The Sight of God in the Theology of Saint Symeon the New Theologian [102]

Here, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101.

***

The depths of the man are censored and methodical extirpated from the secular discourse or they are stolen to the ghostual life and appear right constitutive elements for the foils of novel, for the area of a piece of theater or for an advertising generating of a guaranteed profit.

However in culture and art the bottomless depths of man are populated only by subliminal monsters, on when, in philosophy and science, the soul is an enigma preferable at the level of intellection, but not and at that of personal racordation at the life of God.

For that does not give two coins on the ghostual necessities of the soul and of the man in his totality, because the interior life is despised in postmodernity, the postmodern overplayings the education and the professional preparation, as biographical landmarks of self-standing and he prefers, in the exchange of these, the retardation or the ghostual backwardness and emotional, staking on the accumulation of disparate dates, against of his growth in wisdom, of obtaining of the interior equilibrium and of deepening in holiness.

Is preferred, into a word, the identitary discourse based on a minimal anthropology, of spontaneous origin, is eulogized, into an exasperating mode, a man who comes from nowhere and is drived chaotic and extremist in life, but, of most of the time, is not found something interesting, in paradoxical mode, into a maximal anthropology, which sees in man a  creation made ​​by God, from love and for to be fulfilled in love, into a responsible life and full of transfiguration, into a holy life.

The concept of life as a jungle masters the frivolity and the incoherence of deepness of the autonomous postmodern, makes him to be, in false mode, a dynamic man and good-willing, with charisma and projects of life, but which do not have nor the seal of the grace and nor the dimension of eternal fulfillment.

Into a schizophrenic mode, the postmodern without roots lives an active life, which empties him of enthusiasm and removes him, of most of the time, of the natal places and of his proper family or a life of the experiment, extremist of most of the time, in which the violence and the lubricity sends him, always, towards underground zones, occult.

Having in its substance the nihilism, as method of intellection and the deconstruction as primordial stake, on which is founded always the new conception about man, world and existence, the postmodernity refuses to receive lessons from history, considers that it can unravel by itself and prefers to be indifferent or false traumatized, panicky traumatized of future into much that to fantasize about him into a depersonalized mode.

If the postmodernity and could translate until end the conception about man and existence, from its gnoseologic mythology in fact, in reality, the future would not have neither any alternative gods, the man would transformed into a performant robot of a post-human epoch, which would no longer have no christian impress and no identitary conscience.

The futurological milenarism of postmodernity, the myth of perennial happiness on the face of an earth untransfigurated by grace, but full of an architechnologised life and ultraperformant, beats head in head with a future imagined as unchaining of energies, as a maladive territory of the anarchism and as a negation of any gnoseology or of personal praxeology.

The black future, horror, of posthumanity of after postmodernity is the final vision of this world, a secular eschatology, which has nothing to do with the perpetuation of life and nor with its everlastingness.

But turning us back in the present, where we recant of communism and we opt, more or less energetic, for a capitalist era in Romania, we are put in the face of the fact to analyze lucid the two ethoses of social life from orthodox perspective.

Thus, the communist ethos of life, which „tends to sink the man in the anonymous mass of nature and to speak of equality”^[1], of a equality which depreciates the personal choice and the human dignity, is an ethos of that we want to rid, although it went deep under skin, and we live the pathetic fervor of a future capitalist, on which we do not critical review and „which tends to raise the individual above nature and to speak of liberty”^[2], understood into a discretionary mode and egocentric.

But, says Father Professor Dumitru Popescu, both ideologies, and the one that we want to separate and the one that we want to appropriate, are impersonal ideologies^[3], which do not unify interior on man, for that „puts both the freedom but and the equality, above the man and of society, as to dominate and to orient the society towards the earthly world, into a total indifference to the heavenly one”^[4].

The orthodox perspective upon the world and of man transpires from the Holy Scripture and from the Holy and the uninterrupted charismatic Tradition of the Church and makes us to constate, „that are not important for us nor the equality and nor the liberty, but the communion or the personal relations between men”^[5].

The impersonalism of the political ideologies cannot integrate in the communional dimension of the Church, where the experimental knowledge of the life of God, the impartation of the glory of God makes us to be proper of some relations of real communion between us.

The authentic relation with God is the foundation of real perception of the human condition, of existence in its ensemble and is the mode through which we obtain an interior clarification over the blessed future of humanity, of the future from the perspective of its Creator.

The false dilemma between the preeminence of equality or of liberty is seen in that, that in the measure in which we dissolve the reality of communion inter-human, ridding us of the ecclesial communion and of interior relations and direct of the Church with the Holy Trinity, „both the liberty, but and the equality…[cannot approach us], as long as they are thought in themselves.

[For that] the true liberty cannot be achieved through the unlimited development of proper powers and wealth, because the human being is not made for the individualistic autonomy and for the frantic course for material goods, which leads at soulish vacuum and grave social inequalities, but for communion and love.

And nor the simple searching of equality cannot create the social righteousness, because this is not accomplished through terror and deprivation of liberty, but just in the reciprocal communion, in which each gives the other listening and love, for to become thus man of humanity”^[6].

In the face of the postmodern ideology, the Orthodox Church is not at all in failure of ideas and nor it feels that is made to it a serious competition to its ontological project from always, that of the deification of the man.