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

totality of the nature. It must be said however that this total nature was
contemplated in an individual manner - [for how otherwise could it have been
seen?] - in a way which made it visible and describable, which allowed it to
eat and drink...11

Humanity for Theodore "exists only in Peter and Paul," i.e., in
concrete human beings, and Jesus was such a being. Otherwise, Thomas'
experience of placing his finger into Jesus' wounds would have been
impossible.12 The iconoclasts claimed that Christ in virtue of the union
between divinity and humanity was indescribable; and therefore, that no
image of Him was possible. But for Theodore, "an indescribable Christ would
be an incorporeal Christ... Isaiah [8:3] described him as a male being, and
only the forms of the body can make man and woman distinct one from
another."13
A firm stand on Christ's individuality as on a man's one again raised
the issue of the hypostatic union; for in Chalcedonian Christology, the
unique hypostasis or person of Christ is that of the Logos. Obviously then,
the notion of hypostasis cannot be identified with either the divine or the
human characteristics; neither can it be identical with the idea of human
consciousness. The hypostasis is the ultimate source of individual, personal
existence, which in Christ is both divine and human.
For Theodore, an image can be the image of an hypostasis only, for the
image of a nature is inconceivable.14 On the icons of Christ, the only
proper inscription is the personal God, "He who is" - the Greek equivalent
of the sacred tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh) of the Old Testament, never such
impersonal terms as "divinity" or "kingship," which belong to the Trinity as
such and thus cannot be represented.15 This principle, rigidly followed in
classical Byzantine iconography, shows that the icon of Christ is for
Theodore not only an image of "the man Jesus" but also of the incarnate
Logos. The meaning of the Christian Gospel lies precisely in the fact that
the Logos assumed all the characteristics of a man including describability,
and His icon is a permanent witness of this fact.
The humanity of Christ, which makes the icons possible, is a "new
humanity" having been fully restored to communion with God, deified in
virtue of the communication of idioms, and bearing fully again the image of
God. This fact is to be reflected in iconography as in a form of art: the
artist thus receives a quasi-sacramental function. Theodore compares the
Christian artist to God Himself making the man in His own image: "The fact
that God made man in His image and likeness showed that iconography was a
divine action."16 At the beginning, God created man in His image. By making
an icon of Christ, the iconographer also makes an "image of God," for what
the deified humanity of Jesus truly is.

By position, temperament, and style, Nicephorus, Patriarch of
Constantinople (806-815), was the opposite of Theodore. He belonged to the
series of Byzantine patriarchs between Tarasius and Photius who were
elevated to the supreme ecclesiastical position after a successful civil
career. As patriarch, he followed a policy of oikonomia and suspended the
canonical penalties previously imposed upon the priest Joseph who had
performed the "adulterous" marriage of Constantine VI. This action brought