5.
The Contribution of the Theotokos to the Theosis of Man
So, the Lord Jesus gives us this possibility to unite with God
and return to the primary purpose which God ordained for man; therefore
He is described
in Holy Scripture as the way, the door, the good shepherd, the life,
the resurrection, the light. He is the new Adam who rights the wrong
of the first Adam. The first Adam separated us from God with his disobedience
and his egotism. With His love, and His obedience to the Father, obedience
unto death, to ‘death on the cross’, the second Adam, Christ,
brings us back once more to God. ’He once again orients our freedom
towards God, by offering Him our freedom, we unite with Him.
The work of the new Adam pre-supposes the work of the new Eve, the
Panaghia who put right the wrong done by the old Eve. Eve drove Adam
to disobedience.
The new Eve, the Panaghia, contributes to the incarnation of the new
Adam who will guide the human race towards obedience to God. Therefore,
as the
first human person who achieved Theosis – in a exceptional and, of
course unrepeatable, way – the Lady Theotokos played a role in
our salvation which was not only fundamental, but both necessary and
irreplaceable.
According to Nicholas Cabasilas, the great 14th century theologian, if
the Panaghia, in her obedience, had not offered her freedom to our God – had
she not said ‘yes’ to God – God would not have been
able to incarnate. Once God had given freedom to man, He would not have
been
able to violate His gift, so He would not have been able to incarnate
if there had not been such a pure, all-holy, immaculate psyche as the
Theotokos,
who would offer her freedom, her will, all of herself totally to God
so as to draw Him towards herself and towards us.
We owe so much to Panaghia. This is why our Church honours and venerates
the Theotokos so much, so that St. Gregory Palamas, summarising Patristic
theology, says that our Panaghia holds the second place after the Holy
Trinity; that she is god after God, the boundary between the created
and the uncreated. ‘She leads those being saved’, according
to another fine expression by a theologian of our Church. Recently St.
Nicodemus
of the Holy Mountain, the steadfast luminary and teacher of the Church,
pointed out that the angelic ranks themselves are illumined by the light
they receive from the Panaghia.
Therefore, she is praised by our Church as ‘more honourable than
the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim’.
The incarnation of the Logos and the Theosis of man are the great mystery
of our Faith and Theology.
Our Orthodox Church lives this every day with its Mysteries, with its
hymns, with its icons, with its whole life. Even the architecture of
an Orthodox
Church witnesses to this. The great dome of the churches, on which the
Pantocrator is painted, symbolises the descent of Heaven to earth; it
tells us that the Lord ‘bent down the Heavens and descended’. The
Evangelist St. John (Jn. 1:14) writes that God became man ‘and dwelt
among us’.
So, we represent the Theotokos in the apse of the altar to show that
God comes to earth and to men through her, because He became man through
the
Theotokos. She is ‘the bridge by which God descended’, and
again, ‘she who conducts those of earth to Heaven’, the Platytera
of the Heavens, the space of the uncontainable, who contained the uncontainable
God within herself for our salvation.
To continue, our Churches show deified men; those who became gods by
Grace because God became man. In our Orthodox Churches we can picture
not only
the incarnate God, Christ, and His immaculate Mother the Lady Theotokos,
but we also show the saints around and below the Pantocrator; on all
the walls of the Church we paint the results of God’s incarnation:
sainted and deified men.
Thus, when we enter an Orthodox Church and see the beautiful holy icons,
this is an immediate experience through which we learn what is God's plan
for man; what is the purpose of our life.
Everything in the Church talks to us about the incarnation of God and the
Theosis of man.
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Source: Praxis
Research Institute
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