Worms and Men

While living at a monastery in California, there was a period of time during which the Abbot and I found ourselves alone with each other, and were sometimes forced to converse. The only monk there at the time, along with the only novice, were both on a pilgrimage to Mt. Athos, leaving the hieromonk and myself to our own devices.

We entertained each other with stories. I spoke briefly of my own conversion, and he of his. I remember him telling me that while he was a student at an ivy league college on the east coast, he, as an avowed agnostic, took a class on the history of Christianity. His idea of Christianity was one that denigrated the human person, an idea that he loathed and did not believe in. In his view, Christianity taught that the human person is a worm, not merely stained by sin, but totally and thoroughly corrupted to the point of a complete absence of spiritual resonance. The heavy burden of guilt, both inherited from Adam as well as attained through one's own actions, proved the human being to be depraved in every faculty of his miserly existence, even down to the marrow of his very nature.

(Although the abbot was not a Calvinist, this is one of the main ideas of Calvinism, from which follows the notion that one is so demolished by guilt and sin that one is incapable of his own volition of wanting to know God, or choosing to embrace Christ, unless he is overpowered by God and spiritually regenerated -- but all that is another story.)

The Abbot, before he became a Christian, felt a particular distaste towards the faith that was focused on this idea of the repugnance of the human person. Then, in the class he was given assigned readings and confronted with the writings of the Church fathers , and found something else entirely. Instead, he discovered that the early Christians believed that the human person, created in the image of God, is good, has intrinsic value, is not de facto guilty of sin from birth, nor so engorged by the presence of sin as to be incapable of seeking salvation from God. He was particularly stricken, and angered, by an article regarding St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330- c.395), who wrote that although stained and darkened by the presence of death through sin, the human person shares through his higher faculties a reflection of the qualities of divinity.

"He who created human beings in order to make them share in his own fullness so disposed their nature that it contains the principle of all that is good, and each of these dispositions draws them to desire the corresponding divine attribute. So God could not have deprived them of the best and most precious of His attributes, self-determination, freedom...." (Catechetical Orations).

The Abbot told me that the early saints of the historic church, particularly St Gregory of Nyssa, infuriated him because they did not describe that which he knew as "Christianity". Instead of describing the human person as at core a hopeless wretch, justly guilt-ridden and deserving of nothing but punishment, they described him as stained and corrupted and darkened by death, yes, and therefore given over to deep-rooted sinful addictions -- but also, they described the human person as in his very nature glorious, the very image of God, of such weight and tremendous value that not even death could totally eradicate his worth.

Angrily, after reading an encyclopedia article about St Gregory of Nyssa in which he described the human person in the latter manner, the student who would later become my spiritual father (for a while, anyway) wrote to the author of the article, someone named Georges Florovsky, a Russian who taught at a nearby university. In response, Florovsky invited him to come and visit him, which he did, and together they visited the writings of the fathers, the Scriptures, and Orthodox services, which he described as a liberating experience, and through which he himself embraced Christ.

I am reminded of his story on occasion, usually when I come across people who are not Christians, but who see us as morose, guilt-ridden and neurotic hypocrites, forever caught in a tangle of self-deprecation and inevitable human longing. This is not the Christian story; it is an unfortunate and deceptive distortion.