Man, the target of God: What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him?

By Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou

In the theology of Saint Silouan and Saint Sophrony, man is the target of divine visitations that serve to make him aware of the image of Christ within him. God created man in His ‘image and likeness’. Although this image has become distorted, the purpose of man’s life in the Church is that it should be perfectly restored. Saint Sophrony referred to the image of God in man as man’s ‘hypostasis’ or ‘personhood’. He taught that this image cannot be realised without the witness of a saint or elder, who demonstrates likeness unto Christ and bears His word. For this reason, he often explained the principle of personhood through reference to the life and writings of Saint Silouan.
In this book, Archimandrite Zacharias, the disciple of Saint Sophrony, likewise presents the principle of personhood through the lives of the elders of his monastery, Saint Silouan and Saint Sophrony. He also examines attributes of personhood in terms of dogma and spiritual practice. Throughout Man, the Target of God, Father Zacharias elaborates on aspects of the theme of personhood which were previously introduced in his doctorate Christ, Our Way and Our Life-A Presentation of the Theology of Saint Sophrony. He developed his thought in a series of lectures in Athens and America, which later became the basis for this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist
• Release date: Apr 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220287197

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ΜAΝ, ΤΗΕ TARGET OF GOD

father Zacharias

Archimandrite ZACHARIAS (Zacharou)

MAN, THE TARGET OF GOD

‘What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him?

and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?

And that thou shouldest visit him every morning,

and try him every moment?’ (Job 7:17-18)

STAVROPEGIC MONASTERY

OF ST JOHN THE BAPTIST

ESSEX 2021

Digital Creation-Design

website: www.presence.gr

email: [e-mail]

MAN, THE TARGET OF GOD

‘What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him?

and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?

And that thou shouldest visit him every morning,

and try him every moment?’ (Job 7:17-18)

ISBN original 978-1-909649-03-3

Copyright © The Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, UK.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, withoutthe prior permission in writing of the Monastery.

Published by

the Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist

Tolleshunt Knights, by Maldon

ESSEX CM9 8EZ, UK

Contents

Introduction

THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS

1  ‘I AM THAT I AM’ (Exod. 3:14)

2  PERSONHOOD: THE FRUIT OF THE VISION OF THE UNCREATED LIGHT

3  THE PORTRAIT OF PERSONHOOD IN SAINT SILOUAN

CHRIST, THE FATHER OF THE WORLD TO COME

4  THEOLOGY AS A SPIRITUAL STATE OF THE PERSON

5  THE HYPOSTATIC PRINCIPLE, A UNIQUE GIFT OF THE TRIUNE GOD THE CREATOR

6  THE HYPOSTATIC MODE OF BEING IN THE LIFE AND MINISTRY OF ELDER SOPHRONY

THOU HAST MADE KNOWN TO ME THE WAYS OF LIFE

7  THE PATH OF THE HUMAN PERSONA

8  OBEDIENCE AS A MEANS TO ATTAIN TO PERSONHOOD

9  THE DIVINE NAME AND HYPOSTATIC PRAYER

10  TEARS: THE HEALING OF THE PERSON

EPILOGUE

INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Introduction

What is man, that thou shouldest magnify

him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart

upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him

every morning, and try him every moment? …

Why hast thou set me as a target?

¹

The Lord is nigh, always close to us and visiting us, from morning until evening and from evening until morning. Blessed is the man who perceives His visitation. God’s attentiveness to man is made known through the bestowing of the Cross, which reveals him to be the target of God’s providence. If a man accepts the conditions of the Cross, and bears the Cross, then he becomes a friend of the Cross, a sign and a mark for his generation.

What is the capacity of man that allows him to be the target of the visitations of the Lord? The principle of the hypostasis is the virtue that God imparted to man when He created him in His image and likeness in order to be able to receive increase in God. It is the capacity of each man to be sensitive and responsive to these visitations, and furthermore to retain their traces. It is the ‘place’ in the deep heart of man where the Uncreated Light of His Countenance is manifested and where God communicates with man. If we had nothing in us of any likeness to God, we would not be able to know anything of God; but He created us in such a way as to be able to know Him and to retain the traces of His presence. When we take up the Cross, the mark upon us of His image, He pours out His energies upon it so that these traces are carved indelibly within us. Thus we may attain to permanent likeness to Him, and say in His Name: ‘O MY CHRIST, IN THEE AND BY THEE… Now – I am.’²

Christ is the brightness of the glory of the Father, the ‘very image of His Person (hypostasis)᾽.³ Likewise our hypostasis, which is our substance, our very being and our personhood, is created in the image of Christ, the True Person, Who revealed himself as ‘I AM THAT I AM᾽.⁴ In Him was recapitulated everything which is divine and everything which is human. Having loved His own in the world, He loved them to the end and gave His life for the world.⁵ Love to the end is the content of the Divine Person. No one has ever seen God the Father,⁶ but the Son has revealed Him because He is the image of the Father. Likewise, the image of the Son is revealed through the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that forms Christ in the heart of man.

Even before His Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, the Spirit bestowed portents of the coming Messiah upon the Prophets of old. When the Holy Spirit overshadowed the psalmist David, he was able to snatch and express the loftiest of divine thoughts, foretelling all the way of Christ and every stage in our relationship with Him. Through his gift of speaking to the Lord directly, the principle of personhood became manifest within him, so that he could even name it, saying: ‘My substance (hypostasis) was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret.’⁷

Although David was able to apprehend at intervals the true hypostasis within him, it was not yet fully revealed as Christ had not yet come in the flesh. This meant that his vision was unstable and he was often unable to remain faithful to what he had seen. Whenever the Spirit forsook him, he sought consolation in the people around him, which led to his adultery with Bathsheba and to the death of her husband Uriah. In the state of inconsolable repentance which followed, he cried out to the Lord that he might know what he had lost. He describes standing mute before Him until his heart grew hot within him.⁸ Condemning himself and furthermore every man with him as ‘altogether vanity’,⁹ he consigned himself to hell, saying to the Lord, ‘My being (hypostasis) is as nothing before Thee.’¹⁰ Only at the moment when his soul was bowed down altogether, did the Lord reveal in the Light of His Countenance something consoling and familiar: a glimpse of his restored image, ‘And now what wait I for?’ He said ‘My very being (hypostasis) is in Thee.’¹¹

The Divine Hypostasis of Christ is also prefigured in several Psalms that refer to David as the Anointed One (Christ). In these Psalms, it is foretold that He will be made to ‘bear in his bosom the reproach of all the nations᾽.¹² His persecution and descent into hell is also prophesied: ‘Shall anyone deliver his soul from the hand of Hades?’¹³ These Psalms even apprehend Christ’s all-embracing prayer, when He pleads with a strong cry that God might spare Him and all mankind: ‘How long Lord, wilt thou turn away, for ever?... Remember what my being (hypostasis) is: for hast thou created all the sons of men in vain? What man is there who shall live and not see death?’¹⁴

The Prophet David was able to foretell the path of Christ, even His descent into hell, although he was not yet able to fully know the power of His Resurrection. Likewise, before Pentecost, the Apostles were also subject to uncertainty and, in the face of death, succumbed to panic and betrayal. Only at the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit entered into the very nature and body of the Apostles, was the revelation of personhood, foreknown by David, apprehended as a secure inheritance of the Church. As the tongues of fire descended on the upper room, each of the Apostles was transformed into a true witness to divine love: a fully realised and unique human hypostasis. Thus, the revelation of the personal God to Moses in the declaration ‘I AM THAT I AM’, was brought to final completion in the mystery of Pentecost.¹⁵ On this day, the same outpouring of the Holy Spirit which occurred on Mount Sinai was given to the Apostles and members of the early Church.

In the Old Testament, the grace of the Holy Spirit was intermittent for as long as God was well pleased to act upon people. At Pentecost, this grace was engrafted into human nature and became a permanent possession of the Church. It flows throughout the ages by means of the saints who bear the breath of the Holy Spirit. As individuals, we can still lose grace. However, provided we do not separate ourselves from the Church, where we find the communion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we are able at any time to be restored to it, as we find it alive in the other members.

When the Apostles witnessed the Comforter speaking the word of God within them, their hearts were enlarged to embrace all the people of the earth. Thus when they went out to preach to the ‘uttermost part of the earth’,¹⁶ the people they evangelised were able to recognise in the voice of each of the Apostles someone akin to them. The flame of the Holy Spirit perfected the Apostles as persons so that all the nations had become the very content of their hypostasis. Thenceforth, the revelation of the word of God became uninterrupted, fulfilling its inherent power to ‘make men divine’.¹⁷

In our contemporary age, the same revelation of the path of the Divine Hypostasis of Christ, which was given to the Prophets and the Holy Apostles, was given to Saint Silouan when he heard the voice of the Lord in the Holy Spirit, saying: ‘Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.’¹⁸ This word taught him a form of asceticism through which he learned all the path of Christ, which means all of Christ. Just as Christ took up the Cross and descended into hell voluntarily, so all the saints of God, at some point in their life, must also take up the Cross and reach the abyss of hell, not that they should perish, but that they should know all the magnitude of His way and fathom the mystery of His appearing even in hell. If we voluntarily condemn ourselves to hell, then we are initiated into the mystery of His descent into hell, and we are able to meet Him and remain with Him no matter what circumstances we find ourselves surrounded by in life. Even if the pain of our experience overwhelms us and we cry out to God from the depth of our being, even this can become, through the Holy Spirit, a blessed despair that detaches us from everything created and attaches us to the Lord for ever.

To keep the mind in hell is never to sink into abject hopelessness – as the word of Saint Silouan states clearly ‘despair not’ – but rather it is ‘against hope a belief in hope᾽.¹⁹ This charismatic despair is truly blessed when it provokes a strong cry of repentance to God; when we see sin and death threatening our lives and we do not surrender but cry out from the depths of our being to Him Who can raise even the dead. Charismatic despair is known from the prayer it generates: if it generates a truly strong cry to God, this means it is from the Holy Spirit. When the threat of death hits us, if we are able to trust completely in Him Who for our sake descended into hell, then this means that the bond we have with Him is stronger than death, so we can say with the Apostle, ‘This is the victory that we have over the world: our faith.’²⁰ The word of Christ given to Saint Silouan teaches us how to find this strength of faith so we can know all of His path and become according to His image, true persons, keeping the bond of love with Him in no matter what circumstances, even under the threat of death and hell. Then we will know Him Whom we follow and we will know to Whom we belong, the Anointed One, Who traced for us a perfect path from which originate all the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Whenever Elder Sophrony spoke about the notion of personhood, he always depicted the spiritual figure of his Elder Saint Silouan. In this, he followed the Apostles and Evangelists, who did not just pass down the commandments of Christ in isolation, but rather depicted His image and the events of His life so as to present Him as a living person. Elder Sophrony taught that the principle of the hypostasis cannot be known except through a relationship with a person within whom it has manifested itself in its fulness. Thus personhood is always passed down from a person to another person, from Apostle to disciple as from spiritual father to son. It is nurtured through this relationship, through the elder’s prayer, his example and his word.

Following the example presented to him in the life of his Elder Saint Silouan, Elder Sophrony taught that a man who has fully realised or manifested the principle of the hypostasis has six major characteristics.

The first characteristic is that he is not a ‘man without instruction’²¹ but rather he is ‘taught of God᾽.²² This means that he has gone through all the three stages of spiritual life.²³ In the first stage, he received the first grace of his calling to be a disciple of the one and unique Master, Christ. In the second stage, he was confronted with the trial of the withdrawal of this grace and waged titanic warfare in order to repossess it. Finally in the third stage, the gift of the Holy Spirit which in the beginning was not his own, an ‘unlawful’ treasure, becomes legitimately his own, so that he might claim it as his inheritance for ever. The man who has gone ‘lawfully’²⁴ through all the phenomena of spiritual life and convinced God of his fidelity and love, becomes a truly spiritual man, as Saint Paul says in the First Epistle to the Corinthians.²⁵ He is received as a son, and thereafter he is able to judge all the phenomena of spiritual life, discerning created things from uncreated ones and discerning the thoughts of the enemy from the thoughts of God. Nothing can surprise him in the spiritual world. Such a man cannot be judged by anybody for he has become as ‘the wind that bloweth where it listeth᾽.²⁶

The second characteristic of personhood is that man, after having gone through chastisement, and having borne the instruction of the Lord, acquires pure prayer. Pure prayer is a divine state in which the one who prays does not know whether he is in the body or outside the body.²⁷ When man has endured patiently all the preliminary trials of the spiritual life, then sooner or later God will visit him. As Elder Sophrony confided in us: ‘It is only necessary to be caught up in the upper world once, to see all the mysteries revealed and every problem of this life solved in the light of the next one.’

The state of pure prayer bestows upon man an indescribable humility because he has known the Lord face to Face. Elder Sophrony refers to this charismatic humility as the third characteristic of personhood. After seeing the Lord face to Face man no longer compares himself with mortals around him but with his prototype Christ, and he cries out for shame that he is not equal to the true humanity he sees in Christ, the perfect man whom God desired before the ages to create on earth. Charismatic humility is given to the saints who have seen the glory of Christ, so that they may keep their bond of love with Him and receive the waves of His grace, as Saint Ephraim the Syrian says,²⁸ without any lessening or withdrawal.

The fourth characteristic of personhood is ontological repentance, which is universal repentance for the whole world. There are two levels to repentance: personal and ontological. During the first stage of spiritual life, man offers his own personal repentance for his transgressions. He offers many tears and cries out with a strong cry to God for healing. Then slowly when this healing comes, he receives an inner eye and with this inner eye he looks at the world and begins to sigh saying, ‘O Lord and this world knows Thee not.²⁹ Give this portion of Thy grace to every creature, to every man that comes into this life.’ Then man begins to repent for the whole Adam and his cry becomes, as Elder Sophrony says, a ‘universal cry᾽.³⁰ This cry is very precious before God because then man cries to God not only for his own sins but also for the errors of all the people. It can become very bold, for instance in the case of Job, who quarreled and argued with God, not out of caprice, but because he wanted to search out all the secret thoughts of His Divinity. Moses, likewise, struggled before God, pleading on behalf of his people that He might not punish them for their sins. He confronted the Bodiless Powers directly declaring, ‘Now heaven hearken and I will speak᾽. Finally, he laid down an ultimatum before God, saying, ‘If Thou will not save them all, then blot me out of Thy book.’³¹ Saint Paul, likewise, in his Epistle to the Romans, demanded that the Lord make him an anathema, in order that his fellow countrymen might be saved.³²

A further example of ontological repentance is the repentance of the three youths in the furnace of Babylon. In the furnace, these three sinless youths cried out saying, ‘We have sinned, we have committed iniquity, we have transgressed.’³³ They condemned themselves to hell, not so much for their own sins, which were negligible, but rather for the sake of their people who had apostatised in Babylon. Prefiguring the mystery of the Incarnation that was going to be manifested in the last times, their repentance was enlarged to embrace all Israelites in captivity, taking upon themselves their blame, and thereby they attracted the visitation of a fourth person, the Son of God, Who descended to keep them company in the flames. Although He was as yet without flesh, He came to hollow out the flame of the furnace and make it full of the dew of His Spirit.

The three youths, in an admirable way, heralded the unique path of Christ, which leads to truth and life. Their prayer in the furnace prefigured also the fifth characteristic of personhood which is to be an intercessor for the whole world. In his prayer, the man who is a true person is able to lay one hand on the shoulder of God and the other hand on the shoulder of man and to become a mediator before God.³⁴ When man becomes an intercessor for the whole world in his prayer, he becomes, like Christ, another Adam. Christ is the New Adam, Who bore in Himself all humanity, suffered with it, died with it and glorified it. Likewise, man as a realised hypostasis brings before God in intercession every creature.

The sixth and final characteristic of personhood is that the man who has become a true person is as if beyond all barriers. All barriers are abolished for him and he becomes truly free. This divine freedom is manifested within him in the love that he is able to have even for his enemies. Love for enemies is a divine characteristic which is imparted to him through the Holy Spirit. The presence of this love is a token of the presence of the Holy Spirit in man; without the grace of the Holy Spirit this love is impossible, because it is far above human nature.

Before acquiring any knowledge of the true nature of the human hypostasis, we live in this world like in a prison. Just as the child living in the womb of his mother is fed by what the mother eats and breathes what the mother breathes, but has not yet a real life; so we, like the child, have to come forth from the prison of the womb and breathe the air freely in order to develop and become a person. If we are instructed by the spirit of this world which is vanity and futility, giving in to the passions of our fallen nature, then we are deprived of the gift of the Holy Spirit. We know, even from the beginnings of humanity, that when sin began to increase, the Lord said those terrible words: ‘My spirit will not continue in them because they have become flesh.’³⁵ As prisoners of the delusions of this world, we cannot breathe the air of the upper world, the air of heaven, and we die in our sins. We have to be born again spiritually to breathe the air of the upper world. We have to receive the gift of Pentecost anew, so that even our flesh will desire the Living God and no longer the base passions. We must cry out to the Lord like David, ‘Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name!’³⁶

The true Prophet and Apostle, the man who is born from the Holy Spirit, has only one desire: to render unto God everything which is holy because the Lord is Holy. The holiness that he seeks in us is nothing other than our spotless and humble love. Having been made in the image of Christ, we have the capacity to know His love unto the end, and only when we acquire this love to the point of self-hatred can we truly relate to our prototype. Love for God unto self-hatred slays our self-love, the infection that we inherited from the