{Fr. Roman} ~ a mediation on the Cross

Quoted from well known blog,

Logismoi...

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This is part of a reflection on a book by GK Chesterton, the Ball and the Cross 

where I found the following:

"...an Orthodox reflection on the Cross: in a 1977 article entitled ‘From the Perspective of the Cross’, Hieromonk Roman (Braga) talks about the very shape of the Cross as indicative of man’s place in the universe. It is worth quoting at some length: 

The cross is the axis of two coordinates that establishes man’s place in the universe. Man is at the point of intersection between the vertical plane, which is transcendent, and the horizontal one, which is limited, historic, inherent. 

Man is the theandric mode of existence in which God and nature must be combined in a harmonious synthesis. But at the same time, man’s being on the cross is a paradox, an enigma—not for the Creator, Who knew what He did when He created man, but for himself. 

If we think of the cross, this imaginary axis, as the intersection of two existential planes completely different from one another—matter and spirit, existence and nonexistence, God and nothingness—then surely at the intersection point, that is, in man, any kind of logic becomes impossible and absurd. Nevertheless, man is the only thinking reality in the world. Why? Because true thinking is in a way paradoxical; it is born of contradictory situations. Once G.K. Chesterton, looking at the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London where the cross is atop a sphere, made a remark that can be considered to be the foundation of the theology of the cross. He said that the sphere, which is the Greek symbol of perfection, is limited to itself. Traveling around the sphere, one reaches nowhere. This is the image of philosophy—it is a closed system, it cannot go out of its dogmatic antithesis. On the other hand, developing a mode of thinking in a cross-like manner gives the world an infinite freedom—on the one hand, growing in God, or ascending on the vertical plane, and on the other hand, the freedom of descending into the total abyss, into total negativism. *

*from: 

Hieromonk Roman (Braga), 

‘From the Perspective of the Cross’, 

Divine Ascent: A Journal of Orthodox Faith 1:2 

(Exaltation of the Holy Cross 1997), pp. 69-70.

quoted from here.