СВЕТИ ЈУСТИН О ПРОМИСЛИ: ИЗВОРИ И ПОСЛЕДИЦЕ
SAINT JUSTIN ON PROVIDENCE: SOURCES AND CONSEQUENCES

Author(s): Stephen C. Headley
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, Theology and Religion, Eastern Orthodoxy
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: providence; ascetic Christology; logos of creation; Christ the Logos; cosmic Liturgy; reintegration; reason for existence
Summary/Abstract: I begin from St Justin’s repeated affirmation that the interior mission of the Church is to purify oneself. His anthropology was uncompromisingly based on a Christological ascesis. To accomplish this he says that every thought that does not transform itself into a prayer is lost. Fortunately in French or in English we have enough of his writings to elaborate on this. For instance that he read carefully Maximos the Confessor for whom true being is not what is inside history, for that field of “not-yet-being” is the object of God’s Providence. In St Maximos’ Mystagogy the “verbal icons and iconic words” can permit us to elaborate a theology of prayer that embraces invocation worldwide. This is promoted in St Justin’s understanding of Providence as it preserves the world and orients the world towards the acts of God’s love. St Paul wrote famously: “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God […] because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole of creation is groaning in travail until now” (Rom 8: 19; 21-22). While for Origen the cosmos was created to stop the fall of rational beings, for Maximos the cosmos is the environment of God’s loving care and providence. Rather than: rest – procession – return, for Maximos the triad is: becoming – movement – rest. The cosmos is where we discover our fallen state and learn to love God. For St Justin the essence of Providence lives in the divinehuman body of Christ – the Church – by Holy Tradition. The doctrine of the logos of created beings (their being the object of natural contemplation; what God reveals of Himself; the “finger prints” of the Creator) means that the logos of created beings is analogous to the Logos Christ. Thus logikos means participation in the Logos. But for St Maximos and for St Justin this requires an intense ascetic struggle in response to God’s self-emptying. Although God is separate from everything in the created order, he desires the true logoi of everything to unite to Him. From Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the successive dimensions of division in creation which converge on the human being who embraces all of the divisions found in created reality, Maximos deduces liturgical movements. He celebrates the healing of the five divisions through the Incarnation (Ambigua 41). The cosmic liturgy is the reality of the humblest celebration of the Divine Liturgy and the highest expression on earth of God’s providence. This interior mission of the Church to purify oneself, which St Justin recommends so strongly, is therefore accomplished by God’s Providence through man’s maturation under grace, unless evil makes him lose his way. God gives us a reason for being that is protological.

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