{263}

II. The Apostles and the Empire

Obviously, the Gospel preached initially in this manner is going to find itself in new historical situations. The first encounter was with the situation of the Greek-Latin spirit.

A) The Apostles and the gentiles. Among the gentiles St. Paul preaches the universality of Christianity. But there were two possibilities. In the first place, a direct universality without circumcision. In the second place, a universality passing through Judaism: that was Judeo-Christianity¹. St. Paul takes a strong stance against this second possibility: Judaism with its initiation rite does not belong to Christianity. Certainly, Christianity follows after the God of the synagogue, Yahweh. St. Paul mentions this frequently: “Are they Israelites? So am I!” (2 Cor 11:22), and he repeats it before the Roman procurator (cf. Acts 24:15). However, what Judaism has of religion is not a previous state for the initiation into Christianity. St. Paul opts for this possibility of de-Judaization. With this, Christianity as religion becomes a strictly universal religion into which each one is incorporated directly to the body of Christ by reason of his individuality, but is incorporated directly without passing through the body of Judaism. This is a rigorous historical universality².

{264} On the other hand, St. Paul has, of course, a disputable, disputed, and still under disputation influence of the religions of the gentiles, at least in their conceptivation. There is no doubt that much of the terminology of St. Paul proceeds from the mystery religions. For example, the palingenesía, the regeneration, or the idea of putting on Christ (endúein Christón), are unquestionably concepts taken from the mystery religions. St. Paul makes these lógoi his own, common theological sayings of his time, often taken for his genial creations, when in reality they are only repetitions. Also, when St. Luke puts in his lips phrases like “we too are His offspring”, he himself says it is a quotation “from one of your poets” (Acts 17:28-29)³. Similarly, the famous text “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) is modeled on one of Epimenides of Knossos (Tr. note: VI cent. B.C., cf. Beginnings). This is not, as has often been said, a syncretism. It is precisely the opposite as I mentioned above: it is the case of a utilization of alien concepts in order to actualize and develop internal possibilities existing in Christianity. Quite the opposite of any syncretism⁴.

Other influences come from Roman law. In this case, the influence of the example I am going to quote has had enormous influence {265} in the course of history, namely, the use of the term huiothesía, adoption. St. Paul says that by the work of Christ we are adoptive sons of God, exapésteilen ho theós ton huión autóu ... hína ten huiothesían apolábomen (Gal 4:4-5). The adoption, clearly, does not mean here a purely juridical relationship, but something real. What is meant is that one is not a son the way Christ is. I shall return to this immediately. At any rate, the Apostolic preaching chooses, among the several existing possibilities, for one way, and for a very clear possibility: the strict and rigorous universalization, without setting out from Israel. And, in the second place, chooses for the enrichment, and unfolding of the internal possibilities of the preaching of Christ to enlarge the range of the intellection of revelation.

B) The Apostles and Greek wisdom. In a second phase, already from the time of St. Paul himself, Christianity not only encounters the gentile peoples, but the mystery religions, and even Judeo-Christianity, which actually had a short life and practically disappeared during the life of the Apostle. In Greece it encounters something different, Greek wisdom, sophía. This is something different. The encounter with Greek wisdom also brings with it different possibilities. According to one of them, one continues to have a progressive illumination, and continues to know more things about God and Christ. This is the source of all illuminisms. At that time, of illuminism and Montanism. On the other hand, the gnosis had appeared⁵. As a consequence there starts a kind of {266} Christianity for aristocrats of the intelligence, which is more or less everything that in general terms was called “Gnosticism”⁶.

However, there was another possibility different from these wisdoms; an illumination not by new revelations under the light of gnosis, but by a simple intellection of the revelation. This was the labor of the apostolic Fathers, particularly of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who, although not an apostolic Father, was the direct disciple of one of them —of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, disciple in turn of St. John. Revelation is not a fountain of illumination, and new revelations. Revelation is not purely and simply something placed among men for them to obtain all the lights they may wish with respect to revelation, but something else altogether: it is not a positum, but a de-positum⁷. Certainly, the term “deposit” can be found in the Pauline writings (cf. 1 Tm 6:20; 2 Tim 1:14). But there it does not have the specific sense it is going to have in St. Irenaeus, among other things because revelation had not concluded yet. Consequently, revelation is a deposit. And to this deposit belongs not only the work of Christ, and the Apostolic preaching, but also the entire revelation of the religion of Israel, as St. Irenaeus —together with the rest of the Church— energetically proclaims. He had to rise against the first brutal act of theological anti-Semitism in history: the work of Marcion, and of the {267} Marcionites. For Marcion, the Old Testament is the revelation of a just God, actually severe and austere, different from the loving God of the New Testament. Hence, for him all the portions of the New Testament, which underline or mention the presence of the Old Testament in the New are apocryphal. The Church forcefully rose against this Marcionist position, and claimed for itself the whole of the Old Testament as an intrinsic moment of its own reality, and its own revelation. It is an integral deposit. Facing gnosticism, St. Irenaeus emphatically affirms the characteristic of mere deposit this revelation possesses in both Testaments. Still, the deposit is not only integral, but in addition affirms against every illuminism that it is a deposit, which concluded with the death of the last Apostle. There are no more possible revelations. This is the reason why revelation as a deposit is integral and has concluded, and it is also transcendent and kept as a deposit by tradition. The transmitted revelation is parádosis, tradition.

This concluded deposit is what St. Irenaeus, with a splendid expression calls, sóma tes alethéias, the body of truth. A concept that should have had a better fortune in the history of theology than the one it has had. It is a body not only in the sense that there is a “logical” implication between dogmas, but that it forms an organic body, where the darkening or illumination of some point of that body has inexorable repercussions on all the other points. The principal question is not the analogia fidei, but its fundament. The somatic, organic characteristic of revelation is the fundament of the analogia fidei.

Hence, this concluded body, this revealed deposit, does not have the characteristic of an exposition, which is transmitted mechanically {268} from some men to others. It has an intrinsically historical characteristic. I would venture to say that the “sóma of truth” is an intrinsically historical sóma, a sóma historikón. And precisely because it is an intrinsically historical body, it is going to illustrate us about God and about Christ, but not separately. Christ did not reveal God by saying what God was, but did so in a more modest, but radical way. He did not reveal God by saying it, but by being Him. From this stems the internal “somatic” implication between the idea of God, which is going to develop in Christianity, and the idea of the very reality of Christ.


III. Christianity and Greek reason

Several religious situations are born here, which bring us to the third stage. The fact is that in addition to defending the characteristic of the revealed against Greek wisdom, Christianity is going to find itself in a third stage with something much more rigorous and stricter than the gentiles or wisdom. It is going to face reason strictly as such: Greek reason. And this Greek reason will have to grapple simultaneously with the two slopes of Christ. On one side, insofar as He really is the Son of God. On the other, as the very revelation of God in act in the reality of Christ. The clarification of the truth of God is founded upon the clarification of Christ as Son of God. Because indeed Christ reveals God by Himself being God. This is why the Trinitarian dogma is founded upon the Christological dogma. Here, several possibilities were being opened, which were still undiscerned in the deposit, but were brought to light by this strictly new situation. The inquiry by Greek reason. Putting aside the details, this inquiry proceeds along three essential phases.

{269} A) First phase: What is it to be Son of God? On the one hand, it could be thought that Son here means purely, and simply that he has a grace, which in a certain way is complete, and perfect. The very text of St. Paul tells us that Christ is the “pléroma (fullness) of divinity” (Eph 3:19). But the Gospel tells us that He was growing in “grace before God and men” (Lk 2:52). Divine filiation would be the plenitude of grace, which was granted to Him at the Baptism on the Jordan, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him. In this sense, Son of God would mean to be “adoptive” Son of God. Christ would be God katá cháris, by grace, full of grace and truth, or, as the early Adoptionists said, katá dýnamin. This carries along a certain conception of what God is⁸.

The Gospel tells us that God is a Father creator of the world, and of men, to whom He wishes to save for their defection or sin; for this reason He sent His Son, and He in turn sent us the Spirit of His Father to enlighten us, sanctify us, and console us. Here we are presented with the primacy of the “missive” characteristic of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is not superficial to begin here, because the form through which God has been revealed to us is the “mission”. Therefore, we must always begin with the missions. But only begin. Because these missions manifest to us what God is in Himself. What are these missions with respect to God Himself, and not only with respect to men? That is the question. Thus, if the Son is nothing but a Son by adoption, his filiation consists in a relationship ad extra between God and creatures. Then, analogously, the Father and the Holy Spirit are nothing but ad extra relationships: creation, and sanctification. If so, these ad extra {270} relationships, these missions, would be what is formally constitutive of each one of the three terms, and ad extra manifestation of what God is in Himself: one single, and unitary God, monás. Paternity, filiation, and sanctification would only be the three modes of His relationship ad extra, of His mission in the world. That was Modalism: one possibility to understand God through the missions. However, it was an erroneous possibility.

There existed a second possibility to understand filiation, namely, to consider that the Son of God is a Son not katá chárin, but by real filiation. The Son is a Son independently of His external relationship of Incarnation, and prior to it. One thing is the Word by Himself, and quite another the Word as Incarnated. And the Word is Son by Himself, and not through the Incarnation. The same must be said of the Holy Spirit. As St. Gregory of Nyssa will later say, if the Holy Spirit is sanctifying, it is so because He is sanctifying by Himself; if He is deifying, it is so because He is God by Himself, prior to, and with independence of the sanctification of creatures, and of Christ Himself insofar as man. Facing adoptive filiation, the Church defined the other possibility: real filiation. With this, not only God Himself had been understood as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were understood, each one in and by itself as God. God is not monás, monad, but triás, triad, as Theophilus of Antioch put it towards the end of the II cent. A.D., apparently the first one to use this term⁹.

This is the first phase of the clarification of the possibilities of the internal intellection of Christ and God: the {271} real, not adoptive, divine filiation of Christ, and therefore, God Himself as a triad, not a monad. What Christ is has provided us with an understanding of what God is. Christ is the truth in act of what God is. Of course, one might ask: What did the Apostles, and the early Christian generations believe? That Christ was an adopted Son or a real Son? One must reply that they had not posed the question. They simply believed in a direct and assertive way, but undiscerned, that Christ was the Son of God. The only thing we can say with certainty is that if we had explained the matter to them, they would have answered the way the Church answered when proclaiming the real filiation. I would call this inchoative intellection. In them the question was not formally, and expressly posited, but rather they believed in the filiation undiscerningly.

B) Second phase: What is it to be the real Son of God? It was not only the case of understanding what it is to be the Son of God, but to understand what it is to be the real Son of God: In what does the reality of this filiation consist? The question now had two aspects. Christ is the Word of God. However, since the Word by himself is the Son of God, as we have just seen, it turns out that to ask for the reality of the filiation is to ask about two different things. One is the reality of the filiation of the Word qua Word before the Incarnation. And the other is the reality of the filiation of the Word qua Incarnated, i.e., the reality of the divine filiation of Christ. Further possibilities of internal intellection continue to be enlightened.

1) Above all, What is the reality of the filiation of the Word qua Word? This is a question, which concerns God himself, prior to any Incarnation, and independently from it. {272} Greek reason had several different possibilities to understand this prior filiation. One, the priority is the priority of cosmic time (of chrónos), of the eons (of aiónon). It was the way Arius understood it, in the IV century A.D., influenced by the Aristotelianism of Antioch. Revelation tells us that the Word was engendered by God. But “engendered” was understood by Arius as “made”. Yet, this “made”, when referring to God creator, means “created” out of nothing by His will. The Word is His first creature. He was created, not in time, but prior to any time, in the duration, so to speak. This Word is with God, but is not properly God. It was this Word that Incarnated in Christ, and the one that received from God all the plenitude of grace. Thus, Arius accepts Adoptionism. The Church vigorously rejected this way of understanding the filiation of the Word qua Word of God. The Word is prior to creation, not only prior to time, but coeternal with God the Father. Generation is not creation. Therefore, the real filiation of the Word consists in the Word and the Father being of the same substance, consubstantial (homoúsios). The Word would be of His same ousía, substance. This was the definition of the Council of Nicea with St. Athanasius. The same would be said about the Holy Spirit in the First Council of Constantinople. In the previous phase, Greek reason had enlightened the truth that the Word and the Holy Spirit are God like the Father. In this second phase, to be God is understood as being consubstantial.

2) Yet, the other question remains: the real filiation of Christ as Incarnate Word. What does it mean to be really Son of God in reference to Christ? Starting from the understanding that the Word is the same substance ousía or substance of the Father, two possibilities of understanding this filiation opened up. Possibilities enlightened by Greek reason when encountering the revealed deposit. One was the possibility of understanding that in the humanity of Christ {273} the very substance of the divinity of the Word inhabited. The unity of Christ would be a simple oneness of inhabitation. It would be the case of a real oneness, but merely moral: Christ would be the temple of the Word. Christ then is a union, not a oneness. This is the position adopted by Nestorius, probably influenced, like Arius, by the Aristotelianism of Antioch.

However, there was still another possibility: to understand that Christ was the very Son of God, i.e., the Word itself. In that case the divine oneness of Christ would not be moral, but physical. Real means “natural”, physical, and not moral. Christ is not a union of the Word and man, but a physical oneness of the Word and the humanity. This was the truth proclaimed as dogmatic truth by the Council of Ephesus, with St. Cyril, against Nestorius. Against Adoptionism it was affirmed that the three are persons, and against the mere union of two substances, now a further step is taken: the real filiation is physical, natural filiation. The Council of Ephesus, and St. Cyril say no more. But, on the supposition of the truth of its definition, new questions arise in the Greek reason, which again enlightens new possibilities for internal intellection, both for the divine Triad, and for the divine reality of Christ.

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¹ From this point on we follow the text of the 1971 seminar.
² In the Madrid 1965 seminar Zubiri noted on the margin: “For God there is no distinction between the Jew and the gentiles: he expressly tells us this when addressing the inhabitants of Corinth: 'The Jews demand signs, and the Greeks look for wisdom (sophía), but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and an absurdity to Gentiles; but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power (dýnamis) of God and the wisdom (sophía) of God' (1 Cor 22:24). And St. Paul develops a Christology, an anthropology, and a soteriology with an expressly universal characteristic. The encounter with the gentiles has given him the possibility of more directly illuminating this universality”.
³ Actually, from the Phaenomena of Aratus. (Tr. note: Aratus of Soli, III cent. B.C., Cilician poet).
⁴ On the text of the 1965 Madrid seminar Zubiri notes: “It is not a syncretism, but the adoption of terminology and concepts in order to provide them with a new meaning. It was the possibility offered by the teaching of Christ of being internally known intellectually according to these concepts, in the new situation with the gentile peoples. These concepts have been useful to expressly and formally actualize possibilities of internal intellection, which Christianity already possessed”.
⁵ In a note to the 1965 Madrid seminar Zubiri distinguishes between gnosticism as “a religious wisdom, a sophía with a speculative characteristic”, “a knowledge superior to the faith”, and illuminism as “a rather charismatic sophía: we are facing new illuminations and revelations”.
⁶ From this point on we follow the 1965 Madrid seminar.
⁷ Zubiri notes at the margin of the text of the 1965 Madrid seminar: “Here: to begin with, because there are charisms (St. Paul): prophecy, etc. two possibilities: a) Illumination: fountain of new revelation. b) Revelation: fountain of illumination to understand revelation as a completed deposit. The first was rejected.”
⁸ From this point on we follow some manuscript pages written by Zubiri himself to be introduced at this point on the 1965 Madrid seminar.
⁹ Cf. Theophilus of Antioch, Libri tres ad Autolycum, lib. II, no. 15, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca, vol. 6, ed. J.-P. Migne, Paris, 1857, c. 1077.