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Beyond the Shattered Image by John Chryssavgis
Book by Chryssavgis, John
- GenresChristianity
Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 1999
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December 19, 2023
Ecology is derived from two Greek words: oikos, meaning home, and logos, signifying reason or purpose. The ecological problem lies in discerning the purpose of that which is shared by all living beings – quite literally our common ground – namely, the world; or, more broadly, the cosmos: a word which not only denotes the whole of what believers call the creation, but also entails its inherent beauty. Cosmos suggests order and harmony; which, as the English word cosmetic implies, are indispensable to beauty. To recognize the world as the world is to apprehend its beauty; to fail in seeing the world’s beauty is to fail to see it at all.
This is the prevailing condition of modernity in both its secular and religious varieties. Secular reason sees not an ordered whole but a chaos of parts: an atomized and objectified existence comprising a gallimaufry of discrete things; each set in opposition to the others and locked in a zero-sum struggle for self-preservation. It is the ethos of egotism, of consumption, of strife—of “cannibalism,” as the nineteenth century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov would have put it. “The world must die,” it says, “so that I may live.”
Far from offering a corrective to this destructive mentality, many Christians share its individualist and anthropocentric assumptions. They subscribe to a theology of evacuation, positing a sharp distinction between nature and supernature, between earth and heaven, between history and eternity. They see the world as a cheap, disposable thing to be left behind in our salvation, which is itself conceived as an individual affair: our rescue from the world by adventitious grace rather than the restoration of life to the world (cf. John 6:51) by God’s Christomorphic self-emptying death-in-love (Philippians 2:5-8). At their worst, they ascribe any veneration of the world, even insofar as it bears the image of its Creator and serves as a locus of His self-revelation, to a "pagan" infiltration of the Church; not realizing that according to the traditional patristic understanding God Himself is a "pagan" insofar as He is oriented toward the world in kenotic love, seeking always to become incarnate in all things through all people. Indeed, the Christ-event only reveals that creation itself has always been an incarnation of God.
John Chryssavgis surveys the eastern patristic (and apostolic) understanding of salvation as cosmic restoration; as the repair of the image of God in creation, which is shattered by our turning away from God in self-love and our egocentric refusal to understand the world properly as a sacrament of divine-human communion. Our objectification of the world – or rather, the illusion that we can objectify it in its deepest essence – reduces us to particles and makes the world opaque to our reason and will. We may only fill up the world, enlarging ourselves to our original and proper stature, through a self-transcending participation in and communion with all things in the ego-death of love; “crucifying” all phenomena (a la Maximus the Confessor) by “sacrificing” them as objects of self-gratification and thereby uncovering the personal Logos residing within them. In so doing, we realize our true identity as sons of God and bearers of His image and likeness.
In Christ, God transforms the world from within: perfecting His strength in a weakness (2 Cor. 12:9) that penetrates the world’s façade of opacity; implanting Himself within the deepest recesses of its autotelic essence, revealing Himself to have been, from the first, the logos spermatikos or “seminal reason” from which the form and beauty of all things is derived. As Origen describes it in his commentary on the Song of Songs, Christ is the “chosen arrow” (cf. Isaiah 49:2, Septuagint) of God’s love, fired into the heart of creation, piercing the armor of its illusory self-sufficiency. God does not redeem the world – or the individual soul, which recapitulates the world in a hypostatic center – by imposing Himself from without, as this would entail only its destruction. The Kingdom of God does not arrive through a hole in the sky, but sprouts up from the soil as creation's inherent generative principle. God has made the world pregnant with Himself, and it brings Him to bear in every leaf, every blade of grass, every minimus of dust. It is our task as individuals – each of us a center of the circle of nature – to redeem our own world in like manner; giving of ourselves for the life of the world, and thereby participating in the Logos of all things. The world is ours to die for.
Nikos Kazantzakis on the moral task of unveiling the logoi within all things, from his “Ascetic Exercises,” which were later published in English as The Saviors of God:
This is the prevailing condition of modernity in both its secular and religious varieties. Secular reason sees not an ordered whole but a chaos of parts: an atomized and objectified existence comprising a gallimaufry of discrete things; each set in opposition to the others and locked in a zero-sum struggle for self-preservation. It is the ethos of egotism, of consumption, of strife—of “cannibalism,” as the nineteenth century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov would have put it. “The world must die,” it says, “so that I may live.”
Far from offering a corrective to this destructive mentality, many Christians share its individualist and anthropocentric assumptions. They subscribe to a theology of evacuation, positing a sharp distinction between nature and supernature, between earth and heaven, between history and eternity. They see the world as a cheap, disposable thing to be left behind in our salvation, which is itself conceived as an individual affair: our rescue from the world by adventitious grace rather than the restoration of life to the world (cf. John 6:51) by God’s Christomorphic self-emptying death-in-love (Philippians 2:5-8). At their worst, they ascribe any veneration of the world, even insofar as it bears the image of its Creator and serves as a locus of His self-revelation, to a "pagan" infiltration of the Church; not realizing that according to the traditional patristic understanding God Himself is a "pagan" insofar as He is oriented toward the world in kenotic love, seeking always to become incarnate in all things through all people. Indeed, the Christ-event only reveals that creation itself has always been an incarnation of God.
John Chryssavgis surveys the eastern patristic (and apostolic) understanding of salvation as cosmic restoration; as the repair of the image of God in creation, which is shattered by our turning away from God in self-love and our egocentric refusal to understand the world properly as a sacrament of divine-human communion. Our objectification of the world – or rather, the illusion that we can objectify it in its deepest essence – reduces us to particles and makes the world opaque to our reason and will. We may only fill up the world, enlarging ourselves to our original and proper stature, through a self-transcending participation in and communion with all things in the ego-death of love; “crucifying” all phenomena (a la Maximus the Confessor) by “sacrificing” them as objects of self-gratification and thereby uncovering the personal Logos residing within them. In so doing, we realize our true identity as sons of God and bearers of His image and likeness.
In Christ, God transforms the world from within: perfecting His strength in a weakness (2 Cor. 12:9) that penetrates the world’s façade of opacity; implanting Himself within the deepest recesses of its autotelic essence, revealing Himself to have been, from the first, the logos spermatikos or “seminal reason” from which the form and beauty of all things is derived. As Origen describes it in his commentary on the Song of Songs, Christ is the “chosen arrow” (cf. Isaiah 49:2, Septuagint) of God’s love, fired into the heart of creation, piercing the armor of its illusory self-sufficiency. God does not redeem the world – or the individual soul, which recapitulates the world in a hypostatic center – by imposing Himself from without, as this would entail only its destruction. The Kingdom of God does not arrive through a hole in the sky, but sprouts up from the soil as creation's inherent generative principle. God has made the world pregnant with Himself, and it brings Him to bear in every leaf, every blade of grass, every minimus of dust. It is our task as individuals – each of us a center of the circle of nature – to redeem our own world in like manner; giving of ourselves for the life of the world, and thereby participating in the Logos of all things. The world is ours to die for.
Nikos Kazantzakis on the moral task of unveiling the logoi within all things, from his “Ascetic Exercises,” which were later published in English as The Saviors of God:
“Everything is an egg, and within it lies the seed of God, calmlessly and sleeplessly active …. Within the light of my mind and the fire of my heart, I beset God’s watch – searching, testing, knocking to open the door in the stronghold of matter, and to create in that stronghold of matter, the door of God’s heroic exodus …. For we are not simply freeing God in struggling with and ordering the visible world around us; we are actually creating God. Open your eyes, God is crying; I want to see! Be alert; I want to hear! Move ahead; you are my head! …. For to save something [a rock or a seed] is to liberate the God within it …. Every person has a particular circle of things, of trees, of animals, of people, of ideas – and the aim is to save that circle. No one else can do that. And if one doesn’t save, one cannot be saved …. The seeds are calling out from inside the earth; God is calling out from inside the seeds. Set him free. A field awaits liberation from you, and a machine awaits its soul from you. And you can no longer be saved, if you don’t save them …. The value of this transient world is immense and immeasurable: it is from this world that God hangs on in order to reach us; it is in this world that God is nurtured and increased …. Matter is the bride of my God: together they struggle, they laugh and mourn, crying through the nuptial chamber of the flesh.”
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