1. Bible & Fathers: “The Trees of Life and Knowledge” by St Gregory of Nyssa
Friday – Feast of St Cyprian the Hieromartyr: 1 Tim. 1:12-17. Lk. 6:17-23.
Online here.
Saturday – Feast of Dionysios the Areopagite: Acts 17:16-34. Lk. 5:17-26.
Online here.
Sunday: 2 Cor. 6:16-18; 7:1. Lk. 6:31-36.
Online here.
Sometime in the fourth century St Basil the Great delivered a series of nine Lenten homilies on the cosmogony of the opening chapters of Genesis, famously known as the
Hexameron. His brother St Gregory of Nyssa set out to supplement and complete that work in a treatise titled
On the Making of Man. Chapters 19 and 20 reflect on life in the garden, particularly on the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Here’s a sample paragraph from chapter 20:
Now since the majority of men judge the good to lie in that which gratifies the senses, and there is a certain identity of name between that which is, and that which appears to be “good”—for this reason that desire which arises towards what is evil, as though towards good, is called by Scripture “the knowledge of good and evil”; “knowledge,” as we have said, expressing a certain mixed disposition. It speaks of the fruit of the forbidden tree not as a thing absolutely evil (because it is decked with good), nor as a thing purely good (because evil is latent in it), but as compounded of both, and declares that the tasting of it brings to death those who touch it; almost proclaiming aloud the doctrine that the very actual good is in its nature simple and uniform, alien from all duplicity or conjunction with its opposite, while evil is many-colored and fairly adorned, being esteemed to be one thing and revealed by experience as another, the knowledge of which (that is, its reception by experience) is the beginning and antecedent of death and destruction.
Read the whole chapter here.
2. Books & Culture: “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” in
The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology Vol. 2. The World: Creation and Deification by Dumitru Staniloae
Yesterday I started re-reading Maximus the Confessor’s masterful introduction to his work
On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios and a footnote pointed me back to Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise
On the Making of Man (see above) and to a section in the book
The Experience of God by Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, translator of the
Philokalia into Romanian and Maximus scholar (he adds loads of commentary on Maximus in the Romanian
Philokalia). So I read both of them and the Staniloae section on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is amazing. Here’s a small snippet of the 2400 words I excerpted from that section:
Creation has been ordered in such a way that it might be a place where God can speak and work with this purpose in view and where we can respond to God through our words and deeds and set out on the path of this developing communion that God has willed. Creation fulfills its purpose when it continues to remain a place wherein our human being can undertake a dialogue of some sort with God. For this dialogue can grow only if the world continues to be seen, at least in part, as a gift of God, a foundation for the higher gift of salvation through which the world will be delivered from its present state of corruptibility and death.
The world was originally created with the qualities that correspond to this purpose. Through the Fall it became to a large extent opaque, and the withdrawal of the divine Spirit from the world weakened the character it had as transparent medium between God and humans and among humans themselves. Because the Spirit has withdrawn both from the world and from the human person, the world no longer keeps its original malleability, nor does the human person preserve that force of spirit whereby he can lead the world toward a state in which it serves fully as a means of communication between God and himself and between himself and his fellow humans. At every point within each causal series the world still allows for the choice of many causal directions, indeed even for the realization of certain effects which surpass the effects that lie within the power of natural causality. But the world no longer affords the possibility to make easy use of the whole of its malleable character, while among humans it is rare to find those who by their efforts acquire enough spiritual force from their link with the divine energy as to overcome natural causality itself and open up an exit from it and at the same time a prospect of the future dawning of the full meaning of existence and of the fullness of life, goodness, and genuine spirituality.
One more bit on the tree of life:
in what sense does Genesis say that God drove Adam and Eve out of paradise after the Fall so that they would not eat from the “tree of life” and live? How could they still eat of the world through “mind” and live, once fallen away from this capacity? Did not the world cease to be a “tree of life” through the very fall of man? Or was the “tree of life” not hidden away by the Fall in the depth of the world? Perhaps that is exactly what Genesis means, even though it attributes this result to a special act of God. Adam and Eve had fallen from the vision of God into a world that had become untransparent and because God had withdrawn from their sight. God does not behave passively when confronted by their fall; they are driven away from the tree of life by a separate act withdrawing this tree from the possibility that they might see it. The world becomes untransparent and brings forth death and corruption not because of the human deed alone, but also because of the act of God who withdraws some of his energies from the world. The fact that the tree of life is said to have remained somewhere from which humans have been removed may mean that in itself the world remained potentially a tree of life and potentially transparent, but that men had fallen away from knowing it in this way. They no longer saw the world as a “garden,” as a paradise of the fullness of life through which God was “walking”; they no longer saw the world in its meaning as open to the personal infinity of God.
This is SO GOOD.
Read the whole excerpt here and then get a copy of the book from Eighth Day Books.
3. Essay et al: “Tolkien the Realist: Against the Ethics of Romanticism and the Tyranny of Relativism” by Malcolm Harris
Since the Inklings Festival is quickly approaching, here’s a piece from the archives, published to promote the inaugural InkFest back in 2015. I’m going to spill the beans and give you the conclusion, since it is even more apropos to our time today than when it was first written:
But what has realism to do with ethics? Philosophical realism posits a real world that objectively exists. Moreover, man has a nature that can be discerned through reason. In simplest terms, there is such a thing as truth, including moral truth. This implies there is an objective right and wrong, a good and evil. Sound like
The Lord of the Rings?
Contrast this with the Romantic point of view, which is best expressed by the line in the Broadway show, “Man of La Mancha” (by Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, Dale Wasserman): “Facts are the enemy of truth!” Reality becomes what I feel. From this, it is a small step to the identity politics and the ethics of “If it feels good, it’s OK.” This seemingly benign approach to ethics descends rapidly to what Joseph Ratzinger described as “The Tyranny of Relativism.” We are witnessing the increasingly aggressive censorship of those who hold to objective moral truth by those whose subjective morality will tolerate no disagreement with their own self-satisfaction. Which side would Sauron choose?
Read the whole reflection here.
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