(II) Fr. George Florovsky: Immortality, Resurrection, and Redemption

Icon of Christ raising Lazarus, Roman Catacombs (3rd century A.D.)

Death is a catastrophe for man; this is the basic principle of the whole Christian anthropology. Man is an "amphibious" being, both spiritual and corporeal, and so he was intended and created by God. Body belongs organically to the unity of human existence. And this was perhaps the most striking novelty in the original Christian message. The preaching of the Resurrection as well as the preaching of the Cross was foolishness and a stumbling-block to the Gentiles. The Greek mind was always rather disgusted by the body. The attitude of an average Greek in early Christian times was strongly influenced by Platonic or Orphic ideas, and it was a common opinion that the body was a kind of a "prison," in which the fallen soul was incarcerated and confined. The Greeks dreamt rather of a complete and final disincarnation. The famous Orphic slogan was: σώμα-σήμα.³⁰ And the Christian belief in a coming Resurrection could only confuse and frighten the Gentile mind. It meant simply that the prison will be everlasting, that the imprisonment will be renewed again and for ever. The expectation of a bodily resurrection would befit rather an earthworm, suggested Celsus, and he jeered in the name of common sense. This nonsense about a future resurrection seemed to him altogether irreverent and irreligious. God would never do things so stupid, would never accomplish desires so criminal and capricious, which are inspired by an impure and fantastic love of the flesh. Celsus nicknames Christians a "φιλοσώματον γένος," "a flesh-loving crew," and he refers to the Docetists with far greater sympathy and understanding.³¹ Such was the general attitude to the Resurrection.
St. Paul had already been called a "babbler" by the Athenian philosophers just because he had preached to them "Jesus and the Resurrection" (Acts 17:18, 32). In the current opinion of those heathen days, an almost physical disgust of the body was frequently expressed. There was also a wide-spread influence from the farther East; one thinks at once of the later Manichean inundation which spread so rapidly all over the Mediterranean. St. Augustine, once a fervent Manichean himself, has intimated in his Confessiones that this abhorrence of the body was the chief reason for him to hesitate so long in embracing the faith of the Church, the faith in the Incarnation.³²
Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, tells that Plotinus, it seemed, "was ashamed to be in the flesh," and from this Porphyry starts his biography. "And in such a frame of mind he refused to speak either of his ancestors or parents, or of his fatherland. He would not sit for a sculptor or painter to make a permanent image of this perishable frame." It is already enough that we bear it now (Life of Plotinus, 1). This philosophical asceticism of Plotinus, of course, must be distinguished from Oriental asceticism, Gnostic or Manichean. Plotinus himself wrote very strongly "against Gnostics." Here, however, there was only a difference of motives and methods. The practical issue in both cases was one and the same, a "retreat" from this corporeal world, an escape from the body. Plotinus suggested the following analogy: Two men live in the same house. One of them blames the builder and his handiwork, because it is made of inanimate wood and stone. The other praises the wisdom of the architect, because the building is so skillfully erected. For Plotinus this world is not evil, it is the "image" or reflection of the world above, and is perhaps even the best of images. Still, one has to aspire beyond all images, from the image to the prototype, from the lower to the higher world. And Plotinus praises not the copy, but the pattern.³³ "He knows that when the time comes, he will go out and will no longer have need of a house." This phrase is very characteristic. The soul is to be liberated from the ties of the body, to be disrobed, and then it will ascend to its proper sphere.³⁴ "The true awakening is the true resurrection from the body, not with the body. For the resurrection with the body would be simply a passage from one sleep to another, to some other dwelling. The only true awakening is an escape from all bodies, since they are by nature opposite to the nature of the soul. Both the origin, and the life and the decay of bodies show that they do not correspond to the nature of the souls."³⁵ With all Greek philosophers the fear of impurity was much stronger than the dread of sin. Indeed, sin to them just meant impurity. This "lower nature," body and flesh, a corporeal and gross substance, was usually presented as the source and seat of evil. Evil comes from pollution, not from the perversion of the will. One must be liberated and cleansed from this filth.
And at this point Christianity brings a new conception of the body as well. From the beginning Docetism was rejected as the most destructive of temptations, a sort of dark anti-gospel, proceeding from Anti-Christ, "from the spirit of falsehood" (I John 4:2-3). This was strongly emphasized in St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian. "Not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4). This is precisely the antithesis to Plotinus’ thought.³⁶ "He deals a death-blow here to those who depreciate the physical nature and revile our flesh," commented St. John Chrysostom. "It is not flesh, as he would say, that we put off from ourselves, but corruption; the body is one thing, corruption is another. Nor is the body corruption, nor corruption the body. True, the body is corrupt, but it is not corruption. The body dies, but it is not death. The body is the work of God, but death and corruption entered by sin. Therefore, he says, I would put off from myself that strange thing which is not proper to me. And that strange thing is not the body, but corruption. The future life shatters and abolishes not the body, but that which clings to it, corruption and death."³⁷ Chrysostom, no doubt, gives here the common feeling of the Church. "We must also wait for the spring of the body," as a Latin apologist of the second century put it — "expec-tandum nobis etiam et corporis ver est."³⁸ A Russian scholar, V. F. Ern, speaking of the catacombs, happily recalls these words in his letters from Rome. "There are no words which could better render the impression of jubilant serenity, the feeling of rest and unbounded peacefulness of the early Christian burial places. Here the body lies, like wheat under the winter shroud, awaiting, anticipating and foretelling the other-worldly eternal Spring."³⁹ This was the simile used by St. Paul. "So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption" (I Cor. 15:42). The earth, as it were, is sown with human ashes in order that it may bring forth fruit, by the power of God, on the Great Day. "Like seed cast on the earth, we do not perish when we die, but having been sown, we rise."⁴⁰ Each grave is already the shrine of incorruption. Death itself is, as it were, illuminated by the light of triumphant hope.⁴¹
There is a deep distinction between Christian asceticism and the pessimistic asceticism of the non-Christian world. Father P. Florenskii describes this contrast in the following way: "One is based on the bad news of evil dominating the world, the other on the good news of victory, of the conquest of evil in the world. The former offers superiority, the latter holiness. The former type of ascetic goes out in order to escape, to conceal himself; the latter goes out in order to become pure, to conquer." Continence can be inspired by different motives and different purposes. There was, certainly, some real truth in the Orphic or Platonic conceptions as well. And indeed only too often the soul lives in the bondage of the flesh. Platonism was right in its endeavor to set free the reasonable soul from the bondage of fleshly desires, in its struggle against sensuality. And some elements of this Platonic asceticism were absorbed into the Christian synthesis. And yet the ultimate goal was quite different in the two cases. Platonism longs for the purification of the soul only. Christianity insists on the purification of the body as well. Platonism preaches the ultimate disincarnation. Christianity proclaims the ultimate cosmic transfiguration. Bodily existence itself is to be spiritualized. There is the same antithesis of eschatological expectation and aspiration: "to be unclothed" and "to be clothed upon," again and for ever. And strange enough, in this respect Aristotle was much closer to Christianity than Plato.
In the philosophical interpretation of its eschatological hope, Christian theology from the very beginning clings to Aristotle.⁴³ On this point he, the writer of prose amid the throng of poets, sober among the inspired, points higher than the "divine" Plato. Such a biased preference must appear altogether unexpected and strange. For, strictly speaking, in Aristotle there is not and cannot be any "after-death" destiny of man. Man in his interpretation is entirely an earthly being. Nothing really human passes beyond the grave. Man is mortal through and through like everything else earthly; he dies never to return. Aristotle simply denies personal immortality. His singular being is not a person. And what does actually survive is not properly human and does not belong to individuals; it is a "divine" element, immortal and eternal.⁴⁴ But yet in this weakness of Aristotle is his strength. Aristotle had a real understanding of the unity of human existence. Man is to Aristotle, first of all, an individual being, an organism, a living unit. And man is one just in his duality, as an "animated body" (τό εμψυχον); both of the elements in him exist only together, in a concrete and indivisible correlation. Into the "body" the matter is "formed" by the soul, and the soul realizes itself only in its body. "Hence there is no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the imprint (τό σχήμα) are one, or, in general, whether the matter of a thing is the same with that of which it is the matter" [De anima, 417b 6]. The soul is just the "form" of the body (εΐδος και μορφή, 407b 23; λόγος τις και ειδος, 4lla 12), its "principle" and "term" (αρχή and τέλος), its very being and "actuality."⁴⁵ And Aristotle coins a new term to describe this peculiar correlation: the soul is εντελέχεια "the first actuality of a natural body" (εντελέχεια ή πρώτη σώματος φυσικού, 412a 27). Soul and body, for Aristotle they are not even two elements, combined or connected with each other, but rather simply two aspects of the same concrete reality.⁴⁶ "Soul and body together constitute the animal. Now it needs no proof that the soul cannot be separated from the body" (4l3a 4). Soul is but the functional reality of the corresponding body. "Soul and body cannot be defined out of relation to each other; a dead body is properly only matter; for the soul is the essence, the true being of what we call body."⁴⁷ Once this functional unity of the soul and body has been broken by death, no organism is there any more, the corpse is no more a body, and a dead man can hardly be called man at all.⁴⁸ Aristotle insisted on a complete unity of each concrete existence, as it is given hie et nunc. The soul "is not the body, but something belonging to the body (σώματος δέτι), and therefore resides in the body and, what is more, in a specific body (και έν σώματι τοιούτω). Our predecessors were wrong in endeavoring to fit the soul into a body without further determination of the nature and qualities of that body, although we do not even find that of any two things taken at random the one will admit the other (του τυχόντος ... το τυχόν). For the actuality of each thing comes naturally to be developed in the potentiality of each thing; in other words, in the appropriate matter" (4l4a 20: τη οικεία ΰλη).
The idea of the "transmigration" of souls was thus to Aristotle altogether excluded. Each soul abides in its "own" body, which it creates and forms, and each body has its "own" soul, as its vital principle, "eidos" or form. This anthropology was ambiguous and liable to a dangerous interpretation. It easily lends itself to a biological simplification and transformation into a crude naturalism, in which man is almost completely equated with other animals. Such indeed were the conclusions of certain followers of the Stagirite, of Aristoxenus and Dikaearchus, for whom the soul was but a "harmony" or a disposition of the body (αρμονία or τόνος, "tension") and of Strata etc.⁴⁹ "There is no more talk about the immaterial soul, the separate reason, or pure thought. The object of science is the corporate soul, the united soul and body."⁵⁰ Immortality was openly denied. The soul disappears just as the body dies; they have a common destiny. And even Theophrastes and Eudemus did not believe in immortality.⁵¹ For Alexander of Aphrodisias the soul was just an "είδος ενυλον."⁵² Aristotle himself has hardly escaped these inherent dangers of his conception. Certainly, man is to him an "intelligent being," and the faculty of thinking is his distinctive mark.⁵³ Yet, the doctrine of Nous does not fit very well into the general frame of the Aristotelian psychology. It is obviously the most obscure and complicated part of his system. Whatever the explanation of this incoherence may be, the stumbling-block is still there. "The fact is that the position of νους in the system is anomalous."⁵⁴ The "intellect" does not belong to the concrete unity of the individual organism, and it is not an εντελέχεια of any natural body. It is rather an alien and "divine" element, that comes in somehow "from outside." It is a "distinct species of soul" (ψυχής γένος έτερον), which is separable from the body, "unmixed" with the matter. It is impassive, immortal and eternal, and therefore separable from the body, "as that which is eternal from that which is perishable."⁵⁵ This impassive or active intellect does survive all individual existences indeed, but it does not properly belong to individuals and does not convey any immortality to the particular beings.⁵⁶ Alexander of Aphrodisias seems to have grasped the main idea of the Master. He invented the term itself: νους ποιητικός. In no sense is it a part or power of the human soul. It supervenes as something really coming in from outside. It is a common and eternal source of all intellectual activities in individuals, but it does not belong to any one of them. Rather is it an eternal, imperishable, self-existing substance, an immaterial energy, devoid of all matter and potentiality. And, obviously, there can be but one such substance. The νους ποιητικός is not only "divine," it must be rather identified with the deity itself, the first cause of all energy and motion."
The real failure of Aristotle was not in his "naturalism," but in that he could not see any permanence of the individual. But this was rather a common failure of the whole of ancient philosophy. Plato has the same short sight. Beyond time, Greek thought visualizes only the "typical," and nothing truly personal. Personality itself was hardly known in pre-Christian times. Hegel suggested, in his Aesthetics, that Sculpture gives the true key to the whole of Greek mentality.⁵⁸ Recently a Russian scholar, A. F. Lossev, pointed out that the whole of Greek philosophy was a "sculptural symbolism." He was thinking especially of Platonism. "Against a dark background, as a result of an interplay and conflict of light and shadow, there stands out a blind, colorless, cold, marble and divinely beautiful, proud and majestic body, a statue. And the world is such a statue, and gods are statues; the city-state also, and the heroes, and the myths, and ideas, all conceal underneath them this original sculptural intuition… There is no personality, no eyes, no spiritual individuality. There is a "something," but not a "someone," an individualized "it," but no living person with his proper name… There is no one at all. There are bodies, and there are ideas. The spiritual character of the ideas is killed by the body, but the warmth of the body is restrained by the abstract idea. There are here beautiful, but cold and blissfully indifferent statues."⁵⁹ And yet, in the general frame of such an impersonalist mentality, Aristotle did feel and understand the individual more than anyone else. He got closer than anybody else to the true conception of human personality. He provided Christian philosophers with all the elements out of which an adequate conception of personality could be built up. His strength was just in his understanding of the empirical wholeness of human existence.⁶⁰
Aristotle’s conception was radically transformed in its Christian adaptation, for new perspectives were opened, and all the terms were given a new significance. And yet one cannot fail to acknowledge the Aristotelian origin of the main eschatological ideas in early Christian theology. Such a christening of Aristotelianism we find in Origen, to a certain extent in St. Methodius of Olympus as well, and later in St. Gregory of Nyssa. The idea of εντελέχεια itself now receives new depth in the new experience of spiritual life. The term itself was never used by the Fathers, but there can be no doubt about the Aristotelian roots of their conceptions.⁶¹ The break between intellect, impersonal and eternal, and the soul, individual but mortal, was healed and overcome in the new self-consciousness of a spiritual personality. The idea of personality itself was a great Christian contribution to philosophy. And again, there was here a sharp understanding of the tragedy of death also.
The first theological essay on the Resurrection was written in the middle of the second century by Athenagoras of Athens. Of the many arguments he puts forward, his reference to the unity and integrity of man is of particular interest. Athenagoras proceeds from the fact of this unity to the future resurrection. "God gave independent being and life neither to the nature of the soul by itself, nor to the nature of the body separately, but rather to men, composed of soul and body, so that with these same parts of which they are composed, when they are born and live, they should attain after the termination of this life their common end; soul and body compose in man one living entity." There would no longer be a man, Athenagoras emphasizes, if the completeness of this structure were broken, for then the identity of the individual would be broken also. The stability of the body, its continuity in its proper nature, must correspond to the immortality of the soul. "The entity which receives intellect and reason is man, and not the soul alone. Consequently man must for ever remain composed of soul and body. And this is impossible, if there is no resurrection. For if there is no resurrection, human nature is no longer human.⁶²
Aristotle concluded from the mortality of the body that the individual soul, which is but the vital power of the body, is also mortal. Both go down together. Athenagoras, on the contrary, infers the resurrection of the body from the immortality of the reasonable soul. Both are kept together.⁶³ The resurrection, however, is no mere simple return or repetition. The Christian dogma of the General Resurrection is not that "eternal return" which was professed by the Stoics. The resurrection is the true renewal, the transfiguration, the reformation of the whole creation. Not just a return of what has passed away, but a heightening, a fulfillment of something better and more perfect. "And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel... It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (I Cor. 15:37, 44). A very considerable change is implied. And there is here a very real philosophical difficulty. How are we to think of this "change" so that "identity" shall not be lost? We find in the early writers merely an assertion of this identity, without any attempt at a philosophical explanation. St. Paul’s distinction between the "natural" body (σώμα φυσικόν) and the "spiritual" body (σώμα πνευματικόν) obviously needs some further interpretation (cf. the contrast of the body "of our humiliation," της ταπεινώσεως ημών, and the body "of His glory," της δόξης αύτοΰ, in Phil. 3:21).
In the period of the early controversies with the Docetists and Gnostics, a careful and precise answer became urgent. Origen was probably the first who attempted to give one. Origen’s eschatology was from the very beginning vigorously denounced by many, indeed with good reason, and his doctrine of the Resurrection was perhaps the chief reason why his orthodoxy was challenged. Origen himself never claimed any formal authority for his doctrine. He offered merely some explanation, to be tested and checked by the mind of the Church. For him it was not enough to refer simply to Divine omnipotence, as the earlier writers sometimes did, or to quote certain appropriate passages of Holy Scripture. One had rather to show how the doctrine of the Resurrection fitted into the general conception of human destiny and purpose. Origen was exploring a via media between the fleshly conception of the simpliciores and the denial of the Docetists: "fugere se et nostrorum carries, et haereticorum phantasmata," as St. Jerome puts it.⁶⁴ And both were dissatisfied and even offended.⁶⁵
The General Resurrection is an article of faith indeed. The same individuals will rise, and the individual identity of the bodies will be preserved. But this does not imply for Origen any identity of material substance, or identity of status. The bodies indeed will be transfigured or transformed in the Resurrection. In any case, the risen body will be a "spiritual" body, and not a fleshly one. Origen takes up the simile of St. Paul. This fleshly body, the body of this earthly life, is buried in the earth, like a seed that is sown, and disintegrates. And one thing is sown, and another rises. The germinating power is not extinguished in the dead body, and in due season, by the word of God, the new body will be raised, like the ear that shoots forth from the seed. Some corporeal principle remains undestroyed and unaffected by the death. The term Origen used was obviously Aristotelian: "το είδος," "species," or "form." But it is not the soul that Origen regards as the form of the body. It is rather a certain potential corporeality, pertaining to each soul and to each person. It is the forming and the quickening principle of the body, just a seed capable of germination. Origen also uses the term λόγος σπερματικός, ratio seminalis.⁶⁶ It is impossible to expect that the whole body should be restored in the resurrection, since the material substance changes so quickly and is not the same in the body even for two days, and surely it can never be reintegrated again. The material substance in the risen bodies will be not the same as in the bodies of this life (το ύλικόν ύποκείμενον ουδέποτε έχει ταυτόν). Yet the body will be the same, just as our body is the same throughout this life in spite of all changes of its material composition. And again, a body must be adapted to the environment, to the conditions of life, and obviously in the Kingdom of Heaven the bodies cannot be just the same as here on earth. The individual identity is not compromised, because the "eidos" of each body is not destroyed (το εΐδος το χαράκτηριζον το σώμα). It is the very principium individuationis. To Origen the "body itself" is just this vital principle. His είδος closely corresponds to Aristotle’s εντελέχεια. But with Origen this "form" or germinative power is indestructible; that makes the construction of a doctrine of the resurrection possible. This "principle of individuation" is also principium surgendi. In this definite body the material particles are composed or arranged just by this individual "form" or λόγος. Therefore, of whatever particles the risen body is composed, the strict identity of the psycho-physical individuality is not impaired, since the germinative power remains unchangeable.⁶⁷ Origen presumes that the continuity of individual existence is sufficiently secured by the identity of the reanimating principle. This view was more than once repeated later, especially under the renewed influence of Aristotle. And in modern Roman theology the question is still rather open: to what extent the recognition of the material identity of the risen bodies with the mortal ones belongs to the essence of the dogma.⁶⁸ The whole question is rather that of metaphysical interpretation, not a problem of faith. It may even be suggested that on this occasion Origen expresses not so much his own, as rather a current opinion. There is very much that is questionable in Origen’s eschatological opinions. They cannot be regarded as a coherent whole. And it is not easy to reconcile his "Aristotelian" conception of the resurrection with a theory of the pre-existence of souls, or with a conception of the periodical recurrent cycles of worlds and final annihilation of matter. There is no complete agreement between this theory of the Resurrection and the doctrine of a "General apokatastasis" either. Many of Origen’s eschatological ideas may be misleading. Yet his speculation on the relation between the fleshly body of this life and the permanent body of the resurrection was an important step towards the synthetic conception of the Resurrection. His chief opponent, St. Methodius of Olympus, does not seem to have understood him well. St. Methodius’ criticisms amounted to the complete rejection of the whole conception of the είδος. Is not the form of the body changeable as well as the material substance? Can the form really survive the body itself, or rather is it dissolved and decomposed, when the body of which it is the form dies and ceases to exist as a whole? In any case the identity of the form is no guarantee of personal identity, if the whole material substratum is to be entirely different. For St. Methodius the "form" meant rather merely the external shape of the body, and not the internal vital power, as for Origen. And most of his arguments simply miss the point. But his emphasis on the wholeness of the human composition was a real complement to Origen’s rather excessive formalism.⁶⁹
St. Gregory of Nyssa in his eschatological doctrine endeavored to bring together the two conceptions, to reconcile the truth of Origen with the truth of Methodius. And this attempt at a synthesis is of exceptional importance.⁷⁰ St. Gregory starts with the empirical unity of body and soul, its dissolution in death. And the body severed from the soul, deprived of its "vital power" (ζωτική δύναμις),⁷¹ by which the corporeal elements are held and knit together during life, disintegrates and is involved into the general circulation of matter. The material substance itself, however, is not destroyed, only the body dies, not its elements. Moreover, in the very disintegration the particles of the decaying body preserve in themselves certain "signs" or "marks" of their former connection with their own soul (τα σημεία του ημετέρου συγκρίματος). And again, in each soul also certain "bodily marks" are preserved, as on a piece of wax — certain signs of union. By a "power of recognition" (γνωστική τη δυνάμει), even in the separation of death, the soul somehow remains nevertheless near the elements of its own decomposed body (του οικείου εφαπτομένη). In the day of resurrection each soul will be able by these double marks to "recognize" the familiar elements. This is the "είδος" of the body, its "inward image," or "type." St. Gregory compares this process of the restoration of the body with the germination of a seed, with the development of the human foetus. He differs sharply from Origen on the question as to what substance will constitute the bodies of the resurrection, and he joins here St. Methodius. If the risen bodies were constructed entirely from the new elements, that "would not be a resurrection, but rather the creation of a new man," και ούκέτι αν είη το τοιούτον άνάστασις, άλλα καινοΰ ανθρώπου δημιουργία.⁷² The resurrected body will be reconstructed from its former elements, signed or sealed by the soul in the days of its incarnation, otherwise it would simply be another man. Nevertheless, the resurrection is not just a return, nor is it in any way a repetition of present existence. Such a repetition would be really an "endless misery." In the resurrection human nature will be restored not to its present, but to its normal or "original" condition. Strictly speaking, it will be for the first time brought into that state, in which it ought to have been, had not sin and the Fall entered the world, but which was never realized in the past. And everything in human existence, which is connected with instability, is not so much a return as a consummation. This is the new mode of man’s existence. Man is to be raised to eternity, the form of time falls away. And in the risen corporeality all succession and change will be abolished and condensed. This will be not only an άποκατάστασις, but rather a "recapitulatio." The evil surplus, that which is of sin, falls away. But in no sense is this a loss. The fullness of personality will not be damaged by this subtraction, for this surplus does not belong to the personality at all. In any case, not everything is to be restored in human composition. And to St. Gregory the material identity of the body of the resurrection with the mortal body means, rather, the ultimate reality of the life once lived, which must be transferred into the future age. Here again he differs from Origen, to whom this empirical and earthly life was only a transient episode to be ultimately forgotten. For St. Gregory the identity of the form, i.e. the unity and continuity of individual existence, was the only point of importance. He holds the same "Aristotelian" conception of the unique and intimate connection of the individual soul and body.

The very idea of uniqueness is radically modified in Christian philosophy as compared with the pre-Christian Greek. In Greek philosophy it was a "sculptural" uniqueness, an invariable crystallization of a frozen image. In Christian experience it is the uniqueness of the life once experienced and lived. In the one case it was a timeless identity, in the other it is a uniqueness in time. The whole conception of time is different in the two cases.

(I) Fr. George Florovsky: Death & Redemption

In separation from God human nature becomes unsettled, goes out of tune, as it were, is decomposed. The very structure of man becomes unstable. The unity of the soul and the body becomes insecure. The soul loses its vital power, is no more able to quicken the body. The body is turned into the tomb and prison of the soul. And physical death becomes inevitable. The body and the soul are no longer, as it were, secured or adjusted to each other. The transgression of the commandment "reinstated man in the state of nature," says St. Athanasius, εις το κατά φύσιν έπέστρεφεν "that as he was made out of nothing, so also in his very existence he suffered in due time corruption according to all justice." For, being made out of nothing, the creature also exists over an abyss of nothingness, ever ready to fall into it. The created nature, St. Athanasius says, is mortal and infirm, "flowing and liable to decomposition," φύσις ρευστή και διαλυομένη. And it is only saved from this "natural corruption" by the power of heavenly Grace, "by the indwelling of the Word." Thus separation from God leads the creature to decomposition and disintegration." "For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again" (2 Samuel 14:14).
In Christian experience death is first revealed as a deep tragedy, as a painful metaphysical catastrophe, as a mysterious failure of human destiny. For death is not a normal end of human existence. Just the contrary. Man’s death is abnormal, is a failure. God did not create death; He created man for incorruption and true being, that we "might have being," εις το είναι (cf. Wisdom 6:18 and 2:23). The death of man is the "wages of sin" (Romans 6:23). It is a loss and corruption. And since the Fall the mystery of life is displaced by the mystery of death. What does it mean for a man to die? What is actually dying is obviously the body, for only the body is mortal and we speak of the "immortal" soul. In current philosophies nowadays, the "immortality of the soul" is emphasized to such an extent that the "mortality of man" is almost overlooked. In death this external, visible, and earthly bodily existence ceases. But yet, by some prophetic instinct, we say that it is "the man" who dies. For death surely breaks up human existence, although, admittedly, the human soul is "immortal," and personality is indestructible. Thus the question of death is first the question of the human body, of the corporeality of man. And Christianity proclaims not only the after-life of the immortal soul, but also the resurrection of the body. Man became mortal in the Fall, and actually dies. And the death of man becomes a cosmic catastrophe. For in the dying man, nature loses its immortal center, and itself, as it were, dies in man. Man was taken from nature, being made of the dust of the earth. But in a way he was taken out of nature, because God breathed into him the breath of life. St. Gregory of Nyssa comments on the narrative of Genesis in this way. "For God, it says, taking dust from the earth, fashioned man and by His own breath planted life in the creature which He formed, in order that the earthly element might be raised by union with the Divine, and so the Divine grace in one even course might uniformly extend through all creation, the lower nature being mingled with that which is above the world."¹⁸ … Man is a sort of "microcosm," every kind of life is combined in him, and in him only the whole world comes into contact with God.¹⁹ Consequently man’s apostasy estranges the whole creation from God, devastates it, and, as it were, deprives it of God. The Fall of man shatters the cosmic harmony. Sin is disorder, discord, lawlessness. Strictly speaking it is only man that dies. Death indeed is a law of nature, a law of organic life. But man’s death means just his fall or entanglement into this cyclical motion of nature, just what ought not to have happened at all. As St. Gregory says, "from the nature of dumb animals mortality is transferred to a nature created for immortality." Only for man is death contrary to nature and mortality is evil.²⁰ Only man is wounded and mutilated by death. In the generic life of dumb animals, death is rather a natural moment in the development of the species; it is the expression rather of the generating power of life than of infirmity. However, with the fall of man, mortality, even in nature, assumes an evil and tragic significance. Nature itself, as it were, is poisoned by the fatal venom of human decomposition. With dumb animals, death is but the discontinuation of individual existence. In the human world, death strikes at personality, and personality is much greater than mere individuality. It is the body that becomes corruptible and liable to death through sin. Only the body can disintegrate. Yet it is not the body that dies, but the whole man. For man is organically composed of body and soul. Neither soul nor body separately represents man. A body without a soul is but a corpse, and a soul without body is a ghost. Man is not a ghost sans-corpse, and corpse is not a part of man. Man is not a "bodiless demon," simply confined in the prison of the body. Mysterious as the union of soul and body indeed is, the immediate consciousness of man witnesses to the organic wholeness of his psycho-physical structure. This organic wholeness of human composition was from the very beginning strongly emphasized by all Christian teachers.²¹ That is why the separation of soul and body is the death of the man himself, the discontinuation of his existence, of wholeness, i.e. of his existence as a man. Consequently death and the corruption of the body are a sort of fading away of the "image of God" in man. St. John Damascene, in one of his glorious anthems in the Burial Service, says of this: "I weep and I lament, when I contemplate death, and see our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured, dishonored, bereft of form."²² St. John speaks not of man’s body, but of man himself. "Our beauty in the image of God," ή κατ’ εικόνα θεου πτλασθεισα ώραιότης, this is not the body, but man. He is indeed an "image of the unfathomable glory" of God, even when wounded by sin, εικών άρρητου δόξης.²³ And in death it is disclosed that man, this "reasonable statue" fashioned by God, to use the phrase of St. Methodius,²⁴ is but a corpse. "Man is but dry bones, a stench and the food of worms." This is the riddle and the mystery of death. "Death is a mystery indeed: for the soul by violence is severed from the body, is separated, by the Divine will, from the natural connection and composition… Ο marvel! Why have we been given over unto corruption, and why have we been wedded unto death?" In the fear of death, often so petty and faint-hearted, there is revealed a profound metaphysical alarm, not merely a sinful attachment to the earthly flesh. In the fear of death the pathos of human wholeness is manifested. The Fathers used to see in the unity of soul and body in man an analogy of the indivisible unity of two natures in the unique hypostasis of Christ. Analogy may be misleading. But still by analogy one may speak of man as being just "one hypostasis in two natures," and not only of, but precisely in two natures. And in death this one human hypostasis is broken up. Hence the justification for the mourning and weeping. The terror of death is only warded off by the hope of the resurrection and life eternal.
However, death is not just the self-revelation of sin. Death itself is already, as it were, the anticipation of the resurrection. By death God not only punishes but also heals fallen and ruined human nature. And this not merely in the sense that He cuts the sinful life short by death and thereby prevents the propagation of sin and evil. God turns the very mortality of man into a means of healing. In death human nature is purified, pre-resurrected as it were. Such was the common opinion of the Fathers. With greatest emphasis this conception was put forward by St. Gregory of Nyssa. "Divine providence introduced death into human nature with a specific design," he says, "so that by the dissolution of body and soul, vice may be drawn off and man may be refashioned again through the resurrection, sound, free from passions, pure, and without any admixture of evil." This is particularly a healing of the body. In St. Gregory’s opinion, man’s journey beyond the grave is a means of cleansing. Man’s bodily structure is purified and renewed. In death, as it were, God refines the vessel of our body as in a refining furnace. By the free exercise of his sinful will man entered into communion with evil, and our structure became alloyed with the poison of vice. In death man falls to pieces, like an earthenware vessel, and his body is decomposed again in the earth, so that by purification from the accrued filth he may be restored to his normal form, through the resurrection. Consequently death is not an evil, but a benefit (ευεργεσία). Death is the wages of sin, yet at the same time it is also a healing process, a medicine, a sort of fiery tempering of the impaired structure of man. The earth is, as it were, sown with human ashes, that they may shoot forth in the last day, by the power of God; this was the Pauline analogy. The mortal remains are committed to the earth unto the resurrection. Death implies within itself a potentiality of resurrection. The destiny of man can be realized only in the resurrection, and in the general resurrection. But only the Resurrection of Our Lord resuscitates human nature and makes the general resurrection possible. The potentiality of resurrection inherent in every death was realized only in Christ, the "first-fruits of them that are asleep" (1 Cor. 15:20).²⁵
Redemption is above all an escape from death and corruption, the liberation of man from the "bondage of corruption" (Romans 8:21), the restoration of the original wholeness and stability of human nature. The fulfilment of redemption is in the resurrection. It will be fulfilled in the general "quickening" when "the last enemy shall be abolished, death" (1 Cor. 15:26: έσχατος εχθρός). But the restoration of unity within human nature is possible only through a restoration of the union of man with God. The resurrection is possible only in God. Christ is the Resurrection and the Life. "Unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility," says St. Irenaeus. The way and the hope of the resurrection is revealed only through the Incarnation of the Word.²⁶ St. Athanasius expresses this point even more emphatically. The mercy of God could not permit "that creatures once made rational, and having partaken of the Word, should go to ruin and turn again to non-existence by the way of corruption." The violation of the law and disobedience did not abolish the original purpose of God. The abolition of that purpose would have violated the truth of God. But human repentance was insufficient. "Penitence does not deliver from the state of nature [into which man has relapsed through sin], it only discontinues the sin." For man not only sinned but fell into corruption. Consequently the Word of God descended and became man, assumed our body, "that, whereas man turned towards corruption, he might turn them again towards incorruption, and quicken them from death by appropriation of his body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like a straw from the fire."²⁷ Death was grafted on to the body, then life must be grafted on to the body again, that the body may throw off corruption and be clothed in life. Otherwise the body would not be raised. "If death had been kept away from the body by a mere command, it would nonetheless have been mortal and corruptible, according to the nature of our bodies. But that this should not be, it put on the incorporeal Word of God, and thus no longer fears either death or corruption, for it has life as a garment, and corruption is done away in it."²⁸ Thus, according to St. Athanasius, the Word became flesh in order to abolish corruption in human nature. However, death is vanquished, not by the appearance of Life in the mortal body, but rather by the voluntary death of the Incarnate Life. The Word became incarnate on account of death in the flesh, St. Athanasius emphasizes. "In order to accept death He had a body," and only through His death was the resurrection possible.²⁹
The ultimate reason for Christ’s death must be seen in the mortality of man. Christ suffered death, but passed through it and overcame mortality and corruption. He quickened death itself. By His death He abolishes the power of death. "The dominion of death is cancelled by Thy death, Ο Strong One." And the grave becomes the life-giving "source of our resurrection." And every grave becomes rather a "bed of hope" for believers. In the death of Christ, death itself is given a new meaning and significance. "By death He destroyed death."

George Kordis: The Tale of Eros & Psyche

Father Alexander Schmemann: Forgiveness Sunday

 In the Orthodox Church, the last Sunday before Great Lent – the day on which, at Vespers, Lent is liturgically announced and inaugurated – is called Forgiveness Sunday. On the morning of that Sunday, at the Divine Liturgy, we hear the words of Christ:

"If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses..." (Mark 6:14-15)

Then after Vespers – after hearing the announcement of Lent in the Great Prokeimenon: "Turn not away Thy face from Thy child for I am afflicted! Hear me speedily! Draw near unto my soul and deliver it!", after making our entrance into Lenten worship, with its special memories, with the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, with its prostrations – we ask forgiveness from each other, we perform the rite of forgiveness and reconciliation. And as we approach each other with words of reconciliation, the choir intones the Paschal hymns, filling the church with the anticipation of Paschal joy.

What is the meaning of this rite? Why is it that the Church wants us to begin Lenten season with forgiveness and reconciliation? These questions are in order because for too many people Lent means primarily, and almost exclusively, a change of diet, the compliance with ecclesiastical regulations concerning fasting. They understand fasting as an end in itself, as a "good deed" required by God and carrying in itself its merit and its reward. But, the Church spares no effort in revealing to us that fasting is but a means, one among many, towards a higher goal: the spiritual renewal of man, his return to God, true repentance and, therefore, true reconciliation. The Church spares no effort in warning us against a hypocritical and pharisaic fasting, against the reduction of religion to mere external obligations. As a Lenten hymn says:

In vain do you rejoice in no eating, O soul!

For you abstain from food,

But from passions you are not purified.

If you persevere in sin, you will perform a useless fast.

Now, forgiveness stands at the very center of Christian faith and of Christian life because Christianity itself is, above all, the religion of forgiveness. God forgives us, and His forgiveness is in Christ, His Son, Whom He sends to us, so that by sharing in His humanity we may share in His love and be truly reconciled with God. Indeed, Christianity has no other content but love. And it is primarily the renewal of that love, a return to it, a growth in it, that we seek in Great Lent, in fasting and prayer, in the entire spirit and the entire effort of that season. Thus, truly forgiveness is both the beginning of, and the proper condition for the Lenten season.

One may ask, however: Why should I perform this rite when I have no "enemies"? Why should I ask forgiveness from people who have done nothing to me, and whom I hardly know? To ask these questions, is to misunderstand the Orthodox teaching concerning forgiveness. It is true, that open enmity, personal hatred, real animosity may be absent from our life, though if we experience them, it may be easier for us to repent, for these feelings openly contradict Divine commandments. But, the Church reveals to us that there are much subtler ways of offending Divine Love. These are indifference, selfishness, lack of interest in other people, of any real concern for them -- in short, that wall which we usually erect around ourselves, thinking that by being "polite" and "friendly" we fulfill God’s commandments. The rite of forgiveness is so important precisely because it makes us realize – be it only for one minute – that our entire relationship to other men is wrong, makes us experience that encounter of one child of God with another, of one person created by God with another, makes us feel that mutual "recognition" which is so terribly lacking in our cold and dehumanized world.

On that unique evening, listening to the joyful Paschal hymns we are called to make a spiritual discovery: to taste of another mode of life and relationship with people, of life whose essence is love. We can discover that always and everywhere Christ, the Divine Love Himself, stands in the midst of us, transforming our mutual alienation into brotherhood. As l advance towards the other, as the other comes to me – we begin to realize that it is Christ Who brings us together by His love for both of us.

And because we make this discovery – and because this discovery is that of the Kingdom of God itself: the Kingdom of Peace and Love, of reconciliation with God and, in Him, with all that exists – we hear the hymns of that Feast, which once a year, "opens to us the doors of Paradise." We know why we shall fast and pray, what we shall seek during the long Lenten pilgrimage. Forgiveness Sunday: the day on which we acquire the power to make our fasting – true fasting; our effort – true effort; our reconciliation with God – true reconciliation.

Martyrdom: Death and Resurrection

By the hand of Markos Kampanis

Olivier L. Clément

Martyrdom means witness. But to bear witness to Christ to the point of death is to become one who has risen again. Christian martyrdom is a mystical experience, the first attested in the history of the Church. It is recorded right at the beginning by the example of Stephen the ‘protomartyr’ in the Acts of the Apostles thus: [Stephen], full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened. And the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” … Then they cast him out of the city and they stoned him; And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he said this, he fell asleep, (Acts 7. 55-60). Vision of glory … prayer for the executioners… when history comes full circle and another witness is put to death, this very death ‘opens the heavens’ and allows the energies of love to make their entry into the world.

Martyrdom was the first form of sanctity to be venerated in the Church. And when there were no longer any martyrs in blood, martyrs in ascesis, monks, came instead. It was the monks who coined the saying that expresses the meaning of martyrdom: ‘Give your blood and receive the Spirit.’ The martyrdom returned.

A martyr can be, at first sight any man or woman at all. But when they are crushed by the suffering they are identified with the Crucified Christ, and the power of the resurrection takes hold of them. In very direct accounts composed at the time without embellishments, at the beginning of the third century, we see a young Christian woman in prison lamenting the birth of her child (if a pregnant woman was arrested she was not sent to execution till after the birth). The jailer jeers at her. But Felicity gently explains to him that in the moment of her martyrdom another will suffer in her. Her friend Perpetua in fact feels nothing when she is exposed to the wild bulls. She is momentarily spared before coming out of the ‘ecstasy of the Spirit’, as if awakening from a deep sleep. And the martyrs, before meeting death together, give one another the kiss of peace, as during the eucharistic liturgy.
For the authentic Christian, death does not exist. He casts himself into the risen Christ. In him death is a celebration of life.

Felicity was eight months pregnant when she was arrested … Her labor pains came upon her … She was suffering a great deal and groaning. One of the gaolers said to her, ‘If you are already crying out like this, what will you do when you are thrown to the wild beasts? …’ Felicity answered him, ‘Then there will be another within me who will suffer for me because it is on his account that I an suffering …’

Perpetua was tossed in the air first [by a furious bull]. She fell on her back. As soon as she could sit up … she pinned back her hair which had come loose. A martyr cannot die with dishevelled hair, lest she seem to be in mourning on the day of her glory. Then she got up and noticed Felicity who seemed to have collapsed. She went to her, gave her hand and helped her to her feet. When they saw both of them standing up, the cruelty of the crowd was subdued. The martyrs were taken out through the gate of the living.

There Perpetua was welcomed by a catechumen, Rusticus, who was very much attached to her. She seemed to awake out of a deep sleep, so long had the ecstasy lasted. She looked around her and asked, ‘When shall we be delivered to the bull? When she was told it had already taken place she could not believe it, and refused to accept the evidence until she saw on her dress and on her body the traces of the ordeal. Then she called her brother and the catechumen. She said to them, ‘Remain steadfast in the faith. Love one another. Do not let our sufferings be a subject of scandal for you…’

The people demanded that the wounded be brought back into the arena so that they could enjoy the spectacle of the sword piercing the living bodies … The martyrs… came to the p0lace that the crowd wanted. They gave one another the kiss of peace to consummate their martyrdom, in accordance with the rite of faith. All of them remained motionless to receive the fatal blow.
Martyrdom of Felicity and Perpetua, in the year 203, at Cartage (Knopf-Krüger, p.35-44)

The blood of the martyrs is identified with that of Golgotha, and so with that of the Eucharist, which imparts the inebriation of eternity. The martyr becomes Eucharist, becomes Christ. And that is why the relics of the martyrs, regarded as fragments of the glorified cosmos, of the ‘world to come’, are enshrined in the altars on which thw Eucharist is celebrated.

O blessed martyrs, human grapes of God’s vineyard, your wine inebriates the Church … When saints made themselves ready for the banquet of suffering they drank the draught pressed out on Golgotha and thus they penetrated into the mysteries of God’s house. And so we sing, ‘Praise be to Christ who inebriates the martyrs with the blood from his side.’
Rabulas of Edessa Hymn to the Martyrs (Bickell II, p. 262)

In the following passage from the letter written by Ignatius of Antioch to the Christians of Rome – the bishop of Antioch was being led to the capital of the Empire for solemn execution, at the beginning of the second century – almost all the aspects of this ‘death-and-resurrecti8on’ are brought together. The martyr crushed by the teeth of wild animals, like grains of wheat in the mill, becomes eucharistic matter; he shares fully in Christ’s divinizing flesh; he reproduces, in a quasi-liturgical sense, the Passion of the Crucified, in order to put on the Glorified, and to feel his victorious power. Victor, the conqueror, was the name given to every martyr. In Christ the Spirit is, for Ignatius, a stream of living water that leads to the Father.
Here the body of death is no longer dissolved by ascesis and spiritual experience, but all at once by human violence, The martyr hastens the coming to birth of the glorious body.

I am writing to all the Christians to tell all of them that I am gladly going to die for God … Let me be the food of beasts thanks to which I shall be able to find God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts in order to become Christ’s pure bread … By suffering I shall be a freedman of Jesus Christ and I shall be born again in him, free … let no being, visible or invisible, prevent me out of jealousy from finding Christ. Let fire and cross, wild animals, torture, dislocation of my bones, mutilation of my limbs, the grinding to pieces of my whole body, the worst assaults of the devil fall on me, provided only that I find Jesus Christ… My new birth is close at hand. Forgive me, brethren, do not hinder me from living. Let me come into the pure light. When I reach that point I shall be a man. Allow me to reproduce the passion of my God. May anyone who has God in him understand what I desire and take pity on me, knowing what it is that straitens me … My earthy desires have been crucified. There is no longer in me any fire to love material objects, only living water that murmurs within me, ‘Come to the Father’ … It is the bread of God that I desire, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ … and for drink I desire his blood, which is imperishable love.
Ignatius of Antioch To the Romans, 4-7 (SC 10, p. 130-7)

In the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, in the same period, one is struck by the affectionate simplicity of the man and the power of his intercession. He welcomes the police officers as neighbors sent to him by God. He does not pray for himself but for all those whom he has met, good or bad, and for the Universal Church.

Since his conscience is involved, the martyr deliberately disobeys the authorities. He calmly proclaims before magistrates and crowd that the only ‘Lord’ is Christ, namely God-made-man, and not the holder of power, not the sacralized might of Rome. Thereby he asserts the transcendence of conscience, of the person made in the image of God. He makes his own the protest of Antigone and Socrates, but in the joy of the resurrection. He radically relativizes political importance.

For all that, the martyr is not a rebel. Like Socrates, he accepts the sentence of the magistrates and prays for the Emperor. By that very fact he is a blessing to the city of men, and without disrupting it he enriches it with an uncompromising freedom.

The end of the passage takes up again the identification of martyrdom with the Eucharist, the witness of victory over death.

Learning then that the police officers were there, he [Polycarp] went down and talked to them. They were amazed at his age and his calmness and at the trouble that was taken to arrest a man as old as he. He had served them with as much food and drink as they wished, asking them only for an hour to pray as he desired. They allowed him that, and standing upright he began to pray, so full of God’s grace that for two hours he could not stop, and those who heard him were astonished, and many repented of having come to arrest so holy an old man.

In his prayer he remembered all the people he had ever met, illustrious or obscure, and the whole catholic Church spread throughout the world. When he had finished, the hour having come to depart, they mounted him on an ass and took him to the city … Quickly they piled round him the materials prepared for the pyre. As they were about to nail him to it he said, Leave me like this. He who gives me strength to endure the fire will also enable me to remain firm at the stake.’ Accordingly they did not nail him to it, but they bound him. With his hands behind his back le looked like a ram chosen for sacrifice from a large flock … Raising his eyes to heaven he said:

“Lord, almighty God, Father of thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ through whom we have received the knowledge of thy name, God … of all creation … I bless thee for having judged me worthy of this day and of this hour, to share among the number of thy martyrs in the chalice of thy Christ, looking for the resurrection of body and soul in the fullness of the Holy Spirit … And so for everything I praise thee, I bless thee, I glorify thee, through the eternal heavenly high priest Jesus hrist thy well-beloved Son, through whom be glory to thee with him and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.” … In the midst of the fire he stood, not like burning flesh, but like bread baking.
Martyrdom of St Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, 7,2-8, 1; 14, 1-3; 15,2 (SC 10, pp. 250,252, 260, 262, 264)

The following dreams, which are visions, show the souls of the martyrs taking part in the heavenly liturgy as it is described in the Apocalypse. The gardens of paradise with the leaves of the trees singing to the breeze of the Spirit; a temple or a palace with walls of light; at the center of it all, the Ancient of Days with white hair but a face radiating youth; the face of Christ in the youthfulness of the Spirit; kiss of peace; the mouthful of food offered by the Shepherd; the ineffable perfume that is as food; so many symbols of the mystical state of martyrdom similar to the actual experience of the Eucharist.

Perpetua’s Vision
Then I went up. I saw an enormous garden. In the middle there was a tall man dressed as a shepherd. He was engaged in milking sheep. Around him, in thousands, were men clothed in white. He raised his head, looked at me and said, Welcome, my child.’ He called me and gave me a mouthful of the cheese he was preparing I received it with hands joined. I ate it and they all said ‘Amen’. At the sound of the voices I woke up with the taste of a strange sweetness in my mouth. I related this vision at once to my brother [Saturus] and we understood that it was martyrdom that awaited us.

Saturus’s Vision
Our martyrdom was over. We had left our bodies behind. Four angels carried us towards the East but their hands did not touch us … When we had gone through the first sphere that encircles the earth we saw a great light. Then I said to Perpetua who was at my side, ‘This is what the Lord has promised us’. We had reached a vast open plain that seemed to be a garden with oleanders and every type of flower. The trees were as tall as cypresses and their leaves sang without ceasing … We arrive at a palace whose walls seem to be made of light. We go in and hear a choir repeating, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ In the hall is seated a man clothed in white. He has a youthful face and his hair shines white as snow. On either side of him stand four elders … We go forward in amazement and we kiss the Lord who caresses us with his hand. The elders say to us, ‘Stand up!’ We obey and exchange the kiss of peace … We recognized many of the brethren martyrs like us. For food we all had an ineffable perfume that satisfied us wholly. Martyrdom of Felicity and Perpetua (Knopf-Krüger)

TEDxAcademy - Father Antonios Papanikolaou

A remarkable video about contagious love...
In Greek with English subtitles.

Iconographer Fr. Stamatis Skliris

Jacques Derrida On Love and Being

Regardless of what you might think of Derrida this is a remarkable video that reveals a space in which Orthodoxy can dialogue with post-modernism.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas: Finding the Future

(The following is an excellent lesson from Metropolitan John on how we as Orthodox Christians should approach Social Action and our need for, "that elusive future.")

 When you bring an eschatological dimension into the world, you create a morality and a behavior which has social repercussions.  You aren’t supposed to make a special effort to emulate the activities of secular societies, to copy their methods and to familiarize yourself with their activities in order to compete with them.  Instead of getting itself involved in philanthropic projects, with all the specifications of a successful philanthropic organization or a Ministry of Welfare, the ancient Church simply had almsgiving.  You cannot turn love into an institution (if we were to take love as an example). This of course does not mean that you remain inactive.  When someone is hungry, you give him food.  The more that you carry the eschatological identity inside you, the more you will love him and help him, even sacrificing yourself.  I am trying to say that there are ways that the Church can better perform its duty in such areas, without spending itself in social activities, without becoming inactive, but rather in a personal manner, and not as an institution. I would say the same thing applies to missionary work and to all related topics.  Things evolved more naturally in the ancient Church.  Nowadays, everything is “organized”.  What we call “organization of the Church” is based on secular standards.  We may not be inactive, but we certainly haven’t avoided secularization, because that is what will happen, when you emulate secular forms.  I happened to read a newspaper article, whose commentary-response by a professor Gousides I found very interesting.  He labeled the article “the exodus”, while the reference was to the clergy. Apparently, everyone seeks an exit in order to become more active, hence the clergy should do the same.  But the nature of the Church is entirely different, and I believe that the people need that “otherness”, that eschatological difference.  Proof of this, is that whenever the Church attempted to develop secular activities, even though She may have momentarily noted success, it eventually dwindled away.  We (of the previous generation at least) had actually lived through such attempts years ago, where bishops strived to build boarding homes, foundations, etc.  All of these were quite nice of course – they were a testimony of the Church. But then along came the welfare state and improved them or even took over such institutions. So, what do the people expect? How was this act of the Church evaluated? Very little.  People go to Church to worship, to cross themselves, to light a candle, and not because the Church has, say, a retirement home for the aged.  You may very well ask: can’t the Church have such a retirement home?  Of course it can.  But what I am trying to say is, that the Church must not make this a part of Her identity, or Her program.  Naturally every diocese has its elderly, and it will take care of them. So will the bishopric. What I am referring to, is the spirit, the stance, the placing.

Anyway, the Church seems to be bipolar at this point. On the one hand, it has to attend to its mission, since it is dispersed throughout the world. On the other hand though, in contrast to the Jews (and even the Westerners, I would say), the Church also has the experience of an eschatological congregation, on account of the Resurrection of Christ and the Pentecost.  In other words, the Church has a foretaste in the present of that which is to be expected in the future.  The Church is linked to this eschatological union, which has not yet been fully realized and is still anticipated, hence She exists between these two situations.  She exists within History, She is dispersed, She makes missionary attempts, but that is not the entire issue. She simultaneously tastes and experiences the eschatological congregation – a situation that does not contain missionary work or dispersal.  That is to say, while the missionary experience and the dispersion are elements of the Church, they do not constitute Her identity.  The Church that does not have this experience of an eschatological congregation has lost its identity. Its identity is linked to that very foretasting of the eschatological union of God’s people.

Anyway, judging from all the above, it appears that the Church is going through an “identity crisis”, as it is fashionable to say nowadays in Sociology.  It is a fact that people also go through an identity crisis, just like institutions do.  And if you were to pose the question: “where is the identity of the Church? – where does each one of us place it?” then, not only in theory, but also in practice, I am afraid you will observe a vast difference of opinions.  The temptation of History is immense.  Eschatology seems like a vaporous thing, which cannot be grasped.  But we do not realize –as a Church – that people do not want us like that.  I believe that Man needs this vaporous and elusive and future element; he cannot find it in any other institution of society, only in the Church. And that is why he will continue to go to Church, regardless of how many activities the priest or the bishop may have to show for themselves, because that is where a person wants to drop anchor – in that elusive future.  And woe betide, if the Church deprives him of it.  Fortunately, we Orthodox have a form of worship that is permeated with the eschatological dimension, the eschatological character. That is what makes it so appealing.  That is what attracts the people, otherwise we would have no-one in the Church, just as it is beginning to occur in England nowadays, where those gigantic churches are being shut down and sold.  They lack people. Because the social work that the churches believed was of greater importance, has been supplanted by other institutions; it has been substituted.  And the clergyman does not know what else to do, or to give.  The more we displace the eschatological element, the more that it dwindles within the Church, the more we are at risk of losing the true identity of the Church.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann: The Christian Concept of Death

Icon by the hand of Babis Pilarinos (To view more of his work visit http://pilarinos.gr/en/)

“He suffered and was buried. And He rose again...” After the Cross, after the descent into death there is the Resurrection from the dead — that principal, fundamental and decisive confirmation of the Symbol of Faith, a confirmation from the very heart of Christianity. Indeed “if Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain.” These are the words of the Apostle Paul, and they remain fundamental for Christianity to this day. Christianity is a belief, first of all and above all, in the fact that Christ did not remain in the grave, that life shone forth from death, and that in Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, the absolute, all-encompassing law of dying and death, which tolerated no exceptions, was somehow blown apart and overcome from within.
The Resurrection of Christ comprises, I repeat, the very heart of the Christian faith and Christian Good News. And yet, however strange it may sound, in the everyday life of Christianity and Christians in our time there is little room for this faith. It is as though obscured, and the contemporary Christian, without being cognizant of it, does not reject it, but somehow skirts about it, and does not live the faith as did the first Christians. If he attends church, he of course hears in the Christian service the ever resounding joyous confirmations: “trampling down death by death,” “death is swallowed up by victory,” “life reigns,” and “not one dead remains in the grave.” But ask him what he really thinks about death, and often (too often alas) you will hear some sort of rambling affirmation of the immortality of the soul and its life in some sort of world beyond the grave, a belief that existed even before Christianity. And that would be in the best of circumstances. In the worst, one would be met simply by perplexity and ignorance, “You know, I have never really thought about it.”
Meanwhile it is absolutely necessary to think about it, because it is with faith or unbelief, not simply in the “immortality of the soul,” but precisely in the Resurrection of Christ and in our “universal resurrection” at the end of time that all of Christianity “stands or falls,” as they say. If Christ did not rise, then the Gospel is the most horrible fraud of all. But if Christ did rise, then not only do all our pre-Christian representations and beliefs in the “immortality of the soul” change radically, but they simply fall away. And then the entire question of death presents itself in a totally different light. And here is the crux of the matter, that the Resurrection above all assumes an attitude toward death and an concept of death that is most profoundly different from its usual religious representations; and in a certain sense this concept is the opposite of those representations.
It must be frankly stated that the classical belief in the immortality of the soul excludes faith in the resurrection, because the resurrection (and this is the root of the matter) includes in itself not only the soul, but also the body. Simply reading the Gospel leaves no doubt about it. When they saw the risen Christ, the Apostles, as the Gospel says, thought that they were seeing a ghost or a vision. The first task of the risen Christ was to allow them to sense the reality of His body. He takes food and eats in front of them. He commands the doubting Thomas to touch His body, to be convinced of the Resurrection through his fingers. And when the Apostles came to believe, it is precisely the proclamation of the Resurrection, its reality, its “bodiliness” that becomes the chief content, power and joy of their preaching, and the main sacrament of the Church becomes the Communion of bread and wine as the Body and Blood of the risen Christ. And in this act, says the Apostle Paul, “proclaiming the death of the Lord, they confess His Resurrection.”
Those who turn to Christianity turn not to ideas or principles, but they accept this belief in the Resurrection, this experience, this knowledge of the risen Teacher. They accept faith in the universal resurrection, which means the overcoming, the destruction, the annihilation of death as the ultimate goal of the world. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death!” exclaims the Apostle Paul in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. And on every Pascha night we proclaim, “O Death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. Christ is risen, and life reigns!” In this way the acceptance or non-acceptance of Christ and Christianity is essentially the acceptance or non-acceptance of belief in His Resurrection, and in the language of religious representations that means belief in the union in Him of body and soul, of which the dissolution and ruination is death.
We are not speaking here about those who reject the Resurrection of Christ because they reject the very existence of God, i.e. convinced (or think that they are convinced) atheists. The discussion concerns a quite different area. Of much greater importance is that strange “obscurity” of faith in the Resurrection, which I just mentioned, among those very believers, those very Christians who connect in a peculiar way the celebration of Pascha with the actual, perhaps often subconscious, rejection of the Resurrection of Christ. There has occurred in historical Christianity a sort of return to the pre-Christian concept of death, which consists of, first of all, a recognition of death as a “law of nature,” i.e. a phenomenon inherent in nature itself, with which, for this reason and no matter how frightening death might be, one must “come to terms,” which one must accept. Indeed, all non-Christian, all natural religions, all philosophies are in essence occupied with our “coming to terms” with death and attempt to demonstrate for us the source of immortal life, of the immortal soul in some sort of alien world beyond the grave. Plato, for example, and countless followers after him teach that death is a liberation from the body which the soul desires; and in this circumstance faith in the resurrection of the body not only becomes unnecessary, but also incomprehensible, even false and untrue. In order to perceive the entire sense of Christian belief in the Resurrection, we must begin not from that belief itself, but from the Christian concept of the body and death, for here lies the root of the misunderstanding even within Christianity.
Religious consciousness assumes that the Resurrection of Christ is first of all a miracle, which of course it is. But for the average religious consciousness this miracle is even greater: the miracle of all miracles remains “unique” so to speak, pertaining to Christ. And since we acknowledge that Christ is God, this miracle ceases to be a miracle in a certain sense. God is almighty, God is God, God can do anything! Whatever the death of Christ signifies, His divine power and might did not allow Him to remain in the grave. Yet the fact of the matter is that all this comprises only half of the age-old Christian interpretation of the Resurrection of Christ. The joy of early Christianity, which still lives in the Church, in her services, in her hymns and prayers, and especially in the incomparable feast of Pascha, does not separate the Resurrection of Christ from the “universal resurrection,” which originates and begins in the Resurrection of Christ.
Celebrating one week before Pascha Christ’s raising of His friend Lazarus, the Church solemnly and joyfully confirms that this miracle is a “confirmation of the universal resurrection.” But in the minds of the faithful these two inseparable halves of the faith — faith in the Resurrection of Christ and faith in the “universal resurrection” initiated by Him — have somehow become disconnected. What remains intact is the belief in the rising of Christ from the dead, His Resurrection in the body, which He invites the doubting Thomas to touch: “Reach hither thy finger, and thrust it into My wounds: and be not faithless, but believing.”
Now as for our mortal and final destiny and fate after death, which we have begun to call the world beyond the grave, this destiny and fate has gradually ceased to be interpreted in the light of the Resurrection of Christ and its relation to it. As far as Christ is concerned we confirm that He rose from the dead, but as far as we ourselves are concerned we say that we believe in the immortality of the soul, in which the Greeks and Jews believed ages before Christ, in which to this day all religions believe without exception, and for which belief the Resurrection of Christ (however strange this may sound) is even unnecessary.
What is the reason behind this odd bifurcation? The reason lies in our concept of death, or better in a different concept of death as the separation of the soul from the body. All pre-Christian and extra-Christian “religiosity” teaches that this separation of the soul from the body should be regarded as not only “natural” but also positive, that in this should be seen a liberation of the soul from the body, which prevents the soul from being spiritual, heavenly, pure and blessed. Since in human experience evil, disease, suffering and the passions arise from the body, the goal and meaning of religion and the religious life become naturally the liberation of the soul from this bodily “prison,” a liberation precisely in death which allows it to attain its fullness. But it must be most strongly emphasized that this concept of death is not Christian, and furthermore it is incompatible with Christianity, manifestly contradictory. Christianity proclaims, confirms and teaches, that this separation of the soul from the body, which we call death, is evil. It is not part of God’s creation. It is that which entered the world, making it subject to itself, but opposed to God and violating His design, His desire for the world, for mankind and for life. It is that which Christ came to destroy.
But again, in order not so much to understand, but rather to sense, to feel this Christian interpretation of death, we must begin by saying at least a few words about this design of God’s, as much as has been disclosed to us in the Holy Scriptures and revealed to its fullness in Christ, in His teaching, in his death and in His Resurrection.
This design may be simply and concisely outlined thus: God created man with a body and soul, i.e. at once both spiritual and material, and it is precisely this union of spirit, soul and body that is called man in the Bible and in the Gospel. Man, as created by God, is an animate body and an incarnate spirit, and for that reason any separation of them, and not only the final separation, in death, but even before death, any violation of that union is evil. It is a spiritual catastrophe. From this we receive our belief in the salvation of the world through the incarnate God, i.e. again, above all, our belief in His acceptance of flesh and body, not “body-like,” but a body in the fullest sense of the word: a body that needs food, that tires and that suffers. Thus that which in the Scriptures is called life, that life, which above all consists of the human body animated by the spirit and of the spirit made flesh, comes to an end — at death — in the separation of soul and body. No, man does not disappear in death, for creation may not destroy that which God has called from nothingness into being. But man is plunged into death, into the darkness of lifelessness and debility. He, as the Apostle Paul says, is given over to destruction and ruin.
Here, I would once more like to repeat and emphasize that God did not create the world for this separation, dying, ruin and corruption. And for this reason the Christian Gospel proclaims that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” The Resurrection is the recreation of the world in its original beauty and totality. It is the complete spiritualization of matter and the complete incarnation of the spirit in God’s creation. The world has been given to man as his life, and for this reason, according to our Christian Orthodox teaching, God will not annihilate it but will transfigure it into “a new heaven and a new earth,” into man’s spiritual body, into the temple of God’s presence and God’s glory in creation.
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death…” And that destruction, that extermination of death began when the Son of God Himself in His immortal love for us voluntarily descended into death and its darkness, filling its despair and horror with His light and love. And this is why we sing on Pascha not only “Christ is risen from the dead,” but also “trampling down death by death…”
He alone arose from the dead, but He has destroyed our death, destroying its dominion, its despair, its finality. Christ does not promise us Nirvana or some sort of misty life beyond the grave, but the resurrection of life, a new heaven and a new earth, the joy of the universal resurrection. “The dead shall arise, and those in the tombs will sing for joy…” Christ in risen, and life abides, life lives… That is the meaning; that is the unending joy of this truly central and fundamental confirmation of the Symbol of Faith: “And the third day, He rose again according to the Scriptures.” According to the Scriptures, i.e. in accordance with that knowledge of life, with that design for the world and humanity, for the soul and body, for the spirit and matter, for life and death, which has been revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures. This is the entire faith, the entire love, and the entire hope of Christianity. And this is why the Apostle Paul says, “If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain.”
Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
Russkaya mysl’, Nos. 3299, 3300, March 13, 20, 1980.
Translated from Russian by Robert A. Parent

For my Best Friend and Beautiful Wife

I cannot believe in any happiness other than the acceptance of the world which we see, complete acceptance, which makes you secure, allows you to forget yourself; you do not doubt its truth. The embraces and kisses which I exchange in such moments with my wife have a sincerity that touches my inmost depths. I trust in her existence, her little body dressed tightly in her clumsily sewn everyday coat; it is the most tender thing I can touch.
-Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

Finding Love in the Desert

When we find love, we partake of heavenly bread and are made strong without labor and toil. The heavenly bread is Christ, who came down from heaven and gave life to the world. This is the nourishment of angels. The person who has found love eats and drinks Christ every day and every hour and is thereby made immortal. …When we hear Jesus say, “Ye shall eat and drink at the table of my kingdom,” what do we suppose we shall eat, if not love? Love, rather than food and drink, is sufficient to nourish a person. This is the wine “which maketh glad the heart.” Blessed is the one who partakes of this wine! Licentious people have drunk this wine and become chaste; sinners have drunk it and have forgotten the pathways of stumbling; drunkards have drunk this wine and become fasters; the rich have drunk it and desired poverty, the poor have drunk it and been enriched with hope; the sick have drunk it and become strong; the unlearned have taken it and become wise. –St. Isaac the Syrian

Whoever loves himself cannot love God; but if, because of 'the overflowing richness' of God's love, a man does not love himself, then he truly loves God (Ephes. 2,7). Such a man never seeks his own glory, but seeks the glory of God. The man who loves himself seeks his own glory, whereas he who loves God loves the glory of his Creator. It is characteristic of the soul which consciously senses the Love of God always to seek God's glory in every Commandment it performs and to be happy in its low estate. For glory befits God because of His majesty, while lowliness befits man because it unites us with God. If we realize this, rejoicing in the glory of the Lord, we too, like Saint John the Baptist, will begin to say unceasingly, 'He must increase, but we must decrease.' –St. Diadochos of Photiki