themselves (and such divine virtue takes training, a long pedagogy). By this
sacrificial life, the creature chooses freely to existas a human beingand by
grounding that being and existence in an act of freedom, to live the same life of
love that God himself is. The creature only comes into this uncreated lifeas a
human beingwhen the creature gives their own‘fiat’!
Following the apostle Paul, Irenaeus describes this transition as a movement
from animation to vivification.^16 Thefirst Adam was animated by a breath of
life, but the Last Adam became a life-giving Spirit, a pledge of which is given to
the baptized as afirst taste of the fullness of the life-creating power of the
Spirit. This gift already renders Christians spiritual, even now, as they begin to
put to death the desires of theflesh and to begin, instead, to live in the gifts of
the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentle-
ness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–3). And when they relinquish their last
breath, the return on the pledge, which had been kindling the spark of new
life, will be set ablaze in the fullness of the life-creating power of the Spirit
through our actual death and resurrection in Christ: as the apostle put it,‘what
is sown in an animated body is raised in a spiritual body’(1 Cor. 15:44). Or as
Psalm 103/4.29– 30 —a poem on creation, perhaps older than Gen. 1—puts it:
‘You take away their breath, they die and return to the earth; you send forth
your Spirit, and they are created.’Creation,finally and fully, comes about
through death: it is as‘the Amen, the faithful and true martyr’that Christ is
‘the beginning of creation’(Rev. 3:14).
We return to the dust, then, so as to be created by God. Perhaps here we can
see a movement from the creation account in Genesis 1, where God announces
his project to create a human being in his image, to the creation account in
Genesis 2, where God takes dust from the ground and fashions the human
being. For, in the most real sense, we do not start off as clay, but rather we all,
with an absolute certainty, end up as clay. For Christians, having committed
themselves once for all in the sacrament of baptism to die to Adam and live to
Christ, life is thereafter one of‘learning to die’, and thereby learning to live:
‘Dying, behold we live’(2 Cor. 6:9). Yet, until they actually die and lie in the
grave, they are caught in thefirst-person singular. I can only say:‘Didn’t I die
well to myself today?’It is still I who am working while I learn how to let go
of all that pertains to my self, learning to become earth or clay, or, simply,
flesh, with a heart offlesh rather than stone (cf. Ezek. 36:26). Until I am
returned to the dust, it is still I who am doing this, dying to myself. When, on
the other hand, I amfinally reduced to dust in the earth, then I stop working.
Then and only then do Ifinally experience my complete and utter frailty and
weakness; then Ifinally experience myself asflesh. And so, it is also only then
that the God whose strength is made perfect in weakness canfinally be the
(^16) Cf. 1 Cor. 15:44–8; Irenaeus,Haer. 5.1–15, esp. 5.12; Behr,Irenaeus, 149–58.
Patristic Humanism: The Beginning of ChristianPaideia 25