The Foundations of Spirituality, Part One

Paul Evdokimov

May 04, 2025

Translated From:
Paul Evdokimov, La Nouveauté de l’Esprit: Études de Spiritualité (Bégrolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1977), pp 13-63.

1. Major Characteristics

Spirituality is not a doctrine, nor a theology, but life itself; this is why it is not easy to define. A vigilant guardian of truths, it warns of dangers, and indicates perfection, but its proper domain is practical. It is a direct application of the Gospel to men’s lives, their “collegial” experience of God. This is not about the psychology of peoples, which is only a particular case of an infinitely broader perspective. It is the relationship between God and humanity, the appropriation of the Gospel by the people, the encounter with and living experience of Christ in liturgy that ultimately determine a certain type of Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant spirituality.

Setting aside the imperfections found everywhere, our task is to describe the very essence, the Orthodox ethos nourished and refreshed at the life-giving source of its saints, its fathers, its great spiritual figures, which forms an amazingly homogeneous whole, despite its two-thousand-year history. This essay is situated beyond any polemical comparison. It is only after an objective description that one can, if desired, seek convergences and an in-depth ecumenical encounter.

The Origins of Orthodox Mysticism

Orthodox Christianity is the form of Christianity least translatable into concepts. Indeed, the Orthodox have never had sympathy for “theological summas” or scholastic systems. Any excessive formulation or definition provokes spontaneous distrust. Orthodoxy does not need to formulate; moreover, it needs not to formulate. This is the innate conviction, coming from the Church Fathers, that it is not good to speculate on mysteries that offer themselves only to contemplation, and which become illuminating without allowing themselves to be rationalized. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, called “the Theologian,” gives the right directive: “Speaking of God is a great thing, but it is even better to purify oneself for God.” Hence a type of spirituality that is much more liturgical and iconographic than discursive, conceptual, and doctrinal.

The Church has always resisted excessive dogmatization; dogmas are reduced to the strictly indispensable, leaving a very large margin for free reflection by theologians and the faithful. But dogmas are never separated from the liturgy as word is from life. “Our doctrine conforms to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms it,” says Saint Irenaeus. The councils formulated dogmas in the form of songs, praises, or doxologies, to the point that they easily enter into the very fabric of divine offices, and at the same time, all dogmas offer themselves for contemplation on the icons of liturgical feasts. The Church sanctifies, prays, and contemplates more than it teaches and forms.

It is through this liturgical and sacramental aspect, where the heavenly is experienced, that the soul naturally becomes accustomed to feeling constantly in God’s presence. The Fathers’ adage: “A theologian is one who knows how to pray,” means that no one is a true theologian, no one is a true disciple of Christ, if their faith does not have the character of a lived personal encounter with God. Saint Symeon the New Theologian strongly affirms that our union with God is true only if we are conscious of having truly put on Christ. Saint Gregory Palamas says: “Every word contests another word, but what word can contest life?” He cites the three sources of his theology: the Scriptures, the Tradition of the Fathers, and his humble experience of God. Following him, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow said: “The Creed does not belong to you until you have lived it.” Nicholas Cabasilas, the great liturgist of the 14th century, titled his treatise on the sacraments Life in Christ. Similarly, a spiritual figure at the end of the 19th century, Father John of Kronstadt, in his book My Life in Christ, describes only his Eucharistic experience. It is in the same perspective that “apophatic theology” is situated: beyond all knowledge, it is “generative of unity,” initiating into the burning proximity of God. Thus, according to the beloved tradition of the “Jesus Prayer,” pronouncing His name draws Jesus into the heart and places man in his perpetual presence. The liturgy teaches this in its own way; before the Lord’s Prayer, the priest says: “And grant us, Lord, Thou who art above the heavens [that is, ineffable], to invoke Thee with boldness, and without fear to call Thee ‘Father.’” God, radically transcendent, and yet deeply experienced as the Thou of the Father.

In this light, one can understand to what extent “Orthodox mysticism” flows entirely from the words of Saint Peter (2 Peter 1:4): “That you may become participants in the divine nature.” Such a definition of the goal of Christian life means that the earthly is real only to the extent of its participation in the heavenly.

The search for this participation naturally creates a constant intimacy with the celestial, situates man at the boundary of two worlds, forms an exactly mystical mentality, “intoxicates,” so to speak, and forever, his soul with the Absolute of the Gospel. And one understands then that, for the Orthodox, all that is merely temporal and earthly proves bland and of little importance. The Orthodox ideal transcends civilization, and any installation in the intermediate layer of History, toward universal salvation, toward the transfiguration of the world and of man into a “new creature”: life, not in the penultimate values, but in the apocalyptic ultimate.

However, what is called the “apocalyptic mentality” of the Orthodox has nothing in common with a curiosity that would seek the date of the end of the world; it is a way of being, oriented, even in the details of daily life, toward that which surpasses them, an innate habit, above all, of posing every problem in the light of the End, of the integral meaning of existence.

Biblical Spirituality

The best way to define Orthodox spirituality is to say that it is essentially biblical; but one must grasp the Orthodox sense of this term. The Church Fathers lived by the Bible, thought and spoke through the Bible with that admirable penetration which goes as far as the identification of their being with the biblical substance itself. Pure exegesis, as an autonomous science, never existed in the time of the Fathers. If one places oneself in their school, one immediately understands that it concerns the inner reality of all biblical reading: the Word read or heard always leads to the living Word, to the presence of the Person of the Word. Saint Ephrem advises: “Before any reading, pray and beseech God that He may reveal Himself to you.” “Him whom I seek in your books,” said Saint Augustine. The legitimate aspiration to understand, to find answers, submits to the greater, to the one thing needful and places itself in the sacramental perspective of the advent: “One consumes Eucharistically the word mysteriously broken” (Origen) with a view to communion with Christ. To know is not to see from the outside, but to assimilate, to take, to identify oneself, so that God assumes, in the very act of His knowledge, the suffering of man. Providentially, the verb “to know” in Hebrew and Greek means “to know through communion,” with a nuptial sense; the wedding of the Lamb stands as the great symbol of the perfect knowledge of God.

The Gospel according to Saint Luke (24:45) tells us that Christ “opens the understanding” of His disciples by showing how the Bible should be read to discover “all that is written about Me”; beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them in all the Scriptures what concerned Him. This is how the Lord “opened the meaning of the Scriptures,” revealing that the Bible is the verbal icon of Christ.

This revelation teaches what might be called the Orthodox a priori of all reading of Scripture. God wanted Christ to form His Body where His words resound as words of Life. It is therefore in Christ, within His Body, in the Church, that one must read the Bible and listen to God. As soon as a believer takes up the Bible, the a priori places both of them in the Church, and it is within this act of “ecclesialization” that a historical document appears as a Holy Book filled with presence, and begins to speak. Ultimately, it is always the Church that reads the Bible when its pages are opened. Even alone, one reads together, liturgically. God wanted it this way, for the true subject of knowledge-communion is never the isolated man, but man as a member of the Body, liturgical man. Christ spoke to the College of the Twelve, the Church in embryo; the Apostles addressed communities, the Church in formation.

Faithfulness to the Tradition of the Fathers

The Eastern patriarchs have affirmed: “We preserve, uncorrupted, the doctrine of the Lord, and adhere to the faith He has given us; we keep it intact as a royal treasure.” The idea of living continuity through transmission is contained in a single word: Tradition. Saint John Damascene synthesizes in the 8th century: “We do not change the eternal boundaries that our fathers have placed, but we keep the tradition as we have received it.”

The dogmas, the sacraments, the liturgical hymnography, the icons, the writings of the Fathers, all these constituent elements of tradition form a dynamic whole charged with life and resonance of the Word, inseparable from the Word itself as its living continuation and coming from the same source of inspiration: “When He comes, the Spirit of Truth, He will guide you into all truth” (St John 16:13).

It is not about seeking ready-made answers in the archives of the past. It is about appropriating the great experience of the Church and allowing the instinct of Orthodoxy to develop within oneself, which will guide toward the interior of the consensus patrum et apostolorum of the Church. Until the moment when one suddenly understands that through the multiple forms of tradition, it is Christ Himself who comments on His own words. The Holy Spirit attests to this; but this testimony operates only in the catholicity of the Body; for it is on the humanity of Christ become Church that the Spirit rests and fully manifests Him: “He will take from what is mine and declare it to you” (St John 16:14).

To justify tradition, one can note two different methods. Saint Basil places emphasis on the inner tradition derived from the Apostles, sheltered under their authority. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus sees well the historical difficulty of this method, given the absence of precise references, and he shifts the emphasis toward an entirely different principle. He speaks of the progressive revelation of God, for God does not want to compel anyone, and He takes into account human receptivity.

He divides History into several epochs, each being introduced, symbolically speaking, by an “earthquake”: the gift of the Law and then the coming of the Gospel. But now, he says, it is about the third earthquake: God unfolds the Gospel Revelation. What the disciples could not bear is now revealed in the lived experience of the Church. The elements of tradition are not new revelations, but the explanation of the allusions and “silences” of the Gospels. Tradition bears witness to Scripture and the latter is part of tradition; however, the Bible remains the primary source of faith with absolute primacy and authority. The “eternal Gospel” (Rev. 14:6) is the incomparable reference form any form and criterion of truth.

The ecumenical councils continue theological reflection to answer the questions posed by each era. Alongside dogmas, the immense domain of theologoumena, theological opinions, is formed; in dubiis libertas remains the golden rule of the Church.

The notion of the infallibility of the Fathers and all elements of tradition is only a rabbinic conception or ignorance of the exact situation. The doctrinal failures and certain ambiguous elements in the writings of the Fathers demonstrate that no unconditional dogmatization, even of the greatest authorities, is workable. Even the Bible with its variants and the impossibility of having the original text proves the theandric, divine-human principle of the Bible itself: the infallibility of the divine and the relativity of the human; the two are united without confusion but also without separation. Thus certain theories of Origen, the neo-Platonism of Gregory of Nyssa and the Corpus Areopagiticum and certain theses of Saint John Chrysostom, the accusations of Messalianism against the writings of Macarius of Egypt, the intellectualist Origenism of Evagrius, the Nestorian milieu surrounding Isaac the Syrian, the excessive asceticism of certain passages of the Philokalia, the Aristotelianism of John Damascene, the ambiguity of many texts of liturgical poetry, demonstrate this and require an impartial discrimination between Tradition and traditions, in order to extract the indisputable essential.

With the apostolic age, Revelation is closed. God adds nothing to the content, revealed once and for all, of His Word. But on the day of Pentecost begins the time of the Church, time of transmission. Saint Paul emphasizes its importance: “Stand firm and keep the teachings we have transmitted to you, either by word of mouth or by letter.” This is continuity assured in both oral and written form. In addition to dogmas that all refer to Scripture, the Church teaches “facts” of a doctrinal nature transmitted by Tradition, without, however, endowing them with the dogmatic framework of conciliar definitions. These are the facts of spirituality that fall under the lex orandi, of the lived liturgy: the cult of the Theotokos, of saints, of angels, the sacraments, eschatology, and others, inseparable from Orthodoxy’s doctrinal corpus. The Church thus appears as a perpetual Council, dispersed in space and time, but always currently convened, always in action, in order to explain the truth carried in its tradition. Saint Irenaeus emphasizes the unanimity of the lex orandi and the lex credendi, of doctrine and worship. The unity of word and life is the most constant and expressive trait of Orthodox spirituality. That is why, Saint Irenaeus says again, the tradition of the apostles is visible in each Church, for the Church, disseminated throughout the entire world, preserves the apostolic preaching “as if it inhabited a single house... had a single soul... and a single mouth.”

The Council of Constantinople in 553 proclaimed: “We confess to maintain and preach the faith which was given from the beginning by our great God and Savior Jesus Christ to the holy Apostles, and which was preached by them throughout the world. This is the faith that the holy Fathers confessed, explained, and transmitted to the Churches, and in all things we follow them.” The formula: “thus believed the Apostles and the Fathers,” became classic in the texts of all the Councils. Thus Orthodox spirituality is strongly structured by the patristic tradition of the Church of the seven Councils.

However, it is not just a matter of erudition, but of discovering and appropriating the patristic style. Returning to the Fathers means advancing in creation, not in imitation. It is not enough to translate the ancient formulas into modern categories, but it is necessary to rediscover the experience of the “catholic” consciousness of the Fathers. This is not “collective” but “collegial.” Those who express it, we call Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Their testimony, according to Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous words, was “in the manner of the fishermen-apostles, not in the manner of Aristotle,” nor of Plato or Heidegger — a testimony of the vision of mysteries and not a justification of concepts.

Today’s Church finds itself in a missionary situation analogous to the pre-Christian world, grafted onto the post-Christian world with the same atheistic skepticism. It is here that the patristic tradition teaches a prophetic and global vision of the mystery of God. Saint Athanasius, who introduced the term “consubstantiality,” was called “the eye through which the universe looked at the Trinitarian mystery” and, according to Macarius of Egypt, the whole man must become such an eye, and this is the man of tradition and liturgy.

The appropriation of the Fathers’ thought is especially that of their experience: a return to sources backward but also forward, as Gregory of Nyssa said: “one remembers what is to come.” This paradoxical statement allows us to say that thanks to the Witness-Apostle who remains, tradition is an agreement with the future that one finds in the past. The Spirit draws backward in Christ what it announces forward in the light of the Kingdom (St John 16:15).

This principle must be understood in the vertical sense, just like the definition of tradition in Saint Vincent of Lérins: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, confessed always, everywhere, and by all. It is evident that in the horizontal sense of duration, this is an absurd principle; but vertically, it designates this deep dimension where, above time and space, that is to say above all fragmentation and distance, the consensus omnium patrum coincides with the Truth and reveals the perfect agreement of all, always and everywhere. The miracle of tradition is precisely in this paradoxical agreement of the past with the future; but, as the Russian theologian Khomiakov said, this is not a human definition but a divine one.

The Catholicity or Sobornost of Spirituality

The law of the physical world, where each being lives only through the destruction and death of others, gives way to the spiritual law of “catholicity” which governs the world of the spirit where each person carries the universal and lives from the life of others. Here the uniqueness of each is fulfilled in the symphonic agreement of all the “uniques,” where the Eucharist operates the “sacrament of the brother.” Man can never stand before God alone, separated from others, just as one is never saved alone but liturgically with all. “He will be saved who saves others” (V. Soloviev).

The phenomenological analysis of consciousness clearly shows its transsubjective nature and signifies that the structure of consciousness is collegial, which is expressed by the Russian term sobornost. Truth is accessible only to the organism of united consciousnesses, to the mutual love of all. The Slavophiles give a beautiful and profound formula of all true knowledge: “to hold a council of all within one’s spirit.”

The encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs addressed to Pope Pius IX in 1848 confirms this principle by saying: “The guardian of Truth is the entire people of the Church,” including the patriarch and the episcopate. In the most ancient texts, the term “catholic” was never used in the qualitative sense of the spatial expansion of the Church; it aimed at the integrity and unity of faith and doctrine by opposing fragmentary and sectarian tendencies. Cyril of Jerusalem says: “The Church teaches all dogmas in a ‘catholic,’ integral manner.” The extension to the outside, the missionary field of the Church, is only a spatial consequence of the inner catholicity which is not a matter of geography or numbers. The Fathers endowed the term “catholic” with its breadth and qualitative meaning.

Authority and Freedom

It is in light of this qualitative interiorization that the relationship between authority and freedom becomes clearer.

In the West, since the Reformation, the problem has been posed in terms of an agreement between authority and freedom, with varying emphasis on one or the other of these two realities of ecclesial life. It is indeed a problem of proportion: what is the reciprocal share of the two, what is the measure of legitimate freedom of the people that can be authorized in order to safeguard the order and authority of the clergy? Protestantism emphasizes freedom and asks what measure of authority can be allowed in order to safeguard the freedom of every believer. We can clearly see that this conflict determines authority and freedom as correlative principles where freedom is defined in relation to its limit, which is authority, and authority is defined in relation to the freedom it must limit. Depending on the era, the limit shifts in one direction or the other.

In anarchist movements, the limit shifts to the point of no longer delimiting anything; it is the elementary requirement of a radical freedom that eliminates all constraint. At its logical conclusion, freedom by its nature cannot remain “moderate” with a little more or a little less; it’s all or nothing. Sooner or later, the shadow of Nietzsche’s superman emerges; Feuerbach announces the liberation from all alienation; Dostoevsky finally takes stock and designates the ultimate truth of revolutionary arbitrariness: “freedom or death.” The circle is complete and the conflict has no way out, because the principle of “proportion” makes the terms reciprocally external; it externalizes them and opposes them to each other, which immediately loses the depth of interiorization that alone is capable of providing a solution. The external correlation of the two terms, their “objectification” is explosive. Throughout History, freedom undermines authority, authority chains freedom under the hypocritical pretext of inviting people to do freely what is necessary as dictated by authority. Dostoevsky’s “underground man” rises violently against formal logic and exclaims: “And what if we sent all these ‘two and two make four’ to the devil?” We know well what this means concretely.

Before addressing the problem from the inside, it would be useful to recall some classic definitions. According to the Littré dictionary, authority is the power to be obeyed, to impose oneself and to command. Authority, legitimate or not, is invasive; it does not easily resign itself to a position that is not all-powerful. If it uses the power and practical competence at its disposal to subordinate others to its particular ends, it is enslaving. The philosopher Alain radically distinguishes authority from power; he subverts the conventional correlation and warns: “If authority pretends to love, it is odious, and if it truly loves, it is without power.” Karl Jaspers explains it through a penetrating analysis: “The notion of authority comes to us from Roman thought. Auctor is one who supports something and develops it, one who makes it grow. Auctoritas, according to etymology, is the force that serves to support and increase”; that watches over not defense, but growth. It is clear that this is not about making others obey, but about helping them flourish. Lafay specifies: “Authority differs from power. One inspires a feeling of respect and veneration, the other a feeling of fear. Authority relates to dignity, power to force.” But it is Father Laberthonnière who goes furthest: “Authority that subordinates itself in a sense to those who are subject to it, and which, binding its fate to their fate, pursues with them a common end: that authority is liberating.” In this case, authority is the guardian of freedom; it is its guarantee. As Mgr Dupanloup says: “Any authority whose principle is not devotion is not worthy of this great name.” This devotion is designated in Scripture by the term diakonia. “Authority,” says Father Laberthonnière, “which is conceived solely as a power imposing itself by constraint or by skill, finds itself by its very essence irremediably external and foreign to the one on whom it is exercised... But it can take on another character, and even an absolutely opposite character,” and this would be the interior character. In the gospel of Saint Luke (9:54-55): “And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, ‘Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.’” Father Laberthonnière, very close to Eastern Christianity, expresses well this very principle of interiorized authority that completely changes its nature.

Saint Paul shows in Christianity the charter of freedom of the human spirit. The evangelical maximalism eliminates all “moderation” of the well-weighed and measured golden mean. “God doesn’t ask so much...” says the common sense of an honest man; but God asks for everything, and even more. Man says: “I am imperfect,” and God answers him: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Man says: “I am dust and nothing,” and Christ says: “You are all gods and you are my friends”; “You are of God’s race,”1 affirms Saint Paul, and Saint John says: “You have received the anointing and you know everything.” Man is created and yet he is not created, but “born of water and the Holy Spirit”; he is earthly and heavenly, creature and god-in-becoming. “A created god” is one of the most paradoxical notions, just like “created person” and especially “created freedom.” The boldness of the Fathers deepens these maxims, in order “not to grieve the Holy Spirit.” Saint Symeon notes: “Truly, it is a great mystery: God among men is God in the midst of gods undergoing deification...”

The Desert Fathers posed no theoretical problem of freedom: they left the City and in the caves of the desert empirically found unlimited freedom. Their example always teaches the same interiorization: every man finds the same space of inner freedom by placing himself before the Face of God. This is already the experience of Epictetus, it is the teaching of Saint Paul; even a slave is inwardly a royally free man. It is in God that such freedom finds, not a limit — for the Unlimited can never become a limit — but its unique Source, which quenches its thirst and stands as the object and content of freedom beyond all constraint. Man must submit to the will of God, and yet he must not submit purely and simply. God desires the fulfillment of His will and does not desire that man be a slave, but that he be a free son and the friend of Christ.

The classical definition of freedom sees it as the faculty to choose. Saint Maximus the Confessor affirms exactly the opposite: the need to choose, he says, is a poverty, a consequence of the fall. True freedom is a total momentum entirely oriented toward the Good and that knows no questioning or hesitation. At the level of sainthood, choice ceases to condition freedom. The perfect one follows the Good immediately, spontaneously; he is beyond any option. In this highest form, freedom is an activity that produces its own reasons, instead of submitting to them. It rises to the level where the freest acts are the most perfect. God does not choose. In His image, the act of a saint surpasses all preference. Hesitating and choosing, seeking authority and its directives, is characteristic of a will divided into contradictory desires that constantly clash. Perfection lies in the simplicity of a supernaturally natural convergence with the divine will. It can only be attained by transcending all exteriorization of relationships.

If one follows the false dialectic (“here is the power of the Episcopate, and there is the freedom of the People of God”), everything becomes deformed, objectified and disproportionate through rigid categorization. We have already seen that authority conceived as an external value changes its nature. On the contrary, interiorized, it appears as one of the most paradoxical values: it is the authority that negates its own being as authority, negates its own being as a power of constraint, and rises to a level where it identifies with Truth. The eastern Tradition affirms: the Church is not an authority, as God is not an authority, nor is the Christ of the Gospels, because authority is always something external for us. Not the authority that chains, but the Truth that liberates.

Any balancing, in the image of political blocs, poses freedom as a choice. Man is free before choosing; as soon as the choice is made, he is no longer free. He has chosen a principle that he erects as an authority to which he submits. We face a paradox: freedom is a choice that limits this choice and eventually suppresses it.

However, the Gospel clearly speaks of a completely different situation. It calls us to know and therefore to choose Truth as its object, and it is this Truth that sets free and makes one truly free. This means that any opposition between authority and freedom exists on a plane outside the Church, where the victory of only one or the other does not set one free in the sense of the Lord’s word. Scholastic theology is always tempted by its own measurements: a bishop has a full measure, a priest a little less, and a layperson even less; here grace is present, there it is absent. Yet, the Spirit blows where it wishes, and who can measure it? We know its presence, but we are ignorant of its absences, which perhaps do not exist.

One of the oldest symbols of faith confesses: “And in the Holy Spirit Church”; this mysterious identification means: “to believe in the Church in the Holy Spirit,” in its superabundance of “grace upon grace” without measure. "The Law (authority) was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (St John 1:16); “God gives the Spirit without measure” (St John 3:34). The thirst for true freedom is the thirst for the Holy Spirit who liberates without measure. Simone Weil speaks well of this thirst: “To call upon the Spirit purely and simply; a call, a cry. Like when one is at the limit of thirst, when one is sick with thirst, one no longer imagines the act of drinking in relation to oneself, nor even in general the act of drinking. One imagines only the water, the water taken in itself; but this image of water is like a cry of one’s entire being...” To this thirst responds the Church experienced as the perpetual Pentecost, the perpetual superabundance: “Let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes receive the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17). This is the very essence of the Church: not authority, but the Source of superabundance, grace upon grace, freedom upon freedom, which eliminates all “objectivization,”2 all conflict, all slavish trembling. Saint Cyril of Alexandria anticipates Hegel and Nietzsche, and, in place of the Master-slave relationship, establishes the Father-son relationship.

The Fall was precisely the perversion of the inner relationships established by God. But before that, it was the serpent who perverted the paradisiacal state by suggesting the false idea of a prohibition — thus, of a law before the Fall. The serpent insinuates: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1). But God says exactly the opposite: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat” (Gen. 2:16) — though with different consequences. If Saint Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient,” the serpent would say: “All things are forbidden, but all things are useful”; thus, God is turned into law and prohibitions. Yet God does not say, “Do not eat this fruit, otherwise you will be punished”; He says, “Do not eat this fruit, otherwise you will die.” It is not a command, but the warning of a destiny in one direction or another. This is not a matter of mere disobedience; it is a matter of failing to remain attentive to the living communion with the Father, of lacking the thirst for His presence — for His Love-Truth, which is life — because at the other pole lies death. At the moment of temptation, man imagines God as an authority who dictates commands and demands blind obedience. That suggestion comes from Satan, from the primordial rebellion against an authority that has been objectified — and thereby impoverished and perverted — because it ceases to be the Truth that sets free. Man had “objectified” God and introduced a distance, an external space; from that point on, he seeks the darkness and hides, fabricating an existence in the “cave of Plato,” as a prisoner. That is why Christ comes “to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty them that are bruised” (St Luke 4:19).

The effect of original sin is the transformation of God into an external Authority, into Law; logically, the next step is the transgression of the God-Law, which places man outside of God. The Incarnation was necessary for man to once again find himself within God. It was necessary for the “Child Jesus” to reveal the true face of the Father in the parable of the prodigal son — where justice-as-authority lies not with the Father, but with the elder son; the Father does nothing but run to meet His child.

“Let the dead bury their dead” means to bury the dead authority and the dead freedom — both perverted in equal measure. “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister” (St Matthew 20:25–26). Saint John the Baptist is “the greatest among those born of women” because he is “the least.” The words of Saint Paul (2 Cor. 1:24) — “Not that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy” — beautifully define in the East the nature of episcopal authority.

The knowledge of the Truth that sets free is not knowledge about God, but knowledge of the Truth Who is God — the Feast of encounter, as Saint Symeon says so beautifully: “I give thanks to Thee that, without confusion, without separation, Thou hast made Thyself one spirit with me.” The divine fire renders Creator and creature indivisible, abolishes all distance, all objectivization or externalization of authority. In Sartre, it is the thirst for freedom that dominates, but this freedom is empty, without object; in the words of Simone Weil, it is the object that dominates: the water of life, the Holy Spirit given without measure.

Saint Peter’s discourse on the day of Pentecost cites the prophecy of Joel: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17). One could say that the last days have already been inaugurated in a qualitative sense, and that the gifts of the Spirit have begun to pour out — though, for now, not yet fully discerned or ordered. Following the [Second] Vatican Council, the movements that emerged show a dynamism that stirs the Body. Often this is a clumsy groping, but it is a sincere search — through the deviations of the past — for a true relationship between the different members of the one People of God; bishops and laity together, equally, are servants in the image of the Lord. The Holy Spirit can provoke impatience and thirst, honest searching, and use it for the advancement of the Kingdom.

In his memoir Words (Les Mots), Sartre says something profound: “I was waiting for the Creator (the Father); instead I was served a great Boss.” The Church must be attentive to this waiting and searching, and respond to it. In that response, one will see in a bishop not a chief, a boss, or a power of coercion, but the image of the Father; and in a man thirsting for freedom, the prodigal son — not seeking authority but the heart of the Father. It is the joy and freedom of the children of God who, in the Church — beyond rules and functions — find the Holy Spirit.

Obedience to God, interiorized, contemplates what the liturgy sings: “Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord, Jesus Christ.” This is the only Lordship revealed by God Himself, and it is the Lordship of Christ who knocks at the door of the human heart (Rev. 3:20). Alongside this is the Pentecostal Lordship of the Holy Spirit — His breath of freedom — while we await the Lordship of the Father in the Kingdom. But can we call Lordship authority?

That would be absurd. The Kingdom is the Lordship of the Trinity, which includes within its sacred circle of the eternal circulation of love all people — finally and fully set free by the Truth-Joy that does not fade. The Church, like Saint John the Baptist, must “decrease” so as to reveal only the presence of Christ the Bridegroom, who already offers the eucharistic communion as a nuptial communion with His whole human soul.

Paschal Spirituality

If one penetrates to the very heart of Orthodox spirituality, one finds above all the vivid sense of the triumphant irruption of eternal life — the victory over death and over hell. This is the very breath of the Gospel message, carried by the Paschal joy. “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” This apostolic insistence is fundamental. Today, the dividing line among people does not lie in belief in the existence of God, but between those who believe in the real and historical event of Christ’s Resurrection, and those who see in it nothing more than a myth. The Resurrection is not the miracle of a reanimated corpse, as in the case of Lazarus, but the definitive victory of the Spirit — in the fullest sense of the “new creature” deified and inaugurated by Christ. The mystery and the silence surrounding it, the confusion of the disciples and of Mary Magdalene who do not at first recognize Him, point to a divine dimension of the event — one that calls for faith, beyond any empirical observation or any verification of the kind sought by Thomas. It is a “sign” in the Johannine sense, whose meaning man is free to recognize or to reject. One must “turn around,” as Mary does; one needs the flash of a eucharistic consciousness, the heart’s eye opened and set ablaze like that of the disciples on the road to Emmaus — or the “sober intoxication” of the apostles on the day of Pentecost, the space of love in which to recognize the Orient overflowing with light.

This is not merely a hope or a waiting. The “liturgical Memorial” “remembers” the Passion, the Resurrection, but also the Parousia. The events are at once within history and within eternity and, by that very fact, they transcend time. The “Memorial” makes us contemporaries of the event it commemorates. The Resurrection that occurred two thousand years ago is a continued presence today, and our own resurrection is bound up with it. When we say the Paschal greeting, “Christ is risen,” we know that we are alive instead of being dead or dying. This Paschal exultation permeates all the forms of the Church's life, for the victory over death concerns the destiny of every human being and of the entire universe. It is the divine joy of Christ “coming forth from the tomb as from a bridal chamber, and from hell as from a royal palace.” “Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be filled with gladness, let all the universe, visible and invisible, celebrate this day, for Christ is risen, eternal joy!” “All is filled with light — heaven, earth, and even hell.” “Let us be illumined with joy, let us embrace one another and say, ‘Brethren!’” And even to those who hate us, let us say: “Let us forgive one another, and let us sing thus: Christ is risen!”

Faith expands our capacity to receive, and it interprets the Resurrection as an absolute, objective, historical fact which, according to the Scriptures, reveals the glorified corporeality of Christ. This glorified body transforms the prison of space and time into an eternal feast of encounter — into Love that gives itself and transforms.

Saint Isaac the Syrian, as a master of asceticism, gives us a phenomenology of sin. In the eyes of God, all sins are but dust, because repentance is granted to man. The one sin — the sin — is “to be insensible to the Risen One”! What a moving and timely prophecy: its light, coming from the 7th century, illuminates the modern mindset, which — alongside the militant anti-gods of Marxist nations — rejects the historicity of the Resurrection.

Now, every true believer is aware that his resurrection has already been accomplished
in the Risen Christ. That is why Seraphim of Sarov, in the last century, would greet each visitor with the life-giving words: “My joy, Christ is risen!”

Eucharistic Spirituality

The Eucharist is the most intimate reality of spirituality. It extends over each and over all — over history and over eternity. The entire liturgy is nothing but the expectation of the Lord, whose sacrifice is made present.

In Greek, the words symbol and devil come from the same root, but they express opposite realities. The devil is the divider, the one who breaks all communion and reduces being to infernal solitude. By contrast, the symbol binds, bridges, restores communion.

In the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:9), Christ asks the demon a terrifying question: “What is your name?”— meaning: “Who are you, what is your nature, your hidden being?” The demon replies: “My name is Legion, for we are many.” This sudden shift from singular to plural, from I to we, reveals the action of evil in the world: being decomposes, atomizes into a multitude — a legion of isolated fragments — and this is hell. By contrast, Saint Paul shows the action of Good: “Since there is one single bread [Christ], we who are many [decomposed by evil into a ‘legion,’ a wicked multitude] form one single body” (1 Cor. 10:17).

Eucharistic communion gathers all into Christ. Christians are not merely united — they become one in Christ, and this defines the Eucharistic style of spirituality. “There is only Yes in God,” proclaims Saint Paul — this is the affirmation of being and of immortality. The choice between Yes and No, between Being and Nothingness, has been present from the very beginning of Christian thought; it is the famous catechesis of the two ways: “I have set before you life and death: therefore choose life,” says the Lord (Deut. 30:19).

The Fathers interpreted Saint Paul’s words on our “incorporation” into the Lord in the most realistic way. The world in Christ, says Saint Maximus, is the “burning bush,” and the Eucharist inflames us with that same fire. Saint Symeon speaks this in the prayer before Holy Communion: “I hope in Thee, trembling, and I commune with fire. By myself I am but straw, yet — O miracle — I feel suddenly set ablaze, like Moses’ burning bush of old... Lord, my whole being shines with the fire of Thy divinity, ineffably united to it. And Thou grantest that the corruptible temple of my flesh be united to Thy holy flesh, that my blood be mingled with Thine; and henceforth I am Thy member, transparent and luminous…”

In Christ, all is given; yet the Holy Spirit requires of us a radical metanoia — a turning of our consciousness and our whole being, in order that we may become Eucharistic men, capable of responding to the anguish and thirsts of today’s world.

The Fathers say that baptism is already the “little resurrection,” the immortality of the soul. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Risen One: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life”; “he does not come into judgment, but has already passed from death to eternal life.” Death, then, is not ahead of us — it is behind, in time; what lies ahead is Pascha, the passage into eternity.

Spiritual life is built around communion with Christ, the “sacrament of the brother,” and the universal communion of all in the Risen Christ. As the first fruits of the sanctification of the entire universe, the bread — taken from the fields — and the wine — taken from the vineyards — become the Body and Blood of the Lord. To this cosmic aspect is added the eschatological vision: after each communion, the prayer of the Paschal office pleads, “Grant that we may partake of Thee even more perfectly in the unending Light of Thy coming Kingdom.”

Liturgical Spirituality

With His passage to the Father, Christ completed His mission, and yet He promises: “I will come again; I will be with you until the end of the world.” From the Body that is being built up, the Lord is not absent, but the mode of His presence has changed: He returns and is present in the Holy Spirit.

During His earthly life, it was Christ who acted, and the Spirit was within His deeds. Now it is the Spirit who acts in order to manifest Christ through His deeds. The time of the Church is the time of the Spirit, situated between the two comings (“Parousias”) of the Lord: the Incarnation and the Second Coming in glory. To the “gift” of Christ is added the “action” of men borne by the Spirit: “He fills the witnesses, establishes the bishops”; the Fathers of the Council assemble with the Spirit who presides and enlightens. Everything in the Church is charismatic — through ministries, gifts, and charisms.

The Acts of the Apostles — acts of the Church until the end of the world — constitute the Gospel of the Holy Spirit. Alongside institutional and hierarchical forms, one sees “event-based” acts (Saint Paul, “apostle by exception,” is recognized by the college of the Twelve). To the regular mediation of the priesthood is added the unpredictable mediation of holiness, where grace cannot be “organized”; alongside structure, life springs forth.

This immediate relationship with God is inseparable from its liturgical source and powerfully shapes the very type of Orthodox spirituality: a spirituality that is essentially liturgical.

The word “orthodox” comes from the Greek word doxa and means both right doctrine and right praise, with a doxological priority: “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray; and if you truly pray, you are a theologian,” says the patristic adage.

In the 14th century, Nicholas Cabasilas universalized and socialized the liturgical method of the great spiritual masters, making it accessible to all: “The sacraments,” he says, “this is the way… the door that He has opened…; it is by returning through this way and this door that Christ comes again to mankind.” Indeed, the sacraments continue the historical visibility of Christ; the memorial of the sacraments “reproduces” the life of Jesus, guiding us step by step along the figurative arc of salvation by following the Lord. In the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, man joins in the song of the angels, beginning with the Trisagion: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal” — the Father, source of holiness; the Son, who triumphs over death; the Holy Spirit, the life-giver, breath of eternal life. The second angelic hymn, the Sanctus, sums up the theme of the anaphora — the Eucharistic adoration that is always Trinitarian. The ministry of men and angels is united in the same movement of worship: “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.” God exhorts men, saying: “Be holy” — His call marks the dawning of the glory of the age to come, begun already here below. A saint is not a superman, but one who finds and lives the truth of man as a liturgical being, and who embraces his vocation of unceasing adoration. The human being is the man of the Sanctus and of the Trisagion, as the psalm so magnificently says: “I will sing to my God as long as I live.”

The lives of the great spiritual masters tell us that “Abba Anthony, who lived in solitude, learned one day through a vision that a man of holiness equal to his own lived in the world, working as a physician; he gave all his surplus to the poor and sang the Trisagion all day, joining the choir of angels.” It is for this “action” that man is “set apart,” made holy. To sing to his God is his sole concern, his only “work.” The Apocalypse shows us this: “And all the angels… the elders and the four living creatures… fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying: Amen, Alleluia! And a voice came from the throne saying: Praise our God, all ye His servants” (Rev. 7:11 and 19:4).

In the catacombs, a frequent image is that of a woman in prayer, the “orans”; she represents the truest posture of the human soul. It is not enough to have prayer — one must become prayer, be prayer, be shaped in the form of prayer, transform the world into a temple of adoration, into a cosmic liturgy. It is not about offering what one has, but offering what one is. This is a much-loved theme in iconography; it condenses the Gospel message into a single word: joy — hence the names of icons that express it so beautifully: “Rejoice and adore” or “Let every creature that breathes give thanks to God.” It is the marvelous relief from the weight of the world, from the heaviness of man himself. During the liturgy, one hears: “The King of kings, Christ, draws near,” and this is the one thing needful — to receive our Sovereign with dignity. That is why, at this solemn moment, the Church sings: “We who mystically represent the Cherubim (united with the angels), let us sing to the life-giving Trinity the thrice-holy hymn, and lay aside all earthly care, that we may receive the King of all, invisibly escorted by angelic hosts. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” As in the triple Amen of the epiclesis, this is the Trinitarian seal, which we find again in the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer: “the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” This Kingdom is not merely coming — it is already present, for liturgical time is itself its coming, its Parousia. It is in order to stand on this level and fulfill his vocation as a liturgical being that man is charismatic: “You were sealed with the Holy Spirit… and God has acquired [these sealed ones] for the praise of His glory” (Eph. 1:14). One could not define liturgical spirituality more precisely. Modern exegesis translates Genesis 2:15: “Yahweh Elohim took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden for worship and for keeping.” Paradise is thus assimilated to a sanctuary, and the first man is its priestly guardian; from the beginning, man is a liturgist.

Patristic meditation always ends in a doxology. “I go forward singing to You,” declares Saint John Climacus. The same joy appears in Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: “Thy glory, O Christ, is man, whom Thou hast set like an angel, a singer of Thy radiance... It is for Thee that I live, speak, and sing — the only offering that remains to me from all my possessions.” Or again, Saint Gregory Palamas: “Illumined, man reaches eternal heights… and already here on earth becomes all miracle. And even without being in heaven, he joins the heavenly hosts in their unceasing song; standing on earth like an angel, he leads all creation toward God.”

Monastic Spirituality

One of the surest ways to grasp Orthodox spirituality is to enter into it through monasticism, which played a foundational role in shaping its character and maintaining its perfect homogeneity. Indeed, there is only one spirituality for all, without any distinction between clergy, monks, or laity — and that is monastic spirituality. Orthodoxy has never recognized a division between commandments and evangelical counsels. The Gospel, in all its absoluteness and total demands, is addressed to everyone, to each and all alike. It is therefore in the light of monasticism — its ascetic and pedagogical school — that one must seek the foundations of Orthodox piety.

Monasticism immediately evokes the Thebaid, cradle of so many giants of the Spirit — an arid and scorched desert, yet entirely illuminated by their light. These astonishing masters of experimental wisdom taught the highly refined art of living according to the absoluteness of the Gospel.

Historically, monasticism is explained above all by the most radical revolt against evil and its dominion in the world, and by a categorical “no” to all compromise, all conformity. Its thoroughly evangelical violence, in order to seize the Kingdom of God, demanded the renunciation of the world’s ambiguous and equivocal forms. The longing for the Kingdom stood opposed to the all-too-human nature of the Christian Empire and the City of Man.

In the time of persecutions, the clearest manifestation of the maximalism of the Christian faith — its witness driven like a thorn into the flesh of the world — belonged to the martyrs, whom the Church venerated as her very heart and called “those wounded by the love of Christ.” The martyr proclaims Christ by becoming a “spectacle” before God, the angels, and men — a living, striking sign of total fidelity to the Lord.

The Concordat of Constantinople granted the Church legal status and a “peaceful” existence, as it was now protected by the State. From that moment on, the witness that the martyrs had borne to “the one thing needful” passed into monasticism and was transformed there into a charismatic ministry of eschatological maximalism. The monks’ “baptism of asceticism” took the place of the “baptism of blood” of the martyrs. The famous Life of Saint Anthony, written by Saint Athanasius, describes this father of monasticism as “the first to attain holiness without tasting martyrdom.”

Whoever hears the Gospel call becomes, says Saint Symeon, the equal of the apostles; like John the Evangelist, he may turn toward men and tell them what he has seen in God. He may, and he must. In fact, he cannot do otherwise — for the monk is a witness par excellence of the last things, an apostle of evangelical perfection. In the desert, in caves, or in the prayerful silence of monasteries, in the school of the theodidacts — those “taught by God” — the birth of the “new creature” slowly took shape. One may say that at least here, in contrast to the compromises of the world, the metanoia of the Gospel — the total reversal of human existence, the transformation of the “second birth” — had succeeded.

Is this an irreducible opposition to the world? One may see it as a stark contrast, but not a rupture. The two paths of existence — within the world and on its margins — culminate in the same reality, each justifying the other, in order to respond to the fullness carried within the womb of the Incarnation. Monks leave the world in order to bless it immediately from the desert and to carry it in their unceasing prayer. And it is in the monks’ maximalism that the spirituality of those who remain in the world finds its measure, its standard of comparison, its canon, the model of existence. Struck with wonder before the stylites, the world discovers — through prayer and adoration — the essence of man: the offering of his being, “ground in the millstones of humility, so as to become sweet and pleasing bread for the Lord.” And finally, through the ascetical spirit of detachment, the world perceives the eschatological dimension of history itself.

Through its evangelical striving toward “the impossible,” toward “the one thing needful,” monasticism saves the world from its most fearsome self-sufficiency and from the idolatry of its own self. Its art of prayer, discernment of spirits, cultivation of attentiveness, strategy of invisible combat, science of the heart and of the subconscious, mastery of the spiritual over the material — these reach an astonishing level of perfection and become a mirror of conscience in which the world comes to see and judge itself.

A monk is not someone who diminishes his being, but one who enlarges it — someone who exists in the image of the Divine Existent. His asceticism is not a philosophy or a system of virtues, but unceasing communion with the wholly Other, the Transcendent. This is why John Climacus, a spiritual master, never ceases to emphasize that the defining mark of a monk is tireless love for God, a love like that of a bridegroom for his bride. According to his disciples, he himself, “aflame with divine love, was nothing but unceasing prayer, nothing but inexplicable love for God.” No asceticism, no knowledge devoid of love brings one close to God — this is the constant refrain of the greatest spiritual masters. According to Saint Maximus the Confessor, the task of monasticism is not only to unite the mind with the Holy Trinity, but to manifest the truth of that union among men.

The Philanthropy of God

Hearing the words, “If you would be perfect, sell what you have,” the monks, having already been stripped of all possessions, understood it to mean: “Sell what you are.” This is the total offering of one’s being. Man has fallen beneath himself; monastic asceticism raises him above himself, restoring to him his dignity as a child of God, a new creature in Christ. If common sense says, “God doesn’t ask that much,” monasticism proclaims urbi et orbi: God is fearsome in His jealousy — He asks for everything, and leaves nothing behind.

Is this a titanism of natural forces? One must return to the sources to grasp the relationship between freedom and grace. To the question of man’s part in the work of salvation, Eastern synergism responds — but it must be rightly understood. “Virtues,” according to the ascetics, are nothing other than dynamism — not autonomous, but set in motion by the grace of God. The Fathers distinguish between the freedom or free will of intention, and the freedom of actions. They affirm the freedom of the desire for salvation, for healing, and they leave the operation entirely on God’s side. Yet in a certain way, this desire is already operative, for it answers God’s own desire to save, and thereby draws grace: “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.” To every sigh, to every movement to go beyond oneself, grace responds by lifting one up. To ascend to heaven, says Saint Maximus, “man has two wings: freedom and grace.” Grace, in its very essence, is the matrix of two initiatives, two fiats — divine and human; but it is granted only to our total offering. Maximus states: “The Spirit generates no will that resists Him. He deifies only the will that desires Him.” “The virtues,” say the spiritual masters, “are still God’s doing — He places them in the human heart; but to man belong the labors and the sweat.”

One might say, paradoxically: God works, and man sweats. This is not a “meritorious work” or a reward system, but human action within divine action — that is the most precise definition of synergism. “God is our Savior; He is not the one who weighs and measures the value of works,” says Mark the Hermit. “If God looked to merit, then no one would enter the Kingdom of God.” “God does everything in us,” says Maximus, “virtue, knowledge, victory, wisdom, and goodness.” And yet, every truth is always antinomic. The soul is stretched not toward salvation in the self-interested sense of securing its destiny, but toward the response God awaits from man. At the heart of the immense drama of the biblical God lies not merely the interaction of grace and sin, of the Judge and the guilty, but above all the Incarnation — the interaction of God’s descending love and man’s ascending love. If anything is to be saved in the world, it is first and foremost this love — the love that God first directed toward man, the love that surpasses and overwhelms us. The liturgical texts name it with a word already full of grace: the Philanthropic God.

This name expresses a certain image of God that each Church traces in its own way, starting from its lived experience of God. This is important to our subject, because spirituality is centered on that vision.

Saint Gregory sees in Abraham the type of man who, without asking questions, walks in the mysterious depths of God. But human beings do ask questions and demand proofs; yet proofs wound the Truth, and the Lord refuses them.

The optimism of arguments for the existence of God produces a kind of “existential boredom” and ignores the fact that any coercive proof violates human conscience. That is why God limits His omnipotence, renounces His omniscience, withdraws every sign, and encloses Himself in the silence of His suffering love. He spoke through the prophets, He spoke during His earthly life — but after Pentecost, He speaks only through the breathings of the Holy Spirit. It is in this silence, says Nicholas Cabasilas, that God declares His love: manikon eros — the “mad love” of God for man — and His wondrous respect for human freedom. “The form in which God extends His hand to us is the very one that makes that hand invisible.” The hand of Christ covers our eyes — but it is pierced, and the eyes see through it.

Faith is the response to this kenotic attitude of God. Saint Paul describes it and shows that the “alienation” lies not on man’s side, but on God’s: “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant… He humbled Himself” (Phil. 2:7–8). It is because man can say “no” that his “yes” takes on its full resonance and stands in the same register of freedom as the yes of God. That is also why God accepts being refused, misunderstood, rejected, cast out of His own creation. On the Cross, God — against God — took the side of man. Nicholas Cabasilas expresses it beautifully: “God presents Himself and declares His love… rejected, He waits at the door… For all the good He does us, He asks in return only our love; and in exchange, He cancels all our debts.” The Christian is a miserable man — but he knows that there is someone even more miserable: that Beggar of love at the door of the heart: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him” (Rev. 3:20). “God,” says Saint Maximus, “became a beggar because of His beggarly condescension toward us, suffering until the end of time, in proportion to each person’s suffering.”

The Son comes to earth to sit at the “table of sinners.” Love can only be self-offering — even unto death. God dies so that man may live. The voice of God is silent; it exerts an infinitely gentle pressure, never irresistible. God does not issue commands — He offers invitations: “Hear, O Israel” or “If you want to be perfect…” To a tyrant’s decree there comes a dull resistance; to the invitation of the Master of the Banquet comes the joyful acceptance of “the one who has ears,” of the one who makes himself elect by closing his hand around the gift offered by his King.

That man is free does not mean that he is the cause of his salvation, but that even God Himself cannot compel his love. Yet the simple invocation of God’s name immediately makes present that Someone who is unknown and yet intimately known from the beginning. According to the Fathers, the Holy Spirit is the hypostasized Gift; therefore, if every request depends on the will of God, the request for the coming of the Holy Spirit is never denied — for refusal would contradict the very nature of the Spirit-Gift: “How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” says the Lord.

God created the “second freedom,” and He takes the supreme risk of an emergent freedom, one capable of defeating God Himself, compelling Him to descend into death and into hell — letting Himself be freely murdered in order to offer the murderers forgiveness and resurrection. His omnipotence lies in making space for human freedom, in veiling His foreknowledge so as to engage in dialogue with His “other,” to love him to the point of that infinite suffering which awaits a free response — a free creation of a shared life between God and His child. The patristic adage declares: “God can do everything, except compel man to love Him.” The omnipotence of God takes the form of the life-giving Cross — the only true answer to atheism’s charge concerning freedom and evil.

Human freedom can always say: “Let not Thy will be done”; even God has no control over that word. The freedom to reject God is willed as such by God — that is, without limit. This suspensive power of human choice renders his destiny conditional. And this is, so to speak, the hell of divine Love, the divine vision of man immersed in the infernal night of loneliness.

The terrible and impassible God of overly rational theology turns out to be a suffering God, as Philaret of Moscow put it: “The Father is the Love that crucifies; the Son is the Love crucified; the Spirit is the invincible power of the Cross.” This is the mystery of Love, all streaming with light, on the morning of Pascha.

This mystery had already been intuited by the mystical current of Jewish thought. Rabbi Baruch sought a way to explain that God is a companion in exile, a forsaken solitary, a stranger unrecognized among men. One day, his grandson was playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid, but the other child refused to seek him and went away. The child came weeping to his grandfather. Then, with tears in his own eyes, Rabbi Baruch exclaimed: “God says the same thing: I hide, but no one comes looking for Me…”

A saint once said to his child: “You see, if you could play with the Lord, that would be the most wonderful thing anyone had ever done. Everyone takes Him so seriously that they make Him boring… Play with God, my son; He is the supreme playmate…”

Saint Paisius the Great prayed for his disciple who had denied Christ. The Lord appeared to him and said: “Do you not know that he has denied Me?” But the saint, full of pity, only prayed all the more fervently for his disciple. Then the Lord said to him: “Paisius, by your love you have made yourself like Me.”

Saint Anthony said that hell certainly exists — but for him alone. This means that hell is never “for others”; it is never the object of discourse, but of hope.

The religious idea of a people is formed beginning from its vision of the Christ of the Gospels. Among the various “icons” of Christ, shaped according to the religious genius of different peoples, there exists a Russian Christ who bears something essentially evangelical: in the kenotic aspect of the humble Brother of the humiliated — He who is always with the poor, the sick, the suffering. The painter Nesterov expressed this well in his famous painting “Christ and Holy Russia,” where Christ is shown surrounded by beggars, the infirm, and the little ones of this world. The great contemporary Russian writer Solzhenitsyn notes that “Russian literature has always turned toward those who suffer”; it follows the Christ who has compassion, who heals, who consoles. He is never a “judge”; and this is why all human judgment must follow the charity of Christ, must seek His Pravda — an untranslatable word in which justice is fulfilled in mercy. The name “Johannine Christianity,” often applied to Orthodox spirituality, refers to the indwelling of the Word in the human soul, the nuptial communion in which the divine is never a principle of justice or power, but the Source of Philanthropy from which the “new creature” springs forth.

This “Johannine” type also refers to that word of Saint John which testifies to the extreme realism of the spiritual: “That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, and which our hands have touched.” A Christmas hymn expresses this realism well: “I behold a strange mystery: a cave becomes heaven, and a manger receives Him whom the entire universe cannot contain.”

In Russia, this thirst for intimacy with the heavenly gave rise to a phenomenon that may be regarded as national: the very particular love of pilgrimages to holy places. The historian Kliuchevsky, in his listing of social classes, places “pilgrims” in a separate category — a true social class of those who were fed, along the way, by villagers, in the name of Christ. Periodically, multitudes from all walks of life would take to the open road, heading for sanctuaries, monasteries, and theophanic places. One had to go on foot, wherever possible, even to Palestine — the Holy Land par excellence. It was an imperative necessity to be present in places where grace had manifested itself in a striking, tangible, palpable way: people needed to touch the holy, to feel close to the sacred, to live — if only for a moment — in the atmosphere of the Kingdom of God, in the light of the Day without decline.

Curiously enough, this expressed a kind of familiarity, a direct and immediate relationship with the heavenly — but one that was accompanied by the utmost sobriety. In contrast to all romantic or psychological sentimentality, asceticism teaches the sobriety of the spiritual stripped of all pietistic emotionalism; all genuine emotion is rigorously filtered. It rejects every pursuit of visual or sensory phenomena: “If an angel appears to you, reject the vision, humble yourself, and say: I am unworthy to see it.” And to Satan who had taken the form of Christ, a monk once declared: “I do not wish to see Christ here, but elsewhere in the age to come.” “Do not seek during prayer to discern any image or form,” advises Saint Nilus of Sinai. The interiorization of the spiritual life eliminates all sterile superstition and orients itself toward indwelling in the Johannine sense: “We will come and make our abode in him.”

Spiritual sobriety calls for vigilance of the heart, nourished by unceasing prayer; it shows great mistrust toward all psychic emotionalism, any uncontrolled affective or sensual element, and all visionary imagination.

For a baptized person, Christ is the interior fact of his being. Without eliminating the gap, the divine presence fills it with its burning nearness: “If you are pure, heaven is within you; it is within yourself that you will see the light, the angels, and the Lord Himself.” Enstasis is opposed to the ecstatic state, which is considered dangerous and, according to the saints, not the mark of the perfected but of novices. Saint Symeon warns: “Be immaterial in the presence of the Immaterial.” The wisdom of the elders says: “If you see a young man rising of his own will to heaven, grab him and throw him back down to the earth, for it will do him no good.”

While resistant to all imagination and materialized representation, Orthodoxy has, at the same time, created the veneration of the icon, surrounded itself with images, and shaped the visible aspect of the Church through them. This is because the icon is a visual theology of symbols, one that lifts the gaze toward a presence without shape or figure; from the invisible within the visible, it leads toward the pure invisible.

The Ultimate Ideal of Spirituality

Saint Seraphim of Sarov summarizes the tradition well when he says: “The true goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.” According to Saint Athanasius: “The Word became flesh so that we might receive the Spirit.” The term thus defined designates the religious ideal of Orthodoxy, known by the Greek word theosis — deification. One could also say pneumatization: the penetration of the whole human being by the deifying energies of the Holy Spirit. Saint Basil says that “man has been commanded to become god,” and Athanasius: “God became man so that man might become god by grace” — that is, one who partakes of the holiness of God (2 Peter 1:4), and shares in the conditions of divine life: integrity of being and immortality. “Ye are gods,” says the Lord; and the canon of Matins for Holy Thursday sings: “In my Kingdom, I shall be God, and you shall be gods with Me.”

The Palamite distinction between the radically transcendent divine essence and the divine energies that are immanent to man removes all danger of pantheism. Man remains a creature, even while becoming a “new creature.” Full deification is the work of the Eighth Day, which the saints already manifest in anticipation. The icon represents this state of the transfigured in the image of Christ on Mount Tabor. The disciples of Arsenius the Great, while he prayed, saw him “like a pillar of fire.” Abba Lot asked Abba Joseph what more he should do. The elder stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. And his hands became ten burning candles. And he said to Abba Lot: “If you wish to be perfect, become all flame.” According to Macarius of Egypt: “The soul that the Holy Spirit has chosen, He illuminates, and it becomes all light, all fire, all eye.”

Deification begins even now; but the higher a saint ascends, the more he continues to repeat: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” or, as one of the greatest once said: “All will be saved — only I will be condemned.” Abba Sisoes, on his deathbed, was entirely radiant. Those present heard him speaking to someone, and he explained: “The angels have come to take me, and I am asking them to leave me a little more time so that I may repent.” The elders said to him: “But you have no need of repentance anymore.” He replied: “Truly I say to you, I have not even begun to repent.”

Deification is offered to all through the sacraments, and especially through the Eucharist, which is the “sacrament of the brother.” “Our life or death depends on our neighbor,” said Saint Anthony, “for if we gain our brother’s heart, we gain God; and if we cause our neighbor to stumble, we sin against Christ.” A desert father said: “If it were possible for me to give my body to a leper in exchange for his, I would do it with joy — for that is perfect love.” Love for God is active and passes through love for every man.

If one seeks a definition, Orthodox spirituality is not moral but ontological; from moral catharsis (purification), one ascends to ontological catharsis, to the transfiguration of nature. The prayer of Symeon Metaphrastes, read after the Divine Communion, expresses this clearly:

Thou Who hast given me Thy flesh as food, Thou Who art a fire consuming the unworthy, do not consume me, O my Creator, but rather enter into my limbs, into all my joints, my loins and my heart. Burn away the thorns of all my sins, cleanse my soul, sanctify my heart, strengthen my knees and bones, illumine my five senses, and make me wholly one in Thy love.

Man is “Christified” in his very being: “the clay receives royal dignity… [and] is transformed into the substance of the King,” notes Nicholas Cabasilas. This is the very heart of Orthodox spirituality: man becomes by grace what God is by nature. For Saint Macarius, the “spirit” of man is above all the receptivity of his whole being to the penetration of the gifts, the charisms, and the energies of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirituality of the Communio Sanctorum

Those who visit Orthodox churches are often struck by their light and a particular warmth and intimacy with the heavenly. This is because, even outside of services, every part of the walls is animated by presences testified to by the icons, which place the person in communion with his elders: angels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints. One feels spontaneously, naturally, as if visiting in the house of God, surrounded by God’s friends. With Christ comes “heaven, where the Triune God dwells and moves, having descended to earth,” and the soul is seized by this vision to such an extent that one might define Orthodoxy as “heaven on earth.” In this celestial atmosphere of the liturgy, man feels at ease, at home, a member of the vast Communio Sanctorum.

Death does not break the bond of mutual love; communion unites the living and the dead. It conditions both the intercessory prayer for the departed and their prayer for the living. Symeon the New Theologian sees the saints as a golden chain: “The saints of each generation,” he says, “join those of the previous ones and, like them, filled with light, they become a golden chain in which each is a distinct link, joined to the previous one by faith and charity. In this way they form a single chain in God, and it cannot be broken.” According to Saint Paul, all are called to be saints, and each has his place in this chain or “golden belt” of the Church. “There is only one sadness,” said Léon Bloy, “and that is not to be a saint...”

Every Orthodox Christian receives at baptism the name of a saint, which means that he enters the earthly Church, but also the heavenly Church. His patron saint joins his guardian angel, and together the two protect the faithful.

As soon as one speaks of sanctity, a psychological block often appears. People think immediately of the giants of old, the hermits and stylites, to such a point that these “illuminated ones,” “equal to the angels,” no longer seem of this world. Yet a saint is not a superhuman being; he is simply one who has realized likeness to God through faith and love, and who never ceases to be an embodied prayer, a living doxology to his God. If some undergo martyrdom by the sword, as a spectacle before all, others undergo the martyrdom of hidden love that crowns them inwardly, invisibly to the world.

The saints are our intercessors and protectors in the heavens, and therefore the most active members of the Church militant. They surround us with a cloud of witnesses and cover us with their prayers. They are not mediators between God and men — for the only Mediator is our Lord — but they are our friends, who pray with us and for us, and help us in our spiritual life.

The Philanthropic God grants the saints the grace of active assistance. They constitute the invisible presence of the Church, like the hands of God, to carry out His economy of salvation. Before our Father, we stand together, and this is the “communion of saints.”

Each day of the year is marked by the liturgical memory of one or more saints. The golden thread of the transfigured, the crimson thread of the martyrs — known or unknown to the world — extends until the end of time.

The martyr seals his faithfulness with his death; but he is the one who prays for his executioners, and the only hope of the torturer on the day of judgment will be the plea of the martyr, who alone, by right, may forgive in the name of Christ and in His image.

The “fools for Christ” are those who seek humiliation by preaching the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. One such fool, as he was dying, kept repeating: “May all be saved, may the whole earth be saved!” The veneration of the saints crowns spirituality with an election of blood and light.

Just like the saints, the angels pray and intercede for human beings; they are servants of the Incarnation. Every person has a guardian angel who stands before the face of the Father. He is not only a friend and protector but, in a certain way, a heavenly prototype of the person, the divine thought concerning him. Those who are attentive and sensitive to invisible presences know this marvelous intimacy and come to converse with their angel.

An iconographic composition called the Deisis (Supplication) represents the summit of the veneration of the saints. Always placed above the royal doors of the iconostasis, it shows Christ as Teacher and Judge, surrounded by the Theotokos and Saint John the Baptist in their ministry of intercession for all people. “More honorable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim,” the Mother of God, without substituting herself for the One who is Christ, stands before the Son. As the praying one, the prayer of the Church, she appeals to mercy. The more we venerate Mary, the more we become aware of the incomparable greatness of her Son; it is because of Him that we turn to His Mother, without diminishing the worship due to God.

The Theotokos was never the object of apostolic preaching. Her mystery became clearer at the same time as the mystery of the Holy Spirit. Both emerged from liturgical experience, from the heart of the Church. The veneration of the Virgin is the soul of Orthodox piety in its aspect of maternal tenderness and protection. She is not only the instrument but the human condition of the Incarnation. Christ could not become incarnate by forcing human nature; it was necessary that this nature, through the voice of the Virgin, itself say the fiat.

“Thou didst give birth to the Son without a father, the Son who was born of the Father without a mother” — so sings the Church, reflecting the Trinitarian mystery within humanity. To divine Fatherhood corresponds human Motherhood. Mary expresses the “maternal virginity” of the Church; this is why she is the Mother of all mankind and the figure of the Church. The word from the Cross addressed to John — “Behold thy mother” — instates her in this dignity, akin to that of the Spirit-Advocate and Comforter. In giving birth to Christ, Mary also gives birth to Him in every soul. Saint Maximus defines a saint as “one in whom the birth of the Lord is most fully manifest.”

Christ is the “way” and the “door” — God-Man, He is the only one. The Virgin is the first among creatures; she precedes humanity, and all follow her toward the Kingdom. She was the first to pass through the death her Son made powerless, and this is why the canon read at the hour of every believer’s death is addressed to her protection. The Dormition seals the doors of death; the seal of the Theotokos is placed upon nothingness; it is sealed above and below by the God-Man through the first resurrected creature.

Editor’s note: Acts 17:29: “γένος… τοῦ Θεοῦ.”

Editor’s note: A term — объективация — frequently used by Nikolai Berdyaev and central to his thought.

Flavertex

My whole life I have been haunted by slavery to choice. I feel, to the dismay of my good sense, that I must "get it right" or "God will punish me." So I have obsessively weighed and measured between religion and irreligion, between different religions, and then between different denominations of Christianity, and now I return again to my native Catholicism but with the siren call of Orthodoxy seeming, to my eyes, as more honest, more holy, more real, more genuine, and more true. But I am stupefied that, to choose to leave my native tradition, is to put me in the position of one who chooses and who does not know how he knows what he knows (if I feel that Orthodoxy is more true, does this justify conversion? Am I justified in choosing this for myself, as an island?). Moreover, I do not even know if I truly do know truly what I thinks that I knows, and indeed it seems that each and every day I am drawn either to enter the seminary for Catholicism or to convert and become Orthodox. What a dichotomy! And how frequently I deliberate and am drawn in this direction and that! For my entire life I have hated the Catholic Church, I have had a fire in my heart against it as a father whom I looked for to feed me bread, but he gave me rocks instead. I would both love and loathe to return to it: I have in all practical ways done so, but in my heart a fire of great hatred burns against the "gratuitous abuse of infinite power justified with arbitrary authority." I have seen in the Catholic Church the very authority which you here condemn as that deception of the Serpent: but is this the fault of the Church, or the Serpent? Are my eyes polarized still between master and slave?

This is a deeply personal reflection, I know it's a bit much as a response and I certainly don't except a solution. But, this article really strikes me where I am right now and I wanted to express that it's all-encompassing breadth is a fertile testament to your faith, and an inspiration to mine, even if mine is mired in the slavery of choice, and of feeling the need to choose.

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Beniy Waisanen

Thank you for this work! I look forward to reading it carefully. My battered copy of Fr. Alexander's diary is sitting right next to me.

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