Introduction by the Saker: Today I am starting a new feature of the Saker Blog – I will regularly publish various texts written by Russian philosophers and Orthodox Church Fathers. My goal here is to open a window, however small, in the real historical, social, political, spiritual, philosophical and cultural roots of what I often refer to as the “Russian civilizational realm”. I am very fortunate to have been contacted by Edvin Buday who has offered his superb translation skills to this blog and who also shares my fascination with this “other” world which is geographically so close to the West but which might as well be located on a different planet. I want to clarify here that this is in no way a substitute to the History of the Orthodox People project, but a complementary feature which, I hope, will present a much more down to earth view of a much misunderstood, and often misrepresented, civilization. Since any text is, by definition, a statement I have decided to include the “Russian civilizational realm series” in the “Speeches, Statements and Interviews” section of the blog.
The Saker
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Ivan Ilyin on contemplative love
Translated from the Russian by Edvin Buday
Ivan Ilin on a painting by Mikhail Nesterov
Ivan Ilyin (1883, Moscow – 1953, Zollikon, Switzerland) was an outstanding Russian political and religious philosopher, publicist, and supporter of the White Movement and monarchy in Russian. He received a degree in jurisprudence in 1906 and began work as a scholar at the University of Moscow in 1909, where he read courses on philosophy and law. Although initially enthusiastic of the revolutions sweeping Russia, his opinion changed after witnessing the brutalities of the October Revolution, and in 1922 he was forced to emigrate on a Philosophers’ ship. He edited the journal Русский колокол and became one of the founders of Russian philosophy in exile. After a four-year persecution by the Nazi government, he was able to travel to Switzerland in 1938, where he would spend the rest of his life working for the Russian cause. In 2009, his body was repatriated and reinterred at the Donskoy Monastery, where Ilyin had wished to be buried.
The text below is a chapter from Ilyin’s most personal and spiritual work, The Singing Heart (Поющее сердце), which was first published in 1958 by Ilyin’s widow in München. It is a spiritual, theological, in some cases political, and biographical work which is deeply influenced by the Orthodox and Russian spirits, and in a certain sense, can be considered one of the hidden masterpieces of Russian spiritual prose. The chapter is a response to a letter from Ilyin’s son on questions as diverse as love, creativity, and a solution to the spiritual crisis of the Western world, no mean feat for such a short text and speaks of the author’s skill and mastery of his craft.
Without love (from a letter to his son)
So, you think that it is possible to live without love if by way of a strong will, a just cause, justice, and furious battle against wrongdoers? You write me: “Better not to speak of love: there isn’t any in people. Better, too, not to call forth love: who will awaken it in hard hearts?”
My dear! You are both correct and incorrect. Please collect your impatient patience and penetrate my thoughts.
Man cannot live without love, because love itself wakes up within him and rules him. And this has been given to us by God and nature. We are not supposed to arbitrarily control our inner world, remove some sincere feelings, replace them with others and implant new ones that aren’t our own. We can raise ourselves, but we cannot break ourselves down and build something new according to our own design. Look how the life of man flows by. A child turns to its mother with demands, expectation, hope, pleasure, comfort, mollification, and gratefulness. And once all this crystallises in primal and most tender love, then its personal fate is sealed. The child looks for its father, expects a greeting from him, expects help, defence, and leadership, relishes his love and loves him back in turn. It is proud of him, imitates him, and feels its father’s blood within itself. This voice of the blood speaks within it for its whole life, links it to its brothers, sisters, and its entire line. And when it later flares up with mature love for ‘her’ (or, correspondingly, for ‘him’), the task is to turn this ‘awakening of nature’ into a long ‘visit of God’ and accept it as one accepts one’s fate. And is it not natural for him to love his children with the same love that he waited for from his parents in his young dreams? How can one do without love? What can it be replaced with? What can fill the terrifying void that forms when it is absent?
Man cannot live without love, and this is why it is the main selective force in life. Life resembles an enormous stream that is boundless on all sides, which crashes down onto us and carries us with it. Not everything that it carries may live; one should not surrender oneself to that whirling chaos of substance. The man who tries to do that will lose and ruin himself: he will not escape, because he will die in the mixing of all. One must choose: refuse a great many things for relatively little, and this little must be attracted, safeguarded, valued, collected, grown, and be perfected. This is what personality must be built with. The selective force is love: it ‘favours’, ‘accepts’, values, safeguards, keeps, covets, and is loyal. Will is but the tool of love in this making of life. Will without love is empty, harsh, hard, violent, and, what is most important, blind to good and evil. It will quickly transform life into penal discipline under the command of vicious men. The world already has a whole series of organisations built on such principles. May the Lord guard us from them and their influence… No, we cannot do without love: it is a great gift to see the better, choose it, and live by it. It is the necessary and valuable ability to say ‘yes’, to accept and begin selfless service. How horrible is the life of a man who has been separated from this gift! What a void[1], what depravity his life turns into!
A man can’t live without love and this is why it is the main creative force of the human being.
For human creativity does not appear out of nothingness and does not flow in a random combination of elements, as many haughty men now think. No, one can only create by accepting the God-given world, by entering into it, by growing in its wondrous order, and merging with its mysterious paths and laws. And this require the entire force of love, the entire gift of artistic transformation that is released to man. Man does not create out of nothing: he creates out of what has already been created, out of that which exists, creating the new in the bounds of the reality that has been given to him out of the external-material and the internal-spiritual. The creating man must internalise the depth of the world and sing from it by himself. He must learn to contemplate with his heart, see with love, leave his small personal shell for the bright reaches of the divine, find his Great (affined) co-possession[2] in them, feel it and create the new from the old and the unseen from the eternal. This is how things are in all main areas of human creativity: in all arts and in science, in prayer and the just life, in the interaction between people and in all of culture. Culture without love is a dead, doomed, and hopeless affair. All the great and genius creations of man were created out of the contemplative and singing heart.
Man cannot live without love, because the most important and valuable things in his life reveal themselves to the heart. Only contemplative love reveals someone else’s soul to us for loyal, heartfelt communion, to mutual understanding, to friendship, to marriage, to childrearing. All this is inaccessible to heartless men. Only contemplative love reveals a man’s homeland to him, i.e. his spiritual link to his native people, his national loyalty, his spiritual and inner womb [3]. To have a homeland is a happiness, and one can have it only through love. It is not for nothing that the men of hate, the modern revolutionaries, are internationalists: by being dead to love, they are separated from their homeland. Only contemplative love opens the way to religiousness and God to man. Do not be surprised, my dear, by the unbelief and faithlessness of the Western peoples: they took an incorrect act of faith from the Roman Church which begins from the will and ends with rational thought and, having taken it, disdained their hearts and lost the art of contemplation. This is what predetermined the religious crisis that they are suffering through today.
You dream of a strong will. This is good and necessary. But the will is terrifying and destructive if it does not grow from a contemplative heart. You want to serve a just cause. This is right and excellent. But how will you see your goal if not by contemplation of the heart? How will you recognise it if not by the conscience of your heart? How will you see its rightness if not through love? You want justice, and we should all look for it. But it demands artificial individualisation in our perception of people from us, and only love is capable of truly perceiving people. Furious battle against wrongdoers is necessary and a lack of aptitude for it can make a man into a sentimental traitor. But this anger should be born from love, it should be its embodiment, in order to find justification and boundaries for it… This is why I said that you are “right and wrong”. And there is something else: I understand your sentence about “better not to speak of love”. This is true: love must be lived, and not be spoken of. But look here: open and insane propaganda of hatred has been spread through the world; a persistent and ruthless hunt for love has begun in the world: a crusade against the family, a denial of the homeland, the suppression of faith and religion. The practical heartlessness of some has grown into a pure sermon of hatred of others. Crudeness has found its apologists. Rage has become a doctrine. And this means that the time to speak of love and rise up in its defence has come.
Yes, there is not much love in people. They have excluded it from their cultural behaviour, from science, from faith, from art, from ethics, from politics, and from education. And, as a result, modern humanity has entered a spiritual crisis, unheard of in its depth and scope. If we see this and understand this, we must really ask ourselves: who will awaken love in harsh hearts if it has not awoken from the words of Christ, the Son of God? How could we do this with our small, human strength?
But this doubt quickly disappears, when we listen to the voice of our contemplative heart, which assures us that Christ is within us and with us…
No, my dear! We cannot do without love. Without it, we and our whole culture are doomed. Our hope and our salvation are within it. And how impatiently will I wait not for your letter with the confirmation of this.
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Translator’s notes:
[1]: The word used by Ilyin is пустыня, which more literally means ‘desert’. However, it derives from the stem пуст- (empty, emptiness), so I have taken the liberty of translating it here as ‘void’.
[2]: Ilyin coins a term here that can best be translated as ‘co-property’, ‘co-possession’.
[3]: Ilyin uses to words that both mean ‘spiritual’ (духовный and душевный), with the former having the connotation of ‘spiritual, religious’ and the latter of ‘pertaining to the soul, pertaining to feeling’. I have here opted for the translation ‘spiritual and internal’, as духовный can also be translated as ‘inner’.
Quite beautiful! I’m not sure many western theologians here in the United States, where there seems to be a church on every street corner as well as a bank, would understand it. Please excuse a little exaggeration for humor
mixed with some truth!
The only American theologian who understood the meaning and power of love I can think of right now was Martin Luther King.
Well, I know the one who definitely understood — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraphim_Rose
Thank you Saker for posting this, and I look forward to future translations about the “Russian civilizational realm”. This expansion of our knowledge and understanding is really enlightening and informative.
Hinematov umanayim, shevet achim gamyachat.
What he is talking about, constitutes the difference between heaven and hell on earth.
This is totally beautiful – thanks Saker and Edvin for this Beauty clothed in Truth – this Truth clothed in Beauty.
It would be nice to have a date when this was composed – I see he was alive between 1883 and 1953 – so he lived a long life – I wonder if he outlived his son ?
What he says at the end is true too – there’s a lovely small part of one of John’s Epistles – that says –
God is Love
Whoever abides in Love
Abides in God
And God in him.
Its also a hymn which I really love and it can be done to harmonies.
I have a request to the moderators – I was wondering if I could put this comment I wrote to Serbian Girl on the article from a couple of days ago – where she asked if Ron and Rand Paul had signed the Israeli First pledge that all campaigners for government positions in the US are asked to sign – I was wondering if I could put my answer on this thread so I could do my push to get the world changed – anyway here it is – I’ve also posted it on the thread that the question is asked on – but I would like to say that I doubt anyone would read it on that thread. so here it is.
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Hi Serbian Girl – about whether or not Ron and Rand Paul have taken the Israel First – oath-
I don’t know for sure if either of them have, I’m only guessing – but in reality – look at the struggle Cynthia is going through now because her integrity won’t allow her to take the pledge – so she has NO funds for campaigning.
Both the Pauls are in the government – Rand is actually a SENATOR – which is much higher up the food chain, that a congressman – which is all Ron Paul ever made it to –
Its actually amazing that Ron Paul is so famous – he’s very outspoken, as are some of the present congressmen today actually – like Tulsi Gabbard – and there’s others too – really GREAT people.
But do you know HOW HARD it is to get to the Senate ? And then the presidency is still like another planet away – and Rand Paul is ALMOST there – so people that find a tiny bit wrong with Rand are just being arm chair perfectionists – he’s ALMOST there – he should be supported – do you think – I don’t mean you Serbian girl – I mean the nit-pickers who don’t like Rand Paul because he’s ‘this and this’ and not ‘that and that’ –
Do these nit pickers think that just because they think that Tulsi Gabbard is better than Rand Paul that she’s going to WIN ?
I wonder if all and I mean ALL the people that read alternative media – would get off their high chairs – and vote for Rand Paul, because he’s the best positioned of any – AND he’s very against military intervention which truly is the most important issue of all – no one can deny that Rand Paul is against military intervention – he’s against every single military intervention and often he’s the only SENATOR who is –
If all of us were to vote for Rand Paul – hehe – I’m not even an American — so I’m speaking figuratively – if EVERYONE who is against military intervention – ignored the other nit picky problems with voting for Rand – my question is this —-
WOULD WE WIN ??
You might enjoy reading the book “The Ways and Power of Love” by Pitirim Sorokin.
The version about the same of “that man from Lebanon”.
http://www.katsandogz.com/onlove.html
I’ve heard it had also been made a song there
Beautiful and gloriously written like so much of the intelligent, inspiring and simply accurate analysis of the human condition found throughout the vast library of Russian literature. And what strikes me most clearly is that as with others who have expressed to me epiphanies and other happenings of a religious nature, their experiences are quite similar to my own experiences of falling in love…when I find all my senses gilded, starlight pours from my heart and flows out through my eyes and expressions to the world. I seek and find beauty in everything, even in my enemies, whom I look upon with a gorgeous softness and unwavering compassion, a current running through me of pure love and bliss….
I have no interest in naming this as God, or of any other religious totem, and yet feel no diametric opposition to those who do feel the need to seek some form of human proximity with a divine source of bliss. It is just semantics and pointless drivel to argue such points. yet my own stance, my own experience, is that the richest wine of life that can be drunk is of true romance, true love, Everything felt Truly and Fully, whether found with a Woman or found in the waves and the branches dancing in tune to the breeze and the blizzards…I find such glorious glee swimming naked in the ocean, bathing in hidden waterfalls in the wilderness.
My point is that I believe these sometimes fleeting periods of true bliss are not found solely by looking inwards, they are the appreciation and recognition and awareness of something precious, perhaps eternal, found Within, in perfect harmony with something of the same found Without. It is the connection between the two, a sensation of immense solidarity of something so much bigger than ourselves, of shared roots in something divine, universal.
If people need to seek this through religion, so be it. i could not care less of the path, the journey, it is the belief and seeking, ideally the achieving of a state, or even experience of true happiness which is where those of us privileged enough to embark, must aim our hearts, our minds, our souls.
And what is of equal essential understanding, is the duality of all things. The dark and the light. One can not be known without the other. Bliss and Agony. It is the giving, the striding through existence with a heart wide open, for only through giving our everything can we ever hope to experience life to the fullest. For good and ill.
It is not “just semantics and pointless drivel”.
Ivan Ilyn was a Christian (Orthodox) and he was speaking in a Christian Orthodox context. Clearly the ‘love’ of Ivan Ilyn is not that kind of cosmic orgasm similar to the orgasm resulted from coital activity (regardless of partner or lack of it) that all ‘feelgood’ seekers are after, but the Biblical love, “agape” (affection, good-will, love, benevolence, the love of men to men, especially of that love of Christians toward Christians which is enjoined and prompted by their religion, the love of men toward God, the love of God toward men, the love of Christ toward men; the agapae were the feasts expressing and fostering mutual love which used to be held by Christians before the celebration of the Lord’s supper, and at which the poorer Christians mingled with the wealthier and partook in common with the rest of food provided at the expense of the wealthy). Agapetos/oi, the term used by St. John, refers to: “the Beloved”, a title of the Messiah (Christ), as beloved beyond all others by the God who sent Him and of Christians, as beloved by God, Christ, and one another.
Ilyn had an interest to naming this as God (but no other religious totem, like the Rainbow ‘Love’).
Yes and only this uplifts the emotion to something eternal. How did Jesus say, don’t listen to your heart, it is a den of scorpoins and vipers. Divine love can come out of passionate love to a person but only after accepting god, the source of all that is (exists). I don’t love people for what they are but for what they can become and what they do, that’s different to animals, I love birds in the forests in a way I never could with people. Animals ARE unshaded creations of god their light is immediate and full, only little children are almost the same, animals, plants are what they are, but we, we are something very,very different we are the spirit in living progress to sanctify god’s magnificent creation beyound words by our will and desire for the becoming – a boundless desire to see more of god and become one.
‘God is Love’ because ‘Love is from God’.
“15 If ye love me, keep my commandments. 16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; 17 Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not… 21 He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. 22 Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? 23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. 24 He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me” (John 14:21-24).
“6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 12 No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. 13 Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. 15 Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. 16 And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 17 Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:6-17).
Worth noticing that the Bible never uses the term for passionate love of sexual nature ‘eros’, but constantly agape (even in the most ‘erotic’ of the Books, the Song of Songs). Even in Plato’s dialogues the noun erôs (“love”) and the verb erôtan (“to ask questions”) are explicitly connected.
Very well said, Ivan Illyin! And thanks for the beautiful translation, Edvin Buday.
“Man cannot live without love.”
Man can easily live without love. This is Nature’s survival program, hard-coded into all animal DNA. But – I just said it – without love man is a mere animal among animals, always on auto-pilot, always utterly unconscious, predictable, blind, groping in the dark.
Man is not prefabricated by nature – this is our yoke, our challenge, but also, our freedom, our grace, our glory – because manhood requires our total effort and courage to consciously transcend the sleeping state we have been born with.
Love is the gate to all that is beautiful, precious, sublime. Not any love will do. Motherly love, for example, is still too instinctual. It has to be unconditional love.
Love, prayer, gratefulness, surrender, trust – and the energy starts rising up the spine from the roots chakra, the sex chakra through the anahata, the heart chakra, ultimately to the sahasrar, the crown chakra, the thousand petaled lotus.
“Do not be surprised, my dear, by the unbelief and faithlessness of the Western peoples: they…lost the art of contemplation.”
The art of contemplation is impossible without a richly cultivated interior space. And the general directedness of this life is gnostic in orientation, or inside-out. The interior should inform the exterior world, not vice-versa. In America, the reverse has happened and has been happening for a long time.
I return to the atheist Sartre (of all people!) and his invaluable first impressions of America recorded for The Nation magazine when he visited in 1947. The stranger’s eyes, especially of one so incisive, are often invaluable for reasons even he may not intend and certainly in the context of this recitation from a Russian spiritual thinker of all people.
The essay in its entirety is available on-line here:
https://www.thenation.com/article/americans-and-their-myths/
“The system is a great external apparatus, an implacable machine which one might call the objective spirit of the United States and which over there they call Americanism-a huge complex of myths, values, recipes, slogans, figures, and rites. But one must not think that it has been deposited in the head of each American just as the God of Descartes deposited the first notions in the mind of man; one must not think that it is “refracted” into brains and hearts and at each instant determines affections or thoughts that exactly express it. Actually, it is something outside of the people, something presented to them; the most adroit propaganda does nothing else but present it to them continuously. It is not in them, they are in it; they struggle against it or they accept it, they stifle in it or go beyond it, they submit to it or reinvent it, they give themselves up to it or make furious efforts to escape from it; in any case it remains outside them, transcendent, because they are men and it is a thing.”
Sartre I think is really good here, though inadvertently. The American project of supplanting the interior voice with exterior slogans is the work of the Spirit of Antichrist. The implacable machine is the System of Babylon identified in some of its more notable parts as petrodollar recycling and the military industrial complex. Since 1947, that system has spilled over America’s borders into the world at large with a vengeance. As you would expect of a Spirit conducted by the Prince of This World, it is impervious to national borders and hardly needs an invitation to roost in Syria or anywhere else.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases/5564
For those expecting a well-earned pause or respite or perhaps acknowledgement of ‘a fair fight won’ in Syria, these human features are alien to the Beast. It is ‘implacable’ as Sartre noted. Relentless. Untiring. Unbowed by irony, decency or embarrassment.
“because we are men and it is a thing”
No rest for the wicked. Prepare for ISIS 2.
Another curious series of observations comes from Muslim Brotherhood founder Sayyid Qutb’s “The America I Have Seen.” (1951). It too is available on-line.
-FSD
https://fullspectrumdominoes.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/the-devils-still-here-and-hes-bringing-brimstone-back/
@FSD. You are in the heart of it, what great writing ! What still bothers me, is how, and to what extent that Babylon can or must be fighted against. If I want to conquer a Fort I myself must have a stronger one, or I will fail sooner or later, the weapon of ‘love’ cannot be used against it, only total pyhsical annhihlation without a trace would be an acceptable outcome. I’m really struggling over this question, are we to wait like lambs to be slaugthered or will IT crumble into itself in historical time with a humanity left over to progress further. Or will it just play out to the darkest, because there is not enough resistance ? These questions become pressing in the light of a horizon filled with technological tools to enforce their system down to the molecules (Genetics, Bio-Enhancements, IT/Artificial Intelligence)..
@FSD. Many thanks for that link to that Sartre essay. I read it at University in the early 50s and since then have often mused on it; but your introducing it in the context of Ivan Ilyin throws a whole new light on that famous “bottom line” materialism (sachlicheit, empiricism) of the US collective psyche: what Sartre calls its thing-like nature. It strikes me that Russian literature is much less permeated than is Western literature by that desolate cry from the height of 19th century materialism: “God is dead!”
Sorry, I meant to add the recently updated US military maps of the late Professor Jules Dufour. To use military parlance, where is the threat? The ‘threat’ is everywhere the Beast is not!
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases/5564
Sorry, but to add briefly to the extinction of contemplation in the American mind…
the swapping-out of organically generated thought by media content has occurred to such an extent that when the average American ‘shares his thinking’, one hears the unleavened media tropes of MSNBC or Fox News spilling forth. You can practically identify their preferred media outlet by their mode of discussion.
The feeling one gets of a thought ‘rising in one’s mind’ has been obliterated. Thinking has become memorization, regurgitation and recitation. This is a HUGE and very eerie phenomenon. Sartre’s implacable machine has gained permanent entry into the American mind where it precedes to mimic the workings of that mind like a cunning parasite.
Paraphrasing Heidegger: ‘the most thought-provoking phenomenon of the modern era is how few people are really thinking.”
-FSD
Beautiful thoughts, written from a man with a great soul and spirit, large as Russia itself. Thanks saker for posting this !
Many thanks for opening this window into Russian Christianity. I do think our lives are today all lopsided because they have become so focused on external things. To add these passages to a website devoted to politics and international relations shows a keen foresight and sense for what is needed. Thank you, Saker!
On a related point, I am meeting more people in the US who seem aloof, emotionally disconnected. We have long ago outgrown the Cartesian rationalism and need a new model for understanding man and society– above all, a new model for articulating truths socially. Our social skills have plummeted dramatically since we threw out manners, customs, and rituals. We need to revisit the contemplative heart–Russian thinkers of spiritual depth, and the long-ago Desert Fathers — those wonderful denizens of the desert who left a great legacy for both East and West — for a Christianity before it was fissioned.
God bless.
Contemplative love… a prerequisite for a moral sense of purpose and the conduit to the source of spiritual authority.
I do not know Russian, and have only a cursory reading of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn; but from this extract by the Saker it would appear that Ilyin ranks among them. Interesting to find a him described somewhere as “Putin’s philosopher”; confirms my own independently formed opinion of Putin’s religious and ethical standards.
Agreed that Putin does appear to be linked contemplatively (spiritually) with moral purpose.
Excellent !poking forward to more.
Maybe a bit off topic, but there’s a question that’s been nagging me: I see often the assertion that “God is all love”.
Now, if so, where do the Fallen Angels come from? Anyone?
My humble twopence, if you allow me.
My understanding is that God is the true and exemplary father, unlike myself. He allows his son to make his own choice and pursue his course, but the son is properly informed about the consequences of each choice. And I also realised that God never punishes us for our sins – we do it ourselves, we just reap the consequences of our misdeeds/sins (the idea emerged from my linguistic observations – in Russian ‘sin” is cognate with ‘error’, ‘fault’, ‘fail’ грех – огрехи, погрешность).
An indeed, I can’t imagine Father punishing his son with mauling, burning, boiling in cauldrons and all the other stuff the church has been propagating as a pay-off for sinning. No. Father will look sadly as you make you way into sinful acts only for you to feel how it hurts on your own butt. Father will ultimately forgive once you repent your sins but you will have to bear the consequences for the rest of your life. Lest you forget.
Talking about Fallen Angels. The universe is made of a multitude of Conscious Entities, wallowing in their wrapped-up self-appreciation, and our God used to be one of those Entities until he spun out of control in his inspiration to collect the universal energies for Creating the world for his Son. There you go. The other Entities may be watchful and jealous and intruding. And powerful they are, for sure. As a working hypothesis of those nasty angels.
We should not allow ourselves to take such liberties with the very words of Christ.
We know that it is not the Father who judges, but the Son who shall “come again with glory, to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end”.
“31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats…41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels…46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment (εἰς κόλασιν αἰώνιον)*, but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:31-46).
*κόλασις, κολάσεως, ἡ (κολάζω), correction, punishment, penalty.
The world was not created by “God’ for his Son, but through his Son, who is the “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made”.
There is one sin that will not be forgiven: “anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”
“Talking about Fallen Angels. The universe is made of a multitude of Conscious Entities, wallowing in their wrapped-up self-appreciation, and our God used to be one of those Entities until he spun out of control in his inspiration to collect the universal energies for Creating the world for his Son. There you go. The other Entities may be watchful and jealous and intruding. And powerful they are, for sure. As a working hypothesis of those nasty angels.”
There’s real poetry in this, Val.
You could almost be suggesting God was the first rebelling (Lucifearian) entity who broke from the status quo. I don’t think you are though. But I like your God for His sheer initiative.
I’ve been kicking around Physics’ E8 Lattice theory for its theological operability. I read somewhere that the most popular follow-on career for departing physicists is theology. It may not be true but it should be. What;s string theory but angels dancing on the head of a CERN collider?
https://fullspectrumdominoes.wordpress.com/2018/01/14/1933/
–FSD
Thank you Saker :)
I pray that the world awakens to The Doctrine of Incarnation. Imagine what a world! What a universe we would all live in :)
One of the best expositions of love and its crucial significance for life.