Is the Incarnation inseparably linked to Christianity? Prof. Jerzy Nowosielski deals with that question in his book “Wokol ikony” (On the icon). We have already paid attention to him on our blog several times,
recently
at the beginning of Advent. Under the text we attach a link to a gallery of icons by Nowosielski from the Byzantine Catholic Cathedral in Wrocław (Lower Silesia, Poland).
(…) the Judeo-Christian-Hellenistic circle has reached the level of experiencing
human person. The East experiences the immanence and transcendence of God as two aspects of one reality. The empirical reality, however, is not experienced as a reality that can be experienced in a personal way and that could become important for a person as such, simply because the Orient hasn’t discovered the person as absolute value. Therefore, in my opinion, Christ couldn’t have incarnated ultimately in the religions of the East – because there was nothing he could incarnate in. Of course God has incarnated in the eastern religions in an absolutely real way – I believe that such incarnations like Krishna are genuine theophanies – but they couldn’t reach the level of drama and catastrophe, because there was nothing to incarnate in, neither was there a person to incarnate in. Only in the Greek-Roman world and in the Jewish world, there, where the experience of the person first came to being, could happen the personal incarnation of God in a human being.
The gallery
.
