Antioch Abouna: Frankenstein or Christ?

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Frankenstein or Christ?

The story of Frankenstein touches something deep inside us. The longing for immortality so cruelly expressed in this enlivened cadaver and in all the other failed human resurrections from Tutankhamen to Lenin persists. The tragic aspect concerns what we know of all such human attempts at immortality from cryogenic freezing to elixirs of life, from transhuman cyborgs to Frankenstein zombies: they are all doomed to fail. Yet humans still strive to make themselves immortal and each fatal setback does not seem to put them off. What they and we resist is the notion that THIS life does not bear within it any seed of immortality, either accessible by science or religious experience. This life always has limits from life spans to the distant but nonetheless finite trajectory of the universe. All turns to dust in the end. We still of course labour and exult in the wonder of this creation for all that, and rightly so. A creation with limits still has inestimable value and our place and calling within it reflects that. In Christian terms though this creation is dying and any attempt at amelioration is conditioned by that perspective. If then we attempt to build a human centred utopia from the raw materials of this world we shall only see corruption. This is the inexorable logic of the Frankenstein myth. Eternal life cannot be moulded from the stench of human corruption. Immortality is from God or it is from nowhere.

Of course this is the point where Christians part company with humanistic fellow travelling idealists of all sorts. On this we insist that the resurrection of Christ is our ONLY grounds for hope in eternal life; His, that is God’s, victory over death which He has imparted to our humanity in the Incarnation and sacramentally through Holy Baptism and the Eucharist. As we die to ourselves in His death, his resurrection life breaks through into our own. As we drown the old Adam in the waters of baptism so the Risen Christ is manifest in our members within the Church, the Body of Christ, (no Frankenstein body here!). As we eat of the Body of Christ and drink of his Blood in Holy Communion we taste of the goodness of the Lord in the Food of Immortality. As we embrace Christ in His embrace, as we drink freely of the Spirit outpoured for us we find, as it were, a fount of living water bubbling up inside of us to eternal life. As we die to ourselves we are born again (or from above) to a life in God that has smashed death and rendered it senseless. As we surrender this creation to God we receive in its stead a New Creation where the waters of God’s regenerative and healing Love remake and renew all things.
So Frankenstein or Christ? No contest.

From the Fathers

On Repentance

When Abba Sisoes was about to die, and the fathers were sitting with him, they saw that his face was shining like the sun. He said unto them, "Behold, Abba Anthony has come." After a little while he said again, "Behold, the company of prophets has come," and his face shone twice as bright. Suddenly, he became as one speaking with someone else, and the fathers sitting there asked him, "Show us with whom you are speaking, father."

Immediately, Abba Sisoes said to them, "Behold, the angels came to take me away and I asked them to leave me so that I might tarry here a little longer and repent." And the old men said unto him, "You have no need to repent, father." And Abba Sisoes said to the fathers, "I do not know in my soul if I have rightly begun to repent," and they all realized that the old man was perfect.

Then, suddenly, his face beamed like the sun and all who sat there were afraid and he said to them, "Look! Look! Behold, the Lord has come and he says, 'Bring unto me the chosen vessel which is in the desert,'" and he at once delivered up his spirit and became like lightning and the whole place was filled with a sweet fragrance.

On Faith and Science

"Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. " (St. Augustine on Genesis)