People weren’t made to stay where they
are. They were made to become what they aren’t. Our majesty isn’t to be
found in the present or the past, but in our future. Stagnation in the
present, as immobility, is the equivalent of death. And any movement
towards the past is motion towards the non-being from which we were
called by the Creator’s command. It’s only movement towards the future
that denotes vitality and the chance of prospering.
The time of our life acquires meaning
and content only when it unfolds as a movement towards the fulfilment of
the purpose of our existence, the purpose for which we were created.
And that purpose is for us to become what we aren’t. We’re made in the
image of God and are called to become like Him. To become gods by grace.
Despite this, almost all scientific
research on people and the world is most often directed towards the
past: to primeval people and the first moments of the creation of the
world. What were people like initially. How did they evolve? What were
the conditions of their life? How did they arrive at today’s state? How
did the cosmos come about? What about the beginning of the universe?
What are its true dimensions, and so on?
A whole host of researchers from various
parts of the world are working, at the present moment, at the research
centre at CERN, in Switzerland, and enormous sums are being spent so
that we can understand the past and to advance our knowledge, even by
just a few fractions of a second, concerning the Big Bang. And one is
tempted to wonder, along with Socrates, and say: ‘What is it about these
people? Did they imagine they’d learned everything there was to know
about people and so devoted themselves to other things, or have they
abandoned the study of humans and have engaged in the examination of
other things in the belief that in this way they’re doing their
duty?’[1].
Our first duty is to try and examine and
understand ourselves. And the first consequence of such an effort is
humility and repentance. When we examine ourselves and come to know our
internal state, when we understand what we really are and what we should
be, it’s natural that we should be humbled, to repent for what we are
and to want to remedy the situation.
Of course, there’s another possibility:
that we’ll justify ourselves and reckon that we’re just about saints,
because we haven’t committed any egregious wickedness in our life
(haven’t killed, haven’t robbed, haven’t dishonoured). This is why we
need to have some measure of comparison in our conscience, so that we
know what a person should be. Where our value as people lies and what
the purpose of our life is.
When he was already advanced in age,
Elder Païsios, this great saint of our times, said: ‘I’ve gone white as a
monk. But the further I go, the blacker I become internally, also as a
monk, but a negligent one. But I justify myself as being sick, when I
happen to be ill and as being sick at other times when I’m perfectly
well and deserve a good beating’ [2]. Moreover, in his spiritual
testament he writes the following: ‘On my word, I, the Monk Païsios, as I
have examined myself, have seen that I have violated all the Lord’s
commandments, and have committed all the sins. It is of no importance
whether some have happened to a lesser extent, because I have no
exoneration, because the Lord has been so good to me. Pray that the Lord
will have mercy on me’.
What was the measure to which Saint
Païsios held himself? As is clear from his spiritual testament, it was
God’s commandments. And what ideal did he have in his mind? Who was the
person he wanted to sculpt in his life? His ideal was to be a real
person, a person as his Creator wanted him to be, a creature ‘in His
image’ [3].
We weren’t made to remain as we are:
transient and mortal. We were made to become what we aren’t: permanent
and immortal. We were made to become the same as God, created gods, gods
through grace. People who reach perfection, writes Saint Maximos the
Confessor and gods in all things except participation in the divine
essence [4], because in that case, to all intents and purposes, they
would cease to be human and we’d be left with pantheism pure and simple.
It seems, however, that we spurn this
sublime destination. We don’t seek it. We don’t investigate it. We avoid
it. And usually people avoid what they fear. All the centuries-long
research and inquiries which we’ve made have been concerned, as we’ve
said, with the past, with our pre-history and the pre-history of the
cosmos. Today, in particular, in what is known as post-modernity, it
seems that everything’s become history and there are no prospects at all
for the future.
Even calling this era ‘post-modernity’
seems to indicate the end of historical ages. What era can be imagined
after post-modern? And there’s much other evidence which points towards
some sort of exclusion of the future, some termination in the present
or, even more so, some taste of the end of all things. This is why today
there’s talk of the end of ideologies, the end of philosophy, the end
of politics and the end of history.
Naturally, this phenomenon isn’t
unrelated to the more general experiences people have, with the downturn
in the economy, environmental problems and many other areas. What makes
this era special, however, is our terrible alienation as persons, the
stripping away of our inner world, the way we’re reduced to being mere
numbers and our classification by machines.
Elder Païsios wrote: ‘Machines have
multiplied, beguilement with them has increased, they’ve made people
into machines and now the machines and things made of iron tell people
what to do. Which is why our hearts have become hard as iron. With all
these means that there are now, our conscience isn’t being cultivated’
[5]
Cultivation of the conscience, with the
will of God as the guide, and the observance of His commandments, summed
up in the dual commandment of love, opens up our heart so that we can
embrace the whole world, the whole of creation. In this way we become
‘universal’. The saints of our Church were people such as that:
universal people.
A pre-requisite for universality is the
eradication of egotism, which confines us to ourselves and isolates us
from God and other people.
Selfishness makes us want to keep
everything for ourselves and to use everything and everyone to serve our
own interests It’s people like this who are shaping globalization.
They’re the globalized people of our time.
Universal people are exactly the
opposite. They open themselves up and widen their hearts to make room
for the whole world. They eradicate the ego, the ‘I’, and turn it into a
universal ‘we’. They see their real selves in the faces of others and,
in the person of others, they see the person of Christ: ‘If you do this
to one of the least of my brethren, you do it to me’ [6].
Such a man was Elder Païsios, a
universal person, just as were the other Fathers of our Church. Indeed,
the hymnographers call them ‘Universal Fathers’. All of them were
imitators of the first universal person, Christ the new Adam, Who is the
foundation and model of unity and of our universality.
We live in the era of globalization. An
age where the person is crushed and we’re treated as units of production
or consumption. It’s an age which has been shaped by entirely different
political systems, which in a strange- though not theologically
inexplicable manner- agreed on one thing: the eradication of people as
persons. They agreed, which is how they arrived at the same conclusion
from diametrically opposed starting points. Naturally it was impossible
for any of these systems to approach, let alone achieve universality.
Universality is promoted and achieved
through the presence of universal persons. Persons who cultivate a
humble outlook, eradicate egotism and embrace the whole of the world
with love. The perfect person is a universal person. And the perfect
society is one made up of universal members.
But how can we imagine or conceive of
such a society? Biology today tells us that every cell in an organism
has all the information concerning the composition of that organism. In
other words, each one of the cells of an organism contains within it the
whole organism to which it belongs and is able to reproduce it. This is
true of plants, animals and human beings. This is what the efforts at
cloning are based upon.
The similarities of all these cells,
however, doesn’t make them uniform, nor does it prevent them from being
different and from forming the enormous variety of tissues, organs and
members of the body: blood, innards, hands, feet, eyes and so on.
Initially, all the cells in our organism are similar to each other, but
they become different in order to make up the harmonious unity of our
indivisible organism.
So like every other living organism,
people are formed from cells, each of which potentially contains the
whole of the organism. Human society, likewise, if it wishes to have
organic unity, i.e. universality, must have persons, each of whom
possesses within them the whole of human society, with the power of
common understanding and love. When certain cells in the human organism
rebel and disobey the rules, they then begin to develop to the detriment
of the organism, to the point where they destroy it and are themselves
destroyed (malignant growths, carcinomas). The same is true for human
society.
As opposed to globalization, which is
ruinous for us and for human dignity and which is being promoted today,
we have Christian universality. The universality which the Saints and
Fathers of the Church cultivate through their humility and love. This
was the universality of the heart, which Elder Païsios experienced and
transmitted in our own time. When asked what his heart said, he replied:
‘What my heart says is to take a knife, cut it into little pieces,
share it out among people and then die’.
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