Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 24 - June 7, 2024
This remembrance of the future Coming of Christ is to be found in all the eucharistic canons of the East, but strikingly in none of the West.
In many cases, particularly among the Orthodox today, the Eucharist is celebrated in dark churches so as to create the atmosphere of “mysticism” or even contrition, while the splendor of iconography or of the clerical vestments inherited from Byzantium tends to be regarded as an offence to the humility displayed by Christ in his earthly life. What the Church “remembers” in the Eucharist today is no longer the glorious eschatological King but the humble and crucified Jesus. It is a remembrance of the past, not of the future.
The same importance must be given to eschatology in dealing with the doctrine of the fall. We normally understand the fall as the loss of an original perfection owing to the disobedience of the first human beings to God’s commandment, the cause of the appearance of all the evils in our existence, including corruption and death. Such an understanding of the fall is at odds with the scientifically established fact that corruption and death existed in creation long before the appearance of the human being and were not caused by human behavior. The idea of an originally perfect world was common to
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This is how the ingenuity of a thinker like St Maximus the Confessor perceives the fall: “The first human being,” he writes, “having deprived (ἐλλείψας) the movement of its natural power of the energy toward the end (τῆς πρὸς τὸ τέλος ἐνεργείας) was diseased with the ignorance of its own cause.” Evil, therefore, is nothing else but “the deprivation (ἔλλειψις) of the energy toward the end.”42 The human being has fallen not from its past but from its future; it refused to move to the end to which it was called, or for which it was created.
The essence of the fall consists in humanity’s enslavement to the past, its exiling of the future to the domain of the unreal and denial of it having an ontological effect on existence.
It is not accidental that Byzantine iconography represents Christ’s Resurrection as his descent into hades and the liberation of Adam from death. The Resurrection, therefore, was not a successive stage in Christ’s life following upon his Cross and his burial; it was already present in Christ’s death, as the factor that made this death ontologically significant. Had there not been the Resurrection, the death of Christ would prove that history is condemned to succumb to its finitude, to “being-unto-death.”
The things of the Old Testament are shadow (σκιά); those of the New Testament are image (εἰκών); truth is the state of the things of the future.
For Heidegger, the futurity of being is identical with death: it is our finitude that draws us back to the past in order to understand, or interpret, our historical existence (an infinite being does not need hermeneutics.) For the Christian faith, it is the abolition of death by the Resurrection that leads us back to the past in order to
interpret history. The consequences are existentially important.
σαρκικὸς = living παρὰ φύσιν ψυχικὸς = living κατὰ φύσιν πνευματικὸς = living ὑπὲρ φύσιν96
Maximus goes on to spell out these three categories by giving examples of the ethical behavior associated with each category. Thus, to the “fleshly (σαρκικὸς)” corresponds doing evil, to the “psychic (ψυχικὸς)” neither doing nor suffering willingly evil, and to the “spiritual (πνευματικὸς)” or “driven by the Spirit of God,” who “cuts himself off from both world and nature,” readiness not only to suffer willingly injustice and evil done to him but also to do good to those who do evil to him, following Christ’s commandment—“if someone wants to sue you for your shirt give him your coat also” (Mt
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Being in this case is only threatened by death, understood not as annihilation, as Heidegger conceived it, but as the destruction of the mode of beings, their relational existence which grants them their hypostasis, their communion.
If death is conceived as the collapse of communion and the dissolution of beings into substances, the ὁ ὢν can never die, not because he is an eternal substance (substances are never “living” unless they relate), but because he is the Father, whose being is by definition relational.
Precisely because the creation of the world was the product of the Creator’s will, and because will is associated with the future, the beginning of creation coincided with the appearance of time.
By being the product of the will understood as the power to bring about something entirely new, time is a movement to an “end,” a purpose higher than the beginning, an eschaton which is not the outcome of any principium and which grants ontological significance to the beginning.
The universe, therefore, in being a product of the will is, according to St Maximus, not static. It is dynamic, but not in the Neoplatonic sense of an emanation from the higher to the lower state of being, which is a movement from “above” to “below.” It is a movement toward an end, “the will’s forward thrust.” St Maximus expresses this in the most eloquent way in his famous response to question 60 of Thalassius: The eschatological recapitulation of all in Christ is “the great hidden mystery … the blessed end for which everything has been constituted … [and the end] for the sake of which
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While St Maximus conceives the “end” as causing everything that exists without being caused by anything, in these teleologies the historical future not only depends on the past but becomes itself past, that is, nonexistent—every historical “tomorrow” inevitably becomes a “yesterday”, and a “tomorrow” which follows upon a “yesterday” is bound to become itself a “yesterday.” A historical future not only cannot grant being but it ceases to exist itself, becoming a “fact,” i.e., something that has “passed” and exists no longer.
Eschatology brings a future that is not of the same kind as that of the future given by history. It is an “end,” i.e., the utmost of futurity, which, as St Maximus puts it, depends on no other end, an “eighth day” which is not following upon the “seventh” day but makes the seventh day acquire existence, a future.
Has the being of creation been fixed at the beginning, or will it be fixed in the end? If everything was ontologically perfect and firm at the beginning, the final destination of creation would have to be, ontologically speaking, a return to the beginning.
In my view, scientific cosmology has done nothing but confirm the patristic view of creation, as it has just been expounded here. Scientists suggest that the universe “is heading for an all-enveloping death.”22 The final future of the universe, according to science,
as forecasted by the combination of Big Bang cosmology and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, will be one of extinction (“freeze or fry”).
There is nothing in creation that can protect it from nonbeing; the only way for it to stay in being is communion with God. This communion is given to creation through the presence in it of a divine Person, the Logos.
By seeking its end, the human being arrives at its beginning.… It is not proper to seek the beginning, as I said, as if it has been realized in the past (ὀπίσω γεγενημένην); but you must seek the end which lies ahead of you (τὸ τέλος ἔμπροσθεν ὑπάρχον); so that you know the beginning you left behind through the end, since you did not know the end from the beginning. And
this is what the wise Solomon mystagogically says: That which has happened, is that which will happen. And, that which has been made is that which will be made, as if he was showing the beginning from the end. The end, therefore, is not, after the disobedience, shown from the beginning, but the beginning from the end. And one does not seek the logoi at the beginning but asks for the logoi, which move and lead to the end.47
Adam was created at the end precisely because he was called to unite in himself the whole creation and lead it to eternal life by uniting it with God. For this reason man is introduced as the last one into the existing things (τοῖς οὖσιν) as a natural link mediating between the extremes and bringing to unity into himself the things that are divided naturally by distance (τῷ διαστήματι)51 in order that they may be united in God.52
The idea that human beings experienced at the beginning of their existence a “golden age” or a “paradise,” in which there was no suffering or evil of any kind, appears to be incompatible with the scientific findings of our time.5 The appearance of homo sapiens took place in the midst and as a consequence of a fierce struggle of survival among the various species, involving them in suffering and death. Death, both as a result of killing and a matter of senescence, was already there when the human being appeared; it was not introduced at the fall.
In looking for his end, man meets his origin, which essentially stands at the same point as his end … For he should not seek (ζητῆσαι) the beginning, as I have said, as something that lies behind him, but he should search for (ἐκζητῆσαι) the end which exists ahead of him, so that he may come to know through the end his lost origin, as he did not know the end from the beginning.39
The first human being, therefore, having deprived (ἐλλείψας) the movement of its natural powers of the energy toward the end (τῆς πρὸς τὸ τέλος ἐνεργείας) was diseased (ἐνόσησεν) with the ignorance of its own cause.75
The human being took the wrong direction away, not simply from God’s will (like in Augustine), but from the end toward which the entire creation was to move, headed by humanity, in order to overcome the mortality inherent in its nature.
Adam, the first human being, received a “call”—in fact it was this call that brought him into existence as other than the rest of creation97—to lead not only humanity but the whole of creation to a “blessed end,” which would include the abolition of evil, corruption, and death, to a state of participation in the bliss and the glory of God himself—to theosis. This was put before Adam as a future, an eschatological destination which would have to pass through time and history, that is, through the exercise of human freedom. The human being was created as a forward-looking creature; eschatology
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Adam’s fall lies in his refusal to perform this mission. Instead of looking and moving forward, he chose to cling to what was already there, to nature, and, above all, to himself, to his senses, to what St Maximus calls τὰ αἰσθητά. Either out of fear or out of ignorance—or, most importantly, self-love (φιλαυτία)—the first human being from its beginning (ἅμα τῷ γενέσθαι) preferred to hold fast to what was given rather than to what was promised, to the certainty of reality which could be controlled by its senses, instead of embarking on a journey in faith, to the future. Adam preferred to be god
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If we put aside the forensic interpretation of the relation of sin to death (death as a “punishment” for disobedience), death is “the wages” of sin not because it is a result of it (death existed in creation before sin) but because sin (the fall) has subjected us to death and made it dominate creation forever as part of “reality,” owing to our progenitor’s refusal to lead the world to a future free of death. By failing the test of faith, by not fulfilling the eschatological call, the human being “bought” (ὀψώνια) death as part of the “real” to which it chose freely to subject itself.
Sexuality, therefore, is at once good and evil: it is good because it reproduces life, and it is evil in that it does so by bringing forth mortal beings. “Between ‘fear of death’ and ‘slavery to sensual desire through love for life’, the circle is inescapably closed; the perpetuation of life, for which man strives, is in fact a perpetuation of death.”105
The “tree of life” (i.e., of life eternal or eschatological), from which Adam refused to eat, was also a tree of knowledge (John 8:28,32; 14:7,20; 16:3 etc.), not, however, of the world as it was when Adam was created (and as it still is because this was the tree from which he ate) but as it will be when it is freed from the antinomies of good and evil, of life and death in the eschata. The knowledge which Adam obtained by eating from the forbidden tree was the knowledge of the “real” world with its existential antinomies.
According to St Maximus, evil is “the deprivation (ἔλλειψις) of the energy toward the end of the powers implanted in nature … the irrational movement … of the natural powers toward a direction other than the end.”
The original “deficiencies” of creation, therefore, including death, are not “evil” if they serve the movement of creation toward the “blessed end” (which will transcend or abolish them). If they do not follow the eschatological course, they become evil like everything that deviates from the movement to the end, according to St Maximus’ definition of evil.
If, then, the general resurrection will restore nature to ever-being, which also constitutes the logos for which it was created, then all who have freely chosen to live and exist in opposition to “the logos of nature,” which is ever-being, will find themselves at the eschaton confronted with that in which they do not wish to participate: with ever-being. This “knowledge” of the eternal affirmation and confirmation of ever-being, in which they did not ever wish to participate, will prove for them to be “ill-being,” or hell, for as long as ever-being, which the resurrection has guaranteed,
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“For I think that by ‘today’ it means this age … that bread which thou didst prepare for us in the beginning that our nature might be immortal do thou give us today, while we are in the present time of mortality … that it may conquer death.”122
I often hear many people saying, “Alas, how shall I be saved? I haven’t the strength to fast; I don’t know how to keep vigil; I can’t live in virginity; I couldn’t bear to leave the world—so how can I be saved? How? I will tell you how. Forgive and you will be forgiven;… here is a short cut to salvation. And I will show you another. What is that? Judge not, it says, and you will not be judged. So here is another path without fasting or vigil or labor.… He who judges before Christ’s coming is Antichrist, because he abrogates the position that belongs to Christ.123
From all this, one understands that the abolition of the entrances into the Church building or the Altar is a great liturgical loss. It is true, certainly, that the church architecture which now prevails does not permit the priests to make a real entrance as they did in the ancient Church. The bishops, however, are able to make an entrance, and it is a shame that they no longer do it, clearly because they do not appreciate its significance.
