"The divine essence is beyond articulation; the words of Scripture point beyond themselves and reveal the absurdity of any fundamentalism. To insist on "literal truth" in theology is to make a fool of oneself, whether one articulates theism or atheism. In doing so we "know not what we do," because any articulation taken literally is at best a reduction of ultimate truth to what a finite intellect can grasp; it is an idol."
Fr David Starr
++++++++++++
"In Irenaeus and in Justin Martyr and Athanasius after him, I found a teaching that God became man in order to complete the divine image in man and bring us closer to himself. John had written of Christ making us children of God, and Peter of his giving us a participation in the divine nature (Jn 1:12-13; 2 Peter 1:4). In the second century Irenaeus taught that in Christ God had become human to share the nature of man, in order that we might share God's nature. He laid great stress on the life, suffering and death of Jesus as establishing a communion, sanctifying our being in every phase of our mortal existence , and enabling us to live the life of Christ. Borrowing and elaborating on St Paul, he saw Christ as having recapitulated all creation and most especially human life, recreating it in perfection (On apostolic preaching 6, 32; Against Heresies I.X.I, III.xvi.6).
The depth and clarity of Irenaeus' account gave coherent reasons for the Incarnation and deepened my understanding of John's Gospel in unanticipated ways. The sense of discovery grew as I read in St Gregory of Nazianzus' Second Paschal Homily from the late 4th century that Christ sanctified the life of man by making the life of God human. St Maximus the Confessor's treatise on Love, written two centuries later, spoke of the transfiguration of human virtues. Most concise was St Athanasius of Alexandria, who taught that God became human in order that men might be deified, i.e., given a participation in the life of God. Gregory held that death was less a punishment that a consequence of our loss of intimate association with God; similarly, St Isaac of Syria described hell not as a place created by God but a condition invented by creatures (The Ascetical Homilies, Homily 27). Is the "eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Mt 25:41) the same fire that "shall try every man's work," purging the unworthy but saving "as by fire" (1 Cor 3:13-15)? Is this fire the Presence of God, before the wicked perish "as wax melts before the fire"?(Ps 68:1-2). The early fathers affirm God's love and ultimate victory over the enemy of mankind without telling how "the restitution of all things" (Acts 3:21) comes to pass. St Gregory holds that the answers to such questions are in Christ and cannot be abstract; he says,
'If He descend into hell, descend with Him. Learn to know the mysteries of Christ there also, what is the providential purpose of the twofold descent, to save all men absolutely by His manifestation, or there too only them that believe' (St Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Paschal Homily, XXIV)
What he primarily finds in Christ is the miracle of our salvation: "A few drops of blood recreate the whole world, and become to all men what rennet is to milk, drawing us together and compressing us into unity" (ibid., XIX).
Reading such things, I began to note that most who taught them either lived early in the first millennium or in the eastern part of the Christian world, writing in Greek or Syriac. Similar Latin traditions were rare after the tenth century. Augustine already held human nature innately evil and incapable of good before the fifth century; Anselm of Aosta and Canterbury seven hundred years later in Cur Deus Homo reduced the human-divine relationship to terms off medieval politics. Created to vindicate God's honor by replacing the rebel angels, we failed by siding with the enemy; we thus needed a divine-human substitute to pay the infinite debt our defection had incurred. The metaphor determined much of the subsequent course of Western Christendom.
As I began to discover the source of my disillusionment with Christianity, I recalled a limited though powerful encounter with the Orthodox Faith at sixteen, reading The Brothers Karamazov. I had been so deeply impressed by the beauty of Elder Zosima's teaching that it was for a while my spiritual ideal. Thinking about it and discussing it with thoughtful fellow-Christians, I sadly concluded it a seductive fiction, unlike "real Christianity," which had to face harsh realities about the nature of man and of justice. Were these realities, or mere corruptions of the faith? Long-buried thoughts and hopes began to stir.
The "realism" of a concept of justice that required satisfaction through retribution was simple common sense in Puritan America. I now see it as an instance of the scandal Christ spoke of in the Gospel according to St Matthew (Mt 18), i.e., a snare by which innocence is corrupted. Anselm's theory presupposed Germanic codes of honor and Aristotle's theory of retributive justice. Substitutions in various equations of acts and sufferings were thought to accomplish an "arithmetical" equality of punishments and the crimes which they punished. "Righteousness" in Biblical texts has not a mathematical but an ontological sense, suggesting goodness, truth, honesty, and charity derived from God. The Hebrew original connotes holiness and embodiment of divine grace. This constitutes in the New Testament, where the Greek diakaios translates the Hebrew tzedek and is very close to agape which translates the Hebrew cognate tzedakah; at the same time, it continues a Hellenic tradition in which Socrates tells us that the just man is wise and benevolent and never harms even bad men (e.g., Republic, I. 350c, 355e). This is very close to Christ's evangelical precepts and consistent teaching that God is love and wills no man evil. What Aristotle calls corrective justice is a reality, but it is typically dealt out in anger by unjust men, often, as Cain demonstrates, against themselves; for the murderer says, "Everyone that findeth me shall slay me," and it is the Lord who marks him to protect him (Gen 4:14-15).
Original sin, which Shakespeare aptly calls "the doctrine of ill doing, " is the teaching that we are born bad and must persist in it. I think it manifests the scandal of which our Lord speaks. Children are innocent but vulnerable to people more experienced in sin, and their induction into violence and exploitation is the work of people who "scandalize" them by teaching them the ways of the world. Children are drawn, even with benevolent intent, into compromise, cynicism, and the pride of those like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor who think wisdom requires them to control and manage unsophisticated folk "for their own good." Dostoevsky's novels by no means ignore wicked and perverse elements of human nature, the possibility of cynicism, or the reality of child neglect and abuse. He always uses these themes to unmask his characters and show our spiritual need to refuse the diabolical bargains the world proposes and to protect children from such solicitations; for innocence can be corrupted, and good souls can fall into terrible despair and moral self-destruction. But he does not portray either effect as salutary or necessary, nor does he shirk the task of confronting our own freedom and responsibility.
Because Dostoevsky shows that truth sets us free, he presents characters who, whether beautiful as Zosima, innocent as Myshkin, corrupt as Karamazov senior, evil as Svidrigailov, or demonic as Stavrogin, present themselves as who they are. Without fear that real evil, truthfully portrayed, will attract us, Dostoevsky composes bufoons, heroes, victims, and monsters, to the dismay of the more fearful, less faith-filled souls who would hide evil from view. Because real evil wants disguise and anonymity, Dostoevsky follows his Lord in conscientiously uncovering it and exposing its stratagems. The Christian world-view I could not recognize in 1956, because it was too beautiful for the adolescent I then was, began to appear to me thirty years later through the fathers of the Church, to whom I turned to defend my hypothesis about the teaching of St John the Evangelist.
It took a very long time for me to face in myself the seeds of evil and the impossibility of dealing with it in terms of Augustinian Christianity or the increasingly radical rejections of Christianity I found in Hume, Smith, Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger. As a graduate student I had pursued Martin Heidegger to the news of the absence even of a dead God in modern Europe. I then resisted Nietzsche and Heidegger, trying to preserve a sort of Christianity as a neo-Calvinist and later as a non-papal would-be Catholic. When this failed, I tried to scrub my conscience clean as a disillusioned western Buddhist and comparative religionist. While trying to have a conscience and preserve something of my heritage, I had not improved my soul, but with God's help I began to the beauty of Orthodoxy. If the god of metaphysical politics, as Nietzsche put it, had killed himself from compassion for mankind, he was sadly misidentified, for the god thus discredited as an absolute cultural construct was not the Holy Trinity as confessed by Orthodoxy.
In disillusionment I sought to cleanse my conscience and consciousness of a false self-image and and inflated opinion of my knowledge of God. Self-knowledge, as Christ shows the quarreling disciples, requires the humility of a little child. Socrates shows Meno that the humility of a young boy is hard to achieve, for to have it we must relinquish the host of pretensions accumulated to defend against a hostile world. To recognize our pretensions we must recognize our ignorance, and no ignorance is as important as unknowing God; that is, we must free ourselves of the conceptual idols that separate us from communion with our personal God. When I began to attend Orthodox services regularly, it was soon apparent that there was no system I could grasp to assure myself that I had mastered a position; there was no position, just long services and too much tradition, it seemed for any man to master. I time I encountered the works attributed to St Dionysius the Areopagite; these demonstrate that the little child of whom Christ spoke to his disciples is the trues self of each of us before God. The divine essence is beyond articulation; the words of Scripture point beyond themselves and reveal the absurdity of any fundamentalism. To insist on "literal truth" in theology is to make a fool of oneself, whether one articulates theism or atheism. In doing so we "know not what we do," because any articulation taken literally is at best a reduction of ultimate truth to what a finite intellect can grasp; it is an idol.
The strongest 'positions' are at best illusions of strength. Predestination, for instance, is a strong position, for it claims to know a God who will protect one from everything - from poverty to the Great Tribulation - although it makes God responsible for all the evil in the world. Atheism is another strong position, claiming to know that no god, however powerful, will be able to damn one to hell; it is very comforting, especially to someone tempted to believe in a god who judges harshly. All such theories are finally childish insistence that the world cannot be out of our control, although war, disease, and natural disasters demonstrate that it is. Child like, as distinct from childish, consciousness allows that, although the world is very great and I am very small, it is beautiful and I am free to enjoy it, returning love for love.
Pascal found infinitely terrifying and wagered his faith to face that fear. The Unknown had acquired a very formidable aspect. Anselm of Aosta and Canterbury in the Proslogium sought certainty in a concept of god "greater than which nothing can be conceived," inaugurating a millennium of absolutism. From the Cartesian quest for an indubitable ground of truth to the absolutes of Spirit (Hegel), Matter (Marx), Positivism, and Protestant Fundamentalism, all ideological triumphalism is akin to the Crusades Anselm defended and the Norman Invasion he consolidated as God's Will. That than which no greater can be conceived threatens to consume the civilization that constructed it. Religion and politics are a dangerous pair; as religion provides a basis for ruthless pursuit of politics, the latter offers vast means to its idol. Machiavelli advised his Prince that, although love is good, fear is more useful, because love belongs to the lover, but the power of fear lies in the Prince. Hobbes' state like Pascal's faith is founded on terror.
St John tell us that God is the Love whose perfection casts out all fear. Faith, love, and sin are three things we are said to confess. All are fundamental commitments; confessing faith is an act of devotion to God, confessing love is a promise to keep faith with the beloved, and confessing sin commits one to repentance and reform. None can be done with full knowledge, for we cannot know the infinites of time, divinity, or the soul. Moses and Paul tell us God is not only incomprehensible but destructive to our mortal being; yet both affirm the faithful love he demonstrates by protecting Moses in the cleft of the rock and healing Paul of the blindness he incurred by persecuting him. We have the word of Christ that the incomprehensible God comes to us in love, in his own Incarnation and in the person of the Holy Spirit who dwells intimately with those who follow the ascended Lord. Who sees him, sees the Father, he says; moreover, he prays the Father that as Father and Son are One, his disciples will be one with them, and with each other. This union with the Eternal is an infinite task, requiring eternal life for fulfillment in a finite being. It begins of necessity with free confession of sin, faith, and love, approaching God with loving fear and trust."
+ Fr David Starr, St Julianna of Lazarevo Russian Orthodox Parish, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
[Starr, David. "A Confession" in "Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith" Edited by Rico Vitz (Yonkers: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2012) 148-154.]
