Reflections on required reading pt. iv

Χριστος ανεστη!

I have spoken about this before, but what keeps me captive with the passion of rage is the want for those who have wronged me to apologize for what they did, or what I perceived as what they did.

It’s a long list.

This is forgiving others’ trespasses as a transactional interaction, though, and not only that, but I assume I’ll be waiting long after the Second Coming for an apology that I wouldn’t also just lord over the one who wronged me. I know in my heart that even if someone apologized to me, sincerely, it wouldn’t make a difference. Christ could show up with trumpets and confetti and I’d still sit pouting about all this stuff that is just… the Leviathan. 

The logos is blind, it cannot return back to its source; it cannot accomplish its purpose nor succeed in that which it was sent by God. How can it accomplish anything that is in Christ when its teleological path is shaped from ignorance?

Thus, we come back to God’s perfect love for humanity and His longsuffering of we who have strayed from His Presence, His ways, and His will. We, too, must suffer as our Father suffers, which is only suffering for a temporary time before it reveals in us joy everlasting. This type of suffering is following Christ to the cross where we voluntarily surrender ourselves: mind, body, and soul to God in obedience to Him… forgiving others as God Himself forgives us. 

God is merciful whereas we are petty… I am petty. 

Too often it feels that Christians learn the commandments out of an obligatory sense of doing Christianity, but then wield God’s teachings as a way to position themselves so much higher than others, in and out of the Church, alike. When we hold on to religious teachings without love the only thing that can arise from this mode is legalism leading to self-righteous piety which is a mask for self-infatuation or: Pride. 

As previously stated, Christianity is not a religion among many religions, but a relationship between Divinity and Man, when we focus too much on checking the spiritual boxes of His commandments then we will inevitably lose the love in which imbues this relationship in its fullness.

We will have nowhere to go but to sit on our own seat of judgment, which itself implies stagnation and non-movement… non-being,

“But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces” (Luke 11:42-43). 

The Pharisees neglect justice and the love of God; I looked it up and found that cardinal virtues which go back to Plato and expounded upon by Aristotle in his work on ethics eventually finding themselves in the Christian tradition by no later than the 4th century with the writings of St. Ambrose.

These four cardinal virtues are as follows: temperance (or sobriety/nepsis and watchfulness), justice, prudence (or Wisdom), and fortitude (or endurance, fortitude, or courage). Now, if “there can be no doubt that the Word of God is the substance of virtue in each person” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 58), then it is clear that when we practice justice, we are living Christ, for God is justice (Psalm 10:7).

I bring this up, because it is clear to me that we humans have a distorted view of justice (at least I do) to wield in such a way against others, intentionally or not. While justice, to me, means that everyone who has wronged me takes responsibility for what they’ve done… Funny how that excludes me from doing the same thing; this does not feel like Divine Justice. This is not the virtue of which emerges from the substance of the Word of God. 

So, what is justice? 

St. Dionysius the Areopagite writes, “But further, Almighty God is celebrated as justice, as distributing things suitable to all, both due measure, and beauty, and good order, and arrangement, and marking out all distributions and orders for each, according to that which truly is the most just limit, and as being Cause for all of the free action of each. For the Divine Justice arranges and disposes all things, and preserving all things unmingled and unconfused, from all, gives to all existing beings things convenient for each, according to the due falling to each existing thing” (On the Divine Names, Caput 8:7).

Justice is order, a perfect ordering of things; The Fall put the cosmos into disarray and so Man continues this in his disobedience to God. The Incarnation re-ordered the cosmos, literally justifying Man in relation to God. So, justice in relation to our practical Christian lives can be understood as participating in the divine nature, being justified is not only a forensic theological term, but means to be made God by God… So, in cooperation with God and in accordance with the Eternal Logos from which the logos of our being has as its ontological beginning and end, we can practice justice, and thereby participate in the essence of Christ by being merciful.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). 

Mercy is the forgiveness of sins and the gift of God’s divinizing grace. When we show mercy unto others we are opening up to God’s mercy and vice versa. In this opening we are declaring that we are nothing without God, we are identifying with the publican rather than the Pharisee that we need God, we need Him, because without Him we would not have our being for He is Being itself. 

Extending the hand of mercy is manifesting the Eternal Logos and becoming an icon of the Almighty. 

The logoi that make up humanity’s being are held in and emerge from the Word of God that are expressed through Creation and will come back to Him accomplishing that which He has purposed for them. We are all here to do the will of God, whether we know it or not; whether we accept that or not, but this can only be done by voluntarily surrendering our logos through obedience and recognition that it is only through the Word, our beginning, that we can approach the Father. 

To be made God by God is to become like God in self-sacrifice, sacrificing our fallen want to chase after the fleeing serpent and fleeting desires of pride, lust, and greed that defile the logos. St. Dionysius writes that Divine Justice “arranges and disposes all things, and preserving all things unmingled and unconfused, from all, gives to all existing beings things convenient for each, according to the due falling to each existing thing.”

Unmingled and unconfused, harkening back to the Council of Chalcedon wherein Christ’s divinity and humanity were explained as unconfused in this hypostatic union, making Christ very God and very Man. Furthermore, this idea of unconfused being conjures an image of the pre-existing logos within us unmingled with the things of this world, unconfused by its fallen self with knowledge of its true being. 

St. Maximus writes, “If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (λόγος) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi? This is evident in the incomparable differences among created things. For each is unmistakable unique in itself and its identity remains distinct in relation to other things” St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 54).

What I take from both of these Saints’ works together is that the beginning of our journey is in acknowledging the reality of God and that we derive our being from Him. That the logoi are of one genesis, Who is Christ and true being in realizing that we are not wholly material beings, simply products of the world, but are, in fact, children of God, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34). 

We are of God and for a lot of us that means we need to spend our sojourn through the world unlearning what it has taught us about ourselves. Justice, then, is holding fast to the truth–that we are the children of God for He is our ontological beginning and that the means of redemption are as unique and distinct as the logoi that are expressed by the Logos.

Salvation is found in our beginning and through Him we return to Him. Yet, we return differently than how we were born, because of going through life, refined and tested like silver and gold. Justice is recognizing that it is not our life that we live for ourselves, but a life that has movement in God, lived for God, as it is God’s life. 

This is justice: participating in the divine life, being made God by God instead of participating in the fleeing serpent and fallen time of this current age. And this is difficult because it means we must take responsibility for the logos that yearn to return to their Creator. And for this reason, we must extend the hand of mercy toward others, because they are children of God, too—they are Christ Himself, Incarnate and walking amongst us… and they are suffering.

Seeing them with God’s eyes, the perspective of an unconfused, undefiled logos is to see everyone as God’s precious child and when one suffers all suffer, for we are all connected by the Father. Even those who have wronged us suffer, those we see as enemies suffer, those we see as foreigners suffer, those we see as agents of non-being suffer (yes, the demons suffer, too).

And perhaps it is not too far-fetched to say that the devil, the non-person, parasitic entity that seeks to destroy the image of God within humanity and pull us all into non-being… perhaps this creature suffers, too. 

All the logoi suffer, in ways distinct and as unique as their being and the good works prepared for them to do by God. God’s children suffer because this is not their home; they long to go home, yet many do not know the Way.

Though the goodness of God is revealed and multiplied in all things that have their origin in him, with a degree of beauty appropriate to each being we all have a single destination that we are moving toward. And by the grace of God the more we can act in accordance with our logos, that has its origin in Him, the more we can succeed in the thing for which He sent us, to recapitulate all things in Himself. 

So, a life in Christ is movement.

Movement using every part of the logos: mind, body, and soul. We participate in a relationship with Him wherein we are made God by God… And to be made God by God is to do the good works that God has prepared for us. What that is for each of us will be revealed through living virtuously and sacramentally, but for me I see nothing more beautiful than walking His children home. 

With Christ, in Christ, and through Christ all we’re doing is walking each other home.

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