So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread? Don’t. Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.

Instead of majoring on fear of losing religious freedom, or fear that our gay neighbors will marry, Christians will be a lot more effective if they invest their time and energy into prayer, repentance, almsgiving, and effectively doing love to the people we have contact with. We don’t need to “defend” traditional marriage – what Christians need to do is live traditional marriage: teach chastity and faithfulness by example and also verbally in worship and discipleship. (If you can’t prove you have the goods, don’t try to sell them!) We don’t need to fight a culture war for Christmas or for 10 Commandments at the courthouse; our calling as individuals and as worshiping communities is to be a light that draws people to Christ in us.

Historically, the Church has been most effective at testifying to Christ, making converts, subverting cultures and making saints, when the culture has been hostile to the Church. Other than a quite natural love of ease and popularity, there’s no eternal value in fighting for religious rights or preferences. Since when is it easy to be a disciple?

Christians who let fear drive them into a defensive posture against the bad old secular culture make themselves and their religion so unattractive it’s no wonder they’re marginalized. A victimized, mistrustful siege mentality is the opposite of Christ’s image of wellsprings of life flowing from within each of his confident disciples. Fear makes Christians look like the music industry agencies who constantly cry “Victim!” about piracy, and then wonder why nobody wants to buy their pop music.

If you’re in relationship with the God of infinite creativity, hope, joy, mercy and peace, then act like it :-)

tl;dr: Don’t defend your Christianity against worldliness; demonstrate that it’s better.

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…

One of the common complaints against traditional evangelicalism is that it has been held captive by a distinctly Western approach to rationality. The central target of this complaint is the “Enlightenment,” with its emphasis on reason to the detriment of revelation.

This story about the Enlightenment opens up, I think, the possibility of reflecting about new ways in which we might be captive to the Enlightenment. Specifically, I wonder whether we have adopted of a pragmatic notion of rationality where what we think is subordinated to the ends it produces. To use a popular example, we tend to think that the missionary impulse is enough justification to engage in something like online church.

But our imperatives — our missional impulse — must be chastened and directed by the very real indicatives of theology.

…One more potential implication: evangelicals, in our adoption of technology, need to recognize that we are taking the fruit of a sickly tree. The ideology that undergirds technological production in our era is not neutral, but is grounded in an impulse to subordinate the whole world to our whims and wills. Churches should think seriously about being technological refuges, places where we can escape the principality and power that is technocentricism and adopt — if only for a few hours — a different way of being human. That younger evangelicals continue to be drawn toward Rome, Canterbury, and Constantinople is indicative of the fact that we want an alternative to this paradigm, while many churches are unwittingly perpetuating it.

More…

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…

The great power and theological depth of the Scripture is found within these points of tension, and again within the tension between our lives today and the various parts of this ancient collection of books.  The Bible is like a stringed instrument in this respect.  It only works because of great tension.  Stop trying to take the tension out of the Bible.  If you take away the tension, smoothing over and dumbing down and making everything instructions and promises, all you get is a poorly tuned instrument and really bad music.

Read on…

I take it for granted that when we talk about God we are not talking about a god, a large and powerful member of the genus ‘gods’ who just happens to be the only one. We are talking, in the wake of the great Hebrew breakthrough into monotheism in the post-exilic period, of God who is not one of the gods. Of God about whom it is truer to say that God is more like nothing at all than like anything that is, because God is not a member of the same universe as anything that is, not in rivalry with anything that is. God is not an object within our ken; we find ourselves as objects within God’s ken. God is massively prior to us, and God’s protagonism is hugely more powerful than any possible action or reaction which we might imagine. Or, in the phrase my late and beloved novice master, Herbert McCabe, used to enjoy saying: God and the Universe doesn’t make two.

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

Teva: First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time for this interview and sharing your thoughts with the readers of The St. Nina Quarterly. You are originally from Kansas and came to Boston to pursue graduate studies in education at Harvard University. While in Boston, you were received into the Orthodox Church. Would you tell us about your journey to the Church – what attracted you to Orthodoxy.

Sister Aemiliane: I knew nothing about Orthodoxy growing up. I was friends with Mary Ford, now a professor at St. Tikhon’s [Orthodox Seminary in South Canaan, Penn.] who was the first person to tell me about Orthodoxy. She was studying theology and literature at that time and was able to explain some things to me about the difference in theology – what Orthodox theology is and what the West says theology is.

Orthodox theology seemed to me so obviously more adequate, natural, and just… true. There were other things that I didn’t understand, didn’t like, or was repelled by, but one thing that I understood was that these people knew about prayer. They knew about the connection between the mind and the body. Those were enough to interest me. I still had an attract/repel relationship with the Church. I had to turn inside out in order to enter the Church.

T.: Can you elaborate on that?

S.A.: I had all the fashionable feminist conceptions of my age, education, and culture. I found that these very much restricted what I was able even to see and hear in the Church. For instance, I was offended by the thought that only men can be priests and, walking into a church, I didn’t even see that the Panagia [all holy, Mary] was the biggest thing in the Church. She is the first thing we see. On the iconostasis both Christ and the Panagia are present and are the same size. Anyone else is smaller and farther away. She is beside Christ. I didn’t hear the prayers in which you cannot end a prayer without saying, “… remembering our Most Holy Lady&hellp;” You can’t even say a prayer without calling the Panagia to mind. But I didn’t hear that. I was so busy with my ideas about what it would mean if women were suppressed or honored or whatever.

Another blindness had to do not only with my constructs but with the Church itself – what it is like in America . I was all busy with the fact that women can’t go in the altar, when the fact is that no one can go in the altar unless they have a reason and a blessing to do so. When I was in the Holy Land on a pilgrimage, I noticed that the Panagia’s tomb is the altar of a church. The pilgrims are passing by – in it, in front of it, through it, kissing it. When it comes time for the Liturgy, that stops for the brief time of the service, and then it continues [after the service.] You go to the tomb of Christ and the tomb itself is the table of preparation – the piece of stone that was sealing the tomb is the altar. The pilgrims are passing in and venerating the tomb of Christ, and the rock becomes the altar during the Liturgy. In Bethlehem, the altar is built over the star that is embedded in the floor of the place of the Nativity. There is no iconostasis. I was in the cave for the Christmas Liturgy right in with the star – there was nothing between me and it. Pilgrims enter, venerate the star, falling on their faces, and then grab onto the altar table to pull themselves up. My trip to the Holy Land radically changed my whole experience of everything.

From the Holy Land I went to Greece, where I visited my first women’s monastery (there were almost none in America at that time). In a women’s monastery, not only do the nuns serve in the altar, but you see the nuns taking the blessing of the abbess – as well as lay people, men and women. Even priests and monks take the blessing of the abbess or nuns. I then began to realize that all this stuff that I had in my head [regarding hierarchy and patriarchy] was not applicable. And was in large part blown out of proportion by the unnatural state of the Church in America, made up almost entirely of parishes with very few, if any, monasteries.

This is quite in addition to the fact that when speaking of power issues with Christ and the Holy Spirit we have everything upside down. The beatitudes are the reversal of all the categories and of all secular ambitions, values, and interpretations of what good is and what power is, what strength is; the secular and political assumptions of what is important are all upside down.

In addition, although already in the Orthodox Church at the time, I didn’t receive all the sensations that I had expected from what I thought was a hierarchical, liturgical church. I think that was also because of the way the space is used in an Orthodox church. Everything is included. Icons are everywhere – behind you, in front of you, to the side, above you. The incense is everywhere. You don’t have a linear or vertical perception of things.

T.: In the summer of 1981, two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, killing 114 people and injuring many others. You were severely injured when you were trapped by the fallen beams and debris. I was actually in Boston that summer (prior to relocating to the area) and I remember praying for someone named, Melanie [Sister Aemiliane]. I didn’t think I would ever meet you in person.

Would you tell us about that experience and your subsequent recovery?

S.A.: I had a burst fracture of the third lumbar vertebra. My spinal cord was badly twisted and crushed with pieces of bone sticking in it. The initial X-rays compelled the X-ray technicians to jump up and down in amazement when they saw that I had sensation, because the X-rays showed a huge piece of bone right where the spinal cord is, indicating that my spinal cord was almost undoubtedly severed. It wasn’t, but I was paralyzed from the waist down. I had a bunch of ribs broken, a compound fracture of the ankle, my lung collapsed….

T.: And yet, here you are today.

S.A.: The first part of recovery was being extracted from the rubble. Many people died who were not hurt as badly as I was, because they couldn’t get them out in time. (This is what is happening now in Turkey and Athens [The recent earthquakes in these areas]. There are people who are experiencing what it is to be buried alive or just crushed and killed.) It was impossible for others to get to me. And it was impossible for me to be extracted in time to survive.

T.: Do you remember that?

S.A.: Yes, I do – in detail. I remember that I was crushed – bent over with my face between my knees. I couldn’t move anything except my right hand slightly from side to side. There was not enough room even to breathe – there were sixty tons on top of me. My knees broke my ribs. At some point my sister pulled on my right hand but couldn’t move me. Then, at some point I spoke to my guardian angel: “Where are you?” I felt my right hand clasped, without pulling, and then I was out. I was lying on my back, totally free of the rubble. Someone I did not recognize was holding me and told me that I would be OK. No one remembers seeing this person.

T.: This experience must have affected your life in many ways. How did it affect your spiritual life?

S.A.: The fact of the virgin birth, in which Christ came out of the womb without destroying virginity, without pain. The fact of the Resurrection, in which He rose from the tomb without moving the rock. It was sealed until the angel moved it away. The fact of the experience of the disciples when they were in the upper room and the doors were shut, but Christ came in – not as a spirit or as a metaphor or phantom, but in His flesh. He ate and drank. The disciples stuck their fingers in His wounds. This was all made very real to me. This is not because I am something. It is because of the prayer of holy persons who have purified their hearts by incredible commitment, by scathing honesty before their father confessor, themselves, and God, by humbling themselves to the extreme and becoming like Christ – full of Christ. It is nothing more than a witness to that – to the power of prayer, the power of the love of God, which is resurrection and life. It is the fact of the resurrection.

T.: How did you decide to follow the monastic way of life?

S.A.: Although I didn’t think about it at the time logically, the whole of my life was as broken as my back. The whole of my life was as paralyzed as my body. 114 people were killed. So what matters after that? What could bear that much meaning? What could express or feel that much, as to include a connection forever with all those people, all those souls? Only living for them and for everyone. At that point, my studies lost whatever meaning they had. I got well. I could do anything – marry, have a career. A year after the accident, if you just saw me, you wouldn’t have been able to tell [that I had been so seriously injured]. The doctors are still totally mystified about it and they openly admit it. They had told my parents that I might not live, but if I lived, I would never walk. And then I received Holy Communion on the eighth day [after the accident], and I moved my whole left foot. So they said, “We don’t know, maybe she will walk, but it will be a year in the hospital with braces and canes.” I left after three months – with a body brace, but with no braces on my legs, and with two canes. So my doctor in Kansas City said and still says that, “We never could explain you, we can’t and that is it.” So, I could do anything, but I didn’t care enough about any career to give myself to it. Nothing in the secular life meant enough to me. In that moment no doctor, no scientist, no social worker, no psychologist, no member of my family, no loved one, no friend – nothing – could help me; all the technology in the world wasn’t enough to have saved me. And the others died.

Nine months later I was still in great need after all that had happened and with everything black in front of me. I came to Holy Cross [Seminary in Brookline , Mass. ] for confession with a Hieromonk from Holy Mountain, Fr. Dionysios (He had been invited to the seminary by Archbishop Iakovos during all of Great Lent to offer guidance to the students and faculty). I am still eating the spiritual bread he gave me at that moment. Some months later, he sent me a picture of his Elder, Archimandrite Aemilianos, Abbot of Simonos Petras Monastery, Mt. Athos. I was totally shocked. I recognized his likeness as the one who pulled me out from under the tons of debris after the accident. Then I knew. What saved me was the prayer of the Elder Aemilianos – someone who was on the other side of the world in his monastery without ever having set foot in America, in the flesh. There was no reason why he should or could know me. I had heard of him and his spiritual son, my Elder, Dionysios, but had no idea I could ever meet them. After that, I found out that the day of the accident was his namesday – 18 July, the feast day of St. Aemilianos the martyr. So it became clear to me in my very blood and broken bones, without this being at all, ever, an analytical thought, that the prayer of a pure – purified! – heart is the most powerful thing in the cosmos.

By the way, on the old calendar, on the Holy Mountain, it was 5 July, which is the feast day of St. Athanasios the Athonite, the father of cenobitic [communal] monasticism on Mount Athos in the tenth century. Many times we do an all-night vigil on 5 July to celebrate this feast. At the beginning we start reading about the life of St. Athanasios. Every year we only get part way through. By that time that part is finished in Orthros, or (if we are reading it during the meal) the meal is finished. I had never read the end. The “end” of the story is that St. Athanasios the Athonite was killed by the collapse of a new building.

I then saw the icon of the guardian angel (here, in Boston, at the Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration), on which is written a prayer from Compline that says, “Take me by my wretched and outstretched hand….”

When the structure of things is wrong or increasingly inadequate, the only hope is to break it all apart and then it can be restructured – a new creation. Gerontas [Elder] Aemilianos said to me sometime much later that God prepares and provides in the life of every person a “Hyatt” that is the bridge to the new life.

T.: You first joined a large monastery in Greece, Ormilia, a sister monastery to one on Mount Athos - under the spiritual direction of the Elder Aemilianos. You were in a new country with a different culture and language. Would you tell us of your experience living and praying in that environment?

S.A.: Yes. It was paradise. It’s true that it was hard work. It was work to learn Greek and everything else. But Gerontas Aemilianos said to me, “Exile is a very heavy work.” You can become a monk or a nun without undertaking exile. Becoming a stranger in terms of country and culture is not necessarily part of it. But it is in some cases. So he said, xeniteia, exile, is a very heavy work. So then, when I sometimes felt tired, I thought, “Well of course I am tired, it’s natural, it is a very heavy work.” He saved me in this way, as in many other ways.

T.: You are now part of a new, international women’s monastery outside of Athens in Thebes – the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The community includes women from many different parts of the world – Romania, Russia, Britain, South Africa, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the United States. In what ways do the various cultural backgrounds of the community influence your lives together?

S.A.: It is Pentecost all the time – we have a continual feast of Pentecost. The different languages make it abundantly clear that communication is not absolutely dependent on language nor is miscommunication largely a matter language. It has mainly to do with the clarity of heart, the honesty, the humility, and the sacrifice of the people involved in the communication.

T.: Do you learn things from them because they come from so many different backgrounds?

S.A.: All the time – every day, every month. It is like a mosaic. There is such beauty and such possibilities, such talent, such strengths that are cultural and these all come together. It sounds like a stereotype, but our Abbess is German and she is a very good administrator. She has a mind “like a computer,” but she has a heart and spirit first. So when you see this kind of strength, which is common from her culture, when you put this kind of power under and at the disposal of and at the direction of the spirit and of obedience and of a humble heart, then you have an incredible thing. It is not just being an administrator. If this power is at the service of the heart, then you have miracles happening all the time. In our monastery it is impossible to go on our natural charisms, because the thing wouldn’t hold together for five minutes. But if someone is there in the Holy Spirit, humbling herself and repenting all the time for her sins, which are the things that divide one from the other people and make it impossible for us to live together, then the whole thing turns into something divine.

T.: Are there advantages to being a monastic in an Orthodox country?

S.A.: Oh, yes. The simple people from the village teach us what we are and who we are by their expectations, by their holy hearts, by their faith, which is just mind-boggling, by their humility, by their gratitude – especially since so many of us are converts from Western countries who have not grown up in the Church. When you hear the immediate reactions and incredible sensitivity, from someone who may not even be a college graduate – in order to orient what I want to say according to the assumptions and values of western culture – then you say, “Wow!” You realize that this is from this culture of prayer, the courtesy, the kindness, the sensitivity which is from centuries of life in the Church. There is a spontaneous piety totally without affectation. For example, I remember my mind being blown away as a convert when I was in a village in Greece at the very beginning and I was walking along the street and an adolescent boy was coming around the corner on his bicycle. He was steering with his left hand and making the sign of the cross with his right hand because he was going around the church. It was totally natural with every motion baptized with grace.

T.: Based on your experience in helping to build a new monastery in Greece , what advice do you have for establishing and building up monastic communities in the U.S. (or other non-majority Orthodox countries)?

S.A.: This is a burning issue. I think Fr. Sophrony (a great elder from England, a saint – holy monastic of our time who very much loved both my geronta, Dionysios and his geronta, Aemilianos) said to me (although I didn’t have enough experience to even formulate the question at the time), “The Orthodox monastery is organically related to its surroundings, and so,” he said, “the very same Tradition – the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church – when it is in a Western, non-Orthodox country, will look very different and its forms will seem very different than in a traditional Orthodox country – in order to be the same. In order to be that same genuine Orthodox monasticism.”

When he said this to me, I didn’t have any idea where to connect this or where to apply it.

Now at that time Fr. Sophrony was already going on ninety years old and frail. In addition, it was winter. I was sent to him by my Elder and he knew that and accepted me, and when he finished counseling me he said, “Now we are going to go to my cell and we are going to walk like this (arm and arm). This way, if anyone sees us they will hesitate to approach.”

I didn’t find anything strange in that. I was very honored and happy because when you are near someone who is holy you feel very happy. We set off. As we were going along. I said, “Can you give me an example of what you just said, about how Orthodox Monasticism is different in a non-Orthodox country?”

And he says to me, with a slightly indignant – as in “Obviously!” – and emphatic tone, “Well! In Greece we could never walk like this.” At that time, I had never been to Greece . It is true. It is just unthinkable. And what this means to me now, in relation to your question, is that you can’t take a Greek or Russian monastery and just put it lock, stock and barrel someplace else. The meaning of Fr. Sophrony’s words is very, very powerful. If you have a carbon copy from one context placed in a different context, then almost by that very fact, you are deforming the Tradition. I realize that that may be taken as an extremely radical thing to say. But it means that the rare virtue of diakrisis, discretion, is necessary. You can be an actual saint and yet not happen to have that particular virtue, as far as I understand. Yet only with this virtue can it be distinguished in the Holy Spirit what must be rejected, what can and must be baptized, what corresponds to and serves and expresses living Tradition.

T.: As a monastic, what do you see as some of the important issues facing women in the Church today?

S.A.: In the Holy Land, for instance, it becomes clear that to be a Christian is more and more like it was in the beginning to be a Christian. I think what we have to realize is that Christianity is counter-cultural. It is radically different. It is a continual change of mind. It is continual repentance, a continual sobriety which challenges even the most fashionable and almost universally accepted presuppositions and values of our cultures and times. Everything around is not necessarily able to be incorporated into the life of the Spirit. We are a little flock – a dynamic leaven. The Lord says to us, “Fear not little flock.” We have to not be afraid to be different, not afraid to be looked down on, misunderstood, and even be ridiculed or suffer for being different.

T.: Once again, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts, experiences, and feelings with our readers. You have given us much to reflect upon.

Interview: 12 September 1999. Published in the St. Nina Quarterly, Volume 3, No. 4.

One of the most frightening phrases in the English language is: “It’s nothing personal.” It almost always precedes something bad. For someone to tell me that what they are about to do is not personal is already a confession of sin. But why should the word personal carry such weight?

In the life of the Eastern Church few words could be more important. Oddly there is not a single definition for the term, only, as Met. Kallistos Ware notes, “a series of overlapping approaches.” And yet there is agreement as to its importance. The Elder Sophrony stressed what he called the “cardinal importance of the personal dimension in being.”

But what is it that is so important? Personhood, which is the Latin-derived English word for the more technical Greek “hypostasis,” refers not so much to what we are as to who we are. But it refers to a manner of existing as an individual that is not individualistic. To exist as person is to exist in a unique manner of communion. Person has the capacity for ultimate self-giving (emptying) and ultimate receiving (fulness). It has an individual aspect in that the person is unique and unrepeatable, but it is a unique and unrepeatable existence that always exists by communion (emptiness and fulness).

Speaking in such a way about personhood makes it somewhat clear that none of us yet exists in such a manner in any way that we could think of as complete. Personhood is indeed the glory that is being worked within us as we are changed into the image of Christ. The Person of Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, is the Person Who is manifest to us in the incarnation. That Person Who from eternity is Divine by nature, “hypostasizes” – gives Personal existence to human nature in taking flesh of the Virgin and becoming man. Thus the image of personhood set before us as the Divine goal of our conformity is none other than the Person of Christ, human and Divine.

Personhood is the proper end of man – it is what we should have always become. Existing as less than fully personal beings – as mere individuals who do not share (emptying) nor receive (fulness) – this sinful mode of existence manifests itself in every form of selfishness and greed. Its ultimate expression is the sin of murder. The Biblical account does not wait to tell us of murder as a sin that took eons to develop, but rather in the second generation of humanity – between the brothers Cain and Abel – jealousy results in fratricide.

Murder is the utter antithesis of personhood. It does not give, nor is it interested in receiving that which may be legitimately received. It is interesting that Christ said that our enemy “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).

A more subtle form of murder than Cain’s is the frequent diminishment of another human being to something less than person – or the self-murder we perform as we refuse to allow ourselves be raised up towards the level of personal existence. There are many ways in which this is done. Making of another human being nothing more than an object or granting nothing more than a collective existence are both denials of personhood. When a human being becomes for us a mere object, then we find it easy to do to them anything we might do to a stick of furniture or something else that we regularly treat as object. The collective existence is manifest when a person simply becomes an example of a larger group: worker, management, nationality, gender, etc.

“It’s nothing personal!” is the battle-cry of murderers through the ages. We hear elements of it in Cain’s defense of his murderous action: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” His “brother” in this case is less than a personal category. He does not call him by his name.

Though none of us yet exist in the fulness of personhood, we are, nevertheless called to that mode of existence and our Christian life offers us disciplines and the grace for precisely this purpose. One of the Biblical images that frequently reveals this graceful manifestation is found in the stories of the changing and acquiring of names. Thus the Patriarch Jacob, who begins his life conniving and tricking to get everything he wants and all he feels has been promised to him. His name, Jacob, means “one you tries to take someone else’s place.” Jacob endures muc, including wrestling with the Angel of the Lord. After that experience, Jacob is partially crippled. He has been marked by his struggle with God. The end of the matter is his name is changed. He has moved from someone who does not share and cannot receive legitimately, to one who is now, “The Prince of God,” Israel.

Abram becomes Abraham. Sarai becomes Sarah. The stories surrounding these changes are the stories of personhood coming forth. Christ frequently gives new names to His disciples. Peter, the Rock, who had to live nearly an entire lifetime to fulfill the name Christ had given him. Saul becomes Paul. Indeed in the Revelations of St. John, each of us will receive a new name. Personhood is our common destiny in Christ.

But we live in a world that does not know Christ and thus does not know of the human destiny of personhood. We speak about “personal” relationships with Christ, even though we ourselves have not yet reach personhood. Thus the phrase misstates the present case. “Personal relationship” is a weak term. Of course, it is not a Biblical nor a Patristic term – but something that has largely grown out of modern American evangelical jargon. There it exists with little or no theological underpinning, just a phrase to be used.

What we seek from Christ is Personal Communion. We want to participate in Him as He is Person. The transformation that flows from that communion or participation is the transformation of our individualistic existence with its greed and self-centeredness to a growing manifestation of personhood in which our heart contains more of the universe and our lives are marked by giving (emptiness) and receiving (fulness).

Fr. Sophrony describes this transformation:

…[It is] in the utmost intensity of prayer that our nature is capable of, when God Himself prays in us, [that] man receives a vision of God that is beyond any image whatsoever. Then it is that that man qua persona really prays ‘face to Face’ with the Eternal God. In this encounter with the Hypostatic [personal] God, the hypostasis [person] that at first was only potential, is actualized in us.

The Elder Sophrony’s Grand-nephew, Fr. Nicholai, offers this observation:

When man’s self remains his ultimate existential concern, he is existentially directed toward himself and so his potential for embracing the infinite, God, and thus himself becoming infinite, is not realized. And vice versa: when his existential concern is reoriented toward the infinite, his own infinite potential opens up and comes to its realization:

Quoting his uncle:

I is a magnificient word. It signifies persona. Its principal ingredient is love, which opens out, first and foremost, to God. This I does not live in a convulsion of egoistic concentration on the self. If wrapped up in self it will continue in its nothingness. The love towards God commanded of us by Christ, which entails hating oneself and renouncing all emotional and fleshly ties, draws the spirit of man into the expanses of Divine eternity. This kind of love is an attribute of Divinity.

+++

“It’s nothing personal” is a statement that is almost correct. More precise would be: You are not personal. You are nothing. Beware of such men and don’t be numbered among them.

Quotes from Nicholas V. Sakharov are from his work: I Love Therefore I Am: the theological legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony.

Originally posted at fatherstephen.wordpress.com

It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.

— John Howard Yoder

Brendan O’Neill writes in spiked:

I am avowedly atheist. But listening to the bishops’ drab, eco-pious Christmas sermons, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Bring back God!’

They say we get the leaders we deserve. We also get the bishops we deserve. And in an age of petty piety, where relativistic non-judgementalism coexists with new codes of personal morality, giving rise to a Mary Poppins State more than a Nanny State, it’s fitting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a trendy schoolteacher type who dispenses hectoring ethical advice with a smarmy grin rather than with fire-and-brimstone relish.

In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves.

More…

by Father James Lloyd, CSP

Since I was a mere stripling of fifteen or so, I have been delighted with Hilaire¹ Belloc’s little ditty: Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine/ there’s dancing and laughter and good red wine/ at least I have always found it so/ Benedicamus Domino/. My delight stems, I think, from my deep seated Catholic sense of the essential goodness of the material and its intended synthesis with the spiritual. I believe that both matter and spirit are basically good. My Scriptural background does clearly indicate that God looked upon what He had done and said “It is very good.” (Gen.1, 31). This certainly includes “matter”, that which we call the material.

Catholics believe that evil often surfaces, not from the material itself, but from the misuse and misdirection of “things” thus differing from the plan of the Creator. The dour, grim, unsmiling deviation which one sometimes finds in neurotic Catholics (and certainly in those other religions which doggedly chase witches, drunks and gamblers who smoke) is hardly within our real tradition. It is not alcohol, betting, sex or food, per se, which are intrinsically evil. It is the way we use them which causes departure from the Lord. Drunkenness, gluttony, avarice, lust, covetousness are all offenses before God, caused not by things but by the perverse will of the human being. However and obviously, there is a profound tendency in all of us to misuse the gifts of the earth.

In theological circles this tendency is called “Original sin.” An adult spiritual life, seeking healthy balance, contains and controls such a tendency. The Blessed Apostle Paul recommends a little wine for the sake of the stomach. We teach that Sexual love between a husband and wife is holy and righteously to be enjoyed. This is Incarnational Theology or the role of the physical in the Great Plan of God. Limited betting at the Racetrack, if it does no injustice to others, can be a legitimate form of recreation and appropriate enjoyment. Eating while essential for the survival of the human being, can be a source of exquisite pleasure, enjoyment and, I argue, holiness.

With such a Catholic/Belloc conscience and a healthy stomach, I enjoy and relish (I hope appropriately), eating, especially at eventide, in Restaurants of almost any stripe: Italian, Spanish, French, American, Portuguese, Chinese, Irish, Turkish, Moroccan, Mexican and others. Eating in restaurants for me usually is a fulfilling and delightful experience. To be with good friends whose conversation and company I enjoy while savoring fresh, well prepared food in a charming spot — pampered by waiters, preferably with European accents and manners — this suffuses me with a warm and expansive gratitude. Gratitude to Whom? That’s easy. To the Lord God Himself. Such eating brings me closer to God rather than the opposite.

When I am enjoying a pungent dish of escargots with good friends, I can easily overlook what otherwise might be a source of annoyance (or even uncharity) for me. The guys who eat with their baseball caps on or the screaming babies whose parents seem unconcerned, or the loudmouth who spouts ignorant slurs on my Church, are all “ignorable” in the flush of my God-given enjoyment. I think this applies even to the Hot Shot who wears his cap backwards with the peak scratching the nape of his neck! When a glass of red wine courses through my veins, when my friends and I publicly ask God’s blessing on our fun and companionship, when I eat good food, when I feel the excitement of open and spirited conversation, my being is drawn to the loving Father, Who is God, for providing such bounty to my life. Recently, at a charming Italian restaurant in New York’s Theatre district, I had a wonderful dinner with a Catholic family. We laughed and shouted and reached Cloud 9. We kidded with the waiters. We drank wine. We ate heartily. We all held hands in a circle and acknowledged Our Lord and Master to the surprise and, I suspect, the envy, of other diners. This was Community and the fusion of the spiritual and the material at its best! This was also the Catholicism of which Belloc writes.

It was the heretical Manicheans who saw Matter as intrinsically evil, not authentic Catholics. But how many good and intelligent persons have been seduced by this and similar errors! It was so with the great St. Augustine and the brilliant Rene Descartes with his Cartesian “split” between the spiritual and the material!! Both were misled to such a philosophic false extreme.

The Catholic Church has always, as a Church, respected the material. There are innumerable blessings of the “physical”. Note the blessings for crops, animals, automobiles, marriage beds, airplanes, corpses, and all appropriate² material things. We have the blessing “Ad Omnia” — for Everything. I consider the great Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady to be a triumphant validation of the “material.” So holy was her body that it was not allowed by the Father to decompose. In fact, it is a Catholic belief that all dead bodies will rise again on the last day. How is that for esteeming the physical dimension of us!

The Catholic Church promotes the beautiful with unbelievably gorgeous Churches and Cathedrals, with music that lifts the soul, with paintings and sculpture, with poetry, and with liturgy which features incense, color and choreographed movement. All of it uses the physical, the material. While there have been the extremists certainly in other religions who despise matter and who lust to destroy religious art, we have had some misled Catholics who have ranted also in Christ’s own Church. We have this periodic rise of Catholic extremists who shout for “getting back to basics” while grimly missing the warmth and richness of Belloc’s Catholicism.

I remember an analogous reference to extremism by William Langland in his work Piers Plowman when he wrote of certain Jansenist nuns who “….are pure as angels but proud as devils…” Clearly, imbalance is always a danger in the spiritual and emotional life. Chastity is a jewel for loving God and, at the same time, highly congenial, not antithetical, to appropriate enjoyment in life.

I recall the wonderful book, “Keys of the Kingdom” by the Scottish physician author, A.J.Cronin. The central character, Fr. Andrew Chisolm, enthuses with his little nephew about the beautiful bounty of God in filling the lake with so many fishes for people to enjoy eating. It does appear that regardless of extreme vegetarian stances, it is the Will of the Great God that we should be delighted with Dover Sole, Red Snapper and Irish Salmon. Who would dare dispute with Jesus Who, as God, cooked fish for his followers obviously encouraging others to do likewise?

I certainly won’t but I fully intend to enthuse about my Lord. I will sing His praises and thank Him now and hopefully for all eternity. I will continue to link my pollo scarparliello with my Faith while I trumpet the Catholic insight about Matter. Viva Belloc and his notion of “wherever the Catholic sun doth shine.”

New York City. Aug. 20, 2006

Notes

1. Sometimes he called himself “Hillary” after a great saint. I prefer for esthetic reasons to use Hilaire since the other resonates an unpleasant note relative to a political figure.
2. I note that in the First World War the Pope refused to bless armaments which are clearly meant to destroy.

Father James Lloyd is a retired Roman Catholic priest. He blogs at frjameslloyd.blogspot.com

1. The historical coordinates

We give the name “pietism” to a phenomenon in church life which certainly has a particular historical and “confessional” starting point, but also has much wider ramifications in the spiritual life of all the Christian Churches.

Pietism made its appearance as a distinct historical movement within Protestantism, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, around 1690-1730. ¹ Its aim was to stress “practical piety,” as distinct from the polemical dogmatic theology to which the Reformation had initially given a certain priority.² Against the intellectualist and abstract understanding of God and of dogmatic truth, pietism set a practical, active piety (praxis pietatis): good works, daily self-examination for progress in virtues according to objective criteria, daily study of the Bible and practical application of its moral teaching, intense emotionalism in prayer, a clear break with the “world” and worldly practices (dancing, the theatre, non-religious reading); and tendencies towards separatism, with the movement holding private meetings and distinguishing itself from the “official” Church.³

For pietism, knowledge of God presupposes the “rebirth” of man, and this rebirth is understood as living up to the moral law of the Gospel and as an emotional experience of authoritative truths.⁴ Pietism presents itself as a mystical piety, and ultimately as a form of opposition to knowledge; as “adogmatism,” in the sense that it ignores or belittles theological truth, or even as pure agnosticism cloaked in morality.⁵

Under different forms and in various “movements,” it has not ceased to influence Protestantism, and indeed also the spiritual life of other churches, to this day. In combination with humanism, the Enlightenment and the “practical” spirit of the modern era — the spirit of “productivity” and “efficiency” — pietism has cultivated throughout Europe a largely “social” understanding of the Church, involving practical activities of public benefit, and it has presented the message of salvation primarily as a necessity for individual and collective morality.

2. The theological coordinates

Pietism undermines the ontological truth of Church unity and personal communion, if it does not deny it completely; it approaches man’s salvation in Christ as an individual event, an individual possibility of life. It is individual piety and the subjective process of “appropriating salvation” made absolute and autonomous, and it transfers the possibility of man’s salvation to the realm of individual moral endeavor.⁶

For pietism, salvation is not primarily the fact of the Church, the theanthropic “new creation” of the body of Christ, the mode of existence of its trinitarian prototype and the unity of the communion of persons. It is not man’s dynamic, personal participation in the body of the Church’s communion which saves him despite his individual unworthiness, restoring him safe and whole to the existential possibility of personal universality, and transforming even his sin, through repentance, into the possibility of receiving God’s grace and love. Rather it is primarily man’s individual attainments, the way he as an individual lives up to religious duties and moral commandments and imitates the “virtues” of Christ, that ensure him a justification which can be objectively veri. fied. For pietism, the Church is a phenomenon dependent upon individual justification; it is the assembly of morally “reborn” individuals, a gathering of the “pure,” a complement and an aid to individual religious feeling.⁷

By this route pietism reached a result opposite to its original intent. Seeking to reject the one extreme of intellectual religion, it ended up at the other extreme, separating practical piety from the truth and revelation of the Church. Thus piety loses its ontological content and ceases to be an existential event — the realization and manifestation of man’s existential truth, of the “image” of God in man. It turns into an individual achievement which certainly improves character and behavior and perhaps social mores as well, but which cannot possibly transfigure our mode of existence and change corruption into incorruption, and death into life and resurrection.

Piety loses its ontological content; and, in addition, the truth and faith of the Church is divorced from life and action, and left as a set of “principles” and “axioms” which one accepts like any other ideology. The distinction between contemplation and action, between truth and life or between dogma and morality, turns into a schizophrenic severence. The life of the Church is confined to moral obedience, religious duties and the serving of social ends. One might venture to express the situation with the paradox that, in the case of pietism, ethics corrupts the Church: it turns the criteria of the Church into worldly and conventional criteria, distorting the “great mystery of godliness” into a rationalistic social necessity. Pietistic ethics distort the liturgical and eucharistic reality of the Church, the unity in life and communion of the penitent and the perfect, sinners and saints, the first and the last; they turn the Church into an inevitably conventional, institutional corporation of people who are individually religious.

A host of people today, perhaps the majority in western societies, evaluate the Church’s work by the yardstick of its social usefulness as compared with the social work of education, penitentiary systems or even the police. The natural result is that the Church is preserved as an institution essential for morals and organized like a worldly establishment in an increasingly bureaucratic fashion. The most obvious form of secularization in the Church is the pietistic falsification of her mind and experience, the adulteration of her own criteria with moralistic considerations. Once the Church denies her ontological identity — what she really, essentially is as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion — then from that very moment she is reduced to a conventional form under which individuals are grouped together into an institution; she becomes an expression of man’s fall, albeit a religious one. She begins to serve the “religious needs” of the people, the individualistic emotional and psychological needs of fallen man.

The utilitarian institutional mentality, a typical product of pietism, has led many churches and Christian confessions to a fever of anxiety lest they should be proved out-dated and useless in the modern technocratic, rationalistically organized society, and should appear to lag behind in keeping up to date with the world. Frequently they try to offer contemporary man a message as convenient and well-fitted as possible to his utilitarian demands for prosperity. “Humanistic” ethics — the principle of keeping up appearances — takes precedence over truth, over the salvation of existence from the anonymity of death. The miracle of repentance, the transfiguration of sin into loving desire for personal communion with God, the way mortality is swallowed up by life-these are truths incomprehensible to the pietistic spirit of our age. The Gospel message is “made void,” emptied of its ontological content; the Church’s faith in the resurrection of man is made to appear vacuous.

3. The moral alienation of salvation

When the piety of the Church is transferred to the plane of individual ethics and separated from her truth, this inevitably results in a blurring of the difference between the truth of salvation and -the illusion of salvation, between the Church and heresy. The idea of heresy or schism loses all real content, and is confined to abstract, theoretical differences understood only by “experts” who discuss them at meetings and conferences, exchanging the thrust and parry of confessional articles and formulations which fail to correspond in any way to the life of human beings.

Increasingly pietism equates the spirituality and piety of the various churches and confessions, taking them on the level of individual, or socially useful and efficacious, ethics, while disregarding even fundamental dogmatic differences. The piety of a Roman Catholic, a Protestant and frequently even an “enlightened” Orthodox, do not present substantial differences; practical piety no longer reveals whether the truth one lives is real or distorted. Dogma does not appear as a “definition,” laying down the limits within which the Church’s experience is to be expressed and safeguarded. Christian piety appears unrelated to the way we experience the truth of God in Trinity, the incarnation of the Word, and the energies of the Holy Spirit which give substance to the life of the members of the Church.

The model of Christian piety in the different churches and confessions is increasingly equated with that of a more “perfect” utilitarian ethic, with an individual morality which takes precedence over the fact of the Church. The only distinctions in piety are variations in religious customs and religious “duties.” Even the liturgical act is incidental to individual piety, a complement, aid or fruit; it is thought of as an opportunity for “edification” or a religious duty. The eucharist, the original embodiment of the fact of salvation, is distorted by the pietistic spirit; it is construed as a narrowly “religious” obligation, a duty to pray together and perhaps to listen to a sermon which usually confines itself to prescribing how the individual should behave. The eucharist is not the event which constitutes and manifests the Church, the changing of our mode of existence and the realization of the ethos of the “new man.”

Ultimately, even participation in the sacraments takes on a conventional, ethical character. Confession turns into a psychological means of setting individual guilt-feelings at rest, and participation in holy communion becomes a moral reward for good behavior-when it is not a scarcely conscious individual or family custom bordering on magic. Baptism becomes a self-evident social obligation, and marriage a legitimization of sexual relations without regard to any ascetic transfiguration of the conjugal union into an ecclesial event of personal intercourse or communion.

4. The moral assimilation of heresies

A typical and entirely consistent extension of all this blurring and alienation of the ontological character of the Church’s truth is the modern movement towards the so-called “union” of the churches, and the much-vaunted priority of the “love” which unites the churches over the “dogma” which divides them. One could say that this movement was historically justified, since it often looks as if union has been accomplished on the level of, a common, non-dogmatic piety — on the level of pietism. What, used to divide the Church from heresy was not abstract differences in academic formulations; it was the radical break and the distance between the universality of life and illusions of life, between realizing the true life of our trinitarian prototype and subjugating this truth to fallen man’s fragmentary mode of existence. Dogma “defined,” or showed the limits, while the Church’s asceticism secured participation in that truth of life which defeats corruption and death and realizes the image of God in the human being.

When piety ceases to be an ecclesial event and turns into an individual moral attainment, then a heretic or even a non-Christian can be just as virtuous as a “Christian.” Piety loses its connection with truth and its ontological content; it ceases to be related to man’s full, bodily participation in the life of God — to the resurrection of the body, the change of matter into “word,” and the transfiguration of time and space into the immediacy of communion. Piety is transformed into an entirely uniform manner of being religious which inevitably makes differences of “confession” or tradition relative, or even assimilates the different traditions, since they all end in the same result — the moral “improvement” of human life.

Thus the differences which separate heresy from truth remain empty verbal formulations irrelevant to the reality of life and death, irrelevant even to piety. They are preserved simply as variations in religious customs and traditional beliefs, with a purely historical interest. It is therefore natural for the distinct Christian confessions to seek formal union — respecting, of course, the pluralism in religious customs and theoretical formulations — since they are already substantially assimilated in the sphere of “practical life.” This is the obvious basis for the unity movement in our times — when, of course, it is not guided by much more stark socio-political considerations.

Socio-political considerations, however, have influenced church.life in every age; they are the sins of our human nature which has been taken into the Church. And they are not a real danger so long as we are aware that they are sins; they do not succeed in distorting the truth and the f act of the Church. The danger of real distortion lies in heresy: when we take fortruth and salvation some “improved” version of the fragmented mode of existence of fallen man. And the great heresy of our age is pietism. Pietism is a heresy in the realm of ecclesiology: it undermines or actually denies the very truth of the Church, transferring the event of salvation from the ecclesial to the individual ethos, to piety divorced from the trinitarian mode of existence, from Christ’s way of obedience. Pietism denies the ontological fact of salvationthe Church, life as personal coinherence and communion in love, and the transfiguration of mortal individuality into a hypostasis of eternal life.

Pietism undermines the ontological truth of the Church or totally rejects it, but without questioning the formulations of that truth. It simply disregards them, taking them as intellectual forms unrelated to man’s salvation, and abandons them to the jurisdiction of an autonomous academic theology. Pietism preserves a formal faithfulness to the letter of dogmatic formulation, but this is a dead letter, irrelevant to life and existential experience.

In that particular, this real denial of the truth of salvation differs from previous heresies. It does not reject the “definitions,” the limits of the Church’s truth; it simply disconnects this truth from the life and salvation of man. And this disconnection covers a vast range of distinctions and nuances, so that it is exceptionally difficult to “excommunicate” pietism, to place it beyond the bounds within which the Church’s truth and unity are experienced. But this is precisely why it is perhaps the most dangerous assault on this truth and unity.

5. The individualistic “culture” of pietism

Pietism is definitely not an autonomous phenomenon, independent of the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped western civilization over the last three centuries. The spirit of individualism, rationalism and utilitarianism, the priority given to rationalization, the myth of “objectivity” and the “values” it imposes, the connection of truth with usefulness and of knowledge with turning things to “practical” account — all these are factors which have influenced and shaped the phenomenon of pietism, and have equally been influenced and shaped by it. Corresponding currents and tendencies, like the Enlightenment, humanism, romanticism or positivism, are part of the web of interdependence formed by these same factors which ultimately make up the mentality and the standards of our modern culture, setting an imperceptible yet decisive seal on people’s character and temperament.

This assertion poses an exceptionally difficult problem for Christian theology. If the way of life in western civilization, the only civilization which can really claim to be called worldwide, presupposes and imposes the cult of the individual, what place remains for the experience and realization of ecclesial truth and life? If the technocratic consumer society throughout the world presupposes and develops the primacy of intellectual ability in the subject, the autonomy of his will, the rationalistic regulation of individual rights and duties, “objective” backing for individual choices and for the economic safeguards assured for the individual by trade unions, and a rationalistic linkage of the individual with the group then the individualistic religion of pietism is the inevitable consequence. Indeed, it is the only possibility for religious expression in western culture — the necessary and sufficient condition for religious life. There seems little or no scope for experience and historical realization of the Church’s truth, the trinitarian mode of existence: no room to live our salvation through a practical subjection of the individual to the experience of communion which belongs to the Church as a body, and to realize the ethos or morality of the Gospel through self-transcendence on the part of the individual and through the freedom and distinctiveness of persons within the communion of saints.⁸

It is no accident that the first pioneers of pietist ideals consciously envisaged an ecumenical movement which was to restore “genuine Christianity” throughout the world.⁹ Pietism spread with exceptional speed over a remarkably wide area. From Germany it passed at once to England, where the ground had been prepared by Puritanism, and to the Netherlands and Scandinavia; it spread eastwards as far as Russia, and took hold in America with the first generations of settlers, as also in the missionary churches of Africa and Asia. But the factual details of how pietism spread so rapidly and the ecumenical ambitions of its founders are only a part of its far more general and organic identification with the tendency towards expansionism and universality innate in western civilization.

It is certain that pietism holds a central place in the web of mutual influence between the factors which have shaped the peculiar character of western culture. However much this might seem both a generalization and a paradox, it could be maintained that pietism has played one of the most significant roles in the historical development of “western type” societies. This assertion becomes more comprehensible if we accept the view of scholars who attribute to pietism the birth and development of the system of the autonomous economy, or capitalism¹⁰ — a system which today is decisive in determining the economic, political and social lives of people all over the world.

The initial historical link between pietism and capitalism is well known. The linchpin of the capitalist ideology may be identified with the pietistic demand for direct, quantifiable and judicially recompensed results from individual piety and morality — in this case, from hard work, honesty, thrift, rationalistic exploitation of “talents,” etc. Work acquires an autonomy: it is divorced from actual needs and becomes a religious obligation, finding its visible justification and “just deserts” in the accumulation of wealth. The management of wealth similarly becomes autonomous: it is divorced from social need and becomes part of the individual’s relationship with God, a relationship of quantitative deserts and rewards.¹¹

Confirmation of the conclusions thus formulated could be based not only on the inevitably relative agreement among students of the phenomenon of capitalism, but also on reference to direct historical examples. Perhaps the most representative example is that of the birth and development of the United States of America. This superpower of our times, which is also the most powerful and important factor in the operation of the world capitalist system, has its roots in the principles and the spirit of pietism. The successive waves of Anglo-Saxon Puritans and pietists who first emigrated to America with the millenarian vision¹² of a Puritan “promised land”¹³ identified trust in God with the power of money,¹⁴ and religious feeling with the economic efficiency of work (work ethics) I and ultimately hallowed as ethics whatever ensured individual security and social prosperity.¹⁵ By the very fact of their existence, the two hundred and fifty or so different Christian confessions in that country make the truth of the Church body take second place; in defining the quality of a Christian, priority is given to the peculiarly American idea of individual ethics (civil religion).

Going by the example of America and the pietistic basis of the “gospel of wealth” which took shape there,¹⁶ one might venture to make a further assertion. The whole of mankind lives today in the trap of a lethal threat created by the polarization of two provenly immoral moralistic systems, and the constant expectation of a confrontation between them in war, perhaps nuclear war. On the one side is the pietistic individualism of the capitalist camp, and on the other the moralistic collectivism of the marxist dreams of “universal happiness.” At least the latter refuses to cloak its aims under the forged title of Christian, while the name of Christianity continues to be blackened in the sloganizing of even the foulest dictatorships which support the workings of the capitalist system, upholding the pietistic ideal of individual merit.”

If the witness of an ecumenical council of the Church were to have any meaning in our day, its chief purpose would be to denounce this torture of man, this imprisonment in an adulterated and falsified idea of Christian piety: the corrosion and destruction of the truth of salvation and the reality of the Church by generalized pietism.

Additional Note

Footnotes

1 There is a rich bibliography on pietism, chiefly in the form of monographs dealing with the numerous local pietistic movements and the personalities of their leaders. Although not very systematic, the fullest study of the phenomenon as a whole is still A. Ritschl’s three-volume work Geschichle des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880-1886). A recent work, exceptionally informative and well-documented, is Martin Schmidt’s Pietismus (1972). The Roman Catholic approach, with a concise, objective and reasonably full description of the phenomenon and history of pietism, may be found in Louis Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality and Protestant and Anglican Spirituality (History of Christian Spirituality 111, London, 1969), p. 169ff. As for the rest of the bibliography, we note here some basic aids: W. Mahrholz, Der deutsche Pietismus (Berlin, 1921); H. Bornkamm, Mystik, Spiritualismus und die Anfange des Pietismus im Luthertum (Giessen, 1926); M. Beyer-Frohlich, Pietismus und Rationalismus (Leipzig, 1933); K. Reinhardt, Mystik und Pietismus (Berlin, 1925); 0. S6hngen, ed., Die bleibende Bedeutung des Pietismus (Berlin, 1960) ; E. Sachsse, Ursprung und Wesen des Pietismus (1884) ; F. E. Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Studies in the History of Religions IX, 1965), pp. 180-246.

2 “The picture one gets from the relevant bibliography would justify the view that the historical roots of pietism are spread throughout the religious and theological tradition of western Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. There is, nevertheless, a particularly direct historical link between this phenomenon and certain Dutch offshoots of Protestantism, English Puritanism and above all Roman Catholic mysticism. Jansenism in seventeenth century France, the Port-Royal movement, Quietism, Thomas i Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis of Sales and F6n6lon are considered by most scholars to be immediate forerunners of Protestant pietism. It is typical that Lutheran “orthodoxy” always condemned pietism as pro-Catholic. See M. Schmidt, Pietismus, p. 26; L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality…, pp. 169-170 and 193.

3 See Karl Heussi and Eric Peter, Precis d’Histoire de l’Eglise (Neuchatel, 1967), § 106; M. Schmidt, Pietismus, p. 140. The first of the founders of the pietist movement, Philip-Jacob Spener (1635-1705), a Lutheran pastor from Alsace, created the blueprint for this moralistic campaign by organizing the zealous faithful into Bible study circles (Bibelkreise) independent of the Church’s gatherings for worship. Study of Scripture was meant to lead to practical moral conclusions affecting the individual lives of the members of the movement. Any of the faithful could be in charge of such a “circle.” Spener and the other pioneers of the pietist movement (A. H. Francke, 16631727, G. Arnold, 1666-1714, N. L. Graf von Zinzendorf, 1700-1760, J. A. Bengel, 1697-1752, F. C. Oetinger, 1702-1782) laid particular emphasis on the universal priesthood of the laity, and were sharply critical of the clergy of their time and the “institutional Church, compromised with the world.” See L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality…, pp. 170-17 1; M. Schmidt, Pietismus, pp. 12-42; Nouvelle Hisloire de l’Eglise vol. 4 (Paris, 1966), pp. 35-36.

4 See L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality p. 174: “…the dissolution of all defined dogmatic faith and its substitution by unverifiable sentiment…”

5 “‘[Pietism] considers the practice of piety as the essential element of religion… but is accompanied more often by a growing indifference with regard to dogma”: Nouvelle Histoire de I’Eglise, p. 35. “Whenever the Church started dogmatizing, so he held, it fell into decadence, and the only way out lay in the fact that each generation produced simple-minded men whose instinctive reaction (bullied by authority) constituted a prophetic reaffirmation of the one pure Christianity, primitive and free from all ratiocination”: L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality, p. 175.

6 “At the center stands the individual person: the early Christian image of ‘building up’ is transformed in an individualistic direction (building up of the inner person)”: M. Schmidt, “Pietismus,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 5, Col. 370. Idem, Pietismus, pp. 90 and 123.

7 “‘The new type of community… is the formation of groups of reborn individuals, not the community of those called by word and sacrament. The initiative lies with the subject… Individualism and subjectivism undermine the sacramental perpective”: M. Schmidt, “Pietismus,” Col. 371. “In the confusion between faith and sense experience and the tendency to replace the objective data of faith and the sacraments by an emotional subjective event, he discerns at least latent indifference regarding all established doctrine, and, in a more general way, loss of sight of the Church and its ministry as institutions”: L. Bouyer, Ortbodox Spirituality, p. 174.

8 ‘Precisely because the Church is not a religious ideology but the continuous assumption of the flesh of the world and the transformation of it into the theanthropic flesh of Christ, it is impossible for the ontological truth of the Church’s unity and communion to “coexist” passively with a culture centered on the individual, a culture of objectification. The Church lives and functions only so long as she is continuously and dynamically assuming individualistic, objectified existences in order to transfigure them into unity of life, into personal relationship and communion. But this means that on the historical and social level, the life and unity of the Church operates as a radical and direct rejection or subversion of the cultural “system” of individualism and objectification. Otherwise, the rck would be subject to the way of life imposed by the “system,” so that she herself would be alienated both as a reality of truth and salvation, and as an institutional expression of this reality.

9 “Pietism originally was an ecumenical, world-wide phenomenon… Above all it understood itself to be of ecumenical scope, the representation of true Christendom over all the earth”: M. Schmidt, Pietismus, p. 11.

10 See R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Penguin Books, 197511)- Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Die protesiantische Ethik, I (Hamburg, 19733) ; E. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen, 1965); H. Hauser, Les debuts du Capitalisme (Paris, 1927); A. Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism (London, 1935); H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge, 1933).

11 “Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing [the morally self-sufficient] see in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches not an object of suspicion-though like other gifts they may be abused-but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will”: Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 229-230.

12 “Millenarist tendencies and expectation of the Messiah are characteristic of pietism, “… a sort of renewed ‘chiliasm,’ that is to say the immediate expectation of a kingdom of God on earth which it would be within our power to produce”: L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality, p. 174. See also M. Schmidt, Pietismus, pp. 130-132 and 160; and Charles L. Sanford, The Quest of Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana, Ill., 1961).

13 See Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant — American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York, 1975), especially pp. 7-8 and the chapter “America as a Chosen People” (P. 36ff.); Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Prentice-Hall, 1971); H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York, 1937).

14 “In God we trust” is the inscription on every coin and dollar note. See also Moses Rischin, ed., The American Gospel of Success (Quadrangle Books, 1965); Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966).

15 See Robert Handy, A Christian America (New York and Oxford, 197″ especially the chapter: “Components of the New Christian Civilization: Religion, Morality, Education,” especially pp. 33-40; William McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967); Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-made Man in America (Free Press, 1966).

16 See Andrew Carnegie’s famous essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” reprinted from The American Review 148 (1889), pp. 653-664, in Gail Kennedy, ed., Democracy and the Gospel of Wealth (Boston, 1949).

Additional Note:

Some specific products of pietism are the Halle movement (founded by August-Hermann Francke), the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter BrUidergemeine-founded by N. L. von Zinzendorf), the Methodists (founded by John Wesley, 1703-1791), the Quakers (founded by George Fox, 1624-1691), and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a host of “Free Churches,” missionary societies, schools of preaching, “inner mission” movements, Protestant monastic brotherhoods, etc. See M. Schmidt, Pietismus, pp. 243-60.

In Roman Catholicism we rarely bear of autonomous groups or moveInents of pietists, perhaps because pietistic tendencies and initiatives were Officially adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the form of orders, societies, sacred confraternities, etc. In Roman Catholic mysticism, certainly, Pietism has always found the conditions for its natural generation. The in dividual approach to virtue, anthropocentric sentimentality and the transference of religious feeling to the “interior” of the individual are all hall. marks of Roman Catholic mystics, whether as individuals or in organized and officially recognized groups. The link with the body of the Church is of secondary importance and sometimes of purely legal and formal sig. nificance. “Bei ihnen kam alles auf die inneren Menschen, nichts auf die aussere Form der Kirchlichkeit an”: M. Schmidt, Pietismms, p. 26.

Of the Orthodox churches, the Russian Church was the first to be invaded by the spirit of pietism. Early in the eighteenth century, Bishop Feofan Prokopovich (1681-1736), professor and later rector of the Theological Academy in Kiev, represented in Russia the pietistic Halle movement (see Schmidt, “Pietismus,” article in Die Religion in Geschichte and Gegenwart, vol. 5, col. 372; R. Stupperich, “Protestantismus in Russland,” in the same volume, col. 1248). Prokopovich’s influence was very widespread and left a distinct mark on the Church and spiritual life of Russia, from the moment when Peter the Great (1672-1725) took him on as a close collaborator, after promoting him to the archbishopric of Novgorod, and let him fundamentally shape his religious reform. (See Igor Smolitsch, Geschichte der russiscben Kirche, 1700-1917 [Leiden, 19641, p. 94ff; and Reinhard Wittram, Peter I — Czar and Kaisar, vol. 2 (Gottingen, 1964], p. 189ff.) The religious reform of Peter the Great had as its aim the systematic westernization of the Russian Church both in structure and in spiritual life. And under the influence of Feofan Prokopovich, many areas of Russian church and spiritual life were shaped precisely in accordance with the spirit and the criteria of Protestant pietism. At the same time, his theological “system” and his writings imposed on the academic study of theology in Russia what Florovsky calls “the domination of Latino-protestant scholasticism” (Puti russhogo bogosloviia [Paris, 19371, P. 104; the reference is from 1. Smolitsch, Geschichte der russischen Kirche, p. 577. See also H. Koch, Die russische Orthodoxie im Petrinischen Zeitalter (Breslau, 19291; Cyprien Kern, "L'enseignement theologique superieur dans la Russie du XlXe siecle," Istina, 1960; Igor Smolitsch, Russische Monchtum, 988-1917 [Wiirzburg, 1953]. p. 383ff.) The influence of Feofan Prokopovich’s theology reached even as far as Greece, at least through Theoklitos Fafmakidis, “the first to teach dogmatic theology at the Ionian Academy on Kerkyra in 1824, following the text of the Russian Feofan Prokopovich”: Manuel Gedeon, The Cultural Progress of the Nation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries [in Greek — Athens, 1976), p. 206.

Actual pietistic movements in Russia were probably very few; the best knawn is the Moravian Brethren, from 1740 in Sarepta on the Volga (R. Stupperich, "Protestantismus in Russland," col. 1250). What is more striking is the way in which the Church's mentality as a whole was undermined. In combination with the stress on sentiment introduced into Russia by the religious romanticism of the nineteenth century, and the corresponding prevalence of baroque in church art which distorted basic theological presuppositions in Russian Orthodox worship, a general climate of pietism often shapes the atmosphere and complexion of Russian church life.

Pietistic influence is apparent even in the figures most representative of Russian spiritual life. The most important spiritual figure in eighteenth century Russia, St Tikhon Zadonsky (1724-1783), is also a typical representative of pietistic and Roman Catholic influences. "He was strongly influenced by contemporary western piety, both Counter-Reformation Catholic piety and Protestant piety with an emphasis on pietism... We find in [his works] a direct echo of St Augustine and the Imitation of Christ, as of Lutheran works such as Arndt’s True Christianity… and Anglican ones such as the Meditatiunculae subitaneae by the Puritan Bishop Hall”: L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality, pp. 37-38.

In the form of an organized movement, pietism appeared in the Romanian Orthodox Church just on the eve of World War II, under the name of “the Army of the Lord” and with the priest Joseph Trifa at its head. There, however, the Church reacted swiftly; she excommunicated the founders and excised from her body this danger which threatened to alienate her tradition and her life.

In Greece, pietism made its appearance as a symptom of a more general “europeanization” of the country. Quite early, around the eighteenth century, Humanism and the principles of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment exerted an obvious influence on Greek scholars and church writers who turned to the West for their higher education. Rationalism and moralism, as direct results of European thinking and theology, reached the Orthodox Greek East through the writing and teaching of the “enlightened Teachers of the Nation,” learned preachers and writers from the period of Turkish domination. At least in the works of Vikentios Damodos (16791752), Elias Miniatis (1669-1714), Evgenios Voulgaris (1716-1806), Nikeforos Theotokis (1730-1800), Theoklitos Farmakidis (1754-1860) and Neofytos Vamvas (1770-1855), there is manifest influence from western theological positions of their day: moral eudaemonism, the “religion of sentiment” (Schleiermacher), the connection of Church and 11 culture” (Kulturchristentum), the identification of spiritual regeneration with moral regeneration, the juridical understanding of morality (see Ch. Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West — Theology in Greece Today [in Greek-Athens, 19721, especially pp. 57-95, with bibliography).

With the establishment of the independent Greek state and the imposition of German and Protestant models on the organization of the Church of Greece (which became “autocephalous” in 1833) and of theological education, western influences prevailed in Greek academic theology and in “official” church life — though not without exceptions and reactions. The phenomenon could perhaps have been contained there, since popular spirituality and piety remained untainted by western alienation. But from the very first decades of our own century, pietism made its appearance in Greece in the form of a specific movement whose intention was to bring in the broad masses of the people. Initially it seemed that the aim of the “movement” was the renewal of church life, with the systematic organization of sermons, catechism classes, religious publications and confession. But it very soon separated itself and its activity from the life of the Church, the life of the parishes and the jurisdiction of the local bishops. It was organized as an independent effort, with a system of administration and organization independent of the church hierarchy, and with its own spiritual and theological direction.

It is quite extraordinary how closely the modern Greek pietist movement copied its German and Anglo-Saxon prototypes. Preaching and teaching were based on exactly the same premises: the theological truth of dogmas was ignored or passed over in silence and replaced with the teaching of ethics, a rationalist apologetic, utilitarian rationalism and moral eudaemonism, and stress on individual virtue and the cultural necessity of religion. Following Spener’s method to the letter, the “movement” organized a vast number of Bible study circles meeting in houses all over Greece. This led to the formation of a kind of private worship outside church — in imitation of the Protestant “service of the word” (Wortgottesdienst) — with the lay element alone. It consisted of reading from the Bible, always with a moral conclusion, ex tempore prayers and sentimental songs, usually from Protestant collections of hymns. The Greek pietist movement, exactly like the Protestant ones, came to be dominated by a strongly military discipline: its members were forbidden to go to public spectacles or recreation centers, to smoke, or to read books or other material of their own choosing. They have developed more or less a common style of dress, and cultivate a militant missionary spirit to gain followers.

To the general public, the pietistic movement in Greece is known as the Zoe movement, after the first “Brotherhood of Theologians” which began its organized efforts in 1911. Later, however, there emerged offshoots of this same organization (the Fellowship of Academics “Aktines,” the Student Christian Union, the Christian Union of Working Youth, the Women’s Fellowship “Evseveia,” the Fellowship of Nursing Sisters “Evniki,” the Christian schools “Elliniki Pedeia,” etc.). There were also parallel movements which copied the Zoe model in principles and structure (the Brotherhood of Theologians “O Sotir,” the organizations of Metropolitan Avgoustinos Kandiotis of Florina, etc.).

Making their moralistic criteria into absolutes, these movements in Greece turned into complete religious units, divorced from the life of the Church, and society. They developed into closed, autonomous religious groups, entry to which could be secured only by objectively recognized “suitabilie and moral rectitude. Divorced from the life of the parishes and from local bishops, these pietistic groups consolidated their independence by taking the form of secular “associations” with recognition from the state. They were thus able to control the numbers and the morals of their members, and organize a kind of “para-ecclesial” life in open opposition to the official Church. They acquired buildings of their own for catechism meetings and, where possible, their own churches. They have their own clergy who are formally attached to the local bishop but are in reality directed, down to the last detail by the administration of the organizations. They thus have their own confessors and separate confession, in the buildings belonging to the organizations rather than in the churches — own separate liturgies, where entry is controlled and only organizations are allowed in.

It may perhaps be useful to add some mention of the position taken up by the pietistic organizations in Greece on the question of ecumenism, a position which contradicts their principles. The organizations came out in fanatical opposition to the idea of church unity, although the idea of union had to a great extent been embodied by these same pietistic movements. It was they who had been exclusively responsible for transferring to Greek Orthodox territory both the practice of western piety and also, on many points, such western dogmatic teaching as was essential for their moralism. Such points of doctrine include the legalistic theory of the satisfaction of divine justice through Christ’s death on the Cross, denial of distinction between God’s essence and energies, rejection of hesychasm and the neptic tradition, an apologetic devised with utilitarian ends, the general priesthood of the laity as an autonomous absolute, a legal understanding of the transmission of original sin, etc. We are bound to conclude that their stance against church unity is simply the result of a tragic confusion in spiritual criteria, and shows the movements’ lack of theological selfawareness, or else is nothing but a conventional attempt to outdo everyone else in conservatism. Either way, it cannot be a matter of deliberately upholding Orthodox spirituality and the Orthodox tradition, since the organizations could be said to ignore these quite provocatively and to distort them systematically.

It would require a separate study to analyze the various forms these distortions take: the abolition of the holy icons, which are replaced with Renaissance art (both in their catechetical work and in the buildings belonging to the organizations), the almost exclusive use of Roman Catholic and Protestant manuals and religious literature for the spiritual nourishment of the faithful, the polemics against monasticism and the Holy Mountain, the institution of “lay brotherhoods” (like the western “orders”), neglect and erosion of the authority of the episcopate, etc. See further Christoph Maczewski, Die Zoi-Bewegung Griechenlands (Gottingen, 1970); V. Yioultsis, “A Sociological View of the Religious Brotherhoods” (in Greek), in Sociological questions in Orthodoxy, ed. Prof. G. Mantzaridis (Thessaloniki, 1975), pp. 169-203; A. Alexandridis, “A Phenomenon of Modern Greek Religious Life: The Christian Organizations” (in Greek), in Synoro 39 (1966), pp. 193-204; Ch. Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West-Theology in Greece Today (in Greek), p. 95ff.; idem, The Privilege of Despair (in Greek-Athens, 1973), pp. 80-92; idem, Chapters on Political Theology (in Greek-Athens, 1976), p. 114ff.; idem, Honest to Orthodoxy (in GreekAthens, 1968), pp. 68-73.

Nevertheless, the most positive sign in the history of Orthodoxy in Greece over the last century must surely be the progressive weakening and ultimate disintegration of the pietistic movements. It is extremely encouraging how the Orthodox consciousness has reacted to this foreign intervention in its living body. Over approximately the last two decades, the pietistic movements have undergone a relentless series of internal problems; they have suffered splits and lost their followers, and have really ceased to be a substantial presence in the spiritual life of the country. At the same time, there has been an awakening of theological consciousness in the Church in Greece, and the initial fascination which pietism exerted over a majority of lay theologians and clergy has been significantly curtailed.

This awakening is summed up and expressed in a truly unique manner, and in organic continuity with the Orthodox patristic tradition, in a text which is among the most important products of modern Greek theology and spirituality. This is the declaration of the “Holy Community” of the Holy Mountain on the academic approach to theology independent of the Church’s experience, and the pietism of the religious organizations which corresponds to it. This memorable Athonite text was published in the Periodical Athonitikoi Dialogoi (1975, pp. 20-27) a propos of Prof. P. N. Trembelas’ work Mysticism — Apophatism — Cataphatic Theology, vols. 1-2 (Athens, 1974):

The help of the logic and language of Western theologians and the spiritual opinions that spring from the experience of a closed, Pietistic mentality, are both things that leave no place for the mystery of the mystagogic coinherence of Orthodox theology and living experience…

The tragic state of our times does not allow us to concern ourselves with pietism and the obsolete theology of the workshops of scholasticism, that characteristic curse of the West which is effectively nourished by the Western tradition and which suffers from its divisions and passes on its sickness… Especially today, when young people all over the world, in their barren journey through the desert wilderness of modern so-called civilization remain dissatisfied with a dry scientific approach, with the paltry productions of an insipid pietism…

The theology of the universities and the various Christian movements needs to be rebaptized into the mystery of our living church tradition; this will give them new strength and new methods of work and evangelism…

A scholastic and spiritually jejune theology is useless for the salvation of man. And a dogmatically spineless pietism which thinks that deification is an improvement in character should by its very nature be rejected. Such a theology is at its last breath; and such a way of life is powerless to withstand the general crisis of our era. The two together, theology and pietism, form one of the causes and the consequences of the spiritual decadence of our times.

If the theology of the Church were like this, it would create not fathers and confessors who spoke the words of God, but cold academic researchers and disputants of the present age. And if the spirituality of our tradition were like this, it would not create the neptic fathers as “gods by grace” and “lamps of discernment,” but morbid sentimentalists who were prey to psychic hallucinations.

Why should we wander pointlessly in sterile concern with a cerebral and superfluous theology and an unreal, insipid pietistic way of life? Both of these are unknown to our holy tradition, alien to the wishes and needs of man and unworthy of them.

Our pietistic ideas about sanctity as -improvement in character” are shocked and rendered powerless when set side-by-side with the holy experience of our saints, who received Christ in their hearts .. as light, in a real and substantial way; seen invisibly and comprehended incomprehensibly, with formless form and appearance beyond appearance.”

We feel as Orthodox that we do not simply belong to the East geographically, nor do we fight the West in a geographical sense. We belong to the Church of the uncreated divine Light that knows no evening, which saves both East and West.

From henceforth, then, “let no profane hand touch” the mystery of Orthodox theology, but “let the lips of the faithful” sing without ceasing in praise of the Church, the Mother of God which brings forth gods according to grace; for only in her and through her saints are we led unfailingly to life and knowledge.

By Dr. Alexander Kalomiros

A reply to the questions: Is God really good? Did God create hell?

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

There is no doubt that we are living in the age of apostasy predicted for the last days. In practice, most people are atheists, although many of them theoretically still believe. Indifference and the spirit of this world prevail everywhere.

What is the reason for this state?

The reason is the cooling of love. Love for God no more burns in human hearts, and in consequence, love between us is dead, too.

What is the cause of this waning of men’s love for God? The answer, certainly, is sin. Sin is the dark cloud which does not permit God’s light to reach our eyes.

But sin always did exist. So how did we arrive at the point of not simply ignoring God, but of actually hating Him? Man’s attitude toward God today is not really ignorance, or really indifference. If you examine men carefully you will notice that their ignorance or indifference is tainted by a deep hate. But nobody hates anything that does not exist.

I have the suspicion that men today believe in God more than at any other time in human history. Men know the gospel, the teaching of the Church, and God’s creation better than at any other time. They have a profound consciousness of His existence. Their atheism is not a real disbelief. It is rather an aversion toward somebody we know very well but whom we hate with all our heart, exactly as the demons do.

We hate God, that is why we ignore Him, overlooking Him as if we did not see Him, and pretending to be atheists. In reality we consider Him our enemy par excellence. Our negation is our vengeance, our atheism is our revenge.

But why do men hate God? They hate Him not only because their deeds are dark while God is light, but also because they consider Him as a menace, as an imminent and eternal danger, as an adversary in court, as an opponent at law, as a public prosecutor and an eternal persecutor. To them, God is no more the almighty physician who came to save them from illness and death, but rather a cruel judge and a vengeful inquisitor.

You see, the devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave; that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose.

Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him. They love only themselves, trying to escape God’s vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator.

Do you perceive the devil’s slander of our all-loving, all-kind, and absolutely good God? That is why in Greek the devil was given the name of diabolos, “the slanderer.”

II

But what was the instrument of the devil’s slandering of God? What means did he use in order to convince humanity, in order to pervert human thought?

He used “theology.” He first introduced a slight alteration in theology which, once it was accepted, he managed to increase more and more to the degree that Christianity became completely unrecognizable. This is what we call “Western theology.”

Did you ever try to pinpoint what is the principal characteristic of Western theology? Well, its principal characteristic is that it considers God as the real cause of all evil.

What is evil? Is it not the estrangement from God Who is Life?1 Is it not death? What does Western theology teach about death? All Roman Catholics and most Protestants consider death as a punishment from God. God considered all men guilty of Adam’s sin and punished them by death, that is by cutting them away from Himself; depriving them of His live-giving energy, and so killing them spiritually at first and later bodily, by some sort of spiritual starvation. Augustine interprets the passage in Genesis “If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will die the death” as “If you eat of the fruit of this tree, I will kill you.”

Some Protestants consider death not as a punishment but as something natural. But is not God the creator of all natural things? So in both cases, God – for them – is the real cause of death.

And this is true not only for the death of the body. It is equally true for the death of the soul. Do not Western theologians consider hell, the eternal spiritual death of man, as a punishment from God? And do they not consider the devil as a minister of God for the eternal punishment of men in hell?

The “God” of the West is an offended and angry God, full of wrath for the disobedience of men, who desires in His destructive passion to torment all humanity unto eternity for their sins, unless He receives an infinite satisfaction for His offended pride.

What is the Western dogma of salvation? Did not God kill God in order to satisfy His pride, which the Westerners euphemistically call justice? And is it not by this infinite satisfaction that He deigns to accept the salvation of some of us?

What is salvation for Western theology? Is it not salvation from the wrath of God?2

Do you see, then, that Western theology teaches that our real danger and our real enemy is our Creator and God? Salvation, for Westerners, is to be saved from the hands of God!

How can one love such a God? How can we have faith in someone we detest? Faith in its deeper essence is a product of love, therefore, it would be our desire that one who threatens us not even exist, especially when this threat is eternal.

Even if there exists a means of escaping the eternal wrath of this omnipotent but wicked Being (the death of His Son in our stead), it would be much better if this Being did not exist. This was the most logical conclusion of the mind and of the heart of the Western peoples, because even eternal Paradise would be abhorrent with such a cruel God. Thus was atheism born, and this is why the West was its birthplace. Atheism was unknown in Eastern Christianity until Western theology was introduced there, too. Atheism is the consequence of Western theology.3 Atheism is the denial, the negation of an evil God. Men became atheists in order to be saved from God, hiding their head and closing their eyes like an ostrich. Atheism, my brothers, is the negation of the Roman Catholic and Protestant God. Atheism is not our real enemy. The real enemy is that falsified and distorted “Christianity.”

III

Westerners speak frequently of the “Good God” (e.g. in France ‘le bon dieu‘ is almost always used when speaking of God). Western Europe and America, however, were never convinced that such a Good God existed. On the contrary, they were calling God good in the way Greeks called the curse and malediction of smallpox, eulogia that is, a blessing, a benediction, in order to exorcise it and charm it away. For the same reason, the Black Sea was called Euxeinos Pontos – the hospitable sea – although it was, in fact, a dreadful and treacherous sea. Deep inside the Western soul, God was felt to be the wicked Judge, Who never forgot even the smallest offense done to Him in our transgressions of His laws.

This juridical conception of God, this completely distorted interpretation of God’s justice, was nothing else than the projection of human passions on theology. It was a return to the pagan process of humanizing God and deifying man. Men are vexed and angered when not taken seriously and consider it a humiliation which only vengeance can remove, whether it is by crime or by duel. This was the worldly, passionate conception of justice prevailing in the minds of a so-called “Christian” society.

Western Christians thought about God’s justice in the same way also; God, the infinite Being, was infinitely insulted by Adam’s disobedience. He decided that the guilt of Adam’s disobedience descended equally to all His children, and that all were to be sentenced to death for Adam’s sin, which they did not commit. God’s justice for Westerners operated like a vendetta. Not only the man who insulted you, but also all his family must die. And what was tragic for men, to the point of hopelessness, was that no man, nor even all humanity, could appease God’s insulted dignity, even if all men in history were to be sacrificed. God’s dignity could be saved only if He could punish someone of the same dignity as He. So in order to save both God’s dignity and mankind, there was no other solution than the incarnation of His Son, so that a man of godly dignity could be sacrificed to save God’s honor.

IV

This paganistic conception of God’s justice which demands infinite sacrifices in order to be appeased clearly makes God our real enemy and the cause of all our misfortunes. Moreover, it is a justice which is not at all just since it punishes and demands satisfaction from persons which were not at all responsible for the sin of their forefathers.4 In other words, what Westerners call justice ought rather to be called resentment and vengeance of the worst kind. Even Christ’s love and sacrifice loses its significance and logic in this schizoid notion of a God who kills God in order to satisfy the so-called justice of God.

Does this conception of justice have anything to do with the justice that God revealed to us? Does the phrase “justice of God” have this meaning in the Old and New Testaments?

Perhaps the beginning of the mistaken interpretation of the word justice in the Holy Scriptures was its translation by the Greek word dikaiosyne. Not that it is a mistaken translation, but because this word, being a word of the pagan, humanistic, Greek civilization, was charged with human notions which could easily lead to misunderstandings.

First of all, the word dikaiosyne brings to mind an equal distribution. This is why it is represented by a balance. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished by human society in a fair way. This is human justice, the one which takes place in court.

Is this the meaning of God’s justice, however?

The word dikaiosyne, “justice,” is a translation of the Hebraic word tsedakav. This word means “the divine energy which accomplishes man’s salvation.” It is parallel and almost synonymous to the other Hebraic word, hese’d which means “mercy,” “compassion,” “love,” and to the word, eméth which means “fidelity,” “truth.” This, as you see, gives a completely other dimension to what we usually conceive as justice.5 This is how the Church understood God’s justice. This is what the Fathers of the Church taught of it. “How can you call God just,” writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, “when you read the passage on the wage given to the workers? ‘Friend, I do thee no wrong; I will give unto this last even as unto thee who worked for me from the first hour. Is thine eye evil, because I am good?’” “How can a man call God just,” continues Saint Isaac, “when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son, who wasted his wealth in riotous living, and yet only for the contrition which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck, and gave him authority over all his wealth? None other but His very Son said these things concerning Him lest we doubt it, and thus He bare witness concerning Him. Where, then, is God’s justice, for whilst we were sinners, Christ died for us!”6

So we see that God is not just, with the human meaning of this word, but we see that His justice means His goodness and love, which are given in an unjust manner, that is, God always gives without taking anything in return, and He gives to persons like us who are not worthy of receiving. That is why Saint Isaac teaches us “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright, His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind. ‘He is good,’ He says, ‘to the evil and impious.’”7

God is good, loving, and kind toward those who disregard, disobey, and ignore Him.8 He never returns evil for evil, He never takes vengeance.9 His punishments are loving means of correction, as long as anything can be corrected and healed in this life.l0 They never extend to eternity. He created everything good..ll The wild beasts recognize as their master the Christian who through humility has gained the likeness of God. They draw near to him, not with fear, but with joy, in grateful and loving submission; they wag their heads and lick his hands and serve him with gratitude. The irrational beasts know that their Master and God is not evil and wicked and vengeful, but rather full of love. (See also St. Isaac of Syria, Ozomena Asketika [Athens, 1871], pp. 95-96.) He protected and saved us when we fell. The eternally evil has nothing to do with God. It comes rather from the will of His free, logical creatures, and this will He respects.l2

Death was not inflicted upon us by God.l3 We fell into it by our revolt. God is Life and Life is God. We revolted against God, we closed our gates to His life-giving grace.l4 “For as much as he departed from life,” wrote Saint Basil, “by so much did he draw nearer to death. For God is Life, deprivation of life is death.”15 “God did not create death,” continues Saint Basil, “but we brought it upon ourselves.” “Not at all, however, did He hinder the dissolution… so that He would not make the infirmity immortal in us.”l6 As Saint Irenaeus puts it: “Separation from God is death, separation from light is darkness… and it is not the light which brings upon them the punishment of blindness.”l7

“Death,” says Saint Maximus the Confessor, “is principally the separation from God, from which followed necessarily the death of the body. Life is principally He who said, ‘I am the Life.’”18

And why did death come upon the whole of humanity? Why did those who did not sin with Adam die as did Adam? Here is the reply of Saint Anastasius the Sinaite: “We became the inheritors of the curse in Adam. We were not punished as if we had disobeyed that divine commandment along with Adam; but because Adam became mortal, he transmitted sin to his posterity. We became mortal since we were born from a mortal.”l9

And Saint Gregory Palamas makes this point: “[God] did not say to Adam: return to whence thou wast taken; but He said to him: Earth thou art and unto the earth thou shalt return…. He did not say: ‘in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, die!’ but, ‘in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, ye shall surely die.’ Nor did He afterwards say: ‘return now unto the earth,’ but He said, ‘thou shalt return,’ in this manner forewarning, justly permitting and not obstructing what shall come to pass.”20 We see that death did not come at the behest of God but as a consequence of Adam’s severing his relations with the source of Life, by his disobedience; and God in His kindness did only warn him of it.

“The tree of knowledge itself,” says Theophilus of Antioch, “was good, and its fruit was good. For it was not the tree, as some think, that had death in it, but the disobedience which had death in it; for there was nothing else in the fruit but knowledge alone, and knowledge is good when one uses it properly.”2l The Fathers teach us that the prohibition to taste the tree of knowledge was not absolute but temporary. Adam was a spiritual infant. Not all foods are good for infants. Some foods may even kill them although adults would find them wholesome. The tree of knowledge was planted by God for man. It was good and and nourishing. But it was solid food, while Adam was able to digest only milk.

V

So in the language of the Holy Scriptures, “just” means good and loving. We speak of the just men of the Old Testament. That does not mean that they were good judges but that they were kind and God-loving people. When we say that God is just, we do not mean that He is a good judge Who knows how to punish men equitably according to the gravity of their crimes, but on the contrary, we mean that He is kind and loving, forgiving all transgressions and disobediences, and that He wants to save us by all means, and never requites evil for evil.22 In the first volume of the Philokalia there is a magnificent text of Saint Anthony which I must read to you here:

God is good, dispassionate, and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well ask how, in that case, it is possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good and showing mercy to those who honor Him, and as turning away from the wicked and being angry with sinners. To this it must be answered that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions; nor is He won over by the gifts of those who honor Him, for that would mean He is swayed by pleasure. It is not right that the Divinity feel pleasure or displeasure from human conditions.

He is good, and He only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same. We men, on the other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him, but if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him. By living in holiness we cleave to God; but by becoming wicked we make Him our enemy. It is not that He grows angry with us in an arbitrary way, but it is our own sins that prevent God from shining within us and expose us to demons who torture us. And if through prayer and acts of compassion we gain release from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him to change, but that through our actions and our turning to the Divinity, we have cured our wickedness and so once more have enjoyment of God’s goodness. Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.23 [Chap. 150]

VI

You see now, I hope, how God was slandered by Western theology. Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and all their pupils contributed to this “theological” calumny. And they are the foundations of Western theology, whether Papist or Protestant. Certainly these theologians do not say expressly and clearly that God is a wicked and passionate being. They rather consider God as being chained by a superior force, by a gloomy and implacable Necessity like the one which governed the pagan gods. This Necessity obliges Him to return evil for evil and does not permit Him to pardon and to forget the evil done against His will, unless an infinite satisfaction is offered to Him.

We open here the great question of pagan, Greek influence on Christianity.

The pagan mentality was in the foundation of all heresies. It was very strong in the East, because the East was the crossroad of all philosophical and religious currents. But as we read in the New Testament, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” So when heresies flourished, Orthodoxy flourished also, and although it was persecuted by the mighty of this world, it always survived victorious. In the West, on the contrary, the pagan Greek mentality entered in unobtrusively, without taking the aspect of heresy. It entered in through the multitude of Latin texts dictated by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Saint John Cassian who was living then in the West understood the poison that was in Augustine’s teachings, and fought against it. But the fact that Augustine’s books were written in Latin and the fact that they were extremely lengthy did not permit their study by the other Fathers of the Church, and so they were never condemned as Origen’s works were condemned in the East. This fact permitted them to exercise a strong influence later in Western thought and theology. In the West, little by little knowledge of the Greek language vanished, and Augustine’s texts were the only books available dating from ancient times in a language understood there. So the West received as Christian a teaching which was in many of its aspects pagan. Caesaro-papist developments in Rome did not permit any healthy reaction to this state of affairs, and so the West was drowned in the humanistic, pagan thought which prevails to this day.24

So we have the East on the one side which, speaking and writing Greek, remained essentially the New Israel with Israelitic thought and sacred tradition, and the West on the other side which having forgotten the Greek language and having been cut off from the Eastern state, inherited pagan Greek thought and its mentality, and formed with it an adulterated Christian teaching.

In reality, the opposition between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is nothing else but the perpetuation of the opposition between Israel and Hellas.

We must never forget that the Fathers of the Church considered themselves to be the true spiritual children of Abraham, that the Church considered itself to be the New Israel, and that the Orthodox peoples, whether Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, etc., were conscious of being like Nathaniel, true Israelites, the People of God. And while this was the real consciousness of Eastern Christianity, the West became more and more a child of pagan, humanistic Greece and Rome.

VII

What were the principal characteristics of this difference of thought between Israel and paganism? I call your attention to this very important matter. Israel believes in God. Paganism believes in creation. That is to say, in paganism creation is deified. For the pagans, God and creation are one and the same thing. God is impersonal, personified in a multitude of gods.

Israel (and when we speak of Israel we mean the true Israel, the spiritual sons of Abraham, those who have the faith given by God to His chosen people, not those who have abandoned this faith. The real sons of Abraham are the Church of Christ, and not those carnal descendants, the Jewish race), Israel knows that God and creation are two radically different kinds of existence. God is self-existent, personal, eternal, immortal, Life and the Source of life, Existence and the Source of existence; God is the only real Existence: O Wn the Existing, the Only Existing; this is the meaning of the article “‘O”.25

Creation, on the contrary, has no self-existence. It is totally dependent on the will of God. It exists only so long as God wants it to exist. It is not eternal. It had no existence. It was null, it was completely nothing. It was created out of nothingness.26 By itself it has no force of existence; it is kept in existence by God’s Energy. If this loving Energy of God ever stops, creation and all created beings, intellectual or non-intellectual, rational or irrational will vanish into non-existence. We know that God’s love for His creation is eternal. We know from Him that He will never let us fall into non-existence, from which He brought us into being. This is our hope and God is true in His promises. We, created beings, angels, and men, will live in eternity, not because we have in us the power of eternity, but because this is the will of God Who loves us. By ourselves we are nothing. We have not the least energy of life and of existence in our nature; that which we have comes entirely from God; nothing is ours. We are dirt of the earth, and when we forgot it, God in His mercy permitted that we return to what we are, in order that we remain humble and have exact knowledge of our nothingness.27 “God,” says Saint John Damascene elsewhere, “can do all that He wills, even though He does not will all things that He can do – for He can destroy creation, but He does not will to do so.” (Ibid. 1, 14)28

In the Great Euchologion, a fundamental liturgical book of the Church, we read:

“O God, the great and most high, Thou Who alone hast immortality”

[7th prayer of Vespers, p. 15]

“Thou Who alone art life-giving by nature… O only immortal”

[Ode 5, Funeral Canon for Laymen, p. 410]

“Thou art the only immortal”

[P. 410]

“The only One Who is immortal because of His godly nature”

[Ode 1, Funeral Canon for Laymen, p. 471]

This is the faith of Israel.

What is the teaching of paganism? Paganism is the consequence of the loss of contact with God. The multitude of the sins of humanity made men incapable of receiving the divine light and of having any union with the Living God. The consequence was to consider as something divine the creation which they saw before them every day.

Paganism considers creation as being something self-existent and immortal, something that always existed and will always exist. In paganism the gods are part of creation. They did not create it from nothingness, they only formed the existing matter. Matter can take different forms. Forms come into existence and vanish, but matter itself is eternal. Angels, demons, and the souls of men are the real gods. Eternal by their nature, as is matter itself, they are, however, higher than matter. They might take different material forms in a sequence of material existences but they remain essentially spiritual.

So in paganism we see two fundamental characteristics: (l) An attributing of the characteristics of godhood to the whole of creation, that is eternity, immortality, self-existence. (2) A distinction between the spiritual and the material and an antagonism between the two as between something higher and something lower.

Paganism and humanism are one and the same thing. In paganism, man is god because he is eternal by nature. This is why paganism is always haughty. It is narcissism. It is self adoration. In Greece, the gods had human characteristics. Greek religion was the pagan adoration of man. The soul of man was considered his real being, and was immortal by nature .

So we see that in paganism the devil succeeded in creating a universal belief that men were gods and so did not need God. This is why pride was so high in Greece and why humility was inconceivable. In his work The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes the following words: “Not to resent offenses is the mark of a base and slavish man.” The man who is convinced by the devil to believe in the error that his soul is eternal by nature, can never be humble and can never really believe in God, because he does not need God, being God himself, as his error makes him believe.

This is why, from the very first, the Fathers of the Church, understanding the danger of this stupid error, warned the Christians of the fact that, as Saint Irenaeus puts it “The teaching that the human soul is naturally immortal is from the devil” (Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, 111, 20. 1). We find the same warning in Saint Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 6. 1-2), in Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 2. 97), in Tatian (To the Greeks 13), etc.

Saint Justin explains the fundamental atheism which exists in the belief of the natural eternity and immortality of the human soul. He writes: “There are some others who, having supposed that the soul is immortal and immaterial, believe though they have committed evil they will not suffer punishment (for that which is immaterial is also insensible), and that the soul, in consequence of its immorality needs nothing from God” (Dialogue with Trypho 1).

Paganism is ignorance of the true God, an erroneous belief that His creation is divine, really a god. This god, however, who is Nature, is impersonal, a blind force, above all personal gods, and is called Necessity (Ananke). In reality, this Necessity is the projection of human reason, as a mathematical necessity governing the world. It is a projection of rationalism upon nature. This rationalistic Necessity is the true, supreme blind god of the pagans. The pagan gods are parts of the world, and they are immortal because of the immortality of nature which is their essence. In this pagan mentality, man is also god like the others, because for the pagans the real man is only his soul,29 and they believe that man’s soul is immortal in itself, since it is part of the essence of the universe, which is considered immortal in itself and self-existent. So man also is god and a measure of all things.

But the gods are not free. They are governed by Necessity which is impersonal.

VIII

It is this pagan way of thought that was mixed with the Christian teaching by the various heresies. This is what happened in the West, too. They began to distinguish not between God and His creation, but between spirit and matter.30 They began to think of the soul of man as of something eternal in itself, and began to consider the condition of man after death not as asleep in the hands of God, but as the real life of man,3l to which the resurrection of the dead had nothing to add and even the need of the resurrection was doubtful. The feast of the Resurrection of our Lord, which is the culmination of all feasts in Orthodoxy, began to fall into second place, because its need was as incomprehensible to the Western Christians as it was to the Athenians who heard the sermon of the Apostle Paul.

But what is more important for our subject, they began to feel that God was subject to Necessity, to this rationalistic Necessity which was nothing else but human logic. They declared Him incapable of coming into contact with inferior beings like men, because their rationalistic, philosophical conceptions did not permit it, and it was this belief which was the foundation of the hesychast disputes; it had already begun with Augustine who taught that it was not God Who spoke to Moses but an angel instead.

It is in this context of Necessity, which even gods obey, that we must understand the Western juridical conception of God’s justice. It was necessary for God to punish man’s disobedience. It was impossible for Him to pardon; a superior Necessity demanded vengeance. Even if God was in reality good and loving, He was not able to act lovingly. He was obliged to act contrary to His love; the only thing He could do, in order to save humanity, was to punish His Son in the place of men, and by this means was Necessity satisfied.

IX

This is the triumph of Hellenistic thought in Christianity. As a Hellenist, Origen had arrived at the same conclusions. God was a judge by necessity. He was obliged to punish, to avenge, to send people to hell. Hell was God’s creation. It was a punishment demanded by justice. This demand of justice was a necessity. God was obliged to submit to it. He was not permitted to forgive. There was a superior force, a Necessity which did not permit Him to love unconditionally.

However, Origen was also a Christian and he knew that God was full of love. How is it possible to acknowledge a loving God Who keeps people in torment eternally? If God is the cause of hell, by necessity then there must be an end to it, otherwise we cannot concede that God is good and loving. This juridical conception of God as an instrument of a superior, impersonal force or deity named Necessity, leads logically to apokatastasis, “the restoration of all things and the destruction of hell,” otherwise we must admit that God is cruel.

The pagan Greek mentality could not comprehend that the cause of hell was not God but His logical creatures. If God was not really free, since He was governed by Necessity, how could His creatures be free? God could not give something which He did not possess Himself. Moreover, the pagan Greek mentality could not conceive of disinterested love. Freedom, however, is the highest gift that God could give to a creature, because freedom makes the logical creatures like God. This was an inconceivable gift for pagan Greeks. They could not imagine a creature which could say “no” to an almighty God. If God was almighty, creatures could not say “no” to Him. So if God gave men His grace, men could not reject it. Otherwise God would not be almighty. If we admit that God is almighty, then His grace must be irresistible. Men cannot escape from it. That means that those men who are deprived of God’s grace are deprived because God did not give His grace to them. So the loss of God’s grace, which is eternal, spiritual death, in other words, hell, is in reality an act totally dependent on God. It is God Who is punishing these people by depriving them of His grace, by not permitting it to shine upon them. So God is the cause of the eternal spiritual death of those who are damned. Damnation is an act of God, an act of God’s justice, an act of necessity or cruelty. As a result, Origen thought that if we are to remain Christians, if we are to continue to believe that God is really good, we must believe that hell is not eternal, but will have an end, in spite of all that is written in the Holy Scripture and of what the Church believes. This is the fatal, perfectly logical conclusion. If God is the cause of hell, hell must have an end, or else God is an evil God.

Origen, and all rationalists who are like him, was not able to understand that the acceptance or the rejection of God’s grace depends entirely on the rational creatures; that God, like the sun, never stops shining on good or wicked alike; that rational creatures are, however, entirely free to accept or reject this grace and love; and that God in His genuine love does not force His creatures to accept Him, but respects absolutely their free decision.32 He does not withdraw His grace and love, but the attitude of the logical creatures toward this unceasing grace and love is the difference between paradise and hell. Those who love God are happy with Him, those who hate Him are extremely miserable by being obliged to live in His presence, and there is no place where one can escape the loving omnipresence of God.

Paradise or hell depends on how we will accept God’s love. Will we return love for love. or will we respond to His love with hate? This is the critical difference. And this difference depends entirely on us, on our freedom, on our innermost free choice, on a perfectly free attitude which is not influenced by external conditions or internal factors of our material and psychological nature, because it is not an external act but an interior attitude coming from the bottom of our heart, conditioning not our sins, but the way we think about our sins, as it is clearly seen in the case of the publican and the Pharisee and in the case of the two robbers crucified with Christ. This freedom, this choice, this inner attitude toward our Creator is the innermost core of our eternal personality, it is the most profound of our characteristics, it is what makes us that which we are, it is our eternal face – bright or dark, loving or hating.

No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. If it depended on God, we would have nothing to fear. We have nothing to fear from Love. But it does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us, and this is the whole tragedy. God wants us to be in His image, eternally free. He respects us absolutely. This is love. Without respect, we cannot speak of love. We are men because we are free. If we were not free, we would be clever animals, not men. God will never take back this gift of freedom which renders us what we are. This means that we will always be what we want to be, friends or enemies of God, and there is no changing in this our deepest self. In this life, there are profound or superficial changes in our life, in our character, in our beliefs, but all these changes are only the expression in time of our deepest eternal self. This deep eternal self is eternal, with all the meaning of the word. This is why paradise and hell are also eternal. There is no changing in what we really are. Our temporal characteristics and our history in life depend on many superficial things which vanish with death, but our real personality is not superficial and does not depend on changing and vanishing things. It is our real self. It remains with us when we sleep in the grave, and will be our real face in the resurrection. It is eternal.

XI

Saint John of the Ladder says somewhere in his work that “before our fall the demons say to us that God is a friend of man; but after our fall, they say that He is inexorable.” This is the cunning lie of the devil: to convince us that any harm in our life has as its cause God’s disposition; that it is God Who will forgive us or Who will punish us. Wishing to throw us into sin and then to make us lose any hope of freeing ourselves from it, they seek to present God as sometimes forgiving all sins, and sometimes as inexorable. Most Christians, even Orthodox Christians, have fallen into this pit. They consider God responsible for our being pardoned or our being punished. This, my brothers, is a terrible falsehood which makes most men lose eternal life, principally because in considering God’s love, they convince themselves that God, in His love, will pardon them. God is always loving, He is always pardoning, He is always a friend of man. However, that which never pardons, that which never is a friend of man, is sin, and we never think of it as we ought to. Sin destroys our soul independently of the love of God, because sin is precisely the road which leads away from God, because sin erects a wall which separates us from God, because sin destroys our spiritual eyes and makes us unable to see God’s light. The demons want to make us always think of our salvation or our eternal spiritual death in juridical terms. They want us to think that either salvation or eternal death is a question of God’s decision. No, my brothers, we must awaken in order not to be lost. Our salvation or our eternal death is not a question of God’s decision, but it is a question of our decision, it is a question of the decision of our free will which God respects absolutely. Let us not fool ourselves with confidence in God’s love. The danger does not come from God; it comes from our own self.

XII

Many will say “Does not Holy Scripture itself often speak about the anger of God? Is it not God Himself who says that He will punish us or that He will pardon us? Is it not written that ‘He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him’ (Heb. 11:6)?33 Does He not say that vengeance is His and that He will requite the wickedness done to us? Is it not written that it is fearful to fall into the hands of the living God?”34

In his discourse entitled That God is not the Cause of Evil, Saint Basil the Great writes the following: “But one may say, if God is not responsible for evil things, why is it said in the book of Esaias, ‘I am He that prepared light and Who formed darkness, Who makes peace and Who creates evils’ (45 7).” And again, “There came down evils from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem” (Mich. 1:12). And, “Shall there be evil in the city which the Lord hath not wrought?” (Amos 3:6). And in the great Ode of Moses, “Behold, I am and there is no god beside Me. I will slay, and I will make to live; I will smite, and I will heal” (Deut. 32:39). But none of these citations, to him who understands the deeper meaning of the Holy Scriptures, casts any blame on God, as if He were the cause of evils and their creator, for He Who said, “I am the One Who makes light and darkness,” shows Himself as the Creator of the universe, not that He is the creator of any evil…. “He creates evils,” that means, “He fashions them again and brings them to a betterment, so that they leave their evilness, to take on the nature of good.”35

As Saint Isaac the Syrian writes, “Very often many things are said by the Holy Scriptures and in it many names are used not in a literal sense… those who have a mind understand this” (Homily 83, p. 317).

Saint Basil in the same discourse 36 gives the explanation of these expressions of the Holy Scriptures: “It is because fear,” says he, “edifies simpler people,” and this is true not only for simple people but for all of us. After our fall, we need fear in order to do any profitable thing and any good to ourselves or to others. In order to understand the Holy Scriptures, say the Fathers, we must have in mind their purpose which is to save us, and to bring us little by little to an understanding of our Creator God and of our wretched condition.

But the same Holy Scriptures in other places explain to us more accurately who is the real cause of our evils. In Jeremias 2:17, 19 we read “Hath not thy forsaking Me brought these things upon thee? saith the Lord thy God…. Thine apostasy shall chastise thee and thy wickedness shall reprove thee; know then, and see that thy forsaking Me hath been bitter to thee, saith the Lord thy God.”

The Holy Scriptures speak our language, the language which we understand in our fallen state. As Saint Gregory the Theologian says, “For according to our own comprehension, we have given names from our own attributes to those of God.”37 And Saint John Damascene explains further that what in the Holy Scriptures “is said of God as if He had a body, is said symbolically… [it contains] some hidden meaning, which through things corresponding to our nature, teaches us things which exceed our nature.”38

XIII

However, there are punishments imposed upon us by God, or rather evils done to us by the devil and permitted by God. But these punishments are what we call pedagogical punishments. They have as their aim our correction in this life, or at least the correction of others who would take a lesson from our example and correct themselves by fear. There are also punishments which do not have the purpose of correcting anybody but simply put an end to evil by putting an end to those who are propagating it, so that the earth may be saved from perpetual corruption and total destruction; such was the case in the flood during Noah’s time, and in Sodom’s destruction.39

All these punishments operate and have their purpose in this corrupted state of things; they do not extend beyond this corrupted life. Their purpose is to correct what can be corrected, and to change things toward a better condition, while things can still change in this changing world. After the Common Resurrection no change whatever can take place. Eternity and incorruptibility are the state of unchangeable things; no alterations whatever happen then, only developments in the state chosen by free personalities; eternal and infinite developments but no changing, no alteration of direction, no going back. The changing world we see around us is changing because it is corruptible. The eternal New Heavens and New Earth which God will bring about in His Second Coming are incorruptible, that means, not changing. So in this New World there can be no correction whatever; therefore, pedagogical punishments are no longer necessary. Any punishment from God in this New World of Resurrection would be clearly and without a doubt a revengeful act, inappropriate and motivated by hate, without any good intention or purpose.

If we consider hell as a punishment from God, we must admit that it is a senseless punishment, unless we admit that God is an infinitely wicked being.

As Saint Isaac the Syrian says: “He who applies pedagogical punishments in order to give health, is punishing with love, but he who is looking for vengeance, is devoid of love. God punishes with love, not defending Himself – far be it – but He wants to heal His image, and He does not keep His wrath for long. This way of love is the way of uprightness, and it does not change with passion to a defense. A man who is just and wise is like God because he never chastises a man in revenge for wickedness, but only in order to correct him or that others be afraid” (Homily 73).

So we see that God punishes as long as there is hope for correction. After the Common Resurrection there is no question of any punishment from God. Hell is not a punishment from God but a self condemnation. As Saint Basil the Great says, “The evils in hell do not have God as their cause, but ourselves.”40

XIV

One could insist, however, that the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers always speak of God as the Great Judge who will reward those who were obedient to Him and will punish those who were disobedient, in the day of the Great Judgment (11 Tim. 4:6-8). How are we to understand this judgment if we are to understand the divine words not in a human but in a divine manner? What is God’s judgment?

God is Truth and Light. God’s judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth. The “books” will be opened. What are these “books”? They are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed. If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice seeing God’s light. If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life.

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one’s heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation – and there really is – it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (I Cor. 4:6).

The Light of Truth, God’s Energy, God’s grace which will fall on men unhindered by corrupt conditions in the Day of Judgment, will be the same to all men. There will be no distinction whatever. All the difference lies in those who receive, not in Him Who gives. The sun shines on healthy and diseased eyes alike, without any distinction. Healthy eyes enjoy light and because of it see clearly the beauty which surrounds them. Diseased eyes feel pain, they hurt, suffer, and want to hide from this same light which brings such great happiness to those who have healthy eyes.

But alas, there is no longer any possibility of escaping God’s light. During this life there was. In the New Creation of the Resurrection, God will be everywhere and in everything. His light and love will embrace all. There will be no place hidden from God, as was the case during our corrupt life in the kingdom of the prince of this world.4l The devil’s kingdom will be despoiled by the Common Resurrection and God will take possession again of His creation.42 Love will enrobe everything with its sacred Fire which will flow like a river from the throne of God and will irrigate paradise. But this same river of Love – for those who have hate in their hearts – will suffocate and burn.

“For our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love. Some shine and others become black and dark. In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone.

The difference is in man, not in God. The difference is conditioned by the free choice of man, which God respects absolutely. God’s judgment is the revelation of the reality which is in man.

XV

Thus Saint Macarius writes, “And as the kingdom of darkness, and sin, are hidden in the soul until the Day of Resurrection, when the bodies also of sinners shall be covered with the darkness that is now hidden in the soul, so also the Kingdom of Light, and the Heavenly Image, Jesus Christ, now mystically enlighten the soul, and reign in the soul of the saints, but are hidden from the eyes of men… until the Day of Resurrection; but then the body also shall be covered and glorified with the Light of the Lord, which is now in the man’s soul [from this earthly life], that the body also may reign with the soul which from now receives the Kingdom of Christ and rests and is enlightened with eternal light” (Homily 2).

Saint Symeon the New Theologian says that it is not what man does which counts in eternal life but what he is, whether he is like Jesus Christ our Lord, or whether he is different and unlike Him. He says, “In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ’s love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father.”

XVI

Saint Peter the Damascene writes: “We all receive God’s blessings equally. But some of us, receiving God’s fire, that is, His word, become soft like beeswax, while the others like clay become hard as stone. And if we do not want Him, He does not force any of us, but like the sun He sends His rays and illuminates the whole world, and he who wants to see Him, sees Him, whereas the one who does not want to see Him, is not forced by Him. And no one is responsible for this privation of light except the one who does not want to have it.

God created the sun and the eye. Man is free to receive the sun’s light or not. The same is true here. God sends the light of knowledge like rays to all, but He also gave us faith like an eye. The one who wants to receive knowledge through faith, keeps it by his works, and so God gives him more willingness, knowledge, and power” (Philokalia, vol. 3, p. 8).

XVII

I think that by now we have reached the point of understanding correctly what eternal hell and eternal paradise really are, and who is in reality responsible for the difference.

In the icon of the Last Judgment we see Our Lord Jesus Christ seated on a throne. On His right we see His friends, the blessed men and women who lived by His love. On His left we see His enemies, all those who passed their life hating Him, even if they appeared to be pious and reverent. And there, in the midst of the two, springing from Christ’s throne, we see a river of fire coming toward us. What is this river of fire? Is it an instrument of torture? Is it an energy of vengeance coming out from God in order to vanquish His enemies?

No, nothing of the sort. This river of fire is the river which “came out from Eden to water the paradise” of old (Gen. 2:10). It is the river of the grace of God which irrigated God’s saints from the beginning. In a word, it is the out-pouring of God’s love for His creatures. Love is fire. Anyone who loves knows this. God is Love, so God is Fire. And fire consumes all those who are not fire themselves, and renders bright and shining all those who are fire themselves (Heb. 12:29).

God many times appeared as fire: To Abraham, to Moses in the burning bush, to the people of Israel showing them the way in the desert as a column of fire by night and as a shining cloud by day when He covered the tabernacle with His glory (Exod. 40:28, 32), and when He rained fire on the summit of Mount Sinai. God was revealed as fire on the mountain of Transfiguration, and He said that He came “to put fire upon the earth” (Luke 12:49), that is to say, love, because as Saint John of the Ladder says, “Love is the source of fire” (Step 30, 18).

The Greek writer, Fotis Kontoglou said somewhere that “Faith is fire, and gives warmth to the heart. The Holy Spirit came down upon the heads of the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. The two disciples, when the Lord was revealed to them, said ‘Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us in the way?’ Christ compares faith to a ‘burning candle.’ Saint John the Forerunner said in his sermons that Christ will baptize men ‘in the Holy Spirit and fire.’ And truly, the Lord said, ‘I am come to send fire on the earth and what will I if it be already kindled?’ Well, the most tangible characteristic of faith is warmth; this is why they speak about ‘warm faith,’ or ‘faith provoking warmth.’ And even as the distinctive mark of faith is warmth, the sure mark of unbelief is coldness.

“Do you want to know how to understand if a man has faith or unbelief? If you feel warmth coming out of him – from his eyes, from his words, from his manners – be certain that he has faith in his heart. If again you feel cold coming out of his whole being, that means that he has not faith, whatever he may say. He may kneel down, he may bend his head humbly, he may utter all sorts of moral teachings with a humble voice, but all these will breathe forth a chilling breath which falls upon you to numb you with cold”43

Saint Isaac the Syrian says that “Paradise is the love of God, in which the bliss of all the beatitudes is contained,” and that “the tree of life is the love of God” (Homily 72).

“Do not deceive yourself,” says Saint Symeon the New Theologian, “God is fire and when He came into the world, and became man, He sent fire on the earth, as He Himself says; this fire turns about searching to find material – that is a disposition and an intention that is good – to fall into and to kindle; and for those in whom this fire will ignite, it becomes a great flame, which reaches Heaven…. this flame at first purifies us from the pollution of passions and then it becomes in us food and drink and light and joy, and renders us light ourselves because we participate in His light” (Discourse 78).

God is a loving fire, and He is a loving fire for all: good or bad. There is, however, a great difference in the way people receive this loving fire of God. Saint Basil says that “the sword of fire was placed at the gate of paradise to guard the approach to the tree of life; it was terrible and burning toward infidels, but kindly accessible toward the faithful, bringing to them the light of day.”44 The same loving fire brings the day to those who respond to love with love, and burns those who respond to love with hatred.

Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God, a loving fire which embraces and covers all with the same beneficial will, without any difference or discrimination. The same vivifying water is life eternal for the faithful and death eternal for the infidels; for the first it is their element of life, for the second it is the instrument of their eternal suffocation; paradise for the one is hell for the other. Do not consider this strange. The son who loves his father will feel happy in his father’s arms, but if he does not love him, his father’s loving embrace will be a torment to him. This also is why when we love the man who hates us, it is likened to pouring lighted coals and hot embers on his head.

“I say,” writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, “that those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love…. It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it” (Homily 84).

God is love. If we really believe this truth, we know that God never hates, never punishes, never takes vengeance. As Abba Ammonas says, “Love never hates anyone, never reproves anyone, never condemns anyone, never grieves anyone, never abhors anyone, neither faithful nor infidel nor stranger nor sinner nor fornicator, nor anyone impure, but instead it is precisely sinners, and weak and negligent souls that it loves more, and feels pain for them and grieves and laments, and it feels sympathy for the wicked and sinners, more than for the good, imitating Christ Who called sinners, and ate and drank with them. For this reason, showing what real love is, He taught saying, ‘Become good and merciful like your Father in Heaven,’ and as He rains on bad and good and makes the sun to rise on just and unjust alike, so also is the one who has real love, and has compassion, and prays for all.”45

XVIII

Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God’s love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father’s estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father’s love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother’s return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father’s house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father? This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one’s heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God’s Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God’s New Creation, nor hide from God’s tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, “In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy” (On the Soul and the Resurrection).46

In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting inner fire of hatred,47 saith the Lord, because I was thirsty for your love and you did not give it to Me, I was hungry for your blessedness and you did not offer it to Me, I was imprisoned in My human nature and you did not come to visit Me in My church; you are free to go where your wicked desire wishes, away from Me, in the torturing hatred of your hearts which is foreign to My loving heart which knows no hatred for anyone. Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate, unknown and foreign to Me and to those who are with Me, but prepared by freedom for the devil, from the days I created My free, rational creatures. But wherever you go in the darkness of your hating hearts, My love will follow you like a river of fire, because no matter what your heart has chosen, you are and you will eternally continue to be, My children. Amen.

Notes:

CHAPTER II

1 “This is evil: estrangement from God.” St. Basil the Great, That God is Not the Cause of Evils, {Ellhnes Pateres ths Ekklhsias [Greek Fathers of the Church] 7, 112 (hereafter cited as EPE). “As many… as stand apart in their will from God, He brings upon them separation from Himself; and separation from God is death.” St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 5. 27.2. “Men, rejecting eternal things and through the counsel of the devil turning toward the things of corruption, became the cause to themselves of the corruption in death.” St. Athanasius the Great On the Incarnation 5 (Migne, PG 25.104-105).”For as much as he departed from life, just so much did he draw nearer to death. For life is God; deprivation of life is death. So Adam was the author of death to himself through his departure from God.” St. Basil the Great (PG 31. 345 ) .

2 “The redemptive sacrifice…was accomplished in order to reestablish the formerly harmonious relation between heaven and earth which sin had overturned, to atone for the flounted moral law, to satisfy the affronted justice of God.” Encyclical Letter for Pascha 1980 of Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios, Episkepsis (in Greek), no. 229, 15 April 1980.

3 “Truly foolish, therefore, and lacking all understanding and mind is he who says there is no God. Alongside him no less in this madness is he who says that God is the cause of evils. I consider their sins to be of equal gravity because each one similarly denies the good; the former denies that He exists at all, while the latter defines Him as not being good; for if he is the cause of evils, He is clearly not good; so from both sides there is a denial of God.” St. Basil the Great, EPE, op. cit., 7, 90.

CHAPTER IV

4 “But someone will say, verily Adam fell, and by disregarding the divine commandment he was condemned to corruption and death, but how were the many made sinful on his account? What do his transgressions have to do with us? How is it that we who were not even born were condemned along with him, and yet God says, ‘The fathers shall not be put to death for the children and the sons shall not be put to death for the fathers; everyone shall die in his own sin’? (Deut. 24:18). Surely, then, that soul that sins shall die; but we became sinners through the disobedience of Adam in this way: For Adam was created for incorruption and life, and his life in the Paradise of delight was holy, his whole mind was continually caught up in divine visions, and his body was tranquil and serene, since every shameful pleasure was calmed, for there was no disturbance of intemperate emotions in him. However, since he fell under sin and sank into corruption, thence pleasures and pollutions penetrated into the nature of the flesh, and so there was planted in our members a savage law. Nature became diseased with sin through the disobedience of the one, i.e, Adam; thus the many also became sinners, not as transgressing together with Adam – for they did not exist at all – but as being from his nature which had fallen under the law of sin… because of disobedience, human nature in Adam became infirm with corruption, and so the passions were introduced into it…. ” St. Cyril of Alexandria Interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans (PG 74. 788-789). “And furthermore, if they who were born from Adam became sinners on account of his sinning, in all justice, they are not liable, for they did not become sinners of themselves; therefore the term “sinners” is used instead of “mortals” because death is the penalty of sin. Since in the first-fashioned man nature became mortal, all they who share in the nature of the forefather consequently share mortality also.” Euthymios Zigabenos, Interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, 5:19.

5 It means something totally different from what we customarily mean by the term “justice.” This ignorance has caused us to consider as touchstones of Orthodoxy some very strange theories, most particularly the juridical conception of salvation which is based upon a justice that resembles the Necessity (Ananke) of the ancients, and oppresses not only man but God also, and gives a gloomy aspect to Christianity. See the relevant study of S. Lynonnett “La Soteriologie Paulienne,” Introduction a la Bible 11, (Belgium: Desclées & Bower), p. 840.

6 “If a man readily and joyfully accepts a loss for the sake of God, he is inwardly pure. And if he does not look down upon any man because of his defects, in very truth he is free. If a man is not pleased with someone who honors him, nor displeased with someone who dishonors him, he is dead to the world and to this life. The watchfulness of discernment is superior to every discipline of men accomplished in any way to any degree.

“Do not hate the sinner. For we are all laden with guilt. If for the sake of God you are moved to oppose him, weep over him. Why do you hate him? Hate his sins and pray for him, that you may imitate Christ Who was not wroth with sinners, but interceded for them. Do you not see how He wept over Jerusalem? We are mocked by the devil in many instances, so why should we hate the man who is mocked by him who mocks us also? Why, O man, do you hate the sinner? Could it be because he is not so righteous as you? But where is your righteousness when you have no love? Why do you not shed tears over him? But you persecute him. In ignorance some are moved with anger, presuming themselves to be discerners of the works of sinners.

“Be a herald of God’s goodness, for God rules over you, unworthy though you are; for although your debt to Him is so great, yet He is not seen exacting payment from you, and from the small works you do, He bestows great rewards upon you. Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright (cf. Ps. 24:8, 144:17), His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind. ‘He is good,’ He says, ‘to the evil and to the impious’ (cf. Luke 6:35). How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers? ‘Friend, I do thee no wrong I will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is thine eye evil because I am good?’ (Matt. 20:12-15). How can a man call God just when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son who wasted his wealth with riotous living, how for the compunction alone which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck and gave him authority over all his wealth? (Luke 15:11 ff.). None other but His very Son said these things concerning Him, lest we doubt it; and thus He bare witness concerning Him. Where, then, is God’s justice, for whilst we are sinners Christ died for us! (cf. Rom. 5:8). But if here He is merciful, we may believe that He will not change [i.e., as regards the state after death, which St. Isaac mentions again a little below] .

“Far be it that we should ever think such an iniquity that God could become unmerciful! For the property of Divinity does not change as do mortals. God does not acquire something which He does not have, nor lose what He has, nor supplement what He does have, as do created beings. But what God has from the beginning, He will have and has until the [unending] end, as the blest Cyril wrote in his commentary on Genesis. Fear God, he says, out of love for Him, and not for the austere name that He has been given. Love Him as you ought to love Him; not for what He will give you in the future, but for what we have received, and for this world alone which He has created for us. Who is the man that can repay Him? Where is His repayment to be found in our works? Who persuaded Him in the beginning to bring us into being? Who intercedes for us before Him, when we shall possess no [faculty of] memory, as though we never existed? Who will awake this our body [Syriac: our corruption] for that life? Again, whence descends the notion of knowledge into dust? O the wondrous mercy of God! O the astonishment at the bounty of our God and Creator! O might for which all is possible! O the immeasurable goodness that brings our nature again, sinners though we be, to His regeneration and rest! Who is sufficient to glorify Him? He raises up the transgressor and blasphemer, he renews dust unendowed with reason, making it rational and comprehending and the scattered and insensible dust and the scattered senses He makes a rational nature worthy of thought. The sinner is unable to comprehend the grace of His resurrection. Where is gehenna, that can afflict us? Where is perdition, that terrifies us in many ways and quenches the joy of His love? And what is gehenna as compared with the grace of His resurrection, when He will raise us from hades and cause our corruptible nature to be clad in incorruption, and raise up in glory him that has fallen into Hades?

“Come, men of discernment, and be filled with wonder! Whose mind is sufficiently wise and marvelous to wonder worthily at the bounty of our Creator? His recompense of sinners is, that instead of a just recompense, He rewards them with resurrection, and instead of those bodies with which they trampled upon His law, He enrobes them with perfect glory and incorruption [St. Isaac speaks here of those who have repented, as is evident from other similar passages in his book.] That grace whereby we are resurrected after we have sinned is greater than the grace which brought us into being when we were not. Glory be to Thine immeasurable grace, O Lord! Behold, Lord, the waves of Thy grace close my mouth with silence, and there is not a thought left in me before the face of Thy thanksgiving. What mouths can confess Thy praise, O good King, Thou Who lovest our life? Glory be to Thee for the two worlds which Thou hast created for our growth and delight, leading us by all things which Thou didst fashion to the knowledge of Thy glory, from now and unto the ages. Amen.” St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 60.

7 Ibid.

8 “‘For God so loved the world as to give His Only-begotten Son unto death for it.’ Not that He could not have redeemed us by another means, but He wished to manifest to us His boundless love, and to draw us near Him through the death of His Only-begotten Son. Indeed, if He had anything more precious than His Son, He would have given it for our sakes, in order that through it our race would be found nigh to Him. Out of His abundant love, He was not pleased to do violence to our freedom, although it was possible for Him to do so; but He let it be in order that we would draw nigh to Him with the love and volition of our own will.” St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 81.

9 “In times of despondency, never fail to bear in mind the Lord’s commandment to Peter, to forgive a person who sins seventy times seven. For He who gave this command to another will Himself do far more.” St. John Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 26, (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1978), p. 147.

10 “A man who is just and wise is like God because he never chastises a man in revenge for wickedness, but only in order to correct him, or that others be afraid.” St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 73. “God granted this great benefit to man: that he not abide in sin unto eternity.” Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2.26.

11 “And God saw all the things that He had made, and behold, they were very good.” Genesis 1:31 ” [God] created everything whIch has good qualities, but the profligacy of the demons has made use of the productions of nature for evil purposes, and the appearance of evil which these wear is from them and not from the perfect God.” Tatian Address to the Greeks 17. “The construction of the world is good, but the life men live in it is bad.” Ibid. 19. “For nothing from the first was made evil by God, but things good, yea, very good.” Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2.17. “Pour l’hebreau, le sensible n’est pas mauvais, ni fautif. Le mal ne vient pas de la matiere. Le monde est tres bon.” ["For the Hebrew, perceptible things are not evil, nor are they deceptive lit., erroneous). Evil does not come from matter. The world is 'very good,'"] C. Tresmontant, Essai sur la Pensee Hebraique Paris 1953). “There is nothing that exist which does not partake of the beautiful and the good.” St. Dionysius the Areopagite On The Divine Names ( Pg 3. 704). “For even if the reasons why some things come about escape us, let that dogma be certain in our souls that nothing evil is done by the good.” St. Basil the Great, ElIE 7, 112. “For it is not the part of a god to incite to things against nature… But God, being perfectly good, is eternally doing good.” Athenagoras, Embassy, 26.

I2 “The devil is evil in such wise that he is evil in disposition, but not that his nature is opposed to good.” St. Basil the Great, EPE, 7, 112. “Since God is good, whatever he does, He does for man’s sake. But whatever man does, he does for his own sake, both what is good and what is evil.”Philokalia, vol. 1, chapter 121, St. Anthony the Great.

l3 “For God made not death, neither hath He pleasure in the destruction of the living, for he created all things that they might have their being, and the generations of the world were healthful, and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of Hades upon the earth.” Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14. “For God created man to be immortal and made him to be in an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world.” Wisdom of Solomon 2:23-24.

14 “And so he who was made in the likeness of God, since the more powerful spirit [the Holy Spirit] is separated from him, becomes mortal.” Tatian Address to the Greeks 7.

15 “For as much as he departed from life, just so much did he draw nearer to death. For God is life; deprivation of life is death. So Adam was the author of death to himself through his departure from God, in accordance with the scripture which says ‘For behold, they that remove themselves from Thee shall perish.’” Psalm 72:27.

16 “Thus God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves out of an evil disposition. Nevertheless, He did not hinder the dissolution on account of the aforementioned causes, so that He would not make the infirmity immortal in us.” St. Basil the Great (PG 31. 345).

17 “But as many as depart from God by their own choice, He inflicts that separation from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord. But separation from God is death, and separation from light is darkness…. It is not, however, that the light has inflicted upon them the penalty of darkness.” St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 5. 27:2. “But others shun the light and separate themselves from God….” Ibid., 5. 28:1.

18 Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 27 (Greek edition), St. Maximus the Confessor.

19 “We became the inheritors of the curse in Adam. Certainly we were not punished as though we had disobeyed that command along with him, but because he became mortal, he transmitted the sin to his seed; we were born mortals from a mortal.” St. Anastasius the Sinaite, 19. Vide I. N. Karmire, Sunoyis Dofmatikes Didaskalias tes Orthodoxou Katholikes Ekklesias, p. 38.

20 “Man’s transgression against the Creator’s righteousness brought the soul’s death sentence into effect; for when our forefathers forsook God and chose to do their own will, He abandoned them, not subjecting them to constraint. And for the reasons we have stated above, God lovingly forewarned them of this sentence. But he forbore and delayed in executing the sentence of death upon the body; and while He pronounced it, He relegated its fruition to the future in the abyss of His wisdom and the superabundance of His love for man. He did not say to Adam ‘return to whence thou wast taken,’ but ‘earth thou art, and unto earth thou shalt return’ (Gen. 3:19). Those who hear this with understanding can also comprehend from these words that God ‘did not make death’ (Wisdom 1:13), either the soul’s or the body’s. For when He first gave the command, He did not say ‘in whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, die!,’ but ‘In whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, ye shall surely die’ (Gen. 2:17). Nor did He afterwards say ‘return now unto earth,’ but ‘Thou shalt return’ (Gen. 3:19), in this manner forewarning, justly permitting and not obstructing what should come to pass.” St. Gregory Palamas Physical Theological Moral and Practical Chapters 51 (PG 1157-1160).

21 “The tree of knowledge itself was good, and its fruit was good. For it was not the tree that had death in it, as some think, but the disobedience which had death in it; for there was nothing else in the fruit but knowledge alone; but knowledge is good when one uses it properly.” Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 2. 25. “The tree did not engender death, for God did not create death; but death was the consequence of disobedience.” St. John Damascene Homily on Holy Saturday 10 (PG 96. 612a).

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22 “‘And what is a merciful heart?’ It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons and for every created thing; and by the recollection and sight of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he continually offers up tearful prayer, even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns in his heart without measure in the likeness of God.” St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 81.

23 “It is not God who is hostile, but we; for God is never hostile.” St. John Chrysostom (PG 61. 478).

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24 See J. S. Romanides, Ton Propatorikon Amartema (Athens, 1957).

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25 “Therefore, we believe in one God one principle, without beginning, uncreated, unbegotten, indestructible and immortal, eternal, unlimited, uncircumscribed, unbounded, infinite in power, simple, uncompounded, incorporeal, unchanging, unaffected, unchangeable, inalterate, invisible, source of goodness and justice, light intellectual and inaccessible; power which no measure can give any idea of but which is measured only by His own will, for He can do all things whatsoever He pleases; Maker of all things both visible and invisible, holding together all things and conserving them, Provider for all, governing and dominating and ruling over all in unending and immortal reign; without contradiction, filling all things, contained by nothing, but Himself containing all things, being their Conserver and first Possessor; pervading all substances without being defiled, removed far beyond all things and every substance as being supersubstantial and surpassing all, super-eminently divine and good and replete; appointing all the principalities and orders, set above every principality and order, above essence and life and speech and concept; light itself and goodness and being insofar as having neither being, nor anything else that is derived from any other; the very source of being for all things that are, of life to the living, of speech to the articulate, and the cause of all good things for all; knowing all things before they begin to be; one substance, one godhead, one virtue, one will, one operation, one principality, one power, one domination, one kingdom; known in three perfect Persons and adored with one adoration, believed in and worshipped by every rational creature, united without confusion and distinct without separation, which is beyond understanding. We believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit in Whom we have been baptized. For it is thus that the Lord enjoined the apostles ‘Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” St. John Damascene Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1. 8.

26 “He created without matter.” St. John Chrysostom (PG 59. 308).

27 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1.14.

28 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1. 8.

29 “The soul without the body can do nothing, whether good or evil. The visions which some see concerning those things that are yonder are shown to them by God as a dispensation for their profit. Just as the lyre remains useless and silent if there is no one to play, so the soul and body, when they are separated, can do nothing.” St. Athanasius the Great.

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30 “For each of these, after its kind, is a body, be it angel, or soul, or devil. Subtle though they are, still in substance, character, and image according to the subtlety of their respective natures they are subtle bodies.” St. Macarius the Great, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 4, 9.

31 “Let us go and behold in the tombs that man is bare bones, food for worms and a stench.” Great Euchologion, (Venice, 1862), p. 415. “For just as the light when it sets in the evening is not lost, so man also is given over to the grave as if setting; yet he is preserved for the dawn of the resurrection.” St. John Chrysostom .

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32 “He who berates the Creator for not making us sinless by nature, does naught but esteem the irrational nature above the rational.” St. Basil the Great, EPE, 7, 110.

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33 Also, “Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.” Hebrews l0:35 .

34 “For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses. Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Hebrews 10:26-31.

35 St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 94-96. In this particular passage, St. Basil carefully makes a distinction between the Greek verbs ktizw and dhmiourgew both of which are generally translated into English as “create.” However, ktizw has a long history, beginning with the Sanskrit kshi, which, as in early Greek, meant “to people a country,” “to build houses and cities,” “to colonize.” Later, in Greek, the word came to mean “to establish,” “to build up and develop,” and finally, “to produce,” “create,” “bring about.” Having in mind these other connotations of the verb ktizw St. Basil discerned the proper implication of the word in this context and hence made a point of emphasizing this distinction.

36 Ibid. 7.98.

37 St. Gregory the Theologian Fifth Theological Oration 22 (PG 36. 157).

38 St. John Damascene, op. cit. 1.11.

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39 “Famines and droughts and floods are common plagues of cities and nations which check the excess of evil. Therefore, just as the physician is a benefactor even if he should cause pain or suffering to the body (for he strives with the disease, and not with the sufferer), so in the same manner God is good Who administers salvation to everyone through the means of particular chastisements. But you, not only do you not speak evilly of the physician who cuts some members, cauterizes others, and excises others again completely from the body, but you even give him money and address him as saviour because he confines the disease to a small area before the infirmity can claim the whole body. However, when you see a city crushing its inhabitants in an earthquake, or a ship going down at sea with all hands, you do not shrink from wagging a blasphemous tongue against the true Physician and Saviour.” St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 94. “And you may accept the phrase ‘I kill and I will make to live’ (Deut. 32:39) literally, if you wish, since fear edifies the more simple. ‘I will smite and I will heal’ (Deut. 32:39). It is profitable to also understand this phrase literally; for the smiting engenders fear, while the healing incites to love. It is permitted you, nonetheless, to attain to a loftier understanding of the utterance. I will slay through sin and make to live through righteousness. ‘But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day’ (11 Cor. 4:16). Therefore, He does not slay one, and give life to another, but through the means which He slays, He gives life to a man, and He heals a man with that which He smites him, according to the proverb which says, ‘For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from death’ (Prov. 23:14). So the flesh is chastised for the soul to be healed, and sin is put to death for righteousness to live…. When you hear ‘There shall be no evil in a city which the Lord hath not wrought’ (cf. Amos 3:6), understand by the noun ‘evil’ that the word intimates the tribulation brought upon sinners for the correction of offenses. For Scripture says, ‘For I afflicted thee and straitened thee, to do good to thee’ (cf. Deut. 8:3); so too is evil terminated before it spills out unhindered, as a strong dike or wall holds back a river.

“For these reasons, diseases of cities and nations, droughts, barrenness of the earth, and the more difficult conditions in the life of each, cut off the increase of wickedness. Thus, such evils come from God so as to uproot the true evils, for the tribulations of the body and all painful things from without have been devised for the restraining of sin. God, therefore, excises evil; never is evil from God…. The razing of cities, earthquakes and floods, the destruction of armies, shipwrecks and all catastrophes with many casualties which occur from earth or sea or air or fire or whatever cause, happen for the sobering of the survivors, because God chastises public evil with general scourges.

“The principal evil, therefore, which is sin, and which is especially worthy of the appellation of evil, depends upon our disposition; it depends upon us either to abstain from evil or to be in misery.

“Of the other evils, some are shown to be struggles for the proving of courage… while some are for the healing of sins… and some are for an example to make other men sober.” St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 98-102.

40 1bid. 7, 92.

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41 “The devil became the ‘Prince of matter.”‘ Athenagoras, Embassy, 24, 25. “They [the demons] afterwards subdued the human race to themselves… and… sowed all wickedness. Whence also the poets and mythologists, not knowing that it was the angels and those demons who had been begotten by them that did these things to men, and women, and cities, and nations which they related, ascribed them to God Himself.” St. Justin Martyr Second Apology 5 .

42 “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” I John 3:8.

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43 Fotis Kontoglou, “Church Calendars,” Orthodoxos Typos 131 (Athens), 1 January 1971.

44 St. Basil the Great, Homily 13 . 2, Exhortation to Holy Baptism (PG 31. 428 and 95, 1272).

45 Library of Greek Fathers, vol. 40, pp. 60-61.

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46 “‘I am father, I am brother, I am bridegroom, I am dwelling place, I am food, I am raiment, I am root, I am foundation, all whatsoever thou willest, I am.’ ‘Be thou in need of nothing, I will be even a servant, for I came to minister, not to be ministered unto; I am friend, and member, and head, and brother, and sister, and mother; I am all; only cling thou closely to me. I was poor for thee, and a wanderer for thee, on the Cross for thee, in the tomb for thee, above I intercede for thee to the Father; on earth I am come for thy sake an ambassador from my Father. Thou art all things to me, brother, and joint heir, and friend, and member.’ What wouldest thou more?” St. John Chrysostom, Homily 76 on the Gospel of Matthew (PG 58. 700).

47 “‘The end of the world’ signifies not the annihilation of the world, but its transformation. Everything will be transformed suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye…. And the Lord will appear in glory on the clouds. Trumpets will sound, and loud, with power! They will sound in the soul and conscience! All will become clear to the human conscience. The Prophet Daniel, speaking of the Last Judgement, relates how the Ancient of Days, the Judge, sits on His throne, and before Him is a fiery stream (Dan. 7:9-10). Fire is a purifying element; it burns sins. Woe to a man if sin has become a part of his nature: then the fire will burn the man himself.

“This fire will be kindled within a man: seeing the Cross, some will rejoice, but others will fall into confusion, terror, and despair. Thus will men be divided instantly. The very state of a man’s soul casts him to one side or the other, to right or to left.

“The more consciously and persistently a man strives toward God in his life, the greater will be his joy when he hears ‘Come unto Me, ye blessed.’ And conversely the same words will call the fire of horror and torture on those who did not desire Him, who fled and fought or blasphemed Him during their lifetime!

“The Last Judgement knows of no witnesses or written protocols! Everything is inscribed in the souls of men and these records, these ‘books’, are opened at the Judgement. Everything becomes clear to all and to oneself.

“And some will go to joy, while others – to horror.

“When ‘the books are opened,’ it will become clear that the roots of all vices lie in the human soul. Here is a drunkard or a lecher: when the body has died, some may think that sin is dead too. No! There was an inclination to sin in the soul, and that sin was sweet to the soul, and if the soul has not repented of the sin and has not freed itself from it, it will come to the Last Judgement also with the same desire for sin. It will never safisty that desire and in that soul there will be the suffering of hatred. It will accuse everyone and everything in its tortured condition, it will hate everyone and everything. ‘There will be gnashing of teeth’ of powerless malice and the unquenchable fire of hatred.

“A ‘fiery gehenna’ – such is the inner fire. ‘Here there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ Such is the state of hell.” Archbishop John Maximovitch, “The Last Judgement,” Orthodox Word (November December, 1966) 177-78.