Paradox I.

Edward Moore, S.T.L., PhD (c) 2014

No one is interested in beings who are perfectly happy.

~ Chateaubriand

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

~ Lord Byron

There is secular art, and there is religious art. In both, the most moving examples are those that depict extremes of suffering, of tragedy, even of death. Edgar All Poe remarked that there is no theme more fitting for poetry than the death of a beautiful woman. The tragic downfall of beauty is, indeed, the stuff of great poetry. Witness Milton's Paradise Lost, with the transformation of defiant, heroic Satan from a fearless (and many say sympathetic) general of a diabolical army into, finally -- a toad and a serpent. And in the works of Shakespeare, the self-destruction of Hamlet (which occurs long before the hit with the poisoned sword) and the cruelty suffered by doddering King Lear, from his own daughters, affects us far more profoundly than the (to me) largely obsolete comedies. In religious art, both literary and visual, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," by Jonathan Edwards, makes for provocative reading, regardless of one's faith or lack thereof. Gruenewald's painting of the Crucifixion, described by J-K Huysmans, in his novel La-Bas, as depicting a "God of the morgue," transfixes the eye of the modern observer in a way that the triumphant Adonis Christs of the late Middle Ages do not. And for a literary example from the relatively recent past, the twenty-first chapter of A Clockwork Orange, by the late Anthony Burgess, which provided a "happy ending" to the unrelieved violence and psychopathy of Alex, made the novel fall flat, and so was omitted from the first published editions, as well as from Kubrick's film.[1] Why the fascination with the unhappy ending, or at least with the imperfectly resolved ending?

(Matthias Gruenewald, The Crucifixion, 1525)

Aristotle, in his Poetics, explained that such works (he was writing specifically of tragedy) serve a cathartic role in our lives, permitting us to purge ourselves of our own violent or anti-social tendencies by watching them played out by others on the stage, in works so powerful it is easy to forget they are fiction. The famous -- or infamous -- sermon by Jonathan Edwards, however, was given in earnest, and caused such an outburst of negative reaction in his congregation that he was, eventually, sent off as a missionary to the Mohicans.[2] Religious art -- and I use that term very loosely, for the majority of religious art is intended to be instructional, certainly not 'art for art's sake' -- is not intended solely to purge us of sinful tendencies by depicting their horrific consequences (as in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, for example) but also to raise up the spiritual part of our intellect to spaces beyond the mundane, and unite us, in imagination, with certain aspects of divine reality that are not readily apparent in nature. Or, sometimes, to remind us that the erotic is never far from our thoughts, even at their most lofty.[3]

(Fra Angelico, 'Noli Me Tangere',1445?)

In Christian history we find many equivocal attitudes towards art, ranging from ancient Iconoclasm (which sprang up once again among the more zealous of the so-called Reformers, and is by no means extinct today) to demands that a Christian art must depict only -- and with literal accuracy -- scenes taken directly from scripture (usually the New Testament). Allegory was sometimes frowned upon, in later times, but never banished entirely. Some of the more enlightened and humanistic Christians of recent times, like the Dominican friar Marie-Alain Couturier (1897-1954), did not even demand that a creator of Christian art be a Christian. He said that "all great art is spiritual since the genius of the artist lies in the depths, the secret inner being from whence faith also springs." An atheist in touch with both self and other (the latter meant in the expansive sense of all that one sees in the world: people, animals, trees and flowers, etc.) is more than capable of having a faith, albeit one that does not require a personal God -- nor even an impersonal, clockmaker God, as in Deism. Rather, the faith of the atheist is in the future, which is, as Keats said of joy, ever bidding us adieu.

This is not to say that the faith of the atheist is merely a faith in an eventual utter dissolution, in which the exhausted human mind may finally rest in oblivion. I believe that the future will someday arrive, as a new 'way of things,' so to speak ... And as Faulkner stated in his Nobel Prize speech, we human beings are not meant simply to endure -- for we all are capable of endurance, as anyone who has been sorely tried by sickness, addiction, loss of freedom, loss of love, knows all too well -- but we are meant to prevail. I am not sure over what, exactly. Perhaps over the limitations of our own intellect, morals, ethics ... the things we possess, partially tapped, that are capable of ushering in (metaphorically) the Kingdom of God, as Christ so often declared in the Gospels (see, for example, Luke 17:21: "behold, the kingdom of God is within you"). Faulkner called upon us not to chatter away pointlessly and heedlessly until the end of time, but to overcome the debilitating fear that makes us less than human -- indeed, the fear that makes us animalistic, the fear or anxiety discussed by Kierkegaard, which is purely subjective (not fear for the human race as a whole): the fear that our life amounts, in the end, to nothing.

Admittedly -- and it pains me to write this -- philosophy has little to offer as antidote to this existential despair. Jean-Paul Sartre had great difficulty founding an atheist existentialist ethic, although he did allude, in a footnote at the end of Part III of Being and Nothingness, to some sort of "radical conversion" that will bring about "deliverance and salvation," but he never discussed it. It is doubtful that he had Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" in mind, for we know he chose Marxist communism instead. Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, described philosophy as "the ongoing conversation of Western Civilization." But to what end? Somehow I am reminded here of Lord Dunsany's haunting vignette Charon, in which the last words of the last man to be rowed across Styx to the land of the dead are simply "I am the last." And then, Dunsany writes: "No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep."

Being-toward-death was one of Martin Heidegger's main themes, for he saw death as the most unique, personal potentiality of the human being, something no one else can suffer. The acceptance of death, argued Heidegger, frees us from its terror, relieves us of the anxiety attendant upon thoughts of our demise, and frees us up to become who and what we authentically are. I found this, upon my first reading of Heidegger (so many years ago), to be ridiculous (and still do); the fear of death is a product of our evolution, a guarantor of at least temporary survival in a hostile world. Being-for-others, as Christian existentialists and personalists both secular and religious, would have it, is certainly a more humane and, ultimately, a more dynamic and creative manner of engaging with the world. At the very least, it permits us to love. And we can only truly love that which always, however partially, eludes our grasp.

(Ingres, The Virgin Adoring the Host, 1862)

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all of these,

Because my love is come to me.

~ Christina Rossetti, A Birthday

Notes:

1. Examples may be multiplied, almost indefinitely. But to mention one more (one of my favorites): Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights -- What are we to make of those two bodies sharing a single soul, Heathcliff and Catherine?

2. While the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (preached July 8, 1741) was not directly responsible for his eventual banishment from his congregation, its nightmarish message surely set the tone for discontent. Barely six years later, after cohabitating with a slave-girl named "Venus," Edwards was finally sent off to the Mohicans, by the common consent of his flock.

3. See, for example, Fra Angelico's 'Noli Me Tangere' (1441), or the sublimely beautiful virgin Mary of Ingres. In the literary sphere, one will note the masturbation scene before a statue of the virgin in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

On Atheism, Morals, and Education

Edward Moore (c) 2014

St. Elias Seminary and Graduate School (http://www.steliasseminary.org/)

patristics@gmail.com

In his book Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (New York: Prometheus Books 2002), Michael Martin mentions a study by Gorusch and Aleshire showing that the countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia, where less than 50 percent of the population profess a belief in God, have a significantly lower homicide rate than the United States, where nearly 90 percent of the population profess a belief (p. 29). As Martin states, this should give theists pause. His arguments are in-depth and lucid, but I think the reason for the readiness to declare oneself a believer in this country is due far more to cultural pressure and backwardness than to any authentic, personal conviction. Indeed, religious education -- and ALL education, for that matter -- is, in the United States, of the most appallingly superficial kind.

How many run-of-the-mill American 'Christians,' of any denonimation (or 'non-denomination') are capable of giving an account of the great Trinitarian debates of the early centuries and the impact these debates had on attitudes towards the individual person and his or her autonomy, dignity, and divine eikon and homoiosis (Gen 1:26 LXX)? How many have studied, in any depth, the history, languages, and theological development of their faith? I am not talking about Sunday school or basic catechism, but rather an objective, academic examination of the philosophical basis of the faith, in the manner of St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and even Tatian (in his own way), among many others. These early Fathers, by defending the faith, were forced to don the robes of the philosophers, following St. Paul when he visited the Areopagus and quoted from Cleanthes the Stoic, stating "in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28) -- this being a direct quote from that 'pagan' philosopher's Hymn to Zeus. As I have stated before, the world -- and by extension our faith -- is a far more difficult and complex matter than most would admit, or wish it to be. And there is the rub. The myth of a primitive, simple Christianity (fostered by the various 'bible' churches that can be found in nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country) have done much damage. The early church was divided, riddled with debate, and productive of the various approaches to Christ and His revelation that were later to be labelled 'heresies'.

The Gnostics, for example (of which there were many types; so many, in fact, that the term has become saturated and all but useless) have been described as the rationalists among the early Christians. Philip Schaff wrote of Gnosticism that it was "the Rationalism of the ancient church; it pervaded the intellectual atmosphere, and stimulated the development of catholic theology by opposition" (History of the Christian Church, in e-Sword Reference Library: www.e-sword.net 2013). In my own works on the subject (including a major article written with John D. Turner for The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity) I have demonstrated how the various schools dubbed 'Gnostic' were of two main types: radical re-interpreters of Jewish scripture, and Middle or Neo-Platonists who felt a strong emotional and intellectual connection to emerging Christianity.

I made this brief digression simply to point out the wide variety of areas into which Christians need to delve for a full understanding of their faith. Why, some may ask, do I need to know all these things, when St. Paul preached only Christ crucified? Well, the death of a divinity (which is an ancient motif going back to prehistoric times [cf. Frazer's Golden Bough, which is still largely relevant]), and is not unique, in and of itself, to Christianity. One need only recall the drama of Osiris and Set, and the former's salvation by Isis; and as for crucifixion, the hanging of Odin on the tree of Yggdrasil. There is a very good reason why the Fathers labored so many points concerning Christ's dual nature, and the deeper -- indeed deepest -- meaning of His death. The unity of the Trinity, as exposited by some of our best contemporary theologians (many of them Orthodox), shows that the substance (ousia) of the Trinity is 'communion,' a unity of Love between three unique but united Persons. As the Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas has put it, "the substance of God, ‘God’, has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion ... it is communion which makes beings‘be’; nothing exists without it, not even God" (Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press 1993). We may view this as a trope for the ethical and moral expectations of thinking human persons (of which there are precious few), theist or atheist (and as Martin has shown in his book, a "nonobjective morality" is possible for an atheist), or as a truly divine mystery, unknowable in the present life.

I have often considered, in a rather Eunomian manner, this unknowability doctrine to be an excuse for intellectual laxity. [Eunomius believed that we are capable of knowing God as well as He knows Himself, according to Socrates, Church History IV.7.] So to return to my original point, regarding the excess of violent crime in our country, compared to Western Europe and Scandinavia, I will state boldly that a lack of intellectual curiosity leads one down a dangerous path of indifference to the accomplishments of humanity, and the greatness of the greatest among us, past and present. As H. L. Mencken once wrote:

If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers. In Defense of Women (1922, 106-107)

Indeed, the prevalence of medications for children with various 'disorders' like ADHD (and many forget that what is called 'hyper-activity' is in fact part of the natural mental growth-process of a child, especially between the crucial ages of two to seven) leads to intellectual dullness, if not outright torpor and dazed stupidity in later life -- something I witness daily in the degenerate city in which I am forced by present circumstance to dwell. Stupidity is the result of a lack of intellectual curiosity; this lack leads to indifference to others, and makes crime 'no biggy.' A teenager who prefers various types of sublimated aggression to the quest for mental growth will not necessarily become a criminal -- but he or she will become (whether Christian, atheist, or other) what H. P. Lovecraft called "a piece of flesh without intellect, a walking abortion." Education, at both the religious and secular levels, is the antidote for this disease of the mind.

Some Thoughts About Nothing

Others take the view expressed by Plato, that giant among the Greeks. He said that God had made all things out of pre-existent and uncreated matter, just as the carpenter makes things only out of wood that already exists. But those who hold this view do not realize that to deny that God is Himself the Cause of matter is to impute limitation to Him, just as it is undoubtedly a limitation on the part of the carpenter that he can make nothing unless he has the wood. How could God be called Maker and Artificer if His ability to make depended on some other cause, namely on matter itself? If He only worked up existing matter and did not Himself bring matter into being, He would be not the Creator but only a craftsman.

~ St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, I.2

Since the Roman Catholic Church celebrates St. Athanasius today, I find myself musing on the implications of his critique of Plato, and am both fascinated and troubled by the metaphysical problem of creatio ex nihilo versus a "crafting" of our universe (and selves) from some pre-existent "stuff."

In his book A Universe from Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), astrophysicist Lawrence M. Krauss explores the implications of particle physics, the fabric of the observable universe, and how this fabric adds up to "nothing." In short, the universe that we observe (according to Krauss) was generated from non-observable "stuff" -- in short, "nothing." I have no intention of entering into an explanation of the deep science of this book; however, as some may recall, Martin Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?, engaged the perennially troubling question: "Why are there beings (or being) rather than nothing?"

Those who place their feet firmly on the ground of this earth, and take comfort in the solidity of life, often create for themselves a mini-empire of self, and seek for nothing beyond their immediate surroundings (by which I mean family, job, pointless hobbies, etc.). Levinas provided a reminder that we are, in our existence, usurping the space of an other, that we have no ontological right to occupy the space we do. If the universe was created from pre-existing "stuff," then we, by logical extension, are fragments (if you will) of the stuff; it would not be possible, in such a system, for us to occupy any other space than the one in which we find ourselves. There is some comfort in that; but it is the comfort taken by an unthinking being. A true person (hupostasis) engages dynamically with the world to form a ground or foundation of being, which is precisely what hupostasis (or in Latin, subiectum, whence English "subject") means.

Philosophically, the notion of creation from nothing makes our existence shaky, does not permit us to feel ourselves to be necessary beings but rather privileged beings, whose existence demands a response, a stewardship as it were of the world and others. This is the basic tenet of the philosophy of St. Maximus the Confessor, and it is, in my view, a healthy way of engaging with the life-world.

An atheist -- and I have struggled with my own atheistic tendencies recently, despite my philosophical embrace of Christianity -- may take comfort in the notion that our universe (and hence selves) amounts in the long run to "nothing," but such a view makes ethics and morals voluntary, not a necessary component of the authentic person. The idea that we are generated from the mind of an eternally thinking Being or Mind (the ego eimi ho On of Exodus 3:14, in the Septuagint) inspires us (one would hope) with a feeling of obligation to all existing things, not just other people, but animals, plants, our entire eco-system.

Creatio ex nihilo inspires us to view our existence as a gift, not as some random accident in a pathetic universe that amounts to "nothing."

"The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty [is] harmony, and at the back of harmony [is] -- union."

The quote is from John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. It seems to me that what I (and many other) scholars have taken as 'Gnosticism' is a response to the existentially valid idea that the appreciation of Beauty originates in loneliness. I do not mean the pedestrian loneliness of 'all by myself' but rather the primordial loneliness of vision cut short by the limits of intellect. Is this not what the unkown author of the

Secret Book of John

had in mind when s/he posited forethought (

pronoia

) as the first, productive desire of the first thinking entity?

Patristic piety, from the earliest Fathers to St. Maximus the Confessor and beyond, never lost sight of the important distinction between the Creator and His creatures. God is indeed ontologically other, and separated from the created realm by an unbridgeable gap or ‘spacing’ (diástêma); yet the crown of His creation, humanity, is able to know Him through His energies (energeiai), manifested in various ways throughout the created order. The Platonic philosophical tradition, however, insisted upon contemplation (theôria) as the unbreakable link between existents and the higher principles on which they depend for their being. This contemplation was not only the mode of communion with the deity proper to lower orders of existence; it was also the connecting link between the productive triad of One, Intellect, and Soul. Since all was believed connected by this ‘golden chain’ of intellectual co-dependency, human freedom and uniqueness (what some contemporary theologians would call personhood) had no place, for the ultimate goal of all was unity. As Plotinus explained, in his treatise “On Nature and Contemplation and the One” (Ennead 3.8.10):

[T]he origin (arkhê) is not divided up into the All (to pan), for if it were divided up it would destroy the All too; and the All could not any more come into being if the origin did not remain by itself, different from it. Therefore, too, we go back everywhere to one. And in each and every thing there is some one to which you will trace it back, and this in every case to the one before it, which is not simply one, until we come to the simply one; but this cannot be traced back to something else. (tr. Armstrong 1967, 395-397)

The origin or source, for Plotinus, is indeed different (hetéras) from its productions, but this difference or otherness is not ontological, for everything is ultimately traced back and subsists in relation to the One, i.e., all things have the One as the ground of their being (ousia). The division (meros) characteristic of lower entities is not a permanent state, and certainly not one in which personhood is freely developed in relation to God; rather, it is an unstable situation that is only remedied by a contemplative reversion (epistrophê) to the immediate source of one’s being. In the case of the second and third principles, Intellect and World-Soul, their productive and maintaining powers, respectively, are effectual only because they simultaneously proceed from and revert to the absolute One.

Any attempt to come to provide a philosophical explanation of the triune God on the basis of this Platonic system obviously renders Christ and the Spirit ontologically dependent upon the Father, and therefore of lesser rank; and it renders the creation a necessary efflux of God, with no real value apart from its dependence upon the divine ousia. The One’s difference or otherness, in the Platonic-Plotinian schema, is not due to its free act of calling existents out of non-being, but rather to its effortless overflowing of essence. Whereas all beings or hypostases, including the second and third divine principles, susbist by way of their contemplative dependency upon the One, the One itself contemplates and depends upon nothing but itself (cf. Ennead 5.2.1). Herein lies it otherness. Communion and freedom are alike impossible.

Theophilus of Antioch, writing a century before Plotinus, described, through the language and concepts available to him – and to the limited extent that it is possible do so – the inner life of God, which is that of a freely willing creator: “the power of God is shown in this, that, first of all, He creates out of nothing, according to His will, the things that are made” (Ad Autol. 2.13, ANF 2:99). God’s logos and sophia were not, for Theophilus, subordinate hypostases emanating from the Father. We have seen that Theophilus, borrowing a Stoic distinction, conceived of the Logos as the expression of the Father’s internal thoughts, actualized for the purpose of creation. The Spirit (pneuma) he conceived as having a two-fold power or purpose: to hold the cosmos together in a divine embrace, and to penetrate the material realm with a vivifying and maintaining power.

[B]y the Spirit which is borne above the waters, [Moses] means that which God gave for animating the creation, as he gave life to man, mixing what is fine with what is fine. For the Spirit is fine, and the water is fine, that the Spirit may nourish the water, and the water penetrating everywhere along with the Spirit, may nourish creation. For the Spirit being one, and holding the place of light, was between the water and the heaven, in order that the darkness might not in any way communicate with the heaven, which was nearer God, before God said, ‘Let there be light.’ (Ad Autol. 2.13, ANF 2:100)

This is sublime imagery: the Spirit-filled water flowing through the rifts and rills of matter, being carried to every inch of the created realm, giving life and sustenance to all. God, while wholly other, surrounds and penetrates this realm, holding it lovingly in His hand and nourishing it with His Spirit (Ad Autol. 1.7). It is a relation of a proud creator to His glorious creation. Possibly a bit too anthropomorphic for the subtle tastes of Platonic philosophers, but if we pass beyond the poetry to the theological conception, we arrive at a view of God that at once maintains His complete transcendence and otherness, and brings to the fore His intimate relationship with His free creation. The intimate connection between principles that we have seen in the Platonic schema, and which was attractive to Christian theologians, was hereby maintained by Theophilus, yet without sacrificing the purely Christian concept of God as a triune power whose loftiness exceeds human intellectual capacity. “The containing spirit,” writes Theophilus, “is along with the creation contained by the hand of God. As, therefore, the seed of the pomegranate, dwelling inside, cannot see what is outside the rind, itself being within; so neither can man, who along with the whole creation is enclosed by the hand of God, behold God” (Ad Autol. 1.5, ANF 2:90).

Big Evil

The occasion for these reflections on the problem of evil is my reading of the sixth essay, “On Nature of Evil,” in Bogoljub Šijaković, Between God and Man: Essays in Greek and Christian Thought (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag 2002). This collection of seven essays, written between 1985 and 2001, covers such topics as anthropology and self-knowledge (the famous Apollonian dictum “Know Thyself”), paradox and mysticism, guilt and repentance – to name but a few. What interests me here, however, is Professor Šijaković’s nuanced, philosophical, and at times even subtly poetic discussion of evil in our world.

Professor Šijaković’s chief concern is the result of viewing evil as strictly meontic – i.e., as having no existence, being no-thing, simply the absence of good. However, since the good is God, and God is not a “what” but a “who,” a person and not a mere substance – or, more accurately, God’s substance is His person, the person of the Father – then evil must not be considered a substance, even if that ‘substance’ is no-thing; rather, evil is properly understood as an “ontological usurpation” (p. 91) resulting from the faulty exercise of human freedom. Evil, then, is “personological” (ibid.); the concept of “metaphysical evil” can never, as Professor Šijaković explains, be resorted to as an explanation for the intrusion of “senselessness and madness” into our world. Certainly there is such a thing as “natural evil” (disasters, disease); however, as Šijaković explains, by the mere fact that we use the terms good and evil as “moral categories” (pp. 92-93, my emphasis), we are tacitly acknowledging that all evil “bears witness to the abuses of human freedom [and] rests on freely made decisions of the will” (p. 93).

However, it is often easy to explain away evil – especially natural evil – by resorting too readily to the exercise of human freedom, and its sometimes negative results, as a cause. Stanley Harakas, for example, in his book Toward Transfigured Life (Minneapolis: Light and Life 1983) makes an attempt to exonerate God of any blame for natural evil with the example of the destruction of a village in the French Alps by an avalanche. Harakas tacitly places the blame on the villagers, who should have somehow been aware that the location of the village was not a safe one, and so built elsewhere (p. 75). It was their free choice to build in a bad location that caused the evil of the loss of life, not God or some abstract system of nature or fate. Taken to its extreme conclusion(s), of course, Harakas’s attempt at theodicy ends in absurdity. Suppose, for example (following Harakas’s ‘reasoning’) that, wishing to eat a healthier diet, I purchase a bag of salad tainted – unbeknownst to me – by some potentially lethal chemical. I eat the salad, sicken, and die. Who is to blame? The company who distributes the bagged salad? The farmers who grow the vegetables? The government agency whose job it is to inspect the various sites of manufacture? All of the above? Or perhaps the blame should be placed on my hypothetically deceased self? That’s it! I shouldn’t have been such a lazybones. If only I had grown my own veggies in my backyard, I’d still be here today.

Things get trickier, of course, with moral evil, especially when we enter the misleadingly black and white realm of victims and perpetrators. How often do we hear the families of victims of violent crimes demanding ‘justice’? Invariably, this ‘justice’ involves retaliation or vengeance against the perpetrator of the crime. When the ‘justice’ in question involves the government-sanctioned murder of the perpetrator, then evil has only succeeded in doubling itself; now not only has one human being bearing the image of God been eliminated from existence, but two! It seems to me that one of the least remembered biblical verses, especially among so-called conservative Christians (particularly in the United States) is Romans 12:19-21. Šijaković is, fortunately, sensitive enough to the complexity of the problem of evil to avoid the Herculean task of attempting an explanation for the varieties of moral evil in our world. He does, however, give us a much-needed warning: “The biggest evil is when evil succeeds in convincing us that there is no evil” (p. 99). On the ontological level, evil may indeed be no-thing; but it can usurp the being of the world, and turn the positive ascendancy of life into a degeneration, a return, as St. Athanasius would put it, into the nothingness out of which God called us (De Incarnatione 3.3.1-5).

Evil must be personalized; for it is, according to Šijaković, precisely our personal powers of reason, scientific ability, and education that provide evil with an opportunity to burst forth from nothingness into existence. While reliance upon our God-given gifts of rational understanding, creativity, ingenuity, etc., can indeed result in contributions to a better world, it is easy to overlook the increased opportunities for ontological usurpation (evil) created by such progress. This is, of course, a perennial problem, and one for which there is no ready solution. As Christians, we have faith that God will, when the time is right, return His creation to its intended state – which, for us, means deification (theôsis). In the meantime, we would do well to follow the advice of Professor Šijaković: love the other, even to the extent of taking responsibility for his or her own evil – that is the only path to salvation from evil (p. 104).