Translated from L’Amour Fou de Dieu by Paul Evdokimov
Éditions du Seuil, 1973
Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970) was a Russian Orthodox theologian and writer who emigrated to France after the Russian Revolution. He was born in St. Petersburg and was influenced by the Russian spiritual revival of the early 20th century. After leaving Russia, he studied at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, where he later became a professor. He was notably influenced by the Russian religious philosophers of the early 20th century, including Nicolas Berdyaev, and carried forward aspects of the spiritual and intellectual tradition that had flourished in pre-Revolutionary Russia. His work bridges Russian Orthodox spirituality with Western thought, particularly engaging with contemporary existentialist philosophers. Evdokimov wrote extensively on Orthodox spirituality, the role of women in the Church, and the prophetic dimension of Christian life.
The following text demonstrates his skill in translating the Orthodox understanding of spiritual authority and freedom into terms that engage with modern philosophical preoccupations, while remaining faithful to Patristic theology. He maintains the depth of Orthodox tradition, while making it accessible and relevant to modern intellectual concerns.
LIBERTY, THE CENTRAL MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE
Today we observe a certain unease regarding the problem of authority, one that cannot be reduced merely to the abuse called “authoritarianism.” Throughout history, there has been frequent confusion between obedience to God and obedience to a purely human will. The current crisis is not simply a demand for better adjustment of reciprocal relationships; it goes much deeper, and concerns the legitimacy of justifying Church authority through an appeal to the obedience of faith. We know of the violent reaction of prophets, martyrs and saints against abuses of theocratic power. Saint Paul continuously exhorts us not to lose Christian freedom, not to extinguish or grieve the Holy Spirit through blind obedience.
Now, it is undeniable that for today’s individual, this is not just about the Church alone; secularized humanity perceives God as the enemy of freedom. In Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, it is the relationship between Master and slave; in Freud, it is the symbol of the “sadistic Father” that provokes the “murder of the Father”; in Nietzsche, God is “the celestial Spy” whose gaze disturbs me, transforms me into a thing. The common idea of divine omnipotence and omniscience reduces history to a puppet show. As one philosopher said: “The drama is written to its final act and no actor is given the power to change anything whatsoever.” In this terrible determinism, God alone is free and thus appears solely responsible for the existence of evil. This is what Proudhon affirms in saying: “God is evil.” “If God exists, I am not free; I am free, therefore God does not exist,” states the atheistic syllogism through the mouth of the anarchist Bakunin and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Without justifying it, one can understand this reaction, for the idea of God has undergone a frightening deviation in history. The terrible Judge of the Old Testament sacrifices his Son to appease his anger; he is all-powerful and manifests himself in prodigies and miracles, he is omniscient, he foresees and orchestrates the whole of existence through his “providential” interventions in history. Yet, according to Shakespeare, history in appearance is “a tale told by an idiot.”
THE CONFLICT
In the West, within the Church, the situation is complicated by the repercussions of man’s idea of God in various theologies, which provokes internal conflicts. At the two extremes, we find, on one side, the formalist conformism of the integrists and, on the other side, the excessive taste for anarchic contestation among progressives. In the progressive Christian milieu, we no longer preach the Gospel, but rather a theology of revolution and violence. Instead of “taking heaven by force,” the only violence that Christ speaks of (“The Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” [Mt 11:12]), violence is directed against the structures of consumer society, against capitalism as an economic system. Certainly, the Gospel demands “justice” in human relationships and in the building of human society, but this demand is articulated in the context of a “hierarchy of values” whose summit is sacrificial love. The ideal of a comfortable, hygienic, easy, abundant life is not envisaged by the Gospel. Between eliminating the famine and glaring injustice of the Third World, and a self-centered bourgeois and comfortable life, there is an abyss. It’s not about measuring and limiting comfort; it’s about opening the city to God’s presence, to the miracle of his Incarnation whose goal is not simply a “happy” person but a “blessed” person, matured in the sun of the Beatitudes even if persecuted and martyred: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Everything is subordinate to the Kingdom, not to the merely natural exploitation of the earth, nor especially to a quiet settling down in history, but to their transfiguration into the “new earth” — there is no transfer, no escape into the beyond, but a change of objective: the surpassing of penultimate values toward the final and ultimate values.
Intelligent faith is an adult act and not that of a child. The Church is constituted by the second birth of the Spirit and not by the first birth of humans. Only a Church recruited by that first birth would lend an ear to certain aspects of the “new theology” and thus fall into religious infantilism.
The wearisome opposition between “faith” and “religion,” advocated by the theology of secularization and the “death of God,” wipes clean the slate of Tradition in all its positive aspects, in its doctrine of the deification of man and in its emphasis on the “new creature.” This new creature is made new through Christ’s death and resurrection, which changed the ontological conditions of human existence. One wonders if, comparing these two sides, we are dealing with the same God, the same Gospel, the same mystery of Christ the suffering Servant. A dangerous Marxization of Christian consciousness is occurring, posing an alternative: fidelity to God’s Word and the desires of His will, or fidelity to human desires which inaugurates a left-wing millenarianism that is much more rooted in the Old Testament than in the New. It is symptomatic that the currents of a new ideology claim to follow the profound thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet this Lutheran theologian, admirable in certain ways, notes at the tragic and premature end of his life: “I have increasingly noticed to what extent everything I think and feel is inspired by the Old Testament, which I have read more these last months than the New...”1
Progressive currents engage in political, economic and social struggle, drawing inspiration precisely from the prophets of the Old Testament and making a permanent contestation the myth of revolutionary and violent action. Yet the only true revolution can come only from evangelical metanoia centered on the man of the Eighth Day, for whom “all things are new” because “Christ has placed upon all things the sign of his Cross.”
Without forgetting the demands of justice, the organization of human society in Isaiah (40—53) is subordinate to the vision of the Suffering Servant and God’s presence among men. The world as it is is radically contested in the Gospel, the capitalist world as well as the Marxist world, in the name of what lies beyond this same world. Man works here below and builds history through the earthly path and all its values, not for an immanent ideal city, but for a “new earth,” a new city of God’s Kingdom. Man’s strategy must participate in God’s strategy. In this transcendent strategy, the Gospel promises no material success; indeed, each epoch in history ends in failure, but these failures are great successes because they de-center history and lead it outside its frameworks toward the beyond of its own transfiguration. It is Christ who contests this world and that is why Pentecost unleashes its saving energies. Christ contests death through his death and descends into hell to emerge from it as if from “a bridal chamber”; he contests his executioners to offer them pardon and resurrection. He offers to all not an opulent life, but divine sonship and immortality that begins here below.
All acts of justice and social renewal have no absolute value in themselves; they are true only in Christ in whom they witness to the Father’s love. They are destined, even here below, to find their eternal dimension: God’s today within mankind’s today, which appears only at the moment of their transcendence toward the “wholly Other.” Yet, the proclamation of the “death of God” opens the way to violence that seeks to appropriate God’s love according to human views and declares that it would be accessible only through politics and by way of one’s neighbor. The direct relationship with God is called into question; prayer and contemplation are rendered useless, because it is in violent revolution, conditioned by it, that the relationship with God would become accessible again — it is through politics that God would be resurrected!
Faced with this aberration, we must say with the Fathers that love as the “sacrament of the brother” means welcoming the other through, in, and with Christ present in my soul, who alone enables us to recognize one another as “brothers.” Theologies of violence lack evangelical roots, failing to recognize that Christ calls for the transcendence of conflicting passions. If drastic measures are required in a concrete case, one must have the lucid awareness that they always risk unleashing demonic powers.
THE PARADOXICAL ATTITUDE OF GOD ACCORDING TO THE FATHERS
The Church Fathers advocate a negative approach to the mystery of God, warning about the danger of anthropomorphism inherent in notions of power and omniscience. They say these categories do not apply to God; He is “wholly Other,” the “mysterious one,” the “eternally sought.” Indeed, the Trinitarian dogma shows that the Father is Father only because he renounces all superiority in relation to His Son and to the Holy Spirit. In equal dignity, He gives them all that He has, all that He is. According to Saint John Damascene, the Three unite not to merge but to contain one another reciprocally. Each divine Person establishes itself by establishing the others, by containing the others, by receiving everything from the others, by offering everything to the others in an eternal circulation of Trinitarian love, such that divine freedom identifies with love.
The creation of man (“Let us make him in our image”) places him in an intimate relationship with the Trinitarian mystery, within its sacrificial love. This creation, the Trinity’s masterpiece, implies a certain risk taken by God through a free and self-offering limitation of his omnipotence. God created man and awaits from him a free response, his free love: “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). This is why God “withdraws,” leaving to man the pastures of his own heart, the space of his own freedom, for “God can do everything except compel man to love Him,” as the Patristic adage says. It is because He wants to establish a free reciprocity with man that God in some way becomes vulnerable and “weak.” He abdicates His omnipotence, he shares with man the bread of suffering while wanting to share with him the wine of joy. But this divine “weakness” is the summit of his omnipotence, which brings forth not a passive reflection, a submissive puppet, but a “new creature,” free in the image of divine freedom — that is to say, without limits, capable of loving God for himself because also capable of refusing and saying “no.” This is why God does not manifest himself in storm and thunder, but in the gentle breeze, pure interiority, the almost secret waiting of a friend (1 Kings 19:11-13). According to the great mystics, God is a divine beggar of love who waits at the door of the heart: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears me and opens the door, I will come in and sup with him...” (Rev 3:20). God, says Saint Maximus, has made himself a beggar because of his beggarly condescension toward us, suffering until the end of time, according to the measure of each one’s suffering.
A tyrant’s orders always provoke a silent resistance. In contrast, the Bible emphasizes and multiplies calls and invitations: “Hear, O Israel” (Deut 6:4), “If you want to be perfect...” (Mt 19:21). “The king sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding” (Mt 22:3). God is the King who issues His call and who waits “in suffering” for the free response of His child. God’s authority is not an order imposed from above; it is God’s secret action, not upon man, but within him. God is “more intimate to ourselves than we ourselves,” says Saint Augustine, for he is infinitely beyond all that we can imagine of him. “I am who I am,” the Incomparable, the Unseizeable. His authority is to be the radiating truth of love, an evidence that can neither be proven nor demonstrated, but that one receives by saying with Thomas: ‘My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).
The prophets never substitute themselves for God, but transmit His word; likewise the Apostles are ministers because they are servants. “Do not have yourselves called Rabbi... call no one on earth Father... do not have yourselves called Teacher” (Mt 23:8-10). The only Master is Christ, the Son who translates the Father’s love and serves mankind’s divine sonship. To the “Suffering Servant,” to “Jesus the Child,” the Gospel nowhere applies juridical terms of authority. So it is with conjugal obedience; where authentic love reigns, the relationship between spouses exists in a register where obedience becomes reciprocal truth lived and open to Christ’s presence. The Church follows the Lord’s example; it is only a servant of the truth, so as not to create a screen between people and the Gospel, between children and their Father. In this way behaved the great spiritual masters in their total self-effacement, making of their “spiritual sons” not their own children, but free and adult children of God himself.
“Whoever listens to you listens to me” (Lk 10:16); if one emphasizes “listens to you,” this becomes the juridical conception of authorities and the delegation of powers from the sovereign legislator. Yet God’s only will is to unite with man through free love. Opposing the pyramidal conception of the Church with cascading delegations of hierarchical power is the concentric figure of the circle with radiating Love at the center and rays that draw closer to each other as they move toward the divine center. It is not about questioning the Church’s authority as the place of the Word and divine Presence; it is about not confusing the divine with ministries and human functions in the Church.
AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM IN THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
In the West, since the Reformation, the problem has been framed in terms of reconciling authority and freedom, with varying emphasis on one or the other of these two realities of church life. It is fundamentally a question of balance: what is the reciprocal role of each? In Rome, the question is: how much freedom can be granted to the people while preserving the clergy’s order and authority? Protestantism emphasizes freedom and asks how much authority can be legitimized while preserving every believer’s freedom. We can clearly see that this conflict establishes authority and freedom as correlative principles where freedom is defined in relation to its limit, which is authority, and authority is defined in relation to the freedom it must limit. Depending on the era, this boundary shifts in one direction or the other.
In anarchist movements, the boundary shifts to the point of no longer delimiting anything — it becomes the basic demand for a radical freedom that eliminates all constraint. Taken to its logical conclusion, freedom by its nature cannot remain “moderate” with a little more or a little less; it’s all or nothing. Sooner or later, the shadow of Nietzsche’s superman emerges, Feuerbach proclaims liberation from all alienation, and finally Dostoevsky takes stock and identifies the ultimate truth of revolutionary arbitrariness: “Freedom or death.” The circle is complete and the conflict has no resolution, for the principle of balance makes the terms external to each other; it externalizes them and sets them in opposition, which immediately loses the depth of internalization that alone could provide a solution. The external correlation of these two terms, their objectification, is explosive. Throughout history, freedom undermines authority, while authority chains freedom under the hypocritical pretext of inviting people to freely do what authority dictates. Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” violently rebels against formal logic and declares: “What if we send all this ‘two plus two equals four’ to the devil!” We know well what this means in concrete terms.
Before addressing the problem from within, it would be useful to recall some classical definitions. According to the dictionary, authority is the power to be obeyed, to impose oneself and to command. Authority, legitimate or not, is invasive; it does not easily resign itself to not being all-powerful. If it uses its power and know-how to subordinate others to its particular ends, it becomes enslaving. The philosopher Alain [Émile-Auguste Chartier] radically distinguishes authority from power, reversing the terms and warning: “If authority pretends to love, it is odious, and if it truly loves, it is powerless.” Karl Jaspers explains it through a penetrating analysis: “The notion of authority comes to us from Roman thought. Auctor is one who sustains something and develops it, one who makes it grow. Auctoritas, according to etymology, is the force that serves to sustain and increase,” which watches over not defense, but growth. We can clearly see that it’s not about making people obey, but making them flourish. Lafay specifies: “Authority differs from power. One inspires a feeling of respect and veneration, the other a feeling of fear. Authority relates to dignity, power to force.” But it is Father Laberthonnière who goes the furthest: “Authority that subordinates itself in a sense to those who are subject to it, and which, binding its fate to their fate, pursues with them a common end: that is liberating.” In this case, authority is the guardian of freedom, it is its guarantee. As Monsignor Dupanloup says: “Any authority that does not have devotion as its principle is not worthy of this great name.” This devotion is designated in Scripture by the term diakonia. “Authority,” says Father Laberthonnière again, “which is conceived solely as a power imposing itself through constraint or skillful manipulation, finds itself, by its very essence, irremediably external and foreign to the one over whom it is exercised... But it can take on another character and even an absolutely opposite character,” and this would be the interior character. In the Gospel according to St Luke (9:54 ff): “His disciples said: ‘Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to consume them?’ But Jesus rebuked them: ‘You do not know what spirit you are of.’” Father Laberthonnière, very close to Eastern Christianity, expresses well his principle of internalized authority which completely changes its nature.
THE EASTERN TRADITION
St Paul demonstrates in Christianity the charter of freedom of the human spirit. The maximalism of the Gospel eliminates all the moderation of a carefully weighed and balanced middle ground. “God doesn’t ask so much...” says the common sense of an honest man, yet God asks for everything and even more.
The Desert Fathers posed no theoretical problems; they simply lived an unlimited freedom. Their example always teaches the same internalization: every person finds the same space of interior freedom by placing themselves before the Face of God. This was already Epictetus’ experience, it is St Paul’s teaching — even a slave is internally, royally free. It is in God that such freedom finds not a limit, for the Unlimited can never become a limit, but its unique source that quenches its thirst and establishes itself as the object and content of freedom beyond all constraint. Man must submit to God’s will but he must not submit purely and simply. God desires the fulfillment of His will, and does not desire that man be a slave, but that he be the free son and friend of Christ.
The classical definition of freedom sees it as the faculty to choose. St Maximus the Confessor affirms just the opposite: the need to choose, he says, is a poverty, a consequence of the Fall. True freedom is a total impulse oriented entirely toward the Good and knows no questioning or hesitation. At the level of sainthood, choice ceases to condition freedom. The perfect one follows the Good immediately, spontaneously, beyond all option. In this highest form, freedom is an activity that produces its own reasons, rather than being subject to them. It rises to the level where the freest acts are the most perfect. God does not choose. In His image, a saint’s action transcends all preference. To hesitate and choose, to seek authority and its directives, is characteristic of a will divided by contradictory desires that constantly clash with each other. Perfection lies in the simplicity of a convergence that is supernaturally co-natural with the divine will. It can only be attained by transcending all externalization of relationships.
AUTHORITY IS THE TRUTH THAT LIBERATES
If one follows the false dialectic (here, it’s the power of the Episcopate, and there, it’s the freedom of the People of God), everything becomes deformed, objectified, and distorted by the extreme concern for calculation. We have already seen that authority conceived as an external value changes its nature. On the contrary, when internalized, it appears as one of the most paradoxical values: it is the authority that denies being authority, denies being power of constraint and rises to a level where it identifies with Truth. The Eastern tradition affirms: the Church is not an authority, just as God is not an authority, nor is the Christ of the Gospels, for authority is always something external to us. Not the authority that chains, but the Truth that liberates.
Any balance modeled on political blocs poses freedom as choice. Here, man is free before choosing; as soon as the choice is made, he is no longer free. He has chosen a principle that he erects into an authority to which he submits. We are facing a paradox: freedom is a choice that limits it and ultimately eliminates it.
But the Gospel manifestly speaks of an entirely different situation. It calls us to know and therefore to choose its object, the Truth, and it is this Truth that liberates and makes truly free. This means that any opposition between authority and freedom exists on an extra-ecclesial level where the victory of one or the other does not liberate in the sense of the Lord’s word. Scholastic theology is always tempted by its own measurements: a bishop has a full measure, a priest a little less, and a layman even less; here grace is present, there it is absent. But the Spirit blows where it will, and who can measure it? We know its presence, but we are ignorant of its absences, which may even be nonexistent.
One of the oldest symbols of faith confesses: “And in the Holy Spirit the Church”; this mysterious identification means: to believe in the Church, in its superabundance of “grace upon grace” without measure. “The law (authority) was given through Moses; grace and truth (freedom) came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17): “God gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). The thirst for true freedom is the thirst for the Holy Spirit who liberates without measure. Simone Weil speaks well of this thirst: “To call upon the Spirit purely and simply; a call, a cry. As when one is at the limit of thirst, when one is sick with thirst, one no longer imagines the act of drinking in relation to oneself, nor even in general the act of drinking. One imagines only water, water taken in itself; but this image of water is like a cry of one’s whole being...” To this thirst responds the Church lived as continued Pentecost, the perpetual superabundance: “Let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who desires receive freely the water of life” (Rev 22:17). This is the very essence of the Church: not authority but the source of superabundance, grace upon grace, freedom upon freedom, which eliminates all “objectification,” all conflict, all slavish trembling.
The Fall was precisely the perversion of the internal relationships established by God. But before that, it was the serpent who perverted the paradisiacal state by suggesting the false idea of a prohibition, thus of a law before the Fall. The serpent insinuates: “God said: You shall not eat from any tree in the Garden” (Gen 3:1). But God said just the opposite: “You may eat from every tree in the Garden” (Gen 2:16), albeit with different consequences. If Saint Paul says: “Everything is permitted, but not everything is beneficial” (1 Cor 6:12), the serpent would say: “Everything is forbidden, but everything is useful”; thus God is transformed into law and prohibition. But God does not say: “Do not eat this fruit, or you will be punished”; He says: “Do not eat this fruit, or you will die.” This is not an order, it is the warning of a destiny freely chosen in one direction or another. It is not about simple disobedience, it is about inattention to living communion with the Father, the drying up of the thirst for His presence, of His truth-love which is life, for at the other pole lies death. At the moment of temptation, man represents God as an authority who dictates orders and demands blind obedience. This suggestion comes from Satan, from the first revolt against an objectified authority thus impoverished and perverted, for it ceases to be a truth that liberates. Man has “objectified” God and created a distance, an external space, and from then on he seeks darkness and hides, fabricating a prisoner’s existence. This is why Christ comes “to proclaim liberty to captives... to set free those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:19).
The impact of original sin is to transform God into external authority, into Law, and then logically, the next step is the transgression of God-as-Law, which places man outside of God. The Incarnation was necessary for man to find himself once again within God. It was necessary for the “Child Jesus” to reveal the true face of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son where authority-justice is not on the father’s side, but on the elder son’s. The father only runs to meet his child.
“Let the dead bury their dead” means to bury dead authority and dead freedom, both equally perverted. “You know that the rulers of nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant” (Matt 20:25-26). St John the Baptist is “the greatest among men” because he is “the least” (Mt 11:11). St Paul’s words (2 Cor 1:24): “We are not masters over your faith, but servants of your joy,” magnificently define episcopal “authority” in the East.
In the New Covenant, the “new commandment” replaces Mosaic Law and establishes a reciprocal relationship: “Whoever loves me... I will love them.” The messianic authority of Jesus is the power to forgive sins and to heal, to save. Everything is internalized, the Law and prophets are reduced to the commandment of love. The authority conferred on the Twelve and their successors is placed within the community and never above it. The identification between the Church and Christ, the Body and the Head, makes impossible any human authority over the People of God, which would be human authority over Christ. The episcopate, since Irenaeus, is not a power over the Church, but the expression of its nature; its sacramental identity and its charism of truth are not a personal infallibility, but that of the local Church, identical to the Church in its totality.
Since Pentecost, the Church is led by the Holy Spirit and the Apostolic council of Jerusalem, without referring to Christ’s word, formulated its own principle of life: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28).
However, in the Church, “everything is according to order,” and the bishop is responsible for correct teaching and pastoral direction of the community. Universal consensus is the sign of truth in matters of faith, for the only supreme authority within the Body is the Holy Spirit. The birth of the “new creature” liberates and reveals in the Church the place of “the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).
Current skepticism opposes external authority and seeks the internal principle, sensing the mystery of the Church which is not authority, but Spirit of Truth.
The knowledge of Truth that liberates is not that of truth about God, but the knowledge of the Truth who is God, the celebration of encounter as St Symeon so well says: “I thank You that without confusion, without separation, You have made Yourself one spirit with me.”2 The divine fire makes Creator and creature inseparable, eliminates all distance, all objectification and externalization of authority. In Sartre, it is the thirst for formal freedom that dominates, but this freedom is empty, without object; in Simone Weil’s words it is the object, the content that dominates: the water of life, the Holy Spirit given without measure.
St Peter’s discourse on the day of Pentecost cites the prophecy of Joel: “In the last days, says God, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young people will see visions and your elderly will dream dreams"“ (Acts 2:17). The descent of the Holy Spirit means that the last times have already been qualitatively inaugurated and that the gifts of the Spirit are beginning to pour forth, though a bit “helter-skelter” for the moment. After Vatican II, the movements that flow from it show a dynamism that moves the Body. Often an awkward groping, but one that is a positive search, through the deviations of the past, for a true relationship between the different parts of a single People of God; the bishops and laity all together and on the same basis are servants in the image of the Lord. The Holy Spirit can arouse impatience and thirst, loyal searching, and use these for the advancement of the Kingdom.
In his adolescent memories (The Words), Sartre speaks a profound word: “I was waiting for the Creator (Father); they served me a Great Boss.” The Church must be attentive to this expectation, this searching, and respond to it. Through this response, one will see in a bishop not a chief, a boss, a power of constraint, but the image of the Father, and in a person thirsting for freedom, the Prodigal Son who seeks not authority, but the Father’s heart. It is the joy and freedom of God’s children who find in the Church, beyond rules and functions, the Holy Spirit.
Internalized obedience to God contemplates what the liturgy sings: “Only One is Holy, only One is Lord: Jesus Christ.” This is the only Lordship revealed by God himself and it is that of Christ who knocks at the door of the human heart (Rev 3:20). Alongside Christ stands the Pentecostal Lordship of the Holy Spirit, with its breaths of freedom, awaiting the Lordship of the Father in the Kingdom — but can one call Lordship authority? That would be absurd. The Kingdom is the Lordship of the Trinity which includes in the sacred circle of the eternal circulation of love all people, finally totally liberated by unfading Truth and Joy. The Church, like St John the Baptist, must “decrease” to reveal only the presence of Christ — Spouse and Bridegroom — who already offers Eucharistic communion as a nuptial communion with every human soul.
D. Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Submission, ed. Labor et Fides, Geneva, 1967, p. 76
St Syméon, Hymnes, I, Paris, 1969, p. 153