ON ONTOLOGICAL UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE

The article analyses theological teaching about human nature expressed in the book (sic), ('Took the form of a servant ... The issue of distortions of the Orthodox understanding of Incarnation in the Catholic and Orthodox theological thought of the end of the 19th - beginning of the 21st cc.') published in 2020. The authors of the book question the ideas on Incarnation put forward by a number of the 20th cent. theologians, combined under a concept of "incarnation theology". They believe that teaching about ontological unity of human nature leads to a misinterpretation of Incarnation as the union of Christ with all humanity and implies a doctrine of apocatastasis, the salvation of everyone. The article considers the views of the authors of the book in the context of Russian theology. It points out that the authors inherited the arguments against the idea of natural unity of humankind from Archbishop Feofan (Bystrov), who, criticising the "moral theory of Atonement" of Metropolitan Antoniy (Khrapovitskiy), questioned the very idea of unity of human nature, which was the basis of Metropolitan Antoniy's theory and which was adopted by a number of the 20th cent. theologians. The article analyses the three-part definition of human nature put forward by the authors of the book, partly based on the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and neoplatonics on universals. The article rejects some parts of this definition as poorly compatible with the Orthodox doctrine, the definition of human nature as composition common to all humans is acceptable; however, the authors' objection against ontological unity of human nature means that they only understand unity as sameness and come close to John Philoponus' doctrine of "partial substances". The article demonstrates that misinterpretation of the notions of nature and hypostasis underlies the authors' criticism of St. Ilarion (Troitsky) and Vladimir Lossky on the issue of common nature.