Becoming Human: On the Redemptive Path of Suffering | Part 1 of 2

Theological Letters

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This is part 1 from a live talk I gave to the Antiochian Men’s Group. Please come back next week for part 2.

Suffering. A word near to those who choose to rise early on a Saturday to hear a theological lecture.

Thank you for being here. And thank you to the Antiochian Men’s Group for the invitation.

Those who read my work or listen to my podcast know that I tend to speak on matters of theology and metaphysics, readily confessing that I am no one’s priest. I am a scholar who works in areas of philosophy and historical theology. None of that changes here this morning. I am a layman of the Orthodox Church. I say this because I have chosen to include in this morning’s talks lessons about suffering and its spiritual benefit. The lessons I offer carry no spiritual authority over any of you. I offer them not as a spiritual athlete who has excelled in transformation. Rather, I offer them as a layman and a fellow Orthodox Christian, hobbling on the road to salvation.

Before I begin, allow me to provide a road map for this morning’s talk. We’ll begin by looking at what the Eastern fathers of the Church tell us about the nature of man, our creation, our corruption, and our correction.

I provide this backdrop for two reasons. The first is because the majority, if not the totality, of us are Westerners. Whether we know it or not, we have been shaped by Western thinking. And much of Western thought about the nature of man is contrary to the teachings of the Eastern fathers. Hence, it’s important to correct these lenses as part of our ongoing catechesis and repentance.

The second reason is that it provides the abstract reasons why suffering is indispensable to the remaking of man, which is to say, to our salvation. Such is part 1 of this talk.

After providing the abstract reasons for the importance of suffering, I’ll turn, in part 2, to the enfleshed reality, offering to you, dear listeners, lessons from my own life that have taught me in very tangible ways the wisdom behind so many words of the Saints about pain. So with that, let’s begin.

Part 1: The Making, Corruption, and Remaking of Man

For most of us in the West, the anthropology with which we are most familiar is one born out of the Pelagian Dispute, an early Latin controversy that definitively shaped both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology. We need not delve into the details of the dispute. For our purposes, let the familiar results suffice:

Man is born into this world sinful. He bears the stain of his forefather, Adam, and every deed of his own is tainted by sin. He can do nothing to remedy his condition, and not even his best efforts to do good are pleasing to God. In a word, he is born into this world damnable, and he heaps damnable deeds atop this condition with his every breath. His condition is one destined to stand before his divine Judge, his condemnation certain, his damnation inevitable. His sole hope is that God has mercy upon him. Yet, he cannot evoke such mercy, since even his pleas for help come from damnable lips, tainted by the condition he inherited from birth. So, if God shows mercy and provides aid, we should marvel. As for the nature of this aid — what is called “grace” — its kind and effects are disputed amongst Catholics and Protestants, but what is undisputed is that it is supernatural. Nature, of which man is part, can do nothing pleasing to its Maker of its own accord. So if anything good is to come of us, it must come by miracle, something transcendent invading our natural condition.

The tale of man, as told by the Eastern fathers, is notably different from the picture just painted. Let’s begin with the making of man, as told by these fathers of the Church. Within the Genesis story, we find talk of the heavens and the earth, and within this telling, the heavens are the realm of things immortal, while the earth is the realm of things mortal. And bridging this gap, we find man: a creature taken from the earth but breathed into from heaven.

Now, this merger of heaven and earth raised a question in the minds of those in the East, first in Jewish writer, Philo of Alexandria, and then in the Eastern Church fathers after him: Was man created mortal or immortal? Their answer was uniform: neither. Man was made potentially mortal and potentially immortal, his will functioning like the fulcrum of a balance scale, choosing whether to live and die like the beasts or to live the life of angels.

This choice goes to a second critical feature of the story that is recognized by all fathers of the East. When deciding to create man, God says, “Let us make man in our own image and according to our likeness.” And after these words, God creates man in his own image, likeness is not repeated.

The Eastern fathers take this omission to be important. The image, they teach, concerns our higher nature or spirit, which is rational, free, and capable of communing with God. The likeness of God concerns our active imitation of God by which we come to commune with him and be transformed. Such is the reason Adam was made in the image of God but not his likeness. For the likeness is active, born from choice; Adam must choose to cooperate. But we know the story: he chose poorly.

Now, before discussing the effects of this choice, let’s say a bit more about this communion by imitation, the sort of communion meant to give rise to the divine likeness.

When considering the nature of God expressed in his operations, we might think of words like love, justice, mercy, compassion, longsuffering, and so on. Such attributes are impossible for a rock or plant or dog, but not for a man. We, too, are capable of such operations. And when we imitate God in these ways, we also participate in God.

The point is alien to the Western mind. Something like virtue is thought of as a purely natural activity: Aristotle tells us it is the acquisition of habit by a repetition of will, and the sentiment echoes in Latin Christians, like Thomas Aquinas. But the Eastern fathers do not see such activity as natural. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, speaks of Christ as Virtue. Hence, when one acquires virtue, he participates in Christ.

The most common analogy for explaining such participation, in both the Eastern fathers themselves and in contemporary writers on their thought, is the analogy of iron and fire. Fire expresses its nature by operations of heating and lighting. And iron, when communing with fire, comes to glow and burn. The iron remains iron, but something of the nature of fire has taken up residence within it. And so it is with our participation in God, according to the Eastern fathers. We, as images of God, are made to commune with God, and through that communion be transformed, bearing in our person things divine. When we imitate God, displaying these attributes on a small scale, something of God is resident in us.

We catch the clearest glimpse of this in the person of the Resurrected Christ, the first manifestation of man, bearing both the image and likeness. Here, we see not only the perfection of virtue, but also immortality and incorruption in one who radiates the glory of God.

And such is the promise of the gospel. In the gospel, Christ offers to us eternal life. While many tend to think of this as mere longevity, worked upon us like a divine magic trick, we should notice a small statement from Saint Paul to Timothy: God alone is immortal. Yet, this very same Paul says, in his discourse on resurrection, that we must put off mortality for immortality. The two statements point to a truth stated plainly by Saint Peter: We escape the corruption that has come upon the world by partaking of the divine nature. Or as Christ himself says to his hearers in the Gospel of John, The Father has given it to me to have life in myself, but you will not come to me to have life. The life Christ offers is the very life of God. Our hope, the hope of the gospel, is that we might partake of God and be transformed by bearing in our person something of the divine nature. Such is the destiny of man.

But here, we see a critical difference between the Christian East and the Christian West. Notice that, on this understanding, the reason we are capable of communion with God is because we are divine image bearers. Yes, the results of such communion are supernatural, giving rise to divine attributes in our person. But our access to God’s supernature is perfectly natural.

And just as importantly, the Fall does not rob us of this access. You and I now, despite the Fall and the corruption of our nature, continue to bear God’s image. The redemptive work of God in Christ, which we will talk about in a moment, is understood by the Eastern fathers as the restoration of our nature, an unearthing of something already within us.

Saint Antony the Great tells us that the soul is twisted, but if one untwists the soul, it does what it is made to do, deify the person. Gregory of Nyssa reads the parable of the lost coin as a picture of the work of Christ. You know the story. A woman has a coin of inestimable value, which gets lost in her cluttered house. So she cleans the entire house in order to find the coin and then throws a party to celebrate. The house, says Gregory, is man. The coin is the image of God within man. The clutter that hides the coin is the passions. The woman is Christ, who clears away the passions, unearths the coin, and celebrates with the angels.

Gregory has already thrust us into the topic of Christ’s redemptive work, so let’s talk about the corruption that has set in as a result of the Fall and Christ’s undoing of corruption in the Incarnation.

The simplest way to understand the corruption of our nature, as taught by the Eastern fathers, is as an inversion. As noted, we are composed of things earthly and things heavenly, of a spiritual nature and an animal nature. And just as wisdom bids that in a relationship between a man and his horse that the man steer, so Wisdom herself bids man that his higher nature govern, order, and care for the lower.

But having chosen the life of beasts, we find this arrangement inverted. Our animal passions hold unnatural sway over our rational spirit, pulling us toward the things that animals desire, food, sex, ease, and the avoidance of death. Yet, our rational spirit retains its memory that it is made for more. So we find ourselves discontent, longing for something higher, though we often know not what. And should we strive for something higher, such as the virtuous life, we find ourselves crying out with Saint Paul: I know the things I ought to do, but I do not do them, and the things I will not, I do. In this famous passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we find the clearest description of our Fallen condition, a war between the spirit and the flesh. Now, translations often mislead readers to think of this as a spiritual war between the “sin nature” and the Holy Spirit. But the Greek is clear. Paul speaks here of the flesh and its passions. And the spirit that it wars against is our rational self, which is why he uses spirit (pneuma) interchangeably with mind (nous). The picture is of a rational mind enslaved to the passions of its lower nature, impotent to cast them off for the life of angels.

Into this condition steps the Son of God, our Maker. Before saying more on this, allow a word on something, once again, rather notable in the Eastern tale. Unlike in the West, where God has no obligation to rescue humanity and his aid is arbitrary in the true sense (bare choice) because he has no obligation to us and we have no claim to help, in the Eastern fathers we find something very different. Athanasius tells us it would be unworthy of God to allow demonic schemes to thwart his intent for creation. And when speaking about divine providence, these fathers state something extraordinary: God can do nothing but will the good of a creature. Such is his nature. Hence, far from seeing man as a damned mass, which the divine Judge must decide whether to cast into Hell or show mercy to some, the Eastern fathers offer a very different picture of God. Seeing his creation corrupted and sick, the Maker himself enters the cancerous organ in order to drive away its disease, instill divine life within it, and nurture it back to health, so that this good infection (as C. S. Lewis calls it) might spread to the whole of man, and from man to the cosmos.

Now, I promised in my opening that this glimpse into the creation, corruption, and correction of man would offer insight into why suffering is indispensable to our salvation. Before delivering on this promise, allow me one further observation from the Eastern fathers, not about man per se, but about creatures generally.

Every creature is a being in process. The point becomes evident in the Arian dispute, the first dispute to give rise to an Ecumenical Council, namely, the Council of Nicea and the first draft of the Nicene Creed.

Well known enough is the heresy of Arius that occasioned the dispute. According to Arius, there was a time when the Son of God was not, or did not exist. In a word, Arius argued that the Son of God was a creature. And amid this dispute, the pro-Nicenes make abundantly clear the ramifications of this claim. Athanasius, Alexander of Alexandria, and the Council itself explain that if the Son came into being then he is changeable, corruptible, morally turnable, and so on. The charges brought to line the Eastern patristic understanding of creatures generally.

And central to this understanding is that every creature moves from non-being into being, or put more colloquially, from potentially something to actually something. The Greek word is alloiōtos: we are changeable or can become something else. In other words, every creature is developmental. We begin in a seedling state, develop into infancy, to adolescence, and on to adulthood. And even when we are formed bodily, we continue to develop in other ways, intellectually, musically, artistically, morally, spiritually. In such developments, we become something we previously were not. Such is the mark of creatures.

The point brings us back to a distinction noted earlier: God made man in his own image, but not (yet) according to his likeness. Why? The reason is this. The likeness of God is something that requires cooperation. Recall that we participate in God and come to bear his likeness by imitating him. God can create an image-bearer, but to bring about his likeness in that image-bearer, the creature itself must cooperate, freely choosing to imitate its Maker.

The need to cooperate and freely choose the Good is not a post-Fall phenomenon. Such was required of Adam, and it continues to be required of us. And on the heels of this truth enters suffering.

Unlike our First Father, we are corrupt, a sick and dying organ within the cosmos. And the path to health is painful.

We see the pattern first laid bare in the person of Christ. Here, our Maker chooses to become a creature, for our sake, joining himself to the cancerous organ. In this union, his divine life drives away the cancer, restoring the organ to health. And yet, according to the Eastern fathers, the remaking of man is not complete until Christ’s Resurrection. He suffers temptation; he suffers grief and sorrow; his soul recoils from his impending death, as all animals do. This is why Maximus the Confessor says the cross is the definitive defeat of the passions. For every passion cries out, give me this or die, or take this from me or I die. But in embracing the will of God even unto death on a cross, Christ puts to death the passions by his own death. And as John Behr, commenting on Saint Ignatius, explains, his cry, “It is finished,” is a proclamation that what is finished is the remaking of man. And when he bursts forth from the tomb, having carried his immortal life into Hades, undoing death, he rises as our archetype: Man, bearing the image and likeness of God, immortal, incorruptible, fully formed and alive.

But notice that the path to this formation involved pain. Temptation. Grief. Sorrow. Suffering. Even death. And the call of Christ assures us that if we, too, wish to live, then we too must die: “Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will keep it.”

On this Eastern telling, the gospel is not about absolution before a future Judge, or about supernatural aid to earn merits in his sight, or about unmerited favor despite our sinfulness. God loves us and can do no other. He wills our good and can do no other. He readily forgives and can do no other. But such is not the good news. The good news is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Our Maker has put the cancer of our world into remission. And if we join ourselves to him, imitating this death by turning and returning and returning the soul back to God, despite the assailing passions and countless failings, that good infection, that life and healing can come to us as well. But as in all things creaturely, it is a thing of process. And as with all processes that involve the rational soul, such a process requires choice, repetition, and struggle. But because the sufferings of Christ have redeemed suffering itself, such struggle is redemptive. “I have told you these things, so that you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart. I have overcome the world.”

To be continued…

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