Bearing all the above in mind,
we shall proceed to make certain observations as regards their
significance, not just for us theologians who speak a ‘language’ of
our own, but for every human being. What is the meaning of this
Dogma on God? Does our existence change, if God wasn’t this or
that? And what is the meaning of all these details?
First of all, let’s take the question of
whether the essence expresses the unison of God or not. If, in other
words, we were to follow Augustine’s theology, where would it lead
us? ( I Am Referring to our existence in general ). When a teenager
asks “who asked me if I wanted to come into this life?”, he is
elevating his freedom above his existence. He does not take
his existence as something given. He would like to have been
asked. He wasn’t asked. Hence, he sees his existence as something
restrictive to his freedom. And indeed, there are no greater
shackles, than those of existence itself. Don’t think of this as
something strange. We have become accustomed to the moral concept of
freedom; we believe that we are happy if we can choose between two,
three pieces and then vote (this is what we call political freedom,
or , in the moral sphere we understand freedom as being the ability
to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’). But a bigger challenge for freedom is that I
cannot say ‘no’ to my existence. And should I wish to say
‘no’ to my existence, then I cease to exist and my freedom is also
retracted.
My freedom becomes self-annulled. But
what is this attributed to? It is attributed to the fact that my
person does not precede my essence; that my essence comes before
my person. Should you apply this to God, and create a theology in
which the essence precedes the person of God, you would have –
ontologically - the most un-free being of all. God would then also
be shackled by His existence. Don’t let it surprise you that
something like this would preoccupy us. It should preoccupy us,
because if God were not free to exist, then what could we expect?
Why do we seek this freedom? Or is this perhaps an impermissible
thing to do? No, it is not impermissible. It is within the notion
of freedom. That is why we express it by creating new identities (as
we mentioned in a previous chapter ), which we freely choose. And
it is significant, that at the exact moment that the teenager asks
“who asked me if I wanted to come into this life?”, he is going
through the crisis of abandoning his given identities which are his
family members, as well as his tendency to create his own identity,
his own identities, that will be based on the unfettered
relationships that he wants to define; these are defined by nature
and given by the family. Consequently, freedom – with regard to
identity, to identifying with something and for something to exist
for us - is a basic element of our having been created free by God
and that we are in God’s image, therefore if God Himself isn’t free
according to this aspect, then we too cannot hope or expect that we
shall become - or shall be – free, hence freedom is a totally
groundless thing.
We
must know whether the God in
Whom we believe, and Whose images we want to be, is shackled to His
existence or not; also, whether He exists because He has to exist; because He exists and cannot do otherwise. This very
important subject is hidden behind the person’s priority.
If that which makes God exist
is not His essence, but the Person of the Father, then we
definitely have freedom. God does not exist because He can’t
do otherwise. He exists, means: “He is”. He is hypostasized
freely. A Person is that which hypostatizes Him. Just as I can
freely say to someone: “To me, you don’t exist”. To us, this
ability to say: “you exist” or “you don’t exist”, is paradoxical.
If you have read the “Theatre of the Absurd”, you will see in there
how intense this speculation is. You will see in there that
tendency to ignore and to say that: to me, that person doesn’t
exist; I ignore him. That is the absurd (of course) yet so natural
element of existence: you cannot ignore it. To us it is absurd,
because existence precedes essence, as an obligatory reality. And
the person comes after that, because it is reacting to
that obligatory reality; it wants to independently create its own
identities. It ignores the objective essence and reality, but
creates something absurd, because it can’t actually do it. This
absurdness is the logic of Triadic Theology. Logic is now the
illogical ! Because in there, it is no longer illogical. It is the
reasoning within God’s Being. It is because the essence does not
precede, nor does it define, existence. If we think in an unorthodox
way of God in this area, and we say that the essence precedes
existence, then all these existential consequences appear. And
God? Well, we must then either introduce the absurd element into
God, or we ignore the personal speculation, and the speculation on
freedom that the absurd element creates within us. Of course, to a
certain point this can be done, and we do, in general terms, put
aside this absurd element. But I don’t think it is possible –
unless we deprive mankind of freedom altogether – to deprive it of
its protest towards the phenomenon of the obligatory fact of his
existence, which implies, as I said, the precedence of the essence
to the person.
So, if God exists because the Father exists, and not because the
essence exists, then we too have the hope that this absurd thing
that we seek, may quite possibly be logical in reality; it may
become logical. The logic of Theology therefore, is the reversal or
the denial of this absurd element. This absolute freedom of God is
expressed in the specific way of the Triadic relationship, and here
we have another existential consequence, which is the continuation
of the previous one. Because for us existence is a given thing and
therefore obligatory, our freedom is exercised in a double way;
either by our unshackled acceptance of our freedom, or the denial
of our existence, i.e. to not be able to deny my existence, to
commit suicide, just as Dostoevsky analyzes it in his book “The
Possessed”. In this way, you will be fully proving your freedom.
It is only then that you prove your freedom fully: when you deny
your existence.
Well, for us there is the
possibility to exercise freedom, at any rate there is the temptation
to exercise our freedom in a negative manner, because our existence
is a given thing, by someone else, hence our reaction to this
existence. In the case of God, how can God be free? How can God
exercise His freedom, if His existence is not a given thing? He has
only one way to exercise it: affirmatively, positively. For God,
freedom is a one-way street; it is always affirmation. God cannot
say ‘no’. What would He say ‘no’ to? His freedom is
only
affirmative, and that’s why God’s freedom is expressed with His
Triadic existence. The Father’s freedom is expressed by saying
‘yes’ to the Son, the Son saying ‘yes’ to the Father. It is the
‘yes – yes’ that Paul says was brought to us by Christ (Corinthians
II, 1:19). You cannot say ‘no’ within the framework of the
freedom that is not provoked by given existence, nor is it given
‘from without’ (that framework). With God, nothing can be
given ‘from without’. Even His own self, His own existence, is not
the result of His essence. Consequently, not even His existence is
obligatory. He wouldn’t have been free otherwise. On the other
hand, if we were deprived of the ability to say ‘no’, we
would cease to be free. Seeing how existence for us is a given
fact, we must have the option of being able to say ‘no’ to
anything that is given to us ‘from without’. But to God, there is
no such option of choice; freedom is not exercised by God as a
choice; it is exercised voluntarily, and only as Love, in its
affirmative sense. Now, if you apply this to the human existence –
as a fulfillment by the image of God, or as that which was revealed
by Christ, or as it will be fulfilled eschatologically in the state
of theosis – you will see that even then, freedom is forever a
one-way street (as expounded by Saint Maximus extensively). It is
forever affirmative. Freedom is not the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’. It is
only the ‘yes’. The relative verse in Corinthians II is very
revealing. Paul says there: “Jesus Christ who is amongst you and is
preached by you, did not become ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but within Him was
the ‘yes’” (Corinthians II, 1:19). God’s ‘yes’ and Christ’s ‘yes’
is now the freedom of affirmation. It is from the Triadic dogma
that this aspect of existence called ‘freedom’ springs from – or
rather, is illuminated by. And how is it illuminated? By what
conclusion? The conclusion is that there is only one way to
exercise freedom to prove that you are free, and that is LOVE. The
positive kind; the affirmation towards another being, other than
yourself. To freely say that “I acknowledge that this exists for
me, and that it becomes a part of my existence.”
This is how the Trinity exists. The
Father freely consents that He wants to have a Son, and He has that
Son, freely. God exercises His freedom when the Father begets the
Son, also when He sends forth the Holy Spirit. And he exercises it
in one form alone: as LOVE, as an affirmative action, and not a
negative one. His negative freedom would have been His saying that
He doesn’t exist; He would deny Himself. But He would be saying
that, only if the essence preceded - and therefore defined – His
existence.
Thus, a way of existence is created for
man also, which is comprised of expressing, of exercising our
freedom affirmatively, as love, and not negatively. This is the
“likeness of God”. The image of God is fulfilled, precisely this
self-government of man, which has the ability to say ‘no’, but when
it says ‘yes’, it is exercising freedom in a divine manner. This is
how one also reaches those great connoisseurs of God and mankind as
well, who are none other than the monks, whose existence begins and
is supported by their eradication of their personal wills, and by
their ‘yes’ to the other person, and their Elder.
All the above are
revelations of Triadic Theology from the aspect of experience which
we spoke of in the first lessons. You see now, that God - whom we
theologians speak of dogmatically and have difficulty in making
sense out of all this – to a saint, it is just a very simple
experience. He most probably won’t be able to put everything in
words, the way that we do, but if you observe what I just told you,
when I analyzed the existential consequences of the Triadic dogma,
you will immediately see that a saint comprehends them
automatically; he experiences them.