"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

ultimate fate of man.
Western Christological thought since the early Middle Ages has been
dominated by the Anselmian idea of redemption through "satisfaction;" the
idea that Jesus offered to the Father a perfect and sufficient sacrifice,
propitiatory for the sins of mankind, has been at the centre of
Christological speculation playing a prominent role in modern historical
research on the patristic age. The result is that Christology has been
conceived as a topic in itself, clearly distinct from pneumatology and
anthropology. But if one keeps in mind the Greek patristic notion that the
true nature of man means life in God realized once and for all through the
Holy Spirit in the hypostatic union of the man Jesus with the Logos and made
accessible to all men through the same Holy Spirit in the humanity of Christ
and in His body, the Church, Christology acquires a new and universal
dimension. It cannot be isolated any longer from either the doctrine of the
Holy Spirit or the doctrine of man, and it becomes a key for the
understanding of the Gospel as a whole.
The issue of "participation in God's life" and "deification" stands as
a necessary background to the clash between Alexandrian and Antiochian
Christology in the fifth century. When the great exegetes of Antioch -
Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, and even Theodoret of
Cyrus - emphasize the full humanity of the historical Jesus, they understand
this humanity not merely as distinct from the divinity but as "autonomous"
and personalized. If "deified," Jesus could no longer be truly man, he must
simply be the son of Mary if he is to be ignorant, to suffer, and to die. It
is precisely this understanding of humanity as autonomous, which has
attracted the sympathies of modern Western theologians toward the
Antiochians, but which provoked the emergence of Nestorianism and the clash
with Alexandria. For the concept of "deification" was the very argument with
which Athanasius had countered to Arius: "God became a man, so a man may
become God." The great Cappadocian Fathers also shared this argument, and by
it, they were convinced, as were the vast majority of the Eastern
episcopate, of the truth of the Nicaean faith in spite of their original
doubts concerning the term "consubstantial."
Thus, the essential "good news" about the coming of new life - human
because it is also divine - was expressed by Cyril of Alexandria and not by
the more rational scheme defended by Nestorius. Cyril lacked the vocabulary
however and the flexibility to satisfy those who feared the Monophysite
temptation of seeing in Jesus a God who ceased to be also man. Cyril's
formula of "one nature [or hypostasis] incarnated" was still polemical in
leaving the door open to the Orthodox distinction between the divine nature
per se and the "divine nature incarnated" and therefore recognizing the
reality of the "flesh;" it was anti-Nestorian not balanced formula and
positive definition of who Christ is. The Chalcedonian definition of 451 -
two natures united in one hypostasis yet retaining in full their respective
characteristics - was therefore a necessary correction of Cyril's
vocabulary. Permanent credit should be given to the Antiochians - especially
to Theodoret - and to Leo of Rome for having shown the necessity of this
correction, without which Cyrillian Christology could easily be, and
actually was, interpreted in a Monophysite sense by Eutyches and his
followers.