Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XII
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
XII.
This reasoning and intelligent creature, man, at once the work and the
likeness of the Divine and Imperishable Mind (for so in the Creation it
is written of him that “God made man in His image1410
”), this creature, I say, did not in
the course of his first production have united to the very essence of
his nature the liability to passion and to death. Indeed, the truth
about the image could never have been maintained if the beauty
reflected in that image had been in the slightest degree opposed1411
| 1411 ὑπεναντίως; i.e. even as a sub-contrary. | to the Archetypal Beauty. Passion was
introduced afterwards, subsequent to man’s first organization;
and it was in this way. Being the image and the likeness, as has been
said, of the Power which rules all things, man kept also in the matter
of a Free-Will this likeness to Him whose Will is over all. He was
enslaved to no outward necessity whatever; his feeling towards that
which pleased him depended only on his own private judgment; he was
free to choose whatever he liked; and so he was a free agent, though
circumvented with cunning, when he drew upon himself that disaster
which now overwhelms humanity. He became himself the discoverer of
evil, but he did not therein discover what God had made; for God did
not make death. Man became, in fact, himself the fabricator, to a
certain extent, and the craftsman of evil. All who have the faculty of
sight may enjoy equally the sunlight; and any one can if he likes put
this enjoyment from him by shutting his eyes: in that case it is not
that the sun retires and produces that darkness, but the man himself
puts a barrier between his eye and the sunshine; the faculty of vision
cannot indeed, even in the closing of the eyes, remain inactive1412
, and so this operative sight necessarily
becomes an operative darkness1413
rising up in the
man from his own free act in ceasing to see. Again, a man in building a
house for himself may omit to make in it any way of entrance for the
light; he will necessarily be in darkness, though he cuts himself off
from the light voluntarily. So the first man on the earth, or rather he
who generated evil in man, had for choice the Good and the Beautiful
lying all around him in the very nature of things; yet he wilfully cut
out a new way for himself against this nature, and in the act of
turning away from virtue, which was his own free act, he created the
usage of evil. For, be it observed, there is no such thing in the world
as evil irrespective of a will, and discoverable in a substance apart
from that. Every creature of God is good, and nothing of His “to
be rejected”; all that God made was “very good1414
.” But the habit of sinning entered as
we have described, and with fatal quickness, into the life of man; and
from that small beginning spread into this infinitude of evil. Then
that godly beauty of the soul which was an imitation of the Archetypal
Beauty, like fine steel blackened1415
with the
vicious rust, preserved no longer the glory of its familiar essence,
but was disfigured with the ugliness of sin. This thing so great and
precious1416
| 1416 Cf. Prov. xx. 6, μέγα
ἄνθρωπος; and Ambrose (de obitu Theodosii), “Magnum et
honorabile est homo misericors;” and the same on Ps. cxix. 73,
“Grande homo, et preciosum vir misericors, et vere magnus est,
qui divini operis interpres est, et imitator Dei.” | , as the Scripture calls him, this
being man, has fallen from his proud birthright. As those who have
slipped and fallen heavily into mud, and have all their features so
besmeared with it, that their nearest friends do not recognize them, so
this creature has fallen into the mire of sin and lost the blessing of
being an image of the imperishable Deity; he has clothed himself
instead with a perishable and foul resemblance to something else; and
this Reason counsels him to put away again by washing it off in the cleansing
water of this calling1417
| 1417 τῆς
πολιτείας: used in the same sense in “On
Pilgrimages.” | . The earthly
envelopment once removed, the soul’s beauty will again appear.
Now the putting off of a strange accretion is equivalent to the return
to that which is familiar and natural; yet such a return cannot be but
by again becoming that which in the beginning we were created. In fact
this likeness to the divine is not our work at all; it is not the
achievement of any faculty of man; it is the great gift of God bestowed
upon our nature at the very moment of our birth; human efforts can only
go so far as to clear away the filth of sin, and so cause the buried
beauty of the soul to shine forth again. This truth is, I think, taught
in the Gospel, when our Lord says, to those who can hear what Wisdom
speaks beneath a mystery, that “the Kingdom of God is within
you1418
.” That word1419
| 1419 ὁ λόγος,
i.e. Scripture. So τὸ λόγιον in Gregory passim, and Clement. Alex.
(Stromata). |
points out the fact that the Divine good is not something apart from
our nature, and is not removed far away from those who have the will to
seek it; it is in fact within each of us, ignored indeed, and unnoticed
while it is stifled beneath the cares and pleasures of life, but found
again whenever we can turn our power of conscious thinking towards it.
If further confirmation of what we say is required, I think it will be
found in what is suggested by our Lord in the searching for the Lost
Drachma1420
. The thought, there, is that the
widowed soul reaps no benefit from the other virtues (called drachmas
in the Parable) being all of them found safe, if that one other is not
amongst them. The Parable therefore suggests that a candle should first
be lit, signifying doubtless our reason which throws light on hidden
principles; then that in one’s own house, that is, within
oneself, we should search for that lost coin; and by that coin the
Parable doubtless hints at the image of our King, not yet hopelessly
lost, but hidden beneath the dirt; and by this last we must understand
the impurities of the flesh, which, being swept and purged away by
carefulness of life, leave clear to the view the object of our search.
Then it is meant that the soul herself who finds this rejoices over it,
and with her the neighbours, whom she calls in to share with her in
this delight. Verily, all those powers which are the housemates of the
soul, and which the Parable names her neighbours for this occasion1421
, when so be that the image of the mighty
King is revealed in all its brightness at last (that image which the
Fashioner of each individual heart of us has stamped upon this our
Drachma1422
| 1422 ἐνεσημήνατο
ἡ ?ν τῇ
δραχμῇ. | ), will then be converted to that
divine delight and festivity, and will gaze upon the ineffable beauty
of the recovered one. “Rejoice with me,” she says,
“because I have found the Drachma which I had lost.” The
neighbours, that is, the soul’s familiar powers, both the
reasoning and the appetitive, the affections of grief and of anger, and
all the rest that are discerned in her, at that joyful feast which
celebrates the finding of the heavenly Drachma are well called her
friends also; and it is meet that they should all rejoice in the Lord
when they all look towards the Beautiful and the Good, and do
everything for the glory of God, no longer instruments of sin1423
. If, then, such is the lesson of this
Finding of the lost, viz. that we should restore the divine image from
the foulness which the flesh wraps round it to its primitive state, let
us become that which the First Man was at the moment when he first
breathed. And what was that? Destitute he was then of his covering of
dead skins, but he could gaze without shrinking upon God’s
countenance. He did not yet judge of what was lovely by taste or sight;
he found in the Lord alone all that was sweet; and he used the helpmeet
given him only for this delight, as Scripture signifies when it said
that “he knew her not1424
” till he was
driven forth from the garden, and till she, for the sin which she was
decoyed into committing, was sentenced to the pangs of childbirth. We,
then, who in our first ancestor were thus ejected, are allowed to
return to our earliest state of blessedness by the very same stages by
which we lost Paradise. What are they? Pleasure, craftily offered,
began the Fall, and there followed after pleasure shame, and fear, even
to remain longer in the sight of their Creator, so that they hid
themselves in leaves and shade; and after that they covered themselves
with the skins of dead animals; and then were sent forth into this
pestilential and exacting land where, as the compensation for having to
die, marriage was instituted1425
. Now if we are
destined “to depart hence, and be with Christ1426
,” we must begin at the end of the
route of departure (which lies nearest to ourselves); just as those who
have travelled far from their friends at home, when they turn to reach
again the place from which they started, first leave that district
which they reached at the end of their outward journey. Marriage, then,
is the last stage of our separation from the life that was led in
Paradise; marriage therefore, as our discourse has been suggesting, is
the first thing to be left; it is the first station as it were for our
departure to Christ. Next, we must retire from all anxious toil upon
the land, such as man was bound to after his sin. Next
we must divest ourselves of those coverings of our nakedness, the coats
of skins, namely the wisdom of the flesh; we must renounce all shameful
things done in secret1427
, and be covered no
longer with the fig-leaves of this bitter world; then, when we have
torn off the coatings of this life’s perishable leaves, we must
stand again in the sight of our Creator; and repelling all the illusion
of taste and sight, take for our guide God’s commandment only,
instead of the venom-spitting serpent. That commandment was, to touch
nothing but what was Good, and to leave what was evil untasted; because
impatience to remain any longer in ignorance of evil would be but the
beginning of the long train of actual evil. For this reason it was
forbidden to our first parents to grasp the knowledge of the opposite
to the good, as well as that of the good itself; they were to keep
themselves from “the knowledge of good and evil1428
,” and to enjoy the Good in its purity,
unmixed with one particle of evil: and to enjoy that, is in my
judgment nothing else than to be ever with God, and to feel ceaselessly
and continually this delight, unalloyed by aught that could tear us
away from it. One might even be bold to say that this might be found
the way by which a man could be again caught up into Paradise out of
this world which lieth in the Evil, into that Paradise where Paul was
when he saw the unspeakable sights which it is not lawful for a man to
talk of1429
.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
