I have shied away from politics in my writing here, for the most part even when I’ve engaged with the social media dimension of this platform that so many of us have come to rue as it has risen in prominence and addictiveness. Still, there are some political (or more properly, metapolitical) issues that are close to my heart, deeply linked to my perennial religious concerns, and uncomfortably far from the Overton window — even though as these metapolitical concerns have matured for me over the past two decades, I have seen the Overton window shift dramatically towards them.

I don’t want to alienate readers, or, taking my own advice, impair the basic witness of my heart to the Gospel in the concrete circumstances of my life that is the deepest purpose of my writing here. But the truth is that to witness to the Gospel means in the end a witness to all truth, and the endemic evils of the age are precisely the place where the Gospel’s healing light is most immediately needed, and where the temptation to a betrayal of the truth through silence is greatest.

Also, I simply think that what I am about to say is true, and important. Writing it is an act of honesty, and of service towards something in the world that is a great gift of God and a manifestation of His glory: something that is the enduring object of my love and admiration and gratitude. Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Gott helf mir.

I don’t want to write this, but I feel myself constrained to write it. Every time over the past weeks that I have sat down to work on it, I have begun with dread, with the sense that I should leave it alone and leave what it says unsaid. But then every time I finish working on it, I find I have said things that I must say. It is a dreadful and particularly modern predicament that one loses one’s innocence in the defense of innocence; that one loses one’s simplicity in the defense of simplicity. I hope that readers will extend charity as they encounter perspectives here that may trouble them. My desire is to serve the true, the good, and the beautiful, and to serve justice.

Where Tradition Fails

To lay the basic groundwork for what follows: the crux of my quarrel with the Tradition of Christianity as I receive it is its failure, if not theoretical, then certainly existential and practical, to inhabit and valorize fully the finite, created world. I think this is the essential thrust of all desire for “re-enchantment,” or what fellow travellers here have called “liturgical realism.” We want both to understand the grounding of the world’s beauty in the divine, and to grasp the character of that beauty as revelation of God’s wisdom and, perhaps more sharply, of the secret heart of Creation itself.

We want to grasp and live the erotic impulse as the radical presence of a creative love truly handed over by God in His kenosis to the created being’s keeping. In this vision we long to unify the reality of God as Creator with the proper reality of Creation in the very abyss of its createdness — we long to see Creation and created things in that inarticulable, meonic depth of what Berdyaev called, following Boehme, the Ungrund (whether or not we follow Boehme and Berdyaev in the full theoretical implications of that word) from which their truly free creative response to God arises.

Deep calleth unto deep, at the voice of Thy cataracts. (Psalm 41:8)

Der Abgrund meines Geists ruft immer mit Geschrei den Abgrund Gottes an. Sag: welcher tiefer sei? (Angelus Silesius)

All created things share in this vocation, this gift, this reality; all of the “cosmic flesh” of which we are made, all of the historicity and specificity of our concrete, embodied being on earth. I take this as the fundamental impulse and insight of Sophiology. Sophiology as a whole represents a new impulse to take Creation seriously as the embodiment of divine Wisdom; Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s distinction of divine and creaturely Sophia is an attempt to do justice to the soul’s burning demand to reconcile the reality of God and the proper reality of created things — to prevent Creation, to prevent ourselves, to prevent our love, from falling, in the failure of our spiritual vision and the dazzling of our spiritual eyes, into the all-consuming fire of a divine Absolute construed according to the demands of a merely human reason.

We could easily exhaust ourselves in an artificially truncated examination of our very embodiment, in the specificity of this body and its life. This examination is of course of capital importance, since this locus is a most pressing and immediate area of concern, and one where the Tradition’s spiritualizing view has resulted, as I have often written, in a sadomasochistic history of false asceticism and the social contagion of cruelty that is its existential obverse. (Of course, there is also a true asceticism that is the participation of the whole person, body and soul, in the heart’s kenosis as it pours itself out in an erotic Exodus from itself; there is an asceticism that is an ecstatic oblation in love of body, mind, and heart, and I know that this is the deepest reality of the asceticism counselled by the Tradition.)

Still, we must not permit our examination to exhaust itself here; we must expand the Sophiological inquiry into wider realities. Because of course, our concrete flesh, like our soul (of which it is a face), is only apparently isolable. In reality it is inescapably linked with wider circles of embodiment, both physical and spiritual. By the former, I mean identifiable, intelligible constellations arising from the nature of human physicality as fundamentally transmitted through sexual reproduction: the sexual dyad of mother and father; the extended family; and in widening circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation (or “race”), and wider humanity as such, the planetary reality of the human species.

The Assault of Modernity On the Person

The movement of what pragmatically I must call “leftism” or “progressivism” or most generally “liberalism,” referring to an entire existential and historical trend more or less coterminous with “modernity,” is one of the progressive de-valorization of circles below some tentatively ultimate level of abstraction. Liberalism seems always to be reaching higher for “more abstract” abstractions to valorize over and against any that have come before, viz. the current impulse generally called “transhumanism,” which is for the moment its forward edge — hence its capture of formal leftist political institutions and propaganda organs. (I should clarify at this juncture that I see essentially no formal political institutions or organizations that are not “liberal” in this sense. “Conservatives” qua classical liberals are more properly “right liberals”; progressives are left liberals; thus, “they’re all liberals,” particularly in the United States, even if the right liberals are tardy in their adoption of the nostrums of the left liberal vanguard.)

The heart of liberalism’s war against reality is of course its war against the person, the drowning of the person — that unique bearer of freedom and the vocation of love — in the ocean of one or another collectivity: that is, not seeing the collectivity as one in which the person participates, but one in which the person is exhaustively accounted for, explained, reduced. That is, the person is a “nothing but.” In the guise of an explanation that ultimately explains nothing and wins its apparent success only by means of a huckster’s redirection of attention, this reductive tendency elevates for adoration what is finally an idol. To that idol, it sacrifices the person: hence the diabolical Golgothas of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Gaza, Hiroshima, the Middle Passage, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, the Clearances, the “Satanic mills.”

But the spirit of the age is wily. As I have written elsewhere, on the one hand, it proceeds by the direct dissolution of the person qua individual; but on the other hand, it proceeds more subtly by a refusal of the various levels of historical “flesh” in which the person must be embodied, must take form. This latter is the preferred ontological acid of a “right liberalism,” viz. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no society; there are only individuals.”

So then, apart from the fundamental metaphysical assault of reductionist scientism, it is the environing circles of incarnate personhood that modernity attacks in its erasure of the person — the sexual dyad attacked in Promethean individualism, individualist anarchism, and homosexualist activism; in promiscuity and pornography, in the stupefying mythology of “self-realization.” The extended family and the tribe attacked in the crushing “rationalization” of déracinement, dispossession, and the Enclosures; in industrial production, systematized usury, and titanic urbanism. The nation, the race, attacked in the reduction of homelands, “fatherlands,” “motherlands” (not accidentally so called) to deracinated “Colors of Benetton” laissez-faire economic transit zones, in the relentless xenophilic and oikophobic catechesis of the entertainment-industrial complex, in the apotheosis of universalist political and economic doctrines (democracy, capitalism, socialism, fascism).

A Sophiological vision sees the totality of this war against reality as a war against God and against the divine depth of Creation.

National and Racial Consciousness

Above I equated “nation” and “race” in a way that may be confusing for readers. Recall simply that the etymology of nation lies in the Latin natio, which refers originally to a breed, a stock, or a race. The nation is not the state. The state is a political organ, a structure of organized coercive power and authority, that may or may not be coterminous with, or even serve, a nation; it may indeed be, as virtually all modern states are, indifferent or fundamentally hostile to the nation in the proper sense, that is, a people, identifiable biologically, linguistically, historically, culturally, religiously, and in the age that predated modern diasporas, often geographically.

Virtually the only state on earth constituted to serve a nation, rather than to suppress or destroy it, is the state of Israel. The fact that only in this singular case is the subordination of state to nation considered admirable or even acceptable is in itself a fact worthy of deepest consideration. (The Visegrád Group may harbor elements tacitly dedicated to such a program, but it is clearly a phenomenon of a qualitatively different kind.)

In any event, against all propaganda, against all the assaults on the nation that are critical elements of modernity’s assault on the person — as critical as its assaults on the family, on childhood, on the freehold, on regional dialects and accents and minority languages, on traditional crafts and self-reliance, on old-growth forests, pollinators, and watersheds — nations still exist, and even in those places where nations are under the most brutal assault, even where particular nations are forbidden to publicly name themselves, they remain realities as fundamental as the most immediate realities of individual biological existence.

Theological Foundations

More deeply, however, than simply forbidding our self-naming, the powers ranged against the true life of the nations forbid us to love the divine idea that the nation incarnates on earth. That is, we are forbidden to name ourselves, but in the end this is a mere stratagem in the war to make us hate ourselves — so that we will then acquiesce in our own ethnocide, so that we will become participants in the diabolical strategy to undo creation, the Devil’s nihilism that wants to replace all distinction with homogeneity, that flies the rainbow flag at the head of its campaign to turn the world gray — the comprehensive “heresy of formlessness.”

If Sophiology is the attempt to express the rootedness of creation in its inmost depths in divine reality, or, to be more bold, to indicate the proper divinity of creation, there must, then, be a Sophiology that sees and correctly valorizes the nation as such a “divinely informed form” — a Sophiology of the nation.

In the 1930s, the great Romanian theologian Dimitru Stăniloae (recently glorified as a saint by the Romanian Orthodox Church) wrote on this topic in a series of articles in the ecclesiastical newspaper Telegraful Român. In these articles he quotes Bulgakov’s mature works, including the first book of the “major trilogy,” The Lamb of God, published in Russian in 1933 — demonstrating that he was interacting with the Sophiological current (I am not a scholar but I assume St Dumitru was fluent in Russian). He writes:

Regarding man specifically, God created Adam and Eve at the beginning. But in them were potentially contained all nations. These are revelations in time of images that exist eternally in God. At the foundation of each national type acts an eternal divine model which that nation has to realize within itself as fully as possible… Nations are, according to their content, eternal in God. God wants them all. In each He shows a nuance of His infinite spirituality. Shall we suppress them, wanting to rectify God’s eternal work and thought? Let it not be! Rather we will hold to the existence of each nation, protesting when one wants to oppress or suppress another and preaching their harmony, for complete harmony exists also in the world of divine ideas.

To draw this Sophiological meditation on the nation in a more existentially incisive direction, I would wish to ground it in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s axiology. That is, our love of the nation — and not merely our own nation, but all nations as divinely willed, and nationhood as such — is the proper response of the human heart to a perceived value. We do not value the nation merely as self-interested individuals; the outgoing of our heart towards its integrity and beauty as a divine idea is not merely a matter of subjective self-satisfaction, nor is it merely the perception of some morally neutral vital good which is instrumental in serving some other higher purpose. Our love of our nation and our desire to serve its proper flourishing is precisely the proper response to a Hildebrandian value.

It is of utmost importance to bear this in mind as this argument proceeds — to feel in one’s heart the warmth of a genuine response to transcendent value in one’s contemplation of one’s own nation and of the genuine national diversity that characterizes the life of human beings on earth. I would argue that the fundamental spiritual purpose of liberalism is to drain, obfuscate, and “problematize” this warmth. As St Seraphim of Sarov said, the Devil is cold, and seeks to make our hearts cold. (Given my own spiritual constitution, one of the most painful examples of this diabolical coldness for me is the indifference of my people’s hearts to their own traditional music. But more on this topic below.) Our first response to the vision of our own folk should be to love them, to love their existence with a warm heart.

The very fact that there will likely be a visceral hesitation among my readers to acknowledge the value-bearing character of the nation or race as a divine idea to which we owe a morally laden response of proper service and veneration — the very fact that this assertion will likely trigger indignant objections of a thousand kinds from race doesn’t exist! to this valorization of race will lead to atrocities! — indicates that something is afoot, indicates that I am here trespassing on and exposing a stratagem that has succeeded in subverting the clear thought and feeling of a significant section, indeed, an outright majority, of educated and cultured people, at least in the “developed” west. Until five minutes ago, historically speaking, an instinctive appreciation of, and approbation of, human diversity under the heading of “race,” and of one’s own race, would have been considered so unproblematic and obvious that it could not be objected to and in fact didn’t even need to be consciously affirmed. (To be sure, there are historical reasons for this instinctive hesitation, to which I am sympathetic, and I will address these below in the context of the nation’s proper subordination to values ontologically yet higher than its own. Axiology is hierarchically ordered.)

If there is now an environmental theology that applies the resources of various theological traditions to the valorization of the natural world in an attempt to marshal them to the practical task of protecting the integrity of that world from the assaults of a capital that is unconstrained by any allegiance to deeper values, that environmental theology must be turned to a defense of the nation. If we resist the strip-mining of the natural world to serve Mammon, we must perceive the ideology of transnational homogenization, as expressed through the overpowering organs of corporate propaganda and through the legislative actions of a state captured by and in ultimate service to usurious, deracinated global capital, as another strip mining — another deforestation — another clear-cutting — another extinction — another poisoning of the air, soil, and water. The globalist project of deracination should attract the same instinctive spiritual, philosophical, theological, and political ire as the destruction of the natural world does for environmentalists, and should prompt the same level of practical questioning: How can we live a life that rejects this destruction root and branch? How can we structure our personal lives — therefore also our communal lives — in a way that serves life rather than participating in its destruction?

We should be asking ourselves not simply, how can we contribute to a rebirth of the peoples’ life on the earth, in the sense of re-establishing a vital relationship of person, community, soil, and wildlands, but explicitly — how can we contribute to the rebirth of the peoples of the earth?

A further theological grounding of the nation must come from angelology. The traditional angelology of the Church, beginning with Origen and Clement of Alexandria, holds that each nation — remembering again that this word to the ancients referred not to the state but to a people’s total intelligible character as distinct from other peoples, its “common birth” — has a tutelary angel. That angel inspires and guides it historically in its preparation to receive the Gospel. The great Ressourcement theologian and patrologist Fr Jean Daniélou ascribes the various propaedeutic wisdoms of the nations to the inspiration mediated by their angels. Filial love for the nation is thus organically related to the veneration of its angel, and through this takes on a transcendent character.

This is not an idolatry of the nation as it exists in history, any more than it is an idolatry of the person to acknowledge the guiding and inspiring reality of that person’s own guardian angel. Persons and nations also have tutelary devils which seek to draw them aside from righteousness and salvation. Prior to a person’s baptism and prior to a nation’s embrace of the Gospel, the devils have the upper hand; afterwards, the guardian angels come within the sanctuary of a person or a nation’s “soul” and guide and strengthen it from within. (There is a reason that exorcisms feature so prominently in the “great works” that witness to the divinity of the Incarnate Word. His entire economy can be seen as an exorcism.) Very truly, then, we could say that the guardian angel of the Greeks was able to inspire philosophy fully — that pagan Greek “Old Testament” — only after the nation’s ingrafting into the Incarnate Word. The true glory of Greek philosophy is neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Plotinus, but the Fathers’ “baptized Platonism.”

The Nation That May Not Be Named

I wish to offer some personal reflections at this juncture, to bring the discussion back to earth: particularly, to my own “earth” — the flesh of my own nation.

This nation is forbidden to publicly name itself except to condemn itself. This was evident, above all, in the response of the “commanding heights” of culture, politics, and media to the decade-old “It’s okay to be White” meme. The commissars and mandarins declared that it was coherent to reject this meme and yet to embrace “Black lives matter,” although in neither case can neutral reason detect anything remotely objectionable. As memes they employ the same strategy, yet one is admirable and the other is “hate speech” — what does this tell us?

How then shall I name my nation? “White” is indeed the most obvious word, yet it is so inadequate that I think the word itself might be a ruse suggested by our adversaries. In spite of the derision and vitriol it provokes from current leftist partisans (who of course refuse even to capitalize it), it does have an older pedigree than one might suspect, given that it was referred to in the earliest naturalization act of the nascent United States as a defining characteristic of those eligible for citizenship in the new Republic. A curious indication, incidentally, of the fact that the United States is not, purely, in its origins, a universalist project; it was rather the project of self-governance of a specific people — so how shall I name that people, my people?

“White” first of all falls under the problematic of “color,” that is, of the identification of national differences with something that is precisely only “skin deep.” There is nothing “skin deep” about the identity of my nation, or indeed, about the identity of any nation. The idea that national identity is “skin deep” is a misdirection that is obviously congruent with the “nothing but” reduction of persons and their environing incarnational Sophianic matrices. (Note, once again, the biological resonance in the very word matrix/mater.)

I sometimes call myself “a mongrel son of Europe.” This is warm but also inadequate; the self-deprecation, while congenial to me, cuts against the grain of what self-naming needs to achieve under current conditions in which the state that ought to be the organ of the nation’s thriving is instead implacably hostile towards it. To call ourselves “mongrels” is to accede to our abasement. “Heritage American” is making the rounds at the moment, but has many obvious disadvantages, not least that it is manifestly attempting to skirt or obfuscate the underlying stratum of common birth that is the crux of the issue.

The option where, for now, I plant a stake, pending any better option, is “Amerikaner.” Because of the resonance with the Dutch settlers of the Veldt, it suggests a people whose ethnogenesis is the result of their settlement in a land distant from their ancestors’ homeland (the same associations of course attend also the old use of the term “the Pilgrims,” with the addition of a salutary gloss of piety and reverence), and yet who are manifestly rooted in the patrimony of that ancient motherland, and manifestly in filial continuity with it despite their distinctiveness.

If the powers that be forbid us to name ourselves, if they proclaim relentlessly that we are not a people (even as they proclaim cynically that other peoples, usually the ones they are recruiting to displace us in our own homelands, are indeed peoples, and worthy of protection, succor, and veneration — an essential plank of xenophilic brainwashing), then our response must be precisely first to name ourselves, to unapologetically assert the reality, the specificity, the incommensurability, the depth, the beauty, and the goodness — the Sophianic willedness by God — of our existence as a people.

Thus I assert: I am an Amerikaner. We are a nation. Like any nation we can distinguish ourselves in many ways: biological, cultural, historical, linguistic, mythological, religious, aesthetic. We have been, even if only inchoately, conscious of our existence and identity from our beginnings. We are beautiful as well as ugly; we are precious as well as wounded; we deserve to exist because our existence is willed by God, and like all nations, we are accompanied not merely by the devils who work to draw us away from Him, but by angels to whom we may attend and who instruct us in divine mysteries — some of which mysteries are granted to us to know with unique depth and perspicacity — and draw us forward on the path of salvation. We are thus drawn forward as persons, but not as individuals. We are drawn forward as persons, and persons are inevitably rooted in, informed by, their family, their clan, their tribe, and their nation — that is to say, their race.

The Fate of My People, and of All Peoples

I noted above that the modern states, being diabolical, are implacably hostile to the nations, with one very noteworthy exception (Israel), whose nation enjoys an apparently unique right, by their lights and the lights of our own rulers, to give political and military teeth to its assertion of its right to existence and self-determination. I admire the Sabras for this. I deny that they are unique. I further deny that they have the right to draw my nation by subterfuge into the defense of their own, to make their enemies our enemies; and I observe a strange incongruence between their advocacy for their own national life, and their prominence in the propaganda movements that have undermined my own nation’s self-consciousness and capacity for a similar self assertion.

The Hart-Celler Act was the Nakba of my people — a “civilized” and initially bloodless Nakba conducted in the legal stratosphere rather than with tanks, rifles, and mortars on the dusty roads of my ancestral homeland. (It was initially bloodless, but has become more bloody as it has come to fruition, of course.) The strategic genius of it is strangely admirable. Cloaked in soothing nostrums that would appeal to the dulled sensibilities of the most coddled generation in history, it initiated a generational democide: the marginalization of the Amerikaners in the lands we had settled. When we sit today and watch Piers Morgan utterly unable to comprehend why any young person would listen to Nick Fuentes, all we have to do is remember that Morgan and his confreres grew up in a world in which the national founding stocks were still ascendant, and enjoyed all the benefits of this ascendancy, whereas Fuentes and his partisans have grown up in the successor society — a racial Balkans in which the ruling authority doesn’t even have the perennial wisdom of empire (which historically allowed empires’ constituent nations their own territories of internal predominance as long as they paid their taxes), but instead applies every available tool of legal compulsion, pulls every lever of mass propaganda, to force the nations into the same spaces — spaces where inevitably, they are in cultural and demographic conflict. For the regime, homogenization — that is, the destruction of the nations — is their final solution.

(And by the way, if your heart does not rebel at the prospect of the global death of the nations, at the elimination of this diversity, your vision is inadequate. You do not see the depth of the beauty of your own folk, or of any other. You lack the central and architectonic virtue seen by von Hildebrand: reverence. Seek it.)

Zoomers live this conflict and pay the price. Some give up in one way or another and succumb to dissociative psychoses such as elective homosexuality, gender dysphoria, Tumblr subcultures, or collectivist radicalism: the less “agentic” into the mere sedation of the algorithms. Who can blame them? But other Zoomers notice, and having noticed, stand up, and refuse — to be sure, it is mostly an inchoate, angry, feral refusal, but a refusal nonetheless. And who can blame them for this? I can’t blame them, but I can counsel them — as long as I am not a Piers Morgan, wholly dedicated to (and richly rewarded for) my willful failure to see the betrayal of my fathers.

This is the world that we are facing. And not just we Amerikaners: every nation is facing this situation, because the forces ranged against us all, ranged against the real, concrete diversity of the peoples of the world, grinding and crushing and reducing us to a demographic slurry, with embodied culture replaced by the ersatz schlock and pabulum of vapid mass “culture” delivered to the terminally online (increasingly, and by design, to everyone), are global.

What is of utmost importance is that the current situation spark the rebirth of our national consciousness by means of the rebirth of our culture in the deepest sense — that our national awareness take first of all a positive form, an axiological form of service to the transcendent value of our national existence as the embodiment of God’s wisdom in creation, under the guidance of angelic powers, rather than a merely negative form, a nihilism of rage that can only end by descending into cruelty, barbarism, and destruction. In other words, that finally betrays both itself and God.

There was a great man, the son of a noble folk, who saw his people persevere through this kind of darkness.

Pope St John Paul II said: “I am the son of a nation which has lived the greatest experiences of history, which its neighbors have condemned to death several times, but which has survived and remained itself. It has kept its identity, and it has kept, in spite of partitions and foreign occupations, its national sovereignty, not by relying on the resources of physical power, but solely by relying on its culture…. [I think] with deep interior emotion, of the cultures of so many ancient peoples which did not give way when confronted with the civilizations of the invaders: and they still remain for man the source of his ‘being’ as a man in the interior truth of his humanity.”1

All of this great man’s meditations on colonialism, on national identity and a properly rooted Christian humanism that environs it without negating it, lay the foundations for the kind of national rebirth for which I am advocating here. All of these deserve utmost consideration by hearts that see the mortal danger of the present moment but want to respond from the depth and truth of the Gospel rather than from some recrudescent barbarism. They bring the sublime hope of the Gospel, the story of humanity’s deliverance from death, into the intermediate ontological spaces of our historical flesh — giving hope not just for our own individual deliverance from death, but for a personal deliverance from death that includes the regeneration of the family, the tribe, and the nation.

This courage under mortal existential danger, this determination for a national rebirth where we must trust not in princes, in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation — this is our task.

What We Must Hold Together

And yet, even for those who are willing to look outside the Overton window and acknowledge everything I have already said, there are mortal dangers. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. Nietzsche, that great and tragic anti-nihilist and Yes-sayer, knew that we could become monsters. In this, on the cusp of a century of murder and dissolution, he was prescient, as always.

There are two essential components to our proper response, when we have seen and cannot unsee. It’s here, in holding these two components together with martyric determination if necessary, that there is a noble way to bear the agony that arises after we have seen — after we have seen the beauty of our nation, and the diabolical cunning and mortal hostility of its enemy. (And again — it is not merely my nation that faces this enemy — it is every nation.)

One: we must defend our nation — foremost through exhortation, through awakening, through a deeper personal possession of the vision of its beauty and through our participation, in whatever way God’s gifts enable us, in the service of the nation by kindling the love of it in the hearts of our people. There is a great deal of radically important work here for artists and philosophers and theologians and religious leaders. But that is only first. After that comes the political and metapolitical task which demands, and not merely demands, but builds, from within the ruins if necessary, a state in service of this nation, rather than one dedicated to its destruction.

Thinking through the character of this state — which perhaps might be modeled more on the multi-ethnic empires of old, rather than on the modern attempts at the constitution of a nation-state — is something that comes into view as a great work and one that, given the forbidden character of the concern, languishes still without cultural and institutional resources for its elaboration, if not without the sporadic genius of a brave vanguard. Above all, we must develop the resolute determination to refuse acquiescence in our own destruction and express this determination in whatever way we can, both within established structures and movements and outside them.

This practical work may fail, as Pope St John Paul II noted above with regard to his own people (though we should not become defeatists and assume it will fail, however grim the circumstances may seem). It may fail for periods of centuries. If we are facing such a national Sonnenuntergang, what will preserve us through the coming night is our culture, and that means, above all, the persistence of our embodied memory.

But there is something more that will, by God’s grace, preserve us, and here I arrive at the crux of what I wish to say to the persuaded and the half-persuaded; perhaps it will help bring the latter on board.

I desire the life of my nation — but I do not merely desire its life, I desire its thriving, its fulfillment. And therefore above all, I desire its growth in virtue, and that means, in the virtues, as these have come down to us in our tradition: originating in the propaedeutic wisdom of our ancients, and perfected and enlightened by Christian faith. I desire my people’s vital well-being — our physical and cultural health and strength: but I do not desire only this, and I do not desire this at any cost. There is an axiological hierarchy, as I noted above. Particularly, I do not desire the strengthening of our vital existence at the cost of sacrificing faith, hope, and charity, because I know that ultimately, that too is a path to an even deeper destruction. “Death before dishonor.”

The supreme good of my people is our free subjection to eternal truths, as those are mediated through Christian faith. Therefore “leadership” that is venal, vulgar, and vicious is finally no real leadership at all. I will leave aside the advisability of hitching our wagon to such “leadership” on some alleged ground of pragmatism; to me, it is a betrayal, and I am quite convinced that virtually all such “leaders” will prove to be wolves in sheep’s clothing at best, and enemies of our people (or perhaps, covert friends of the enemies of our people).

Of course, I am here thinking of Donald Trump and virtually every high-ranking person in his circle. At best, what is happening in this phenomenon, as is more than apparent to me when I see the foreign policy decisions and the execrable personal moral standards, the self-dealing that is characteristic of banana republics, is the cynical exploitation of my people’s despair and abasement. Here, an amoral charlatan harnesses the inchoate nationalist sentiment of my people to fuel his own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, indifferently and cynically furthering the national goals of the historical architects of my people’s marginalization in their own homeland. What use could we possibly have for such a leader? With friends like this, who needs enemies?

What applies to Donald Trump applies orders of magnitude more to the manifestations of the “Old Right” in the 20th century. The “great figures” of this movement were, almost to a man, grotesque and verminous caricatures of anything my people would recognize as true nobility. Himmlers, Görings, Goebbelses — pathetic, vicious beasts — are not wanted here.

The heroic righteousness of our greatest national heroes includes both a filial devotion to their nation, and a higher devotion that sees it in the light of truths that embrace all of humanity — and there is no contradiction between these things. On the contrary, they mutually condition and support one another. We can love the stranger, and not hate our literal brother according to the flesh.

We can say with Terence Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, and yet desire to live under the authority of a state constituted to defend and further the integrity of our life as a distinct people — because we love the divine beauty incarnate in our complete embodied existence, because we love the color of our skin and hair and eyes, because we love the shape of our faces, because we love the desirable and fruitful beauty of our young women and men, because we love the radiance of our children, because we love the nobility of our heroes and elders, because we mourn the abasement and despair of our poor, because we love the epic of our history, because we love the pathos of our music and song, because we love our saints and their holy places, because we love the roots that extend over the great sea to our Urheimat, the cold northern Cuiviénen where at the Creator’s call we first awoke to the sight of the stars and the glory of the mountain fastnesses and cataracts and caves of our Dreamtime.

None of this love is contrary to the love of God; on the contrary, any supposed love of God that dogmatically excludes it is a deception. Properly ordered, it is gratitude for His Creation in the utmost intimacy of our life as persons incarnate in earthly history. And a noble and righteous wrath exercised in defense of this love is also something to be praised and devoutly desired.

You can read this homily, but you must believe me when I say that reading it is the faintest shadow of hearing it proclaimed. Hearing it proclaimed not just in the context of Lent, of Holy Week, of the church’s theanthropic liturgical catechesis to roll away the stone from our hearts. Hearing it proclaimed in the context of my life, my hard heartedness, my despair, my confusion, my failure; in the context of the sweetness and beauty of life that seems, when I trace its roots, always to lead me back in the end to the grief of my own fragility, vulnerability, subjection to vanity and death; and of course not just my own, but the death of those I love. The Paschal Homily is the archetypal sermon, the ur-sermon, just perhaps as the anaphora of St Basil is the archetypal theology.

Nothing matters more, to begin with, than our belief that this is all true, that this homily is preaching the truth. Yet there is an infinite distance between wanting to believe that it is true, and actually believing that it is true. “O Lord, I believe — help my unbelief!” Wanting to believe that it is true, and that prayer for faith, are with me all the time. I can forget consciously that this desire is there, of course, but it is present in my heart like a deep strain of music, so deep and so quiet that sometimes it is a kind of musical silence, upholding my heart secretly in the midst of all my cares and sins.

Wanting-to-believe includes this experience: that this faith is supremely desirable because it alone makes sense of anything and everything. Sometimes a verse of a hymn, or a sentence of Scripture, or the sight of an icon, or a liturgical gesture, or a story from the life of a saint, or the scent of incense, or the melody of a hymn, reveals to me how the totality of the faith coheres, how it is utterly harmonious, how it encompasses everything, how all the disparate, prismatic expressions of the faith derive from the central light. Yet even that perception is not yet belief; it is only a prolegomena to belief; it is only the intensification of the desire for belief.

Wanting to believe that the faith is true is present always. Believing that it is true comes in flashes. I have come to regard those flashes with gratitude rather than with grasping. There is a kind of willing “dwelling in death”1 that accompanies this gratitude. I am not yet the kind of man who can live in the knowledge of this truth. Truth is known in the heart. My heart can’t be faithful and still. My love is too poor. Therefore the experience of this knowledge only comes as a grace. Grace is a gift. I can’t control it. This is the whole point.

Last night, after the Lamentations and as the clergy prepared to take the plashchanitsa in procession, God gave me this grace; I felt, I knew, for a moment, that the noble Joseph’s taking the Lord’s most pure body down from the Cross and laying it in a new tomb is not an event distant from us in time and space; that it is present now, that we are there, that we are eyewitnesses, that the Lord of Glory lies before us, ready to be lodged in a narrow tomb.

How would your heart respond if you were there, with St Joseph of Arimathea? What love and fear and gratitude and tears would you find within yourself? How would you say farewell to Him? How would you kiss His wounds?

To be there, and know the truth — as much as that truth can enter my human heart — of the abasement and kenosis of the Son of God, descending into and beneath every terror, into the utmost closure and constriction, into death in a sense so deep that we can’t comprehend it? Into desolation, into emptiness, into a total loss?

O Life, how canst Thou die? as the Lamentations sing in the voice of the Mother of God.

From this grace, the grace of seeing for just a moment, this reality, I learned something; this I think is why the Lord gives us graces, not simply to console us (though of course they do), but to teach us, so that they lead us on our own path to transformation, so that He can prepare our hearts for greater graces yet to come. Graces are seeds, promises, instructions, invitations.

I see that I still live in the fear of death. And I see that I still strive to resolve that fear by human means, by my own will, by my own power. But there is no resolution to that fear but the Cross and the Resurrection. There is no resolution to that fear but the kenosis of the Son of God. Nada, nada.

Darkness, in this sense: I have to give up my self-reliance and put my trust in the Lord.

No trust in “the immortality of the soul.” No trust in metaphysics. No trust in “universalism.” No trust in apokatastasis. No trust in theories, no trust in thoughts, no trust in theology, no trust in the Church, no trust in liturgy. Trust in the Lord. A trust that does not see. A trust in darkness. Nada, nada.

Maybe that trust in the Lord bursts forth like a blossom with all those other things bathed in the light of the Resurrection. I have also experienced the grace of seeing the historical flesh of the Church as evidence that this blossoming is true and real. But they are not the root; they are the flowers.

In the end, as Ben Sasse is doing with such humble lucidity, I have to face death with nothing — nothing but the Lord Who delivers me, and His whole creation, from death. To let go of everything as with tears I let go of the living Lord and kiss Him as we place His body in the tomb of all our hope.

And my eyes fill with tears already as I think of the radiant Night to come. As I think of the first Paschal hymn in the darkened temple:

Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Savior, the angels in heaven sing; make us worthy also on earth to glorify Thee with a pure heart.

It should be enough for the rest of your workday, or for your festive gathering tonight.

Beannachtaí na Féile!

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We know him as St Ciarán of Saighir, one of Ireland’s earliest Christians. It is said that he met St Patrick in Rome. Sensing a kind of saintly outlandishness in him, Patrick gave him a hand-bell, telling him to go home and set up a monastery wherever it rang unrung. It rang, unrung, in a wilderness scarce in everything except savagery.

Reverent remembrance, already old in the eighth century, loves his story:

The blessed Ciarán took up his habitation like a hermit in the waste, for all about was a waste and tangled woodland. He began to build his little cell of mean stuff, and that was the beginning of his monastery. Afterwards a settlement grew up by God’s gift and the grace of the holy Ciarán. And all these have the one name, Seir.

Now when he came there he sat down under a tree in the shade of which was a boar of savage aspect. The boar seeing a man for the first time fled in terror, but afterwards, being tamed by God, it returned like a servant to the man of God. And that boar was Ciarán’s first disciple and served him like a monk in that place. For the boar immediately fell to before the eyes of the man of God and with his teeth stoutly severed branches and grasses to serve for the building of the cell. For there was none with the holy man of God in that place. For he had fled to the waste from his own disciples. Then came other animals from the lairs of the waste to the holy Ciaran, a fox, a badger, a wolf and a stag. And they abode with him as tame as could be. For they followed the commands of the holy man in all things like monks.

One day the fox, being more subtle and full of guile than the rest, stole the slippers of the abbot, the holy Ciarán, and turning false to his vow carried them off to his old earth in the waste, designing to devour them there. And when the holy Ciarán knew of this, he sent another monk or disciple, the badger, to follow the fox into the waste and to bring his brother back to his obedience. So the badger, who knew the ways of the woods, immediately obeyed the command of his elder and went straight to the earth of Brother Fox. He found him intent on eating his lord’s slippers, so he bit off his ears and his brush and tore out his hairs. And then he constrained him to accompany him to his monastery that there he might do penance for his theft. So the fox, yielding to force, came back with the badger to his own cell to the holy Ciarán, bringing the slippers still uneaten. And the holy man said to the fox: “Wherefore, brother, hast thou done this evil thing, unworthy of a monk? Behold! Our water is sweet and common to all. And if thou hadst a desire of thy natural craving to eat flesh, the omnipotent God would have made thee flesh of the bark of trees at our prayer.” Then the fox, craving forgiveness, did penance fasting, and ate nothing until the holy man commanded. Then he abode with the rest in familiar converse.

Afterwards his own disciples and many others from every side gathered about the holy Ciarán in that place; and there a famous monastery was begun. But the tame creatures aforesaid abode there all his life, for the holy elder had pleasure to see them.

What a charming end to our battle with the Beast in ourselves and in the world! Ciarán and badger and boar and fox and stag and wolf singing matins together in a little thatched church in the wilderness, its door antler high and wide to nature inside and outside us:

Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentum.

Singing lauds together:

Cantate Domino canticum novum, cantate Domino omnis terra. Cantate Domino, et benedicite nomini ejus: annunciate de die in diem salutare ejus. Annunciate inter gentes gloriam ejus, in omnibus popules mirabilia ejus...

Singing nones together:

Jubilate Deo omnis terra: servite Domino in laetitia. Introite in conspectu ejus, in exultatione.

Singing vespers together:

In ilia die stillabunt montes dulcedinem et colles fluent lac et mel, alleluia, Euouae.

It must be that Ciarán was at ease with animal nature in himself, else the boar-brutal, fox-vicious, stag-shy animals of the wilderness wouldn’t have been so happy to sing Nunc Dimittis, bringing compline to an end, with him:

Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace, quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum, quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum, lumen ad revelationem gentium et gloriam plebis tuae, Israel.

Bethlehem and Saighir or, as it is phonetically rendered in the text, Seir.

Over the centuries, Christians have become used to Bethlehem, to the idea of two domesticated animals, an ox and an ass, breathing warmth on a wonder-child lying in their manger.

But what of Seir? What of two savage animals, a wolf and a boar, what of them singing matins? What of them, before they go back to their monastic cells at night, singing Simeon’s Song of Salvation:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

A wolf! With predatory eyes! Breaking off from the hunt and seeing salvation — with those eyes?

Is this the messianic outcome of history and of creation as the Bible foresees it?

Is it that, here in Seir, Ciarán and the animals are already living that outcome?

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb...

The lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put his hand in the cockatrice’s den.

There will be no hurt on God’s holy mountain.

A sense I have is that there is something quite different going on in Seir.

The sense I have of him is that Ciarán is a Christian Orpheus.

In his nature, in all of it, not just in part of it, he has emerged into the Orphic note and that is why the animals, savage like the boar and shy like the stag, are happy to sing it with him.

Not that it is all Orphic plain sailing in Seir.

When it does eventually happen, the regression, while comic, is serious, especially so in the case of the badger.

One day there it was, another bowl of vegetable soup set before the fox. Looking down into it, his mouth wearied and watered for flesh, for bleeding, hot raw flesh deep as his teeth. In his mind he had a hare in sight, his nostrils drinking her smell. Mightily he resisted the impulse and soon again he was calm, the soup, as it so often did, tasting like penance. Next day, passing his cell door, he saw that the abbot had left his slippers outside to dry in the sun. Thinking that he might find the taste of hide in the leather, he yielded to his instincts and made off with them and before he knew what was what he was back to his old ways in his old earth in the wood.

No sooner had the badger entered the earth than he too regressed, turning snarlingly savage, biting off the fox’s ears, biting off his tail, tearing the fur from shoulder and belly. Never, during all those years in the wild, had he fought as ferociously as he did now, in the interest, seemingly, of monastic law and order.

So what then of the Orphic note? Does it exist? And if it does, are there people who in their very being become it? Is it immanent in all of nature, in rocks, in animals, in stars? Is the universe but a blossoming of it? Is it an astronomical exuberance of it? Is it the eternal divine silence in its adventure into sound that we are talking about? Is that what the Orphic note is, the sound of the eternal divine silence, that sound solid in rocks, stellar in stars? And when someone reverts from sound to silence, will wolf and badger and boar and fox and stag, as by impulsion from an awakened instinct that lessens established instincts, will they turn on their trails, following what is now their chief desire, to be sym-phonic with it?

To be symphonic with it in Ciarán of Seir is to be symphonic with it in themselves. In Seir, to be symphonic with it as sound is to be symphonic with it as silence. The boar and the stag who were symphonic with it as sound at matins, at lauds, at nones, at vespers and at compline, were symphonic and maybe homeophonic with it as the eternal divine silence.

It should be remembered as a great day — the day a handbell rang unrung in Ireland.

And Seir? Seir is the bindu, the centre of the mandala, the place of universal emergence and return.

And Ciarán? As Ogma once was, Ciarán is now the philosophical question. To understand him is ultimate understanding of all things.

In Ireland, St Ciarán’s Christianity preceded the Christianity of St Patrick. Isn’t it time we gave it precedence in other than a temporal sense? In this of course, even in thinking about it, we must remember that it was Patrick who gave the hand-bell to Ciarán, and so, in fairness, the question of precedence must remain undecided. What is important is that, having been a founding bell, the hand-bell could be the bell of refounding.

Christianity isn’t only a morality that has its source in divine command.

As well as so much else that it presumably was, at Seir Christianity was the lived apprehension of unity in plurality out of which an ecumenical morality prospered. Ecumenical not just among human beings of different persuasions and languages. Ecumenical across all boundaries, among all species living and extinct, among all worlds visible and invisible.

And as for what happened to Brother Fox and Brother Badger, well, yes, it happens to individuals, it happens to tribes, it happens to civilizations and we only have to look at the one we live in to know that it happens to worlds.

As Christ born on the bestial floor does, as Christ in the Canyon does, Ciarán of Saighir suits our world.

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But such as I have, I give unto thee: a Friday playlist inspired by a Macedonian darkwave band… with whatever else felt like coming along.

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Much of what I write here relates directly or tangentially to metaphysics and to my struggles with it. A lot of my reading as well. Metaphysical speculation seems endemic among the people I end up hanging out with. I referred to the “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of metaphysical enthusiasm and disillusionment here:

So when I go down some theological rabbit hole and come up against the inevitable problems, after I shed some tears and spend some nights in confusion, walk around for a few days making my family wonder what’s going on, rack my brains, order a few more books for the pile, stand stony-hearted in the Liturgy — eventually I come back to the saints.

I want to take a step back from this, though, and reflect on the inner movements and gestures that precede an appeal to “the saints,” because honestly, that is a bit too strong, and doesn’t reflect the larger epoché with which I hold the Church as an exoteric institution and as a hierarchically structured body with historical flesh that purports to provide metaphysical truths demanding our assent.

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There is something wider that contains this “sitting at the feet of the saints.” This latter is one enactment of a certain gesture of the heart as it encounters the world, and it’s this gesture that I want to try to put some words to — tentatively.

I have to say that with all honesty, faith as a creedal system is dead to me. As a modern person (I may hate it, but it’s true), I demand — I can’t but demand — that faith be found in experience, not in assertion. I demand to be led to see, and that at the end of the leading, which I have genuinely followed step by inner step, I do in fact see. Faith is inner vision, it is direct grasping, or it is false. I do not mean to see a concept or a structure of concepts. I do not mean some kind of rational or intellectual contemplation.1 I mean the knowledge I have of the sun’s warmth or of the fragrance of blooming jasmine. I mean the existential presence of what is known, its revelation to me.

Anything other than this is doubtful, and I mean that word literally; it is full of doubt. As a matter of rational assertion, I do not know whether the propositions of the Nicene Creed are true. Perhaps they are; perhaps I also wish them to be; but I do not know that they are, and it would surely be irresponsible and basically contemptible of me to maintain pugnaciously that they are or to attempt to “convince” others of the truth of what I do not myself really know. If this is true of the Creed, how much more is it true of any metaphysical system or argument?

It seems to me that so much religious discourse founders on (dis)honesty. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” This is why all the doctrinal wrangling, both within Christianity and among the world’s religions, is so crushingly boring and frankly adolescent.

Those who still suffer from the delusion that a proper structuring of rational argument will lead them and others to know are playing a game that in the last analysis they likely already know (ironic, isn’t it) to be pointless. But they continue for a few reasons. One, it is distracting, and life is difficult enough that distractions are not to be sneered at (though I think a good cup of coffee is undeniably better than metaphysics). Two, a certain kind of people (my kind of people) just enjoy the exploration. Three, more darkly, it presents opportunities for us to feel superior, to “win” arguments and “defeat” opponents.

This is not knowledge; it is ideology (and sometimes propaganda). Religion as it is practiced and proclaimed is much more ideology and propaganda than knowledge, and fundamentally, I have no interest in ideology, and outright contempt for propaganda.

So the question seems to me to be: if God cannot be “demonstrated” either to exist or to have the characteristics ascribed to “him” by traditional dogmatic religion — whether exoteric or esoteric — and if God also in all honesty seems absent, or in Nietzsche’s word, dead, in the historical experience of contemporary humanity: that is, if we do not know the truth of what the creeds tell us about God; and our contemplation of the world, its life, and the destiny of suffering human beings irretrievably casts all the once-mandated metaphysical certainties into an abyss of doubt: then where, amidst this absence of God, can we find a way to open ourselves in depth to the experience of God?

I emphatically do not mean, “so that we can finally build a new metaphysical system” — a metaphysical system that will at last be true, a dissident metaphysical system that will somehow succeed where all the old metaphysical systems failed — even though it exists on the same plane they did! As long as we are stuck in that quest, we’re still doing one of the three things I mentioned above: entertaining and distracting ourselves, enjoying the aesthetics, or preening ourselves in a fight with our “enemies.” In the face of our naked life, all the systems — even the most enticing ones (and what makes them enticing of course is a matter of taste and the current context of our life), seem external and arbitrary.

The gesture or stance I want to highlight is one of quiet waiting as we attend deeply and reflectively to the content of our experience, in the hope that there we will learn something about God that we can honestly say we know.

The feeling of this gesture: something like the silence that falls after an agony of grief, when the tears are, for a moment, exhausted. Something like the serenity of a morning on which we have no responsibilities (barely imaginable to me now) and any chronic worries are stilled; perhaps the first morning of a summer holiday when we were young. Something like being present with the world, whether in joy or sorrow, when there is nothing calling us to exercise our powers, and our sense of ourself and our own significance pales, and we have no need to assert or exert. I could almost say that we are “just present,” but we do have an intentionality. Our “mere presence” is empty of assertion and exertion, but full of attention and intention. We are allowing things to be; yet within that allowing there is not merely resignation, but tenderness. There is hope: even if it is a circumstance that seems hopeless, we are awaiting hope hopefully. We have our eyes open to see it. This is the kind of expectant, alert inner stillness I mean.

As an illustration, I want to take tradition itself: because the non-creedal attitude I am suggesting could be taken wrongly as fundamentally indifferent to Christianity, or to the distinctives that delineate (and separate) Christian ecclesial communities, or indeed to any religious differences at all. In this post-metaphysical and post-creedal existential situation — I even find myself wanting to say post-dogmatic — what is there to take from tradition in any of its manifestations? This question leads me to reflect on memory.

The tradition holds a memory: a memory, in the case of Christianity, above all of who it is that we are waiting for. It’s that holding of that memory that makes tradition matter — not a mechanical transmission of propositions about metaphysical reality. Tradition as such, as the transmission of memory within and beneath dogma, but also within a community’s mythic, artistic, and liturgical life, matters for this reason. And so the attitude of wakeful, quiet, intentional waiting and looking applies deeply to tradition. This is how to sit with tradition: without bringing to it our weight of desperate need, but to sit apart from it a little, to inquire within our heart what light is in it, the way we might sit with a cup of tea and study our little child at play with her treasures. (A thing, of course, which I love to do.) The who, by the way, should evoke all the concreteness, the inimitability, of every person you know and love.

The Church as tradition is thus a world of memory, a space of memory, of anamnesis (the use of the term should indicate that I am not wholly off the rails here). This anamnesis gives shape to our intention and our tenderness — but it does not at all mean subservience to the ideology of others or acquiescence to propaganda. And of course the anamnesis is first of all an anamnesis of Jesus. The process of conversion is the process of coming to dwell in this space of memory. This is what makes me a Christian, and incidentally, also what makes me Orthodox: that my attentiveness to the quiet coming of God in my experience, my listening and waiting for this quiet coming, is occurring where I have settled down in the house of this memory. Religious belonging is thus, in this sense, profoundly a matter of dwelling, and not nearly so much a matter of assent to a scheme of ideas.

When tradition really speaks, then, it speaks of a perception. It is sober; it is not intoxicated with the rage and pride of ideas (and therefore perhaps in its integrity should teach us to stop choosing sides in metaphysical and ideological debates). It offers to us a place to dwell and to listen; above all, it schools and directs our attention.

Rather like the fundamental witness of the saints. These holy ones — and of course, He who is the Holy One par excellence — dwell with us here, in this house of memory. They gently rest a hand on my shoulder and say, “Look up — look here — you have forgotten.”

My religious readers will likely appreciate the first part and excoriate me for the second. My non-religious readers will be friendlier; they will skim the first part, and possibly enjoy the second, though they will wish it were said more simply. Shout out to the heretics of both parties who will read and think, “Interesting.”

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Part One

In trying to articulate a sexual morality, both for the sake of offering counsel to others and for the sake of clarifying and strengthening my own convictions, I have often resorted to this metaphor: sex is a language with which we can either tell the truth, or lie.

There are high points in sexual experience as there are in the experience of language. Often we go through our days having functional linguistic interactions with other people, but then there are also the times when language, brought somehow into relief, standing out against surrounding world of apparently mere things, brought intimately within the fire of a heart, itself catches fire and, passing between us, can enflame the hearts of our hearers. It becomes, rather than an instrument of commerce, a transmission of wakefulness of spirit, of the mind’s and soul’s life. Sometimes it is the whole life of the writer that does this, when the writer can summon the ordinary light of words into a burning focal point. Sometimes it happens seemingly by grace in the words of an “ordinary” and unstudied person, under the pressure of enormous feeling, tragedy, overpowering love or care. In a way, the great treasures of oral literature, which I know mostly through the old English and Scottish ballad tradition, are this grace incarnate in the life of a people (my people).

I think when this happens, we tell the truth.

Perhaps I am naive, or revealing my philosophical ineptitude, but I can’t in the end conceive of truth as expressed in the word I speak as some mere correlation of thought and reality, in the mode of a card describing the species of the dead insect to which it is attached.

True words are words of fire that spread from heart to heart. If the logos is indeed the Logos, this is the fire that He has come to cast on the earth, that He would were already kindled. This is the fire that He had already begun to cast on the earth through the tongue of Adam when he gave Adam the gift, grace, and labor of naming the animals. We latter-day revert animists should reflect that Adam’s naming of “animals” really means his naming of everything, because everything is animate. And this “naming” means, not a mere placeholder in a linguistic game — it means offering the presence of the named a home, inviting the presence of the named not merely into being, but into life (and this is why the history of Israel really begins, in a certain sense, with Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush where God names Himself).

This naming, this primordial telling, this primordial “Godspell,” “good word,” is really an action as radical as the creation itself, I might dare to say. God’s word gives being; man’s naming sets that being alight in the heart of the world.

None of the “things” had God’s own breath. This breath of life was given to man. Man’s vocation is to enkindle things with that fiery breath. Where the first Adam finally failed, the second Adam succeeded. This is Pentecost. This is why the Gospel is true, not finally because it contains factually correct propositions about physical and metaphysical reality, but because it is a gateway into the life of a world set aflame, that is, into true life. This is also why the Gospel word does indeed finally sit in judgment on Christian history and Christian community, indeed on the whole world (cf St John 12:48) — not, of course, in the way fundamentalists understand it, the fire of whose “truth” has been extinguished in a trivial facticity.

So this is the feeling of “truth” and “truth-telling” that I have in mind when I say that sex is a language in which we can either tell the truth, or lie. Because of course, the other great mystery of language happens in Genesis after the Logos has enlisted Adam in the fundamental human task, of naming (enlivening, revealing, kindling, presencing) the logoi of created things. That is, the Adversary uses language to lie, and teaches us to use language to lie. The naming of things that was given us as a way to be God’s co-workers in giving life to the world, becomes a dying and an intended transmission of death, that is, murder. See the direct connection:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (St John 8:44).

In the enkindling moment of sex as truth-telling, we mean with our hearts the actions of our bodies. We “name” the beloved; we intend to transmit life. My Roman Catholic readers will immediately and joyfully seize on that last sentence for the purpose of upholding the traditional teaching against contraception, but this is not what I intend, nor will I go down that rabbit hole here. The transmission of life I intend here is not procreation. It is the most fundamental affirmation of the beloved, it is the overflowing of a heart that wills the beloved not merely to be but to live. And if it wills that the beloved live, it wills finally that the beloved live forever. It wills that the beloved possess not merely a passing life but an eternal life, not merely a moment of joy but the fullness of joy. In personalist terms, it affirms the value of the beloved, it is a sursum corda, it is the elevation of the Host. I trust that I am not far afield from the deep tradition to make sex very explicitly and directly Eucharistic in this way.

It follows from this, that if this is sex as truth-telling, much traditional sexual morality falls into place not as some alien nomos imposed on us from “above,” but as the manifest and obvious integrity of a reality that is open to the experience and reflection of every human being, believer or unbeliever. If we will the eternal life and eternal joy of the beloved, if this is the meaning of the word that we speak through and in sex (and I invite you to remember and reflect on your own greatest experiences of sexual ecstasy here, even if you may see them as lies or betrayals in hindsight), how could we be speaking truly unless the whole life environing this act were congruent with that will?

What does such a life look like? It looks to me like exclusivity, fidelity, devotion, all the patient and painstaking adjustments required for those; it looks like a death to self in so many ways — of course, the kind of death to self that is an entrance into life, not an entrance into destruction (St Matthew 16:25). But it does not have the pained feeling of “sacrifice” as that word has decayed in our usual speaking. It is a “sacrifice” in the literal etymology of the word, a making holy, a doing of the holy — the holy being above all (and in the end, only?) the reception and transmission of the Spirit of Life to the beloved. The life of sexual truth looks like marriage.

Now let me move on to the counterpoint, because I am concerned here to excavate my heart, indeed, to tell the truth, and I have said only half the truth.

So let’s talk about Wilhelm Reich for a moment.

Part Two

Reich’s early life was shaped by the dysfunction of his parents’ marriage. His violent, rigid, and authoritarian father would berate and abuse Reich’s mother for her alleged infidelities, whether he imagined these were actually consummated or merely contemplated. At the same time, Reich’s father (as Reich discovered when still quite young) struggled with promiscuous desires — indeed it seems that in the beginning at least, his accusations against his wife were pure projection. In the end, this dismal pattern of abuse and dishonesty culminated in the actual infidelity of Reich’s mother with his beloved tutor, the father’s discovery of this infidelity, and his mother’s subsequent suicide (though it is unclear whether this was an actual suicide, or death from complications after a botched abortion).

This childhood experience lay at the root of Reich’s lifelong effort to identify and heal the sexual repression that he came to believe lay at the root of so much (perhaps all) human misery — the repression that produced authoritarian, “armored” personalities and bodies and families and societies, that blocked human beings from the spontaneous and joyful experience of and engagement with incarnate life (“orgastic potency,” not limited of course to its genital expression). He referred to this negative transmission in his later writings, where psychoanalysis and radical social theory gave way to vitalist metaphysical speculation, as “the emotional plague.”

I can’t help but imagine the violence and repression of his turn-of-the-century central European, assimilating Jewish household, with its whole weight of half-rejected tradition and bourgeois status-seeking, and ask: what if his parents could have been honest with each other about their desires? Is it really true that the erotic desires we experience that overflow the banks of conventional sexual morality, as it is experienced and enacted in a coercive social code, are “lies”? Is it really true that the affirmation of the other and of the self that we experience in the entire life of erotic attraction — from its first revelation to its consummation, whether or not that ever occurs — must imply lifelong fidelity and exclusivity?

Let me attempt to express why it might not be. I will take the risk of some personal honesty here — not that this whole piece has not been intended to be honest.

First, something phenomenological. I experience the ebb and flow of vital enthusiasm in my life across all domains — practical, social, aesthetic, religious, intellectual — as being intimately linked with whatever might be my concurrent experience of the intensity of sexual eros. I have taken to referring to this as my “Matthew 5:28” problem. (I could get into a detailed linguistic exegesis of the verse in question, but first, I am more concerned with the verse as it is typically understood than with excavating some “original meaning”; and second, such excavations typically strike me as disingenuous, in much the same way that “historical Jesus” quests seem to end up reflecting the investigator’s own face from the bottom of the well, as Albert Schweitzer observed.)

A “problem,” as Hans Jonas observes, is “the collision between a comprehensive view and a particular fact.” The “comprehensive view” is the total mythical, religious, philosophical, and moral view of human sexuality (indeed, of cosmic and divine life as a whole) expressed in the first half of this essay. The “particular fact” is that when I permit the free flow of eros, eros violates the norms commended to me by the reflections above (and the norm apparently presented by Jesus in Matthew 5:28); and on the contrary, when I contain or restrict the free flow of eros, it is not merely eros in its limited dimension of appetitively experienced sexual aliveness that is contained — aliveness across the entire spectrum of my life is dulled, dampened, and turned off. I die a little. Or a lot.

Essentially, when I am open to sexual perception, interest, and desire across the board, I am more alive in every department of life, more engaged, more excited, more energetic, more perceptive, more hungry. When my sexual aliveness is dampened, I am less interested in being alive. I take this as a clue that the fundamental vital force, drawing no distinctions between spiritual and psychic and biophysical, is inescapably sexual in its roots, whatever else it may also be.

I love being aware of beautiful women for this reason. When my life is “lit,” I experience physical desire when I am aware of a beautiful woman, but I experience far more than physical desire; that desire is an index of the extent to which my psychospiritual organism is a sensitive receptor for a universal energy that then separates prismatically into creative power in a myriad of forms — as many as I can acquire the skill to express. It is raw fuel for life. When I write well, eros is the fuel. When I crush the free flow of eros, I crush my ability to write, to create, to love, to be tender, to appreciate even apparently non-erotic beauty, to be patient with my child, to pursue my own health, to give gifts, to work well. I lose my entire “appetite.”

It fell upon a holy day, / As many in the year, / Musgrave to the church did go, / To see fine ladies there.

I remember visiting the Barnes in Philadelphia with a new lover, and seeing for the first time the canvases of van Gogh’s human, all-too-human characters — such as this provincial French postman whose homeliness is so tenderly portrayed that I could only stand and weep. I could weep because my lover’s body, my desire for her body, had awoken me. (Please visit the Barnes if you are in Philadelphia — it is a revelation. Even better, visit it with a new lover.)

Desire and tenderness are not opposed; desire is the root of tenderness, even if it can be perverted and twisted.

The presence or absence of my “Matthew 5:28” problem is an effective gauge for whether or not I am truly living or just going through the motions. There is much, of course, to be said for going through the motions. But I do not believe that we should aim at merely going through the motions. I think we should aim at being lit, being alive.

“The glory of God is a man fully alive.” Of course St Irenaeus was not thinking of a man, for example, whose entire psychospiritual system is responsive to the flow of eros in the presence of a beautiful woman. But he should have been.

It is not apparent to me that sexuality exercised outside the confines of marriage must fail in “speaking” truthfully about this eros. By “outside the confines of marriage” I mean — sexuality exercised without a promise, explicit or implicit, of permanence, fidelity, or exclusivity.

In this realm, a sexuality that speaks the truth about the value of the sexual other is a sexuality that speaks a vital, present, and existential truth about the other’s presence within, and transmission of, the flow of universal eros, of the vital life energy that feeds us in every endeavor and experience of our lives. Sex then becomes a mutual celebration not of some half-known, intuited inwardness raised to an effectively disembodied spiritual realm, where the other is perceived and received as an immortal, almost as an idea; it becomes a mutual celebration within time of something that is itself alive, dynamic, and changing, something that is itself in coming and going; something that can come and go in one form, and come and go in another form; a dance that can be danced with many partners.

Is there a reason why that mutual celebration cannot be something that is more or less transient? Even without consummating it, I have experienced this transience and this celebration. In all frankness — my life has from time to time been enriched profoundly by the erotic presence of women with whom I had no formal relationship of any kind, and certainly no commitment whatsoever, sometimes not even friendship — sometimes not even real acquaintance. And yet for a season, they occupied a place in my erotic imagination and energy flow that enlivened me dramatically, that invisibly and secretly fed my inspiration in my entire engagement with life. Indeed I owe periods of spiritual renewal and advancement, in mysterious ways, to some of these muses. I daresay much of the wealth of the world’s culture is owed exactly to this erotic influence of women on men, utterly distinct from any formal or explicit relationship they may have.

I will say further simply that I know this is true not only for me, and not only for men. Here there is scope for the actual valorization of animal vital energy without descent into bestiality — a valorization that, I note, the tradition is painfully unable to provide. This frame permits me to say yes to that animal vital energy without devolving into an impersonalism. I can celebrate animal desire as such, without becoming a beast.

The Christian tradition is classically hostile to imagination across the board — a tendency which reaches its apotheosis in certain 19th century Russian ascetic writers such as St Theophan the Recluse and St Ignatius Brianchaninov. How much more hostile it is to the explicitly erotic imagination (here its mercilessness borders on sadistic mania)! There are various figures, including many in the “re-enchantment” camp, who, following the Romantic trail, attempt a retrieval of imagination: but what religious man will now attempt a retrieval of the erotic imagination? Yet I will say — the erotic imagination, distinct from degradation and cruelty and perversion, is an index of the life of our soul and body. It is not something that should be suppressed; it is something that should be cultivated, educated, catechized.

What if Wilhelm Reich’s parents could have engaged with the erotic imagination that so evidently tormented them, with transparency and honesty and without shame? What shame should there or could there fundamentally be regarding this erotic imagination that is simply the index of our entire receptivity as “living souls” to the vital energy of the cosmos, that force that through the green fuse drives the flower? Is it really to be desired that, ostensibly for the sake of defending an objective “truth” about erotic and sexual communion, we lie and hide our desires, even from those with whom we supposedly share our deepest life? What is this, and where does it lead?

So, cruelty and degradation and perversion: where do they come from? If marriage and erotic communion outside marriage both find their dignity in genuine regard for the sexual other — either regard for their person, for their spirit, contemplated, valued, and loved in the light of eternity; or regard for their participation in and transmission of the universal vital energy within their incarnate finitudes of season, time, and space — then what turns either use of the “language” of sex into a lie rather than the expression of truth is simply the denial of the other in either of these manifestations. In the case of marriage, the denial that the other is a person known and loved by God. In the case of non-marital sexuality, the denial that the other, like myself, is not a machine or a puppet, but a freely dancing eddy in the vast cosmic field of energy, that now unites, and now parts; that now is superposed on another wave, that now breaks and ebbs back into the ocean to seek its next return to the shore.

It may seem to pose a greater risk to truthfulness, a greater temptation towards the lie, to valorize sex outside the structure of marriage — but married sexuality can itself become a great temptation to lie against the truth of eros, to seek death rather than life, as is endlessly attested in both literature and folk culture. Marriage does not by itself confer safety and security against the temptation of erotic untruth, however much foolish humans may perennially confound rule with integrity. And of course, likewise, the mere presence of erotic aliveness in a sexual encounter does not confer safety from a self-seeking that fails to recognize the other as a person bearing a gift, and not a thing to be exploited.

I think that what we want — what I want — is, in all honesty, not one or the other of these, but both of them. We want marriage, but we also want the sexual life of lovers meeting for the first time; where our mutual desire is not spiritualized as the service to some greater thing than the presence of the living, fiery universal vital energy that is between us here and now.

The whole question is whether we can have both — and how. Speaking personally, I am not satisfied with an answer that denies either. Denying marriage is tantamount to denying God; denying free eros is tantamount to denying life. I negate the negations.

Epilogue

Then there is the pragmatic reality within which all this is occurring, which is that although eros has the dimension of an encounter between two subjects, it is also generative not just in the sense of giving subjective life to those subjects; it is generative in the sense of giving life to new subjects. Those new subjects are themselves the proper objects of moral concern on the part of their parents, which is to state the obvious: that family and children’s welfare is implicated in sex. (And also, incidentally, since women bear intrinsically so much of the burden related to childbirth and child-rearing, women’s welfare is also implicated in a way that calls for explicit recognition.)

However, it is a wholly different matter to say, “Children’s welfare is best served by deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding,” and to say, “The primacy and preferability of deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding as a context for sex can be drawn from neutral phenomenological observation of human life.” The latter is the religious claim, and the former is no longer a religious, but merely a practical claim that admits in theory of other solutions. That our present cultural situation, confused and taking neither position with consistency and seriousness, is a terrible mess, is itself also an accident; after the dissolution of our traditional patterns, other patterns may arise (which I note will not necessarily be any repetition of anything ever before elaborated by a human culture; new things happen). Some of these patterns might be quite functional, or better than functional. But in the meantime, we are not there; we are here.

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From Come, Holy Spirit: Meditations for Apostles, by Fr Léonce de Grandmaison, SJ

I was struck when I read this passage because I have become acutely conscious of this topic as Substack has leaned heavily into Notes and become the “Orange Twitter” — for the moment, a higher-rent version of the platform of mass febrile outrage, but I know from many comments that others here too sense where things are going.

I am of course highly susceptible, being a strongly opinionated person. I tend to lose sight of the fact that while the strength of my opinions has been pretty constant since I had my political awakening in the 80s, the content of those opinions has not been. I am instinctively as righteous about my opinions now as I was when I held the polar opposite of my current views.

When the algorithm feeds me outrage, I am quick to take the bait — though thankfully I have become a little more skilled at feeling the provocation without acting on it.

Fr Léonce’s observation gave me a helpful perspective, which is essentially this: Most of the things about which I am tempted to be outraged are, neutrally, matters where I have little sure knowledge and next to no direct experience or competence, on which I have expended no intellectual or moral sweat, and about which I therefore have every right to have an opinion and no right at all to be doctrinaire or contemptuous. They are not essential. That someone thinks differently about them is fundamentally not my concern and none of my business. I have no practical or moral obligation to say anything to contradict someone who believes differently than I do. God’s honor, the truths of the faith, and the felicity of the innocent are not at stake.

This also arises, given that the subtitle of Fr Léonce’s book is “meditations for apostles”: I have an apostolate. I am a member of the Body of Christ. That body’s heart is the Lord’s heart, receiving the Holy Spirit for the transfiguration and restoration of Creation. Why on earth would I risk alienating and scandalizing someone who might, through me, open his heart to the Savior of the world? And for the sake of my opinion about some matter that, in the “fog of war” that is human history, I must in charity and candor say can admit of many analyses and contradictory assessments?

How ridiculous! How contemptible!

On the other hand, the opposite of this partisan warfare of opinion is the labor to perceive and to grasp what Dietrich von Hildebrand called values — meaning not some emotional human attachment to forms of culture, mores, or behavior, but the things that are genuinely, objectively, intrinsically valuable. In von Hildebrand’s doctrine of spiritual life, proper axiology — the perception, understanding, and clarification of values — is in a way the architectonic virtue: reverence. It is learning to know and love the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. (I apologize to any real Hildebrand scholars who chance to read this — I am doing my best!) Reverence, faithfulness, responsibility, veracity, goodness, justice, purity, humility, loyalty, reliability, gratitude: these are the values worthy of our life and witness.

Grasping values and remaining faithful to them is essential. Holding opinions is not.

Therefore the need for my response to someone’s terrible take is precisely zero, except when it could be an occasion for witness to values that does not in its enactment contradict those values. “In everything else — and this is all-embracing — we must not tenaciously espouse and uphold our own opinion... [we must] learn to step aside in this matter.”

Someone might be open to hear the Gospel through your words and deeds. Don’t let your opinions get in the way.

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But such as I have, I give unto thee: a long-delayed Christmas playlist, which I deign to bestow even upon you execrable New Calendarists!

A blessed Yule and a merry Christmas to all!

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What is feeling — that part of our affective life that is immersed in the flesh and intrinsically dependent on it? We feel as the animals do, said a Father of the Church; but we think with the angels. The remark is ambiguous. Neither the animal life nor the spiritual exists in us in a pure state. Our feeling is that of a spiritual being, our mind is that of a sensuous being; the deepest law of our nature lowers our spirit towards the flesh, but at the same time it exalts the flesh towards the spirit. This ontological law is convincingly verified in the domain of action. Strictly speaking, we are aware of neither sensuous nor spiritual activities, but only human activities. The most brutish actions of the flesh (the act of eating, for example) implies a certain consent and delectation of the mind; conversely, the loftiest spiritual activity is dependent on a minimum of sensuous co-operation. Even the night of the senses is something “sensed”. There is an experience of absence. Psychologically all we can state about the matter is this: no human act, whether of the senses or of the mind, is performed in complete isolation; but among these human acts, all of them compounded of feeling and spirit, some are inclined and polarised towards the senses, others towards the spirit.

The Antagonism

The most fundamental of our interior experiences shows two realities in apparent contradiction: the mysterious unity of feeling and, with the inseparable synthesis of all their manifestations, and on the other hand their mutual antagonism. From the individual and collective history of mankind we learn how the freedom, power and purity of the spirit cost a bitter discipline of the life of the senses. Human greatness is inseparable from asceticism. More than any other ideal of wisdom or heroism, Christianity, seeking the growth of the spiritual life into the divine, accentuates this antagonism between the soul and the flesh, between the old unregenerate man and the new. It is with good reason that the history of Christianity, to an idolatrous apostle of “life” like Nietzsche, seems a vast crucifixion of all the delights and loves of the senses. The teachings of many Christian ascetics and teachers, taken as a basis for speculation, readily lend themselves to a dualist interpretation of human nature.1 In fact, we have become so used to this paradox that we tend to be blind to its deeper meaning. Fundamentally there is something baffling in this conflict at the very heart of an absolute solidarity. How can there be so radical an antagonism between two forces that are really inseparable, interdependent and substantially one?

Some put the blame upon original sin. Far be it from us to extenuate its misdeeds! But it is too like indolence to explain the whole of human conflict by the fall. If Adam’s state was above all conflict, this was not so much due to the integrity of his nature as to the supernatural gifts in which his nature was clothed. Per peccatum homo fit tantum homo.2 The conflict between sense and spirit does not arise solely for moral reasons (the original fall); its roots are ontological, in the human constitution. We have no idea what man would be like in a state of pure nature, equally unaffected by the evils of sin and by the benefits of grace; but we can be certain that in a being so complex and unequal — a converging-point of all the elements of the sensible world and of immaterial thought — a certain tension between sense and spirit would be inevitable. And in fact, by analogy, the idea of conflict can be recognised at every stage of material creation.3 It would be easy to multiply examples: positive and negative electricity in physics, the tension between the autonomic and sympathetic nerves, and that at the very heart of the endocrine system in biology. But conflict is not a final and independent reality; it is merely a subordinate “moment” of existence. Normally in every substantial whole the antagonisms and oppositions are dominated by a central peace and harmony. When limited and integrated, the conflict is healthy and profitable. But when the substantial unity of the being disintegrates, when the internal tension is no longer moderated and harnessed by some higher finality, the individual becomes the victim of anarchy and perishes. We can therefore distinguish between two kinds of conflict: the one positive and organic, the other negative and “corrupting”; the first has a tendency to preserve the vital synthesis, the second to destroy it.

What do we learn now from Christian dogma? That human nature has been wounded by original sin. Wounded: that means given over, not only physically, but in the very depths of its spiritual and moral being, to the attractive force of death, to succumb to all that is baneful in conflict, to everything that is negative and dissolvent. This war between the spirit and the life of the senses, which in normal conditions should make for the purifying of the senses and the tempering of the will, ends in man’s degradation and the prostituting of the spirit to all his lower appetites. The conclusion is that original sin has perverted and “denatured,” turned to corruption and disorder, that tension between sense and spirit which we have seen to be essentially inherent in human nature.

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From What God Has Joined Together: An Essay On Love, London: Hollis and Carter, 1952, pp 41-45.

Back in the day, the battle lines were very clear. When I became Orthodox, the choice was between “World Orthodoxy,” which participated in the ecumenical movement, sent representatives to the joint theological commission with the Catholic Church, and whose delegates sat on various committees in the World Council of Churches, and on the other hand, the panoply of the “resistance” — ranging from the moderates of ROCOR to the various Old Calendarist “true Orthodox” synods in Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria. (There was also the perpetual fruitless search for any real descendants of the Russian Catacomb Church.)

You may think woke bullsh*t started only after the launch of the iPhone and the Obama presidency, but in fact, many Protestants and a healthy slice of Catholics were batsh*t crazy wokesters even back in the early 90s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (ask Archbishop Lefebvre). And still, most Orthodox thought it worthwhile to talk to them and even to pray with them (“is outrage! is against holy canons!”).

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ROCOR had anathematized ecumenism. It was out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox world, except for the patriarchates of Serbia and Jerusalem. I am not sure how they justified that theologically, since both of the latter participated in the ecumenical movement in various ways and were also in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had, since the glory days of Patriarch Athenagoras, been highly chummy with the Pope of Rome and had even dared to lift the anathemas of 1054. The “two lungs” language started with Athenagoras; Pope St John Paul II just adopted it from him.

There was a healthy, vibrant,1 and entirely marginal and irrelevant family squabble that went on between those “resistance” factions like ROCOR and the synod of Metropolitan Cyprian in Greece (whose U.S. outpost is/was the Old Calendar monastery in Etna, CA), who believed that the “New Calendarist and ecumenist” Orthodox local churches still had grace and real sacraments, but had to be “walled off” from communion, and those like the various shades of splintered Florinite and Matthewite synods who believed that every church but their own was comprised of graceless heretics. (Alexandre Kalomiros took the whole thing to its logical conclusion, a kind of Greek analogue of the Old Believer bezpopovtsy, deciding that none of them had grace — so he died in a church of one.)

But if you were a young zealot in those days, and believed that ecumenism was a heresy, you didn’t dillydally in your local Greek or Antiochian or OCA parish and watch Josiah Trenham and Peter Heers and Jay Dyer videos and get a 300-knot chotki and rant online. You put your money where your mouth was and you left the communion of “World Orthodoxy.” Because you were actually consistent. You went to ROCOR, or to a Greek Old Calendar parish, if you could find one. And usually you could!

You know how we yell at small-o orthodox Anglicans because they remain in communion with hierarchs who promote sodomy, transgenderism, communism, and outright atheism? Well OK, the same applies to you. If the Orthodox Church alone is “the true church,” full stop, then every single mainstream Orthodox body in the world is in heresy, because of the countless documents issued by theological commissions concerning the Catholics and the Miaphysites — at the very least. Indeed, if you’re going to hold the rigorist line, you can’t even be in communion with someone who’s in communion with ecumenists, even if they’re not ecumenists themselves.

(Thank you, highly organized Roman Catholics, for keeping all the receipts in one place.)

So if you really believe that, grow a pair and go to the True Orthodox. You can’t go to ROCOR any more, because they got bought off, and reconciled with the Sergianist ecumenists who staff the Moscow Patriarchate (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to spend more time online).

But of course, the rigorist Orthobros won’t do this, because doing so would consign them to oblivion. They would have to grapple existentially with being a tiny, despised minority, and worshipping in living rooms (or strip malls, if they’re really lucky.) They would lose their panache. They would lose the great bulwark of historic and contemporary Orthodoxy standing in serried ranks behind them like a host of angry angels. As it is, they can pose and preen and use the Orthodox Church as a prop for their pride, even as it engages in ecumenical dialogue that they proclaim urbi et orbi is a “betrayal of Orthodoxy.”

“Orthodoxy or death,” as the monks of Esphigmenou said? Nah, for the Orthobros, it’s not even “Orthodoxy or inconvenience.”

Dautais, Philippe. Éros et liberté: Clés pour une mutation spirituelle. Bruyères-le-Châtel: Nouvelle Cité, 2016, pp 7-18

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If we look closely, these two words — eros and freedom — touch the heart of the matter, personally and collectively. They lie at the root of humanity’s dynamism and weave the fabric of history. Here we will consider eros in its full dimension, in its primordial depth, which Jean-Pierre Vernant calls “primordial eros,” “present since time immemorial,” and which shares in the upsurge of life at every instant.1 It is from within this dynamic that we will look at the different expressions of eros, notably the one Plato calls “popular eros.” What will particularly hold our attention is the relation between eros and freedom as the possibility of giving meaning, of orienting history positively, or of letting oneself slip toward chaos. Eros can blossom into love, as the fullness of relationship, or on the contrary be a factor of destruction.

At what is original in ourselves, eros is power and the engine of life. Nothing is accomplished without eros, without the vital impetus. Through it, the forces of life are set in motion, interact, and become fruitful. Each person carries within himself qualities, aptitudes, competencies that will expand and bear fruit if they are energized by eros. The function of eros is to make life truly alive, provided it is embraced from this perspective. Human beings often have great difficulty establishing a right relation with this life-power, channeling it, and finding the paths of its flourishing. Recognized and integrated, it can lead a person toward the fullness of life; but if he allows himself to be overwhelmed by those inner forces, they can become destructive. Eros proves to be a devouring fire that must be tamed so as not to suffer the backdraft. This is a permanent challenge laid upon the human being, a challenge that impels him or her to acquire an inner maturity which we will define here as a capacity for integration and an awakening of consciousness. The management of fire has been a constant human concern. It stands at the heart of Greek myths and of the founding texts of humanity. It remains a central axis from which the questions of good and evil, of life and death, emerge. To detach these notions from their bond with eros leads us toward a moralism without roots and of little help in facing existential challenges. By contrast, recovering this bond places us before our responsibility and our freedom, both personally and collectively.

We are passing through a period marked by the surge of eros in the continual assertion of freedom. This tone is inscribed in every domain: cultural, sociological, economic. We want to be able to enjoy everything, right away, without hindrance to our freedom. Limits are then experienced as constraints we will try to push back, even to erase. The general tendency today is to make borders disappear, both cultural and natural. Yet limits and borders define the separation between outside and inside for the sound management of flows. Skin is a good example. It envelops the whole organism; in so doing, it defines the distinction between outside and inside and, at the same time, it is porous and thereby allows adaptation to the environment for a proper regulation of internal balance. Erasing borders weakens the safeguarding of the organism’s integrity and thus diminishes its capacity to sustain exchanges. The more porous the borders, the harder it is to manage flows. This reality is characteristic of a pathological state. In such a state, the dynamism of eros is transformed into malaise, into illness, into a devouring fire that consumes and destroys. At every level, the right relation to eros makes structures and boundaries necessary.

Early in my life, I was confronted with the necessity of this right relation. My inner balance depended on it. Outwardly, I had to bear the pressure of conditionings — physical, cultural, and social. I perceived the outer world as strange and alien, yet I had to accept it on pain of being rejected. I was afraid of losing myself in it, or more precisely, of losing my soul there. Inwardly, I stood before an immensity, an infinite, which had surged up in bursts during experiences of the numinous.2 To safeguard my inner balance, I had to assimilate the codes of the outer world and enter into the deciphering of the inner world in order to make it an ally, even though it presented itself as a threat.

This, I did not put into words at the time, but I was inhabited by a quest for understanding and by a thirst for meaning that proved insatiable. These challenges were stimulating. Through them, life posed questions to me that I had to answer. First there was the dusk — indeed the night with its dangers — then, thanks to providential encounters, the lifting of the veils. This path led through the body — through anchoring in the body, through physical and psychic structuring — as though one first had to plant roots in the earth and secure the foundations. Then came the almost simultaneous encounter with Annick de Souzenelle3 and with the Desert Fathers of Egypt.4

With Annick, I discovered the biblical meaning of Man,5 of Adam. Adam, a being of desire, seized within the movement from image to likeness; called to name the Hayoth (Gen 2:19), the “energies of life,” in order to integrate them and thereby to associate them with the process of spiritual growth. Adam, a being-in-becoming, whose vocation is to attain the “I Am” by disposing his inner soil for the growth of the Yod, the divine Son whom he is potentially. A path of fulfillment presented in the Gospels in three stages or three baptisms: of water, of fire, and of the skull.6

Her perceptive reading of Genesis opens onto the dialogical universe of symbol. Heaven and earth, light and darkness, the Waters above and the Waters below — though distinguished, are not separated. A cord binds them; information circulates. The whole visible universe takes root in the Word that founds its reality of being. Nothing is separate; everything is bound to everything; all communicates, all is in interrelation and interdependence — that is to say, everything is alive and participates in an immense weaving, a weaving that articulates unity and diversity. For an organism to develop, it must be in relation with its environment; it is coded by a specific information that configures it and makes it to be what it is. An acorn bears within itself the “oak” information. Every seed carries the information of the plant it will become. Is this information the result of random combinations, or did it preside over the arrangements that led to the formation of DNA and RNA molecules? A human DNA molecule contains three billion nucleotides, and the order of their arrangement on the DNA is known. By what law were these nucleotides arrayed? Is it a matter of chance, or did precise information preside over their ordering? In other words, does language precede the arrangement of letters, or did the letters combine by chance to form a coherent language? Is the universe of the living intelligible? If it is, as Einstein thought, might it not be an immense library available to potential readers? Or is it empty of meaning, the result of random combinations that by good fortune led to the advent of life and of the human being?

We will take the side of the first option and consider that the human being, endowed with intelligence, is capable of deciphering the language of nature and of gathering the information contained in the depths of the living universe. From all time, he has listened to nature and has progressively elaborated a true medicinal science — proof of the close bond between nature and the human being. Plant essences do not heal solely by the supply of substances; they also deliver information capable of re-balancing the human organism.

In human experience, language is inherent to dialogue; it is built within the relational universe. Is it the same for the cosmos? Is its structure dialogical? Is it the place of an immense dialogue? This is what the Bible, and then the Fathers of the Church, affirm. The book of Genesis expresses it clearly: the cosmos springs from spoken words. At the root of each created element is a word — a word given, awaiting a response. It falls to the human being to decipher this language by a vertical, symbolic, poetic reading, in order to enter into a constructive dialogue with the Author of the words.

Annick de Souzenelle devoted herself particularly to this reading. With her, everything took on meaning. In every Hebrew letter, every word, every narrative, the biblical message became coherent. It revealed itself as the unfolding of the first word: Bereshit, which she translates as “in the principle is the Son.” I then perceived that her entire teaching is founded on Bereshit, the axis of all biblical revelation. “Son” is the one who, conscious of bearing the Source within, has the vocation to reveal it and to translate it, in a singular way, in words and deeds. Becoming a son and coming to oneself — to the “I” — proved to be the same thing. This is what gave meaning to the trajectory of my existence.

To embark on such an adventure, it was necessary to be guided and to find a marked path. Extraordinarily, that path was proposed to me at the same time by an Orthodox priest who was present at the session led by Annick de Souzenelle. In response to my questions, he spoke to me for the first time about the Desert Fathers of Egypt. My enthusiasm was such that every year, for about twenty years, I went to Wadi Natrun, between Cairo and Alexandria, to meet those who stand in that lineage.

In the fourth century, after the recognition of the Christian religion in the year 313 by the Roman emperor Constantine, thousands of men withdrew into the Egyptian desert, to preserve the oral testimony they had received from the apostles and to live evangelical maximalism far from the world’s agitation. In response to an inner call, they sought to live an intense relationship with “the One who is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.” They understood well that the question of God is bound up with what is original in the human being. They identified this origin with what the Bible calls the “image of God,” the reflection of the divine Presence in the heart of the Human. By turning toward the origin, toward the Source from which transcendence springs, they believed they could approach the mystery of life and of being.

Thus the quest for the origin corresponded to a thirst for life, to an aspiration to be, and to the recognition of inner beauty. For these elders, this innate desire, this mysterious aspiration, is interior prayer.

In this sense, to pray is to be one with life; it is to enter the dynamism of life and of the living, through relationship with the One who makes all things to be. In this spirit, these thirsting souls, drunk with God, plunged into a spiritual adventure called philokalia, which in Greek means “love of beauty.” The Philokalic tradition7 — whose foundational texts were first published in Venice in 1782 — is today a living tradition and a point of reference, a support for those who aspire to live what is essential at the heart of the existential, the one thing needful.

The Philokalic approach was luminous for me. It brought to light key points of the spiritual life: the importance of desire, the therapeutic dynamic, spiritual combat, and the necessary acquisition of discernment of spirits for the right fulfillment of the potentialities inscribed in every human being. If, as the Bible affirms, Adam is created in the image of God, then Adam’s vocation is to become fully and consciously what he is in potency — this in his two dimensions, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and cosmic. To say that Man is created in God’s image is to name a constitutive aspect of himself that escapes any cosmic hold and any genetic determinism; it is to name a capacity for transcendence and for freedom. By this fact, he has the possibility of differentiating himself from the cosmic elements — recognizing them in order to integrate them, rather than being under their sway. At every instant life solicits Man and gives him occasions to discover the riches he bears within, at his own origin, to set them in motion, to make them live in a right relation to that origin. If he does not bring into operation the powers of life that are being called upon — if they are repressed — they will act in him despite himself and thus take on a death-dealing character. This articulation demands particular attention, so characteristic is it of human processes. Hence the necessity of discernment, lest one go astray, miss the mark, or fail of the goal — so as to fight the good fight and thus arrive safely at harbor. The maximalist experience of these “fools for God” opened a new, well-marked path, still alive today. This way inscribes itself within a tradition (a transmission) of spiritual experience that gives pride of place to the therapeutic dynamic, far from any moralism. Every therapy is founded on a process that passes through the gaining of awareness — through naming, accepting reality, and then dis-identifying oneself,8 so as no longer to be under the sway of the wounds and mechanisms that act in us in spite of ourselves. It is a process of liberation, of purification, to come to be as a person. Where moralism imprisons within a judgment, categorizes, and condemns, the therapeutic dynamic opens onto a possibility of liberation and transformation. We know it well: moralism engenders guilt and introduces an inner division, whereas the therapeutic process, by analyzing the psyche, tends toward knowledge of the inner movements and toward the re-appropriation of oneself, toward inner unity.

The novice who arrived in the desert had to entrust himself to an elder, to reveal to him his thoughts and states of soul, so as to be led toward discernment of spirits — the science of sciences. Discernment which, in the Breath of the Spirit, is acquired in humility through a long labor uniting maturity in prayer with purification of the heart.

The first stage is called praxis — practice. It takes root in a Philokalic vision, a quest for inner beauty. To attain it, the spring must be cleared of sand; the deep heart must be uncluttered so that, like a mirror, it may clearly reflect the divine presence. Praxis is the necessary work of purifying the heart-mind in a divine-human cooperation. It consists in a true psycho-analysis in the primary sense — an analysis of the movements of the psyche — in order better to differentiate oneself from them and acquire “authority over,” rather than being “under the sway of,” these movements. According to the Fathers, this dynamic is insufficient by itself; it must be completed by a cultivation of attention and by the necessary interior combat. This is what we will consider in the chapters that follow:

“The spring, which ceaselessly bursts forth, thirsts to be drunk.” This saying of Saint Augustine explains by itself why the Fathers of the Philokalia, in the spirit of the Gospels, insisted on receptivity. Just as “the sun shines on the good and on the evil,” so too “the light enlightens everyone coming into the world” (Mt 5:45); grace is poured out upon all, but not all welcome it (the parable of the sower is explicit in this regard). The light shines, but it appears — becomes manifest — only where there is receptivity. Hence the emphasis on the purification of the heart together with the purification of the gaze. The real is the Real; to perceive it, one needs “eyes to see and ears to hear.” How many times in the Gospels does Jesus exclaim: “They have eyes and do not see; they have ears and do not hear.” The Real is veiled by appearances, by what falls under the senses. What offers itself to sight is only one aspect of reality, and it is further altered by our subjective perception, which is tinted by our projections, our representations, and the idea we form of things. One then understands the link between praxis and the acquisition of discernment.

To want to follow these athletes of the desert is certainly not within everyone’s reach. Nevertheless, they have been beacons for generations of Christians. I propose that we listen to them and let ourselves be inspired by their wisdom, to apply it in our daily lives and to shed light on the processes unfolding within our societies.

Following the broad lines of the Philokalic teaching — handed down notably by Evagrius Ponticus,9 St Isaac the Syrian,10 St Maximus the Confessor,11 and many other great figures of Christian mysticism — we will highlight the relationship between eros and freedom, between nature and person, so as better to situate the spiritual path of the human being. Let us note that, for these elders, the notions of good and evil cannot qualify realities in themselves, but only their use. These notions have meaning only in relation to freedom. This vision orients us toward the future and the possibility of transformation. At every moment, we have the possibility of letting our relationship evolve positively and constructively — to the cosmos, to the other, to matter and to money, to ourselves — within the opening to One greater than ourselves within ourselves. It is always possible to readjust, to open our eyes to the depth of reality, to emerge from distorted or perverted relations, and to place ourselves within a dynamic of growth. This leads us to take the measure of our personal responsibility with regard to our own becoming and to that of humanity.

Philippe Dautais, Si tu veux entrer dans la vie: Thérapie et croissance spirituelle. Bruyères-le-Châtel: Nouvelle Cité, 2013

Read Part One

The Unitive Vision

All is one. Everything proceeds from unity. Each element expresses, in its own specific way, an aspect of this unity. The human journey consists essentially in discovering this unity and bringing it to life.

The unitive vision considers not only the unity of the whole but also the uniqueness of each thing. In this it differs from the notion of “globality,” which tends to make each singularity disappear for the benefit of the whole. The unitive vision is the perception of the whole in each element. Thus it invites us to respect and care for every plant, every animal, every species, every human being, as essential to the whole. It highlights the importance of diversity, of biodiversity, which is not contrary to unity but intrinsically bound up with it. By virtue of this vision, we can say that we are a hologram bearing within ourselves the totality of the cosmos. Nothing is foreign to us — least of all the other person. We are woven together and share in the same flesh (Isaiah 58), the same humanity, the living universe.

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In continuity with this, it seems that we are gradually emerging from the dualism that opposed soul and body — exalting the soul and despising the body. At the start of the twenty-first century, however, there is a strong temptation to swing to the opposite extreme — toward an anthropology that reduces the human being to biology alone, even to denying the soul — despite the considerable advances of psychosomatic medicine in recent decades.

In Christian circles, reintegrating the body has reopened for us the field of inner experience and allowed us access to a spirituality of depth. It is striking to see how bringing the body back in has changed our spiritual outlook. We have moved from a regime of mere belief — most often reduced to intellectual assent or sentimental piety — to the desire to live the realism of God’s Presence at the core of ourselves and of our daily life. No longer only believing in Christ, but living in Christ.

There is no longer a body–soul opposition, but a complementarity that gives full meaning to the theology of the Incarnation.

At the same time, the human sciences entered the discussion to contribute to the ongoing anthropological work. They reminded us that Man is also moved by the unconscious, and that from birth (even before), he develops psychological processes that sometimes disrupt his vital movement and his relational world. The relevance of these insights has led many Christians to take an interest in the flourishing field of psychology.

Catholic priests and Protestant pastors have become psychoanalysts, and many programs have arisen aimed at healing both soul and body. Many books have been published bearing witness to a new understanding of the human being that answers the expectations and thirst of our contemporaries. The field of human and spiritual experience has been enriched.

In Western Christian contexts, this approach leads us out of an opposition between a spirituality that would neglect somatic and psychological dimensions and a humanism that would refuse the divine and transcendent dimension, in favor of a spiritual dynamic that does not deny the human but opens it, from within this very humanity, to its capacity for transcendence. There is no split between the psychological and the spiritual, but a relationship between them.

We have seen, in the unitive vision of the biblical tradition, the relationship between the noûs and the psychē. Both are essential to the human being; each has its own proper function. The danger lies in denying one of these dimensions. On one side, in the name of spirituality, people avoid taking into account the movements of the psychē and its psychic derivatives (the “psychic contents,” in C. G. Jung’s terms). On the other side, out of suspicion toward religion, the human being is reduced to the psychosomatic — or even to the “neuronal man”; consciousness is treated as an aspect of the psychē or as an epiphenomenon of the brain.

Now, in our anthropology, as we have shown, the event of becoming conscious belongs to the noûs, to the human spirit, and not to the psychē. Firstly one forgets — or worse, ignores — that the essence of the spiritual path consists in the purification of the soul and in its “pneumatization.” But the purification of the soul entails a true psycho-analysis in the literal sense of the term: an analysis of the psychē that leads us to name the movements of our nature so that we are no longer subject to them, but instead gain the authority of consciousness over them. One cannot attain inner freedom without passing through self-knowledge.

Healing According to the Unitive Vision: the Quest for Inner Unity

Every human being aspires to a fullness of life and ardently desires to love and to be loved. This inner thirst wells up from the depths of our being. It is the most precious good we possess, for it is what gives us creative impetus and joy in living, and enables us to pass through trials. By this thirst we can transform obstacles into opportunities for growth and maturity. It reveals within us capacities undreamt-of. This thirst is not a trait of nature but a gift of God, which must first be recognized as such and nourished with gratitude and thanksgiving.

In its psychological emergence we call it “resilience,” the capacity to withstand shocks and to bounce back in the midst of trial. It is through this that we shoulder each stage of existence. When it fails us, various symptoms appear: fears, self-depreciation, discouragement, giving up — in short, what we commonly call “death-drives.”

Being alive is one thing; tending the desire for life is another. That is why every path of healing begins in this desire, in this thirst. If a person does not wish to be healed, no therapy will benefit them. To the Canaanite woman who implored him — after putting her to the test — Jesus replied: “Woman, great is your faith; let it be done for you as you desire” (Mt 15:28). In other situations Jesus asks the one who comes to him to voice the desire: “Do you want to be healed?” (Jn 5:6) or “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mk 10:51; Lk 18:41). In response to that desire Jesus says, “Go; your faith has healed you.” Faith in the life that wells up from the depths of being, faith in God the giver of life, or simply faith in Jesus’ power to heal — if such faith is the cause of healing, then it is essential to care for it.

At first, such faith is a Yes to life that expresses the desire to live. This Yes is the founding act of a new birth — just what Christ affirms when he says, “Go; your faith has healed you.” We were brought into existence by our parents’ begetting; we are the fruit of their desire. With this Yes we signify our full acceptance of the gift of life; with this Yes we are born into life.

One of the key points of baptismal initiation is the Yes to Christ and the No to Satan — Yes to life and No to the powers of death. For it to lead us toward the fullness of life, this “yes to life” must be accompanied by a no to death and to death-drives. For the yes to life is undone if we keep, on the side, a few indulgences toward the death-drives. So as not to yield to them, the yes in question must be a total yes that inaugurates a path of transformation — one that does not come without struggle.

This path of transformation begins with accepting what is, which includes accepting not understanding. We know that acceptance can already be the fruit of an inner journey that passes through denial, bargaining, revolt or anger, depression — a journey in which all the attempts of the “old man” to evade the inescapable wear themselves out, so that we reach the fertile ground of letting go. Saying yes to the reality of the present moment allows us to become one with the event; it opens the field of a future, a possibility of growth and change that will reveal unsuspected resources.

This yes is therefore the opposite of fatalistic resignation or of giving up; it is the fruit of trust in life — or, for Christians, trust in God. It is the possibility of a future that is not a mere repetition of the past. It is a way of listening and becoming aware, an attentiveness to the divine pedagogy communicated within events, without confusing the two (strictly speaking, the event is not willed by God).1

It is then the expression of that original thirst. It restores the symbolic link between the exterior and the interior, between the existential and the essential; more deeply still, it ushers us into the dynamism of divine–human cooperation.

Man: a Being in Becoming

As we have seen above, the human being is unfinished and therefore inscribed in a process of becoming. He or she was created in the image of God, capable — by the grace of the Holy Spirit — of likeness. By this grace and by the disposition of his or her freedom, in cooperation with God, he or she is called to become consciously the image of God. According to this anthropology, each of us is set within a dynamic of growth that has a beginning, a development, and an end.

St Irenaeus of Lyons, heir to the Johannine tradition, affirmed that “Adam was very small, for he was a child and, by developing, had to reach the adult state” (Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 12; see also Against Heresies IV, 38, 1). Here “Adam” is to be understood as the generic term for every human being.

If Man was created by the divine will alone, the dynamic of fulfillment nevertheless involves his freedom and responsibility and makes him a co-actor in his own becoming. St Isaac the Syrian (7th century) therefore considers that life in this world is a school in which “God instructs His children in knowledge” (II, 3, 3, 71) — a school in which the divine pedagogy is expressed at every moment. For him, life on earth is a time of formation and growth.

From this perspective, the yes to life — which is the renewal and actualization of baptismal commitment — opens us to the possibility of making every trial, every illness, an occasion for inner growth and maturity. A priori, trial, sickness, and accident are hard to accept; they can arouse revolt and incomprehension. One may feel a victim of an evil suffered and helpless before the reality of what happens to us. It falls upon us; we must cope; the only remedy is to fight against the blow of fate with whatever means we have. If we place ourselves simply within the unfolding of history, in the consequences of a past, on the merely existential plane, we can be overwhelmed by feelings of injustice and powerlessness, feeling crushed by a burden we cannot bear.

In the face of the weight of the past, of the chain of causes and effects, of the specter of determinism, Christ — in the ninth chapter of St John’s Gospel — proposes a reversal of perspective. Instead of seeking the cause of what happens to us in the past, He invites us to discover it in a becoming. In that episode the apostles present Christ with a man blind from birth and ask Him: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered: “It was not that this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”

Christ does not deny that this man or his parents may bear responsibility, that there might be a transgenerational cause, but He places the accent on the to-come as the possibility of transformation. He moves us from why to for what. He reminds us that we are inscribed in a becoming that can save us from the past and from the consequences of the past.

What is essential, from the perspective of healing, is not so much to consider the cause or causes of the trial, but to attend to the path of transformation that a person lives because of (or thanks to) the trial. Only this path opens onto the dimension of meaning and makes us agents of our own growth and subjects responsible for our own becoming.

In the reality of our lives, illness, accident, and trial are inscribed within the unfolding of causes and effects; they are the outcome of a process. What remains is to assume, as well as possible, the consequences of these events. Faced with what imposes itself upon us, we may feel powerless or feel injustice and revolt: Why is this happening to me? What did I do to end up here? In what am I at fault? Why is God sending me such a trial? These questions have no answer; they express the distress of a person who undergoes the event and does not understand what is happening to him.

If the person accepts the event, it can set one off on an inner path and become the cause of a dynamic of transformation. A diagnosis of illness, an accident, can produce a salutary shock and prompt awakenings in such a way that the person’s life will be upended. The question of meaning appears not in the why but in the for what. Meaning is not in the event itself but in the path of transformation that we will be able to live thanks to the event. The future opens the field of possibilities, whereas the past is inescapable.

On the existential plane, the trial can be painful and hard to bear. However, it is the possibility of an awakening with respect to the inner person. What matters is the trajectory it can set in motion. This does not mean that we should ignore the causes of illness or trial, but that, first of all, we attend to the information that can spark awakenings and contribute to the process of transformation.

The search for causes in the past can meet two pitfalls. On the one hand, that of offering explanations that justify the event, one might place it back within the natural order, and thus strip it of all meaning and of any initiatory dimension. On the other hand, it can lead to the temptation to designate culprits — for example, the parents or the transgenerational line — and to lay on others the responsibility for what happens to us, which sterilizes the very idea of a path of personal transformation. Two ways of denying any pedagogical dimension to the event, short-circuiting the possibility of an awakening, and remaining in a life merely undergone.

Perhaps it is necessary to recall that, for the first Christians, salvation is the fruit of a “divine–human cooperation,” or — as the Orthodox tradition still holds — of a “holy synergy.” God calls every human being to deification; he “wills that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). God’s will is to lead each person to full “participation in the divine life” (2 Pet 1:4). To be fulfilled, this calls for a free human response to the divine initiative, an adherence to the divine plan.

This Yes, of which we have spoken, is not simply an act of faith but a faith enacted. Grace does not impose itself. Certainly, we are saved by grace, but the human being, in his or her freedom, can welcome it or refuse it. Assured of God’s love, it belongs to the human being to dispose himself or herself to grace so that it can be operative. “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (St Matt 5:45). God’s love is unconditional, but not all welcome it; this is the meaning of the saying: “Many are called, but few are chosen” (St Matt 22:14). The chosen are those who respond to the call. Saying Yes to life and to God makes us among the chosen. In this sense we can reread the parable of the wedding guests.

That is why Jesus Christ, following Saint John the Baptist, calls for metanoia, repentance — a conversion of the heart — so that divine grace may act and bear fruit. This disposition of the heart is to be understood dynamically, calling for active participation on our part, and not as something that follows automatically from baptism. Metanoia is the mode by which we can actualize baptismal grace.

To help us discern the proper articulation between what comes from God and what belongs to the human being, Christ gave us the parable of the sower, the seed, and the soils. He himself provides the interpretation to his disciples (St Matt 13:18–23).

He said: ^“And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: but other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mt 13:4–9).

“Parable” comes from the Greek parabolē, which means comparison. Through parables, Jesus Christ describes scenes from everyday life, familiar to everyone, and at the same time speaks of the inner life. He establishes symbolic links, in this case between the seed and the word. Just as good seed will bear fruit according to the quality of the soil, so too the word of God will bear fruit according to the quality of listening, the disposition of the heart, and the inner experience of the one who receives it. Jesus unfolds this inner disposition in four stages:

Christ taught the crowd in parables by the sea, to indicate the lowest, most accessible level. Everyone could listen to the word, but not everyone allowed himself or herself to be touched by it. Only those who were sensitive to the word would remember it and keep it in the heart. This word would make the heart fruitful. The others would forget it or, according to the Gospel account, it would be taken away from them. This is the meaning of the seeds that fell along the path. Awakening happens more through allowing oneself to be touched than through resorting to analysis; that is why Jesus concludes by saying, “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

The second level of listening consists in letting the word sink down into the depth of the heart, especially through “eating” the word and memorizing it, so as to make it one’s own, to interiorize it, to draw out its sap. The word is information; Christ shows us the path of the disciple who must be attentive to the biblical word, meditate on it, open himself or herself to its meaning, and then be able to hear the message given in the midst of events and trials.

Depth of soil, rootedness, is acquired through the interiorization and then the putting into practice of the biblical word, through awakening to the meaningful dimension of events, and finally through the resultant spiritual experience. This experience roots faith; it makes a person able to persevere and remain faithful in the midst of tribulations. The lack of rootedness and of experience, signified by the rocky places, means that the word will not find sufficient resonance and will not be judged essential. In time of trial, it will be of no help. The word was heard with joy, but it did not make the heart fruitful.

The third level, in reference to ground overrun with thorns, raises the demand for purification of the heart and the guarding of the heart. It is not enough to listen to the word and put it into practice for it to be fruitful; it is also necessary not to let oneself be diverted by the worries and concerns of the world, which could eventually overwhelm us and choke the word. Guarding the heart is a state of vigilance not only with regard to worries, but also to all parasitic thoughts, especially those inspired by the passions. Vigilance is a key for the spiritual path.

According to the quality of the exercise and the intensity of the practice, the word will bear more or less abundant fruit: in one case thirty, in another sixty, in another a hundredfold.

This parable places the emphasis on receptivity. Spiritual fruitfulness presupposes a well-disposed heart. In the relationship of divine–human cooperation, the parable highlights human responsibility and the necessary work of purification or uncluttering of the heart so that grace can act and be fruitful. From this point of view, we are not saved solely by grace as such. Human freedom has its full place.

God does not save man in spite of himself. By way of comparison, no therapist can lead a person toward healing without that person’s consent and cooperation. Salvation is not automatic, nor is it a matter of predestination. It joins together divine grace and human freedom. Grace does not cancel freedom, but freedom can resist grace. Our responsibility is linked to our freedom; it expresses, according to the very etymology of the word, our capacity to respond. Spiritual growth and fruitfulness depend together on the outpouring of grace and on the right disposition of the heart.

Grace is poured out on everyone, but not everyone responds in the same way to the action of grace. Put differently, it is night in broad daylight for someone whose eyes are closed or whose bedroom shutters are closed. That is why the Desert Fathers, taking their inspiration from the Bible, strove to “till and keep” the garden of the heart (Gen 2:15), so that it might be fruitful in God.

The Genesis of the Righteous Act

The book of Genesis is not a historical account that one could place 5,773 years ago. This book cannot withstand historical and archaeological criticism. It is easy to show this, whether the fundamentalists like it or not. The light of “day one”2 mentioned in Genesis 1:3 is not that of the sun, which does not appear until the fourth day. How can the seeds on the earth, which appear on the third day, bear fruit without the light of the sun? The lights in the sky which are “signs for the seasons, for days and years” and which “are to give light upon the earth” do not come into being until the fourth day.

Because of this, the “days” in question are not twenty-four-hour days. The narrative cannot be reduced to a scientific explanation. Operating on a completely different register, it describes for us the depth of reality, which each person can experience. In the mode of parable, it forges a link between, on the one hand, inner and heavenly reality and, on the other hand, outer and earthly reality. From this point of view, the invitation to “till and keep” the garden establishes a correspondence between the purification of the heart and the right attitude in tending the cosmic garden.

The Fathers understood well that words and actions are the expression of what springs from the heart. If the heart is not purified, words and actions will not be rightly ordered; they will not be the fruit of sound discernment. That is why, in the spirit of the Gospel, the Fathers so strongly insisted on the need to begin with inner purification (praxis), which opens onto a new way of perceiving outer reality (theoria). Behavior will then be guided by this perception, which does not stop at appearances but opens onto the contemplation of the glory of God hidden in beings and in things.

It is an attitude of wonder before the intelligence of life and the ordering of living things. It is by entering into true life that one can perceive the majesty of all life. It is within this kind of sensitivity that a genuine ecology can take root. “What is essential is invisible to the eyes. One sees rightly only with the heart” (The Little Prince, by Saint-Exupéry).

Tilling and Keeping the Garden

We have already mentioned that the human being is unfinished and, for that very reason, is inscribed in a process of becoming. Within, each person bears an immense wealth that we are invited to recognize in order to express it more fully. Recognizing these gifts is essential for the flourishing of the person. In order for talents to bear fruit, they must at least be noticed and taken into account. One of the tasks of therapeutic accompaniment is to help the patient become aware of this wealth so that it can become operative. For some, this is not obvious because of wounds. We carry within ourselves two archaic modes of defense: denial and splitting.

Denial is the refusal to recognize the qualities inscribed in the depths, either because there is no access to them, or because they are hidden under marked self-deprecation and perhaps the fear of having to take them up.

Splitting relies on a mechanism of repression born of the inability to reconcile what the subject feels with what the subject knows about himself or herself. The subject will then attempt to retrieve what has been repressed in an idealized form, or will remain in denial. This mechanism of protection tends to paralyze all growth of the psychic life.

We have understood that the recognition of gifts can only take place in a climate of trust. If this recognition could not take place through the benevolence of parents, only a gaze of love will allow access to it. In the Gospels, we see this gaze at work. By this gaze, and certainly by the whole of his attitude, Jesus enables those who come to him to reconnect with the immense potential they bear in the depths of the heart. Enriched by this experience, they can then assume their destiny in a dynamic of life and spiritual growth.

To till the garden means above all to make talents bear fruit and to place them at the service of the common good.

The parable of the talents illustrates this theme wonderfully. Like all parables, it draws on a scene from everyday life to speak to us of the inner person.

Here is the story: a man goes on a journey and entrusts his fortune to three servants. “And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.” (Mt 25:15–18).

A quick reading of this parable awakens a feeling of injustice. Those who have received the most make it bear fruit and receive even more, while the single talent entrusted to the third is taken away and given to the one who has ten. What is more, that man is condemned.

Such a juridical reading seems to confirm the logic of the world, where the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. It is not coherent with the Gospel, and therefore not with the message of Christ. We must therefore look at it in another way.

The first two make their talents bear fruit: the one who received five gains five more, and the one who received two gains two more. Each doubles the patrimony received, in a relationship of trust toward the master. Thus, through their activity they have produced as much as they received from the master. By extension, one can think that if two others had received three and four talents, they would likewise have doubled their patrimony. What is highlighted here is the notion of fruitfulness, which is proportional to the capacity of each person.

The third has not made his talent bear fruit because he has refused to take part in the enrichment of the master, whom he sees as “an hard man,” reaping where he did not sow and gathering where he did not scatter. “And,” he says, “I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.”

This servant has adjusted his behavior to the judgment he has formed about his master. He sees himself as a slave and not as a free person. Because of that, he has not perceived the possibility his master was giving him to make the talent bear fruit, and thus to make his capacities valuable. He has not received the talent as a gift, but as a burden to carry. He has been paralyzed by the fear of losing the talent instead of feeling encouraged to make his capacities count. He has not set in motion, put into circulation, the talent received.

If we place this parable back into the whole of the Gospel, we find again the theme of sending and receiving, as in: the seed and the various kinds of soil; the one who gives an invitation and those who are invited to the banquet; the one who gives and those who receive. This theme points to the human condition. According to the biblical account, we have received “life and breath and all things”; the human being is not his or her own origin, not the creator of himself or herself. The human being is the receptacle of a gift that is called to bear fruit, or, in other terms, the trustee of a potential to be fulfilled.

We can then ask whether fruitfulness consists in increasing the patrimony as though it were a matter of acquiring new gifts, or rather in making the gifts received bear fruit by letting them live. If we place ourselves in the biblical perspective of the unfinished human being, to make talents bear fruit means to actualize the immense potential wealth that has been sown in humanity. To recognize and then to name the energies of life that we bear within is the foundation of every dynamic of fulfillment — a dynamic that implies a divine–human cooperation.

In this parable, the two servants who make their talents bear fruit gain as much as they received. Cooperation between the master and the servant makes it possible to double the patrimony. This is what earns them the words: “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” Their status changes: from servants, they are called to share the joy of the master, because they have entered into the dynamism of life.

Life is fruitfulness and fecundity; life is a dynamic of interrelationship, a dynamic of exchange, an unceasing flow of giving and receiving; it places everything in relation with everything. Might not the capacity to make talents bear fruit be bound up with the dynamic of gift, which consists in setting in motion what has been received? It must be added: setting it in motion not for personal profit, but in the service of all beings. Is it not this disposition of the heart that is exalted here, with a pedagogical intention? The master would not then be the one who keeps knowledge and privileges for himself (see Gen 3:5), but the one who rejoices to give and rejoices still more in the fruitfulness of the gifts — in the capacity of human beings to make the gifts circulate, to place charisms at the service of others, and to grow in the acquisition of graces.

Life must not be held back or buried; it must be able to circulate freely. To bury one’s talent is to prevent life from circulating. That leads to death. According to this parable, judgment and fear prevent life from circulating and bearing fruit. It remains necessary, however, to recognize a gift as a gift and not as something owed or as a burden. Life is given so that we may become truly alive, that is, so that we may grow in the dynamism of gift, which is the dynamism of love.

Might not growth in love, the fruitfulness of gifts, and the fulfillment of the human being be in fact the same reality — equivalent expressions? If so, then everything is said in this parable. Through the parable, Jesus presents a God who calls the human being to enter into true life: by recognizing the immense potential wealth inscribed in the very being of the person; by self-giving; by the fruitfulness of gifts; by setting gifts in motion at the service of humanity and creation; by a dynamism of fulfillment that is growth in love. St Irenaeus of Lyons affirms in this sense: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

An edifying image is given to us by St Thérèse of Lisieux, which completes our reading. She says in Story of a Soul that it matters little to her whether she is a large glass or a thimble; what matters is to be filled with grace. Then she adds that the more she allows herself to be filled, the more she sees her capacity grow. The welcoming of grace enlarges capacities. The more one gives, the more one gives oneself, the more one receives. The more one becomes, the more life bears fruit within.

The rest of Matthew 25 speaks to us of the Last Judgment, “when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him” (Mt 25:31). We are told that he will separate the sheep from the goats, those on his right from those on his left. The criterion of separation rests on the care given to one’s neighbor, on the openness of the heart, and on the capacity for self-gift. The gift made to the other returns as a criterion for eternal life, for entering into true life.

Here Christ gives particular depth to his message. By saying: “Truly I tell you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” he identifies himself with the poor person, with the one who is hungry, with the one who is thirsty, with the stranger — with the one who benefits from attention and self-gift. In the poor person he becomes the receptacle of the gift, he who never ceases to give his life. Those who will have made the gift of love circulate are blessed; those who have not given have cut themselves off from life.

The usual assumptions about the Last Judgment are reversed. Instead of a divine sentence, this account sends the human being back to freedom and responsibility. Instead of a moral and juridical judgment, we are confronted with a law of life. In order to enter into life, it is essential to enter into the dynamism of giving and receiving. This is the message Jesus addresses to the rich young man: if you want to enter into life, prefer relationship to material wealth. True wealth does not depend on money but on the relational and dialogical dynamism lived with others and with the whole cosmos.

To enter into this dynamism, two things are necessary:

• the desire for life, the aspiration to be;

• liberation from all obstacles, from everything that prevents access to true life.

We will first take up this second point before approaching the first, because most often it is necessary to clear the sand from the spring in order to feel it gush forth, to unclutter the heart in order to make contact with the power of desire, with the meaning and the taste for life.

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It is mainly in relation to men that we can exercise a ministry of transfiguration. The risen Christ appeared several times under an aspect which was no longer the one his disciples knew. “He appeared in another form…”; the form of a traveler on the road to Emmaus, or of a gardener near the tomb, or of a stranger standing on the shore of the lake. It was each time in the form of an ordinary man such as we may meet in our everyday life.

Jesus thus illustrated an important aspect of his presence among us — his presence in man. He was thus completing what he had taught: “I was an hungered and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me drink... naked and ye clothed me. I was sick, and ye visited me. I was in prison, and ye came unto me… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Jesus appears now to us under the features of men and women. Indeed this human form is now the only one under which everybody can, at will, at any time and in any place, see the face of Our Lord.

Men of to-day are realistically minded; they do not live on abstractions and phantoms; and, when the saints and the mystics come and tell them: “We have seen the Lord,” they answer with Thomas: “Except I shall... put my finger into the print of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Jesus accepts this challenge. He allows Himself to be seen, and touched, and spoken to in the person of all his human brethren and sisters. To us as to Thomas He says: “Reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side, and be not faithless, but believing.” Jesus shows us the poor, and the sick, and the sinners, and generally all men, and tells us: “Behold my hands and my feet… Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”

Men and women are the flesh and bones, the hands and feet, the pierced side of Christ — His mystical Body. In them we can experience the reality of the Resurrection and the real presence (though without confusion of essence) of the Lord Jesus. If we do not see Him, it is because of our unbelief and hardheartedness: “Their eyes were holden that they should not know Him.”

Now the Name of Jesus is a concrete and powerful means of transfiguring men into their hidden, innermost, utmost reality. We should approach all men and women — in the street, the shop, the office, the factory, the bus, the queue, and especially those who seem irritating and antipathetic — with the Name of Jesus in our heart and on our lips.

We should pronounce His Name over them all, for their real name is the Name of Jesus. Name them with his Name, within His Name, in a spirit of adoration, dedication and service. Adore Christ in them, serve Christ in them. In many of these men and women — in the malicious, in the criminal — Jesus is imprisoned. Deliver Him by silently recognizing and worshipping Him in them.

If we go through the world with this new vision, saying “Jesus” over every man, seeing Jesus in every man, everybody will be transformed and transfigured before our eyes. The more we are ready to give of ourselves to men, the more will the new vision be clear and vivid. The vision cannot be severed from the gift. Rightly did Jacob say to Esau, when they were reconciled: “I pray thee, if now I have found grace in thy sight, then receive my present at my hand, for therefore I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God.”

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I recently returned to the Desert Fathers after a long absence. It was a trajectory that drew me back into a very simple-hearted faith. I had an insight into the reality of God’s providence in my life, over and against all theological speculation; I felt where God had been with me even in my failures, bringing great good out of them. I stepped back from my usual reading into the simpler things that some part of me knows are close to the “one thing needful” — the Psalms, St John of Kronstadt’s My Life In Christ, the Discourses of Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, and then back to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

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If you don’t know these, they’re the record, treasured by Orthodox and Catholic monastics and layfolk for nearly 2,000 years, of the brief teachings, in word and deed, of the first ascetics who fled Christianity’s “success” in the third and fourth centuries and went to live in the wilderness. The age of martyrdom was over, and the Spirit inspired men and women to find a new way of living out the Gospel’s impossibly radical demands in solitude and spiritual warfare in the remote deserts of Egypt and Syria. You must read them to get a taste of them; it might revise your whole opinion of what Christianity is.

Some call these sayings Christian koans, but they are not that; they are too saturated in Christian caritas. By turns, they shock with revulsion and with the recognition of undeniable truth manifested in a superhuman love that reveals precisely what it ought to mean to be human — what we have sunk beneath. They convict, they offend, they set the heart on fire. Perhaps they are the most direct existential evidence of the perfect continuity between the Gospel and the ancient church. And since they remain the foundation of Orthodox monasticism and piety, a concentrated expression of the fragrance that permeates the whole of Orthodox spiritual life, they are evidence (to the one whose heart is open to it) that the Orthodox Church lives in direct spiritual continuity with the Gospel and the desert. This evidence precedes and exceeds all doctrinal disputation and in a way renders it irrelevant. There is a golden thread connecting the Gospel, the Desert Fathers, the saints of Russia’s “northern Thebaid,” the triumph of the New Martyrs, and the teaching of contemporary saints.

OK, that was my encomium to the Desert Fathers and to all the ascetic saints of Orthodoxy. (See, I am not just a hater: I love my Church.) Now comes the difficult part.

I want to be as honest and straightforward as I can be.

As I started to assemble a reading list for myself, I remembered St John Cassian, the man who more than any other transmitted desert spirituality and monastic life to the west (he was born more than a century before St Benedict). In browsing his Institutes, I came upon the (in)famous sixth chapter, which the bashful Victorian editors of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series declined to translate. A sample:

When the thought of the feminine sex first creeps up on our mind through the subtle suggestions of the crafty demon, beginning with the recollection of our mother, sisters, relatives or of certain pious women, we should hasten to drive it out of our inner being. If we were to linger over it, the tempter might take the occasion to make us gradually think of other women and so introduce evil thoughts. That is why we must carefully remember this precept: “Guard your heart with all vigilance.” We should observe according to God’s chief commandment the deadly head of the serpent. It is the principle of evil thoughts, by which the devil tries to creep into our soul. Nor should we negligently allow the rest of his body to penetrate into our heart, that is, by assenting to temptation. If allowed in, it will doubtless destroy the captive mind with its virulent bite.

(What follows is a transparent expression of my visceral reaction to this world of ascetic “piety.” I suspect that many ascetics would have expressed themselves in similar terms if they were honest about their reactions to sex, but few — Tertullian was one, perhaps — would be so straightforward.)

I despair of specifying all the ways in which I find this teaching so profoundly, monstrously perverted (later, St John spends some time discussing how often a monk might have a nocturnal emission without its indicating something amiss in his spiritual life — apparently two months is a good heuristic). I find it so in itself, though really, it’s none of my business and not my concern (except inasmuch as this culture of renunciation still seems to bear such evil fruit in the life of the Church, particularly since the Church is literally ruled by monastics — bishops in the Orthodox Church are monks). It’s a conversation monastics are having with each other about the difficulties of the strange way they’ve chosen to live. It feels like a technical discussion about spaceflight being carried on by professional astronauts, except much less heroic and interesting.

Sex is problematic. Everyone can agree.

If you’re trying to be celibate, it’s problematic because you want it and you’re not letting yourself have it. This is actually an extremely simple problem. Not easy, but simple.

If you’re married, it’s potentially problematic for a whole host of other, far more complicated and difficult reasons — perhaps because you want to have sex with people other than your partner or your partner wants to have sex with other people than you (or both); perhaps because you have “impermissible” or troubling sexual fantasies of various kinds; perhaps because you and your partner have mismatched sex drives; perhaps because neither of you wants sex with the other enough; perhaps because you want it but circumstances (work, health, children) make it difficult; perhaps because you have practical or psychological reasons to fear childbirth and child-rearing.

If you’re not married or otherwise partnered, it’s problematic even if you don’t have moral qualms about casual sex, because you very likely want more of it than you can get, or want it with people who don’t reciprocate your desire, or want sex within a committed relationship and for one reason or another can’t make one happen.

Sex is very literally a hot mess. I always laugh at the celibates who imagine that the only problems come from the fact that we non-celibates want sex too much. Believe me, I want to tell them, the problems for married people are generally much more about not wanting it enough. But this is a symptom of the entire issue that I want to bring to light here. This touches on the global way in which religion and spiritual life are presented to us by a Church whose piety and praxis have been wholly formed by celibates.

When it comes to teaching on sex — and I mean specifically teaching on sex, not on marriage — the teachers held up by the Church as the normative guides to spiritual life, the ones who are supposed to instruct us in what it means to “work out our salvation,” have nothing positive to say. Why? Because all of them are celibates, that is, because all of them have chosen a particular strategy with regard to the character of sex as a “hot mess” — they’ve renounced it. What a gloriously simple solution! All the complexity is gone with that No. All the work is gone, apart from a perpetual, lifelong effort to subdue and sublimate, a perpetual, singular struggle with a secret temptation.

Do I find that effort impressive? I do not. In an adult, I find it autistic and lazy. It is “impressive” in the way a man-child’s collection of Star Wars memorabilia is impressive. “Astounding — you’ve succeeded in a pointless task that required a yearslong, unflagging effort not to feel the direct and indirect self-harm you’ve inflicted by your avoidance of real life.”

Is it indeed pointless, this lifelong rejection of sex? Well, in itself, what is the point, please tell me? Whatever inward achievements of soul might occur, they’ve occurred at the cost of cutting off communion of the most fundamental kind with other human beings and the world. In itself, what is the point — what does it achieve? There is no way to answer this except to claim that sex in itself is an evil and an imperfection. Now certainly as I said quite clearly above, sex is surrounded with all kinds of complications and dreadful difficulties. So is agriculture. So is painting and writing poetry. So is childrearing. So is architecture, so is actual conflict resolution, so is urban planning. So is the entire actual life of human beings in the world.

We are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” who, whatever their protestations, whatever the post hoc theology, pursued a way of life whose fundamental strategy was avoidance and rejection of sex, and whose whole praxis surrounding sex consists of managing an imperious drive which they refused. They were generally obsessed with sex far more than non-celibates. It is the perpetual unspoken secret subtext of the life-way that they offer. And they invite us to share it — by proposing all sorts of ways in which we worldlings too might share in their silent self-torment: even if not absolutely, since we do indulge from time to time, then at least partially. They cast their veil over our hearts. We accept them as spiritual teachers, and they become not the servants of our joy but the masters of our self-doubt.

Now: if only I could simply remove this part of their teaching and praxis, and take the rest! If only I could listen, for example, to their teaching on humility… but wait a moment. In the Discourses of Dorotheos of Gaza, the saint tells us that

Before anything else we need humility: a being ready to listen whenever a word is spoken to us, and to say, “I submit.”

Here, the same ascetic simplification is at work that is at work in the complete renunciation of sex. Rather than participate in a generative, fruitful, delightful, painful, confusing, confounding, infinitely complex and infinitely rich reality that demands our utmost attention and discernment and constant, laborious learning — that is, rather than participate in dialogue and relationship with other human beings — we are to hear, and submit. The saint’s solution to the vast, thoroughly intractable reality of relationship is to find a way to make ourselves not exist.

What cowardice, masquerading as virtue!

How can I take this submission as a rule in a world where I have jobs to do — jobs, by the way, that I believe God gave me, and that I embrace joyfully? What would it mean to “submit” when a word is spoken to me (screamed at me?) by a child having a tantrum, or by a subordinate who is shirking the work he needs to do for the team to reach its goals, or by a soldier whose carelessness is putting the platoon in mortal danger? Or, for that matter, to submit when the world — including perhaps members of my own family — wants to pull me away from an artistic endeavor to which the depth of my soul calls me, so that I can sweat my life away in manual labor?

Follow this problem out through the entire self-effacing “morality” that is proposed to us by the monastic asceticism that has sexual renunciation as its root and its “glory.” It is a morality that solves every problem of real-life aspiration, difficulty, and responsibility by counseling that we cease to exist. I think this is an autistic way of understanding the Lord’s saying that we should take up our Cross, that we should lay down our life for our brother, that we should lose our life in order to find it in Him. It represents a kind of adolescent narcissism and a refusal of human maturity.

In the end, it is predicated on fear and despair: I can’t do it, so I won’t try. The heroic and human attitude is, I may not be able to do it, but I will die trying.

This, by the way, is love greater than fear. A love that ventures, instead of refusing everything that seems impossible (such as grappling with the hot mess of sex rather than escaping it by refusing it completely) and hiding away in self-effacement — a self-effacement that so often ends up being just a thin layer on top of resentment, and a resentment that often ends up silently becoming a self-justification for genuinely evil and perverse acts.

An even deeper problem is that this entire issue cuts into the very reverence I have for the Church itself. I’ve written a great deal about the love I have for the saints, and how this love is the first tie that binds me to the Church. Well: this cloud of witnesses is almost entirely comprised of monks and nuns. Early on, and in terrible times under the yokes of Islam and godless Communism, it was also comprised of martyrs, and scattered here and there are some pious kings and queens, a few warriors, and, thanks be to God, a small handful of normal layfolk. But in general, the instinct that is inculcated in all situations of theological doubt is, Find a holy ascetic saint, see what they said on this matter, and trust it.

Listen: it’s better than trusting someone just because they can spin an eloquent and convincing theological yarn, which is the alternative that seems to be most common. But the trouble is that once I have seen the rotten root of ascetic piety — the spiritual escapism that dresses itself up in a false and deceptive podvig — the Church’s whole system of counsel comes into question.

“What then shall I do?”

“Abba, give me a word!”

How I wish the shelves of normative Orthodox teaching were taken up with the treasured sayings of men and women who lived in the world, who built businesses, who led armies, who made paintings and sculptures and symphonies and great monuments, who raised families, who learned skills and crafts, who asserted themselves boldly for the sake of the common good, who delighted in the pleasures of life, who laughed and ate and drank heartily, who traveled and marveled at the depths of nature and of human history, who were passionate lovers, whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, who wept and dreamed — who engaged not in the ascetic effort of self-abnegation but in an Orphic podvig drawing inspiration up from the mysterious, fathomless depths of their hearts where they are in dialogue with the Living God.

But the Church will not present them to me. The Church will not sing them. The Church will not offer their icons to me to venerate.

So I am left to find them for myself.

Give me Goethe, and Nietzsche, and Rilke, and Beethoven. Give me Beowulf and Roland and Aragorn and Elrond and Gandalf, Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich; Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Baudelaire and Rabelais and Montaigne; Blake, Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence, Milosz; Bukharev, Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, Florensky; Mahler, Wagner, Stravinsky, Rakhmaninov, Satie; Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Marc Chagall, Magritte, Renoir; Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Péguy; Alexander, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Lee, Washington, De Gaulle; Marco Polo, Shackleton, Magellan, Ibn Battuta; Ben Franklin and Robert Owen; Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell; Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Marie Curie; Einstein and Bohr and Bohm; Florence Nightingale and William Wilberforce.

Give me a menologion of the saints of the world! And give me determination to find the holiness in each of them, in spite of whatever hot mess may surround it.

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Minerals as Symbols

Stone signifies first and foremost Christ Himself. This was said already by the prophets. The fourth kingdom that King Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream, in the form of an idol of iron and clay, represented the Roman Empire. The stone cut from the mountain, which struck that idol and ground it to dust, prefigured Christ, the founder of a new kingdom above kingdoms, which “shall never be destroyed,” according to the far-seeing prophecy of Daniel (Dan. 2:44).

The great Isaiah calls Christ a stone of stumbling — “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense… and many shall stumble on it, and fall, and be broken… a chosen stone, a cornerstone, precious, a sure foundation; he that believes shall not be confounded” (Isa. 8:14; 28:16; cf. Rom. 9:33). Such a Stone God set on Zion, His holy mountain, to be the foundation of a new, imperishable kingdom — the Christian kingdom.
Wonderful is that Stone, and terrible as well: wonderful for those who receive Him, and terrible for those who reject Him.

More fearsome words did gentle Christ never utter than when He said: “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will crush him” (Lk. 20:18). With those dread words He warned all builders — builders of a soul, of a household, of a society, of a nation, of a state, of mankind — that they must not and cannot build apart from Him, the Corner-Stone. Theophylact of Ohrid says: “The Jews were crushed (by that stone) like chaff and scattered over the whole world. But observe how they first fell upon that stone — that is, took offense — and afterwards how the stone fell upon them and punished them.” (Theophylact, Commentary on Luke.)

Since stone symbolizes Christ, it simultaneously symbolizes firm faith in Christ. When the Apostle Peter confessed his faith in the Lord, saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” the Lord answered him: “You are Peter (and Peter means stone), and on this stone I will build my Church,” that is, on this faith which you have now expressed. And that same “little Stone” (Peter) in his epistle calls the faithful “living stones,” saying: “Coming to Him (Jesus) as to a living stone… you also, as living stones, be built up a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:4–5). For all who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ and have become like Christ. On that account the Apostle gives Christians a Christ-name: living stones. The multitude of stones in the world symbolizes the multitude of the faithful from the world’s beginning to its end, in accord with God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants by true faith would be “as the sand which is upon the seashore” (Gen. 22:17).

Those who build their life upon Christ as the steadfast stone are called wise in the Gospel, while those who build on sand are called foolish. The building of the wise stands and endures, but the building of the foolish falls and is ruined by winds and storms. In most ancient times men fell away from God and conceived to build a tower up to heaven. They began to build it of dried earth — brick. But God scattered their building, because it was not upon the stone — upon the stone of faith — but upon the sand and mud of unbelief; in other words, it was not on faith in God but on faith in man. Thus has it always been, and thus it shall forever be, that every construction not raised in the name of the true God and on faith in Him is scattered. Sand, then, is a symbol of inconstancy and weakness.

Gold is a symbol of truth. The Eastern Magi brought to the newborn King gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Chrysostom interprets these gifts as: knowledge of the truth, obedience, and love. Gold does not change; it does not deceive. What it is in a royal crown, the same it is in earth, in water, in fire — ever the same. Hence for Christian theologians and seers gold has always represented the image of truth — not truth itself, but an image of truth, a symbol of truth.

Gold was not taken for the foundation, but stone. For a foundation must be firm, while gold is soft. Faith is laid as the foundation of our salvation. Gold represents the further building upon the stone of faith. That is, whoever has faith in Christ firm as a stone, to him thereafter the truth of the faith is revealed — bright in purity like gold, and gentle in mercy like gold. For mercy is inseparable from truth, as it is written: “Mercy and truth have met” (cf. Ps. 85[84]:10). Truth is radiant and kindly, just as gold is shining and soft. Therefore the Apostle Paul says that on the stone there stands gold — which is to say: upon faith, truth (1 Cor. 3:12).

And that gold is only a symbol of truth and not truth itself is clear from the Law, which most strictly forbade bowing down to gold and making idols of gold (Exod. 32). That gold is only a symbol, and not truth itself, is seen further from John’s description of the heavenly city. In vision John saw the heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says: “The building of its wall was jasper; and the City was pure gold, like clear glass” (Rev. 21:18). Since that spiritual world cannot be of material substance, here “gold” does not denote ordinary gold but truth. And truth is pure and transparent on every side. For that reason the Seer says “like clear glass,” because he speaks of truth and not of ordinary gold, which is altogether unlike glass.

Faith is the foundation of life here on earth. In heaven faith is not needed; there one lives by sight, not by faith. Therefore ordinary stone — the symbol of faith — is not mentioned at all in St John’s heavenly visions. He saw the heavenly City with foundations other than stone. He names twelve precious stones as the foundations of the heavenly City: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst. These precious stones symbolize twelve powers or virtues, each shining with its own brilliance. The twelve gates of the City are twelve pearls, and “the streets of the city were pure gold, as it were transparent glass” (Rev. 21:19, 21). This is to say that in that world gold loses its value and is laid as the paving of streets, underfoot, because there truth is openly seen, and the symbolics of gold are no longer needed.

Salt is a symbol of the true Christian, who also preserves others. A soul well salted with Christ’s teaching does not succumb to corruption, and moreover helps its neighbors to stand and not decay. “You are the salt of the earth,” said our great Lord. This applies not only to the apostles and clergy but to all Christians in general. If Christianity were to lose its strength and become insipid, with what would the human race be salted? And what could then restrain it from corruption? If the soul has not within it the truth of Christ, it becomes unsalted, insipid — earthy and putrid — and together with the body turns into mere decay. Salt also signifies heavenly grace, in the words of blessed Theophylact, who says: “And that grace is salt, hear Paul: ‘Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt’” (Theophylact, Commentary on Luke 14:34). And so, then, salt is the symbol of the Christian in the world and of grace in the Christian.

Plants as Symbols

For a tree to grow, it must be rooted in the earth. So too the soul must be rooted in the spiritual, heavenly realm, for that is its soil in which it takes root and from which it grows.

For a tree to flourish, it must be watered. So too the soul must be watered by the grace of the Holy Spirit if it is to be healthy and strong. St Anthony says: “Just as trees cannot grow if they are not watered by natural water, so the soul cannot grow if it does not drink in the delights of heaven. Only those souls grow which have received the Spirit and are drenched with heavenly sweetness.”

For a tree to bear fruit, it must have light and warmth from the sun. So too the soul must be illumined and warmed by God, the Sun of eternal righteousness. For only by the light and warmth that come from the living and life-giving God can the soul live, grow, and bear fruit.

The lily as a symbol of freedom from anxious care. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (Matt. 6:28). Yet they are so finely arrayed as even King Solomon never was in all his glory. Nilus of Sinai writes about the symbolism of the lily and says: “Of the perfect soul it is said that it is like a lily among thorns; this signifies the soul that lives without care in the midst of those who are anxious about many things” (Nilus of Sinai, On Avarice).

The olive as a symbol of gracious election. The Lord once chose the people of Israel as an olive tree among wild trees, that they might be His chosen people (Jer. 11:16). Elijah and Enoch are also called olive trees, who will appear as forerunners of Christ’s second coming. Both the Prophet Zechariah and St John foresaw them in vision as two olive trees standing before the throne of glory in heaven (Zech. 4:3; Rev. 11:4). As a tree that yields oil and as one of the longest-lived among earthly trees, the olive also symbolizes every grace-filled person who shines with mercy and truth from the Spirit of God and who by faith has rooted himself in eternal life. The Psalmist bears witness: “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever” (Ps. 52[51]:8).

Seed is a symbol of the word of God. “The field is the world,” says the Lord. “The good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the evil one” (Matt. 13:37–38).

Wheat denotes the teaching of God, the teaching of Christ — the good seed in contrast to tares, which denote the devil’s seed. “While men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). Christians who keep within themselves the divine seed of Christ and tend it to the harvest will be saved; the careless, who cultivate chaff instead of wheat within themselves, will perish. St John the Forerunner also testified that God “will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Thus wheat also signifies true Christians who have kept within themselves the seed of God, while chaff signifies unbelieving sinners. The decay of the wheat-grain in the earth was cited by the Lord as an image of His death and resurrection, and at the same time as an image of the dying of the old and the birth of the new man in each of us (Jn. 12:24; 1 Cor. 15:36).

Grapes and thorns, figs and thistles are symbols of good and evil people. “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? No; from the vine and the fig tree one gathers good fruit, but from thorns and thistles, evil fruit. Even so every good tree brings forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that does not bring forth good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you shall know them” (Matt. 7:16–20). Of whom does the Lord speak here — of trees or of people? Clearly of people. Trees are taken only as symbols of human beings, whether good or evil.

The vine (stock) is a symbol of Christ, and the branches are the followers of Christ. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” said the Lord to His disciples. The vine is partly visible and partly hidden; so too the Son of God is partly known and partly unknown. A branch without the vine can neither grow nor bear fruit. Therefore He also said: “Without Me you can do nothing.” Good people draw the life-sap from Christ, are nourished by Him, and bear good fruit like healthy branches on the vine. But evil people cut themselves off from Christ and remain dry and fruitless like severed branches. Therefore the former will be preserved as fruitful branches, while the latter will be cast into the fire like dry branches (St John 15:1–6).

The mustard tree/seed is a symbol of the kingdom of heaven in the sense of its growth from small to great. “It is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches” (Matt. 13:32). So the kingdom of heaven in a man’s soul grows greater than everything else that grows in the soul, and with its branches reaches into heaven, and the angels of God alight upon its boughs.

The palm and the cedar of Lebanon are symbols of the righteous. “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree; he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon… They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing (fresh and green)” (Ps. 92[91]:12, 14).

Basil and immortelle (helichrysum) — especially basil — are greatly loved among Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. They symbolize the righteous soul, which gives off a more heavenly fragrance the more the body ages and withers. For these two flowers smell more sweetly when they have withered and dried than when they are fresh. Basil is also used in the blessing of water; in that case it symbolizes the grace-filled fragrance of the higher world which, together with the power of the Cross, keeps the water from corruption.

Grass and flowers in general are symbols of the transience of bodily life and of outward human glory. The Apostle Peter writes: “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; the grass withers and its flower falls away” (1 Pet. 1:24; cf. Ps. 103[102]:15). According to the Psalmist, the fate of grass is the symbol of the fate of the ungodly: “When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever” (Ps. 92[91]:7). Again elsewhere he says: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers, neither be envious against those who work iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb” (Ps. 37[36]:1–2). The righteous are like grass only with respect to the body; the lawless are in every respect like the passing grass.

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Philippe Dautais, Si tu veux entrer dans la vie: Thérapie et croissance spirituelle. Bruyères-le-Châtel: Nouvelle Cité, 2013

Philippe Dautais, from a very devout Catholic family, is a French Orthodox priest under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Romania. From childhood, his deeply personal bond with the invisible led him toward the desert and toward the Desert Fathers, whose teaching has nourished the Christian tradition since the first centuries of our era. Working closely with Annick de Souzenelle, he founded the Sainte-Croix Center in the Dordogne with his wife Élianthe in the early 1980s; it remains very active and vibrant today. His openness to the great wisdom traditions of humanity — especially those of the East — and his deep personal mysticism have enabled him to develop a particularly incarnate spiritual teaching, in which bodily and psychological healing plays an important role.

Francophone Orthodoxy has much to offer the English-speaking Church, not simply in richness of reflection, but in an ecclesial style that seems to evade many of our besetting cultural and religious pitfalls.

Introduction

Man1 is a being of relationship. Relationship sets in motion what is inscribed in each person. Without this dynamism, the immense richness we carry within us would remain inactive and therefore sterile. The other allows me to express who I am and, in return, I allow him to express who he is, to the enrichment of both. It is through the mode of relationship that each person learns to know himself and to discover the other, in what is similar and what is different.

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We each bear the same humanity. Yet each one expresses this common nature in a unique way. Because we have everything in common, we can communicate; and because we are not confused with one another, we can enter into relationship. Sharing the same flesh, each person is different. We will never finish exhausting the immensity of diversity and the unfathomable depth of humanity. Something escapes us in the other and in ourselves. This mystery draws us and spurs us on. Through it, we are carried — often without realizing it — into a dynamic of life that makes us alive.

Relationship is life and life is relationship. In relationship there is the other, myself, and what is between the other and myself. This inter-relationship, this exchange of life between one and the other, allows each of us to reach more than ourselves. It makes one alive and brings out in us unsuspected qualities. We find this dynamism in the simplest elements of matter. If we combine two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, in specific proportions, the resulting element (water, H₂O) brings forth properties that were in neither the hydrogen nor the oxygen — properties that generate life.

Relationship is life and makes us alive. It is, plainly, the foundation of all therapy and the path toward true life. It is always worth emphasizing that every therapy is founded on a relationship of trust and mutual welcome. There is here a virtue proper to relationship which, in a climate of benevolence, will make it possible for speech to free itself. To speak is to bring into the open, into the light, what remained dark and was acting without our knowing it, within us and even against our will. This process, made easier by relationship, consists in seeing, recognizing, and then naming, so as no longer to be under the sway of unconscious movements. It allows access to interior freedom and to the emergence of the person through the path of dis-identification, watchfulness, and metanoia. That is what will be brought to light in this book.

In the Gospels it appears clearly that Jesus of Nazareth did not come to found a new religion. He strove to live relationship to the full with each of the disciples and with those who came to him. When a person approached him, he engaged himself fully in the relationship, fostered an attitude of trust which he regarded as the cause of healing, and from that encounter there sprang a transformation that could be expressed in a physical healing. Christ sealed this transformation with these words: “Go, your faith has saved you.” Here “faith” describes the dynamic of trust that brought the healing to the surface.

In the encounters reported by the Gospels — especially with Levi, Zacchaeus, Martha, Mary, the Samaritan woman — we see Jesus committing himself to the relationship. He brings each one back into contact with that person’s deep being and sets him again within a dynamic of spiritual growth.

This attitude sends us back to an essential question: what was the triggering element of our own search for meaning? What event or encounter set in motion our thirst for life and our aspiration to be? It is clearly acknowledged that one cannot walk the path in another’s place. In that fact, the essential thing lies in the spark that will awaken an impulse of life and a thirst for fullness. “If anyone thirsts,” says Jesus, “let him come to me and drink” (St John 7:37).

This thirst lies latent in the heart of every human being; the principal pedagogy deployed by Christ consists in awakening it. Love, as the goal, takes root in the springing forth of desire. It is said: “You shall love.” This word is not to be heard as a commandment, for one cannot love on command, but as an encouragement. It tells us that we are capable of loving, that we bear this aspiration within us, and that it remains for us to put it into practice. The Gospels show us that it is by and in relationship that the seed of love can blossom. Love is the quality of the relationship. Thus, relationship lived in this perspective is the royal road. The essential message of the Gospels is summed up in this word: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is the whole Law and the Prophets” (St Matthew 22:37–40).

The approach proposed here rests on the Gospels (which are in connection with the whole of Scripture) and draws largely on the Philokalic tradition. This tradition is rooted in the experience of the Fathers of the Egyptian desert in the 4th century, whose main current extends up to the 14th century and has come down to us through the monastic way. Philokalia means “love of beauty.”

For the ancients, beauty is a name of God. It is the expression of His unity. The Philokalia is the quest for this interior beauty, identified with “the image of God” in Man. It is the quest for what is most original in each of us, buried in the depth of the heart, like the precious pearl in its field according to the Gospel, and available as soon as one opens oneself to this dimension. The Desert Fathers affirmed that every human being can have access to this Source which springs in the innermost part of each one. Saint Augustine specified that “this Source thirsts to be drunk.” The Fathers considered that the best remedy is to discover this source and that, before all else, it is a matter of taking care of this precious pearl, of what is sound in us, in order better to bear our interior disorders. It is an invitation to return inward, to discover the immense wealth inscribed in the depth of every human being. It is from this depth that each person can draw the resources needed for healing.

By this path of return to oneself, the existential perspective changes. The world is no longer an end but a means; it is no longer the only horizon but the possibility of opening to true life.

In this opening, illnesses and trials become so many occasions of spiritual growth. In this sense, therapeutic action must not aim only at the restoration of health but must orient man toward a dynamic of fulfillment. The healing accounts in the Gospels are explicit in this regard. Conversion (metanoia) is the key word.

In the philokalic spirit, the therapeutic process does not stop at treating sufferings, unease, or wounds; its vocation is to lead the person to interior unity. It begins with a consultation, with a search for help. It continues in a relational dynamic in which the person is welcomed, listened to, taken into account in his subjectivity. A relationship of trust which will enable the person to speak his distress, to name what hurts him, oppresses him, even what destroys him, and also to say the feelings that dwell in him.

In this approach, the therapist or guide centers on the person, on the potentialities and forces of life that are being expressed, more than on the difficulties he is going through, for the essential thing is to bring the subject to the surface and to lead the person toward himself. This attitude will help the person to “stand upright,” and then to transform the crisis or the trial into an occasion of maturity and spiritual growth.

We shall see that this change passes through a process of successive “dis-identifications” which places the subject as observer and leads him to the recognition of a deep dimension that escapes the hold of worldly conditionings and assaults. It is from this dimension that the path of reconstruction can take place.

It is an awareness that the person is much more than his wounds, his sufferings, or his relational dysfunctions. An awareness that gives meaning and orients him toward a becoming in which the force of life and the upward dynamism that dwell in the depth of each being can be expressed. A true turning-about, a change of outlook in which the evil suffered becomes an initiatory possibility, in which the person gains the upper hand over what is happening in him, over the movements of nature in him. Thus he will be able to reappropriate his potentialities, his interior qualities in order to put them into practice, to reach his deep desire, and to fulfill his specific vocation. An opening to the dynamic of fulfillment which responds to the quest for meaning.

This passage is the very condition for attaining interior unity. The principle of unity in the human being is the person.2 Thus the path toward interior unity and the emergence of the person, of the subject, are one and the same thing.

This path passes through the integration of one’s own history and through successive reconciliations with oneself, with one’s reality of incarnation, with God, in order to lead to reconciliation with the other. Forgiveness is here an essential key. We shall see how it is an opening toward a new life, a break with a murderous and death-dealing logic and with the infernal cycle of repetitions, how it opens the field of reconciliations even to the impossible love of enemies. Finally, it is the restoration of a state of trust.

In the vision of the Gospels (as seen above) and of the Patristic tradition, the essential element of the therapeutic approach (also called praxis) is to place the human being again within the dynamic of spiritual fulfillment. Existential wound and failure become privileged places of transformation. It is the role of the guide to make this clear in order to help the person to reappropriate his own capacities and to free himself from what keeps him from entering into true life. Jesus Christ, physician of souls and bodies, has shown us the way.

Chapter One: What Is Man?

Every accompaniment and every therapeutic approach rests on a conception of the human being. This presupposition is more stated or less, but it is always present and underlying. It is formative. The path proposed toward interior unity presupposes a unitive vision in which the psychological and the spiritual are not set in opposition, but in which the therapeutic dimension is situated within the perspective of Christian spirituality, founded on a Judeo-Christian anthropology.

The Christian view of Man is naturally inspired by the biblical account and by the Hebrew tradition. The Jews have a unitive view of the human being. They consider him as a whole: flesh (bassar) permeated by breath (nefesh), where flesh is less the body than Man in his entirety in his cosmic dimension, and nefesh represents the vitality of the flesh, that which sets it in motion. In this view, flesh is never grasped apart from breath, from vital impulse. Flesh without breath is no longer flesh but a corpse. It should be noted that the word “body” does not exist in Hebrew; one cannot therefore identify flesh with body.

The Bible also introduces the notion of “Ruah,” which designates the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God breathes grace into the creature who is, according to the book of Genesis, unfinished and therefore inscribed in a dynamic of fulfillment. The Ruah makes possible the coherence of the two constitutive parts of Man, bassar and nefesh. It energizes them and sanctifies them.

We are far here from a static view of Man as made up of juxtaposed elements. In this view, the human being is placed within a dynamism and a horizon. After the resurrection, Man’s body will be a spiritual body, a “pneumatized”3 body, whose principle of life will be the very energy of the Holy Spirit. This transfigured body will express the soul, itself illumined and deified by the divine light.

Thus Man has existence only through participation in the Ruah; this is what Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians: “Do you not know,” he says, “that you are God’s temple and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). Elsewhere he will say: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) who is in you?” (1 Cor 6:19).

The body is not the tomb of the soul, as Plato thought, but “the musical instrument animated by the Spirit,” according to the fine expression of Saint Gregory of Nyssa (4th century).4 In this perspective, to be spiritual is not to escape the body, but to open, in one’s body, to the deifying action of the Ruah, of the Spirit. The apostle Paul calls “spiritual” those “who are docile to the Spirit and are the dwelling of the Holy Spirit who is in them” (cf. 1 Cor 3:16). A Pharisee, son of a Pharisee, he teaches a Semitic anthropology, which is expressed in his letters, notably in 1 Thess 5:23: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your whole being — Spirit (Pneuma), soul, and body — be kept blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” According to St Irenaeus of Lyon (second century), the Apostle, by this statement, “clearly defined the perfect and spiritual Man,” for “the molded flesh, by itself, is not the completed Man: it is only the flesh of Man, therefore one dimension of Man. The soul by itself is not Man either: it is only the soul of Man, therefore one dimension of Man. Nor is the Spirit Man: it is given the name Spirit, not the name Man. It is the union, in communion, of these three realities that constitutes the completed Man” (Against the Heresies V, 6, 1). The perfect Man is the one who participates fully in the life of the Spirit.

By the integration of the body, by taking account of the movements of the psyche, together with a dynamic of opening of consciousness in a spiritual perspective, we recover the unitive vision that was that of the first Christians. They had a tripartite view of the human being and held that each element — body, soul, spirit — was essential for spiritual ascent. Man would not be whole if one of his components were lacking. What we call Man is an indivisible whole.

Not all the Fathers adopted this approach; nevertheless they are strangers to any dualism that would oppose intelligence and matter. They distinguish, however, in Man, two successive states: his present condition, historically marked by sin; and his eschatological condition, marked by the return of Christ, when Man and creation will be transfigured by the outpouring of the energies of the Holy Spirit.

This final condition of the universe was in the original divine plan and will at last be realized.

In the present condition, Man is subject to servitude and to the laws of biology (through the need to nourish himself, to follow natural cycles, and to reproduce sexually); he is also subject to suffering, to death, to decay.

After the resurrection, he will be totally set free and will be clothed with a spiritual body (the body and the soul will be “pneumatized”) and plunged into the divine light (1 Cor 15:35–49). Each will keep his own identity: Peter will remain Peter, Philip will remain Philip...

Man Created in the Image of God

First of all, the Fathers made the distinction between the uncreated and the created, between the Creator and the creature. They recalled the transcendent dimension of God, who is wholly Other in relation to the created cosmos and to the human being. Thus Man is not of divine nature but created in the image of God. This distinction does not introduce a dualism; it causes to coincide both otherness and kinship between Man and God. On this basis it is necessary to specify what Orthodox Christians mean by the “image of God.”

First of all, Man, created in the image of God, is the reflection of divine beauty; above all he is a marvel of God. In his deep being are inscribed the divine qualities of which love is the synthesis. It is therefore love that is original and not sin. It is freedom that is original and not alienation; it is joy that is original and not bitterness; it is health that is original and not sickness.

Man created in the image of God bears his own freedom, “The divine is that which transcends man, and the divine is mysteriously united with the human in the divine-human image. It is for this reason only that the appearance in the world of personality which is not a slave to the world is possible.”5 And he added: “God is a freedom realized; Man is a freedom in the course of realization, in the course of fulfillment.”6

The Fathers of the Church asked whether it is possible to distinguish, in Man, the divine element. St Gregory of Nyssa, Cappadocian Father of the fourth century, answers this clearly, starting from what is commonly attested in Christian experience: “It is the spirit (noûs) that makes Man the image of God. For the spirit is the freedom of Man.” Here he names a dimension inherited from Greek philosophy, namely the noûs, which renders the Hebrew notion of the heart — not in the sense of the organ, but of the deep heart which Olivier Clément called the “heart-spirit.” We find this reference to the noûs in most works on the hesychast tradition. We shall return to this fundamental notion later.

It remains to be specified that the image of God does not concern only the spirit. St Irenaeus of Lyon affirms that it is not Man who offered Christ the body in order to be incarnate, but that Man was created in the image of Christ — body, soul, spirit. Christ is the model, and it is Man who is created in the image. Man is called to become like Christ, to be in all things similar to Christ, who is the Alpha and the Omega of Man. “Christ is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Man is a being created “in the image of God,” called to actualize this image in order to become like Christ.

From Image to Likeness

The image, the ontological foundation of the human being, by its dynamic structure calls for likeness, which is subjective, personal. The seed (having been created in the image) leads toward its blossoming: being according to the image.

The image of God is therefore the indelible mark of the deep being whose principle (logos) cannot be altered. If the image of God is actual, likeness is to be achieved. The image relates to the constitution of nature; the accomplishment of likeness depends on personal freedom and will. The image contains faculties which it must direct toward God. Likeness corresponds to an actualization of the potentialities of the image.

Verses 26 and 27 of the book of Genesis confirm the pneumatic dynamism we have sketched. In verse 26 God says: “Let us make Man in our image, capable of likeness, and let him have dominion...” Most of the Fathers of the Church distinguish between the image, which is inscribed in the human being, and the likeness, which is to be acquired through divine-human cooperation. Likeness would be the fruit of the deifying action of the Holy Spirit and of the cooperation of Man’s freedom.

Thus Man, in the biblical vision, was created in the image of God (Gen 1:27) and placed in a becoming, in a dynamic of growth to reach full maturity. St Irenaeus of Lyon (second century), and other Fathers after him, taught that Man was not created perfect but with a view to perfection, that he was not created immortal but with a view to immortality: “He was a child who still had to grow in order to attain his perfection” (Against the Heresies IV, 38, 2). Adam was a child rich in potentialities which he had to assume in order to reach the full maturity of a son of God.

If he was created in the image, he must be made according to the likeness. This word “to make,” which is not the same as the word “to create” in Hebrew, expresses the divine project, which presupposes the action of the two hands of the Father, that is, the Word and the Spirit, as well as the free participation of Man. In Genesis the two notions are clearly distinguished: on the one hand, God says: “Let us make Man in our image, capable of our likeness” (Gen 1:26); on the other hand, “God created Man in his image” (Gen 1:27). Such is the foundation and axis of all Christian anthropology of the first centuries and, thereafter, of Orthodox anthropology. Creation in the image of God places Man before God, in a relationship. Likeness gives him an orientation, a perspective of growth which presupposes cooperation, the agreement of two freedoms. This is what gives meaning to existence and makes of every human being a pilgrim toward himself, on the path from image to likeness.

St Gregory of Nyssa will affirm that there is no limit to this spiritual journey, that we shall not cease to grow “from beginnings to beginnings toward beginnings that will never end.” There will be no limit to this ascent “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18), said the Apostle Paul, for God is infinite and inexhaustible. The sanctification of Man is therefore the fruit of the cooperation (synergia) of Man’s freedom and divine grace.

Body, Soul, Esprit — or Pneuma

The French word esprit introduces a confusion because it translates two different Greek words: pneuma and noûs. The habit has been taken to translate noûs with a lowercase-s “spirit” to signify the spirit of Man, and Pneuma with a capital “S” to designate the Spirit of God. The introduction of the noûs comes from Platonic influence (its equivalent in Hebrew is the heart: lev). Christian spiritual experience confirmed and specified the noetic dimension of the human being and assimilated it to the deep heart, distinct from the heart as organ. We shall see later how noûs and Pneuma articulate and complete one another. But first we must specify what the noûs is.

The Noûs or Heart-Spirit

The distinction between spirit and soul proves essential in spiritual experience. Plato had perceived that, in its interiority, the soul becomes aware of its aspiration to transcendence. This interior dimension of the soul he called noûs. It seems, however, that he confused the aspiration to transcendence with Transcendence itself, thereby deducing the immortality of the soul from the “connaturality of the soul with the divine.” For Christians, the noûs is compared to a mirror in which the image of God is reflected. It is of this mirror that the Apostle Paul speaks when he says: “For now we see through a mirror, but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). The noûs is akin to an organ of vision and is called for that reason “the eye of the heart.” In the first sense it is the organ of awareness; it is the possibility, within the soul, of becoming aware of the states of soul and of naming the movements of the soul — moods, emotions, feelings, passions... It is also through it that we can have access to the contemplation of mysteries and to the vision of God: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

When we speak of the tripartite dimension of the human being — body, soul, spirit — ordinarily we are speaking of the noûs and not of the Pneuma. Also called the fine point of the soul or the higher part of the soul, the noûs is identified with the deep heart as capacity for silence, for awareness, and for determination:

• The capacity for interior silence (or hesychia) is experienced in prayer and meditation; it expresses an untroubled state of being.

• The capacity for awareness and for speech allows Man to become aware of interior movements, of states of soul, and to be able to name them.

• The capacity for freedom, which is capacity for decision and determination, allows one to enter into and then remain in an interior dynamism without letting oneself be distracted by the solicitations of the world or diverted by parasitic thoughts.

The spiritual path consists in the restoration of these original capacities so as to make them operative. This restoration lays down the double requirement of the life of prayer and of the purification of the heart-spirit. The means employed is the practical exercise commonly called “asceticism” in the spiritual tradition. The goal of asceticism is the acquisition of the primacy of the noûs over the soul (psyche) and over the flesh (sarx), that is, the reestablishment of the original ordering. The human being has the task of acquiring the authority of consciousness over natural movements, of passing from the state of submission to the passions to the application of the divine will. It is the passage from slavery to freedom, signified by the exodus of the Hebrews from the land of exile (Egypt) to the promised land.

We recall that the angelic world is purely noetic. The human being has noetic capacities which he must put to work in order to attain his stature as son (or daughter) of God and to become king of creation — which does not mean to enslave or mistreat, but to spiritualize nature, to allow it to express fully its sacramental potentialities.

In the Orthodox tradition, the noûs has a function of integration of the personality. It is the center of the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the central organ of the interior senses, the root of everything, the point of encounter between God and Man, where Man meets God face to face. It is called by the Apostle Paul the “inner man.”

The Relation of the Whole — Body, Soul, Spirit — to the Pneuma

For certain Fathers, and according to the Apostle Paul (1 Thess 5:23), the term Spirit (Pneuma) designates the gift of the Holy Spirit or the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is the very life of God. It is by grace that we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). “By grace we are penetrated and impregnated with God, we live in Him and from Him, we partake of His nature, as red-hot iron partakes of the nature of fire and, while remaining iron, becomes fire, shining like fire. By grace we are deified; by grace we are sons of God,” says St Maximus the Confessor.

Deification is a “pneumatization” or spiritualization of the whole being: of the body, of the soul, and of the noûs. Man becomes fully human, perfect — according to the expression of St Irenaeus cited above — when he is penetrated by grace in his body, his soul, and his intelligence (noûs). Grace opens his intelligence to the contemplation of mysteries and to the vision of God. By grace the human being can become a participant in the divine life: “The life of Man will be the vision of God” (St Irenaeus of Lyon).

The Ontological Unity of All Humanity

“We who constitute a single nature devour one another like serpents” (St Maximus the Confessor).

The Bible sees in Adam at once each human being and all humanity. In Adam it brings to light unity and diversity: unity of the human race and diversity of faces; coincidence of unity and diversity.

Each human being has a unique way of expressing the humanity that is common to us. Each has a mode of being that is proper to him according to unique configurations, expressed in his unique genome and manifested in his unique face. Diversity is the miracle of life. It is an essential richness.

God really created only one Man, the Adam-Humanity. What harms one human being reverberates through the whole of humanity. We are all one in Adam. We all partake of the same humanity, of the same flesh (Isa 58:7), “we are members one of another” (Eph 4:25). No human being is an island. All humanity is in organic connection, where each of us is a cell of a great body that forms a living and organic unity. By this fact we are all in solidarity and responsible for one another. What I do to the other, I do to myself.

We are invited to enter into this awareness in order finally to respect every human being and to consider him as a part of ourselves. To respect him and to consider him as a brother or sister in humanity means to take care of him instead of experiencing him as a rival or a threat. To take care of him is also to take care of his difference, of what he bears that is unique and irreplaceable.

In this unitive thought, Saint Silouan of Athos7 affirms: “Our brother is our own life.” He who despises his brother despises his own flesh (cf. the Gospel of John): a mystery of the ontological unity of human nature, of humanity. He who kills his brother kills himself. Everything that you do not love in the other expresses, to a certain degree, what you do not love in yourself. That is why, according to Saint Silouan of Athos, we must have only one thought and one hope: “That all may be saved.”

Adam is Created Male and Female

Moreover, according to the Bible, Adam is created male and female, masculine and feminine. In the first book of Genesis, creation is shown to be a process of differentiation. The term usually used in translations is “separation.” But today that word suggests the idea of rupture, which is why it is preferable, strictly speaking, to use the term “differentiation,” which is a principle of life. Differentiation joins distinction and connection. Two differentiated cells are distinct, and interact.

In the first chapter of Genesis, God distinguishes, in the dynamism of creation, heaven and earth, light and darkness, the waters above and the waters below, the dry from the wet, Adam from the adamah, and the masculine from the feminine. The Fathers of the Church will say: “God distinguishes without separating, in order to unite without confusing.” Distinctions call for successive unions. The vocation of every human being (man or woman) is to attain interior unity through the union of the polarities or complementary antagonisms that constitute him. He is invited to recognize the other part of himself, to espouse it, in order to reach the fullness of his being. The man–woman marriage expresses, on the existential plane, this fundamental work.

That is why the Church gives a privileged place to marriage, inasmuch as it represents the very dynamism of spiritual life and then of union with God. In the Bible, everything is marriage. At the heart of the Bible, the Song of Songs is there to remind us of this. In this sense, the distinction of the sexes, of the masculine and feminine genders, is inscribed in the fruitful distinction of polarities. The encounter with the other as complementary other is a possibility of surpassing and of fullness. In such an encounter there is more than the one and more than the other: there is the one and the other and what circulates between the one and the other; there is also what escapes us in ourselves and in the other, and which we could call the “hidden third.”8

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From Dumitru Stăniloae, Ortodoxie și românism. Sibiu: Editura (Tipografia) Arhidiecezană, 1939.

Christianity addresses the person. It does not address the nation, for there is no hypostatic, self-subsisting consciousness of a nation. Yet human persons are not abstract units stripped of all determinants and therefore entirely identical. From any given person one can, of course, set aside certain determinants as accidental and superficial. But there is a series of characteristics of which a person cannot be divested, even if we were to penetrate to the very last kernel, to what we call that person’s “I.” Not only a person’s body, ideas, feelings, and experiences bear certain characteristics, but so does the “I” itself, that ontological center which is given from the outset of the formation and organization of a personal content of life — its immanence — and which, from transcendence, governs this whole process. The “I” is not simply a hypostatic entity endowed with the power necessary to constitute a human organism and with a lantern by whose light it sees itself and its content of life. If these ultimate centers of human persons were neutral in every other respect — being completely identical to one another — and if all the determinations that so greatly distinguish one person from another arose only from external influences, from the circumstances in which different persons live, we would not understand why brothers born of the same parents (they may even be twins), receiving the same education, living (for example, in a village) the same life, are nevertheless enormously different from one another despite all their closeness.

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The opinion is very common that, in the last analysis, differences among personal “I”s also reduce to external life-circumstances, though not to the circumstances in which the persons themselves live, but to those in which their forebears lived. The experiences of their ancestors — their history — have passed, over generations, from the surface of the soul gradually down into its ontological depths, showing themselves in the descendants as determinants of their “I”s.

And if the descendants nevertheless differ so radically from one another in their personal centers, this is due to the mysterious caprices of the law of heredity, which makes one child resemble some remote ancestor, and another some collateral relative.

In the face of this opinion, we note first that precisely the mysterious caprice of the law of heredity proves that it alone cannot explain everything, for a natural law is characterized by unwavering constancy, by monotonous repetition. Why are two twins never identical? At least sometimes we ought to see identical twins.

That the history of forebears contributes something to the determination of their descendants’ “I”s is very plausible and, from the Christian point of view, admissible. The process of variation and development of the world is determined neither solely by God nor solely from immanence. A mysterious cooperation takes place even in the bringing to light of new human faces. All human faces have their eternal models in God — models that are not static ideas but forces that work at shaping their images in the created world, also engaging the immanent powers of the world. When the world has reached that point of development at which the appearance of a certain human face is foreseen, that face appears both as a result of immanent factors and as an effect of the working of the model-force from transcendence.

The immanent powers and circumstances bring only those determinants of the new “I” that exist in the divine image of that person from eternity. One can intuit, and even ascertain by an analytical mental process, this mysterious collaboration between the immanent process and something above it. A new human “I” cannot be produced solely by an immanent process. Yet that process has its rights up to a point.

Two twins are wholly distinct human faces from the moment of their birth—and even of their conception. Each of them can be explained up to a certain point by gathering a series of moments and features antecedent to him and bringing them into a kind of causal connection.

But neither of the two causal chains imposed itself of necessity by its own power; both were initially determined by a power that transcends natural causality. Life — even the life of all forebears together — is not sufficient by itself to explain the nature of the descendant persons. One ground for this is the fact that, according to Holy Scripture or to oriental cosmogonic legends, the children of the first human pair were just as different from their parents and from one another as are the children of today, when behind each newborn lie hundreds of generations. No human face is formed entirely by the past that precedes it, nor by its own history.

Each human being comes with an original a priori schema, determined only in part by the past, and within which he is to exercise creative freedom, filling it with one content or another. The hypostasis of every person comes from God, but it comes by passing through the medium of a past accumulated in earthly parents, and this passage is integrated into the act of his constitution according to the image he has in heaven.

The individualizing notes that the newly constituted “I” receives in the order of the world from the medium of history accumulated in the parents, viewed from our chronological perspective, seem to be added to other notes that it possessed beforehand.

In reality, the new “I” is constituted by a single, wholly simultaneous natural-divine act.

Therefore one cannot say that the notes with which the new “I” is endowed by the past preceding it are superficial, of a secondary order, and thus possibly to be shed by a person in order to return to a state of a priori purity and freedom from the influences of the past. We say only this: no “I” can be explained solely by the past that precedes it. In no case do we mean that the “I,” at the moment of its first appearance in immanence, would be in a state free of any trace of the past in whose medium it begins to bathe.

From the first moment of its existence, the “I” has also the notes given to it by the history of its forebears. Before having these notes — before its appearance in immanence — it does not even exist. There exists only the model-force which, until now, has prepared only the ground for launching it into existence, but has not yet succeeded in constituting it. And the model-force of each “I” virtually includes all its determinants, including those that the “I” receives through the mediation of the history that precedes it.

In this way, the national quality of the human “I” is not something accidental, superficial, a posteriori; it belongs to its essential destiny and is included among the determinants of its eternal image. The heavenly model of each person is the model of a concrete human being, specified historically.

What does the national quality consist in? Obviously not in a tri- or bi-colored flag; not in obstinate assertion of one’s nationality; not in what is called nationalism, which often includes an unsympathetic note. All these can be based on the national quality. The national quality is not a feeling, nor an extra spiritual organ, nor an added faculty of man. If it were so, one might speak, perhaps, of the possibility of canceling this “extra” that distinguishes different groups of people, in order to reduce them to the supposedly original uniformity. The national quality is not an accidental add-on to pure humanity. The national quality is humanity itself in a certain form. Just as any material element necessarily has a certain form, so humanity necessarily presents itself in a certain form determined from within and therefore intrinsic to it. A pure humanity undetermined by some particular form cannot be conceived. Even formlessness is a form. A humanity without some particular form is an abstraction with which only mathematical thought can work, not imaginative thought applied to the concrete.

The national quality does not sit in a corner of the soul; it does not constitute a separate piece in the spiritual-bodily organism of man. It does not stand alongside thinking — which is purely human — or alongside love — again purely human — or alongside joy and sadness — again purely human — as some distinct endowment. Rather, it is thinking, love, joy, sadness, action, conscience, all bearing a certain disposition, a certain vibration, a certain fragrance common to a group of people and not found in other groups. The charm of a certain flavor with which, for example, Romanian love is imbued does not make that love any less human. Nor is Romanian thought any less thought. Between the national and the human there is no antagonism. On the contrary, the more you deepen your human feelings, the more you penetrate into the core of your national quality. Humanity lies in the depths of your national nature. It is a notorious fact that imitators of foreign feelings and attitudes are less human, because they live more on the surface. A Romanian understands and loves people of another nation not by transcending his Romanian reality, by descending somewhere into a purely human substratum of his personality, but by remaining Romanian. When a Romanian feels pity for a Hungarian, in that pity he remains Romanian. And this is felt all the more, the stronger the pity is, the more the subject forgets that he is Romanian. Love for all people, whatever their nation, is not an “ana-national” love. A sentiment that is “ana-national” does not exist in its roots and its texture.

These are the premises Orthodoxy has in view when, answering the question about the relation between Christianity and the nation, it does not underrate the national factor.

It would be easy for us to show how the Orthodox answer flows from these premises and thus to end our article here. But since an important branch of Christianity — Catholicism — introduces into the debate two notions that greatly cloud the clarity of the question, it is useful to strengthen the Orthodox answer also by clearing away possible objections arising from the Catholic position.

The two notions Catholicism uses in the debate are: nature and supernature. In appearance, these two notions would greatly simplify the problem: the nation is natural; Christianity is supernatural, therefore supranational. Christianity, then, can in no case be national, for then it would no longer be Christianity but paganism.

The Catholic attitude in this matter results from Catholic doctrine in general, which sees everything through the prism of the division into natural and supernatural.

According to this doctrine, primordial man consisted of two sections: nature and the donum superadditum, or supernature. Nature bore within its being the germ of death and sinful desire (concupiscentia carnis). Immortality and purity did not lie in man’s nature; they were not ontologically connected with human nature; they were additions from outside, not belonging to the intrinsic constitution of human nature. By the fall into sin, man’s nature was in no way impaired; only the donum superadditum was withdrawn.

“Of the three kinds of goods that we can consider as being in human nature—(1) the essential principles and the properties that result from them, (2) the natural inclination toward the good of virtue, and (3) the gratuitous gifts that constituted original justice—the last kind was totally removed from the whole of human nature by original sin… By contrast, the essential principles of nature with the properties that flow from them remain absolutely intact; neither original sin nor even personal sins can affect these in any way. Finally, the inclination toward the good of virtue is not in itself diminished by original sin, which does not weaken nature, the source and principle of this inclination.”1

Orthodoxy knows nothing of this ontological dualism in primordial man; rather, it teaches that immortality and purity were natural potencies of man, which he was to develop together with his whole nature. The divine image was imprinted in the very constitution of human nature; it was not some add-on as a “super,” as something non-essential to it. We would make God the creator of death and of sin if we were to say that the human nature He created would be by its nature — normally — sinful and mortal. The fall into sin would be incomprehensible if Adam were restrained from sin not by his own will but by the donum superadditum, which Catholics say was the bridle that held in check Adam’s natural concupiscence. How is it that at a certain moment this divine gift yielded to man’s desire toward sin or to the assaults of the serpent? In general, we do not understand why God would have made Adam with two sections: with a sinful and mortal nature and with a supernatural bridle.

Inasmuch as it is the image of God, human nature is good; superior spiritual life — communion with God — is something natural, normal to it. But insofar as it is created, this nature also has the possibility of change; it can fall from its normal divine-human life; it can be impaired, the divine image imprinted in it can be altered. Here is what the Russian theologian Fr. Sergius Bulgakov says: “The undeveloped and young man had within himself both the power of life — posse non mori — and the power of purity — posse non peccare — not as an extraordinary gift, a donum superadditum, but as an internal norm, as the authentic nature of his being. Both death and sin, though possible to man by virtue of his created character, were for him abnormal and contrary to his nature.”2 Man was entirely open to divine action, destined for the full realization of his deification, on the basis of his innocence alone: God came in the cool of the evening to speak with man as with a friend; but this conversation was not a donum superadditum in relation to his as-yet-unmatured nature. On the contrary, this communion with God was given and destined to him on the basis of his nature. Thus, through original sin there was not a simple withdrawal of a donum superadditum such that nature remained intact. Man’s state after the fall is not a “natural” state — the state of pure nature — but a state of the corruption of nature; he no longer possesses his nature in its fullness and proper sense; he has an impaired nature into which defectiveness has been introduced. For Catholics, however, man remained with his nature intact.

We thus have two conceptions of human nature. To be sure, the formal definition of the natural may be the same: the sphere of the natural in a being includes all those powers, endowments, and acts that belong to that being, grow from it, manifest it, and are not accidents or artificial additions unnecessary to it. But concretely, Orthodoxy’s conception is that spiritual life is not something accidental, unnecessary to human nature; it belongs to it and expresses its meaning and direction. Since spiritual life is participation in divine life, it follows that human nature is such that it cannot live a true life except by participating in divine life. Not only is the capacity to participate in divine life — to be deified — imprinted in human nature, but also the necessity for it, the organ that seeks that life; without it, nature either suffers terribly or shrivels into a sub-natural, blind, defective life.

It might seem a contradiction to call spiritual life — communion with God, deification — “natural.” For what is natural to man grows from man, whereas his spiritual life is a connection with something that comes from beyond him, with God.

Yet there is no contradiction here. Spiritual life — deification, or whatever else one may call man’s participation in divine life — is, first of all, a human act of launching into the divine or of absorbing the divine: a human act or function of spiritual nourishment. If material food is not extra-natural, neither can spiritual food be. A flower also feeds on air and light, but the process of this feeding is not supernatural to the flower. On the contrary, without it the flower shrivels and lives for a while a needy, sub-natural life, and then dies. We agree that a perfect application of the definition of the natural (“growth from oneself”) cannot be made to man’s spiritual life (nor, in fact, to any of his other activities). Participation in something outside oneself is, in a certain respect, something other than growth from oneself. But if we consider that man is entirely made by God, then even a growth from himself of spiritual life would still be a kind of participation in divine richness; and if we consider further that among the natural endowments with which God created man, one of the most essential is precisely that he should participate — on pain of the fullness of his natural life — in divine life, then we may reckon this participation in divine life, man’s deification, as belonging to his nature, being required by it and manifesting it.

What belongs to man’s nature is not only body and soul, but also divine-human life. Man is, in his nature, a theandric being. We do not distinguish between natural and supernatural, but between life without God and life in God.

But natural life is life in God.

Does this difference between Orthodox and Catholic conceptions of human nature have any practical significance? Is it merely a quarrel about words? It has considerable significance — especially in connection with our problem. Among the elements that constitute a being’s nature there is such a perfect welding together that they form a single whole with a single meaning, a perfect unity. Though of different substances, the constitutive elements of human nature bear, on different levels, the same characteristics; only all of them together express and realize, in common acts, its meaning and destiny. Just as the soul, although of a substance different from the body, forms with the body one whole, expresses together a meaning, and realizes together every act, so also in man’s spiritual life grace — God’s action — meets in a mysterious unity with the soul’s and body’s acts, together expressing and realizing the full life of human nature. And since human nature presents itself in each person with certain individualizing characters, the spiritual life that belongs to the nature of this or that person will also bear, in its own way, the same individualizing characters that manifest themselves in the soul and become visible in the body.

Spiritual life, however profound, is different in each person. There are no two people who experience participation in divine life in the same way and who manifest it in the same fruits and in the same manner. There were no two prophets who had the same visions and used the same images to express their experiences. We are not speaking here of differences that separate people, nor of a justification of individualism in the sense of religious isolation. Those who have other visions and are compelled to express them in a different manner know at the same time — also through religious experience — that they must refer them to the same Subject who has revealed Himself to them. They understand each other perfectly, for they know that, at bottom, they express the same thing with slightly different means, just as the nature of each is slightly different. Love, under the influence of religious experience, is experienced differently by each person. But this does not mean they cannot love one another. Sobornicity is not uniformity but harmony — the same melody sung together by slightly different instruments. Spiritual life too has the national character of the subject who lives it.

Quite different consequences result from the conception that spiritual life is supernatural and does not form with nature an ontological whole. In the supernatural sector we will not necessarily meet the individual characters that nature has in different persons. The supernatural is one, whereas persons are different; nature is variegated. And no matter how often the adage of Thomas Aquinas may be recalled — “Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit”3 — the supernatural is nevertheless conceived4 not as in an organic continuity with nature, but as a separate sector whose mission is not so much to awaken the powers of nature to full life as rather to reduce nature to silence, to potentialize it, arranging above it — not from its own soil — a kind of aerial, supernatural garden with its own virtues and life.

Thus one speaks of virtues infused by grace, not — as we would say — exfused from human nature. It is true that the subject of these infused virtues is still said to be the human being; but obviously, in this role the human subject is stripped of all his concrete individuality and reduced to the role of a simple physical agent for handling the infused virtues. Other characters of nature are stifled by grace — for example, concupiscence. In general, the personal note and particular determinants are to be smothered by the supernatural, which is of a general, uniform character. The perfecting of nature by grace is also understood as a correction of nature, as a reduction to potentiality of some of its properties. Of the national quality the supernatural wants to know nothing, since it is a particular quality. The national quality cannot become a supernatural quality. Remaining only within the sphere of the natural, Catholicism looks upon it with suspicion.

We shall try to show, also by a brief investigation of the process by which nature is raised from its fallen state, that the separation of man into natural and supernatural is mistaken.

Without doubt, the restoration of fallen human nature is accomplished through help from above. In relation to deteriorated nature, the descent of power from above — from God — is clearly distinguished. But the first man was not given, likewise, in two installments: a basis as nature with inclinations toward sin, and an extraordinary add-on as a bridle against sin. He was given everything at once, as a whole.

We observe this infra and supra in present-day man not only at the moment when powers from above come upon his deteriorated state, but also afterward, so long as no perfect welding has yet been achieved between those powers and his former sinful state — so long as nature has not been delivered from defectiveness, not repaired. In an imperfect Christian, still retaining strong impulses toward sin, one can still speak, not of nature and supernature (for nature in its true sense is not something sinful), but in any case of something infra and something supra. Each of us can intuitively observe this in our own souls. We can see how, at certain moments, we are carried along by envious, lustful, lower impulses, and we can feel how, at other moments, there comes over them something from above, from beyond our human sphere, ennobling them.

But this distinction can no longer be made in a perfect Christian. (To be sure, an absolutely perfect Christian has not existed; but there have been personalities who rose to great heights — Saint John the Apostle, for example.) Can we still distinguish in his soul two zones: one infra — his own, sinful — and one supra? Can we still say: these are thoughts and impulses from below; those are from above? Is he not Christian entirely? And this is the goal toward which Christians strive: to a complete welding of the power from above with their deteriorated state, so that there are not two zones within them, but one whole which is nothing other than human nature restored — the nature of man as conceived and created by God. Grace and man’s will are no longer felt as two principles of action, but as one: the will enlightened and strengthened toward the good. Under grace, man’s feelings do not remain what they were, so that by the somehow physical force of grace they merely appear otherwise than they are; rather, the effect of grace wholly passes into their intrinsic constitution, transforming and ennobling them. The efficacy of grace is real only from the moment when it succeeds in converting its power into the intrinsic power of the faculties and organs with which man is endowed. Grace is not a hypostatized entity — a little heap of power from God sent into the soul — as Catholicism teaches when it says that grace is created and therefore separated from God (“Sanctifying grace is therefore a reality distinct from God, created, infused, and inherent in the soul”5). Grace is an action, a working of God, not separated from His being, springing from it. As such, there cannot exist in man a standalone life of grace; we must admit either that only God is the subject of that gracious life, or that grace becomes an act of man as well — of his powers and functions.

The first “horn” of the dilemma cannot be admitted, for it would mean the annulment of man. Thus only the second horn remains possible: man as subject of the gracious working — or co-subject together with God. Whereas, for Catholicism, the supernatural life of grace is neither human nor divine but something quite bizarre, in the Orthodox conception it is both profoundly human and divine — or it is all the more fully human the more it is divine; it is a theandric life, the life of a deified human being.

So long as gracious action remains external to man’s psychic powers — even if present within the soul — it cannot produce effects that are truly the soul’s, the virtues of the human being. Only when this action of God awakens, develops, and strengthens the soul’s faculties — thus becoming their intrinsic force — will Christian feelings and deeds, which are man’s own, arise. Can one still distinguish, in these feelings and deeds, a natural sector and a supernatural one? Do we still see here a nature that remains as it was, and above it a supernature that stifles it? The whole human being, with all his faculties, endowments, passions, and characteristics, has been raised up — all these being filled, as organs, with a new force directed toward the good. The Russian theologian B. Vysheslavtsev, referring especially to the Eastern Father Maximus the Confessor, says: “The passions in their totality are not evil in themselves; they are good in the hands of those who strive for a good life. Passions such as desire, pleasure, fear, through sublimation are transformed: desire into a powerful longing for divine gifts, pleasure into the happiness and delight of the soul for God’s gifts, fear into the corresponding dread of error, sorrow into repentance. The vicious man is built from the same material as the virtuous… The natural powers of the soul and body… become evil only when they receive a particular form — namely, the form of perversion. The fundamental idea of the entire Greek-Eastern ascetic and mystical tradition is deification (θέωσις). Deification is the continuous sublimation of the whole being of man and of all the powers of his body and soul… Sublimation categorically opposes Christian asceticism and mysticism to any non-Christian asceticism and mysticism — be it Hindu, Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Stoic. There is no sublimation there; there is negation — not the salvation of the world, but salvation from the world… For negative asceticism, the transfiguration of soul and body — resurrection — is an absurdity. What is lower (body, passions, emotions, the subconscious, nature, cosmos) is not ‘saved,’ not shaped and sublimated, but uprooted, denied, and cut away.”6

Man’s powers, endowments, characteristics are not converted and melted into grace; rather, gracious working allows itself to be poured into, and molded according to, man’s aptitudes and faculties. The national quality — which is nothing other than a general form of the soul — is not dissolved in grace; instead, grace allows itself to be poured into the mold of the national soul, sublimating this quality of the soul.

The distinction between what comes from above and what man brings can, in a good Christian, be made only by recollection — by thinking how he was before he was perfected in the Christian life. Let us take an analogy: the patient and medicine. The patient is human nature after the fall; the medicine is the grace that heals him. Man, at the beginning, was not made in two installments and distinct sections — sick by nature but kept in a healthy state by a remedy dripped into him. He was created as a healthy whole. After he became sick, one observes how the restoration is effected by a remedy from outside him. And the distinction between the sick man and the remedy is still observed until the remedy has thoroughly permeated his tissues, been absorbed into them, and, thereby, the man has become healthy.

To be sure, the analogy has the defect of picturing man as receiving divine grace only for a certain time and thereafter no longer receiving it, but having it within him. In reality, man stands continually under the effusions of grace, and his state is continually elevated — continually deified. But this is the natural life of his nature. As everything grows in the body, so man is made to grow in the Spirit, in God. Nature has no limit in its ascent; it never becomes a static entity, though it has a path and a framework in its development. It belongs to man’s nature that the divine grace should rain upon him unceasingly — and that he should unceasingly absorb this rain, producing ever more beautiful fruits.

God’s working upon man becomes ever more powerful and intense the more man’s faculties — awakened and strengthened by grace — are capable of receiving new forces, of rendering more intense work, of increasing their capacity for feeling, virtue, and action, becoming co-subject of the divine working.

The measure of grace given is a function of the measure and quality of the soul’s organs in the respective person. The inner life of the soul’s organs and their outward action are always a refraction of the gracious working upon the soul, with a strict proportion maintained between them. It is said in Orthodox asceticism that the person raised to the high peaks of deification reflects exactly with his soul the divine working exerted upon him, so that God and the person are two subjects in a common work, radiating a common power — God as the essential source of this working, and man become “god by participation.” If at first — before he was able fully to absorb into his tissues the force of gracious working — man observed in himself, and observed that there was, a discontinuity between himself and grace, a vacuum, a certain hiatus; then, after the soul has acquired the habit of this absorption — after the synthesis with divine grace has been effected — he no longer observes this discontinuity with respect to the power of grace that continues to come. Man is lifted into the divine light and no longer distinguishes the surpluses that continually come to him; he feels himself bathed in a continuous light, articulated within it; he feels himself in his element; he feels himself its subject. Deified and full of grace is his soul; deification and grace come to him continually. One no longer distinguishes a “nature” (in the sinful sense) and a “supernature.”

But if one can no longer speak of a nature and a supernature — only of a nature in normal development — does it not follow that Christianity is broken into pieces, varied according to each individual and nation? Is not the ecumenicity of Christianity imperiled?

We answer decisively: no. It is true that from the synthesis between Christianity and the state that each person or nation brings, new types of Christians arise again and again. Saint John the Apostle was one kind of Christian, and Saint Paul another. Grace causes to blossom the germs contained in each person, just as rain and sun — though the same — cause each plant to blossom differently. Grace manifests itself by ennobling and beautifying — by sublimating — the aptitudes and contents of life of each nation. In one nation there blossoms, under divine power, a superior lyric poetry, because that nation has brought sentimental inclinations; in another, a philosophy; in another, an organization; in another, a superior art. The lyric poetry of two Christian peoples differs because their motives, memories, incidents of life, and inner resonances differ in each of the two peoples. The entire content of traditions, concerns, aptitudes, creations, and manifestations of a people becomes Christian. All the material of spiritual life — different from person to person and from people to people according to historical and geographical determinations — when bathed and kneaded by the same divine grace and the same Christian teachings, becomes Christian. And then, evidently, each people represents Christianity realized in a different way.

How, then, does ecumenicity fare? There are two kinds of ecumenicity. There is an ecumenicity equal to uniformity. In this sense, ecumenical is the treasury of faith and grace considered in themselves; ecumenical in this sense is Christianity considered as a system of divine ideas and powers existing on their own, distinct from the fruits they produce in each individual or nation. And there is an ecumenicity understood as a symphony, as a field of flowers sprinkled by the same rain, warmed by the same sun, tended by the same gardener. This is the ecumenicity of Christianity considered as life — as a living relation between man and God. One subject of this relation is man with his individuality, with his whole content of life. Ecumenicity, in this second sense, includes not only the uniform system of ideas and powers that work in people, but the entire spirituality of those peoples in whom faith and grace work. The whole spiritual content of those peoples is attuned; there is among those contents a fraternal feeling, for though different, the same underlying melody resounds within them. There is a relation of ecumenicity between the spiritual life of a Romanian and that of a Russian, between Greek and Serbian folklore.

We have ecumenicity in the sense of uniformity when believers and peoples keep their gaze fixed upon the same spiritual sun; they feel themselves as brothers while looking toward the same goal dear to all. We have ecumenicity in the sense of harmony in the variety of effects that result from the falling of the same light upon historical and spiritual spaces filled with other motives, other contents, other problems imposed by geography and by the inheritance of the past.

In this way, one can say that Christianity is both supranational and national. Ecumenicity is not torn apart by the national note.

Quite different is the situation in Catholicism. For it, nature does not become otherwise under the influence of grace, just as it did not become otherwise after the fall. It remains confined to what man is before grace descends upon him. Nature cannot emerge from this state, which is fundamentally sinful. Grace remains forever a pedagogue holding in check a pupil who cannot internally, really, become other. The pupil constantly strains, but cannot escape the bridle. If the pedagogue were to step away for a moment, the pupil would immediately give himself to abominations; the bridle disappearing, evil desires and deeds spring forth automatically.

Catholicism knows nothing of an intrinsic change of man’s sinful nature under the heat of divine grace.

If this is so, evidently an individual — as also a nation — keeps, beneath that “above” from God, a nature that is by essence potentially sinful. Nature cannot properly become Christianized. Therefore Christianity always remains something above, not penetrating ontologically into nature, not being absorbed by it. Two distinct planes remain: one variable — the plane of individuals and nations in their potentially sinful natural state — and another uniform plane hovering above all — the supernatural. To speak of a nationalization of Christianity, in this case, is evidently tantamount to blasphemy. It would mean making Christianity sinful if the nature with which you wanted to fuse it remains fundamentally sinful. In Catholicism, ecumenicity is understood only as uniformity. The specific yet Christian spiritualities of different peoples have no place within it. For Catholicism, Christianity means only the system of ideas and powers that hovers above. When Catholics say that Catholicism is supranational, they understand this in an exclusive and unilateral sense. Since the national quality is a natural quality, it cannot be raised into that “above” without ceasing to exist. Nor can that “above” have any intrinsic effect upon the national quality, which — according to Catholics — can only be natural. In relation to the national quality as such, Catholicism can therefore have neither interest nor love. The affirmation of the nation, in the Catholic conception, necessarily and always equates to the affirmation of a pagan, inferior reality. There cannot be a noble, Christian, moral nationalism as Orthodoxy believes is possible. By definition it is anti-Christian. This is because between the supernatural and the natural there remains forever an unbridgeable chasm. The supranational sphere in which Catholicism places itself means an ontological place outside all nations: the international.

Over against Catholic abstractionism — hostile to the whole concrete nature and thus also to the national factor — Orthodoxy appears as a mother who stretches her saving love over the whole human being, with all his inherited and acquired determinants, over his whole life rooted in a living and concrete milieu.