With or without reason

Christ Encounters the Woman at the Well (Serrin)

This was one of the things that startled me the most when I became Orthodox, that the Word of God would have become man, even had we not sinned. But then, finding out that original sin as taught and believed in the Western Church, was not held in the Orthodox East, also startled me. I was brought up from childhood in a very Augustinian form of Christianity, as if there were no other church fathers than the bishop of Hippo, and took it for granted that humanity’s sinful nature was the cause of all the universe’s troubles.

As a catechumen, this Catholic’s eyes were opened to many things.

It still really boils down to our limited human understanding of what our existential dilemma is, how we will deal with it, and how we will appropriate the salvation Christ offers us. West or East, our understandings have their very poignant moments, and power; but neither of us have the answer in our intellectual grasp: only in that close encounter with the Lord of all, with Christ, where we surrender to His love, is the goal and meaning of life vouchsafed to us, with or without reason.