You live in deep space. The vistas that terrified Pascal are all around you. They are the within, the inwardness, of all things. This is Fäerie, this is Tír na nÓg, this is the Heavens, this is the Heart, this is the abyss, this is Zion, this is God’s throne, this is the Silver Branch land to which Bran voyaged. This is the land of magic, the land of enchantment, the land of persons, the realm of freedom, the well of creation.

The heart itself is but a little vessel, and yet there are dragons, and there lions, and there venomous beasts, and all the treasures of wickedness; and there are rough uneven ways, there chasms; there likewise is God, there the angels, there life and the kingdom, there light and the apostles, there the heavenly cities, there the treasures, there are all things.

St Macarius the Great, Spiritual Homily 43:7

All of modernity’s pathos is a forgetfulness of the reality that we live and walk in this land here and now, that it is less than a hair’s breadth from us.

This is the heart-land to which the Lord ascended, to which Enoch was translated, to which the Mother of God was assumed, leaving behind in place of this outward body a mass of flowers, our Christian Blodeuwedd.

The souls of trees are near you. The souls of animals are near you. Their eyes are windows. The stories are windows, are doors. The music is a door. Dancing is a door. Sex is a door. Your love is a door. Prayer of the heart is a door. Your suffering is a door. Someone is knocking at the door. The door can open, you can walk through into that other land, you can walk through now, and yet remain here, surrounded by the outward but drawing into it a flame. The flame burns within. The Lord who wishes to kindle fire on the earth is knocking so you will open the door and allow the flame to pass through. This is your task, this is your vocation, and only you can open this door.

The Silver Branch land is real. It is the very reality of this outward world in which the forgetful have shut themselves. The doors are locked from our side. This is exile, this is purgatory, this is hell, when we are here behind that closed door. But the Kingdom of Heaven is near, it is where the Lord is, the Lord of Avalon, the Lord who is the Lord of Annwn because he descended into it.

Read the story and believe it. Sing the prayer and mean it. Love the sisters and brothers, the land and its creatures, and serve them, serve their souls, serve their life. Open the door, enter the perilous realm, seek the King, seek the Queen, dance with her in the summer meadow, in the secret valley cradled in the heart of those Summerlands. Climb those holy mountains with love in your heart as your feet bleed on the stones.

Open, open, open!

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Who can really look with charity at Christians outside his own confession and conclude that they’re not in the church? What does “the church” even mean? Almost all of us come to some way of including “the others,” sometimes while managing to maintain the centrality of our own ecclesial home, sometimes as a straightforward pluralist who just rejoices in the riotous diversity without needing to impose any structure on it. In any event, the pious old Evangelical grandma is obviously a Christian, and that means that in some sense she’s in the Church. Period.

Alexei Khomiakov, from The Church Is One: Так как Цеpковь земная и видимая не есть еще полнота и совеpшение всей Цеpкви, которым Господь назначил явиться пpи конечном сyде всего твоpения, то она твоpит и ведает только в своих пpеделах, «не сyдя остальномy человечествy» (по словам апостола Павла к Коpинф.) и только пpизнавая отлyченными, т.е. не пpинадлежащими ей, тех, котоpые от нее сами отлyчаются. Остальное же человечество, или чyждое Цеpкви, или связанное с нею yзами, котоpые Бог не изволил ей откpыть, пpедоставляет она сyдy великого дня. “Since the earthly and visible Church is not yet the fullness and completion of the whole Church — which the Lord has appointed to appear at the final judgment of all creation — she works and knows only within her own bounds, ‘not judging the rest of mankind’ (in the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians), and recognizing as excommunicated, that is, as not belonging to her, only those who excommunicate themselves from her. The rest of mankind — whether foreign to the Church, or bound to her by bonds which God has not deigned to reveal to her — she leaves to the judgment of the great day.”

And again, Наши перегородки до неба не доходят, that is, “our partitions do not reach up to heaven” — a Russian saying attributed to several 19th century hierarchs and quoted approvingly in the 20th century. As near as I can tell, it likely was spoken by Metropolitan Platon (Gorodetsky) of Kiev (1803–1891), who served as Archbishop of Riga and Jelgava from 1848 to 1867 — a see where he certainly encountered a richly diverse community of Orthodox, Old Believers, Catholics, and Lutherans. He had a reputation for an irenic, conciliatory pastoral manner. In any event, this is a legitimate and deep thread in the Russian Church, apparent in the great St Philaret of Moscow.

I had a moment many years ago when watching the Iranian film Color of Paradise. You may know the story: a blind boy is rejected by his father, who just wants to be rid of him so he can find a new wife. One of the few characters who loves the boy is his grandmother. There was a scene where she was praying her prayer beads. I don’t know if this is the case in Shi’i Islam, my experience has all been with Sunni Sufism, but the prayer beads are often used to invoke God under His many names, the Majestic, the Subtle, the All-Merciful, the Beautiful… I saw her praying these beads and I could not escape the knowledge that God hears her and loves her. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” — whoever said that “opening” requires a particular set of ideas to be held consciously by the mind? Who could maintain this? Which of us can say that the ideas we hold — which ought to “remind us of straw,” as the greatest theologian of the west said — are so luminously perspicacious that we can think they are anything other than a child babbling? “My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways” Prov 23:26.

To the convinced exclusivists, I just say, yes, and. I can’t not see the primacy of the heart and the conscience. I can’t not see that God is the lover and judge of hearts, that the disposition of the heart is the fundamental reality that governs our relationship with Him, not accidents of birth or of culture or of ideology. “The devils also believe, and tremble.”

Of course, we have to stand where we stand; we have to confess the truth we see; but it is a fundamental gesture of the heart to acknowledge that our dogmatic “enemy” is doing the same thing, unless he is truly overwhelmed by ill-will, i.e., not by his incorrect ideas but by the corruption of his heart. And then in the midst of the disagreement, a light shines — a light in which we acknowledge our own fallibility and weakness, in which we stand in awe of the grandeur of God’s truth that so outstrips us, in which our vision of mercy floods our contraction and fear.

I feel it like music. I have many genres of music that, when I’m in the proper mood, I’ll hear and think “this is what I love best.” The Father’s “many mansions” are like this for me. It’s like some dispositive astrological planet moving in my internal heavens.

Today, my heart is captivated by the traditional Gaelic music I grew up with.

Maybe that will go on for weeks or months. But then a turn will come for European early music…

or for medieval and renaissance sacred choral music…

And a turn might come for Tuareg desert rock…

or dub techno…

or tribal electronica…

or 70s cassette New Age (hello Iasos!)…

or classical Hindustani music…

or qawwali…

or the Armenian duduk…

or Fela Kuti’s groove symphonies.

Yes there are different layers of depth, but the truth is they all bring something to the table that at this or that time, my heart craves.

This is honestly the way I feel about theology. Yes, I’m a communicant of the Orthodox Church. I sing the creed every Sunday and I mean it. I receive the mysteries. I love my church very much, and after the decades, it’s home in a way nothing else is. But still, I am fundamentally, in my heart, a holder of multiple citizenships. Here are a few:

Orthodoxy — obviously. But truly, at this point, the vibe, not the rules. I know the rules, but as in language, the point of knowing the rules is to know the spirit of the rules and follow it rather than the letter. I love the gestalt, the messy whole. I struggle with parts of it, I reject parts of it. My Orthodox spirit animal is Nikolai Berdyaev, a courageous freethinker and yet also a spiritual child of St Alexei Mechev. I venerate the Fathers more than I take their theology as gospel. So shoot me.

John Moriarty’s “Silver Branch” Christianity. This is the mythopoetic answer to my child’s soul that loves Ireland, who was weaned on Tolkien, this is the bursting of the whole conceit of the philosophy of the west, a Christian Nietzsche perhaps to lead us down and out and under and through. This is my Druidic ace in the hole.

And a lot of you will flip out at this one: Mormon Christianity. There is something incomparable here, something obviously ancient and obviously new. This is an inspired Christianity that finally, heroically — in a way like Moriarty in spirit, if totally different in vibe! — breaks Christianity out of the crust of Greek philosophy. It’s a process theism before process theism, somehow cooked up by an uneducated farmboy from backwoods New England. That alone should give any honest questioner pause. It’s a Christianity that rejects “omnigoddism,” the timeless, spaceless, finally impersonal Absolute beloved of philosophers and philosophical theologians. It’s also so American, deeply optimistic, deeply future oriented, deeply pragmatic. Trying on Mormon doctrine to get a taste for how the world feels when you believe it is a really interesting exercise. Recommended for the genuinely open-minded: Terryl Givens’ The God Who Weeps and The Christ Who Heals, and James Faulconer’s Thinking Otherwise.

Personally, I think there is enormous scope for dialogue among all of these widely differing traditions. Martin Shaw, now Orthodox, is essentially a spiritual child of John Moriarty. And Catholic theologian James Webb modeled how “great tradition” Christianity can learn from and appreciate Mormon faith and praxis in Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation.

There’s more traditions that I love. We all have so much to learn from each other, we each have gifts that the whole Body needs! The ranks of the rigorists are full. I’ll be over here jamming with the ragtag ecumenists. Come on, among all these new converts coming into Orthodoxy there have got to be some freaks and weirdos. Looking forward to your joining me. Or yelling at me. Go for it.

Part of the benefit of a book is that when you’re done reading it, you know the author a little bit. Reading random flotsam online, you know the author not at all, so you’re easy prey for whatever psyop may be getting transmitted through a given piece of schlock.

Ask yourself: when in normal life, outside electronic media, would you ever just give credence to something said by a person you don’t know at all? Yet this is the character of virtually all electronic media — except perhaps for the traditional blog.

The wonderful thing about buying DIY books is that you know that because you bought the book, there is one more copy in the world than there would have been otherwise.

It’s really hard to really remember that the anons are really people. There is something so insulated, muffled about interaction here. Thinking this after hearing ’s voice for the first time. There is something embodying about the voice, some truth of the voice, that this medium works against. Maybe we need to try hearing the writer speak as we read.

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This moon has me feeling a bit reflective and adventurous and optimistic about that adventure — like sitting around a campfire swapping stories after an expansive day in the mountains, looking forward to rest and another day, and enjoying the camaraderie.

Have a soundtrack.

The world is plural. All attempts to make it “one” are prima facie absurdities. It is not one. I sometimes think it must be one if only in the sense that all the many beings in relationship must be in relationship against some “ground,” and then, what is that ground? But perhaps this is an unnecessary speculation. Perhaps the terms of relationship are inherent in the many beings individually. If we go the Mormon route of positing eternal intelligences, then their relations constitute the ground. The world is countless beings making world. This idea has the singular value of being coherent with my daily experience of life, with my experience of moral responsibility, with my experience of both the reality and finitude of my own agency and that of other beings, human and nonhuman.

In short, there is nothing other than communion all the way down, all the way up — allowing for a hylozoism or panexperientialism. The word “God” then conceals two meanings. What the classical tradition means by “God” qua “ground of Being,” or “Being itself,” is the character of the eternal intelligences as manifest in their relatedness. There’s a resonance here with Wieman’s notion of God as “creative interchange,” which is perhaps something that Wieman could give Mormon theology by way of addressing what, in that theology, might fulfil the role played by God as ground-of-Being in classical theism. Wieman’s empiricism is a natural fit with the matrix of American empiricism and pragmatism that characterizes Mormon thought generally.

William James’ pluralism also seems a congenial fit here. This character of eternal intelligences is a brute fact, but the classical view is content with brute facts, obviously, as its God is for it a brute fact. There is no fact more brute than the Absolute; it is the definitive brute fact apotheosized.

The other meaning of “God” is then a more elevated being, perhaps even the “supreme being,” but, contra classical theism, definitely a being among beings. The character of this God is then an open empirical question to be settled by experience and not a priori, and we look to God’s covenantal faithfulness as the basis of our trust. Altogether a more Biblical view, I note. And likewise, as I go through the world, I need not restrict myself to the dry skepticism of a Wieman, but I can allow a more open sensitivity to the presences of many other spiritual agents in creation — empiricism without reductionsm, but also without ceding the God of perennial Christian experience. “Re-enchantment,” but without collapsing into the pagan nightmare of hostile entities to be appeased by sacrifice and superstition. (Tolkien did it with the angelology of his Valar, and I can do it too. Let’s build a shrine to Yavanna.)

This God is then the one who most faithfully instantiates the character of being-as-relation, the truthfulness of communion as the essential character of primordial “brute” reality. Perhaps among a choir of other gods and gods-to-be, including us. Orthodox Christians should not cavil at the notion of gods-to-be, which after all is simply the theosis we claim as the goal of human life.

There is scope here for the Whiteheadian view of the emergence and enrichment of beings through their evolutionary journey, and also for the fundamental Mormon optimism about embodiment as an exaltation rather than the consequence of a fall, which frankly, as I try it on and look at the world through that lens, feels like I am being released from prison or waking from a nightmare.

“Let our use of books and learning in every case mirror the ‘icon’ of the honeybee. For such does not visit every flower in the same manner, neither does the honeybee attempt to fly off bearing the burden of the entire flower. Rather, once it derives that which is needful from the flower, it leaves the rest behind and takes flight.

“So, too, if we are wise, once we derive from learning what resonates with truth, we too shall leave the rest behind and take flight. For is it not so that when we take a rose we avoid the thorns? So, too, let us approach diverse writings, harvesting the fruits that they offer for our objectives, while protecting ourselves from the damaging elements that may lie within them. In all our studies, let us take with us and take within us only what builds us up, and what leads us in the fulfillment of our mission.”

St Basil the Great

And PS — bees are pretty enthusiastic. Be the bee.

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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!

Download the playlist info here.

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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