01. Summary
The present paper is part of a larger theology of the Christian Life, organized around the motif of the spiritual marriage between Christ and the believer. Here I would like to explore how the humanity of Christ is instrumental in this transformation. First, I will show how the natural desire for God is expressed through the desire for other human beings. Second, given this inflection of our desire for God, Christ can be seen as the healer of our desire precisely through his embodied humanity. If the love of God is inseparable from the love of other human beings, and primarily from spousal love, then the love of Christ is the supreme conjunction of the two loves – spousal love and love of God. Our disfigured desires are transformed through spousal union with Christ. The indwelling of the Spirit too has a specific role, but particularly because he is the Spirit of Christ, “processed” through his humanity. The resulting account of transformation is a trinitarian one, where our spousal union with the humanity of Christ results in the “offspring” of the Spirit, whereby the believer is “pneumatized.”
02. Key Quotes
“ . . . The other sex is an object of desire precisely because it inflects transcendence through the body. This is the profound mystery of love – not simply love of another body, but love of the Good shining through in bodily form.”
“Only the Triune God is the supreme and ultimate resting place of our desire. But our desire is manifesting itself in an enfleshed way, by glimpsing God in his creatures, by enjoying the spiritual in the material and thus the material in the spiritual.”
“The humanity of our Lord is the sensible site where our desire for God is aroused and focused . . . The constructive argument in this section is that the humanity of Christ is both the source and object of our transfigured desires . . . Christ is the one in whom our natural love for God finds its fulfilment.”
“. . . Christ is the source of the Christian’s love for God. While this love does indeed actualize a created potency, it is novel and supernatural. The created capacity and natural operation are elevated supernaturally and thus transfigured in the process . . .”
“To love Christ is to adore him not only with a spiritual devotion to his divine perfections, but with a certain desire and adoration of his humanity which involves our natural senses . . . We come here to the nuptial theme again.”
“ . . . the transformation of the senses takes place precisely through this attachment to Christ, carnal at first, spiritual at the end.
“The kind of desire for himself that Jesus fostered in the disciples and his followers, for example, is not one that avoided the natural senses and the sensible desire for personal and bodily intimacy. But it was always made quite clear that these tracks lead to something more than the satisfaction of a carnal passion.”
“Gregory speaks of an infinite beauty, of which physical beauty is only a cypher. Nevertheless, it is a necessary cypher, since we are carnal beings.”
“Our senses are in the process of being transfigured because of their attachment to this new object of desire. They remain our senses, natural, and finite, yet they are now blessed to recognize a reality that escapes the sensual dimension, even though it incorporates it.”
“For this reason our love for Christ is both a human delight, involving all our human senses, as well as a supernatural delight, as our senses are led through the humanity of Christ to his divine glory, which cannot be enjoyed directly with human eyes.”
“A second dimension of this love is the love of Christ for the world . . . The loved poured by the Holy Spirit into our hearts (Rom 5:5) is in fact the very love of Jesus Christ for the world.”
“What we have here, in this new love, is a participation in the Holy Spirit, who is the love between the Father and the Son. By the Spirit we are united with Christ and transformed into his image from glory to glory. The Spirit is the one who gives us a new heart, not of stone but of flesh (Ez 11:19; 36:26; Jer 24:7).”
“The particularity of the Spirit’s mission is to transform our affections on the basis of a heart-to-heart knowledge of Jesus Christ . . . The Spirit has access to the pre-cognitive recesses of our souls, inaccessible even to the human person, and knows these deep sighs, longings, and fears. Paul speaks of the Spirit’s intercession, ‘with groanings too deep for words’ (Rom 8:26).”
“The sanctification of the believer is predicated precisely upon this transformation, which takes place by way of love: ‘Love is the principle that actually assimilates and conforms us unto God.’”
“The delight in Christ unites both our natural desire for God and the craving for human love. . . For the Bride of Christ, the source of transformation is a contagion with the love of Christ . . . The Spirit’s indwelling presence . . . transforms us by smiting us with love for Christ. Falling in love with him, all other desires fade, or rather are re-focused on the object of our love.”