by Paul Rosenboom
- I Love, therefore I Am
God comes to us out of love and makes us children of God. Knowledge of God is experiential and it is our participation in Divine Love that is necessary for us to grow in communion with Christ. Christian love experienced within the life of the Orthodox Church is a new life that reveals the wealth of the human person. In the sacramental and ascetic life of the Church, man enters the Uncreated, endless love of God and, in turn, the Christian loves the Lord with all his heart and mind and soul, and his neighbor as himself. The greatest joy of this life, according to the saints, is the love for the God-Man, a love that is the strongest and most delightful of all loves, a love which frees the soul of sin and the passions and clothes it in the divine virtues. Once the soul has come to understand that the Logos is the true good that fulfills all its infinite desires, the soul loves Him infinitely, commensurate with His all good and immaculate beauty and perfection. Pierced by this love, the soul throws off the ties of every worldly love. And once the soul has become filled with gratitude to Christ, and has been wounded by His love, it will strive to become like Him whom it loves.
St. Symeon the New Theologian eloquently describes this love:
“Yes, the one who has been deemed worthy to see and contemplate Him has no other desire; nor can the one who has been filled with the love of God have more love for anyone on earth. Let us be eager, then, to find Christ and see Him as He is, in His beauty, His attractiveness. Flee the world, flee the illusion of this life and its false happiness. Hasten to Christ, the one Savior of souls. Let us endeavor to discover the One who is present everywhere. When we have found Him, let us keep to Him, let us fall at His feet and embrace them in the fervor of our souls. Yes, I entreat you, let us endeavor to see Him, even in this life, and to contemplate Him. For if we are deemed worthy to see Him sensibly here below, we shall not die, and death shall have no dominion over us.” ( 15)
Within the life of the Church, man is called to a communion in love with his brothers and sisters in Christ and it is here that he finds fulfillment as a person. The Church is constituted of living people deified in Christ, or rather, a communion of persons alive in Christ, for the love of Christ is eternal life. All members of the Church are brethren born of God, redeemed through the precious blood of their King and Lord, who has loved them with perfect love, and has given Himself as a ransom for them. Consequently, all these brethren born of God are profoundly connected with one another and with the eternal God-man through the same perfect love with which they have been loved by Him, who has redeemed and regenerated them. Each brother loves the Lord who has redeemed him, and he also loves every Christian brother with the same selfless love. Christ is the ultimate Lover of man; in turn, it is incumbent upon each of us to return His mercy and love by offering our actions and sufferings to Christ in the person of His brothers. The Christian conducts himself towards the brothers of Christ just as Christ did for the sake of each of us, for insofar as we do it to the brothers of Christ, we do it to Christ. What peace and concord between brothers! How could men and women wrong one another when they desire only to do one another good? This love completely excludes selfishness and every unfree and sinful love and uproots the passions, for he that fervently loves Christ and his brethren, can have neither selfishness, nor love of authority or glory, or money, nor any other illicit love; instead, he loves above all else the perfect radiant virtue of his Savior Christ. This power of selfless, mutual love and the resulting concord, equality and freedom found in the Church is a result of the mystery of the Eucharist, by which Christ comes to dwell in us in the Spirit. For since all the faithful partake of the Body and Blood of Christ, they all bear the same body and blood, and are therefore all brethren of each other and of Christ, and are truly sons of God.
It is a great blessing that as members of Christ’s Body, we can commune not only with God but also between ourselves. The Spirit acts through the Holy Mysteries and dwells in all the members of the Church, uniting them in one Spirit and one Body. In the life of the Orthodox Church, men partake in the “communion of the saints, and experience the joy of union with Christ. By this we mean that within the Church we are not isolated members but a unity, a brotherhood, a fraternal community-not only among ourselves, but also with the Saints of God, those who are living on earth today and those who have passed away. Not even at death are Christians divided. Death is unable to separate Christians because they are all united in the resurrected body of Christ.” (16) We are renewed by one another and bound together in one life. Knowledge of God is the fruit of loving communion with God and the brethren through Christ in the Spirit.
In the Divine Liturgy, before the Creed, we hear the words: “Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess…” The unity of the Church is a lived sacramental unity in faith and love, sustained by the Spirit of Truth. Saint Justin of Chelie writes: “Your thought, as long as it is in Christ, forms one body with the thoughts of all the holy members of the Church, and you truly think with all the saints; your thought is, by grace, organically united with their thoughts. So are your feelings, your will and your life; as long as they are in Christ. As in our body there are many members, yet but one body, so it is with Christ, for by one Spirit are we all baptized into one Body and the one Spirit leads us to the one Truth.” (17)
Love is only love if it is given freely. Freedom and love are the two most essential and inter-related characteristics of the human person as they are of God. God meets man out of love and freedom, not by necessity, and man, in gratitude, freely returns this love in his own self-emptying. The healing of the human will takes place only when man voluntarily turns to God, that is, only in freedom and in love. Only in this authentic freedom is the human will redeemed and healed in voluntary union with Christ, in the new life with Him, in synergy with the Holy Spirit.
- The Ascetic Dimension
While the regenerated man shares in Christ’s life, he nevertheless continues in possession of a body which is mortal and subject to the passions. At the beginning of spiritual life, while the person is still in his spiritual infancy, the flesh prevails and often makes the soul a captive of the law of sin. The carnal and spiritual natures clash and contend with each other, each of them endeavoring to subject and enslave the other to itself. Subject to corruption and death, man is constantly induced to sin and becomes a slave to it by surrendering to the temptations of the devil. Human nature did not cease to be essentially good but without God’s grace, acquired through the humble prayer, self-denial and watchfulness, nourished by the Eucharist, man is incapable of vanquishing the temptations of the flesh, of wealth and pride.
“Naturally, this is not at all easy, because the struggle to uproot the passions from within us is great. Much effort is required so that gradually our inner wasteland is cleansed from the thorns and stones of the passions so that it can be cultivated spiritually, and so that the seed of God’s Logos may fall and bear fruit. Great and continuous effort towards ourselves is. necessary for all this.”(18) To submit his will to the will of God and fulfill the commandments, the Christian must exercise spiritual discipline and self-denial. Asceticism offers us the possibility of experiencing death in this world as life in the Lord. Asceticism is essential for the soul’s conversion from the passions to dispassion and a sustained concentration on God. But there is always the temptation of making the discipline an end in itself and so we must be continually mindful that true asceticism is itself an expression of love for Christ, for the devout Christian fervently strives, through prayer, vigilance and self-denial, to remove any and every obstacle to union with his beloved Christ, namely the desires of the flesh and the self-conceit and pride of the intellect that obstruct the paths of Grace. Fasting, vigils, prostrations have no value in and of themselves but are impelled by love for the Savior.
Because we frequently fall into sin, repentance is a way of life and through the mystery of Confession, man is healed and purified. Thus, the true freedom of man’s person, an eternal, God-like freedom, consists in freedom from sin, death and the tyranny of the devil. But along with Repentance and Confession and the practice of continual prayer and watchfulness, comes the living of a virtuous life according to the dictates of Christ. Christian virtue is achieved only through life according to the Commandments and participation in the sacramental life. Within His commandments, God Himself lies hidden.(19 ) When a Christian observes the Gospel law out of love and faith in Christ, then He unites with the Lord. “Obedience to the Lord Christ stems entirely from love.” (20) By dying with Christ and being raised up with Him, man returns to his authentic humanity. Christ Himself lives and operates in the believer. The more the spiritual nature is nourished and grows and the struggling soul tastes the supremely delightful and real joys of spiritual life, the more the flesh weakens and submits to the law of the spirit. According to the Fathers, life according to the commandments of Christ is man’s authentic natural life and this death to sin and life in Christ must be manifest in his daily conduct. The man regenerated in Christ is characterized by the virtues of Christ, namely humility, meekness, love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This likeness to God is achieved through the power of the Holy Spirit, which dwells in man from the moment of his baptism. The Holy Spirit penetrates and permeates the entire man who is humble of heart. We see this concretely and most powerfully in the person of the God-bearing saint. Man must live his entire life in conformity with this sacramental grace. The pleasures of this carnal life are flagrant and momentary, passing away like a dream, but the joys of spiritual life are supreme and enduring, always thriving and never diminishing.
Footnotes:
- St. Symeon the New Theologian, In the Light of Christ St. Symeon the New Theologian: Life, Spirituality, Doctrine ed. Archbishop Basil Krivocheine (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press NY 1986) p.240
- Fr. George Kapsanis, Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life (Holy Monastery of St. Gregory Mount Athos 2006) p.61
- St. Justin Popovich, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, Trans. By Benjamin Emmanuel Stanley (Lazarica Press Birmingham, England 2000) p.12
- Kapsanis, p.51
- St. Mark the Ascetic, The Philokalia Compiled by St. Macarios of Corinth and edited by St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite Vol.1 Translated. and Edited by Constantine Cavarnos The Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, MA. 2007) p.274
- Popovich, p. 18
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Forthcoming: Part Three - Contemplating the Human Soul of Christ in Relation to Theosis
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