THE WORLD

The World is a neutral substance; it is what you make of it. It can be either the threshold of Heaven or the Gate of Hell; Merrie Middle Earth, eaten into on both sides until there is but a filament's worth of neutrality in it, if that. He who would walk this razor wire must indeed keep his feet firmly planted on terra firma.

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What relation to the world should a Christian have? We are told that we are in the world, but not of the world; most seem to interpret that passage as saying, "even though we are not of the world, we must strive to be integrated into the affairs of the world". To me it seems obvious that the intent of the verse is that we are in the world whether we like it or not, but must take care that we do not become "of the world". Much scholarship is directed at the idea that what the Fathers meant by the world is not the world as such, but the sinful passions which afflict us. Of course, I agree that what the Fathers speak against is not God's creation, which is good, but the fallen world and fallen nature, the bonfire of the vanities, and in this sense it is very true that He who is a friend of the world is the enemy of God, but it is necessary for us to realize just how profoundly Man's rebellion against God affected the substance of the World, and not speak as if the World as it exists now is not groaning with us in the shadow of corruption cast by our Firstfather's ordinal misdeed. Some speak as if when Christ ressurected, destroying death, or when He was baptized, sanctifying the nature of Matter, that the effects of the Fall were reversed at that point, and the World reverted to its ordinal "good" condition. Those who say such things reveal, by the way, their low view of God's Creation (usually they are somewhat under the influence of Medieval Scholasticism), but also that they not only do not have the Patristic Mind, but are not even in accordance with Scripture; when St. Paul wrote of all Nature groaning in anticipation of it's deliverance from the bondage of Death, this was after the Earthly life of Christ, which the aforesaid pundits attribute as the deliverance from the effects of sin. It probably hasn't escaped anyone's notice, but Death exists, and death is the result of sin.

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Why this blindness in the face of the fact of sin? It is the love of the World (which is emnity to God); embracing the good of this world, and plummeting to perdition, finding in the end that the love of anything in this world for itself alone is the embracing of corruption. The beauties we see in the world point us toward life in God and the Eternal Kingdom; if we learn to love that life, we will always be in exile here, under the harsh tutelage of corruption, and must always long for the day when the world we know will be purged, and return to its ordinal condition. Till then, the Kingdom of Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven are in this world together like oil and water, two principles so completely contrary to one another that no compromise can ever exist between them, contending against each other until the last day.