From Dumitru Stăniloae, Ortodoxie și românism. Sibiu: Editura (Tipografia) Arhidiecezană, 1939.
Christianity addresses the person. It does not address the nation, for there is no hypostatic, self-subsisting consciousness of a nation. Yet human persons are not abstract units stripped of all determinants and therefore entirely identical. From any given person one can, of course, set aside certain determinants as accidental and superficial. But there is a series of characteristics of which a person cannot be divested, even if we were to penetrate to the very last kernel, to what we call that person’s “I.” Not only a person’s body, ideas, feelings, and experiences bear certain characteristics, but so does the “I” itself, that ontological center which is given from the outset of the formation and organization of a personal content of life — its immanence — and which, from transcendence, governs this whole process. The “I” is not simply a hypostatic entity endowed with the power necessary to constitute a human organism and with a lantern by whose light it sees itself and its content of life. If these ultimate centers of human persons were neutral in every other respect — being completely identical to one another — and if all the determinations that so greatly distinguish one person from another arose only from external influences, from the circumstances in which different persons live, we would not understand why brothers born of the same parents (they may even be twins), receiving the same education, living (for example, in a village) the same life, are nevertheless enormously different from one another despite all their closeness.
The opinion is very common that, in the last analysis, differences among personal “I”s also reduce to external life-circumstances, though not to the circumstances in which the persons themselves live, but to those in which their forebears lived. The experiences of their ancestors — their history — have passed, over generations, from the surface of the soul gradually down into its ontological depths, showing themselves in the descendants as determinants of their “I”s.
And if the descendants nevertheless differ so radically from one another in their personal centers, this is due to the mysterious caprices of the law of heredity, which makes one child resemble some remote ancestor, and another some collateral relative.
In the face of this opinion, we note first that precisely the mysterious caprice of the law of heredity proves that it alone cannot explain everything, for a natural law is characterized by unwavering constancy, by monotonous repetition. Why are two twins never identical? At least sometimes we ought to see identical twins.
That the history of forebears contributes something to the determination of their descendants’ “I”s is very plausible and, from the Christian point of view, admissible. The process of variation and development of the world is determined neither solely by God nor solely from immanence. A mysterious cooperation takes place even in the bringing to light of new human faces. All human faces have their eternal models in God — models that are not static ideas but forces that work at shaping their images in the created world, also engaging the immanent powers of the world. When the world has reached that point of development at which the appearance of a certain human face is foreseen, that face appears both as a result of immanent factors and as an effect of the working of the model-force from transcendence.
The immanent powers and circumstances bring only those determinants of the new “I” that exist in the divine image of that person from eternity. One can intuit, and even ascertain by an analytical mental process, this mysterious collaboration between the immanent process and something above it. A new human “I” cannot be produced solely by an immanent process. Yet that process has its rights up to a point.
Two twins are wholly distinct human faces from the moment of their birth—and even of their conception. Each of them can be explained up to a certain point by gathering a series of moments and features antecedent to him and bringing them into a kind of causal connection.
But neither of the two causal chains imposed itself of necessity by its own power; both were initially determined by a power that transcends natural causality. Life — even the life of all forebears together — is not sufficient by itself to explain the nature of the descendant persons. One ground for this is the fact that, according to Holy Scripture or to oriental cosmogonic legends, the children of the first human pair were just as different from their parents and from one another as are the children of today, when behind each newborn lie hundreds of generations. No human face is formed entirely by the past that precedes it, nor by its own history.
Each human being comes with an original a priori schema, determined only in part by the past, and within which he is to exercise creative freedom, filling it with one content or another. The hypostasis of every person comes from God, but it comes by passing through the medium of a past accumulated in earthly parents, and this passage is integrated into the act of his constitution according to the image he has in heaven.
The individualizing notes that the newly constituted “I” receives in the order of the world from the medium of history accumulated in the parents, viewed from our chronological perspective, seem to be added to other notes that it possessed beforehand.
In reality, the new “I” is constituted by a single, wholly simultaneous natural-divine act.
Therefore one cannot say that the notes with which the new “I” is endowed by the past preceding it are superficial, of a secondary order, and thus possibly to be shed by a person in order to return to a state of a priori purity and freedom from the influences of the past. We say only this: no “I” can be explained solely by the past that precedes it. In no case do we mean that the “I,” at the moment of its first appearance in immanence, would be in a state free of any trace of the past in whose medium it begins to bathe.
From the first moment of its existence, the “I” has also the notes given to it by the history of its forebears. Before having these notes — before its appearance in immanence — it does not even exist. There exists only the model-force which, until now, has prepared only the ground for launching it into existence, but has not yet succeeded in constituting it. And the model-force of each “I” virtually includes all its determinants, including those that the “I” receives through the mediation of the history that precedes it.
In this way, the national quality of the human “I” is not something accidental, superficial, a posteriori; it belongs to its essential destiny and is included among the determinants of its eternal image. The heavenly model of each person is the model of a concrete human being, specified historically.
What does the national quality consist in? Obviously not in a tri- or bi-colored flag; not in obstinate assertion of one’s nationality; not in what is called nationalism, which often includes an unsympathetic note. All these can be based on the national quality. The national quality is not a feeling, nor an extra spiritual organ, nor an added faculty of man. If it were so, one might speak, perhaps, of the possibility of canceling this “extra” that distinguishes different groups of people, in order to reduce them to the supposedly original uniformity. The national quality is not an accidental add-on to pure humanity. The national quality is humanity itself in a certain form. Just as any material element necessarily has a certain form, so humanity necessarily presents itself in a certain form determined from within and therefore intrinsic to it. A pure humanity undetermined by some particular form cannot be conceived. Even formlessness is a form. A humanity without some particular form is an abstraction with which only mathematical thought can work, not imaginative thought applied to the concrete.
The national quality does not sit in a corner of the soul; it does not constitute a separate piece in the spiritual-bodily organism of man. It does not stand alongside thinking — which is purely human — or alongside love — again purely human — or alongside joy and sadness — again purely human — as some distinct endowment. Rather, it is thinking, love, joy, sadness, action, conscience, all bearing a certain disposition, a certain vibration, a certain fragrance common to a group of people and not found in other groups. The charm of a certain flavor with which, for example, Romanian love is imbued does not make that love any less human. Nor is Romanian thought any less thought. Between the national and the human there is no antagonism. On the contrary, the more you deepen your human feelings, the more you penetrate into the core of your national quality. Humanity lies in the depths of your national nature. It is a notorious fact that imitators of foreign feelings and attitudes are less human, because they live more on the surface. A Romanian understands and loves people of another nation not by transcending his Romanian reality, by descending somewhere into a purely human substratum of his personality, but by remaining Romanian. When a Romanian feels pity for a Hungarian, in that pity he remains Romanian. And this is felt all the more, the stronger the pity is, the more the subject forgets that he is Romanian. Love for all people, whatever their nation, is not an “ana-national” love. A sentiment that is “ana-national” does not exist in its roots and its texture.
These are the premises Orthodoxy has in view when, answering the question about the relation between Christianity and the nation, it does not underrate the national factor.
It would be easy for us to show how the Orthodox answer flows from these premises and thus to end our article here. But since an important branch of Christianity — Catholicism — introduces into the debate two notions that greatly cloud the clarity of the question, it is useful to strengthen the Orthodox answer also by clearing away possible objections arising from the Catholic position.
The two notions Catholicism uses in the debate are: nature and supernature. In appearance, these two notions would greatly simplify the problem: the nation is natural; Christianity is supernatural, therefore supranational. Christianity, then, can in no case be national, for then it would no longer be Christianity but paganism.
The Catholic attitude in this matter results from Catholic doctrine in general, which sees everything through the prism of the division into natural and supernatural.
According to this doctrine, primordial man consisted of two sections: nature and the donum superadditum, or supernature. Nature bore within its being the germ of death and sinful desire (concupiscentia carnis). Immortality and purity did not lie in man’s nature; they were not ontologically connected with human nature; they were additions from outside, not belonging to the intrinsic constitution of human nature. By the fall into sin, man’s nature was in no way impaired; only the donum superadditum was withdrawn.
“Of the three kinds of goods that we can consider as being in human nature—(1) the essential principles and the properties that result from them, (2) the natural inclination toward the good of virtue, and (3) the gratuitous gifts that constituted original justice—the last kind was totally removed from the whole of human nature by original sin… By contrast, the essential principles of nature with the properties that flow from them remain absolutely intact; neither original sin nor even personal sins can affect these in any way. Finally, the inclination toward the good of virtue is not in itself diminished by original sin, which does not weaken nature, the source and principle of this inclination.”1
Orthodoxy knows nothing of this ontological dualism in primordial man; rather, it teaches that immortality and purity were natural potencies of man, which he was to develop together with his whole nature. The divine image was imprinted in the very constitution of human nature; it was not some add-on as a “super,” as something non-essential to it. We would make God the creator of death and of sin if we were to say that the human nature He created would be by its nature — normally — sinful and mortal. The fall into sin would be incomprehensible if Adam were restrained from sin not by his own will but by the donum superadditum, which Catholics say was the bridle that held in check Adam’s natural concupiscence. How is it that at a certain moment this divine gift yielded to man’s desire toward sin or to the assaults of the serpent? In general, we do not understand why God would have made Adam with two sections: with a sinful and mortal nature and with a supernatural bridle.
Inasmuch as it is the image of God, human nature is good; superior spiritual life — communion with God — is something natural, normal to it. But insofar as it is created, this nature also has the possibility of change; it can fall from its normal divine-human life; it can be impaired, the divine image imprinted in it can be altered. Here is what the Russian theologian Fr. Sergius Bulgakov says: “The undeveloped and young man had within himself both the power of life — posse non mori — and the power of purity — posse non peccare — not as an extraordinary gift, a donum superadditum, but as an internal norm, as the authentic nature of his being. Both death and sin, though possible to man by virtue of his created character, were for him abnormal and contrary to his nature.”2 Man was entirely open to divine action, destined for the full realization of his deification, on the basis of his innocence alone: God came in the cool of the evening to speak with man as with a friend; but this conversation was not a donum superadditum in relation to his as-yet-unmatured nature. On the contrary, this communion with God was given and destined to him on the basis of his nature. Thus, through original sin there was not a simple withdrawal of a donum superadditum such that nature remained intact. Man’s state after the fall is not a “natural” state — the state of pure nature — but a state of the corruption of nature; he no longer possesses his nature in its fullness and proper sense; he has an impaired nature into which defectiveness has been introduced. For Catholics, however, man remained with his nature intact.
We thus have two conceptions of human nature. To be sure, the formal definition of the natural may be the same: the sphere of the natural in a being includes all those powers, endowments, and acts that belong to that being, grow from it, manifest it, and are not accidents or artificial additions unnecessary to it. But concretely, Orthodoxy’s conception is that spiritual life is not something accidental, unnecessary to human nature; it belongs to it and expresses its meaning and direction. Since spiritual life is participation in divine life, it follows that human nature is such that it cannot live a true life except by participating in divine life. Not only is the capacity to participate in divine life — to be deified — imprinted in human nature, but also the necessity for it, the organ that seeks that life; without it, nature either suffers terribly or shrivels into a sub-natural, blind, defective life.
It might seem a contradiction to call spiritual life — communion with God, deification — “natural.” For what is natural to man grows from man, whereas his spiritual life is a connection with something that comes from beyond him, with God.
Yet there is no contradiction here. Spiritual life — deification, or whatever else one may call man’s participation in divine life — is, first of all, a human act of launching into the divine or of absorbing the divine: a human act or function of spiritual nourishment. If material food is not extra-natural, neither can spiritual food be. A flower also feeds on air and light, but the process of this feeding is not supernatural to the flower. On the contrary, without it the flower shrivels and lives for a while a needy, sub-natural life, and then dies. We agree that a perfect application of the definition of the natural (“growth from oneself”) cannot be made to man’s spiritual life (nor, in fact, to any of his other activities). Participation in something outside oneself is, in a certain respect, something other than growth from oneself. But if we consider that man is entirely made by God, then even a growth from himself of spiritual life would still be a kind of participation in divine richness; and if we consider further that among the natural endowments with which God created man, one of the most essential is precisely that he should participate — on pain of the fullness of his natural life — in divine life, then we may reckon this participation in divine life, man’s deification, as belonging to his nature, being required by it and manifesting it.
What belongs to man’s nature is not only body and soul, but also divine-human life. Man is, in his nature, a theandric being. We do not distinguish between natural and supernatural, but between life without God and life in God.
But natural life is life in God.
Does this difference between Orthodox and Catholic conceptions of human nature have any practical significance? Is it merely a quarrel about words? It has considerable significance — especially in connection with our problem. Among the elements that constitute a being’s nature there is such a perfect welding together that they form a single whole with a single meaning, a perfect unity. Though of different substances, the constitutive elements of human nature bear, on different levels, the same characteristics; only all of them together express and realize, in common acts, its meaning and destiny. Just as the soul, although of a substance different from the body, forms with the body one whole, expresses together a meaning, and realizes together every act, so also in man’s spiritual life grace — God’s action — meets in a mysterious unity with the soul’s and body’s acts, together expressing and realizing the full life of human nature. And since human nature presents itself in each person with certain individualizing characters, the spiritual life that belongs to the nature of this or that person will also bear, in its own way, the same individualizing characters that manifest themselves in the soul and become visible in the body.
Spiritual life, however profound, is different in each person. There are no two people who experience participation in divine life in the same way and who manifest it in the same fruits and in the same manner. There were no two prophets who had the same visions and used the same images to express their experiences. We are not speaking here of differences that separate people, nor of a justification of individualism in the sense of religious isolation. Those who have other visions and are compelled to express them in a different manner know at the same time — also through religious experience — that they must refer them to the same Subject who has revealed Himself to them. They understand each other perfectly, for they know that, at bottom, they express the same thing with slightly different means, just as the nature of each is slightly different. Love, under the influence of religious experience, is experienced differently by each person. But this does not mean they cannot love one another. Sobornicity is not uniformity but harmony — the same melody sung together by slightly different instruments. Spiritual life too has the national character of the subject who lives it.
Quite different consequences result from the conception that spiritual life is supernatural and does not form with nature an ontological whole. In the supernatural sector we will not necessarily meet the individual characters that nature has in different persons. The supernatural is one, whereas persons are different; nature is variegated. And no matter how often the adage of Thomas Aquinas may be recalled — “Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit”3 — the supernatural is nevertheless conceived4 not as in an organic continuity with nature, but as a separate sector whose mission is not so much to awaken the powers of nature to full life as rather to reduce nature to silence, to potentialize it, arranging above it — not from its own soil — a kind of aerial, supernatural garden with its own virtues and life.
Thus one speaks of virtues infused by grace, not — as we would say — exfused from human nature. It is true that the subject of these infused virtues is still said to be the human being; but obviously, in this role the human subject is stripped of all his concrete individuality and reduced to the role of a simple physical agent for handling the infused virtues. Other characters of nature are stifled by grace — for example, concupiscence. In general, the personal note and particular determinants are to be smothered by the supernatural, which is of a general, uniform character. The perfecting of nature by grace is also understood as a correction of nature, as a reduction to potentiality of some of its properties. Of the national quality the supernatural wants to know nothing, since it is a particular quality. The national quality cannot become a supernatural quality. Remaining only within the sphere of the natural, Catholicism looks upon it with suspicion.
We shall try to show, also by a brief investigation of the process by which nature is raised from its fallen state, that the separation of man into natural and supernatural is mistaken.
Without doubt, the restoration of fallen human nature is accomplished through help from above. In relation to deteriorated nature, the descent of power from above — from God — is clearly distinguished. But the first man was not given, likewise, in two installments: a basis as nature with inclinations toward sin, and an extraordinary add-on as a bridle against sin. He was given everything at once, as a whole.
We observe this infra and supra in present-day man not only at the moment when powers from above come upon his deteriorated state, but also afterward, so long as no perfect welding has yet been achieved between those powers and his former sinful state — so long as nature has not been delivered from defectiveness, not repaired. In an imperfect Christian, still retaining strong impulses toward sin, one can still speak, not of nature and supernature (for nature in its true sense is not something sinful), but in any case of something infra and something supra. Each of us can intuitively observe this in our own souls. We can see how, at certain moments, we are carried along by envious, lustful, lower impulses, and we can feel how, at other moments, there comes over them something from above, from beyond our human sphere, ennobling them.
But this distinction can no longer be made in a perfect Christian. (To be sure, an absolutely perfect Christian has not existed; but there have been personalities who rose to great heights — Saint John the Apostle, for example.) Can we still distinguish in his soul two zones: one infra — his own, sinful — and one supra? Can we still say: these are thoughts and impulses from below; those are from above? Is he not Christian entirely? And this is the goal toward which Christians strive: to a complete welding of the power from above with their deteriorated state, so that there are not two zones within them, but one whole which is nothing other than human nature restored — the nature of man as conceived and created by God. Grace and man’s will are no longer felt as two principles of action, but as one: the will enlightened and strengthened toward the good. Under grace, man’s feelings do not remain what they were, so that by the somehow physical force of grace they merely appear otherwise than they are; rather, the effect of grace wholly passes into their intrinsic constitution, transforming and ennobling them. The efficacy of grace is real only from the moment when it succeeds in converting its power into the intrinsic power of the faculties and organs with which man is endowed. Grace is not a hypostatized entity — a little heap of power from God sent into the soul — as Catholicism teaches when it says that grace is created and therefore separated from God (“Sanctifying grace is therefore a reality distinct from God, created, infused, and inherent in the soul”5). Grace is an action, a working of God, not separated from His being, springing from it. As such, there cannot exist in man a standalone life of grace; we must admit either that only God is the subject of that gracious life, or that grace becomes an act of man as well — of his powers and functions.
The first “horn” of the dilemma cannot be admitted, for it would mean the annulment of man. Thus only the second horn remains possible: man as subject of the gracious working — or co-subject together with God. Whereas, for Catholicism, the supernatural life of grace is neither human nor divine but something quite bizarre, in the Orthodox conception it is both profoundly human and divine — or it is all the more fully human the more it is divine; it is a theandric life, the life of a deified human being.
So long as gracious action remains external to man’s psychic powers — even if present within the soul — it cannot produce effects that are truly the soul’s, the virtues of the human being. Only when this action of God awakens, develops, and strengthens the soul’s faculties — thus becoming their intrinsic force — will Christian feelings and deeds, which are man’s own, arise. Can one still distinguish, in these feelings and deeds, a natural sector and a supernatural one? Do we still see here a nature that remains as it was, and above it a supernature that stifles it? The whole human being, with all his faculties, endowments, passions, and characteristics, has been raised up — all these being filled, as organs, with a new force directed toward the good. The Russian theologian B. Vysheslavtsev, referring especially to the Eastern Father Maximus the Confessor, says: “The passions in their totality are not evil in themselves; they are good in the hands of those who strive for a good life. Passions such as desire, pleasure, fear, through sublimation are transformed: desire into a powerful longing for divine gifts, pleasure into the happiness and delight of the soul for God’s gifts, fear into the corresponding dread of error, sorrow into repentance. The vicious man is built from the same material as the virtuous… The natural powers of the soul and body… become evil only when they receive a particular form — namely, the form of perversion. The fundamental idea of the entire Greek-Eastern ascetic and mystical tradition is deification (θέωσις). Deification is the continuous sublimation of the whole being of man and of all the powers of his body and soul… Sublimation categorically opposes Christian asceticism and mysticism to any non-Christian asceticism and mysticism — be it Hindu, Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Stoic. There is no sublimation there; there is negation — not the salvation of the world, but salvation from the world… For negative asceticism, the transfiguration of soul and body — resurrection — is an absurdity. What is lower (body, passions, emotions, the subconscious, nature, cosmos) is not ‘saved,’ not shaped and sublimated, but uprooted, denied, and cut away.”6
Man’s powers, endowments, characteristics are not converted and melted into grace; rather, gracious working allows itself to be poured into, and molded according to, man’s aptitudes and faculties. The national quality — which is nothing other than a general form of the soul — is not dissolved in grace; instead, grace allows itself to be poured into the mold of the national soul, sublimating this quality of the soul.
The distinction between what comes from above and what man brings can, in a good Christian, be made only by recollection — by thinking how he was before he was perfected in the Christian life. Let us take an analogy: the patient and medicine. The patient is human nature after the fall; the medicine is the grace that heals him. Man, at the beginning, was not made in two installments and distinct sections — sick by nature but kept in a healthy state by a remedy dripped into him. He was created as a healthy whole. After he became sick, one observes how the restoration is effected by a remedy from outside him. And the distinction between the sick man and the remedy is still observed until the remedy has thoroughly permeated his tissues, been absorbed into them, and, thereby, the man has become healthy.
To be sure, the analogy has the defect of picturing man as receiving divine grace only for a certain time and thereafter no longer receiving it, but having it within him. In reality, man stands continually under the effusions of grace, and his state is continually elevated — continually deified. But this is the natural life of his nature. As everything grows in the body, so man is made to grow in the Spirit, in God. Nature has no limit in its ascent; it never becomes a static entity, though it has a path and a framework in its development. It belongs to man’s nature that the divine grace should rain upon him unceasingly — and that he should unceasingly absorb this rain, producing ever more beautiful fruits.
God’s working upon man becomes ever more powerful and intense the more man’s faculties — awakened and strengthened by grace — are capable of receiving new forces, of rendering more intense work, of increasing their capacity for feeling, virtue, and action, becoming co-subject of the divine working.
The measure of grace given is a function of the measure and quality of the soul’s organs in the respective person. The inner life of the soul’s organs and their outward action are always a refraction of the gracious working upon the soul, with a strict proportion maintained between them. It is said in Orthodox asceticism that the person raised to the high peaks of deification reflects exactly with his soul the divine working exerted upon him, so that God and the person are two subjects in a common work, radiating a common power — God as the essential source of this working, and man become “god by participation.” If at first — before he was able fully to absorb into his tissues the force of gracious working — man observed in himself, and observed that there was, a discontinuity between himself and grace, a vacuum, a certain hiatus; then, after the soul has acquired the habit of this absorption — after the synthesis with divine grace has been effected — he no longer observes this discontinuity with respect to the power of grace that continues to come. Man is lifted into the divine light and no longer distinguishes the surpluses that continually come to him; he feels himself bathed in a continuous light, articulated within it; he feels himself in his element; he feels himself its subject. Deified and full of grace is his soul; deification and grace come to him continually. One no longer distinguishes a “nature” (in the sinful sense) and a “supernature.”
But if one can no longer speak of a nature and a supernature — only of a nature in normal development — does it not follow that Christianity is broken into pieces, varied according to each individual and nation? Is not the ecumenicity of Christianity imperiled?
We answer decisively: no. It is true that from the synthesis between Christianity and the state that each person or nation brings, new types of Christians arise again and again. Saint John the Apostle was one kind of Christian, and Saint Paul another. Grace causes to blossom the germs contained in each person, just as rain and sun — though the same — cause each plant to blossom differently. Grace manifests itself by ennobling and beautifying — by sublimating — the aptitudes and contents of life of each nation. In one nation there blossoms, under divine power, a superior lyric poetry, because that nation has brought sentimental inclinations; in another, a philosophy; in another, an organization; in another, a superior art. The lyric poetry of two Christian peoples differs because their motives, memories, incidents of life, and inner resonances differ in each of the two peoples. The entire content of traditions, concerns, aptitudes, creations, and manifestations of a people becomes Christian. All the material of spiritual life — different from person to person and from people to people according to historical and geographical determinations — when bathed and kneaded by the same divine grace and the same Christian teachings, becomes Christian. And then, evidently, each people represents Christianity realized in a different way.
How, then, does ecumenicity fare? There are two kinds of ecumenicity. There is an ecumenicity equal to uniformity. In this sense, ecumenical is the treasury of faith and grace considered in themselves; ecumenical in this sense is Christianity considered as a system of divine ideas and powers existing on their own, distinct from the fruits they produce in each individual or nation. And there is an ecumenicity understood as a symphony, as a field of flowers sprinkled by the same rain, warmed by the same sun, tended by the same gardener. This is the ecumenicity of Christianity considered as life — as a living relation between man and God. One subject of this relation is man with his individuality, with his whole content of life. Ecumenicity, in this second sense, includes not only the uniform system of ideas and powers that work in people, but the entire spirituality of those peoples in whom faith and grace work. The whole spiritual content of those peoples is attuned; there is among those contents a fraternal feeling, for though different, the same underlying melody resounds within them. There is a relation of ecumenicity between the spiritual life of a Romanian and that of a Russian, between Greek and Serbian folklore.
We have ecumenicity in the sense of uniformity when believers and peoples keep their gaze fixed upon the same spiritual sun; they feel themselves as brothers while looking toward the same goal dear to all. We have ecumenicity in the sense of harmony in the variety of effects that result from the falling of the same light upon historical and spiritual spaces filled with other motives, other contents, other problems imposed by geography and by the inheritance of the past.
In this way, one can say that Christianity is both supranational and national. Ecumenicity is not torn apart by the national note.
Quite different is the situation in Catholicism. For it, nature does not become otherwise under the influence of grace, just as it did not become otherwise after the fall. It remains confined to what man is before grace descends upon him. Nature cannot emerge from this state, which is fundamentally sinful. Grace remains forever a pedagogue holding in check a pupil who cannot internally, really, become other. The pupil constantly strains, but cannot escape the bridle. If the pedagogue were to step away for a moment, the pupil would immediately give himself to abominations; the bridle disappearing, evil desires and deeds spring forth automatically.
Catholicism knows nothing of an intrinsic change of man’s sinful nature under the heat of divine grace.
If this is so, evidently an individual — as also a nation — keeps, beneath that “above” from God, a nature that is by essence potentially sinful. Nature cannot properly become Christianized. Therefore Christianity always remains something above, not penetrating ontologically into nature, not being absorbed by it. Two distinct planes remain: one variable — the plane of individuals and nations in their potentially sinful natural state — and another uniform plane hovering above all — the supernatural. To speak of a nationalization of Christianity, in this case, is evidently tantamount to blasphemy. It would mean making Christianity sinful if the nature with which you wanted to fuse it remains fundamentally sinful. In Catholicism, ecumenicity is understood only as uniformity. The specific yet Christian spiritualities of different peoples have no place within it. For Catholicism, Christianity means only the system of ideas and powers that hovers above. When Catholics say that Catholicism is supranational, they understand this in an exclusive and unilateral sense. Since the national quality is a natural quality, it cannot be raised into that “above” without ceasing to exist. Nor can that “above” have any intrinsic effect upon the national quality, which — according to Catholics — can only be natural. In relation to the national quality as such, Catholicism can therefore have neither interest nor love. The affirmation of the nation, in the Catholic conception, necessarily and always equates to the affirmation of a pagan, inferior reality. There cannot be a noble, Christian, moral nationalism as Orthodoxy believes is possible. By definition it is anti-Christian. This is because between the supernatural and the natural there remains forever an unbridgeable chasm. The supranational sphere in which Catholicism places itself means an ontological place outside all nations: the international.
Over against Catholic abstractionism — hostile to the whole concrete nature and thus also to the national factor — Orthodoxy appears as a mother who stretches her saving love over the whole human being, with all his inherited and acquired determinants, over his whole life rooted in a living and concrete milieu.
I. E. Masson, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, tome XI, cols. 41–42.
Fr. S. Bulgakov, The Burning Bush (Russian ed.), pp. 24–25.
“Grace does not abolish nature but perfects it.”
In the Catholic conception.
J. van der Meersch, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, tome VI, col. 1609.
🎼 Sobornicity 😌 📯 🪗 🎷🎻 🎹 🎺 🇹🇩 🌐 ⛪ ☦️
.....no two alike, the person and the nation. 🔔
Holy Father Saint Dimitru Staniloae, pray for us!