The Ecclesial Gathering of All into Divine Unity

Note: This article is, in large part, a reflection on themes and ideas in the fourth volume of St. Dumitru Stăniloae’s The Experience of God.

Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?¹

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.²

The general sense of the Greek word ἐκκλησία (ecclesia) is a gathering or assembly—etymologically: ones called out or summoned—with the implication that there is some purpose for their coming together. The United States Congress, for example, is in this sense an ecclesia: a group of elected persons who assemble and cooperate, as one body³, to perform various governmental functions. Indeed, there are many kinds of human ecclesiae—even within the government of the United States alone—with their various respective purposes. The Christian Church in particular, however, is a catholic ecclesia both because it is, as a whole, universal in scope and because its local manifestations (or Churches) each bear the fullness and are expressions of the whole ecclesial Body: namely, that of Christ, the Head par excellence, in an eternal communion of love with His Father and His Spirit. The catholicity of the Church is founded precisely on the fact that Christ is fully and personally present, without division or dilution, expressing His love and mercy Spiritually in and through each individual member, each local Church, and the Church as a whole Body—as one communion of all local Churches under the same Head. In grasping the movement of the catholic ecclesia as a divine ingathering through God’s love for the express purpose of a subsequent outward expression through man of that same divine love, we begin to perceive the Church not merely as an assembly of the faithful as individuals but as a living, mystical, communitarian organ of transformative love, the uncreated heart of creation pumping divine blood, wherein all members of the Body in union among themselves and with God through Christ are called to manifest progressively the fullness of divine eros on the plane of creation, drawing together all creatures—as a reverberation of their own prior drawing by the Spirit—to make them one suitable offering to God. Through their ecclesial transformation, all things are unified according to the Triunity of God and, in their union, become one transparent medium of divinity as a part of the freely willed self-sacrifice of man in Christ, enabled by Christ’s own self-sacrifice, resurrection, and ascension as perfected man.

The purpose of the Christian Church, as the catholic ecclesia, is the universal integration of creation according to man’s eternal unity in communion with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—an integral ordering and opening of all things into the freedom of God’s infinite love and their resultant perfection as one creation: the Body of Christ, the union of created and uncreated, time and eternity, earth and heaven. St. Dumitru Stăniloae says:

The Church is the union of all that exists, or, in other words, she is destined to encompass all that exists: God and creation. She is the fulfillment of God's eternal plan: the unity of all. In her are found both the eternal and the temporal, with the latter destined to be overwhelmed by eternity; both the uncreated and the created, with the latter destined to be overwhelmed by the uncreated, to be deified; both the spiritual things of all categories and matter, with the latter destined to be spiritualized; both heaven and the earth permeated by heaven; both the nonspatial and the spatial; both "I" and "thou," "I" and "we," "we" and "thou," united in a divine "Thou," or in a direct, dialogical relation with Him. The Church is a human communitarian "I" in Christ as a "Thou," but at the same time the Church's "I" is Christ.⁴

According to their constitution as one Body through their eucharistic participation in the Church as a divine-human organism, Christ's temporal members are jointly and continually oriented toward the progressive actualization of the eschatological unity of creation within God—a creation of which they are both a part and yet transcend—embodying concretely and working to realize their shared yearning for the perfection that unites all things in His infinite love.

Although it is destined to be so, in the present age the Church’s temporality has not yet been overwhelmed by eternity. In her present level of spiritual development, according to the perspective of her human members whose spiritual maturation is still in process, the Church lives with an insatiable hope in anticipation of the blessed eschatological unity of Christ actualized as all and in all. With this orientation, each thought, desire, and movement of the Church, according to her Spirit, is prophetic and colored by the light of eternity—gradually shining forth as from a sun rising on an infinite horizon—and is drawn into life and grows toward Christ like a tree toward this sun, despite her roots being presently spread through the soil of an earth not yet fully spiritualized or permeated by heaven. But as the day dawns, as the Church grows through her photosynthesizing the divine light, she becomes ever more eschatological in her being, ever more clearly the Tree of Life, whose fruit is the becoming of all creation in Christ. The Church is one Tree with one sap—but a Tree with diverse branches and myriad kinds of fruit.

“In the Church all things are united but unconfused in this unity”.⁵ That God calls all, through man, into perfect eschatological unity implies that He desires that there be no spiritual distance between things, no obstacles to their communion nor to their mutual enjoyment as gifts given to each other, and all together given to God. But even in the bridging of this distance and the overcoming of all spiritual intervals between things—accomplished only by the movement of God’s love within them—the particularity and otherness of things is retained. Were this not so, creation could not be an expression of Triunity but rather only a bald impersonal oneness that is incapable of supporting any reality which is other in relation to God and yet participates in Him dialogically through the medium of the Church. In the progressive actualization of ecclesial unity, the otherness He gifts creatures is neither obliterated nor compromised; any supposed unity realized through the dissolution of otherness is not genuine unity, but is simply the fact that an amorphous oneness remains after the annihilation of otherness, or after some hypothetical revelation that there never was any genuine otherness to begin with; this is not God’s unity, for God is an uncreated, pre-eternal Triunity of distinct Persons in perfect communion. As the absolute beginning and end of all things, God is, irreducibly, unity in multiplicity. This unity pervades creation even now, though incompletely, and can be seen virtually everywhere by those who have eyes to see; one analogy helpful in this context is that of the members of an individual human’s body; an arm, a leg, a nose, and the other parts of the body, are all distinct in their identities as different members and yet, nevertheless, unified in their identity as one human body. Indeed, my nose is simultaneously my nose, my body, and me. At still a more general level, humanity is one nature, but exists as a multiplicity of particular and distinct persons who are nevertheless inescapably interdependent; humans are each other at the level of nature, and yet remain distinct at the level of person. St. Dumitru says: “[t]he Church is the body of Christ and as such is united with Him and distinct from Him”⁶. This is true, again, in a sense analogous to a human person’s identity with and distinction from his own body, for a man’s body is both his body—as an integral part of, yet not exhaustive of, the whole person—and truly him through its identity with him as person. This is due to the holistic quality of persons as both immanent and transcendent in relation to themselves—with their identities as particular persons suffused throughout their component parts and aspects, while at the same time transcending each as a holistic personal unity. That is, no part of a person is exhaustive of him, but each part nevertheless is the person. This pattern of transcendent unity in multiplicity is reflected also in the structure of personal consciousness. As subject of a distinct phenomenal consciousness, apart from any particular qualitative experience therein, the person constitutes a transcendent unity of multiplicitous and ever-shifting qualia⁷, for any particular contents of his phenomenal consciousness are necessarily distinguishable both from each other and the “I”—or the person himself as conscious integrative subject—as the one having the experience, even though these are inseparable and always manifest together in unity. Indeed, the contents of my qualitative experience are mine and bound up inseparably with the ontological manifestation of myself to myself as subject, or as “I”, though my subjectivity per se has a permanence in relation to the ever-changing qualities of its experiential contents, and thereby serves as the phenomenological ground and center of identity for its particular experiences. This is God’s gift of otherness to us, for He gives us to ourselves; and thus, as His images, the core of our natural vocation is to give ourselves to others; to fulfill this vocation, we must first give ourselves to Christ as His Body, as the One who first gave His body for us, and then to all others in the Spirit of His love. Observing this pattern across multiple levels of human being serves to support its analogical applicability to the Church as one Body of persons in communion with God and each other, identified with and yet distinct from the Son.

The material substrate of a person’s body becomes a living unity at his conception—a multiplicity which shares one identity—precisely because it is joined to and wholly suffused by a human soul. The body and soul together form a hypostatic unity, interpenetrating and continuously informing one another. The human persons out of which the Church is built come similarly to share one identity in and as Christ, their Head and ultimate Hypostasis, because they both share the human nature which He, as the Divine Son, enhypostatized through the Incarnation, and because they are indwelt by His uncreated Spirit, given to the Church upon her birth at Pentecost, after the Resurrection and Ascension, and thus bear His personal presence in their hearts which conveys them into a life that transcends their own. Indeed, in order to become one in accordance with God’s Triunity, humanity must transcend itself through putting on collectively an identity higher than itself, just as the members—or even individual cells—of a human body must transcend themselves in their mutually constituting one body by all together putting on the higher identity of the whole human person and dedicating themselves in service to the life of the whole.  St. Dumitru says:

Having Christ as its head and being constituted in this way in the Church, humanity thus has ultimate transcendence in an intimate relation with itself, as its loving and living hypostasis; it can transcend itself with the help of this fundamental hypostasis, who has descended to the ranks of human hypostases. Through Him humanity finds itself in an endless transcending.⁸

Christ, as the head of the Church, holds His mystical Body together by sending and suffusing it with His Holy Spirit, opening its members together into a transcendent divine unity of being and activity: His eternal life of love. In a similar way, man’s own “head” (i.e., his rational, agentic, and willing subjective center) opens all the members of his body into the transcendent unity of the whole person’s being and activity. For example, when I reach for a glass of water, it is not my arm per se that is the originating agent of this activity, but me acting in and through my arm. My arm, utilized as a member of the body of a person, moves according to the vector of my personal will, which itself serves as a principle of unity for all the bodily parts and processes required to execute such purposeful action. For my arm could not perform its task in accordance with my will without my eyes’ seeing, my heart’s pumping blood, my lungs’ breathing air, etc. Indeed, my arm is an integral part of my whole body—and thus me—and yet nevertheless has a distinguishable identity of its own; but it cannot be considered in and of itself, entirely abstracted from the other members within the integral unity of my whole body, or as having an existence apart from my person as a body ensouled, else it would cease really to be my arm. Likewise, as members of the Body of Christ, individual human persons are, in unity of will with God, able to act synergistically within the agency of Christ by the Spirit, identified fully with and as Him, while also retaining their identities as individual members, though not as independent of or abstracted from the very One who gives and sustains the Life which unites them, the One on whom the existence of all things depends, and in whom they hold together.

One point of disanalogy between the Church as the perfect, uncreated, and eschatologically actualized body of Christ and the bodies of individual fallen humans is that, with regard to the latter, fallen man cannot be fully present as person in each member of his body perpetually, nor consequently in his body as a unified whole. This is so because the fallen body is ravaged by the passions, and, through its tendency to pursue their fulfillment, man thereby slips into a sub-personal mode of activity—and for an interval is vanquished as person from his own body. To this extent, the bodies of fallen humans exist in a spiritually fractured state, prone to attentional scattering and teleological divergence. St. Paul describes even the Christian of this age as being bifurcated into the old and new man, with the former tending toward enslavement to the flesh and the latter constantly at war with the former in accordance with the Spirit of which he was born anew. This means that those who have not attained “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”⁹ have not made themselves completely, body and soul, instruments of the righteousness of Christ and, to this extent, have not subjected their own bodies in freedom to the law of Christ, which subjection ultimately confers the highest form of unity: the Triunity of God. When this does occur, one’s very subjectivity—and all within its scope—becomes an instrument of God’s love and a beacon of Christ’s presence. It is only through the Logos, the One in whom all of creation finds unity of meaning and purpose, that man can overcome his tendency toward decomposition—and that not bodily only, but at all levels of his being and activity.

The stability of the transcendent unity into which a person rises who dwells in Christ as a member of His body requires a life in a constant state of sacrifice—through participation in Christ’s own sacrificial state as the High Priest and Offering—for each member, through his baptism, embarks on a pilgrimage to offer himself entirely to the Father in and for Christ, at first saying, “He must increase, but I must decrease”¹⁰, until finally he can say, in truth, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”¹¹, through which culminates the reality of the one catholic ecclesial Body, with one Head, one faith, living one life of resurrection—that of Christ Himself. Such is the case precisely because Christ’s life is itself one integral whole, and, within it, resurrection follows self-sacrifice as a matter of course. If the cells of a person’s body were to cease offering themselves up constantly to the life of the body as a whole, a person’s ability to act through his body would become increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, culminating in the separation of the soul from the body, or death. But if those cells maintain an orientation of self-offering with respect to their personal head, the life of the body as a whole continues—and, with an infusion of divine power through which death is vanquished, continues eternally. Of the general dynamic of self-sacrifice in the Church, and the relation between that of Christ and that of the faithful, St. Dumitru says:

By offering ourselves as a sacrifice to Christ, by renouncing the egoism that limits us, we place ourselves in a peaceful and perfectly loving relationship, in a relationship of total openness, with God the Father; we open ourselves through love to His loving infinity, just like His incarnate Son. In this way we sanctify ourselves. And this takes place in the Church, in the milieu of the communion that the faithful have with the sacrificed Christ and among themselves. In the Church we obtain in Christ the state of sacrifice, or of His offering to the Father—the state of openness toward Him from whom the waves of life and infinite love flow eternally. The Father objectively opens for us our entrance to Him, to the relationship with Him in love, but we too must subjectively eliminate the obstacles from the path that takes us closer to God, obstacles that close us off within ourselves. "For God the Father regards us in Christ and thus remembers us, and in Him [Christ] He made us known and worthy of regard, as it is written in the book of God." "Christ takes away our sins, and through Him we are accepted when we offer our gifts in the Spirit to God the Father," that is, when we approach Him with a love through which we forget ourselves.¹²

The whole Church, which exists as the communion of those human persons baptized with the Holy Spirit and incorporated into the mystical Body of the ascended, self-sacrificing Christ, is also manifest in and as the soul of each individual member. Through partaking of Christ’s body in the Eucharist and departing therefrom into the world to offer their own bodies for the sake of others through living lives of virtue, the faithful participate in and, synergistically with God, work out in the world the life-giving benefits of Christ’s own eucharistic self-offering. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, reflecting on the words of St. Maximus, says:

Through the Eucharist, the soul becomes a Church, so that the actual man-made church building, with the various services celebrated in it and the Eucharist, which sums up and unites them all, forms an image of the eucharistic restoration of the soul and its deification through grace, upon which it becomes "truly a church of God”.¹³

This reality—namely, the soul of each member of Christ becoming a Church—is founded on the fact that human persons are communal, and specifically perichoretic, beings by nature, and is accomplished by the mutual indwelling of the Head in each member of the Body, each member of the Body in the Head, and all in one another. That is, Christ dwells Spiritually in each member of the Church—having become man, died on the Cross, risen from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of the Father specifically for the purpose of sending His Spirit down to a humanity transformed through the life He lived as man—filling each with His glorious presence. Likewise, each member of Christ’s Body dwells reciprocally in Him through living in a state of self-sacrifice for His sake, or through participation in His own state of self-sacrifice as man; in turn, each member is opened, in communion with one another, to resurrected life as His Body, and ascension to the Father as adopted sons and brothers of Christ. This mutuality is precisely what allows the bidirectional, synergistic life of the Church as a divine-human Body identified with Christ Himself and yet simultaneously composed of truly diverse human members unified in the Spirit. The distinctness of each member is due precisely to the particular role he plays—the Spiritual gifts he utilizes—in the functioning of the whole communal Body; unity and diversity in the Church are in this way complementary and integrally related aspects of her constitution.

The Church is the mystical reality of Christ’s Body given for us—sacrificed, resurrected, and ascended to become actualized in the world by the Spirit as a temple built of human stones, all together white-hot with the self-same divine fire, given reciprocally back to God as a Body for His Son, so that He might maintain his sacrificial state in each member, and each member likewise in Him. In this way, with the whole of Christ indwelling each member, the Church is an organic fractal superstructure whose parts each contain the undivided, whole Christ, given for the life and unity of the whole creation. Each member comes to live and experience more fully the wholeness of the Church in his own subjectivity as his love for and communion with both Christ and other members increases, to the glory of the One Almighty Father of all. Ultimately, this love culminates as the eschatological expression of perfect Triunity in the Church, when all within her come to share unshakably—together in perfect liberty—in the heart, mind, love, and will of Jesus Christ our God, who loves and is loved by His Father perfectly in the Spirit eternally. As the God-Man, He is thereby the mediator between God and creation as the one who communicates the fire of God’s love through the Spirit, granting all things to become its transparent conduits to all others, in the form of an active, synergistic manifestation of uncreated energy extending through man to all things, through all things to man, and outward to infinity.

This fire of God’s love, far from harming the faithful who are engulfed by it, rather imparts to them ineffable joy and peace that surpasses all understanding. As members of the Church, the faithful thus become, all together in communion, one with the resurrected Christ; but, like the wood of the burning bush, they are not incinerated but given life by the divine fire of His loving presence which indwells them. To this effect, St. Dumitru says:

The Church and each of her members are thus the burning bush, unconsumed by the inexhaustible fire of love that was brought to human beings in Christ's humanity. For the risen Christ shines forth from the Church and kindles her endlessly but does not consume her, He did and does the same with His human nature. "The flame spared the bush and became bearable for the weak and small wood. For the Godhead was comprised within humanity. This is the mystery of Christ.¹⁴

1. 1 Corinthians 3:16

2. 1 Corinthians 12:27

3. More accurately, the congress of the United States is an organ of a broader governmental organism, with the federal government being its “head” and the state governments together comprising the body per se; but the general point holds that the congress is, construed generally, an ecclesia.

4. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 13.

5. Ibid, p. 13.

6. Ibid, p. 13.

7. I use the term ‘qualia’ here broadly, in reference to the discernible phenomenal qualities of one’s conscious experience.

8. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 21.

9. Ephesians 4:13

10. John 3:30

11. Galatians 2:20

12. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p.24.

13. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, pp. 30-31.

14. St. Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Vol 4. p. 30.