First [we have] the mystery of the created Person in its vertical relation, on the one hand to God who calls it, and on the other [we have] the human nature which it must assume, and whose ‘panhuman’ and cosmic aspects we [must recognize].
Vladimir Lossky has shown clearly that the supernatural character of the person runs right through the Chalcedonian definition. This emphasizes the unity of the humanity and the divinity. Christ is true God and true man; he is perfect in his humanity. This humanity in its wholeness embraces the visible and the invisible, the body and the ‘reasonable’ soul. ‘Reasonable’ is a poor translation of the Greek, which means the spirit, the fine point of the soul, the spiritual capacity by which human nature is opened to the Spirit. Christ’s humanity is therefore complete, comprising a spiritual soul and a body. However, he is not a human person, since he is the incarnate Word, the Son co-eternal with the Father, and therefore a divine Person. In other words, in the human being the person is not identifiable with the body, or the soul, or the spirit. It arises from another order of reality.
We can see that in Christian anthropology the fundamental distinction is not between the body and the soul, or between the body and the spirit. The Fathers and the ascetics, despite the influence of Hellenic dualism, have stayed faithful to the biblical understanding of the human being as a unity which God radically transcends and which he can entirely transfigure. So a truly Christian approach has no difficulty with the psychosomatic unity on which modern human science lays such emphasis.
The real distinction is between the nature and the person.
When we ask of something, ‘What is it?’ we are seeking to learn about its nature. The question, being an abstract idea, is neutral. The person, however, goes beyond all questions. It cannot be defined; it cannot be captured by conceptual thought.
The person, says [Vladimir] Lossky, is ‘the irreducibility of the individual to his human nature’, the person is irreducible. In the non-Christian East reduction is by ascetic practice, in the post-Christian West by science. The Eastern method removes the dead layers, cosmic, biological, social, psychological, and reabsorbs the human being in the transpersonal. The Western method concentrates on the health of the intrapersonal, analyzing its conditionings and curing them by psychoanalysis or social revolution.
But what the person desires is deified humanity. It acts in collusion with the living God, being like him secret, mysterious, incomprehensible. Deep calls to deep. The only approach to the mystery of the living God is by means of ‘negative’ theology, which denies all possibility of limiting God to the capacity of our thoughts. And the only approach to the created person is through a ‘negative’ anthropology. Here the ascetic practices of the non-Christian East and the scientific analyses of the West are most valuable, not because they tell us what the person is, but because they help us to understand what it is not. To know something of the mystery of the person, we must go right beyond its natural context, beyond its cosmic, collective, and individual environment, beyond all the ways in which it can be grasped by the mind. Whatever the mind can grasp can only be the nature, never the person. The mind can grasp only objects, whatever is open to inspection. But the person is not an object open to inspection, any more than God is. Like God it is incomparable, inextinguishable, fathomless.
Adapted from Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
