ORTHODOXY AND THE MATERIAL WORLD
By Sister Ioanna
St. Innocent of Alaska Religious Community, Redford MI
What is more basic to us in our daily lives than the material world — our own bodies and those of other people
ORTHODOXY AND THE MATERIAL WORLD
By Sister Ioanna
St. Innocent of Alaska Religious Community, Redford MI
What is more basic to us in our daily lives than the material world — our own bodies and those of other people and animals, and the entire created world around us? How do we relate to these physical entities, starting with our own bodies? Is this material world good or bad? Does the material world play any role in salvation? Perhaps you have never thought much about these things, but these are extremely important questions to ask and to seek answers to, because the answers shape how we live our daily lives, whether or not we are aware of it, because our actions inevitably proceed from our beliefs. The Orthodox position on countless ethical issues are direct consequences of the Orthodox view of the material world, and therefore it is vital that we reflect about these things. Are our attitudes and how we act a result of our Orthodox Faith, or a result of the opposing secular ideas in the society around us that we have we absorbed without realizing it? We will briefly inquire about three aspects of some of these many and complex issues: (1) the reasons why the prevailing Western secular attitude is to exploit the material world; (2) the reasons why the Orthodox view of the material world is the exact opposite; and (3) how the Orthodox view of the material world should affect our behavior in our daily lives — in other words, putting into practice what Orthodoxy teaches.
(1) THE WESTERN SECULAR VIEW
Orthodoxy’s life-affirming and world-affirming view of the material world is in radical opposition to the prevailing Western secular attitude — that the material world is for us to subjugate, dominate and exploit, and its resulting lack of reverence for life. Where does this Western attitude towards the material world come from — what are its sources? We can readily identify three sources. The first source is the prevalence in the West of the many centuries-old belief that the material world is bad, as reflected in early Christian heresies, and reinforced in the 16th century by the Protestant Reformation’s doctrine of the total depravity of man. The second source is Humanism’s human-centered set of values and priorities (“Man is the measure of all things.”), with its accompanying profound alienation of persons from themselves, from God, and from the rest of creation. These ideas exploded into Western European culture during the Western Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries, and have been spreading and expanding since then, down to our own day. The third source comes from the highly significant Western misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “dominion,” as when in Genesis (1:26 & 28) we are told that God gave “dominion” over the animals and the world of nature to Adam and Eve. Our modern western English meaning of the word “dominion” implies “dominating” and “subjugating,” which gives way to exploitation, pollution and abuse of the material world, and general lack of reverence for life. But the English word “dominion” is derived from the Latin word “Domine,” which means “Lord.” Therefore, for humans to have “dominion” over the animals, nature and the whole material world does not mean to subjugate them like a tyrant— it means to relate to them in the same way as the Lord relates to His creation. This attitude is the exact opposite of subjugation — it means to treat all of creation with the love, caring, respect and reverence for life that the Lord has towards His own creation, which is the Orthodox view.
To help us better understand the reasons for today’s proliferation of the lack of reverence for life, and the exploitation, subjugation, pollution and abuse of the created world, let us look a little closer at the first source mentioned above, that stems from the West’s inherited tendency of embracing various material-world-rejecting and denying beliefs. Upon reflection, we see that if the physical world is bad or evil, then one can respond in either of two different ways. (1) On the one hand, a religious person might seek to escape from the material world precisely because it is evil. This attitude reflects the Western tendency since the 4th century to accept Arianism and some of St. Augustine’s thoughts, which are further exalted in the Protestant Reformation’s concept of the “total depravity” of human nature and the Protestant rejection of the corrupt material world, which cannot participate in salvation precisely because it is hopelessly corrupt. (2) On the other hand, if the material world is evil, then one can readily reject any responsibility whatsoever to protect, preserve and respect the material world, and one can then do whatever one wants with it. We clearly see here that how we act is a direct consequence of what we believe. This distorted attitude has been growing for centuries.
The Protestant concept of the depravity of the material world of the 16th and 17th centuries, then combines with the 18th century Enlightenment’s religious concept of Deism. Deism denies the belief that God is involved i