The Nature of Man

The following is a chapter taken from the book "O Death where is thy Sting?" written by Father Alexander Schmemann. Chapter 8 entitled "The nature of Man" contemplates the mystery of the fall and how we can move forward following the fall. Fr. Alexander uses as his starting point the imagery of food. He relates food to the fall and how it is we become in communion with each other instead of being in communion with God. Our ultimate goal is communion with God and he tries to display this in the chapter!
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One of the popular critiques of Christianity relates to its teaching about the fall of man. In this teaching the opponents of Christianity see a pessimistic attitude and the demeaning of human dignity. Perhaps in light of what I was discussing previously this accusation begins to lose its demagogic sting.

I began my conversations by citing Feuerbach, one of the founders of contemporary materialism. Feuerbach is remembered for his classic statement: “man is what he eats”. Ironically, this seeming reduction of humanity to food, to matter, without realizing it, Feuerbach himself said exactly what the bible says about mankind. The Bible teaches us that man is first of all a being who is thirsty and hungry, who transforms the world into his own life. But in contrast to Feuerbach, who subjects humanity to food and matter, the Bible sees in this transformation the goal of humanity to make the world into life, and thereby make it a means of communion with the world, with its beginnings, with its purpose, with God. Only in light of this basic biblical teaching can we understand why the symbol of man’s fall in the bible is also connected with food. 

On the basis of the mythical (that is, symbolic) story in the Bible, the whole world was given by God as food to man, with the exception of one forbidden fruit. And it is precisely this fruit that man eats, refusing to believe and to obey God.

What is the meaning of this story, which greets us like a child’s fable? It means that the fruit of this one tree, in contrast to all others, was not given as a gift to man. It did not bear God’s blessing. This means that if man ate this fruit, he did not eat it in order to have life with God, as a means of transforming it into life, but rather as a goal in itself, and thus, having consumed it, man subjected himself to food. He desired to have life not from God or for God but rather for himself.

The very fall of man consists in the fact that he desired life for himself and in himself, and not for God and in God. God made this very world a means of communion with himself, but man desired the world purely for himself alone.

Instead of returning God’s love with love for him, man fell in love with the world, as a goal in itself. But herein lies the whole problem, that the world cannot be an end in and of itself, just as food has no purpose unless it is transformed into life. So too, the world, having ceased to be transparent to God, has become an endless commotion, a senseless cycle of tie in which everything is constantly in flux, constantly vanishing, and, in the final analysis, dying.

In the divine conception of humanity, dependence on the world was overcome by the transformation of the world itself into life. Life means possessing God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men”=so we read in the Gospel of John (1.4). But if the world is no longer transformed into anything, if life ceases to be a transformation into communion with Absolute Meaning, with Absolute Beauty, with Absolute Goodness, then this world becomes not only meaningless, it becomes death. Nothing has life in and by itself, everything vanishes, everything dissolves. Cut off from its roots, a flower can live for a short time in water and even decorate a room, but we realize that it is dying, that it is already subject to corruption.

Man ate the forbidden fruit, thinking that it would give him life. But life itself outside of and without God is simply communion with death. It is no accident that what we eat already needs to be dead in order to become our life. We eat in order to live, but since we eat something that is already deprived of life, food itself inevitably leads us to death. And in death there neither is nor can be any life.   

“Man is what he eats”. There it is, he eats…death-dead animals, dead vegetation, rot and dissolution. He himself dies and, perhaps, the enormity of his fall consists precisely in the fact that this very death-filled and corrupt life, this life defined from the very beginning by corruption, this life that flows and irrevocably vanishes-this life he considers absolutely normal. And he is confirmed in this attitude by those who dare to blame Christianity as being pessimistic and as destructive toward man. But when Christ approached the grace of his friend Lazarus, and they said to him, “Do not come near, for he already stinks” (Jn 11.39), Christ did not consider this normal-he wept.

“I am the image of your ineffable glory”-and yet they remove him and hide him so that he would not smell and disrupt their routines-this Man, this image and likeness of God, this king and crown of creation! Indeed, this horrible meaninglessness of the world, this constant commotion of mankind within a cosmic cemetery, these pathetic attempts to build something for those who are dying, for those already dead, and finally, the affirmation of all of this as normal and natural-this is what Christianity declares as the Fall, as the falsification by man of himself and of his divine and eternal calling. It refuses to come to terms with such a worldview, and firmly and clearly proclaims: “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15.26).

We began these conversations with food, with Feuerbach’s “man is what he eats”. At the same time we saw that Christianity also places the fundamental hunger of mankind at the center of its understanding. However, Christianity alone offers an entirely unique approach to the question of what man is ultimately seeking, of what is the only thing that can satisfy his hunger. What is it that he desires? Feuerbach and the rest of the materialists will answer: he wants freedom, he wants prosperity, and he wants to be well fed. But what is the use of freedom, prosperity, and food to one who is condemned to death? Why should one build vacation homes in cemetery? Whatever we pursue, everything ends up in this dead-end, which Vladimir Soloviev described so well, “death and time are reigning on earth”.

To this question Christianity answers: man desires life, not simply for a moment, but for eternity, life which in the church’s hymnography so beautifully is called “life unfading”. This life is not to be found in food, although it is through food that man receives it, and not in the air, although breathing gives him the possibility to search for and desire it, and not even in good health. This life is the One who is himself life, that is, in God-in the knowledge of him, in communion with him, in love and in praise and in the possession of him. This is why it is the one who is fallen into death and into servitude to food, having become only that which he eats-this man-who needs to be saved. Subsequently, this becomes the basic theme of Christianity, the teaching about salvation, about the restoration and resurrection of man from death to life. 

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, O Death where is thy Sting, The nature of man, Pages 71-78. 

God is Motion

Metropolitan Georges Khodr: God is Motion

Original Arabic here.

I am always struck by he words of the Nazarene, "Love your neighbor as yourself". He never once said, "strive for your neighbor to love you". Love is an act of going to the other, not of attracting an emotion. Christ never once said, "seek to be loved". You come into being by abandoning yourself. This is the mystery of humanity, that one of us subsists in himself or for himself. You exist in and with others. Human existence is communion: Your Lord knows you if you love. you exist if you forget yourself in your act of going to the other.

Individualism is true if you mean by it the independence of each one of us from the tyranny of the group, but individualism is not withdrawal or isolation. Personhood is contemporary philosophy does not mean isolation or inward withdrawal. It is the conformation of the self in love because the self exists in communion.

There is no contradiction between sound individualism and existing in society, because a good society does not eliminate the rational and loving self. Indeed, it can only exist in it. The group is not a herd because the herd has no love in it.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" because he is your equal, because the two of you are one before the Lord. The one whom you love is not necessarily your friend. You love because you come into existence through love insofar as it is going out from the "I" into the "we". Truth is in the "we". Egoism is exclusionary, but love is confirmed and confirms the other at the same time. It is not possible for you to love the other unless you subsist within yourself (and I did not say "subsist in yourself"). For you to subsist within yourself also means that you subsist in the other. You cannot be in yourself if you are not one with the Lord. If the Lord is not within you, you are deadly for yourself, you eat yourself.

Love is not in rejecting the self. It is rejecting the closed-off ego. If you go out to the other by casting egoism out of yourself, you return to yourself free. The one who loves does not hate himself. He hates to monopolize himself. Loving yourself, insofar as your self is from God, is loving God. It is gaining God for yourself, since if you do not make God your own, how can He be? If you do not understand that He is motion, He will not reach you. He is fixed in his motion.

God is a movement of love. We have only known Him in His supporting His people and no one knows Him unless the Lord Himself moves towards him. God is constantly in a state of coming down. This is the true meaning of inspiration. God is revelation. Yes, the Lord is fixed. This fixedness is His love.

Love is movement. It is you believing that the other is fundamental for you, even for your breathing. If you move toward the face of the other, you find the face of God. In your isolated tower, you have no god. It is your suicide. You do not face God by Himself. You find in Hi others, because God is in the group, in love. There is nothing that will be revealed to you if you do not go out of yourself to it and to others. You have no existence with your Lord if you are not with others. He is on their faces--it is there that you read Him.  

The Speech - Science wins?

A close friend of mine (Vanda) had sent me the other day this speech. I found it quite enlightening and relating to our modern times. Give it a read and leave your comments. Also I have attached a link at the bottom to a talk given by Fr. John Behr. The theme is death and I thought it relates quite well to the theme of this particular speech.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"

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With the world watching he began to speak...

To those of science, let me say this. You have won the war.

The wheels have been in motion for a long time. Your victory has been inevitable. Never before has it been as obvious as it is this moment. Science is the new God.

Medicine, electronic communications, space travel, genetic manipulation...these are the miracles about which we now tell our children. These are the miracles we herald as proof that science ill bring us the answers. The ancient stories of immaculate conceptions, burning bushes, and parting seas are no longer relevant. God has become obsolete. Science has won the battle. We concede.

But science's victory has cost every one of us. And it has cost us deeply. Science may have alleviated the miseries of disease and drudgery and provided an array of gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience, but is has left us in a world without wonder. Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident. Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal. Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it nay wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history? Does science hold anything sacred? Science looks for answers by probing our unborn fetuses. Science even presumes to rearrange our own DNA. It shatters God's world into smaller and smaller pieces in quest of meaning...and all it finds is more questions.

The ancient war between science and religion is now over. you have won. But you have not won fairly. you have not won by providing answers. you have won by so radically reorienting our society that the truths we once saw as signposts now seem inapplicable. Religion cannot keep up. Scientific growth is exponential. It feeds on itself like a virus. Every new breakthrough opens doors for new breakthroughs. Mankind took thousands of years to progress fro the wheel to the car. Yet only decades from the car into space. Now we measure scientific progress in weeks. We are spinning out of control. The rift between us grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFOs, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experience, mindquests-all these eccentric ideas have a specific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. They are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology.

Science, you say, will save us. Science I say, has destroyed us. Since the days of Galileo, the church has tried to slow the relentless march of science, sometimes with misguided means, but always with benevolent intention. Even so, the temptations are too great for man to resist. I warn you, look around yourselves. The promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species...moving on a path of destruction.

Who is this God science? Who is the God who offers his people power but no moral framework to tell you how to use that power? What kind of God gives a child fire but does not warn the child of its dangers? The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad. Science textbooks tell us how to create a nuclear reaction, and yet they contain no chapter asking us if it is a good or bad idea.          

To science, I say this. The church is tired. We are exhausted from trying to be your sign posts. Our resources are drying up from our campaign to be the voice of balance as you plow blindly on in your quest for smaller chips and larger profits. We ask not why you will not govern yourselves, but how can you? Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur. So you move on. You proliferate weapons of mass destruction, but it is the Pope who travels the world beseeching leaders to use restraint. You clone living creatures, but it is the church reminding us to consider the moral implications of our actions. You encourage people to interact on phones, video screens, and computers, but it is the church who opens its doors and reminds us to commune in person as we were meant to do. You even murder unborn babies in the name of research that will save lives. Again, it is the church who points out the fallacy of this reasoning.

And all the while, you proclaim the church is ignorant. But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lighting, or the man who does respect its awesome power? This church is reaching out to you. Reaching out to everyone. And yet the more we reach, the more you push us away. Show me proof there is a God, you say. I say use your telescopes to look to the heavens, and tell me how there could not be a God! You ask what does God look like. I say, where does that question come from? The answers are one and the same. Do you not see God in our science? How can you miss Him! You proclaim that even the slightest change in the force of gravity or the weight of an atom would have rendered our universe a lifeless mist rather than out magnificent sea of heavenly bodies, and yet you fail to see God's hand in this? It is really so much easier to believe that we simply chose the right card from a deck of billions? Have we become so spiritually bankrupt that we would rather believe in mathematical impossibility than in a power greater than us?    

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this. When we as a species abandon our trust in the power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faith...all faiths...are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable...with faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. If the outside world could see this church as I do...looking beyond the ritual of these walls...they would see a modern miracle...a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

Are we obsolete? Are these men dinosaurs? Am I? Does the world really need a voice for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the unborn child? Do we really need souls like these who, though imperfect, spend their lives imploring each of us to read the signposts of morality and not lose our way?

Tonight we are perched on a precipice. None of us can afford to be apathetic. Whether you see this evil as Satan, corruption, or immorality, the dark force is alive and growing every day. Do not ignore it. The force, though mighty, is not invincible. Goodness can prevail. Listen to your hearts. Listen to God. Together we can step back from this abyss.

Pray with me...

Liturgical Experience

Last week I was speaking to my father about the progression of the church from the 1st century to the modern times. We concluded that the beauty of the church is not about how "it has stayed the same", which it has, but rather the progression of the faith throughout the century has made the church what is it today. Many complain that the church is out of date and that 3 hour liturgies need to be dropped. I would challenge such an idea and ask the question since when did 3 hour liturgies ever remain the same? In the early church celebrating the Eucharist probably took less than an hour however, the fellowship spent at the church house probably lasted the whole day. Liturgy should then not be viewed as an "3 hour service" but liturgy should be taken in as the service of love. Liturgy lived for the life of the world is the liturgy that people can see Christ in us. By seeing Christ and seeing the love we live by then Christ becomes the ever present reality for the life of the world. Liturgy by definition is the ever lasting work of the people. It is not about a priest doing a few funny things in front of the holy of holies but it is the work of the people coming together in the body of Christ to fulfilled the commandment of Christ. To go out to the rest of the world and to preach the word of Christ baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the priest always recites "Your own of your own we offer unto you, on behalf of all and for all". The work of the people is the liturgy that is lived for the life of the world. The following is a nice passage I came across from a book I was reading that relates the message of the progression of the liturgy. Enjoy. 

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Liturgical Experience

'During divine service be trustful, as a child trusts his parents. [...] Cast all your care upon the Lord [...]; "Take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in the same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father, which speaketh in you." Long ago has the Lord freed us from this care, having by His Spirit taught the Church what to say, how to pray, at divine service." Such an attitude to the worship of our Church does not stem from conservatism.

Nor were the Church's hymnographers inspired by the principle of newness. New elements do not come into Orthodox worship from any feeling that past forms are stale, but for positive reasons:

• 1) Teaching - for example when heresy threatened, or a Feast was instituted to focus more specifically on an event such as Christ's birth.
• 2) New events, such as a saint's canonisation or a miraculous deliverance.
• 3) An aspect of life is made the subject of common prayers - for instance, the environment, or a child's beginning school.
• 4) Local celebrations and adaptations are more widely adopted.
• 5) God inspired the composition and its insertion without any previous pastoral decision giving rise to it.

Orthodox teenagers were speaking disparagingly about forms of worship they had experienced at an ecumenical service.

Girl: 'They even had guitars in church.'

Another girl: 'We had to sing - and mime! - a "harvest" thanksgiving chorus about MacDonald's hamburgers!' [I was treated to a rendition.] 

S.M.: 'I'd feel an idiot singing that in a church! But be careful to get your reasons for being so scathing right! At least they were thanking God, singing about Christ. That's quite something nowadays. You can glorify God by a guitar. Or just enjoy it anyway, there's no sin in that. The really important point is not that it was laughably corny, but that it is a mistake to keep adapting the Liturgy, to replace inspired services. It is not wrong in itself to add another means of worshipping for other moments.'

Girl: 'The girls at school don't want it; the teachers make it up to try and be up to date.' 

S.M.: 'Yes, to "keep the young people in Church". C.S. Lewis says, "If something is not eternal, it is eternally out of date." Look at the rock charts. By the time you compose a service based on this week's style and get it approved by a liturgical committee  you'll be ages behind the fashion and have to start again. And there's no guarantee you're inspiring truth about God. It is not a service tested by centuries of praying saints. I'd rather struggle to pray like St. John Chrysostom myself. It's more sure. And it will take me a lifetime to get all I can out of it. The things that don't matter so much can change week by week.'

The saints who expressed reservations about elaborated hymnography in comparison with monologistic prayer (monologistic means concentrated in a short phrase; the Jesus prayer is the most widely practised of this type) were not rebels. Some ascetics live at such a depth of prayer that they have less need of liturgical richness. For the rest of humanity, the forms of our public services take people in a positive direction, freeing their minds from heterogeneous preoccupations. Common worship is also valuable as means of uniting with others in prayer. Athonite monks are taught that even thought prayer in the cell can go deeper than prayer in the church, monks who conclude that it is therefore better to skip the services will not gain grace in their cells.

+ Sister Magdalen of Essex, "Conversations with Children: Communicating our Faith," (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2004) 194-6. ISBN 1 874679 21 5

I Believe in God but I don't go to Church

I cam across this blog entry: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/07/i-believe-in-god-but-i-dont-go-to-church.html and I thought this would be excellent to re-blog here because it deals exactly with a lot of issues that many priests and clerics deal with on a daily basis. Archimandrite Paul Papadopoulos get's to the heart of the issue which is focused on egoism. Egoism fuels the drive to be above scripture, to be above the church and everything that it stands for. Of course being united to Christ is not the work of the individual but the work of the community.

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I believe in God but I don't go to church."

We often hear the above phrase from acquaintances, friends and relatives, so our discussion will focus a little more on spiritual matters.

The basic argument of people who say that they believe in God yet do not go to church to participate in the Mysteries of our Orthodox Church, is that they are bothered by certain things, such as the luxuriousness of churches, obnoxious priests and chanters, the language is ancient (they don't understand it), the microphones, the lights, the candle offering (where they give money for a candle), the time the Divine Liturgy is celebrated, etc.

The excuses are certainly a lot when someone DOES NOT WANT to live according to how the Church says. Unfortunately these people consider themselves outside the Church since they do not accept the basic components of the life in Christ, which is the participation of a Christian in the Mysteries of the Church. These people are not Christians, at least not Orthodox, because while they (supposedly) believe, they do not follow any word of Christ.

The issue of course is that most baptized Christians do not know who Christ is or what the Church is, and what Christ and the Church offer to people. Thus they do not attend church, because essentially they do not know what they are missing, and they do not know what the sacramental life can offer.

The Church, with all Her Mysteries, transforms us, sanctifies us, and brings us into communion with God. Our participation in the Mysteries of the Church is the key to this personal resurrection of ours.

The Church does not exist merely to take the position of medicine and exhaust all its capabilities, as some wrongly treat it. The Church exists to lead people, the faithful, to the Love, the Light and the Life in Christ through the Mysteries.

To say you believe in God is easy, but to believe in God in an Orthodox manner and to do corresponding works is difficult, though not impossible.

If a person really wants to know Christ, they can do this through the sacramental life offered by the Church. If you want to fool yourself you can claim to achieve this on your own. However, I do not know anyone that has been sanctified outside the Church. (The crazy thing is that some people consider as saints people like Elder Paisios, Elder Porphyrios, etc., yet they do not accept their lives.)

All this happens for just one reason: Egoism. When each person believes themselves to be a better interpreter of the Scriptures, and they believe the God-bearing Fathers of the Church are beneath them, and they believe they are smarter, more worthy and holier than the old "religionists" as they call them, and when they believe they have no need to repent of any of their sins (!), and they could be saved by themselves (whatever that means to them), then this text will probably not trouble them at all, rather it has been a long time since they fell into the abyss of self-love and delusion.

The biggest obstacle that prevents contemporary man from reaching communion with God is precisely this: they are trying to know Him the wrong way, using the wrong means, outside the Church. They dismiss the mystery of love and remain willfully grounded in a sterile faith which in a best case scenario simply means "acknowledging the existence of God" and not trusting and surrendering to Divine Providence.