The Absence of this Concept in Contemporary Morality and Philosophy
a. Both humanistic and Protestant morality have arrived at the conclusion that in order to strengthen love it is necessary to break away from scholastic concepts. Instead, they wish to establish a single divine life diffused in creatures and striving to blend once again into one blessed fullness, thereby replacing spiritualism with pantheism.
b. This contradiction between egoism and the principle of love is not resolved by the searching of philosophical thought as long as this thought is based on one or another principles of natural life. The Church represents a concept in which the “not I” is not somehow the opposite of the “I.” The most typical representatives of this combination are found in the categories of holy martyrs, ascetics, and hierarchs of the Church.
c. The Christian truth about the Church frees man from the natural contradiction between the self-consciousness of the individual and self-denying love as a principle of life.
- What are the three categories of which Metropolitan Anthony speaks, and what do they represent?
- How does Metropolitan Anthony draw his definition of the Church not from concepts of earthly life, but from the teaching of the Triune Being of God?