The Tragedy of Man
The tragedy of our times
lies in our almost complete unawareness, or unmindfulness, that there are
two kingdoms, the temporal and the eternal. We would build the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth, rejecting all idea of resurrection or eternity.
Resurrection is a myth.
God is dead.
Let us go back to Biblical revelation, to the creation of Adam and Eve and
the problem of original sin. ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at
all’ (1 John 1.5). The commandment given to the first-called in Paradise
indicates this and at the same time conveys that, although Adam possessed
absolute freedom of choice, to choose to eat of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil would entail a break with God as the sole source of life. By
opting for knowledge of evil, by savouring evil- Adam inevitably broke with
God, Who can in no way be joined with evil (cf. 2 Cor. 6.14-15). In breaking
with God, Adam dies. ‘In the day that thou eatest thereof’, thus parting
company with me, rejecting my love, my word, my will, ‘thou shalt surely
die’ (Gen. 2.17). Exactly how Adam ‘tasted’ the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is not important. His sin was to doubt God, to
seek to determine his own life independently of God, even apart from Him,
after the pattern of Lucifer. Herein lies the essence of Adam’s sin- it was
a movement towards self-divinisation. Adam could naturally wish for
deification- he had been created after the likeness of God- but he sinned in
seeking this divinisation not through unity with God but through rupture.
The serpent beguiled Eve, the helpmeet God had made for Adam, by suggesting
that God was introducing a prohibition which would restrict their freedom to
seek divine plenitude of knowledge- that God was unwilling for them to ‘be
as gods knowing good and evil’ (Gen. 3.5).
I first met with the notion of tragedy, not in life but in literature. The
seeds of tragedy, it seemed to me in my youth, are sown when a man finds
himself wholly captivated by some ideal. To attain this ideal he is ready to
risk any sacrifice, any suffering, even life itself. But if he happens to
achieve the object of his striving, it proves to be an impudent chimera: the
reality does not correspond to what he had in mind. This sad discovery leads
to profound despair, a wounded spirit, a monstrous death.
Different people have different ideals. There is the ambition for power, as
with Boris Godounov. In pursuit of his aim he did not stop at bloodshed.
Successful, he found that he had not got what he expected. ‘I have reached
the height of power but my soul knows no happiness.’ Though the concerns of
the spirit prompt a nobler quest, the genius in the realm of science or the
arts sooner or later realises his inability to consummate his initial
vision. Again, the logical denouement is death.
The fate of the world troubled me profoundly. Human life at whatever stage
was unavoidably interlinked with suffering. Even love was full of
contradictions and bitter crises. The seal of destruction lay everywhere.
I was still a young man when the tragedy of historical events far outdid
anything that I had read in books. (I refer to the outbreak of the First
World War, soon to be followed by the Revolution in Russia.) My youthful
hopes and dreams collapsed. But at the same time a new vision of the world
and its meaning opened before me. Side by side with devastation I
contemplated rebirth. I saw that there was no tragedy in God. Tragedy is to
be found solely in the fortunes of the man whose gaze has not gone beyond
the confines of this earth. Christ Himself by no means typifies tragedy. Nor
are His all-cosmic sufferings of a tragic nature. And the Christian who has
received the gift of the love of Christ, for all his awareness that it is
not yet complete, escapes the nightmare of all-consuming death. Christ’s
love, during the whole time that He abode with us here, was acute suffering.
‘O faithless and perverse generation,’ He cried. ‘How long shall I suffer
you?’ (Matt. 17.17). He wept for Lazarus and his sisters (cf. John 11.35).
He grieved over the hard-heartedness of the Jews who slew the prophets (cf.
Matt. 23.37). In Gethsemane his soul was ‘exceeding sorrowful, even unto
death’ and ‘his sweat was as it were drops of blood falling down to the
ground’ (Matt. 26.38; Luke 22.44). He lived the tragedy of all mankind; but
in Himself there was no tragedy. This is obvious from the words He spoke to
His disciples perhaps only a short while before His redemptive prayer for
all mankind in the Garden: ‘My peace I give unto you’ (John 14.27). And a
little further on: ‘I am not alone, because the Father is with me. These
things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world
ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world’
(John 16.32, 33). This is how it is with the Christian: for all his deep
compassion, his tears and prayers for the world, there is none of the
despair that destroys. Aware of the breath of the Holy Spirit, he is assured
of the inevitable victory of Light. The love of Christ, even in the most
acute stress of suffering (which I would call the ‘hell of loving’), because
it is eternal is free of passion. Until we achieve supreme freedom from the
passions on this earth suffering and pity may wear out the body but it will
only be the body that dies. ‘Fear not them which kill the body, but are not
able to kill the soul’ (Matt. 10.28).
We may say that even today mankind as a whole has not grown up to
Christianity and continues to drag out an almost brutish existence. In
refusing to accept Christ as Eternal Man and, more importantly, as True God
and our Saviour- whatever the form the refusal takes, and whatever the
pretext- we lose the light of life eternal. ‘Father, I will that they also,
whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my
glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovest me before the foundation of
the world’ (John 17.24). There, in the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit, must our mind dwell. We must hunger and thirst to
enter into this wondrous Kingdom. Then we shall overcome in ourselves the
sin of refusing the Father’s love as revealed to us through the Son (cf.
John 8.24). When we choose Christ we are carried beyond time and space,
beyond the reach of what is termed ‘tragedy’.
The moment the Holy Spirit grants us to know the hypostatic form of prayer
we can begin to break the fetters that shackle us. Emerging from the prison
cell of selfish individualism into the wide expanse of life in the image of
Christ, we perceive the nature of the personalism of the Gospel. Let us
pause for a moment to examine the difference between these two theological
concepts: the individual and the persona. It is a recognised fact that the
ego is the weapon in the struggle for existence of the individual who
refuses Christ’s call to open our hearts to total, universal love. The
persona, by contrast, is inconceivable without all-embracing love either in
the Divine Being or in the human being. Prolonged and far from easy ascetic
effort can open our eyes to the love that Christ taught, and we can
apprehend the whole world through ourselves, through our own sufferings and
searchings. We become like a world-wide radio receiver and can identify
ourselves with the tragic element, not only in the lives of individual
people but of the world at large, and we pray for the world as for our own
selves. In this kind of prayer the spirit beholds the depths of evil, the
sombre result of having eaten of the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and
evil’. But it is not only evil that we see- we make contact, too, with
Absolute Good, with God, Who translates our prayer into a vision of
Uncreated Light. The soul may then forget the world for whom she was
praying, and cease to be aware of the body. The prayer of divine love
becomes our very being, our body.
The soul may return to this world. But the spirit of man, having experienced
his resurrection and come near existentially to eternity, is even further
persuaded that tragedy and death are the consequence of sin and that there
is no other way to salvation than through Christ.
Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov (2001) (2nd ed.) His Life is Mine. Chapter
4: The Tragedy of Man. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
