In the Mother of God, the first created person who has entered the resplendence of the Kingdom in her earthly flesh, we see the two mysteries conjoined: that of the image restored in Christ and that of the likeness achieved by the Spirit and freedom. Nicholas Cabasilas said that God, as long as he had not found a mother, was like a king in exile, like a stranger without a city.
Solely because a young girl, in her sovereign freedom, received the angel’s message, could God take flesh, re-enter the heart of his creation, recreate the world from within. For the body is simply the world as interior to a person, and only a person could readmit the Exile to the world through her body. There it was that the new Eve, for the first time since the original banishment, undid the tragedy of human freedom.
Today the mystery of Mary has become universal in the Church of the Holy Spirit. ‘Christ is mysteriously born in the soul, taking flesh through those who are saved, making a virgin mother of the soul that gives birth to him’ (Maximus the Confessor. PG,XC,889 C).
The incarnation is not extended, but made actual in each person through the operation of the Holy Spirit. It is Christ who comes, the human Christ and the universal Christ, who is thus manifested little by little; he is identical with the risen Christ, but the Vine now bears innumerable clusters whence flows the wine of great joy.
The Christ who comes will be in a new sense the Son of Man; every time the image of Christ, our pattern, bears fruit in a personal likeness according to the eternal youth of the Spirit, we bring him to birth.
A young Greek theologian, Panaghiotis Nellas, has observed that in the course of centuries many atheists have asserted that humanity could become God; but none of them, he says, has dared to think that human beings might give birth to God. That is what we affirm when we venerate the Mother of God, when we see in the faces of the saints the glorious advent of the Lord.
~Adapted from Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
His Image Recovered
“So—and yes, I ‘m asking—what was the God to do? What other course—His being God and All—but to renew His lately none-too-vivid Image in the aspect of mankind, so that, by His Icon thus restored, we dim occasions might once more come to know Him? And how should this be done, save by the awful advent of the very God Himself, our Lord and King and gleaming Liberator Jesus Christ?
Here, beloved numbskulls, is a little picture: You gather, one presumes, what must be done when a portrait on a panel becomes obscured—maybe even lost—to external stain. The artist does not discard the panel, though the subject must return to sit for it again, whereupon the likeness is etched once more upon the same material. As He tells us in the Gospel, I came to seek and to save that which was lost—our faces, say.” –Saint Athanasios
~From Scott Cairns, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life
