THE AGE OF FAITH
From the Beginning to 1453 AD
Volume 1 of “AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY”
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View
Vladimir Moss
© Copyright Vladimir Moss. All Rights Reserved, 2019.
A profound and hidden mystery is the fall of man. It is quite
impossible for a person to understand it by his own powers. This is
because among the consequences of the fall is mental blindness,
which prevents the mind from seeing the depths and darkness of the
fall. Our fallen state appears to be a state of triumph, and the
land of exile seems to be an exceptional field of progress and
enjoyment.....What a different picture, brethren, and how terrible
is the sight that meets our gaze when the mystery is disclosed to
us!
St. Ignaty Brianchaninov.
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given: and the
government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the
Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there
shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon His Kingdom, to
order it, and to establish it with judgement and with justice
henceforth even for ever.
Isaiah 9.6-7.
It is he that shall build the Temple of the Lord, and shall bear
royal honour, and shall sit and rule upon his throne. And there
shall be a priest by his throne, and peaceful understanding shall
be between them both.Zechariah 6.13.
The Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men,and giveth it to
whomsoever He will,
and setteth up over it the basest of men.
Daniel 4.17.
I would advise those who seek liberty and shun the yoke of
servitude as evil, not to fall into the plague of despotic rule, to
which an insatiable passion of unseasonable freedom brought their
fathers. In excess, servitude and liberty are each wholly bad; in
due measure, each are wholly good. The due measure of servitude is
to serve God; its excess is to serve man. Law is the god of the
right-minded man; pleasure is the god of the fool.
Plato, Letters, viii, 354.
Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than
fair masters.
Sallust, Histories.
My Kingdom is not of this world.John 18.36.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the
things that are God’s.Matthew 22.21.
The Lord’s Resurrection has indeed remained to this day the most
proven fact in human history. What other fact from the distant past
stands so comprehensively and carefully proven as this?Bishop
Nikolai Velimirovich.
From Him and through Him the king who is dear to God receives an
image of the Kingdom that is above and so in imitation of that
greater King himself guides and directs the course of everything on
earth… He looks up to see the archetypal pattern and guides those
whom he rules in accordance with that pattern… Monarchy is superior
to every other constitution and form of government. For polyarchy,
where everyone competes on equal terms, is really anarchy and
discord.Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, Oration in Honour of
Constantine, 1, 3.
Equality is known to produce strife. Therefore God allowed the
human race to be a monarchy, not a democracy. But the family is
constructed in a similar way to an army, with the husband holding
the rank of monarch, the wife as general and the children also
given stations of command.
St. John Chrysostom, Homily 34 on I Corinthians, 7.
The people should be led, not followed, as God has ordained…
Those who say, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God,’ are
not to be listened to, for the unruliness of the mob is always
close to madness.
Deacon Alcuin of York to Charlemagne.
The Lord commands us not to keep silent when the faith is in
danger. Nobody can say: "But who am I to speak" A priest or a
ruler? No. A soldier, or a peasant? No, I am a poor man who worries
only about his daily bread. It is not my affair to speak, or to
worry about this." Alas! Will the stones cry out, while you keep
silent?
St. Theodore the Studite.
If the Emperor forgets the fear of God, he will inevitably fall
into sin and be changed into a despot, he will not be able to keep
to the customs established by the Fathers, and by the intrigues of
the devil he will do that which is unworthy and contrary to the
commandments of God, he will become hateful to the people, the
senate and the Church, he will become unworthy to be called a
Christian, he will be deprived of his post, will be subject to
anathema, and, finally, will be killed as the ‘common enemy’ of all
Romans, both ‘those who command’ and ‘those who obey’.
Emperor Constantine VII, On the Government of the Empire.
The judgement of God is higher than that of Rome…
Pope Sylvester II (997).
The Pope is truly the vicar of Jesus Christ, anointed of the
Lord, set between God and man, lower than God but higher than man,
who judges all and is judged by no-one.
Pope Innocent III.
Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to
that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if
on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once
ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of the law.
Thomas Aquinas.
Let Caesar honor Peter as a first-born son should honor his
father, so that, refulgent with the light of paternal grace, he may
illumine with greater radiance the earthly sphere over which he has
been set by Him who alone is Ruler of all things spiritual and
temporal…
Dante, De Monarchia.
There can be no compromise between truth and falsehood.
St. Mark of Ephesus.
Of the three forms of state power: monarchy, democracy and
despotism, strictly speaking, only the first, monarchy, is based on
a religious-ethical principle, the second, democracy, is based on
an a-religious ethical principle, and the third, despotism, is
based on an anti-religious, satanic principle!
Confessor-Professor I.M. Andreyev (+1976)
The Tsar was the embodiment of the Russian people’s… readiness
to submit the life of the state to the righteousness of God:
therefore do the people submit themselves to the Tsar, because he
submits to God.
St. John Maximovich.
INTRODUCTION: THE MEANING OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY9
I. PREHISTORY19
1. THE CREATION OF MAN20
2. THE FALL OF MAN30
3. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (1) FROM CAIN TO NOAH38
4. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) NIMROD’S BABYLON48
II. ISRAEL AND THE GENTILES54
5. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (1) ABRAHAM55
6. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (2) JOSEPH64
7. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (3) MOSES67
8. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (4) SAUL AND DAVID74
9. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (5) SOLOMON82
10. THE DECLI NE OF THE ISRAELITE AUTOCRACY86
11. THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY91
12. THE ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY97
13. THE CLASSICAL GREEK WORLD-VIEW103
14. PLATO ON THE STATE113
15. ARISTOTLE ON THE STATE123
16. FROM POLIS TO COSMOPOLIS: ALEXANDER THE GREAT126
17. FROM ZERUBBABEL TO THE HASMONAEANS131
18. THE ROMAN REPUBLIC142
19. THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC149
20. HEROD THE GREAT154
21. THE END OF THE STATE159
III. CHRIST, THE JEWS AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE161
22. THE PAX ROMANA162
23. THE COMING OF THE KING169
24. THE KILLING OF THE KING AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM174
25. CHRIST AND THE SYNAGOGUE180
26. CHRIST AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE192
27. WHY ROME?208
28. ROME AND CHINA: TWO VISIONS OF UNIVERSAL EMPIRE214
29. THE CRISIS OF OLD ROMAN STATEHOOD228
III. NEW ROME AND THE NATIONS232
30. ST. CONSTANTINE AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS233
31. THE HIERARCHICAL PRINCIPLE238
32. THE EMPEROR IN THE CHURCH242
33. THE HERETICAL AND PAGAN REACTIONS254
34. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN NEW ROME264
35. NEW ROME AND THE NON-ROMAN WORLD277
36. CHRISTIANITY, CULTURE AND MONASTICISM285
37. THE FALL OF OLD ROME291
38. THE CHURCH OF OLD ROME302
39. THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS310
40. THE SYMPHONY OF NATIONS318
41. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (1) VANDAL NORTH AFRICA323
42. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (2) OSTROGOTHIC ITALY329
43. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (3) FRANKISH GAUL333
44. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (4) VISIGOTHIC SPAIN339
45. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (5) CELTIC AND ANGLO-SAXON
BRITAIN344
46. THE SACRAMENT OF ROYAL ANOINTING354
47. CHRISTIANS, JEWS AND PERSIANS360
IV. NEW ROME, ISLAM AND THE SLAVS366
48. THE RISE OF ISLAM367
49. MONOTHELITISM AND ICONOCLASM378
50. ST. PHOTIUS THE GREAT AND CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS386
51. MIGHT AND RIGHT IN NEW ROME395
52. THE FIRST BULGARIAN EMPIRE402
53. THE RIGHTS OF THE ORTHODOX AUTOCRAT408
54. ST. VLADIMIR AND THE BAPTISM OF RUS’413
55. CHURCH AND STATE IN KIEVAN RUS’422
56. THE YEAR 1000: APEX OF MONARCHISM429
V. THE PAPAL DESPOTISM435
57. THE CAROLINGIANS, ROME AND CONSTANTINOPLE436
58. THE FALL OF THE POPES: (1) FROM NICHOLAS I TO JOHN
VIII451
59. THE GROWTH OF FEUDALISM460
60. THE ANGLO-SAXON MONARCHY469
61. THE GERMAN MONARCHY477
62. THE FALL OF THE POPES: (2) FROM SERGIUS IV TO LEO IX488
63. THE NORMANS AND THE SCHISM OF 1054497
64. THE FALL OF THE POPES: (3) FROM STEPHEN IX TO ALEXANDER
II507
65. THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND511
66. DOMESDAY: THE DESTRUCTION OF ORTHODOX ENGLAND518
67. THE FALL OF THE POPES: (4) GREGORY VII529
68. CHRISTIAN JIHAD: THE CRUSADES540
69. ROMAN LAW, COMMON LAW AND THE PAPACY552
70. THE KINGDOM OF SICILY560
71. THE JEWS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE565
72. MAGNA CARTA AND THE REVIVAL OF ENGLISHNESS577
73. THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL LAW584
74. THE INQUISITION AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST HERESY591
75. UNAM SANCTAM AND DE MONARCHIA595
76. PROTO-PROTESTANTISM: (1) WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND MARSILIUS OF
PADUA600
77. PROTO-PROTESTANTISM: (2) JOHN WYCLIFFE AND JAN HUS605
78. PROTO-PROTESTANTISM: (3) THE CONCILIAR MOVEMENT617
VI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEW ROME625
79. THE SLIDE TOWARDS ABSOLUTISM626
80. ST. ANDREW OF BOGOLIUBOVO AND THE RESTORATION OF
AUTOCRACY639
81. THE NICAEAN EMPIRE AND ROYAL ANOINTING648
82. THE GEORGIAN MONARCHY658
83. ST. SAVA AND SERBIAN AUTOCEPHALY664
84. THE MONGOL YOKE AND ST. ALEXANDER NEVSKY667
85. MOUNT ATHOS, THE UNIA AND MICHAEL PALAEOLOGUS674
86. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SERBIAN EMPIRE683
87. ST. GREGORY PALAMAS AND THE HESYCHAST CONTROVERSY692
88. ST. SERGIUS OF RADONEZH AND THE RISE OF MUSCOVY695
89. THE CRISIS OF NEW ROMAN STATEHOOD704
90. THE COUNCIL OF FLORENCE714
91. THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE726
CONCLUSION: AUTOCRACY, DESPOTISM AND DEMOCRACY737
INTRODUCTION: THE MEANING OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY
History is the teaching of philosophy by example.
Thucydides.
The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.
Friedrich von Schiller (1786).
The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through
history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches
past.
Count Otto von Bismarck.
Religion is the Key of History.
Lord Acton.
Short-sighted is he who sees in history only fact; in it, as in
the whole world, spirit rules over matter.
I.P. Yakoby (1931).
Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past, and
you’ll lose both eyes.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973).
A universal history is not a summary of the histories of all the
nations, but an attempt to discern a thread unifying and making
sense of them all. As the great Russian novelist, Nikolai Gogol,
put it: “Universal history, in the true meaning of the term, is not
a collection of particular histories of all the peoples and states
without a common link, plan or aim, a bunch of events without
order, in the lifeless and dry form in which it is often presented.
Its subject is great: it must embrace at once and in a complete
picture the whole of humanity, how from its original, poor
childhood it developed and was perfected in various forms, and,
finally, reached the present age. To show the whole of this great
process, which the free spirit of man sustained through bloody
labours, struggling from its very cradle with ignorance, with
nature and with gigantic obstacles – that is the aim of universal
history! It must gather into one all the peoples of the world
scattered by time, chance, mountains and seas, and unite them into
one harmonious whole; it must compose out of them one majestic,
complete poem. The event having no influence on the world has no
right to enter here. All the events of the world must be so tightly
linked amongst themselves and joined one to another like the rings
of a chain. If one ring were ripped out, the chain would collapse.
This link must not be understood in a literal sense: it is not that
visible, material link by which events are often forcibly joined,
or the system created in the head independently of facts, and to
which the events of the world are later arbitrarily attached. This
link must be concluded in one common thought, in one uninterrupted
history of mankind, before which both states and events are but
temporary forms and images! The must be presented in the same
colossal size as it is in fact, penetrated by the same mysterious
paths of Providence that are so unattainably indicated in it.
Interest must necessarily be elicited to the highest degree, in
such a way that the listener is tormented by the desire to know
more, so that either he cannot close the book, or, if it is
impossible to do that, he starts his reading again, so that it is
evident how one event gives birth to another and how without the
original event the last event would not follow. Only in that way
must history be created…”[footnoteRef:1] [1: Gogol, “O Prepodavanii
Vseobschej Istorii” (On the Teaching of Universal History), in
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Complete Works), vol. 8, pp.
50-51.]
If Gogol’s grandiose conception is far beyond the powers of this
writer, he can nevertheless agree with, and attempt to emulate, his
basic aim: to discern in a very general way how and why the world
has developed to its present condition, to “the end of history”, in
Hegel’s phrase. Such an aim means that this book cannot be purely
historical (as if any history could be “purely” historical!). But
neither is it historicist in Hegel’s sense. There is nothing
determined in history, in which the free will of God, men and
demons play the dominant roles, although this is not to say that it
is not wholly foreseen by God and communicated by Him in part to
His holy prophets.
Thus in trying to discern the footsteps of God on the paths of
history, history is inevitably also theological. For “theology and
history,” as Peter J. Leithart reminds us, “are not ultimately
divisible.”[footnoteRef:2] Again, as Archimandrite Lazarus Moore
writes, “Christian theology is essentially the knowledge of God and
His will revealed to man through God’s action in history, which is
truly His story…”[footnoteRef:3] [2: Leithart, Defending
Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Press, 2010, p. 306.] [3:
Moore, The Orthodox Psalter, http://orthodoxyinfo.org/psalter.html,
p. 5.]
The historical flesh, as it were, of this book is held up by a
theological skeleton, a “theology of politics”. According to this
theology, there is no such thing as chance. God holds in His
almighty hands the threads of the destinies both of every
individual human being, civilization and social and political
institution. Without violating personal free-will, but always
honouring it and taking it into account, God invisibly steers the
destinies of states and nations towards a certain end, which is the
salvation for eternity of as many people as He has chosen. If we
cannot see how certain historical events contribute to this end,
this is because the comprehension of such things is beyond our
human capacities, which are in any case obscured by our sinfulness,
which limits, obscures and distorts our vision, and because we live
in the middle, and not at the end of the historical process,
lacking the gift of prophecy that transcends these limitations. For
“If there a calamity in the city, will not the Lord have done it?
Surely the Lord God does nothing unless He reveals His secret to
His servants the prophets” (Amos 3.6-7)
Nevertheless, it is not wrong, but on the contrary right and
indeed necessary, to attempt in fear and trembling to lift a little
the veil on God’s judgements in history, using those clues and
guiding principles that He has given us through the holy prophets
and apostles and elders in the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition,
and always calling on His help, without which we can see
nothing.
For, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “The reading of histories,
my dear Sir, may dispose a man to satire; but the science of
HISTORY - History studied in the light of philosophy, as the great
drama of an ever-unfolding Providence has a very different effect.
It infuses hope and reverential thoughts of man and his
destination…”[footnoteRef:4] [4: Coleridge, On the Condition of the
Church and State, 1830.]
*
Now history can be studied on three levels, which we may call
the levels of the how, the why and the whither. Let us briefly
examine the relationship between these three levels in the context
of one particularly crucial historical topic, the origins of the
First World War. “Questions of why and how,” writes a distinguished
historian of the period, Christopher Clark, “are logically
inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question
of how invites us to look closely at the sequences that produce
certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go
in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism,
nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national
honour, the mechanics of mobilization. The why approach brings a
certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect,
because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal
pressure; the factors pile up on top of each other pushing down on
the events; political actors become mere executors of forces
established and beyond their control.
“The story this book tells is, by contrast, saturated with
agency. The key decision-makers – kings, emperors, foreign
ministers, ambassadors, military commanders, and a host of lesser
officials – walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps.
The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made
by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of
a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and
formed the best judgements they could on the basis of the best
information they had to hand. Nationalism, armaments, alliances and
finance were all part of the story, but they can be made to carry
real explanatory weight only if they can be seen to have shaped the
decisions that – in combination – made war break out.
“A Bulgarian historian of the Balkan Wars recently observed that
‘once we pose the question “why”, guilt becomes the focal point.’
Questions of guilt and responsibility in the outbreak of war
entered this story even before the war had begun. The entire source
record is full of ascriptions of blame (this was a world in which
aggressive intentions were always assigned to the opponent and
defensive intentions to oneself) and the judgement delivered by
Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles has ensured the continuing
prominence of the ‘war guilt’ question. Here, too, the focus on how
suggests an alternative approach: a journey through the events that
is not driven by the need to draw up a charge sheet against this or
that state or individual, but aims to identify the decisions that
brought war about and to understand the reasoning or emotions
behind them. This does not mean excluding questions of
responsibility entirely from the discussion – the aim is rather to
let the why answers grow, as it were, out of the how answers,
rather than the other way round…’[footnoteRef:5] [5: Clark, The
Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914, London: Penguin,
2013, pp. xxvii-xxviii.]
The third level of historical inquiry, that of the whither,
seeks to answer the question of ultimate purpose: whither is God
taking us in and through the events of history as described and
analyzed on the how and why levels? This, of course, presupposes
that God is an Actor in history Who shapes it in accordance with
His will and with a specific purpose, but without violating the
freewill of the human actors. It presupposes that through history
God brings mercy on His elect by leading them to salvation, and
justice on the rest of mankind – albeit only a partial justice
insofar as the fullness of both mercy and justice must await the
Day of Judgement, which both brings history to an end and goes
beyond history into eternity.
The story this book tells, therefore, is the story of whither
God has led us so far in His ultimate purpose of executing mercy
and justice on mankind. Just as the why answers grow, as it were,
out of the how answers, so the whither answers should grow out of
the why and how answers. But the distance between the whither
answers and the lower-level now and why answers is greater than the
distance between the two lower-level answers, and requires more
explicit explanations. As such, this work will inevitably be
controversial, even among those who share the author’s Orthodox
Christian world-view - theodicy, like eschatology, is among the
most controversial branches of theological science. But the attempt
is worth making; for unless we believe that history is “a tale full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, we must try to make some
sense of history in its broadest sweep. Only in this way can we
become fully conscious and responsible actors in history, making
our actions join the current of God’s whither rather than vainly
trying to resist it.
To begin with, we must distinguish between the two distinct ways
in which God works within history: through the outer kingdom of
nature and the inner Kingdom of Grace. When the Lord Jesus Christ
ascended into heaven, He declared: “All power hath been given unto
Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28.18). All power means just
that: power over both angels and men, both believers and
unbelievers, both souls and bodies. Jesus Christ is the supreme
King of kings and Lord of lords, “the prince of the kings of the
earth” (Revelation 1.5): there is nothing created that is not ruled
by Him.
Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers make a particular
distinction between the power that Christ wields in the spiritual
realm, and in the secular realm. His power is supreme in both, but
is wielded in different ways, corresponding to their different
natures. The spiritual realm is the “inner Kingdom”, the Kingdom
that is “not of this world”. In it Christ rules in an inner,
mystical way those who through faith have voluntarily submitted to
His dominion, declaring Him to be their King and God in Holy
Baptism, and promising to obey all His commandments. The secular
realm, on the other hand, is the “outer kingdom”, the kingdom “of
this world”, which Christ rules through His providential power.
As Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria writes: “’All is delivered’
to the Son by the Father (Luke 10.22) in that all is to be subject
to the Son. There are two ways in which God rules over all. First,
He rules over all independently of their own will [the outer
kingdom]. And second, He rules over those who willingly subject
themselves to Him [the inner Kingdom]. Hence I can say: God is my
Master independently of my will, inasmuch as He is my Creator. But
He is also my Master whenever I, as a grateful servant, fulfill His
will by working to keep the commandments.”[footnoteRef:6] [6: Bl.
Theophylact, The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy
Gospel according to St. Luke, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press,
p. 114.]
Divine Providence uses the whole of nature, rational and
irrational, to attain Its ends. As St. John of Kronstadt says: “The
Lord has full respect for nature, which He has created, and for her
laws, as the production of His own infinite, most perfect wisdom;
this is why He usually accomplishes His will through the medium of
nature and her laws; for instance, when He punishes men or blesses
them.”[footnoteRef:7] So the kingdom of this world embraces the
whole of nature, including the State, which is that part of the
outer kingdom that is organized by human beings to the highest
degree, embracing the whole of society. The Church, on the other
hand, is God’s inner kingdom on earth. Although it has a visible
presence and organization on earth, its essence is not of this
world, being the Kingdom of Grace.[footnoteRef:8] The inner Kingdom
of the Church ministers to the inner needs of man, his salvation
for eternity. The outer kingdom of the State ministers to his
external needs - food and shelter and security from external
enemies. [7: St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ.] [8: New
Hieromartyr Mark (Novoselov), Bishop of Sergievo, distinguished
between the mystical and spotless inner organism of the Church and
her outer and flawed organization (Pis’ma k Druziam (Letters to
Friends), Moscow, 1994).]
“One must distinguish two Kingdoms of Christ,” writes M.V.
Zyzykin, “and consequently two of His powers. ‘The Son of God,
having received human nature into the unity of His Divine
Hypostasis, is called a king,’ says St. Gregory the Theologian,
‘but in one sense He is king as the Almighty and king of both the
willing and the unwilling, and in the other, as leading to
obedience and submitting to His kingdom those who have willingly
recognised Him as king’ (quoted in Metropolitan Makary, Dogmatic
Theology, vol. 2, pp. 178-179). In the first case the kingdom of
Christ is without end and all three Persons of the All-Holy Trinity
participate in Providence. In the second it will end with the
leading of all the true believers to salvation, when Jesus Christ
hands over the Kingdom to God and the Father, when He will annul
every authority and force, that God may be all in all (I
Corinthians 14.18). The power of which it is said: ‘all power has
been given to Me in heaven and on earth’ was handed over by Him to
nobody. He remains the Highest Teacher (Matthew 23.8), the Highest
Priest (Hebrews 7.24-25) and the highest Ruler of His kingdom, the
Pastor of pastors (I Peter 5.4).
“The Church is the visible form of the Kingdom of Christ, its
realization on earth, whereby it is destined to embrace the world
(Mark 16.15-16; Matthew 28.19-20; Luke 24.47; John 20.23). It is
the kingdom that is not of this world (John 18.36), the sphere in
which the relationship of man with God is developed (Matthew 22.21;
Luke 20.25). Church power by its spiritual character does not
consist in the mastery and lordship that are characteristic of
earthly power, but in service (Matthew 20.25-27; Mark
9.35).”[footnoteRef:9] [9: Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw:
Synodal Press, 1931, p. 231.]
The relationship between the two kingdoms was highlighted during
Christ’s trial before Pilate. While recognizing Pilate’s power as
lawful, the Lord at the same time insists that both Pilate’s and
Caesar’s power derived from God, the true King and Lawgiver. For
“you could have no power at all against Me,” He says, “unless it
had been given to you from above” (John 19.11).
These words, paradoxically, both limit Caesar’s power, as being
subject to God’s, and strengthen it, by indicating that it has
God’s seal and blessing in principle (but not in all its particular
manifestations). Nor is this conclusion contradicted by His earlier
words: “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36), which refer
to the inner Kingdom of Grace.
For, as Blessed Theophylact writes: “He said: ‘My Kingdom is not
of this world’, and again: ‘It is not from here’, but He did not
say: ‘It is not in this world and not here.’ He rules in this
world, takes providential care for it and administers everything
according to His will. But His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, but
from above and before the ages, and ‘not from here’, that is, it is
not composed from the earth, although it has power
here”.[footnoteRef:10] [10: Blessed Theophylact, On John
18.36.]
Again, the great Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič (+1956)
writes: “Let no-one imagine that Christ the Lord does not have
imperial power over this world because He says to Pilate: ‘My
Kingdom is not of this world.’ He who possesses the enduring has
power also over the transitory. The Lord speaks of His enduring
Kingdom, independent of time and of decay, unrighteousness,
illusion and death. Some man might say: ‘My riches are not on
paper, but in gold.’ But does he who has gold not have paper also?
Is not gold as paper? The Lord, then, does not say to Pilate that
He is not a king, but, on the contrary, says that He is a higher
king than all kings, and His Kingdom is greater and stronger and
more enduring than all earthly kingdoms. He refers to His
pre-eminent Kingdom, on which depend all kingdoms in time and in
space…”[footnoteRef:11] [11: Velimirovič, The Prologue from Ochrid,
Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, September 30, pp.
395-396. ]
Now God has created three instruments by means of which He
steers us towards salvation: nature, the State and the Church.
Through nature, including our own human nature, He sustains and
protects, chastises and punishes us. Through the State He enables
the basic unit of human society, the family, to survive from one
generation to another. And through the Church He provides us with
the Holy Spirit, Whose acquisition is the aim of our life on earth.
Of these three instruments, the most essential is the Church. The
State is in essence an auxiliary instrument protecting the Church,
the only Ark of salvation. As for nature, it certainly plays an
important part in history – as in the Flood of Noah, or the Black
Death of 1348-49, or the severe Russian winters of 1812 and 1941.
But it is not on such natural – albeit undoubtedly God-directed -
catastrophes that this work will concentrate, but on the central
and vital relationship between the Church and the State, religion
and politics.
Three major forms of State structure are singled out as
differing radically in their relation to God and man according to
their relation to God and man: autocracy, despotism and democracy.
Autocracy is commonly understood to mean absolutism or despotism.
But in this work it signifies something qualitiatively different:
monarchy in union with the Church, respectful of her essential
independence and autonomy. Despotism is monarchy that attempts to
control the people in all aspects of its life, including the
Church. And democracy is the despotism of public opinion (usually
manipulated by unseen actors) regardless of the teaching of the
Church. Autocracy is the only form of government that is pleasing
to God; and in such historical forms as the Byzantine and Russian
empires it has guided multitudes of men to the Church and
salvation, in spite of the sins of its rulers. Despotism and
democracy are two aspects of the same bipolar disease; in them
Providence still guides men to salvation, but in spite of rather
than with the help of governments, insofar as the dominant ideology
is now not Orthodox Christianity but paganism, heresy or
atheism.
This is not an original thesis. In his article “Three Forces”
(1877), the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev made essentially
the same distinction when he identified three basic forces as
having determined the whole of world history, which were in his
time incarnate especially in Islam, the West and the Russian
Orthodox Autocracy. Soloviev characterized Islam as being under the
dominating influence of what he called the first force, which he
defined as "the striving to subject humanity in all its spheres and
at every level of its life to one supreme principle which in its
exclusive unity strives to mix and confuse the whole variety of
private forms, to suppress the independence of the person and the
freedom of private life." Democracy he characterized as being under
the dominating influence of the second force, which he defined as
"the striving to destroy the stronghold of dead unity, to give
freedom everywhere to private forms of life, freedom to the person
and his activity; ... the extreme expression of this force is
general egoism and anarchy and a multitude of separate individuals
without an inner bond." The third force, which Soloviev believed
was incarnate especially in the Slavic world, is defined as "giving
a positive content to the two other forces, freeing them from their
exclusivity, and reconciling the unity of the higher principle with
the free multiplicity of private forms and
elements."[footnoteRef:12] [12: Soloviev, “Tri Sily” (Three
Forces), Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works), St. Petersburg,
1911-1914, volume I, pp. 228-229.]
Since, as the historian Shlomo Sand rightly points out, “the
best way to define a concept is to follow its
history”[footnoteRef:13], I have attempted to explicate the
concepts of autocracy, despotism and democracy in the context of a
universal history spanning six volumes and the whole sweep of
history until the year of our Lord 2001. In this first volume,
which covers the ancient and medieval periods from ancient Israel,
Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome to the Fall of Constantinople in
1453, we see the origins and nature of autocracy, despotism and
democracy with particular clarity (their nature is summarized in
the conclusion). This was the Age of Faith, in which most men, even
pagans and heretics, believed in God and the age to come and in the
important role of the State - almost always a monarchy - in helping
to bring men to salvation. [13: Sand, The Invention of the Jewish
People, London: Verso, 2010, p. 25.]
In later volumes we shall see how secular, humanist ideologies
undermined this faith, changing and complicating Church-State
relations. These ideologies include liberalism, socialism and
nationalism, which since the French revolution of 1789 have come to
be believed in more than any of the traditional religions. For, as
Paul Johnson writes, “perhaps the most significant characteristic
of the dawning modern world… was the tendency to relate everything
to politics.”[footnoteRef:14] Nevertheless, underneath these modern
political ideologies the basic forms of autocracy, despotism and
democracy are still discernible. Thus the second volume traces the
development of these forms in the Age of Reason, from the
Renaissance to the French revolution of 1789; the third volume – in
the Age of Revolution, from 1789 to the eve of the American Civil
War in 1861; the fourth volume – in the Age of Empire from 1861 to
the eve of the First World War in 1914. [14: Johnson, The Birth of
the Modern, World Society 1815-1830, London: Phoenix, 1992, p. 662.
]
It is only in the fifth volume, covering the period of the two
World Wars until 1945, that autocracy disappears from the scene.
This is the Age of Catastrophe, when Communism, the most evil form
of despotism yet invented, takes control over one quarter of the
earth’s surface from Berlin to Peking, in accordance with the
prophecy: “I looked, and behold a fourth horse. And the name of him
who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed after him. And power
was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the
sword, and with hunger, and with death – and by the beasts of the
earth” (Revelation 6.8).
The sixth volume, covering the period from 1945 to 1992, sees
the fall of Communism and the supposed triumph of Democracy
throughout most of the civilized world. I have called it the Age of
Mammon, because it witnessed both the growth of the world’s
material product to unprecedented levels and the similarly
unprecedented collapse in its spiritual capital.
In the seventh volume, covering the period from 1992 to the
apocalyptic sign of the times, the destruction of the Twin Towers
of the World Trade Building in New York, we see the progress of
globalization and democratization – but also of a growing elemental
opposition to them.
*
It is my contention that only autocracy – that is, a monarchy in
“symphony” with the True Church of Christ - is blessed by God; and
that absolutism and democracy represent two sides of a single coin
- equal and opposite deviations from this ideal - that have in
common the rejection of the true God as the ultimate source of all
true authority and His replacement by one man (despotism,
absolutism) or everyman (democracy).
This book argues that the meaning of universal history consists
in the struggle between the Orthodox Christian Autocracy, on the
one hand, and “the revolution” on the other, a process of apostasy
extending over centuries and millennia that has progressively
undermined autocracy through the bipolar sickness of
despotism-democracy, and all Christian faith and morality through
heresy, atheism and satanism. This process culminated in what
appeared to be the final fall of the Orthodox Autocracy in the
Russian revolution of 1917, which ushered in what Holy Scripture
calls “the last times”, a period of increasing anarchy leading
finally to the reign of the most despotic of tyrants, the
Antichrist. I will argue that the only hope for the world consists
in the return of autocracy, which is called by St. Paul “that which
restrains” the appearance of the Antichrist (II Thessalonians
2.7).
This alternation between the three basic modes of politics is of
a special, dual kind. On the one hand, despotism alternates with
democracy in the prehistoric period before the rise of Israel, and
again in the most recent phase of history, since the Russian
revolution. And on the other hand, in the intervening period (most
of history) the despotism-democracy alternation itself alternates
with autocracy (from King David in about 1000 BC to Tsar-Martyr
Nicholas’ abdication in 1917 AD). However, although this, in my
contention, is the basic “rhythm” of history, it never truly
repeats itself, for both unconscious memories and conscious
invocations of previous incarnations of autocracy, democracy and
despotism interact with, and modify, their reappearance in later
ages.
In the writing of this book I am indebted above all to the Holy
Fathers. It was St. Augustine’s massive and famous work, The City
of God, that was the first to attempt to see the whole of history
in the light of God’s saving Providence. I have as it were tried to
“fill in the blanks” in his project, bringing the narrative up to
the present day.
Among more recent Fathers and Church writers, I have especially
drawn on the works of Russian Fathers: Patriarch Nikon of Moscow,
St. Philaret of Moscow, St. Ignaty Brianchaninov, St. Theophan the
Recluse, St. Ambrose of Optina, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky,
Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov (whose Religio-Philosophical
Foundations of History represents another model, with The City of
God, for my universal history), M.V. Zyzykin, Archbishop Seraphim
(Sobolev) of Lubny, St. John Maximovich of Shanghai and San
Francisco, Archbishop Averky of Jordanville and Archpriest Lev
Lebedev (whose Great Russia has been vital for my understanding of
Russian history). But I have also drawn extensively on many other
contemporary writers and historians, both Orthodox and western,
whose names are mentioned in the footnotes.
Inevitably in a work of this scope I have had to rely mainly on
secondary sources; only a minority of chapters have been based on a
detailed study of primary sources; these have been mainly those on
contemporary (post-1917) Orthodox Church history. In justification
of this, I can do no better than quote from Francis Fukuyama in the
preface to his similarly wide-ranging work: “While many of the
individual chapters will not pass muster with people whose job it
is to study particular societies and historical periods in depth,
it does seem to me that there is a virtue in looking across time
and space in a comparative fashion. Some of the broader patterns of
political development are simply not visible to those who focus too
narrowly on specific subjects…”[footnoteRef:15] [15: Fukuyama, The
Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. xvi.]
Although I have tried to be accurate to the best of my ability,
it goes without saying that I, and I alone, am responsible for any
errors that may have crept into this book, for which I ask
forgiveness of all my readers.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our
God, have mercy on us! Amen.
September 6/19, 2019.
Miracle of the Holy Archangel Michael at Colossae.
I. PREHISTORY
1. THE CREATION OF MAN
The very beginnings of time, created being and life on earth are
hidden from the gaze both of historical and of scientific research.
But they were revealed, in a vision on Mount Sinai, to the holy
Prophet and God-seer Moses, who recorded them in the Book of
Genesis. Since the Lord Jesus Christ, together with all the holy
Apostles, Prophets and Fathers of the Church, accepted the
testimony of Moses, we shall do the same.
To believe in Moses and Christ, of course, necessarily involves
a rejection of Darwin and Hawkins and the whole naturalist,
essentially atheist theory of origins that rules the contemporary
world. For, as Hieromonk Seraphim Rose noted, “The evolutionary
philosophy of ‘up from the beasts’ certainly seems irreconcilable
with the Christian view of ‘fall from paradise,’ and our whole view
of history will certainly be determined by which way we
believe!” [footnoteRef:16] All attempts, whether “Christian”
or otherwise, to reconcile the irreconcilable are vain and
blasphemous. [16: Rose, Letter 247, July 3/16, 1977. For more on
the impossibility of reconciling “theological evolutionism” with
the Christian faith, see Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man,
Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000.]
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
(Genesis 1.1)) - about seven and half thousand years ago (1992 AD
corresponds to 7500 in Byzantine chronology[footnoteRef:17]).
Having first created the angelic world, God went on to create the
material, vegetable and animal worlds in the first three days. On
the fourth day the sun and all the galaxies were created; the whole
cosmos was “stretched out as it were a curtain” by His almighty
power. [17: It was the Byzantine Universal Historian George
Syncellus (c. 800) who first calculated that the earth was created
in 5492 BC. In about 240 Julius Africanus gave the date 5501
BC.]
Genesis’s placing the creation of the sun and the stars after
the earth, clearly contradicts both ancient pagan and modern
scientistic cosmologies. But this did not trouble the Holy Fathers,
who always believed that the Word of God was more reliable than all
human reasoning. Thus St. Theophilus of Antioch (second century)
writes: "On the fourth day the luminaries came into existence.
Since God has foreknowledge, he understood the nonsense of the
foolish philosophers who were going to say that the things produced
on earth came from the stars, so that they might set God aside. In
order therefore that the truth might be demonstrated, plants and
seeds came into existence before the stars. For what comes into
existence later cannot cause what is prior to it."[footnoteRef:18]
Again, St. Basil the Great (+379) wrote: “The reason why the
adornment of the earth was before the sun is the following; that
those who worship the sun, as the source of life, may renounce
their error. If they be well persuaded that the earth was adorned
before the genesis of the sun, they will retract their unbounded
admiration for it, because they see grass and plants vegetate
before it rose.”[footnoteRef:19] [18: St. Theophylus, To Autolycus,
2.15.] [19: St. Basil, Hexaemeron, Homily VI.]
As regards the apparent contradiction between Genesis and
contemporary “Big Bang” cosmology, Dr. John Hartnett writes: “This
very rapid acceleration of the cosmos during Day 4 of Creation Week
caused cosmic clocks to run very fast compared to Earth clocks.
This, then, provides the massive time dilation needed to allow
light to travel the vast distances of the universe, even billions
of light-years in a matter of one day – as measured by Earth
Clocks…
“Observations are consistent with our galaxy being situated
somewhere cosmologically near the centre of a spherically symmetric
universe of finite extent that has expanded many-fold… The time it
took light to travel from the most distant sources to Earth was a
matter of only one day, in local time units.”[footnoteRef:20] [20:
Hartnett, Starlight Time and the New Physics, Atlanta, Ga.:
Creation Book Publishers, 2012, pp. 103, 109.]
Again, as regards the apparent contradiction between the
Darwinist and the Biblical accounts of the creation of man
(Darwinists say that our species split off from the apes some
100-200,000 years ago, while the Bible says that Adam and Eve were
created only a few thousand years ago), the most recent genetic
evidence confirms the Biblical account, declaring that our first
ancestor, so-called “Mitrochondrial Eve”, came into being 6,000
years ago.[footnoteRef:21] [21:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Lc8N63UM8. For very many more
instances in which science confirms creation rather then evolution,
see Vince Farrell, Creation versus Evolution.]
The Holy Fathers of the Church were not disturbed by possible
contradictions between Holy Scripture and science. We shall discuss
this in more detail in later volumes, but suffice it to say now:
there can be no essential contradiction between the Word of God and
true science[footnoteRef:22]: contradictions arise only with false
science, or with “science falsely so-called” (because the latter
goes beyond the boundaries of valid empirical investigation or is
based on false assumptions), not only occur, but should be expected
to occur in our fallen world, and patience and firm faith is
required until the falsehood is exposed through clear logic and
sound empirical research. [22: “Only with a superficial knowledge
do there arise false contradictions between faith and knowledge,
between religion and science. With a deeper knowledge these false
contradictions disappear without a trace... A broad, scientific and
philosophical education not only does not hinder faith in God, but
makes it easier, because the whole arsenal of
scientific-philosophical thought is natural apologetic material for
religious faith. Moreover, honest knowledge often has a methodical
opportunity to uncover corruptions of faith and exposing
superstitions, whether religious or scientific-philosophical.”
(Professor Ivan Andreyev, "Christian Truth and Scientific
Knowledge", The Orthodox Word, March-April, 1977, Pravoslavnij
Put’, 1961}]
The Orthodox Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I
Timothy 3.15), accepts the Scriptural account of creation as
interpreted by St. Basil the Great; and all subsequent patristic
interpretations accepted by the Church, while further illumining
specific points, have remained within the guidelines of his
Hexaemeron.
A characteristic of the Orthodox interpretations is their robust
refusal to adopt allegory as a way of reconciling apparent
contradictions between Scripture and contemporary science in the
manner of the modern “theistic evolutionists”. Thus St. Basil,
although probably the cleverest and most learned man of his time,
and especially well versed in sophisticated literary forms, had no
truck with over-sophisticated allegorism: “I know the laws of
allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others.
There are those truly who do not admit the common sense of the
Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who
see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the
nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories,
like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to
make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish,
wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in a literal sense. For I
am not ashamed of the Gospel… Those who give themselves up to the
distorted meaning of allegory have undertaken to give a majesty of
their own invention to Scripture. It is to believe themselves wiser
than the Holy Spirit, and to bring forth their own ideas under a
pretext of exegesis. Let us hear Scripture as it has been
written…”[footnoteRef:23] [23: St. Basil, Hexaemeron, Homily
IX.]
That St. Basil’s interpretation is divinely inspired was
witnessed by his hagiographer: “The Queen of the Angels summoned
Saint Basil and gave into his hands a book which had been written
containing the creation of everything visible and invisible, and
the fashioning of man by God. Indeed, at the beginning of the book
the hierarch noticed an inscription, commanding: ‘Speak.’… But when
he was about to commence his homily on the seventh (sic) day and
how God fashioned Adam and Eve, then it was in those days that the
saint was translated into the heavens, leaving the work unfinished.
Afterward his brother Gregory, who served as Archbishop of Nyssa,
wrote about the making of man, and completed the book. The words,
‘Speak,’ and ‘The end,’ were prophetic for Saint Basil. It is true
that, at the Theotokos' behest, the saint spoke in sermons about
the creation. Then when he was about to begin speaking on the
making of man, he was not vouchsafed to complete this labor,
because it was the end of his earthly sojourn.”[footnoteRef:24]
[24: The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, January 1, Holy
Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, CO, 2003.]
A firm and undoubting faith that God created all things out of
nothing, and through His Providence rules all things in accordance
with His Word and Wisdom, is the foundation of all true knowledge,
including historical knowledge. “The fear of God is the beginning
of wisdom” (Proverbs 1.7, 9.10), and there can be no fear of God
where it is not fully understood that the uncreated God holds the
whole of His creation in the palm of His hand, and that nothing can
prevent Him from carrying out His will – although He grants a
limited autonomy to the free will of men and angels. As He brought
all things into being out of nothing in the beginning, so He orders
all things until the end of time, while always respecting the free
will of man; for He is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End
of the whole of the historical process.
*
On the sixth day, God proceeded to the crown of His creation,
saying: “Let Us create man in our image and after Our likeness”
(Genesis 1.26). The plural “Us” indicates that God exists in a
plurality of Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So
man in his spiritual aspect is created in the image of the Holy
Trinity.
In Genesis 2, we read that while man’s body is made of earth and
water (the word “Adam” means “earth”), his soul is breathed into
him by the Spirit of God Himself. So he is both material and
spiritual by nature.
St. Anastasius of Sinai points out that before the reference to
man’s creation in Genesis 1.26, God is referred to with one word
only, “God”, whereas after that He has the double name, “Lord God”.
This is a subtle prophecy that God would acquire a second nature
when He became man in Jesus Christ! So already from the beginning
God knew that, for the sake of salvation of his greatest creation,
He would assume human nature, becoming, as the Holy Apostles Thomas
said on the day of the Resurrection, “My Lord” (in his humanity)
and “my God” (in His Divinity) (John 20.28). [footnoteRef:25] [25:
St. Anastasius, Hexaemeron, Book VII, Part 2. ]
The image of God in man has been interpreted variously by the
Holy Fathers, but the general consensus is that it refers to that
which distinguishes man from the animals – his free-will, his
rationality and his eternity. According to St. Gregory of Nyssa,
man is made in the image of God because he is made in the image of
the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and
the God-man; like a painter and his model, God took the Incarnate
Christ as His model in the creation of man.
As for the relationship between image and likeness, St. Basil
the Great writes: “We possess the one by creation, we acquire the
other by free will.”[footnoteRef:26] In other words, we use our
free will in order to steer our created nature, which has the
potential to acquire the likeness of God, to the actual possession
of that likeness. The likeness of God in man is deification,
holiness, the full indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Adam was holy and
in the likeness of God in the beginning, but he lost that holiness
in the Fall. [26: St. Basil, in Rose, op. cit., p. 149. ]
Vladimir Lossky writes: “The image cannot be objectified,
‘naturalized’ we might say, by being attributed to some part or
other of the human being. To be in the image of God, the Fathers
affirm, in the last analysis is to be a personal being, that is to
say, a free, responsible being. Why, one might ask, did God make
man free and responsible? Precisely because He wanted to call him
to a supreme vocation: deification; that is to say, to become by
grace, in a movement as boundless as God, that which God is by
nature. And this call demands a free response; God wishes that this
movement be a movement of love…
“A personal being is capable of loving someone more than his own
nature, more than his own life. The person, that is to say, the
image of God in man, is then man’s freedom with regard to his
nature, ‘the fact of being freed from necessity and not being
subject to the dominion of nature, but able to determine oneself
freely’ (St. Gregory of Nyssa).”[footnoteRef:27] [27: Lossky, In
the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s
Theological Seminary, 1989, pp. 71-72. ]
*
Eve also partook of Adam’s God-likeness; both the unity and the
distinction of the sexes is entailed in the words: “in the image of
God He created them; male and female created He them” (Genesis
1.27). But in the very beginning there was only the male of the
species, Adam, whose body was created from dust mixed with water,
and his soul from the “inbreathing” of the Spirit of God (Genesis
2.7). In some texts man is said to be composed of spirit, soul and
body (I Thessalonians 5.23). The “spirit” is the higher part of the
soul, with which man enters into prayerful communion with God. In
addition, as St. Seraphim of Sarov points out, the Divine Spirit
(with a capital “S”) can be said to have been part of the original
composition of man – before he lost It after the Fall.
However, judging that Adam should not be alone and needed “a
helper like him” (Genesis 2.18, 20), “the Lord God caused a deep
sleep [“ecstasy” in the Greek Septuagint text] to fall upon the
man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its
place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the
man He made into a woman, and brought her to the man.” (21-22). The
Hebrew word translated as “deep sleep” here, tardema, actually
means “visionary trance”, which is close to the Septuagint’s
“ecstasy”.[footnoteRef:28] [28: Shaser, “Splitting the Adam”,
Hebrew Bible Center, June 7, 2018.]
Nicholas J. Shaser writes: “The description of the woman made
from the man’s “rib” has led to the mistaken conclusion that women
are inferior to men because they originate from one small part of
the male anatomy. Yet according to Exodus, for example, God
told Moses to make four gold rings for the Ark of the Covenant,
“two rings on one side (צלע; tsela) of it, and two rings on
the other side of it” (Exodus 25:12). Likewise, when God takes
one tsela from the man to make the woman, Eve comes from
an entire side of Adam’s body, not a single rib.
“Adam’s own words clarify that Eve comes from one of his sides
when he declares of his wife, ‘Finally, this is bone of my bone and
flesh of my flesh!’ (Genesis 2:23). Had Eve been created from the
man’s rib alone, Adam would only have been able to say that she was
‘bone of his bone.’ As Adam’s bone and flesh, the woman
is the man’s ‘other half.’ When man and woman cleave to one another
and return to being ‘one flesh’ (2:24), the two equal halves of
humanity are brought back together. The primordial couple in
Genesis represents God’s vision of equality and complementarity
between the genders.”[footnoteRef:29] [29: Shaset, “Did Eve Come
from Adam’s ‘Rib’?” Israel Bible Weekly, June 6, 2018,
https://weekly.israelbiblecenter.com/eve-come-adams-rib/?via=5051b71
However, the surgeon J.E. Shelley had a different interpretation:
“The account in Genesis 2.18-25 is as factual as words can make it.
It reads like the account which a surgeon writes for the records of
the operating theatre! God performs a surgical operation under
general anaesthesia, a rib re-section in this case. Note the
detail: ‘He closed up the flesh instead thereof’. In just such a
manner would a surgeon describe his closing up of an incision.
Remarkably enough, provided that the surgeon is careful to leave
the periosteum (the membrane which envelops the bones) of the
removed rib, the rib will reform in a non-septic case, and the
operation performed upon Adam was truly aseptic. So far as I
remember, the rib is the only bone in the body of man which will do
this. God gave it this property, which is why He chose it. With the
vast reservoir of living cells contained in this rib, ‘He built up
Eve’.” (How God created Man, a Bible Christian Unity Fellowship
Study, p. 6. Out of the 206 bones in the human body, only the rib
can regenerate itself when taken out of the body. See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVfqvmnViM]
Why from the side? Because it is the antitype of the creation of
the Church, the Bride of Christ, from the blood and water that
flowed from His side in the sleep of death on the Cross. “It is not
without significance,” writes St. Ambrose, “that the woman was made
out of Adam’s rib. She was not made of the same earth as he, in
order to show that the physical nature of man and woman is
identical and that together they were the one source for the
propagation of the human race. Thus neither was man created with a
woman, nor were two men nor two women created at the beginning, but
first a man and then a woman, God willing that human nature be
established as one. Therefore from the very beginning of our race
He eliminated the possibility that different natures could
arise.”[footnoteRef:30] [30: St. Ambrose of Milan, On Paradise, IX,
48.]
And yet there is a difference, a difference. This difference is
for the sake of sexual reproduction – but not only for that… Thus
“Adam said, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she
shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore
shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his
wife; and they shall be in one flesh.” (2.23-24)
Thus “Adam,” writes St. Ephraim, “was both one and two, one in
that he was man, two in that he was created male and
female”.[footnoteRef:31] Again: “He honoured [Eve]”, writes St.
John Chrysostom, “and made them one, even before her
creation”.[footnoteRef:32] But “the wise counsel of God at the
beginning divided the one into two; and wanting to show that even
after division it still remains one, He did not allow that
procreation should be possible through one person only….” [31: St.
Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis, 2.12; quoted in Robert
Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, Cambridge University Press,
1975, p. 302.] [32: St. John Chrysostom, Homily 31 on I
Corinthians, 5.]
And so, concludes the holy Father, “one may see that they are
one, for she was made from his side, and they are, as it were, two
halves.”[footnoteRef:33] [33: St. John Chrysostom, Homily 12 on
Colossians, 5. ]
A more spiritual interpretation of the differentiation of the
sexes is that through it God instilled in the nature of each one of
us an intuitive understanding of the relationship between God and
His creation, with God occupying the masculine, active role of
saviour and protector, while man in relation to God adopts the
feminine, passive role. Many Biblical passages portray God as the
bridegroom of the human soul…
*
Contemporary supporters of the LGBT ideology argue that the
sexual distinctions are not important and therefore can be
“renegotiated”, that men can become women and women - men. However,
according to the Holy Scriptures, the distinction – and the
attraction - between male and female was there from the very
beginning, even before the fall. When Eve was created out of the
side of Adam, he said of her: “This is now bone of my bone, and
flesh of my flesh: and she shall be called woman [isha in Hebrew]
because she was taken out of man [ish]”[footnoteRef:34]. Here he is
acknowledging that they are of one flesh – in other words, that
they are married – physically married. These words, as Bishop
Nikolai Velimirovich writes, are “the foundation of, and the reason
for, the mysterious attraction and union between man and
woman”.[footnoteRef:35] They “have become,” writes St. Asterius of
Amasea, “a common admission, spoken in the name of all men to all
women, to the whole female sex. These words bind all the rest. For
that which took place in the beginning in these first-created ones
passed into the nature of their descendants.”[footnoteRef:36] [34:
The Hebrew words “ish” and “isha” (like the English “man” and
“woman”) emphasize the unity of the sexes in a single human nature.
For “this name,” as St. John Chrysostom says, “should reveal their
common creation and become the foundation of a durable love and the
cement of their union” (Homily 6 on Genesis, 5).] [35:
Velimirovich, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press,
1986, volume IV, p. 241, November 25.] [36: St. Asterius, Sermon on
Matthew 19.3, P.G. 40:228; in S.V. Troitsky, “Brak i
Tserkov’”(“Marriage and the Church”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian
Regeneration), 1986 (III), № 35, pp. 25-26.]
“This is the origin,” writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev, “of the
irresistible attraction of man to his ‘wife’ (the woman) as to the
most necessary complement of his own nature. Union in love with the
woman can be replaced only by union in love with God, which is
immeasurably more profound. It is on such a union with God that
monasticism is founded, which is why it does not lead to
psychological complexes. But monasticism is not for everyone, it is
the lot of special people, ‘who can accommodate’ this condition
(Matthew 19.11-12). But for the majority the woman remains one of
the most necessary conditions of a normal
existence.”[footnoteRef:37] Adam continues with the famous words
which the Lord Jesus Christ, followed by the Apostle Paul, saw as
the founding document of marriage: Therefore shall a man leave his
father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall
be in one flesh. [37: Lebedev, “O masterakh i margaritakh” (“On
Masters and Margaritas”), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 53,
№ 5 (640), May, 2003, p. 31.]
Now it may be true, as St. Gregory of Nyssa argues, that the
whole apparatus of sexual anatomical differences and sexual
reproduction, being aspects of “the garments of skin” given to Adam
and Eve after their fall, only came into being after the fall. If
that is so, then sexual intercourse took place, as St. John of the
Ladder points out, only after the fall. But the fact remains that
Adam was a man and Eve a woman already in Paradise, before the
fall, that they were married and of one flesh already in Paradise,
and that even then they were attracted to each other in a natural,
but sinless, unfallen manner. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria writes
of Adam's body before the fall that it “was not entirely free from
concupiscence of the flesh”.[footnoteRef:38] For “while it was
beyond corruption, it had indeed innate appetites, appetites for
food and procreation. But the amazing thing was that his mind was
not tyrannized by these tendencies. For he did freely what he
wanted to do, seeing that his flesh was not yet subject to the
passions consequent upon corruption.”[footnoteRef:39] [38: St.
Cyril of Alexandria, On I Corinthians 7; quoted in Walter
Burghardt, The Image of God in Man according to Cyril of
Alexandria, Woodstock, Maryland: Woodstock College Press, 1957, p.
98.] [39: St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian, 3, P.G. 76, 637;
quoted in Burghardt, op. cit., p. 98.]
Now science has established that the intellectual and emotional
differences between men and women may be related to hormonal
differences and to different patterns of activity in the right and
left hemispheres of the brain. Indeed, these hemispheral
differences appear to complement each other rather like male and
female.[footnoteRef:40] It is as if each individual man and woman
were one half of a single bisexual organism, so that each man
appears to be “missing” certain feminine qualities that would make
him more whole, while each woman appears to be missing certain
masculine qualities that would make her more whole. [40: Professor
Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the
Extreme Male Brain, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
2003.]
Be that as it may, and whether or not such differences existed
before the fall, the fall has accentuated and corrupted the
differences between the sexes. Thus men tend to be crude,
insensitive and boastful, and women – weak-willed, vain and easily
led by all kinds of influences. But these fallen differences do not
entail that in the beginning, before the fall, there was never
meant to be any real and important difference.
The restoration of the image of God in man involves, not the
abolition of all sexual differences, but their return to their
original, unfallen condition, not the abolition of sexuality but
sexual integration. Thus men return to real masculinity together
with those feminine qualities which fallen masculinity drives out;
and vice-versa for women.
After all, although Christ was the perfect man, with none of the
weaknesses of fallen men, nobody would claim that He is anything
but supremely masculine. And the Virgin Mary, similarly, is
supremely feminine…
Again, modern medicine claims to be able to change men into
women, and women into men. But sex-change operations appear to be
far less successful than is commonly claimed.[footnoteRef:41] And
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief for John Hopkins
Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of
Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that
merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and
that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are
collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.[footnoteRef:42]
And the reason for that seems to be that while you can (up to a
point) change a man’s (or a woman’s) secondary, external secondary
characteristics, you cannot change his primary, internal sexuality.
For sexuality is not as superficial and “negotiable” as the
modernists would like us to believe. There is more to sexuality
than meets the eye… [41: Walt Heyer, “’Sex change’ Surgery: What
Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and you should Know”,
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/78949.htm, April 27, 2015.] [42:
Michael W. Chapman, “Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist: Transgender is
‘Mental Disorder;' Sex Change ‘Biologically Impossible’”,
cnsnews.com, June 2, 2015. Cf. “The Transgender Tipping Point:
America's Next Civil Rights Frontier”, Time Magazine, June 9,
2104.]
The deeper aspects of sexuality, even on the purely physical
plane, appear to be immutable.[footnoteRef:43] Thus every man has
an X and a Y chromosome, while every woman has two X chromosomes;
and there are at least 6,500 genetic differences between men and
women which no amount of hormones or surgery can change. [43: Cf.
Dorothy Kimura, "Sex Differences in the Brain", Scientific
American, vol. 267, September, 1992, pp. 80-87.]
As a scientific journalist writes: “Although men and women
sometimes act like separate species, scientists have long assumed
that – in terms of their DNA – they are more or less the same. But
a new study has shown that the sexes really are quite different,
reports Nature magazine, and it all comes down to the X chromosome.
Women carry two X chromosomes; men, by contrast, have one X,
inherited from their mothers, and one Y. The Y is an ‘eroded’
version of the X chromosome with fewer than 100 working genes. The
X, by contrast, has more than 1000, and is able to deploy them more
intricately. “Because women have two X chromosomes, one is
inactive. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely silent. The new
research has revealed that up to 25 % of genes in the so-called
inactive chromosome are actually switched on. In other words, women
are getting ‘double doses’ of some genes. ‘The effect of these
genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the
differences between men and women that are not attributable to sex
hormones,’ said Laura Carrel of Pennsylvania State University.
These could include emotional, behavioural and physical
differences, including susceptibility to disease. Although the X
contains only 4% of all human genes, it accounts for almost 10% of
those inherited diseases that are caused by a single gene. These
‘X-lined’ disorders include colour blindness, haemophilia, various
forms of mental retardation and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. With
no ‘spare’ X to make up for genetic deficiencies, men are more
vulnerable to ‘X-linked’ conditions.”[footnoteRef:44] [44: “The
Difference between Men and Women”, This Week, March 26, 2005, p.
17.]
Thus the scientific evidence, taken as a whole, supports both
the thesis that the sexuality of a man or woman is immutable, and
St. Gregory’s view that certain secondary sexual characteristics
were “added” to the original man and woman after the fall. On the
one hand, since, as the Lord says, there will be no marriage in the
resurrection, it follows, as St. Gregory writes, that these
secondary characteristics will not exist in the Kingdom: “If the
organs of marriage exist for the sake of marriage, when that
function does not exist we shall need none of the organs for that
function”. [footnoteRef:45] On the other hand, “male and female
created He them”: the evidence also supports the position that
there is a deeper, primary level of sexuality that is “wired into”
the nature of men and women and cannot be removed or changed; from
which it follows that the attempt to remove or reverse or
“renegotiate” sexuality is unnatural and perverse... [45: St.
Gregory, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 10. However, Hieromonk
Seraphim Rose writes that “Adam and Eve were created, like the
whole of the first creation, in the bloom of youth and beauty, and
already possessing the sexual distinction that would be needed in
their fallen nature” (Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina,
Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 187)]
2. THE FALL OF MAN
God placed Adam and Eve in Paradise – located in what is now
North-West Iran, according to some sources, in Iraq according to
others - together with the animals; and there they would have lived
forever in joy and harmony without any pain or sorrow if they had
obeyed God.
However, although they were sinless and living in a wholly
sinless and incorrupt world, the Paradise of delight, their
holiness was as it were immature and untested. God decided to test
their free will by seein whether they would fulfill a small,
easily-fulfilled commandment. He also allowed the devil (a fallen
angel who had rebelled against God before the creation of the
material world) to approach them and tempt them to break the
commandment. If they resisted the temptation and obeyed, they would
become more mature and grounded in their holiness, and therefore
still closer to God and each other. But if they disobeyed, they
would lose that holiness, and the sinless nature both inside and
outside them would be corrupted.
The Lord’s commandment was: “Of every tree of the garden you may
freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you
shall not eat, for in the day that you eat, you shall surely die”
(Genesis 2.16-17). The devil (in the form of a serpent) tempted the
woman, first, by suggesting that God was a liar, and that they
would not die. Then he suggested that God was in fact envious of
the apotheosis they would achieve if they ate of the tree. “For God
knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and
you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3.5). Eve
liked the look of the fruit, ate of it and then gave it to her
husband to eat.
Eve’s sin consisted in sensuality and disobedience to her
husband. Adam's sin consisted in the desire to please his wife more
than God. Both sinned in their pride and unbelief. As St. Symeon
the New Theologian writes: "Adam sinned with a great sin because he
did not believe the words of God, but believed the word of the
serpent. Compare God and the serpent, and you will see how great
was the sin of most-wise Adam. In his great wisdom he had given
names to all the animals (Genesis 2.19-20). But when with his whole
soul he believed the serpent and not God, then the Divine grace
which had rested on him slipped away from him, so that he became
the enemy of God by reason of the unbelief which he had shown to
His words."
Having believed in these lies and slander against the all-good
God, and eaten of the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were expelled
from Paradise, lost the Grace of the Holy Spirit, and suffered a
catastrophic change in their physical and psychological nature.
This change is signified in the Biblical text by their being
endowed with “garments of skins” (Genesis 3.21). It is necessary to
examine the meaning of this term with care insofar as it
constitutes the first and only major change in human nature in
history.
Now skin is dead, for garments of skin can only be obtained by
the killing of an animal. Therefore “by a garment of this kind,”
writes the Venerable Bede, “the Lord signifies that they had now
been made mortal – the skins contain a figure of death because they
cannot be drawn off without the death of the animal”.
[footnoteRef:46] And why, asks St. Ephraim, “would animals have
been killed in their presence? Perhaps this happened so that by the
animal’s flesh Adam and Eve might nourish their own bodies and that
with the skins they might cover their nakedness, but also that by
the death of the animals Adam and Eve might see the death of their
own bodies.”[footnoteRef:47] [46: The Venerable Bede, On Genesis,
I, 3.22.] [47: St. Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis,
2.33.1.]
Thus the spiritual death of man through sin led to the killing
of an animal, the first physical death in creation (contrary to the
theory of evolution, which posits billions of completely senseless
animal deaths before the appearance of man on the scene). This dead
animality, in the form of animal skins, was then placed on man like
an outer garment. But not simply placed on him: it entered into
him, corrupting and coarsening his whole psycho-physical nature. It
took hold of his natural faculties and turned them into something
different, what we call the passions. Thus St. Gregory Palamas
writes: “Through this [the original] sin we have put on the
garments of skin… and changed our abode to this transient and
perishable world, and we have condemned ourselves to live a life
full of passions and many misfortunes”.[footnoteRef:48] [48: St.
Gregory Palamas, Homily 31, P.G. 151:388C; quoted in P. Nellas,
Deification in Christ, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1987, p. 85.]
There are three kinds of death: (i) spiritual, the separation of
the Holy Spirit from the soul (and hence, as we have seen, the loss
of the likeness of God), (ii) physical, the separation of the soul
from the body, which comes later than spiritual death, but is an
ineluctable consequence of it, and (iii) eternal, the fixed and
unchangeable alienation of a man from God.[footnoteRef:49] St.
Gregory of Nyssa compares this fallen life, or spiritual death, to
“animals turning the mill”: “With our eyes blindfolded we walk
round the mill of life, always treading the same circular path and
returning to the same things. Let me spell out this circular path:
appetite, satiety, sleep, waking up, emptiness, fullness. From the
former of each pair we constantly pass to the latter, and back
again to the former, and then back again to the latter, and we
never cease to go round in a circle…. Solomon well describes this
life as a leaking pitcher and an alien house (Ecclesiastes 12.6)…
Do you see how men draw up for themselves honors, power, fame and
all such things? But what is put in flows out again below and does
not remain in the container. We are always consumed with anxious
concern for fame and power and honor, but the pitcher of desire
remains unfilled.”[footnoteRef:50] [49: For this distinction, see
Chrestos Androutsos, Dogmatiki tis orthodoxou anatolikis Ekklisias
(The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Eastern Church), Athens, 1907, p.
164.] [50: St. Gregory of Nyssa, Funeral Oration on Placilla, P.G.
46:888D-889A; quoted in Nellas, op. cit., p. 87.]
Sexual desire, like hunger, sleepiness and all the other
passions are fallen because they all belong to “the pitcher of
desire” that “remains forever unfilled”. For fallen man, like the
prodigal son, is forced to try and satisfy his hunger from the
husks of the constantly changing and delusive world of fallen
nature – a diet that only seems to nourish, but ends by making him
hungrier than ever. It was not like that in Paradise, where man’s
unfallen nature did not need corruptible food, but was constantly
feasting on the incorruptible food provided by God Himself.
Thus St. Gregory writes: “When we have put off that dead and
ugly garment which was made for us from irrational skins (when I
hear ‘skins’ I interpret it as the form of the irrational nature
that we have put on from our association with passion), we throw
off every part of our irrational skin along with the removal of the
garment. These are the things which we have received from the
irrational skin: sexual intercourse, conception, childbearing,
dirt, lactation, nourishment, evacuation, gradual growth to
maturity, the prime of life, old age, disease and
death.”[footnoteRef:51] [51: St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and
Resurrection, chapter 10; translated by Catherine Roth, Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 114. It may be surprising to
think of “gradual growth” as a consequence of the fall. But St.
Ephraim the Syrian writes that in Paradise “just as the trees, the
vegetation, the animals, the birds and even humankind were old, so
also were they young. They were old according to the appearance of
their limbs and their substances, yet they were young because of
the hour and moment of their creation. Likewise, the moon was both
old and young. It was young, for it was but a moment old, but was
also old, for it was full as it is on the fifteenth day”
(Commentary on Genesis, 1.24.1). Thus while there might be moral
development in Paradise, there was no physical development or
ageing. That came only as a result of the fall.]
According to St. Gregory, the garments of skin, though the
consequence of sin, are intended to turn us away from sin in two
ways. The first way was delineated originally by Origen. Jean
Daniélou writes: “In his work On the Dead [St. Gregory] explains
that ‘the garment of skin’ allows man to turn back again freely to
God: since man had despised the life of the spirit for carnal
pleasure, God did not wish man ‘to withdraw from sin unwillingly
and be forced by necessity towards the good’, for this would have
destroyed man’s freedom and the image of God within him. Hence He
made use of man’s very tendency by giving him the ‘garment of
skin’. This would cause man to experience a disgust with the things
of the world, and thus ‘he would willingly desire to return to his
former blessedness’.
“In the Great Catechetical Discourse Gregory puts forward the
second reason for the ‘garment of skin’, which derives not from
Origen but from St. Athanasius. The idea is that the ‘garment of
skin’, our present state of mortality, permits the bodily part of
man to be destroyed; but since evil is so closely bound up with the
body, evil too is destroyed, and thus man can be restored to his
original innocence. Man’s body returns to earth like a vase of
baked clay; thus the evil that was mingled with his body is now
released, and the divine Potter can raise him up once more to his
original beauty. Thus the ‘garment of skin’, though really foreign
to human nature, was only given to man by a solicitous providence,
as by a doctor giving us a medicine to cure our inclination to evil
without its being intended to last forever.
“In answer to the question whether man was created without the
‘garment of skin’ (that is, without mortality and all the things
that sex implies), Gregory gives one answer in his work On the
Creation of Man: ‘The grace of the resurrection is the restoration
of fallen man to his primitive state’. But in another passage in On
the Creation of Man he puts forward another hypothesis, ‘as a kind
of exercise’. Here he suggests that God in His foreknowledge knew
that man would abuse his freedom and would fall; and hence ‘seeing
that man by his sin had fallen from his blessed angelic state, God
established a way by which the human race could be propagated in
accordance with our nature; thus the total number of human souls
would not be deficient, even though man had now lost the method of
propagation by which the angelic hosts had multiplied.’ On this
view (which is the one most important to us), God would have
created man from the beginning with a mortal body through His
foreknowledge of man’s sin.
“It is against the background of this doctrine that Gregory
explains the two accounts in Genesis of the creation of man. Philo
had already detected in Genesis two stages in man’s creation: in
the first account, man, the first-born, is created in God’s image
as the pre-existent archetype of the intelligible world; in the
second, man, created as man and female, is man as he actually
appears on earth… In man created in God’s image he sees the
pre-existence of human nature in the perfection of the divine
foreknowledge – such as it will be only at the end of time. Thus
for Gregory, man created as male and female though first in the
order of time is only second in the order of
intention…”[footnoteRef:52] [52: Daniélou, From Glory to Glory:
Texts from Gregory of Nyssa, London: John Murry, 1962, pp.
12-14.]
St. Maximus the Confessor writes: “When God created human
nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it;
rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for
pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy
God ineffably.[footnoteRef:53] But at the instant he was created,
the first man, by the use of his senses, squandered this spiritual
capacity – the natural desire of the mind for God – on sensible
things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural
pleasure through the medium of the senses. Being, in His
providence, concerned for our salvation, God therefore affixed pain
(οδυνη) alongside this sensible pleasure (ηδονη) as a kind of
punitive faculty, whereby the law of death was wisely planted in
our corporeal nature to curb the foolish mind in its desire to
incline unnaturally toward sensible things.[footnoteRef:54] [53:
Since, according to St. Maximus, pleasure is defined as “that for
which we naturally strive”(Ambigua 7, P.G. 91: 1088D), some kind of
pleasure was present in us even before the fall. But this was a
spiritual pleasure, a pleasure in God rather than in sensible
things. (V.M.)] [54: There is a pun here on the words “pain” and
“pleasure”, οδυνη and ηδονη, which sound similar in Greek.
(V.M.)]
“Henceforth, because irrational pleasure entered human nature,
pain entered our nature opposite this pleasure in accordance with
reason, and, through the many sufferings (παθηματα) in which and
from which death occurs, pain uproots unnatural pleasure, but does
not completely destroy it, whereby, then, the grace of the divine
pleasure of the mind is naturally exalted. For every suffering
(πονος), effectively having pleasure as its primary cause, is quite
naturally, in view of its cause, a penalty exacted from all who
share in human nature. Indeed, such suffering invariably
accompanies unnatural pleasure in everyone for whom the law of
pleasure, itself having no prior cause, has preconditioned their
birth. By that I mean that the pleasure stemming from the original
transgression was ‘uncaused’ insofar as it quite obviously did not
follow upon an antecedent suffering.
“After the transgression pleasure naturally preconditioned the
births of all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free
from birth subject to the passion associated with this pleasure;
rather, everyone was requited with sufferings, and subsequent
death, as the natural punishment. The way to freedom is hard for
all who were tyrannized by unrighteous pleasure and naturally
subject to just sufferings and to the thoroughly just death
accompanying them.”[footnoteRef:55] [55: St. Maximus the Confessor,
Questions to Thalassius, 61; translated by Paul M. Blowers and
Robert Louis Wilken in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: St.
Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2003, pp. 131-133.]
In spite of this, some of the passions – what are called the
innocent passions - are necessary for survival in life after the
fall. For, as St. John Chrysostom says, after the fall God
“refashioned” the human body, which was “originally superior to
what it is not”, so that it would be useful to us in our new
situation.[footnoteRef:56] This is most obvious with hunger and
sleep. If man did not feel hunger or weariness, he would not eat or
rest and would waste away; for death, the first result of the fall,
constantly erodes the strength of man from within, necessitating
his restoration through food and sleep. It is also obvious in the
case of sexual desire, which, while not necessary for the life of
the individual, is necessary for the survival of the species as a
whole. As St. Symeon of Thessalonica writes, marriage “is permitted
because of the death that follows the disobedience, in order that,
until the life [ζωη] and immortality that is through Christ should
come, this present corrupt life [βιος] should
remain.”[footnoteRef:57] Moreover, sexual desire not only
stimulates the act that propagates the species. It is also an
important factor in cementing the bond between the father and
mother far beyond the duration of the sexual act (in human beings
desire lasts longer, and fluctuates less, than in animals). The
family unit in turn is the building block of the State (and the
Church), which provides other essential survival functions. [56:
St. John Chrysostom, On the Statues, 11, 4; P.G. 49:125; in Nellas,
op. cit., p. 74.] [57: St. S
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