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A brief excerpt from a paper delivered by Metropolitan HILARION:“We may describe in brief the patristic or liturgical picture of the world thus: God, being beyond all things, created matter from nothing and through the act of his divine will brought forth matter from chaos (disorder) into the state of the cosmos (order, beauty).
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| Russian Orthodox Metropolitan HILARION (Alfayev) with Hungary's Péter Cardinal Erdő |
From this element of order and source of becoming there arose the models of ordering society. Thus states and whole civilizations are formed.
The demons, the ‘evil spirits of the underworld’, along with people under the influence of these spirits, were opposed until a certain time to the divine order. Set against God and his order, the action of the devil sows chaos, anarchy, sin and death.
Yet the Saviour, the Son of God, God who became a human person, came to people and redeemed the human person from the power of the devil through his suffering and death, with his death he vanquished death and opened up to humanity the way to salvation.”
Metropolitan HILARION (Alfayev)
Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate)
Uppsala, Sweden, 14 May A.D. 2014
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