Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch
Lectures in Switzerland on “A Theology of Creation” and “The Responsibility of Christians”
In response to an invitation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Switzerland together with the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, His Beatitude Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch presented a series of lecture-sermons during Great Lent, 1989. Immediately below is the initial lecture in this three-part series, delivered in Zurich, Switzerland on March 10, 1989. This text was provided to the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration in its original form by the offices of HB Patriarch Ignatius IV Damascus, Syria. English translations approved by HB Patriarch Ignatius IV. Reprinted by Permission. Original French published: Ignace IV Patriarche d’Antioche Paris, DDB, Collection Théophanies, 1989. Thanks are due to Boniface Ramsey for his initial abridged translation, and to Patricia Sivils Krueger for this present full translation. The third lecture in the series follows below.
1. A Theology of Creation
§1 “Man is an animal called to become God,” said one of the Fathers of the Church. And that is why the Word became flesh: to open to us, through the holy flesh of the earth transformed into a Eucharist, the path of deification.
§2 But there is another terrible path which man has wanted – and still wants: that is to make himself divine by means of his own powers. He wants to build a tower of Babel and not to welcome the New Jerusalem. He has wanted – and still wants – to make of the world his prey, to be its tyrant and not its king and priest. He has made for himself, out of the potential transparency of all things when restored in Christ, the mirror of Narcissus.
§3 Today that mirror is breaking up. The maternal sea is polluted, the heavens are rent, the forests are being destroyed and the deserts are increasing. We must protect creation. Better yet, we must embellish it, render it spiritual and transfigure it because Christianity has this responsibility. In the East especially Christianity has not loved the earth enough. Orthodoxy knows that the earth is sacred, but for too long our history has been plagued with hostility, even captivity, and this has prevented her from giving definition to this intuition, from bringing forth this knowledge into the culture and the course of current affairs. Today she ought to try to do it for the sake of participation. This will not happen without cost. The cost is the “small change” of revolution, the only revolution that counts, that is, a revolution of the spirit.
§4 But nothing will be done unless there is a general conversion of men’s minds and hearts. In the Bible men’s hearts and mind are the same thing. Nothing will happen unless our personal and liturgical prayer, our sacramental life, our asceticism regain their cosmic dimension.
§5 Cosmology is a form of knowledge which is given to us in Christ by the Holy Spirit. “The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word,” wrote St. Maximus the Confessor, “contains within itself the whole meaning of the created world. He who understands the mystery of the Cross and the Tomb knows the meaning of all things, and he who is initiated into the hidden meaning of the Resurrection understands the purpose for which God created everything from the very beginning.”
§6 If this is in fact so, it means that everything has been created by and for the Word, as the Apostle says in Colossians 1:16-17, and that the meaning of this creation is revealed to us in the re-creation effected by the same Word taking flesh, by the Son of God becoming the son of the earth. “He is before all things, and by Him all things are held in existence by living in him.” This text reinforces the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John: “All things were made by him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”
§7 The Word is the archetype of all things, and all things find in him their consummation, their “recapitulation.” The Gospel ought to be preached “to all the creatures,” according to the Epistle to the Colossians, and the Church in this vision is nothing other than the creation reunified with God through Christ. Such is indeed the “mystery of the Father’s will” which the Apostle announces to the Ephesians: “That he might unite all things in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10).
§8 Thus, it is that the Church, as eucharistic mystery, gives us knowledge of a universe which was created to become eucharist. The Eucharist as sacrament corresponds to the Eucharist as spirituality and as action. Make Eucharist, that is, “give thanks in all things,” as Paul says (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
§9 In this perspective the Fathers maintain that the historical Bible gives us the key to the cosmic Bible. In this they are faithful to the Hebrew notion of the Word, which not only speaks, but creates: God is “true” in the sense that his word is the source of all reality, not only historical, but also cosmic reality. In the priestly account of the creation [Genesis 2:4ff], things exist only through a divine word, which creates them and sustains them in their being. That is why, as St. Maximus the Confessor says, we discover, or rather the Gospel discovers for us, that on the one hand, the Word “hides himself mysteriously in the meaning of created things like so many letters,” and on the other hand, “he condescends to express himself in the letters, symbols and sounds of Scripture.” Precisely in the transfiguration of Jesus do the shining garments signify the words of the Bible and the body of the earth. Both are illumined by God’s grace. The relationship between Scripture and the world corresponds to that of the soul and the body: he who has in Christ a spiritual understanding of the first will be given a profound understanding of the second.
§10 What does this profound understanding which comes to us by way of the Fathers and the prophets of all the ages of the Church tell us?
§11 First, it makes two complimentary affirmations: It says that the creation has its own consistency, but it is animated by a dynamic movement toward transparence. Then it speaks to us of the part man has to play, and thus of creation in the history of salvation.
§12 The universe is not simply a manifestation of the Godhead, as in the Hindu concept of “maya,” or illusion. It does not arise from a demiurge putting in order some pre-existing material, as the ancient Greeks often thought. It is neither a degraded copy of the world of ideas, a Platonic conception, nor is it the evil work of a bad god, as the dualists teach. It was created radically new, from nothing as is clearly affirmed for the first time in the Second Book of Maccabees 7:28, and as is implied in the two creation narratives in Genesis. The notion of “nothing” here is a kind of “limit” and suggests that God, who has no “beyond,” makes the universe appear by a kind of “self-withdrawal”: the location of the world is thus within the love of God, a love which is supremely inventive while at the same time it is sacrificial. To indicate this creative act which is reserved for God alone, the [Hebrew] Scriptures use the word “bara” as opposed to the word for being made or constructed. The universe springs from the hands of the living God Who sees that it is “tov,” that is, “good and beautiful.” Thus it is willed by God, it is the joy of his wisdom, and it exults in that reverential joyfulness which is described in the Psalms and in the cosmic passages of the Book of Job. Here the universe is described as “a musical ordering,” as “a marvelously composed hymn.” A father of the Church has called it “hymn, music, rhythm and change.”
§13 The biblical and patristic conception of creation breaks down the cyclical obsession of the ancient religions. Creation, the perpetual passage from nothing into being, through the magnetic attraction of the infinite, is a movement in which we are given simultaneously time, space and matter.
§14 So, in the Christian vision, nature is a true reality, dynamic, in no way divine in itself. We know that Genesis, from this point of view, “desacralizes” both the stars and living things – yet these things are willed and wanted by God, and they find their place and their vocation in his love.
§15 At the same time the early Fathers, like the Orthodox religious philosophers of our century, when meditating on the great Pauline insights, have rejected the notion of any such thing as “pure nature.” Uncreated grace, the glory of God, the divine energies which shine forth from the risen Christ, are the same in their origin and at the very root of things. Nature is inseparable from grace, and the physical, in its very density, is spirit-bearing.
§16 Every thing in creation expresses the divine glory in its own way and in accordance with the living Word by which and in which God brings it into being. Prayer is at the heart of all things. Their very existence is ontological praise, and there is a hiddenness in the openness of their testimony. St. Paul says, in First Corinthians 15:41, “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for each star differs from another star in glory.” It is the word “doxa” that is here translated as “glory.”
§17 The world is a gift and word from God, and all the words that God sends us are contained in the Eternal Word, Who is himself inseparable from the breath which gives us life. “The Father has created everything by the Son in the Holy Spirit,” wrote St. Athanasius of Alexandria, “for what the Word makes takes on life in the Holy Spirit.”
§18 In the very existence of the Word, in its rationality and in its beauty, the Trinity reveals itself. The Church of the first centuries liked to comment in this sense on Ephesians 4:6: “One God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
§19 God, “above all,” the Source of all existence – the Father; God “through all,” as structure and intelligence – the Logos, Word, Wisdom and Reason of the universe; God “in all” – the Spirit, the dynamism of fulfillment and of beauty.
§20 It falls to man to decipher in a creative way the “book of the world,” this immense “logos alogos,” or “speechless word,” as Origen defined the world.
§21 In Genesis God asks Adam to “name the animals,” a naming which includes all modes of knowledge and expression, from contemplation to art and science. Man is a microcosm, a synthesis of all creation, which he can therefore know from within; he is the interface between the visible and the invisible, between the carnal and the spiritual. But man is above all a person, in the image and likeness of God. As such he transcends the universe, not in order to leave it behind, but in order to contain it, to give expression to its praise and thereby cause grace to shine forth within it.
§22 Nicholas Berdyaev, a great Orthodox religious philosopher of the first half of our [twentieth] century, wrote: The person is not a part, and cannot be a part of any whole, even if this should be the entire universe. Only the person is capable of possessing a universal content; man is, in his unity, in potential, the universe.
§23 Man should listen to the cosmic words that God is speaking to him, and return them to him as an offering, after having marked the works of his creative genius. And when I say man, I mean of course “man in communion”; I mean humanity in its vocation as a “collective, cosmic Messiah.”
§24 Thus man, for the universe, is the hope of receiving grace and sanctification. But he brings with him the risk of failure and downfall as well, for, when turned away from God, we only see the appearances of things, the “shadow which passes,” as Paul says, what is available to our senses, what we can “sink our teeth into,” as popular language says. Blocking partially the radiance of the divine light, we condemn the world to death and let chaos arise within it.
§25 Christian is inseparable from the history of salvation. The theology, spirituality and all the experience of Eastern Christianity stress that the Fall of man from his condition in paradise constitutes a truly cosmic catastrophe. But it is a catastrophe which is not accessible to science because it took place in another dimension of reality and because scientific observation belongs inevitably to the subsequent modalities of our fallen existence.
§26 God did not create death. But he has used it in the present stage of evolution so as to crush spiritual death and to give back to man his vocation as created creator and to restore to matter its sacramental character.
§27 Christ, through his Incarnation, his Resurrection, his Ascension and his sending of the Holy Spirit, has brought about the potential transfiguration of the universe. Liturgical and patristic texts, following the lead of St. Paul and St. John, out do one another in proclaiming the cosmic dimension of the Body of Christ. St. Maximos the Confessor says, “Christ has become ‘the sun of the world’ under whose rays the unity of the cosmos is ripening.
He is the great mystery, the joyous end for which all was created, the original end of all existence. This is the unwavering purpose for which God has called all things into existence. Christ constitutes the fullness by which all creatures accomplish their return to God. It is for the mystery of Christ that the universe and all that it contains exists.
§28 Absolute personal existence, the Lord as a divine Person, “One of the Holy Trinity,” as our Liturgy says, not only lets himself be contained by the universe at one particular point in space and time, but by realizing at last the vocation of the person, he contains the universe hidden in himself. He does not want, like us, to take possession of the world; he takes it up and offers it in an attitude which is constantly eucharistic. He makes of it a body of unity, the language and flesh of communion.
§29 In him fallen matter no longer imposes its limitations and determinisms; in him the world, frozen by our downfall, melts in the fire of the Spirit and rediscovers its vocation of transparency. And so we have the miracles of the Gospel. In no way are they “wonders” to impress us, but “signs,” anticipations of the ultimate re-creation of the world. A world without death comes into sight, where things are the presence of Christ and men, at last, His visage.
§30 According to early Christian thought, the Ascension in particular has clothed the cosmic mystery to the fullest extent. It is thus, says St. Paul, that Christ is established as the Lord of all. The King of Glory, chants the Byzantine liturgy, “ascends to the height of heaven after having fulfilled everything.”
§31 The Cross has become the new Tree of Life. “The wood of the cross,” wrote Hippolytus of Rome during the second century, …climbs from earth to heaven. This immortal plant establishes salt in the center of heaven and earth, the first support of the universe, the bond between all things, a cosmic interlacing, fixed by the invisible clasp of the Spirit such that it never vacillates in its divine adjustment, touching heaven with the brow of its head, fortifying the earth with its feet, and in the space in between, embracing the entire cosmos with the immeasurable grasp of Christ. Christ is intimately and thoroughly everywhere, filling all things. Through his Ascension, he gave life and power to all things, as if this divine extension completely penetrated the agony on the cross. O you, who are all in all! The heavens held your spirit and Paradise your soul, but your blood belongs to the earth.
§32 The blood sprang from the pierced side of Jesus on Golgotha and sanctified the earth, which received it like an immense Grail. From that time on, all is marked with the sign of the cross.
§33 At the same time, this transfiguration remains a secret, hidden under the veil of the sacraments, out of respect for our freedom. Though illuminated in Christ, the world nevertheless remains darkened by us, fixed in its opacity by our own spiritual opacity, delivered over to the forces of chaos by our own inner chaos. “The desert is growing,” said Nietzche a century ago, speaking of man’s heart. And today we can see it growing in nature.
§34 The metamorphosis of the cosmos requires not only that God should become man in Christ, but also that man should become God in the Holy Spirit, that is, should become fully man, capable of the gentleness of the strong and of the love which knows how to submit itself to all that lives, in order to make it grow. Christ has made men capable of receiving the Spirit – that is, of collaborating with the cosmic coming of the Kingdom.
§35 In Christ, in his divine-human body, in his divine-cosmic body where the Spirit blows, the ultimate stage of the “cosmogenesis” has begun, with its upheavals and its promises. “The fire hidden and stifled under the cinders of this world will burst forth and divinely set alight the crust of death,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa. And no doubt this ultimate conflagration will be an irruption, a breaking-open, but it is for man to prepare for it by sweeping away the cinders, by bringing the secret incandescence to the surface of the world.
§36 Such is, such should be, the role of the Church. Between the first and second coming of the Lord, there is the Church, whose cosmic history is that of giving birth, the giving birth to the universe as the glorious body of a deified humanity. The Church is the womb in which is being woven the universal body of the new Man, of renewed men.
§37 This theme of giving birth runs through the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, from Eve to the land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8), from Mary at the foot of the Cross to the woman “clothed with the sun,” “who was with child and cried out in her pangs of birth in anguish for delivery” (Revelation 12:2).
§38 In the Epistle to the Romans Paul writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail… until the time of its regeneration… with the hope that it will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-22).
2. The Responsibility of Christians
March 12, 1989, Lucerne
This lecture text was provided to the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration in French by the Office of His Beatitude Patriarch Ignatius IV, Damascus, Syria. Translated by Patricia Sivils Krueger, June 2004 and Reprinted with the Blessing and Permission of His Beatitude Patriarch Ignatius IV. Original French published: Ignace IV Patriarche d’Antioche Paris, DDB, Collection Théophanies, 1989.
§1 It seems quite clear that it is the biblical revelation alone which has made possible modern science and technology. It is the Bible which postulates that the world exists, that it is a fundamentally good creation for which a personal God has made man personally responsible.
§2 A great twentieth century mathematician, physician and religious philosopher Paul Florensky has written, “Only in the light of this revelation did man no longer see in the created world the mere outer shell of a demonic power, a sort of emanation, a mirage of divinity, like a rainbow in a drop of water, but rather could conceive of the world as a creation of God, autonomous in its being, its raison d’être, and its internal integrity.”
§3 And even if men have subjected creation to death, God has stabilized it through His wisdom, and prepared and ripened it for the Incarnation. In Christ, under the breath of the Holy Spirit, the responsibility of man is restored. He rediscovers his vocation as “created creator” and collaborates in the work of God. At the threshold of the modern era, we hear [Martin] Luther affirming that “God is present even in the innermost parts of a louse,” and from [Johann] Kepler, one of the founders of scientific astronomy, “the works of God are worthy of contemplation.”
§4 In Syria and in Egypt the first monks were intoxicated with God. They uprooted the pagan magicians, the adoration of Baal, the indulgence in impersonal erotic ecstasy, the use of beasts and divinized stars, all practices which the Bible had already rejected. Plutarch writes that this launched a strange and reverberating cry across the sea of antiquity, “The great Pan is dead!” Thus the world was “disenchanted,” it was set free from a vague or ambiguous spell, so that man could embrace it with his intelligence, and perhaps one day, transfigure it. The idol could then become an icon!
§5 The paradoxical approach to the mysteries of being adopted by the Fathers and the Councils – with God simultaneously one and three and Christ simultaneously God and Man – created a conceptual tension which has remained to this day the source of all true research, in contrast to the apories of classical antiquity or the monism of the oriental mystics. The first decisive break-throughs in technological innovation – even though this has not been sufficiently acknowledged – appeared with the Christianization of culture: the water wheels and windmills in the East, the harness yoke, the bellows for the forge, the navigational tiller in the West. It was the monks who fostered the epic poems of the European peasantry from the forests of Gaul across to the Russian tiaga.
§6 Christianity has thrust man forward with a mission to explore and assume the universe, from the atom to the galaxy. Since the calling of Abraham and through the life-giving Cross, the world can no longer close in on itself; a tension about its ultimate conclusion now penetrates and runs through it. Science and modern technologies have developed in this openness, in this adventure born of a departure toward we know not where, born of the fool-like love of a God who has made us free by dying like a slave on the Cross.
§7 Today the earth no longer encloses man in her stifling and fecund maternity. Man has broken the umbilical cord. He can separate himself from her, travel through the stratosphere, sojourn in space, even walk on the moon and send probes out to Mars. What then will the earth be for him? An object, a collection of things, or a reservoir of resources which was long thought to be inexhaustible but now appears threatened by limits, imbalances, and even death. In parts of Europe and even in places quite near here the forest is dying of acid rain. Why and how have we come to this? Christianity stripped the world of its ancient sacred character, but this was in order to make it holy. Has Christianity betrayed its cosmic mission? Has it given up, abdicated its mission and withdrawn?
§8 The separation of Western from Eastern Christianity in the latter half of the Middle Ages profoundly modified the spiritual context in which technology developed. The Age of Antioch, above all in its Syrian dimension, proclaimed a truly cosmic view of love, an immense and heart-felt compassion that included the animal world. St. Isaac the Syrian asked:
“What is a compassionate heart? It is a heart which is burning with a loving charity for the whole of creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts of the earth, for all the creatures. So strong is this compassion that the person who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense love which seizes his heart; a heart which is so softened and can no longer bear to hear or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being inflicted upon any creature. This is why such a person never ceases to pray also for the animals, for the enemies of truth, and for those who do him evil, that they may be preserved and purified. He will pray even for the snakes and reptiles, moved by the infinite compassion which arises in the hearts of those who are becoming united with God.”
§9 By the sixth century, the Age of Antioch had elaborated, with Saint John of Damascus, a theology of the divine energies springing from the Risen Christ and transforming matter. John of Damascus wrote, “I do not adore matter, but I adore the Creator of matter who in order to save me became matter.” And also: “I venerate matter through which salvation has come to me, so as to be filled with divine energy and grace.”
§10 The theology and spirituality of the divine energies found their full development in Byzantium in the fourteenth century, thanks to Saint Gregory Palamas. Those who have admired the early frescoes at Mistra, or the “Descent of Christ into Hell” in the old church of Chora in Constantinople, have felt, in the tendency of that art, what a transfigured Renaissance might have been in which the human would have been affirmed while also affirming the cosmic, but without separating itself from the divine.
§11 But Byzantium was assassinated, and although its humanism passed over to the West through the Greek scholars who came to enrich the Italian and French Renaissance, the theology and spirituality of the divine energies and the sense of the sacramental potential of matter were, if not forgotten, at least buried in a small number of monasteries, without any significant application to culture and history.
§12 Western Christianity, while it gave stimulus to science and technology, was not able to enlighten and orient the West and provide its citizens with their true direction. It is significant that the thought of Aristotle, which was transmitted to the West through Islam — that is to say through a spiritual world view which did not know the Incarnation — made it difficult to express in terms of participation the communion of man with God and the sanctification of the cosmos. If the constitution [or composition] of creation is no longer born out of its transparency, it finds itself isolated, objectified, and subjected to mere human reason and passion.
§13 The openness to the cosmos which characterized the Renaissance was abandoned by Western Christianity. A more individualistic religion of “God and my soul” took over. There developed in Puritanism and its Roman Catholic equivalents a proselytizing, conquering morality which conceived the rule of man over nature as a hard and simplistic domination. This cosmic sense has become the prey of an occultism which has become more and more secularized in the will to power. One thinks of the occult origins of the Faustean theme when one witnesses the strange continuity between the pretensions of contemporary biology and the esoteric dreams of the homunculus and of the golem.
§14 If nature is not transfigured, she becomes disfigured. Today we are threatened by a barbarism and even by the suicide of all humanity. By barbarism I mean the sense which the French philosopher Michel Henry gives to this term, the transformation of technology into “destiny,” which is the same sense that destiny had for the ancient Greeks, an inevitable, death-like fatality. The fatality lies in doing everything that we are capable of doing without first questioning the consequences.
§15 To take a particularly cruel example, we run the risk of bringing more and more children into the world who do not know their fathers and have several mothers. We are beginning to realize that the suicide of humanity is a possibility, what with Chernobyl and the determination of the great financial organizations to destroy the forests of the Amazon.
§16 At the same time Christianity, in spite of the collapse of the so-called Christian societies – or because of this collapse, is experiencing a purification and deepening, a meeting and a sharing of the mystical heritage of the East with the Western sense of historical responsibility. Thus the moment seems to have arrived for a truly Christian commitment concerning the safeguarding of creation.
§17 Only the highest of forces, that of the spirit united with the heart – to use the language of the Orthodox tradition – can face up to the challenge of technology. Asceticism is necessary in order to fight against the instinct of possession, of blind power and a flight into hedonism.
§18 Michel Sollogoub, a French economist and an Orthodox of Russian descent, wrote, “the frenetic pursuit of the goods of this world secured for us a life marked by anxiety in the face of illness and death; the multiplicity of sensations produced by music or television causes us to forget the horror of nothingness; our neighbor is a competitor on his way to becoming an enemy, while nature becomes merely a means to satisfy our desires and our thirst for domination.” Asceticism therefore is indispensable if we are to achieve that limitation of desires which will make it possible for us both to better respect the earth, its rhythm, and the life which belongs to it, and to bring into practice the necessary sharing on a planetary scale.
§19 This sharing has already begun through the formation and activity of small groups of Christians who are resisting the pressures of advertising, adopting simplicity and sobriety, and putting themselves in touch with various villages and sectors of the Third World. There they seek to encourage new and responsible forms of development, not designed on Western models, and they wish to give, but also to receive of the wisdom, skills, and beauty in the societies which they serve.
§20 Asceticism is also necessary as a basis for that profound sympathy with nature which is often experienced by today’s youth, who have no other way toward the mysterious other than the beauty of the world. This sympathy may prove to be the last barrier remaining against barbarism and against the destruction of the animal and plant world.
§21 Whenever the animals which we raise for meat or milk are mutated, and perhaps even changed into monsters by genetic and hormonal manipulations, it will be necessary for our school children to learn by heart a hymn to the cow written by Gandhi, in which he calls her “a poem of humility.” The cow symbolizes not only the maternal fertility of the subhuman world, but also the peace and the gentleness of beasts who do not eat other beasts.
§22 To asceticism there needs to be joined what I call “creative exorcism.” We need to exorcize the undeclared but invasive totalitarianism of a limitless technology. This in no way means a discrediting or limiting of scientific research. On the contrary, it means fighting at the heart of this research to make it more open and attentive to a larger divine reality. It means to fight, in the name of the truth of all beings and things, against the Promethean temptation to construct the world as a closed totality in which man would be the little god.
§23 What should animate science is a desire to reduce the unknown by rational means and a respect for the mystery of things when contemplated vertically, that is to say, as penetrated and animated by the great divine Reason, by the Logos, the Word and Intelligence of God. Do not the infinitely subtle structures which scientific reasoning decodes today and which continually counteract disintegration and entropy to form a marvelously ordered complexity bear the imprint of that divine Reason?
§24 Ilya Prigogine, at the end of his book, Nouvelle Alliance, marks an important stage in the development of contemporary epistemology. He writes: “Scientific knowledge… can now reveal itself … as a poetic listening to nature.” Reason as instrument has “disenchanted” the world – to paraphrase the famous dictum of Max Weber – and reason as contemplation now has to teach us to admire and to respect it.
§25 In this way exorcism becomes creative. It opens up another way of looking at reality through the most careful research. This is a way of looking which re-enchants! At the same time, in relation to technology, it turns us into adults by making us able to distinguish between the possible and the desirable. “All is possible,” said St. Paul, “but not everything is expedient.” If not everything, at least very much is technically possible, and so we might paraphrase, “but not everything is expedient.”
§26 Man will be an adult in relation to technology when he can freely say sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no.” The problem with technical civilization today is the problem of meaning. Meaning cannot come from technology itself; it can only come from man, and then only if he sees himself as being in the image of God, and if he approaches the world as the gift and word of God. Simone Weil once said, more or less, that we need a holiness which also partakes of genius!
§27 Driven by this asceticism and exorcism, Christians must call upon humanity to unite in a common effort for the safeguarding of the earth, and also for its revitalization. Even the most secularized of societies need to recognize that an understanding of transcendence amidst the materiality of the world is necessary, and that without this understanding, there can be no proper distinction between the realms of society and religion.
§28 This understanding of transcendence should be found, on the one hand, in the irreducible person who can have no definition other than that of being indefinable. This is not merely the individual, subject to a variety of impulses, fantasies, and anguishes, but the person, who is capable of transcendence and being in communion, and whose face is suggested to us by the icon. The reality of a human being is both mystery and love, which is to say that it is Trinitarian. What would a just world be if it were not also a place of friends?
§29 On the other hand, this understanding of transcendence must also be a respect for things, for beasts and plants and the earth. It must be a faithfulness toward the earth, not like that of a Nietzche, but like that of an Alyosha Karamazov as he followed the guidance of Starets Zosima [in Doestoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov]:
“Brothers, Love all of God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals. love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will soon perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing, universal love.”
§30 Yes, let us call humanity to a common task, drawn by the love of man as the image of God and of the universe as the creation of God.
§31 It will be a common task if all Christians take part in it and share their experience and their hope, those of the West and those of the East, those of the North and those of the South. This is an immense and concrete task of a renewed ecumenism, in which, more and more, I hope, the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church will collaborate.
§32 Christians will act by giving a cosmic dimension to their prayer, their hearing of the Word, their sacramental life, and their asceticism. Christians will act by example, showing the cultural, social and ecological richness of traditional ascetic values when they open out onto history. Here, I repeat, I am thinking above all of the voluntary limitation of our desires and needs along with a profound sympathy for all life.
§33 Those who put emphasis on the Word of God in Scripture will need to recognize that the world is also a word of God, and to treat it as such. Those who stress the Eucharist will try to deepen it and extend it into their daily lives and their historical responsibilities. Word and sacrament, the spirit of the Liturgy, must bring the power of the Resurrection into the life of the world and the entire cosmos.
§34 This will be a common task if, on the initiative of Christians, the two “spiritual hemispheres” of humanity meet and collaborate: the Oriental hemisphere of the Far East, from India to Japan, for whom the divine energies water the world and make the earth sacred, but who do not know the personal source of these energies, and consequently tend not to understand the person and history; and the biblical, Semitic hemisphere which affirms the individual, but separates heaven and earth to the point where individuals want blindly to dominate the latter. The Christian understanding – and here the Orthodox have much to say regarding the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the diffusion of the Trinitarian energies through the Incarnation – should enable us to carry along with us in this work both those who place an accent on the divine and those who place an accent on the human; those who put it on history and those who locate it in the cosmos.
§35 This joint effort of revitalization will provoke a spiritual revolution, the repercussions of which will gradually be inscribed in social and economic life. We who belong to the end of the second millennium, who are so often orphans without hearth or home, shall find our dwelling place in Christ. For it is Christ Who unites heaven and earth, and it is the Church which in its depths is the world on its way to deification.
§36 Biblical and evangelical revelation has desacralized the earth, not in order to abandon it to the forces of nothingness, but to transfigure it. The earth today is no longer the all-powerful Mother. May she become the betrothed, whom we must protect from rape, and let us lead her to the wedding of the Lamb.