Paying Attention To The Sky

The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon 451AD

The following is adapted from Fr. Robert Barron’s And Now I See which one reviewer has called “the most readable, sensible and well-supported view of Christianity” he had ever read. It constantly surprises me that as I return to this book to help me advocate the Church’s positions, I always find something clear-cut and easily understandable. Most recently I was in an Internet food fight on the historicity of Jesus. The Jesus Denier was going on and on about how Jesus was in fact a fable constructed from earlier pagan myths. I used the Chalcedonian Doctrine against him, pointing out that what had gone before in various mythologies was as similar to the Jesus of the gospels as a fine burgundy wine is to grape Kool-Aid.

Anyways, here is the amalgam of arguments I used in a longer more thoughtful piece. It couples Fr. Barron’s writings on Chalcedon and Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason (another fine book previously featured on PayingAttentionToTheSky)

The Chalcedonian Doctrine came at the end of a long period of debate and discussion in the early church concerning the nature and salvific significance of Jesus Christ. To simplify somewhat, two camps battled for supremacy over the course of two centuries: one placing greater emphasis on the humanity of the Lord and the other on his divinity. Arius, the fourth-century heresiarch, proposed a sort of compromise according to which Jesus is somewhat divine and somewhat human. Arius’s position, to give it its due, had a certain coherency in the context of the ancient world, since it was borrowed from a mythological framework. In the legends of the Greeks, many gods and goddesses “mixed themselves” with humans, producing all sorts of divine/human hybrids, quasi-gods and demigods. Arius proposed to his Hellenistic Christian world a similar theory of the mingling of nature and supernature.

Robert Sokolowski has commented on this Christian distinction between older pagan myths and legends and the Christian religion:

Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflection primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness. It is not the case that God and the world are each separately understood in this new way, and only subsequently related to each other; they are determined in the distinction not each apart from the other.

The Christian distinction between the world and God may receive its precise verbal formulation in a theoretical context, since it is described especially by theologians and philosophers, but the distinction does not emerge for the first time in this theoretical setting. It receives its formulation in reflective thought because it has already been achieved in the life that goes on before reflective thinking occurs.

The distinction is lived in Christian life, and most originally it was lived and expressed in the life of Jesus, after having been anticipated, and hence to some extent possessed, in the Old Testament history which Jesus completed. The Christian distinction is there for us now, as something for us to live and as an issue for reflection, because it was brought forward in the life and teaching of Christ, and because that life and teaching continue to be available in the life and teaching of the Church. It is a massive theological and philosophical fact that this understanding arose and is maintained by Christian belief.

Further, as Sokolowski explains this “Christian distinction” carries with it a certain strangeness:

When we turn away from the world or from the whole and turn toward God, towards the other term of the distinction that comes to light in Christian belief, we begin to appreciate the strangeness of the distinction itself. In the distinctions that occur normally within the setting of the world, each term distinguished is what it is precisely by not being that which it is distinguishable from. Its being is established partially by its otherness, and therefore its being depends on its distinction from others. But in the Christian distinction God is understood as “being” God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole. God could and would be God even if there were no world. Thus the Christian distinction is appreciated as a distinction that did not have to be, even though it in fact is. The most fundamental thing we come to in Christianity, the distinction between the world and God, is appreciated as not being the most fundamental thing after all, because one of the terms of the distinction, God, is more fundamental than the distinction itself.

In Christian faith God is understood not only to have created the world, but to have permitted the distinction between himself and the world to occur. …No distinction made within the horizon of the world is like this, and therefore the act of creation cannot be understood in terms of any action or any relationship that exists in the world. The special sense of sameness in God “before” and “after” the creation, and the special sense of otherness between God and the world, impose qualifications on whatever we are to say about God and the world, about creation out of nothing, about God’s way of being present and interior to things and yet beyond them….Furthermore, if “being” is the term that philosophers use to name that which is articulated in the sameness and otherness that reason can register, if “being” is used of the world as last horizon, it is appropriate that another term, like “esse,” be introduced for use in the “whole” made up of God and the world, as a name for what is articulated in the identities and differences occurring in this new context.

Of course it was the Council of Nicea that famously refuted Arius’s view with the counterclaim that Jesus is homoousios with God, “one in being” with the Father, not a demigod but fully divine. In the wake of Nicea, the debate continued to rage, Arius and semi-Arians fighting defenders of homoousian orthodoxy, such as Athanasius the bishop of Alexandria. At the center of the controversy was the nagging problem of relating the true and complete divinity of Jesus with his undoubted humanity. How could these two come together without contradiction, compromise, or mutual exclusion?

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christian bishops and theologians of both the East and the West met to resolve the difficulty, and their statement of belief has emerged as a sort of classic expression of Christian faith on the question of the ontology of Jesus, It is interesting to note that the Chalcedonian fathers provided, not so much a philosophical explanation of how the divine and human come together in Christ, as an ecstatic proclamation born of faith. Standing in the rich tradition stretching back to the Scriptures and the first witnesses to Christ, they gave voice to the fundamental Christian conviction that, in Jesus, divinity and humanity coexist in a noncompetitive way and that, as we have often emphasized, the fullness of each is revealed precisely in their coexistence.

The “definition” of Christ offered at Chalcedon can be stated rather briefly:

One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures which exist without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and both concurring into one Person and one hypostasis — not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

The first, and in some sense elemental, affirmation of this statement is the oneness of Christ. In Jesus we are dealing, not with two things or two persons, but with one basic reality or power of existence And it is this unified ground that the Council fathers identify as the divine person of the Logos. In the language of Greek metaphysics, “person” refers to an instantiation of a rational nature, the specification and concrete expression of an abstract form.

Thus the “person” of Socrates is a particular focusing of the general species of humanity, the receptacle, if you will, into which the form of human being is poured in his case, it is that which makes Socrates this one individual and identifiable human being. The center and source of unity in Jesus is the divine “person” of the Logos, but there is a key difference with regard to Christ, for his person bears or instantiates, not one nature, but two — and here we see the real novelty of the Chalcedonian formula. No Greek philosopher would speak of a single person bearing multiple natures, though it was a commonplace to hold that a single nature could be instantiated in multiple persons, as Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are all instances of the one nature of humanity. As is so often the case, Christian dogmatic language twists and breaks the language of philosophy even as it uses it.

In Jesus, one person “lights up” two distinct natures, divine and human, allowing both to come to expression in all of their distinctiveness and uniqueness. Accordingly, Jesus is fully human, that is to say, in possession of a human body, mind, will, and passion, as well as subject to all of the characteristic limitations of being a creature. As Karl Rahner points out, despite the union of natures spoken of at Chalcedon, Jesus remains a creature who confronts the divine across an infinite abyss. The ontologically limited and culturally determined humanity of Jesus is not overwhelmed or swallowed by his divinity.

But Jesus is also in possession of a divine nature, that is to say, of all that characterizes and renders distinctive the being of God. In him, the sacred reality that transcends the universe and yet pours itself out in creative love, is alive, operative, personally present. And the ontological proximity of the human nature of Jesus does not compromise or overwhelm this divinity. He is not a demigod or a lesser divinity, but rather “fully divine.”  As the surprising formula states it, the two natures — human and divine — exist in personal union, but without “confusion, change, separation or division.”

Sokolowski looks at the Incarnational Jesus from the standpoint of God and what it says about Him:

The Council of Chalcedon, and he councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ, but they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains its integrity before the Christian God. And second, they tell us that we must think of God as the one who can let natural necessity be maintained and let reason be left intact; that is God is not himself a competing part of nature of a part of the world.

If the incarnation could not take place without a truncation of human nature, it would mean that God was one of the natures of the world that somehow was defined by not being the other natures; it would mean that his presence in one of these other natures, human nature, would involve a conflict and a need to exclude some part of what he is united with. Either God would only seem to have become man, or he would have become united to something less than man and would have become a new kind of being in the world. These are all ways in which the pagans thought the gods could take on human form or bring about beings that were higher than the race of men but lower than the gods. The reason the pagans could not conceive of anything like the incarnation is that their gods are part o f the world, and the  union of any two natures in the world is bound to be, in some way, unnatural, because of the otherness that lets one thing be itself only by not being the other.

But the Christian God is not part of the world and is not a “kind” of being at all. Therefore the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive. …To consider the early Christological controversies and their attendant councils as merely historical episodes, or to suppose that they are just an importation of Hellenistic thought-patterns into Christianity, is to fail to take seriously the need to distinguish Christian faith and its theology from simply natural religion and philosophy.

On the surface of it, what is being proposed here is nonsense. How can two mutually exclusive realities — one finite, the other infinite — come together as one? It seems as though this formula violates the most elemental principle of logic, the law of noncontradiction. What is being proposed here, to borrow the language of Hans Urs von Balthasar, is a “theo-logic,” a new way of thinking about the real based upon an ecstatic sense of who God truly is.

We saw that one of the chief effects of the originating sin is the tendency to objectify the divine. Once we have established our egos as sovereign and central, God necessarily appears as a supreme being, either threatening or irrelevant. From the standpoint of the self-elevating pusilla anima, God is a being with whom we have, at best, an extrinsic relationship; he is “out there” and “over and against us.” To be sure, this attitude born of sin affects decisively the way we think theologically: we cannot imagine that God is the immanent/transcendent ground in whom we find our own center. We cannot conceive of the intimacy with the sacred that can be ours. And consequently, we find it terribly difficult to accept the ecstatic metaphysical poetry of Chalcedon, the language of divine/human unity.

But, from the standpoint of metanoia, from the perspective of the new mind, we see that God is not a competing supreme being, but the power whose very closeness to us enhances our humanity, whose very proximity makes us most fully ourselves. And we see, at the same time, that God is a reality that can work its way into every corner of creation without ceasing to be itself In a word the “natures” of God and creation can come together without compromise and contradiction, precisely because God is not a being but the mysterious power of Being itself.

The Chalcedonian fathers proclaim, in their sober philosophical language, the undoing of Eden, they see as reality what the sinful mind can appreciate only as illusion or nonsense. And this new vision, these new eyes, come from Jesus Christ, from the God/human intimacy that is his very being. In the startling and unique way of being that was Christ’s, the first believers glimpsed the theonomy that was offered but lost at Eden, that was held out alluringly throughout the Old Testament, that indirectly animated and gave purpose to all the finest expressions of the religious imagination of humanity.

Let us make this a bit more explicit with regard to the reality of God We see, in the Chalcedonian formulation, the unheard of closeness of God to the world. What we have termed the creativity, passion, and humility of the sacred are clearly on display in the language of hypostatic union. In Christ we see just how low the divine can stoop — even to the point of “becoming” what is not divine.

What is perhaps less obvious is the equal, though implicit, emphasis on the transcendence of God that is contained in Chalcedon. The realm of finitude is characterized by mutual exclusion. One finite thing is defined, appropriately, over and against all those other things that it is not to be a particular chair is not to be any other chair or any other thing. More to the point, one finite reality cannot become another without some radical change taking place a chair becomes a table or is reduced to ashes only by ceasing to be a chair, a wild beast “becomes” a  leopard only by being devoured .Because of the mutual exclusivity that marks all limited things, relationship between them is always difficult if not dangerous.

But the Council of Chalcedon boldly proclaims that, in Christ, two natures, divine and human, come together in personal unity in such a way that one can speak of God becoming a creature. Yet this becoming in no way compromises the integrity of the natures, nothing is ceded either on the part of God or on the part of the human nature of Jesus But this entails that God is not in any sense a worldly nature, decidedly not a finite form. If God were a thing alongside of others, a supreme being among beings, then the union of God with a creature would be possible only through some radical compromise of either God’s or the creature’s ontology.

As in mythological conceptions, the divine would have to supplant or push out some dimension of the non-divine as it makes its way into the world. But it is just this notion, just this style of thinking, that is consciously rejected at Chalcedon in favor of a properly “theological” solution. The God who can establish the intimacy with the race experienced in Jesus Christ must be, not any sort of being, but a power of existence that, in the most dramatic sense possible, transcends finitude God must be, not a being, but Being itself. And therefore, like the Infancy narratives, this formula implies the serenity, self-sufficiency, and sovereignty of God just as surely as it implies the tensive qualities of God’s humility, creativity, and passion. The bipolarity hinted at on Sinai in the revelation of the burning bush now comes to full expression: the God capable of hypostatic union is very strange indeed, strange enough to save us from our sins.

The God of the Incarnation is thus the power that “throws everything off,” that calls into question everything we assumed about the structure of reality. We live, not in a world of division, presided over by the supreme being, but rather in a universe of interrelationship and “charged with the grandeur of God.” God can become one of us, and therefore our minds have to change, the Word has been made flesh, and metanoia is the only valid response.