Love and Solidarity in the Light of Death and Eternity

Originally published by Macrina Magazine, May 9, 2020

The despoiling of Death of Aphrahat

And when Jesus, the slayer of Death, came, and clothed Himself in a Body from the seed of Adam, and was crucified in His Body, and tasted death; and when (Death) perceived thereby that He had come down unto him, he was shaken from his place and was agitated when he saw Jesus; and he closed his gates and was not willing to receive Him. Then He burst his gates, and entered into him, and began to despoil all his possessions. But when the dead saw light in the darkness, they lifted up their heads from the bondage of death, and looked forth, and saw the splendour of the King Messiah. Then the powers of the darkness of Death sat in mourning, for he was degraded from his authority. Death tasted the medicine that was deadly to him, and his hands dropped down, and he learned that the dead shall live and escape from his sway. And when He had afflicted Death by the despoiling of his possessions, he wailed and cried aloud in bitterness and said, Go forth from my realm and enter it not. Who then is this that comes in alive into my realm? And while Death was crying out in terror (for he saw that his darkness was beginning to be done away, and some of the righteous who were sleeping arose to ascend with Him), then He made known to him that when He shall come in the fullness of time, He will bring forth all the prisoners from his power, and they shall go forth to see the light. Then when Jesus had fulfilled His ministry among the dead, Death sent Him forth from his realm, and suffered Him not to remain there. And to devour Him like all the dead, he counted it not pleasure. He had no power over the Holy One, nor was He given over to corruption.¹

Good from Evil? or the Nothingness?

Demonstrating the existence of God has been done since Plato and Aristotle, through Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, and up to today with folks like Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart. In a certain sense I think the case is closed when it comes to the question of (capital “G”) God, intellectually that is. I simply have not seen any decent refutation of the classical argument such as the argument from contingency, the Thomist first cause arguments, the various moral arguments, etc etc. I am tempted to think that the perseverance of Atheism is largely a cultural phenomenon. In my mind, only in a culture where science can pretend to be a metaphysics (rather than a method of modelling the various regularities of the physical world), only in a culture where Capitalism and the State has reduced value and morality to instrumentality and force (no need to think about values, the market takes care of that, or morality, we have law and rights), and only in a culture where reality has already become disenchanted (not through science, but largely through Christianity, science didn’t kill Zeus, that began with Theodosius I) and remains so uncritically, is Atheism tenable.