Representing variable bodies and variable needs in care contexts can be a challenge for scholars and clinicians alike. Where ability-centric definitions of the body tend to represent wellness as aligned with ability, the healthy body is assumed to contain certain requisite capacities and capabilities. In such definitions, disability is correspondingly represented as a deficit of those requisite abilities, not as an example of human variety. However, disability scholars emphasize that such assumptions push people with disabilities to the margins, handling variable bodies as afterthoughts rather than as integrated members of a diverse population. In contexts where the goal of care is to enable independence, people who experience extended states of dependency may be represented as experiencing diminished quality of life stemming from their material impairments rather than as a result of a system that marginalizes their lived experiences and chronically underserves disability communities.

Drawing from both critical disability studies and disability theology, I discuss the development of ontological dependency in disability studies and the ethics of care, arguing that support for universal human dependency can be found in Eastern Orthodox¹ theological anthropology such that human beings are expected to depend upon social and material supports at every stage of life. Dependency as a core trait is not related to sin or a degraded way to be human, but instead represents a central aspect of human relationality. I argue that dependency is not a provisional human state but instead an ontological feature of human nature common to all human beings. Furthermore, I argue that recognizing universal ontological dependency provides the basis for reconsidering how models of medical and spiritual care support the wellbeing of persons with variable or extended needs, especially persons with disabilities.²

In Eastern Orthodox theology, dependency upon one another figures dependency upon God and is thusly related to the transformative capacities of the human being in relationship with the divine. By amplifying Eastern Orthodox approaches to human dependency, I intend to bolster arguments for dependency-centered Christian bioethics by pointing to the ancient traditions of the Christian movement. Dependency as human ontology provides an alternative to individual autonomy models in health care and law, which may compromise the vision of the person who requires extended supports. However, by regarding variable dependencies as expected features of human embodiment, we may better anticipate the diverse needs of changing bodies and consider those needs as elements of common human variety across the lifecycle.

How we imagine health parameters directly impacts communities’ access to health supports. Cultural competency and cultural literacy are increasingly recognized as factors of care in clinical contexts and impact a patient’s overall wellbeing. Physicians who understand the lived experiences of patients and their cultural contexts give more attention to nuance and variability in patient narratives than those who misidentify cultural markers as signs of resistance to treatment or as predictive of poor health outcomes (Whitley 2012). For example, during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, disability advocates reported concern that disability communities were being unfairly triaged, disproportionately assessed to be in poor health as a result of non-progressing, static disabilities. Haben Girma, a Deaf-Blind human rights advocate and legal theorist, explains how unfamiliarity with the Deaf-Blind community results in people being separated from their communication devices while in hospital and silenced in their own medical decision-making. Lack of disability cultural competency on the part of physicians meant members of the Deaf-Blind community were denied potentially life-saving treatment because their disabilities were identified as comorbidities rather than as elements of material diversity, like race or gender (Wright 2020).

Disability scholars have long highlighted that medicine functions as a conceptual window into the social imagination of the body. How a society imagines medicine to function reveals what that society believes about good and proper bodies—for example, that a healthy body comes with certain requisite abilities as the baseline for human nature, and that the goal of medicine in this social imaginary is to restore the body to its natural, abled state (Garland-Thomson 2009, 31). Tobin Siebers (2008, 9) examines this social “preference for able-bodiedness” as a function of what he terms “the ideology of ability,” an ideological belief of ability as a natural good that underwrites and pervades the construction of material and social systems. The preference for ability influences the way a society constructs material realities and the degree to which it prepares for variability in the population. Privileging ability as a natural good correspondingly shapes disability as unnatural, harmful, and anomalous. The association between disability and deficit or disease invites what disability social theory calls “the medical model of disability,” or the definitional category that handles disability as a pathology to be treated and cured rather than as a feature common to human life (Siebers 2008, 25).

Framing definitions of disability, Mike Oliver describes two models, functioning as the lay definitions of disability. The medical model of disability defines disability as deficit, as a lack of ability to be remediated curatively. The “social model of disability,” which Oliver (1990, 13) pioneered in the context of the British disability rights movement, instead detaches impairment from disablement, examining how bodily impairments are meaningfully separate from the social and moral meanings assigned to them. The social model of disability is intended to answer for the disablement created by the medical model by orienting societies toward the ways social beliefs manufacture gaps in accessibility and facilitation. In Oliver’s (1990, 35) work, disablement has “nothing at all to do with the body” but rather everything to do with the society’s devaluing of disabled lives.

In the first edition of The Politics of Disablement, Oliver (1990, 78) originally termed his medical model of disability the “individual model of disability.” The individual model for disability, he explains, treats impairments as the cause of social isolation, pain, suffering, and poor quality of life, as if the individual’s body itself is the cause of negative life experiences. The medical model “locates the problem of disability within the individual and secondly it sees the cause of this problem as stemming from functional limitations or psychological losses which are assumed to arise from disability. These two points are underpinned by what might be called ‘a personal tragedy theory of disability’ which suggests that disability is some chance event which occurs at random to unfortunate individuals” (Oliver 1990, 3). This model associates impairment with negative wellbeing and suffering without examining how disabling social structures and lack of access create structural isolation for people with disabilities. Siebers (2008, 26) explains the individuality of the medical model as relating “disability as a property of the individual body that requires medical intervention.” Although disability advocates contend that disability ought to be regarded as a group to which civil rights are afforded—and indeed the Americans with Disabilities Act is structured using other civil rights legislation as its precedent—“this analogy almost always fails because racism and sexism lead easily to political action based on the recognition of a particular advocacy group, while discrimination against a person with a disability seeks the same kind of solution used in healthcare and rehabilitation” (Siebers 2008, 46).

Those solutions are individual, targeted toward the body, aimed at curative measures and isolated actions instead of regarding the needs of people with disabilities collectively and systemically. Siebers relates the medical model of disability to the individualized and isolated approach to accessibility. Rather than handling accessibility concerns as a systemic problem, the medical model “designs an individual remedy that addresses one person’s particular problem or a small subclass of problems” (Siebers 2008, 45–46). Solutions trend toward a case-by-case basis: “If a wheelchair user cannot enter a restaurant, the restaurant need not be made accessible; two waiters can lift the chair through the door, providing individual attention and an individual solution. A local street sign may designate the presence of a deaf child in the neighborhood, supposedly protecting the child but also eliminating the need to develop universal forms of accessibility” (Siebers 2008, 46).

The medical model of disability does not describe medicine as it ought to be, but instead demarcates a space of medical bias where the bodies of people with disabilities are viewed mechanistically and disability is considered a flaw of the body rather than a mode of variable embodiment experienced by roughly a quarter of the human population (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Siebers (2008, 6) describes the ideology of ability operating in the practice of medicine and its social imaginary: “The pathologization of other identities by disability is referential: it summons the historical and representational structures by which disability, sickness, and injury come to signify inferior human status.” However, while other minoritized groups have gained significant civil rights in the last century, disability “marks the last frontier of unquestioned inferiority because the preference for able-bodiedness makes it extremely difficult to embrace disabled people and to recognize their unnecessary and violent exclusion from society” (Siebers 2008, 5–6).

At the heart of the medical model of disability is a laudatory regard for independency and individuality, that the partial goal of medical intervention would be restoring individual autonomy and thereby improving individual quality of life. The ideology of ability is supported by conceptual associations between ability, individual autonomy, and wellness, such that a significant portion of the Western philosophical tradition represents human nature by nesting those qualities inside one another. Martha Fineman describes what she calls “the autonomy myth” by defining the mutually dependent terms involved in describing autonomy. She lists the dictionary definitions for several nested terms to show the ways they require one another—for example, the definition of autonomy is “independence or freedom, as of the will or one’s actions . . . the condition of being autonomous; self-government or the right of self-government: independence” (Fineman 2005, 8). Accordingly, Fineman (2005, 8) glosses independence, which is defined as “not influenced or controlled by others; thinking or acting of oneself . . . not depending or contingent upon something else . . . not relying on another for aid or support.” In this way, autonomy is defined by independence, independence by lack of support or aid. By defining terms, Fineman highlights that what is described as natural to the human being via autonomy and independent moral decision-making is conventionally regarded as the antithesis of dependency.

If the good human life is one that is autonomous, self-securing, and independent, then quality of life is assumed to be attached to these descriptors as well, meaning that the goals of social supports ought to be support toward greater independence rather than dependency upon welfare aid or other supports (Fineman 2005, 53–54). Applied to disability, the centrality of individual autonomy means that even systemic solutions that account for accessibility and enhanced quality of life ought to facilitate non-reliance upon those solutions over time. In this way, even systems that might display interdependency like the inner workings of a family or community, when seen through the autonomy myth, mark locations of concealed dependency rather than reconsideration. Fineman (2005, 54) describes how social welfare aid often weaves together the appearance of support with moralistic judgments against those who display protracted dependencies. In a system where independency is a moral good, dependency must only be provisional. When it becomes chronic or endemic, then dependency marks a degraded way to be human.

The alternative to the individual or medical model of disability is the social model of disability: “The social model opposes the medical model by defining disability relative to the social and built environment, arguing that disabling environments produce disability in bodies and require interventions at the level of social justice” (Siebers 2008, 25). Describing the early concept of the social model, Oliver (1990, 47) argues that disability is a socially dependent category in which a person with an impairment meets an inhospitable material and social environment that does not support the person’s wellbeing (Oliver 1990, 47). The social model of disability articulates how physical impairments are meaningfully separate experiences from the disablement inequitable environments manifest and the moral language used to associate positive attributes to ability and negative worth to disability (Oliver 1990, 25).

However, latent in Oliver’s descriptions is a castigation of dependency. His goal is that through advocacy and reform social and material environments will dismantle barriers, and through this social transformation persons with disabilities will come to enjoy the independence and range of motion available to persons without disabilities (Oliver 1990, 99). When describing people with disabilities, Oliver (1990, 85) states that “dependency is not an intrinsic feature of their impairments but is socially created by a disabling and disablist society.” For Oliver (1990, 49), dependency either on social welfare systems or individualist modes of access, like being lifted into a building where there is no ramp, is the primary harm of the medical model. Where disability cannot be curatively removed, people with disabilities are forced to become dependent on secondary segregationist systems that only provide limited access to education or employment, not equity of experience when compared to non-disabled persons.³ Dependency marks the space of forced secondary status and suboptimal quality of life such that persons with disabilities become dependent upon systems of access that consider their capacity for wellbeing to be limited by impairment rather than by systemic barriers. For Oliver, dependency is a harm to be acted upon, not a universal experience. Dependency describes infantilization, a loss of human dignity, and disablement rather than a universal quality common to all human beings.

Like Oliver, Bill Hughes states categorically that shared vulnerability cannot provide a common basis for human rights and is particularly inadequate to provide for the needs of disabled people. In Hughes’s assessment, ontological dependency is a problem for people with disabilities because it underwrites negative assessments of disability essentialism, as if people with disabilities have a different nature and substance than non-disabled people. Hughes (2019, 831–32) amplifies this dual ontology where persons with disabilities represent a dependent population by grouping the historically ontological characteristics of ability versus vulnerability or abjection. Hughes describes “moral social ontology” (Hughes 2019, 848) inside “the ableist moral economy” (Hughes 2019, 830–32) or the system of discursive practices that support ability as morally virtuous and upright, while disability is downcast and undesirable. Historically, disability is handled as an entirely different human nature, invalidated by its very essence: “Disability is positioned as the antithesis of embodied value as diminished agency and polluted embodiment, both good to be good to and good to mistreat. Non-disability is, by contrast, ontologically pristine and self-sufficient, the touchstone of propriety and cleanliness, the wellspring of agency, and the legitimate source of dignity and moral action” (Hughes 2019, 831).

Hughes (2019, 834) describes how universal vulnerability “is embedded in the discourse of human rights” such that sociologist “Bryan Turner argues that our common human frailties and limitations legitimate a theory of universal human rights.” Hughes (2019, 834) describes Turner’s stance as one where humanity is “part of a community of suffering by virtue of our common ontological vulnerability. Self and other see a reflection of one another in the mutual gaze, from which compassion arises.” Universal vulnerability and interdependency serve as the basis for many large-scale health agencies that aim to account for social discrimination. For example, the World Health Organization uses universal factors of health in its mandate to provide equitable access to vaccines, respirators, and other infrastructural needs, recognizing that shared dependency means health care access is a universal human right (Iozzio 2023, 6). Different global populations share the same health care needs because being dependent upon structural supports is common to all human beings. Yet, when it comes to the human rights of people with disabilities, Hughes argues that this stance falls short. Vulnerability passes “into abjection and pity . . . displaced by disgust,” which Hughes (2019, 836) relates to the high rate of abuse, which he classifies as hate crimes, experienced by people with disabilities. Ontological vulnerability does not, in Hughes’s estimation, operate as a unifying universal when it comes to disability civil rights historically, but in contradiction, seems to amplify the precarity of people with disabilities who are seen as essentially weak, dependent, and abject in comparison to stable, independent, and virtuous ability.

Describing the category of embodied ontology, which Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson offer as a solution to some of the deficits of a materialist social model, Hughes (2007, 676) states categorically that he sees little value in ontologies when phenomenological accounts better describe the particularities of disability experiences: “Why would one want or need to make a case for disability rights based on an argument from the universality of impairment when an equally if not more compelling case can be made from the vast amount of empirical evidence that indicates, with unquestionable clarity, that disabled people live lives marred by discrimination and exclusion.” However, what Hughes criticizes in ontological vulnerability is not the universal expression of vulnerable human nature, but the inequitable application of its pervasiveness. That a binary persists that syphons persons into the ontological categories of abled and disabled supports historical eugenics policies and the harms that continue from that legacy. Accordingly, despite Hughes’s descriptions of harmful historic ontologizing against persons with disabilities, it is a failure to recognize universal vulnerability that creates and sustains such a binary.

In contrast to Oliver and Hughes’s negative regard for dependency, feminist ethicists who focus on care describe both vulnerability and dependency at the heart of human relationality. Relationality comes packaged with vulnerability, contingency, and dependency upon others for a host of goods and services that are beyond one’s individual access. However, when we are in relationships of care, being available to intimate connection correspondingly makes one susceptible to harms stemming from lack, including neglect or abuse. A relationship built upon a need makes us susceptible to the unfulfillment of that need, but relational bonds are forged through vulnerable connections. We need one another and forge deep relational bonds through the meeting of one another’s vital needs. This means that the same features that open one up to vulnerability and precarity also make the person available for relations of care. In this way, dependency is woven into experiences of precarity because reliance upon others is a tenuous space. Depending on others for aspects of one’s personal wellbeing means that there are opportunities for direct interpersonal harms as well as systemic harms related to large-scale discrimination.

Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds examine how vulnerability, dependency, and precarity fluctuate, expanding upon Fineman’s sense of universal vulnerability to explain how intrinsic and extrinsic forms of vulnerability operate. They identify different types of vulnerability, focusing on how ontological and situational vulnerability are layered in a host of applied situations. Ontological vulnerability is an innate contingency or “embodied vulnerability to others that makes human life precarious. Vulnerability and dependency are thus intertwined” (Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014, 4). Recognizing the precarity of human life, how we need support in manifold ways, does not preclude situational vulnerabilities related to injustice. The common vulnerability and dependency of the human being opens the person up to specific situational dependencies, which can, through exterior harms and abuses of power, form “the contingent susceptibility of particular persons or groups to specific kinds of harm or threat by others” (Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014, 6).

In this way, Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds (2014, 5) explain that shared vulnerability “provides a powerful theoretical lens for reconfiguring legal and political approaches to inequality and disadvantage.” Dependency as an ontology, then, introduces a dynamic lens through which to critique power and injustice because it upends the binary between able and disabled, independent and dependent, self-sufficient and facilitated. The human being is ontologically and situationally vulnerable, innately and environmentally dependent, and the question of specificity then revolves around the ways in which such a dependent ontology shows diversity of need, not whether or not human beings are contingent or self-securing. Universal vulnerability and ontological dependency provide the framework for particularizing specific harms, not for relativizing them under some sort of generic experience of vulnerability. It is precisely because dependency is a common human state that the individual stigmatization of disability forms a harm—because such negative judgment is an imbalanced recognition of vulnerability and dependency.

If all bodies are ontologically dependent, then harms against persons with disabilities for specific dependencies constitute unequal and inequitable judgment against some dependencies over others. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds position vulnerability and dependency upon care as experiences across the lifecycle, meaning that we do not age out of vulnerability and social dependency but rather move across different ways of being dependent and relationally vulnerable. Furthermore, it is this ontological dependency that forms the basis for naming the abuses of vulnerability, like lack of access to education or employment for minoritized populations. Because human beings are universally vulnerable and dependent upon social and material systems outside of their direct control, the ways in which certain persons are overlooked becomes a facet of discrimination, not dependency.

Significant contributions to Christian ethics on the topic of dependency and disability include Mary Jo Iozzio’s work on dependency-centered bioethics. Iozzio (2023, 66) argues that just as Catholic social teaching, through the work of liberation theologians, has come to regard God’s love as preferencing those who have been marginalized, so too God’s preferential option includes people with disabilities who historically have not been included in their full personhood. Iozzio additionally argues that to fully understand and embody divine preference is to see the preferential option for marginalized groups as preferential justice, not only love. Iozzio (2023, 67) states, “Justice demands that persons with disability and others who are marginalized receive their due preferentially, especially since what’s due is what has been denied them in spite of their personhood as imago Dei. That denial is sinful.”

Grounded in the recognition of human rights, justice for persons with disabilities is at the heart of Iozzio’s work on dependency. Iozzio weaves the mutuality and interdependency found in the Trinitarian relationship into human–divine relations, emphasizing that injustice toward people with disabilities is a denial of human nature, human rights, and the goodness of divine interdependency. Iozzio (2023, 67) names that denial sin, as the denial of God’s own priorities: “In order to reverse the sin, justice demands that they have access to all the conditions necessary for their flourishing in the fullness of life with all due haste. This way of conceptualizing the preferential option—as a preferential justice—returns to the subject matter, insights, and demands of natural law and the common good and reminds us of the dangers that come with a just and subversive love.”

One of the key aspects in reversing injustice in Iozzio’s work is learning to perceive the hidden mechanisms of privilege. “Regardless of where our lives began, since our conceptions and births each of us is relationally dependent on others: mothers, fathers, siblings, extended family members, and friends as well as church, school, work, play, commerce, social services, infrastructure, and so on” (Iozzio 2023, 71). In this construction of dependency, those who experience social precarity also experience God’s preference, and therefore correcting injustice against people with disabilities ought to constitute a preferential model for the church modeled after other modes of preferential justice for people experiencing economic or political insecurity in Catholic social teaching. Applied to disability, this means that a preferential model that centers dependency as a core attribute of human nature ought to prioritize variable bodies, questioning biased assumptions about health, wholeness, and ability.

If all human beings are variably dependent in diverse ways, as Iozzio details, then this should call into question how people with disabilities are singled out for their reliance upon certain social or material systems that facilitate access. Disability does not create a separate human ontology such that persons with disabilities are dependent while persons without disabilities are independent. Instead, the entire human population is reliant upon social and material supports that facilitate access. The difference in experience within these supports relates to the social ideologies of disablement that provide accessibility to some bodies while denying access to others. With this approach in mind, I turn to arguing for an alternative grounding for dependency as human ontology within Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology, arguing that dependency and vulnerability are features that ground human nature in Eastern Christian moral theology and could provide an alternative articulation of the good life for Christian ethics. Iozzio’s work on disability and dependency lays the foundation for further retrieval from traditional Christianities, especially where such retrieval might integrate dependent subjectivity and variable embodiment into perceptions of human diversity.

Just as Iozzio details, when examining access, it is important to emphasize how layered human dependency is in action, because for those people who do not experience friction between their bodies and their environments on a regular basis, dependency may seem like an isolated event. However, all bodies are variable and dependent. Every aspect of human wellbeing relies upon food, clean water, and safe environments. Each of these are mediated spaces, where goods and services are secured to the individual by the efforts of others.

St. Basil the Great, well known for early hospital care, describes how every human being depends on the labor of unseen others in a variety of industries and arts to secure one’s daily wellbeing. Though an individual may believe herself to act independently, the ease of motion she experiences in routine activities directly relates to the facilitation of others. Basil explains that we depend on the farmer for healthy foods, the textile worker for clothing, the lawmaker for safety, and the physician for physical health (St. Basil of Caesarea 2010, 330–36). Each of these arts, as Basil calls them, present layers of mediated contribution across generations. The farmer depends on acquired knowledge and industry standards, as does the lawmaker and physician. Each industry requires specialized education and training, making the contribution of others to each field even more intercommunal and unseen. Generations of knowledge go into the production of food services. Generations of knowledge train the competent physician, and in their daily contributions to wellbeing, these arts present icons of human dependency.

St. Basil (2010, 331) explains, “In as much as our body is susceptible to various hurts, some attacking from without and some from within by reason of the food we eat, and since the body suffers affliction from both excess and deficiency, the medical art has been vouchsafed us by God, who directs our whole life.” When the human community depends on these layered industries, in Basil’s assessment, though we may not be aware of the labor of others, our reliance upon them is an icon of our dependency on Christ as the one who feeds the sparrows, who clothes the lilies, and cares for our physical and material needs as the Great Physician. The human being relies upon the mediated care of others, all collectively reflecting an iconographic relationship between situations of human need and the divine mediation revealed behind the industries that secure personal wellbeing. As we are contingent, susceptible to unmet needs, and reliant upon goods that we cannot individually secure, the manifold ways in which the human being is intercommunal and interdependent provide a layered iconographic representation of human nature as ontologically dependent.

The early church councils described this dependent human nature as “passible,” from the Greek pathatos or the Latin passibilis, denoting the capacity to suffer or feel emotions (Gavrilyuk 2006, 98–100). Passibility is not the state of suffering itself but rather the quality that opens the human being up to contingency. Because human beings are passible, we are acted upon by outside forces, open to suffering, but also open to the transformative impact of trusted relationships and the facilitation of others. Passibility is the quality that opens the human being to emotion, to the full range of human joys and sorrows that derive from dependency. Early in the Christological debates, the question of God’s inability to suffer functioned as a way to speak about divine permanence, God’s non-contingency when compared with creaturely and derivative needs (Gavrilyuk 2006, 48). Because God is derived from nothing but God’s self, God cannot be contingent or subject to the fluctuations of precarity (Gavrilyuk 2006, 5–8).

Yet, when considering whether or not God can suffer, Chalcedon did not maintain that the divine was entirely outside of human emotion. Paul Gavrilyuk explains that the doctrine of divine apatheia should not be understood as representing an apathetic God who is not involved in human experiences, but rather that expressions of susceptibility do not apply to the first person of the Trinity (Gavrilyuk 2006, 61). Gavrilyuk contends that impassibility ought to be recognized as an apophatic expression designed to connote God’s permanency and uncreated stability, not apathy toward humanity. Accordingly, while Nicaea and Chalcedon affirm God’s impassibility, they also affirm Christ’s passibility. Christ as the second person of the Trinity, being fully human, experienced every way to be human, assuming all aspects of human lived experience (Gavrilyuk 2006, 48).

Gregory the Theologian expresses the salvation and restoration of humanity through Christ’s assumption of human experience, stating “that which was not assumed was not healed” (Gregory of Nazianzus 1894, 32–35). This expression has become a cornerstone of Chalcedonian thought, affirming that Christ was fully human and therefore assumed every aspect of human diversity. A central aspect to Christ’s humanity includes Christ’s full passibility, the quality that renders him contingent upon food, water, safety, parenting, and friendship. These aspects of human dependency, because they are seen in Christ’s own passibility, are not the result of sin or fallen human nature. That Christ relied upon external supports proves that dependency is packaged with human nature outside of sin. Christ relies throughout his life upon social and material supports, exhibiting both contingency upon those supports to meet his needs and loss when trusted others fail to meet those needs.

Athanasius comments on Christ’s passibility in his exposition On Incarnation, formulating his examination of human nature around Christ’s human nature. Athanasius positions Christ as the archetype of humanity, entering the world of the icon or derivative image to restore human nature as an iconographer would restore a painted icon. When Christ becomes human, it is the original image of God taking on the shape of the icon, the original form assuming the likeness of that which images it:

For as when a figure painted on wood has been soiled by dirt from outside, it is necessary for him whose figure it is to come again, so that the image can be renewed on the same material—because of his portrait even the material on which it is painted is not cast aside, but the portrait is reinscribed on it. In the same way the all-holy Son of the Father, being the image of the Father, came to our place to renew the human being according to himself. (Athanasius 2011, 79)

When Christ becomes human, Athanasius (2011, 87) surmises that nothing substantial changes, prefiguring Chalcedon’s later affirmation that Christ is fully divine and fully human without confusion and without change. Because Christ is the original image of the invisible God, when Christ inhabits human history, the archetype comes into the space of the type. The image of God comes into the space of the icons that figure him, and in so doing restores, or literally rewrites, those icons crafted in his image. Athanasius (2011, 51) describes at the outset of his treatise that the incarnation of Christ is what the Gentiles mock but the Church adores, that Christ became human and was “apparently degraded” even to the point of death. Human nature appears degraded in reference to the divine, so when the second person of the Trinity takes on humanity, it appears as if he takes on worthlessness. Yet, Athanasius states that what others mock Christianity glorifies, that Christ has come into the space of the human icon to rewrite and restore the “in the image” original to human nature— because “it was not for another to turn what was corruptible into incorruptibility except for the Savior himself . . . it was not for another to recreate again the ‘in the image’ for human beings except the Image of the Father” (Athanasius 2011, 93).

Christ’s human nature proves, for Athanasius, that humanity is meant to commune with the divine because human nature is entirely compatible with divine action. Because of this compatibility, Christ takes on human nature without change. Human nature is meant to participate with God. Because Christ’s humanity is what iconographically provides the basis for human nature, then the ways in which Christ displays human activity defines human capacities outside of sin. If we want to know the fullness of human completion, outside of any degradation or corruption, Athanasius points to Christ’s humanity. Therefore, when the councils affirm Christ’s passibility—that Christ is subject to outside forces, to human emotion and dependency upon social and material supports, and to the losses related to unmet needs—then the Church affirms that such dependencies result from human nature itself and not from the corruption of sin. That Christ’s human nature is passible means he is subject to contingency and dependent upon others. Athanasius maintains that Christ is the only full human being, and because Christ exhibits innate dependency, that passibility that creates social and material need cannot constitute a lesser way to be human. Dependency, then, is not related to fallenness or corruption but instead forms a core human attribute because it is exhibited through Christ’s human perfection.

In the description of Christ’s passibility, we find nested commentary on human dependency. Christ exhibits dependency, and human beings derive our very nature from Christ, depending on Christ’s human nature to inform our definitions of human ontology. In this way, human ontology itself depends on Christ’s dependency to define our operational integrity outside of sin, corruption, or injustice. Because Christ’s human nature is contingent, requiring both social and material supports across his life, then as the image of God, the firstborn of all creation, Christ’s passibility forms the archetype for human icons. Made in the image of God, figuring Christ, human contingency is a part of human ontology, packaged with human nature and not merely an aspect of living in a precarious environment. Therefore, if both Iozzio and Mackenzie inform the way we might view this universal passibility, human dependency as ontology ought to meaningfully distinguish between the experiences of vulnerability that derive from innate need and those that derive from secondary injustice.

That all human beings are passible means humanity is vulnerable by nature, and as such the variable dependencies exhibited by diverse populations must be acknowledged as aspects of the human experience. Experiences of precarity that arise from unmet needs constitute a secondary category of vulnerability, meaning that where disabled people are not facilitated in their social and material wellbeing, that is not an instance of innate dependency but rather a violation of dependency. Denying the structural needs of persons with disabilities constitutes a failure to recognize universal vulnerability. When facilitative supports are provided for non-disabled persons and yet not provided for people with disabilities, this is a failure to recognize the equal deservingness of an ontologically dependent community. Recognizing shared dependency as an attribute of human nature correspondingly calls a society into a relationship of care because we are all socially responsible for creating structures that produce access. This provides the platform for reimagining the goals of a just society.

Dependent ontology reframes the anthropological starting point, inspiring new questions for social and material care. Instead of searching for displays of independent autonomy, dependent ontology enables a different question entirely: what dependencies describe the individual, and are those met in such a way that facilitates decision-making, access, and achievable patient-centered standards for wellness? When the human being is defined through passibility, then extended states of dependency do not represent deviation from human nature because they are located in an variably dependent framework. When situational vulnerabilities are positioned inside a dependent ontology, then local and specific needs deriving from a variable body fit into a conception of human nature that expects material and social contingency.

Long-term dispositional vulnerabilities, like those experienced by wheelchair users in a city system that does not accommodate their needs for mediated access, do not render the person more dependent than bipedal walkers navigating the same city. Both people with disabilities and people without disabilities rely upon structural facilitation for their range of motion. However, city planners plan millions of details over many generations to provide for the needs of bipedal walkers, creating structures that support some bodies while creating barriers for others. Furthermore, regarding derivative dependencies, child caregiving that ends after a certain developmental milestone is not less dependent than caregiving that lasts a lifetime insofar as both relationships model variable human nature and the care responsibilities of others in those variabilities. In both cases, vulnerable subjects relate in a layered social model. Material and social needs introduce precarity but also relationality, illuminating that the human being is not more or less dependent ontologically, but instead variably dependent, entering into a variety of relational dependencies across the lifecycle.

Passibility provides the space within Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology to reconsider expectations of the body, especially the limitations of human embodiment. Passibility describes how the human body is acted upon by social and material factors and corresponding fluctuations in need over time. This ontological descriptor, if integrated into considerations of human nature, could reorient the expectations of physical, psychological, and intellectual capacities from a fixed or stable set of descriptors toward a variable, ever-changing series of socially mediated relationships. This is what Oliver’s social model of disability initiates, that the socially mediated nature of access might become definitional and thereby upend the medical model of disability that represents capacities as deriving only from the body. Furthermore, if the human being is passible by nature, then the mediated relationships that provide for human needs ought to be the central organizational aspects of any good society.

An equitable society can be assessed based on the degree to which that society recognizes the variability and contingency that comes packaged with human embodiment and creates structures that anticipate variable bodies. By describing vulnerability and contingency as core traits of all human beings, passibility in Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology emphasizes universal human dependency as an ethical foundation for anticipating need. The human being needs social and material supports to facilitate range of motion. For Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology, dependency upon one another figures humanity’s ultimate dependency upon divine facilitation. Christ’s human nature provides the archetype for human agency, and Christ’s own reliance upon social and material goods provides the basis for considering dependency as central to human nature itself. Such representation in Eastern Christian theology positions dependency as a moral feature rather than a flaw. Associating dependency with human nature could provide a disability-positive foundation for reconsidering layered dependencies within the human community, wherein the goal of social systems, then, might become greater social and material facilitation.

Notes

1. I use the terms “Eastern Orthodoxy” and “Eastern Christian” throughout the article to describe the texts and practices of Christians in the Levant, North Africa, Greece, and across Eastern Europe as well as the communities they historically fostered worldwide. Although it is conventional for scholars to speak only of “Orthodox Christianity” and its epistemologies regardless of geographic knowledge production, I maintain that using the terms “Eastern Christian” and “Eastern Orthodox” is vital to representing descendant communities from non-Western Christian spaces who created the knowledge systems which are historic to these global practices. Eastern Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy as terms are also mutually intelligible to scholars of Christianity and Judaism, where otherwise “Orthodox” might denote either separatist strains of Protestant Christianity or the Orthodox Jewish community and its distinctive histories, practices, and beliefs. [^{^}]
2. To indicate the linguistic and theoretical diversity amongst disability communities, I use both person-first and identity-first language in this article to discuss disability. It should, however, be stated that various communities prefer either person-first or identity-first language, related to their historical development as a community, experiences with social representation, and personal identity formation. [^{^}]
3. Segregationist systems would include residential schools and hospitals which historically removed persons with disabilities from the general population following nineteenth and twentieth century eugenics policies aimed at regulating racialized and disability communities. See Oliver and Barnes (2012, 22). [^{^}]

References