Incarnation: The unity of divinity and dust

Detail from Georges de la Tour's Adoration of the Shepherds (1644)

 Let’s start with an easy question: What is the Incarnation?

— Well, I’m not sure it is such an easy one. First of all, it is an impossible paradox, because it is the account of the union of two incommensurate entities: the uncreated being of God and our being of dust. The great Christian wonder is that mysterious union. […] We need to remember that in becoming flesh, the Word didn’t simply occupy one human body as a guest for 33 years. Human nature as such ⁠— that is, flesh ⁠— was invested with a potential for divinity. And so being a human being in the wake of the Incarnation isn’t the same as being a human being before the Incarnation, whether or not one believes in Christ and whether one even knows that Christ ever walked on this Earth. We like to talk about things being ‘systemic’ these days, and something systemic happened to human flesh through the Incarnation that opened it to transcendence and to eternity.

Ω From an interview with Erik Varden, a Norwegian bishop and Trappist monk. Read the splendid interview in full here. See Varden's own spiritual writing here.

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