Category: Dr Jean-Claude Larchet

…what man is potentially in his nature by grace, he must also become personally and actively by his free will in all his life and being. For, as St Gregory of Nyssa warns: “That which you all have not become, you are not.”

And St Diadochus of Photice spells out in detail that if the first of the gifts bestowed by the grace of baptism is the immediate restoration of the image of God, the second gift–the likeness of God–“requires our cooperation.”

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol. 2, p. 57)

The pathological character of love of money and greed is likewise and consequently made manifest in the relationship of man to himself. Subject to these two passions, he lacks the most basic love with regard to himself; he prefers money and material riches to his own soul. Preoccupied with keeping the goods he possesses and acquiring new ones, he neither takes care for his soul, nor does he worry about his salvation.

St John Cassian says that he neglects “the image and likeness of God…which [he] should preserve without stain in himself” by worshiping God: “Indeed, one cannot love both one’s soul and money.” Occupied with increasing and maintaining material wealth, man cannot develop his spiritual potentialities and effect the blossoming of his nature, and thus he keeps himself enclosed within the limits of the fallen world.

Even though he believes that he truly enriches himself–that he gains his freedom and guarantees himself life in gathering treasures on earth, he alienates and pins down all his being and existence to this world and “the flesh”, “for where man’s treasure is, there his heart is also”.

…Above all, it takes the place of spiritual delights which are incomparably superior and alone capable of fully satisfying man, whom pleasure in the end deprives of eternal bliss. Thus it is clearly apparent that man in many ways becomes “his own enemy”, as St John Chrysostom says, through love of money and greed.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, vol.1, p.174)

Where there is the love of God, “Christ is all and in all” and “there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man” “neither male nor female.” On the contrary, where self-love reigns, there one sees only oppositions, divisions, rivalries, envy, jealousy, dissensions, enmity, quarrels, aggression, all manifestations which are the fruits of this passion, as are unsociability, injustice, the exploitation of others and even murders and wars.

Self-love appears then to be deeply pathogenic on many levels, and is considered by the Fathers–as much in its nature as in its effects–as the mark of a man who has become mad and as itself being mad and profoundly irrational.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, pp.149-150)

Scientific knowledge itself is not neutral; but, as St Gregory Palamas emphasizes (in this matter the most modern epistemological thinking concurs with him), it is relative “to the intention of those who make use of it,” “appearing according to the thought of those who make use of it and easily taking the form which is given it by the point of view of those who possess it.”

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, p.62)

Having lost the true knowledge of reality that he possessed in the Spirit, but nonetheless needing knowledge, fallen man ends up replacing this knowledge not by another single knowledge, but by a multitude of forms of knowledge of all sorts, corresponding to the multitude of appearances among which he henceforth moves. St Mark the Ascetic thus notes that its ignorance and forgetfulness of God “cast a pall of terrible and unstable curiosity over the soul.”

But the types of knowledge resulting from this loss are partial, shifting, differing, even opposed to one another–just like the phenomenal realities to which they apply. Man, in his substitutive forms of knowledge, is limited to classifying the appearances of things–these appearances that per se have no objectivity–since they are defined by the deformed and fallen intellect of their observer.

…Fallen man’s various forms of knowledge are thus nothing more than illusory projections of his fallen consciousness, and even where an objectivity or truth seems to have been attained (such as in scientific knowledge), this objectivity and truth can be reduced as a matter of fact to the temporary agreement of states of consciousness producing the same type of projection and being in accordance with one another in some way in their common state of decline.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, pp.61-62)

Thus, fallen man replaces the worship of the Creator with the worship of creatures. Idolatry exists not only in the oft-taken forms of organized religion, in which creatures are explicitly defined as gods, but also in all man’s attitude vis-a-vis being, when this being is taken as an end and is endowed with a sense and value per se, instead of these latter being recognized in God. Idolatry also exists in every activity and effort consecrated upon a being per se, instead of being consecrated to God through it. One holds an idolatrous attitude towards a being whenever this being stops being transparent to God, stops revealing Him–in other words, whenever man stops perceiving its spiritual ‘reasons’ and ‘perceiving’ in them the divine energies present in them that define its true nature.

Thus this being hides God instead of manifesting Him; it is closed in on itself in a way instead of serving as a stepping stone for man, that he might be raised up to his Creator.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, pp.58-59)