About the purpose of man
Many people cross the threshold of the temple for the first time, seeking, as they themselves define, their path in life - their destiny. Often this word - “destination” - refers to private, personal questions: whether to start a family or choose the monastic path, what profession to study, whether to devote one’s life to one form of art or another. You never know if doubts may arise related to finding your place in life... But in order to resolve them, you need not just come to the temple - you need to work hard to understand how the Lord Himself sees the purpose of man in principle. Then everything else will gradually begin to fall into place.
Hegumen Nektary (Morozov) reflects on what everyday experience and the experience of saints can help a person realize what he is really destined for.
Broken clock
Hegumen Nektary (Morozov) / Photo: Pravmir
Probably, each of us in childhood - perhaps even more than once - had to deal with such an experience: we disassemble some mechanism, for example, an old alarm clock, then we assemble it and see that some part turned out to be superfluous. And it’s unclear where to insert it, what place it was in before we intervened, and yet the mechanism without this part does not fully work or even does not work at all. We sometimes have to feel approximately the same thing about ourselves: we sometimes feel that we are out of place, that something is wrong in our life, and “wrong” - globally. Probably, this feeling arises precisely when a person loses the purpose that the Lord has assigned to him.
Any more or less complex device that we purchase and intend to use has what is called an instruction manual. And before we start pressing some buttons, still unknown, we look into this instruction and from it we try to understand what to do with this device, firstly, so that it does not break, and secondly, so that it can serve that service for which, in fact, he was brought into the house. In the same way, when a person enters life, he must definitely ask himself the question of what this life is and what is his place in this life, why he was brought into it at all. And of course, the book that gives a person the answer to this question is the Holy Scripture.
Deceived Wanderers
If we look at how this world was created, we will see that man is a very special creation. Man, as many holy fathers testify, had to combine within himself the earthly and the heavenly. Everything that the Lord gave him for use and defined as his area of responsibility, he had to accept and return to God in a natural return movement. Those words that sound during the celebration of each Divine Liturgy: “Thine from Thine, what is offered to Thee for all and for all” - should have sounded in the human heart. And he, having received this whole world, with everything that is in it - the world is not as it is now, but a beautiful world, without any flaw in itself, in a completely natural way should have said: “Lord, I and this the world is all Yours. And I hand over everything Yours to You, do with it what You please.” But instead, a terrible thought crept into the heart of man, which destroyed our forefathers and so often destroys us, that everything is “ours”, and that our “I” is more important than everything that the Lord has given us. The Monk Paisios of Athos often said that when a person constantly repeats the word “I” in prayer and in his life, he ends up with his small, imperfect human “I”, which is doomed to destruction because it contains the wrong, destructive narcissism. And when a person constantly turns to God in prayer and in his life, leaving his “I” as if on the periphery, then the Lord can give the one who prays everything that he really needs...
“The most terrible consequence of the Fall for man was the loss of the idea of his destiny”
...But now, this “I” sounded in human history - and an invisible line separated our current existence from the prosperity that our forefathers once had. And probably the most terrible consequence of the Fall for man was precisely the loss of the idea of his purpose. He, called to live on the border between the heavenly and the earthly, between the spiritual and the physical, without completely deviating from one and not forgetting the other, turned almost completely into an earthly being. His eyes, including his spiritual ones, turned not to Heaven, but to the earth, and in fact, everything that we regard today as the history of mankind is evidence that for many, many millennia, man dealt primarily with the earth - with what is on it. And what is on earth became much more interesting to him than what is in Heaven. We all have this burden of the flesh that we carry on ourselves, which constantly tempts us, attracts us to the base, and not to the sublime. And if a person still does not understand where his path lies, what he should strive for, then, of course, he risks living his whole life not even as a charmed, but as a deceived wanderer, who does not understand where he came from and where he is going.
Dew drop
I really love and often quote in conversations the words of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) about what a person is. When the saint was already old and seriously ill, he thought something like this: “Who am I? Am I a being and can I say that I truly exist when I understand that in just one moment I will no longer be in this world? Or am I just a phenomenon of this world? No, I am something more, because I think, I feel, I experience.” Among these reflections, he remembered the words of St. John of Damascus that man is a reflection of the light of the One who created him. And from this the following image was born: a person is like a drop of dew on a stalk of grass in a field, in which the rising sun is reflected. This drop contains the ability to become like the sun, the radiance of its light, but if the sun does not rise, then it remains just a drop of water. Likewise, the purpose of man lies in his ability to perceive this Divine light, to glow with this light and to live by it. To the extent that a person perceives this light in his life, to which he is able to share this light with the world around him, he is truly human and corresponds to his real purpose.
If we look at the lives of the saints who were transformed by the action of the Holy Spirit, we will be convinced that sometimes this transformation even occurred in a visible way. For example, we find a lot of evidence of how people came to the Monk Seraphim of Sarov and saw him completely different: they saw his face shining with an uncreated light. And at the same time, the saints, transformed by the action of the Holy Spirit, transformed the world around them; Of course, this happened through the action of God's grace. Grace seeks those vessels in which it can dwell and act, and the saints of God became such vessels. Why did people strive for saints, why did they go to them? Because it was very good to be around them. Even we, in our current life, so imperfect, so most often removed from God, sometimes meet a person and feel that it is good to be with him. Why? Because peace reigns in his heart, because he is a humble, meek man. We feel that the peace that is in his heart is communicated to our heart; we feel that the light that is in him - perhaps to a small extent - is transmitted to us. And we already feel it as a kind of happiness. This happiness was the lot of the saints - it was something that they could no longer refuse. This became their main desire - to be in such peace and unity with God, which gave that same feeling of warmth, light and amazing inner purity. And we can say that we correspond only to the extent to which we strive for this being with God.
Liken life... to a wheel
Of course, our daily life constantly captivates us - both with current concerns and problems, and with what we call “temptations”. Temptations are a very diverse thing, because we can be tempted by the action of all our passions.
“We get involved in the process of struggle, sometimes excessively, and because of this we often forget what we were created for.”
If you want to eat delicious food during Lent, is that a temptation? Temptation. On the one hand, from weak flesh, and on the other hand, from the habit of pleasing oneself with something - in this case, food. Some person has angered us - again this is a temptation from the action of our passion. And there are temptations of a different kind, associated with some difficult circumstances that we need to understand and which we need to cope with. We get involved in this process of struggle, sometimes excessively, and because of this we often again forget about what we were created for, what we were destined for. And as soon as we forget, our life immediately plunges into darkness, we feel abandoned, abandoned, lost, lost. Although in fact no one left us - we simply, figuratively speaking, either put on dark glasses, or turned our gaze so much to the ground that we completely lost the ability to see the light that could illuminate our path.
Experience shows that even saints sometimes, finding themselves in a difficult situation, first went through the path of temptation from this situation, and then stopped and asked themselves the question: why am I looking for a solution down there, when it is above? As soon as a person remembers this, as soon as he turns to grief , what seemed insoluble is resolved, be it temptation from circumstances or temptation from passion, or simply everyday worries that are difficult to cope with on your own. Either the situation is corrected, the situation changes, the passion fades, or the person simply acquires the ability to relate to all this completely differently. And this is the main victory we are looking for. The Venerable Ambrose of Optina writes in many of his letters that the life of a person who believes in God should be like a wheel - not in the sense of some kind of endless torsion, not in the sense of running like a squirrel in a wheel, but in the sense that the wheel only a very small part of its surface moves along the ground at any given moment, and the rest of it is above the ground. And indeed, we can also live like this, it is within our power. Everything again depends on the skill.
I can say from my own experience, and probably almost everyone has this experience: when we leave in some situation that leads us away from God and forces us to plunge into wandering, the Lord sends a saving thought: “Where are you going, stop! Turn to Me, and I Myself will tell you what to do.” And as soon as such a call sounds in our heart - and it can sound differently, sometimes even a person can say it to us, but this person will speak on behalf of God - it is very important to stop at that very moment and say: “Exactly! Where did I go!
But it rarely happens otherwise: we hear it in our hearts, we hear it from people who tell us about it, but no, we need to reach the end, we need to exhaust this whole situation, we need to taste all the bitterness that this situation brings us, We have prepared this temptation or these circumstances of life, and only then, like a fish that has been thrown ashore, wait until the wave picks us up again. This wave - of God's mercy - will definitely catch us, but the whole question is what state we will be in by that time and whether we will still be viable. Therefore, there is no need to lie for a long time on the shores of temptation or some misfortune, but we must immediately strive into the water of Divine grace that nourishes us.
The Ideal Plan and the "Plan of Resistance"
In addition to the universal human destiny, which is to be with God and strive for that state that the holy fathers call with that slightly scary word for us - deification , each of us has some kind of personal destiny. And it must be said that often a person is wrong, but nevertheless it is so - what worries him to a greater extent is his personal path in life - the question of what exactly the Lord intended him to do. And a person really wants to understand what to do, how to live, what path to choose for himself. For church people, believers, it is sometimes a choice between marriage and monasticism, between work in the Church and work, so to speak, in the world. There may be completely different areas of choice, but I am convinced that if a person understands his universal destiny correctly, then, of course, he will find his personal destiny. He will definitely find the path in life that the Lord has prepared for him.
In addition, it probably needs to be said that the Lord has a certain ideal plan for each of us, but we can comply with this plan, or we can resist it. And the Lord will be able to do with a person exactly as much as he is ready to accept. If He gives something to a person, but the person resists it all his life, then, of course, this plan will not be realized, but a “plan of resistance” will come to life. And it’s very bitter if you are the one who has resisted God all your life. Therefore, probably, when we strive for something in life, when we want to achieve something in life, want to become someone or, conversely, don’t know who we want to become, we must constantly have inner openness, a willingness to accept God's will for yourself. This openness and readiness is nurtured and developed thanks to little things, thanks to various life situations, which again happen to us in abundance. If a person is ready to accept God’s will for himself in some private situation that is upsetting for himself and to come to terms with this will, even if it is difficult and inconvenient for him, he will definitely be able to accept what the Lord determines in some global way in his life. And vice versa, if in each individual life situation we fiercely resist what the Lord does to us with human hands - if we rebel, if we are exhausted from this, sad, despondent - then, of course, we and, in general, God’s will for ourselves We won’t be able to accept it either.
Very often, in the lives of different saints, approximately the same words are heard. A person asks: “Lord, why am I sick, why am I exhausted, why am I persecuted, why am I slandered?” And the answer sounds in his heart: “But simply because I want it to be so.” “So” - not because God is pleased to see our suffering, but because the Lord knows: this suffering will lead us to a completely different, much more joyful and beautiful life than the one we live. If it is possible not to put a person through this terrible crucible, the Lord will not do this.
There are people who are amazingly humble, amazingly meek, amazingly simple, who have avoided literally everything bitter and difficult that is in this life - precisely for simplicity, for humility, for meekness. Because they don’t need to be humbled, they don’t need to be taught meekness, they don’t need to be made simpler - they are already like that. But most of us are not like that, and therefore the tree of what grows in the soil of our heart becomes the cross of our entire life. And if we accept it, then, in essence, we accept what the Lord has judged for us - the best that can happen to us in this life.
In the main photo: Michelangelo Buonarroti's fresco “The Creation of Adam” (Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome, 1508–1512)
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Man disobeyed God, and therefore doomed himself to degradation, suffering and death
What do we know about human life in the Garden of Eden? He performed some duties of caring for the garden itself and the animals, communicated with God, and probably did not need anything. The Bible briefly touches on this period:
“And the Lord God took the man [whom he had created] and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.”
(Gen. 3:15)
But the Lord created man free, and therefore capable of acting according to his own will, contrary to the will of the Almighty. He created the only prohibition - not to take fruit from one single tree, but man violated it.
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s prohibition and gave rise to the degradation of our world and humanity (“Adam and Eve”, Titian). Photo: opisanie-kartin.com
This is one of the most criticized beliefs of the Christian faith. The debate on this topic is likely to be endless. The following are discussed:
- if God is omniscient, then why did He give Adam a obviously impossible task;
- if Adam succumbed to temptation, it means that God did not endow him with sufficient qualities;
- if the tree was needed by God, but not by Adam, it could generally be planted beyond the reach of man.
The list of such objections can be very, very long. Christian theologians do not have a single answer. All questions were solved differently by philosophers in their eras. Someone believes that God leads man along a path that is unknown to Him, since the future does not exist.
Others believe that in order to become a man, one needed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
All events from Genesis 3 are part of the Divine plan.
We will not dive into details, but will present the facts as they are presented in the Orthodox tradition:
- God established a ban;
- people violated this ban;
- punishment followed - the separation of man and God.
People were expelled from paradise. Whether heaven was a symbol of the spiritual world or a real place on earth is difficult to say. In any case, this event is considered as a consequence of human freedom of choice.
Even though Adam and Eve could not weigh the pros and cons, it is their act that Orthodoxy considers the cause of all human misfortunes.
What kind of disasters are these? Death has entered the world. Everything began to deteriorate. Diseases, vices, everything dirty and vile - these are symptoms of a world that is getting worse and worse. Man was the guardian of this world, and now he has left everything to chance. Or even worse: he began to destroy everything around him (how can one not recall environmental pollution, hunting, wars?).
God in the minds of people
Religion in general can be considered both as a science, and as a way of influencing the consciousness of billions of people, and as something sacred that does not require proof. At all times, people have tried to prove or disprove the existence of God. The truth always lies exactly in the middle between two extremes. It is impossible to say categorically whether He exists or not. of a higher mind is undeniable . And here it is necessary to clarify, namely the mind, and not the being. The highest being is man. The mind can exist outside the material shell. It is located in all points of the Universe . Everywhere. Everything is subject to him: time , space , energy , matter . I would like to hope that in the near future people will learn to coordinate their actions with him. This is already practiced today, but not very successfully. In the USA and Russia there are people who are consulted before spacecraft launches and other similar cases. Such “consultations” with the Higher Mind are necessary when it concerns events on a global scale. Small-scale problems have nothing to do with this. People must solve everyday problems 60-70% of the scriptures are just beautiful fairy tales . But the rest is based on real events. The Bible , the Koran and other similar publications were created by people to maintain their spirit in such situations. A person easily solves most of his problems when he has something to believe in. Some people believe in various deities, others in a loved one, and for others, faith in themselves . Religion, as a way to control the human mind, is very convenient to use. Always, with the exception of the 20th century, the church has had enormous power. XI century. November 1095. Pope Urban II addressed the huge crowd of people gathered . In his speech, he called on everyone to take up arms and go to the East (the speech took place near the French city of Clermont) in order to win the Holy Sepulcher and clear the bound land from them. The Pope promised forgiveness of sins to all participants in the campaign. The campaign began with the words of the same Urban II: “God wants it this way . The army was defeated by the Seljuk Turks . Of the 25 thousand “armies of Christ,” about 3 thousand survived. That is, religion is against sin. But after sinning, there is an opportunity to repent and then sin again? No commandments can stop a person if he wants something. The sacred 12 commandments interpret the norms of human life with stunning accuracy. Petty priests forgive people all their sins for a fee. This commits an even greater sin before your God, because if you follow the Holy Scriptures, then no one has the right to forgive except the Lord. If people learn to follow the instructions of the Higher Mind, then humanity will prosper. (The existence of parallel worlds . But the creatures living there, despite their achievements in various fields, compared to people, are cats, dogs and similar animals). To accept any religion, it is necessary to perform the rite of baptism. At the same time, a person undertakes to fulfill the commandments, to follow blindly. In addition, faith in God is necessary. No one asked me about either the first or the second before the ceremony. Most commandments are feasible, but there are situations in life when you have to break them.
Religion is the path back to God
Religion is a way to renew a lost connection with God. In different eras, people tried to do this in their own way. India knew Vedic rituals, Egypt tried to save itself through a pious king, temple prostitution was practiced in Mesopotamia, Jews were circumcised and waited for the Messiah.
The Orthodox are convinced that they cannot make the transition from the sinful world to the divine world on their own. It is necessary that everyone, on his part, extends his hand (as in the painting “The Creation of Adam”) - this is what Orthodox culture says about a person.
Religion restores the connection between God and man.
That is, the return of a person to God is a mutual gesture from God to man and from man to God.
What gesture did God make, from the point of view of Orthodoxy? The New Testament talks about this.
The foundations of Christian anthropology were laid by the Apostle Paul
To put it scientifically, all this time we have been talking about Christian anthropology, that is, about the doctrine of man from the position of the teaching of Christ (in its Orthodox interpretation).
We briefly went over the main milestones of this discipline. However, behind all this there is a deep philosophical world. Christianity developed on the foundation of antiquity. And antiquity, as we know, gave the world very complex theological categories.
Christian anthropology also learned a lot from the Greeks and Romans.
But the apostle Paul gave the impetus to all this. It was he who tried to systematize the teachings of Christ and outlined his conclusions in his Epistles. Against the background of our current knowledge base, some of his reasoning is superficial, some are naive. But still, without a little, there won’t be a big one.
The Apostle Paul gave birth to Christian anthropology. He introduced the concepts of soul and body. Photo: azbyka.ru
It was the Apostle Paul who outlined the place of man in the Christian worldview.
Today, theologians and philosophers continue to develop his ideas. For example, this is what Archimandrite Iannuariy (Ivliev) writes about the body and soul in his work “Basic Anthropological Concepts in the Epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul”
“The term “soul” (psychê) is rarely used by the Apostle Paul. Together with the word “body” only in 1 Thess. 5:23.
Paul nowhere contrasts the soul with the body in the sense of Hellenistic dualism. The “naked soul,” freed from the clothing of the body, is the dream of the ancient Greeks.
Paul argues vigorously with such anthropology. He does not want to be “naked” (2 Cor 5:3), he does not want to be “undressed” (5:4).
Paul nowhere mentions the Hellenistic view of the “immortality of the soul” as a kind of substance freed from corporeality.
Like the Old Testament nephesh, “soul” everywhere means the power of natural life, life itself or man as a being with feelings and will (Rom. 2:9; 13:1).
Sometimes the word “soul” can well be replaced by a personal pronoun (“my soul” = “I”, 2 Cor 1:23; “your souls” = “you”, 2 Cor 12:15, etc.).”
Read in the electronic library: Basic anthropological concepts in the epistles of St. Apostle Paul
We see how human experience and scientific knowledge allow us to weigh and contrast ideas known to antiquity. The religious polemics of those years take on new meanings.
Studying the texts of the Apostle Paul allows us to discover new meanings in the teaching about man.
It becomes clear what the author of the Epistles meant by this or that word. This gives us the opportunity to more clearly understand what niche he assigned to the human being in our world.
There is still a lot of work to be done in this area. Therefore, Christian anthropology is not a static, but a developing science. It promises us many more interesting discoveries.
With every new study we become closer to God.
But here it is necessary to make a reservation that here we discussed exclusively the Orthodox position. Catholic and Protestant views differ on a number of issues. They should not be mixed.
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