We are created, we are creatures; this basic statement of faith sums up the truth that we are not self-sufficient, that we cannot find fulfillment without turning towards the unknown God who holds us in existence and calls us to himself.
We must avoid static, objectifying language, as if the Creator and his creature existed side by side. Creatures exist only in God, in that creative will which is precisely what distinguishes him from his creation. We must all, one day, utter in our own words the excellent prayer of Dostoevsky’s wanderer, Makar: ‘Everything is in thee, my God; I myself am in thee; receive me.’ God will always welcome us, but only if we freely ask to be received.
‘Creatures,’ wrote Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow in the last century, ‘are balanced upon the creative will of God as upon a bridge of diamond; above is the abyss of the divine infiniteness and below is the abyss of their own nothingness.’ Nothingness, by definition, is not ‘something’. It is a limiting concept signifying that the human being does not exist by itself but that God is ‘its beginning, its middle and its end’ (St Maximus the Confessor), that it is in God, as Paul told the Athenians, ‘that we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28).
So we cannot exist apart from God or outside of God. No one can. By the very life in us we are rooted in the one living God. In Islam there is a saying that the first cry of the newborn and the last sigh of the dying together compose and utter the divine Name.
Each heartbeat is an act of faith. Living cannot but be celebration. That is why Alyosha Karamazov tries to dissuade his brother Ivan from nihilism, begging him to love life, to dare to abandon himself to the great love that is within him; only afterwards will it make sense to him. And it is why even today, despite the apparent victory of nihilism, there are so few suicides. Through loving life we become aware that God’s grace is prevenient, that existence apart from him is impossible, because life is inseparable from grace.
‘Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being’ (Genesis 2.7). The Fathers are constantly commenting on this passage, saying that uncreated grace, which is light and fire, is implicit in the act of creation itself. Humanity receives life and grace at the same time.
From the beginning grace is inherent in the very fact of existing. Gregory of Nazianzus even speaks of an ‘outpouring of divinity’ (On the Soul PG.XXVII. 452). For him, the life within us is the actual breath of God, the Holy Spirit, who not only broods over the waters at creation, but is concentrated in the life of the human person, where the universal life is completed and transcended.
In countries where Orthodoxy has been influential, literature, even when avowedly atheist, bears witness to this essential grace. In their own way the novels of Kazakov or the songs of Theodorakis express gratitude for the gift of life. The same gratitude transforms the ‘tragic nihilism’ of Kazantzakis. Wherever Eastern Christianity has left its mark there remains an awareness of divine forces, even when God is denied.
The human vocation is to become the willing and conscious celebrant of this great mystery. The only truly natural person is the one who is aware of being a creature drawn by grace, called to union with the Creator.
There is no middle ground. Modern humanism was able to spread only because it had been secretly carried within the Christian revelation of the divine-human. The death of God brings about the death of Man. Gregory of Nyssa used to say that if a person’s face is not clothed in the light of the Spirit it will wear the mask of a demon; and the danger is that the mask will take flesh, turn into a snout. In our own time Nicholas Berdyaev has said that the meaning of history eventually resolves itself into the choice between the divine-human and the bestial-human.
~From Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
