If this measure is observed, abstinence may appear in a very strong degree and still not be blameworthy. What may be blameworthy is only this: if someone turns one measure of abstinence into an unavoidable law for all.
Because people differ in bodily strength, such a rule may prove destructive for some. Therefore abstinence has always been left to freedom. Perhaps the Colossian speculators erred in this respect, as may be concluded from the severity toward the body which the Apostle reproves below.
Yet it seems they erred more by assigning too great a value to abstinence. This was not so much to abstinence itself as to substances approved or disapproved for use.
They acted as though in these substances, in their very nature and properties, there were something that helped or hindered spiritual progress.
They may also have thought substances helped or hindered communion with Angels, which they preached as the only path to knowledge of truth, communion with God, or help in the work of life.
From this came their rule: “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle.” All this was presented as if one could hardly know what wisdom it contained. From all this St. Paul now warns the Colossians.
He does not touch on the details of the error. He takes the general thought lying at its foundation, as though material things in themselves could give something spiritual. He turns them away from accepting it, not by elaborate proofs, but by pointing to what they have become in Christ Jesus.
“You have died,” he says, “to the elements of the world.” Why, then, should you enter into discussions about them with those who assign them some special value?
You should have turned your ears and eyes from them at once. Instead, you allowed them to propose such teaching and allowed yourselves to listen, as though you lived in the world.
It was as though you had not turned from the material, and had not perceived or entered the spiritual realm.
“You died with Christ to the elements of the world.” Some understand the elements of the world as Jewish material service to God. But the Colossians did not live under the laws of that service.
Therefore, when they died to the elements of the world, they did not die to that service. We must suppose they died to something else. To what? This is indicated by the chief characteristic feature of life in Christ Jesus.
Life in the Lord Jesus is the migration of thought, feeling, and desire from the material to the spiritual. It is from earthly to heavenly things, from corruptible to incorruptible, from temporal to eternal, from created things to God.
Dying in Christ Jesus is directly dying to sin. But with this death all bonds with the material are also cut. In the very act of dying, the one who has died in Christ throws off all these bonds like constricting clothing.
He freely enters, or soars, into the spiritual world toward immaterial blessings, which he immediately tastes and to which he cleaves. This is what St. Paul means by “you died to the elements of the world.”
Consequently, for him the elements of the world mean everything material, earthly, and corruptible, to which every true Christian dies in Christ Jesus. In such a person’s eyes, everything material loses all value.
It becomes alien to him and falls out of his attention. His mind and heart are occupied with something else. Begin speaking to such a person about something material, and it cannot occupy him.
He has no taste for it and turns away from it, because his heart is full of something else. Whoever among such people began to heed your speeches would act against the spirit of his own life.
He would show that material things can still occupy him. Such a person may rightly be reproved: why are you listening?
It is as though your soul were bound to the material, found taste in it, and lived in the world. This is the reproach St. Paul makes to the Colossians: “Why, as though living in the world, do you submit to decrees?”
“Submit to decrees,” δογματιζεσθε. Δογματιζειν means to set forth dogmas. Δογματιζεσθαι means to be instructed by dogmas, to listen to their exposition.
Why, says the Apostle, do you place yourselves in the rank of catechized disciples? Why do you allow these speculators to set forth their teaching about material things, as though anything material could have significance for you?
They explain to you that one substance means this and another means that. Use this in such and such a way, at such a time and in such a place, but do not touch that.
If you listen, they will fill your head with the conviction that material things have some great value for you. They will pile up in your attention a whole mountain of material things.
This mountain will hide from your spiritual sight God, the Lord Jesus, and everything spiritual. Then you will again be drawn into the material. But you have died to it.
You must keep yourselves dead to it, as though it did not exist for you. Your inward being must be clean of all material clouds, so that in it the one Sun, God, may be clearly seen.
Ambrosiaster reasons about this as follows: “The one baptized into Christ dies to the world. He renounces all superstitious errors and begins to live by faith alone in Christ the Lord.
He lives in the order proper to those who live in God by the hope that is in Christ Jesus. By virtue of this renunciation, man and the elements of the world are called dead to one another.
When the Apostle says ‘world,’ in the phrase ‘from the elements of the world,’ he means every fleshly error or way of thinking. Everything visible is counted as fleshly.
Therefore the Apostle John also says, ‘Do not love the world, nor the things in the world’ (1 Jn 2:15). That is, do not love the elements of which the world is composed.
Nor love the errors concerning them which human tradition has devised. Love only Christ, who died for us, so that from the perishing, as we were, He might join us into His living body.
Therefore those buried with Christ died to the elements, so that they would no longer pay them any attention. They have learned to strive toward the higher things, which can bestow unceasing life.
These elements neither give present life nor allow one to obtain the future life. Whoever after baptism wavers in thought concerning certain things, supposing that they have some special power, shows that he is alive to the elements of the world.
He either determines to value them highly, or hesitates to despise them. Such a person remains within the circle or region of the world.
Being still clothed in the old man, he cannot detach himself from the fleshly and material.”
THEOSIS