Reflections on required reading pt. ii

Χριστος ανεστη!

Through reading St. Maximus’ works, prayer, and the grace of God, I have come to understand the cosmic nature and consequences of The Fall through the lens of God’s love for Man. Otherwise, it is only another sacred origin story like any other, having parallels with Mesopotamian origin myths. But as previously alluded to, Christianity’s true practice is not as a religion among many religions; Christianity is a relationship between Divinity and Man as well as the movement of God to Man and Man to God.

It is why our religion needs to be safeguarded against people who either do not understand its nature or try to make it fit their needs: this goes for far-right fundamentalists and far-left progressives alike.

Christianity is not a lego set that one can dismantle by adding or subtracting pieces from other lego sets to suit them and their ego. It is in this way one defiles their logos using the very tools in which another seeks to free their logos from captivity of the passions, and this fallen state.

God’s love for Man is profound and while no words could possibly describe His love for Man, words might certainly reduce His love to a mere transaction between Deity and individual. I’ll get down off my soapbox when we Christians are ready to accept God for Who He is rather than Who we want Him to be which by extension follows that by accepting the Christian confession we are accepting who we are, deep down as pre-existing logoi which were held together in Christ before our creation with their inherent telos rather than what we want to be—which too often, due to our fallen selves, involves slouching toward non-being.

The latter of which can be categorized (if non-being can be categorized at all) as the false, or idealized, self. 

Recognize His love for us! 

Anyway, perfect freedom is acting in accordance with the logoi and participating in the divine nature via virtuous and sacramental living. This freedom is a process of realizing our true being, which has its origins in God and has as its end, its beginning. Yet, as a result of The Fall, human beings can use their free will to voluntarily defect and continue falling, directing our desire toward what defiles our being rather than what energizes it and unifies it with God.

I see the consequence of The Fall ongoing, but the direct result of it: death, as a sign of God’s perfect love for humanity. “Adam was deceived and chose to cut himself off voluntarily from God’s happy end for him, preferring by his own free choice to be drawn down to the earth than to become God by grace… [Therefore] God who works out our salvation, fixed a punishment that is suitable to the irrational movement of our intellectual faculty. The punishment was death” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 67).

This punishment is not the conjuration of an angry Deity Who seeks to injure us or put us down, but the action of a loving Father Who simply wishes for us to seek Him in contrast to our own selfish desires, which are inherently in a state of flux due to our fallen nature. 

The Eternal Logos is the generative force behind Life, yet it is the longsuffering love that gave human’s mortality for without death we would be trapped in the fallen world, unable to be redeemed or be united with Him–death entered the world by Adam’s disobedience, yet “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And so, it is this punishment of death that became our way to eternal life, through the sacrifice of God’s Word. This is love. That the Eternal Logos gave His life, imbuing death with eternity, so that we might never face the punishment for Man’s first sin.

Again, this is the love of a Father Who is pained to bring death to His children, yet uses it to bring them closer to Him. It is a profound love and even suffering, a byproduct of The Fall, works for good, because “it is only when we have been taught by suffering that we who love non-being can regain the capacity to love what is” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 67).

Suffering here can be seen as a product of a paternal love, the love that a Father has for His children, and it is non-being that can help shake loose the intellect of Man so that he may stagger from darkness into light. 

It is somewhat remarkable that God, the Father of Creation, can use even evil to His gain; He can use the fleeting desires of Man and the passions that hold them captive to redirect their focus toward things that lie above.

On the other hand, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted by St. Maximus writes, “None of the good things of this present life can be relied on. They are shortlived. The things we see, though made by the creative Logos and the wisdom that transcends all wisdom, are always changing, now one way and now another, born upward and then downward. That is why it seems we are being played with. Before something can be laid hold of it flees and escapes our grasp. Yet there is purpose in all this, for when we reflect on the instability and fickleness of such things, we are led to seek refuge in the enduring things that are to come” (Ibid.). 

We see that it is neither the good or the bad things of this life, subjective as those categories can sometimes be, are the object in which we should focus our aim, if sin is to miss the mark (hamartia/ἁμαρτία), then even aiming at what might be desirable will lead us to error due to the inherent instability and fickleness of such things, “but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

Christ explains that seeking that which is eternal above all things will be enough to acquire what we need in this present life, for though these things were generated by the creative Logos these things are not God… 

The Fall is an instrumental record of what is continuing to be prevalent in this present age. It was Satan, who according to the Fathers, is not a person, because only God is a Person; Satan is a parasite and entity that uses persons to advance darkness and confusion in the world. The sin that Satan tempted Eve and by extension Adam with is a twofold error: disobedience to God or defecting from movement toward Him as our logos is naturally inclined to do, and the temptation to become God without God.

This is apotheosis and it is where we find ourselves today, to the nth degree. Additionally, the disobedience of this present age can be found in the amount of suffering that our contemporary society faces, internally and externally–where we are trapped by our own prideful logismoi, pushed and pulled by corporate BS and our own fleeting desires. 

But the suffering that God allows for us to reckon with is out of His immense and long-suffering love that He has for us all. 

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:18-21).

The trials we face work toward our freedom from the passions; the suffering we face in this life is meant to direct our logos toward its telos, “For if life always went well, would we not become so attached to our present state, even though we know it will not last, and by deception become enslaved to pleasure? In the end we would think that our present life is the best and noblest, and forget that, being made in the image of God, we are destined for higher things” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 67). 

The disobedience introduced through the first temptation still holds us captive to this day, in that we seek to obliterate the image of God within us and thereby destroy our inherent telos. Ontologically-speaking, we are eradicating our origins and falling further into ignorance of our true being. To go back to the idea that our mind, soul, and body are one, in relationship with one another and each defined by their relationship with each other then we can consider the illusory concept of reincarnation, but rather the reality of the bodily resurrection.

See, reincarnation (and westernized, bastardized, Eastern philosophical concepts) too often are used to promote subjective idealistic perspectives and its solipsistic philosophical consequences: hedonism and nihilism. 

Reincarnation… as ironic as it may seem to say, is a deceptive trap leading the individual to believe that there is yet another life after this one wherein they can make better choices or live in an idealized state—both of which are tricks of the fallen self—lies of the devil that repentance can wait until tomorrow. 

Not just tomorrow, but until the next life. 

Reincarnation has been used as a political tool in India’s caste system, so why would it not also be devised as a demonic tool of non-being trying to convince us all that if we only do this or that, that we can come back with riches beyond our wildest dream?

In the West, the approach is different because of the contentedness of our culture giving reincarnation the laissez-faire quality that it has amongst New Age communities and others of their ilk.

No, the body and the soul are one, and as such they are to be treated as one, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).  

What does the Apostle mean when he declares that we are not our own? 

He is explicitly referring to the logoi, our logos, that which belongs to Christ, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We are not meant to spend our time here chasing after even the good, for see that these things are shortlived, nor are we to fall into despair over suffering because we see that these things are for our good, to be refined like silver and gold; to truly see the fickleness of worldly things. 

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,

    vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). 

If we can take anything from the teaching of reincarnation it is meant to teach us there is nothing new under the sun, “Through the irregularity of things that are seen and shift back and forth God directs us to those that are stable and enduring” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 67). 

We will be looking at the Christian concept of reincarnation and the Christian vocation of likening our image to He Who gave us His image which is being imaged in Life. Selah.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ