pantheistic confusion or the purely metaphorical

I noticed with their new catalog that Eighth Day books is offering a translation of Archimandrite Placide Deseille’s Orthodox Spirituality and the Philokalia translated from the French by Anthony P. Gythiel.  Archimandrite Placide is a former Trappist monk.  My first recollection of encountering his name is in the published Journals of Thomas Merton, as Merton corresponded with Fr. Placide in the 1960’s.

The Orthodox blogger over at Logismoi recently posted Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) on Orthodoxy and Catholicism in which he provides some brief translations of the Archimandrite’s thoughts on this matter from some Greek translations of Archimandrite Placide’s work.  The writer promises to finish a complete translation of a lecture by Fr. Placide entitled ‘Roman Catholic Spirituality and Orthodox Tradition.’ Here are the brief excerpts of that lecture so far translated at Logismoi:

the natural law of death

In the beginning thoughts of St. Athanasius’ The Incarnation of the Word of God, he well establishes that it was God the Father by whom all things were created and all things are sustained. He then goes on to reflect upon the nature of man in and of himself (that is, considered apart from God), and he calls this nature something peculiar, by the standards of anglophone natural theologies anyway:

…But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He has given by making it conditional from the first upon two things – namely, law and a place. He set them in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition. If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their original innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs, without sorrow, pain or care, and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became vile, throwing away the birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death, and live no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and in corruption.

…For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit), and had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in the process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore, when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing; but he also bears the likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt.

…This, then, was the plight of men. God had not only made them out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on them His own life by the grace of the Word. Then, turning from eternal things to things corruptible, by counsel of the devil, they had become the cause of their own corruption in death; for, as I said before, though they were by nature subject to corruption, the grace of their union with the Word made them capable of escaping the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created. That is to say, the presence of the Word with them shielded them even from natural corruption….