ว In the last chapter I highlighted how Jesus' human way of life in the world might be the point of a traditionally formulated, but significantly reconceived Chalcedonian Christology. In this chapter, I want to draw out the meaning of Christ's human way of life for us, by situating it within a very broad cosmo-theological frame. Where do humans fit in a broader theological scheme of things that has Christ as its center? With this as a basis, I proceed in the next chapter to a more concrete discussion of the shape of human life. One comes to understand better theologically the meaning of human life by placing it within a whole structure of oddly similar but materially different gift-giving relations that bring together or unite God and the world. Human life takes on sense when it is positioned within 'a recurrent analogical "structure" of different types of union between God and what is not God." These different relations of connection or union elucidate one another, as they become visible in light of one another around a couple of organizing centers: the Trinity and the incarnation. The triune God is a God who perfectly communicates the goodness of Godself among the three Persons of the Trinity in perfect self-unity. Expressing this dynamic life outward in a grace of beneficent love for what is not God, the triune God brings about a variety of different Henk Schoot, Christ the 'Name' of God: Thomas Aquinas on Naming Christ (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 188. JESUS, HUMANITY AND THE TRINITY forms of connection or union with the non-divine, for the sake of perfecting what is united with God, in an effort to repeat the perfec- 3 tion of God's own triune life. 'God, full beyond all fulness, brought creatures into being. ... so that they might participate in Him in proportion to their capacity and that He Himself might rejoice in His works... through seeing them joyful and ever filled to overflowing with His inexhaustible gifts." In a variety of distinct forms of connection or union in the gift-giving effort, God's work begins with creation, continues in historical fellowship with a particular people, Israel, and ends with Jesus as the one through whom, in the Spirit, all people and the whole world will show forth God's own triune goodness in unity with God. The incarnation is the perfect form of such relations of connection or union for gift-giving ends: 'it belongs to the essence of the highest good [that is, God] to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up. Hence, it was fitting that God should become incarnate In order for the whole of the human and natural worlds to be perfected with God's own gifts, they must be assimilated to this perfect relation between God and the created world in Christ, by way of him. Indeed, the Word, with the Spirit, sent by the Father, has, since the begin- ning of the world in diverse fashions, been working for the embodi- ment of God's goodness in it. By assuming human nature in all its embodied connectedness and embeddedness in its physical surround- ings, the Word in Christ joins the human as well as the natural world with God. It is in the body that we stand in solidarity with the whole material creation. All this God has taken into himself, in sharing man's bodily condition of weak- ness and limitation: 'O marvellous device of divine wisdom and love, uniting things lowest with the highest, human with the divine, through our nature, the least and last and sunken lower still, raising up the whole universe into union with himself, encircling and enfolding all with his love, and knitting all in one; and that through us!"+ Maximus the Confessor, "Third Century of Love,' trans. G. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware, in The Philokalia, vol. 2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), section 46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Dominican Fathers (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1981), IIIa, Q. 1, A. 1, body. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God (Wilton, Connecticut: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 60, citing E. B. Pusey's Sermons (1845), 294. 36 THE THEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THINGS Human beings who are one with Christ, by the Spirit, further the effort for all people and for the cosmos as a whole in recognition of their essential links with all others and their inextricable being in the midst of the natural world. Thus, 'we have always to remember that God's glory really consists in His self-giving, and that this has its centre and meaning in God's Son, Jesus Christ, and that the name of Jesus Christ stands for the event in which man, and in man the whole cosmos, is awakened and called and enabled to participate in the being of God.” Through Christ, human beings have a crucial mediatorial role to play in God's gift-giving ends for one another and the whole world: 'In his way to union with God, man in no way leaves creatures aside, but gathers in his love the whole cosmos disordered by sin, that it may at last be transfigured by grace." God's whole effort to share God's trinitarian life with the world, with all its many distinct facets, is in this way focused in Christ: 'The incarnation of the Word of God at Bethlehem, in Galilee, in Jerusalem, is not an isolated wonder, but a central focal point in a network of divine initiatives which spread out into the whole of human history, indeed into the whole universe." Situated within this theological structure of many different parallel or analogous relations of gift-giving unity, human life - indeed, any aspect of the structure (say, Christ himself on the account I offered in the last chapter) - gains a greater intelligibility, as each aspect becomes a kind of commentary on the others. Intelligibility here is like that of myth according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, where conundrums are naturalized, rather than resolved, by repeating them across a variety of domains. Or it is like the intelligibility provided by a Freudian Karl Barth, Church Dugmatics II/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 670. "Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), 111, discussing the views of Maximus the Confessor. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God, 72, discussing Maximus the Confessor. On this as the view of Bonaventure, see Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1979), 206-7: 'although the coincidence of opposites is the universal logic of Bonaventure's system, each major area of his thought has its own specific form of the coincidence of opposites based on the metaphysical structure of that area. The notion of Christ the center, then, accounts for the common logic at the same time that it sustains the specific difference of each class." * See Claude Lévi-Strauss' treatment of myth in his Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 37