concerning the Glorified Body
“…in this, our evolution: to be conquered
by beings of ever greater might.”
—Rilke, “The Witness”1
“Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”
—John 10:34
Each human person lives not of himself, but by the grace of all Creation and, by extension, the power that created and sustains it. The air we breath is a gift of the grass upon, and the trees under which, we trod. The fire in our hearts is siphoned from the furnace of stars and the time it keeps is a measure from the score of cosmic history. The world is our body and our body is the world.
People at first imagine statements like this must be poetic conceits or axioms of religious doctrine, but regardless of whether it is these things, it is also a description of the human condition that is self-evident upon contemplation of our station and existence. As is is said, ex nihilo nihil fit—“nothing can come from nothing”—so for the enumerated gifts, among countless others, to have appeared, there must have been a Giver of them. For the spatiotemporal universe to commence, together with its apparently inexorable evolutionary march, a “Being-beyond-being” must have been active from before the start. In English, this X has been called “God.”
Consider that a man has a soul correlative to his body, and cannot be properly conceived without an integrative comprehension of the inner an the outer. Again, conceive of the soul not as an item of religious doctrine or metaphysical speculation, but as the phenomenological reality of experience, self-evident to observation, and the patent and manifest difference between a body and a corpse. In the same that the body bears and is sustained, sculpted, and enlivened by the soul, so the world itself also bears an inside correlative to its external appearance and spatial extension.2 The world, as we ordinarily conceive of it, is an outward expression of something that is not exhausted in this expression. Instead, the body of the world is the external appearance of the soul of the world. The soul of the world—its inwardness—is none other than the quickening spirit of God, which in the beginning bodied forth the observable universe as an outpouring of his creative power. To this time, the spirit of God has been known to dwell in holy places, on the mountaintops, and in the hearts of saints and mothers. But if God is, and has been, anywhere, he must be, and have been, everywhere, for to circumscribe him in one place would be to place limits on that which is essentially and axiomatically free from them.
Now, if a single creature realized and made manifest the presence of, and identity with, this original creative power in himself, then the rest of the universe concurrently would have become his body—as the outward expression of the spirit of God. This connection is demonstrated by the logic of modus ponens, which is summed up in the axiom “a part of a part is a part of the whole.” Of course, God has no parts, and this is a crucial point to apprehend if we are to arrive at a clear conception of what the theosis here described must entail. More on this below. Let us, however, at this time consider that we ourselves remain outside of this divine body only to the extent that we do not know the gospel here conveyed, and only insofar as leaf knoweth not its branch or as my fingernail remains unaware of its station amongst the higher corporality. Our not knowing this is “the Cherubims,” at the East of Eden, “and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”3 But in the realization of this higher life in which we already live and move and have our being,4 our self may at once partake of communion in a higher identity than it ordinarily conceives of—a divine life and not merely a biological or biographical or existential one.
As Jesus, who is the Christ sayeth:
I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.5
Indeed, as it was written, God became Jesus and Jesus became Christ. When he died on the Cross, his blood flowed into the Earth to lave and permeate every atom, imbuing it with the seal of Heaven. Our own bodies are wrought of these same atoms, and now we may partake the Divine Body of Jesus as members, just as every cell and organ in our body participates the life of a higher organization. As the Apostle proclaims:
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ…That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.6
The Resurrection Body is the reality of the corporal body once its illusions have been cast off:7 “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,”8 “and I in him.”9
Still more directly: God has no parts and no spatial situation. For this reason, God is therefore nowhere and, by the same token, there is nowhere he is not. In this light, it can be seen that the difference between “the world,” conceived abstractly in the mode of externality and res extensa of which we are a part, and God, is not one of space but of mode of existence. God has no parts while the world seems to be constituted of them, of which, again, we are one. “The world” is the same thing, perceived piecemeal, as God, experienced through full participation and communion of spirit. We can’t technically become part of God even though we are part of the world because God has no parts, howbeit we can become God through participation in his nature, which is to say, through theosis. As Saint Athanasius affirmed:
The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.10
This potentiality of the human person has been the message and injunction of saints and martyrs and theologians and prophets since the beginning:
“Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”
my translation of the final stanza of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Der Schauende”:
“WHOSOEVER beaten by the Angel, (which so often declines even to fight) shall depart upright and rightened made greater by the firmest hand, that formed him to transform him. to win presents no temptation. in this, our evolution: to be conquered by beings of ever greater might.” (Wen dieser Engel überwand,/welcher so oft auf Kampf verzichtet,/der geht gerecht und aufgerichtet/und groß aus jener harten Hand,/die sich, wie formend, an ihn schmiegte./Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein./Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte/von immer Größerem zu sein.)
externality, which is really to say, “spatial extension.” hence, even the bodily organs are external, in this sense.
Genesis 3:24.
As the Apostle sayeth in Acts 17:28
John 15:5-6.
1 Corinthians 12:1, 12:25-27.
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Galatians 2:20.
John 15:5.
Athanasius, De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B.
“We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Self-Reliance,” in Essays, Everyman’s Library, London and New York: Dutton, 1995, p. 41.
Just where my contemplation has been leading me :)