| This is prescribed by the order of nature: it is thus that God has created man. For let them, He says, have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every creeping thing which creeps on the earth. Genesis 1:26 He did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation, – not man over man, but man over the beasts. And hence the righteous men in primitive times were made shepherds of cattle rather than kings of men, God intending thus to teach us what the relative position of the creatures is, and what the desert of sin; for it is with justice, we believe, that the condition of slavery is the result of sin. And this is why we do not find the word slave in any part of Scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name. It is a name, therefore, introduced by sin and not by nature. The origin of the Latin word for slave is supposed to be found in the circumstance that those who by the law of war were liable to be killed were sometimes preserved by their victors, and were hence called servants. And these circumstances could never have arisen save through sin. For even when we wage a just war, our adversaries must be sinning; and every victory, even though gained by wicked men, is a result of the first judgment of God, who humbles the vanquished either for the sake of removing or of punishing their sins. Witness that man of God, Daniel, who, when he was in captivity, confessed to God his own sins and the sins of his people, and declares with pious grief that these were the cause of the captivity. Daniel ix The prime cause, then, of slavery is sin, which brings man under the dominion of his fellow – that which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with whom is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to award fit punishments to every variety of offense. But our Master in heaven says, Every one who does sin is the servant of sin. John 8:34 And thus there are many wicked masters who have religious men as their slaves, and who are yet themselves in bondage; for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. 2 Peter 2:19 And beyond question it is a happier thing to be the slave of a man than of a lust; for even this very lust of ruling, to mention no others, lays waste men " s hearts with the most ruthless dominion. |
| Should pastors grease the Kardashian celebrity machine by mentioning Bruce Jenner from the pulpit? There are good arguments for ignoring the whole thing, but I think that’s a pastoral mistake. So much of our cultural trajectory converges on Bruce: our rampant Gnosticism, our confidence in technology, our moral libertarianism and determined flight from biblical standards, our cult of fame, our sexual self-contradictions. Bruce Jenner will be forgotten soon enough, but what he represents isn’t going away, because transgressiveness is one of the few cultural imperatives that we are not permitted to transgress. If we preach about Bruce, what should we say? When I asked the Jewish theologian David Novak how a synagogue would respond, his answer was stunning in its simplicity: First, “Jews would not recognize Jenner as a woman”; then, “Torah forbids castration.” Castration doesn’t turn a man into a woman. It only leaves him a damaged man. Novak was referring to Deuteronomy 23:1: “No one who is emasculated, or has his male organ cut off, shall enter the assembly of the Lord.” As long as we’re looking for proof texts, we might add Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear a man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” It doesn’t matter that the cross-dressing is surgical rather than sartorial. If men are forbidden to wear bras, we are presumably also forbidden to wear breasts. Many Christians don’t think Jesus said anything relevant to questions like this, but he did: “He who created them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Jesus was answering a question about divorce, but, as John Paul II showed, Jesus appeals to the “beginning” as a revelation about the created pattern of sexuality. Jesus didn’t mean, God made everything, therefore he must have made both male and female. He meant, God made a male and then made a female. God created each individually, and he created the distinction between them. The creation account makes this clear, distinguishing the origin of Adam (from the ground) from the origin of Eve (from Adam). |
| Away, I say, with the thought, that before there was any sin, there should already have been committed regarding that fruit the very sinwhich our Lord warns us against regarding a woman: Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery with her already in his heart. Matthew 5:28 As happy, then, as were these our first parents, who were agitated by no mental perturbations, and annoyed by no bodily discomforts, so happy should the whole human race have been, had they not introduced that evil which they have transmitted to their posterity, and had none of their descendants committed iniquity worthy of damnation; but this original blessedness continuing until, in virtue of that benediction which said, Increase and multiply, Genesis 1:28 the number of the predestined saints should have been completed, there would then have been bestowed that higher felicity which is enjoyed by the most blessed angels – a blessedness in which there should have been a secure assurance that no one would sin, and no one die; and so should the saints have lived, after no taste of labor, pain, or death, as now they shall live in the resurrection, after they have endured all these things. Chapter 11.– Of the Fall of the First Man, in Whom Nature Was Created Good, and Can Be Restored Only by Its Author. But because God foresaw all things, and was therefore not ignorant that man also would fall, we ought to consider this holycity in connection with what God foresaw and ordained, and not according to our own ideas, which do not embrace God " s ordination. For man, by his sin, could not disturb the divine counsel, nor compel God to change what He had decreed; for God " s foreknowledge had anticipated both – that is to say, both how evil the man whom He had created good should become, and what good He Himself should even thus derive from him. For though God is said to change His determinations (so that in a tropical sense the Holy Scripture says even that God repented ), this is said with reference to man " s expectation, or the order of natural causes, and not with reference to that which the Almighty had foreknown that He would do. |
| It has now become part of our everyday thinking and behaviour. All aspects of life are modeled on evolution. Apart from the Darwinian concept of biological evolution, we are also confronted by social and political evolution that measure progress and human development in terms of the intellect and the amazing achievements of technology. And finally there is religious evolution: religion that is evolving towards the “Omega Point” envisioned by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or towards the “Age of the Spirit” anticipated in the works of Nikolai Berdyayev. Upon this foundation of apparent progress, modern man has been encouraged to believe in his own superiority over nature, technology and social interaction. According to such secular thinkers as Theodosious Dobzhansky and John Dewey, evolution is no longer a destiny imposed from without, but a destiny that can be controlled by man, in accordance with his wisdom and his values. The result of this is the belief in a new kind of man. Our hi-tech society has transformed Homo sapiens into Homo technicus. However in the light of Orthodoxy, Homo technicus instead of being a demi-god as proclaimed by the champions of evolutionary humanism, is in actual fact subhuman. Homo technicus is man made in the image of God, but without Christ. The Rule of Pleasure and Pain Man was created without the sense of pleasure and pain. St Maximos the Confessor tells us that pleasure and pain were not created at the same time as the body. Before the Fall, Adam possessed a noetic faculty, that is, a spiritual mind by which he could enjoy God. Pleasure for Adam was thus a spiritual pleasure. But Adam misused this noetic faculty and turned his spiritual mind towards sensual things and began to experience pleasure contrary to his God-given nature. St Gregory of Nyssa writes that pleasure and pain together with the desire and fear that follow, were introduced only after our being had lost its natural God-like nature. Before the Fall, Adam lived without fear and illness. He suffered from neither the heat nor from the cold. Water could not drown him. Nothing could harm him or cause him pain. |
| Lead by false or superficial scientists the modern premise of overt sexuality is based on nothing else but on the same atheistic and evolutionist view of the world. If evolution theory stands true man is nothing else but an animal and for the animals sex is very natural. All the species do it all the time and they are not inhibited to display it even on prime time on “Discovery Channel”! Starting with this premise nothing is or should be “taboo” in human sexual behavior. All sexual expressions are licit and are nothing more than an expression of who we are. Heterosexuality‚ homosexuality‚ bisexuality and a wide array of perversions are all accepted as being part of the natural human spectrum of behavior. No boundaries to the Homo Sexualis! More than this with a naturalistic view of the human person‚ asserting that all is dictated by neuro-chemical reactions‚ our free will also disappears in biological determinism. We are genetically programmed to behave one way or another so we have no responsibility for our acts. We become in other words biologically enslaved to a world that dictates our every move. As traditional Orthodox Christians however we cannot agree with this cold mechanistic view of the world‚ because we believe in a Creation of the world out of love‚ out of a willingness to share an eternal relationship with a personal God. The Creation of man is a special act in which we receive not only a body resembling that of animals‚ but also the image of God. Through its biological appearance man can be indeed considered an animal but an animal “which can be deified through its inclination towards God” according to St. Gregory the Theologian. St. Athanasius the Great said once: “God became man so man can become god”. Man was created not as perfect but bearing the potentiality of entering into a dynamic progress toward communion with God. In other words man is called to deification‚ theosis‚ to reach the supreme stage of being God-like‚ to be fully in His likeness. But he has to do this He has to want this himself “as a deer longs for flowing streams” (Psa 4’:1). |
| The false mode of knowledge chosen by the first hypostases of the human race – Adam and Eve – claims to link knowledge with a purely natural aspect of being, and therefore reaps the rewards of corruption by nature, excommunicating (‘κενωθντας’ – literally ‘exhausting’) a person from knowing God and making him unreasonable (λογον). 36 Obviously, this does not imply a complete loss of rationality, but the direction of its dynamics, depending on the selected mode of existence and cognition. 37 Patristic thought inseparably connects the origin and development of the created intelligent existence with the hypostatic unity and the vector of free personal will. 38 St. Gregory Palama also notes that the lack of distinction between the multiple uncreated energies would lead, in particular, to the negation of the freedom of will as concerns both created beings and the Creator Himself. 39 This idea maintains the relationship between the hypostatic freedom of volition and cognition and the internal structure of uncreated energies reflecting the ‘hypostatic structure’ of existence. On Man’s Knowledge of His Own Nature and That of the Outside World as Leading to the Knowledge of God St. Athanasius considers the process of human cognition of his own nature throughout his life journey 40 and cognition of God by man in himself as in a reflection. 41 Human capability of cognizing God based on our conformity to Him is also discussed by St. Basil. 42 Again, this fact compels us to relate the cognitive process not only to the intellectual nature of human race but also to the hypostatic element in order to avoid the tautological thesis of the mind coming to know itself as well as to draw an analogy between hypostatic-natural integrity of human ontology and that of their Creator. Of importance for our theme is also a theological idea of the original, starting from the moment of creation, human conformity to the Logos, the plan of Whose incarnation is the highest prototype of human duality, including not only created nature but also uncreated energies. The likeness of the first and of second Adam in complexity and synthetic character of hypostatic being, in fact, is the key to solution of the problem of the knowledge of God consisting in the incomparability of the created and uncreated nature. Patristic thought also draws our attention to the fact that all creatures bear the imprint of their ‘Father Superior’ – the Logos, through Whom they were brought into being, hence even natural knowledge of the surrounding world can lead man to the cognition of the hypostasis of the Logos and through Him –– also of His Father. 43 Similarly, the activity, the fruit of labor of an individual human hypostasis enables to know the wisdom thereof. 44 On the Knowledge of Difference between Species through Sets of Idioms and Potential Unlimitedness of a Hypostatic Idiom Series |
| In Greece, where polytheism began to displace monotheism about 600 years BC, we see a healthy resistance by the thinking people of that time – the philosophers. The first of them, Xenophon (570–466 BC) rose up against those who deified animals and their legendary heroes. He said: «Among gods and people there exists one Most High God, Who does not resemble them either mentally, or externally. He is all sight, all thought, all hearing. He eternally and immovably resides in one place... With His thought He governs all without difficulty.» Heraclitus speaks of the eternal Logos, from Whom everything received its existence. By Logos he means Godly Wisdom. (The teachings about Logos were developed by Philo in the first century AD). Anaxagoras (500–427 BC) calls God the purest Reason, omniscient and omnipotent. This Reason, by being an omnipresent and omnipotent spiritual Essence, brings everything to order. He created the world from original chaos. Socrates (469–399 BC) recognized that there is one God. This God is the moral beginning in the world and «Providence,» i.e. He concerns Himself with the world and with people. Plato (428–347 BC), battling with heathen superstitions, demanded that any trace of imperfection, jealousy or variability from the concept of Deity be barred: «God, and not man, is the highest measure of all.» For Plato God – «Demiurg» – is the builder of all, the Artist of universe. He is the eternal Spirit, changing the appearance of matter in accordance with His thought. There exists an eternal, real world of ideas, which is inherent to true reality, and at the head of this kingdom of ideas soars the Idea of Good, or God, the Builder of the universe (Composition «Timei»). Plato argued that the human soul is eternal. Aristotle (384–322 BC) sees in God a universal moving beginning above the world, «the immovable First Mover,» the source of movement in the universe. He is the eternal all-perfect essence, «thought of thoughts,» free from any materiality, living in the most intensive intellectual activity of self-contemplation. «Reality of thought is life, and God is that reality.» In accordance with Aristotle the whole world yearns toward God, as to a Being, beloved as the result of His perfection. The writer of the 3rd century BC Aratus of Cilicia even rose to the idea of the image of God in man, saying «we are of His lineage» (A similar thought was expressed by his contemporary stoic Cleanth). It can be presumed that under the influence of the philosophers, insisting on the existence of one most wise Being over the world, that the Athenians raised an altar to the «Unknown God,» mentioned by the Apostle Paul at the beginning of his famous sermon in Athens (Acts 17:23). |
| Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse: An Orthodox Priest Reflects on the Retirement of Pope Benedict XVI By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse When faith dies man gradually loses the knowledge that he was created by God and so he loses himself. NAPLES, FL. (Catholic Online) – Like almost everyone, the resignation of Pope Benedict came as a shock to Orthodox believers. Those of us who have watched Pope Benedict and his predecessor Pope John Paul II work to lessen the estrangement between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches hope that Pope Benedict’s successor will continue on the same path. Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is an Orthodox priest serving in Naples, FL. He is President of the American Orthodox Institute. Two things stand out in Pope Benedict’s relationship with the Orthodox Churches. First is his deep understanding of the Christian patrimony of Christendom. The Christian foundation of culture should be self-evident to most, but in our post-Christian (and poorly catechized) age our historical memory has grown increasingly dim. Religion vivifies culture. Christianity is the well from which meaning and purpose are drawn. That meaning and purpose shapes law, institutions, and the other constituents that define Western culture. Many have forgotten that – while others don’t even know it. The loss of this Christian cultural awareness has created a moral crisis of the first order. When faith dies man gradually loses the knowledge that he was created by God and so he loses himself. Only through concrete, existential encounter with the Risen Christ can man come to know God in the full measure of God’s self-revelation to him through Jesus Christ. And only in this relationship can man learn what it is to be truly human. Any kind of decline follows contours that are specific to the culture within which the decline occurs. In our technological age we tend to see man as a machine and the self-organization of society as strictly a rational enterprise. In the simplest terms our crisis is the dehumanization of the individual person. |
| Origen was undoubtedly the most successful of the early apologists of Christianity. His system made the Christian religion acceptable to Neoplatonists, but the acceptance of Christianity on Origenistic terms does not necessarily imply the rejection of the basic Neoplatonic concepts of God and of the world. If the Cappadocian Fathers, for example, after reading Origen in their student years, were finally led to orthodox Christianity, others, such as their friend and contemporary Evagrius Ponticus, developed Origenism in quite a different direction. In his famous De principiis, Origen first postulates creation as an eternal act of God. God has always been the all-powerful Creator, and «we cannot even call God almighty if there are none over whom He can exercise His power.» 22 But since Origen is very careful to refute the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter, he maintains that the ever-existing created world is a world of «intellects,» not of matter. The basic Platonizing spiritualism implied here will always appeal to monastic circles looking for a metaphysical justification of asceticism. The next step in Origen« " s thought is to consider that the » " intellectual» world, which includes «all rational naturesthat is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Angels, the Powers, the Dominions, and other Virtues, as well as man himself in the dignity of his soulare one unique substance.» 23 Later patristic tradition will oppose to this idea the notion of the absolute transcendence of God expressed in apophatic theology, but for Origen the monistic structure encompassing God and the «intellects» in one single substance is broken only by the Fall. Misusing their «freedom,» the intellects committed the sin of revolting against God. Some sinned heavily, and became demons; others sinned less, and became angels; others still less, and became archangels. Thus each received a condition proportionate to its own sin. The remaining souls committed sins neither heavy enough to rank with the demons nor light enough to become angels, and so it was that God created the present world, linking the soul with a body as a punishment. 24 The present visible world, which includes manunderstood as an intellect transformed through sin into a bodyis the result of the Fall; man« " s ultimate destiny is dematerialization and a return to a union with God»«s substance. |
| We might express this by saying that the hierarchies (and cataphatic theology) are concerned with God’s manifestation of Himself in and through and to the cosmos. It is concerned with God’s movement outwards. Apophatic theology is concerned with the secret, hidden relationship between the soul and God: it is concerned with the soul’s movement inwards to God. Denys sometimes seems less clear than he might be on this because he uses one image only for the soul’s movement Godwards, that of ascent. It is misleading because the most obvious ascent would be up the hierarchies, which is not at all what Denys is thinking of. An image that would have expressed his meaning better would have been that of movement inwards (an idea very common in Plotinus and Augustine). The soul is involved both in God’s manifestation outwards through the soul and also in her own movement inwards into God; and the two are indissolubly linked. We have already seen that the soul’s role within the hierarchy is to be as closely united as possible with that divine energy which establishes it in the hierarchy. The ultimate fulfilment of that role is by the way of apophatic, mystical union with God. Apophatic theology does not contradict cataphatic and symbolic theology. The movement inwards in no way detracts from God’s movement outwards through the soul. The more deeply the soul is in God (ultimately in unknowable union) the more clearly and perfectly can it manifest the glory of God. That is, then, in outline, Dionysian mysticism: a deeply significant mystical theology that puts the experience of mystical union with God in a context that preserves the fundamentally Christian insight that God is not the highest part of man, but beyond, transcendent – One who created all else out of nothing, essentially unknowable because of another order of reality altogether. But, alongside that, there is a deep awareness of the immanence of God in creation, for each created being depends immediately on God for its very being: ‘Everything and any part of anything participates in the One, and on the existence of the One everything depends for its existence’ (DN XIII.2: 977 C). This assertion of the immanence of God underlies the doctrine of the divine names. |
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