Love as Life: Fr. Rafail Noica on the Hymn of Cassiani
The martyrs, perceiving the Divinity of Christ like the sinful woman, were filled with the grace of this love, and were unmoved by torments and death, and they died full of grace
Love as life - when this love lives in the members of a human being, then torments cannot decrease it, and death has no teeth to bite into it. I want to bring your attention to another Troparion which we sing in Holy Wednesday - the Troparion of St. Cassiani: “The woman who had fallen into many sins, perceiving Thy divinity, said ‘Woe is me, for my life was a dark and moonless night’”. This is all I remember, but pay attention to this. The martyrs, perceiving like the sinful woman the Divinity of Christ, were filled with the grace of this love, and were unmoved by torments and death, and they died full of grace, and their bodies, instead of becoming carcasses and decaying, became relics for us. In the Old Testament everything that died became filthy. When people buried their parents, then a whole day, 24 hours, they were not allowed to go into the temple so that they wouldn’t defile the living with the dead. Today, if we don’t have relics of saints or martyrs in our altars, then the altars are not consecrated, and we are not able to serve the Liturgy. You see, among other things, how death was mocked by Christ. Because even sinful human beings were able to become like Christ.
Monasticism, rightly understood and rightly lived, is a lifelong martyrdom. Martyr means witness, etymologically speaking. Witness to what? Witness to a Life which cannot be extinguished by anything belonging to the world of decay, of death, of lies, of pride. This pride is, as we said, the power cord which, if we take it out of the electrical socket, we destroy the virtual reality of everything that is not God. Why do I say “virtual”? Hell was not made by God; God made only good, very good things. So everything that is outside God is only a virtual reality and has power only over those who live in the virtuality of pride, of lies. The toil of the Christian is to get out of this virtuality, to be a martyr, which means a witness, to this Life.
True martyrs were the ones whose testimony was pure. Among the 20,000 martyrs of Nicomedia, it seems that one name was not written down as a martyr. Why? Because on the way to martyrdom, he tore down from a wall the Decree of Caesar which condemned the Christians. His fault was that from that moment on he could be prosecuted by Caesar, according to Caesar’s judgement, because he set himself against Caesar. His testimony was about the way Caesar ruled over his people, so his testimony for the incorrupt Life was not pure. This is what we need to keep in mind - that we need to be witnesses to that Life which lives in the members of the human being, which cannot be overcome, as Christ says to Peter: “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Excerpt from:
Hieromonk Rafail Noica - Conference: “What is the Human Being?”
Alba Iulia, November 23, 2006
Translated by Grig Gheorghiu