Since the beginning of human
history, men have endeavoured to understand the ontology of truth, the deeper
meanings of life, existence, reality, God etc. With the establishment of the
Church we are introduced into a new understanding, a combination of Greek
Philosophy and Jewish Teaching, giving us thus very high teachings and beliefs
on our new, spiritual life. This new, spiritual life differs from our simple,
biological life. C.S. Lewis explains the difference between biological and
spiritual life, claiming:
‘We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that
both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that
the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness.
In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so
important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort
which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is
always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by
incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God
from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain
shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but
only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue
and a man. A man who changed from having Bios
to having Zoe would have gone
through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to
being a real man.
And that is precisely what
Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the
statues and these is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day
going to come to life.’[1]
No comments:
Post a Comment