There was a pause before the next question. “Yes, Teresa,” Fr. Maximos said, giving the floor to a woman in her thirties who had raised her hand. I was always impressed with his capacity to remember people’s names.
“Would you say that we know God through our experience rather than through our logic?”
“I believe we know God through both our experience and our logic. Human beings are also rational creatures.”
“But I thought,” Teresa added, “that with pure reason we cannot know God.”
“Correct. Reason is just a stage. You must step through it in order to go to the next one. You can truly come to understand God through love and direct experience.”
“Fr. Maxime,” Emily interjected, “you said that we can know God through the Creation, through knowledge, and through the heart. Do you mean by the way we treat nature?”
“No, not on the basis of how we treat nature,” Fr. Maximos clarified. “As we contemplate the magnificence of Creation and the wisdom embedded in Creation, we come to understand that everything was created by an omnipotent and all-wise God. And He created everything for the sake of human beings so that they may get to know Him. It is what the Fathers of the Church call the logoi ton onton, meaning the logics of beings. That is, the purpose of the cosmos is the gnosis or knowledge of the Creator and the divinization of Creation.”
“Isn’t there a danger, Fr. Maxime,” Emily mused, “in saying that the Creation came into being for the sake of human beings?”
“What do you have in mind, Emily?” Fr. Maximos asked quizzically.
“Doesn’t such an understanding place human beings as the dominant species over all other creatures of nature, giving them the right to use and abuse other species? Is it not this very human privilege that has led us to our ecological predicament today? What I have in mind is what Thomas Berry writes in his Great Work: Our Way into the Future, that it is precisely this anthropocentrism, the notion that human beings are the privileged crowning of Creation, that gave them exclusive dominion over nature and paved the way toward its destruction and the decimation of other species.”
“No,” Fr. Maximos responded, “I believe this is a false interpretation of what the Bible teaches. A good father or a good mother does not try to undermine the well-being of his or her family but looks after it, helps it grow and prosper. A loving parent becomes the custodian of the family. That is how our relationship with the created world ought to be. In other words, when the Bible teaches that God made man king of Creation, it should not be interpreted that man should become a destroyer of Creation. It says ergazesthe kai fylatteen [belabor and protect], which means you should work and protect the Creation so that you may come to know the Creator and attain Theosis.”
“We should, but we don’t,” Emily insisted. “People misinterpreted certain words in Genesis, such as when it says kai katakyriefsate ten Gen, that is, that we are urged to act like conquerors of the earth rather than stewards of the earth.”
“This is a gross misconception,” Fr. Maximos replied. “The word kyrievo in the original Greek means ‘I become master of,’ just like God is master of the world, not to destroy it but to save it and protect it. This is how we should properly understand the meaning of the created cosmos. God did not provide us with a green light to destroy nature but to become its stewards and glorify the Creator in the form of a Divine Eucharist.”
~Adapted from Kyriacos C. Markides, Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality
