Amen to that.
Advent Day 24 – Taking On Human Flesh
by Fr. Robert Barron
Asking how God, the “sheer act of being” (ipsum esse), can take on human flesh is an interesting question because I think it is only ipsum esse that can accomplish this.
It’s a commonplace of the Christian tradition that in Jesus, God has become a creature. We have to be careful about that language. We don’t mean that God turned into a creature—that God stopped being God by turning into a creature. Nor do we say that a creature turned into God—that’s mythological language. What we mean is that God took to himself a human nature to use for his iconic purposes. St. Paul talks about Jesus as “the icon of the invisible God.” His humanity is the iconic representation of the invisible God.
Having made that clarification, it’s only ipsum esse that can pull off this trick. If God were a being in this world, like one of the ancient gods or the deist god, then he would only relate to a human nature in a competitive way. To use an analogy, my two hands can’t become one another—they repel each other. Likewise, I can’t become a bookshelf, and a bookshelf can only become something else (like ash) by being burned and destroyed. That’s the way it goes with finite natures.
But God can become a creature, without ceasing to be God or compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes, precisely because he’s not a competitive nature in the world. He’s not a being, but ipsum esse—the sheer act, or energy, of “to be” itself.
That’s why the ideas of the Incarnation and God as ipsum esse are correlated and mutually implicative.