It seems to me that the Christian attitude towards this quest for freedom should be above all one of respect. In sin, especially when it is pursued through thick and thin, regardless of the consequences, the whole paradox of human nature is revealed. The divine image is obscured but clear enough to point to its Archetype. We need to be able to recognize the yearning for the infinite, for freedom and communion, the determination not to sink into an unthinking conventional spirituality, the suffering entailed in the search for the absolute in a world which can offer no salvation but is itself waiting to be saved. According to the young revolutionaries, to be grown up is to have given up the struggle, an acquiescence as adults which is adultery. They wish their adolescence could go on forever because their only experience of the Spirit is their own youthful vitality, which is still running at full strength. They cannot put into words what they are looking for, they do not know its Name, but they feel the thirst. And within the adult, in whom madness is often evidence of freedom, we must discern the person still passionately and blindly yearning for fulfillment, since we know for certain that even in deepest hell, Christ, who has conquered hell for eternity, waits for the person called in the Book of Revelation ‘the one who thirsts’.
Here we can cite two great witnesses. Denys the Aeropagite writes (Divine Names 4.20): ‘The libertine is deprived of good by his irrational lust; we can say that the privation annihilates him in some way, also that his lust has no real object. Nevertheless, because there remains in him a faint echo of communion and friendship, he still shares in the Good. In the same way, anger shares in the Good by its intrinsic desire to bring about an improvement in something it sees as bad. Even one who desires the worst possible life, since it is a desire for life, and a life which seems the best, by the mere desire to live, by reaching out towards life, that person has some part in the Good.’
And St John Climacus (Heavenly Ladder 5.6.57): ‘I have seen impure souls, who were possessed by carnal love to the point of fury and madness, at last embrace penitence and, thanks to their experience of physical eros, and its conversion into divine eros, become enflamed with love for the Creator, transcending all servile fear. That is why Jesus Christ did not say of the chaste sinner that she had feared much, but that she had loved much …’
Thus the experience of separation and of desire, unavoidable for everyone destined to rise again, becomes the spiritual turning point. While we are looking to the ‘passions’ for fulfillment, our desire for the infinite is doomed to be frustrated. Once we realize this, we discover that God alone can satisfy the need which is basic to our nature.
Origen has described a striking vision of the soul plumbing the depths of evil by experiencing the horror of excess; after actually dying, having journeyed through the infernal regions, it eventually realizes that evil has its limitations, that one can be surfeited with it to the point of utter boredom. Then God is revealed as alone inexhaustible, to whom everyone, even Satan, will turn in the end. The Church has condemned the Origenist belief in the certainty of universal salvation, since that would make salvation automatic, indeed compulsory. But it has absorbed the hope which the teaching contains and expressed it in a highly spiritual form as a prayer of universal compassion that all might be saved.
Metanoia, the complete turning round in a person’s heart of hearts, is not an attempt to achieve some superficial mental improvement by an effort of will, to overcome some fault or vice. It is first and foremost the utter trusting in Christ who gives himself up to death, hell and separation for us, for me; to the death which I have caused, to the hell which I create and in which I make others and myself live, to the separation which is my condition and my sin. By enduring them, he has made death, hell and torment the door of repentance and new life. Then we discover something we never dared hope for, that our hellish autonomy has been breached by sin, death, and despair, that these have opened us to the mercy of the living God. Then the heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh, the stone which sealed the fountain of life in our heart is shattered; then gush forth the tears of repentance and wonderment, washing us in the waters of baptism, the great waters sanctified by Christ in the beginning, in which we are purified and recreated by the Spirit.
~From Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
