Never Not Moving

Life as Movement

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. (James 2:14-16)

While the implications of this article may be detrimental to what is usually laid out as the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, the purpose of this article is not polemical. 

We, as creatures, are always moving. Even when we are sitting stationary we are still moving through the dimension of time. There is a sense in which time and motion are inextricably bound to one another. Consider the theology of time as laid out by Fr. Dumitru Staniloae in his essay Eternity and Time. Staniloae describes time as the waiting period between the acts of love between subjects. Time exists in the image of the eternal love of the trinity, where there is no waiting period. The Father gives Himself in eternity to the Son, through the Spirit, and the Son instantaneously and fully reciprocates this love back through the Spirit to the Father. Because this act of love is instantaneous there is no waiting period, or time. Creation exists, as Colossians 1 says by the Son and for the Son. Creation exists in the image of this dialogue in the Trinity, as a gift from the Father to the Son. Following trinitarian theology then, we can understand that the movement of creation in time is to be united the Son’s reciprocation of love in the Spirit back to the Father. This existence in time means that everything that occurs is happening in light of this dialogical movement between God and His creation. Everything we do is done in the context of the movement of time which draws creation forward towards its archetype. This means that there are fundamentally two directions we can move in, either towards this end, or in contrast to this end. These are the two categories of movement described by Christ in Matthew 12:30 “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” To not actively move towards God is to refuse the very principle of communion which allows us to exist in the first place – self-emptying towards the other. 

Whenever we choose to do something we are actively choosing, also to not do an infinite amount of other things. When we choose, let’s say, to learn guitar, we are also actively choosing not to learn how to build rockets or speak Hungarian. This means that whenever we direct our attention and energy towards something that does not serve the highest good, we are thus actively choosing NOT to serve the highest good. This is what evil most fundamentally is. Evil is a twofold action of both turning away from God and turning towards that which is not God. Let us use an analogy here. Imagine the path towards God as a mountain, and we are climbing the mountain. To stop at any given point, to lose focus on the top of the mountain is to say that the point which you have reached is the final good towards which you would like to strive. To do this is to reduce God to something which is not God. This image is something which I am sure we have all seen before. This is the image of the divine ladder of ascent and is also the image St. Gregory of Nyssa consistently uses to describe the spiritual path of man. To sin is to miss the mark – that is, to not choose the highest possible good. This is what Adam did when he chose the good of knowledge over the more ultimate and higher good of God’s grace.