from creatures now say that we are to become god? Likewise, how could St. Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, claim that we might become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4 RSV)? 

The great Christian tradition before us has done much wrestling to help us comprehend the meaning of these words. There is much to sift through, but I have recently discovered E. L. Mascall’s The Importance of Being Human: Some Aspects of the Christian Doctrine of Man. Mascall, a twentieth-century English priest and professor of Historical Theology at King’s College London, describes how Western Christianity has understood what it means to be a human being and, by extension, what it means for a human being to be deified. 

What Is Man?

The book is framed by a famous question of the Psalmist: “What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou carest for him? Thou didst make him for a little while lower than the angels, thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, putting everything in subjection under his feet” (p. 1). Mascall offers some reflections to help answer this question. 

First, Mascall considers the definition of a human being. Contrary to the increasingly popular naturalistic explanations of mankind’s origin, “we must remember that … a man is not just a highly developed biological organism, but a highly developed biological organism which has been subsumed into a mysterious and complicated union with a spiritual and immortal soul” (p. 14). 

Christian orthodoxy treads a thin line between pure naturalism, where man is just a highly evolved biological organism, greater in degree, perhaps, than the animals, but no less animal himself, and Platonic angelism, where man is most truly his soul, and the body is his habitation (or prison). This psychophysical nature we have is the contrivance of God’s “form-giving thought” (p. 23). It is on this idea—that natures are the products of form-giving thoughts—that St. Thomas Aquinas and Sartre actually agreed. Sartre, however, believed there was no God to think our natures into being, and thus we must manufacture our own natures. Aquinas confesses that God is the one who gives form to our nature.

Open to the Activity of God

A further reflection from Mascall follows from this idea. If humans, in their very essence, are the products of God’s divine intellect, then “they exist simply and entirely because they are being incessantly created, conserved, and energized by God” (p. 56). We are entirely dependent upon God, not only for our existence itself, but also for the way in which we exist. Share on X We are entirely dependent upon God, not only for our existence itself, but also for the way in which we exist—we are existentially and essentially contingent. Mascall draws on another of his works when he says, “to be a finite being is to be essentially open, open to the activity of God, who, without annulling or withdrawing anything that he has given, can always give more.”[2] Thus, there is the natural—that which is proper to us in virtue of our nature—and the supernatural—a purely gratuitous act of God upon our nature. 

It is here that light is shed on the Christian doctrine of deification. The reason why devout and learned saints, such as St. Augustine, can say that “God wishes to make you a god, not by nature but by adoption” (p. 63-64) is that they understood that man’s nature is essentially open to God’s grace, and that God has poured out His grace on human nature through the person of Jesus Christ. It is conceivable that God would confer these graces on certain individuals as He sees fit; but “the covenanted and public vehicle of grace is the human nature taken by God the Son” (p. 93).

Sons in the Son

In my own experience, I can agree with Mascall’s observation that the important doctrine of Jesus’s expiatory work has, at times, overshadowed other, equally important aspects of the Incarnation. He writes, “if this aspect [the expiatory] is treated as all-inclusive, we are in danger of overlooking or belittling the fact that in the Incarnation God was not concerned in the first place to vindicate his own dignity but to rescue man from the consequences of man’s malice and obstinacy: ‘the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost’” (p. 95). Christ came not just to forgive our sins, but to re-create the human race. The nature of Adam is swallowed up into the life of God in the person of Jesus. Most assuredly, we would not be able to come into communion with God without the cross; it must be remembered that Christ died to save us for something greater. We have been given “means of being incorporated into the human nature which the Son assumed” (p. 98). This is the grace of adoption. We become sons in the Son. Share on X

Thus the grace which the Christian receives, while it elevates him into the life of God and, in the scriptural phrase, makes him ‘a partaker of the divine nature,’ does this by the specific means of communicating to him, by his incorporation into Christ, the sonship which the Son of God enjoys in the Holy Trinity. We become sons in the Son.  ‘Because you are sons,’ writes St. Paul, ‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, ‘Abba, Father!’’… This is nothing less than a new act of creation (p. 99).

As we are united to Christ, we are united to the perfect human nature, and thus ours is “perfected, elevated, and healed by grace” (p. 91).

The Body of Christ

Man is the very good and complicated image of God on earth who, as a union of body and soul, inhabits both the realm of matter and the realm of spirit. Share on X This is a beautiful reality, but Mascall is not naive to the on-the-ground situation. Although believers are united to Christ, sin still afflicts us. He notes: “In making these exalted claims for the Church, there is, of course, no suggestion that its members are themselves free from defects” (p. 104). We must cooperate with the Lord and allow Him to let the inner reality we have been brought into become apparent in its manifestation. According to Mascall, this is one reason why the Sacraments are vital to the life of the Church. The Church is literally the Body of Christ because Jesus still has a human nature for us to be incorporated into, and the way in which we are incorporated is through the Sacraments. The Eucharist is the clearest example of this. Despite differences in understanding the mode of communication, the catholic tradition has maintained that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, and if this is true, then “the essential reality by which the glorified, the Mystical and the Sacramental Body are constituted is one and the same; it is the human nature which, at his Incarnation, the Word of God took to himself…Thus the Eucharist is the means by which the earthly Church is nourished and maintained, for in the Eucharist the Church’s inner reality is communicated to her” (p. 105). In other words, the Eucharist unites us to Christ, and it is in this union that we become truly human, freed from the corruptions of our sins. 

Coming back to the question of the Psalmist, we can see how Mascall’s doctrine of man helps answer the question, “What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou carest for him?” Man is the very good and complicated image of God on earth who, as a union of body and soul, inhabits both the realm of matter and the realm of spirit. “Thou didst make him for a little while lower than the angels.” For as we stand composed of matter and spirit, we are “below the summit of creation” (p. 33). However, through the Incarnation, our “nature has been assumed by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity [and] raised to a dignity that even angelic nature has not known” (p. 33). Through this blessed union, we find that we are one with Him who has been “crowned with glory and honour,” and under whose feet all things are in subjection.

Notes:

[1] Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1892), 65. 

[2] E.L. Mascall, Via Media: An Essay in Theological Synthesis, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1956), 153.

Photo Credit: Marcel Strauß