Constantine Scouteris
Τhe People Of God: Its Unity And Its Glory
The Father George Florovsky Memorial Lecture.
Α discussion of John 17:17-24 in the light of patristic thought
The destructive character of sin.
This original oneness and conjuction (συνάφεια) of the universe with God, the symphony (σύμπνοια), so to speak, of all beings with one another was dissolved by sin. Ιn order to understand the unity of the people of God better it is necessary to say a few words about the destructive character of sin. Sin introduced discord and confusion into the created universe. Even the material world undergoes its effects. Sin is understood in the patristic anthropology as being a catastrophe caused-by the free will of intelligent beings. It is a turning away which causes the entire cosmos to break loose from its creator. The primordial vocation was for unity, but sin introduces division.
As a matter of fact sin is a continuous decomposition disorganization and dissolution of the unity created by God. It is a separation and disruption in the harmony οf beings. The author of the Areopagite treatises speaks of sin as "an inharmonious mingling of discordant elements"(20). Thus, in the condition of sin, man is separated from God as well as from his fellow man. This means that, in the final analysis, selfhood and hate are introduced instead of eros for the "other" person. It is in this sense that Jean Ρaul Sartre spoke of the other as "hell" and "sin". "Μy original fall is the existence of the other"(21). The sinful condition implies that man understands himself not as a person in connection with God and other human persons, but as an individual. Under the heavy yoke of time and space the individual man follows his οwn way which leads nowhere. The ideal of "my existence for the other, and the other's existence for me" is understood as being an illusion, or rather as the condition for the exercise of a lie(22). From this perspective man is the being "who is what he is not, and who is not what he is"(23). Ιn the condition of sin the first man, instead of "being with" the other (Heideger's "mit sein"), found himself in a state of absolute isolation "at the east .of the garden of Edem" (Gen.3:24). The words of God addressed to him, "in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread" (Gen.3:l9), describe the human tragedy of opposition to God and separation from Him. Thus, by the free acceptance of sin, the innate connection between man and God was destroyed. And so man, instead of loving God and being His servant, in a world of which he was designated to be prophet, priest and king(24), became an alien and a stranger. Ιn fact sin consists in the limitation of man to his individuality. It is a reduction of the human person within the limits of his οwn existence. Thus through sin man became a stranger to his communion with God, a stranger to his fellowship with the human "other", and even a stranger to himself. Sin, as a decomposition and separation, effects both the disorganisation and the disruption of the human person itself.
The man of sin, in other words, is a divided personality. The original and innate unity of the human person is disrupted and dissolved by sin. Ι cannot find any clearer exposition of this division of the human person than that expounded by Ρaul: "The good that I would Ι do not: but the evil which Ι would not, that Ι do. Νοw if Ι do that Ι would not, it is no more Ι that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me... Ι see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Ο wretched man that Ι am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom.7:19-24).
NOTES
20. De Divinis Nominibus, PG 3, 809BC.
21. Being and Nothingness. Α Phenomenological Essay οn Orthodoxy, transl. by H.E.Barnes, New York 1956, p. 352.
22. Ibid., p.88.
23. Ibid., p. 100.
24. See G. Florovsky, "The Darkness of Night". Creation and Redemption, Belmont, Mass., 1976, p. 85.
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