Jesus came to put his heart into humanity.

I was thinking this as I was wrestling again, as so often, with theodicy, with the problem of evil. Our little has cavities for reasons we can’t understand — good diet, good oral hygiene, but something else is going on, and at the coming appointment she’ll need novocaine, an initiation I’d devoutly wished I could spare her for a long time. We’re figuring it out — mouth breathing is my current suspicion — but it’s so painful to watch a child suffer.

I’m feeling so intensely the sorrow and weight of that pain. And that leads me to the reflection that essentially this is the pain, the sorrow, the compassion that God feels for all his creatures and for the world. And if that’s the case, then the question of theodicy rises again: if God feels this pain, why does it exist? How can it exist?

In a way the question of theodicy is like a blank wall. There are just no solutions to it that are finally satisfying. Whatever the truth is, coming to know that truth will be a superhuman “raising of our level” of spiritual comprehension. An ant crawling over the pages of a book will perceive the letters as mounds of ink; it’s of course utterly incapable of grasping the meaning of the printed words. If an ant could somehow be raised to the knowledge of human language, that’s what it would be for us in terms of understanding the mystery of evil. Or perhaps it’s more that a veil needs to be lifted from our eyes. And somehow, for now, our dwelling in this mystery is necessary to the unfoldment of a design that otherwise couldn’t be realized. Believing that this is so is just an existential necessity for me.

The thought came to me that the Lord’s purpose, his grand design perhaps, is to put his heart in the midst of humanity. To make humanity’s heart his heart. That heart that feels such impossible love for every creature, of which I have a pale reflection in the love and agony of heart that I feel for my own children. That’s the heart that God wants to awaken in humanity; that’s the heart that he is awakening in humanity through and in the heart of Jesus. Because the heart of Jesus represents the coming of the Father’s heart into the human totality.

I thought of the prophetic vision and promise that our heart of stone would be taken away, and a heart of flesh would be given to us. Of course I’ve always interpreted that verse in a spiritual way, as indicative of a promise of my own personal spiritual transformation. But now I’m seeing it in a human sense, in the sense of the entire human race — or even a cosmic sense, in the sense of creation itself, through the Incarnation.

The story of the Incarnation is, “The heart of divine love comes to be the heart of creation.” This then is the human vocation, as Adam is the one who names the creatures. This is the regal vocation of humanity, this human appropriation of the divine heart, the heart of Jesus — and through that, of the Father’s heart.

This is the infinite content of the easy platitude that “love is everything.” This is why what matters in the end for us as persons living our lives on earth is not this or that achievement; the achievements are dust, doomed to be lost in the cosmos. What’s the divine contribution of any genuine achievement? It’s the contribution towards the reception of the heart of Jesus as the world’s heart.

As persons in communion with one another and with the world, we have a dual vocation. One, to receive the heart of Jesus as our own heart: essentially to let our heart of stone be alchemized into the heart of flesh, personally. And two, through our communion with the created world, to allow, to assist, to participate in the diffusion of that alchemy throughout creation and among all created things — even in the crucible of the doubt and fear that are ours because of the tragic nature of the world.

Even in the midst of that crucible we can hold fast to our vocation in both its dimensions. One, to allow the Lord’s heart to alchemize our own heart, and two, thereby to allow our alchemized heart, to whatever degree it is alchemized, to whatever degree it has become the heart of Jesus — to allow it to have the influence that it will have on creation as a result of the Lord’s design.

This is the design of love and the design of freedom. In order for this process to actually occur, human persons require freedom — and we can only have freedom in a state of relative ignorance, in a state where God’s reality is not obvious with the overwhelming obviousness that it would have if we saw and understood everything clearly. Therefore we live in the shadow of doubt and fear, as a confirmation of and foundation for the gift of freedom.

We are invited, in the midst of doubt and fear and suffering, to discover faith. And to discover (in the same gesture?) our own roots, to draw out of our soul what’s really there. As if, again, God says, “I’m placing you in this crucible of earthly life so that you can freely discover who you are, so that you can freely decide to allow my heart to contact you, to transform your own heart.”

Maybe this is a species of the “vale of soul-making” theodicy. As an idea, it seems flat; but again, given the nature of the case, given the nature of what that account actually points towards in itself, it’s inevitable that it will seem flat, unless and until we receive it by faith.

We have to exercise this great — in a way, terrifying — freedom, in our discovery of love. This discovery is both our own accomplishment and completely the gift of the Lord who comes to offer us his heart, not just in the sense of loving us, but offering to make his heart our heart. This also is why the coming of his heart, the offering of his heart in this decisive way in his life, entails Gethsemane and the Cross. This is the only way that his heart could be brought into contact with the depths of the human condition.

This contact is necessary: “what is not assumed is not healed.” The most intimate contact is necessary. This is the hunger of Eros, above all: Eros is the desire for transforming contact. Every erotic impulse manifests the desire for transforming contact, the desire both to be transformed oneself, and to participate in the transformation of the beloved. This is the Eros that God feels for all of creation, and in a unique way for human persons. Yes, there is a hierarchy of loves: and the summit of the love of God reveals itself in the Incarnation, in the Cross, in the Harrowing of Hell, and in the Resurrection.

AI Statement: I am a flesh-and-blood human being; I wrote every word of this myself and I meant all of it.

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It may not be obvious to many of my readers that I’m an Orthodox Christian, and those who know may wonder why I’m still an Orthodox Christian. In these cris de coeur I have said bluntly that I am not sure I believe the Nicene Creed as a set of metaphysical propositions; that the traditional asceticism counseled by the Church as the bedrock of spiritual life is repugnant to me; that I am seeking some way to re-inhabit the animist cosmos of my pagan ancestors; that I am a radical ecumenist skeptical of evangelism as a call to abandon non-Orthodox or non-Christian spiritual patrimonies; and that I have an acid disdain for Orthodox rigorists and polemicists. I have waxed lyrical about visions of Aphrodite and questioned the absolute normativity of the Church’s teachings on human sexuality. I write regularly and appreciatively about theologians and philosophers not just beyond my own tradition but far beyond it; I listen to them earnestly. So what am I doing still in the communion of the Orthodox Church?

The first simple answer is “Jesus.” Jesus has so far survived all of my honesty and all of my questioning. Jesus has persisted in reminding me that there is a holy of holies within the faith, interior to all the superstructure of dogma and praxis built up over the centuries. I have never visited Jerusalem, but I have the impression of the holy sites of Christian history and imagination there as archetypes of organic growth: shrines built on shrines built on ruined shrines; contentious hierophants on the same holy ground in an uneasy peace that occasionally breaks out into a brawl (a description that could serve as a summary of exoteric Christian history); labyrinthine streets and passages and walls and tunnels leading, by paths traveled only in trust of the pilgrims who have gone before, to the earth heart tomb-cave of the Resurrection. All are accidents of history pointing somehow, impossibly, to the essential that is not an accident. What is true of human history, with all its sin and error, is true of the Church, with all its sin and error.

And so it is all bound together: the beautiful agony of the wrack and ruin of human and cosmic history; the witch-light of the moth-like stars that I follow through hollow lands and hilly lands; and this Jesus, merciful and ruthless teacher, faithful companion and lone-wolf cosmic troubadour; water-walker, water-giver, wine-maker, storm-calmer, Spirit-breather; judge, redeemer, crucified, risen; who transfixes my heart and my imagination, before whom I kneel and say de profundis, as in that moment my mind bows down with me, “My Lord and my God.”

Wisdom is youth that has met the tragedy of life. Fortunate as I am, I know little enough of tragedy, and thus unfortunately, I have little enough of wisdom; but my own drop of tragedy is enough for me to taste the ocean of it. My youthful innocence and joy are an Eden from which I am blocked by an angel with a flaming sword.

But what does the wisdom gained say? She tells me what is most precious: living souls, the bodied persons who surround me; beauty, aesthetic and moral and sensual, the desire of it and the pursuit of it and the veneration of it and the service of it; and freedom — all terrible brightnesses but in that very blinding excess, undeniable, even as all lie under the sign of death. And so the other precious gift or curse — heartbreaking, unbearable — is the cry of desolation from the cross of crucified humanity. Where else but in the story of Jesus is all of this presented to me as the model and matrix, where else is it all laid before me with the exhortation to choose life? The story is incomparable; everything is here.

And what, then, does wisdom counsel me to do? To give my heart to serve what is most precious, to shed blood in the hope of receiving the Spirit, to wait without idols, as Auden says. This is not a rational enterprise. This is not a rule of life. This is neither a goal nor an objective. If there is obedience in it, the obedience — the “listening,” the “hearkening,” etymologically — is finally to the Lord, but to the Lord whose voice I find to be, when I listen deeply enough, the very voice of my own heart. Deep calleth unto deep at the voice of Thy cataracts.

Yes, then, Jesus: but why Orthodox Christianity?

The “blinding excesses” of God’s wisdom, in God’s wisdom (as faith might testify), “all lie under the sign of death.” St John’s Gospel says it in the prologue: τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.” The verse is ambivalent. Are we to rejoice that the light remains shining — or are we to lament that though it endures and shines, it has not dispelled the darkness?

What, indeed, is the tenor of our whole life as our hearts bow before the Lord? Is it joy, or is it lamentation? Is it ecstasy, or is it repentance? Is Christian life a feast or a fast, askesis or eucharistia? Should we, may we, can we “be of good cheer” in the face of a world that gathers in a mob around Jesus and shouts, “Crucify him, crucify him”? Because after all, he is crucified every day, to this day.

This drama is not located comfortably outside of me, situated for leisurely, detached contemplation — it is a drama that unfolds within me, where I know within myself both the light that cannot be extinguished and the darkness it cannot dispel. I know it both in my failure and in my doubt, and it haunts me in the midst of my joy. I know it in my inability to reconcile belief and unbelief: a belief, or perhaps a hunger for belief, that will not die, and an unbelief that will not let belief live. O Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!

This is small-c catholic Christianity, κατά ὅλου, “according to the whole.” Fundamentally it is the Christianity that lives within the tension of light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, sin and virtue, failure and victory, earth and heaven — as we also live in this tension, we in whom prayer and the life that is prayer become, as a consequence, drops of blood, as they did for the Lord in Gethsemane. The Didache, the oldest record of Christian discipline outside the New Testament, instructs us to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily, in which we educate and concentrate our hearts to feel and to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is a petition, the summit of all petitions — not a proclamation, not a metaphysical proposition.

This is therefore the life of the Church. The impulse for that life to be “pure,” to be “according to our thought,” κατά διανοίας, rather than “according to the whole,” κατά ὅλου, is an impulse to escape Gethsemane and Golgotha, it is an impulse to refuse the cup that the Lord — showing us, opening to us, our way — accepted. The Church is not pure, not infallible, not merely divine. The Church is the heart of each of us writ large across the ambivalence of history, sketched in chiaroscuro. Here, without seeking to impose my mind on it, I find that surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

Above all, I have found the Orthodox Church to be the ecclesial body where this truth is accepted and lived with the fewest institutional and doctrinal scars of rebellion. If the Orthodox Church is a garden, we are the gardeners who have learned best from Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese apostle of “do-nothing farming,” agricultural wu wei. We have let it be messy, as it wishes to be. We have both ferociously defined it, and defined that it cannot be defined. We have insisted on hierarchical strictness, and undercut the hierarchy with the illimitably hospitable expanse of oikonomia, “household management.” We have established rigorous structures to administer the Mysteries, and accorded quiet finality to the witness and judgment of charismatic elders and fools.

This is why it is so superficially fruitless and infuriating when we participate in ecumenical dialogue. The self-selected cadre of polemicists can only ever represent one shade of the chiaroscuro, and it’s one we permit to exist, as we permit all the shades to exist.

This is also why visitors and enquirers and transient converts can leave, exasperated by some strand of aesthetics, or theology, or praxis that they find unsatisfying and problematic. Yes, those strands are there, they are like weeds, but we welcome the weeds. Our garden is supremely unkempt. But you should really stay long enough to taste the wine. If you fall asleep beside the fire in our temple that is open to the sky, it may be an uncomfortable night. But when you wake with an aching back, and turn over to look up, you might see a shooting star reflected in the dark waters of your heart, and your life will never be the same.

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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…

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

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

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Minerals as Symbols

Stone signifies first and foremost Christ Himself. This was said already by the prophets. The fourth kingdom that King Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream, in the form of an idol of iron…

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

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

Christianity addresses the person. It does not address the nation, for there is no hypostatic, self-subs…

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Earth, Sun, and Stars As Symbols

1. It is said: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” By “heaven” is understood the realm of spiritual realities, invisible and bodiless. By “earth” is understo…

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Reality and Its Symbols

1. While a child is learning the alphabet, letters themselves are for him a kind of idol. Letters are, for him, material reality. As he spells, the child fixes all his attention o…

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INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

A Letter to Students of Theology About Christian Philosophy

Many times you have asked me whether Christianity has its own philosophy or not. In the history of philosophy you were t…

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From Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Destiny of Man. Translated by Natalie Duddington. London: G. Bles, The Centenary Press, 1937. Part II:III:3, pp 182—196

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I have the sense that my reflections are sometimes a bit too autobiographical, but I also think that they might reach people for whom they’ll resonate, and who might find them helpful. I promise that there will be some conclusions at the end of the wandering. Also, this whole piece is too long, and I’m sorry.

Christ found me in the depths of despair after the death of my father almost 40 years ago. I may still always be waiting for a “road to Damascus” moment, but in retrospect, I actually had one. Then an unbeliever — a young man with a typical trajectory for modern adolescent seekers that had taken me through Crowley, psychedelics, Zen Buddhism, Be Here Now, and a vague neopaganism — I bent my head in solitude and cried and prayed to the Unknown God: “I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t help me, I’ll die.” And, typically in my experience of such prayer, the darkness did not lift immediately, but it did lift; and never again, in the throes of all life’s tragedies thus far, have I ever found myself in a like pit of darkness (though I have come close).

The way forward that presented itself was faith in God, in the One God of the world’s personalist Semitic monotheisms. Of course, raised in the fading cultural ambience of Christian faith in middle-class 1970s America, a monotheism was my first resort for serious religion once it was a matter of existential survival and not just youthful spiritual flânerie. Serendipity brought me first to Islam, but I got to Christianity eventually, and soon to a living ancient form of it, Orthodoxy. (I never gave Catholicism a fair shake at that time, but later I remedied that oversight.)

However, I was dogged at every step by problems with the philosophical theism that seemed to comprise one essential strand of Orthodox (and broadly, mainstream classical Christian) tradition. This tradition presented me with two distinct worlds or themes, which, though it gave them as inseparably linked, or even as merely different expressions of the same truth, I could never reconcile without a tension so great that it seemed to strain my mind and my soul to the breaking point. These worlds were, on the one hand, the world of affective faith and simple-hearted religious belief, the spiritual world especially of Russia’s unlettered ancient startsi, or elders, the beautiful-souled, wilderness-dwelling exemplars of repentance, humility, and silence; and on the other hand, the world of philosophical reflection on and distillation of that world into philosophically shaped dogmatic assertions about the metaphysical truths underlying it. (The Nicene Creed that we Orthodox sing every Sunday is one such distillation, though Orthodox hymnography in general is so freighted with theology that it’s a bit overwhelming sometimes.)

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Last night my wife came to me upset after having put our little to bed; she’d had an experience that I won’t describe in detail, but suffice it to say that it was eerie. As we talked it over, some th…

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Asking someone to convert, to change his religion, is akin to asking someone to leave his marriage, or to emigrate from his home …

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