In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. [Amen.]

It is hard to believe that we have barely finished Christmas and we are already at Meatfare Sunday. We’re faced with an enormous task between now and supper, aren’t we? [Laughter] Have to eat all the meat that’s accumulated in our house, because after midnight, it’s all over. It’s all over. So we really have to apply ourselves today, strenuously, because Cheesefare Week starts tomorrow. The gravity of that obligation, I suppose, is suggested by the story of the last judgment.

This morning, beloved, meditating on today’s gospel, I want to speak to you about the anthropology of the last judgment, and inquire: What does the parable of the last judgment imply with respect to anthropology? Anthropology: two words, anthropos and logos, the study of man, the study of anthropos, the study of the human being. Now, what does the very matter of the final judgment have to say on this subject, anthropology? What are the implications about the human being that we derive from this theological expectation of a final judgment? What is there about the human being that must be said if we are to take a last judgment as seriously? Another way of putting this, I suppose, is the relationship of two concepts, what the Greeks called krisis, judgment, and anthropos, the human being—what do they say about each other?

I want to say three things this morning. First, an anthropology influenced by the last judgment must be non-determinist. Why do I use this apophatic form, non-determinist, instead of the more active form, freedom? Why do I say non-determinism instead of freedom? I do this because “freedom” has so many senses. One of its senses is political, but that’s normally the way it’s understood: political freedom. We seem to consider political freedom, that is to say, the democratic republic is the only political system compatible with freedom, as though people would never have been free before 1776. I don’t want to go into this business of freedom this morning at all. It’s only a brief sermon, a mere half-hour. Freedom has too many senses for my purposes. It’s easier to say what freedom is not. It is not determinist.

Now, it is a fact that the major influential thinkers of the past 200 years are all, without exception, determinist. All of them. I’m thinking of the men most responsible for the ideas that have shaped our inner history and continue to dominate the common presuppositions of our educational systems. I limit myself just to four. The first of these determinists is Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin teaches a biological determinism. Charles Darwin does not believe there’s any difference between the human being and any other form of life. Darwin’s is a purely materialistic interpretation of the human being. According to Darwin, man’s existence is not in even the slightest degree different from the existence of the amoeba. It’s just a development of that first thing. In Darwinism, the human being is only a rodent on two legs. If the human being is only a rodent on two legs, how can there possibly be a judgment?

Second, Karl Marx: political determinism. It is not without interest that Marx called himself the Darwin of economics. According to Marx, the human being is determined by historical forces he cannot escape, and the only possible last judgment can be what Marx called the “judgment of history.” Find me somebody today who does not believe there is something called the judgment of history. I haven’t listened to the new president often enough to know whether he says that or not, but the last president certainly did; it was the only judgment that he was facing, was the judgment of history. When they say “judgment of history,” recognize a Marxist. That is a Marxist concept: that’s the only judgment. How are we responsible, since we have nothing to say about the movement of history? We can either go with it or resist it, but it’s inevitable.

Another example: Sigmund Freud: psychological determinism. Sigmund Freud interprets the subconscious as just another form of mechanical causality. We’ve talked about that the last couple of weeks, haven’t we? mechanical causality. Freud is sort of credited with discovering the subconscious. Frankly, I don’t really believe he discovered it; I think he invented it. I’m not entirely sure there is a subconscious. It relies entirely on a metaphor. The consciousness is built over what is under it. In other words, man lives on a sewer.

Now, that was fairly common long before Freud, for people to believe that man lives on a sewer. Look at Victor Hugo; look at the novels of Victor Hugo. Where does the final scene take place? Down in the sewers of Paris; that’s where it’s reconciled. We live on a sewer. All cities are built on a sewage system, aren’t they? Freud believed human beings are built the same way: on a sewage system. I’m sure that people my age—there aren’t any of you my age—have read Albert Camus’ The Plague, where the rats come up out of the sewer, and the bubonic plague takes place in the city of Oran in Africa.

For Freud, the id is the deep, driving force of the subconscious. It is Freud’s way of saying what human beings have always known. Why does he call it the subconscious? He could have just as easily called it the unconscious. And we’ve always known that many of our desires and thoughts and so forth are unconscious. So why call them the subconscious? You’re saying something about anthropology there, about what constitutes the human being. Why subconscious? It’s a metaphor. We have to remember it is a metaphor which tells us exactly what Freud thinks about the construction of the human being.

The major human problems, however, have not come from our subconscious, they have not come from our id—the major human problems have come from our thoughts, our conscious thoughts! The evil in the world has been done by conscious thinking, not by the subconscious. It is not that the turmoil and the violence that is deep within human nature emerges. On the contrary, it’s the mind that’s creating these problems. Be very cautious. Here I suppose I’m hitting the major heresy of today. As soon as someone says to you, “I feel that… I feel that…” Don’t have anything else to do with them. All they’re doing is giving you their feelings.

With respect to… I know that some of you like me to recommend books… Let me tell you of a psychiatrist and a psychologist whom I think far more reliable than Freud, and that’s Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and neurologist, a man of high scientific training, far beyond anything in Freud. I refer you to Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Or, if you want to move to France, although this book is available in English, Paul Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence. I refer you to the poet Paul Valéry.

Another example of determinism: Albert Einstein, physical determinism. Anybody want to challenge whether Einstein is a major figure in determinism? I know Marx isn’t so much any more, but Freud and Darwin certainly are. The only place Marxism is taken seriously is the American university campus. Albert Einstein, physical determinism. “Physics,” wrote Einstein in 1925, “is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality.” Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality: reality is physical; it follows physical laws. That’s reality.

What is missing there? What’s missing in all the others? Logos, logos! The last judgment presumes that logos is at the base of reality. Einstein’s determinism is what compelled him to question, to deny, to refuse to believe—because that’s what it was, a refusal to believe—all the study of physics that didn’t go along with that. I’m thinking particularly of Heisenberg. I’ll give another quotation from Einstein: “Physical reality exists, and it would exist even if there were no observers to observe it.” There is Descartes in a nutshell: there’s objective reality and then there’s subjective nowhere. So you’ve got this dual… this split between the subjective and the objective. There’s Descartes with a vengeance.

This naive dualism of objectivity and subjectivity refuses to recognize that reality is not just physical things. Reality includes human beings, and we are part of that. Human beings are the place where the world itself, the cosmos itself, reflects upon its own active thought. In fact, it’s the only place there is thought. There are semblances of thought in things like animals, because animals do ask the question, “How?”; they never ask the question, “Why?” But human beings can ask, “Why?” And that itself is part of the universe: human beings.

You see, Einstein has no logos. Man always stands as a mere observer of reality. There’s no recognition that the human being exists in order to create reality. The human being exists in order to create reality. Let me give you a very simple example. In the year 1800, probably the poorest country in Europe was Switzerland. The only people to live there were people who couldn’t live anywhere else; it was like being in Chicago. If you really had your choice, you would not pick Chicago. Well, Switzerland was the Chicago of Europe. [Laughter] Nobody really wanted to live there. Now, how did that change? The physical reality of Switzerland is still there. How is it now one of the wealthiest countries in the world, rivaled only by a couple of Scandinavian countries which are also cold and mountainous? How is that? What transformed Switzerland?

Mainly poets. Think of Byron. In fact, think of Shelley. Poets! The poet saw the value of the mountains, and they wrote about them. They went and visited, and they wrote about them, and other English people thought, “Oh! That sounds really neat. Let’s go to Switzerland!” And people started going to Switzerland for the mountains, the very thing that kept people away before. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Switzerland is surrounded by Italy, France, and Austria; that’s a big help itself, and in fact all three languages are spoken there. There’s a total transformation of the economy of Switzerland—through poetry! In other words, human beings can actually change even social reality.

Point two: What other feature of anthropology is demanded by a last judgment? Responsibility. There can be no judgment unless there is some responsibility. We don’t hold cats to the judgment. Cats aren’t really responsible. They just do what they do. Rats are not really responsible; they just do what they do. But the component of responsibility is an essential feature of human existence, and this is implied by the theological fact of the last judgment.

This second feature of anthropology flows logically from the first. If human beings are not determined biologically or by economics or the subconscious or physical causes, that is, human choices are not to be explained by mechanical causality, then human choices must render some account of themselves. Human choices must render an account of themselves, because the choice is the assumption of responsibility.

There’s something very positive about the word “responsibility”: look at it closely. It’s the ability to respond. Now think about that: responsibility is the ability to respond. It suggests the human innate capacity, the innate openness of a human being to an invitation. Responsibility means the future response: not a compulsion from the past but a response from the future. Responsibility is the human ability to receive prophecy. Prophecy is always aimed at responsibility. Just start with the earliest of the prophets to see that. “For three transgressions of Moab, and I will not take away the punishment. For three transgressions of Amon, and for four… for three transgressions of Edom, and for four…” The earliest of the prophets: he is laying it on them, responsibility. He likens himself to a lion calling out in the wilderness.

You see, beloved, if our choices are not determined, then we are responsible for them. We are responsible for what we choose to do, but hear me again, because this is about the third or fourth time I’ve said this in the last month. We are responsible for the choices we make about what thoughts we’re going to think. Thoughts are not things we have; thoughts are things we choose. And we’re responsible for our thoughts, and that all implies the final judgment.

Three. Man’s responsibility is a social responsibility. It’s a social responsibility. Human nature is not just one other species, like any other biological species. Human nature is open to God. Human nature actually has a history. People now speak of the pre-history of man. There is no such thing as the pre-history of man. Man is not an evolved rodent. Man is created in the image and likeness of God, and if we ever compromise on that, we have sold out the Gospel. That was one of the major features of the proclamation of the Gospel in the Mediterranean world. For the first time, the Greco-Roman world heard the biblical doctrine of creation, and that is in our Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”

The great Christological heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries all attacked the second article of the Creed. We are now dealing with attacks on the first article of the Creed: “God, the Father Almighty, Creator.” That’s what’s being denied today. He’s the Father because he has a Son, an eternal Son, the Logos, and there is your major difference, by the way—I say, “by the way!”—that’s your major difference between Islam and the Church. The notion I’ve heard so many Antiochian Orthodox say, “Well, the only difference between us and the Muslims is that we believe in the identity of Christ.” That’s secondary!

Our major difference is the identity of God. The Muslim God creates things determinate; he does not create things in his logos. That the Logos is divine and became human is specifically Christian. There’s no, no resemblance between Islam and the Church even worth talking about it except they both like to eat hummus. [Laughter] That’s the only similarity! There are no other similarities. God preserve hummus and all those nice things, and above all, God preserve baba ganoush. [Laughter] Because I can eat that without any danger to my health; I’ve got to be careful of things that are made from chickpeas, but baba ganoush, I tell ya… Well, I’ll get back to my topic here.

The human species is not like other biological species. The deepest part of human beings is not the id. We are not built on a sewer. We’re built on the foundation that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and that call of the image and likeness of God is what makes possible heaven and hell. Heaven and hell: both are made possible by that capacity of human beings put in them called the image of God. This is the ultimate foundation of human dignity: the image of God.

“Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brethren, you do unto me,” says the Savior of the world. Whatsoever you do to any of these: how you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, visit the sick—all the things we are to do for one another we do because we’re all created in the image and likeness of God. It is not simply following an impulse of kindness. That impulse of kindness has a reason in it. There’s reasons why I’m inclined to deal gently with my cat, a lot more gently with my cat than a cat will deal with a mouse. Where does that impulse come from? The fact that I’m made in the image and likeness of God. It comes from the deepest part of me.

We are responsible not only for ourselves; we are responsible for one another. The liturgy says this over and over and over again. That’s one of the things that most struck me the first time I attended the Divine Liturgy. “Let us commit ourselves and one another… Let us commit ourselves and one another, and all our life, to Christ our God.” Ultimately, this is the criterion of the last judgment, Jesus tells us.

I regret I have to tell you this—I’m an old person now, and they won’t kick me out of the church for saying it… or maybe—I regret there’s so much emphasis in the hymnography of the day about the river of fire at this terrible, terrible, terrible judgment. I think that’s to get us all worked up, get us in the right mood for the Great Canon. You notice, nothing good happens in the Great Canon either.

The last judgment, beloved, is not something we need to fear. We are to serve the living God, says 1 Thessalonians 1:10, I think. We are to serve the living God, and to wait for his Son, who will deliver us from the wrath. Amen.