Soaked in the divine nature

Source: ChristianB

Today we commemorate St Cyril of Alexandria who lived from 376-444A.D. in what is, today, Egypt.  He was no stranger to controversy and if some accounts are to be believed he did not suffer heretics gladly.   He presided at the Council of Ephesus which affirmed Mary as the Theotokos or God-bearer (or Mother of God).  For one particular overview of some of these controversies refer to here. 

Cyril made an important contribution to theology in helping to deepen the Church’s understanding of both the human and divine nature of Christ. The joining of these two natures is so mystically powerful that Cyril uses images of fire to describe how the divine nature spreads out from the body of the God-man into the human race transforming iron but never destroying it.  Human nature is ‘divinised’ or transformed and transfigured.

Christ, the God-man, suffers in his own flesh and gives that flesh for the life of the world. When we receive his flesh, we are soaked in divine life. In his commentary on the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St John, Cyril teaches that Christ abides in us and we in him; the Eucharist binds us to Christ both physically and spiritually. It is a work of transformation from within, without destroying our human nature.

For Cyril, as for the doctors and saints of the early Church, there is a clear line from the Incarnation, to the giving of Christ’s flesh for the life of the world, to the Eucharist, and finally to the transformation of our bodies:

We proclaim the fleshly death of God’s only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, we confess his return to life from the dead and his ascension into heaven when we perform in church the unbloody service, when we approach the sacramental gifts and are hallowed participants in the holy flesh and precious blood of Christ, saviour of us all, by receiving not mere flesh (God forbid!) or flesh of a man hallowed by connection with the Word in some unity of dignity or possessing some divine indwelling, but the personal, truly vitalizing flesh of God the Word himself.  (Third Letter to Nestorius 7). [Source: St. Cyril and the Eucharist — Dominican Friars | Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus]