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.

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.”

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.

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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Minerals as Symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plants as Symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter One: What Is Man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man Created in the Image of God

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

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

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

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

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

From Image to Likeness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body, Soul, Esprit — or Pneuma

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

The Noûs or Heart-Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ontological Unity of All Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam is Created Male and Female

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

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

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

Read Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But natural life is life in God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 understood the ensemble of symbols of those realities, perceptible and bodily. The earth is therefore a symbolic image of heaven.

2. All physical forces in the earth — such as attraction and repulsion, heat, electricity, radiation, and the rest — are symbols of spiritual powers in the heavenly kingdom. In themselves these forces would neither be forces nor even be able to exist if there were not behind them incomparably greater, original, spiritual powers. And if above the physical forces there were no might and control of rational, eternal powers, they would grow feeble, fall into confusion, and turn the whole world into chaos. As it is written of God and His creatures: “When Thou turnest away Thy face, they shall be troubled. Thou wilt take their spirit, and they shall cease; and unto their dust shall they return” (Psalm 103).

3. The sun is a symbol of God Himself. Saint Gregory the Theologian writes: “What the sun is for the senses, God is for the spirit.” Just as the sun shines and by its light illumines and warms all living beings on earth, so God illumines all souls with His mind and warms them with His love. Without the sun — death to bodies; without God — death to souls. Moses said to the people of Israel: “See, I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life, that you may live” (Deut. 30:19). That is: know God, the one living and unseen God, and worship Him alone; and do not worship visible symbols as gods, lest you become an idolater. The former is life; the latter, death.

4. “For the Lord God is a sun and a shield” to the righteous, says the God-inspired prophet (Ps. 84:11). (This expression does not appear in all translations.) Of course, the prophet has in mind God as the eternal light, the eternal luminary of truth, righteousness, and love. The prophet Malachi calls God the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2; 2 Pet. 1:19). The seer John relates in his Revelation how he saw the city of the heavenly King, the Jerusalem on high, and says: “And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illumines it.” And elsewhere, describing the glory of the righteous, he says: “And there shall be no night there; and they have no need of lamp-light nor of sunlight, for the Lord God will illumine them” (Rev. 21:23; 22:5).

5. But someone may object: did not Christ call all the righteous “suns,” and is not the sun therefore a symbol of all the righteous? Truly the Lord said: “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (St Matt. 13:43) — and more strongly and beautifully than this visible, physical sun. That is, they will shine in likeness to God, the Sun of righteousness. But the light with which they will be clothed and shine will not be from themselves but from God, just as the stars have their light from the sun. Of this the Apostle Paul speaks clearly: “One glory is of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars” (1 Cor. 15:41).

6. The prophet Daniel says of the righteous that they “shall shine like the stars forever and ever” (Dan. 12:3). And Symeon Metaphrastes likens the saints to stars which, set in the firmament of heaven, illumine the whole universe. Many other great spiritual writers have always regarded the stars as symbols of angels, of the righteous, and of God’s friends, while they regarded the sun as the symbol of the King Himself and God Most High.

7. Thus we Christians understand the earth, the sun, and the stars as symbols of spiritual reality, and by no means as reality itself. The pagans, ancient and modern, have looked and still look upon these cosmic bodies as reality itself. Reality — and immediately worship! Hence pagans of every age fell into the dark delusion of worshiping those creatures of the Creator as deities. The Greeks worshiped the earth under the name Ge, and the sun under the name Apollo. In Egypt the sun-god was called Osiris and the moon Isis. The moon was especially worshiped in Babylon, Assyria, and Arabia under the name Astarte. The Persians, worshipers of fire, bowed down to the stars as deities.

8. The delusion of idolaters, ancient and modern, arose from this: it was not their spirit that led their eyes, but the reverse — the eyes led the spirit. The spirit, like a blind man, stumbled after the sensory sight and bowed down to what the eyes proclaimed to it as reality, as divinity. The Savior had to come to strengthen the enfeebled spirit and give it precedence over the eyes and over matter. And the Savior did come among men and proclaimed the eternal truth: “God is Spirit” (St John 4:24). For those who heard and received this, the scales fell from their spiritual sight — as from the blinded Saul — and they suddenly began to see and behold. They saw and understood that all the things in the world which they had hitherto worshiped as gods, as truth and reality, were nothing other than parables about the one, eternal, living God.

The Knowledge of Truth

Since God is Spirit, all truth must be spiritual. For God and truth are one and the same.

When we speak of sensible objects, of their properties and relations, and then say: “this or that is true,” we do not mean truth in the absolute and eternal sense, but in a relative and practical sense. For in the absolute sense, only God is the eternal and inviolable Truth.

Does this mean that created nature is a lie? God forbid! But it can present itself as a lie to two types of people: to the European materialist and to the Indian nihilist. (There are two kinds of nihilists: political and philosophical. Here the philosophical nihilist is meant.) When the materialist says: “This nature which we see and perceive, with the whole sum of its perceptible properties and actions, constitutes in and of itself the whole truth, the whole reality — everything that can exist at all,” then nature truly appears as a lie. Likewise nature appears as a lie, through and through, to the spirit of the nihilist when he confesses and says: “This nature, with all its properties and actions, is a deception, a dream, a nothing.”

Thus both he who asserts that the sensible nature is sheer truth, and he who says that sensible nature is a lie, a dream, and an illusion — both utter an equal untruth.

Nature is a symbol of truth. The physical world is the visible expression of the invisible spiritual world. The first is the symbol; the second is the meaning of the symbol — spirit and reality.

When the Christian poet, Saint John of Damascus, says: “Truly, all is vanity;
life is a shadow and a dream,” he does not think in the least as a Buddhist nihilist. He looks with visionary spirit toward the real and eternal life, in comparison with which bodily life on earth is indeed like shadow and dream. He calls “vanity” everything that unspiritual people pursue in this world in search of truth and happiness. The world in itself is not a deception, for its Creator is the true God. From the fountain of truth how could a lie flow, when the fountain itself is truth? But the world can appear deceptive to one who seeks in it what it neither has nor is — like trying to catch the moon in the water.

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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 on the letters and with all his mind thinks only of the letters. When he reads a word, letter by letter, you ask him what he has read, and he does not know. And he is puzzled why you are asking him that. He has no inkling of the meaning of the letters he has read. The shape, size, and color of the written letters—this alone has made an impression on his soul; and this is all he currently knows about letters. Letters are for him material reality, just as idols are for an idolater. Hence both the primer-pupil and the idolater look upon their idols with fear and reverence.

2. Many adults are similar to primer-pupils, and even many who call themselves philosophers and scientists. With great labor and sweat they barely attain to spelling out the letters of nature, but never to their sense and meaning. A literate person reads letters without thinking about the letters; he reads catching quickly their meaning. A teacher must toil long to teach a pupil to “read for meaning.” What holds true regarding a book holds true regarding nature as well. Worshipers of nature are the same as worshipers of letters. Worshipers of nature are adults, but undergrown children. If you ask them what things and events signify, they look at you just as puzzled as a primer-pupil asked about the meaning of what he has read.

3. Thus one may say: all idol-worshipers are illiterate, and only worshipers of the Spirit are literate. For the former, created things in nature represent a material reality, expressed in their forms, sizes, colors, and various functions and relations. For the latter, creatures are symbols, and spiritual reality is the meaning, the life, and the justification for the existence of those symbols.

4. Saint Symeon the New Theologian speaks wonderfully about this: “He who is enlightened by the Holy Spirit, who makes all things new, acquires new eyes and new ears, and no longer looks simply as a man, that is, sensibly at the sensible, but as standing above man he contemplates sensible and bodily things spiritually, as symbols of invisible things” (Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse 65). Such a one is indeed spiritually literate. He does not spell out the letters of nature like a beginner in literacy, like a primer-pupil, but goes after the meaning, grasps the meaning, and explains the meaning.

5. Saint Maximus the Confessor expresses himself similarly, saying: “The whole intelligible (spiritual) world is presented mystically in symbolic images in the sensible world for those who have eyes to see; and the whole sensible world is contained in the intelligible world.” (Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy, ch. 2). This is seen by those who have eyes to see — that is, who are literate and know how to read for meaning; in other words, whose spiritual sight is opened so that they can behold spiritually by the spirit, and not only bodily with bodily eyes.

6. The Apostle Paul speaks of this in these words: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). And again: “Now we see through a glass, in a riddle, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). And again, yet more expressly: “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are for a time, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).

7. From this it is clear that whoever reads nature without the Spirit and without meaning is reading death, seeing death, receiving death. And whoever regards visible nature as material reality and not as a riddle in the mirror of the spirit sees no more than the primer-pupil who has not advanced beyond spelling letters. And whoever looks at what is seen by the eyes as something eternal — as some philosophers did, from the ancient Greek naturalists down to their most recent Teutonic-Latin like-minded followers — is truly an illiterate idol-worshiper whose entire knowledge lies in spelling out and adoring senseless letters. Eternity belongs to spiritual reality, and to time belong the symbols of that reality.

8. The Old-Testament tabernacle, which the God-wise craftsman Bezalel made according to the pattern God showed Moses on Sinai, served “as a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Heb. 8:5). But the tabernacle vanished with the coming of Christ, just as letters pass from view when their meaning is understood. When reality appeared, the symbol of that reality disappeared. When the Lord came, He extended the symbolism of spiritual reality to the whole universe. Not only the tabernacle, which served, but the whole universe represents the copy and shadow of heavenly things.

9. Christ, so to speak, took up the symbols of nature with both hands to explain the spiritual reality He was revealing to the world. When multitudes gathered around Him, He told them many things in parables. The Slavic word “priča,” or the Greek “parabole,” denotes some dramatic action, or an ordinary event, or the relation of things to a person, but in such a way that it indeed has an evident sensible meaning, while its true and primary meaning is found only in the realm of spiritual realities — in the spiritual kingdom. “Therefore I speak to them in parables,” said the Lord, “because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” Why so? “For the heart of this people has grown dull” (Matt. 13:11–15). A “fattened” (dull) heart signifies the closing and blinding of the spiritual sight that is in the heart. And that spiritual sight, which is in the heart, embraces all that scholars vaguely call the subconscious, intuition, etc.—and more besides.

10. “To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” Thus Christ spoke to His closer disciples. By whom was it given to them? By Him Himself. He removed from their hearts the dark accretions, and their spiritual sight was opened so that they could behold spiritual realities directly — like Adam before the fall — without parables and symbols. For sinless Adam in Paradise was perfectly literate in reading the sense and meaning of all created beings and things. Because of this Adam was able to give to every creature a name that corresponded to the spiritual essence or meaning that the creature symbolically represented. For the Creator did not name the animals, but brought them to Adam to see what he would call each one. And Adam did not err but rightly gave a name to every beast and to every bird of the air and to every animal of the field (Gen. 2:19–25).

11. To materialistic thinkers — men of dulled hearts — that seems a trifling matter: giving names to animals. Of course, it is quite a small and insignificant thing if one assumes that Adam gave names to the animals casually and senselessly, the way materialists now give names to their horses and dogs—more mock-naming than naming. But Adam did not do this casually and senselessly; he did it with a deep and accurate vision of the spiritual reality that the particular animals represented. That work, infinitely difficult for a sinner, Adam accomplished both quickly and easily. He easily read all the symbols of reality because it had been given him to know realities even without symbols—to see them with a crystal-clear heart in the Creator and through the Creator. This visionary knowing, this penetration and realization, the Savior renewed in His intimate disciples. He renewed it, but not quickly and all at once; rather slowly and gradually—through long instruction and purification, and finally by enlightenment from the Holy Spirit of God.

12. That beholding of reality without parables, without parabolai, which Adam had and lost and which the apostles, having lost, received again, is intended for all of us Christians. And we would all possess that marvelous Adamic and apostolic capacity—that sense for the immediate perception of truth—had we, after baptism, remained ungnawed and un-darkened by sin. But every sin turns our gaze down from heaven to earth and from the Creator to the abyss. After every sin we hide from God, just as Adam, having sinned, hid himself among the trees in Paradise (Gen. 3:8). And we hide and keep hiding, sinning and sinning, until at last external nature, our involuntary accomplice, becomes our god in place of God — that is, until truth completely vanishes from before our sight and the symbols of truth replace the whole truth, the whole reality. Or, in other words: until the sight of the heart becomes completely blind and we give ourselves over entirely to the animal sensory sight to lead us. And then it happens with us as it is said: the blind lead the blind.

13. Christ also said: “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63). Not only man’s flesh, but no flesh in the universe profits anything by itself. It can be of some use in this life only if the spirit employs it as its instrument, as its symbol. Spirit is reality; body is the symbol of spirit. The king is the king, and the royal arms are the royal arms. One would be irrational who denied the being of the king while acknowledging the royal arms as the king. Alas, such pitiable souls exist even in our Christian epoch, in our own days. It is as though we were living in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar so many thousands of days and nights before Christ, and not in the time of baptized kings twenty-five centuries after the idol-worshiper Nebuchadnezzar! But you, Christians, must not pay heed to the illiterate idolaters of our time, whether they wear a royal crown or an academic gown. You must be conscious that truth has been revealed to you, and that you know it. But — strive unceasingly, precisely, to know it.

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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 taught that the following can be called Christian philosophers: Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, James, Solovyov, and others.
You have heard how Roman scholasticism adopted Aristotle as its official philosopher, even though the Western teacher Tertullian said: “Philosophers are the patriarchs of heresies.” Yet you were troubled by the great discord among these philosophers on essential questions. How could all of them be called Christian philosophers when they do not share the same teaching about God, about the soul, about nature? “That you all say the same thing,” the Apostle commands, “and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Cor. 1:10). You know that Christian revelation is without a single error, not even so much as a jot. How then would it be possible for a philosophy that proceeds from that faith to be plural rather than singular — not one but many? And with such disagreements and contradictions in their assertions!

To your question I have answered that Christianity has its own distinctive, organic and systematic understanding of life and the world, but it is different from all human philosophies. And that is all. Still, I promised you that sooner or later I would set forth this Christian understanding more fully. By now offering this little book to your attention, I am keeping my promise. How well — let the Church judge. This is not my personal philosophy — God forbid — but, I believe, the understanding that the universal Orthodox Church has held from its beginning until today. I will tell you what in this work is mine: that all my best life-experience agrees with what the luminaries of our Church have said and written. What I have received and made my own, that is what I hand on to you.

An English historian (Gibbon), writing about imperial Rome, says that in those times religion was regarded by the people as true, by the philosophers as false, and by the statesmen as useful. Even today in baptized Europe one can hear such statements. The saying is often repeated: religion is the philosophy of simple folk! But we ask: which religion? That English historian is speaking of the pagan, idolatrous religion. If that is what is meant by “religion,” then it is madness to call Christianity a religion. “What fellowship has Christ with Belial?” Christianity is not a religion like other human religions, by no means; rather, Christianity is the heavenly revelation of truth, the Good News to the human race, not from man or angel, but from God the Creator Himself. Christ said: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Free from what? Precisely from religions, from human philosophies, from self-appointed worldviews, from the tyranny of all the worldly delusions that oppose the Truth, whatever their name and whatever platter they are served on. In the same sense the great Apostle says: “Brothers, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). For truth is one, while human opinions are many. Truth is always the same and always consistent with itself. Christ’s truth has no parallel in any system that has arisen from the private reason of an individual man. But I say this only in passing, and only to strengthen you in the conviction that Christianity is neither one of the religions nor one of the philosophies, but an entirely distinct, original, and perfect organism of divine living truth — light-bearing and salvation-bringing. And also so that you may know with what conviction I wrote what I dedicate to you, the future pastors and standard-bearers of the Church of Christ.

I have entitled this composition Symbols and Signals because I could not find words in the Serbian language with exactly the same meaning. Images and Parables could only partly express what is conveyed by the classical terms Symbols and Signals.

This work is neither exhaustive nor final. It is only a signpost — yet, I believe, a reliable one — that can be of use to you in your own observation and reading of the wonders of God’s world. Occupied with diocesan duties, I scarcely found the time to write even this much. But I place my hope in you who will understand and make these written words your own: that in due time you will labor to develop and present this subject more fully, to the glory of God and for the benefit of the Christian people.

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I read this book on retreat before my ordination and have re-read it many times over the years. It is long out of print, and very difficult to find, but God rewards the perseverent seeker.

Semyon Frank was a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy, reared in Judaism by his pious grandfather, who was a synagogue cantor; his earliest childhood religious experience was steeped in traditional Judaism. He followed the intellectual path of many Russians in the early 20th century, beginning as a political radical, seeing the flaws in Marxism and materialism, embracing idealist philosophy, and finally entering the Church. He was exiled to the west on the “Philosphers’ Ship” in 1922, which carried many other Orthodox luminaries including Fr Sergius Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev. Taking up residence in Paris, he then fled the capital during the Nazi occupation and lived in hiding in the south of France until the end of the war. Thus his life followed the tragic path of so many great Russian religious figures of his era, and his work, in its more heartfelt expression, is directed to locating the living heart of a gracious, life-giving reality in the depths of human experience — a reality that can be relied upon in any state of outward suffering and oppression. The book from which this passage is taken is in a sense an irenic, philosophical catechism of an “Orthodoxy of the heart.”

Historian Nikolai Lossky regards him as the greatest Russian metaphysician of the 20th century. Frank once commented that “in a sense, his greatest religious teacher” was Nicolas of Cusa — a comment that underlines his profoundly warm ecumenical spirit. He is another exemplar of an “open Orthodoxy,” a different stream from the rigorist neopatristic synthesis of figures like Fr Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky and their successors.

Once we get rid of the usual, popular use of words and ideas connected with them, we become aware that dogmas — in the only sense that is important for our religious life — are not incomprehensible formulae or theoretical arguments but our actual religious convictions. At moments of greatest spiritual tension — for instance, at the time of bitter trials or in the face of death — we know that for a truthful and responsible religious mind the important thing is not the actual wording of the creed or even agreement with its meaning; the only thing that really matters is that which we know, experience, and inwardly confess as our own religious convictions, as truths revealed to the heart. The test of such living dogmas is their significance as practical guides in life. Our will may be so weak and sinful, so dominated by sensuous ideas and strivings that we by no means always live, feel and act in accordance with those convictions, but they still remain the criterion which we apply to ourselves in judging our life and conduct or trying to improve it. It is not a question of a mere theoretical distinction between truth and error, but of an incomparably more vital difference between right and wrong — between the light shining in our heart or the darkness in which it may be plunged.

Dogmas of faith refer to quite a different realm of being than do the theoretical judgments about the external world, or the practical precepts which enable us to find our bearings in it and to succeed in life. The truths of faith are truths of the heart, the fruit of heartfelt living experience, affirmed in spite of all “the intellect’s cold observations.” As contrasted with “the wisdom of this world” they appear as “foolishness,” but for the believer they possess an immanent inner self-evidence.

We must neither exaggerate nor belittle the significance of exact dogmatic knowledge. On the one hand faith is not thought, but experience of the heart, and in this sense it may be said that dogmas are not intellectual convictions, but convictions which determine our spiritual attitude as a whole and motivate our conduct. A man who is intellectually an unbeliever, but whose heart is aglow with love for his fellow creatures, who is forgetful of self and thirsting for goodness and righteousness, really believes — without being aware of it — that God is love and that one must lose one’s soul in order to save it, i.e. in fact confesses the fundamental dogma of the Christian faith. And if a so-called “believer” repeats the words of the creed with conviction, but is a harsh and heartless egoist, he is really an unbeliever, for in fact he rejects the Christian dogma; if all he can see and prize are earthly goods, he actually denies the existence of God and His Kingdom. Nietzsche has well said of such believers: “they say that they believe in God but in reality they believe only in the police.” A dogma is from its very nature a judgment of value, an affirmation of the value of something. Accordingly, the motives by which we are guided in our practical life show what dogma we really profess. I repeat, God judges not our thoughts, but our hearts. This is made abundantly clear by the Gospel story of the two sons, one of whom expressed obedience but did not carry out his father’s will, and the other expressed disobedience but in fact did his father’s bidding, and by Christ’s words that publicans and harlots will enter the kingdom of heaven before “the scribes and the pharisees,” i.e., before theologians, Bible scholars and intellectual confessors of faith.

We must not, however, fall into the opposite extreme and belittle the significance of understanding dogmas, i.e., of rendering ourselves a conscious account of the faith which is to guide us in life. In this domain as elsewhere knowledge is more useful than profession. And although on the one hand true spiritual wisdom (which finds expression in the living dogmatic consciousness) is opposed to the “wisdom of this world,” on the other it is the only firm foundation of true practical wisdom. The spiritual reality with its laws revealed to us in religious experience is in the last resort the only true determinant of human life as a whole.

Those who have no knowledge of it inevitably build their life “upon sand,” strive after phantoms, and are in danger of perishing. Strictly speaking, we can have no real knowledge of the human heart and, consequently, no sober understanding of life and of the world so long as we are blind to the structure of the spiritual reality, i.e. have no true “dogmas” of faith. Those who have no insight into the depths of reality are in a state of delusion with regard [even] to its material earthly surface.

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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

As I always observe when referring to Berdyaev, Orthodox readers who are taken aback by his perspective should remember that he was not one of those intellectuals far from the life of the Church — he was the spiritual son of a great confessor of the faith, St Alexei Mechev. On St Alexei, more here:

The ethics of creativeness presupposes that the task which confronts man is infinite and the world is not completed. But the tragedy is that the realization of every infinite task is finite. Creative imagination is of fundamental importance to the ethics of creativeness. Without imagination there can be no creative activity. Creativeness means in the first instance imagining something different, better and higher. Imagination calls up before us something better than the reality around us. Creativeness always rises above reality. Imagination plays this part not only in art and in myth making, but also in scientific discoveries, technical inventions and moral life, creating a better type of relations between human beings. There is such a thing as moral imagination which creates the image of a better life—it is absent only from legalistic ethics.1 No imagination is needed for automatically carrying out a law or norm. In moral life the power of creative imagination plays the part of talent. By the side of the self-contained moral world of laws and rules to which nothing can be added, man builds up in imagination a higher, free and beautiful world lying beyond ordinary good and evil. And this is what gives beauty to life. As a matter of fact life can never be determined solely by law — men always imagine for themselves a different and better life, freer and more beautiful, and they realize those images. The Kingdom of God is the image of a full, perfect, beautiful, free and divine life. Only law has nothing to do with imagination, or, rather, it is limited to imagining compliance with, or violation of, its behests. But the most perfect fulfilment of the law is not the same as the perfect life.

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Imagination may also be a source of evil — there may be bad imagination and phantasms. Evil thoughts are an instance of bad imagination. Crimes are conceived in imagination. But imagination also brings about a better life. A man devoid of imagination is incapable of creative moral activity and of building up a better life. The very conception of a better life towards which we ought to strive is the result of creative imagination. Those who have no imagination think that there is no better life at all and there ought not to be. All that exists for them is the unalterable order of existence in which unalterable law ought to be realized. Jacob Boehme ascribed enormous importance to imagination.2 The world is created by God through imagination, through images which arise in God in eternity and are both ideal and real. Modern psychologists and alienists also ascribe great importance to imagination, both good and bad. They have discovered that imagination plays an infinitely greater part in people’s lives than has been thought hitherto. Diseases and psychoses arise through imagination and can also be cured through it. The ethics of law forbids man to imagine a better world and a better life, it fetters him to the world as given and to the socially organized herd life, laying down taboos and prohibitions everywhere. But the ethics of creativeness breaks with the herd-existence and refuses to recognize legalistic prohibitions. To the law of the present life it opposes the image of a higher one.

The ethics of creativeness is the ethics of energy. Quantitative and qualitative increase in life’s intensity and creative energy is one of the criteria of moral valuation. The good is like radium in spiritual life and its essential quality is radio-activity, inexhaustible radiation. The conceptions of energy and that of norm come into conflict in ethics. The morality of law and the morality of creative energy are perpetually at war. If the good is understood as a real force, it cannot be conceived as the purpose of life. A perfect and absolute realization of the good would make it unnecessary and lead us completely to forget moral distinctions and valuations. The nature of the good and of moral life presupposes dualism and struggle, i.e. a painful and difficult path. Complete victory over the dualism and the struggle leads to the disappearance of what, on the way, we had called good and moral. To realize the good is to cancel it. The good is not at all the final end of life and of being. It is only a way, only a struggle on the way. The good must be conceived of in terms of energy and not of purpose. The thing that matters most is the realization of creative energy and not the ideal normative end. Man realizes the good not because he has set himself the purpose of doing so but because he is good or virtuous, i.e. because he has in him the creative energy of goodness. The source is important and not the goal. A man fights for a good cause not because it is his conscious purpose to do so, but because he has combative energy and the energy of goodness. Goodness and moral life are a path in which the starting point and the goal coincide—it is the emanation of creative energy.

But from the ontological and cosmological point of view, the final end of being must be thought of as beauty and not as goodness. Plato defined beauty as the magnificence of the good. Complete, perfect and harmonious being is beauty. Teleological ethics is normative and legalistic. It regards the good as the purpose of life, i.e. as a norm or a law which must be fulfilled. Teleological ethics always implies absence of moral imagination, for it conceives the end as a norm and not as an image, not as a product of the creative energy of life. Moral life must be determined not by a purpose or a norm but by imagery3 and the exercise of creative activity. Beauty is the image of creative energy radiating over the whole world and transforming it. Teleological ethics based upon the idea of the good as an absolute purpose is hostile to freedom, but creative ethics is based upon freedom. Beauty means a transfigured creation, the good means creation fettered by the law which denounces sin. The paradox is that the law fetters the energy of the good, it does not want the good to be interpreted as a force, for in that case the world would escape from the power of the law. To transcend the morality of law means to put infinite creative energy in the place of commands, prohibitions, and taboos.

Instinct plays a twofold part in man’s moral life — it dates back to ancient, primitive times, and ancient terror, slavishness, superstition, animalism and cruelty find expression in it — but at the same time it is reminiscent of paradise, of primitive freedom and power, of man’s ancient bond with the cosmos and the primeval force of life. Hence the attitude of the ethics of creativeness towards instincts is complex — it liberates instincts repressed by the moral law and at the same time struggles with them for the sake of a higher life. Instincts are repressed by the moral law, but since they have their origin in the social life of primitive clans, they themselves tend to become a law and to fetter the creative energy of life. Thus, for instance, the instinct of vengeance is, as has already been said, a heritage of the social life of antiquity and is connected with law. The ethics of creativeness liberates not all instincts but only creative ones, i.e. man’s creative energy hampered by the prohibitions of the law. It also struggles against instincts and strives to sublimate them.

Teleological ethics, which is identical with the ethics of law, metaphysically presupposes the power of time in the bad sense of the word. Time is determined either by the idea of purpose which has to be realized in the future or by the idea of creativeness which is to be carried out in the future. In the first case, man is in the power of the purpose and of the time created by it, in the second he is the master of time for he realizes in it his creative energy. The problem of time is bound up with the ethics of creativeness. Time and freedom are the fundamental and the most painful of metaphysical problems. Heidegger, in his Sein und Zeit, formulates it in a new way, but he connects time with care and not with creativeness. There can be no doubt, however, that creativeness is connected with time. It is usually said that creativeness needs the perspective of the future and presupposes changes that take place in time. In truth, it would be more correct to say that movement, change, creativeness give rise to time. Thus we see that time has a double nature. It is the source both of hope and of pain and torture. The charm of the future is connected with the fact that the future may be changed and to some extent depends upon ourselves. But to the past we can do nothing, we can only remember it with reverence and gratitude or with remorse and indignation. The future may bring with it the realization of our desires, hopes and dreams. But it also inspires us with terror. We are tortured with anxiety about the unknown future. Thus the part of time which we call the future and regard as dependent upon our own activity may be determined in two ways. It may be determined by duty, by painful anxiety and a command to realize a set purpose, or by our creative energy, by a constructive vital impulse through which new values are coined. In the first case time oppresses us, we are in its power. The loftiest purpose projected into the future enslaves us, becomes external to us and makes us anxious. Anxiety is called forth not only by the lower material needs but also by the higher ideal ends. In the second case, when we are determined by the free creative energy, by our free vital force, we regard the future as immanent in us and are its masters. In time everything appears as already determined and necessary, and in our feeling of the future we anticipate this determinateness — events to come appear sometimes to us as an impending fate. But a free creative act is not dominated by time, for it is not determined in any way — it springs from the depths of being, which are not subject to time, and belongs to a different order of existence. It is only later that everything comes to appear as determined in time. The task of the ethics of creativeness is to make the perspective of life independent of the fatal march of time, of the future which terrifies and torments us. The creative act is an escape from time, it is performed in the realm of freedom and not of necessity. It is by its very nature opposed to anxiety which makes time so terrible. And if the whole of the human life could be one continuous creative act, there would be no more time — there would be no future as a part of time — there would be movement out of time, in non-temporal reality. There would be no determination, no necessity, no binding laws. There would be the life of the spirit. In Heidegger reality subject to time is a fallen reality, though he does not make clear what was its state before the Fall. It is the realm of the “herd man.” It is connected with care for the future and anxiety. But Christ teaches us not to care about the future. “Enough for the day is the evil thereof.” This is an escape from the power of time, from the nightmare of the future born of anxiety.

The future may or may not bring with it disappointment, suffering and misfortune. But certainly, and to everyone, it brings death. And fear of the future, natural to everyone, is in the first place fear of impending death. Death is determined for everyone in this world, it is our fate. But man’s free and creative spirit rises against this slavery to death and fate. It has another vista of life, springing from freedom and creativeness. In and through Christ the fate of death is cancelled, although empirically every man dies. Our attitude to the future which ends for us in death is false because, being divided in ourselves, we analyse it and think of it as determined. But future is unknowable and cannot be subjected to analysis. Only prophecy is possible with regard to it, and the mystery of prophecy lies precisely in the fact that it has nothing to do with determinations and is not knowledge within the categories of necessity. For a free creative act there exist no fate and no pre-determined future. At the moment when a free creative act takes place there is no thought of the future, of the inevitable death, of future suffering — it is an escape from time and from all determinateness. In creative imagination the future is not determined. The creative image is outside the process of time, it is in eternity. Time is the child of sin, of sinful slavery, of sinful anxiety. It will stop and disappear when the world is transfigured. But transfiguration of the world is taking place already in all true creativeness. We possess a force by means of which we escape from time. That creative force is full of grace and saves us from the power of the law. The greatest moral task is to build up a life free from determinateness and anxiety about the future and out of the perspective of time. The moral freedom to do so is given us, but we make poor use of it.

Freedom requires struggle and resistance. We are therefore confronted with the necessarily determined everyday world in which processes are taking place in time and the future appears as fated. Man is fettered and weighed down. He both longs for freedom and fears it. The paradox of liberation is that in order to preserve freedom and to struggle for it, one must in a sense be already free, have freedom within oneself. Those who are slaves to the very core of their being do not know the name of freedom and cannot struggle for it. Ancient taboos surround man on all sides and fetter his moral life. In order to free himself from their power man must first be conscious of himself as inwardly free and only then can he struggle for freedom outwardly. The inner conquest of slavery is the fundamental task of moral life. Every kind of slavery is meant here — the slavery to the power of the past and of the future, the slavery to the external world and to oneself, to one’s lower self. The awakening of creative energy is inner liberation and is accompanied by a sense of freedom.4 Creativeness is the way of liberation. Liberation cannot result in inner emptiness — it is not merely liberation from something but also liberation for the sake of something. And this for the sake of is creativeness. Creativeness cannot be aimless and objectless. It is an ascent and therefore presupposes heights, and that means that creativeness rises from the world to God. It moves not along a flat surface in endless time but ascends towards eternity. The products of creativeness remain in time, but the creative act itself, the creative flight, communes with eternity. Every creative act of ours in relation to other people — an act of love, of pity, of help, of peacemaking — not merely has a future but is eternal.

Victory over the categories of master and slave5 in the moral life is a great achievement. A man must not be the slave of other men, nor must he be their master, for then other people will be slaves. To achieve this is one of the tasks of the ethics of creativeness which knows nothing of mastery and slavery. A creator is neither a slave nor a master, he is one who gives and gives abundantly. All dependence of one man upon another is morally degrading. It is incomprehensible how the slavish doctrine that a free and independent mind is forsaken by the divine grace could ever have arisen. Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty. Where there is liberty, there is the Spirit of God and grace. Grace acts upon liberty and cannot act upon anything else. A slavish mind cannot receive grace and grace cannot affect it. But slavish theories which distort Christianity build up their conception of it not upon grace and liberty but upon mastery and slavery, upon the tyranny of society, of the family and the state. They generally recognize free will but only for the sake of urging it to obedience. Free will cannot, however, be called in merely to be threatened. The freedom of will which has frequently led to man’s enslavement must itself be liberated, i.e. imbued with gracious force. Creativeness is the gracious force which makes free will really free, free from fear, from the law, from inner dividedness.

The paradox of good and evil — the fundamental paradox of ethics — is that the good presupposes the existence of evil and requires that it should be tolerated. This is what the Creator does in allowing the existence of evil. Hence absolute perfection, absolute order and rationality may prove to be an evil, a greater evil than the imperfect, unorganized, irrational life which admits of a certain freedom of evil. The absolute good incompatible with the existence of evil is possible only in the Kingdom of God, when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and God will be all in all. But outside the Divine kingdom of grace, freedom and love, absolute good which does not allow the existence of evil is always a tyranny, the kingdom of the Grand Inquisitor and the antichrist. Ethics must recognize this once and for all. So long as there exists a distinction between good and evil, and consequently our good which is on this side of the distinction, there must inevitably be a struggle, a conflict between opposing principles, and resistance, i.e. exercise of human freedom. The absolute good and perfection outside the Kingdom of God turns man into an automaton of virtue, i.e. really abolishes moral life, since moral life is impossible without spiritual freedom.

Hence our attitude to evil must be twofold — we must be tolerant of it as the Creator is tolerant, and we must mercilessly struggle against it. There is no escaping from this paradox, for it is rooted in freedom and in the very fact of distinction between good and evil. Ethics is bound to be paradoxical because it has its source in the Fall. The good must be realized, but it has a bad origin. The only thing that is really fine about it is the recollection of the beauty of Paradise.

Is the struggle waged in the name of the good in this world an expression of the true life, “first life”? Is it not bound by earthly surroundings and is it not only a means to life? And how can first life, life in itself, be attained? We may say with certainty that love is life-in-itself, and so is creativeness, and so is the contemplation of the spiritual world. But this life-in-itself is absent from a considerable part of our legalistic morality, from physiological processes, from politics and from civilization. First life or life-in-itself is to be found only in the first-hand, free moral acts and judgments. It is absent from moral acts which are determined by social environment, heredity, public opinion, party doctrines, etc., i.e. it is absent from a great part of our moral life. True life is only to be found in moral acts in so far as they are creative. Automatic fulfilment of the moral law is not life. Life is always an expansion, a gain. It is present in first-hand aesthetic perceptions and judgments and in a creatively artistic attitude to the world, but not in aesthetic snobbishness.

Nietzsche thought that morality was dangerous because it hindered the realization of the higher type of man. This is true of legalistic morality, which does not allow the human personality to express itself as a whole. In Christianity itself legalistic elements are unfavourable to the creative manifestation of the higher type of man. The morality of chivalry, of knightly honour and loyalty, was creative and could not be subsumed under the ethics of law or the ethics of redemption. And in spite of the relative, transitory and even bad characteristics which chivalry has had as a matter of historical fact, it contained elements of permanent value and was a manifestation of the eternal principles of the human personality. Chivalry would have been impossible without Christianity.

Nietzsche opposes to the distinction between good and evil, which he regards as a sign of decadence, the distinction between the noble and the low. The noble, the fine, is a higher type of life, aristocratic, strong, beautiful, well-bred. The conception of fineness is ontological while that of goodness is moralistic. This leads not to a-moralism which is a misleading conception, but to the subordination of moral categories to the ontological. It means that the important thing is not to fulfil the moral law but to perfect one’s nature, i.e. to attain transfiguration and enlightenment. From this point of view the saint must be described as fine and not as good, for he has a lofty, beautiful nature penetrated by the divine light through and through. But all Nietzsche knew of Christianity was the moral law, and he rebelled against it. He had quite a mistaken idea about the spirit and spiritual life. He thought that a bad conscience was born of the conflict between the instincts and the behests of the society-just as Freud, Adler and Jung suppose. The instinct turns inwards and becomes spirit. Spirit is the repressed, inward-driven instinct, and therefore really an epiphenomenon. The true, rich, unrepressed life is for Nietzsche not spirit and indeed is opposed to it. Nietzsche is clearly the victim of reaction against degenerate legalistic Christianity and against the bad spirituality which in truth has always meant suppression of the spirit. Nietzsche mistook it for the true spirituality. He rejected God because he thought God was incompatible with creativeness and creative heroism to which his philosophy was a call. God was for him the symbol not of man’s ascent to the heights but of his remaining on a flat surface below. Nietzsche was fighting not against God but against a false conception of God, which certainly ought to be combated. The idea, so widely spread in theology, that the existence of God is incompatible with man’s creativeness is a source of atheism. And Nietzsche waged an agonizing struggle against God. He went further and asserted that spirit is incompatible with creativeness, while in truth spirit is the only source of creativeness. In this connection, too, Nietzsche’s attitude was inspired by a feeling of protest. Theology systematically demanded that man should bury his talents in the ground. It failed to see that the Gospel required creativeness of man and confined its attention to commands and laws — it failed to grasp the meaning of parables and of the call to freedom — it sought to know only the revealed and not the hidden. Theologians have not sufficiently understood that freedom should not be forced, repressed and burdened with commands and prohibitions. Rather it ought to be enlightened, transfigured and strengthened through the power of grace. A curious paradox is exemplified in the teaching of the Jesuits.6 Jesuitism is in a sense an apotheosis of the human will — a man may increase the power of God. Jesuitism teaches a new form of asceticism — asceticism of the will and not of the body. It takes heaven by storm and gains power over the world. And at the same time Jesuitism means slavery of the will and a denial of man’s creativeness. The real problem of creativeness, so far from being formulated and solved by Christianity, has not even been faced in all its religious implications. It has only been considered as the problem of justifying culture, i.e. on a secondary plane, and not as the question of the relation between God and man. The result is rebellion and rejection of the dominant theological theories.

Human nature may contract or expand. Or, rather, human nature is rooted in infinity and has access to boundless energy. But man’s consciousness may be narrowed down and repressed. Just as the atom contains enormous and terrible force which can only be released by splitting the atom (the secret of it has not yet been discovered), so the human monad contains enormous and terrible force which can be released by melting down consciousness and removing its limits. In so far as human nature is narrowed down by consciousness it becomes shallow and unreceptive. It feels cut off from the sources of creative energy. What makes man interesting and significant is that his mind has so to speak an opening into infinity. But average normal consciousness tries to close this opening, and then man finds it difficult to manifest all his gifts and resources of creative energy. The principle of laisser faire, so false in economics, contains a certain amount of truth in regard to moral and spiritual life. Man must be given a chance to manifest his gifts and creative energy, he must not be overwhelmed with external commands and have his life encumbered with an endless number of norms and prohibitions.

It is a mistake to think that a cult of creativeness means a cult of the future and of the new. True creativeness is concerned neither with the old nor with the new but with the eternal. A creative act directed upon the eternal may, however, have as its product and result something new, i.e. something projected in time. Newness in time is merely the projection or symbolization of the creative process which takes place in the depths of eternity.7 Creativeness may give one bliss and happiness, but that is merely a consequence of it. Bliss and happiness are never the aim of creativeness, which brings with it its own pain and suffering. The human spirit moves in two directions — towards struggle and towards contemplation. Creativeness takes place both in struggle and in contemplation. There is a restless element in it, but contemplation is the moment of rest. It is impossible to separate and to oppose the two elements. Man is called to struggle and to manifest his creative power, to win a regal place in nature and in cosmos. And he is also called to the mystic contemplation of God and the spiritual worlds. By comparison with active struggle contemplation seems to us passive and inactive. But contemplation of God is creative activity. God cannot be won through active struggle similar to the struggle we wage with cosmic elements. He can only be contemplated through creatively directing our spirit upwards. The contemplation of God Who is love is man’s creative answer to God’s call. Contemplation can only be interpreted as love, as the ecstasy of love — and love always is creative. This contemplation, this ecstasy of love, is possible not only in relation to God and the higher world but also in relation to nature and to other people. I contemplate in love the human faces I love and the face of nature, its beauty. There is something morally repulsive about modern activistic theories which deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle. For them not a single moment has value in itself, but is only a means for what follows. The ethics of creativeness is an ethics of struggle and contemplation, of love both in the struggle and in the contemplation. By reconciling the opposition between love and contemplation it reconciles the opposition between aristocratic and democratic morality. It is an ethics both of ascent and of descent. The human soul rises upwards, ascends to God, wins for itself the gifts of the Holy Spirit and strives for spiritual aristocratism. But it also descends into the sinful world, shares the fate of the world and of other men, strives to help its brothers and gives them the spiritual energy acquired in the upward movement of the soul. One is inseparable from the other. Proudly to forsake the world and men for the lofty heights of the spirit and refuse to share one’s spiritual wealth with others is un-Christian, and implies a lack of love, and also a lack of creativeness, for creativeness is generous and ready to give. This was the limitation of pre-Christian spirituality. Plato’s Eros is ascent without descent, i.e. an abstraction. The same is true of the Indian mystics. But it is equally un-Christian and uncreative completely to merge one’s soul in the world and humanity and to renounce spiritual ascent and acquisition of spiritual force. And when the soul takes up a tyrannical attitude towards nature and mankind, when it wants to dominate and not to be a source of sacrificial help and regeneration, it falls prey to one of the darkest instincts of the subconscious and inevitably undermines its own creative powers, for creativeness presupposes sacrifice. Victory over the subconscious instinct of tyranny is one of the most fundamental moral tasks. People ought to be brought up from childhood in a spirit completely opposed to the instincts of tyranny which exhaust and destroy creative energy. Tyranny finds expression in personal relations, in family life, in social and political organizations and in spiritual and religious life.

Three new factors have appeared in the moral life of man and are acquiring an unprecedented significance. Ethics must take account of three new objects of human striving. Man has come to love freedom more than he has ever loved it before, and he demands freedom with extraordinary persistence. He no longer can or wants to accept anything unless he can accept it freely. Man has grown more compassionate than before. He cannot endure the cruelty of the old days, he is pitiful in a new way to every creature — not only to the least of men but also to animals and to everything that lives. A moral consciousness opposed to pity and compassion is no longer tolerable. And, finally, man is more eager than ever before to create. He wants to find a religious justification and meaning for his creativeness. He can no longer endure having his creative instinct repressed either from without or from within. At the same time other instincts are at work in him, instincts of slavery and cruelty, and he shows a lack of creativeness which leads him to thwart it and deny its very existence. And yet the striving for freedom, compassion and creativeness is both new and eternal. Therefore the new ethics is bound to be an ethics of freedom, compassion and creativeness.

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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The Honeymoon Ends

Eventually, as the initial honeymoon of conversion wore off (be sure that if it hasn’t yet for you, it shall, so gird your loins), the sheer joy and gratitude of having found a basic answer to death, loss, and absurdity was joined with nagging questions. Those questions focused at first on the problem of evil and theodicy — that is, the justification of the goodness of an omnipotent, omniscient God in the face of the manifest actual evils of the world. I will not rehearse this problem in depth, or the various solutions offered to it in so-called “classical” theism. Whether because of my own invincible ignorance, or because (as I do prefer to think) none of those solutions really work, the problem became torturous for me.

My father had been an academic deeply concerned with the Shoah. Something must have carried on in me from him, because my doorway into Orthodox faith was the story of the New Martyrs of the Communist yoke in Russia. One of the most powerful books that introduced me to Orthodoxy was Russia’s Catacomb Saints (I was also deeply affected by the lives and writings of the Romanian “saints of the prisons,” especially Fr Georges Calciu of blessed memory). So the sense of the reality of evil in the world was a deep presence in my heart as I came into Orthodoxy, as was the witness of those martyrs to an invincible love and truth in the midst of the most profound desolation.

The knowledge that the faith had lived in Russia and elsewhere in the Communist world in spite of inconceivably brutal torment, in the hearts of people who faced death and the obliteration of everything they loved with an inextinguishable light in their souls, accompanied my early experiences of Great Lent and Pascha. As I waited that first Pascha in a darkened church, with the silent crowd in an émigré parish, surrounded by ancient icons rescued from the Godless ones by refugees, and heard the clergy within the altar area begin to chant Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Savior, the angels in Heaven sing, I knew that I would become Orthodox. I get goosebumps and tears rise in my eyes as I think of it, even to this day.

All this is to say that evil, and its answer (God’s answer, the word of the Cross and the empty tomb), were central to my conversion, and later, central to my troubles with the intellectual expression of the faith. Because those intellectual expressions — as much in Orthodoxy as elsewhere in Christian theological tradition, though with important caveats — all failed. There was (and is, I believe) no way to square the goodness of God with God’s all-powerfulness as literally construed by discursive theology.

“An all-good God would wish to prevent all senseless evils. An all-powerful God could do so. But senseless evils exist. Therefore, God is not all-good, or God is not all-powerful, or God does not exist.” I might add, “Or senseless evils do not exist,” but I do not accept the theodicies that assert that — I have seen and learned too much; my heart rebels, and I must listen to it.

(Philosophically inclined readers, I beg your indulgence; the chances are very great that I have heard your well-thought-out responses to this problem that claim to rescue classical theism, and I reject them.)

But I knew that God existed, with the knowledge of the heart; I did not require any proofs of God’s existence for my mind. Perhaps this was the result of an unconscious operation of Newman’s “illative sense.” I also knew that God is all-good with perfectly certain knowledge; if God were not all-good, God would not be the God Who was revealed to me that Paschal night, the God Who, in retrospect, my heart felt touching me in every beauty of the world and my life. (Jung’s “theodicy” in Answer to Job, which locates evil in God, has always struck me as monstrous.) So I concluded, to avoid the final immolation of reason, that the tradition must be wrong in the way it speaks about God as “all-powerful.” (There are deeper problems in theodicy, of course; I am sketching a brief picture. Others might have chosen different parts of the trilemma on which to impale themselves.)

And thus began my journey with dissident, unorthodox theism. As I entered this world, some other theological issues with classical theism began to become apparent to me: the problem of the reality of human freedom in the context of classically construed divine omnipotence, omniscience, and timelessness being one of them; the problem of God’s relationship, if He is truly “immutable” as classically conceived, with the created world being another. Increasingly it seemed to me that the God proposed to me by classical theism was incompatible with the God proposed to me by the Gospel and by traditional Orthodox piety as it manifested in the life and practical teaching of the saints I had come to love so deeply.

My first stop was open theism, which turned out to be essentially an evangelical Protestant attempt to address some of these issues using the resources of the 20th century “philosophers of process,” most notably Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. I quickly saw that this was a halfway house: once I admitted the kind of doctrinal revisions suggested by the open theists, there was no way to avoid the progress into deeper waters — into the process philosophers themselves and into the process theologians who took Whitehead much more radically than the open theists. David Ray Griffin’s books Unsnarling the World Knot; Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality; and God, Power, and Evil prompted a revolution in my thought. I found process thought immensely compelling — a philosophical theology rooted in process, change, and freedom as aboriginal elements of the universe and of God, a one-stop shop for the resolution of impossible theological quandaries and the reconciliation of religious faith and scientific naturalism.

The problem was that it didn’t stop there. My first deep issue with Whitehead’s God was not the usual one (many classically theistic believers simply ask, “Is this a God worthy of our worship?” but I never had any trouble answering that in the affirmative). Instead, it was technical. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, God as the most-moved mover (Hartshorne’s description, but very apt) receives and preserves eternally all the events of the cosmos in God’s “consequent nature.” This is the locus of objective immortality. But I saw that this would require that God also preserves forever all the universe’s greatest horrors and evils, that evil (even if only evil as suffering undergone) would be objectively immortal in God. I had the opportunity to discuss this issue personally with John Cobb, one of the most prominent 20th century process theologians, and while I do not now recall his exact answer, I was not satisfied. It felt viscerally to me that this was a flaw, a fundamental flaw in Whitehead’s theological vision, and it made me wonder what other such flaws I had overlooked in my enthusiasm.

So I went deeper down the rabbit hole, into process naturalism, the position of thinkers such as Henry Nelson Wieman (whose name is not well-known now, but who was a very prominent liberal 20th century theologian). Wieman’s position was that we can say very little about God, but we can identify (and he did very painstakingly identify, examine, and describe) a creative process at work in the universe that is the source of all the values we can perceive. This creative process he proposed that we should name as “God” — God may be more than this, but we can confidently say that God is at least this. So his is effectively an impersonal theism, a form of theistic naturalism. In companionship with the existentialism of another liberal theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, Wieman’s parsimonious metaphysics made an extremely austere expression of Christian faith, compatible with the most thoroughgoing scientific naturalism, even physicalism. Perhaps, I thought, this farthest end of metaphysical parsimony could save my belief in God from the problems generated, it seemed, by all varieties of philosophically informed natural theology.

Alas, that too was wrong. I saw that even Wieman’s extraordinarily minimalist theistic metaphysics was dogged by at least one fundamental problem, namely this: Wieman claims that he has identified a process at work in the universe that produces all values, and is therefore worthy of our “ultimate commitment,” and that this process can be properly identified as “creative interchange.” His elaboration of it is remarkably precise and subtle and perceptive. And yet, “creativity” and “change” do not lead inexorably to the creation of values; they can lead just as easily, and looking at the world, one might say, much more often lead, to the creation of disvalues and the destruction of values already brought into existence by the cosmic process. “Creativity” is not trustworthy in itself. It is not the proper object of our “ultimate commitment.” Certainly, my child, as a person, is of greater value than the abstraction of “creativity.” If embracing “creativity” led me to destroy or harm my child, so much the worse for “creativity.” I choose the concrete person.

At this point, the nadir of my descent, as it were, I finally grasped a fundamental truth: all philosophical elaborations of the content of the faith are provisional, incomplete, and indeed, broken and deceptive in certain regards. In short, philosophical cogency and consistency cannot be the criterion of truth, and conversely, philosophical incoherence and contradiction cannot be the criterion of error.

Here’s why this insight may be valuable to some of those who are flocking to traditional Christianity, and this is why I’m really relating any of this personal history at all.

Approaching the Faith Today

The specific thinkers and theological approaches that I burned through in my attempt to make rational sense of the faith are peculiar to me; others will have quite different histories, but perhaps a similar underlying error: seeking to solidify what we must honestly admit is a tenuously held, fragile faith by expressing it with complete, consistent intellectual clarity.

Of course our faith is fragile and tenuous. We live in a world where the last vapors of culturally operative and normative Christianity have dissipated. A true gulf separates us from the beforetimes when faith could be taken for granted as a common existential foundation for the culture. The life that we live, the media to which we are exposed, the intellectual and existential and moral atmosphere that surrounds us, is not merely hostile to traditional faith: almost worse, it is uncomprehending, indifferent. It is only in rapidly evaporating ponds of culture that we could even assume, for example, that an oblique but obvious allusion to the Sermon on the Mount will evoke any memory, let alone any emotional and moral resonance.

So there’s no sin in the weakness of our faith. But it’s a dead end to attempt to strengthen it by pinning our hopes on an exhaustive rational exposition and expression of it; literally a dead end — that is, it does not lead to Christ; it leads in the other direction. There will always be something that escapes. There will always be holes, disappointments, contradictions, inconsistencies. The grander the theological architecture, the more serious these lapses will be, because they will be more subtle, the structure itself more dazzling and comprehensive, more inviting of our “ultimate commitment” — which properly belongs only to God, not to a rational construct, however brilliant, however insightful. We are so struck by the cathedral that we miss the cave, the mountain, the ocean, and the unhewn stone; so struck by the choir that we miss the wind and the chorus of birds. We turn from what we cannot master, to what we believe we can master, from icon to idol. Our belief that we can master it is false. We do not master it; it masters us, and if we do not get free, we lose our souls.

There is something inherently idolatrous about a fascination with theology as a rational exercise. Really, it was a great blessing for me to encounter, in the various ways I did, the failures of so many forms of classical and dissident philosophical theism. A great blessing, because it threw me back, ultimately, onto my heart.

The question is how to enter more deeply into the faith. We enter it with some ideas about it that are compelling (at least for us, and at least at this moment), but it’s our hunger for God in the midst of beauty and evil, love and death, that really draws us. The ideas will let us down eventually, however excited about them we are when we first encounter them.

Part of the problem is that we don’t really even understand them. We take up the traditional doctrinal formulations, for example, and we handle them as if they were translucent to our penetrating intellect, as if we really grasped them. We don’t. We manipulate, explicate, criticize, and deploy them all from within a framework of fundamental ignorance — and I don’t mean ignorance as a lack of information; I mean ignorance as an unenlightened heart. And we can acquire more and more information — study languages, for example, become scholars, develop our rational and critical acuity to awe-inspiring degrees, write articles and books of blazing and incisive articulate cleverness that scatter all their foes before them1 — and yet remain fundamentally spiritually ignorant because our hearts have remained unchanged.

The whole point of the faith is to change our hearts, to make us more able to love God, other people, and the whole created world. Greater love means greater understanding; we can’t understand what we don’t see with the eye of love. The fundamental point of the praxis of Christianity is the transformation of the heart, not the acquisition of knowledge — and still less the accumulation of opinions. Indeed, the tradition as I receive it asserts unequivocally that knowledge without love is diabolical (quite literally, if you look more deeply into the etymology of that word). “The devils also believe, and tremble,” according to the Apostle James.

The real exemplars, then, are the saints. I mean something very particular by that. I mean the numinous human beings held up for veneration by the Church whose beauty is actually recognizable to the eyes of your heart. This is how the light of Christ reaches us: through the souls of those who have given themselves to him and therefore can fundamentally attract us to him.

I despair a little at describing this. If you know you know, and if you don’t, I can only pray that you come to know it. If you have not had the experience of falling in love with a saint, really seeing them, really feeling your heart going out of itself in a movement of veneration and gratitude and wonder that they exist, there is not much I can tell you except that in my experience, all the familiarity in the world with doctrine and praxis on an external level really means nothing. “It reminds me of straw.”

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.

Not the great dogmatists. Not the elevated mystical theologians. I can’t understand them. I don’t know how to forgive my neighbor. I don’t know how to love anyone, not much, and certainly not my enemies. I still go into thought spirals of resentment for things that happened years ago. I still chafe at making sacrifices for my family, let alone for strangers. How could I expect to pick up St Gregory of Nyssa, or St Gregory Palamas, or St Dionysios the Areopagite, and understand anything there? All I will do is misunderstand it. And I’m pretty smart. I’m good at this “rational understanding” game. Too good at it. It’s my comfort zone. But the heart is never a comfort zone. The heart is where it’s real. The heart is where there’s no evasion. The heart is where my arguments and my pride don’t work because the heart is like the earth of a garden or like a child or like a lover — it doesn’t resonate with your words; it resonates with your actions, your being, your energy, your reality. But it is also therefore where I can let go of my fear, my grief, and my despair.

So the saints I go to are not the theologians (or, more deeply, they are the true theologians, according to the maxim of Evagrius of Pontus: “The theologian is one who prays truly”). They are мужики, peasants. I was blessed to meet a few of them early on. One was the saint I took as my patron, Seraphim of Sarov. Another — one who just came to my heart again a few days ago — was Abba Isidore of Gethsemane Skete, a great 19th-century ascetic who was the spiritual father of Pavel Florensky, among other luminaries of Russia’s Silver Age.

I have “met” many more in the accounts of the monks of the “Northern Thebaid,” the Russian wilderness to which monastics in the tradition of St Nilus of Sora fled to escape the corruption and wealth of so many of their co-religionists. Yet there is no criticism or rebellion in them. Their focus remains on the love of God, and thus they are able to accomplish more than any reformer or revolutionary. But “accomplishing more” in this regard isn’t even their goal. Their “goal,” if any, is to love more, not to reform or revolutionize anything. “My place” where I habitually stand in Liturgy is in front of the icon of St Sergius of Radonezh. Every time I arrive in church and greet him and light a candle, I feel his silence, his love, his abandonment, his prayer, flowing over all the lands of Rus’, across all the centuries, travelling everywhere the émigrés and refugees have traveled, and coming at last to me; and he is alive, his eyes are alive, and he knows, he knows the truth of God, and he loves, he loves God, he loves me, he prays for me. And he is beautiful. And I love him. The saints are the Gospel written in human flesh and blood and bone.

I should say also that I am not advocating fideism or dogmatic indifference. It’s a secret third thing — neither rejecting the doctrine we don’t understand, nor accepting it uncritically and externally. It’s a form of patience and realism with regard to doctrine — accepting provisionally what we can accept with our whole heart, and for the rest, simply letting it be. Maybe it’s wrong; maybe we just don’t really understand it; God knows. But right now, we don’t need to know. Right now, we need to love as the Lord loved us. That’s enough to work on, don’t you think?

Brothers and sisters, don’t come for the theology: or if you come for the theology, stay for the saints, and then stay for the impossible task of loving as the saints teach us to love. Wrestle with theology if you must, but when you meet things you don’t understand, rest easy. Set it aside. You don’t have to accept it according to the meaning you think it has. Very likely, after you stay for awhile, you will develop the ability to understand what it means more deeply, and you’ll see that what you disagreed with was a misunderstanding. Or maybe this will never happen. Maybe you’ll keep disagreeing forever. (I often think this about myself with regard to certain problems.) Whatever. The program is not acquiring new ideas and opinions. The program is learning of the Lord, for He is meek and humble of heart, and we need rest for our souls.

This article was not written using AI.

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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 thoughts coalesced in my mind. I’d spent the previous morning (Saturdays are my day for a few solid hours of reading in a silent house before the rest of the family wakes up) with Terryl Givens’ account of the doctrine of souls’ pre-existence, When Souls Had Wings. Givens is a good writer and an erudite scholar, and I recommend him wholeheartedly to all; it will help you get over any merely polemical negativity you harbor for Mormons.

Somehow the conversation and my train of thought converged, as they often do. I began to feel my revulsion for the entire universe of speculative thought — for what I think St Paul was referring to when he mentioned fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith. I believe, as I have read commentators say, that these endless genealogies refer to the various impenetrable systems of emanations in the Gnostic cosmologies that were already circulating in the milieu in which the Gospel was being preached. Here is where I reveal my inner evangelical fundamentalist: ultimately I think there is no essential difference between these speculative elaborations and the speculative elaborations of metaphysicians. There is also no essential difference between those metaphysical speculations and the world of fear and superstition that accompanies engagement with occult or paranormal phenomena. The speculations are of course more systematic, more educated, more articulate. But they are still a form of sorcery, of magic in the sense in which the tradition correctly condemns it: they place fundamental trust for the establishment of security on the workings of our own mind, on forces arising in and from our own spoken or willed interiority.

I think Jesus is perpetually taking up the sword and cutting these Gordian knots open; at least, this to me is the existential effect of the Gospel. When I sink myself into these imponderables with what is, indeed, an essentially irreproachable desire to know — after all, isn’t our mind made for knowledge? — eventually I look up, like the young man in a famine-stricken land who suddenly realises that he can simply repent and go home to his father’s house. I suddenly remember my thirst for the transparent, sparkling water welling up unto eternal life; my hunger for the bread of the Word that satisfies.

Then I turn again to the ascetical tradition, seeing in it a golden thread from which I can easily be distracted. That thread is woven in with much else that is dubious and troublesome, with a crypto-Manichaean hatred and fear of the flesh, embodied existence, sensuality, sexuality. Who can cast aspersion on that Manichaean tendency, in the end, of course? Who hasn’t looked nakedly on the agony of life on this earth and groaned with the great Stoic emperor, How long, then? And yet my heart rebels at the tension: I cannot simply accept the grim and dismal rejection of embodied life, but neither can I revel and sport in the depths of creation’s delights while the dark realities sit silently just out of the ring of firelight. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

I know the deep resolution of this tension; it is Pascha; I long for it every year; it is the shining summit of my life to which the grace of the Spirit in the Church brings me. But it is not a summit where I can dwell. It is when I descend from these heights that I grasp again the golden thread of the ascetic tradition.

What is it?

Here is where my advocacy always becomes a mute gesture. I have to point. Mostly, I point at the lives of ascetic saints. But there is so much dross there, so much useless, superficial sensationalism that in older days apparently must have been effectual as an appeal for veneration, admiration, and imitation, but today more often than not simply serves to repel. He spent his life standing atop a pillar! Ah, then he was a deranged madman? Let’s be honest: who can hear this? And let’s not pretend, with the rad trads, that we can mystically teleport ourselves into that age — that age is gone. And it is gone for a reason. The rad trads always want to forget that there was a reason the people of the past embraced the march of “progress” so-called. Perhaps those mystical revanchists need to spend some days in unremedied contemplation the next time they have a toothache, when the pain becomes so severe they can’t think, to become a little more honest. (By the way, the same goes for their critique of feminism. Some conversations with old women are helpful in this regard.)

Again, then — the golden thread of asceticism. If it is not the advertising slogans made to dazzle the men and women of a lost time, what is it? Where can it be seen?

In the lives and lore of some ascetic saints, beneath the sensationalism when it is there (but in modern accounts, often, it is not there, and this is why the saints who are close to us in time and space are so important for us), there is something pure and limpid: there is a humble heart content not to know, content to throw itself on the Lord and cry Have mercy on me! Our minds may indeed be made to know, but if I can put it this way: the path to knowledge is not to seek knowledge. Our minds’ capacity to know shall be satisfied some day — but today is not that day. And they cannot bootstrap themselves there with a pursuit of knowledge secretly fueled by the fundamental fear that accompanies the practical rejection of God in an intellectual and spiritual self-reliance.

Now: this does not mean a wilfully ignorant, fundamentalist reification of revelation or of the authority of the Church, either. Much that comes to us in “revelation” and “tradition” is, as Nikolai Berdyaev says in Truth and Revelation, merely sociomorphism and cosmomorphism, a projection of our own human, all-too-human desperations and fears and hungers into a false certainty that ends up being tragically fragile and unreliable. I can practically taste the fear and self-delusion whenever I meet someone wholly committed to any dogmatic or metaphysical system, even if it is officially sanctioned by some ecclesial authority or other. I taste it the way you can pre-taste the blood in your mouth when you meet someone who’s obviously hell-bent on punching you in the face. (I hope you’ve never had that experience.) When I talk about an epoché with regard to metaphysical speculation, I’m talking about the Fathers, too. I’m talking about the Tradition, too. I’m talking especially about the attitude that appropriates the Fathers and the Tradition — or rather, appropriates our particular parochial approach to them — as weapons for a fight. God save us!

Faith is not a system of ideas. The Gospel is not an ideology. The life of the Spirit is not a bureaucracy or a creed or an enchantment.

As far as I can see it and say it, the Gospel, as it is transmitted existentially and experientially in the golden thread of asceticism, is first of all an utter simplicity. It is laying aside the all-too-human attempt to know by our own power what we cannot know by our own power. (Re-read God’s response to Job out of the whirlwind — deeply unsatisfying as it is.) It is contentment to be small, to be ignorant, to put all our business aside and set out on a pilgrimage, to simply leave all that hunger for knowing behind.

Yes, when with our minds we press down into the Gospel itself, even there, we find endlessly fascinating material. One strand that fascinates me: the Aramaic roots that underlie the Greek text of the Gospels that we have, and what they reveal about Jesus’ concrete historicity, the resonances they open up within his teaching that have been obscured by the overlay of Hellenism. But on the contrary: also the examination of the entire, endlessly complex cultural and religious background of the Gospel’s setting — a background which Margaret Barker has revealed as far stranger and richer than the vastly oversimplified cartoon sketch that comprises the common understanding of that milieu.

So much for all of that. It’s the same territory, endless genealogies. I say that with the simple consciousness that however far down that path I go, I eventually find myself a starving swineherd looking longingly at the food his pigs are eating, realizing that I can simply return to my Father’s house. This, after all, has turned out to be the final destination of the “quest for the historical Jesus,” at least for those who are not inclined to set up a permanent residence in the far country of hunger and penury.

Asceticism in essence is that return, in simplicity and compunction, penthos.

And concealed within that utter simplicity of repentance and renunciation and pilgrimage, as its burning heart, even if the burning is mere coals — there is love. This is Jesus’ Way.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The great saints whose lives kindle (or rekindle) in us the desire for this Way are normies. They live, as Jesus did, not in the world of metaphysics, but in the world of bread and salt and water and candles and grain and wine and sheep and lepers and the blind and newlyweds.

These are the ones I love most, in the end — not the high mystical theologians. To be honest, I don’t know quite what to make of the latter. But I know that seizing on their theology before understanding what lies beneath and before it, before reaching the point where hearing the Beatitudes at the Divine Liturgy brings me to tears, is delusional, indeed, it is a path to perdition.

It’s easier to be with the normie saints. The ones who would smile and nod when you ask them perplexing theological questions, when you propound esoteric theories and elaborations, and walk over to the samovar to pour you a cup of tea, and tell you about the frogs who have taken up residence in their little monastic garden, and with whom they sing the psalms. (If you want to read that one, go find a copy of St Paul Florensky’s Salt of the Earth — and be sure to read that book before you try to read The Pillar and Foundation of Truth. The confessor Serge Fudel said, “In all his mathematics, Father Pavel was building a fragrant temple for prayer.”)

This finally is the answer to modernity. This is what is drawing me towards a life in the mountains without computers or electricity. This is what makes me want to pray, to bake bread, to write, to play with my daughter, to garden, to make love with my wife, to drink tea in the morning silence, to read the Gospel and the Prologue of Ochrid and the psalms, to wonder what I can do today to take another step on Jesus’ Way.

This post was written without using AI.

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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 and never return. In rootless modernity perhaps this statement doesn’t mean much; marriage is fungible, relationships are disposable, and most people are perpetual nomads living far from kith, kin, and any “ancestral” homeland and with no more loyalty to the earth they walk on than to a t-shirt. (Happy Fourth of July: the United States, the first “propositional nation,” was built on this attitude, at least superficially.) But to anyone who is blessed to have received, or re-created, an attitude to life that accords more weight to the virtue of fidelity on all its levels, the likening of religious conversion to other forms of infidelity to family or motherland might strike home, even if it evokes disagreement.

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I’ve heard enough emigration ballads, and I’ve soaked my heart enough in premodern religion and its ambient ethos, to feel this likeness sharply once it occurred to me.

To ask for religious conversion is a huge ask. For someone rooted in a real tradition, and yes, “real tradition” to me includes most historic varieties of Protestant Christianity, religious conversion means leaving their soul’s motherland. Get thee behind me, Enlightenment rationalism: religion is not a matter of a set of doctrines, held more or less abstractly as intellectual propositions. It is an undefinable, ungraspable participation in a universe of feeling, a history of longing; it is membership in a family, in a living community whose presence in and journey through the world has led to the accumulation of a treasury of graces received and sufferings and joys undergone and gathered.

In our age of digitized, hyper-rational, hyper-linear madness, we can set aside that whole environing richness and chase some idea of spiritual life proposed to us by some literally disembodied voice heard through a computer (this by the way is what you’re doing every time you go down a YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole). If we were sane we wouldn’t do it. We’d laugh at the prospect. I knew old Baptists, back in my days of ur-Orthobro convertitis, who just laughed when I told them about Orthodoxy. Not that they were dismissive: they were just saying, that’s lovely, and I have a home, thank you so much. Really the same way a virtuous man laughs at being propositioned: that’s lovely, I’m so flattered, and do you see this ring? I have a wife, thank you so much.

I have arrived at something like the same position. I will listen to everyone. Certain people, I am more interested in, because of my own spiritual concerns (not to say obsessions). I’ll mention Roman Catholics, particularly personalists and existentialists; liberal process theologians; Mormons (if you are a Christian and have not engaged with Mormon theology, you’re missing out); MacDonald and Lewis and Tolkien; some Sufis, particularly Chishtis; and some Sikhs, especially some in the Sant Mat traditions. I recall one in particular, Baba Sawan Singh Ji, whose photograph was enough to arrest me — there was magic in it, something radiantly beautiful in his eyes, and I just saw and felt that he “had something” for me.

And yet — my home is the Orthodox Church, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church. I have no interest in converting to anything. “I have a home, thank you so much.” This does not mean that I believe we Orthodox “have the truth.” Lord, have mercy: that goes the other way around, one should hope: that the Truth would have us (of course perhaps He doesn’t, which is much the more serious possibility to consider). I hang my hat mostly on a few 19th century Russians. Khomiakov, in The Church Is One, says that there are many united to the Church by bonds that the Lord has not willed to reveal to us. St Philaret of Moscow said to a Catholic interlocutor that “the walls of our division do not rise all the way to Heaven.” But of course St Paul also says, “In every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.”

In the communal madhouse that is the modern world, there are many with no tradition at all in any real sense. To them, I extend a heartfelt invitation to come and visit the Orthodox Church, to find if it is a doorway for them back to the Lord. But go out and argue with other Christians? Zero interest. And I fail to see that it is going to do more than draw in cadres of angry fundamentalists focused on doctrines and ideas. Be Orthodox and let the proof of its truth be the fact that your face is radiant, and you are full of love — let the proof be that it works as it should. “Give a reason” for your hope when asked, and otherwise, stay busy working the earth of your own heart in the sweat of your brow. The Lord had words not just for the Pharisees of his time, but for us modern Pharisees: “Ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God.”

Now I will make the leap that will get me tarred and feathered not just by the Orthobros but perhaps by almost everyone. I extend the same philosophy across the board. I am doing no disservice to non-Orthodox Christians when I set aside aggressive proselytism, because the Lord Jesus Christ is present to them in their tradition (or in spite of their tradition — makes no difference to me which of those it is). What I want is for the presence of the Lord to be revealed to them; what I want for myself is for it to be revealed to me. Inasmuch as Orthodoxy has anything to contribute, I want it to be a voice that helps non-Orthodox understand and grasp with deeper clarity and deeper joy what is already true for them, the presence of the Lord who is already with them, who has never left them. And then, do you know what? Over time, and organically, the faith and praxis of their community will be transformed. And someday, God willing, we will be in communion again.

This is what I mean by “ecumenism” and this is why I am an “ecumenist.” And it includes not merely sharing “my” riches with others, but receiving others’ riches when they share them with me.

When I say that I extend this philosophy across the board, I mean that I apply it not merely to non-Orthodox, but to non-Christians. I don’t want Hindus to to “convert” to Christianity in the sense of replacing their current set of ideas with a “Christian” set of ideas. I want to help reveal to them what Raimundo Panikkar beautifully called “the unknown Christ of Hinduism.”1 I want the reality of Christ, the vision of Christ, to awaken in the hearts of all — as was the Lord’s desire: “Lo, I have come to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”

And when I speak of Christian Druidry, I mean this exercise of the imagination: what if this had been the attitude of those who preached Christianity to my ancestors? What if St Boniface could have revealed the Lord in the oak, rather than cutting it down? What if the intent and the praxis had been to reveal the Christ already present in Druidry, rather than to obliterate that tradition? As it was, it had to wait until the 19th century for Iolo Morganwg’s laudanum-fueled Romantic ravings to gesture towards this path.

And with all that said, tomorrow I will have the joy of attending the Divine Liturgy (and let me tell you, if you do not wake up on Sunday thinking “I get to go to church today!” you’re not doing it right). I have no intention of leaving my home. It is my home after all. But slowly I am putting aside the crazy, dare I say “autistic,” hive mind of digital modernity with all its logical, linear exclusions and its dogmatic insistence that its own categories must never, can never be violated, and inhabiting a different, calmer, more generous “open space.”

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At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but forever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the wicked can.

Translated from
Татьяна Горичева. Блажен иже и скоты милует. Санкт-Петербург: Алетейя, 2001.

Tatiana Goricheva is an Orthodox philosopher, writer, and activist, born in 1947 in Leningrad. She graduated from the philosophy faculty of Leningrad State University and became involved in the Christian dissident movement in the 1970s, co-founding the first Christian women’s group in the USSR. In 1980, she was expelled from the Soviet Union for her religious and human rights activities. She lived and studied in Germany (at a Jesuit institute) and in France (at the Orthodox St. Sergius Institute in Paris). Her writings, situated at the intersection of theology, existential philosophy, and feminist critique, gained wide recognition in Europe. Her books explore spiritual life, the body, suffering, animals, and ecology, from a deeply rooted Orthodox perspective.

“The silence of the earth seemed to merge with that of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars… Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly, as if cut down, flung himself to the ground. He didn’t know why he embraced it; he couldn’t explain why he was seized with an uncontrollable urge to kiss it all over — but he did, weeping, sobbing, flooding it with tears, and in ecstasy he vowed to love it forever. ‘Drench the earth with your tears of joy and love these tears,’ sounded in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, he wept in his ecstasy even for those stars, shining down at him from the abyss, and he ‘was not ashamed of this ecstasy.’
It was as if the threads from all those innumerable worlds of God had converged at once in his soul, and it quivered, ‘touching other worlds.’ He wanted to forgive everyone and everything and to ask forgiveness — not for himself, oh no, but for all, for everything, for all things; and ‘for me others are already praying,’ rang again in his soul. He fell to the ground a weak youth, and rose a fighter strong for life, knowing and feeling it all at once in that same moment of his ecstasy. And never, never could Alyosha forget that moment for the rest of his life.”

(Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Alyosha Karamazov becomes a warrior for the Lord’s cause through his communion with the earth; Raskolnikov finds liberation from his inner hell by asking forgiveness of the earth; the lame girl preaches the same “religion” of Mother-Damp-Earth. And their souls, in trembling, touch other worlds. Some kind of initiation occurs in those who partake of the mystery of the earth: they rise transformed, reborn, uplifted, different.

If this is “paganism,” it is deeply Christian, for the Lord Jesus Christ has quickened in His spiritual body the entire body of the earth. In the Eucharist, the body of the earth becomes the body of resurrection. Orthodox cosmology is geocentric precisely because it is Christocentric. In Christ, the metaphysical heaven and the pan-cosmic earth are joined. The farthest solar systems are but cosmic dust circling the Cross.

“And His voice was as the sound of many waters… and He had in His right hand seven stars” (Revelation 1:16). The earth is not merely a planet; —it is pan-cosmic; it symbolically discloses humanity’s relationship to the planets, the galaxies, and beyond. The world must become a bridal chamber, a temple, a eucharistic gift.

(See Olivier Clément, Le Christ, terre des vivants.)

Among many peoples, with no historical contact between them, the earth is considered the mother of all humans. The earliest evidence of human culture and religion is dedicated to the Mother. The oldest cultic figurines of the Paleolithic depict mother goddesses. All life is born of the Mother and nourished by her. She is the cosmic archetypal human. The earth comes first; she embodies the maternal principle.

Among many peoples, there is a custom of burying small children (those who die before a certain age — two months, for example, in India) in the earth, while all others are cremated. Burying children reflects a hope for swift resurrection, a rebirth from the soil. There is also the belief in many cultures that the soul of the dead inevitably returns to the earth. In many cultures, both newborns and the dying are laid in the earth. The midwife is called “earth mother.” The eternal cycle of “die and become” is bound up with Mother Earth.

The cult of Mother Earth was widespread: on Olympus, in Delphi, in Athens they honored Gaia. In Asia Minor she was called Astarte, Diana; in Egypt, Isis.

The connection between man and earth is also spoken of in the biblical tradition: Adam was taken from the earth. He is the archetypal “earthly being.” Only later came today’s man and woman (Gen. 2:7). But in the Old Testament, the earth is no longer the mother of humankind — only the raw material for its formation. The patriarchal monotheism of Yahweh displaced the matriarchal pantheism of earlier religions through a masculine interpretation of creation. The structure remained — “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” — but the subject changed.

The symbol of the wheat grain remains:

“But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die”

(1 Corinthians 15:35–36).

In his two books on the earth — The Earth and the Reveries of Will and The Earth and the Reveries of Repose — the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard gives a detailed account of the archetype of “earth.” In reading these books, one cannot help but sense how differently the people of the West and the people of Russia understand “earth.”

Bachelard writes of earth as something solid and resistant. Earth is a partner of our will, because resistance requires effort.

“Dreams of earth are dreams of power and will, concentrated in the Medusa complex” (The Earth and the Reveries of Will, vol. 1, p. 12).

If one compares this to the Russian, or rather the ancient “maternal” tradition more broadly, one is struck by the contrast. Not “hostility closest to us” (as Rilke put it), not dryness, but total acceptance and softness. Mother-Damp-Earth is not characterized by frozen, Medusa-like resistance; she is moist and yielding, endlessly generous:

“When you love [the earth], when you water and feed her with your sweat and labor, she never deceives. If you plunge your hands into her, right now, you’ll always find something to eat. She once marveled, still very young, at the earth’s reckless generosity: receiving a tiny seed, it gave back a massive turnip; a single poppy seed turned into a great capsule filled with thousands of seeds. And she rejoiced at the reliability of human life, served by such a bountiful being. The scent of soil, the smell of fresh greenery — these were for her tangible signs of the goodness of being.”

(Anatoly Kim, The Onion Field)

And alongside such artistic testimony, there is the scientific perspective of Soviet agronomist Vasily Robertovich Williams:

“Soil makes a finite amount of elements infinite. This is because it participates in a number of biospheric cyclical processes. Elements in soil can engage in practically unlimited interactions, forming an almost infinite number of connections.”

Bachelard’s idea of a willful, violent relationship to the earth (an idea echoed earlier in Schopenhauer’s association of matter with will) has revealed itself today to be criminal — and not only today. Orthodox Russia once knew pity for the earth. Here is a ritual confession to the earth:

“That I tore your bosom
With sharp, rending plowshare,
That I did not roll you with care,
Nor comb you with an orderly rake,
But tore your breast with a heavy harrow,
With iron teeth rusted through —
Forgive me, little mother,
Forgive your sinful breadgiver,
For the sake of Christ the Savior,
For the sake of the Most Holy Mother of God.”

There’s no need to speak at length about what has happened to the earth, to nature as a whole, turned into an object of Promethean predation. Thank God, we live in an age of ecological awareness and repentance.

The modern world is mired in the whoredom of labor, surrendered to the fetishism of work. It is a world of hysterical, unceasing activity. And here, will is bound to reason — a link long observed. As Nietzsche wrote, the will desires eternal return. And as Heidegger commented, eternal return is the return of the laws of logic. Reason can only grasp the past — only what has come to a halt. The mechanical character of today’s Euro-American civilization is the product of glorifying will and reason. Yet the earth is inaccessible to enterprising Faust, to “daring” Prometheus, to the indifferent “man without qualities.” Earth reveals herself to tears, to defenselessness, to pliancy. She calls out to what is irrational in man.

According to Bachelard, the response to “the hardness of matter” is the clenched worker’s hand, the strength of the fist. Labor is one of matter’s attributes. Work most precisely and concretely indicates the cause-and-effect chains that govern the world. These thoughts of Bachelard are typical of the Western attitude toward reality. For the Western thinker, to exist means to crash against a boundary. The negative inspires both thought and life. But the Orthodox, Eastern tradition is different. Here it is not “opposition” that determines the direction of consciousness. In Orthodox iconography there are no shadows; in Orthodox asceticism there are no murky, ambiguous transitions from evil to good, or from good to evil. Here one grows “from strength to strength” and is transfigured “from light to light.”

The ascetic-Orthodox relationship to the earth is aristocratic. Hierarchy — even in labor — is unbroken. The earth remains the mother-nourisher. One begs her forgiveness. In Bachelard’s terms, master and slave reverse roles (following Hegel’s formula: through absolute fear and labor, the slave ultimately becomes the master). The spiritual-aristocratic attitude is based on differentiation — that is, on non-mixing (as Derrida, Deleuze, and others have noted). The slave remains the slave of God; the master remains a master, while being, in Gospel terms, the servant of all. Just as the lady-earth unfailingly serves us all.

As already stated, for Bachelard earth and matter symbolize causal chains. Today, the falsity of this assertion becomes increasingly obvious. Earth has become something small (in the age of cosmic speeds), she is more defenseless than ever, naked. In the face of today’s and tomorrow’s many catastrophes, the earth appears as a whole. A holistic approach now reigns not only in New Age theories. Cause and effect reverse their roles — or vanish altogether — because the event happens within the fullness of the whole.

But Bachelard offers not only “reveries of will” but also “reveries of repose” — ideas we may well find useful: about the simplicity of the earth, her intimacy, the infinitesimally small of the earthly. These thoughts lead us directly to the connection between earth and the Church.

The symbol of the cosmic proto-human passed into Christianity. The immediate point of contact was Stoic cosmology, where the world is the visible body of the invisible God, and God is the invisible soul of the visible world.

Yet the emphasis shifted: the idea of the proto-cosmic human is found not so much in the symbols of creation as in Christian concepts of salvation.

“In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:
Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
And he is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.
For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell;
And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.”

(Colossians 1:14–20)

A cosmic liturgy unfolds — Christ becomes the head, the universe His body; the unity of creation is revealed as the unity of one person, the cosmic Adam. (See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie; Jürgen Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung.)

The Church, “which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:23), becomes “the mother of all the faithful.” The symbol of the Church is the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, who sanctifies even the mother-earth. As Saint Cyprian said:

“He cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his Mother.
From her womb we were born, by her milk we were nourished, by her spirit we are quickened.”

Today the Church can be compared to a living organism even more aptly than in the time of the Apostle Paul, the Ecumenical Councils, or Khomiakov.

We now see that the death of God and the extinguishing of the Spirit have led to the death of all living things — for only the Holy Spirit gives life. Forests and waters, birds and fish, poets and dreamers, children and angels — all share in a common misfortune. The age of technology (with an enormous leap in the past thirty years) has objectified the last islands of spontaneity, intuition, instinct. The computer has driven out imagination. The artificial has replaced the natural. And in many Western churches it has grown cold. “Institution,” bureaucracy, has triumphed even there.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has always carried within itself more of the maternal spirit (the Spirit of the Mother of God); it has always been more “Marian” than “Petrine.” And today, her warm, cave-like world — a world of flickering lampadas, natural tears, and mysterious chant — allows one to forget that somewhere there is a dehumanized kingdom of neon, glass, and concrete.

In our time, even thinkers far from Christianity — such as Heidegger — arrive at this insight:

“Spirit as the spirit of life must be more plant than the plant itself, more animal than the animal.”

(Commentaries on the Poetry of Hölderlin)

The Spirit that lives in the Church of God is comprehended only from within. A new “philosophy of life” is needed here, a new division between inner and outer. The Mother of God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Anyone who has ever encountered this experiential reality in prayer will testify that knowledge of the Mother of God and of the Church is the most intimate of all human knowledge.

By “inner,” of course, we do not mean psychological experience — not the experience of passions, regression, or romanticism. This inner life is intentional. Its source always lies outside the self — in Revelation, in Grace, in the Mysteries. But this inner life cannot be objectified, ideologized, turned into a mechanism. Organic ecclesiality is formed through the continual irruption of the Holy Spirit. If there can be a “philosophy of the Church,” its method will be the opposite of Fichte’s and Hegel’s. Fichte’s subject generates history and reality out of itself. Fichte is driven by the pathos of outward conquest, of megalomaniacal thrust toward the infinitely large.

The infinitely small of the Church is symbolized in the Eucharist. The “atom” of the Eucharist overturns the whole world. The infinitely small of the Church is also symbolized in the image of the Mother of God — the most “invisible,” silent, and meek. And yet,

“Thy womb is more spacious than the heavens.”

She contained within herself not only the whole universe but the One who is greater than the universe.

If Fichte’s philosophy has no end and must be infinitely expanded and completed, the philosophy of the Church is content with the smallest of things: a fragment, a gesture, a moment. In every cell of organic ecclesial life the whole Church is reflected. In every fragment, the entire liturgy; in every movement of a churchly person, their churchliness is seen. Paul Evdokimov spoke of the “Orthodox instinct.” A churchly person unmistakably recognizes another churchly person.

In the second half of the twentieth century, this is especially vital — to love not only God, but specifically the Church, for the Holy Spirit is incarnate here in all concrete power. Through the Church, any other life can also be reborn:

“Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.”

As I travel the world delivering lectures on the Russian Church, I encounter everywhere people who feel precisely her — the Church. By the light in their eyes I see that in Western Europe, too, the knowledge of her has not died. Interest in politics, dissidence, feminism, Marxism, the abstract search for “the meaning of life” — all that is in the past. But more and more palpably, a brotherhood of those who live in the Church is being felt.

As has been said many times, the Church cannot be explained. It is something absolutely simple — hence the special intimacy of the church experience. To say anything about this simplest “substance,” one would have to constantly exaggerate and poetize, fall into baroque and other extremes. For only thus, through a flood of apophatic speech, can one point to its opposite: simplicity. Of course, we must not forget the cataphatic language of Revelation either — but that is a special and rare case.

We can say that we live in the age of the Holy Spirit. Not in the sense of Joachim of Fiore, or Merezhkovsky, or Ernst Bloch. Such a predominance of the Spirit in our time can be interpreted only metaphorically. This is a radically apocalyptic age — an age of choosing between life and death. And that choice is real not only for Christians. If once science was thought to be neutral, today more and more scientists are bewildered — and many Western scientists, alas mostly Western, are ashamed to be scientists at all. Nature is no longer just a “background” for rest or travel — through it the Spirit speaks. Today’s empiricism is apocalyptic in itself. To the mechanistic Euro-American civilization and the functionalism of its sterile institutions stands opposed, as never before, the primal freshness and virginity of what remains of the natural world. Novelty and wonder — that is what draws us to the ever-renewing earth, ageless, generous, fruit-bearing. Today it brings paradise and life. Today, more than ever, it symbolizes the life-giving Holy Spirit.

“Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee” (Job 12:8).