Hebrews 1:10-2:3
Troparion, Kontakion, etc.
Mark 2:1-12

"My Soul Magnifies the Lord,
and My Spirit Rejoices"

Last week we departed on a pilgrimage into a wilderness, a pilgrimage of forty days and forty nights. We travel over rocky road through gloom arriving by twists and turns to the door of a tomb. We follow the Lord Jesus, Who emptied Himself of Divinity entering the narrow and horrible prison-house of our broken humanity (Phil 2:7). We follow him by denying our fleshly desires so that we might claim our own Divinity which participates in His. We travel as by night not knowing where to turn, whether left or right. The way ahead is hard, scattered with rubble, and it is dangerous.

Facing these trials, our mental powers will not avail us. Only the state of our soul will matter now. We turn our attention therefore to this neglected instrument, for it must be clear and true to steer us rightly. As with the Magi long ago, only the pure and clear state of our souls will rightly see the stars of Heaven set in the firmament by God leading us to Him. We strive to purify our souls eschewing bodily pleasures, for nothing must cloud or taint this empyreal organ of perception. Everything will depend on arriving to our goal, which is our eternal destination.

This is the subject of the Second Sunday in Great Lent and the kernel of our Gospel lesson. In the pericope of the paralytic lowered down through the roof by his faithful friends, we saw that reasoning in your heart, the mistake of the Scribes, will not do. You must perceive through your spirit as Jesus does.

To the ancients, the heart (καρδι'α, kardia) was understood to be the seat of the intellect, the engine of human reason. We recall in the Ode of the Theotokos (the Magnificat) that God "has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts" (Lu 1:51). By contrast, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior" (Lu 1:46-47). Only by humbling ourselves, denying our flesh, imitating the lowly estate of the Handmaiden of the Lord, will we enter into true friendship and communion with God. Jesus perceives not in His kardia, but in His spirit, His πνευμα (pnuema).

Yes, this Sunday is named "Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas," but that is because his name and, particularly, his work known as the Triads signify the incommensurable difference between the powers of the intellect and the clarity of the soul.

On the First Sunday in Great and Holy Lent, we reflected on the rationalist beginnings of the Western Catholic Church. Arising from an engineering culture whose great contributions were military science, civil engineering, and world governance, the Roman Empire was, above all, a triumph of human reason. The Roman Church was formed in this mold — established in basilicas, which were judicial buildings, and founded on Canon Law.

The Roman Church had been in communion with the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for a thousand years. Understanding its decision to break off forming an independent Church would require a book-length study (probably of several volumes). But surely among the leading causes was a decision to valorize intellectual life over spiritual life — an exaltation of human reason over the humble, God-seeking soul.

By the turn of the second millennium, theological currents in the Western Catholic Church gave way to a new technology. We may use the word logic to describe this. But this is not just any logic but rather a highly refined algorithm called dialectic. The method was so striking in its technical rigor and character that it deserved its own name, Scholasticism. And its adherents — Anselm, Ockham, Duns Scotus, among others — have become synonymous with logic pyrotechnics, fireworks, not spiritual writing. We should add, that the symmetries of the Latin language are well-suited to the bifurcations of dialectic.

It is not a coincidence that the spiritual riches of the Christian Church, and the Sacred Scriptures themselves, are expressed in Greek. For unlike Latin, the Greek language possesses a middle voice, which expresses mystery and psychological subtlties beyond the capacities of intellect and reason.

Scholasticism was one of several reasons that led the Roman Church to split itself off from the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Father of Scholasticism, Anselm, was active around this time. Following that schism, Scholasticism developed from a technology practiced by a few influential writers to becoming the hallmark of Roman Catholic thought. In fact, this eleventh-century brushfire of rationalism in the Roman Church was stoked into a vast wildfire triggered by the historical event known as the Recovery of Aristotle beginning in the twelfth century when over 42 works of Aristotle were translated into Latin from the Greek originals and Arabic redactions. In the following century, St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest expositor of Aristotelian philosophy would become a juggernaut, who dominated the Roman Church through the middle of the twentieth century. We here in the Hermitage grew up revering the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas!

It was this overheated milieu that produced the zealous Scholastic philosopher and future Roman Catholic bishop Barlaam of Seminara, born 1290, sixteen years after the death of Thomas Aquinas. Barlaam was incensed at the idea that spiritual life could lead to God. He had placed his technology of hyper-logic above all things and accounted the monks of Mount Athos, praying the Jesus Prayer in contemplation, to be "intellectually incompetent fanatics" (The Triads, 6). to quote Fr. John Meyendorff, the leading Palamas scholar and Dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary. We do not have time to read through passages from the Palamas-Barlaam debate, but we can reflect on its scale and importance.

The Roman Church lived through a virtual Babylonian Captivity of Thomism (as Scholasticism came to be called). The conviction that human reason alone could approach and even encompass the Divine lived on even into the twentieth century. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the secular world was already discarding this sort of philosophy. Gottlob Frege saw in the 1870s that logic was fatally inadequate if only because it was bound to natural language. During the same period semioticians pointed out that any word has several meanings, which were constantly shifting depending on context. Moreover, words have no deterministic linkage to objects in the real world. Their definitions are contained in a dictionary, whose meanings point not to reality but to others words, which in turn are defined in the same dictionary. This self-contained system does not provide deterministic connections to objects in reality ... only to other words in a closed and isolated system.

Frege set out to uproot logic, liberate it, and place it on a foundation of mathematics, called predicate calculus. But this too proved to be insufficient. Frege was followed by Bertrand Russell, born in the year that Frege took his Ph.D. Russell attempted to establish logic on a foundation of set theory but early on his attempt, he failed noticing a fatal paradox. Other philosophers followed only to fall short.

During the same timeline, physicists had begun pointing out other disturbing problems. Werner Heisenberg showed that by the time an observer attempts to perceive the basic structures of matter, those structures had already changed before they could be verified giving rise to an Uncertainty Principle, which called meaning itself into question. In linguistics Ludwig Wittenstein made an obvious, though devastating point: it is impossible to design, much less execute, an objective scientific experiment. For the act of selecting the data has already biased the experiment. That is, you can only find what you are already looking for — a purely subjective enterprise.

Certainly, scholars within the Roman Church, such as the great theologian Henri de Lubac, SJ, were aware of the catastrophe. They saw that the very structures that were the basis for nearly all Roman Catholic theology were not valid. But the reins of power within the Western Church continued to be tightly held by Thomists and especially Reginald Garrigou Lagrange, OP, the so-named Sacred Monster of Thomism (St. Augustine's Press, 2015). Fr. de Lubac argued brilliantly that the Western Church must return, at least theologically, to her home before the Great Schism of 1054. Only in that way could the Roman Church be saved. For his efforts, de Lubac entered the horrible prison of internal exile. He could not teach, preach, or publish (at least not in Rome). And Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical letter Humani generis "concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine" directed against de Lubac and his colleagues.

But the forces of darkness, desperately clutching a universe of metaphysics that was crumbling in their hands, were not to have the last word. Fr. de Lubac had published a book under the radar as it were in 1938 with the innocent title, Catholicism. How could a book such as this offend the Catholic Church? But his title pointed not to the Roman Catholic Church but to the true and original Church. Its nearly 500 pages were in fact nothing less than an anthology of the Greek Fathers: Hermas, Ignatius of Antioch, Origen, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nyssa, Fulgentius of Ruspe, Severus of Antioch, Maximus the Confessor, and the Latin Father, Augustine of Hippo. Here is Catholicism! de Lubac declared. Only by drinking from the pure springs of the Greek Fathers could the Western Church be healed. Only the pure waters letting Aristotelian philosophy slowly leach out of her. His cry in French, "Ressourcement! ressourcement!" "Go back to the sources!", rang down through the years and would galvanize prelates in the Roman Church to begin advocating for a General Council, so that the errors of medieval philosophy might be stripped away. And that Council, the Second Vatican Council, would send up her own cry in Latin echoing de Lubac's French: "Ad fontes, ad fontes!" We must go back to the pure springs of the Greek Fathers!

When he had begun his attack on the monks of the Holy Mountain, Barlaam believed he was shooing away amateurs, who wasted their time in contemplation and prayer, and he condemned the Jesus Prayer, in particular. He could not know that his road of philosophy would lead to catastrophe, even perdition. For he trusted his intellect to navigate through these deep waters. He chose the imagination of his heart, to borrow St. Luke's language. And he mocked the celestial instrument of the spirit, of the souls of the monks of the Holy Mountain.

And de Lubac? What was to become of him? He would be created a cardinal by those who knew better. Years later, Pope John Paul II was delivering an address at the Angelicum, the Pontifical University of Thomas Aquinas in Rome, which Reginald Garrigou Lagrange once ruled with an iron fist. The large and distinguished audience were attentive as their Holy Father delivered a paper. Suddenly, Pope John Paul fell silent. He stood motionless. Time was passing. A nervous murmur could be heard. Had the Holy Father suffered a stroke?! Finally, he spoke: "I remove my cap. For Cardinal de Lubac has entered the room."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.