ANUARUL ACADEMIC 2003-2004 - Facultatea de Teologie "Andrei ...

element, since only the soul constitutes the essence of man and it has to revealitself or to perfect itself by the detachment of the body, by its progressive denial 19 .Father Stăniloae states that: “the human body is a palpable, concrete, specialrationality, in connection with the palpable, concrete rationality of nature. Itrepresents the most complex system of plasticized rationality”. 20 “The human bodyis neither merely matter, nor merely plasticized rationality as an object, butsubjectivied matter, taking part in the subject as a subject. In the reality of my bodythere is something which transcends what might be called its materiality and itssimply automatic movements, something that cannot be reduced to its materialproperties. There is a partial non-objectivity of the body” 21 .When Fr. Stăniloae writes about the Son of God’s incarnation, sacrifice,resurrection and bodily ascension to the Heaven, when he makes an introduction tothe sacramental theology, and in the chapter on eschatology, too, father Staniloaealso refers to the importance and the value of the human body. It is worth renderingsome texts which are self-speaking by the depth of the content as well as by thebeauty of expression.“But Christ, becoming man made up of soul and body, showed us the valueGod is granting to the human body, also called by resurrection to eternity” 22 .“Christ, as Son of God’s union with mankind in a certain moment of history, issealed as virtuality in our very nature. The fact that only by the humanity assumedin His Hypostasis is the Son of God close to us and conveyable to the maximum.19 The anthropology of the early Church Fathers (especially that of Saint Irenaeus, Saint Justin theMartyr and the Philosopher, Hippolyte, Tertulian and even Clement of Alexandria) is formulated as areaction against Gnosticism and the dualist aspects of Platonism. The defense of the Orthodoxanthropology would remain necessary in the course of the following centuries, when some Gnostictheses, especially within the Origenist movement, will endanger even in the Church (especially incertain monastic circles) the authentic Orthodox conception. Thus, Origen, Evagrius, Didimus theBlind, would be, in 553, sentenced by the sixth Synod because – as the first canon of the quinisextSynod in 692 would remind- they “restored the Greek myths”. But the Origenism would leave traceseven much time after the sixth century, so we would see Saint Gregory Palamas obliged to refer oncemore to the Orthodox conception on man and to remind the Patristic teaching about the communionof destiny of the body and soul so that both of them achieve deification. On the Origenist crisis see:A. Guillaumont, 1962, Les “Kephalaia gnostica” d’Evagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origenismechez les Grecs et les Syriens, Paris and J.Meyendorff,1969, Le Christ dans la theologie byzantine,Paris, c.III, pp. 59-8920 Dumitru Stăniloae, Teologia Dogmatica Ortodoxă, vol.3, Bucureşti, Editura Institutului Biblic şi deMisiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1978, p. 375.21 Ibidem, p. 367.22 Ibidem, p. 150.154