Text
The salvation history is described by some Syrian Christian writers as consisting of four main scenes. It is only rarely that all four scenes are presented together, but there is no doubt that the entire scenario was familiar to all Christian Syriac writers. In the first scene, Adam and Eve are together in paradise, viewed as a mountain, and clothed in “robes of glory/light”. In the second scene the Fall takes place, Adam and Eve are stripped of their “robes of glory/light”. In order to remedy the naked state of Adam/mankind, brought about by the Fall, in the third scene the Divinity himself “puts on Adam” when he “puts on a body”, and the whole aim of incarnation is to “reclothe mankind in the robe of glory”. The Nativity, the Baptism, and the Descent/Resurrection are the three central “staging posts” of the Incarnation which are separate in profane time, but intimately linked in sacred time. All the three are seen as descents of the Divinity into successive wombs, the womb of Mary, the womb of the Jordan, and the womb of Sheol. The descent into the Jordan is of central importance, for it is then that Christ deposits the “robe of glory/light” in the water, thus making it available to the mankind for the second time to put on in baptism. In the fourth scene the baptism of Christ is the foundation and source of Christian baptism: by descending into Jordan Christ sanctified in sacred time all bapismal water; at Christian baptism it is the invocation to the Holy Spirit in the prayer of consecration of the water which effectually makes the water of the individual source identical in sacred time and space with the Jordan waters. By baptism the Christian himself goes down into the Jordan waters and thence he picks up and puts on the “robe of glory” which Christ left there. Baptism is a reentry to paradise, but this final stage of mankind is seen as far more glorious than the primordial paradise, and God will bestow mankind with divinity which Adam and Eve tried to take by eating of the Tree of Life.
Bibliography
| Brock 1992, XI 12 | Brock, Sebastian. Studies in Syriac Christianity, History, Literature and Theology. London: Variorum Reprints 1992. |
Amar Annus
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000905.php
|
