“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:35-39)
A List of Enemies, All of Them Outside
The holy Apostle Paul asks a question and lets it ring like a challenge: who? Then he counts. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword; then death and life, angels and principalities, height and depth. Every item on the list lies outside the man: it comes upon him, it does not come out of him. Saint John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage, draws the conclusion anyone feels who reads it: nothing from outside can tear a person from Christ, only his own will.
And Scripture says the same thing elsewhere, without detour: “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Is. 59:2). The one who separates is not in the depth or the height; he is in the man himself. There is one more word in the last verse worth holding: “nor any other creature.” The list has counted every creature that might stand between us and God and judged all of them powerless. But the word “other” leaves a door open, unspoken: the creature that is not “other” is the one reading. This is an observation about the reading, not a dogmatic claim, but it agrees with everything the Church knows about man.
God Does Not Withdraw
Before anything else, we must keep the truth without which none of this can be said soberly: God does not separate Himself from us. “God did not make death” (Wis. 1:13), nor separation. After the fall, Adam hides among the trees of the garden, and God asks: “Adam, where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). He does not ask because He does not know, but because a Father who can no longer see the place where He used to meet His son does not stay put, but calls out. Love does not cease; what ceases is its reception.
Psychology confirms, in its own language, what the words say: June Tangney showed that guilt leads toward repair, while shame leads toward hiding. Adam does not say “I have sinned,” but “I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid” (Gen. 3:10). Shame no longer stays before the Face; it makes itself a tree out of foliage and slips into it. Here the separation begins, before any great deed: in a small, quiet place where a man prefers not to be seen.
Separation Is Not an Act but a Road
The prodigal son did not leave the house in a moment: he “journeyed into a far country” (Lk. 15:13), and the Gospel records the distancing as a journey. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, says we become just by doing just acts and greedy by doing greedy ones; habit is a second nature built from many small choices, none of which the man doing it counts as “the choice.” Separation from God is therefore made like a wall of bricks: each brick looks innocent.
Saint Maximus the Confessor distinguishes the will according to nature, which moves us naturally toward God, from the deliberative mode of choosing, in which we hesitate, weigh and deceive ourselves. Sin enters by the door of this second mode, not by willing evil as such, but by willing an apparent good outside the Good. So what does “we choose” mean? Not that we knowingly hand ourselves to the Devil, but that we often choose not to choose: to postpone, to settle, to look the other way. The Lord gives man one verb for what remains for him to do: “Abide in Me” (Jn. 15:4). Communion is kept by abiding, and lost by not abiding.
The Word from the Paterikon
It is told of Abba Anthony that he saw all the snares of the enemy spread upon the earth and, sighing, said: “Who can pass through them?” and a voice answered him: “Humility.” Notice what is missing from the answer: not vigilance, not strength, not knowledge. The snares are many and all outside; the one who passes among them is the one who does not stand rigid before them, but stays small and does not put himself at the center.
Abba Moses, who had been a robber before his repentance, said to a brother who wanted to flee his own thoughts: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Whoever flees from himself flees in vain, because what separates him from God goes with him. The cell solves nothing; you might call it a place where you can no longer blame the place. And Abba Anthony, near the end of his life, said that the great work of man is to put his own fault before God and to expect temptation to his last breath. In other words: separation is a lifelong danger, and against it man is given not a weapon but a posture.
The Separation Is Not Healed by Our Own Strength
There is a trap, just after we have said that we are the ones who separate ourselves: to think that we must also glue ourselves back together by straining the will. That would be the error of Pelagius, and the Apostle stops it in the same chapter: “we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37). Not through ourselves, but through Him; not by the strength with which we hold on, but by the strength with which we are held. We supply the fragile “yes”; He brings the rest.
Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, describes despair as refusing to be oneself before God, and health as the state in which the self “rests transparently in the power that established it.” Contemporary psychology of avoidance (Steven Hayes calls it experiential avoidance) has observed that fleeing inner states enlarges them rather than shrinking them. Abba Anthony already knew: do not flee, put it before God. The shame that hides is healed by being seen and received; God does not wait for a clean man, but for a man who has stopped hiding.
As Long as There Is Life
Separation is not final while a man breathes. The prodigal son is seen “a great way off” (Lk. 15:20): the Father had remained on the threshold, looking down the road. And Paul’s list, read to the end, includes tribulation, famine and sword: suffering is not separation. The Cross is often precisely the place where love shows itself in flesh. The only true separation is the one we make in silence, with our face turned away. And even that one, until the last breath, has its door open.
