1 John. L. Daniel Cantey
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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