- Preface
Many pressures bear upon us to constrict the scope of values and intentions that govern our expenditures of thought and energy, beginning with the necessity to secure our survival. The drive to succeed, the desire to secure place and position, the ambition to acquire and exercise power over both the natural and social environments sound incessantly within us and come to dominate much of our time and effort. Still, we remain open to music from another sphere, and the dim vision of a fullness of life that unfolds on a different order exerts its own claim upon our hearts. The spiritual tension that results from this mélange is a prominent theme in our ancient spiritual and intellectual traditions. Plato makes this tension thematic in many of his dialogues as he challenges the Athenian harnessing of intelligence to serve the purposes of political power and empire with an account of the true nature of the soul and the temporal frame of eternity within which it unfolds its nature. He does so most notably in the conclusion of both Gorgias and Republic, in which he makes an appeal to ancient mythic traditions to call upon his readers to conduct human judgment, action, and thought in a manner that lives up to the claims of the soul's ultimate eternal home. In a different mode, William Wordsworth, two hundred [End Page 5] years ago in much of his poetry dramatized the danger we face when our lives and vision become increasingly narrow as we mature and appealed to his own sense of ancient wisdom to call for the recovery of the fullest vision of life.
Christian revelation and the spiritual traditions grounded in that revelation illuminate this aspect of the human condition as well, of course, and the Incarnation as the heart of Christian revelation both corrects and fulfills other anticipations of this ultimate horizon. Fr. Michael Casey, OCSO, in a recent book titled Fully Human, Fully Divine: An Interactive Christology, provides an account of this aspect of revelation that beautifully assimilates the tradition of Cistercian spirituality in terms that directly address contemporary concerns and modes of life.1 Casey is a monk in the Abbey of Tarrawarra near Melbourne, Australia, and his writings draw deeply upon St. Benedict's Rule for Monasteries and the wisdom cultivated in the monastic life and extend the gift of that wisdom to readers in all conditions of life, as is richly reflected in his most recent book, The Road to Eternal Life: Reflections on the Prologue of Benedict's Rule.2
Fully Human, Fully Divine addresses the theme of divinization, acknowledging that this is a neglected doctrine in contemporary thought and might even be resisted when we contemplate our Christian calling: "Morality we can understand and the divine mercy is not beyond our comprehension. It is much harder for us to understand the call and the gift to be as God is" (vii). The startling insight and claim put forward by the book is that it is our failure to embrace the worthiness of our concrete humanity with its flaws and contradictions that leads us to neglect the invitation to become sharers in the divine nature. To the extent that we abase ourselves, we distance ourselves from the incarnate Christ and so risk resisting the call to be like him—we become increasingly blind to the "wonder of God's enfleshment" (2). The core Christian doctrine of the full humanity and full divinity of Christ poses a challenging mystery, to be sure, and Casey cites the term "theandric" coined by ancient theologians to name the union of divine and human natures in the [End Page 6] unique form of the Incarnation as an example of the difficulties we face in conceptualizing the reality named by this doctrine (1). But it is essential that we recognize the actual humanity of Christ as the same daily humanity we experience if we are to open ourselves to the transformative power of the revelation that God became human to lead us to friendship and communion with God.
The book pairs accounts of scenes from the life of Christ presented in the Gospel of Mark...