Today’s post-modern people do not know what a person is. They live, and project, the mask of a persona. What is a mask? It’s a guise which was used in Ancient Greece by actors to take on a variety of roles- personae- on stage in the theatre. So this mask is not something real, it’s artificial, it’s a virtual reality, to use modern IT terminology. We need to remove this false object and replace it with the real one, which, in this case is the person.
The Fathers of the Church did not define what a person is. But in order to refer to the magnificence, the enormous worth of the human being, they used the term “person”. Basil the Great writes that persons are the only animals who are God-made. Saint Gregory the Theologian says God made a creature- the person- who was a mixture of visible and invisible nature, who is a second cosmos, “great in miniature”. Saint John Chrysostom stresses that “the person is the most carefully made of God’s living things”
“Archimandrite Ephraim, Abbot of the Vatopaidi Monastery”
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