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| Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. |
We hear from the first lines of
Genesis that God created the world (Gen. 1:1-31). We hear also, from St John's
Gospel, that in the beginning was the Word and that from Him all things
proceeded (Jn. 1:1-3). When we try to understand how things came into being we
are faced with a strange analogy. Today in scientific circles people speak
about the big bang. In the Gospel we read about the Word that brought
everything into being (Jn. 1:3). Modern science thinks of the big bang because
we always think that important events must be tremendous, noisy, shaking, and
we forget that in the story of Elijah, when the prophet finds himself in the
desert, there was a thunderstorm, there was lightning, and God was neither in
the one nor in the other; and then came the quiet voice of the evening breeze,
and God was in it. And I think that none of us imagines the creation by the
Word of God as a tremendous bang sounding in the universe and bringing into
being all things that were to become. We read in the Bible that in the beginning
there was what the English translations call the chaos. And very often we
understand the chaos as an extremely disorderly state of being. No, chaos does
not necessarily mean that. When we speak of chaos we visualize the chaos of the
world, the chaos that results from the falling of bombs, the tragedies that
occur in our human lives, the destruction of harmony, the annihilation at times
of the existing order. But chaos has also another meaning: chaos is being that
has not yet unfolded itself, like a bud that has not yet opened. The chaos
created by God in the beginning is exactly that. He creates a whole mass of
potentialities. And the thing that strikes me is this quiet voice of Christ,
'Come', which is a call of love, 'Come', because you are called to be my
companion of eternity, 'Come' because there will be the day when all things
will be in God. Over this chaos of potentialities the Spirit of God is
brooding. He is not simply breathing like a wind over the sea. He is brooding,
if I may put it in Biblical terms, like a hen, over this chaos (Mt 23:37),
warming it, and calling out of it all that it can become: not by forcing it, as
its maker, but by calling it to unfold itself, to open itself up, to become all
that it can be. In the Bible we can see several stages of this process (Gen.
1:1-31). At every single stage something appears that was not there before.
There was nothing artificial about this process of becoming. Everything grows
out as a possibility that unfolds itself and declares its presence. And at the
end of every day God looks at what has unfolded and says ‘That is good'. And
yet, the next day starts, and something else comes, which is also good, because
the unfolding continues unceasingly.
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| "The Creation".Russian icon |
Having touched on this aspect of the
creation I would like now to say something about the light. We are told that in
the beginning God creates light; not the luminaries, but light itself. Light is
seen both in the Old and in the New Testament as something which makes things
visible, perceptible. There is an interesting passage in a novel by Charles
Williams in which a painting is described. The person who looks at the painting
says that the light was not streaming from one point or another; it seemed that
the light filled the entire canvas, that the light became color, that this color
became matter and that this matter was a beam of wood. I think we could imagine
the unfolding of things in creation in these terms. The Spirit of God calls out
of the potentialities that were created one thing after the other, and each
thing comes into existence according to its response. The light becomes matter,
matter takes shape, one thing after the other emerges, and each of them is good
and right. So this is the first way in which matter, apart from man, relates to
God. The wonderful thing is that matter has its own way of relating to God.
Matter and God are correlative in that sense, leaving aside the fact that God
is eternal and uncreated whereas matter is created. But at that particular
moment, the presence of man is not needed in any way.
And then man is created. What strikes
me in the story of the creation of man is that he is not created as a more
perfect ape or animal or other being. His appearance does not represent the
culminating point of the creation. A moment comes when God creates a being whom
he will put in charge of the world he has created. In order to make this being
capable of relating to all the things he has made, he takes the dust which is
the basic material out of which everything else evolves. He cannot go lower. He
takes the basic element, and therefore man, having been created on that level,
is akin to everything that has emerged out of the chaos. He is at the root of
the chaos, at the lowest level of the chaos. He is akin to the greatest and the
smallest things. He is not simply more perfect. Man is made different from the
other beings in that God breathes into him His own Spirit. So, there are two
levels on which man relates to God: on the one hand as matter, and on the other
hand as a living soul. These two levels are not absolutely identical, because
matter remains pure even when man falls. I remember a spiritual writer saying
that what we call 'the sins of the flesh' are the sins that the spirit commits
against the flesh, i.e. matter. (In this case the word 'spirit' is used in the
sense of psyche, a man's soul.) Matter is not sinful in itself. In a
human body hunger belongs to matter; the choice of food and greed belongs to
our imagination. And this could be extended to everything else. So we are confronted
with a world in which God relates to matter directly. In that sense
Christianity can be considered as a sacred materialism.
However, with the Fall a dramatic
change occurs; but it is man who is instrumental in the catastrophe that
transforms the original chaos — this infinite possibility and potentiality —
into chaos as we know it. Something that could be beauty, perfection, harmony
and structure, as a consequence of the Fall collapses in ruins. It is man who
causes this chaos and that is something that we must remember. Man was created
to be a guide to all things created from fullness to fullness. We cannot know
what this fullness was meant to be because we do not know what was the
condition either of matter or of the
human being, in paradise. We cannot imagine how man was to grow from a state of
total perfection which was incipient, let us say from a state of innocence,
into a state of holiness. But what we know is that it was avocation, both of
the material world, and the human and the animal world, and that it collapsed
because man fell away from God.
Instead of wanting to understand and
to know the world from within his communion with God, he was tempted to try to
know all the created world, including himself, by his own means. The tree of
knowledge is not simply an apple tree, it is no apple tree at all in the Bible
(Gen. 2:16-17 and 3:3). It is not a tree from which one eats, it is an
attitude: 'I will know' instead of 'I will commune with God and in Him and
through Him all things will be transparent and understandable to me'. And then
the catastrophe comes. In the Bible we are told that man was called to have, as
we read it in English, dominion over all things (Gen. 1:26). We
understand dominion in a very narrow sense. The word 'dominion' comes from the
same root as dominus, the master. But the master may be one who rules
with a rod of iron, or one who has mastery in himself and conveys it to others.
I believe that man was created to be the guide and teacher, listening and
understanding within rules of harmony; and not to overpower the rest of
creation.
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| Adam and Eve in paradise. |
At this point I would like to make a
short digression. The law of God is the law of freedom. But what does freedom
mean? When we think of freedom we think more often than not of the possibility,
or indeed the right, of being and doing what we want. When we speak of civil
liberties that is what we mean. We have got rights and we will use them. We can
claim them. Liberty, however, comes from the Latin word liber, which is
the word used concerning a child born free, in a family of free men and women
and not of slaves. That implies that a human being is born free, but he will
not remain free unless he acquires mastery over himself. The way in which his
parents will make him into a free human being is by teaching himself mastery,
discipline and self possession. This is what man was to learn, in which case he
could indeed lead the whole creation from glory to glory.
I am using these words because I have
no other words to use; because we do not know what the paradisiac condition of
man, of matter and of animals was. There was, however, a moment when we can
glimpse the way in which man related not to matter as such, but to the created
world. In the second chapter of Genesis (Gen. 2:19-20) we are told that God brings
all animals to man, and man gives to each of the animals its name. In biblical
terms, the name and the being are coincidental; it is not simply a way of
describing one being to contrast it to another. It expresses the very substance
of the being, and at that moment, because man is still in full communion with
God, however incipiently, however immature he maybe in himself, he is in God
and relating directly to Him; and for this reason he can see each animal as God
sees it, and gives it a name.
We are told in the Book of Revelation
that a day will come when all things will be fulfilled, when each of us will
receive a name (Rev. 2:17): a name which unlike Peter, Paul, John or Mary, no
one knows but God and he who receives it, a name which contains the whole of
the creature whom it expresses. And so, freedom, which was offered to man, and
which he was to convey to others, was of that quality: a communion with God
that would allow man to see every being, animals, plants, stones, the sky and
the earth, as God sees them, and possess the key to their being by knowing
their name. And man has destroyed this harmony.
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"God brings all animals to man,
and man gives to each of the animals its name".
(Gen. 2:19-20)
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There is a remarkable story in the
novel L'âne culotte by the French writer Henri Bosco. It is the story of
a man called Monsieur Cyprian. Monsieur Cyprian is a man who spent many years
in the islands of the Pacific, alone, in primitive conditions, and had learned
to commune with nature, and to love it deeply. In this communion of love nature
had conveyed something to him, but he is also able to do something about
nature. He comes back to France, buys a piece of land which is all stone, rocks
and not even weeds, and sings songs of love to this earth which has become
barren and dead because man is alienated from God. And this earth begins to
come back to life, a new paradise is formed there. To this paradise all animals
flock, because it is a place of harmony which in God's own name has become an
earthly paradise, however limited. Everything is good but for one terrible
thing: there is one animal that refuses to come and live in paradise. It is a
fox. The fox cannot be beguiled. No song attracts him, no food, nothing. He
runs around this newly created paradise. He yaps. He tries to beguile the other
animals to come out. In the end Monsieur Cyprian thinks that if there were no
fox paradise would be fulfilled, and he goes out of paradise and kills the fox.
And when he comes back the earth has become arid again, the plants have died
and all the animals have run away. This is what we have done to the earth and this
is what we have done to matter, or rather not to matter in its substance,
because matter remains what it was, but to the way it relates to man and to all
things. We have created chaos. God, however, continues to relate to matter. He
remains the God of this material world. In Him the created world is still full
of potentialities and we can see this in several ways. First of all, in the
Incarnation God becomes man in the same way that the first Adam was created out
of the dust of the earth. In that sense, the incarnate Son of God, through His
materiality, through His material humanity, is akin to every single thing that
exists: every atom, every galaxy, every star, every plant, every animal can
look at Him and recognize itself mysteriously in Him. Every being can recognize
itself as it is called to be, in glory, in the glory to which it is called
ultimately to become when again, in the words of the Apostle, God shall be all
in all (Eph. 1:23).
I know that various interpretations
have proposed a limited reading of these words: God will be all in the saints,
in those who are good, and so on, but this is not what the Apostle means. The
calling transmitted in the words of the epistle to the Ephesians is that the
whole of the created world will commune with God, that He will pervade all
things and they will be pervaded by Him and be deified. In the Incarnation this
has already happened to one human being who can now be the guide, the dominus,
the master, the one who leads all creation (not only mankind, but the whole
creation) into its fullness, which in Him can see itself in eternal glory.
However, before this happens man must change because it is we, human beings,
who create a problem. As long as we are not in communion with God we cannot be
leaders of the rest of the creation, we cannot be guides. And even if the whole
world could be in God it would still not be paradise because we would be the
little foxes outside the garden of Monsieur Cyprian.
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| "Take, eat; this is my body".(Mt26: 26). |
In order to provide this communion
God has therefore introduced sacraments into the world to teach us something
about matter and about ourselves. When we celebrate the liturgy or any other
sacrament, it is Christ who is the celebrant. In one of the secret prayers in
the liturgy we say, ‘Thou art he who offers and is offered.' He is the
celebrant. And the power that transmutes this bread and this wine into the body
and the blood of Christ, is the Holy Spirit. It is not the priest; the priest
is instrumental, in the name of the whole congregation of the believers, but he
is not one who has power. No ordination, no consecration can give a human power
to make this bread into the body of Christ, or this wine into the blood of
Christ or, if you prefer to look at it conversely, to force Christ into bread
or to force Christ into wine. There is something greater than this: it is
Christ who takes this bread and this wine and integrates it into Himself. It is
by the hands of the priest that it is distributed, but the miracle has occurred
by the power of Christ.
This applies to all the sacraments. I
do not have time to go into it, but there is not one sacrament in which one
could say that it is the priest who has the power to do this or that. He prays,
but he prays in the name of the whole Church, the body of Christ, and indeed,
of the whole created world. And the miracle happens. It goes very far indeed if
we consider, for instance, that in the blessing of a bell we are told that this
bell is blessed and its sound will resound in the souls of people and awaken
them to eternal life. It is remarkable that even in this instance God is
active, reaching out through matter to human beings who have fallen away from
communion with Him. I think that when we look around us we should be aware that
we are surrounded not by a world of objects, but by matter which is free to
commune with God in a reciprocal relationship. God is free to commune with
matter because it is sinless, it is not fallen, it has become a victim of the
Fall of man. St Theodore of Studion in one of his Admonitions (Catecheseis) says
that the created world, as we know it now, so anarchical, so wild, so brutal,
so frightening, is like a good horse ridden by a drunken rider. We are the
drunken rider. The world in which we live is like a perfectly good horse. We
drive it mad and the result is chaos as we know it and not the original chaos
of potentialities as God created it.
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| Christ the Healer. |
The same applies also to miracles.
Miracles are not moments when God uses His power to enforce harmony upon the
world that surrounds Him or us. A miracle is an act of God by which things are
freed from the enslavement which we have imposed upon them and can breathe.
When it applies to nature, it is a direct and simple act of God by which he
restores harmony. Remember the event in which Christ commanded the seas and the
wind to abate, to calm down, to come back to peace. They came back to the peace
of God, they came back to His peace. This was not the case with the Apostles.
Peter wanted to come to Christ who was standing at the very eye of the cyclone.
He wanted to come, and yet he thought of himself: he was afraid, he did not
believe, he was not free of himself; and he began to drown. So, nature is open
to miracles, open to the act of God, to the extent that we do not hamper it.
When it comes to human beings, there must be consent, there must be a harmony
of intent between God and man. How often do we see in the Gospels Christ
speaking to a sick person, or to a possessed man, or whomever, and asking him:
'Dost thou wish to be made whole?' Healing is not imposed. Healing is not
forced upon him; he must open himself: ‘Yes, I want it.' And then the miracle
occurs. The words used are not simply, 'Dost thou want to be healed?', as if a
person were to be healed of a temporary illness. The words 'Dost thou want to
be made whole?' refer to the restoration of wholeness, to the extent that this
is possible in a fallen world, a wholeness which is ours by vocation. Something
that we often disregard when we pray for the healing of ourselves or of others
is the fact that this wholeness implies that we must die and be made new. We
must renounce all the things that have made us sick unto death, and accept
newness of life in Christ. When Christ says, ‘You are now whole, go and sin no
more,' he gives an absolute command. It is not simply conditional — ‘Try to be
better than you were' — because the life of wholeness that I have now given you
cannot coincide with your previous sinful life. Of course, all those who were
healed were not made perfect. They were not yet back into the paradise of
creation or that of eternity; but they were on the brink of it. I remember
Father George Florovsky saying to me that the Church is a mysterious
eschatological body which is both at home and on its way home; it is already
fulfilled and in process. It is fulfilled because the fullness of God abides in
it. Christ is the first born in this Church. He is the first member of this
Church. He is one of us through His humanity. The Holy Spirit has come into it.
And we are already in a position, if we are in Christ and in the Spirit, to
call God our Father, as Christ called Him His Father. It is only to the extent
that we are in Christ that God is also our Father. At the same time we are in
the process of change and of becoming: the power of the Spirit is working in
us, the power of Christ is working in us through His teaching, His example and
His sacraments. Two things are instrumental in this process: on the one hand
our will, and on the other hand the matter which conveys this change to us. Our
will is essential because all things are done by God together with us, in
synergy with us. God does not act upon us as an overlord who can do with us
whatever He wants. He always says, 'Dost thou wish...?', 'Are you prepared
to...?', 'Dost thou want it?' There was only one event, wonderful but tragic
because of the circumstances, in which God acted one-sidedly and had to pay the
cost of it. It was the creation of the world. God did not ask us whether we
wanted to be created, because there was nobody to ask. So, knowing that in the
end it would come right, He created a world and us in it. He took, however,
full responsibility: for the Fall of this world that was caused by the Fall
within the human person, and for the resulting tragedy of the world. In order
to save the world he becomes one of us, He takes upon Himself, and shares with
us, all the tragedy, circumstances and limitations of this world. We know from
the Gospels that He was surrounded by misunderstanding, hatred and betrayal. He
accepts all that and something more; something which man had brought into the
world: death.
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Τhe Incarnation,a result
of the total mutual agreement
between God and man
represented by the Virgin.
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By becoming man, although remaining
immortal, He accepts to share with us our mortality and our death. When He says
on the cross, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Mt. 27:46), it is a
moment when subjectively in His humanity He feels separated from God and
therefore can only die, because separated from God one dies. The creation was
the only occasion when God acted one-sidedly, at a cost to him that we can see
and respond to. There is in one of the Russian spiritual writers a passage in
which the eternal council of the Holy Trinity before the creation is imagined.
The Father says, 'My Son, let us create the world and man'; and the Son says,
'Yes, Father.' The Father continues: 'But man will fall away from us, and to
bring him back you will have to become man and die'; and the Son says, 'Let it
be so, Father.' Only then does the world come into being. The response of this
world to the Incarnation was voiced through the lips of the Virgin Mary in the
Annunciation. The Mother of God did not receive simply the joy, and the miracle
and the glory of the Incarnation but also the terror and the awe of the
encounter with the archangel. As St Gregory Palamas puts it, the Incarnation
would have been as impossible without the assent of the Virgin as it would have
been without the positive will of God. Here, synergy, i.e. working together, is
restored and salvation has come into the world. The salvation that resulted
from the Incarnation, the union of the human and the divine nature in the
person of Christ, was not one-sided: it came as a result of the total mutual
agreement between God and man represented by the Virgin.
In this sense we may say that matter
is indeed something miraculous. On the one hand, it is a martyr and a victim of
our Fall, and it suffers throughout the ages of our Godlessness. On the other
hand, in Christ matter is restored potentially to the fullness of its glory;
and in Christ and in the Spirit it becomes capable of conveying to us what we
have lost, communion with God. It is precisely this communion that we may cry
for in prayer and in desperate longing and which is given to us by an act that
involves matter and which is accessible to each of us. We may not be able to
pray as the saints do, but a babe can open its lips and receive the Holy Body
and the Holy Blood of Christ. Each of us can approach and say, 'Here am I, I am
open to the gift although I am unworthy of it.' At times that is indeed how it
happens.
I have mentioned in the past the case
of a woman who came to see me, almost fifty years ago, and said to me, 'I have
a problem. Lent is coming, then Easter. I am forced by my family, who are all
believers, to receive communion. And yet, I believe neither in God, nor in
communion. What shall I do?' I told her that her problem was already solved
because even if she came to receive communion I would not give it to her. I
proposed, however, to talk about it. We talked throughout Lent, once per week,
but I could convey nothing to this woman; not even the sparks of knowledge I
possessed. There was no hope.
Then, on Good Friday, she came to
church, and I said to her, ‘The Church has let you down. We priests have
betrayed our vocation. Your family has not given you what it should. Let us go
and ask it from God Himself.' When I knelt before the epitaphios, she stood
next to me for a while and then she knelt too — because, as she told me later,
she felt uneasy towering over me. And I stayed there saying to God, 'You only
can save her. You only can do something. Do it, or tell me what I should do!' Then
a thought came to me, and this was not a thought that had simply evolved in me.
I turned to her and said, 'Does it matter enough to you to have an answer to
this question that you are prepared to do anything to acquire it?' She said,
'Yes. If there is no God there is no meaning in life. I must have an answer
because I will not live if there is no God. What shall I do?' I said, 'I do not
know.' And then I turned to God and said, 'She is prepared to receive an
answer. What is the answer?' The answer came in a way that I would not have
dreamt about because I found it terrifying: ‘Tell her to come to communion on
Saturday before Easter and claim an answer from me.' When I told her what she
had to do she said, 'If God exists, that is blasphemy. It is impossible.' I
said that that was all I had to offer. I remember that she came to communion
saying to God, 'Your Church has betrayed You; your priests and my family have
betrayed me. Now I am challenging You. If You do not give me an answer in
communion, I renounce You for ever and my blood is on Your head!' And then she
received communion, and she left, and I also left for France. Two days later I
got a short note from this woman in which she said, 'I do not know yet whether
God exists or not, but what I know for sure is that I did not receive bread and
wine. It was something else.' And that was the answer, after which the process
continued and she discovered God and grew into a great fullness of life in
Christ.
So, if I may put it in such a way,
matter really matters. It is not only instrumental as an object, which we use
as a tool. Matter in the example I gave you was filled with God and conveyed to
this woman what I could not convey in anyway. The words of the Epistle to the
Ephesians that I quoted above, that God shall be all in all, give us an idea
about the vocation of the world. It gives, however, an image rather than a
concrete description of the vocation of the world. There will be a communion
with God far greater than that of the lost paradise. That paradise was the
paradise of the innocent who were to grow into holiness. In the world in which
we now live innocence is rare, sinfulness is in abundance and yet, in the soul
of every person, in the soul of the Church as a whole, there is a longing,
there is a cry: 'O come, Lord Jesus, and come soon!' The day will come when it
will happen, and it will not be the paradise of the innocent, it will be the
paradise of those who are in total, full, perfect communion with God. On this
day, God and creation will be one, although God will always remain beyond His
creation; and yet, the creation will be communing ever increasingly with God as
it unfolds itself wider and wider, through His presence and action. At this
point I want to close this talk in which I have expressed my thoughts about the
way in which God relates not to man, but to matter, and about the role which
matter plays in our becoming and in the becoming of the world.
Reference:
PUBLICATION,Russian Orthodox Diocese of
Sourozh, Diocesan Conference. Headington, Oxford
23-26 May 1997
