One of the most astonishing features of our time is the tendency of spiritual truths, till recently known only to contemplatives, to become historical facts. So the splitting of the atom is only the outward expression in history of the spiritual state of disintegration in humanity known to Tradition and called just the same thing, ‘atomization’. When the self turns away from God, it can no longer contain its nature; it becomes an individual – atomos – in which the nature is broken up. While in Christ and in holy people we see human and universal nature (using ‘nature’ in its proper theological, not philosophical, sense) working together in perfect harmony, in our case the unity is ‘atomized’. We are side by side but our faces are closed towards each other, wearing an alien expression that cuts us off from the whole of creation. The impulse of thanksgiving in nature has become a blind force. Instead of working through us to find its fulfillment in God, it plays with our closed and misshapen selves, rattling these ‘atoms’ together.
And this is the condition we are in: we must kill to eat until we die and are absorbed by decayed nature; we must kill also, in one way or another, to find an ephemeral security; we seek security through mastery of the world – and it becomes our tomb. Eros, which ought to point towards immortality, becomes simply the means of perpetuating the species. The ‘passions’, as the ascetics call them, turn into idols. Nature, now become impersonal, enslaves humanity and plunges it into death. Individuals tighten their grasp on freedom, but it is a freedom devoid of meaning, attaching itself to outward things and becoming enslaved to them and to the desire for possession which they arouse. The only thing that can put an end to this impossible and ultimately destructive love is death. Here lies the root of our slavery.
So on the one hand we have individual freedom which is meaningless. On the other hand, we have an impulse to worship and to celebrate, a way to the infinite, which is the ‘nature’ within us; which, unless the self allows it expression, and uses it to attach us to God, turns into a senseless impersonal force, carrying us away in its momentum. It becomes a search for ecstasy – no matter of what kind – achieved through destruction, drugs or sex. The worshipful integration of nature in the person is inverted in a hellish imprisonment of the individual in nature.
It is one of the essential marks of our fallen condition that we are not only in death, but already, here and now, in hell. The yearning to be God, the yearning for the absolute, when diverted towards the contingent, destroys it, becomes lethal. Other people are seen merely as obstacles to our achievement of communion. Even while the desire to love persists, they are reminders of our state of non-communion and its mortal outcome. Such is the fallen condition of the world that the Greek Fathers speak of it in terms of defeat, disease, absence, and separation. The Indians call it an Illusion; one that, feeding off a creation that is wholly good, causes such endless suffering, such sighs and groans of the whole created order, that St Paul compared them to those of childbirth.
By contrast, the God of the Gospel and mainstream Christianity neither avenges nor terrorizes. At the heart of the Gospel message there is nothing but Love, which is infinite, sacrificial and life-giving, which respects our freedom ‘to death, even death on the cross’ (Phil. 2.8). The condition of death brought about by sin is not a punishment, or is at the most a self-inflicted one which God turns into a cure. Death is the result of rejecting the living God, excluding the Creator from his creation. But God was to take flesh and die, in order to fill death itself with his love and turn it into resurrection for the human race.
~Adapted from Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
