The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers (Part 2: Cappadocian Theology—Key to the Apologetics of the 21st Century)
Part 2 of the 1996 Book by Bishop Basil (Rodzianko)
Below my introductory comments here, subscribers will find the entire Part 2 of Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s 1996 book entitled The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers with my notes throughout the text. [See here for Part 1 of this book along with my notes on the sources and the methods used for producing this English text (as well as links to all of the original Russian text that is available online from rodzianko.org such as part 2 here or archived here). Also, see here for more information about publishers considering this text and about its legal status.]
As we saw in the first part of his book, Bishop Basil Rodzianko defends the universalism of St. Gregory of Nyssa:
Divine Providence leads everyone to Paradise, but does not deprive anyone of freedom of choice. There is no coercion, nor can there be. (This is the psychological error and heresy of Origen, condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council.) Some saints have expressed the theological opinion that all will be saved (e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa), but no one has ever condemned it as heresy, because it was only an opinion, not a definitive assertion. That is, it belonged to apophatic theology, not to cataphatic theology. In this case, it may indeed turn out that everyone repents—perhaps at the very last moment before death on Earth, or in the first moment in the next world. Everyone will be given this opportunity, in the freedom of each individual and in God’s love, mercy, and Providence. How exactly this will happen is known only to God Himself, and “it is not for us to instruct Him.”
This open stance from Bishop Basil Rodzianko to theological opinions in support of patristic or purgatorial universalism is not surprising given that the vision of Bishop Basil in this second part of his book is so vastly comprehensive, cosmic, and corporate:
No “nature” [or “essence”] exists by itself, either in God or in humans, without personhood. And, of course, [there is] no pre-existence of any mangled personhood, nor of some fragment of nature, nor of any souls torn away from them in any “collective of Adam.” …There is the Divine Image of the Trinity, implanted at creation into Adam and taken into Himself by the New Adam—Christ—into His Body—the Church!
AND CHRIST IS RISEN, AND NOT ONE IS LEFT IN THE GRAVE!
Bishop Basil’s thesis in part two of his book is that Cappadocian theology understood humans to be created as one body in the image of God who is a divine tri-personhood united by the fire of kenotic love and without which any abstract talk about God’s nature or essence (or of an abstract human nature) would be meaningless. Humans are persons that share one body in Adam and Christ which is their “nature” in a sense that is not reducible to any abstract concept. Given this, humanity cannot be conceived of or understood apart from our timeless origin and end within God’s own trinitarian life. This is the ultimate source of our world as created by God, and the fallen world that we occupy is an incomplete and shattered distortion of God’s creation. Bishop Basil makes the case that the Cappadocian fathers would have recognized in the Big Bang a description of the boundary line of the “firmament” below which is this fallen world and above which is God’s creation:
It is precisely here that Cappadocian theology provides full scope for following science in interpreting this “firmament” up to the “Big Bang,” to which this “firmament” is shifted. Within the “Big Bang” begins for the Cappadocian “some intelligible creation” and that “abyss,” about which St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks as follows: “Understanding these things allegorically, I introduce a blending of ideas and thereby agree with the views of those who preceded us and had a similar perspective, and I say: the abyss refers to fallen powers, and under the darkness above the abyss is understood the ruler of the darkness of this world.”
We also find a clear case for an ontological fall—one in which human sin incontrovertibly distorts or impedes the functions of the world within the Big Bang. Bishop Basil argues that Pelagius and Augustine, ironically, both insisted, for very different reasons, that the natural world was immutable and unchanged by the human fall. For this reason, Bishop Basil jokes that “Thomas [Aquinas] would probably be very surprised if he were told that he was a Pelagian.” This point about “creation’s immutability” being “alien to the theology of the Cappadocians” was clearly a point of inspiration for Alexander V. Khramov’s far more systematic and comprehensive exposition of “alterism and perseverism” within the theology of the fall for all church fathers up through Augustine. On this topic (as in several other places), Bishop Basil slips out of his academic voice and simply has some fun:
While the Cappadocians seem afraid to stray from the “paradisiacal reality” or, after the Fall, to “forget” paradise, Blessed Augustine . . .seems not to notice that after the Fall, this earth is no longer the same, and he crosses the boundary back and forth without hesitation, not even thinking about a passport or visa. This is simply ingrained in his subconscious. Paradoxically, all this is caused by the “Western mentality,” the legacy of ancient Rome, its civilization, Roman law, and legalism, and theologically—by the influence “from the contrary” of the heresy of Pelagius, with whom Augustine waged endless disputes.
This is a book that wanders ecstatically and autobiographically through many topics, anecdotes, illustrations, and miniature homilies along the course of its argument. This made my “digital translation” work more difficult than I anticipated but also more rewarding for me. Over some of this Christmas festal season, I’ve been lost in a world of historical, biographical, theological, and linguistic questions that I’ve not descended into this deeply since researching the landscape of Protestant political theology in Elizabethan England during my graduate studies at the University of St Andrews a long time ago.
This was a world of Russian theologians who were all either exiled or killed in the Gulag. Bishop Basil, you may recall, ran a BCC radio broadcast for three decades that reached behind the Iron Curtain. He started this after being pulled out of a communist prison himself by the direct intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Following up on the many heroes of Bishop Basil who died during this time in Russia, I found several more books that have never been translated into English (as far as I can find yet) and that sound to me like treasure troves of theological and Christian apologetical insights. Here are two examples:
Apologetics by Vasily V. Zenkovsky published in Russian in 1959 in Paris. [Zenkovsky’s A History of Russian Philosophy has been translated into English by George L. Kline in two volumes.]
Essays on Christian Apologetics (Очерки христианской апологетики) written by Nikolai Nikolaevich Fioletov sometime before his death in the Gulag in 1943 and published posthumously in 1992 (as his wife risked her life to preserve his manuscript). Fioletov was a Russian theologian and professor at Perm University.
While appreciating his fervor for the host of deeply devout and learned Russian thinkers and theologians during this tragic period of Soviet persecution, I will admit that Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s enthusiasm for something like Russian nationalism is a little hard to read at times. It is, of course, especially sad today in light of the blood and soil theology that has come to dominate the Moscow Patriarchate. Of course, it is difficult to imagine the heartbreak of someone like Bishop Basil Rodzianko surveying the current state of affairs given that he was both a native Ukrainian and a great lover of Russia.
Bishop Basil Rodzianko is also a little heavy handed at some points with his rhetoric against “the West.” This is most happily tempered, however, by his earnest and evident love for his Anglican hosts and teachers during many years in the UK both as a young man and later in life. Several of his autobiographical asides are extremely moving to read. I’ll certainly carry with me to my grave his account of watching a yule log burn that had been lit during the Christmas season by the Anglican priest who was hosting Rodzianko as a young, unmarried theology student. Something about the English child that he played with in Russian and his musing on trinitarian theology over the fire during the Christmas season all connected with me in a rather personal way as I read and worked on getting it into coherent English while many of my own 25 or so nieces and nephews played in a room of my sister’s home where a warm fire crackled on the hearth.
In a very different kind of autobiographical note that is more immediately related to the thrust of Rodzianko’s main thesis in this book, here is an account of his own early sensitivity and innocence on the topic of human origins and the history of our planet:
My senior friend, who had brought me from Yugoslavia to England for postgraduate studies, Nikolai Mikhailovich Zernov, invited me to visit with him the famous London Natural History Museum in Kensington. At that time, I was interested in everything, and I gladly accepted the invitation. What I saw there literally blinded me. It began with the enormous monument—a statue of a seated Darwin, clearly dominating the museum. There was no doubt—this was a scientific museum of Evolution. The exhibits were so serious, so intelligently arranged, with such profound ideas, that I... was bewildered! Previously, especially back in Yugoslavia, everything had been clear: the theory of evolution was scientific fantasy; it did not exist; only the Bible did! But here—everything collapsed: “Could it really be true?”... I could not believe my eyes. What was terrifying was not what I saw, but how it was presented. Before me was no fantasy: the dinosaur skeletons filling the entire hall were a reality; the development of species appeared self-evident... What on earth was this? How could I part with the dearly cherished world of God, which I had absorbed at the feet of my late elder? How could I make sense of it all?
Back at college, overcome by pondering... I settled in the library... reading and reading and reading. Thoughts whirled in and out, interrupted by a prayer of despair. How? To whom? Where is everything?
And suddenly, in one of those moments, when it became very frightening to lose this God-given world forever, a thought pierced from somewhere: “You lose nothing; this world exists, but it is not here. Here is the result of the Fall, but that world, dear to you, is there...”
All this must be understood. One must learn...
The soul calmed, prayer flowed again. I remembered Vladyka (Bishop) John Maximovitch, who revealed to me then, at the age of 12, that other world, to which I now returned not through simple trust but consciously. Consciously? Yes!
In closing, I will simply highlight a few lines or passages that stood out to me as especially beautiful. I was move by Bishop Basil Rodzianko here:
It is impossible to separate concern for personal salvation from participation in the work of spiritual renewal for all mankind and the world—a mission entrusted to the Christian community on its journey through earthly history.
Likewise here, when he writes about the vital importance of liturgical songs and poetry:
It is entirely clear that to speak historically about subconscious memories of the Fall in Eden is impossible. Only poetry can convey what was beyond and before the beginning of this world of ours!
Finally, here is a longer passage where Rodzianko addresses how the Holy Trinity is the basis of “the unity of humanity” in its “first dispensation” according to St. Gregory of Nyssa:
Qualitatively, these two unities [the Trinity and humanity as one body in Christ] are identical: they are one and the same unity, unity in multiplicity, achieved and attained through love in a single organism: divine in the Most Holy Trinity and human in the Body of Christ—the Church, “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world,” according to the Revelation to Saint Apostle Paul in the Arabian desert, described in the epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians.
. . .Being a holistic theology, interconnected in all its parts, it is also interdependent: consubstantiality, the triadic nature of hypostases, the procession of the Holy Spirit, the Divine Trinity, the unity of humanity in creation, primordial goodness, the unity of the Church, the rupture of human nature by original sin (according to St. Basil the Great), the fragmentation of the entire world by sin and its transformation into “this world” with “the prince of this world,” who has nothing in common with Christ—the Creator of the world “in its first arrangement” (according to St. Gregory of Nyssa), the total disintegration of our entire universe due to sin, which so closely corresponds to all the data of modern science—all of this depends on one another and constitutes a single whole. Whenever we violate any of it—any of this whole picture—we have violated the whole!
Table of Contents
To the Readers [by Bishop Sergius (Sokolov) of Novosibirsk and Berdsk; from the printed book and not included in the online Russian text linked above]
Author’s Acknowledgments [from the printed book and not included in the online Russian text linked above]
Introduction
Part 1. Cosmology and Theology [pages 1 to 88]
Heaven and Heavens [or “Sky and Heavens”] [page 10]
History of Astrology [page 13]
The Uniqueness of a Person [page 16]
The Uniqueness of the Infant [page 19]
On the Divergence from Astrology [page 21]
Cosmology and Christianity [page 23]
What World Do We Live In? [Or “What Kind of World Do We Live In?”] [page 26]
“Big Bang”—The Big Bang [page 31]
The Anthropic Principle [page 35]
Creation of the World [page 42]
How God’s World, Created by Him, Differs from This World Distorted by Satan [page 45]
Biblical Paradise [page 48]
Tree of Life [page 53]
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil [page 56]
Shards [or “Fragments”] [page 59]
The Fate of the Shards [or “The Destiny of the Fragments”] [page 62]
Where Does the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil Come From? [page 64]
The Role of Humanity in the Salvation of the World [page 66]
Hawking and the Catholic Church [page 71]
Dr. Hawking and St. Basil the Great [page 74]
“Imaginary” Time [page 79]
The Omega Point [page 81]
Alpha [page 84]
Can Science Speak of the “Alpha” of Another World? [or “Can Science Talk About the ‘Alpha’ of an Alternate World?”] [page 86]
Notes (from Part 1)
Part 2. Cappadocian theology is the key to apologetics for our time: Apologetics for the twenty-first century [pages 89 to 235]
Is St. Gregory of Nyssa an Origenist? [page 91]
Revelation and Theology [page 95]
Theology of the Cappadocians [page 97]
Scholarly Literature on the Cappadocians [page 104]
Revelation in the Arabian Desert [page 107]
The Primordial Creation of the Holy Trinity’s Image [page 121]
Attempt by Russian Theologians of the 19th and 20th Centuries to Revive Cappadocian Theology [page 132]
Spirituality and Mysticism of Cappadocian Theology [page 162]
Answer to the Question [page 173]
Cappadocian Personalism [page 182]
Personality in God [page 185]
Latin Theology on Original Sin [page 189]
Two Theologies: East and West [page 195]
Cappadocian Theology in Liturgical Poetry [page 210]
Notes (from Part 2)
Epilogue [page 233]
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