Death to the World

"Death to the World" is different than "Death to the Earth".

It is said in the Bible that the devil is the “god of this world.”

This is why Orthodox Christians proclaim “death to the world.”

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

- 1 John 2:15

What is the ‘world’?

“The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them the passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead […] Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”

- St. Isaac the Syrian

‘The world’ does not mean ‘the earth.’

Earth is the counterpart to Heaven. Earth is the body, while Heaven is the soul. Heaven is the blueprint, while Earth is the material.

This is why “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.”

That’s why we say “death to the world” while also holding to Christ’s promise that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

The passions are the psychic immaterial forces within the soul that animate the body towards sustaining itself. Hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, societal validation, etc. are all necessary for our survival. But since we have fallen, we do not trust in God to provide these things for us unfailingly; therefore, these passions take control of us and become independent of our will. We aim towards fulfilling them and chase after them for their own sake.

Perception is reality. ‘The world’ is our personal phenomenological experience of earth and earthly things. If you are serving the passion of lust, all you will see in the world will be opportunities for sexual pleasure. If you are aiming toward the passion of hunger, all you will see are things to eat. We will only perceive the earth in a way that will bring fulfilment to our goals, we become blind to everything else. In cognitive science, this is the phenomena of ‘relevance realization’ as frequently discussed by Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke. Thus, ‘the world’ can be seen as the psychic landscape that we project onto the earth.

Today, it is common to say “we have the world at our fingertips.” Through technology and globalization, we have access to an unfathomable amount of the earth’s resources. Yet, we do not hear the expression “we have the earth at our fingertips.” That is because all of these resources are framed in the context of fulfilling our passions, thus, we have ‘the world’ at our fingertips.

“Dying to the world” means eliminating the passion-driven psychic landscape and substituting it for a virtue-driven one. This is why Christ says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Everything Christ did was driven by virtue in order to serve His Father. This is also why Christ says that “the kingdom of God is within you.” We don’t have to wait around for physical death in order to see heaven, we can see it right now; if we change the orientation of our perception, our experience of the earth will completely transform.

In Revelation 21:8, it states that God will create a new heaven and new earth while the old one will pass away. The earth and earthly things are inherently good, but it is our evil that corrupts it.

“Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.”

- St. Maximus the Confessor

That is why the devil is the god of ‘this world’ and not the god of ‘this earth.’ He only has control over provoking our passions and fulfilling them, thus transforming ‘the world’ through the fall of man. Man is the center of creation and once Adam fell, so did the rest of ‘the world.’ The devil corrupted our perception of reality through the fall; instead of seeing paradise, we now see ‘this world.’ But if we are dead to ‘the world,’ then we may see paradise again.

Death to the world.