Orthodoxy represents the victory of prayer over syllogistic logic and the rejection of rationalism as a path that might discover God. It was St. Gregory who articulated this primary insight:
Our journey from the Western Church to the Eastern Church has slowly revealed a far-reaching principle: when any part of the Church breaks away, it must, of necessity, invent — invent God, invent a conception of conversion, invent religion.
At first we read articles professing to chart correspondences between West and East. In the West you cross yourself beginning on the left; in the East you begin on the right. In the West you say "world without end"; in the East you say "unto the ages of ages" and so forth. But Orthodoxy is not simply a version of Western Christianity. These are fundamentally different religions. The breakaway Churches are so different that in the West they refuse to call each other valid Christian Churches!
The Protestant rejection of the Church Jesus founded is radical and obvious. Sacred Tradition (including the hidden teachings of the Risen Christ) is rejected. The Mysteries, or Sacraments, are rejected. Holy Orders are rejected. Theosis is rejected. And the Protestant embrace and elaboration of a theology invented a thousand years after Jesus' death — that Jesus' death, not His Life, saves us — has eclipsed everything that the Master taught and instituted. That is, materialism — the corporeal exchange of a dead body in a hoped-for trade gaining Heaven — became the new faith.
Materialism lies at the heart of Roman Catholic belief, as well, as we have detailed in previous reflections.
Christianity is not the swap of a corpse for Heaven, but rather a mystical, Living Unity. Once a faction has separated itself from the Church, which the Risen Christ founded upon the Apostles (Jn 20:22), the journey leading to Unity with the Divine ceases. All that is left is to live in your head. The invisible and mysterious process of becoming One with Christ devolves into intellection and apologetics as Protestant historical theology and Catholic Answers and EWTN attest.
Our feast today, commemorating St. Gregory Palamas, persecuted by intellectual philosophers of the West, is the right occasion for exploring these elemental differences.
But let us go back to the beginning, for these same differences are seen in Jesus' lifeworld and a thousand years before that. In a haunting, prophetic image, Jesus entered history during a civil war fought between a spiritual party devoted to religion given at Sinai and materialist Judeans, who adhered to an invented religion, which they would call Judah-ism, developed under the supervision of Mesopotamian overlords.
This all-important backdrop remained nearly invisible to scholars until 1947 with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, upon which we reflected last week. The religion of Sinai is one of profound personal transformation. Solomon's Temple represented the Created Order. Through it, one undertook a ritual journey from the gross, material world (we might say, East of Eden) to the Garden of Eden itself, and thence, beyond a veil, into the Uncreated Order, the Presence of God. The essence of the journey was love of God and, as is the case with all true love, purity. Who can advance in true love without purity?
Beyond the veil one entered unity with the Divine. Divisions ceased. All became One. Creatures which you might have recognized as angels in the visible world, for example, became united to a vast, eternal Unity. As Jesus declared, "I and My Father are One" (Jn 10:30). His prayer that His Disciples might also become One with the Father as the Father and He are One (Jn 17:11) continues to be the beginning, middle, and end of Christianity. This is Jesus' prayer! And never did He mention offering His dead body in exchange for salvation.
In contrast to the ancient Israelite religion, Judah-ism had nothing to do with spiritual-moral transformation. Far from it. This was a substitutionary religion distancing the people. The central cultic act was animal sacrifice as if the blood of animals could affect the inner life of humans.
The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that Mesopotamian Jews revised the Hebrew Scriptures to conform to Mesopotamian religion. And their new rites would be practiced in a Second Temple, whose construction was financed and supervised by Mesopotamians.
God sent His Son into the world to restore His adopted sons and daughters, who were lost in this false religion, to the Father. Jesus says this! The path of each man and woman was to be as it had been: recovering the lifeworld of Kings David and Solomon. Each person was to journey toward Tabor Light, to borrow St. Gregory's phrase, which was displayed at the Transfiguration (Mk 9:2-8) — attesting the Unity of the Law (Moses) and the Prophets (Elijah) together with the Holy Trinity extending welcome to the Hebrew faithful, figured by Peter, John, and James. Here is our religion.
But the Disciples were overwhelmed. They had not practiced the necessary sanctity. Peter's idolatry is revealed in his offer to construct booths for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, like the ones he had just seen carved for idols at the Grotto of Pan, the site where Jesus had asked the Disciples only a few days earlier, "Who do you say that I AM?" (Mk 8:29).
Do you see? Jesus took His Disciples to first principles — His Unity with the Father — and then straightaway displayed this Unity. He declared on Mount Tabor, without saying a word, This is it. And His Father echoes Him:
| "This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" (Mt 9:7) |
.... a Divine command.
But the lifeworld of the Disciples was soaked through with materialism. They saw it everywhere. Even the Sadducees, most high religious leaders, tell Jesus "dirty jokes" mocking Heaven and God.
"So, there were seven brothers. Each brother, in turn, married the same woman." And here comes the punchline:
|
Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife of the seven will she be?
For they all had her." (Mt 22:22-28) |
We can hear their carnal snickers echoing down from Antiquity.
Jesus does not smile. He replies,
|
"You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.
For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in Heaven." |
"Your problem," Jesus suggests, "is that, lacking sanctity and lacking purity, you no longer see God nor His sovereign power."
The mind and sensibilities of Judah-ism are attuned to carnality. They resonate with the corporeal: with the blood of the lusting he-goat or the virile bull poured out on an altar as their source of energy and power.
Contemplating the At-One-Ment experienced in Solomon's Temple and the blood lust of the Second Temple, we are able to read the Book of Revelation with greater clarity. The whore of Babylon represents the Second Temple. She has desecrated her private and holy places in return for patronage and political favor. The pure Bride of God, by contrast, is bathed in Tabor Light, the Light beyond the veil enveloping the one who stands in the Holy of Holies, which Gregory called theoria, the endpoint of the journey, or theosis.
Yes, the Blood of the Lamb is cited again and again in Revelation. Indeed, no book in the New Testament comes close to mentioning blood so frequently second only to the Letter to the Hebrews. In both cases, it is the Living and unconquerable power of God that must be the countervailing corrective to the blood-letting of animals in the Second Temple. As St. Paul has written,
|
He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves;
but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own Blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption [for us]. (Heb 9:12) |
As the text says, Jesus as High Priest enters the Holy of Holies, not by letting blood but by being Blood, the Most Noble Blood, into which birthright and unity the Master invited His Disciples and continues to invite us .... O adopted daughters and sons of God.
If you have ever been to a beautiful Orthodox Cathedral or to a splendid Orthodox chapel, such as the one Sr. Maryann and I visited at the Monastery of the Assumption (Calistoga, CA), this experience is palpable. You are surrounded by lifesize icons all around you. Mysterious things take place behind the iconostasis. And then the doors open, and Jesus enters the midst. This is family.
By contrast, the Western Church took a starkly materialist path. The Roman Church's devotion to Aristotle, coming into full bloom with the emergence of Scholasticism, would begin another kind of "Babylonian captivity": the dominance of Scholasticism and Thomism for nearly a thousand years attested by Richard Peddicord's celebrated book, Sacred Monster Of Thomism: Life & Legacy Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (2015).
We may trace this philosophy back to a primary fracture point between Rome, on the one side, and the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, on the other. Rome's decision to break away resulted in a history of unrelieved invention, which we might style the spirituality of manufacture. By postulating that the human mind encompasses God and that logic, taken to minute extremes, will reveal Him (we might say, manufacture or produce Him) brings us to the conclusion that such religion is wholly man-made, bounded on all sides by human reason.
Materialism led the Western Church to see its way to a proposition that blood sacrifice could be exchanged for "membership" in the Kingdom of Heaven. Echoes of animal sacrifice in the Second Temple are never distant.
One of the errors in this calculus, by the way, lies in the Book of Hebrews, in particular the failure to grasp the Greek `ιλασκεσθαι / hilaskesthai (Heb 2:17), translated in English Bibles as "to make propitiation." In fact, the word relates to `ιλαστηριν / hilasturyon which is the Mercy Seat, which is the locus of Divine Union in the Holy of Holies .... but only in Solomon's Temple. There was no Mercy Seat in the Mesopotamian Second Temple. It had been removed.
This same materialism crops up in the Roman "banking system" for clearing the debt of sin. The virtues of saints are deposited in the form of credits, which then are reckoned against the debits of others committing sin. The Pope, too, could make deposits known as indulgences.
The overall effect of this materialism is depersonalization. Anyone who has been there has known it and felt it. The faithful have been denied their journey to the summit of Transfiguration, shunted off to one side as onlookers, sitting in pews while the dead, limp body of Jesus is laid on an altar over and over again. Small wonder that over time the effect is indifference.
The Roman Church itself recognized this: "Why is it so dead out there?!" And they came to the conclusion that the problem was clericalism, that the clergy were concerned with themselves and not the people. But that was not the problem. The root problem was far deeper than that. It was that the entire conception was wrong. And I can tell you as someone who served the Roman Church for ten years that the indifference is just as prevalent among the priests as it is among the people.
For the life-giving mysteries offered to man from the beginning were rejected. The invented religion objectifies everything, rendering all as material externals. Even the cosmic drama of theosis is lost while the Roman Church continues to condemn Holy Mysteries — the Mysteries of the Rosary and the Mysterium Tremendum of the Latin Mass.
Rationalism has become the soul and mind of the West, all interwoven into the regimented divisions of canon law — a fact of life from which no Roman Catholic woman or man might escape.
With the loss of purification and theosis as the essences of religion, it is but a short jump to Roman Catholic Cardinal Reinhard Marx's celebration just last week in Munich of "Twenty Years of Queer Worship." The point is not that the majority of RC priests practice homosexuality (best information suggests 60% do). The point is that carnality itself has moved to the center of Roman ideology. Three generations ago, carnal life was seen as something we must tame in order to advance in "the universal call to holiness" (to borrow the language of that period). Today, sexuality has become a goal with the corporeal term inclusive replacing the spiritual term unitive. "Let us all get together (wink, wink) .... presence of souls not required."
This same distance may be charted from Pope Benedict XVI's directive that homosexual men be banned from seminary (which was reversed, along with Pope Benedict, shortly thereafter) to the present situation in which a homosexual bishop was sought for this country's most important archdiocese and the present pope ostentatiously lauds homosexual priests. What a change we have seen .... to make your head spin!
But what has become of the three-fold path — purgative (becoming pure), illuminative (entering the Light), and unitive (achieved At-One-Ment with the Father)? This is atonement (same word).
As a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk and published author told me twenty years ago, "No one does that any more!" in a disapproving tone that said, "Get with it before you get canceled!"
With the spiritual journey toward unity with God now lost, now consigned to the dust bin, all that remains is so-called "social justice." And discussions of Heaven are dominated by minds overheated with sexuality .... as the echoes of snickering Sadducees ascend from Hell.
| "All theology [in the Eastern Church] is mystical." (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944) |
Orthodoxy represents the victory
of prayer over syllogistic logic
and
the rejection of rationalism as a path that might discover God.
It was St. Gregory
who articulated this primary insight:
| Do you not understand that in place of the intellect, the eyes and ears, [true believers] acquire the incomprehensible Spirit and by Him hear, see and comprehend? For if all their intellectual activity has stopped, how could the angels and angelic men see God except by the power of the Spirit? This is why their vision is not a sensation, since they do not receive it through the senses; nor is it intellection, since they do not find it through thought or the knowledge that comes thereby, but after the cessation of all mental activity. It is not, therefore, the product of either imagination or reason; it is neither an opinion nor a conclusion reached by syllogistic argument. (Triads, § 34) |
The turning-off of the mind frees the soul to hear the Spirit without distraction. But how do we stop our noisy minds? Gregory replies, by using a method of prayer developed on Mt. Athos as monks were feeling their way through mystical darkness into the Divine Presence, — what St Gregory of Nyssa called (about a thousand years earlier) "luminous darkness." Gregory makes the distinction between the "light of knowledge," which leads to darkness, and mystical darkness, which leads to Divine Light, that is, Tabor Light:
| Do you not see how this light shines even now in the hearts of the faithful and perfect? Do you not see how it is superior to the light of knowledge? It has nothing to do with that which comes from Hellenic studies [i.e., Aristotle], which is not worthy to be called light, being but deception or confounded with deception, and nearer to darkness than light. Indeed, this light of contemplation even differs from the light that comes from the Holy Scriptures, whose light may be compared to "a lamp that shines in an obscure place," whereas the light of mystical contemplation is compared to the star of the morning which shines in full daylight, that is to say, to the sun. (Triads, § 62) |
The method, called hesychasm, means silence or rest. The only words resonating down through the interior would be the Word, the Jesus Prayer — never mere syllables, but a pure devotion to Jesus, an all-encompassing devotion, the heart becoming tender, the soul humbly setting forth its petition for mercy, and the mind maintaining a guard through these powerful words, which no impure thought might intrude. The Jesus Prayer permeates the whole person inhaling the salutation: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God," and exhaling the petition, "have mercy on me, a sinner."
Hesychasm follows the Divine direction,
|
"But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door,
pray to your Father Who is in the secret place; and your Father Who sees in secret will reward you openly." (Mt 6:6) |
It honors St Paul's injunction,
| "Pray without ceasing." (1 Thess 5:17) |
And it answers the question rehearsed by St Athanasius (De Incarnatione), "But how do we retain the Divine life given us by the Life of Jesus?" We are to retain it by fixing the heart, mind, soul, and strength entirely upon Him. Indeed, hesychasm is a living, breathing fulfillment of the First Great Commandment, practiced along the threefold journey of purgation, illumination, and finally union with God.
From the dawn of human life,
two paths lay before us.
The path away from God leads back to ourselves,
a dead-end of miscreated invention.
But how do we know the path of Sinai to be true religion?
Taste and see.
The mind will fall away in its ceaseless busy-ness,
the soul will become serene,
and
before very long you will be enveloped in light.
Be prepared for that light.
For it is Tabor Light and our assurance of eternal life.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.