Saturday, July 10, 2021

The age of apostasy.
Saint Sophrony the Athonite.

 The Old Rectory

3rd June 1966

 

Saint Sophrony the Athonite.
(Camil Rahal 2019)
        My idea is very simple: if Christ is not God, then we are in darkness, and to justify God in the face of the endless suffering of the world is, quite simply, impossible. If Christ is indeed God, as we believe without any doubt, then no one can accuse God for the evil which takes place in the world. Thanks to the manifestation of Christ we now know God as He is, and we love Him, and we do not lay any blame on Him; Christ has shown us God, who is “Light, in whom there is no darkness”.

We confess at the same time though that Christ is true Man. The Father, seeing such a Man, gave to Him, to that Man, a place in eternity at His right hand, which means He is perfectly equal to the Father. If men are such, then God the Father does not repent that He created man, as it is said in Scripture: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth." (Gen6: 5-7).

Perhaps human evil is felt particularly vividly in our time, because the evil appears in an organized form as never before. I am already an old man, and only in my very earliest child­hood did I gain an impression of peace and light - but from the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War!" until the present I see mankind overwhelmed by fratricidal wars, and there is as yet no brightening on the horizon; rather, on the contrary, clouds of unprecedented darkness fill the sky, ready to burst out in an apocalyptic storm. And I, notwithstanding this brutal­ity, was ready from my young years to go out into the streets and squares, like Diogenes, with a lighted lantern, to seek for a man. And when I found Christ, I rejoiced at this wonderful discovery, and I will never be able to forget this fact of world history. In essence only He, Christ, is fully a Man. We, though, pass the days of our earthly pilgrimage in striving to become like Him. A man begins to be a man when he is conscious of himself as a son of the eternal Father, and pronounces the prayer "Our Father" with this awareness. But we do not yet feel this dignity of man in its fullness, and that is why we con­tinue on the path of our development, of our upbringing in the Holy Spirit. Without Christ it is impossible to justify human­ity. Thus, Christ, simultaneously God and Man, vindicates God in front of the world, having revealed to the world the immeasurability of the Father's Love, and also justifies hu­manity in front of God, having revealed to God the Father the true face of man. This justification is not juridical, as many Christians tend to think, but of a completely different order.

"Thanks to the manifestation
 of Christ we now
know God as He is"
     After so many years of almost ceaseless mutual slaughter of people on earth - moreover, slaughter which everyone ceaselessly justifies to himself - it is impossible to expect peo­ple to dare to look up to the height of Heaven and call upon God as their Father.'?" In our epoch the 'bestiality' of the world has taken on fearful proportions. The abandonment of Christian faith in its true essence has become an omnipresent phenomenon. This age can be called the age of apostasy (falling away). And I am afraid that only an increase of calamity will now be able to bring people to their 'critical point' of suffering, which will call forth in them once again the capacity to apprehend their original nature in the image of God. Then peace will reign upon earth. But as long as peo­ple are like the wildest animals, we cannot expect peace on earth. All the reinforcing of diplomacy and other such ways and means of eliminating the calamity of war will be in vain. What is vital above all is man's rebirth in spirit; what is needed is the humanisation of this bestial world.

You will understand that what I have written are only small hints, a few fragments, of the picture presented to my mind - especially during the hours of the Liturgy, which is the eternal sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Of course, I would like to speak with you for hours about these vital mat­ters. But there we are, in our days these hours are not given to us.

So, I am wishing you, Maria, all the very best, and among other things I wish you good health. Nonetheless more than all else and before all else, I wish you inspiration from on High for a worthy passage through your old age, which is al­ready upon you, which is our most blessed time on earth. Everything shallow and base fades away, naturally fades away, and the thought of another level of Being becomes un­ceasing, by virtue of the approaching solemn moment of our departure from here. We do not yet know what will happen to us, because our experience is not enough for us to judge this fully. We only know that Christ is risen, and that we will all rise in Him. When these things will be brought to comple­tion, as the actualization of God's creative work, then with more credibility than from scientific proof everything in the cosmos will be revealed to all of us, and our knowledge will acquire that absolute character towards which man's spirit strives in every epoch.

May God keep you, blessing all your days. I send every­one my fervent love.

Your Sophrony.

 

 

 

Reference:

Letters to His Family. Archimandrite Sophrony(Sakharov).(2015).