Page 152 - Prayer Book

152
Prayer B o ok
Saint Athanasius expressed this similarly: “Humans...
having had the nature of non-being, were called into exist-
ence by the presence and philanthropy of the Word but
turning away from the thought of God and returning to
what is not, have become void of being. For evil does not
exist, but good exists, since it comes from the existing
God.”
Therefore, evil does not exist as a nature or substance;
it only exists in the will of the devil and humans, as move-
ment or energy. But this movement is toward non-being,
toward nothingness! It is not movement toward something
that exists but rather a turn toward what does not exist, and
thus, it is a movement toward self-annihilation. This is why
we could say that evil is “so-called,” not truly real!
The ontological will of God will be fulfilled—defini-
tively and irreversibly—at the end of time. Then evil will
no longer exist! This is why the end of time is called the
Kingdom of God, where only the good will of God, the will
of Love and Freedom in Love, will reign. Not only will evil
cease to exist, but even the memory of evil will be erased!
As Father Stamatis once explained in a conversation, “We
will look at each other, and even if, hypothetically (which
is absurd), someone remembers the evil they did and asks
for forgiveness, we will say, ’When did you do me harm? I
don’t remember!’ We will genuinely not remember it, be-
cause even the memory of evil will be gone!”
Thus, even within history, evil has no ontological ex-
istence. We could say once again that evil is “so-called”! It
is so-called evil, not truly evil. If someone is our enemy,
they are not truly our enemy, but only so-called! If some-