The creative act of God.Saint Sophrony the Athonite.

 

        

Icon "Hexaemereon"*.

   God created the world and especially man, by a risk. When I contemplate the coming of Christ on earth, I also contemplate this Divine risk, insofar as my limited capacity allows me. If man is really free, free as God's 'image and likeness', then we are inevitably led to think that God 'in the beginning' cre­ated a pure potential, and that everything that afterwards fol­lows in man's destiny no longer depends only on God the Creator, but also on the freedom of each human person (hy­postasis). Each of us is free to be conformed to God, to be united with Him in love or to reject Him and turn naively to the quest for another life. “Naively”, because outside the Di­vine First Origin there is no life. So it is: in the freedom of man is the tragic character of all the history of the world. And without a doubt, God foresaw this tragedy, contemplated it in His Eternity. So the creation of man is that tragic gesture by which God the Father casts us into the abyss of being, calling us out of the abyss of non-being. God, who is 'everywhere present and filleth all things' , surrounds us, wherever we may be; He lovingly seeks us out, calls us to Him, endures, waits. He never violates our freedom; He respects us as if we were His equals. In every case He treats us as His equals, and He does not expect anything else from us than to see us in full likeness to Him. That is how I understand the Revelation given in Christ, who as Man too ascended to the right hand of the Father.!

From that vision stems my consciousness of our need to undergo the tragic and painful feat of our own creation in eter­nity in the image and likeness of the Father, Who was revealed to us through the coming of Christ and the sending down of the Holy Spirit.

The principle of the hypostasis is the climax of the cre­ation of the world. The life of the person springs up mysteri­ously; the person escapes every rational definition. The person is the bearer of life; the hypostasis is that which truly lives. If it were possible to remove this element, this principle, from Being, then everything would lose its meaning, would in fact be submerged in death. Science knows nothing of this true bearer of life. Not knowing anything of this supreme, ul­timate dimension of being, science will forever remain on a lower plane, finding a material explanation for every phenom­enon, including spiritual phenomena.

But I see things like this: when the person has come into being (I am talking about the created human person), then it is not only incorrect, but also criminal, to turn back and seek to learn the mystery of the generation of the person through scientific investigation into natural life, the life of the material world. If such a retrospective movement i.e. to what pre­cedes our present form of being - goes hand in hand with the rejection of every other level of Being transcending space and time, then the true meaning of our coming into the world is lost. 'Behind' us is that nothing out of which we were pushed by the creative act of God. Yes, we were flung into Being by the tragic gesture of God, and now before us lies this flight across a chasm; a flight which is fearful and yet, together with that, indescribably majestic, attracting us by its purpose, en­gendering in us a determined refusal to 'accept' death. Yes, we must not stop in our striving towards the eternal; and even more than that, we must not 'turn back' .

God, our Father, is a Person, and we likewise are persons, so knowledge of God is not possible except by mutual self disclosure. And it is precisely by way of Revelation that we come to know that 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.'

Let us look at what the latest word of science tells us about cosmology. 'In the beginning was the hydrogen atom, and everything that exists arose out of this simplest atom by a process of evolution. This evolution took 15 thousand mil­lion years.' Apparently, an as yet unknown time will pass and then everything will once again revert to its previous state, that is, to a hydrogen atom.

In ourselves and in the cosmic life surrounding us we contemplate the process of the world's creation. We are clearly aware that the creation of Man has not yet finished. In the act of free self-determination we must “assimilate” the Life of God, our Father, who gives us everything 'without meas­ure’, without limitation, 'without envy'. But this assimilation is bound up with painful struggle throughout our earthly life. This 'pain', however, is utterly indispensable for me if I am to understand my freedom. 'Suffering' forms in me the deepest need to say freely to God: 'I love Thee'. If there were no suffering, I would not attain to the deep meaning, the strong consciousness, of my freedom; because I could not be sure that I love Him, the Father, and not just a certain sweet­ness of love.

Saint Sophrony the Athonite.

I am certain that when I shall attain to perfect love, which will truly unite me to God, when I contain within myself the fullness of this gift, then I shall also become like Him in knowledge of all that exists, for 'the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things' , and 'what things so ever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise' - and I do not mean the Only-Begotten, but every son of man.

I have sung you some verses of my favourite song, which never ends, for it is eternally alive, and eternally new. At one point you were recalling my youth. Then too, half a century ago, I often stood in deep won­der before the mystery of this world, before the mystery of life in general. This very minute an instance has come to my memory. When at one time I was in a state of enthusiastic wonder at life, I saw a spider running across the floor of my studio, and I froze from admiration and wonder at this phe­nomenon. It would be a long task to describe the multitude of similar occasions as the years, the decades, went by, but my sense of wonder has not diminished. I did not straight away realize that this was a gift of God to me. I came to this conclusion from the fact that I have met many people, of the most varied levels of education, for whom such a feeling of wonder was unknown.

 

* Orthodox icons of the Hexahemeron traditionally include the Etimasion, the Feasts of the six weekdays, the Deesis, and the Sabbath of All Saints.The centerpiece consists of six Creation scenes. The main axis depicts God Sabaoth with the Angelic host and the enthroned Christ the Judge with Saint John the Baptist and the Mother of God. It is followed by the six Feasts symbolizing the six days of the week. The border scenes of such Orthodox icons depict the Evangelists, Saints, Church Fathers, the Fools-for-Christ, and the Blessed.

Reference:Letters to his family. Archimandrite Sophrony(Sakharov).2015.