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Towards Personal Paschal Living As we traverse this Lenten and Paschal Celebration once again, it may be helpful to examine the reasons the Church guides us through these experiences. At the beginning of Great Lent, on the Sunday of Forgiveness, the Church immerses us liturgically in the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, directing our attention to refinding and reentering Paradise in Christ the New Adam, along with the Wise Thief during the Paschal Triduum. At the core of the themes of death and resurrection we are invited to experience for ourselves and in ourselves Christ's "undoing" of Adam and Eve's sin, and all of our own personal sins, and the whole burden of sinfulness we all carry. Quite often in taking our sinful condition for granted, we think that its "only natural" for us humans to sin, and that sin is part of our nature, and that sinning is part of our ordinary way of living. Our non-Orthodox culture reinforces that idea in many ways with statements like "He's only human" as a response to sin, and non-Orthodox Christians believe in a variety of theologies that teach that erroneous view that sin and sinning are natural to humans. Recently, one of the graduate students in my campus ministry at Dartmouth College, made an inquiry about this. In reviewing the response I wrote to her, I though this might be of some help to you to know what the Church teaches about this and how it is linked to Great Lent and Pascha, with their very conscious, concerted, willful efforts to enter into true repentance and renewal through the death and resurrection of Christ. Here's the email inquiry I received: "Hi Subdeacon Paul, ...As I was doing a presentation in Chinese Philosophy Class on people's views on human nature I was trapped by the question what is the Orthodox Christian view on that matter? Is it good or evil? I first thought that it is good, but then I thought about where sin comes from, isn't it from the sinful nature that we have? I am very puzzled with it, can you answer me? Thanks A"This is the reply to the inquiry: Dear A in Christ, Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory for ever! We must always remember that it is the work of Christ's Pascha, His death and resurrection, to undo the distortion of the divine image in humans and to restore the lost divine likeness to our human nature, so that each of us can live it eternally in its original beauty, holiness and innocence. As many of the Fathers say, Christ by his saving obedience unto death and resurrection has untied the knot of sin that has bound human nature through disobedience. Christ's death and resurrection has set us free of sin and evil, if we want to be and will to be, if we are willing to join him through the details of our daily lives in overcoming, evil, sin and death. Let's look at what has happened to our human nature to understand this better. 1. The Original (theologically natural) Human Nature is intrinsically good due to its creation by the Infinitely Good God and it recognizes and seeks God freely as its true "Good" and happiness in life. Human Nature is pleased and happy to desire and do the will of God. This is the reality of Adam and Eve before the Fall. 2. Lapsed or Fallen (theologically un-natural) Human Nature remains intrinsically good in its metaphysical essence, but suffers in its operations from the effects of the Fall inherited through human generation in the created personhood which gives human nature or the humanity of the person its real existence. It has lost its exclusive preference for God as its true Good and no longer seeks to freely do the will of God in all things as its true happiness in life In Orthodoxy we believe that we are created by God with his uncreated grace being present in the core of our being from the moment of our creation, and uncreated grace remains contained in the center of our hearts. So God is present in us from our creation, even though we may not be able to be present to God in his presence in us. This Grace is opened to us as the Kingdom of God in us by Holy Illumination through Baptism, Chrismation and Communion. Because of Illumination we could know and commune in this divine presence in us through Faith, if we wanted to, and if we were willing to live our lives in this presence, honoring it through holiness and righteousness. Orthodoxy also believes that we have an inheritance from our first parents and their Fall that affects us, and we all come to actively participate in, and which leads us to eventually commit our own willful sins. This inheritance is particularly experienced in the three chief effects of the Fall which involve the totality of the human person: Mortality, Servile (ungodly) Fear, and Corruption (i.e. this includes all the problems related to the passions, vices and sins that comprise the concept of Sin and feed into the problem of human sinfulness-a very complex theological subject with lots of nuances and distinctions) This is the state of Adam and Eve ( and all their children) after the Fall. While human nature is good, the human personhood in which human nature has concrete real existence is corrupted with its inheritance from Adam and Eve, which Orthodox Theology Terms "Adamic Sin" (in contradistinction to the erroneous Western Christian Theologumena called "Original Sin") . For Orthodoxy, sin is absolutely un-natural to human nature. If you want to be truly and purely human, do not sin! Sin is un-human! Sin dehumanizes! Sin is un-natural! 3. Redeemed and Restored (theologically "re-naturalized") Human Nature in Christ shows us the divine and human synergistic work of the baptismally unleashed deifying divine energies of uncreated grace, which restores human nature to something better than its original state i.e. bodily and spiritual union with the Incarnate Logos who has risen human nature from the dead, destroying the power of Death, Servile Fear, and Corruption to hold human nature captive. In this union with Christ, the Gift of the Holy Spirit makes us ontologically united to God in Christ, completely justifying us from sin and sanctifying us with the very holiness of God Himself, eternally vivifying us with the very Life of God Himself, transforming us into the very Love of God Himself. The Spirit also makes us participants in the Love Life of the Holy Trinity, making us members of the Kingdom of God by being members of the Body of the Risen Christ, the Church. This is the state of all humans who through Faith and Baptism are redeemed and being restored by the Grace of the Holy Spirit in Christ from the effects of the Fall. They not only contain the uncreated grace of god as a principle and potential, they participate in it in actual practice! 4. We must continuously remember that sin is always an abuse of the ever intrinsically good human nature, it is a twisting and deforming of it, a perverting of it, yet never the total destruction of it. Even in the most evil of sinners ( seeming "monsters" like Stalin, Hitler, Nero etc.) their own human nature remains intrinsically good while their personhood chooses the most satanic evil. Such is the power of personal choice in the exercise human free will. Thus, when a human sins it is not because human nature is evil, but because the person has "personally" chosen to act against the goodness of human nature in a way that is theologically, cosmologically, and metaphysically contrary to human nature as God has created it to exist, i.e. they act in an "UN-natural" way!!! ( a theologically un-human way!!!) 5. Orthodox Christian Theological Anthropology (which is the branch of theology we have been discussing) recognizes that part of the "corruption" of the human person is a perversion of the volitional ability of the human person to "personally will" , by means of the "Gnomic Will" inherent in their personhood, what the "Natural Will" , inherent in their human nature, considers its true good which it needs to seek for its happiness. (It's ultimately truest good is God Himself, Who alone can finally and completely satisfy it with the Divine happiness it seeks.) 6. As St. Maximus the Confessor taught, the Fallen personal will presents to and leads the natural will to seek false goods as it's ultimate good and happiness. What the personal will should be doing is freely choosing and presenting the things of God to the natural will, but it no longer does this because of its corruption due to it's share in the effects of Adamic Sin. Thus, fallen human persons and their corrupted human nature no longer consistently prefer and ("naturally") choose the Divine as their good and happiness. Due to Adamic Sin they prefer and ("unnaturally") choose themselves as their god, in a selfish self-idolatry that replaces God with themselves, they selfishly seek themselves for their-own-sake as their only ultimate good and happiness, subtly or overtly, consciously or unconsciously, in everything they say, think, will, desire, and do. They go on to idolize all those things that feed into their own ultimate self-idolatry, twisting and perverting intrinsically good things and even God, and the things of God, for their selfish purposes and needs. This is one of the reasons that Orthodoxy believes it is very easy for people to be completely deluded, especially about spiritual things, until they have become fully deified saints. Ideally, having a confessor or staretz helps people to avoid becoming permanently entrapped by delusion, the Slavonic: "Prelest". This delusion was a large part of the deception, temptation and Fall of Adam and Eve. 7. Having said this, you will not be surprised that Orthodoxy teaches that the corrupted personal will is chiefly afflicted by the ultimate vice of all vices: Philavtia, a Greek term meaning ungodly (anti-God) selfish self love, which feeds into and operates through all of the various vices (habits of sin) that afflict humans. Traditionally these have been organized and discussed as the 8 capital sins and their various species of sin. Conversely, the Grace-restored personal will is driven by the ultimate virtue of virtues: Agape (Greek) meaning the Divine selfless, self sacrificial, self giving Love (God is Love, Love is of God, He who lives in Love lives in God and God in him!) that restores ones self love to seek to do God's Will in all things solely in love for God, and sees and values itself only in God, and only as God sees and values it. Agape feeds and directs all the Deifying Virtues. Traditionally these have been viewed as the habits of godly living and action, which displace and counteract the vices. The Chief Virtues are: Faith, Hope, Love, Justice Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, Patience, etc. People who work with God and his grace and who allow this to live perfectly in them are called Saints (!) of whom there are many, although not enough. Everyone is called by God at the moment of his or her creation to be a saint. This is the meaning of Uncreated Grace being at the core of our being from the moment of our creation at our conception. By daily living out their Baptismal Paschal Union with Christ which opens to them the divine energies of this Grace, the Saints are the ones who are truly human and act with the true, original, natural human nature and true humanity! In our daily spiritual struggles between good and evil, we experience the dynamic tension that exists in us between the pull of Philavtia away from God and the pull of Agape towards and into God. By this Grace and its Agape the Saints died daily with Christ in this struggle to rise daily with Christ to the holiness of eternal life. We are called to do this, too. St. Paul tells us: "If by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the corrupted passions, you will live!" 8. Since we have touched on St. Maximus the Confessor's teaching, let me add from his teaching how it is that we are saved by and in Christ from Adamic Sin and its effects on human personhood. Christ is God the Logos of the Father, incarnate for us and our salvation. He is a Divine Person. As a Divine Person and one of the Trinity, His nature is the Divine Nature. In the mystery of the Incarnation, the union of the human and divine, or Hypostatic Union, results in the a real human nature subsisting in a Divine Person with a real Divine Nature, so that in Christ there is the unity of two natures, human and divine, in one person, the Divine Person of the Logos. Christ did not need created personhood because he already has personhood as the Logos. What he needed was a real human nature, since it is human nature that makes humans really and truly human, and is the content and meaning of their humanity, not their created personhood. The created personhood of humans is the ordinary means by which human nature has real being in which it can exist and become actual and living. So, in Orthodox Theology, the distinction of Human Nature and Created Personhood is very important, not only for understanding the process of willing in human persons, but for understanding how the Incarnation healed the woundedness of the human will due to the Fall. Thus, in Christ we have a Divine Person and his Divine Nature, in Whom a true and real human nature is hypostatically united and subsists, with out confusion, division, etc. 9. While this union of the human and divine in Christ is ultimately a miracle of God that we can not fully understand except by Faith, we do know that this is the necessary means for healing the Fall. Since the Person of Christ is Divine, the one and only Personal Will of the God-Man Jesus Christ, is Divine. What was broken and wounded in Adam and Eve in the Fall, their Personal Will, is whole and "healthy", in the God-man Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus did not have Adamic Sin as a personal attribute, since his personhood did not derive from the Fallen Adam and Eve, only his human nature, which makes him truly human while still being fully Divine. (Hopefully it is clear from the above discussion that Adamic Sin is communicated through created personhood and not through human nature, per se) 10. In the "higher" part of the Human Soul of Christ, the "Nous" (Greek), which is the intuitive intellective-volitional part of the soul (rather than the "lower" psychological and appetitive part of the soul, the "Psyche" (Greek)), the integrity of the Personal Will of Jesus, allowed and enabled Him to always present to His Human Natural Will a proper and fitting godly good to freely choose and seek. That good was a fully human, freely willed, loving conformity to the Divine Will. And the Natural Will of Jesus, exercising his human freedom without compulsion or compromise, in a fully human free act, freely choosing and accepting the influence of His personal will, freely willed to follow that good. And it willed to follow that good with absolutely pure intentions: a fully human pure-hearted Love for God and the seeking of God's Honor and Glory in all things. 11. Thus, where Adam and Eve failed to live and will according to the Original Natural Purity of their Human Nature, Jesus succeeded: His true Human Will, freely and lovingly choose to follow the Divine Will through obedience as its only true good. As St. Paul's Epistles remind us: He put aside his divine glory, took the form of a slave, and became humbler than all men, by being obedient unto death on a cross. He did this so that as true man, God the Father by the Holy Spirit could raise high his crucified human nature, body and soul. In raising him, the Father could reveal it as permanently, eternally, hypostatically united to the person of the undying Logos, thus revealing the true man Jesus as Lord-God incarnate, crucified and risen in love for mankind. In Jesus' bodily humanity, in which the Holy Spirit dwells bodily and through which the Holy Spirit is communicated, Jesus has now become "life-giving spirit" as the one and only New Adam, the New Man, with the one and only New Birth from on high of the Eternal New Life in the New Creation. Into this true God-man Jesus, all believers are bodily joined by Faith and Baptism. IN THE CRUCIFIED AND RISEN CHRIST, THE HUMAN WILL AND THE HUMAN NATURE ARE RESTORED TO THEIR ORIGINAL AND NATURAL STATE. 12. By paschal union with this crucified and risen Christ in Baptism, in principle, our human nature and will is healed. The Gift of the Holy Spirit in Chrismation heals, in principle, our created personhood and our personal will. If we choose through the life of true Faith to put this into practice, by dying to sin and death and rising to holiness and divine life in and with Him, and to use the gifts of grace conferred in principle by these Paschal mysteric sacramental healings of our person and nature, then Adamic Sin and all its worst effects can be reversed in us, too.. Our true human nature will be restored daily as we make humble and patient progress in growing in Christ by Grace during our life's journey of Faith, Hope and Love. Our Great Lenten observance trains us for this state of continual repentance, returning to God in love to open to his love for us and receive him in his love for us by being ready, willing and able to do his will in all things. In union with the Crucified and Risen Christ, by the power of the Grace of the Holy Spirit in us, our personal wills and our natural wills can become progressively restored in actual practice, under the influences of the divine energies of uncreated grace operating through the deifying virtues of the Christian life. This will surely lead us with the help of the Church and its ministry and guidance, to live Pacha unto our own deification in Christ, and it will Christify us as our ultimate salvation, so that the lost Divine Likeness is fully restored in us as we become fully Christlike, and God the Father can see in us the beautiful image of His only Begotten Son and Logos, Jesus Christ Our Lord, who is the love of God made visible and who is the image of the unseen God the Father and the splendor of His Glory!. As we know, by his Pascha, by his dying and rising, Christ has even transformed our mortality and our actual dying and death into our very definitive communion with eternal life. He has made our death and dying into our own personal Pascha with and in him. "Behold I make all things New! ...And because I live, you will Live!" This is the short, fast answer to your question, my dear A. Christ is Risen! With Love in Christ: Blessings! Ippodiakon Pasha Created by Linklings |