Jesus Christ, the Cosmic Navigator Who Descended from Heaven

Thoughts on the Mysterious Meanings of Christmas

Gerard van Honthorst (1592–1656), Adoration of the shepherds (source)

In the midst of one of the darkest moments in the history it is vital to remember the essential. The learned Origen of Alexandria (c.185–c.253) is the one who tells us what to do in such a situation: “let those who see this flee from the Judæa of the letter to the high mountains of truth.” Faced with an unprecedented spread of heresies and scandals, it is absolutely necessary to ascend to “the high mountains of Truth.” Not just any truth, but that divine, revealed Truth that teaches us how to return to the Paradise lost by Adam and Eve through original sin. Thus, preparing our minds through prayer and humble reflection to receive the light that emanates from the Holy Scriptures, we strive to delve into the meanings of an event that decisively influenced the history of the world. The verse that initiates such meditation is found in the Gospel of the Holy Apostle John (chapter 3, verse 13):

And no man hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.

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 (John 3: 13).

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.

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 so-called “heavenly Jerusalem” described in the Apocalypse of the Apostle John. However, as we have already understood from the commentary of Saint Hilary, the uncreated ‘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 created 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, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Thomas Aquinas, we must affirm the existence of three distinct hierarchically ordered levels, 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; if the first, God’s Heaven, can be conceived as the ‘Sun,’ this second—intelligible—world can be conceived (symbolically or analogically) as the ‘air’ through which the Sun and His rays are manifested;

The physical ‘heaven’ of the created world, the only one immediately accessible to humanity after the ‘fall’ following original sin. This is the ‘heaven’ we perceive through our senses (especially through the sense of sight).

Taking into account this minimal 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. 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 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.

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, spiritual 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 allowing man to ascend 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 (illusory) solution: the Logos descends from the uncreated Heaven through 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!