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Since the earliest days of their tradition, one of the great topics to occupy the minds of Christian thinkers and, indeed, believers, has been the question of the nature of Jesus. In what way was He God, and in what way was He man?
The mystery of the two natures of Christ has led those who seek nothing less than identity with God to ask: Is there a dual nature of all mankind, as well?
What if, while we are discovering those "branches" of ourselves that vibrate in the wind of the Divine Presence, we were to discover that the very sap that gives life to each branch is by its own nature divine? This is the very elevated concept that Prof. James Cutsinger (of the University of South Carolina) approaches in his essay "The Mystery of the Two Natures." (1).God became man. But since it was God who was this man, the man cannot but have shimmered with the Divinity of His other nature, and for this reason we are obliged to affirm that even His human nature was not quite the same as our own. In becoming man, says St. Gregory of Nyssa, the Word of God “took our nature within Himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with God. The stuff of our nature was entirely sanctified by Christ.”(2)
(1) Taken from pages 103-104 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the journal Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Winter 1998.
(2) Against Apollinarius, II.