The Mystery of Faith. Introduction to Orthodox Dogmatic Theology

Waiting for the Messiah

The Old Testament era was a time of waiting for the Messiah-Redeemer. The first-created Adam, at the instigation of the devil, violated the commandment and fell away from God, but the Divine plan for man did not change: man is still destined for deification, only now it is no longer in his power - a Savior is needed, Who will reconcile man with God. God mysteriously announces this to the devil, addressing him with a curse at the moment of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise: "... I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (Gen. 3:15); in the Greek Bible it says, "he shall smite thee in the head." The masculine pronoun "he" does not agree with the neuter word "seed" (sperma, according to the LXX translation), which usually means "offspring" in general, but in this case, as Christian interpreters believe, it indicates a specific person ("seed" can also mean "son", "descendant") who will strike the devil in the head. In the same context, God's promise to Abraham is understood: "And in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed" (Gen. 22:18). The dying Jacob, blessing his sons, speaks directly of the Mediator who will come from the tribe of Judah: "The scepter shall not depart from Judah... until the Mediator comes, and to Him is the obedience of the nations" (Gen. 49:10). The entire second Psalm prophetically speaks of the Messiah, who is here called the Son of God and Christ (the Anointed One): "The kings of the earth arise, and the princes take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed One... The Lord said to me, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee" (Psalm 2:2, 7). The prophet speaks of the birth of the Messiah from a Virgin: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means, God is with us" (Isaiah 7:14). Isaiah predicts the birth of the Child (Isaiah 9:7), the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Him (Isaiah 11:1-10, 42:1-7, 61:1). Isaiah's prophecies about the sufferings of the Messiah are striking: "As many were amazed when they looked at You, so much was His countenance disfigured more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men! So many nations will be amazed by Him; kings will shut their mouths before him, for they will see what has not been spoken, and they will know what they have not heard. Who believed what we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord revealed? For He ascended before Him as a sprout, and as a sprout out of dry earth; there is neither form nor majesty in Him... He took upon Himself our infirmities and bore our sorrows... He was wounded for our sins, and bruised for our iniquities... and with his stripes we were healed... We all wandered like sheep, each turned to his own path, and the Lord laid on Him the sins of all of us. He was tormented, but he suffered voluntarily, and did not open his mouth... A tomb with evildoers was assigned to him, but he is buried with the rich, because he committed no sin, and there was no lie in his mouth" (Isaiah 52:14-15; 53:1-2, 4-7, 9). The prophets were witnesses of Christ before His coming—the Holy Spirit revealed to them the future that they spoke of as the present. The Apostle Peter writes that the Spirit of Christ dwelt in the prophets: "To this salvation belonged the searches and searches of the prophets, who foretold the grace assigned to you, examining to what and to what time the Spirit of Christ who was in them indicated, when He foretold Christ's sufferings and the glory that would follow them" (1 Pet. 1:10-11). With their spiritual eyes, the prophets foresaw what would be revealed in the New Testament, and prepared the people of Israel to meet the Messiah. The last of the prophets, John the Baptist, was the first of the apostles: he foretold about Christ and he also testified about Him when Christ came. John the Baptist stands on the verge of two epochs, completing one and opening the other: in his person there was a meeting of the Old Testament with the New.In the years immediately preceding the birth of Christ, the expectation of the Messiah was universal. "I know that the Messiah is coming, that is, Christ; when He comes, He will declare all things to us," says a simple Samaritan woman in the Gospel (John 4:25). Not only among the people of Israel, but also among the Gentiles, many lived with the dream of a "golden age." The Roman poet Virgil (1st century B.C.) in the fourth eclogue of his "Aeneid" announced the mysterious Child, Whose birth signifies the beginning of a new blessed era of salvation. "Peering into the future, Virgil involuntarily spoke in the language of Isaiah and truly appeared as a prophet of the ancient world," writes a modern researcher on this occasion [1]. Mankind languished, seized by a premonition of the coming of the Savior into the world... E. Svetlov. On the threshold of the New Testament. Brussels, 1983. P. 507 ^

Anthology of Holy Texts

The world is beautiful, the creation of the great God, but there is nothing more beautiful than man, the true man, the son of God.Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)It is also worthy of our attention that when the foundation was laid for such a vast world and its main parts, which became part of the whole, the creation was carried out as if in a hurry... The constitution of man is preceded by counsel, and by the Artist... the future creation is prefigured: what it should be, what prototype (should) bear in itself a likeness, for what purpose it will be and what it will do after creation, and over what it should rule - all this was provided by the Word, so that man would assume a dignity that is higher than his being, acquire power over beings before he himself came into being. For it is said: "And God said, Let us make man in our image and after our likeness" (Gen. 1:6)... What a miracle! The sun is arranged, and no council precedes it, neither does the heavens, although there is nothing equal to it in the created (world)... The Creator approaches the very arrangement of man as if with prudence, in order to... to liken his image to a certain primordial beauty... According to the Orthodox worldview, God created two levels of created things: first, the "noetic," spiritual or mental level, and second, the material or bodily level. On the first level, God created angels who do not have a material body. On the second level, He created the physical world—galaxies, stars, and planets—with various kinds of minerals, plant and animal life. Man, and only man, exists simultaneously on two levels. By virtue of his spirit or spiritual mind, he is a partaker of the noetic realm and is a "companion of angels"; thanks to his body and soul, he moves, feels and thinks, eats and drinks... Our human nature is thus more complex than angelic and endowed with greater potential. Viewed from this perspective, man is not inferior, but higher than angels... Man stands at the heart of God's creation. Being a partaker of both the spiritual and material realms, he is the image or mirror of the whole creation, the imago mundi, the "small universe" or microcosm. Everything created has a meeting place in it... Saint Irenaeus said: "The glory of God is a living man." The human person is the center and crown of God's creation.Bishop Kallistos of DiokleiaIn the beginning, when God created man, He placed him in paradise, as the Holy Scriptures say, adorned him with every virtue and gave him the commandment not to eat of the tree that is in the midst of paradise. And he was in the delights of paradise, in prayer, contemplation, in all glory and honor, having healthy senses and being in the natural (state) in which he was created. For God created man in His own image, that is, immortal, free, adorned with every virtue. But when he transgressed the commandment by eating the fruit of the tree, from which God commanded him not to eat, then he was expelled from paradise, fell away from the natural (state) and fell into the unnatural, that is, into sin, love of glory, thirst for worldly pleasures, and other passions, which took possession of him, for he himself became their slave through disobedience. Then evil gradually began to increase, and death reigned. There was no worship of God left anywhere, and everywhere there was ignorance of God... So the good God gave (people) the law to help them convert and correct evil, but it was not corrected. He sent prophets, but they were not successful either. For evil prevailed, as Isaiah says: "Neither for injury, nor for ulcer, nor for inflamed wound is there plaster to apply, nor oil, nor bandage" (Isaiah 1:6, LXX). As if to say: evil is not somewhere in one place, but in the whole body, has embraced the whole soul, has taken possession of all its powers... Only God could heal such a disease... Abba DorotheusAdam was created by God pure to serve Him, and all this creation was given to serve Adam, because he was made lord and king of all creation. But when the evil word found access to him and conversed with him, Adam first received it with his outer ears, then it penetrated into his heart, and embraced his whole being. And thus, after his captivity, all the creatures subject to him were already captive with him, because through him death reigned over every soul, and as a result of his disobedience so distorted Adam's image that people were changed and came to worship demons. For behold, the fruits of the earth, beautifully created by God, are offered to the demons: bread, wine, oil, and animals are placed on their altars. Even their sons and daughters (pagans) were sacrificed to demons.The Monk Macarius of EgyptWhen Adam fell and died to God, the Creator grieved for him: the angels, all the powers, heaven, earth and all creatures mourned his death and fall. For the creatures saw that he who was given to them as king had become the slave of an opposing and evil power. And so, with darkness, bitter and evil darkness he clothed his soul, because the prince of darkness reigned over him. He was the one who was wounded by robbers and became half-dead when he went from Jerusalem to Jericho (Luke 10:30). And Lazarus, whom the Lord resurrected, this Lazarus, filled with a great stench, so that no one could approach his tomb, was an image of Adam, who took a great stench into his soul and was filled with blackness and darkness. But you, when you hear about Adam, about the robbers, about Lazarus, do not let your mind wander as it were in the mountains, but shut yourself up within your soul, because you bear the same wounds, the same stench, the same darkness. We are all sons of this darkened lineage... We are wounded with such an incurable wound that only the Lord can heal it. That is why He Himself came, for none of the Old Testament (righteous), neither the law itself, nor the prophets could heal this wound.St. Macarius of EgyptNot only the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are filled with prophecies about the coming Deliverer from sin and its consequences – death and hell: the expectation of the coming God, the conqueror of hell, suffering, dying and resurrecting, as if by lightning, cut through the darkness of the pagan consciousness... Mankind longed for God-manhood... The prophecy of a suffering god descending into hell for the proud and embittered Prometheus is one of the most amazing images of Aeschylus. Hermes, addressing Prometheus, says: "And know that your sufferings will end only when some god agrees to descend instead of you into the dark kingdom of Hades, into the gloomy abysses of Tartarus." in paradise he knew the sweetness of God's love, and therefore, when he was expelled from paradise for sin and deprived of God's love, he suffered bitterly and wept with a great groan... He did not regret the beauty of paradise so much as that he had lost the love of God, which insatiably draws the soul to God at every moment. Thus, every soul that has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, but then loses grace, experiences Adam's torment... (Adam) wept bitterly, and the earth was not dear to him. He yearned for God and said: "My soul misses the Lord, and I seek Him with tears. How can I not seek Him?.. I cannot forget Him even for a minute, and my soul yearns for Him..." Great was Adam's sorrow after his expulsion from Paradise, but when he saw his son Abel killed by his brother Cain, his grief became even greater, and his soul was tormented, and he wept, and thought: "From me shall come forth and multiply nations, and all shall suffer, and live in enmity, and kill one another." And this sorrow of his was as great as the sea, and only he whose soul has come to know the Lord can understand it... Adam lost the earthly paradise and wept for it: "Paradise is mine, paradise, my beautiful paradise." But the Lord, through His love on the cross, gave him another paradise, better than the previous one – in heaven, where the light of the Holy Trinity is. What shall we repay the Lord for His love for us?

Chapter VI: Christ

The New Adam

At the center of the entire New Testament gospel lies the mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God.The first-created Adam was unable to fulfill the task assigned to him - to achieve deification through spiritual and moral perfection and to bring the visible world to God. After breaking the commandment and falling away from the sweetness of paradise, the path to deification was closed to him. But everything that the first man could not fulfill, was fulfilled for him by the incarnate God - the Word made flesh - the Lord Jesus Christ. He Himself walked the path to man by which man had to go to Him. And if for man it was the path of ascent, then for God it was the path of humble condescension, impoverishment and exhaustion (kenosis).The Apostle Paul called Christ the second Adam, contrasting Him with the first Adam: "The first man is of the earth, earthly, the second man is the Lord from heaven" (1 Cor. 15:47). This opposition is developed by the Holy Fathers, who emphasize that Adam was a prototype of Christ by contrast: "Adam is the image of Christ," says St. John Chrysostom. "As he became the cause of death for those who were born of him, although they did not eat of the tree, so Christ became for those who were born of him, although they did not do good, the giver of righteousness, which he gave to us all through the cross [1]." St. Gregory the Theologian contrasts in detail the sufferings of Christ with the fall of Adam: "For each of our debts a special recompense has been given... For this purpose, the tree is for the tree, and for the hand - the hands, for the intemperately outstretched - courageously outstretched, for the willful - nailed (to the cross), for the one who expelled Adam - uniting the ends of the world together. For this, the ascension (to the cross) is for the fall, the gall is for the eating (of the forbidden fruit)... death for death, burial for return to the earth."2 Few accepted the second Adam and believed in Him when He came to earth. Jesus, incarnate, suffering, and resurrected, became "a stumbling block to the Jews" and "foolishness to the Greeks" (1 Cor. 1:23). In the eyes of the orthodox Jew, Jesus was indeed a scandalous figure ("temptation" - skandalon), since He declared Himself to be God and made Himself equal to God (John 5:18), which was perceived as blasphemy. When Caiaphas, feeling that false testimony is insufficient against Christ, asks Him: "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?", not wanting to say directly "Son of God", so as not to mention the name of God once again, and Christ answers, "I am", the high priest tears his tunic, as if hearing unbearable blasphemy (Mark 14:61-64). We do not know exactly what this "I am" sounded like in Aramaic, but whether He did not call Himself by the sacred name of God Yahweh (Heb. Yahweh, as has been said, comes from ehieh - "I am"), which no one had the right to pronounce, except the high priest once a year, when he entered the Holy of Holies? Over the course of many centuries, Greek wisdom had built a temple to the "unknown God" (Acts 17:23), and it was incapable of understanding how the unknown, invisible, incomprehensible, omnipotent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God could become a mortal, suffering, weak man. The God born of a Woman, the God Who is wrapped in swaddling clothes, put to bed, fed with milk - all this seemed absurd to the Greeks. Ioannis Chrysostomi Opera omnia. Ed. 2. Paris, 1834-1839. T. 9, 520S^PG 35, 433S-436A^

The Christ of the Gospel: God and Man

In the Gospel, Jesus Christ is described as a real person with all the qualities of an ordinary person. He is born and grows, eats and drinks, gets tired and sleeps, grieves and rejoices. Many have been seduced by this evangelical realism and have tried to construct an image of the "historical Christ" by contrasting him with the "Christ of faith" or the "Christ of believers," rejecting all that is miraculous and "mystical" in the Gospel, and leaving only that which "does not contradict common sense." For example, in the book by E. Renan "The Life of Jesus" all the miracles of Christ are called "juggling": He "thought that He performed" miracles, but in reality there were no miracles [1]. In his commentaries on the Gospel, Leo Tolstoy becomes sophisticated in blasphemy about the Seedless Conception, Transfiguration, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, as well as about all healings and miracles: "A sick person waits 20 years for a miracle. Jesus looked at him and said, "In vain do you wait for a miracle from an angel here, miracles do not happen." Wake up. Gather up your bed and live in God's way. He tried, got up and went... I knew a lady who lay down for 20 years and got up only when she was given a spray of morphine: 20 years later, the doctor who gave her a spray confessed that he had sprayed with water, and when the lady learned this, she took her bed and went [2]." In fact, Tolstoy does not so much ridicule the miracles of Christ as he denies the reality of human suffering: the cause of suffering is self-deception. With this approach, both healing and redemption seem simply superfluous: a person only needs to convince himself that he is healthy, and everything will fall into place. The so-called "historical Christ", that is, freed from the "patina of mysticism and miracles", turns at best, as in Renan, into the Christ of human fantasy - a sugary picture that has little in common with the real Christ. In the worst case, as in Tolstoy, everything ends with a caricature of the Gospel.The living, real Christ is known to us when we accept the entire Gospel to the last letter as a revelation of Divine truth. The Gospel is not a book comprehended by the human mind: it is superrational and supernatural, it is full of miracles from beginning to end, and it is itself a miracle. Indeed, the very first chapters of each Gospel bear witness to the Divinity of Christ, to the existence of angels and the devil, and they confront the human mind with a choice: either to humble itself, submitting to faith and the superrational revelation of the Divinity, or... close the book because it contradicts "common sense". Thus, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, we read about the birth of Christ from a virgin without the participation of a man; in the first chapter of Mark - about the temptation of Christ in the wilderness and his meeting with the devil; from Luke - about the appearance of the archangel and the Annunciation; From the first chapters, the Christ of the Gospel is revealed to us simultaneously as God and man: all His actions and words, being the actions and words of man, are nevertheless marked by the seal of divinity. Jesus is born, like other children, but not of a husband and wife, but of the Holy Spirit and a Virgin. The Infant is brought to the temple, like other firstborns, but He is met by a prophet and a prophetess and recognized as the Messiah. He grows and strengthens in spirit while living in his parents' home, but when he is twelve years old, he sits in the temple among the teachers and speaks mysterious words about His Father. He comes to be baptized on the Jordan, like other people, but at the moment of Baptism, the voice of the Father is heard and the Holy Spirit appears in the form of a dove. He gets tired of the journey, sits down at the well and asks the Samaritan woman to drink, but he does not drink or eat when the disciples bring food and offer it to Him. He sleeps at the stern of the boat, but when he wakes up, he tames the raging elements with a word. He ascends Mount Tabor and prays to God, like any other person, but during prayer He is transfigured and reveals to His disciples the light of His Divinity. He comes to the tomb of Lazarus and mourns the death of His friend, but with the words "Lazarus, come out!" He resurrects him. He fears suffering and prays to the Father to avoid it if possible, but He surrenders Himself to the will of the Father and expresses His willingness to die for people. Finally, he accepts desecration, humiliation and crucifixion, dies on the cross as a criminal, but on the third day he rises from the tomb and appears to his disciples.The Gospel irrefutably testifies to the divine-manhood of Christ. Being a book inspired by God, it is, however, written by living people, each of whom describes events as he saw and perceived them, or as he heard about them from eyewitnesses. The "inspiration" of the sacred books is understood as the joint creation of people and the Holy Spirit - their cooperation, synergia. There are certain differences in detail between the four Evangelists, which does not indicate a contradiction between them, but their unity: if the narratives were absolutely identical, this would indicate that their authors consulted with each other and copied from each other. The Gospels are eyewitness accounts in which each fact is reliable, but is presented from the point of view of a particular author. E. Renan. The Life of Jesus. Moscow, 1990. Pp. 188-189 ^ L. Tolstoy. Complete Works. T. 24. Moscow, 1957. P. 311 ^

The Christ of Faith: Two Natures

The Holy Scriptures are the main source of our knowledge about God and about Christ. But Scripture can be understood and interpreted in different ways: all heresies were supported by references to Scripture and quotations from the Bible. Therefore, a certain criterion for the correct understanding of the Bible is necessary: such a criterion in the Church is Holy Tradition, of which Scripture is a part. Holy Tradition includes the entire centuries-old experience of the life of the Church, reflected, in addition to Scripture, in the acts and beliefs of the Ecumenical Councils, in the writings of the Holy Fathers, and in liturgical practice. The whole pathos of the New Testament lies in the fact that its authors were "witnesses": "Of that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and which our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life: for life has appeared, and we have seen, and testify, and declare unto you this eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" (1 John 1:1-2). But Christ continues to live in the Church, and the experience of contact with Him, of life in Him, gives birth to a new witness, which is sealed in Tradition. The Gospel spoke of Christ as God and man, but Church Tradition had to formulate the dogma of the union of Divinity and humanity in Christ. The development of this dogma was carried out in the era of Christological disputes (IV-VII centuries). In the second half of the fourth century, Apollinaris of Laodicea taught that the primordial God the Logos took on human flesh and soul, but did not take on the human mind: instead of the mind, Christ had a Divinity that merged with humanity and made one nature with it. Hence the famous formula of Apollinarius, later erroneously attributed to St. Athanasius: "one nature of God the Word incarnate." According to the teaching of Apollinarius, Christ is not completely of the same essence with us, since He does not have a human mind. He is a "heavenly man" who has only taken on a human form, but has not become a full-fledged earthly man. Some followers of Apollinaris said that the Logos took on only a human body, and that His soul and spirit are divine. Others went further and asserted that He brought the body from heaven, but passed through the Holy Virgin "as through a trumpet."1 Opponents of Apollinaris and representatives of another trend in Christology were Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who taught about the coexistence in Christ of two separate independent natures, which are correlated as follows: God the Logos dwelt in the man Jesus, Whom He chose and anointed, with Whom he "touched" and "lived". The union of mankind with the Godhead, according to Theodore and Diodorus, was not absolute, but relative: the Logos lived in Jesus as in a temple. The earthly life of Jesus, according to Theodore, is the life of man in contact with the Logos. "God from eternity foresaw the highly moral life of Jesus, and in view of this He chose Him as the organ and temple of His Divinity." At first, at the moment of birth, this contact was incomplete, but as Jesus grew spiritually and morally perfected, it became fuller. The final deification of Christ's human nature took place after His redemptive feat [2].In the fifth century, Theodore's disciple Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, following his teacher, made a sharp distinction between the two natures in Christ, separating the Lord from the "image of the servant", the temple from the "living in it", the Almighty God from the "worshipped man". Nestorius preferred to call the Most Holy Virgin Mary the Mother of Christ, and not the Mother of God, on the grounds that "Mary did not give birth to the Divinity." The unrest among the people over the term "Mother of God" (the people did not want to abandon this traditional designation of the Holy Virgin), as well as the sharp criticism of Nestorianism by St. Cyril of Alexandria, led to the convocation of the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431, which formulated (although not definitively) the teaching of the Church about the God-man. but about the "union" of the two natures in Christ. In the incarnation, God took on human nature while remaining what He was: that is, being perfect and complete God, He became a full-fledged man. In contrast to Theodore and Nestorius, Saint Cyril constantly emphasized that Christ is one indivisible person, one hypostasis. Thus, the rejection of the term "Theotokos" means the denial of the mystery of the Incarnation, because God the Word and the man Jesus are one and the same Person: "We have been taught from the Divine Scriptures and the Holy Fathers to confess one Son, Christ and Lord, that is, the Word of God the Father, begotten of Him before the ages, in a manner ineffable and befitting only God, and Him in the last times for our sake, Who was born of the Holy Virgin according to the flesh, and since she gave birth to God Incarnate and Incarnate, we call her the Mother of God. One is the Son, One Lord Jesus Christ, both before and after the Incarnation. There were not two different sons: one Word from God the Father, and the other from the Holy Virgin. But we believe that the same Eternal One was born of the Virgin according to the flesh [3]." Insisting on the unity of the person of Christ, St. Cyril also used the dubious formula of Apollinarius, "the one nature of God the Word incarnate," thinking that this formula belongs to St. Athanasius of Alexandria. St. Cyril, in contrast to the Cappadocians who preceded him in time, used the term "nature" (ousia) as a synonym for the term "hypostasis," which, as it soon turned out, became a source of new perplexities in Eastern Christian Christology. They spoke of the complete "merging" of the Divinity and humanity into "one nature of God the Word incarnate": the formula of Apollinarius-Cyril became their banner. "God died on the cross" - this is how the supporters of Dioscorus expressed it, denying the possibility of talking about some of Christ's actions as human actions [4]. Eutyches, after much persuasion to accept the teaching of the two natures in Christ, said: "I confess that our Lord consisted of two natures before the union, and after the union I confess one nature."5 The Fourth Ecumenical Council, convened in 451 in Chalcedon, condemned Monophysitism and rejected the Apollinarian formula "one nature incarnate", contrasting it with the formula "one hypostasis of God the Word in two natures – divine and human [6]". The Orthodox teaching was expressed even before the beginning of the Council by St. Leo, Pope of Rome: "It is equally dangerous to recognize in Christ only God without man, or only man without God... Thus, in the whole and perfect nature of the true man, the true God was born, all in His, all in our... He Who is the true God is the true man. And there is not the slightest untruth in this unity, since both the humility of man and the greatness of the Divinity exist together... One of them shines with miracles, the other is humiliated... Humble shrouds show the infancy of a child, and the faces of angels proclaim the greatness of the Almighty. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sleep are obviously characteristic of man, and to feed five thousand people with five loaves of bread, to give living water to the Samaritan woman, to walk in the waters of the sea, to calm the rising waves, to forbid the wind, is undoubtedly characteristic of God [7]." In this way, each nature preserves the fullness of its attributes, but Christ is not divided into two persons, remaining one hypostasis of God the Word.In the dogmatic definition of faith of the Council it is indicated that Christ is of one essence with the Father in Divinity and is of one essence with us in humanity, and also that the two natures in Christ are united "unmerged, unchanging, inseparable, inseparable" [8]. These chiseled formulations show how sharp and vigilant the theological thought of the Eastern Church was in the fifth century, and at the same time how cautiously the Fathers used terms and formulas in trying to "express the inexpressible." All four terms that speak of the union of natures are strictly apophatic - they begin with the prefix "not-". This shows that the union of the two natures in Christ is a mystery that transcends the mind, and no word can describe it. The only thing that is said with precision is how the natures are not united, in order to avoid heresies that merge, confuse, and divide them. But the very image of union remains hidden to the human mind. V. Bolotov. Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church. T. 4. Pg. 1918. pp. 136-148. See. See also: M. Posnov. History of the Christian Church. Brussels, 1964. Ss. 372-374. See. See also: J. Meyendorff. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. New York, 1975. R. 15 ^ V. Bolotov. Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church. T. 4. Ss. 152-156. See. See also: J. Pelikan. The Christian Tradition, v. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600). Chicago - London 1971. p. 231-232 ^ St. Cyril of Alexandria. 1st Epistle to Suckens ^ V. Bolotov. Lecture. T. 4. P. 243 ^ Ibid. P. 253 ^ J. Meyendorff. Christ. Pp. 26–27^ Op. cit. by: V. Bolotov. Lecture. T. 4. Ss. 267-269. See. See also: J. Pelikan. Emergence. Rr. 258–259 ^ Op. cit. by: V. Bolotov. Lecture. T. 4. Ss. 292-293 (full Greek text and Russian translation) ^

The Two Wills of Christ

In the sixth century, some theologians said that in Christ one must confess two natures, but not independent, but having one "God-manly action," one energy, hence the name heresy - monoenergism. By the beginning of the seventh century, another trend had formed, Monothelitism, which confessed one will in Christ. Both currents rejected the independence of the two natures of Christ and taught about the complete absorption of His human will by the Divine will. Monothelite views were professed by three patriarchs - Honorius of Rome, Sergius of Constantinople and Cyrus of Alexandria. They hoped to reconcile the Orthodox with the Monophysites by means of a compromise.The main fighters against Monothelitism in the middle of the seventh century were the Constantinople monk St. Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin, the successor of Honorius in the Roman cathedra. St. Maximus taught about two energies and two wills in Christ: "Christ, being God by nature, used a will that was by nature divine and paternal, for He has one will with the Father. Being a man by nature, he also used a natural human will, which in no way opposed to the will of the Father [1]." The human will of Christ, although in harmony with the divine will, was completely independent. This is especially evident in the example of the Savior's prayer in Gethsemane: "My Father! If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me, not as I will, but as Thou wilt" (Matt. 26:39). Such a prayer would not have been possible if the human will of Christ had been completely absorbed by the Divine.Saint Maximus was severely punished for his confession of the Gospel Christ: his tongue was cut out and his right hand was cut off. He died in exile, as did Pope Martin. But the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which took place in the years 680-681 at Constantinople, fully confirmed the teaching of Saint Maximus: "We preach... that in Him (in Christ) there are two natural wills or desires, and two natural actions are inseparable, unchanging, inseparable, inseparable. These two natural wills are not opposed to each other... but His human will... is subject to the divine and omnipotent will [2]." As a full-fledged man, Christ had free will, but this freedom did not mean for him the possibility of choosing between good and evil. The human will of Christ freely chooses only the good, and there is no conflict between it and the Divine will. PG 91, 77D-80A. Cm. See also: J. Meyendorff. Christ. p. 147 ^ Op. cit. by: V. Bolotov. Lecture. T. 4. Ss. 498-499 ^