2023/01/01 by Rowan Williams · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Biblical Studies and Interpretation #Classical Antiquity Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/ijst.12616
openalex publication_date 2023/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
One of the really significant features of Khaled Anatolios' s groundbreaking study is that it obliges us to think more clearly about what the divine image is that is restored or liberated in the process of our redemption – our theosis. That this is pre-eminently the image of ‘filial’ love and intimacy is rightly at the centre of this discussion: to be ‘deified’ is to be renewed in the likeness of the eternal Son (not to acquire a set of detached supposedly divine qualities). But this in turn draws our attention to what it means to say that the Son or Word is the primary image of the eternal Father. The Son glorifies the Father: Anatolios underlines this theme perhaps more copiously and creatively than any theologian in the last century. And this glorification may be understood as the Son making manifest who and what the Father is, and the Son fulfilling or actualizing who and what the Father is. Not that there is some primordial ‘lack’ or potentiality in the Father's hypostatic being which the Son ‘makes good’: we are bound to avoid any such mythologizing narratives where the divine life is concerned. There is no precosmic time in which the Father exists alone, needing to be fulfilled by the generation of the Son, no progression of the Son towards the realizing of a more perfect union with the Father: the creed and anathemas of Nicaea saw off such errors. But we can say that in the generation of the Son, the Father establishes that the divine being in its eternal quality and actuality as Source is eternally and perfectly actual only in pouring out the infinite excess of its life in the active reality of the divine life as Word, as the ‘derived’ life which shows that the divine Source is inexhaustible – that it exists precisely, intrinsically, as Source, as a life that is never contained within itself. The Son/Word is first and foremost that eternally actualized reality which exists because of the truth that divine love is love without containment; and as we discern this, we see how the very being of the Word – and of the Spirit – manifests that the Source of divinity is immeasurably generative, capable of generating what is equal to itself in divine beauty and liberty. So limitless is the divine life as Source that it cannot generate what is less than itself; and so too, what is generated cannot be thought of as living with anything less than a full equality of the glory, radiance and freedom that is intrinsic to the generating action of the divine Source, so that the divine life cannot be simply a relation of two reciprocal agencies – a theme that is familiar in much of the theology of the fourth century. The fundamental texts in Scripture that open this up are to be found in the Fourth Gospel, especially in the Farewell Discourses of chapters 14 to 17, where we read of how the eternal Word receives and shares the glory, the active radiant outpouring of life and generative love, which belongs to the eternal Source; and the Word incarnate ‘glorifies’ the Father in reflecting this generative love in every moment of the fleshly life of Jesus – supremely in humiliation and death, because this fleshly life in its mortal fragility is the means by which creation is fully brought to life, literally re-generated. The Word is the image of the Father in receiving and reflecting the Father's generative power; the Spirit in eternity is the actualization of the fact that the generative freedom of the divine Source is not exhausted in the mere binary of Father and eternal Son but exceeds even this. The divine actuality is the generation of the Word by the Father; but it is also the eternal ‘opening’ of this mutual gift of Father and Son to the further hypostatic reality which represents the fact that this simple mutuality is not exhaustive of divine life and generativity. The existence of the Spirit eternally establishes and manifests the truth that the divine ‘excess’ of generative love is never exhausted, not even in the eternal Word. One aspect of what the Father gives the Son is precisely the capacity to bestow divine life in his own self-outpouring, not only to give back to the Father what has been given, in a mechanical symmetry. The Father bestows on the Son the Father's own abundance of bestowing; or in the language of the tradition, the Father both ‘breathes out’ the Spirit and equips the Word to ‘breathe’ it in turn. So in relation to creation, the Word exercises a generative power appropriate to a being that is itself already generated, and the Spirit is active and free to unite all the created fruit of the Word's ‘generated generativity’ to the Source. The Son is free to breathe the Spirit he receives so as to generate finite images of his filial life. The Son/Word and Spirit are in themselves the supreme and complete eternal actualizing of what the divine Source necessarily is, and thus, in relation to the created order, are equally involved in the active manifestation of divine actuality. If we are created in the divine image, it must be in the image of that ‘generated generativity’. Because there is an eternal image of ‘derived’ or received glory and liberty, it is possible for us who are radically derived and contingent beings to exist (despite our generated and dependent character) in God's image. We might imagine that to be ‘like God’ would be to be free of dependence or origination; but we are able to become like God within our basic dependence because the eternal Word/Son in whose likeness we are re-created is precisely that divine agency that receives life and gives it in turn – giving it back to the Source, affirming and fulfilling the Source's character as giver, and giving it in turn to the finite world in and through the divine Spirit. As we have noted, the Spirit in this context is what constitutes the life of God as an eternally moving and fertile exchange – not a simple reciprocity of one and another, sameness and difference, but unity in difference; not two ‘containers’ of divine life or act confronting and balancing, but a mutuality whose inexhaustible flow is always in excess of any ‘content’. And what this implies for our status as created in the image of the Image is that we fulfill our vocation of living this image through the exercise of our own dependent generativity, our own giving of what we have received. And in this giving of what we have received, our own nature as gift is further opened and empowered to receive – not only from that other that is immediately before us but in the entire network of difference and exchange that is the finite world. So one way of thinking of the state of fallenness and frustration from which we need deliverance is to see it as sterility: we have not acknowledged the gift, we have not adequately glorified the source, and so are incapable of generating new life in others or in our dealings with the rest of the created world, and thus incapable of receiving life as we need to; − or, to come at it from a different angle, we fail to generate new life or liberation, and so are incapable of worshipping as we ought and so of being nourished as need to be. This is where Anatolios's focus – following on the brilliantly illuminating scheme outlined by Scheeben – on the liturgical dimension of our redemption is so constructive. We are to be freed for worship because it is in this liberation for the giving of proper glory to God that we receive more fully that freedom to give proper attention to creation itself, and especially to God-imaging humanity in its responsibility for its own communal life and its life in community with the rest of the material order. Here, then, is a crucial link between glorification and justice. Anatolios's reworking of Anselm with help from Cabasilas allows us to rethink the essential theological definitions of justice in terms of what is appropriately to be given in any context whatever: justice is the adequate response of the agent to the claim upon them of the gift that the other represents and embodies. It is not to do with deserving or achievement but a gift appropriate to the unchanging nature of what we encounter: the other bears for us the fundamental character of a gift from God and an invitation from God in character as reflecting the eternal who in turn the eternal Source. beings that can be it shares fully in the act of that is the agency of the but it is to that the entire created the of that and so the divine see and act is to as to the of God as this is in the world we our we what we in the that we and its in God and also fulfill and its capacity to and bestow life. 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