Some words on Fr. Seraphim Rose

jckstraw72

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Dec 9, 2005
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This assumes chronology in God, something that Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Dionysius, and Maximus were all quite loathe to do.

Army Matt has said much of what I would have said, but I guess i'll offer some thoughts too since this post was in response to me.

I don't see how what I said posits a chronology in God, but rather a chronology in creation. Of course God foreknew death, just as He foreknows all things, but I wasn't speaking of God's knowledge but rather the actual occurrence within creation. The result of sin did not enter until sin.

In short, in wisdom (in the "principle" or "arche"; often translated as "beginning" in a way that de-facto short changes the semantic range of the greek word underlying Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1) God foreknew all things and already arranged the universe accordingly.
well I agree that some things were already arranged accordingly, but not all things. for instance, as im sure youre aware, Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and John Damascene say that the division into male and female was done with the fall in mind, but then, several Fathers also talk about how Adam and Eve were not involved in the arts, did not have clothing, or houses to protect them from the weather, etc because those things were not necessary at that time, in their prelapsarian state. At the fall their bodies became more crude and heavy and "more" physical - but they were not already this way in anticipation of the fall. in the created realm, if the consequence precedes the cause then its not really the consequence. the division into male and female cannot properly be called a consequence of the fall because it pre-exists the fall, and thus we would say that God is in fact the creator of the division into male and female - gender is not fallen because it existed in pre-fallen reality. if death somehow existed before its cause, then God would actually be its Creator and death would not be fallen.

Otherwise, how can we say with Revelations that Christ was the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world? Since that would be before human sin (chronologically speaking)
good question. I don't know, i haven't looked into that particular verse.

Was the Cross really just a "plan B"? A giant "whoopsie" on God's part? Of course not. God knew we would sin because God knows all things. Foreknowing that sin it is hardly a leap to say that death could exist within the created order as a result of human sin even "before" (to our time-limited perspective) Adam and Eve existed.
again, God foreknew what would happen, but that doesn't mean the Cross was His original plan. Christ condemned sin on the Cross - that would not have been necessary without sin. Physical death would not have needed to have been defeated if not for sin which brought that physical death.
St. Athanasius in On the Incarnation even asserts the principle on an historical level, that animals are created to die and that humans only were meant for immortality if they maintained contemplation of God. The "death" which is strictly chronologically AFTER human sin is the 'second death' of human spiritual separation from God, which could not be a part of human existence prior to humans existing (in time).
well i guess i dont see why you would argue that physical death is a consequence of the fall that existed before the fall, but spiritual death is a consequence of the fall that could not have existed before it. physical death for man is when the soul leaves the body - why would that be happening if spiritual death had not yet occurred? if i recall correctly, St. Athanasius says that only man is created in the image of God, but i dont know that he absolutely says that animals necessarily died, because man is the mediator of God's grace to all of creation. So man is unique in being the image - but all of creation benefits from his turning towards God, and all of creation suffers by his turning away from God. He also says that man is by nature mortal, but since man also naturally receives the energies of God, his mortality is held back -- I don't see that animals need to be any different. In his book Maximus the Confessor, Fr. Andrew Louth says that St. Athanasius understood the fall in terms of corruption and death which affected the entire cosmos - not just man (p. 64). off the top of my head, St. Basil says in his Hexameron that vultures did not circle the earth looking for food before the fall, because at that time nothing had died - all animals enjoyed the diet of a swan.

The Fathers, obviously, never connect this to a theory like evolution, but it isn't hard to imagine how they might. On the Cross, God demonstrates that He can use death to create life. In Evolution, God creates life through death. Evolution becomes a 'typology' of the Cross, necessitated in the created order because of human sin, but foreknown by God long "before" that sin occurred and, thus, incorporated by God into His divine providence.
well again, i think you are confusing the foreknoweldge of God with the actual linear chronology within the created order. Yes, God used death on the Cross to bring life - but that was because His death was uniquely deathless. Death could not hold Life and so Life is brought by destroying death, not working with death as His agent.

Calling death evil, St. Basil makes exactly this point in his Hexameron 2.8:

It is equally impious to say that evil has its origin from God; because the contrary cannot proceed from its contrary. Life does not engender death; darkness is not the origin of light; sickness is not the maker of health. In the changes of conditions there are transitions from one condition to the contrary; but in genesis each being proceeds from its like, and not from its contrary. If then evil is neither uncreate nor created by God, from whence comes its nature? Certainly that evil exists, no one living in the world will deny. What shall we say then? Evil is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.
I agree, but I think the issue is more burning for us because we have inherited the historicism of German Protestants and of modernity in general, and this makes it almost impossible for us to conceive of the full implications of God's foreknowledge.
i dont see how this is uniquely Protestant. the ancient Church's calendar dated from the creation of the world, which was figured by reading the Old Testament genealogies literally. You can read about the Byzantine Creation Era calendar here: Byzantine Creation Era - OrthodoxWiki. This calendar was preceded by several others, and the writings of several Fathers, all of which took the Old Testament chronology to be literal history.

I mean, to put it in shocking language, St. Irenaeus makes the claim that God created the world precisely because as Savior (that is, as the Crucified One) He made a world in which to be crucified and save. That's absolute blasphemy unless we understand that God already sees the eschaton and is still seeing the pre-created cosmos in His mind's eye. He's above time. To Him, human causality does not look like it does to us.
could you give the reference for this?

You mentioned you're writing a thesis on this (which is fantastic - I'd genuinely like to read that when you're done). I wrote a term paper on Origen's cosmology last semester that deals with this exact anti-chronological issue; it was misunderstood (I content) in Origen, but the same basic idea shows up in Irenaeus, Maximus, the Cappadocians, etc. In other words, the argument I make with respect to Origen is to bring Origen's cosmology more into line with general patristic cosmology. If you'd like, I can try to get that paper to you as it goes into a lot more argumentative detail on this.
sure, my email is jckstraw72@yahoo.com

but i dont see that these Fathers are anti-chronological. St. Basil says that the first day is the model for all the subsequent days and that by saying "one day" rather than "first day," Moses is defining a day as 24 hours. this may not be the most important aspect of time and eternity for the Fathers, but i dont see how this level is ever negated.

And I agree, in full, that the issue of death and the creation of life through death is absolutely central. I just think a Cross-centered vision transforms that from a problem to a beautiful proof of the Cross: the Cross, foreknown by God, is written into the very fabric of the cosmos. Through death, life.
i think the Cross is precisely what proves this to be a problem -- it proves that death is our enemy. if death pre-existed the fall then we see God declaring it to be good, because He declared all that existed before the fall to be good.

You mean Maximus and his cosmology? Well, I think its pretty clear that the Fathers were unaware of any theory like evolution, so I wouldn't expect their comsological schema to match it.
no im not asking if it exactly matches it -- of course it wouldn't, as you say. but is it compatible? Fr. Vincent Rossi concludes that its not. I gave the article to my thesis advisor to read, but when I get it back I can provide some his arguments.


I think far more problematic, at least to me, is the issue of framework / first-principles (e.g. does natural selection become an all-encompassing first principle for schematizing and understanding other aspects of life and society)? This REALLY strongly differentiates naturalistic evolution (for which that is a danger) from theistic evolution (where it is less so because of the assertion of God's providence as the guiding principle).
well it seems strange to me to accept evolution because the science seems so tight, but then to amalgamate it with Christianity to the point where its no longer the same scientific picture. no Christian is reeeeally accepting evolution full-on, the Creationists just don't mind saying it ;)
 
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