07 — Christ the Archetype of the Human
“Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos” (Deification in Christ, 34). This is the sentence on which Nellas’s whole anthropology rests. Man is the image not of the divine nature in general but of Christ; and since Christ is God incarnate, the pattern according to which humanity was made is a pattern that includes a human body. Adam was made after Christ, not Christ after Adam — a thesis Nellas took from Nicholas Cabasilas and made systematic.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Image of the Image | Man as image of the Archetype; the Pauline foundation; why Christ and not the Logos simpliciter; the reversal of the order of Adam and Christ; what follows for the doctrine of the image and likeness |
| Cabasilas and the Sacramental Life | How the archetype is actually received: baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist in Cabasilas and in Nellas’s Part Two; the refusal of moralism; the spiritual life as participation |
The Two Halves of One Argument
The section is deliberately arranged so that a doctrine and its means of realisation stand side by side, because in Nellas they are inseparable.
The first file states the christological thesis: what a human being is, is determined by Christ, who is not a remedy applied to an already-constituted nature but the archetype according to which that nature was constituted in the first place.
The second file states the sacramental thesis: this archetype is not an idea to be contemplated but a Person to be received, and He is received in the Mysteries. The Christian is not conformed to Christ by imitation of a model but incorporated into Him as a limb into a body.
Take away the first and the sacraments become rites of a religion. Take away the second and the christological anthropology becomes a beautiful idea with no purchase on anyone’s actual life. Cabasilas held them together in the fourteenth century, and holding them together is what Nellas learned from him.
The Debt to Cabasilas, Stated Precisely
The thesis is Cabasilas’s before it is Nellas’s, and this collection is careful about the attribution.
In Book VI of The Life in Christ, Cabasilas argues that it was for the sake of the New Man — Christ — “that human nature was constituted from the beginning, and for him mind and desire were prepared”; that Adam was made after the pattern of Christ and not Christ after the pattern of Adam; and that the first man was “the image of the second” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see Christ-Centred Anthropology).
Nellas’s contribution is not the thesis but the anthropology. He took an argument that Cabasilas states in the course of a treatise on the sacramental life and made it the organising principle of a systematic account of the human person, connected it to the patristic doctrine of the image, and drew from it the consequences for the fall, for the body, for culture and for the sciences. The repository’s Cabasilas collection describes this accurately: Nellas “took up Cabasilas’s conviction that the human being is constituted and fulfilled in Christ … and developed it into a systematic reflection on the human person as oriented from the first to deification in Christ” (see The Modern Rediscovery).
See Also
- Cabasilas Scholarship — the twenty years of study behind the thesis
- The Deified Animal — the anthropological definition this christology completes
- The Garments of Skin — the condition from which the archetype is to be realised
- St. Nicholas Cabasilas — the source
- Christology — the dogma of the Person of Christ
- The Holy Mysteries — the sacraments through which the archetype is received
References
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Part One ch. I, 23–42; Part Two, 109–162.)
- Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
- Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:45–49.