No more winter

January, the characters of the crib are back in the boxes. Not in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where there are always the oldest statuettes in history, sculpted by Arnolfo di Cambio 70 years after the ingenious invention of Saint Francis.

In houses we wrap our statuettes without thinking that affirming what they represent, the birth of a child who is God, is a cost of blood and tears. "God became man so that man could become like God," says Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century. Phrase that pays off with two exiles in the West and a fugitive in the desert of Egypt where he wrote the life of Saint Anthony: image of man full of uncreated Wisdom, who became similar to God. 7th century: Maximus the Confessor openly opposes the formula of faith desired for sinister political reasons by the emperor, who seeks an understanding with the monothelites (supporters of a single will in Christ) and the monoenergetes (in Christ a single energy): thus emptying the reality of the incarnation and therefore of redemption of man. All that remains is for Massimo to take refuge in Rome where Pope Martin prepares a council to forcefully reaffirm the presence in Christ of two wills, divine and human.

But the long arm of power arrested Martino and dragged him to Constantinople, while Maximus, after an exile and two trials, had the tongue with which he spoke cut off and the right hand with which he had written that: «Christ unites in love the created and uncreated reality – marvel of divine friendship and tenderness for us – and shows that through grace the two realities are one. The whole world enters the total God and becoming all that God is, except the identity of nature, receives the total God in its place. Man, image of the Logos, has the task of revealing the logoi, the spiritual essences of things, living a liturgical existence, free from his own egocentrism (filautía), in a path of divinization.

But it is Origen (see image), 2nd century, who is the first to build his great spiritual and theological synthesis on man's participation in the divinity of God.
Christ, Face of the Father, place of all holiness, participates totally in the suffering of men: «If he came down to earth, it was out of compassion. Yes, he suffered our sufferings before he suffered the cross, before he assumed our flesh. First he suffered, then he descended. But what is this passion that he felt for us? It is the passion of love…». It is Christ who in the Canticle says to man: «For you I have resisted the fury of the storms; for you my soul became sad until death. For you I broke the sting of death, for you I loosed the bonds of hell. For this I say to you: Rise and come, my all beautiful, my dove, for behold, the winter has passed, the rain has gone, the flowers have appeared on the earth…because I was born of a virgin and the will of my Father". Yes, in the Beyond with God there is no more winter for us.

Flaminia Morandi
NP January 2023