As Christians we know that by participating in history we are not going to turn it into the Kingdom of God. But our horizon is not limited to history; we know that Christ is coming again in glory to raise all the dead and, through them, the flesh of the world and all that history has created. With this hope we have no need of Utopia.
Christians are making ready within history a transformation which will surpass it, the transformation that is already secretly accomplished in Christ. Thus they escape the dilemma of ‘all or nothing’; nor do they simply accept things as they are, like the hopeless or the well-to-do. They are watchful for every opportunity of promoting freedom, justice, or dignity. Their struggle – an inner one to begin with – is neither conservative nor revolutionary, nor even both at once. The conservativism of Christians is not the same as the cynicism and fear felt by those who have too much, who are all the more willing to theorize about the intractability of history for having themselves benefited from it. Christians cannot stay far from the abandoned and the rebellious. But even while aware of the chances of life, and their tragic consequences in history, we nevertheless know that there are principles, virtually biological laws, by which social life is harmonized with the life of the universe; that the tension between the individual and society is irreducible, and that in politics more than anywhere else ‘he who would be an angel behaves like a beast’; the makers of paradise have been tormentors from hell, and the liver of Prometheus is gnawed away by pollution. Humankind needs justice and happiness, but also risk, transcendence, the profound tragedy of existence. The struggle against the ‘spirit of heaviness’, against stupidity and hatred, is never-ending. Only a hope anchored beyond the world – but already transforming the world through personal beings – can give us the patience to serve life without falling into bitterness or despair.
Christians may not be revolutionary as popular mythology understands the term, but they know that there is a revolutionary force within Christianity, that of Christ the vanquisher of death. This force can alter the makeup of the person. And if this change takes place simultaneously in several people who are in communion, then the world begins to change, and a civilization is founded.
The desire of modern society to forget death is blindingly obvious; people are set free from basic ills but abandoned without mercy to finiteness, a ‘dead life’. This is undoubtedly the pathetic truth about a civilization based on happiness, and it is why people revolt against it. Marxism socializes absolute value, evading personal death – the only real kind – in favour of the prolongation, and the supposed upward progress, of the species. Fascism, in its earliest form, was a glorification of death in battle.
By faith in Christ the vanquisher of death, by our foretaste of the resurrection, and by the hope of the Kingdom, we ought to be able to cure the fundamental dread within and around us, and so set people free to live their lives to the full. To make something of our lives in the transitory cities of this world, we must hold together the recollection of death and of God. Being mindful of the passing of all things, and also of the ‘passover’ of all things in God, we are cured of idolatry and nihilism; we relativize in order to eternize.
The other dimension of witness in the city can only be freedom. The Churches should repent bitterly for having relied for so many centuries on the sword of the State. Today, to the astonishment of young people in Eastern Europe, Christianity appears essentially as the revelation of the person and of freedom. That is why Christians, engaged in history, must make freedom not only the end but the means. According to Chigalev, Dostoevsky’s genial gnostic of history in The Devils, unlimited freedom comes about when ‘those who know’ have unlimited power. It is for us to preserve personal freedom from both social and ideological enslavement. It is for us to bear witness that God is the space of freedom, and that if humanity is not in God’s image it will always be in bondage to nature and history. Now respecting the image of God in people means above all not imposing good on them. People need to be shown, especially by the attraction of communion, that true freedom – the freedom that enables us to transcend ourselves in love – requires a long schooling in death-and-resurrection; otherwise the only freedom will be chaos inhabited by wild beasts. The ‘divine marquis’ showed clearly, at the heart of the French Revolution, that if we abandon ourselves to ‘nature’, fraternity turns into the brotherhood of Cain. But the only creative constraints are those that are self-imposed. ‘A young man came to a holy monk seeking to be instructed in the way of fullness. The old man breathed not a word. The other asked why he was silent. ‘Am I your superior that I should command you?’ he replied. ‘I will say nothing; but, if you like, do what you see me do.”
Our cities desperately need the presence of Christians, enlivened by hope and intent on freedom; when they have studied the workings of society, like everyone else, they must make it their sole task to permeate its density with an unquenchable desire for communion. Fedorov said, ‘Our social programme is the Trinity; everything else is society in decay.’ In this enterprise there can be no conflict between the insistence on fair dealing, the setting up of model communities and the reform of society; the last after all simply means that we house, clothe and feed, as we are bound to do, the ‘thou’ who is our neighbour, all over the world. When St John Chrysostom began to preach the ‘sacrament of the brother’, he conceived the idea of reorganizing the society of Antioch in such a way that poverty would be abolished. But society is an aspect of the person, not the other way round, and however ethical the social institutions are, they are of no value unless they are created by and for persons. Society and morality are bound together, and morality is purified and elevated only by a schooling in contemplation, disciplined prayer and practical love. This happens only over a long period and within a gradually developing common tradition. If we are all to know what it is to be noble, then nobility needs to be embodied in monks and knights. Eventually the tradition is exhausted, and life must be fertilized anew by eternity.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
