The faith of the first Christians was founded on the knowledge of Jesus Christ who is revealed as both God and man. This union was the first plan of the Holy Trinity from the beginning of time. Jesus Christ is both God and man “at the same time,” and this mysterious way of being still confuses philosophers, teachers, and the educated. In the 5th c. AD, eastern theology focused around two major schools of thought. The school in Alexandria stresses the oneness of Jesus while the school in Antioch stressed the distinctions of Jesus’ nature, human and divine. Both Christian schools tended to agree with each other in general. There were, however, extreme positions on both sides. Eutychius thought of Jesus’ divine nature as “swallowed up” by his human nature so that there were two natures before Christ’s incarnation, one that was left afterward. Nestorius took issue with terms that described the Most Holy Virgin Mary as bearing God in her womb (Theotokos); he could not believe that divinity was held within her. Both extremes broke the true unity of Jesus Christ as simultaneously God and man. The Theotokos (the god-bearer) bore Christ the God and man at once.
For philosophers and pagan religions, duality was not hard to accept, and even obliteration of dualities sometimes was an easy route to take, as in some Hellenistic and Buddhist philosophies. Hellenistic, Celtic, Roman, Hindu, many indigenous and pagan religions could accept dualities, whether in conflict or in harmony, or even pluralistic and animistic stories of the universe. But the real, beautiful coming together of man’s nature and the divine in Christ Jesus was a revelation of knowledge that became highly controversial and a crushing cornerstone of Christianity that would either break or pulverize the wisdom of the world. St. Cyril of Alexandria teaches against the Arians that because the fall of mankind affected our whole nature, Christ took on our whole nature, without inheriting sin from the flesh, or our body, so that we can worship Jesus Christ as “one Godman.” Orthodox Christians worship the incarnate God Jesus Christ, not just a “deified man,” as some have argued before. Apophatic theology, then, became a way to correct Christians who went too far in their teachings about Jesus Christ’s nature. Underlying these debates seems to be an uneasiness about accepting the incarnation and its full implications, that God truly loves and truly became a man like us, and that He only seeks to preserve creation and all creatures.
Deliberation and exploration are activities of the human mind. The will of Jesus is at one with His Father. We need those activities daily, often corrupted by passions, because our human thinking doesn’t encompass the world rightly, and it’s not unified with God. The will of the Father are at one with Jesus: to save man by dying on the cross and rising from the tomb. There was no doubt that the Holy Trinity willed for our salvation through the Lamb and the Cross.