The Theology of Illness-The Healing of Human Nature by the Incarnate Word

Jean-Claude Larchet, a french laymen who teaches philosophy in France has written a book on the theology of illness. Throughout the book his aim is to show the connection between illness and sin and how this connection is related to our present reality. The first chapter examines the nature of sin and he breaks down sin using the Patristic fathers. The remainder of the book looks at the relationship with sin, illness and how modern medicine has completely neglected the human being. The treatment of the human being and to see a human being is being neglected as modern medicine keeps pushing for more ways to extend life forgetting to see the real life in that lies right in front of there eyes. I recommend this book highly especially for those in the medical world. The following is a small section from the book dealing with our healing related to the incarnation of God.

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Only Christ can deliver mankind from the consequences of Adam’s transgression and from sin itself. As a divine Person, He is able to “enhypostasize” the fullness of human nature. Thereby He assumes human nature totally, restores it by the power of His own divine nature, and reunites and conforms it in Himself to divinity. Thereby He becomes the New Adam, but an Adam who is perfectly fulfilled; and thereby He fully accomplishes the divine plan which the first man failed to bring to completion. “Thus as one mans trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one mans disobedience many were made sinners, so by one mans obedience many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:18-19). Human nature, fallen in Adam, is restored in Christ and recovers all of the privileges it knew in its prelapsarian state. In the words of St Cyril of Alexandria, “As in Adam man’s nature fell ill from corruption, [. . .] so in Christ it has recovered health.” By His Incarnation, Christ has overthrown the barrier which separated our nature from God and has opened that nature once more to the deifying energies of uncreated grace. By His redemptive work, He has freed us from the tyranny of the devil and destroyed the power of sin. By His death, He has triumphed over death and corruption. By His resurrection, He has granted us new and eternal life. And it is not only human nature, but also the creation as a whole which Christ heals and restores, by uniting it in Himself with God the Father, thereby abolishing the divisions and ending the disorders that reigned within it because of sin.

“God,” St Maximus writes, “became man in order to save nun from destruction. By reuniting in Himself the ruptures in the universal nature ... He accomplished the great work of God the Father by recapitulating all things—things in heaven and things on earth—in Himself, in whom they also were created___First of all He united us in Himself, rendering us in total conformity to Himself. Thereby he restored in us His image, pure and whole, which none of the symptoms of corruption could touch. With us and for us He embraced the entire creation. . . . He recapitulated all things in Himself, thereby showing that the entire universe is one, as if it were itself and in its own manner a human person, fulfilled completely by the reuniting of its various members. . . . He brought to unity those things that had been separated; He put an end to the internal war between created beings, joining together in peace and unbreachable harmony all things both in heaven and on earth".

+ Jean-Claude Larchet, The Theology of Illness, SVS Press, p.40-41.