In one parable Christ describes people who hear about the Kingdom and genuinely, joyfully believe — but they fail to bear fruit and persevere to the end. In the next parable He says that not everybody in the church is His, but we won’t see who’s who until the final Judgment. Elsewhere He says there will be people who are surprised on the last day, thinking they had a relationship with Jesus but discovering they’re strangers to Him. (Here. And here.)

Seems to me an “assurance of salvation” is an arrogant, dangerous thing. It might be better — and a little more humble-minded — to consider that our love of pleasures and self-will, the shallowness of our faith, and our lack of “preparing the way of the Lord” in ourselves might just make us the shallow, rocky weedy soil in which the Word is born but never bears fruit; that we might be the ones just going through the motions of religion and headed for a terrible shock when we’re called to give account.

But that meditation ought to lead us to hope, not to despair. In Jeremiah 4 and again in Hosea 10 we’re called to “Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till He comes and rains righteousness on you.” The hard, stony, weed-choked soil of the heart is not incurable: By grace we can break the hard heart, soften the soil, and “prepare the way of the Lord.”

My namesake, Silouan of Mount Athos, heard the Lord tell him “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.” He learned that the safest, most hopeful and joyful place for the human soul is the assurance that we are unfit for Christ, that we are “sinners, of whom I am first,” that our personal failings and lack of love for God are evidence we have not even begun to repent.

Why is this a good place for the soul? Because it puts the soul at the mercy of the One who delights to show mercy. When we are assured of our unfitness for life in Christ, we quit thinking about justice and put all our trust and confidence in His mercy – then we “receive power to be His witnesses.” We return to the place where we are empowered by Grace: “God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Here is an excerpt from Father Arseny 1893-1973 Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father, trans. by Vera Bouteneff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999). This series of memoirs circulated as samizdat during the atheist regime, before being translated and published in English. The book may be read online at Google, or in hard copy; likewise the sequel, Father Arseny: A Cloud of Witnesses, at Google or in hard copy.

During one of the winters, a young man was assigned to Father Arseny’s barracks. Aged 23, he was a student and had been sentenced to twenty years in the camp. He had no experience of camp life because he had been sent to this special camp directly from the strict Butirki Prison in Moscow. Still young, he did not fully understand what lay ahead of him. As soon as he entered the death camp, he encountered the criminals.

His clothing was still good for he had only been in prison a few months. The criminals, led by Ivan the Brown, decided to get hold of the young man’s apparel. They proposed a card game with clothing at stake. Everybody knew that this lad would soon be naked, but no one could do anything about it; even Sazikov dared not intervene. The camp rule was that whoever interfered would be killed. Those who had been in the camp for a while knew only too well that if the criminals decided to play for your rags, to resist would be the end of you.

Ivan the Brown won all the young man’s clothes. Ivan approached him and said, “Take everything off, my friend.”

At that point things started to go sour. The young man, whose name was Alexei, thought that the game had been for fun and refused to hand over his clothing. Ivan the Brown decided to make an exhibition of it. He began with mocking kindness; then he started beating him. Alexei tried to resist, to fight back, but by now the whole barracks knew that he would be beaten until he could no longer move, or even to death. Everyone sat still and watched as Ivan bashed Alexei. He bled from the mouth and face and was swaying. Some criminals mockingly urged him to fight.

Father Arseny had not seen the beginnings of the fight; he had been piling up logs near a stove at the other end of the barracks. He suddenly saw what was happening. Ivan was going to kill Alexei. By now Alexei could only cover his face with his hands; Ivan was slamming him and smashing him repeatedly. Father Arseny silently put the logs near the stove, calmly walked over to the fight and, before the amazed eyes of the whole barracks, grabbed the arm of Ivan the Brown. Ivan looked surprised, shocked! The priest had interfered in a fight. This meant he must die. Ivan hated Father Arseny. He had never dared touch him for fear of the rest of the barracks, but now he had a true reason to kill him.

Ivan stopped beating Alexei and pronounced, “O.K. Pop, it’s the end for both of you. First the student, then you.” A knife appeared in his hands and he lunged towards Alexei.

Keep reading…

The marker at Father Arseny’s grave in Rostov.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, St. Kosmas Aitolos foretold that a time would come when a person would have to travel for days to meet another person whom he could embrace as a brother. We are living in an age where this is already happening. Contemporary man, in his loneliness, experiences pathological anxiety, anguish and suffering. He is tormented and, in turn, torments others.

Why? This essay will attempt an answer by bringing the fragrance of community found in the desert to the loneliness and the desolation found in cities.

Contemporary Loneliness

Loneliness is the absence of communication and relationship- the inability to develop and maintain associations with others. Contemporary culture and the structures of society, the mass media reflecting prevailing ideologies, even children’s games, lead to social alienation, political estrangement and personal isolation. The individual person begins, early on, to be possessed by an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy, to lose the meaning and purpose of life, to live without principles and discipline, to be constantly suspicious and in doubt.

Alone and insecure, anxious and disorderly, modern man and particularly the contemporary young person attempts to build bridges, to raise flags, to shout slogans. But without a guide or with bad guides he is readily disillusioned and becomes hard and aggressive, a plaything for political exploiters and power-hungry anarchists. The desire for freedom becomes the bitter death of his freedom.

The young, who earlier had declared that they would never compromise with anyone, are now themselves compromised. They take refuge in demonstrations and sit-ins, becoming rebellious in an effort to relieve themselves of the weight of their loneliness, not realizing that they are thrusting themselves into an even more unbearable slavery.

It is particularly unfortunate that all this is happening where least expected even with young people of good education, exceptional intelligence, energy and talent. Unsatisfied with material prosperity and disillusioned by the hypocrisy of their elders, these young people struggle for simpler life, for quality in life, for a better way of life but unfortunately they do not manage to make the right beginning.

Modern art is a good example of the spiritual alienation that we see. Instead of shedding light and opening windows toward others and toward heaven it tends to shut us in and to plunge us, ever deeper, into obscurity and darkness.

It is not long before isolated man begins to talk to himself, to the irrational animals, to the shadows that surround him, and to the dead. By now he is seriously sick. Melancholy, phobias, suspicion and mistrust have made him a psychopath. A most appropriate observation characterizes our time as the century of the psychiatrist. According to World Health Organization statistics for 1985 there are more than 400 million people in the world suffering from deep depression, with about 400,000 committing suicide each year. And these statistics refer only to the developed countries!

In his isolation man is plagued relentlessly by egotism and pride which are the natural parents of his loneliness.

Humility — An Antidote to Loneliness

If egotism and pride foster this kind of loneliness, then true humility — even though the term is misused and loses meaning among those who merely talk about it — produces the climate in which this loneliness is not permitted to thrive. Behold how the desert that good mother, excellent philosopher and theologian speaks about holy humility, silence and peace.

The humble person, according to Abba Poimen, is comfortable and at peace wherever he may find himself.

Abba Isaac tells us that he who makes himself small in everything will be exalted above all. And his discerning voice continues:

“Hate honor and you will be honored indeed. He who runs after honors causes honor itself to be banished from him. But if you merely disdain yourself hypocritically in order to appear humble, God will reveal you.”

In the Gerontikon, which contains a wide variety of spiritual writings from the Fathers, it is repeatedly made clear that:

“The humble-minded and lowly in heart is not the one who cheapens himself and talks about humility, but the one who endures joyfully the dishonors which come from his neighbor.”

In another place the Gerontikon states that:

“The person honored more than he deserves is actually harmed, while the person who is not honored at all by his fellow human beings will be honored in heaven by God.”

Abba Poimen gives us this advice:

“Every possible sorrow that comes to you can be overcome with silence.”

Abba Isaiah agrees with him:

“Until your heart is at peace through prayer, make no effort to explain anything to your brother.”

In studying the writings of the holy fathers of the desert, one can easily observe a common mind, a common noble spirit, a humaneness, an understanding, a wisdom. These are dew drops of the Holy Spirit, which fall in the arid desert after long struggles, which make fragrant flowers grow among the communities of faithful committed totally to God, and which make fragrant the souls of those who truly thirst for God.

Abba Isaiah, that great mind, notes with particular grace and subtlety:

“He who humbles himself before God is capable of enduring every insult. The humble person is not concerned about what others say about him. The person who bears the harsh word of a rude and foolish man for the sake of God is worthy of acquiring peace.”

Abba Mark, on this important topic — our relationship with ourselves and with others, in which we find ourselves stumbling on a daily basis — goes on to note the following:

“When you become aware of the thought in your mind dictating human glory, you should know for sure that this thought is preparing you for shame. And if you discern someone praising you hypocritically, expect also his accusation some time soon.”

And with the daring precision of a surgeon of the soul, the holy Abba continues:

“When you see someone crying over the many insults he has received, you should know that, because he was overcome by vainglory, he is now unknowingly reaping the crop of evils in his heart. He who loves pleasure is grieved by accusations and abuse. On the other hand, he who loves God is grieved by praises and other superfluous remarks. The degree of our humility is measured by slander. Don’t think that you have humility when you cannot forbear even the slightest accusation.”

Abba Zosima goes even further:

“Remember the one who has ridiculed you, who has grieved you, who has wronged you, who has done evil to you, as your physician, your healer. Christ sent him to heal you; don’t remember him with anger.”

Evagrios considered those who spoke badly of him as benefactors.

The divine wisdom of these physicians of the desert has tremendous significance to our topic. It has been said that these remarks are addressed by monks and for monks, but this is a superficial view. The epidemic of loneliness and depression that we are discussing results from proud minds lacking in humility, from failed interpersonal relationships, from unsatisfied egotistical aspirations, from self-aggrandizement, praise-seeking and self-love. This loneliness is strong enough to weaken a person and to make him sick. But love is stronger, capable of healing and regenerating the whole world.

Man has an irrepressible need to communicate, but communication must be properly developed. Initially, we must strike up a conversation a sincere, honorable and courageous conversation with our unknown self. We must rediscover in the very depths of our soul the hidden innocence of our childhood years. Next we must learn to have unmasked face-to-face conversation with the only, true living friend our heavenly Father and God. Only then will we be able to effectively communicate with others, whoever they are — the worst, the best, the neighbors, the distant, our brothers and sisters in Christ. In this manner the webs of loneliness are removed, the inaccessible and sunless dungeons of the heart are illumined, the shell of our ego is broken. When we have rejected the loneliness of miserable, self-centered egotism we can begin to rejoice, to be free, to breathe, to live.

Natural Loneliness: A Sanctuary of Knowledge of Self and of God

There is another type of loneliness — natural loneliness which is not pathological but creative, life-giving, full of grace. It is exemplified by the natural separation of monastics from the world. It is a loneliness to which we all should devote much time. We must be able to withdraw ourselves from the noisy crowds which are so superficial, so distracting, and so counterproductive in a withdrawal which is healthy, beautiful and good. It is important that we learn to shut off the constant communication with the many, which does not allows us to be alone with our self and as a consequence, we are not able to be with the One who is always waiting, the incarnate Logos and God. We must make the time and find the way for this other kind of sacred communication of natural loneliness. And we must pursue this knowledgeably, with an orderly, disciplined program.

Please keep in mind that we are not talking about those who seek to escape from preoccupations with the world in order to find rest, to view beautiful sunsets, to gaze at star-studded skies. Such activities are not spiritual. Neither are we talking about those who seek to meditate using techniques of doubtful origins to achieve dubious results. Nor are we discussing those who devote fleeting moments to superficial daydreams and who presume to have repented when they feel sentimental emotions as they remember indiscretions of their past. And we certainly are not talking about the well-meaning but naïve who think the spiritual life of sacred quietude consists of strolling at the sea shore with a komboschoini (prayer beads) in hand. Furthermore, we are not referring to the spiritual tourists who visit holy places and converse boldly with holy persons, but who do not deny their ego nor sacrifice their will. Activities such as these are only superficial attempts to escape from life, through shallow day-dreaming and capricious imagination.

What we are talking about is sacred quietude achieved with ascetic effort which liberates us from the loneliness of the world, even though we find ourselves in a noisy city or a disorderly household. We are talking about the persistence and the patience which help us probe the deepest roots of our existence and understand its limits, and which dispel the darkness that tires and discourages us.

We need to learn to pray. We need vigils constant vigilance in a posture of immobility and calmness.

When I am near God what do I have to fear? He has guided me to where I may be guided by him. Despairing of friends and acquaintances — sorely disappointed with the arts, the technologies, the ideologies — disenchanted with social chatter and vacuous etiquette — I come to the privilege of ultimate despair. I become aware that, in my nakedness, God himself is there to vest me with authentic hope. And in this miracle the blessed Panaghia and all the saints are present to lend their support.

In this natural loneliness — this divine loneliness — I find relief. The actor’s masks which I had felt obliged to put on or which had been put on me have been discarded. It had been a dreadful state. Every night I needed to go to another gathering, to be part of another group, for I had to be included somewhere. I was constantly changing my mask. Now, however, by turning inward I begin to live, to become aware that I am a child of God, to unveil my unique and irreplaceable identity, my face, my person. I begin to observe the activities of the passions. I can see my strengths and my limitations. I am redeemed from errors, fantasies, excesses, and languid apathy.

A firm resolve helps guide our steps to this lonely sanctuary of knowledge of self and of God. In this sanctuary the loneliness the aloneness which had been feared becomes a delight. For the person who is with God can never be alone since he is in dialogue with himself and with God. Here we find ourselves with less individualism, and greater love for others. We find tears for the pain and suffering of our brothers and sisters, and strength for greater efforts that will help them. For the voice which arises from the depths of the lone person cuts through the clouds and reaches the Triune God, who always listens and always responds.

The Divine Loneliness of Man in Communion with God

The man in communion with God knows how to make his voice more fervent and to rejoice while standing in second place. He knows how to be a friend even with the stranger and to be satisfied with little. Moreover, he knows how to become tired in his diligent efforts and how to wash with tears those who are grasping and prodigal. And he knows how to do these things without complaint or dissatisfaction, even if abandoned by relatives, friends, colleagues.

Far from the tumultuous crowds and the confusion of the public arena, in the privacy of your room, choose freely and without coercion. It may appear that you are not offering anything to others and that you are being self-centered, particularly when others are saying that they need you, as they suffer from painful loneliness. This loneliness which you have chosen for yourself is an arduous task, requiring great strength, heroism, persistence. It is a long and endless undertaking. And sometimes it can be preparation for a return to those whom you have left out of your life, although this should never be the purpose of your ascetic commitment.

All the saints of our Church, the most fervent and active missionaries, even the Lord himself in his earthly life, experienced the mystery of divine loneliness. Remember those great personalities, the prophets of the Old Testament Moses, Elijah, Isaiah and John the Forerunner.

Returning to our century, we find it tragically alone, in despair, pessimistic. In spite of efforts to the contrary, the world is in conflict with everyone and everything countries, governments, races, colleagues, parents, friends, children, books, lessons, work. And being in conflict with itself it is also in conflict with God, to whom it never speaks, never says anything.

The most painful loneliness is to be next to your spouse and yet be unable to transmit your inner feelings, even as external messages are transmitted instantaneously from one hemisphere to another. It is painful loneliness for married couples to keep secrets from each other for years. It is painful when dialogue is non-existent between children and parents, between children and teachers, between children and clergy. There is no more cruel loneliness than for a family to sit for hours in front of the television without speaking a word among themselves. We live in a difficult time. Loneliness is at an all-time high. Man is lost. God is silent.

In this loneliness, in this desolation of the cities, in this apparent absence of God, man is called to gather his thoughts, to come to his senses, to put aside his many worldly preoccupations and to retire to his place of prayer speechless, naked, a child so that God may speak to him, clothe him, and endow him with spiritual maturity. Then his loneliness will become the divine loneliness of liberation and he will achieve a sense of fullness. Only such radical loneliness leads to a fundamental understanding and experience of God, destroying every hesitation, doubt and torment.

In this sacred loneliness man finds himself face-to-face with his existential poverty and the fear of death which it provokes. Yet, even here, there is the danger that he may choose procrastination as a solution and, for a time, set his panic-stricken self at ease. He may resume running back and forth endlessly, expanding social activities, and seeking a variety of entertainments a program of extreme busyness. Other people, other things, work and extensive involvements may serve as a cover for his spiritual impoverishment for a time. And he may continue wandering aimlessly, driven by circumstances, tormented, flirting with one thing and another, fighting, being torn and finally annihilated.

A life of work without the liberation of communion with God is slavery. The struggle for excessive wealth is an incurable, tormenting disease. Fear of the future can stimulate greed, miserliness, hoarding. And God can be easily forgotten.

Here is what Abba Markos says, on how man can avoid the slavery of misguided work and instead become a free servant of God:

“The one who casts off anxious cares for ephemeral things and is freed from their every need, will place all his trust in God and in the eternal good things. The Lord did not forbid the necessary daily care for our physical well-being; but he indicated that man should be concerned only for each day. To limit our needs and cares to what is absolutely necessary is quite possible through prayer and self-control, but to eliminate them altogether is impossible.”

In the discerning remarks of Abba Markos which continue, let me call your attention to a subtle point which applies to many faithful:

“The necessary services which we are obliged to carry out, we must of course accept and carry out, but we must let go of those other purposeless activities and prefer rather to spend our time in prayer, particularly when these activities would lead us into the greed and luxury of money and wealth. For the more one can limit, with the help of God, these worldly activities and remove the material which feeds them, the more will one be able to gather his mind from such anxious wanderings. If again someone, out of weak faith or some other weakness, cannot do this, then, at least, let him understand well the truth and let him try, as much as he can, to censure himself for this weakness and for still remaining in this immature condition. For it is far better to have to give an account to God for omissions rather than for error and pride.”

Let me repeat this last point:

“It is far better to have to give an account to God for omissions rather than for error and pride!”

A drama is played out in man wherein he continuously and intently seeks peace and knowledge externally. But when he comes to his senses he realizes that true hospitality exists in an unexpected place. For it is precisely within himself that he discovers and experiences the particularity of his personhood. It is here that the divine loneliness of liberation, based on the knowledge of his individual personality, is to be found. It is here, in mystical quietude, that he measures, decides, and takes on his responsibilities.

Achieving the mystical experience of what we are, what we should seek, and what we can do, involves troublesome effort which, nevertheless, is critical. It is within us that we rescue ourselves from the loneliness of ego and where we find the way to the light and joy of communion.

Much of the world is governed by sophistry, wisdom has been ostracized, and decency has been lost. Lies and deception abound, revisionism has made history counterfeit, the Gospel is misinterpreted, schoolbooks are political tools mouthing the ideologies of those in power. There is a tendency to mimic false western ideologies, including sentimental pietism and painless social neochristianitiy. The life of the Church and its life-giving Sacred Traditions are ignored.

The only refuge is for each of us to set up our own sanctuary wherever we can. To a world which considers deception to be intelligence and honor to be weakness, we must dare say “Do not touch me!” We must choose to remain voluntarily and responsibly alone, even though such aloneness requires great courage in a society which aggressively seeks our applause and urges us into amalgamation. The weariness over vanities, bitterness, constant motion and joyless joys that has filled our lives, helps us come to the realization that this is the best form of resistance to the general disorientation.

By restoring our inner world, we increase our resistance, and in time become invincible to, the organized attacks of evil. By placing our whole life at God’s feet and seeking the authentic life he wants us to live we begin to have a foretaste of immortality, where we are never alone but in the company of Christ and his saints. All loneliness is dispelled by inner self-sufficiency.

And it may help you to know that there are many, out of sight, who are assisting you with their prayers. These are the monastics, dedicated totally to God, who keep vigil. Even though you have not met them they pray for you, with arms raised and with knees and knuckles callused by their prostrations.

The Supreme Loneliness of Believers Today

It has been said that each person carries his own loneliness. The mentally unbalanced individual has a dangerous loneliness. The sick person has an agonizing loneliness. One who has unjustly accumulated wealth has a bitter and ugly loneliness. But the believer carries a permanent, incurable and supreme loneliness, the loneliness of the way to salvation.

We have become accustomed to referring to the loneliness of late evening, of mourning, of living abroad. And each of us deals with our own individual circumstances as best we can. But, how long will we continue to go around in circles, examining the subject externally yet never entering its reality? Standing before the eternal enigma of existence, when will we the sons and daughters of God by grace and participation, created in his image and likeness, the children of light when will we dare to cast aside worldly ideas and discussions and, standing face to face before God, make the decision to fundamentally change our lives?

Our movements remain uncertain. We talk about God, yet God remains someone we do not really know. We desire to be with God, we advance toward him, yet at the last minute we find an escape route and evade him.

We love ourselves excessively, beyond measure. We are unwilling to bear God. We are afraid of him, and we try to deceive him — although in fact we only deceive ourselves — with excuses which appear to be convincing. We have come to love our deceptions to the point of no longer being ashamed of them. And yet God himself never tires of seeking us out discreetly, reminding us of his presence in our sufferings and in our joys, in our mistakes and in our victories.

It is necessary for believers to begin again the way of the Lord. Let us abandon the crowds and their excited shouting; let not their words entice and influence us. The way of the Lord is narrow, uphill, demanding, lonely, but it is also salutary, as he himself has promised us. The believer must at last attach himself with love to what is essential to his personal existence, setting aside decisively and irrevocably the secondary and superfluous.

The message of the Book of Revelation is truly awesome. The lukewarm believers will be spewed out of the mouth of God! (Rev. 3:15-16) The term used is most expressive of God’s dissatisfaction with those who are indecisive and ambiguous, neither hot nor cold.

To be in the company of God is both a joy to God and the greatest liberating blessedness to man. But reconciliation with God cannot be detached from reconciliation with ourselves and with our brothers and sisters. These always go together the friend of God is a friend of himself and of others.

The relationships that result have no room for conceit or isolation. Love of God must never degenerate into Pharisaism, nor love of neighbor into sterile duty. Openness in three directions — toward self, God and neighbor — is achieved symmetrically, with balance, with knowledge, with freedom and with love.

The great fourth century teacher of the desert, Abba Isaiah, reminds us that

“the pathological love of self and of others is an obstacle to our relationship with God.”

Cicero used to say that

“a great city is a great loneliness!”

This loneliness produces boredom, lack of appetite, pessimistic bitterness, a constant looking to the future and doing nothing today, dissatisfaction, a desire to escape, cowardice. These conditions, collectively referred to by the ascetic literature as accidia, mercilessly plague many, including the careless monastic.

Here is how St. Maximos the Confessor, the great Byzantine theologian, speaks about accidia:

“All of the powers of the soul are enslaved by accidia, while almost all of the other passions are also and immediately aroused by it, because, of all the passions, accidia is the most burdensome.”

St. John of the Ladder, who knows profoundly even the most subtle movements of the soul, described accidia to monks who inquired with characteristic harshness:

“Accidia is the breakdown of the soul, the disorientation of the mind, negligence of ascetic practice, hatred of monasticism, love of worldliness, irreverence toward God, forgetfulness of prayer.”

Evagrios mentions that this unbearable condition of the soul devastates its victim,

“who does not know what to do anymore, seeing the time not passing and wondering when the mealtime will come which seems delayed.”

Antiochos, who lived in the seventh century, is even more vivid and precise in his definition of accidia:

“This condition brings you anxiety, dislike for the place where you are living, but also for your brothers and for every activity. There is even a dislike for Sacred Scripture, with constant yawning and sleepiness. Moreover, this condition keeps you in a state of hunger and nervousness, wondering when the next meal will come. And when you decide to pick up a book to read a little, you immediately put it down. You begin to scratch yourself and to look out of the windows. Again you begin to read a little, and then you count the number of pages and look at the titles of the chapters. Finally, you give up on the book and go to sleep, and as soon as you have slept a little you find it necessary to get up again. And all of these things you are doing just to pass the time.”

St. John of Damascus says that this struggle is very heavy and very difficult for monks.

St. Theodore of Studion says that the passion of accidia can send you directly to the depths of Hades.

Dostoyevski, who had a patristic mind, offered a solution to this problem when he had the Starets Zosima tell us we must make ourselves responsible for the sins of the whole world:

“This understanding of our salvation through others helps us to realize that love is not exhausted only in doing good, but in making the agonies and the sufferings of others our very own. The monks pray daily for the salvation of the whole world. Created in the image of God, we are all his, we are all brothers, his children. Loneliness is abolished in God. We are all ‘members of each other’ according to St. Paul. Thus, our sins and our virtues have a bearing upon the others, since, as we have said, we are all members of one body. Accidia provides a reason for more fervent prayer, and the difficulties are an opportunity for spiritual maturity and progress.”

Let me repeat. Separation from the world, maligned by some as desertion, is courageous and necessary, a resistance to the general leveling of all things. Man finds his authenticity, the beauty of his uniqueness, within the sacred silence of quietude, standing apart from the crowd. His suffering in solitude prepares him to return to the common and familiar, revitalized and ready for whole-hearted service.

Abba Alonios once said:

“Unless a man can bring himself to say to his heart that he alone and God are present in this place, he will never find peace and rest of soul.”

St. John Chrysostom said: “Quietude in solitude is no small teacher of virtue.” Elsewhere he also said:

“No matter where you are, you can set up your sanctuary. Just have pure intentions and neither the place, nor the time will be an obstacle, even without kneeling down, striking your chest or raising your arms to heaven. As long as your mind is fervently concentrated you are totally composed for prayer. God is not troubled by any place. He only requires a clear and fervent mind and a soul desiring prudence.”

St. Makarios of Egypt, in his spiritual homilies, becomes a little more affectionate:

“Even if you find yourself poverty stricken of spiritual gifts, just have sorrow and pain in your heart for being outside of his kingdom, and as a wounded person shout to the Lord and ask him to make you also worthy of the true life.”

Further on, he says:

“God and the angels grieve over those who are not satisfied with heavenly nourishment.”

Finally, St. Makarios makes this significant and remarkable observation:

“Everything is quite simple and easy for those who desire to be transfigured spiritually. They need only to struggle to be a friend of God and pleasing to him, and they will receive experience and understanding of heavenly gifts, an inexpressible blessedness, and a truly great divine wealth.”

Being inexperienced in these more profound spiritual conditions, I should simply work in the beloved desert to uproot my passions. But there is a need to speak of men I have seen and heard, who live on the peaceful mountain sides of the sacred Athonite peninsula, who experience the mysteries of God. They are charismatic monks consumed by heaven, bearing Christ in their hearts and loving God, devotees of quietude, of solitude, thunderous workers of silence, alone but without loneliness, who, in their solitude, remember the loneliness of the whole world. While some in the world suffer involuntarily sleeplessness and others spend their nights without love in strange places, the monks of Mt. Athos keep a voluntary vigil, praying for the health, mercy and salvation of the whole world.

An amazing book by a contemporary hermit, which circulated recently, describes the famous ascetic of Mt. Athos, Hatzi-Georgis, as a faithful friend of quietude in the caves of the desert, an honorable and noble fighter, a great faster who found his rest in vigils, in prayer and in solitude. The desert did not make him wild and harsh like itself. On the contrary it refined and beautified him. His reverend biographer writes as follows:

“Hatzi-Georgis had much innocent love for all. He was always peaceful, tolerant and forgiving. He had a great heart and that is why he had room for everything and everyone, just as they were. In a sense he had been rendered incorporeal. Living the angelic life on earth he became an angel and flew to heaven, for he held on to nothing neither spiritual passions nor material things. He had thrown everything away and, consequently, flew very high.”

The Elder Gerasimos, the hesychast from Katounakia, remained for seventeen years, as noted by his fellow ascetic, at the peak of Prophet Elijah struggling with demons and the elements. He remained an immovable pillar of patience. His tears were flowing constantly. He completed his carefree and quiet life in the sweetness of the constant vision of Christ.

Another hesychast from Katounakia, Fr. Kallinikos, loved pain, toil and quietude beyond measure. He bathed in his tears and perspiration. The last forty-five years of his life he passed in seclusion, praying without ceasing. His face attained the grace of shining like that of Moses when he descended from Mt. Sinai.

The spiritual Father Ignatios had the peculiar habit of closing the shutters of his cell so that he would not notice the coming of the new day, but could continue his prayers. It was his custom to beseech his visitors in this manner:

“Love God who has loved you!”

He would sometimes forget to wash, to comb himself, to eat, but prayer beads were always in his hand and prayer always on his lips and heart. When he lost his eyesight, he became even brighter. He was fragrant in life and he was also fragrant after falling asleep in the Lord.

The remarkable priest and father confessor, Fr. Savvas, from the Little St. Anna, drew his strength from the daily Divine Liturgy which he celebrated in tears. During Liturgy, and during his all night vigils, he would take hours to commemorate thousands of names.

This is the nature of the community of the desert silent, praying, serene, blessed. This is the life of the desert. If a monk does not possess an intense spiritual life and a constant vigilance, he will certainly fall into a myriad of temptations. Accidia will lead him to a barren isolation when, mocked by angels and demons, he will become the worse of the worst, and the loneliness of the desert will become unbearable for him.

Summing Up the Paradoxes

The cities become more and more desolate and they will continue in this direction, while the deserts will become inhabited and will again blossom. No one who remains unrepentant will be able to block the repentance of the willing, the prayer of the faithful, the supplication of the poor. No one can prevent the free person from self-imprisonment, self-exile, from living the mystery of the living God. This miracle is experienced in martyrdom and in humility, where the Orthodox way of life always blossoms in quietude, in silence, in anticipation. We are called to experience the transcendence of Christianity, which is not so much the abolition of evil as it is the honorable acceptance of ourselves and of others, living the wealth of poverty, the health of illness, the blessing of tribulation, the power of weakness, the joy of patience, the victory of defeat, the honor of dishonor, the freedom of seclusion, the majesty of meekness, the resistance to death, the incarnation of God, the deification of man. And we should expect all these spiritual realities, not from the authority of the leaders of this world, but from the authority we exercise over ourselves, and from the creation of healthy and bright spiritual hearths which we call parish, family, cell, workshop, office, auditorium, room.

In this way, though the desolation and loneliness of the cities will continue to exist, it will not penetrate into our hearts. In this way the world can be changed, not from without, but from within and from above.

Do not consider great the missionary to Africa or the significant inventor. Great is the little person who forbears the madness, the injustice, the persecution, the pain of his neighbor and of his own life. According to Abba Isaac, the person who recognizes and overcomes his passions is greater than the person who raises the dead.

All who seek redemption from pathological anxiety, from sorrow and sadness, from emptiness and loneliness are invited to a rendezvous with themselves and with God. And when you do meet, remember the humble person who has offered these thoughts.

— From Athonite Flowers: Seven Contemporary Essays on the Spiritual Life by Monk Moses. The author was born in Athens, Greece and has been living the monastic life on Mount Athos since 1975. He is the Elder of the Kalyvi of St. John Chrysostom at the Skete of St. Panteleimon of the Koutloumoussiou Monastery. He devotes much of his time to studying the lives of saints and poetry, to writing articles and books.

Contents

• Introduction
• A Brief Life of Pelagius
• The Letter to Demetrias
  • History and Text
  • Content and Analysis
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography

by Deacon Geoffrey Ready

Originally published at the now-defunct orthodoxireland.com website. Far from a defense of what has become known as “Pelagianism,” this article seeks to define what Pelagius actually said for himself and to read him in his own context.

Introduction

Few churchmen have been so maligned as Pelagius in the Christian West. For nearly 1,500 years, all that anyone has known of the British monk’s theology has come from what his opponents said about him — and when one’s opponents are as eminent as Augustine and Jerome, the chance of getting a fair hearing is not great. Consequently, it has been easy to lay all manner of pernicious heresies at Pelagius’s doorstep. Only in the last couple of decades have scholars been able to recover and examine Pelagius’s works directly. What they have found is that very little of what has historically passed for “Pelagian” heresy was actually taught by him.

This “rehabilitation” of Pelagius by Western scholars calls for an Orthodox Christian response. Indeed, through ecumenical contact and dialogue with Western Christians, Orthodox theologians have come to appreciate the immense impact that Augustine has had in shaping the landscape of Western Christianity; and the divergence of the Augustinian trajectory of theology from the Apostolic and Patristic Tradition has been carefully charted. It is surely time, then, for an evaluation of Augustine’s chief opponent, Pelagius. We may even find in the British monk’s criticism of Augustinian ideology a voice sympathetic to Orthodox concerns.

There is no denying that Orthodox Christians have traditionally called Pelagius a heretic. Yet no Eastern Fathers were acquainted with him, and condemnations of Pelagianism were included in the Oecumenical Synod of Ephesos only under Western influence. As we shall see, on the couple of occasions during his lifetime that Pelagius was actually tried at local councils in the East, the evaluation was positive. This paper picks up where those councils left off, though a thorough evaluation of Pelagius lies well beyond its scope. We shall begin the process by analysing herein the Letter to Demetrias, in which many of Pelagius’s principal views are set out.

A Brief Life of Pelagius

Tracing the life of Pelagius is not easy. No one wrote his biography, nor are there many autobiographical details in his works. There are no accounts of the controversies from an objective historian, and little commentary exists from friendly or neutral sources. Nonetheless, scholars are confident they have pieced together an accurate portrait of Pelagius’s life.

The first we know of Pelagius is in Rome where he came in early 380s. He was almost certainly from Britain, where he was born around 350.[1] There he received a very good education, with extensive training in the Scriptures, as well as in both Latin and Greek Patristic writings. He inherited in his theological formation the Romanised Celtic tradition, “with its emphasis on faith and good works, on the holiness of all life and the oneness of all.”[2] Consequently, once in Rome, he became impatient with the moral laxity that surrounded him. The Christianisation of the Empire was not making true Christians of people, he believed, only “conforming pagans.” He began preaching with the fervent desire to lead everyone to live an authentic Christian life according to the Gospel. Pelagius believed that the grace and renewing power of baptism had brought the opportunity to struggle on the path to perfection; but instead, he saw Christians squandering their baptism and “lapsing back into their old, comfortable habits of self-indulgence and careless pursuit of Mammon.”[3] The main focus of his preaching was never theological, but practical moral advice.

In Rome, Pelagius gradually gathered around himself a large and influential circle of loyal adherents, including educated aristocrats, many of them women, as well as many clergy. Though he did not belong to any religious community and never sought ordination, Pelagius was often called a monk, a testimony to his holy life. Even Augustine described him as “a holy man, who, I am told, has made no small progress in the Christian life.”[4] Gleaning what they could from his writings, commentators have described Pelagius as “a cultivated and sensitive layman,” “an elusive and gracious figure, beloved and respected wherever he goes,” always “silent, smiling, reserved,” certainly a “modest and retiring man.”[5]

The first hint of theological controversy came around 405, when Pelagius heard someone reading from Augustine’s Confessions, “Give me what you command and command what you will.” This verse annoyed Pelagius very much; he believed this and other Augustinian teachings contradicted the traditional Christian understanding of grace and free will, turning man into a “mere marionette, a robot.”[6] Soon after, he wrote his famous Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, in which he set out his opposition to such Augustinian doctrines as the inherited guilt of original sin, rigid predestination, and the necessity of baptism to spare infants from hell.

With Alaric the Visigoth threatening Rome with attack in the year 409, Pelagius departed for Palestine, where he was greeted with hostility by Augustine’s theological ally, Jerome. Jerome had been busy fighting Origenism, and when he heard that Pelagius was teaching that a baptised Christian was able to live a sinless life, if he so willed, he reacted strongly. For him, this doctrine of impeccantia (sinlessness) sounded like the Stoic notion of apatheia which Origen had adopted. So Jerome managed to have Pelagius formally charged with heresy, and the British monk was brought before Bishop John of Jerusalem at the Synods of Jerusalem and Diospolis in the year 415. At these two synods, Pelagius admitted to having taught this doctrine, but disassociated himself from the more extreme views of Celestius, a lawyer whom he had met in Rome. He quoted Scripture on the necessity of grace and anathematised those who denied that it was essential. The Synod of Diospolis therefore concluded:

Now since we have received satisfaction in respect of the charges brought against the monk Pelagius in his presence and since he gives his assent to sound doctrines but condemns and anathematises those contrary to the faith of the Church, we adjudge him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church.[7]

After his acquittal, Pelagius wrote two major treatises which are no longer extant, On Nature and On Free Will. In these, he defends his position on sin and sinlessness, and accuses Augustine and Jerome of being under the influence of Manicheanism. Their doctrine of original sin restored evil to a Manichean status, and their predestinarianism was tantamount to Manichean fatalism.

Unsurprisingly, Jerome and Augustine were not convinced by the conclusions at Jerusalem and Diospolis. They decided to direct all their energies to attacking Pelagius and the British monk soon found himself “out-manoeuvred and out-gunned.”[8] Under the influence of Augustine, the bishops of Africa appealed to Pope Innocent I, and after some time, he declared that Pelagius and Celestius were to be excommunicated unless they renounced their “heretical” beliefs. Innocent died a month later, and his successor Zosimus reversed the judgement. The African bishops stood fast, though, and between 416 and 418, several councils of Carthage passed numerous canons against the tenets of what had become known as “Pelagianism.”[9]

Today, historians of the Church realise that Pelagius was not condemned simply on theological grounds. Rather, Pelagius’s teaching was seen as a threat, a “potentially dangerous source of schism in the body social and politic.”[10] His central message that there is only one authentic Christian life, the path to perfection, left no room for nominal Christians. If he had gone off into the Syrian or Egyptian desert, he would probably have been a revered “abba.” Instead, he clashed with the comfortable Christianity which had become the basis of unity in the Imperial Church, and, as a result, he has gone down as the West’s chief heresiarch.

Around the time of his condemnation by the councils of Carthage, Pelagius disappeared. He is thought to have died not long after 418 somewhere near the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly in Egypt, though some have speculated that he may have returned to Britain.[11]

At the Oecumenical Synod of Ephesos in 431, those who failed to disassociate themselves from “the opinions of Celestius” were excommunicated. This canon clearly resulted from the direct influence of Cyril of Alexandria and other African bishops, rather than from the theological reflection of the whole Church. Thus, as one commentator has said, it was as “a matter of courtesy rather than a result of reasoned debate” that the Eastern Church overruled the earlier decisions in favour of Pelagius at local Eastern Synods at Jerusalem and Diospolis.[12]

The Letter to Demetrias: History and Text

Pelagius was in Palestine when, in 413, he received a letter from the renowned Anician family in Rome. One of the aristocratic ladies who had been among his followers was writing to a number of eminent Western theologians, including Jerome and possibly Augustine, for moral advice for her daughter, Demetrias. The latter was a young woman of 14, who, though recently engaged to be married, had chosen to take a vow of virginity. Demetrias’s mother wanted her to receive the very best instruction as she began her new life. Evidently, the request was fervently made, for in his response, the Letter to Demetrias, Pelagius admits to having been persuaded by the “remarkable force of her heartfelt desire” (1:2).[13]

Pelagius rose to the dual challenge of not only writing for an aristocratic audience but doing so in direct competition with his illustrious theological adversaries. The Letter to Demetrias has been called “one of the jewels of Christian literature.”[14] One modern commentator describes the impression given by the letter, the impression which Demetrias herself must have received, as that

of an older, wiser friend, writing with deep feeling and sincerity from his own lifetime of experience and commending the values and obligations which he himself prizes above all else in other words, of that same simple, devout Christian teacher whom she had once known as a child in Rome and heard expounding the mysteries of the scriptures to her elders, one whose judgement she could respect and trust, one who believed what he said and practised what he preached, one whose sole concern was to be about his Father’s business. And as she read his advice, no doubt she would have in her mind’s eye a picture of a rather eccentric, distinctly overweight, elderly gentleman, dressed in the simple habit of a monk, strict in his teaching and his behaviour, but capable of impressing the elite of Rome by his enthusiasm and example.[15]

In addition to giving us insight into the practical moral advice which was the centre of Pelagius’s teaching, this letter provides us with the “most complete and coherent account” of his views of natural sanctity and man’s moral capacity to choose to live a holy life.[16]

As with all of Pelagius’s writings, the textual history of the Letter to Demetrias is complicated by his condemnation as a heretic. After the Synod of Ephesos in 431, it became a crime to be in possession of any Pelagian works, so they were transmitted under others’ names. The great irony of this letter is that for centuries it was considered to be one of the works of Jerome and was included in his corpus of writings.[17] Later, the letter would be ascribed to various followers of Pelagius like Celestius and Julian of Eclanum. Today, however, the authenticity of the Letter to Demetrias as a work of Pelagius is not seriously questioned. Textual analysis indicates that its style and vocabulary are typically Pelagian. Moreover, modern scholars point out that Augustine himself knew the letter to have been written by Pelagius, something he mentions in his refutation of it in his work of 417, On the Grace of Christ.[18]

The Letter to Demetrias: Content and Analysis

The first half of the Letter to Demetrias is an exposition of Pelagius’s views of human nature. The monk explains why he begins this way:

Whenever I have to speak on the subject of moral instruction and the conduct of a holy life, it is my practice first to demonstrate the power and quality of human nature and to show what it is capable of achieving (2:1).

The moral life of purity, for Pelagius, can only be achieved by drawing upon both “the good of nature and the good of grace” (9:1); this will be the dominant theme of his exhortation.

Pelagius’s reflections on the human person are not unlike those of the Eastern Fathers. They share the same starting point of moral reflection, that is, the innate goodness of man because God has created him in His image and likeness. Pelagius writes, “you ought to measure the good of human nature by reference to its Creator” (2:2). For Pelagius as well as the Fathers, creation in the image of God means creation with free will, as free, self-determining persons:

Moreover, the Lord of Justice wished man to be free to act and not under compulsion; it was for this reason that ’he left him free to make his own decisions’ (Sir 15:14) and set before him life and death, good and evil, and he shall be given whatever pleases him (2:2).

As with the Fathers, Pelagius has contempt for that “ignorant majority” which believes that because man is able to do evil, he has not been created truly good. In fact, Pelagius says, if man were created to do good “on compulsion and without possibility of variation” — as these people would have preferred — there would be no real humanity, and no real virtue or goodness (3:1). Here we can see that the heart of Pelagius’s objections to Augustine and Jerome is not a question of abstract theology, but practical spirituality: those who deny the free will of man make futile the moral life.

This innate goodness of the human person, Pelagius argues, was not destroyed in the Fall. Man continues to carry in his nature the goodness of creation, a kind of natural grace or “natural sanctity” (4:2). Pelagius goes to great lengths to demonstrate this, offering first as evidence the fact that many pagans have been “chaste, tolerant, temperate, generous, abstinent and kindly, rejecters of the world’s honours as well as its delights, lovers of justice no less than knowledge” (3:3). His central argument, though, is from the Old Testament; he produces a lengthy roll-call of the patriarchs and Old Testament saints (5:1ff) whose examples of holiness prove that it is possible to follow the commandments. Again, Pelagius emphasises the practical moral implications of this doctrine of human goodness:

We can never enter upon the path of virtue, unless we have hope as our guide and companion and if every effort expended in seeking something is nullified in effect by despair of ever finding it (2:1).

There is nothing that Pelagius abhors more than people forsaking the path to life because it is too hard or difficult, because “we are but men, we are encompassed by frail flesh” (16:2). To deny, as Augustine and Jerome did, man’s innate goodness and capacity to live a holy life is not only moral pessimism, it is real blasphemy: for it means that God does not know what he has done or commanded, or that he does not remember the human frailty which he created, or that God has “commanded something impossible” and therefore seeks not our salvation but our punishment and damnation (16:2).

Pelagius also argues against the Augustinian view of the Fall and man because it undermines the reality of sin as a moral choice. The view of his opponents that there is something in nature which compels human beings to sin strikes Pelagius as “blaming nature” for what is really the choice of free human persons. He writes:

If it should be thought to be nature’s fault that some have been unrighteous, I shall use the evidence of the scriptures, which everywhere lay upon sinners the heavy weight of the charge of having used their own will and do not excuse them for having acted only under the constraint of nature (7).

For Pelagius, in the “books of both Testaments [...] all good, as well as all evil, is described as voluntary” (7). This is most easily demonstrated in the case of brothers like Cain and Abel, or Jacob and Esau, who share the same nature. The monk explains, “when merits differ in the same nature, it is will that is the sole cause of an action” (8:1). Therefore, the Fall of man could not have corrupted nature to the point of making of the entire human race the Augustinian massa peccati (mass of sin) unable to do anything but sin. The effect of the Fall must rather be conceived in more “environmental” terms. Pelagius writes:

Nor is there any reason why it is made difficult for us to do good other than that long habit of doing wrong which has infected us from childhood and corrupted us little by little over many years and ever after holds us in bondage and slavery to itself, so that it seems somehow to have acquired the force of nature (8:3).

For the British monk, it was not true to say as Augustine did that all men sinned in Adam and thus inherit his guilt; human beings of their own free will simply imitate Adam and re-enact the Fall in themselves.

Most of what Pelagius argues against Augustine and Jerome can be found in the teaching of the Eastern Fathers. Certainly, the assertion that it is possible to live a holy life after the Fall, as evidenced by the saints of the Old Testament, is a familiar Patristic theme. Moreover, the Eastern Fathers nowhere teach the necessity of sin, emphasising, as Pelagius does, the rôle of human free will. Nor do any of the Fathers propose a doctrine of original sin like that of Augustine which disturbed Pelagius so much. Nevertheless, in his polemics against those who denied human moral freedom, Pelagius develops perhaps too high a view of human free will. As the Orthodox moral theologian, Fr Stanley Harakas, has noted, the Fathers generally distinguished between the innate self-determination (autexousion) of rational beings and the freedom (eleutheria) which is a property only of the “condition reached in Theosis where there is no conflict or struggle in acting in a fully human, divine-like fashion.”[19] Pelagius does seem to confuse these two, anticipating a little too much of real freedom in human self-determination. Furthermore, in his argument against human moral depravity, Pelagius neglects somewhat the effects of mortality and corruption after the Fall which, as the Fathers insist, evoke a tendency (though not a compulsion) towards sin. Finally, to bring it totally in line with Patristic teaching, Pelagius’s understanding of sin would need to be broadened to encompass the concept of “involuntary sin” — the evil acts and events in which we participate, yet do not will.

Still, contrary to caricatures drawn of him, Pelagius does not have a naive and overly optimistic vision of human perfection.[20] The great effort he expends in defending the goodness of human nature is only to show what a wonderful creation has been wasted by sin, to demonstrate “how great is that treasure in the soul which we possess but fail to use” (6:3). It is instructive to recall Pelagius’s response, at the Synod of Diospolis, to one of the principal charges brought against him by Jerome — the belief that “a man can be without sin, if he wishes.” Pelagius answered:

I did indeed say that a man can be without sin and keep the commandments of God, if he wishes, for this ability has been given to him by God. However, I did not say that any man can be found who has never sinned from his infancy up to his old age, but that, having been converted from his sins, he can be without sin by his own efforts and God’s grace, yet not even by this means is he incapable of change for the future.[21]

While he was totally committed to the possibility of a completely sinless life, Pelagius was thus reluctant to admit anyone had ever achieved it.

Despite the oft-cited charge of his critics that he denied the need for redeeming grace,[22] Pelagius clearly emphasises its necessity for the moral life. The first step in the path to moral perfection is baptism, which is a genuine rebirth.[23] After his long roll-call of Old Testament saints, Pelagius writes:

Even before the law was given to us, as we have said, and long before the arrival of our Lord and Saviour some are reported to have lived holy and righteous lives; how much more possible must we believe that to be after the light of his coming, now that we have been instructed by the grace of Christ and reborn as better men (8:4).

This theme of baptismal rebirth is taken up again as a direct exhortation to the young Demetrias:

Consider, I beseech you, that high rank with which you have been made glorious before God and through which you were reborn in baptism to become a daughter of God (19:1).

Like the Fathers, Pelagius teaches that redemption in Christ enables man to co-operate with God in the ascetical struggle toward deification.[24] Yet he departs somewhat from the Patristic Tradition in failing properly to indicate how the grace of redemption works. While Augustine clearly teaches that grace works within the heart of man, Pelagius is never definite about an infused grace. He speaks of being “instructed by the grace of Christ,” of being “purified and cleansed by his blood, encouraged by his example to pursue perfect righteousness” (8:4). These kinds of statements, along with his tendency sometimes to write about “meriting” grace (cf. 25:3), have left Pelagius open to the charge that his understanding of grace is too rationalistic and external.[25]

Notwithstanding possible deficiencies in his theology of grace, Pelagius’s vision of the moral life is far from restricted to external holiness; he directs a lot of his attention to the development of the interior life. Virtues, he writes, “do not come from outside but are produced in the heart itself” (10:4). Nor is it acceptable simply to perform virtuous acts; they must transform the inner person so that we “desire righteousness as strongly as we desire food and drink when hungry or thirsty” (12). Furthermore, Pelagius says that

the habit of doing good must be exercised and strengthened by the practice of constant meditation; only the best things must occupy the mind, and the practice of holy conduct must be implanted at a deeper level (13).

This focus on the interior life must begin at the outset of the path to holiness, with a thorough self-examination: “Let us approach the secret places of our soul” (4:1), Pelagius exhorts his reader.

In the second half of the Letter to Demetrias, Pelagius proceeds to give the young virgin practical advice on the spiritual path she has chosen. It is in this practical realm that Pelagius shines most brightly: his spiritual direction is traditional, yet sharply relevant; the medicine is tough, but administered gently. The spiritual fervour and depth of the teaching are clear evidence of his advanced degree in the ascetical life. This is inspirational teaching at its very best, the kind one only finds in the great Fathers of the Church.

As with all of the Fathers, Pelagius’s writing is permeated with quotations from and allusions to the Bible. It is no surprise that one of his main pieces of advice for Demetrias is to attend to the Scriptures. He tells her: “Read the holy scriptures in such a way that you never forget that they are the words of God” (23:2). Many of Pelagius’s themes are familiar ones from Scripture and the early Fathers. He presents the moral life as a choice between two ways, the path to life and the path to destruction. He writes:

You must avoid that broad path which is worn away by the thronging multitude on their way to their death and continue to follow the rough track of that narrow path to eternal life which few find (10:3).

Another dominant theme from Scripture is Pelagius’s stress that progress in the spiritual life is all-important. There is no standing still, he says; so “if we do not want to go back, we must run on” (27:4). Commenting on the parable of the talents, he writes:

He who hides in a napkin a talent which he has received is condemned by the Lord as a useless and good-for-nothing servant: it is culpable not only to have diminished that talent but also not to have increased it (15).

No hour should go by for a Christian, he insists, without some measure of spiritual growth (23:1).

Pelagius also warns Demetrias about numerous traps and pitfalls in the spiritual life. He tells her carefully to distinguish between vices and virtues: for while they are always contrary to each other, they are “linked in some cases by such resemblance that they can scarcely be distinguished at all” (20:1). This problem often afflicts neophytes who are anxious to live the virtuous life. Pelagius writes:

For how many reckon pride as liberty, adopt flattery as humility, embrace malice instead of prudence and confer the name of innocence on foolishness, and, deceived by a misleading and most dangerous likeness, take pride in vices instead of virtues? (20:1)

He tells her most especially to be wary of false humility. It is easy, he says, to look humble through “verbal fictions” and “feigned gestures,” but “endurance of insult reveals the truly humble” (20:1). “Let there be no sign of pride, arrogance or haughtiness in you” (20:2), he exhorts. “Beware of flatterers like your enemies” (21:1), he goes on to say, for they lead people to think of their reputation rather than their conscience. These are wise words indeed, reminiscent of the advice of the desert Fathers, for they are the product of the same authentic spiritual experience.

Pelagius also shares the maximalistic approach of the Fathers to the spiritual life. “Do everything,” he says bluntly. “We are not to select some of God’s commandments as if to suit our own fancy but to fulfil all of them without exception” (16:1). But as any good elder, he gears himself to the special needs of his novice, tempering his message with pastoral dispensation and concern. At one point, for instance, he urges her to combine her fasting with works of mercy; but he then excuses her for a time from the works of mercy, directing her grandmother and mother to do them for her, so that she can devote all her “zeal and care” to the ordering of her spiritual life (22:1). Elsewhere he urges her not to go to extremes with any of her spiritual disciplines: “immoderate fasting, overenthusiastic abstinence and vigils of extravagant and disproportionate length are [...] evidence of lack of restraint,” he says; the result may be that “it becomes impossible thereafter to perform such works even in a moderate way” (23:3). Thus, “with good practices as well as bad whatever exceeds the bounds of moderation becomes a vice instead of a virtue” (24:1). The reason for moderation is clear: “the body has to be controlled, not broken” (21:2). Furthermore, simplicity in the spiritual life guards the heart against feelings of pride and success. He writes: “Poor clothing, cheap food, wearisome fasts ought to quench pride, not nourish it” (21:2). Throughout the letter, this tempering of severe demands with loving moderation displays Pelagius’s genuine empathy with his spiritual child.

Pelagius’s discussion of virginity in the Christian life is further demonstration of his spiritual maturity. To be sure, he betrays at times the Western tendency to divide the spiritual life into ordinary commandments and “counsels of perfection.” He says that in the Scriptures, “evil things are forbidden, good things are enjoined; intermediate things are allowed, perfect things are advised” (9:2). For instance, “marriage is allowed, so is the use of meat and wine, but abstinence from all three is advised by more perfect counsel” (9:2). But unlike many Western theologians, he vigorously stresses the fundamental unity of the spiritual life. He writes:

In the matter of righteousness we all have one obligation: virgin, widow, wife, the highest, middle and lower stations in life, we are all without exception ordered to fulfil the commandments, nor is a man released from the law if he proposes to do more than it demands (10:1).

Pelagius tells Demetrias that her vow of virginity does not exempt her from the fullness of demands of the Christian life; he warns her not to be deceived by those who adopt chastity “not along with righteousness but in its place” (10:2). Righteousness, he insists, “is enjoined on everyone without exception” (9:2).

The ascetical struggle towards holiness and perfection in which Pelagius instructs Demetrias to engage is a difficult path involving both overcoming the passions and battling against demonic powers. Here again his teaching is perfectly consonant with all the Fathers. In describing how to resist the enemies of our soul, he once more emphasises human free will to accept or reject their temptations:

They indeed can give counsel but it is ours to choose or reject their suggestions, for they harm us not by compelling but by counselling, and they do not extort our consent from us but court it (25:4).

Pelagius quotes from Matthew 15:19, “Out of the heart of man come evil thoughts,” to show that the origin of sin is the evil image or thought in the human heart. These evil thoughts paint “every single deed on the tablet of the heart, as it were, before doing it” (26:2). Therefore, the Christian must learn to discern thoughts in his heart. The mind[26] must become careful and watchful, trained to differentiate between bad and good thoughts, “so that it either nourishes good thoughts or immediately destroys bad ones” (26:2). When the soul is “illuminated by divine speech” and “occupied with heavenly thoughts,” the devil quickly flees (26:2). The key, therefore, is to watch carefully to protect the heart against the first stirrings of evil:

All your care and attention must be concentrated on keeping watch, and it is particularly necessary for you to guard against sin in the place where it usually begins, to resist temptation at once the very first time it appears and thus to eliminate the evil before it can grow and spread (26:3).

Pelagius follows here the Patristic teaching about watchfulness (nepsis) and guarding of the heart, though he does not develop the mystical dimension, the healing rôle of the prayer of the heart. Indeed, the one apparent weakness of his spiritual “system” is his lack of full attention to prayer; but that is a difficult matter to judge, since we have no reason to suppose he was trying to be systematic and all-encompassing in this short letter. At any rate, prayer is certainly both the implied means and end of a spiritual life whose goal he describes as “a soul continuously clinging to God” (23:2).

Conclusion

The great English monk and scholar St Bede once quoted several passages from the Letter to Demetrias saying that it contains “much excellent moral instruction but is marred by the author’s failure to emphasise the need to rely on divine grace rather than free will and strength of mind.”[27] Yet if we remember that Pelagius was not a systematic theologian but a moral reformer, and that his theological argumentation was made in reaction to writings that he believed undermined the authentic Christian spiritual life, we may perhaps more easily forgive his few exaggerations and omissions than did Bede. In fact, since on most of his points of disagreement with Augustine, Pelagius upholds the Patristic Tradition of the Church, and since in his practical spiritual advice he is entirely harmonious with Church teaching, this much-maligned British monk would appear to be no more heretical than many venerable Fathers. When that is considered along with his indisputable holiness of life — attested to not only by the depth of his spiritual writings but by Augustine himself! — can we help but to wonder if we have long-neglected a great saint of the Church?

Pelagius’s lonely and thankless struggle against the novel doctrines of Augustine and Jerome was eventually taken up by monks in southern Gaul. They were alarmed to hear of the “Pelagian controversy,” especially Augustine’s teaching on election and predestination, which they believed to be “contrary to the opinion of the Fathers and the common view of the Church.”[28] They saw the Augustinian theological system as a threat to grace as synergy, as a partnership between God and man. Their champion was St John Cassian, a disciple of St John Chrysostom. Together with his supporters, St Vincent of Lérins and St Faustus of Riez, he upheld the Patristic Tradition against Augustinianism and its proponents, especially Prosper of Aquitaine, as well as against the extreme “Pelagians” who indeed denied the necessity of God’s grace for salvation. These noble Gallic monks were later branded “Semi-Pelagians,” and their doctrine of synergy was condemned at the Synod of Orange in 529. This council rejected Augustinian predestination but accepted much of Augustine’s theology of sin and grace, definitively setting the Western Church on a path diverging from the Apostolic and Patristic Orthodox Tradition.

Endnotes

[1] Pelagius is frequently referred to as either British or a “Scot” (a term, usually derisive, which meant “Irish”). John Ferguson, “In Defence of Pelagius,” in Theology (Vol. 83, March 1980), p. 115. The name “Pelagius” is probably the Greek form (pelagios, “of the sea”) of the Welsh name Morgan or Morien. H. Forthomme Nicholson, “Celtic Theology: Pelagius,” in An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, James P. Mackay, ed. (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1989), p. 386. [Return]

[2] Nicholson, p. 388. [Return]

[3] B.R. Rees, Pelagius: A Reluctant Heretic (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1988), p. 20. [Return]

[4] B.R. Rees, The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989), p. 2. [Return]

[5] Rees, Reluctant Heretic, p. xii. [Return]

[6] Ferguson, “In Defence,” p. 115. He comments: “This, in the end, was the issue. Pelagius did not say that we could be saved by our own efforts. He did insist that we have still freely to turn to the saving grace of God.” [Return]

[7] Rees, Reluctant Heretic, p. 138. [Return]

[8] Ibid., p. 17. [Return]

[9] Ferguson, “In Defence,” p. 117. [Return]

[10] Rees, Reluctant Heretic, p. 20. [Return]

[11] Ferguson presents the compelling idea that Pelagius found refuge first in Lérins and then in Wales (p. 392). Wherever the venerable monk ended up, it is almost certain that he remained in communion with the Church. [Return]

[12] Rees, Reluctant Heretic, p. xv. [Return]

[13] All references to the text of the Letter to Demetrias are to the translation by B.R. Rees, contained in The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers, pp. 35-70. [Return]

[14] Georges de Plinval, as cited by Rees, Letters of Pelagius, p. 34. [Return]

[15] Rees, Letters of Pelagius, p. 35. [Return]

[16] Ibid., p. 32. [Return]

[17] Ibid., p. 33. Equally ironic is the fact that another of Pelagius’s writings, his statement of faith and defence of the Nicene Trinitarian and Christological doctrines, the Libellus Fidei, has only been preserved because the Vatican, until recently, believed it to be one of Augustine’s sermons. William E. Phipps, “The Heresiarch: Pelagius or Augustine?,” in The Anglican Theological Review (Vol. 62, April 1980), p. 125. [Return]

[18] Rees, Letters of Pelagius, p. 33. [Return]

[19] Fr Stanley Harakas, Toward Transfigured Life (Light and Life Publications: Minneapolis, 1986), p. 34. [Return]

[20] As one commentator has noted, “Pelagius is not more optimistic about human nature than his opponents; he is more pessimistic. To say that there is a right way to choose and we do not choose it is ’a really harsh and bitter word for sinners’.” Ferguson, “In Defence,” p. 118. [Return]

[21] Rees, Reluctant Heretic, p. 136. [Return]

[22] We are disappointed to read that an otherwise brilliant theologian, Fr Michael Azkoul, dismisses Pelagius as having “denied the necessity of Grace and true Faith for salvation.” The Teachings of the Holy Orthodox Church, Vol. I (Dormition Skete Publications: Buena Vista, Colorado, 1986), p. 227. Here and elsewhere Fr Azkoul fails to distinguish between Pelagius himself and later “Pelagianism.” In effect, Pelagius himself was more “semi-Pelagian” than “Pelagian”! [Return]

[23] It must be remembered that Pelagius never disputed the necessity of baptism, nor did he reject infant baptism. What he argued against was Augustine’s teaching that infants needed to be baptised in order to remit inherited guilt and that unbaptised babies were damned to hell. [Return]

[24] Pelagius often refers in his writings to the doctrine of “synergy” established by St Paul; cf. Romans 8:28, “We know that in everything God works for good with (synergeo) those who love him.” This paradox of grace and free will — so misunderstood by Augustine — Pelagius championed at the Synods of Jerusalem and Diospolis (to the satisfaction of the Eastern bishops), quoting I Corinthians 15:10, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me.” Phipps, pp. 130-131. [Return]

[25] Cf. Vigen Guroian’s statement that “Orthodoxy speaks of an imitatio Christi but does not accept or express in this a Pelagian rationalism. The old Adam is not capable on his own power to imitate Christ perfectly and fashion himself into a new Adam.” Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics, p. 15. [Return]

[26] Pelagius surely refers to the nous, not the brain. [Return]

[27] Rees, Letters of Pelagius, p. 33. [Return]

[28] Ibid., p. 6. [Return]

Bibliography

Azkoul, Fr Michael, “Peccatum Originale: the Pelagian Controversy,” in Patristic and Byzantine Review. Vol. 3, no. 1, 1984.

Azkoul, Fr Michael, The Teachings of the Holy Orthodox Church. Vol. I. Dormition Skete Publications: Buena Vista, Colorado, 1986.

Chadwick, Henry, The Early Church. Penguin Books: London, 1967.

Evans, Robert Franklin, Pelagius: Inquiries and Reappraisal. The Seabury Press: New York, 1968.

Ferguson, John, Pelagius: A Historical and Theological Study. W. Heffer and Sons: Cambridge, 1956.

Ferguson, John, “In Defence of Pelagius,” in Theology. Vol. 83, March 1980.

Harakas, Fr Stanley, Toward Transfigured Life: The Theoria of Eastern Orthodox Ethics. Light and Life Publishing: Minneapolis, 1983.

Meyendorff, Fr John, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. Fordham University Press: New York, 1979.

Nicholson, M. Forthomme, “Celtic Theology: Pelagius,” in An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, James P. Mackay, ed. T & T Clark: Edinburgh, 1989.

Phipps, William E., “The Heresiarch: Pelagius or Augustine?”, in The Anglican Theological Review. Vol. 62, April 1980.

Rees, B.R., The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers. The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991.

Rees, B.R., Pelagius: A Reluctant Heretic. The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1988.

Throughout the era of the Communist domination of Eastern Europe, there were many heroes who suffered and died in prison for trying to help Christians behind the Iron Curtain. One of the most well-known of these heroes is Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran minister who started an underground ministry in Romania in 1945. Of the next twenty years, he spent fourteen in prison. Finally ransomed out of Romania in 1965, he established a ministry to smuggle Bibles and practical aid to the families of Romanian martyrs. He died in February of 2001, suffering to the end from the maltreatment he had received at the hands of the Communists.

Pastor Wurmbrand himself and those whose stories he relates are shining examples of how faithful Christians can not only survive, but be illuminated through the dreadful sufferings of imprisonment.

A Lutheran Pastor’s Firsthand Account of Prison Life

by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand

I am a Christian from an Orthodox country — the country of Romania. Having been in prison for fourteen years for my faith, it is now my missionary work to help persecuted Christians in Communist countries. I would like to tell you the stories of several Orthodox Christians with whom I was privileged to come into contact during my time in prison. Their examples and their deeds have been a constant source of encouragement to me throughout the years.

Always Rejoice

The first man was a priest who was put in jail at the age of seventy. His name was Surioanu. When he was brought in with his big white beard and white pate, some officers at the gate of the jail mocked him. One asked, “Why did they bring this old priest here?” And another replied with a jeer, “Probably to take the confessions of everybody.” Those were his exact words.

This priest had a son who had died in a Soviet jail. His daughter was sentenced to twenty years. Two of his sons-in-law were with him in jail — one with him in the same cell. His grandchildren had no food, they were forced to eat from the garbage. His whole family was destroyed. He had lost his church. But this man had such a shining face — there was always a beautiful smile on his lips. He never greeted anyone with “Good morning” or “Good evening,” but instead with the words, “Always rejoice.”

One day we asked him, “Father, how can you say ‘always rejoice’ — you who passed through such a terrible tragedy?”

He said, “Rejoicing is very easy. If we fulfill at least one word from the Bible, it is written, ‘Rejoice with all those who rejoice.’ Now if one rejoices with all those who rejoice, he always has plenty of motivation for rejoicing. I sit in jail, and I rejoice that so many are free. I don’t go to church, but I rejoice with all those who are in church. I can’t take Holy Communion, but I rejoice about all those who take. I can’t read the Bible or any other holy book, but I rejoice with those who do. I can’t see flowers [we never saw a tree or a flower during those years. We were under the earth, in a subterranean prison. We never saw the sun, the moon, stars — many times we forgot that these things existed. We never saw a color, only the gray walls of the cell and our gray uniforms. But we knew that such a world existed, a world with multicolored butterflies and with rainbows], but I can rejoice with those who see the rainbows and who see the multicolored butterflies.”

In prison, the smell was not very good. But the priest said, “Others have the perfume of flowers around them, and girls wearing perfume. And others have picnics and others have their families of children around them. I cannot see my children but others have children. And he who can rejoice with all those who rejoice can always rejoice. I can always be glad.” That is why he had such a beautiful expression on his face.

Heaven’s Smile

Let me interrupt to tell you about another Orthodox Christian. He was not a priest, but a simple farmer. In our country, farmers are almost always illiterate, or nearly so. He had read his Bible well, but other than that he had never read a book. Now he was in the same cell with professors, academicians, and other men of high culture who had been put in jail by the Communists. And this poor farmer tried to bring to Christ a member of the Academy of Science. But in return, he received only mockery.

“Sir, I can’t explain much to you, but I walk with Jesus, I talk with Him, I see Him.”

“Go away. Don’t tell me fairy tales that you see Jesus. How do you see Jesus?”

“Well, I cannot tell you how I see Him. I just see Him. There are many kinds of seeing. In dreams, for instance, you see many things. It’s enough for me to close my eyes. Now I see my son before me, now I see my daughter-in-law, now I see my granddaughter. Everybody can see. There is another sight. I see Jesus.”

“You see Jesus?”

“Yes, I see Jesus.”

“What does He look like? How does He look to you? Does He look restful, angry, bored, annoyed, happy to see you? Does He smile sometimes?”

He said, “You guessed it! He smiles at me.”

“Gentlemen, come hear what this man says to us. He mocks us. He says Jesus smiles at him. Show me, how does He smile?”

That was one of the grandest moments of my life. The farmer became very, very earnest. His face began to shine. In the Church today there are pastors and theologians who can’t believe the whole Bible. They believe half of it, a quarter of it. Somehow they can’t believe the miracles. I can believe the whole of it because I have seen miracles. I have seen transfigurations — not like that of Jesus, but something apart. I have seen faces shining.

A smile appeared on the face of that farmer. I would like to be a painter to be able to paint that smile. There was a streak of sadness in it because of the lost soul of the scientist. But there was so much hope in that smile. And there was so much love and so much compassion, and a yearning that this soul should be saved. The whole beauty of heaven was in the smile on that face. The face was dirty and unwashed, but it held the beautiful smile of heaven.

The professor bowed his head and said, “Sir, you are right. You have seen Jesus. He has smiled at you.”

Pure Orthodoxy

Now, to come back to this priest, Surioanu. He was always such a happy being. When we were taken out for walks, in a yard where there was never a flower, a piece of herb, or grass, he would put his hand on the shoulder of some Christian and ask, “Tell me your story.”

Usually the men would talk about how bad the Communists were. “They’ve beaten me and they’ve tortured me and they’ve done terrible things.”

He would listen attentively; then he would say, “You’ve said plenty about the Communists; now tell me about yourself. When did you confess last?”

“Well, some forty years ago.”

“Let us sit down and forget the Communists and forget the Nazis. For you are also a sinner. And tell me your sins.”

Everybody confessed to him — I confessed to him, too, and I remember that as I confessed to him, and the more I told him sins, the more beautiful and loving became his face. I feared in the beginning that when he heard about such things he would loathe me. But the more I said bad things about myself, the more he sat near to me. And in the end he said, “Son, you really have committed plenty of sins, but I can tell you one thing. Despite all of these sins, God still loves you and forgives you. Remember that He has given His Son to die for you, and try one day a little bit, and another day a little bit, just to improve your character so it should be pleasant to God.”

My experiences with this priest were among the most beautiful encounters of my life. He is no longer on this earth. He was an example of what real Orthodoxy is all about. There exists such Orthodoxy. I don’t see much point in becoming an Orthodox from a Lutheran background or from a Baptist background or from any other background unless one desires that kind of Orthodoxy. His was an excellent Orthodoxy, a pure Orthodoxy. May God help us all to be truly Orthodox, after the example of so many saints who are depicted on the icons, and after the example of so many saints alive today.

A Good Confession

There was a brigade in Romania which was only for priests, bishops, pastors, rabbis, and laymen — whoever was in prison for his faith. One day a political officer came to inspect that brigade. Everybody stood at attention, and at random he called out a young man (whose name was Coceanga) and asked him, “What have you been in your civilian life?”

And he replied, “Sir, what I have been in my civilian life, I will be forever. I am a priest of God.”

“Aha, a priest! And do you still love Christ?”

The priest was silent for a few seconds — seconds as long as eternity, because he knew that his eternal destiny would be decided in those seconds. The Lord said, “Whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).

And then after a little meditation, his face began to shine — I have seen so many shining faces — and with a very humble but very decided voice he said, “Captain, when I became a priest, I knew that during Church history thousands had been killed for their faith. And as often as I ascended to the altar dressed in those beautiful, ornate robes, surrounded by the respect and love of the congregation, I promised to God that if ever I had to suffer, if ever I wore the uniform of the prisoner, I would still love Christ.

“Captain,” he went on to say, “I so pity you. We have the truth, and you have whips. We have love, and you have iron bars on prison cells. Violence and hatred is a very poor argument against truth and love. If you were to hang all the professors of mathematics, if all the mathematicians were hanged, how much would be four plus four then? It would still be eight. And eight plus eight would still be sixteen.

“You can’t change the truth by hanging those who speak the truth. If all the Christians were hanged, it would still remain so that there is a God, and He is love. And there is a Savior; His name is Jesus Christ, and by confessing Him a man can be saved. And there exists a Holy Spirit, and a host of angels around the earth. And there exists a beautiful paradise — you can’t change the truth.”

I wish there was a way to convey the tone with which he said those words. We, the others, were ashamed because we believed in Christ, we hoped in Christ, but this man loved Christ as Juliet loved Romeo and as the bride loves the bridegroom.

An Undying Love

When I was in jail I fell very, very ill. I had tuberculosis of the whole surface of both lungs, and four vertebrae were attacked by tuberculosis. I also had intestinal tuberculosis, diabetes, heart failure, jaundice, and other sicknesses I can’t even remember. I was near to death.

At my right hand was a priest by the name of Iscu. He was abbot of a monastery. This man, perhaps in his forties, had been so tortured he was near to death. But his face was serene. He spoke about his hope of heaven, about his love of Christ, about his faith. He radiated joy.

On my left side was the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest almost to death. He had been arrested by his own comrades. Don’t believe the newspapers when they say that the Communists only hate Christians or Jews — it’s not true. They simply hate. They hate everybody. They hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate anti-Semites, they hate anti-Christians, they hate everybody. One Communist hates the other Communist. They quarrel among themselves, and when they quarrel one Communist with the other, they put the other one in jail and torture him just like a Christian, and they beat him.

And so it happened that the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest nearly to death had been tortured nearly to death by his comrades. And he was dying near me. His soul was in agony.

During the night he would awaken me, saying, “Pastor, please pray for me. I can’t die, I have committed such terrible crimes.”

Then I saw a miracle. I saw the agonized priest calling two other prisoners. And leaning on their shoulders, slowly, slowly he walked past my bed, sat on the bedside of this murderer, and caressed his head — I will never forget this gesture. I watched a murdered man caressing his murderer! That is love — he found a caress for him.

The priest said to the man, “You are young; you did not know what you were doing. I love you with all my heart.” But he did not just say the words. You can say “love,” and it’s just a word of four letters. But he really loved. “I love you with all my heart.”

Then he went on, “If I who am a sinner can love you so much, imagine Christ, who is Love Incarnate, how much He loves you! And all the Christians whom you have tortured, know that they forgive you, they love you, and Christ loves you. He wishes you to be saved much more than you wish to be saved. You wonder if your sins can be forgiven. He wishes to forgive your sins more than you wish your sins to be forgiven. He desires for you to be with Him in heaven much more than you wish to be in heaven with Him. He is Love. You only need to turn to Him and repent.”

In this prison cell in which there was no possibility of privacy, I overheard the confession of the murderer to the murdered. Life is more thrilling than a novel — no novelist has ever written such a thing. The murdered — near to death — received the confession of the murderer. The murdered gave absolution to his murderer.

They prayed together, embraced each other, and the priest went back to his bed. Both men died that same night. It was a Christmas Eve. But it was not a Christmas Eve in which we simply remembered that two thousand years ago Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It was a Christmas Eve during which Jesus was born in the heart of a Communist murderer.

These are things which I have seen with my own eyes.

Originally published in AGAIN magazine, September, 1987.
Pastor Richard Wurmbrand was the founder of Christian Missions to the Communist World, Middlebury, Indiana.

Pastor Richard Wurmbrand: Finishing the Race

by Hieromonk Damascene

Our St. Herman Brotherhood and Monastery has for a long time had great respect and appreciation for the life, testimony and work of Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a Jewish convert to Christianity who suffered for fourteen years in Communist prisons in Romania due to his unrelenting Christian activity. Back in 1979, our co-founder Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke about Pastor Wurmbrand to seminarians and pilgrims at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York. In succeeding years we corresponded with Pastor Wurmbrand himself, sent him Orthodox materials, and met with him at some of his speaking engagements.

In 1996 our Brotherhood made personal contact with a man who had been in Communist prisons in Romania at the same time as Pastor Wurmbrand, and for the same reason: the Romanian Orthodox priest, Fr. George Calciu. Fr. Seraphim Rose had also spoken at great length about Fr. George and his courageous preaching of Christ in Romania. We were overjoyed to get to know him here in America, learn from his faith, and benefit from his wisdom and experience.

It soon became known to us that Pastor Wurmbrand and Fr. George were friends. Fr. George told us that Pastor Wurmbrand had confessed to him many times in the United States — not as a sacrament, since Pastor Wurmbrand was a Lutheran — but as before an Orthodox priest and friend. Before these talks, in which he disclosed his struggles, Pastor Wurmbrand would always cross himself.

Pastor Wurmbrand had also confessed to an Orthodox priest many years prior to coming to America, when he was in Communist prison. He told Fr. George about this when he met him in Pennsylvania in 1989. In a recent letter Fr. George informed us about what Pastor Wurmbrand had told him:

Pastor Wurmbrand was in a prison hospital for terminal illness. The majority of the people from this prison had to die.

One day, a new transport of prisoners came to the jail. Among them was a very humble Orthodox priest from a village. He seemed so simple that the guards made all kinds of jokes about him. The prisoners were in the courtyard — a special place surrounded by a fence — and the guard brought in the newcomers, all in rags.

The guard said to them, “Look, guys, this is a priest. He was sent here by the prison administration to hear your last confession — all of you.” He was alluding that they all had to die, including the priest.

Pastor Wurmbrand said, “He [the guard] prophesied: in less than six months, everyone came to this priest and confessed. I was among the first.”

In 1998 Pastor Wurmbrand was in critical condition in a hospital in southern California. He had not eaten for ten days, and it looked like he was dying. He was asked which pastor should be called, and he asked for Fr. George Calciu. Fr. George was telephoned and was prepared to come, but the danger passed and Pastor Wurmbrand got better. Still, Pastor Wurmbrand was in such a condition that he had to be kept in a nursing home — a Catholic nursing home in Torrance, California.

In July of 1998 Fr. George went to see Pastor Wurmbrand. Shortly after this visit, he sent us the following message:

Pastor Wurmbrand was very excited to see me. He is in a nursing home, very weak; he cannot swallow anything, even his own saliva. I found him sleeping, because he wanted not to be tired and to be able to talk longer with me. After half an hour he awoke and was pushed in his wheelchair to a small yard, where there was a statue of the Mother of God. We talked a few minutes all together: his wife Sabina, two Romanian ladies, Nicolae Popa and a young man.

Afterwards, everybody left Richard and me alone. We started by remembering the time in prisons, and he remembered something very touching. He said: ‘I was in prison with different people: Orthodox, Catholic, Romanian, Hungarian, German, etc. And I noticed that the Hymn to the Mother of God existed in all the languages, except Hebrew. And I decided to compose this hymn in Hebrew, because Mary is a Jew and Hebrew was her language.” He started to sing, with his weak and trembling voice, the hymn in Hebrew. The melody was very Jewish, composed by him. I was deeply impressed. The statue of the Mother of God was there, watching and blessing us.  . . . He told me that, in his heart, he loved Orthodoxy, but considered he was not worthy of it, and because of this he did not succeed in becoming fully Orthodox.

If you go to Richard and talk to him, ask him to sing “Ave Maria.” And be prepared to tape the song. He loves very much the Mother of God, and I am sure he will be happy in his heart to let this song be a testimony. I was not prepared and failed the occasion.

Thinking that this might be our last opportunity to meet and talk with Pastor Wurmbrand, we set off to see him almost immediately after receiving Fr. George’s letter.

Hieromonk Gerasim, Mother Nina (who had spent two years in a monastery in Romania) and I arrived at the nursing home in the morning of July 28. Pastor Wurmbrand greeted us with love and was happy to see us. We went with him in his wheelchair to the same courtyard in which Fr. George had spoken with him.

His first concern was what he could do for us. We were moved by how he, so weak and enfeebled himself, was so desirous to give to others.

I asked him how to face persecution, if and when it comes. He told us not to be fearful of persecution. “Persecution must come to all Christians,” he said, “but do not be afraid.”

Mother Nina asked him how to bear suffering. He said that he had always been afraid of suffering, but then he began to be joyful in suffering. “Be joyful!” he exclaimed, “leap for joy!” As Mother Nina remarked later, as he said this his eyes seemed like a sea of light opening into eternity.

Mother Nina asked him about the song he had composed to the Mother of God in Hebrew. Immediately he sang it for us, and we recorded it on tape as Fr. George had urged us to do. Mother Nina wept. When he finished singing Pastor Wurmbrand said that Mary was the closest one to Jesus, and was the only one to change His will. (Evidently he was speaking about Christ’s miracle of changing water into wine. According to the commentary of St. Cyril of Alexandria, at that time the Mother of God did indeed persuade her Son to do something He did not plan; He did it out of obedience to her.) We could see, as Fr. George had told us, that Pastor Wurmbrand had great love for the Theotokos.

Soon we were joined by friends of Pastor Wurmbrand: a Romanian woman, her two sisters, and her American husband. Pastor Wurmbrand’s legs began to hurt him; he was wincing from the pain, and asked to be taken back inside to his bed. (As we later learned, the pain was due to severely advancing leg neuropathy contracted during his three years of solitary confinement, when he was obliged to stand interminable hours, being kept on a starvation diet.)

Once he was settled into his bed, he sang for us once again his song to the Mother of God: first in English, and then in Hebrew. He explained to us the circumstances under which he composed it (this, too, we recorded on tape). “I was in a very bad situation in prison,” he said. “Prison was not always very bad. Sometimes there are better times, sometimes worse times. It was a very bad time. And I prayed that the times would change, and they did not change. Then I promised that if it [the situation] changed for the good of the prisoners, I would translate this song into Hebrew. In five minutes the situation changed.”

We began to sing Orthodox hymns with Pastor Wurmbrand: “Christ is Risen” and “Holy God” in Romanian. Even though it was hard for him to sing and he would choke and cough, he sang the hymns with his whole heart.

I asked him if he would like to be anointed with holy oil, and he gladly consented. Anointing three times his head, hands and feet with oil from the reliquary of St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, I said aloud the prayer of blessing to our Lord Jesus Christ, asking for St. John’s intercessions. After this anointing Pastor Wurmbrand looked more peaceful and ceased to show obvious signs of being in pain.

We were there for almost three hours. We returned in the evening and were met by Sabina Wurmbrand, who beamed with the same joy as did her husband. She too was very glad to see us, especially Mother Nina. Sabina had been in Communist prison for three years together with Orthodox nuns.

During our second visit Pastor Wurmbrand asked us to gather close to him, and he kept asking us for a “word.” He was extremely interested to hear about the missionary work of our Brotherhood.

I was impressed with his humility. When, for example, I mentioned Fr. George Calciu to him, he said, “Fr. George is a great man. He loves sinners. That’s why he loves me.”

He asked Sabina for their checkbook, because he wanted to give a donation toward Mother Nina’s upcoming trip to Romania. We assured him that it was not necessary for him to go to the trouble, but he said emphatically, “We have to show our Christian love through concrete acts.” (Sabina did not have the checkbook at the time, but soon thereafter she sent Mother Nina a letter with a sizable donation, which was then given to an Orthodox publishing house in Romania.)

After a while Sabina began to be concerned that her husband was becoming too tired, and said she thought everyone should leave and let him rest. But Pastor Wurmbrand did not want us to leave, and tried to postpone our departure as long as possible. Finally we did go when visiting hours ended. He expressed his gratitude to us, and as we walked out of the room he looked at us with longing.

We ourselves were truly grateful for this meeting. We were able to experience firsthand Pastor Wurmbrand’s love for God and neighbor, which had been tested and tried in the crucible of suffering for our Lord Jesus Christ. We were witnesses, too, of his love for God’s Most Pure Mother, and of the respect and esteem in which he held the Orthodox Church and her tradition.

Hieromonk Damascene Christensen is from St. Herman of Alaska Monastery, Platina, California.

I recall a televised discussion program in which we were asked what was most important in Christianity. Part of what I said was that the only way we can find ourselves is to deny ourselves. That’s Christ’s teaching. If you cling to yourself, you lose yourself. The unwillingness to forgive is the ultimate act of not wanting to let yourself go. You want to defend yourself, assert yourself, protect yourself. There is a consistent line through the Gospel — if you want to be the first you must will to be the last.

The other fellow, who taught the psychology of religion at a Protestant seminary, said, “What you are saying is the source of the neuroses of Western society. What we need is healthy self-love and healthy self-esteem.” Then he quoted that line, “You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” He insisted that you must love yourself first and have a sense of dignity. If one has that, forgiveness is either out of the question or an act of condescension toward the poor sinner. It is no longer an identification with the other as a sinner, too. I said that of course if we are made in the image of God it’s quite self-affirming, and self-hatred is an evil. But my main point is that there is no self there to be defended except the one that comes into existence by the act of love and self-emptying. It’s only by loving the other that myself actually emerges. Forgiveness is at the heart of that.

As we were leaving a venerable old rabbi with a shining face called us over. “That line, you know, comes from the Torah, from Leviticus,” he said, “and it cannot possibly be translated ‘love your neighbor as you love yourself.’ It says, ‘You shall love your neighbor as being your own self’.” Your neighbor is your true self. You have no self in yourself.

Read on…

Father Thomas, many people recognize there is a value in forgiving and being forgiven, but see it only on the human level, without a theological dimension. Would you say forgiveness is a divine act?

If a person is inspired by the spirit of God, he or she can forgive, certainly. People can forgive. But I’m not sure you can say that in general there is the feeling that forgiveness is of value. I have met people who would say, “I don’t care. I can go on and live my life; it really doesn’t matter to me. If I’m not bothering you and you aren’t bothering me, why be reconciled?” This is plain indifference.

Another reason why people don’t value forgiveness is that they consider it to be collusion with evil. They feel that if a person has done something really terrible, he or she should be reminded of it until death, and further, that the evil should be avenged. And of course, most of us feel that any offense committed against us is irreparable. Nothing that the other person does can ever cancel it. If you kill my child, for example, there is nothing you can do in reparation, and for me to forgive would simply be to condone the evil. So I’m not sure that most people value forgiveness.

When you look at it from the point of view of justice, there is no reason for forgiveness. Only if God exists and we realize that there is either a world with evil or no world at all, only then can we understand that we are going to have to undergo the trial of evil. But if that is not there, I don’t know why anyone would forgive. Or want to. But I do think that people who are not believers in God, by the fact they are made in God’s image, can have the sense that reconciliation is better than allowing the evil to go on. By definition, forgiveness is breaking the chain of evil, beginning by recognizing that evil really has been done. People tend to think forgiveness means something bad was not really done, that a person didn’t understand the consequences, or whatever. If that were the case, there would be no need for forgiveness; it could be seen simply as a mistake. Forgiveness has to admit, and rage over, and weep over a real evil, and only then say, “We are going to live in communion one with another. We are going to carry on.” Never forgetting — you can’t, at any rate — but carrying on in a spirit of love without letting the evil poison the future relationship. Certainly that is what happens theologically. The striking thing in the Gospel is that God refuses to let evil destroy the relationship. Even if we kill him, he will say, “Forgive them.”

Read this whole conversation here…

It was fall when we arrived in the United States. The first weeks passed rapidly, filled with new discoveries every day, and soon we came across a beautiful feast, which we had never celebrated before: Thanksgiving Day, an exclusively American feast. With great enthusiasm we included it in the calendar of our family feasts.

Who can describe our astonishment, however, when a few days after our first Thanksgiving Day we heard from a loudspeaker in a large department store the unmistakable melody of “Silent Night”! Upon our excited inquiry, someone said, rather surprised: “What is the matter? Nothing is the matter. Time for Christmas shopping!”

It took several Christmas seasons before we understood the connection between Christmas shopping and “Silent Night” and the other carols blaring from loudspeakers in these pre-Christmas weeks. And even now that we do understand, it still disturbs us greatly. These weeks before Christmas, known as the weeks of Advent, are meant to be spent in expectation and waiting. This is the season for Advent songs–those age-old hymns of longing and waiting; “Silent Night” should be sung for the first time on Christmas Eve. We found that hardly anybody knows any Advent songs. And we were startled by something else soon after Christmas, Christmas trees and decorations vanish from the show windows to be replaced by New Year’s advertisements. On our concert trips across the country we also saw that the lighted Christmas trees disappear from homes and front yards and no one thinks to sing a carol as late as January 2nd. This was all very strange to us, for we were used to the old-world Christmas, which was altogether different but which we determined to celebrate now in our new country.

More…

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) has a long history of teasing Christians into dangerous territory. I suspect that many if not most Christians have more than a little curiosity about life after death. We want to know what happens. We want to know “how things work.” And this parable – at least on its surface – seems to give more indication of “how things work” than almost any other passage in Scripture.

It gives us a geography of sorts: Lazarus is in “Abraham’s bosom” apparently enjoying good things; the rich man is in Hades and in torment; we are told that there is a “great gulf fixed between the two” so that no one can come from Hades to Abraham’s bosom and no one from Abraham’s bosom can go to Hades.

It interests me that many Christians use this parable as a “map” of the after-life, or at least as a story that supports their own “map” of life after death.

More…

Related: Christ the Conqueror of Hell

Every year, on Hallowe’en, I sit on the front porch of my house with a bowl of candy, a box of beeswax candles, and a large icon for the Feast of All Saints.

Every child who comes to the house gets a piece of candy, and may also light a candle and place it before the icon. Very few kids (even the jaded teenagers) turn down the opportunity.

For those who ask, I tell them that the meaning of the word “Hallowe’en” is “the eve of the Feast of All Saints”.

If they press me on the point, I tell them that they can think of the true meaning of Hallowe’en as being that, because of Christ, they can dress up like ghosts and goblins and whatnot, because we do not need to fear those things any longer.

I wish I had a few photos of the kids in Satan masks, lighting a candle and placing it before the icon…

Part of an excellent series of articles at Glory to God for All Things.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

In the last several posts I have written about the iconic character of reality – the world about us has the character of an icon. I have also noted the iconic character of language and of Scripture. There is much to say about what is meant by such descriptions as well as what it means to see things in an “iconic” manner.

I have made a contrast between what I have termed a literal view of reality and an iconic view of reality. In the literal view, things are things. What you see is what there is. In an iconic view, things point to something beyond themselves – they make present that to which they point.

However, there is much more to this than the mere act of seeing. To see an icon requires that we also be in relationship with that which it represents. Christ is present in His icon but is only made manifest to us because we are in relationship with Him. Thus I have said that to see an icon properly involves its veneration. Veneration is an expression of our relationship with that which is represented.

An important aspect of icons (in the teaching of the Church) is that an icon must be true. We cannot make icons of that which is not true.

I recall a conversation with an elderly iconographer. We were discussing a particular icon of the Russian New Martyrs.

“It is not an icon!” she declared. I remember at the time wondering what she meant. It clearly obeyed all the canons and conventions for an icon – those whom it portrayed were truly martyrs. She drew my attention to the portrayal of those who were pictured carrying out the martyrdoms.

“There is hate in this icon!” She exclaimed. A true icon can never contain hate.

She did not mean that an icon could not portray the martyrdom itself (often a gruesome event). Rather she meant that within the portrayal of the evil-doers, the hatred and anger of the iconographer could be seen. It was, perhaps, a subtle point. But it was a point that was quite vital to this very accomplished iconographer. For veneration and hatred cannot coexist. Hatred will create a distortion which is not healing to the soul but damaging.

The same is true whether we are speaking about seeing the world as icon or reading the Scripture as icon (or encountering another human being as the icon of God). A required element within the experience of iconicity is the purity of our own heart. To read the Scriptures rightly is to encounter the Truth and, in some measure, to be changed in the encounter. There is obviously a dynamic at work. I am not pure in heart (nor are any of us) and my vision is thus always distorted to some extent.

However, what we can bring to every event of seeing is a broken and contrite heart – a heart of repentance. It is also true that our repentance is not pure and our humility is always lacking. But God is merciful. We offer what we can of our heart – and He gives what is lacking. This is the daily struggle of our lives as Christians and the constant and abundant mercy of God.

Evil renders the world opaque. Evil is not made present in things that seek to represent it. Rather, evil is a fracturing of the world – its dissolution in self-love and the drive towards non-being. Thus “art” which seeks to objectify human beings into mere sexual content is not True. It distorts the truth of a person and portrays them in a manner that dissolves reality. When we enter into communion with such “art” we enter into a communion of death – for such “art” only has death as its content.

This, of course, is an extreme example of the distorted efforts at sinful, iconic representation. It could be multiplied across the whole of our experience – for much that surrounds us is marked by such distortion, whether intentional or not.

St. Paul states:

To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work (Titus 1:15-16).

We are all iconographers – or at least involved with icons – for we live in the world and see it. (Even the “icon-smashers” are involved with icons whether they will acknowledge it or not). We either see icons in the distortion of our impure hearts or we struggle to see the world through the heart of repentance and in the purity which is the gift of God. It is in such purity that we can see another human being and confess from the heart that “this is the image of God.” It is not incorrect to say this of someone even if it is only a theoretical acceptance of a theological given. But such theoretical acceptance is not the same thing as actually seeing God in His image. That requires the long and difficult work of repentance – the struggle towards purity of heart. By His mercies, may we all see God.

Introduction

Do children and adults understand each other? To some degree, and if many adults have lost touch with childhood, there are some who understand childhood very well. But when I was a child, I wanted to write a book about things adults don’t understand about children. (I have since forgotten with what I wanted to write.) There is a gulf. A father can read a Calvin and Hobbes strip, and his little girl can ask what’s funny, and the father is in a pickle. It’s not that he doesn’t want to explain it, and he may be able to explain the humor to another adult, but all of those explanations fail with his daughter. Children often believe that there’s a big secret the adult conspiracy is refusing to tell them. And the adult who is trying to get a child to “be serious” by setting aside “make believe” and dealing with what is “real” is like someone who wears a raincoat to the shower. The things that go without saying as part of being serious are in many cases not part of childhood’s landscape.

In this sense, children understand each other. This understanding is compatible with friendship, liking, hating, being aloof, and several other things, but there are certain things that go without saying, and the things that go without saying are shared. Two young children will have a world where the difference between “real” and “imaginary” is not very important, where they have no power and adults laugh at things the children don’t understand, and where the world is full of wonder. And in that sense two children can understand each other even if they don’t know each other’s heroes, favorite ways to play, and so on and so forth. And adults likewise understand things that can normally be taken for granted among adults.

Before suggesting that Western Christianity (in other words, Catholic and Protestant Christianity) is best understood in continuity with the West, I would like to explain what I mean. There are a good many Catholics and Protestants who try to be critical towards Western culture, and who do not accept uncritically what is in vogue. I know several Western Christians who tried to live counterculturally and not accept sour things in Western culture; I was such a Western Christian myself. So is it fair to talk about the continuity between Western Christianity and the West?

There is a common Western tendency to criticize common Western tendencies. I’ve seen Christians eager to criticize Western tendencies. I’ve also seen liberals who were not Christian eagerly criticize common Western tendencies. For that matter, I don’t remember ever hearing someone use the term “common Western tendency” in a flattering way, even though the West is home to many great cultural triumphs (as well as problems). Criticizing “Western tendencies” is a Western thing to do. Taking a dim view of the culture that raised you is a Western thing to do. Working to create a counterculture is a Western thing to do. The focus of this article is not to rebut the West but to explain the East and describe things Western Christians may not know to look for. The Orthodox classics do not try to be Christian by making unflattering remarks about “common Western tendencies.” For reasons that I will elaborate, I know that there are countercultural Western Christians who strive to construct or reconstruct a Christian culture that is very different from the Western mainstream (I was such a countercultural Western Christian), and I still consider their continuities with the West to be significant. More on that later.

This article explores the suggestion that Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity is best understood in continuity with the East, and Western (Catholic and Protestant) Christianity is best understood in continuity with the West. There are of course continuities between Eastern and Western Christianity. But they usually aren’t the point where Western Christians do not understand Orthodox. There are important ways that a Western Christian understands an Eastern Christian and members of (other) Eastern religions don’t. There are also important ways that members of (mostly) Eastern religions understand each other. The purpose of this article is to explain things that the East naturally understands about Orthodoxy, not to explain everything important about Orthodoxy. The understanding between Orthodox, Hindus, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Buddhists, and many less well known religions is of this kind. And so is understanding within the West, but East and West are different as children and adults are different — not because one is more mature than the other (each can see the other as childish), but because there is a gulf. The understanding isn’t a matter of how many details you know, or agreement on important matters. For that matter, it’s not even a matter of civil disagreement. Understanding another religion is perfectly consistent with fighting religious wars. But there is a gulf that is rarely bridged, and I am trying to bring a spark of understanding of the gulf. I am trying to explain what is shared that Westerns, even Western Christians, need to have explained. And I will be looking at both East and West, at both worlds.

This article is partly Eastern and partly Western, and doesn’t completely belong to either world. It’s meant to give explanations a Westerner would recognize, while addressing important things that a Westerner might not think to ask about. I was raised an evangelical, and I am a relatively recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. This means that for better or worse I have a foot in both worlds. I hope to use this position to build a bridge.

The Most Important Thing Is

“Article on understanding Orthodoxy” is a dread oxymoron, a red flag like the phrase “committee to revitalize,” or for that matter a thick commentary on Ecclesiastes 6:11: “The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” (NIV)

Orthodoxy is something you understand by doing. If you want to learn to swim, you get in the water with someone who can show you how to swim. So the first thing an article on understanding Orthodoxy can say is that you can’t understand Orthodoxy by reading an article on understanding Orthodoxy. You can understand it by visiting a parish and seeing how we worship, and maybe participating. A book can be a useful tour guide that can help you keep your eyes open for what to see at a historic site, but it cannot substitute for visiting the site yourself. The first thing to do is, if you know someone Orthodox, ask, “May I join you at church?” Orthodoxy is a live community, and the way to understand it is to interact with the community. If you don’t have that live connection, you can search online for a nearby parish. Some parishes (churches) are warmer than others. There are some parishes that unfortunately aren’t welcoming. If a church doesn’t have a sign out in front, that may be a warning. But there are many churches that are welcoming. And don’t worry if everybody seems to be doing things that you don’t understand. There is a great deal of freedom in Orthodoxy, and apart from receiving communion you should be welcome to do (or not do) anything people are doing. Sometimes you will see different members of the faithful doing different things, walking around, entering, leaving. This is because of the freedom in Orthodox worship and a grand tradition of not sticking your nose in what other people are doing. When I first visited my present parish, well before I became Orthodox, I was self-conscious about following what other people were doing and sticking out. In the time that I’ve been Orthodox, I realized that there was no need to be self-conscious, and in fact no one cared that I wasn’t acting like everyone else.

So make a note in your planner, or call a friend who’s Orthodox. Decide exactly when you will make that contact, and do what you need to do to get that in your planner. Actually visiting the site is infinitely more valuable than reading a guidebook about it.

Symbol and Nominalism

Before explaining what symbol is in the East, I would like to talk about what has happened in the West. Symbol in the West used to be close to what it was in the East — like two trees standing tall. Then something called nominalism came along, and cut down the Western tree, leaving a stump of a once great tree. Nominalism is a good part of what has defined the West.

Nominalism was one side in a Western medieval debate, and it was called the “modern way.” The debate was whether categories of things were something real that existed before things and before our minds, or whether categories are things we construct after the fact. What people used to believe, and what the nominalists’ opponents believed, was that a lot more things were real than the nominalists acknowledged. Their opponents looked at the structures we perceive and said, “It’s out there,” and the nominalists said “No, it only exists in your head.” Nominalism was an axe for cutting down most of what people sensed about the world around us. In its extreme form nominalism says that brute fact is all that exists; if it’s not a brute fact, it can only exist in people’s heads. Some scholars will recognize that as a postmodern distinction; nominalism was something that flowered in modernism and bore fruit in postmodernism. At one stage, nominalism defined modernism and the Enlightenment, while at a later stage, people were more consistent and became postmodern.

Another thing that nominalism did was to cut apart the thing that represents and the thing that is represented in a symbol. Nominalism is the disenchantment of the entire universe. Nominalism is a disenchanting force that says, “If you can’t touch it, it can only be in your head,” and the place of symbol was changed from what it once was. Symbol wasn’t the only casualty, but it was one of the casualties.

Imagine two very different surfaces, like the surface of the ground. The first surface, Orthodoxy, is rich in connections, layers, and colors. Imagine that the first surface is textured, like the surface of the earth, while there are not only buildings but great arcs connecting one part to another so that what is present in one place is present in another. A symbol is an arc of this kind, and symbol is not something externally added to reality; it is something basic to what reality is, so that the surface is in fact richer than just a surface and is as connected as a web. If there is something in you that responds to beauty in the surface, or to ways it has become ugly, that is because something inside you is resonating with something out there.

Now imagine another picture, of a surface that is flat and grey, where there is no real order, and any structures and connections you see are only ways of lumping things together inside your head. You can read things on to it; you can imagine structures in its randomness and pretend any two parts are linked; because it has no order, you can project any kind of structure or connection you want, even if this freedom means it is only your particular fantasy. If you find it to be drab and empty, that is a private emotional reaction that says nothing interesting about the drab and empty world, in particular not that it is failing to be in some way colorful like it “should” be. “Should” has no meaning beyond something about our private psychology.

If you imagine these two surfaces — one of them structured, many-layered, colorful, and possessing a veritable web of connecting arcs (symbols), and the other one having only a single grey layer and no connections — you have the difference between what Orthodoxy believes and where nominalism leads. Few people believe nominalism in a pure form; I don’t even know if it is possible to believe nominalism in a few form. Nominalism is more a way of decaying than a fixed system of ideas. Part of what has shaped Western Christianity is the influence of nominalism as the disenchantment of the entire universe. Nominalism disenchants the treasure of a world of spiritual resonance, where symbol and memory have a rich meaning, where a great many things are not private psychological phenomena but something that is attuned to the world as a whole, as much as a radio picks up music because someone is broadcasting the music it picks up.

What was before nominalism in the West, and what is the place of symbol in Orthodoxy now? Christ is a symbol of God, and he is a symbol in the fullest possible sense. How? Christ is not a miniature separate copy of God, which is what a symbol often is in the West. Christ is fully united with God: “I and the Father are One.” God is fundamentally beyond our world; “No man can see God and live.” But “in Christ the fullness of God lives in a body.” And if you have seen Christ, you have seen the Father. Christ visibly expresses the Father’s hidden reality.

The image of God, in which we were all created, does not mean that we are detached miniature copies of God. What it means is that we, in our inmost being, are fundamentally connected to God. It means that we were created to participate in God’s reality, and that something of God lives in us. It means that every breath we breathe is the breath of God. It means that we are to reign as God’s delegates, the moving wonders who manifest God in ruling his visible world.

As an aside, symbol is one important kind of connection that makes things really present, but it’s not the only one. Memory is not understood as a psychological phenomenon inside the confines of a person’s head; to remember something is to make something really present. “This do in remembrance of me” is not primarily about us having thoughts in our heads about Christ, just as saying “Please assemble this cabinet” is not primarily about us seeing and touching tools and cabinet pieces. Saying “Please assemble this cabinet” may include seeing and touching what needs to be assembled, but the focus is to bring about a fully assembled cabinet which not just something in our minds. When Christ said “This do in remembrance of me” , he wasn’t just talking about a psychological phenomenon, however much that may be necessary for remembering; he was telling us to make him really present and be open to his presence, and he isn’t present “just” in our thinking any more than a working cabinet is “just” a set of sensations we had in the course of assembling it. And the idea of “This do in remembrance of me” goes hand in hand with Holy Communion being a symbol in the fullest possible sense: the bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine embodies the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. All of these are tied together.

Amomg these symbols, a reader may be surprised about one kind of symbol I haven’t mentioned: the icon. Icons are something I tried to overlook to get to the good parts of Orthodoxy; it took a while for me to recognize how much icons are one of the good parts of Orthodoxy. Icons are in fact key to understanding Orthodoxy.

When one bishop is giving a speech, sometimes he will hold up a picture, of a traffic intersection (or something else obviously secular), and then say, “In Greece, this is an icon. It’s not a holy icon, but it’s an icon.”

Part of what icons are in the East is easier to understand in light of what happened to icons in the West, not only religious artwork but painting as a whole. What happens if you ask an art historian to tell the story of Western art after the Middle Ages, roughly from the Renaissance to the Neo-classicists?

The story that is usually told is a story of Western art growing from crude and inaccurate depictions to paintings that were almost like photographs. It is a story of progress and advancement.

Orthodoxy can see something else in the story. Western art became photorealistic, not because they progressed from something inferior, but because their understanding of symbol had disintegrated.

If a picture is real to you as a symbol, then you don’t have to strive too hard to “accomplish” the picture, in the same sense that someone who has never gotten in trouble with alcohol doesn’t have to make an unprovoked lecture on why he doesn’t have a drinking problem. People who use alcohol responsibly rarely feel the need to prove that they don’t have a drinking problem; it’s someone who has a drinking problem who feels the need to make sure you know that his drinking is under control. People who don’t have a problem don’t feel the need to defend themselves, and artists and publics who haven’t lost symbols don’t feel a need to cram in photorealism. When Renaissance artists inaccurately portrayed the place of Christ’s birth as having a grid of rectangular tiles, they were cramming in photorealism. It wasn’t even that they thought they needed photorealism to make a legitimate picture. They went beyond that need to make the picture an opportunity to demonstrate photorealism, whether or not the photorealism really belonged there. From an Orthodox perspective the problem is not the historical inaccuracy of saying that Christ was born in a room with a tiled floor instead of a cave. The anachronism isn’t that big of a deal. From an Orthodox perspective the problem is that, instead of making a symbol the way people do when they really believe in symbol, people were making pictures the way people do when the pictures are unreal to them as symbols. The artists went for broke and pushed the envelope on photorealism because the West had lost something much more important than photorealism.

Good Orthodox icons don’t even pretend to be photorealistic, but this is not simply because Orthodox iconography has failed to learn from Western perspective. As it turns out, Orthodox icons use a reverse perspective that is designed to include the viewer in the picture. Someone who has become a part of the tradition is drawn into the picture, and in that sense an icon is like a door, even if it’s more common to call icons “windows of Heaven.” But it’s not helpful to simply say “Icons don’t use Renaissance perspective, but reverse perspective that includes the viewer,” because even if the reverse perspective is there, reverse perspective is simply not the point. There are some iconographers who are excellent artists, and artistry does matter, but the point of an icon is to have something more than artistry, as much as the point of visiting a friend is more than seeing the scenery along the way, even if the scenery is quite beautiful and adds to the pleasure of a visit. Cramming in photorealism is a way of making more involved excursions and dredging up more exotic or historic or whatever destinations that go well beyond a scenic route, after you have lost the ability to visit a friend. The Western claim is “Look at how much more extravagant and novel my trip are than driving along the same roads to see a friend!” — and the Orthodox response shows a different set of priorities: “Look how lonely you are now that you no longer visit friends!”

The point is that an icon, being a symbol, is connected to the person represented. It is probably not an accident that in the Reformation, the most iconoclastic people were those in whom the concept of symbol as spiritual connection had completely disintegrated. When I was a Protestant, the plainest sanctuaries I saw were the sanctuaries belonging to people who disbelieved in symbols as spiritual connections. If a symbol is not spiritually connected, then reverence to an icon is inappropriate reverence to a piece of wood; Orthodox believe that reverence to an icon passes through to the saint depicted in part because of the connection that is real to them.

There are other things to discuss about icons. Here I want to talk about them as symbols, and symbols in an Orthodox picture — the mental image I drew above that has a web of interconnections, has both spiritual and material layers, and is very different from the (almost empty) nominalist picture. A lot of people who try to understand icons are trying to fit the Orthodox icon into the nominalist picture, or at least a picture where part of the Orthodox framework is replaced with something more nominalist. I want to return to icons later, after some comparisons.

Compare and Contrast

How is Orthodoxy different from Western Christianity? I would like to answer, focusing on evangelical Christianity in my treatment of Western Christianity but referring to Catholicism. I don’t believe evangelical Christianity is the only real version of Western Christianity, but it is the middle of the (Western) road. From an Orthodox perspective, “Catholic,” “evangelical,” and “mainline” (or, if you prefer an alternative to “mainline,” you can say “oldline,” or “sideline,” or “flatline” ) represent three degrees of being Western, much as “rare,” “medium,” and “well done” denote three degrees of a steak being cooked. There are important differences, but there is also something that’s the same. Catholicism is like a rare steak, is almost raw in some parts and almost well done in others. A Catholic may be almost Orthodox (certainly a Catholic is not discouraged from trying to be almost Orthodox), and there are a lot of Catholics who believe that Vatican II says that the Reformers were right about everything (or something pretty close to that).

Catholics tend to be sensitive to the differences to Catholic and Protestant (even if they choose not to pay enough attention to those differences). Yet it is common for Catholics to believe that Catholics and Orthodox only differ in the addition of “and the Son” to a creed. Saying that’s the only difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is like saying that the difference between the Bible and the Quran is only that “Bible” was a French word for “book” and “Quran” is, with remarkable similarity, an Arabic word that can mean “book.” Catholic priests will tell you that Catholics and Orthodox believe almost exactly the same thing, and this is because Catholics know how they are different from Protestants but don’t know where their differences with Orthodox lie. The Reformation took a lot of trends in Catholicism and pushed them much further, but the problem isn’t just that the Reformers pushed them further. The problem is that the trends became a part of Catholicism in the first place. To Catholic readers who have been told that Catholicism is almost the same as Orthodoxy and the two should be joined together — I understand why you believe that and it is what one would expect the Catholic tradition to say. But to the Orthodox that is like saying that the Quran is of a piece with the Bible. You’re looking in the wrong place for the differences between the Bible and the Quran when you try to reconcile them by pointing out that “Bible” and “Quran” both mean book in influental languages. Not only do the differences lie elsewhere, they are far, far deeper.

What the Incarnation Means

In the West, doctrines have worked like elements in a philosophical system, while in the East, the focus is on what doctrines mean for us. There is a difference of focus, more than ideas contained, in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Western emphasis has been on philosophical clarity in describing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Eastern emphasis has been on what the persons of the Trinity mean for us and how we relate to them.

The Church didn’t even spell out a philosophical analysis of the Trinity until almost three centuries had passed and a heresy contradicted what they had always known. The Church had always known that the Son and the Holy Spirit were just as divine as the Father, and it taught people to appropriately relate to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before it spelled out why people should relate that way.

The Incarnation, God becoming human, is recognized by all Christians who have their heads screwed on straight (and quite a few who don’t). But in the East, believing in the Incarnation isn’t just an idea that we agree with (although that is important). It is something that in practice determines the shape of a great many things in our spiritual walk. It is something that has great practical relevance. I would like to explain some of what the Incarnation means in the East, and that means explaining how the Incarnation gives shape to our spiritual walk.

There has been a saying rumbling down through the ages. The Son of God became a man that men might become the Sons of God (Protestant). The divine became man so that man might become divine (Catholic). God and the Son of God became man and the Son of Man that men might become gods and the sons of God. This teaching has mostly fallen away in Protestantism, even if Luther and Calvin believed it, and it is one puzzle piece among others in Catholicism. To the Orthodox it is foundational. The whole purpose of Christ becoming man, and our becoming Christian, is to become like Christ. Furthermore, becoming like Christ does not simply mean becoming like Jesus the morally good and religious man without reference to Christ’s divinity. We don’t split Christ like that. If God wants to make us like Christ, he wants to make us like Christ who is fully God and fully human, and that means that we “share in the divine nature” (as spelled out in II Pet 1:4). It means that if we read Paul talking about the Son of God as meaning divinity, then when Paul talks about us as sons of God he is saying something in the same vein. There are caveats the Orthodox believe that help balance the picture — in particular, we can be made divine by grace, but only God can be divine by nature, ever. We cannot make others divine. God has his essence which is beyond knowing and his energies which reach out to us, but we can never reach beyond his manifest energies to see his essence. Catholics believe in a “beatific vision” that in Heaven we will see God as he truly is. Orthodox call that heresy. God can reach out to us and we can meet him when he reaches out, but it is radically, utterly, and absolutely impossible for us to ever know God as he truly is. Neither our being divine by grace nor our glorification in Heaven can ever overcome God’s absolute transcendence. The Orthodox liturgy and prayers not only take account of sin; they spend more time bringing sin we need to repent of before God, than our being made like Christ. With all these caveats, the basic picture means that the Incarnation is not a one-time unnatural exception, something which runs against the grain of how God operates, or something totally unlike what can happen with us. The Incarnation is a peerless model that established the pattern of what it means to be Christian. Christ as the example of who a Christian should be is the only human who was fully divine, and even the only one to be fully human, but the Christian walk was meant to be, and is, a symbol that both represents and embodies what happened in the Incarnation. Christ is really incarnate in every member of the Church, and the Incarnation is not an anti-natural exception, but the pattern for being Christian. The purpose of being Christian is what Orthodox call “theosis,” or “divinization,” or “deification.”

Part of understanding that Christ became human, and in fact became flesh, requires an understanding of how spirit and matter relate. DesCartes is one of the more Western philosophers. Part of his contribution was a lot of thinking about the famous problem of the “ghost in the machine.” The problem of the “ghost in the machine” is the problem of how our minds can interact with our bodies, once you put mind and body in watertight compartments and assume that they shouldn’t be able to interact. It’s possible to be Western and disagree with DesCartes — but the main Western starting point is that mind and body are things one would expect to be separate.

In the East we don’t have trouble with the “ghost in the machine” problem because we don’t treat matter and spirit as things that are cut off from each other. We believe that matter and spirit are tightly bound together. It doesn’t seem strange to us that our minds can move our bodies — it’s a wonder, as all of God’s works are wonders, but it’s not something illogical.

This understanding means that the Incarnation doesn’t just mean that Christ had a body; it means that Christ was connected to his body on the most intimate level. What the Incarnation means for us isn’t just that Christ’s body, and our bodies, are somehow part of the picture. It means that our bodies are an inescapable part of the picture, and they are very relevant to our spirits.

If you visit Orthodox worship, you may wonder why people stand, cross themselves, bow, kiss icons, and so on and so forth — in short, why their bodies are so active. The answer is that since our spirits and bodies are tied together in the whole person, worship includes the whole person. We don’t just park our bodies while our spirits get on with worship. We might do that if we thought that our minds and bodies were separate, but we don’t. We believe that Christ’s incarnation is a matter of the Son of God, and the man’s spirit, mind, soul, and body making one being, Christ, who was as united as possible. And that means that worship at Church and the broader spiritual walk both involve the whole person.

This integrated view of spirit and matter, and of the Incarnation, helps create the space for icons. I found icons strange at first, largely because as a Western Christian I had no place for icons that was appropriate. Believing that physical matter can have spiritual properties, that an icon can embody a real presence, all seems strange to someone shaped by nominalism and a rigid separation of spirit and matter. But I am learning to appreciate that to an Orthodox, to say that Christ had a body and to say that matter and spirit are tied together paves the way to recognizing that icons are a gift from God. They mean that matter is not cut off from spirit when it comes to our bodies, and they mean that matter is not cut off from spirit in places where we worship. Icons are another part of the incarnate faith of the Orthodox Church, and if you disagree with them, please understand that they are part of the understanding of how the Incarnation tells us practically how the Father wants us to worship him.

When I was a Protestant, the songs I heard in Church were about spiritual themes, and more specifically they are about themes in the Bible that seem spiritual and theological given a watertight idea of spirit. As contrasted to the Psalms, there was almost none of the imagery of the natural world. Orthodox liturgy, which contains a lot of teaching, sweeps across the both material and spiritual creation. One hymn praises Mary, the mother of our Lord, as “the volume [book] on which the Word [Christ] was inscribed,” and “the ewe that bore the Lamb of God.” The frequent physical and nature imagery that seamlessly praises God and rejoices in his whole creation is what being spiritual looks like when spirit is recognized as so deeply connected with the material dimension to our Lord’s creation.

Like other Eastern religions, Orthodoxy has a supportive framework of formal and informal prayer, fasting from foods, ritual worship, hesychasm (stillness) and other aspects of spiritual discipline (which some Orthodox call “ascesis” ). These are not “rules,” but they do provide a concrete structure to help people. Partly because Orthodoxy assumes the relevance of matter to being spiritual, Orthodoxy doesn’t just say “Go, be spiritual,” without giving further direction as it doesn’t just say “Park your bodies so your spirits can worship.” The structure provided for spiritual discipline is shaped by the Incarnation, and not only because it addresses the whole person. The spiritual discipline is not very different from other Eastern religions, but the meaning of that spiritual discipline is very different. In Hinduism and Buddhism, asceticism is something you do for yourself, and other people often aren’t part of the picture. When the Buddha decided to turn back and share his discovery with others, he was choosing a second best — according to Buddhism, the best thing would have been to enter complete release (salvation) instead of compromising his own benefit to share his discovery with others. Being good to other people, in Buddhism and in Hinduism tends to be like a boat you use to cross a river: once you have crossed the river, you don’t need the boat any more.

What about Orthodoxy? One Orthodox saying is, “We are saved in community. We are condemned all by ourselves.” Another Orthodox saying puts it even more strongly: “We can’t be saved. The Church is saved, and we can be in it.” Orthodox spiritual discipline is not something that makes ethics unnecessary. The whole point of spiritual discipline is ethical. If I pursue asceticism, the goal isn’t for me to be saved all by myself; it is impossible for me to be saved all by myself, just like it’s impossible for me to have a good friendship all by myself. The goal of asceticism is for the Orthodox to love God and his neighbor, and if someone fails to recognize this, this is a problem. Spiritual discipline is Incarnational because, as much as the Incarnation was an act of love for others, spiritual discipline is oriented to loving with Christ’s own love.

In the West, people see salvation as accomplished through Christ’s cross; in Orthodoxy, we believe that Christ’s whole time on earth, including the cross, saves us. “Incarnation” means not only the moment when the Son of God became a man, but his baptism, ministry, cross, tomb, and resurrection. And thus the Incarnation I have discussed above is not simply the moment when the Son of God became a man, but Christ’s whole coming that saves us.

Ella Enchanted

The movie Ella Enchanted has beautiful fantasy-themed computer graphics. Ella, the daughter of a nobleman, lives in a lovely Gothic-looking house in the middle of a suburban yard, goes down a lovely rustic-looking wooden escalator complete with a rustic-looking peasant turning a manual cogwheel, and is surrounded by stained glass windows and other medieval-looking trappings when she goes to her coed community college and gets into a debate about government policy and racial exploitation. One of the characters is an elf who wants to break out of the stereotype and be a lawyer instead of an entertainer (which is prohibited by law), and one of the nice things that happens at the happy ending is that the elf and a giantess fall in love with each other.

This movie is not just historically inaccurate; it is historically irrelevant, and it wears its historical irrelevancy with flamboyance. Everything you see has a medieval theme. The lovely Gothic-looking architecture, the richly colored medieval-looking clothing, and the swords and armor all tried to communicate the medieval. And it would be horribly unfair to treat the film as a botched version of historical accuracy, because it simply wasn’t playing that game. However much things had been made to look “medieval,” to someone who didn’t understand the Middle Ages, it wasn’t even pretending to faithfully represent that era. It was using the medieval as a projection screen as a whimsical place to address today’s concerns. That was its real job.

That basic phenomenon affects a lot of how the West tries to understand the East, even when it is trying to faithfully represent it. In Ella Enchanted it is intentional, and the effect must be seen to be believed. (But then, that may be too high of a price to pay — as has been said about another movie.) I was appalled when I visited Victor Hugo’s house, heard about Victor Hugo’s fashionable interest in the Orient, and saw an Oriental-themed wooden painting of Chinese acrobats using their bodies to make a V and an H for “Victor Hugo.” China has produced acrobats, and Chinese acrobats are presumably capable of making those shapes with their bodies. But is this China, even allowing for cultural translation errors?

One major thread in most cultures outside the West is a tendency to exalt the whole of society and de-emphasize the individual person; indeed, people are seen without the Western concept of an “individual.” Individualism is historically anomalous, and having acrobats shape their bodies to the greater glory of Victor Hugo would be about as out of place in Chinese culture as a large pro-censorship demonstration would be at an American university. Here and in other places, the “East” is not really the East, even an imperfectly understood East, but a projection screen for use by the West. Ella Enchanted was tongue-in-cheek and knew what was going on, where this was serious (and didn’t know what was going on), but they were both using exotic places as a projection screen rather than something understood in itself.

New Age quotes the East, as well as “anything but the modern West,” and it has its various attempts to create an alternative to traditional society. The East is over-represented in terms of spiritual practices and ideas, but I suggest that the same thing is going on here as Ella Enchanted or the supposedly Chinese acrobats celebrating the greater glory of Victor Hugo. In other words, we have a projection screen (in this case, non-Western) being used to project a thoroughly Western approach to life. The forces displayed are much an exaggeration of things that are accepted in Protestant Christianity.

What is the Western element that is found in New Age?

In the West, heresy is understood as condemned ideas. But the word “heresy” comes from a Greek word meaning “choice,” and in the East heresy is making a private choice apart from the Orthodox Church. This can mean rejecting Church teaching, or splitting off from the Church, but the core of heresy is not the destructively false idea but the private choice. (This already has implications for the American definition of religion as a private choice.)

New Age is Gnostic, but there is something interesting in how it departs from ancient Gnosticism. Ancient Gnosticism was not a single, unified movement, but a broad collection of related but quite different movements with conflicting ideas. In this sense it was like New Age, and for that matter there is a certain deja vu between New Age and ancient Gnosticism. What’s interesting is how New Age is unlike Gnosticism.

Gnostics had a lot of different ideas that conflicted not only with Orthodox Christianity but with each other. And they argued. Gnostics argued with other Gnostics and with Christians. Agreeing to disagree was as foreign to the Gnostics as it was to the Orthodox Christians. Saying “That’s true for you, but this is true for me” or “That’s your choice but this is my choice” would be as strange in classical Gnosticism as an escalator would have been in the Middle Ages.

New Age is a choice, and it is even more of a choice than in Gnosticism in its classical forms. Yes, the ideas are often Gnostic. Yes, New Age gives many of its members permission to indulge in magical, sexual, pride-related, and other sins, almost the same list as what ancient Gnosticism gave its members license for. But the essence of New Age is about a choice, the kind of choice that undergirds heresy. You choose (within certain broad parameters) what you will believe, what your spiritual practices will be, and so on and so forth, and the religion you practice is the sum of the private choices you make.

Where does this idea of religion as defined by private choice come from? One gets the impression from the New Age that it is the wisdom of the East to recognize that all religions say the same thing, and that a sort of Western style inquisition wouldn’t happen. And that is true. Kind of.

In English, poetic license is a legitimate aspect of the language. And there isn’t any central authority to approve instances of poetic license, nor can a poet be expelled from the English Speaker’s Guild for abusing the language. But if one simply tears up the English language, it loses its coherence as English. And so there is poetic license in English, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. And in Hinduism, for instance, there is no centralized authority and no systematic purge of heretics, but that doesn’t mean that a Hindu (or Buddhist, etc.) approves of religion being approached as a salad bar. Leaders in many Eastern religions may say that all religions are equivalent, and Japanese are often both Buddist and Shinto, but most Eastern religious leaders would rather have you be coherently Christian, or Taoist, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jain, than simultaneously try to mix being Christian, and Taoist, and Buddhist, and Jain. That kind of incoherence is not very Eastern in spirit, nor is the idea of creating your own religion particularly Eastern.

What does Orthodoxy say? It matters whether or not you are Christian, and it matters whether or not you are Orthodox. But there is a saying that we can tell where the Church is, but not where it isn’t. There is real truth in all religions, and if the Orthodox Church claims to be the fullness of Christ’s Church, she would never claim that Christ’s Church is limited to her walls. And her rules mean something different from in the West; instead of meaning “You must or must not do _______,” they are resources that your spiritual father can use in addressing the specifics of your situation. In Orthodoxy your spiritual father helps decide what you are going to observe instead of you making the decision on your own, but the rules are more guidelines that your spiritual father can use in meeting the specifics of your situation, than rules in the Western sense. “Oikonomia” is an official recognition that your priest can work with you to figure out how Orthodoxy plays out in your situation.

Which brings me to the Reformation. Martin Luther did something original, but it was not the substance of his criticisms. Almost everything he had said was said earlier by someone else; there were things a lot like the Reformation floating around. Nor would Luther claim to have originated his criticisms much more than a baseball coach telling a boy to “Keep your eye on the ball” would claim to be the first one to give that advice. Luther didn’t get his historic position solely by copying other people, but if you seek new criticisms from him, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Did Martin Luther contribute anything new? His criticisms had generally been circulating in the Catholic Church. An Orthodox might say that the Catholic Church had drifted from its Orthodox roots even further since 1054, when the Catholic Church broke off from the Orthodox Church. An Orthodox might interpret the general malaise in the Catholic Church as a malaise precisely because it had drifted from its Orthodox roots, and that the Orthodox Church agrees with the vast majority of Luther’s criticisms (as for that matter the Catholic Church has — it acted on many of Luther’s criticisms). Then what was new about Luther? Is Luther famous for an obscure reason?

Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason — I do not accept the authority of Popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other — my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

After Luther said this, he split the Church. This is a rousing statement, and it is a rousing statement that contains the heart of heresy. A heretic is not so much someone who has a wrong idea, but someone who has a wrong idea and is willing to split the Church over it. Luther’s distinctive and historic contribution was not levelling particular criticisms against the Catholic Church, but choosing to split the Church rather than go against his conscience, and his understanding of Scripture and plain reason. This choice is at the very heart of heresy.

Luther was a monumental figure, a great hero and a great villain rolled into one. His courage was monumental; so was his anti-semitism. And Luther was a prime example of a heretic. He was a heretic not so much by the points which he had wrong, which are relatively unimportant, but because he defined the Reformation with his precedent of splitting the Church.

So Luther worked to establish the re-established ancient Christian Church, and I am not particularly concerned here with the ways the re-established ancient Christian Church served as a projection screen for ideas that were in vogue at the time. (Somehow, when people re-establish ancient glory, their work ends up with a large dose of ideas that are in vogue with their creators. It happens again and again, and I think it has to do with how the ancient glory serves as a projection screen, much like New Age.) That tendency aside, Luther and the Catholic Church treated each other as heretics for a very good reason. It wasn’t that they weren’t ecumenical enough, or that they needed to be more tolerant, or that they needed to be told they were all Christians and Christianity is Christianity. The reason was something else. I can lament the blood that was shed, but there was a very healthy reason why people went that far against their opponents.

The Catholic Church, along with Luther, and for that matter along with the Orthodox, recognized that there is one Church, bound together in a full communion that cannot exist without agreement in doctrinal matters. Luther’s reconstituted Church and the Catholic Church differed in doctrine and could not have this common basis. If you have two different groups which differ in doctrine, at least one of them is not the true Church. This is for the same reason that if one person says that an airplane is in Canada and another person says the same airplane is in Mexico, at least one of them has to be wrong. They could both be wrong; nothing rules that out. Luther and the Catholic Church might neither be the true Church. But if there are two conflicting organizations competing to be called the true Church, at least one of them has to be wrong, just as an airplane cannot simultaneously be in Canada and in Mexico. Luther and the Catholic Church both recognized this.

What one might have expected, if Luther were simply re-establishing what the Christian Church was in ancient times, was that there would be one and only reformer’s Church. When Luther couldn’t agree with other reformers, they split off from each other, each saying, “We’re the true Church!” “No, we’re the true Church!” It wasn’t long until there were seventy or so different groups, and the claim, “We’re the true Church” could no longer be taken seriously. In retrospect, Luther’s saying “I do not accept the authority of Popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other,” and then moving to Protestant churches was a move out of the frying pan and into the fire. Perhaps Luther could not have foreseen this unintended consequence, but the disagreements and divisions in Luther’s wake made the disagreements of Popes and councils pale in comparison.

At that point, the reformers reconsidered what was going on, but they chose to consider the Church structure generated by the Reformation as valid. There was an unwritten rule: “Whatever you say about churches, it has to approve of what’s happened with the Reformation splintering into many groups that could not be in communion with each other, no matter what Christians have believed about Church since the days of the Apostles themselves.”

The solution they invented included the concept of a “denomination” . The idea was that these different groups were not competitors for the title of “true Church;” instead, they were simply names for parts of the true Church. The true Church was not a unified organism complete with authority as it had been understood from the days of the apostles; it was something invisible and quite independent of formal structures. It’s kind of like there had been a supercomputer club whose charter said that they would have one supercomputer, but they couldn’t agree on which computer was the most appropriate supercomputer, so they violated the club charter by each buying his own computer, and to be able to say they had one computer like the charter said, hooked the computers up and said that the real club supercomputer was something invisible, a sort of virtual computer, that was emulated over the club network — and then said that this is what the original charter really called for. This is not because the reformers read the Bible and this was the best picture they could come up with of what the Church should be. It was much closer to an answer to the question of “How can we re-imagine Church so it won’t look like the Bible condemns the church structures which the Reformation can’t escape?”

Today we have:

• All denominations point to the same Christian truth.
• It doesn’t matter which denomination you’re part of, as long as you have faith.
• It doesn’t matter much whether you stick to one denomination’s prayers, doctrines, and so on and so forth, or for that matter whether you consider yourself a member of one denomination at all.
• We should pursue the goal of uniting all the different denominations.

But let me change barely more than one term:

• All religions point to the same truth.
• It doesn’t matter which religion you’re part of, as long as you have faith.
• It doesn’t matter much whether you stick to one religion’s prayers, doctrines, and so on and so forth, or for that matter whether you consider yourself a member of one religion at all.
• We should pursue the goal of uniting all the different religions.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s New Age. It’s the foundation to the New Age movement that all the exotic Asian decor rests on, and it is more Western than most of the West. Or at least there’s an uncanny resemblance between Protestantism and something most Protestants wouldn’t want to be associated with. (Or at least evangelicals wouldn’t want to be associated with New Age. With mainline, er, oldline, er, sideline, er, flatline Protestantism, the line between “Protestant” and “New Age” is often crystal clear, but at other times can be maddeningly difficult to tell the difference.) Beyond all New Age’s Eastern trappings, the heart of the New Age is a non-Christian twist on a very Western way of thinking about religious community. That way of thinking is the Protestant understanding of Church.

Why am I making such a disturbing and perhaps offensive connection? Do I believe Protestantism is as bad as New Age? Absolutely not; I think there’s a world of difference. The answer has to do with something else, something about Orthodoxy that seems strange to many Protestants. What is this something else?

Jesus, in the great prayer recorded before his execution, prayed fervently that all his disciples may be one, and Paul made incendiary remarks whenever he discussed people having different denominations. So it is important for all Christians to be united, and that goes for Orthodox. So why do Orthodox refuse to attend non-Orthodox worship and especially to take non-Orthodox communion? Why do we exclude non-Orthodox from our own communion cups? So why don’t Orthodox recognize that we are just one more denomination, even if we are a very old denomination? Why are there so few Orthodox at ecumenical gatherings?

Something has to give, and Protestants often try to figure out whether the observations about Orthodoxy are what gives, or whether Orthodox really being Christians gives. Which one gives? Neither. Neither the practices that seem so strange to Protestant ecumenism, nor the imperative to Christian unity, give. What give are the Protestant assumptions about what makes Church, that determines what Protestants see as real ecumenism.

I’ve written a long and subtle discussion about Ella Enchanted, New Age, and other things because I wanted to get to this point. New Age may do all sorts of things to get an impression of being Eastern, and it may be chock full of exotic decor. But underneath that decor is something very Western. It is a modified form of Protestant teachings about Church. The similarity between:

• All denominations point to the same Christian truth.
• It doesn’t matter which denomination you’re part of, as long as you have faith.
• It doesn’t matter much whether you stick to one denomination’s prayers, doctrines, and so on and so forth, or for that matter whether you consider yourself a member of one denomination at all.
• We should pursue the goal of uniting all the different denominations.

and:

• All religions point to the same truth.
• It doesn’t matter which religion you’re part of, as long as you have faith.
• It doesn’t matter much whether you stick to one religion’s prayers, doctrines, and so on and so forth, or for that matter whether you consider yourself a member of one religion at all.
• We should pursue the goal of uniting all the different religions.

is a disturbing similarity. And most evangelicals wouldn’t touch the second list of statements with a ten foot pole. Yet it is connected to the first statement. The first set of statements isn’t what the Bible says. It isn’t what Christians have believed from ancient times. Its job was to give a rubber stamp to the sort of churches the Reformation created, and serve as a substitute for what the Orthodox believe about Church. And, with modifications, that way of thinking about Church has been perfectly happy to abandon Christianity and help give us the New Age movement.

My purpose isn’t to get you to reject Protestant assumptions about church. But it is my purpose to help you see that they are assumptions, and that Orthodox have worshiped God for two millennia with a quite different set of assumptions. If you can see your own objection to New Age treating all religions as interchangeable, you may be able to see the Orthodox objection to treating all denominations as interchangeable, even if it’s on a smaller scale. And to show why Orthodox do not simply see the Protestant style of ecumenism as necessary to a full and robust obedience to the commandment to Christian unity.

The Focus

In Chinese translations of the Bible, the main rendering of Logos (Word in the prologue to John) is Tao, a concept in both Taoism and Confucianism which is important to Chinese thought and includes the Eastern concept of a Way. In Chinese translations, the prologue opens, “In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.” Is this appropriate?

“Tao” translates “Logos” better than any word that is common in English, and the real question is not whether it is appropriate for the Chinese to render “Logos” with their “Tao,” but whether it is appropriate for us to render “Logos” with our much less potent “Word,” which is kind of like undertranslating “breathtaking” as “not bad.”

Is it OK to mix Christianity and Taoism? There are important incompatibilities but my reading the classic Taoist Tao Te Ching put me in a much better position to understand Christ the Logos and the Christian Way than I would have otherwise had. God has not left himself without a witness, and Taoism resonates with Orthodoxy.

In fact, there are quite a lot of things that resonate with Orthodoxy; it would be difficult to think of two religions, or philosophies, or movements, that have absolutely no contact. It may be easy to forget this in the West; one of the Western mind’s special strength is to analyze things by looking into their differences. This is a powerful ability. But it is not the only basic insight. Essentially any two grapplings with human and spiritual realities (religions/philosophies/movements) will have points of contact. It isn’t just Taoism that resonates with Orthodoxy. Hinduism is deep and has a deep resonance with Orthodoxy. The fact that I have not said more about Hinduism is only because I don’t know it very well, but I know that it is deep. Catholicism resonates with Orthodoxy even more than Western Christianity as a whole. Platonism resonates with Orthodoxy, and the Church Fathers learned from their day’s Platonism, however much they tried to avoid uncritically accepting Platonism. For that matter, Gnosticism resonates with Orthodoxy. But isn’t Gnosticism a heresy? Yes, and it couldn’t have a heresy’s sting unless it resonated with Orthodoxy. Part of a heresy’s job description is to be confusingly similar to Orthodoxy. Postmodernism resonates with Orthodoxy. I wouldn’t be surprised if some scholar has said, “Orthodoxy is postmodernism done right.”

It should not come as a surprise that feminism resonates with Orthodoxy, evangelicalism, and the Bible. Jesus broke social rules in every recorded encounter with women in the Gospels. And “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” is profound, and cannot be separated from the rest of the Gospel message. Looking at a historical context and a cultural context where feminism is floating around, where some form of feminism is the air people breathe — in other words, not the Early Church’s context, but our own historical and cultural context (yes, we have one too!), it should come as no surprise that people see the Gospel as moving towards what we now call feminism, a moderate feminism of course, and so people work to develop a Biblical egalitarianism that will coax out the woman-friendly vision the Gospel is reaching towards, and correct certain abuses and misunderstandings of the Bible in its cultural context.

This should not come as a surprise. What I had originally thought to write is as follows: It is entirely understandable to try to adjust Christianity with a moderate feminism and try to help Christianity move in the direction it seems to have been moving towards, from the very beginning, but even if it is understandable it is not entirely correct. It is not entirely incorrect but it is not entirely correct either.

Christ’s robe is a seamless robe that may not be torn. So is the Gospel. The same God inspired “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” and equally inspired, “Wives, submit to your husbands… Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.” The same God who inspired one inspired the other, and if your interpretation doesn’t have room for both, it is your interpretation that needs to be adjusted, not God’s revelation.

But what about cultural context? That question comes up a lot. And let me share some of what I found in my studies. I set out to do a thesis on how to tell when a book which treats a Bible passage’s cultural context is misusing the context to neutralize a pesky passage that says something the scholar doesn’t like. The first time I heard that someone had made an in-depth study of a pesky passage’s cultural context and it turned out that the pesky passage meant something very different from what it appeared to mean, I believed it. I fell hook, line, and sinker. But after a while, I began to grow suspicious. It seemed that “taking the cultural context into consideration” turned out to mean “the pesky passage isn’t a problem” again and again. And I began to study. That seemed to happen with every egalitarian treatment of one particular important passage — not only that I could find, but that my thesis advisor could find, and my advisor was a respected egalitarian scholar who spoke at a Christians for Biblical Equality conference! There were a lot of things I found about using cultural context, and my advisor liked my thesis. But in the end, there is a simple answer to, “How can you tell, if a book studies a pesky passage’s cultural context in depth and concludes that the passage doesn’t mean anything for us that would interfere with what the scholar believes, if the book is misusing cultural context to neutralize the passage?” The answer is, “There will be ink on its pages.”

“In Christ there is no male nor female” is true, and it is for very good reason that that resonates with feminists. What a Biblical Egalitarian or feminist may not realize is that there is also a truth which feminism does not especially sensitize people to. “God created man in his image” is tightly connected with “Male and female he created them.” There is unity in Christ, and we are called to transcend ourselves, including being male and female. But when God invites us to transcend our creaturely state, that doesn’t annihilate our creaturely state; it fulfills us — just as God’s promise that our bodies which are sown in decay and weakness will be raised in power and glory. Christ’s promise of a transformed resurrection body does not take away our bodies; it means that our bodies will be glorified with a depth we cannot imagine. Christ’s establishment of a Church that transcends male and female does not mean that being male and female is now unimportant, but that God uses them in his Kingdom that is being built here on earth. Men and women are meant to be different, in a way that you’re going to miss if you’re trying to see who is greater than who else. Paul writes, “There are Heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the glory of the Heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and and another glory of the stars, and star differs from star in glory” (I Cor 15:40-41). If star differs from star in glory, so do women differ from men in glory. Men and women are different as colors are different, or as a blazing fire is different from a deep and shimmering pool. This is truth, and if you take the feminist truth alone and not the other side of the truth, you flatten out something that is best not to flatten out — and it makes a bigger difference than many people realize.

That’s what I would have written earlier. What I would have focused on now is different. It seems that when people return to past glory, or try to return to past glory, the past resonates with what’s in vogue, and we don’t pick up on things people knew then that we aren’t sensitive to now, or even worse we pick up on them but neutralize them. ((“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.” ) We unwittingly make the past a projection screen for what is sensible to us — which often means what’s in vogue. The Renaissance called for a return to past glory and ended up being an unprecedented break from the past. The same thing happened with the neo-classicist Enlightenment. And something like this happened with the Reformation. When you sever yourself from tradition to get to the past, you’re cutting open a goose to get all the golden eggs.

Part of being Protestant, whether it is evangelical, or the more liberal Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Christ (note the effort to reach further back than even the Greek New Testament), or deconstruction to get to what a text really meant (so that the text agrees with deconstructionist revisions to morality) — part of all of this is the idea that you dig past the tradition’s obstacles and barnacles to unearth the Bible’s meaning, perhaps a meaning that is hidden from the common multitude who blindly accept tradition. The idea that tradition is a connection to the past seems to be obscured, and sometimes the result seems to be digging a hole with no bottom. There’s no limit to how much tradition you can dig past in an attempt to reach the unvarnished text. And this phenomenon is foundational to Protestantism. There are things that distinguish evangelicals from liberal Protestants, but not the effort to liberate the text’s original meaning. In that sense Biblical egalitarianism is a member in good standing of Protestant positions — not the only one, but one member in good standing. And if past glory has functioned as an ambiguous projection screen, this may mean that Biblical egalitarianism has problems. But it doesn’t doesn’t mean that Biblical egalitarianism is a different sort of thing from Protestantism. It may be an example of how a Protestant movement can misunderstand the Gospel.

Attempts to recover past glory can be for the better. One group of evangelicals, originally in a parachurch organization, came to realize that “parachurch” wasn’t part of how Early Christians operated. There was no parachurch, only Church. So, assuming that the ancient Church disappeared, they agreed to research the ancient Church and each century’s developments and follow them if they were appropriate, and founded the Evangelical Orthodox Church. They went some distance into this process before they ran into a Russian Orthodox priest, and they (the real Church) were examining the outsider, or so they thought… and they found that Orthodoxy preserved the ancient teaching about the Lord’s body and blood, and about Church structure, and… things were suddenly upside-down. The ancient Christian Church had not dried up. It was alive and well; they had simply overlooked it when they tried to re-create the ancient Church. It was they who were the outsiders. And they realized they needed to be received into the Orthodox Church.

My parish was Evangelical Orthodox before it became part of the Orthodox communion, which I think is special. So Evangelical Orthodoxy turned out all right. Why then would Biblical egalitarianism have gone wrong? That’s not the puzzle. The puzzle is Evangelical Orthodoxy. Evangelical Orthodoxy is a surprise much like getting an envelope that says “Extremely important — open immediately!” and finding that it has something extremely important that needs to be opened immediately. Usually “Extremely important — open immediately” is a red flag which suggests that the contents of the envelope are something other than what you’re being led to believe.

But my focus is not to say who’s wrong and who’s right in the Protestant theme of recovering the glory of the Early Church. It’s not even to suggest that tradition is a mediator that connects us with past glory, a living link, instead of an obstacle which chiefly gets in our way. My focus is to talk about something that looms this large in Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is not understood best as the content of a private choice, any more than learning physics is privately choosing ideas about how the world works. In one sense it’s hard to out-argue someone who says that, but that isn’t a very Orthodox way of thinking. It could be called using Orthodoxy as if it were a private heresy. (Once I wanted to be Orthodox out of that kind of desire, and God said, “No.” ) It’s also deceptive to say that a convert Orthodox should select Orthodoxy as a sort of winner in the contest of “Will the real ancient Church please stand up?” which he’s judging. It’s truer to say that that happens for many former evangelicals (including Your Truly) than I would like to admit, but Orthodoxy points to something deeper.

Repentance (which some Orthodox call “metanoia” ) looms almost as large in Eastern Orthodoxy as recovering the past glory of the ancient Church looms large in Western Protestantism. For that matter, it might loom larger. And I’d like to comment on what repentance is. This may or may not be very different from Western understandings of repentance — I learned much about repentance as an evangelical — but it would be worth clarifying.

Repentance is not just a matter of admitting that you’re wrong and deciding you’ll try to do better the next time. That’s what repentance would be if God’s grace were irrelevant. But God’s grace is key to repentance. Grace isn’t just something that God gives you after you repent. Repentance itself is a work of grace.

If repentance isn’t simply admitting your error and deciding you want to do better, then what else is repentance? In this case, Orthodoxy becomes clearer if it is compared and contrasted with other Middle Eastern or Eastern religions.

“Islam” means “submission,” and “Muslim” means “one who submits to God.” Submission is not one feature of Islam among others; it is foundational to the landscape, and one of the deepest criticisms of Islam is that the Islamic way of understanding submission, and the Islamic picture of God, effectively deny the reality of man. How does Islam deny the reality of man? God alone contributes to the world’s story. The only real place for us is virtual puppets — not people who help decide what goes into the story. But Islam’s central emphasis on submission is itself something that’s not too far from Orthodoxy.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, one of the defining goals is to transcend the self and become selfless, and both Hinduism and Buddhism believe this requires the annihilation of the self. In some of Hinduism, salvation means that the self dissolves in God like a drop of water returning to the ocean. In therevada Buddhism, to be saved is to be annihilated altogether.

Orthodoxy, by contrast, is deeply connected with the Gospel words, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will find it.” (Mark 8:35) One of Orthodoxy’s founding goals is to become selfless and transcending oneself — offering oneself totally and wholly to God, saying, “Strike me and heal me; cast me down and raise me up, whatever you will to do.” This is how Orthodoxy believes in transcending one’s being male and female: something that is totally offered up to God and which God, instead of annihilating, breathes his spirit into. This is the difference between Orthodoxy on the one hand, and on the other hand Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and even moderate feminism. Unlike Islam’s picture, whoever totally submits to God, or strives for submission, hears God’s voice boom forth, “Come! I want you to contribute to the story of my Creation! I want you to work alongside me!” The goal of Orthodoxy, or one of its defining goals, is to help each person to be fully who God created him or her to be.

What does this have to do with repentance?

Repentance means losing yourself. It means unconditional surrender. Losing yourself for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the Gospel is transformed to mean finding yourself. Repentance is unconditional surrender, and it is one of the most terrifying things a person can experience. It’s much more than letting go of a sin and saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s letting go of yourself. It’s obeying God when he says, “I want you to write me a blank check.” Perhaps afterwards you may be surprised how little money God actually wrote the check for — I am astonished at times — but God insists on us writing a blank check. God tells us to place our treasures, our sins, our very selves at his feet, for him to do whatever he wants, and that is absolutely terrifying. Repentance isn’t letting go of sin. It is unconditional surrender to God. And it’s the only way to transcend the self and become a selfless and transformed “me.”

One pastor used the image (he held up his keys when he said this) that we’ve given God absolutely all of our keys — all but one, that is. And God is saying, “Give me that one,” and we’re giving God anything but that. God demands unconditional surrender, and he calls for unconditional surrender so that we can be free, truly free. In my own life I’ve offered God all sorts of consolation prizes, all sorts of substitutes for what he was asking me, and when I did let go, I realized that I was holding onto a piece of Hell. Before it is terrifying to let go, and then after I let go of my sin, I am horrified to realize that I was holding on to a smouldering piece of Hell itself. A recovering alcoholic will tell you that rejecting tightly held denial is something that an alcoholic will do absolutely anything to avoid — and that rejecting to denial is the only way to be freed from bondage to alcohol. That is very much what Orthodoxy announces about repenting from our sin.

Hell is not something external that will be added to sin starting in the afterlife. Every sin is itself the beginning of Hell. Orthodox theology says that the gates of Hell are bolted, barred, and sealed from the inside. It’s not so much that God casts people into Hell as that Hell is a place people refuse to leave: Hell’s motto may be, “It is better to reign in Hell than serve into Heaven.” Hell is where God leaves people when they refuse to unbolt its gates and open themselves to the Father’s love. I’ve experienced the beginning of Hell, and the beginning of Heaven, and you’ve experienced them both. Every sin is a seed that will grow into Hell unless we let God uproot it, and that means letting him dig however deep he wills.

Repentance needs to be not only admitting to a sin, but an unconditional surrender that leans on God’s grace because apart from God it is beyond us. Repentance needs to be unconditional surrender because only when we give God our last key will we be released from holding on to that one piece of Hell we are trying to avoid giving to God. Repentance is a work of grace, both in God taking the piece of Hell we were clinging to, and in God’s power helping us give us the strength to let go of that one piece of Hell.

That much is true, but this article is incomplete even as a tour guide. I’m not even sure it’s an accurate picture of Orthodoxy. There’s a joyful dance, a dance of grace and ever-expanding freedom, and this article is a still, flat picture of that dance. Everything I describe is meant as Orthodox, but I have flattened out its living energy (which is why this is so philosophical), without doing it justice. The solution is not a better and more complete picture of the dance that will still be flat and still. The solution is for you to see the dance live, whether or not these observations are what God wants you to see. God may want to show you things I’ve never hinted at, or use something I’ve written to help you connect with Orthodox worship, or for that matter use this article as a key to open the treasurehouses of Orthodoxy. But that is God’s choice. And he can also connect you with the here and now as many Orthodox emphasize, or make everyday life more and more a home for contemplation, or pick out other treasures that you need. We don’t know our true needs — God does, and he cares for them.

For Further Reading…

If you’ve read this far and want to know how you can read more, I have not succeeded very well at communicating. I’m not saying there aren’t any good books out there. There are scores and scores, and I’ve even read some of them. I love to read. But please don’t try to read five more books on Orthodoxy so you’ll understand it better. Please don’t.

Go visit a parish. Participate, and come to experience firsthand, for real, what this book is at best a tour guide to. Even if this tour guide helps you see things you might not pick up on your own, it’s only the tour guide. The reality is the life that Orthodox live, and if you come to a service wanting to take something in, I will be surprised if nothing happens. Joining Orthodox worship (even just sitting or standing) and trying to take everything in, is like falling into a lifegiving river, being surrounded by its mighty currents, and coming to contact with a little bit of it. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on. I serve at the altar as an adult acolyte, and I certainly don’t understand all that’s going on. But I don’t need to. There’s a saying that a mouse can only drink its fill from a river, and it’s simply beside the point that we can’t drink all the water in the river. We don’t need to. What we can do is take away what we are ready for and drink our fill.

And if you still feel a bit intimidated, like most of this is too subtle to understand — don’t worry. You don’t need to understand it the Western way, by figuring out all the concepts in an article. The Eastern way is to go to an Orthodox Church, and let God teach you over time. If you do that, it doesn’t matter how much or how little this article seemed easy to think about.

Would you like to find an Orthodox parish near you?

Originally published at: JonathansCorner.com

Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God (Luke 6:12).

Have you ever wondered what Jesus did when He prayed all night? Have you ever tried to pray all night? If your conception of prayer is a monologue of needs, information and requests, then your experience of prayer is either that it is very short or very repetitive.

Years ago, in my years between high school and college, I lived in a religious commune (yes, it was the early ’70’s). From time to time in our efforts to live a life based in Scripture, we “kept watch,” though we had no guidance from tradition to explain the meaning of the phrase. Our practice was first to stay awake all night. Second, we tried to pray. The monologue model made no dent in the hours of the night. We quickly learned that in order to pray all night something else had to serve as prayer. We learned to pray the Psalms. Accidentally, we had begun to practice one of the ancient forms of “keeping watch.”

Fittingly, it was one of the simplest forms of keeping watch – but the experience was instructive. We began to learn the value of simply being present to God (who is Himself everywhere present) and attentive to the words of prayer itself.

It seems to me that Christ would have had no need to hold conversation through the night with the Father. There was no information to be conveyed – no requests not already known. The need to pray in such an intense manner is simply the expression of true communion – such as exists eternally in the Godhead. For human beings, that communion is most frequently expressed as prayer. It is a need greater than food:

In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”

Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?”

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.

And:

When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”

More valuable than food – such communion is greater than sleep as well. Thus Christ prayed through the night on occasion. The practice has continued in the ascetic life of the Church through the centuries.

It is prayer as communion with God that concerns me in this post. Such an understanding is not simply a description of so-called “contemplative” prayer, but is properly the understanding for all prayer. Prayer is communion, expressed in words, in songs, in a presence that sometimes transcends words. Prayer is stepping consciously into the life that has been given us in Christ – and remaining there for a period of time (unceasingly is the Scriptural goal).

Participation in the life of God (communion) is the heart of intercessory prayer.

But [Christ], because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:24-25).

Christ’s “intercession for us” should not be understood as an eternal torrent of words; intercession is Christ’s union with us who have now been united to Him and thus united to His eternal communion with the Father.

This same understanding of prayer is at the heart of the intercession of the saints. Much confusion about the intercession of the saints has been wrought by poor images of prayer. We have reduced prayer to talk and intercession to talk to God about someone else. It is in this imagery that the Protestant question comes forward: “Why do we need someone else to speak to God for us? Isn’t Christ’s prayer enough?”

Of course, if prayer is just talk, then surely Christ’s words would be sufficient. But this oversimplification of prayer fails to do justice to Christ’s own prayer (as well as that of the saints). The intercession of the saints is their communion and participation in the life of Christ. By His life they live and the very character of that life is a communion with God. Rightly understood – that communion is prayer itself. When we express our own communion with the saints through asking their prayers we are giving verbal expression to what is already an ontological reality. As we are in communion with Christ so we are in communion with the saints. The Church cannot be other than the Church.

There may be those who reject the “intercession of the saints” (particularly as caricatured by inadequate understandings of prayer), but if they are truly in the communion of the Church then the intercession of the saints is inherently part of that communion. There is no Church that is not also the communion of the saints.

Our salvation is participation in the life of Christ. It is our healing, our forgiveness, our resurrection and our peace. Prayer is the sound of salvation – even in a wordless state.

Our reluctance to pray (let us be honest) is a manifestation of the primordial sin. It is not the time or effort we avoid – but communion with God that causes us to recoil. It is the hardness of our heart that avoids participation in the heart of God. But it is also His mercy that continues to call us to the life of prayer despite our selfish rebuff.

Coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him. When He came to the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

When He rose up from prayer, and had come to His disciples, He found them sleeping from sorrow. Then He said to them, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation” (Luke 22:39-46).

2000 years ago, God the Word became man and united the human race to the living God. For 2000 years, man has been free from chains of sin, though the rulers of this world have conspired to keep the news from him. To experience this freedom, all a man needs is to know the truth and walk out of his chains by the power of God in Christ.

Many lack the strength to do it, or are too beaten down and defeated; many are able to take the first steps into a new life but then don’t know how to live this life. For them and all of us, God has given us the community of the Church: Many generations, who share with us their experience and hope, show us how free people live, and model the virtues of Christ for us – so that with them, we can be conformed to the image of Christ who is our Freedom.

Juneteenth deserves to be celebrated not only by Americans, but by Christians everywhere, who recognize it as a type of our salvation.

Why would God sing? The question may sound strange and yet it is said in Zephaniah (3:17), “He will rejoice over thee with singing.” I first noticed this verse when I was a very young Christian and have puzzled about it for nearly forty years. Equally puzzling to our modern way of thought is the question, “Why does anybody sing?” I have been to plenty of operas and have to admit that even the ones in English need subtitles – singing does not necessarily make something more easily understood. And yet we sing.

God sings. Angels sing. Man sings.

Other than some adaptations that have been made in a few places in the modern period, any Orthodox service of worship is sung (or chanted) from beginning to end (with the exception of the sermon). Like opera, this musical approach to the liturgy does not mean that it will be better understood. And yet, the Christian Tradition, until the Reformation, was largely universal in its use of singing as the mode of worship. In the Western Church there was a development of the “Low Mass” in which little chanting was used – though this never found a place in the East.

This is not solely a Christian phenomenon. As a teenager I had a close friend who was Jewish. As a young teenager he began training to become a Cantor (the main singer in a congregation – second only in importance to the Rabbi himself). I was curious about Hebrew so he began to instruct me privately. Hebrew is a great language – particularly as published in Hebrew Scriptures.

I mastered the alphabet and began to understand that most vowels were not letters at all, just dots and lines, strategically placed to indicate their sound. I felt somewhat proud the first time I read a line aloud without prompting. I recall that when I finished I pointed at yet another set of markings that my friend had yet to mention.

“What are these?” I asked.

“They’re for the Cantor,” he explained. He also had to explain what a Cantor was and, fortunately, was able to demonstrate when I asked him how the musical markings worked. The sound would have compared easily to Byzantine chant – perhaps with lines of kinship. This past autumn I became acutely aware of another singing religion: Islam. My wife and I made pilgrimage to the Holy Land in September. The first morning (it was the Islamic holy month of Ramadan) a canon went off at sunrise (that will wake you up in Jerusalem!) and suddenly a plaintive chant blared across the city as the Muezzin chanted the morning call to prayer.

Indeed, if you made a study of world religions, you’d be hard pressed to find any people who prayed or worshipped without singing (almost exclusively) other than forms of Christianity that have been influenced by the Protestant Reformation. In light of that fact it might be more appropriate to ask, “If God sings, and the angels sing, the Jews sing, the Muslims sing: why don’t Protestants chant their services?” What is it about modern man that changed his religious tune?

I’ll come back to that question in just a few moments. However, I would first like to take a tour through some experiences I’ve had with music and pastoral care. Wherever in our brain that the ability to sing and understand music resides – it is not the same place as pure speech. I have been making pastoral visits with patients for nearly thirty years. During that time I have frequently noticed stroke patients, who had lost one particular brain function (governed by the area effected by the stroke) be perfectly normal in another area not affected by the stroke. It’s as simple as being paralyzed on one side of your body but not on the other (a common result of strokes).

In the same way, I have seen any number of patients who could not speak or respond to speech, who, nevertheless, could sing and respond to music. The most extreme case I ever saw was in a patient suffering from multiple infarct dementia (thousands of tiny strokes). He was a paraplegic and virtually unresponsive. However, his devout Christian wife had discovered that he responded to both music and to prayer. He would say, “Amen,” at the end of a prayer and tried to join in when you sang a familiar hymn.

God sings. The angels sing. Jews sing. Muslims sing. George, with multiple infarct dementia sings. And so the mystery grows.

A surprising musical experience for me came in visiting St. Thekla’s Summer Camp (in South Carolina). We have youth in our Church, including some who attend the summer camp. However, my experience in Church, is that, like most teens surrounded by adults, they remain quiet. However at the summer camp, surrounded by their peers, they sang with all the gusto of their youth. It was completely natural. Kids sing.

So what happened in the Protestant West that made them change their tune? To their credit they did not completely stop singing. Some of the finest hymns in Christian history were written during the Reformation. Hymns that sang doctrine and offered praise to God – all these were part of the hymnody of Protestant worship. And yet something different did take place. What was different was a shift in understanding how or if we know God and the place that worship plays in all that.

For many in the Reformation God could be known only as He made Himself known in Scripture. Knowing God as He had made Himself known in Christ was a description of knowing what Christ said and did in the New Testament. God was distanced from the sacraments in most cases. He was distanced from worship. We could offer worship to God in our assemblies, but not necessarily because He was present.

The distance that arose between man and God at the time of the Reformation had many causes. Among the most important were the politics of severing God, the individual and the Church (particularly the Roman Catholic Church). Such a severing created the secular sphere as we know it today and at last established the state as superior to the Church with, for the most part, the happy cooperation of the newly minted Churches. For most centuries the Reformation has been studied on the basis of its religious issues – indeed “religion” has unfairly borne the blame for years of hatred and wars. The role of politics has been downplayed – indeed even seen as the force which intervened and spared Europe from further religious madness. The state, as secular state, was seen as the hero of the Reformation. However it is quite possible to understand the history of that period as the history of the rise of the secular state and the state’s manipulation of religion for the interests of the state (Eamon Duffy’s work on this topic is quite revealing).

The Reformation itself brought something of an ideological revolution, a redefinition of man as a religious being. The new thought saw man as an understanding, rational, choosing individual. Thus religious services began to have a growing center of the spoken word. God was reasoning with man through the medium of the spoken word. In most places of the new reforms, efforts were made to establish a radical break with the sacramental past. However God might be present with His people – it was not to be in the drama of the Liturgy. Vestments were exchanged for academic gowns, or no vestment at all. The minister was an expounder of the word, not a priest. The altar that had once clearly been an altar, a place where the bloodless sacrifice took place – a holy place where Christ Body and Blood were present – became a simple table – usually with the minister standing in a position that was meant to indicate that he was performing no priestly action.

The words surrounding the Liturgy were spoken and not sung. Singing at such moments were associated with acts of magic. Thus the “hoc est enim corpus meum” of the Roman Rite, was ridiculed as “hocus pocus,” ever to be associated with magic. Chanting was for witches, not for Christians.

Music did not disappear at the Reformation. As noted earlier, many great hymns were written as part of that movement – and have marked every major “revival” within Protestantism. People sing. But what do people sing?

There is no doubt that vast changes in much of Protestant Church music have taken place in the latter half of the 20th century. The same was true in parts of the 19th century. In efforts to remain “contemporary” much music has taken contemporary form. The influence of Pentecostal worship forms have also shaped contemporary “praise” music.

In many ways a revolution as profound as the Reformation itself has taken place within Protestant Christianity. Whereas the founders of the Reformation saw reason as the primary mode of communicating the gospel – contemporary Protestantism has become far more comfortable with emotion. An interesting player in this modern revolution has been the “science” of marketing which has made careful study of how it is that people actually make decisions and on what basis do they “choose” as consumers. From an Orthodox perspective, it is the science of the passions.

In this light it is important to say that people sing for many different reasons and that not all music in worship is the same. Orthodoxy has long held the maxim that music should be “neptic,” that is, should be guided by sobriety and not by the passions. Thus, there have been criticisms from time to time within the Russian Church that the great works of some modern Church composers are too “operatic” or too emotional. That conversation continues.

But why do we sing?

Here we finally come to the question that has no easy answer – just a suggestion based on human experience. We sing because God sings. We sing because the angels sing. We sing because all of creation sings. We are not always able to hear the song – usually because we do not sing enough. I will put forward that singing is the natural mode of worship (particularly if we follow the model of the angels) and that there is much that can enter the heart as we sing that is stopped dead in its tracks by the spoken word.

It is not for nothing that the one book of Old Testament Scripture that finds more usage in the Church (at least among the Orthodox) than the New Testament, is the book of Psalms, all of which are meant to be sung (and are sung within Orthodox worship). Years ago when I was a young Anglican priest – I introduced the sung mass at a mission Church where I was assigned. A teenager confided to me after the service that the chanting had made her feel “spooky.” She was clearly stuck in a Reformation “only witches chant” mode. She also had not learned to worship. In time, it grew on her and she grew with it.

The heart of worship is an exchange. It is an exchange where we offer to God all we are and all we have and receive in return Who He is and what He has. The exchange takes place as we sing to Him and He sings to us.

I have heard the singing of angels. I am not certain that I have heard God singing – though it is something of an open question to me. But without fail, I hear His voice singing in the person of the priest: “Take, eat. This is my Body which is broken for you, for the remission of sins.” And I have heard the choir sing, in the voice of the people: “I will take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.”

God sings and so should everything else.