Purification by Atheism
Purification by Atheism
Purification by Atheism
Purification by Atheism
Sobornost 5/4 (Winter 1966) 232-248; also in A.M. Allchin (ed.), Orthodoxy
and the Death of God: supplement to Sobornost, Vol. 1, 1971. Originally
published in the review Contacts, and has been translated from the French.
232
I.
lemagne, God has become a God who has been imposed. Throughout the Middle Ages nations were con-
doxy at this point was only a tardy imitator, with the per-
The result has been that in the West, the West which has
fallen world, but worship no longer flowed over into culture, and the divorce between Christianity and beauty
lution took place and the demand for freedom was par-
communion of man, it refused any theology of property, and produced the slavophil reforms. But these, hindered by a nostalgia for old rural community forms, were
incapable of mastering an industrial civilization, brutally
imported from the West, and it was outside the Church
that the Russian revolution finally took place. In it the
instinctive eschatology of a nation steeped in Orthodoxy
found expression in the secularized eschatology of Marxism. Finally, in the Catholic countries, after the brief appearance of liberal Catholicism, the break was even more
complete, on the purely sociological level, between the
theology of property and socialism. This socialism still in
235
blame for all the evil in the world. Here we touch one of
the one who has come, has been lost to view. The per-
236
itual men and women, but always alive, has impelled the
she has defended the beauty of the icons and the trans-
man is for.
In the perspective of the divine-humanity and of salvation by love, we feel, with the Greek Fathers and the Russian religious philosophers, that the creation of man, this
masterpiece of the divine omnipotence, paradoxically
implies a risk for God. The divine omnipotence is fulfilled
in transcending our concept of omnipotence, that is to
say in limiting itself, in running the supreme risk, the
emergence of another liberty. We must then think of the
act of creation at the same time in terms both of omnipotence and the limitation of omnipotence. In one of its
aspects, creation is a continuous act of kenosis on the
part of God; many patristic sayings emphasize that God
can do everything, except force man to love him. Indeed
one must define more closely; freedom is not something
which God has created, which could only put the problem one stage back, and repeat the atheist accusation, it
is someone whom he permits to exist, and it links up with
the limiting concept of original nothingness. It is less the
work of God than his withdrawal so that the other may
be. The other, that is to say the possibility of love but
also of rejection, of rebellion, of hate. For God, the other
is an infinite possibility of longing and of suffering, and
this is the meaning of all love. The other, that is to say
the Cross, the arms always offered, the side always
pierced in a complete openness so that the other may
be, and be living. The lifegiving Cross the only response to the judgment of atheism on freedom and evil.
God, because he is a personal God, a living God, and not
a thing, a stone, an observation post above time, our
God is bigger than our concepts of power and eternity.
His true transcendence is not that of a rationalized theology, but of the freedom which breaks out at the end of
every apophatic approach. God is freedom who wills freedom. God is freedom who makes place for freedom. His
true transcendence, and that is to say his true freedom, is
to will and to be able to risk; to will and to be able to
limit himself, to will and to be able to veil his foreknowledge, so as to be able really to speak with the other, really to love the other, and to love with infinite respect, the infinite discretion, perhaps the infinite suffering of the one who awaits a free response, a free crea-
238
more heavy. The Good News, which before all else is the
II.
to destroy hell. However, for all its entry into a new peri-
er-priests.
of this infantile conception of God, so harshly denounced by Freud as the sadistic father.
The Christianity of Christendom, and often enough still
the Christianity of the family, have been constantly
threatened by a double regression; judaising and intellectualist, one might almost say, Socratizing in the Nietzschean sense of the word. Medieval piety, as we have
seen, expressed on the one hand a politico-religious
240
ism of Camus.
coronation of prostitutes?
felt some need of it, but in order to carry out his design?
the heart of the Gospel message, which is the proclamation and witness of salvation by love. God comes and
declares his love, and asks us to pay him with love in
return ... rebuffed, he waits at the door .... For all the
good that he does to us, he demands only our love in
return; in exchange for our love he absolves us from all
our debt. (Life in Christ.) Thus magnificently wrote Nicholas Cabasilas, a great lay theologian of the fourteenth
century, who never ceased to fight against the terrorist
Thus in the West, the meaning of the Cross and the per-
241
made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but
understand
following
sick child, the child gnawed by secret suffering and solitude. We can make no witness here unless we also have
a healing praxis, an adaptation and realization for our
own time of the great traditional ascesis of prayer as the
art of arts and science of sciences, capable of unifying
man around his understanding heart. Clearly we cannot
without thinking apply the methods of the past to the
man of the great city, of our technological civilization,
drugged with noise and images, devitalized and suffering not so much from inhibition as from fragmentation.
Clearly too, we cannot with impunity leave him in the
hands of the mystics of India who know the secrets of
concentration but are ignorant of the full revelation of
the person, or of psycho-analysts who cleanse the dark
side of man but do not know that eros is the thirst for
immortality. The great hesychast tradition is called today
to take into itself and correct both the Eastern techniques of concentration and the contributions of psychoanalysis. It alone perhaps amidst the diverse traditions of
Christian spirituality, can achieve this fully, for psychosomatic techniques of concentration, and the most pitiless psycho-analysis (taking in the angelic and demonic
levels which modern science can only register in their
reflections in the human psyche) have long been familiar
to it. All this will not be in order to adapt man to his fall-
in
the
profoundly
Orthodox
line
of
for him who demands it, sacrificial for him who gives it.
The first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam
ism.
This unity has fallen apart. Its break-up took place in the
West, but in the present age it has reached an Orthodoxy weakened in its intellectual (I do not say spiritual)
awareness of itself. With the great systems of scholasticism, theology attempted to make itself into a science,
leaving on one side both the negative approach and
244
arrogating an absurd monopoly for itself. The omnipresence of God in the Holy Spirit, making real the life-giving
power of the Risen Lord, has given place to a veritable
exile of God in heaven; sometimes still the physical
heaven (think of the havoc which the Copernican revolution played with popular faith, havoc which Soviet propaganda attempts to prolong today by making use of the
astronauts), but above all the heavens of piety, of belief,
of individual subjectivity.
In the early Church, the life in Christ was powerfully experienced in communion, thanks to the unity of the
245
establish faith in the comfort of scientific demonstrations. It is a theology of guarantees, while faith is the
personal adventure of man, going out to meet the personal adventure of God. Rationality has found its proper
application in the mastery and control of the fallen
world. On this level it has been perceived that the God of
246
the science of sciences. The love of discovery, experience, of a methodical praxis has been moved from the
inner life towards the domination of the fallen world,
towards science and its technical applications.
East.
The rationalization of theology brought with it an individualization of mysticism and a sentimental or intellectualist degeneration of the liturgy. Romanesque art, like
Byzantine art, creates a space which is full, saturated with
the all-presence. Gothic art is an aspiration towards
heaven where God is exiled. From spiritual bodilyness,
sacred art moves to the dreamy anima of the Florentine
Quattrocento, and then to the vital turmoil of the baroque. This active degeneration of Western liturgical art,
which is rich none the less in creative discoveries and
inventions at the human level, gives rise to a passive
degeneration of Orthodox art from the seventeenth century onwards. While Orthodoxy was going to sleep,
rocked in the sublime cradling of a half-heard liturgy,
affective devotion was flourishing in Catholicism, and the
Reformation gave rise to an essentially discursive form of
worship, dominated by a thin Platonism which confused
spiritual and intelligible. Mysticism no longer rooted in
theology and liturgical unanimity slides into an inspired
individualism. After the defeat of pure love in the eighteenth century it leaves the Catholic Church, and one
sees the strange evolution which leads from the illuminism of the eighteenth century to certain aspects of
German romanticism, and from there to the pseudoreligions of the twentieth century.
Thus the Christian faith has become for most people a
simple belief restricted to morality and subjectivity; it has
ceased to open man to the infinite experience of life in
God in heaven, and with the transformation of Christianity into a closed theism. Scholastic substantialism has
almost destroyed the Christian metaphysic of participation and transparence. The upsetting of the mysterious
balance between essence and hypostases in the approach to the mystery of the Trinity, brought about by
the introduction of the filioque, in some way shut God up
in his essence, and made it impossible to perceive the
divine energies really penetrating the created order. The
emphasis on redemption by the merits of Christ to the
exclusion of the deification of human nature in the Godman, a human nature seen as including the flesh of the
earth, has cut off the cosmic dimensions of the doctrine
of redemption. Fallen nature, subject to necessity and
death by the sin of man, was simply identified with Gods
creation, and this brought about in the scientific field the
same phenomena as are to be observed in the social
field. State was set up against state. The Church tried to
make the mystery into a science in opposition to science.
It tried to put limits to research, and in Bonhoeffers
words turned God into a God of the gaps in human
knowledge. Forgetting the soma pneumatikon and the
spiritual potential of matter, both miracle and sacrament
appeared more and more troublesome anomalies. Today
demythologizing and existentialism allow them to be
dispensed with, but then, faith, reduced to subjectivity,
threatens to be dissolved into a pure and simple adhesion to the world, which alone is real and alone is interesting.
in the Orthodox countries themselves, gives us the possibility and the duty of making a renewed expression of
Palamism. Only a theology of the divine energies shining
in the Holy Spirit from the glorious Christ can give Christianity a cosmic dimension, and establish the religious
meaning of human creativity and beauty. God is not exiled in the heavens, he is not the stop-gap of human
ignorance; he is at the centre of beings and things, in the
depth of all love, of all beauty by the radiance of his en-
247
who each in his own way penetrates into the cosmic log-
civilizations?
sea, less vast than the dark space where the astronauts
revolve, less vast than the impersonal beauty of a tree or
a young girl?
248
of God.
.o.O.o.