Another woman raised her hand. “I apologize for my Greek,” she said shyly.
“Don’t worry, my English is worse,” Fr. Maximos reassured her.
“Christ claims,” the woman continued, “that the only way to reach the Father is through Him. This is always a question that is raised among people. What will happen to the rest of the world, to the billions of people who are not born Christian and who may not have even heard of Christ?”
This is a question that I am always asked when I speak to a new audience about my work with Orthodox monks and mystical practitioners. I pretty much anticipated how Fr. Maximos would handle it with this audience.
“Yes, Christ did say that. At the same time, John the Evangelist states in the opening paragraph of his gospel that Christ is the true light that lightens every human being who comes into the world. That is, all of us as human beings are icons of God, and we are invited to unite with Him. It means all human beings can be saved through their conscience. It is not the Gospel that will save us but our conscience.
What does God require of us as stated in His Commandments? He tells us not to steal, not to kill, not to lie, to love our father and mother, to love other human beings. I don’t need to read all these commandments in the gospels in order to follow them. They are an integral part of my true human nature.
Yes, the gospels do remind me of this natural tendency to follow the commandments that spring from within my own conscience. They are part of the nature of every human being, whether he is Christian or not. Therefore, according to the holy elders of Orthodoxy, all human beings can reach God without anything other than their conscience. They can attain the natural state of Adam and Eve before the Fall.”
Fr. Maximos then said a few more things about the nature of conscience.
“The Fathers state that conscience has the following characteristic: the more you listen and obey it, the more sensitive it becomes and the greater its capacity to reveal more truth. The more you ignore it, and the more you are indifferent to it, the coarser it becomes and the greater its tendency to distort reality. That means that even the most illiterate human beings who may never have heard of the Gospel can have the experience of God, assuming they guard and listen to their conscience, regardless of how refined it may be. Eventually their conscience will offer them experiences that will lead them closer to God. Abraham is a good example. He lived before Moses and the Ten Commandments and, of course, before the arrival of Christ. He was in fact an idolater who knew God only through his conscience.”
~Adapted from Kyriacos C. Markides, Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality
