Anastasios wrote:
I have never heard a critique about him about his teaching on heaven and hell.
CONCLUSION: THE RIVER OF FIRE
Between two thieves Thy Cross did prove
to be a balance of righteousness:
wherefore one of them was dragged down
to hades by the weight of his blasphemy,
whereas the other was lightened of his
transgressions unto the comprehension of
theology; O Christ God, glory to Thee.
Kontakion of the Ninth Hour.
God is called love, and also justice. That is why
The wise man in the Song of Songs says to the pure heart:
Justice has loved thee.
St. John of the Ladder, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 24.23.
Although the mystery of God's justice has been a source of puzzlement and stumbling to people in all ages, our age has witnessed a more radical and systematic attack on the doctrine than any other. From within the Orthodox Church three writers have been particularly outspoken: the Greek doctor Alexander Kalomiros, the Serbian bishop (of the "Polish Orthodox Church") Lazar Puhalo, and the Byelorussian philosopher and deputy in the Russian parliament Victor Aksyuchits. Each of these writers has focussed on a different manifestation of God's justice: Kalomiros - on the River of Fire and the Last Judgement, Puhalo - on the Particular Judgement of souls after death and the Toll Houses, and Aksyuchits - on the original Fall and Curse of the first-created couple. However, all three writers share certain common assumptions and arguments in their assault on the traditional teaching of the Orthodox Church on Divine justice. Let us therefore, in concluding this study, examine some of these arguments.
The sentimentalists (as we may call these self-proclaimed champions of Divine love) consider the traditional doctrine to be either a Latinist aberration (Kalomiros, Puhalo) or a survival of pre-Christian Jewish thought (Aksyuchits). They consider that it conjures up the image of a vengeful, bloodthirsty God which is incompatible with the God of love and which is directly responsible for the atheism of modern man. They therefore wish to purge Christian theology of all references to Divine "wrath", "propitiation", "satisfaction for sin", and to substitute for them words expressing man's rejection of the love of God. Thus it is not right, they argue, to speak of God punishing sinners or sending them to hell in His righteous wrath. Rather, the damned punish themselves (in their guilty conscience) and are tormented by the fire of Divine love, not wrath.
Like many heretics, the sentimentalists seize on isolated sayings of the Fathers which seem superficially to support their position, and then use them to extract conclusions which the Fathers in question would never have agreed with. Consider, for example, the locus classicus, taken from the writings of St. Basil the Great, for their teaching that the fire of the Last Judgement is the fire of Divine love, not wrath. St. Basil is interpreting the verse from the Psalms: "The voice of the Lord divideth the flame of fire" (28.7): "Although fire seems to human intelligence to be incapable of being cut or divided, in order that, since there are two capacities in fire, the burning and the illuminating, the fierce and punitive part of the fire may wait for those who deserve to burn, while its illuminating and radiant part may be allotted for the enjoyment of those who are rejoicing. Therefore, the voice of the Lord divideth the fire and allots it, so that the fire of punishment is irksome, but the light of the state of rest remains incapable of burning."
Relying on this passage, in which St. Basil indicates that the same fire which will illumine the blessed will burn the damned at the Last Judgement, the sentimentalists construct the following false syllogism: "God is love. The river of fire is God Himself, His Divine energies. Therefore the river of fire is the fire of God's love. Therefore it is not the fire of His wrath or retributive punishment." But that St. Basil himself would not have drawn this last conclusion is proved by the fact that he calls the river of fire, which in relation to the blessed is felt as light and love, precisely "the fire of punishment" of the damned!
Again, another popular passage with the sentimentalists is the following from St. Isaac the Syrian: "The man who chooses to consider God as an avenger, presuming that [in this manner] he bears witness to His justice, the same accuses Him of being bereft of goodness. Far be it, that in that Fountain of Love and Ocean brimming with goodness, vengeance could ever be found!" And again: "I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love. Nay, what is so bitter and vehement as the torment of love? I mean that those who have become conscious that they have sinned against love suffer greater torment thereby than by any fearsome punishment which can be conceived."
But can it be that this great saint is saying of those sacred writers of the Old and New Testaments who speak of the vengeance of God - and almost all of them do! - that they are accusing God of being "bereft of goodness"?! Of course not! St. Isaac is simply making the point that we must not understand the vengeance of God in an anthopomorphic way, as if God had fallen human passions and was satisfying an emotional need "to get his own back". That would indeed be a blasphemous thought and a denial of the goodness of God. On the contrary: God both in His love and in His vengeance acts with a "passionless passion", with a serene objectivity that is as far above the human passions we associate with those words as heaven is from earth.
Again, when St. Isaac says that the sinners in Gehenna are being scourged with the scourge of love, he is not denying that this scourge is at the same time a scourge of wrath and vengeance (understood, it should now go without saying, in a Divine, and not a human way), and felt as such by the sinners. He is simply pointing out that the greatest punishment of all is to be deprived of the experience of God's love, which we call His grace. And that the greatest torment of conscience we can experience is the knowledge that we have sinned against Him Who loves us infinitely more than any other.
If the sentimentalists confined themselves to pointing out the limitations of human language in speaking about the Divine, and the need to ascend above the fallen aspects of those realities signified by such words as "love", "wrath" and "vengeance", then they would be doing us a service. But in approving "good" words such as "love", and in censuring "bad" ones such as "vengeance", they are actually showing that they know the real scriptural meaning of neither. For true, Divine love, far from dispensing with justice, pursues it with an insatiable zeal. The truly loving father chastizes his erring son, and the truly loving bridegroom will give his own life to save his bride from sin and death. God Himself has given us the perfect example: the Father in His love for man, in His zeal for the righteousness (= sinlessness, justice) of man, gave His Only Begotten Son as a perfect Sacrifice for sin. Only through the restoration of justice by the destruction of sin, which is God's vengeance on the devil and all his works, could the relationship of love between God and man be renewed. Thus the Cross, as we have seen, is perfect love in pursuit of perfect justice.
Another argument of the sentimentalists hinges on the meaning of the word "justice". According to Kalomiros, the Greek work dikaiosyne, "justice", is a translation of the Hebrew tsedaka, which means "the Divine energy that accomplishes the salvation of man". "This term," he writes, "is parallel and almost synonymous with the words hesed (pity, compassion, love) and emeth (faithfulness, truth). This is a quite different conception of justice..."
But is it? Even if we accept the conjectural Hebrew word rather than the word chosen by the Holy Spirit in the Greek Septuagint, the only version of the Old Testament Scriptures which has the unequivocal seal of Divine inspiration, there is surely no contradiction here with the usual meaning of the word "justice". "The Divine energy that accomplishes the salvation of man" pursues this end through the restoration of a state of sinlessness and justice in man's relationship to God. Sin upset the balance in this relationship, almost destroying it completely. This balance is restored through the destruction of sin: on the part of God, by His perfect Sacrifice and propitiation for the sins of all men, and on the part of man by tears of repentance and good works carried out for the love of God and neighbour.
For as Metropolitan Philaret of New York writes: "This is the complete type of justice - the justice of the Christian heart. Its basic, wise, clear and comprehensible principle is expressed in the Gospel by the words: 'So then, whatever you wish that others would do to you, even so do you also to them" (Matthew 7.12). And the apostles' council repeated this in a negative form: 'do not do to others what you do not wish done to yourself'."
Thus love and justice may be seen as the positive and negative poles respectively of the same Divine energy. Love is the natural, that is, just relationship between God and man created by the Divine energy. Sin has destroyed love and created injustice. The Divine energy therefore acts to destroy injustice and restore love. We would not need to speak of justice if sin had not destroyed it. But with the entrance of sin, justice is the first necessity - love demands it...
But what if the Divine energy fails to save man, because of the hardness of man's heart and his impenitent love of injustice? Must the Divine energy then return to its source, like the rays of the sun from off a cold, dark object? By no means; for "so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth: it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it" (Isaiah 55.11). And if the word of God does not accomplish its purpose in redeeming a man, it will nevertheless accomplish it in rewarding him according to his works. And thus will justice be done...
"In this respect," writes St. Dionysius the Areopagite, "the Divine Justice is really true justice because it distributes to all the things proper to themselves, according to the fitness of each existing thing, and preserves the nature of each in its own order and fitness... the nature of each in its own order and capacity."
Thus "with the holy man wilt Thou be holy, and with the innocent man wilt Thou be innocent. And with the elect wilt Thou be elect, and with the perverse wilt Thou be perverse" (Psalm 17.25-26). For that is what they have chosen to do, and God never violates the freewill of man. Thus we must "so speak and so act as those are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgement is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy" (James 2.12-13). To suppose that God is loving but not just, that He gives the Divine Light of the Kingdom to the saints but not the fiery darkness of Gehenna to the sinners, is like saying that the sun gives light but does not burn. It is contrary to the nature of things.
And if the sentimentalists say that the sinner has judged himself, rather than been judged by God, we have no objection to this - if it is meant that the sinner, rather than God, is ultimately responsible for his condemnation because of his own freely willed blindness and impenitence.
But at the same time this must not be understood to mean that God remains entirely passive. For while He wills that all be saved, and does everything to save them, it is still His decision that puts a limit, through death, to the time for repentance (Psalm 6.4), and His word that sends the incorrigibly impenitent to Gehenna (Matthew 25.41).
St. John of Damascus strikes the balance well: "A judge justly punishes one who is guilty of wrongdoing; and if he does not punish him he is himself a wrongdoer. In punishing him the judge is not the cause either of the wrongdoing or of the vengeance taken against the wrongdoer, the cause being the wrongdoer's freely chosen actions. Thus too God, Who saw what was going to happen as if it had already happened, judged it as if it had taken place; and if it was evil, that was the cause of its being punished. It was God Who created man, so of course he created him in goodness; but man did evil of his own free choice, and is himself the cause of the vengeance that overtakes him."
Thus the Last, Most Terrible Judgement is a mystery proclaimed by the Word of God and grounded in the deepest reality of things. It both proceeds from the nature of God Himself, and is an innate demand of our human nature created in the image of God. It is the essential foundation for the practice of virtue and the abhorrence of vice, and the ultimate goal to which the whole of created nature strives, willingly or unwillingly, as to its natural fulfilment. Without it all particular judgements would have a partial and unsatisfactory character, and the reproaches of Job against God, and of all unbelievers against faith, would be justified. And if the Last Judgement is different from all preceding ones in that in it love seems to be separated from justice, love being distributed exclusively to the righteous and justice to the sinners, then this is because human nature itself will have divided itself in two, one part having responded to love with love, to justice with justice, while the other, having rejected both the love and the justice of God, will merit to experience His justice alone...
