Divine Illumination

The Fathers of Nicaea simply left a placeholder in 325 — "I believe in the Holy Ghost" — expecting to elaborate later. Did they lack a theology of the Holy Ghost? No, it was probably the case that they had too much theology, that a process of winnowing down to Divine Truth still remained.

A key event in that process occurred in the 370s, following the elevation of St. Basil the Great as Bishop over the see of Caesarea. He insisted on the doxology "Glory be to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit" to be used in all public worship. An accusation of heresy followed. His antagonists insisted that the correct form should be "glory be to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit." This second form, suggesting a hierarchy of dignity and glory, from greatest (the Father) to least (the Holy Spirit), reflects the Arian teaching of subordination.

In reply St. Basil composed one of the greatest landmarks of Christian dogmatic theology, On the Holy Spirit (375). While he did not live to see it, this work was laid as the foundation stone for the Second Ecumenical Council's teaching on the Holy Spirit.

Was St. Basil privy to some new information? Did the Holy Spirit reveal to him an additional document such as King Josiah claimed to find while cleaning the Zion Temple? No. There was no new document.

But let us widen the question. Could it be that three centuries following the death of the Master that the Church still lacked a definition of Who He Was and still lacked a definition of the Holy Spirit, for Whom Jesus petitioned the Father in prayer (Jn 14:16)? Three centuries. Should we be shocked? No, not in the least. For Holy Scripture is not a plainly written manual nor is it a guide, but rather a mystery. It was so in the first century: St. Paul refers to the Scriptures as "oracles" (Rom 3:2). And it is most certainly true today.

Moreover, a great gulf separates us from the ancients. We who live this side of the revolution of empiricism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we who live this side of scientific revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and still in progress today, have misplaced expectations about what the Holy Scriptures are.

They cannot be read as a newspaper. You know, I have been a pastor of three decades standing, having shepherded many flocks. I can share that the leading conception of the average lay Christian is that the Scriptures are no different from a newspaper. They'll tell you, "I'm going to sit down and read the 'Good Book' staight through" .... giving away a profound misconception concerning the nature of Scripture. The Scriptures cannot be read as a handbook or a guide book though people long for a simple directory on the conduct of life. They cannot be read as a cook book with simple procedural instructions.

The Scriptures, and especially the Four Gospels, are incommensurably Divine. And we must approach them reverently, hesitantly, cautiously, and removing our sandals for we are standing on holy ground:

In opening this Book, we must quake and tremble. For while we believe we are discerning It, we will discover that, entering in, It is discerning us: "a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."

We do not simply read the Scriptures seeking to extract information. We must encounter the Scriptures, deeply engage these holy words. And this reveals the nature of prayer. Prayer is the direct encounter of the soul with God. Our souls, the Divine organ, set within us by God, is the master organ of one's being. It encompasses the mind, the affections of the heart, the passions (so often are our driving wheel through life). And all of it and ourselves are subject to the sovereignty of the soul. It is the soul which discerns Holy Scripture, the meeting place royal where we stand face-to-face with God.

It is incumbent upon us, therefore, to put only the finest instruments at the soul's disposal. We must develop our minds lest we present to God childish babblings, as St. Paul suggests (1 Cor 3:1-2). We must preserve the purity of our bodes lest we pollute the temple where we ask God to enter. We must tame our passions lest we cloud our thoughts.

Do not think we have the remotest chance of discerning Scripture by reading translations. A translation is a commentary and quite often has an "ax to grind" (consider most English translations of John 20:15-22, the interview of St. Peter).

Origen developed a technology called the Hexapla, an six-fold instrument for reading the Old Testament divided into its various translations. Each, he knew, was bound to be a commentary, and he sought to meditate on each of them.

The Holy Fathers agreed that the Holy Scriptures could not be understood unless they were read on at least four levels: the spiritual (or allegorical), the historical (or literal), the tropological (or moral), and the eschatological (through the lens of Last Judgment). A fifth, or literary, sense is implied by Origen's dictum to "gloss Scripture with Scripture."

Above all, the primary meaning of Scripture, Origen said, was the spiritual meaning. But enough on due preparation to read Scripture. Let us turn to the main subject today.

All had been revealed in the Holy Scriptures. I mean, St. John told us that you could fill the world with books containing what was left out (Jn 21:25). But all had been revealed that was sufficient for us. Nothing written after the first century had been added to the official canon. Yet, three hundred years were required to formulate a settled theology on the Father's Relationship to the Son, equal in dignity and same in substance; on the Son's Two-fold Nature; and on the Holy Spirit's high dignity, to be worshiped and glorified together with Father and the Son. Much more remained to be discerned and settled, but three hundred years were required to get this far.

In the process of collective interpretation, certain men — we call them the Holy Fathers of the Church — have been given priority. What does the Church say about the era of the Holy Fathers? When does it begin and, more important, when did it end. St. Symeon the New Theologian, for example, is called a Father of the Church, who died in 1022, just after the Great Schism. That's one thousand years after the teachings of Christ.

He's a Holy Father though he lived one thousand years after the teaching of Christ. One thousand years ago, from the present time, would place us before the Invasion of Britain by William the Conqueror. The language spoken in Britain would have been Middle Low German. The people we call the Celts would still dominate the Western British Isles, and Orthodoxy would still thrive in the West.

I might add that those of us who attempt to study that lost world find it nearly impossible because so little survives of that Orthodox culture — systematically destroyed by Roman Catholic missionaries such as St. Patrick and the Venerable Bede. And we shall see, the "great Fathers" were hobbled by similar circumstances.

We acknowledge the fourth-century Fathers — Ss. Athanasius, Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the Theologian. — as being the "great Fathers." They wrote three hundred years after the time of Christ. Now, going back three hundred years from our own time that would place us 1724. North America would have been divided among Spain (the primary colonizer as measured by territory), France (the second), and Britain (possessing thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast, but not Florida).

From the perspective of the fourth-century Fathers, Jerusalem would have been destroyed nearly three centuries years earlier and riches in archaeological, epigraphal, and textual evidence buried under the rubble, and that rubble buried beneath meters of sediment. That is, most of the evidence surrounding the Scriptures have been unknown to them. We know more about the Scriptures than the Holy Fathers did.

Soon after the destruction of Jerusalem in the 70 A.D. most of the Pharisees gathered in a diaspora and further elaborated upon their hybrid Persian religion eventually giving us the Rabbinical Judaism we know today.

The proposal that Christianity was built upon their work is absurd. As I have recently written, our Eucharist does not arise from Jewish roots, but upon the promise of Christ in Revelation: "I stand at the door and knock. I will sup with him and he with Me." This is an expression of intimacy with God. A precedent for this is Abraham and Sarah supping with the Holy Trinity among the Oaks of Mamre.

Pharisaic Judaism most certainly was not the basis for Christianity, which the Pharisees reviled. And their hybrid Persian religion certainly did not reflect the religion of the Patriarchs, which they and the Sadducees has attempted to destroy before Jesus' birth. These antagonisms are evident in the Gospel of St. John.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, our most significant textual resource — 15,000 scrolls and fragments pointing back to 8,000 discrete documents — would not be discovered until the mid-twentieth century. Decades of painstaking scholarship ensued which is still in progress. On other fronts, significant archaeological discoveries are made all the time requiring careful analysis.

If the fourth-century Fathers were alive today, they would certainly would understand the sacred tasks which called out to them. They would reverently receive these precious windows into the lifeworld of our Lord. That is to say, it is essential that men and women of faith welcome these new evidences, study them with care, and interpret them prayerfully. For only then can we open the way for the Holy Spirit to lead us to more brilliant insights. This process we call Divine illumination.

Yes, all has already been revealed in one great, three-year, Divine Revelation — a blinding light too great to be understood at the time it was unveiled. Even then, it had to be received with great care. For it was not given as a public service announcement:

But later, when the Risen Christ taught the master class to His Disciples plainly, directly .... no record of these teachings has come down to us. We do not have an extra volume of the Gospels titled, The Teachings of the Risen Christ. Nor do we have the volume titled, All Things Taught by the Holy Spirit and Remembrances of All Things that the Lord Said (Jn 14:26).

Today, we face an additional, formidable task. The lifeworld of Jesus, through acts of violence, hatred, willfulness, and irreverence has been buried. To recover that lifeworld — shard of clay by shard of clay, papyrus fragment by papyrus fragment — digging it all out, is a most holy task. What are we digging? What is this ore we seek? The Word of God. To prepare ourselves as laborers in that vineyard, we must diligently master ancient languages and become conversant in such fields as archaeology, epigraphy, textual scholarship, and historiography. And we must do it all with the icons of the Holy Fathers around us. For no matter how long we labor and toil, no matter how much we give of ourselves, no matter how we dedicate ourselves to digging out the truth, they would have done it more scrupulously, more boldly, and more courageously.

Are we willing to be deprived of the Patriarchate of Alexandria as Athanasius was? Are we willing to resign as Patriarch of Constantinople as Gregory the Theologian did? What will we sacrifice in the service of holy truth? The loss of Facebook and Instagram followers? The friendship of colleagues and friends? Is the loss of popularity a price too high to pay?

The Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council were not timid men. They were not the sort of men who curried favor to obtain preferments. Many of them declined preferments. Their eyes were on one thing and one thing only:

Shall our eyes be on anything less?

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