“Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est”— To not be contained in the largest thing, yet delighting to be found in the smallest thing, is divine. This Ignatian mantra formed the spirituality of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, the 20th century Jesuit priest, theologian, and evolutionary scientist, who in his Mass on the World , envisioned the entire cosmos as a eucharistic host, transfigured through a cosmic liturgy, into God.¹ Meditating on the Christian claim of incarnation, the radical claim that divinity does not delight in being separate from creation but desires to be embodied within it, he insists that incarnation has disclosed the end of creation, to be Corpus Christi. To draw such a conclusion from the church’s liturgy and doctrine is strange to many, who find foreign the idea, in the words of the Franciscan Peter Felhner, “that Christian metaphysics is not primarily about efficient and final causality, but literally is Christ.”² It seems more reasonable to base one’s metaphysics in the doctrines of Plato, or Aristotle, to adopt Plotinus or Proclus, a “natural” foundation for our “supernatural” doctrine to build on. Yet if “God became man” is the core proclamation of Christianity, then Christian metaphysics, to be properly Christian, must be first and foremost an incarnationist metaphysics. It is the intuition of Teilhard, along with his many contemporaries, ranging from Barth to Bulgakov, that it is Christ who must more fully permeate theology, so that Christian doctrine can be more fully Christified.

It was Bulgakov who first intimated that the revival of the project of theology meant a revival of Chalcedonian Christology, particularly drawing on church fathers such as Maximus the Confessor.³ Maximus stands as a figurehead in the development of post-Chalcedonian Christology, furthering the claim that Christ is simultaneously Consubstantialem Patri, Consubstantialem nostrae (of one substance with the Father… of one substance with us), a claim that many post-Chalcedonians saw as too radical, and needing clarification. In many dominant theological strains, Chalcedonian symmetry of natures gave way to neo-Chalcedonian asymmetry, where Christ, although identified with both natures,  is only identified as a divine, and not human, person. Yet Maximus rejects this asymmetry – the incarnation “is clearly the ineffable and inconceivable union of divinity and humanity according to hypostasis, which leads the humanity into identity with the divinity in every way through the principle of hypostasis, and effects one composed hypostasis from both [natures], without thus inducing the slightest diminution of their essential difference according to nature.”⁴ For Maximus, not only does Christ as person identify with his human nature and divine nature in the same way (and not in two equivocal consubstantialities), but divinity and humanity are even “lead into identity” with each other in Christ. Christ unites what is naturally alien— divinity and createdness— in his person.

Maximus doesn’t insist on Christological symmetry simply as an apologetics for Chalcedon, but as metaphysics. It is exactly this Chalcedonian symmetry that gives Maximus’s metaphysical and ascetical works its confidence in asserting the doctrine of deification, for “a sure warrant for looking forward with hope to the deification of human nature is provided by the incarnation of God, which makes man god to the same degree as God himself became man.”⁵ Deification is not a mystical doctrine but an extension of Chalcedon. God’s hypostatic identity with creation ensures humanity’s ascent into identity with God. Thus the logic of incarnation is not reductively applied to the one man Jesus, as “the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment [incarnation].”⁶ The incarnation reveals the eternal will of Christ to unite God and creation in his person as the central fact of reality. There is then, also a symmetry between protology and eschatology— creation begins with the Logos’s will to be incarnate “always and in all things”, and thus it must end, actualize, in that very cosmic incarnation.

Maintaining that the incarnation was eternally willed by God, against doctrines which taught that the incarnation was contingent on the fall, became known in the West as “The Franciscan thesis”, or the Scotistic doctrine of the incarnation. For Scotus, to maintain that the incarnation was contingent reveals a fundamental flaw in how one thinks Christ. “To think that God would have given up such a task [of incarnation] had Adam not sinned would be quite unreasonable! I say, therefore, that the fall was not the cause of Christ’s predestination and that if no one had fallen, neither angel nor man in this hypothesis, Christ would still have been predestined in the same way.”⁷ To quote Benedict XVI’s summary of Scotus’s Christology, “[Scotus] reaffirmed that the Incarnation is the greatest and most beautiful work of the entire history of salvation, that it is not conditioned by any contingent fact but is God’s original idea of ultimately uniting with himself the whole of creation, in the Person and Flesh of the Son.”⁸

Sin, then, in the Franciscan thesis, did not determine the incarnation, but the mode of incarnation, Christ being incarnate in a passible flesh, suffering and dying. Yet this does not mean that Christ’s slave-form was incidental or accidental. That God descended to the greatest depths of human depravity reveals, for Bonaventure, that God is not most properly called Being, as the Dominican school insisted, but self-giving Love (Bonum Diffusivum Sui).⁹ The fall is, in the words of the Paschal Exsultet, a “happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer” — the depravity of the fall reveals the unconditionality of God’s favor.¹⁰ The Franciscans brought the Roman church such a profound emphasis on the suffering of Christ, that Lossky’s polemical description of Roman theology, in which “Christian life and thought becomes Christocentric, relying primarily on the humanity of the incarnate Word, [so that] one might almost say that it is this which becomes their anchor of salvation,” is accurate.¹¹ This emphasis on the poverty of Christ’s humanity took liturgical form in the stations of the cross, which have become an unremovable part of every Roman church, the widespread use of crucifixes, and eucharistic adoration. It simultaneously took form in a renewed emphasis on radical poverty, serving the oppressed, the poor and the elderly, and finding Christ in the natural world, in its beauties and its sufferings. One only needs the poignant image of the crown of thorns to understand that Christ not only disclosed who God is, but who humanity is— the bloodied slave, crowned with thorns, yet robed in purple, the radical poverty of God, and the radical dignity of humanity.

Christ’s incarnation was not simply disclository, but informed by mission. Christ entered the world to deify the world. Where Maximus found this in Chalcedon and the Cappadocians, the Franciscans in the life of Christ and his sufferings, Teilhard De Chardin found this in the center of Christian faith, the Mass, the Eucharist. The Eucharist reveals not only God’s willingness to become one with his creation, it reveals the deification of human labor, which is represented in the wheat and wine. More than that, Christ deifies all labor, unifying this splintered creation that groans in labor for the revelation of the Sons of God. “This bread, our toil, is of itself, I know, but an immense fragmentation; this wine, our pain, is no more I know, than a draught that dissolves. Yet in the very depths of this formless mass you have implanted — and this I am sure of, for I sense it — a desire, irresistible, hallowing, which makes us cry out, believer and unbeliever alike— ‘Lord, make us one.’”¹² Just as Christ shed his blood so that his bride the church could live, so too the labor of the evolving world is shown to be Christ’s blood, so that eschatologically the cosmos may be Christ’s one body. History is but a cosmic liturgy, in which in the fullness of time, the high priest has entered, to hold in his hands even the lowest of its elements, and to say, this is my body, this is my blood. Through these words God is irrevocably Creation and Creation is irrevocably God, for in the person of Christ has been enacted an irrevocable union, a marriage of Creator and Creation into one flesh, the one Corpus Christi. “Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding me there, burn me, purify me, set me on fire, sublimate me, till I become utterly what your heart would have me be, though the utter annihilation of myself (ego).”¹³ Thus Teilhard ends Mass on the World in prayer to the Sacred Heart. There is no more room for theologies of the relationship of God and world, except for Christ. The incarnation has disclosed the whole of reality, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man. God has become incarnate in the fullness of time to deify the cosmos, and draws all things into himself, through his elevation on the cross. Christ names the hope that all human sufferings are the birthing pains of a new world. The hope that the same God who has made creation to be his body, will see it to its fulfillment.