In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
My beloved, welcome once again to our video series where we are attempting to do a deep dive into the Eucharist and its understanding in the mindset of St. Cyril of Alexandria. Now if you have been attending with us, you have... are fully already aware of the fact that what we are trying to do is to try to understand what is the richness and the wealth and the beauty of the Eucharist in the mindset of St. Cyril of Alexandria and that we are attempting to try to do this by studying very specific aspects of how St. Cyril speaks of the Eucharist.
So far, we have seen how it is that the human condition was something or was a very specific condition before the fall and how it is that the fall has introduced a new human condition, a fallen human condition. And in so doing, we have inherited corruption, we have lost the meaning of being immortal and so we introduced death into the world and we were also alienated from God. We saw how we were separated from the Holy Spirit and we also saw how it is that now we are in need to be reconciled. We saw a little bit how the incarnation solves all of these problems and we tried to study it through the mindset of the early Church Fathers. We saw a little bit of what St. Athanasius said. We saw a little bit of what St. Basil said. And we really focused on St. Cyril of Alexandria.
And in the last lecture... in the last lecture, we really took a look at what it means for us to try to understand the Eucharist through St. Cyril's Christology. And so, if you were paying attention with us in the last lecture, you saw how it is that... we'd discussed how Jesus Christ truly is the God-man in the flesh, as per St. Cyril's teachings, that this is God who is perfectly divine, who has taken on a full humanity and made that body His own. He took on the form of a bondservant for our sakes. And so, St. Cyril teaches that His attributes, which belong to His person as the incarnate Word of God, are found in the Eucharist as His very own flesh.
Today, God willing, the breakdown of the lecture that we will be having in this fourth segment is to try to understand how the Eucharist brings us from a state of corruption to a state of incorruption. And so we're also going to have to take the time to try to understand what is corruption and incorruption, what does it mean to say that we are corruptible and what does it mean to say that God allows us to participate in His incorruptibility, and so we're going to speak of all of this by discussing specifically the teachings of St. Cyril of Alexandria surrounding the Eucharist. So let's go ahead and jump right into it, my beloved.
First and foremost, let's make something very clear: St. Cyril really teaches that we inherit corruption as human beings and we inherit it from our forefather Adam, which means that
when Adam has sinned, because he is our forefather, what he passes down to us is this very state of death and corruptibility. St. Cyril says it very simply in his first letter. He says:
''So corruption and death are the universal and general penalty involved in Adam's transgression...'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 1)
This is what he hands down to his children generation after generation, because a person who is in a state of corruption will pass down corruption to his children. We see this very similarly in our biological state today. If a mother is plagued with a very specific disease, chances are she might be able to pass it down to her children through inheritance the same way that if I affect my body in a certain way, as a mother, if I inflict on my body specific pains of violences through drug abuse or alcohol or whatever that may be, it is going to have a direct effect, because I pass it down directly to my child who comes from me, who takes his nature from me. So because my nature is corrupted, that child's nature will also be corrupted. And so here, St. Cyril says it very clearly: this corruption and death are the universal and general penalty involved in Adam's transgression.
Why is this important? Because it's important to understand that that's what we inherit from the first Adam; the first Adam gives us death and he gives us corruption. However, there is something to say about the second Adam according to St. Cyril of Alexandria. In his commentary on the Gospel of St. John, he says the following... he says that:
''The lamb is to become the second Adam, not from the earth but from heaven...'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, Volume 1)
The same way that Adam was formed in Genesis by taking of dust and then the Lord formed him and blew into him the breath of life, which is the Holy Spirit according to St. Cyril. This second Adam is not from the earth but rather from Heaven. And so:
''The lamb is to become the second Adam, not from the earth but from heaven, and to become the source of all good for human nature...'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, Volume 1)
He now is going to become the source of what we inherit. Instead of inheriting death and corruption form the first Adam, we now have a chance to inherit good things for the sake of human nature through the Lord Jesus Christ who is the second Adam. And what is it that He gives to us? He says:
''...the deliverance from imported corruption, the bestower of eternal life, [and] the basis for transformation into God, the source of piety and righteousness and the road to the kingdom of heaven.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, Volume 1)
So, my beloved, this is really the conversation that we're going to have: how it is that through the Lord Jesus Christ and through our participation in Him through the Eucharist, we now have a chance to inherit incorruption, life and union through our Lord, our God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.
So, let's try to have a better understanding of what corruption is and we're going to try to define it together for the sake of making sure that we all mean the same thing when we use the word corruption or even incorruption. So corruptibility can be understood as the process, along with its observable symptoms, of slowly moving towards a state of death. So the introduction of decay or decomposition is an example of corruption within a subject. Any subject or any being that starts off at perfect health and very slowly begins to decay and starts to lose that state of perfection or purity or whatever it may be, immediately, that is an indication of corruption.
Incorruption is the opposite of this. Incorruption is the state of being where the subject no longer suffers such a process and is constantly preserved in a state of purity and in a state of life. Now this is interesting because when we say that the Lord God created us in incorruption, what are we saying? We're saying that we would not have seen the symptoms or the process of moving towards death the way that we see it today. We would not have seen the infectious diseases that we have. We would not see people slowly falling away morally, spiritually, rationally. All of these are indications of a process that bring the human being down to a point where he loses or he is slowly distorting that image that God placed inside him.
But to be incorrupt is to preserve that original, beautiful and pure state that we were in. And the reason that we highlight here this idea of a state of being is because we have to understand that within the orthodox Christian understanding, there is no one who is other than God. Let's make this very clear... We call Him the Being; He calls Himself the I Am. He's the only one who ''is''. We ''are'' not. We are in need of Him in order to exist. He's in need of nothing. He's the only one who is self-existing. He is in need of no other source of energy or power in order for Him to be. And so, He is called the I Am. He is called the Being. And this is the title that the Church gives to Him, because He is self-sufficient. None of us are. We are creations; He is Creator. And so, because He is self-sufficient, He is life, He is the source of all things. He is called the Being. So, we find our being, our existence in Him.
Why is this important? Because when we speak of corruption and incorruption, what we are really asking the Lord is to allow us to have our being, our renewal, our life, our restoration from corruption to incorruption in and through Him. St. Cyril... we know that in the 4 th and 5 th
century... in the 5 th century actually, St. Cyril took the liturgy of St. Mark, which is typically found in the Alexandrian tradition, and this is what we call today the liturgy of St. Cyril... That liturgy that St. Cyril took, which belonged to the anaphora of St. Mark the Apostle, he modified it, if you wish, or revised it and so in the process it became... it was traditionally
called the liturgy of St. Cyril, but it's originally the anaphora of St. Mark the Apostle. He says the following in the Prayer of the Veil and it's a very beautiful prayer... he says:
''You also, O Lord, who have mercy on every one, having had compassion on my weakness, put off from me the old man with his corrupt deeds and his lusts.'' (Liturgy of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Prayer of the Veil)
The only way that we can put off the old man of corruption, the old man that has inherited death and corruption through Adam, the only way that we can find a restoration, a healing, a bringing about of... from... taking from a state of corruption to a state of incorruption is if we turn to Lord and say: give to us from what is yours. And so we turn to the Lord and we tell Him that we are in need of Him; we need to be united to Him in order for us to find our... or to renew our state and go back to being incorrupt.
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