Dialogue Between an Elder and an Atheist

One morning Fr. Epiphanios [Theodoropoulos] was speaking with two or three visitors at his home. One of them was an ideological communist. At one point someone came in from outside and informed them that Athens had been filled with photographs of Mao Tse-tung bearing the inscription: “Glory to the great Mao.” It was the day on which the Chinese dictator had died.

 

Fr. Epiphanios: That is how it is, my child. There are no atheists. There are idolaters, who remove Christ from His throne and place their idols in His place. We say: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” They say: “Glory to the great Mao.” Choose and take your pick.

Communist: And you too, little father, take your drug. Only you call it Christ, another calls it Allah, a third calls it Buddha, and so on.

Fr. Epiphanios: Christ, my child, is not a drug. Christ is the Creator of the entire universe. He is the One Who governs all things with wisdom: from the multitude of the boundless galaxies down to the infinitesimal particles of the microcosm. He is the One Who gives life to us all. He is the One Who brought you into the world and has given you so much freedom that you are able to question Him, and even to deny Him.

Communist: Little father, it is your right to believe all these things. But that does not mean they are also true. Do you have proofs?

Fr. Epiphanios: You consider all these things fairy tales, do you not?

Communist: Of course.

Fr. Epiphanios: Do you have proofs? Can you prove to me that what I believe is false?

…

Fr. Epiphanios: You do not answer, because you too have no proofs. Therefore, you too believe that these things are fairy tales. I, for my part, speak of faith when I refer to God. You, however, while rejecting my faith, in essence believe in your unbelief, since you cannot substantiate it with proofs. But I must tell you that my faith is not groundless. There are certain supernatural events upon which it is founded.

The Criterion of Truth

Communist: One moment! Since you are speaking about faith, what will you say to the Mohammedans, for example, or to the Buddhists? For they too speak of faith. They too teach lofty moral teachings. Why is your faith better than theirs?

Fr. Epiphanios: With this question of yours, the criterion of truth is being raised. For certainly the truth is one and only one. There are not many truths. But who possesses the truth? Behold the great question. Thus, it is not a matter of a better or worse faith! It is a matter of the only true faith!

I accept that the other beliefs also have moral teachings. Certainly, the moral teachings of Christianity are incomparably superior. But we do not believe in Christ because of His moral teachings. Not because of “Love one another,” nor because of His preaching about peace and justice, freedom and equality. We believe in Christ because His presence on earth was accompanied by supernatural events, which means that He is God.

The Divinity of Jesus Christ

Communist: Look. I too acknowledge that Christ was a remarkable philosopher and a great revolutionary, but let us not make Him God now…

Fr. Epiphanios: Ah, my child! That is where all the great unbelievers of history stumbled. The fishbone that stuck in their throat and that they could not swallow was precisely this: that Christ is also God.

The leader of the chorus of deniers, Ernest Renan, cries out concerning Christ: “For tens of thousands of years the world will be uplifted through You”; You are “the cornerstone of humanity, so that for someone to remove Your name from this world would be equal to shaking it from its foundations”; “the ages will proclaim that among the sons of men no one greater than You has been born.” But there they stop, both he and those like him. Their next phrase? “But You are not God!”

And the poor wretches do not understand that all these things constitute an inexpressible tragedy for their soul! The dilemma is inevitably relentless: Either Christ is God incarnate, in which case truly, and only then, He constitutes the most moral, the holiest, and the noblest figure of humanity. Or He is not God incarnate, in which case it is impossible for Him to be any of these things. On the contrary. If Christ is not God, then He is the most wretched, the most dreadful, and the most hateful existence in human history.

In other words: Any man who demanded this sacrifice from his followers would be the most wretched figure in history. But Christ both demanded it and achieved it. Nevertheless, by those who deny His divinity He has been proclaimed the noblest and holiest figure in history. Therefore: Either the deniers are reasoning absurdly by calling the most wretched the holiest, or, in order for there to be no absurdity, but for the coexistence of Christ’s demands and His holiness to have logic, they must necessarily accept that Christ continues to remain the noblest and holiest figure of humanity only on the condition that He is also God! Otherwise, He is, as we have said, not the holiest, but the most dreadful figure in history, as the cause of the greatest sacrifice of the ages in the name of a lie!

The divinity of Christ is proven on the basis of the descriptions given of Him by His deniers!…

Communist: What did you say?

Fr. Epiphanios: You heard me! The statement is weighty, but absolutely true. And here is why: What did all the truly great men of humanity say about themselves, or what idea did they have of themselves?

Socrates, “the wisest of all men,” proclaimed: “One thing I know, that I know nothing.”

All the great men of the Old and New Testaments, from Abraham and Moses to John the Forerunner and Paul, describe themselves as “earth and ashes,” “wretched,” “untimely births,” and the like.

The behavior of Jesus, by contrast, is strangely different! And I say strangely different, because the natural and logical thing would have been for His behavior to be similar. Indeed, as superior and greater than all the others, He should have had an even lower and humbler opinion of Himself. Being morally more perfect than anyone else, He should have surpassed all the aforementioned persons, and anyone else from the creation of the world until the end of the ages, in self-reproach and humble-mindedness.

But the exact opposite occurs!

First of all, He proclaims that He is sinless: “Which of you convicts Me of sin?” (John 8:46). “The ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me” (John 14:30).

He also expresses very lofty ideas concerning Himself: “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

And now I ask you: Has anyone ever dared to claim for himself the love of men above even their very life? Has anyone ever dared to proclaim his absolute sinlessness? Has anyone ever dared to utter the words: “I am the truth”? (John 14:6). No one, anywhere! Only a God could do these things. Can you imagine your Marx saying such things? They would have taken him for a madman, and no one would have been found to follow him.

Now think how many millions of people sacrificed everything for the sake of Christ, even their very life, believing in the truth of His words about Himself! If His proclamations about Himself were false, Jesus would have been the most wretched figure in history, leading so many people to such a heavy sacrifice. What man, however great, however important, however wise he may be, would be worthy of such a great offering and sacrifice? Who? No one! Only if He were God!

In other words: Any man who demanded this sacrifice from his followers would be the most wretched figure in history. But Christ both demanded it and achieved it. Nevertheless, by those who deny His divinity He has been proclaimed the noblest and holiest figure in history. Therefore: Either the deniers are reasoning absurdly by calling the most wretched the holiest, or, in order for there to be no absurdity, but for the coexistence of Christ’s demands and His holiness to have logic, they must necessarily accept that Christ continues to remain the noblest and holiest figure of humanity only on the condition that He is also God! Otherwise, He is, as we have said, not the holiest, but the most dreadful figure in history, as the cause of the greatest sacrifice of the ages in the name of a lie! Thus the divinity of Christ is proven on the basis of these very descriptions of Him by His deniers!…

The Historical Evidence for the Divinity of Jesus Christ

Communist: What you have said is indeed impressive, but it is nothing more than reasoning. Do you have historical evidence that establishes His Divinity?

Fr. Epiphanios: I told you previously that the proofs of His Divinity are the supernatural events that took place while He was here on earth. Christ was not content merely to proclaim the above truths, but He also confirmed His words with a multitude of miracles. He made the blind see, the paralyzed walk; He fed five thousand men, and many times more women and children, with two fish and five loaves; He commanded the elements of nature and they obeyed Him; He raised the dead, among whom was Lazarus, four days after his death. But greater than all the miracles is His Resurrection.

The whole edifice of Christianity rests upon the event of the Resurrection. I am not the one saying this. The Apostle Paul says it: “If Christ has not been raised, our faith is vain” (1 Cor. 15:17). If Christ did not rise, then everything collapses. But Christ did rise, which means that He is Lord of life and death, and therefore God.

The Testimony of the Holy Apostles

Communist: Did you see all these things? How do you believe them?

Fr. Epiphanios: No, I did not see them. But others saw them: the Apostles. They then made them known and even signed their testimony with their blood. And, as everyone accepts, the testimony of life is the highest testimony.

Bring me someone who will tell me that Marx died and rose again, and who will sacrifice his life for that testimony, and I, as an honest man, will believe him.

Communist: Let me tell you. Thousands of communists were tortured and died for their ideology. Why do you not also embrace communism?

Fr. Epiphanios: You said it yourself. Communists died for their ideology. They did not die for facts. But in an ideology, delusion can very easily enter in. And since it is characteristic of the human soul to sacrifice itself for something in which it believes, this explains why many communists died for their ideology. But this does not oblige us to accept it as correct.

It is one thing to die for ideas and another to die for facts. The Apostles, however, did not die for ideas. Nor for “Love one another,” nor for the other moral teachings of Christianity. The Apostles died bearing witness to supernatural facts. And when we say fact, we mean that which falls under our senses and is perceived by them. The Apostles bore witness “to that which they heard, which they saw with their eyes, which they beheld, and which their hands touched” (1 John 1:1).

Pascal’s Reasoning

On the basis of a very fine argument of Pascal, we say that one of three things happened with the Apostles: either they were deceived, or they deceived us, or they told us the truth.

Let us take the first possibility. It is not possible that the Apostles were deceived, because what they report they did not learn from others. They themselves were eyewitness and earwitnesses of all these things. Moreover, they were not at all fanciful, nor did they have any psychological predisposition toward accepting the event of the Resurrection. On the contrary, they were terribly unbelieving. The Gospels are fully revealing of these dispositions of their souls: they disbelieved the assurances that some had seen Him risen.

And something else. What were the Apostles before Christ called them? Were they perhaps ambitious politicians or visionaries of philosophical and social systems, who were waiting to conquer humanity and thereby satisfy their fantasies? Far from it. They were unlettered fishermen. And the only thing that interested them was catching some fish to feed their families. For this reason, even after the Lord’s Crucifixion, despite all that they had heard and seen, they returned to their boats and their nets. That is, there was in them, as we have said, not even a trace of predisposition toward the things that were about to follow. And only after Pentecost, “when they received power from on high,” did they become the teachers of the inhabited world.

The second possibility: Did they perhaps deceive us? Did they perhaps tell us lies? But why would they deceive us? What would they gain by lies? Money? Positions? Glory? For someone to tell a lie, he expects some benefit. But the Apostles, preaching Christ, and Him crucified and risen from the dead, secured for themselves only hardships, labors, scourgings, stonings, shipwrecks, hunger, thirst, nakedness, dangers from robbers, beatings with rods, imprisonments, and finally death. And all this for a lie? It is completely foolish even to think it.

Consequently, the Apostles were neither deceived, nor did they deceive us. Therefore, the third possibility remains: that they told us the truth.

Indeed, I must also emphasize the following to you: The Evangelists are the only ones who wrote true history. They narrate the events, and only the events. They do not proceed to any personal judgment. They praise no one; they condemn no one. They make no attempt to magnify one event or to erase or diminish another. They let the events speak for themselves.

The Resurrection of Christ as Apparent Death

Communist: Is it impossible that, in the case of Christ, there was an apparent death? The other day the newspapers wrote about some Indian whom they buried and then, after three days, dug up again, and he was alive.

Fr. Epiphanios: Ah, my little child. I shall recall again the saying of blessed Augustine: “Unbelievers, you are not hard to convince. You are the most gullible. You accept the most improbable, the most absurd, the most contradictory things, in order to deny the miracle!”

No, my child. We do not have an apparent death in the case of Christ. First of all, we have the testimony of the Roman centurion, who assured Pilate that death had occurred.

Then the Gospel informs us that the Lord, on the very day of His Resurrection, walked along and conversed with two of His disciples on the way to Emmaus, which was more than ten kilometers from Jerusalem. Can you imagine someone having suffered what Christ suffered, and three days after his “death” an apparent death occurring to him? At the very least, for forty days they would have had to feed him chicken broth so that he could open his eyes, not have him walking and conversing as though nothing had happened.

As for the Indian, bring him here so that we may scourge him with a flagellum—and do you know what a flagellum is? A whip to the ends of which they added balls of lead, or broken bones, or sharp nails—bring him, then, so that we may scourge him, place a crown of thorns on him, crucify him, give him gall and vinegar, pierce him with a lance, place him in the tomb, and if he rises, then we shall talk.

Communist: Nevertheless, all the testimonies that you have invoked come from disciples of Christ. Is there any testimony concerning this that does not come from the circle of His disciples? That is, are there historians who certify the Resurrection of Christ? If so, then I too will believe.

Fr. Epiphanios: Wretched child! You do not know what you are asking! If there were such historians who had seen Christ risen, then they would necessarily have believed in His Resurrection and would henceforth have reported it as believers, in which case you would again deny their testimony, just as you reject the testimony of Peter, John, and so forth. How is it possible for someone to certify the Resurrection and at the same time not become a Christian? You are asking us for “a roasted partridge on a wax skewer that also sings”! Ah, it cannot be done!

Nevertheless, since you ask for historians, I remind you of what I mentioned to you earlier: namely, that the only true historians are the Apostles.

Nevertheless, despite all this, we also have just such a testimony as you want: that is, from someone who did not belong to the circle of His disciples. Paul’s testimony. Paul was not only not a disciple of Christ, but even persecuted His Church with fury.

Communist: But they say of him that he suffered sunstroke and, because of it, had a hallucination.

Fr. Epiphanios: My dear child, if Paul had had a hallucination, what would have emerged would have been his subconscious. And in Paul’s subconscious the Patriarchs and the Prophets held a lofty place. He should have seen Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, not Jesus, whom he regarded as a deceiver of the people and an impostor!

Can you imagine some faithful old woman, in her dream or in her delirium, seeing Buddha or Zeus? She will see St. Nicholas and St. Barbara. For these are the ones in whom she believes.

And one more thing. In Paul, as Papini notes, there are also the following wondrous things: First, the suddenness of the conversion: directly from unbelief to faith. No preparatory stage intervened. Second, the strength of the faith: without wavering or doubts. And third, lifelong faith. Do you believe that these things can take place after a case of sunstroke? These things are not explained in such ways. If you can, explain them. If you cannot, admit the miracle. And you should know that Paul, by the standards of his time, was a highly educated man. He was not some little nobody who did not know what was happening to him.

But I shall add something further. We, my child, live today in an extraordinary age. We are living the miracle of the Church of Christ.

When Christ said of His Church that “the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18), His followers numbered only a few dozen persons. Since then, approximately two thousand years have passed. Empires have dissolved, philosophical systems have been forgotten, worldviews have collapsed, yet the Church of Christ remains unshaken despite the continual and terrible persecutions against Her. Is this not a miracle?

And one last thing. In the Gospel according to Luke, it is mentioned that, when the Panagia, after the Annunciation, visited Elizabeth, the mother of the Forerunner, the latter blessed her with the words: “Blessed are you among women.” And the Panagia answered as follows: “My soul magnifies the Lord... For behold, from now on all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).

What was the Panagia then? She was an unknown maiden of Nazareth. Who knew her? Nevertheless, since then empresses have been forgotten, brilliant names of women have faded away, wives and mothers of military commanders have been forgotten. Who knows or who remembers the mother of Napoleon the Great or the mother of Alexander the Great? Almost no one. Yet millions of lips, in every length and breadth of the earth and in every age, hymn the humble maiden of Nazareth as “more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.” Are we or are we not, today, the people of the twentieth century, living the fulfillment of this prophetic word of the Panagia?

The very same things happen also with regard to one of Christ’s “secondary” prophecies: when, in the house of Simon the leper, a woman poured precious myrrh on His head, the Lord said: “Verily I say unto you, wherever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole world, what this woman has done shall also be spoken of in memory of her” (Matt. 26:13). How large was the circle of His followers then, for one to say that they would do everything possible so that this prophecy of their Teacher might be fulfilled? And especially such a prophecy, which, by the criteria of the world, has no particular importance for the many?

Are these miracles or are they not? If you can, explain them. But if you cannot, admit them as such.

Was the Work of Christ Incomplete?

Communist: I confess that your arguments are strong. But I have something further to ask you: Do you not think that Christ left His work incomplete? Unless, of course, He abandoned us. I cannot imagine a God remaining indifferent to the drama of man: we are tossed about here and there, while He stands above, impassive.

Fr. Epiphanios: No, my child. You are not right. Christ did not leave His work incomplete. On the contrary, He is the unique case of a man in history who had the certainty that He had completed His mission, and that He had nothing else to do or say.

Even Socrates, the greatest of the wise, who spoke and taught for an entire life, at the end also composed an elaborate apology and, had he lived, he would have had still more to say.

Only Christ, in three years, taught what He had to teach, did what He wished to do, and said, “It is finished.” This too is a sign of His divine perfection and authority.

As for the abandonment which you mentioned, I understand you. Without Christ the world is a theater of the absurd. Without Christ you cannot explain anything. Why sorrows, why injustices, why failures, why illnesses, why, why, why? Thousands of enormous “whys.”

Understand this! Man cannot approach these “whys” with his finite reason. Only with Christ are all things explained: they prepare us for eternity. Perhaps there the Lord will count us worthy to receive an answer to some of these “whys.”

It is worth the trouble for me to read you a beautiful poem from the collection of Konstantinos Kallinikos, Daphnes and Myrtles, entitled “Question Marks.”

I said to the elder ascetic, the seventy-year-old,
whose hair waved like a branch of lilac:

Tell me, my father, why upon this sphere here below
do night and day walk inseparably?
Why, as though they were twins, do there spring up together
the thorn and the flower, laughter and weeping?
Why, in the most attractive greenery of the forest,
do scorpions and vipers nest, and cold venom?
Why, before the tender bud appears
and unfolds before the light its scentless beauties,
does a black worm come, give it a stab,
and leave it a lifeless rag in its cradle?
Why does the ear of grain need plough and sowing and laborers,
until it becomes bread and loaf,
and why is everything useful and noble and divine
paid for with tears and blood in life,
while parasitism grows strong by itself
and baseness seeks to swallow the whole earth?
Finally, why, amid so much harmony of the universe,
do confusion and disorder force their way in?

The ascetic answered with his deep voice,
raising his right hand toward the heavens:

Behind those golden clouds up there,
the Most Gracious One is embroidering a priceless tapistry.
And as long as we walk down below,
we see the reverse side, my child.
And so it is natural for the mind to see mistakes
where it ought to give thanks and glorify.
As a Christian, the day must come
when your winged soul will cleave the ether
and look upon God’s embroidery from the good side,
and then… all will appear to you as system and order!

Christ, my child, has never abandoned us. He remains near us, a helper and supporter, until the end of the ages. But you will understand this only if you become a conscious member of His Church and are joined to Her Mysteries.

 

Greek source: https://katanixi.gr/archim-epifanios-theodoropoylos-dialo/