From our own experience and from our observation of others we are aware that human nature is damaged. Damaged, first of all, within each one of us; the ‘self is a shadow theatre of neurotic characters, and it is they who are pulling our strings instead of the other way about. Our faculties are disunited and out of order. While the rational intelligence is busy making distinctions, the ‘heart’, in obedience to dark subconscious forces, is obliterating them. We are turned this way and that, lacking any centre of balance.
Not only are we disunited as individuals, we are the same in relation to each other. Whether we are alone or involved with others, we remain separate and hostile, alone even in our involvement, which is to say, in theological terms, that our condition is fallen.
In this condition it is impossible to develop a Christian anthropology. Our thinking can only lead to a dead end. If we examine the personality in its isolated state we become imprisoned in the blindness that caused our ‘alienation’ in the first place, an alienation which is not merely social but basic to our very existence. The shadows, however, are shot through with flashes of light. In mad moments of love or creativity, in the transparency of a glance, or when we are suddenly overtaken by sheer wonderment at our existence, depths of enlightenment are revealed.
Humanity cannot be explained in terms of itself. The fine word ‘ethos’, debased by us into ‘ethics’, originally meant ‘dwelling place’. And Heraclitus said, ‘The dwelling-place of man is God’. So how do we embark on this study of humanity of which the revelation of God is an essential part?
Not by science, as in ‘social sciences’, to which we give due acknowledgement in passing, but by Christian knowledge, which is knowledge in the context of faith, apprehended not by any particular faculty but through the whole person, knowledge which begins and proceeds by way of repentance, or as the Gospel and the Greek Fathers call it, metanoia: the turning round of our self-awareness, the Copernican shift of the self (individual or collective) from geocentric to heliocentric, enabling us to see in the depth of everything around us the furnace of the divine sun.
But first let us attack the walls of our prison. One of the best definitions of fallenness comes from St Andrew of Crete, a 7th century monk whose Penitential Canon is read in the Eastern Churches at the beginning of Great Lent, the season of penitence by which we prepare to celebrate the Resurrection. St Andrew says, ‘Man is the idolater of himself’. That impulse to worship which is basic to human nature, human beings have diverted towards themselves, thus cutting themselves off from the Source of life (on which nevertheless they still depend) and turning back towards the nothingness out of which they were created. Human beings cannot actually annihilate themselves, but they become the slave of death. And death is not only the inexorable fact with which every human life must end, for even in death we can see God’s mercy at work. All the while we are advancing along our destined path we are well aware that everything must finish, that we have done too much, and seen too much. Like the thief on the cross, we can say, ‘In our case we deserved it; we are paying for what we did’ (Luke 23.41). Much more serious is the state of death we are in even while we are alive, because it denotes a life against nature, against the longing for immortality, that compulsion to worship which is the secret truth about us. In that sense, we are in death. And we realize that our human nature and the universe around us are literally in a state of disintegration.
~Adapted from Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
