God-Love created human beings for love. The human heart wants to love and thirsts to be loved. It suffers when it does not love and when it is deprived of love. It wants to expand, to make room in itself, in its own life, for other lives, for many lives, for all lives; going out of itself it seeks to melt, to lose itself in the other, to become the other for its own self, to drown in the ocean of universal love. To lose its own soul in order to save it — such is the law of love as it is shown by the Word who established this law. To discover abundant wealth in spiritual poverty, to live not for oneself but with all and for all, to become in all of one's life the other for one's own self, to become in oneself the not-self, in one's own, the not-own, in emptying oneself to become filled, in humbling oneself to be exalted, to live in love, to become love according to the image of the Holy Trihypostatic and Consubstantial Undivided Trinity — such is the frontier for human nature. Being-closed-in-on-oneself, limitedness, self-love, self-desire, and self-worship are unnatural for a human being. That is the lot of sinful, fallen, perverted human nature, and not that of nature's law in its power and glory. For both as the generic being — Adam and Eve — that received a blessing from the Creator to go out of itself for the increase of descendants, and as the sovereign lord of all creation, capable of loving it in its own nature and comprehending it in love, the human being was created by God — a microcosm in a macrocosm, a small world "propertied" with the ability of turning not to itself but to the other, to humanity and to the whole world, and above all and in all — to the Lord God. A human being lives only to the degree and by how much it loves, and it dies to the extent and by how much it does not love. The one who loves is rich, for one becomes rich in God-Love. Created after the image of God, who created everything by love and who embraced everything by love, the human being is called to make room in its own love for everyone and everything. It only begins the first lessons of love; before it lies the life of the future age, all of eternity, which can be filled only by love, for there is no life and there is no eternity in non-love.

One ought to note particularly the consequence of natural sin indicated above: human personality is born in it not only as a hypostasis created by God in His image, but also as an individuality, which keeps aloof and separates itself from others. Through this the natural, ontological equality of people as multiple centres not only of a similar but also of a common single life becomes obscured and perverted. The wholeness of the human race collapses and comes unravelled together with the loss of chastity, and in place of multi-unity multi-difference appears, bad plurality, in place of concentricism there is eccentricism. This plural number contains the satanic lie, namely the like gods, which knows not only good but also evil, i.e., its own limitedness, and which is always carrying with itself its own shadow. Individuality is the reflected light of the Morning Star on a human being whom he desired to pervert according to the image of his metaphysical egotism — a mono-hypostaseity without love. It is in this sense the consequence of original sin: fallen humankind knows hypostasis only in the form of individuality, and the whole of humanity decomposes into individualities which logic considers possible to unite only in the abstract, by mentally inferring in brackets universal signs.

The loss of one's soul for the sake of Christ, that is, liberation from the captivity of individuality, is the condition of Christian salvation. But in the fallen world individuality is the sole form for the life of the soul, just as a sinful body is for the life of the flesh, and only life in Christ liberates the hypostasis from individuality, leading it into the multi-unity in love that is necessary for it, into the Church. Thus, we repeat once again, quite out of place is the question of whether the individuality of Adam has no decisive meaning for original sin: before the fall into sin there was no individuality, separating him from others, and Adam really was the representative of the entire human multi-hypostatic race. In him and his person every human hypostasis lived and acted harmoniously. So it was before the fall into sin, but after the fall into sin it became otherwise: every hypostasis began to live after its own reckoning, as an individuality, and together all proved to be enslaved to the debt of sin, and became children of wrath — τέκνα όργῆς (Eph 2:3).

… The fullness of the human race, as well as of the angelic assembly, exists from all eternity in Divinity, and this fullness is revealed in the simultaneous creation of the angels and in the gradual creation of human beings in the course of time. The entire fullness of humanity, however, which is actualized in reproduction, is already precontained and precreated in Adam. But this pre-eternal eternal existence in God does not signify some other, preexistent life of the creaturely spirits, a life that is replaced by earthly life and represents a segment of it, as it were. The human world does not preexist «in heaven» as in another world, but it does find there a sufficient basis for itself: as far as its nature is concerned, the human world is based on the Proto-Images of the Divine world, and its hypostases are rooted in divine life. The creaturely hypostases are images of the noncreaturely Divine hypostases. These multihypostatic images, in their singularity, do not reflect God's trihypostatizedness; they can only reflect its individual hypostases. But can the Paternal Hypostasis be the Proto-Image for the creaturely hypostases when it itself is revealed in Sophia, the Divine world, not in its own countenance, but through the Son and the Holy Spirit? Even if one can admit the existence of holy angels corresponding to the Paternal Hypostasis, angels who are always submerged in Divinity as in Mystery and Silence, the image of the human hypostasis can only come from the hypostases that reveal the Father, both in His proper divine world and in the creaturely world.

The first of these hypostases is the hypostasis of the Logos; He is the Proto-Image of the creaturely human hypostases, and they are His rays: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). The human spiritual countenances are images of the Logos, the Man from Heaven. Insofar as the Logos as Christ gathers them into His body, into the Church, it is said about them that “there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28).

Together with the Logos, the Third hypostasis is also the Proto-Image for the human hypostases, because the Third hypostasis reposes upon the Son and, together with Him, reveals the Father in the heavenly humanity. (In the Incarnation this hypostasis corresponds to the divine maternity, manifested by the Virgin Mary, the Spirit-bearer.) In other words, the human hypostases have a double Proto-Image, which belongs to the heavenly humanity in its two countenances: the Logos and the Holy Spirit. This also corresponds to the fact that man, created in the image of God, was created as both male and female, and the context of Genesis 1:26-27 compels one to see the fullness of the image of God precisely in this bi-unity. In man, a clear distinction is established between male and female, expressed in the fact that the female was made out of one of the male's ribs (not directly out of the dust of the earth) and, in general, in the fact that the male plays the dominant role, since he bears the image of the demiurgic hypostasis, the Logos. Male and female, differing as two distinct images of man, bear, in their unity, the fullness of humanity and, in this humanity, the fullness of the image of God: they bear the imprint of the dyad of the Son and the Holy Spirit, who reveal the Father. In their ability to reproduce, they contain the image of multi-unity that is inscribed in the human race as a whole. Thus, man is an uncreated-created, divine-cosmic being, divine-human in his structure by his very origin. He is the living image of the trihypostatic God in His Wisdom.