According to the teaching of the Church, Man is a rather strange combination of contrary factors; made of the substance of Earth, breathed on with the breath of Heaven, He is neither one nor the other, but stands at the intersection of the worlds, and is Himself the reconciliation of these different orders. In His appointed role as steward of the Earth, He stands over it, administering the Grace of God to the entire world, and stands before God offering the praise and worship of all earthly things.
After the Fall, Earth is no longer subject to Man, but He must leave the Garden, and go out to wrest a living from the hostile world; still He carries in Him the seeds of His error, which is the wish to regard Himself the equal of God. Consequently, He is always striving to return to Paradise by His own efforts, of which the Tower of Babel is the first and characteristic example, and our own technological dystopia perhaps the mature fruit. Repeatedly, throughout History, Mankind is raising towers to Heaven, and either seeing the entire project fall apart in confusion through His sinful ignorance and error, or finds, (in a few of His lesser attempts) that His tower is, after all, only another ziggurat, and His attempt to manufacture the terrestrial Paradise just a common garden.
It must be recognized how much the teachings of Evolution distort the Patristic Universe, particularly when it comes to the doctrine of Man. In the Evolutionary cosmology, Man is integrally a part of the life-matrix of Earth, and that is essentially all He is, no matter what kind of spirit-nature God may have tacked onto our ape ancestor; He is the product of slime, being automatically pushed up the ladder of biological evolution, which is assumed to eventually become spiritual, and no act of His own can either advance or retard His progress. He is predestined for salvation, but must first work His way through the Purgatory of biology; clearly we have here entered a universe heavily influenced by a gnostic spirituality. How different is the place of Man in the Christian cosmos; set in a high place, fallen to a low place, created to have fellowship with the Angels, become "like unto the beasts" by His passions, unable to rise from this ignoble position until pulled up by the condescending hand of God Himself, He shall be judged in the end according to His deeds, because He is called to remake Himself after the form of the Perfect Man, and through Him to attain to the likeness of God. Christ, as the "New Adam" stands in the place of the Old as High Priest over all the Earth, and is the reconciliation in Himself of all things, the Spiritual and the Material, the Human and the Divine.
After the Fall, Earth is no longer subject to Man, but He must leave the Garden, and go out to wrest a living from the hostile world; still He carries in Him the seeds of His error, which is the wish to regard Himself the equal of God. Consequently, He is always striving to return to Paradise by His own efforts, of which the Tower of Babel is the first and characteristic example, and our own technological dystopia perhaps the mature fruit. Repeatedly, throughout History, Mankind is raising towers to Heaven, and either seeing the entire project fall apart in confusion through His sinful ignorance and error, or finds, (in a few of His lesser attempts) that His tower is, after all, only another ziggurat, and His attempt to manufacture the terrestrial Paradise just a common garden.
It must be recognized how much the teachings of Evolution distort the Patristic Universe, particularly when it comes to the doctrine of Man. In the Evolutionary cosmology, Man is integrally a part of the life-matrix of Earth, and that is essentially all He is, no matter what kind of spirit-nature God may have tacked onto our ape ancestor; He is the product of slime, being automatically pushed up the ladder of biological evolution, which is assumed to eventually become spiritual, and no act of His own can either advance or retard His progress. He is predestined for salvation, but must first work His way through the Purgatory of biology; clearly we have here entered a universe heavily influenced by a gnostic spirituality. How different is the place of Man in the Christian cosmos; set in a high place, fallen to a low place, created to have fellowship with the Angels, become "like unto the beasts" by His passions, unable to rise from this ignoble position until pulled up by the condescending hand of God Himself, He shall be judged in the end according to His deeds, because He is called to remake Himself after the form of the Perfect Man, and through Him to attain to the likeness of God. Christ, as the "New Adam" stands in the place of the Old as High Priest over all the Earth, and is the reconciliation in Himself of all things, the Spiritual and the Material, the Human and the Divine.
