​Chapter 22. Christianity

Christianity has to be met here. It knows that the who is not the what. It built, across centuries of care, the distinction between the person and the nature, the hypostasis and the ousia. Christianity speaks of a divine name, of love, of communion, of a person met and answered and never really described. It walked right up to the edge of the name. And that nearness is why it is the most dangerous theology there is. It does no crude folding of the person into the nature. It does something subtler: it opens the difference between the who and the what, holds it open with real rigor, and then makes the reverse move, binding the who back to the what, and calls the binding salvation.

Start where the care is greatest, with the Trinity and the person. Against the whole weight of a thought that knows only natures, Christianity built the hypostasis — the who that is not the what, three persons in one nature, the person never melted down into the nature it bears. This is the who-and-what distinction itself, drawn sharp and held under the hardest pressure a doctrine ever put on it. Some of its later readers pressed it further still, toward a person free of natural necessity, a who not used up by any what. The resource was in their hands. Then they spent it on the opposite errand. The person, as they kept it, is the bearer of a nature: the hypostasis has its nature, carries it, comes into its own by bearing it well, and is saved together with it.

The clearest place the binding happens is the Incarnation of Christ. Chalcedon set the formula: one hypostasis in two natures, divine and human, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The Son does not just appear, does not only enter a gesture and answer to a name. He assumes a human nature, and assumes it whole — body, mind, will, mortality, the long human history — taking the what onto himself entirely. Salvation works through that taking. What is not assumed is not healed, the fathers said, which makes the healing a nature-operation through and through: the divine joins itself to human nature and mends it from inside. The name never enters the operation. "Accept Christ" is a test put to the what, and the who that accepts or refuses is interchangeable with any other who, since the grace runs along what they carry.

The same shape governs its account of the fall and the cure, and here the contrast with everything said so far is sharpest. For Christianity the fall is damage to a nature. The nature was made good and was wounded; evil is a privation, a good thing lacking what it should have. Redemption is the nature healed — grace coming to mend and complete it, to perfect what sin had marred, ending in the resurrection of the very body, the good nature restored and raised to its fullness. Set this beside the fall named earlier and they are mirror images. There the fall was the will signing its own residue as origin, taking a deposit for a self; the trouble was having a nature and claiming it. Here the trouble is a good nature damaged, and the cure is to have that nature whole again.

Its summit makes the divergence total. Christianity promises deification, theosis — grace lifting the nature past itself, the human filled with the divine and made god by participation. It is a real ascent and a generous one. And it is deification by addition: the nature kept and crowned, filled beyond its own measure, the person carried up with the whole of its what intact and glorified. The apotheosis runs the other way, by subtraction — the god in the moment of the act, reached by stripping the nature away. Christian theosis raises the person and its nature together; it never translates the person into a name. A man becomes a god as a creature whose nature is flooded with grace, a who still carrying its what. Both call the end deification, and they move in opposite directions to reach it.

It goes deeper than the body and the person, all the way to the will, and this is the council where the naturalizing is finished. When the question came whether Christ had one will or two, Maximus the Confessor held the line for two, against the emperors who wanted one. Two natures, he reasoned, must carry two wills, because the will belongs to the nature — the natural will, the thelema physikon, is a faculty of the nature, and as many natures as there are, so many wills. The reasoning files the will under nature with full deliberation. The will was the last thing left unnatured. For us the will is naturelessness from inside, the gesture no nature reaches, the thing a name can hold and an essence cannot. Maximus, whose theology a solemn council later ratified, made the will a natural faculty. Christianity reaches into the one place that was never nature and naturalizes that too.

Gregory Palamas, settling whether God can be known at all, drew the distinction the Eastern church has rested on since. The essence, the ousia, is never reached; it stays wholly beyond, unknowable, unshared. What is reached, what the saints are joined to, what blazed as uncreated light on Tabor, is the energies, the energeiai — God in his acting, the operations. Deification is participation in the energies, never in the essence. And in this Palamas stood on the very lip of the thing we argue. He was right that the meeting is not with the essence — that what is given is the acting, the energy, and that the knowing runs through the acts and closes on no hidden what behind them. He was mistaken to keep the essence as the hidden source of the meeting, set first and underneath, the depth the energies pour from. Read the order the way the act and residue run everywhere else and it turns over. The act is first. What gets called the essence is the deposit the acts leave as they cool, the residue posted behind them and crowned as their origin.

And the distinction holds for a reason the system can name. The essence Palamas set beyond reach is residue, and residue is individuated — each deposit standing in its own bounds, holding its place on the line. This is why participation in the essence was always impossible. A human carries a body, the nearest residue, set in its own place, and two deposits do not occupy the one place, so the creature's nature and the divine "nature" can never coincide. Place is a coordinate of the cooled, and the cooled keeps its borders. The energies are another matter. They are the acting, and the act stands before the coordinates, with no when and no where of its own, no bound to keep another out. Two acts can meet where two natures never can: one enters the gesture of the other, and that entering is the synergy.

The same cut sorts two unnameabilities the traditions keep confusing. The natureless will cannot be described, since there is no what to read off it, and it can be pointed at without limit. The sealed essence is the reverse. Defined as lying outside every meeting, it offers no direction to aim at and nothing standing forth to indicate, so it cannot be pointed at in any way. The God of negative theology, beyond all speech, is unnameable in the second way, un-pointable, walled off from ostension. The will is unnameable in the first, beyond description and supremely open to the finger.

Kabbalah names it Ain — Ain Soph, the limitless, the no-thing set over the first sefirah, so entire that no attribute reaches it, and from it the whole tree of emanation is said to pour. The name says nothing and the structure says source. This is the un-pointable god raised to a cosmogony, the source the orders pour from, sealed from the finger by its own apophatic veil.

What Christianity does with freedom decides everything. The freedom that we have described is in direct opposition to the loud doctrine of free will and a Savior who frees. Christian freedom is the unhindered following of a nature toward its good. The will is made for God as the eye is made for light, and to be free is to move toward that end without the impediments sin throws up. Aquinas sets the rational creature's liberty inside the very motion that carries every natural thing: the stone falls by its inborn inclination, and the rational soul inclines to its good knowingly and consents. Freedom and nature pull one direction, and freedom is a thing's unobstructed arrival at what it already is for.

So the falling stone is free in this account, free as anything is free, doing without hindrance what its nature bends it toward. The point follows straight from making freedom the unimpeded run of nature to its end, and a stone runs that course to perfection.

Augustine draws the ladder to the top and names the summit. The will that can sin and not sin belongs to the unfallen beginning; the will that cannot stop sinning is the fall; grace brings the will that can refrain; and the crown, in glory, is the will that cannot sin at all, non posse peccare, fixed on God. The freedom can no longer deviate. Maximus reaches the same place from the side of the act. To deliberate between courses, to will otherwise than one's nature would, he calls the gnomic will, and marks it as a wound of the fallen, absent in Christ, whose willing follows the divine with no hesitation. The very faculty of turning aside is the defect.

The gradient drawn early says that more nature is less will, the stone heaviest in nature and emptiest of will, and the limit of capture is the thing that does perfectly and only what it is. The state Christianity names the height of freedom, the will fixed unwaveringly on its good, is that limit reached: a being become flawless residue, an electron lit from within.

And the freedom we mean has its place in Christianity too, named and filed. The act that turns from the given, the break that answers otherwise than the essence would, stands on the books under the heading of sin. The turn from God is the fall; the swerve from one's ordained good is the wound; the whole apparatus of grace and salvation exists to heal the swerve back into conformity. Where we mean freedom, Christianity puts the disease.

So the garden keeps everything, and the one thing it weeds is the deviation. It saves the body and the person, and carries each to a real fullness, and it pulls out by the root the power to act against one's nature, calling that power sin. It is a true gift, offered in good faith and made good on, and it is turned down for the single thing the garden cannot grow and is built to remove: freedom. For that, the gate has to be walked back out of, into the open.