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In Greek the words “symbol” and “devil” come from the same root, and thus they express more forcefully two contrary realities. The devil is a divider, one who separates and cuts off all communication, reducing a being to the utmost solitude. On the other hand, a symbol binds together, builds a bridge, reestablishes communion.
The story of the possessed man of Gerasa8.1 shows clearly the nature of evil. Christ asked the devil a formidable question: “What is thy name?” For the Jewish mentality the name of an object or a being expresses its essence, and the old adage, “nomen est omen”, sees in the name the expression of a person and his destiny. Christ's question meant therefore: “Who are you; what is your destiny, your secret being?” The demon answered: “My name is legion, for we are many.”
This brusque transition from my to we reveals the action of evil in the world. The innocent being created by God is broken, splintered into isolated particles, and this is hell. Both the Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheol mean that dark place where solitude reduces a being to the extreme indigence of demoniacal solipsism. We can represent hell as a cage made of mirrors; one can see in them only one's own face multiplied to infinity, without a glimpse of anyone else's. To see only oneself is to be satiated with oneself even to the point of nausea, even to the ontological hiccup. The Coptic Apophthegms of Macarius the Ancient give a striking description of this solitude. The captives are tied to one another by their backs, and only a strong prayer uttered by the living can bring them an instant of rest. “For the time of a twinkling of an eye, we see one another's faces.”
On the contrary, confronted with this action of evil, St. Paul8.2 shows us the action of good, of Christ: “Because the bread is one (Christ), we though many, are one body, all of us who partake of the one bread.”8.3 In the eucharistic communion we find the one of all who are recapitulated in Christ in the image of the trinitarian communion, God who is one and at the same time three, unity in multiplicity.
It is natural then that the eucharist has its place in the very center of the Church and reveals itself as productive of the unity that is proclaimed, offered and lived. Like a golden block without the least fissure, it constitutes the esse of the Church. The most ancient invocation, Marana tha (Come, Lord)8.4 completes a liturgical prayer and refers to the Parousia, to the eucharistic coming of the risen Lord.8.5God comes to offer himself as nourishment, and we consume his substance, the agape, “incorruptible love”.8.6 Eucharistic communion effects a substantial participation in the total Christ, and this work, unitive by essence, makes the communicants, according to St. Athanasius, beings that “have been made like the Word, Christified”. St. Ignatius of Antioch sees in the eucharist a “remedy of immortality”, that cures death.8.7 Even more, in consuming the flesh and blood of the spouse, we enter into a nuptial koinonia (communion), says St. Theodore of Cyr.8.8 This communion fills us to such an extent that one “can go no further nor add anything”.8.9
The henosis, “the one with Christ”, lived in the eucharist, determines the eucharistic style of the spiritual life. Communion accomplished with Christ and his body--men--becomes an entirely positive growth: “Between the body and the head, there is no room for any interval, for any negation.”8.10 All who participate in God “in whom there is only yes”, profess an entire yes to life, to being. On the other hand, there is only no in Satan, and this refusal marks the limits of the place from which God is excluded, negation, nothingness, hell. St. John8.11 recognizes this no in sin that signifies , transgression, going beyond the ontological limits set by God and traced by his name: “I am the one who is.” The third prayer of the Didache speaks of it: “We give you thanks, O Holy Father, for your holy name that you have caused to dwell in our hearts. It is you, almighty master, who have created the universe in your name.”8.12 “I am a great king, says the Lord, my name is adorable among all the nations.”8.13 To go beyond this limit is to break the original bond, to renounce the king, to claim autonomy and to place oneself outside the name.
Atheism suppresses this limit of created being in its radical denial of all dependency. In place of the human thirst for “the wholly other”, it substitutes the decision to live “as if” this limit had been rendered forever non-existent. Such is Western atheism. The atheism of the anti-God militants of the Soviet world is, in a certain sense, more consistent and radical. Faithful to the historic interest inherent in Russian thought (Tchaadaeff, Berdyaev), it is centered in only one negation since this is historic: “Christ has not risen.”
It is fitting to mention here the name of St. Isaac the Syrian. Living in the 7th century, he made a synthesis of patristic thought, and as a master of ascesis, wrote a phenomenology of sin. Without attaching much importance to the multitude of sins which are almost small, one might say, in the sight of God since he forgives them, Isaac points out in his Sentences the unique sin, the sin, which is to be insensible to the resurrection! A moving prophecy of the Soviet atheism of today. To be efficacious, it attacks only the ir- refutable argument of the cross, and this is a question not of man alone, but of God. Indeed the denial of the resurrection attacks, beyond the creative act, the Creator himself. Mystically this denial effects deicide, the murder of the Father. Nietzsche had formulated it well in speaking of the death of God. “Where is God? I am going to tell you. We have killed him.” The conscience of atheists culminates there, according to Dostoievski: “There was once on earth a day when three crosses were lifted up in the center of the world... toward the end of the day they died... but they found neither paradise nor resurrection... That is the idea, the whole idea. Outside it, there is no other.”8.14 This is the very heart of atheism. It is the secret source from which comes the Freudian complex of universal guilt--the death of the Father--and the inclination of a being toward death, Todestrieb, and likewise Heidegger's formula, Sein zum Tode.
“Alea jacta est”: the die is cast, the choice is made, the atheist's Credo is proclaimed orbi et urbi: God is dead and he does not arise. “The lamb slain from the foundations of the world” means the lamb immolated and truly dead, annihilated, non-existent. In the beginning there was the death of God and his silence.
Since his destiny is at stake, man is driven to choose between the alternatives of yes and no; there is no third choice. Nietzsche expressed this in his correspondence. There are two follies, he says, that make men live; one is the one he chose, the folly of the superman, surviving in the eternal return; the other, which to him was unacceptable, is that of St. Paul, the folly of the cross, of the risen God and of immortal man.
The atheistic argument was foreseen by St. Paul.8.15 If Christ is not risen, our faith is vain, nothing has meaning, and all is nothingness. There are no half measures, no intermediary formulas. We are in the presence of the fundamental evidence of Jesus risen from the dead. A God who does not present his charter as lover of mankind, a God who is not love crucified in order to radiate “life, death of death”, as St. Augustine says, is not really God. In following St. Paul's thought to its conclusion, we could say that all religion exists only by the resurrection and mystically leans on this event. If Christ is risen, this is of interest for all men. If the Christian testimony to the risen Lord is suppressed, no religion will survive on the level of the modern world, for outside the Gospel every religious message stops halfway.
The Gospel's transcendent end is God become a risen Man. This fact does not concern just a few witnesses only; the risen Christ in becoming the contemporary of all men means that every man is contemporary with the eternal Christ. This makes all the events of history essentially christological. Christ is risen as head of the human body, and now all religions and all men can and ought to seek their life in him. This testimony alone determines the ecumenical mission of the Church in the midst of all religions and in the great meeting between East and West. History places the Christian faith in the risen Christ at the crossing point of all ideologies that now reformulate the only important question--that asked by Pilate--“What is truth?” It obliges faith to say its yes, going if need be as far as the confession of martyrdom, that unique answer that resounds universally. Christ is in agony, and eternity is impatient to hear this answer.
The apostolic kerygma announces the event of Easter, the intervention of God raising up Jesus; this alone gives a definitive meaning to the existence of men in history. We find its central core in I Corinthians 15, 3-4, in Romans 4, 24-25 and Acts 2, 36. The resurrection of Jesus is God's amen to his promise, an amen full of the Holy Spirit who manifests it. Amen comes from the Hebrew he'emin and it means an unshakable base of operations. Those who proclaim it--the apostles and martyrs--claim the right to proclaim the event before the magistrates of the earthly city. Likewise the Apologies of Justin, Athenagoras, and Aristides present to emperors the same decisive message and warn them of the imminent judgment. Their kerygma is of interest to all men. It is preached in the presence of angels and concerns all of creation: the kingdom of God has already arrived; we are contemporaries of the one who sits at the right hand of the Father. Here is the lamb immolated and risen and here is his kingdom. He is here and it is the fullness of time. All religions are ways by which men seek God. They are numerous. However, the Christian revelation is unique for it is God who finds man. The preaching of St. Paul is of capital importance for the theology of religion. In deciphering the monument to the unknown God and in giving it the name, Jesus Christ, the apostle integrated with Christ the religious aspiration of all times and gave it value in Christ.
Man's transgression confines him to a situation that is closed to all that is not of this earth. The more material this is and the more it is made a thing, the more it appears deprived of reality and of any substance. This is the world of finance, with its temple, the Stock Exchange, and its votaries of luxury; it is the political world of ambition and covetousness, of collective neurosis of mad passions and unfaithful sensual love. It is a world vacillating above an abyss, without any consistency, being made of vapors and peopled with phantoms, and which at any moment risks disappearing “as smoke in the air and as wax melted by fire”. On the other hand, Origen compares the efforts of the hermits of the desert, in their march toward perfection,8.16 to the slow departure of the inhabitants of Plato's cave. Leaving the silhouetted shadows for a vision of reality, where nothing is interposed between man and the truths of the divine life, the monk of the desert kept firmly to the way of return toward the kingdom.
We find a vigorous and complete vision of human destiny even in the beginnings of Christian thought. St. Gregory of Nyssa8.17 mentions the celebrated catechism of the two ways. The Testament of XII Patriarchs clearly formulates it: “God has given two ways to the son of man and two inclinations, and two manners of acting, and two ends.” This is the doctrine of the two yetser, of the two inclinations of the heart, in conformity either to the action of the angel of light or to the action of the angel of darkness. The Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and other writings draw from the same source, and this theme was to have a great influence on Christian letters. It goes back to the option offered by God, “I have set before you life and death.”8.18 It is always the same choice between yes and no.
According to the Bible, the fool is free to say in his heart: “There is no God.” However, the meaning of the negation changes according to the level of depth and suffering in the one who denies. That is why “Perfect atheism (perfect here means lived even to suffering) is at the top of the ladder, on the second last step before perfect faith,” as Dostoievski affirms.8.19When, far from formless indifference, atheism and faith are carried to “perfection”, they can meet together above senseless talk, in the silent combat of the angel with Jacob, and of grace with despair. Consistent atheism, burning with suffering, knows its own paradoxical cross. At the end of his life, on notes scribbled at the height of his madness, Nietzsche wrote his definitive name--the Crucified. Likewise the atheistic Great Inquisitor8.20 made fun of materialism and positivism, but he attained his true grandeur in his passion for man. His no, in spite of himself, would almost participate in the love of God for man, though he is not conscious of this. Perhaps passion for man goes beyond a certain level that is merely human. Is not the essence of the divine heart this same passion, and would there not be here one of those mysterious “passages to the limit” [i.e., `liminal stages' --ed.]? Perhaps it is necessary to be a saintly “philanthropist”, in the manner of God, in order to feel the deep correspondence. There exists a purifying atheism, according to the words of Jules Lagneau, “that salt which hinders belief in God from corrupting itself”. In this function of protection and safeguard, it cooperated with grace. That is why the Christ of the Legend of Dostoievski is silent, and kisses the face of the Great Inquisitor contracted with suffering.