Notes on The Victory of the Cross by Dumitru Staniloae

Doug Floyd

Staniloae understands creation of as a gift of God to humans (his image bearers). This gift
of time and space is created for movement toward love. In other words, the gift reveals
and expresses God’s love for humans. But the gift is not to be confused with the actual
love which is in the person of God. He writes, “The destiny of this gift is to unite man
with God who has given it.” The gift must be transcended to the love (or more
specifically to the lover).

1. The cross is central to the gift

This understanding of creation now reveals how the cross becomes central to human life.
The gift is “not the last and final reality.” So the gift must be released and sometimes
even lost as the human moves toward the Giver.

Staniloae is interpreting Maximas the Confessor who writes that “all realities which we
perceive with the senses demand the cross” and “all realities which we understand with
our mind have need of the tomb.”

When I was small my Father gave me a gas powered airplane for Christmas. We started it
up and flew it around the yard a few times, then it crashed. As a youth, I might be angry
at the loss of the plane (and almost wish I’d never had it then to have it and crash it). But
the crash of the plane did not end the relationship with my Father.

The plane in one sense expressed the unfolding of the relationship with my Dad, and for
me to be angry at the loss of the plane might denigrate the rich unfolding of my father’s
love toward me.

2. Our passions attach to the gift instead of the giver.

The Eastern Orthodox argue that the great sin of Adam occurs in the passion. Man
becomes attached to creation instead of the Creator. Man trust creation instead of the
Creator. Man looks to creation for the love that can only come from the Creator.

This disease poisons our relationship with God and one another, thus man becomes
bound to the image of a world that is passing away. Or rather, man fails to transcend the
creation to the Creator. True love passes through the perishable to the imperishable,
therefore becomes joyful even in the midst of suffering.

Our attachments cause suffering. This sounds Buddhist except that Staniloae suggests (in
line with Romans 1) it is a Creator/creation issue not an issue of denying all forms.
Suffering comes in many ways.

3. We suffer at the transitory nature of this world.

At some point, al humans come to realize the transitory nature of the world around them.
This transitory nature can cause fear, discouragement, meaninglessness, cynicism and so
on as we see the world around of fading.

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Christian look beyond the world to the resurrection: an image of love beyond the sense or
relationship not limited by death or suffering. Staniloae calls resurrection relationship
beyond the gift.

4. We suffer as a result of being bound in relation to other humans.

We are created with a responsibility to live in love and relation with other persons. This
responsibility can cause various forms of suffering.

We suffer as those we love suffer. We bear their suffering in illness, pain, difficulties, and
struggles. As we share responsibility with a wider circle of family and friends, our
suffering increase. As another Orthodox priest said, “To love is to suffer.”

As we share in their suffering and cry out with them to the Creator, we live more
intensely toward God. So suffering in relation is part of our imaging God in this world.

5. We suffer at the hands of those who misread our love as evil.

Our actions can be misunderstood by friend and foe alike. Some humans can turn against
us in hostility, taking what we meant for good as evil. They see us as obstacles to their
happiness. Our attempts to reach out, to love, to speak to them fall on deaf ears as they
curse us.

Once again, through the cross we turn to the Creator instead of creation. We transcend the
crisis in Father’s love. The world cannot empower us to love in the midst of such
suffering, only by the cross do we learn the Father’s love for the world.

Staniloae writes, “Only by the cross can we remain in submission to God and in true love
towards our neighbors. We cannot purify or develop our own spiritual life, nor that of
others, nor that of the world in general, by seeking to avoid the cross. Consequently, we
do not discover either the depth or the greatness of the potential forces and powers of this
world as a gift of God if we try to live without the cross. The way of the cross is the only
way which leads upwards, the only way which carries creation towards the true heights
for which it was made.”

6. We suffer because of our own evil.

Only Christ knows the full power of the cross because only Christ lives in absolute purity.
We live in a mixture of purity and impurity. While Christ exclusively suffers on behalf of
others, we always bear some guilt in our own suffering.

Maximas the Confessor writes, “He who suffers death on account of his sins, suffers
justly. But he who does not suffer on account of sin, voluntarily accepts death, which was
introduced into the world on account of sin, and thus overcomes sin and, by the divine
dispensation, grants a grace to all human nature by which it overcomes sin.” Only in
Christ is the true power of the cross revealed to free of us from our sinful egotism into a
pure love.

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With this in mind, Staniloae returns to the challenge of relationships. He points out that
when others suspect our love, they are right. He says, “If our neighbors suspect our
thoughts and intentions, it is almost always true that our thoughts towards them, or
towards others, have not been filled with perfect love. If they criticize us it is because we
have not always helped them in their own difficult circumstances. …If a tension or a
coldness exists between me and another person, it is almost certain that I am at least in
part the cause of this tension or coldness, or at least I have not done all that I could to get
rid of it.”

Accepting this responsibility drives us even deeper in the cross. We return again to God
in our own insufficiency, asking God for mercy and grace. This renewed humbling of
ourselves is a key to becoming truly human. For if we fail to humble ourselves before
God, acknowledging our responsibility and need for redemption, we are in danger of
falling out of the human condition.

“For the true human condition,’ say Staniloae, ‘ consists in our ability to hear the word of
God, to enter into personal relationship with God.” Failing to do humble ourselves in the
cross, results in our inability to God word’s and our neighbor’s word. We fall from reality
to a “shadowy, pseudo-reality, into outer darkness.” The self-imposed darkness, this flight
from the light of God, is also a cross, but it is a “cross without hope.”

7. We suffer in pain and pleasure.

Maximas “speaks of the pain which follows upon pleasure.” This pain is a reminder that
mere sensual pleasure is never enough. It is a pang of longing for unbroken relationship
with God.

But some people respond to this anguish by trying to immerse themselves in more
pleasure, more sensuous excessiveness. By pressing more and more into sensuous
pleasures where the “vision of the spirit is absent,” we become trapped in blind pleasure.

A pleasure void of relationship with God or man. This pleasure actually deadens our
capacity for true pleasure, and as we continue to intensify the experience of our senses,
we eventually become trapped in non-sense. So the immersion of pure sensuous
gratification, the abuse of pleasure, eventually leads to a world denying non-sense of
absurdity and meaninglessness.

Thus our pleasure and pain must always return afresh to the cross and the to mercy seat
of Christ. In our pain, in our grief, in our longing or sense of emptiness, we return to God,
confessing His love as our only abiding hope.

Thus Staniloae suggests that the cross of suffering will either humble us and open our
eyes to the riches of God’s love, or the same cross will break the proud and blind them to
the realities of God. It will either bring redemption or judgment.

8. We embrace the cross and encounter the love of God.

The gift of the cross is the gift of of drawing us deeper and deeper into the love of God

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and the love of man.

Looking to Job, Staniloae suggests that Job and friends learn that God’s gift are not
payment for faithfulness. Job discovers a love and relation that thrives even without the
visible signs. This realization frees the created world to become a gift again through
which man moves in relation to God and man.

Like the man who sells everything for the pearl of great price, Job discovers we
sometimes lose all the gifts in order to rediscover the Giver, the supreme treasure, the
lover of our souls. This imperishable love is free to move through, in and beyond images.
It is free to rejoice in all things whether in abundance or in the midst of need.

This then frees me to love others. Staniloae writes, “Truly to love a person means to love
them for themselves even when they no longer give us anything, when they no longer
seem to have goodwill towards us, even when they seem to show us an incomprehensible
coldness or hostility which is altogether contrary to the goodness which they has showed
us earlier, even when it seems that the other person has abandoned us even to death. For
if we remain firm in our love towards others despite their incomprehensible hardness
towards us, we make a true proof of love, of the love which we have for them. This is the
love which God himself forms in us and which does indeed raise us from death. When
love confronts even death, then it conquers death itself.”

So the suffering of the cross is a gift in the midst of a sin-filled world, through which God
works out His redemption in us by His Spirit and through His Son. He transforms us from
glory to glory, or love to love. As we pass through each fire of suffering, we humble
ourselves under the mighty hand of God that He may lift us up in do time. And we are
confident that He will complete this work He has begun and present us blameless in the
end.

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