The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity

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Like all orthodox religions Christianity provides a spiritual anthropology, an understanding of which is essential to salvation. Like Christ, the human being is ambiguous, or two-fold, and further:

…the ambiguity of man is that of the world: everything manifests God—directly or indirectly, or in both ways at the same time—but nothing is God; thus everything can either bring us closer to Him or take us further from Him. Each religion, or each confession, intends to offer its solution to this problem in conformity with a particular psychological, moral, and spiritual economy. (from “Christian Divergences”, p. 98)

This is reflected in the two-fold human response to the confrontation between man and God: metanoia, which is the realisation of the utter reliance of all things on God and the rejection of all thoughts and action that do not honour this—the opposite state to illusory self-sufficiency; and deification, or theosis, which recognises, alongside Islam, that ‘there is no Reality but the Reality’. The human being is, to use the Arabic terms, ‘abd and khalifah, slave and vice-regent, horizontal and vertical.

Inwardness and verticality, outwardness and horizontality: these are the dimensions that constitute man in all his greatness and all his littleness. To say transcendence is to say both metaphysical Truth and saving Divinity; and to say immanence is to say transpersonal Intellect and divine Selfhood: verticality in the face of “our Father who art in heaven”, and inwardness in virtue of the “kingdom of God which is within you”, whence a certitude and a serenity that no stratagem of the powers of darkness can take away from us. (from “Delineations of Original Sin”, pp. 57-8)

The human being images, in a virtual state, Christ:

…Humanity, and with it the individual human, is an image of Christ.…Man is “incarnation” by his Intellect and Freedom, and “crucifixion” by his miseries. (from “Some Observations”, p. 39)

It is this imaging that makes possible salvation, which is not other than union with God—the turning back of the Fall—in which we become by Grace what Christ is by nature. This salvific, and gnostic, truth is proclaimed by the Church Fathers: “For He was made man that we might be made God” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3) and Christianity today needs to recall this.