Micro-Theos: Man Is Wondrous as God Is Wondrous
by St Sophrony of Essex
Feast of SS Sophrony of Essex and Euphemia the Great Martyr
Anno Domini 2020, July 11
“A man is born into the world” (Jn. 16:21). Before Christ no one ever greeted with such rapture the appearance of man as He Who had created man. The Creator of the universe rejoiced more over man than over the glorious choir of heavenly bodies. Man is more precious than all the rest of the cosmos. Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous. He is immortal and supra-cosmic. He is more than a microcosm—he is a micro-theos. For the eternal Logos of the Father to be made flesh “in the likeness of man” (Phil. 2:7) means that, with the gift of His love, man in turn may become like God, even to identity.
Between God and man there is and must be commensurability in spite of all that is non-commensurable. To dismiss this idea of commensurability would make it totally impossible to interpret any form of cognition as truth—that is, as corresponding to the reality of Primordial Being. If man by the nature of his spirit is not “like unto God,” then neither could God have been made man. In the lofty bliss of His all-perfect Being God, infinite goodness, desired to bestow this bliss “outside” Himself, and so He created a world of reasonable beings. He did not create them for a part only of His bliss—any element of limitation would indicate unlikeness and rule out eternal unity with God on the highest plane.
The doctrine that man may become god-like, entirely, not just to a certain degree, lies at the root of our Christian anthropology. As the image and likeness of the Absolute, man is conscious that in his spirit he transcends every other form of natural being. In prayer we glimpse in ourselves divine infinity, not yet actualized but foreknown. Perfection of likeness, however, does not remove the ontological distance between God the Creator and man the created.
The tragedy of creation came with the fall, and continues in our perpetual instability. Prone to evil, we detest and fight evil; in our longing for the absolute good, for God, we push Him away and resist Him.
Christ, having linked God and man inseparably in Himself, is the one and only solution of the apparently insoluble conflict. He is in truth “the Savior of the world” (Jn. 4:42). He is the measure of all things, divine and human. He is the sole way to the Father. He is the sun which illuminates the universe. Only in His light can the way be seen.
*From Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life Is Mine
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 77-78. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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