Page 26 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 9

the name of unlikeness or dissimilarity. The is replaced by personal willpower, and love as
person loses touch with his/her nature (the the essence of human bonding is rejected, deva-
soul) and turns into the guise (P. Florensky), lued, vulgarized or forcibly destroyed.
the mask of unlikeness, the face of the Father
of Lies. As affected by evil, the person has beco- The cynical word ousts chastity. A person for-
me the bearer of iniquity. Malicious actions as med under the influence of the cynical word
post-traumatic effects are mainly unconscious, does not believe in the enabling power of the
but always intentional. word. He does not believe that word can be true
and sincere. Cynicism weakens the power of
While preserving the integrity of the natural the word by placing it in semantic emptiness,
and personal, the human being has lost his/her by leaving solely its outer shell, often filled with
entirety. Personal qualities defaced by evil and contempt and despair.
wickedness become the groove of personal dys- Hypocrisy, having been formally ‘dedicated’ to
function by this violation of the nature of a per- the authority and significance of word, expres-
sonal being. Within the framework of psycho- ses itself with aesthetic exultation, embellishes
pathology we can mark personal transformati- the facts, establishes norms and standards imi-
on as signs of deviation from the image of God, tating the moral law, but prefers to act by virtue
the rejection of the incarnation in the image of of a more accommodating and practical word,
God, and, finally, psychic dysfunction following the word of lucre.
the aberration of the human nature. The ‘con- Betrayal attacks love in its essence, it possesses
stitutional unity’ being removed along with the great destructive power, and by abusing love,
fact of spiritual split, with the alienation of the extinguishes love. Betrayal manifests itself in
human spirit from the divine image, represents a rational, ambitious and vainglorious word
the spiritual foundation of psychic trauma. focused on its own benefits and acquisitions.
Betrayal is not willing to lose, is shut to Godly
A man has been created by Word and Spirit. sorrow (2 Cor 7:10) or any kind of abasement. It
Evil as a personal spirit penetrates into the soul strives to simplify its position and always finds
through personal deformations, gravitating the- reasons to justify itself.
re in the form of mental dysfunction. It abides
in the disfigured personal spirit, in the trans- III
formed personal word and the bowed consci- The moral word in Christian psychotherapy.
ence. Under the weight of evil, the God-likeness In Christian psychotherapy we meet persons
of person is veiled by spiritual inversions that subjected to evil, persons whose personal ‘ap-
manifest themselves as cynicism, hypocrisy and pearance’ has been shaped under the influence
betrayal. All inversions are driven by a peculi- of evil. We see the therapy goal in restoration of
ar word, which presents the person as deprived synonymic correlation between nature and hy-
of the image of God, isolated from God’s Spirit, postasis, in bridging the gap between the soul’s
and, consequently, degenerating in his lonely reality (with its divine purpose) and reality of
and senseless being. The person, having been an actual personality warped by iniquity, and in
identified with this mode of being, alienates the rehabilitation of soul-person integrity in a per-
Godly image as estranged and ‘another’ reality. sonal mode of being. Christian psychotherapy
The distorted personal word acts as a verb, mol- facilitates the revival of the unity of soul and
ding by its spirit the personal attributes of a hu- person through the reconstruction of the per-
man being. If we speak cynically, it is not just son as a representative of the divinely created
a statement, it is something that directly relates soul.
to our personality and ‘creates’ it as cynical at
this very moment. The three forms of distor- If we refer to restoration of the person in Chri-
ted moral word have something in common. stian therapy we face and analyze the therapeu-
Their basic feature is negative moral attitude, in tic potential to enable the person to regain mo-
which the word is transformed, the Godly spirit ral reasoning as a personal act. The moral word,

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