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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