Saint Augustine is astonished, like us, that God who became man was simultaneously present both here, in our fallen world, and in heaven. Saint Hilary of Poitiers clarifies, as much as possible, that on the one hand, “He is the Son of man is from the birth of the flesh which was conceived in the Virgin.” On the other hand, the fact that “He is in heaven is from the power of His everlasting nature, which did not contract the power of the Word of God, which is infinite, within the sphere of a finite body.” After which, in a remarkable synthesis, the same Saint Hilary summarizes the essential Christian teaching, which affirms that Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Holy Virgin Mary over two thousand years ago, is simultaneously true and complete man and true and complete God:

“Our Lord remaining in the form of a servant, far from the whole circle, inner and outer, of heaven and the world, yet as Lord of heaven and the world, was not absent there from. So then He came down from heaven because He was the Son of man; and He was in heaven because the Word, which was made flesh, had not ceased to be the Word.”

With the help of the saints, we begin to perceive the light brought to our minds by the verse from the Gospel of Saint John: “…no one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven…” When we read such a text, the difficulty we face relates to the key term insistently repeated by the evangelist: “heaven” (Gr. Οὐρανός/Ouranós). Influenced both by a mindset that reduces the world to its physical, material dimension and by our daily experience, our minds find it challenging to grasp the meanings that refer to what is not seen – that dimension of the world beyond our sensory perception.

Starting from His eternal, immutable, and uncreated world, where He is forever with the Father and the Holy Spirit, He passes through the heaven of spiritual beings to descend under the physical heaven of the “fallen” world of humans exiled from their Creator’s designated paradise.

The “heaven” about which the apostle speaks of is entirely different from the one we see daily above our heads. The heaven from which the Son of God descended is the “place” beyond our world, representing the divine homeland where the miracle called “heavenly Jerusalem” is described in the Apocalypse of the Apostle John. However, as we have already understood from the commentary of Saint Hilary, the “heaven” in which the Holy Trinity dwells in its indescribable splendor is beyond both the world accessible to us through the senses and the unseen spiritual world, the place where angels, our souls, and spiritual essences reside.

If we were to describe the hierarchical levels of creation in the good tradition of Saints Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, of Scotus Eriugena, and of Saint Thomas Aquinas, we must affirm the existence of three hierarchically ordered levels, distinct yet inseparable, with different ontological consistencies:

• The Heaven (or “world”) of God, uncreated, in which the unique divine essence/nature of God and the Three Sacred Persons of the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – are enveloped in the light of uncreated grace;
• The Heaven of the intelligible world, created, representing both the world of angels and the essences and souls of our spiritual selves;
• The physical “heaven,” actually the entire visible created world, the only one immediately accessible to humanity after the “fall” following original sin.

Taking into account this systematization, which undoubtedly simplifies the real things for explanatory purposes, we can understand the event of the Birth of the Savior Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary in a new light. The Apostle Paul provides valuable clues.

In the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews, in verse 14, we read about Jesus that He is the one who “hath passed into the heavens,” after previously, in the Epistle to the Ephesians (4:10), the same apostle spoke about “He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” From such verses, we derive an image of the Savior that might surprise us.

According to His divine nature, God the Son, the eternal Logos, has always been in His eternal Kingdom, without beginning or end; according to His human nature, taken from the Holy Virgin Mary, He took on the form of a servant, descending into our dark, cold, and desolate world.

Like an astronaut navigating through unknown heights of creation, Jesus Christ is born at the end of an instantaneous cosmic journey during which He traversed all possible levels of existence: starting from His eternal, immutable, and uncreated world, where He is forever with the Father and the Holy Spirit, He passes through the heaven of spiritual beings to descend under the physical heaven of the “fallen” world of humans exiled from their Creator’s designated paradise. Furthermore, He goes all the way in His cosmic journey, descending into the depths of that place which is close to Hell, i.e., Purgatory, to liberate the temporarily captive righteous.

After this extraordinary final act, Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father, opening the way for our sanctification through the gradual restoration of the fallen nature of humanity – the lost sheep saved by the good shepherd. The physical and astronomical image of this journey has both a spiritual and symbolic value: by traversing this entire path to incarnate from the Holy Virgin Mary, the Word of God (the Logos) remained all the time in the “highest” heaven of the Holy Trinity, as Saint Hilary says – “far from the whole circle, inner and outer, of heaven and the world.” Of course, we understand such mysteries through the supernatural light of faith, being convinced that God, being all-powerful, can be simultaneously anywhere. According to His divine nature, God the Son, the eternal Logos, has always been in His eternal Kingdom, without beginning or end; according to His human nature, taken from the Holy Virgin Mary, He took on the form of a servant, descending into our dark, cold, and desolate world.

Gustave Dore's illustration from Dante's Paradiso

Confronted with the dramatic problem of recovering the lost Paradise, the ancient sages desperately sought solutions, from shamanic and magical practices to thaumaturgic and meditative ones, to “traverse” the distance between our physical world and the “beyond” – the metaphysical world. Conceiving the created world in terms of a tensioned duality, as seen, for example, in Plato’s philosophy, they never suspected the existence of a path conceived by God Himself.

Knowing all too well that there is no method that allows man to traverse the infinite distance between creature and Creator, the Heavenly Father foresaw the saving solution in the Incarnation of His only Son, through a “method” that overturns any human philosophy: the miraculous birth from the Virgin. I’ll stop here. No matter how much I write, words can never help us penetrate such amazing realities. However, we are left with the wonderful icon in which we contemplate Mary, the true mother of the divine child, meditating and marveling at the One she sees with her virgin eyes: the eternal Word, God, Jesus Christ, made man. Let us contemplate Him too: so small and fragile but shining to incandescence in the midst of the dark night of our fallen world. He is the only light we truly need.

Merry Christmas!

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