All In The Head

Some questions are so obvious we fail to ask them.

Is it all in the head?

The question is whether the sense of spiritual, refers to anything other than ourselves. Is there any connection between myself and others, between myself and God, between myself and nature, or is such a perception only a set of ideas in my head?

In classical theological/philosophical language, the question is between realism and nominalism. Nominalism, a philosophy that generally dates back to William of Ockham (1288-1348), holds that universals (ideas, concepts, etc.) only exist in the mind. Realism holds that universals have an existence outside the mind. These divisions, inside/outside, may be increasingly problematic in a post-Newtonian world.

For Christians this question is more than “angels dancing on the head of a pin.” At its heart, the question asks about the nature of sacraments and relationships. For many Protestant Christians, nominalism has become the default position. The sacraments are decidedly not real (in the philosophical sense). The bread and wine of the Eucharist are simply bread and wine. Their “spiritual reality” lies in the mind of the believer. Memorial theories of the Eucharist are quite clear about this: the Eucharist is only a remembrance (in the mental sense). Baptism is an obedience – nothing happens (except in the mind). Indeed, within this theological tradition, things spiritual are all in the head. Faith is a mental attitude. Love, kindness, forgiveness, etc., all find their existence as concepts within the mind. Christianity, within this tradition, is the adherence to a set of concepts.

Older Christian traditions, particularly Eastern Orthodoxy, are decidedly realist. The Eucharist is truly Christ’s Body and Blood; Baptism is a true union with Christ. All that exists does so as communion and participation. Everything we know, we know to some extent through participation. The inter-connectedness of all of creation is not a mental construct – it is a description of how things truly are.

There is a middle ground, fairly common within some Christian traditions. The general, nominalist view is accepted, but with exceptions for certain things such as the sacraments. I suspect that many “traditional” Christians find themselves within this view of the world. Modern culture is deeply nominalist. It assumes that things exist within themselves. All connections are merely mental associations. Such “two-storey” lives are stuck in a constant battle. The assumptions of nominalism feel “obvious” (as do most cultural assumptions). The reality of the sacraments runs counter to the obvious, constantly requiring a different set of assumptions (or the suspension of the obvious). This suspension is called “faith.”

It is important to note that this last view, the middle ground, does not have a sacramental view of the universe. It has a sacramental view of the sacraments – a tenuous set of temporary assumptions, at best.

These differences in world-view do much to explain the conversational difficulties between Orthodoxy and most other Christian traditions. Orthodoxy is decidedly realist. However, such realism requires some additional thought and understanding.

There is a view of realism (also quite ancient) which gives rise to magical and “superstitious” practices. If the interconnectedness of all things is understood in a manner similar to all things in nature (as just one more set of quasi-physical phenomena), then attempts to manipulate and control this interconnectedness becomes an obvious temptation. These attempts to control and manage take the form of magic and superstition. Various animist religions, some forms of paganism, and most efforts to influence “luck,” all have something of this world-view in common.

I have often thought that “good luck” is the most fundamental religious urge of all people. Modern notions of “prosperity gospel” and the like are simply semi-sophisticated versions of superstition. They have little or nothing to do with classical Christianity. Orthodoxy is by no means immune to magical practices. There are widespread abuses in much of the Orthodox world that are simply magical superstitions. These, too, have nothing to do with classical Christianity. No form of the Christian faith is without its temptations.

Orthodox Christianity holds to a realist view of the world – but does so out of regard to God as the Creator and Sustainer of all that is (“in Him we live, we move and have our being”). The universe is not established on abstract spiritual principles – inert laws of the “supernatural.” The universe is established by God and the principles of all things are rooted in God.

All of creation is a sacrament – but not of Plato’s forms or the ether of magic’s dreams. Creation is a multiform sacrament of God’s love, revealing itself to those who are God’s friends. The emptiness of modern man lies in his alienation from the world in which he lives. Even his primitive hunger for luck bears witness to his desperation for connection and meaning. The path to that connection and its communion lies through the Cross of Christ. In Him we find ourselves plunged into the uncreated life that sustains all things. And in that life sacrament and reality become one.

Where is reality to be found?

There are no criteria to which any Christian can appeal in order to win an argument. A world-view is an a priori assumption. Christians holding a classical understanding (such as the realism of Orthodox Christianity) have antiquity on their side. Nominalist views evolved at a period in time well-beyond the New Testament and early church era. Whatever nominalism is, it is not the view of ancient Christians.

But is the view of ancient Christianity true? Fr. John Romanides described Orthodox theology as “empirical dogmatics.” He did not mean an empiricism rooted in Enlightenment theories of objective reality. Rather, he meant that the teachings of the Orthodox faith are rooted in experience and borne out in the lives of its saints. Without embracing the entire body of Romanides teaching, it is easy to affirm his simple contention. The triumph of Hesychast teaching in the 14th century (a defense of monastic experience and its understanding of the knowledge of God) set Orthodoxy squarely in the middle of empirical dogma. “He who prays is a theologian, and a theologian is one who prays.” The truth of the classical Christian understanding is found in a life conformed to that understanding.

This empirical dogma is not an argument. It goes where no argument can follow. It is, like the gospel itself, an invitation. It can be proclaimed to the world, but like all things empirical, only experience will confirm its truth.

It is popularly said of Orthodoxy that it is not a set of beliefs, but a way of life. In many respects, this is simply a manner of saying that Orthodoxy is not a nominalist view of the world, but a revelation about the world itself.

Those who stand outside inquiring should ask themselves: did Christ come to assert a set of ideas, or did He come to reveal a way of living? If the latter – then it is not just inside the head.

The Communion of Saints in Prayer

Biblical interpretation and doctrine based on Scripture have certain parameters that anyone rightly handling the word of truth must observe. The particular rule that I have in mind in this posting is the simple avoidance of anachronisms. That is, if an idea did not exist at the time of the New Testament, or shortly thereafter, but is, in fact, a modern development, then, whatever the writer might have meant, he could not have meant something that wasn’t an idea until the modern period. This is a fairly simple rule. If it can be shown that an idea is uniquely modern, then, if it is used as an interpretation of Scripture, we can be sure that the interpreter is reading back into Scripture something that is not there nor can be there.

In no case is this sort of anachronism more flagrant nor more distorting of Christian doctrine, than the notion of the self – and thus of the nature of what it is to be human. The idea of what it means to be a person, or “the self”, etc., is not a given. It varies widely from culture to culture (particularly between ancient cultures). Evidence of this would be quite strong if one was comparing the Christian understanding of the self (in any form) and the Buddhist conception of the self (or the non-self).

But within Christianity, the self has undergone radical change in its definition and the cultural understanding of what it means to be a person. One of the most magisterial treatments of this topic was published in 1989, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. For years, Taylor taught Moral Philosophy at Oxford and more recently at McGill University. He has his own philosophical agenda that is not of particular interest to me, but in the course of his work he offers one of the best descriptions of the evolution in Western thought of the conception of the human person.

He notes that a radical change took place at the time of the Reformation and the early Enlightenment. The arguments of the time succeeded in redefining what it meant to be a person – particularly a person in relation to God. At stake was the theological effort to undermine the traditional claims and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, many of which were simply the common inheritance of both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the understanding and teaching of the early Church.

In a very insightful passage, Taylor has this to say about the Church and the change it underwent with regard to the emerging modern identity:

If the church is the locus and vehicle of the sacred, then we are brought closer to God by the very fact of belonging and participating in its sacramental life. Grace can come to us mediately through the church, and we can mediate grace to each other, as the lives of the saints enrich the common life on which we all draw. Once the sacred is rejected, then this kind of mediation is also. Each person stands alone in relation to God: his or her fate – salvation or damnation – is separately decided. [emphasis added]

As his description of this change develops he describes what happens to the Catholic Christian who is redefined by the Reformation (which happened throughout the Protestant world).

I am a passenger in the ecclesial ship on its journey to God. But for Protestantism, there can be no passengers. This is because there is no ship in the Catholic sense, no common movement carrying humans to salvation. Each believer rows his or her own boat. [emphasis added]

The great shift that occurred was to move from seeing a human being as a person participating in a common human nature – indeed whose existence and salvation are to be understood almost entirely in terms of participation (koinonia). The shift was a move towards the modern autonomous individual who is defined primarily by the choices made in his/her life. The modern individual, understood as consumer, is an almost perfect example of the evolution of this thought. Taylor’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to follow this movement in the history of Western thought.

However, the modern conception of autonomous man is a concept not shared by Scripture. It does not undergird the thought of St. Paul or St. John, indeed it undermines both if it is wrongly brought into the realm of Scriptural interpretation. Its application in Christian doctrine has tended to shift the emphasis in modern Christian teaching away from a sacramental (participatory) understanding and towards a form of volunteerism where the decision of an individual for Christ is the sole defining characteristic of salvation.

Interestingly, Christ never said, “Except a man accept me as His personal Lord and Savior He shall not inherit eternal life,” even though many modern Christians would think that much of what He said means precisely that.

Christ does say, “Except a man be born again (or “born from above” the Greek is purposefully ambiguous) he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” But birth is not an autonomous act, nor does it ever involve a decision by the one being born. I am not arguing here that the role of the human will plays no role in salvation, for it does – but not in the way imagined by modern volunteerists.

In the classical Christian understanding of what it means to be human – we do not exist alone – but as participants in a common nature – and though our fall from grace has left us damaged – so that we generally experience ourselves as autonomous individuals – this is not our proper end – salvation restores us to a place of proper communion with God and with other persons. There is an extension, an enlargement of the self, such that our life can no longer be defined simply by reference to the self, but must be seen as it exists in communion with God and others. Thus love becomes the defining act of our existence.

In no place does this participatory understanding of human existence play a greater role than in the life of the Church – both the Church that we see – and the Church that we do not see – the saints who surround us and pray unceasingly before the throne of God.

It is this proper understanding of human salvation that is safeguarded in the Church’s teaching of the communion and intercession of the saints. And it is the self understood in its modern, autonomous form that makes the doctrine of the intercession of the saints seem so foreign to many modern believers. Saints for them simply get in an individual’s way when he seeks to relate to God.

But if the human person and his salvation are understood in a proper participatory sense – nothing could be more normal than the intercession of the saints. It is simply a description of what it means to actually share a common life – the life of God. How can those who share in the common life of God not care for and pray for one another? How can they not solicit each other’s concern? Far from distracting from God – it draws us towards a right understanding of God – who is the Lord of Hosts – not the God of the autonomous individual.

Thus St. Paul when looking for ways to describe proper Church life will use images such as the body to describe how we are to relate to Christ and to one another. We cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” We cannot say to the saints, “I have no need of you.”

In classical Christian teaching we are told, “No one is saved alone. If we fall, we fall alone. But no one is saved alone.”

Our will has its role. Orthodoxy strongly teaches the importance of asceticism (acts such as fasting and prayer, almsgiving, etc.). But the purpose of asceticism is not self-improvement, but simply to learn cooperation with the communion of grace that is saving us. In fasting and prayer we learn that our life depends not on ourselves but on others – God who is the Source of all life – and our proper communion with the rest of creation.

The Church never teaches a doctrine or dogma simply for the sake of teaching. Such proclamations are always about the truth as revealed to us in Christ – particularly as it relates to our salvation. The intercession of the saints is one such dogma. For it safeguards the revealed teaching concerning what it means to be a human created in the image of God and the very nature of our salvation. Human beings are created such that we are meant to share and live a common life – the life of God. The Communion of Saints is simply a dogmatic expression of that reality – a verbal icon of the truth of our being.

The Intuition of Narnia

A child, in a game of hide-and-seek, enters a large wardrobe. However, the wardrobe is more than furniture – it is a doorway into another world. That entrance is the introduction of the world of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis’ children stories, beloved by one generation, are block-buster movies in today’s empire of Disney. In that wonderland of cinema, the books are overwhelmed in images of battling dwarves and unicorns. Echoes of Tolkien (and the grand cinematography of LOTR movies haunt Narnia). But Narnia is something very different from Middle Earth, though Lewis and Tolkien were extremely close friends. Unlike Middle Earth, Narnia has a direct connection with the world we inhabit. Its mythology echoes our own (necessarily, Lewis would have said). Middle Earth has echoes of our world, but it stands on it own – complete with the deep mythos of the Simarillion.

Every volume of Lewis’ Narnia has, at its heart, an allegory of the Christian life. Whether it be Creation in the Magicians Nephew or Golgotha and the Resurrection in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, every volume has something to say about the Christian life. Tolkien actually criticized Lewis for this very thing. Both were devout Christians, but Tolkien saw himself as a writer of myth, a very deep vocation that cannot be understood apart from reading a great deal about the Inklings and the work of Owen Barfield (another friend) in particular. It is an area of Tolkien neglected by all but a few (I wrote my senior thesis in seminary on Barfield).

Lewis ignored Tolkien’s critique and proceeded to do what he did best – defend and explain the gospel of Christ. Narnia is a very deep, imaginative apologetic for the gospel of Jesus Christ and nothing less. If someone is not converted to the faith by reading it, then they are certainly not made into an enemy of the gospel. If you like Narnia, then you should at least wish the gospel of Christ were true.

In The Last Battle, Professor Digory Kirke exclaims, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” I have seen a number of fairly silly speculations about the Professor’s meaning, though it is quite clear in the greater body of Lewis’ work – and is a key to the Narnian tales. It is the relationship between worlds – an allegory which is yet real. The stories of Narnia could have stood on their own as pure modern allegory (as stories within themselves that only bear resemblance to the gospel). However, Lewis’ genius and Christian belief, are made far more clear in the literary device of connected worlds. This world has a relationship to another world – and there are doors and windows between them.

Digory, as a young lad, visits Narnia at the time of its creation. The world’s creator, Aslan, sends Digory on a journey to find an apple. The apple was planted and grew into a magical tree, The Tree of Protection, that kept the evil Witch from attacking Narnia for some centuries.

Digory took a piece of fruit from the tree back to Earth and gave it to his ill and bedridden mother to eat, healing her of her illness. When the fruit was eaten to its core, Digory took the core and planted it in his yard. The tree grew just as well as its sister tree in Narnia, and seemed to have a link to the other tree – it sometimes moved when there was no wind…at least not in London. The tree was eventually blown down and its wood was used to build a wonderful Wardrobe. (From WikiNarnia).

As an old man, it is Professor Digory who first helps the Pevensie children in their questions regarding a magical world and their sister Lucy’s tales of a magical Wardrobe.

“You mean there really could be other worlds all over the place?” Peter asks.

The Professor responds, “But nothing is more probable! Oh! I wonder what they do teach them at these schools!”

In the same conversation the Professor uses Lewis’ classic defense of the gospel – only this time with regard to the child Lucy’s story of a magical world. Professor Digory is the voice of C.S. Lewis.

And here the intuition of Narnia connects with the experience of the Christian convert, Lewis. He was a great student of the classics and a master of the medieval period. In his early years at Oxford (during which he was an atheist), Lewis became friends with J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and engaged in long conversations about the Christian faith. Much of that conversation turned on the topic of myth. Lewis had a love of myth, of the ancient stories. They stirred a place within him that had an element of longing. Tolkien’s point was that all these myths – the repeated tales of the dying and rising god – were actually fulfilled in the historical reality of Christ. Lewis’ conversion to the faith was expressed precisely in terms of those myths:

“Rum thing. It all seems to have happened once.”

As Lewis himself found Christianity to be the fulfillment of humanity’s deepest, even mythic longings, so, too he offered the gospel in the same manner. His logical books, Mere Christianity, the Problem of Pain, Miracles, are all interesting reads – but it is his fiction where his voice finds its fullness. In that fiction there is always a mythic or allegorical connection between worlds. In the Perelandra Trilogy, the myth bursts onto the scene complete with science fiction and Merlin himself, in a mix of Authurian Christianity that could only be written by an Englishman. The Great Divorce takes a trip to heaven (and hell) in a book whose imagery Lewis warns his readers not to take literally – though its richness cannot help but empower the theological imagination of everyone who reads it.

Lewis is a Christian for whom Christianity has not lost its mythic power. The weakness of literalism is its acute limitation to itself. Lewis would be the first to say, “Yes. Christ’s death and resurrection are historical events.” But he would have hurried to add that their historical character does not rob them of their mythic character – indeed the very fact that they are real inherently means that they are mythic – for the true character of reality lies in its mythic power.

Lewis and Tolkien agreed that God is the great maker of myths. God tells the story of the world and the story is the world itself. We are created with an ear for story and we long to hear it. Tolkien once said, “If God is mythopoetic, then we must become mythopathic.” If God is a teller of stories, then we must become able to hear those stories. Both Tolkien and Lewis, specifically as Christians, become the greatest story-tellers of the 20th century.

And this brings me back to the heart of my own thoughts. The mythic character of reality is another way to speak of a one-storey universe. In Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s terms, the world is sacrament – pointing to and participating in something beyond itself. It is possible to simply speak on the most literal level – to speak of events (such as Christ’s crucifixion) – and relate them to ideas (such as atonement) which inhabit the world of the mind. But such literalism renders the greatest event in the universe into the merest incident of which our later doctrine is the greater reality. The intuition of Lewis is the same as the intuition and teaching of the fathers. The Cross is both event in history and also the truest event of the Great Myth. Its power is such that it draws other things to itself. It is the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, Isaac on Mt. Moriah, the staff of Moses with the snake, the outstretched arms of Moses at the battle with the Amalekites, the Tree that Moses cast into the bitter water, the Footstool of God. At the Feast of the Holy Cross the Church declares: “Let all the trees of the wood, planted from the beginning of time, rejoice; for their nature hath been sanctified by the stretching of Christ on the Tree” (Magnification of the Feast).

The intuition of Narnia (it’s all there in Plato) is that the world is sacrament and icon, doorway and ladder. The angels of God are constantly ascending and descending. The saints surround us as a great cloud of witnesses. Heaven and earth are full of the glory of God and secular materialism is a bankrupt, empty philosophy that robs the world of wonder. Enter the Church and the icons are windows to heaven – not “like” windows to heaven – just windows to heaven. The Baptismal font flows with the streams of the Jordan and the dragons who lurk there are crushed. Christ is in our midst and offers His true body and blood, “In the fear of God, with faith and love draw near!”

The Sacrament of Mercy

There are many things that Christians think about that have been spiritualized out of existence. Our secular culture tends to grant two kinds of realities: the first is the reality of solid objects – or things we treat as solid objects. The second is the reality of thought and imagination. Of course, we do not really think that thought and imagination have any reality. This is one of the great weaknesses of modern secular culture. The imaginary world (which I have described as the “Second-Storey“) sometimes includes God Himself.

The imaginary world certainly includes God’s “thoughts.” Abstractions such as God’s justice, His goodness, His mercy, His kindness, are treated as attitudes – God’s feelings, if you will. In such a theological world, what matters are those things we do to adjust God’s feelings and attitudes. It is the ultimate form of co-dependency.

The world-view of classical Christianity (of which Orthodoxy is the primary expression in the modern world) sees the world in a One-Storey form. The world is better understood as sacrament or icon. We do not live in a dual existence – torn between thought and matter. The God Whom we know became flesh and dwelt among us – and we would not know Him had He not done so.

This God Who makes Himself known, is the God Who gives Himself to us in the sacraments. Those events in the life of the Church, such as the Holy Eucharist, Ordination, Holy Unction, Marriage, etc., are moments in which we receive the very life of God, united to us making possible the life of grace. The so-called “seven” sacraments are really not an exhaustive list (by Orthodox understanding). For those with the eyes to see, the whole world is a sacrament – all things are properly a means of receiving the grace of God. The One-Storey universe is the arena in which we encounter and know God – everywhere and at all times. In such a world, the character of the Christian life is measured in how we ourselves accept the reality of God which is given to us at all times and everywhere. We do not and cannot change God’s thoughts or feelings (what do we mean by such language?). We have God made known to us in Christ, “the same yesterday, today and forever.” It is His love and His mercy that we find at every moment and every place. It abides (“His mercy endures forever”).

The goodness of God (and of His creation) surrounds us at all times. Even within the situations where we encounter pain and difficulty – those situations we would label “evil,” are never devoid of goodness (though sometimes obscured). The spiritual life can be understood as a journey towards the goodness of God.

Good and evil are not static terms (though we speak of them that way). Good and evil within creation are dynamic. All of creation is in motion – nothing is at rest. We were created good – directed towards God who alone is good within Himself. Our purpose, meaning, even existence itself is found in our end – Christ God. He is our good. The good we know in this life is our movement towards Him.

By the same token, evil is a movement away from our good, away from Christ. It is the rejection of our proper end and a substitution of a false end. Thus such movement has no meaning that is true, no purpose that is correct, no existence that is real.

In such a world, our actions become deeply important. At any moment we can change direction – turning towards God and away from that which is not God. This is the heart of repentance.

This is the sacrament of mercy – the sacrament of goodness itself. Those actions that are merciful and kind are more than attitudes and thoughts – they are united with the very life of God and fulfill our lives and the universe in which we live. Our culture is psychologized in the extreme, too often divorced from action and effort, mired in abstraction. The good God acts on our behalf – He became flesh and dwelt among us and continues to give Himself, His own life. We are not invited into God’s attitudes – we are invited into His love.

Accepting life in a One-Storey universe is difficult. The habit of our culture runs counter to such an understanding. But we would do well to see just how concrete is the mercy of God, how solid His love. We would do well to see how concrete should be our own mercy and kindness. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

A note for readers: I will be on retreat until February 18 and unable to manage or respond to comments. Keep the peace with one another.

Giving Thanks

The act of giving thanks is among the most fundamental acts of love. It lies at the very heart of worship – in which, in the words of Archimandrite Zacharias of Essex, there is an exchange. In giving thanks we make an offering which itself is always inferior to what we have received – but which is itself an enlargement of the human heart. To live rightly in the presence and communion of God is to live in a state of constant thanksgiving. For from Him we receive all that we have – our life and existence, all good things, the hope of redemption, and the joy of communion. The offering of thanksgiving is the acknowledgement within our heart that we ourselves are not the author of any of these things, but are rather the recipients – those who receive gifts from God.

The offering of our heart in the giving of thanks is itself an act of joy and of love. It is a moving away from ourselves as the center of our existence and the recognition that our true life is centered elsewhere – in Christ Himself.

We are also the recipients of many things from others around us. No one is self-sufficient. There is no such thing as a “self-made” man. The offering of thanks is a matter of living in our right mind – the failure to give thanks, an act of insanity (unwholeness).

With all of these things in mind, the teaching of Scripture to “give thanks always for all things” becomes yet clearer. We offer thanks not “from time to time,” or “whenever we feel grateful,” but always and for all things. Such an offering is itself an act of communion, a receiving of the love of God through gratefully acknowledging His gifts. To refuse to give thanks is, for the same reason, a rupture in our communion with God.

The Holy Eucharist (eucharist=”thanksgiving”) is thus not simply a sacrament which is celebrated in the Church on an occasional or even regular basis – but a description and revelation of the truth of our life. We were created to live “eucharistically,” always giving thanks to God.

It seems to me no coincidence that St. John Chrysostom, the author of the most common Eucharistic prayer in the Orthodox Church, offered his last words as a Eucharistic offering. Exiled to the very edge of the empire by an ungrateful Emperor, St. John’s last words were, “Glory to God for all things.”

Indeed.

Religion as Neurotic Delusion

From the Journal of Father Alexander Schmemann, Saturday, December 31, 1977

Father Tom gave me a circular Christmas letter from some Trappist in Massachusetts. In his monastery, all traditions meet (West, East, Buddhism), all rites, all experiences. Sounds rather barbarian. It is as if traditions were some sort of clothing. Dress as a Buddhist – and right away an “experience.” This cheap, murky wave of spirituality, this petty syncretism, these exclamations marks – upset me. “I celebrate once a week the Divine Liturgyin the rite of Chrysostom in the joy…” Shamelessness of this contemporary religion. “Culture cannot be improvised,” notes Julien Green. Nor can religion. In the midst of all the excitement where one has to live, one literally loses courage. One wants to leave. A cup of coffee and a hamburger in a simple diner are more authentic, more real, than all this religious chatter. As the sacrament is impossible without bread, wine and water, so religion requires peace, true daily preac. Without it, religion quickly becomes a neurosis, a self-deception, a delusion.

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1977 was a strange time. I was in seminary, just beginning the heady study and thought of various theological teachers. Would that one of those teachers had been Fr. Schmemann.  For some strange reason, Anglican seminarians, were constantly afflicted with experimentation. Experimentation in parishes usally carried a back-lash, thus we were saddled with a never-ending drama of liturgies. Sometimes juggling as many as five or six books.

You cannot pray with five or six books to balance.

And then we had to report on the “experience.” I’m certain that I came off as a grumpy young man who wanted little more than to stumble into chapel in the half-dark, grab my well-word copy of Cranmer, and some beads and be allowed to pray without experimentation. Sweet peace.

Variety is not something we do for God’s sake. Appropriately the liturgy changes for Lent and feast days, etc. but the variety is there for our salvation nor our entertainment. The same is generally true of our private prayers – it is an offering before God, and if we pay attention to our hearts, it can become an offering of our selves, our souls and bodies.

The quiet of which Schmemann speaks is even harder – particularly when it is God who fills the silence and not us (rare occasions). Come sweet peace and fill our hearts, with the soundless wonder of the richness of the Word. Drive away the gloomy thoughts of sin, and neurosis, self delusion and delusion that so easily tumble from our hearts.

Salvation, Ontology, Existential, and Other Large Words

In recent posts I have contrasted morality with ontological, as well as existential, etc. I’ve had comments here and elsewhere in which people stumbled over the terms. The distinction offered is not a private matter. Orthodox theologians for better than a century have struggled to make these points as being utterly necessary to the life of the Orthodox faith. The following is a small article of mine that tries to do some of the same. In a nutshell: morality is “life according to rules or reasonable philosophies.” The Orthodox contention is that morality fails to describe the true nature of the Christian life. Rather the world ontological is more proper: it means have to do with the very being of someone – their essence. What we need is not a change in behavior (morality) but a change in who we are (ontology). Christ came to change us, not reform us. 

Morality does not use Orthodox means – it’s all in the “head.” It is rules. Ontological change requires that our very being or existence (thus the word existential) be united with Christ, His life becomes our life and thus we live a new life. Once this fundamental approach is understood, so we can begin to under the mysteries of the Church and the true character of our life in Christ. Thus this article – a meager thing meant to be of some help. 

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The nature of things is an important question to ask – or should I say an a priori question. For once we are able to state what is the nature of things then the answers to many questions framed by the nature of things will also begin to be apparent. All of this is another way of saying that questions have a way of determining answers. So what is the nature of things? More specifically, what is the nature of things such that Christians believe humanity needs salvation? (Non-Christians will already feel co-opted but I write as a Christian – can’t be helped).

I want to state briefly several things which seem to me to be of importance about the nature of things in this regard.

1. It is the nature of things that man does not have a legal problem with God. That is to say, the nature of our problem is not forensic. The universe is not a law-court.

2. It is the nature of things that Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live. This is to say that the nature of our problem is not moral but existential or ontological. We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.

3. It is the nature of things that human beings were created to live through communion with God. We were not created to live as self-sufficient individuals marked largely by our capacity for choice and decision. To restate this: we are creatures of communion, not creatures of consumption.

So much for the nature of things. (I’ll do my best to leave behind the syllogisms and return to my usual form of writing.)

Much of my experience as an American Christian has been an encounter with people who do not see mankind’s problem as existential or ontological – but rather as moral. They have seen that we behave badly and thought that the primary task of the Church (following whatever event was considered “necessary” for salvation) was to help influence people to be “good.” Thus I recall a Sunday School teacher who in my pre-school years (as well as a first-grade teacher who attempted the same) urging me and my classmates to “take the pledge.” That is, that we would agree not to smoke tobacco or drink alcohol before age 21. The assumption seemed to be that if we waited that long then we would likely never begin. In at least one of those cases an actual document was proffered. For the life of me I cannot remember whether I signed or not. The main reason I cannot remember was that the issues involved seemed unimportant to me at the time. Virtually every adult in my life smoked. And I was not generally familiar with many men who did not drink. Thus my teachers were asking me to sign a document saying that I thought my father and my grandfather were not good men. I think I did not sign. If I did, then I lied and broke the pledge at a frightfully early age.

My later experience has proven the weakness of the assumptions held by the teachers of my youth. Smoking wasn’t so much right or wrong as it was addicting and deadly. I smoked for 20 years and give thanks to God for the grace he gave me to quit. I feel stupid as I look back at the actions of those 20 years, but not necessarily “bad.” By the same token, I have known quite a few alcoholics (some of them blood relatives) and have generally found them to be about as moral as anyone else and sometimes moreso. I have also seen the destruction wrought by the abuse of alcohol. But I have seen similar destruction in families who never drank and the continuation of destruction in families where alcohol had been removed. Drinking can have serious consequences, but not drinking is not the same thing as curing the problem.

I had a far more profound experience, indeed a series of experiences, when I was ten years old – experiences that made a much deeper impression and framed the questions that burned in my soul about the nature of things.

The first experience was the murder of an aunt. She was 45 and a darling of the family. Everyone loved her. Her murder was simply a matter of “random” chance – she was in the wrong place at the wrong time or simply in a convenient place for a man who meant to do great harm to someone. No deep mystery, just a brutal death. The same year another aunt died as a result of a multi-year battle with lupus (an auto-immune disease). And to add to these things, my 10th year was also the year of Kennedy’s assassination. Thus when the year was done it seemed to me that death was an important question – even the important question.

It probably says that I was marked by experiences that were unusual for a middle-class white boy in the early 60’s. It also meant that when I later read Dostoevsky in my teens, I was hooked.

The nature of things is that people die – and not only do they die – but death, already at work in them from the moment of their birth, is the primary issue. The failure of humanity is not to be found or understood in a purely moral context. We are not creatures of choice and decision. How and why we choose is a very complex process that we ourselves do not understand. We can make a “decision” for Jesus only to discover that little has changed. It is also possible to find ourselves caught in a chain of decisions that bring us to the brink of despair without knowing quite how we got there. Though there are clearly problems with our choosing and deciding, the problem is far deeper.

One of the earliest Christian treatments of the human problem, hence the “nature of things,” is to be found in St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. He makes it quite clear that the root problem of humanity is to be found in the process of death. Not only are we all slowly moving towards some inevitable demise, the process of death (decay, corruption) is already at work in us. In Athanasius’ imagery, it is as though we are falling back towards our origins in the dust of the earth. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

And thus it is that when he writes of the work of Christ it is clearly in terms of our deliverance from death (not just deliverance from the consequences of our bodily dissolution and its separation from the soul but the whole process of death itself.)

This is frequently the language of the New Testament as well. St. Paul will write: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live I live by the faith of the son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Or even on a more “moral” note he will caution us to “put to death the deeds of the body.”

The importance of these distinctions (moral versus existential) is in how we treat our present predicament. If the problem is primarily moral then it makes sense to live life in the hortatory mode, constantly urging others to be good, to “take the pledge,” or make good choices. If, on the other hand, our problem is rooted in the very nature of our existence then it is that existence that has to be addressed. And again, the New Testament, as well as the Tradition of the Church, turns our attention in this direction. Having been created for union with God, we will not be able to live in any proper way without that union. Thus our Baptism unites us to the death and resurrection of Christ, making possible a proper existence. Living that proper existence will not be done by merely trying to control our decisions and choices, but by consciously and unconsciously working to maintain our union with God. We are told “greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” Thus our victory, and the hope of our victory is “Christ within you, the hope of glory.”

And so if we will live in such communion we will struggle to pray, not as a moral duty, but as the very means of our existence. We pray, we fast, we give alms, we confess, we commune, not in order to be better people, but because if we neglect these things we will die. And the death will be slow and marked by the increasing dissolution of who and what we are.

In over 30 years of ministry, I have consistently found this model of understanding to better describe what I encounter and what I live on a day to day basis. In the past twelve years of my life as an Orthodox Christian, I have found this account of things not only to continue to describe reality better – but also to be in conformity with the Fathers. It is a strong case for Christian Tradition that it actually describes reality as we experience it better than the more modern accounts developed in the past four hundred years or so. Imagine. People understood life a thousand years ago such that they continue to describe the existential reality of modern man. Some things do not change – except by the grace of God and His infinite mercy.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Orthodox Christians (New Calendar) are currently observing a two-week fast in preparation for the Feast of the Dormition, a day which marks the death (“falling asleep”) of the Mother of God. For those for whom such feasts are foreign, it is easy to misunderstand what the Orthodox are about – and to assume that this is simply a feast to Mary because we like that sort of thing. Flippant attitudes fail to perceive the depths of the mystery of our salvation. The Dormition of the Mother of God is one of many doorways into that mystery – all of which is Christ – who alone is our salvation.

The Christian life, as taught by the Scriptures and the fathers, is grounded in the mystery and reality of communion. We do not exist alone, nor do we exist merely as a collection. Our lives are a communion of lives. We share one another in ways that permeate the whole of our being. I am unique, and yet I am also the child of Jim and Nancy. Though I am unique, so much of who I am and what I am is their lives and the lives of generations of human beings and culture – not just genetic relatives – but all of humanity. Without such knowledge (whether conscious or unconscious), we do not love as we should and will not live as we should. Your life is my life; God help us.

The belief that God became man in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, makes no sense and has but little value apart from the reality of life understood as communion. It is thus crucial that the Creed confesses, “He took flesh of the Virgin Mary and was made man.” The womb of the Virgin was not “borrowed space” which God inhabited until His birth. The womb of the Virgin is also that place and that source by which God “took flesh of the Virgin Mary.”

There are many theological accounts of Christ and His work of salvation that center almost solely upon the idea of Christ as a sacrifice on the Cross that pays the penalty of our sins (the doctrine of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement). This account tends to “stand on its own.” There is nothing inherent within Christ’s birth from a Virgin to such a view of the Atonement. Nor does the Virgin herself have any inherent connection to the saving acts of God as made known to us in the Scriptures. Thus those who profess her virginity in such cases only do so because it is recorded in the Scripture – but they do not do so because they understand its true role in our salvation.

However, our salvation is not achieved by an objective payment (even if the image of payment may be found in the Scriptures). The unifying teaching of the Scriptures with regard to Christ is our salvation through union with Him, through true communion in His life.

His Incarnation thus becomes a part of reality of God’s restoration of our communion with Him. He becomes a partaker of our life, that we might become partakers of His. This reality is made profoundly clear in that God not only comes to dwell among us, but comes to do so as a man, having taken flesh of the Virgin Mary. He becomes “flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone” (Ge. 2:23). And yet another image: “And a sword will pierce your own soul also” (Lk. 2:35). Mary is united to Christ in the flesh, and mystical in her soul as well.

Her role in the salvation of the world (through union with Christ) is so profound that it is prophesied in the early chapters of Genesis (Ge. 3:15). She, and the Virgin Birth, are pre-figured repeatedly throughout the Old Testament (as interpreted by the fathers). There is a traditional hymn, sung during the vesting of a Bishop that makes reference to just a small sample of such prefigurements:

Of old the Prophets aforetime proclaimed thee,
the Golden Vessel, the Staff, the Tablet, the Ark,
the Lampstand, the Table, the Uncut Mountain,
the Golden Censer, the Gate Impassible,
and the Throne of the King,
thee did the Prophets proclaim of old.

Perhaps the greatest collection of such references can be found in the 6th century hymn called the Akathist to the Theotokos.

This prefigurement and their abundant use in the fathers, all flow from the fundamental understanding of salvation as communion. Thus she, as the Mother of God, belongs with Christ. She belongs with Him as the Golden Vessel belonged with the Manna (she is the vessel who contained the Bread of Heaven); she belongs with Him as Aaron’s Rod belongs with the buds which sprang forth (that He should be born from her virginal womb is like the life which springs forth from Aarons lifeless rod); she is the Tablet as Christ is the words inscribed; she is the lampstand as Christ Himself is the Lamp, etc.

As the Creed tells us, Christ died, in accordance with the Scriptures. This does not mean in “accordance with the Gospel writings”, but “in accordance with the Scriptures of the Old Testament” (we first see the phrase in 1 Corinthians 15:3). Through the eyes of the fathers and the Tradition of the Church we begin to see that in accordance with the Scriptures is more than the few references that can be found that refer to payment or sacrifice or that point to the Cross. The Gospel given to us includes a very wholistic understanding of salvation and its story – and unfolds that from beginning to end.

The union with the flesh of the Virgin is the union with our humanity – indeed with the whole created order. What Christ takes to Himself in that action, He takes with Himself throughout His ministry, taking it into death and Hades and raising it again with Himself on the third day. Thus St. Paul can say:

Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin (Romans 6:4-6).

These comments on death and resurrection in the context of Baptism, in which “we have been united together,” only make sense in an understanding of salvation as communion.

The death of the Mother of God (for He who was born of her was truly God as well as truly man), commemorated in the Feast of the Dormition, is something in which all of creation shares. For the point of the Incarnation was not simply to take flesh of the Virgin, but to be united with the whole created order. And so creation itself “groans and travails” as it awaits the final completion of our salvation (Romans 8). Or as the Church sings:

All of creation rejoices in Thee, O Full of Grace,
the assembly of angels and the race of men.
O sanctified temple and spiritual paradise,
the glory of virgins,
from whom God was incarnate and became a child.
Our God before the ages,
He made thy body into a throne,
and thy womb He made more spacious than the Heavens.
All of creation rejoices in thee,
O Full of Grace, glory to thee!

Her Dormition is indeed a day the earth stood still – for the Mother of us all passes from death to life.

The Specific Truth

The Truth, spoken in general, is, perhaps, the most easily spoken truth in all the world. It smooths over the rough edges of hard truth and says more easily that to which all can agree. If all can agree – it is not probably the truth – or it is not a truth worth speaking.

As a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, I find the present time to be one in which the truth is both difficult to discern and difficult to speak. My policy on this blog has always been to avoid the “politics” of the moment and to write of things of greater importance. The politics of the moment are among those things hardest to discern. None of us have enough information to speak with clear authority – and we are often compromised by our own allegiances and friendships.

However, I do believe in truth – not the truth that serves only one point-of-view, not a truth that paints itself as all white while painting its opponent as all black. In the long span of human history, such characterizations have rarely proved to be entirely true.

First off, truth is not simply an accurate account of events. Truth is defined in and by a relationship with Jesus Christ. We have all encountered “masters of the truth” who while offering an irrefutable account of events, have somehow departed from the truth as it is in Christ. Telling the truth is a means of our salvation, not a means of gaining an upper hand or of winning battles. Christ has no interest in the upper hand or in winning battles.

All of this is to say that in Christ, there can be no partisanship. Truth judges us all and makes our partisan commitments to be without meaning. Many of our commitments are but a thin disguise for our passions or the false truth of the ego.

Many of the positions of modernity argue for a form of truth that is rather malleable. That we must never offend each other is not a commandment – though some take a perverse pleasure in giving such.

The history of the Church is replete with Bishops, priests and laity who believed that their great mission in life was to rescue the Church from one error or another, just as today there are many (in various churches and elsewhere) who have a deep need to “fix” the world. This is not the same thing as living the truth, telling the truth, or becoming the truth. The world needs to know the truth even as the Truth knows the world.

The Things We Share

Modern culture frequently celebrates the freedom we each enjoy – in come cases going so far as to think of human beings as discreet individuals. Of course each of us lives in his/her own body – but even as such – we live in a common world. What I do and how I live affects others whether I want it to or not. In one manner or another, we live on the consequences of those who have gone before us – our landscapes – our resources – the shape of political boundaries – the language we speak – generally the whole of our life – is something that is being shared with us – again, whether we want it to be so or not.

There is a more profound sharing that takes place within our lives. That sharing is found in the communion, the participation (koinonia), which we have in the life of Christ and, because of Him, in the lives of each other.

In a number of spiritual writings within the Christian East, the word anadoche is used to describe an aspect of this sharing and participation. It’s meaning (at least at the time of its adoption into the language of the Church) is roughly translated, “responsibility.” It seems to have been borrowed from the world of ancient banking in which it has something of the meaning of “surety,” as in to stand surety for the debt of another.

Within the Church it began to be used to describe certain aspects of our mutual existence. Thus the sponsor at Baptism is sometimes referred to as anadochos – someone who is standing as a guarantor of another’s life in Christ. It is also used to describe the relationship between confessor and penitent and between Spiritual Father and disciple. Particularly in the role of Spiritual Fathers, the understanding of anadoche becomes important. The disciple renders obedience to his elder, but his elder bears far more – taking upon himself the burden of another’s salvation.

This, of course, is perhaps the most extreme example of a spiritual principle. That it is possible to take such a reponsibility, to “bear one another’s burdens” as St. Paul describes it – is only possible because our lives are not discrete individual events -but rather a deeply enmeshed communion with the lives of others and everything around us.

I recall some years ago discussing a mistake I had made (canonically) with my Archbishop. He had the authority to punish me for my error (by suspension for a time) or to be harsh in lecturing me, etc. Instead, as a kind father, he listened to my account, noted my ignorance, corrected me, and then said, “Fr. Stephen, you and I will have to bear this.” I was overwhelmed at such mercy. I was not excused, nor was my failure treated as of no consequence. But I was assured by a more mature elder in the faith that he would share the burden of my action. This is anadoche.

When we pray for others, to some extent we enter into a relationship of responsibility. I do not necessarily take something away from someone else, but I willingly thrust myself into the living communion established in Christ, and unite my life with theirs in a mysterious manner. To pray “for the world” is thus not a light thing – but the greatest possible burden. Christ bears the burden to its fullest possible extent. He took upon Himself the sins of the world. This is God’s great anadoche. Christ has become the surety of a better covenant (Heb. 7:22).

But because our lives are united in a communion established by Christ, there are other forms of responsibility, or sharing, as well. We are commanded of Christ not to judge another “lest we ourselves be judged.” This teaching is far deeper than a warning that God will do to us what we do to others. Indeed, God is far more merciful. Rather, Christ’s words are a warning that judging is a dangerous activity.

To judge another is to enter into the life of another – to inadvertently enter into their sins and weakness. Condemnation, according to Christ, is darkness (John 3:19). The communion into which we are called is a communion of love, in which we bear one another’s burdens freely and with love. The communion of darkness is a communion of coercion and force, where sins are not forgiven and where hatred, greed and envy hold court.

Thus we are told by St. John:

God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.  If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.  But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:5-7).

For a similar reason we are taught to “honor our father and mother.” We share a very deep communion with parents and ancestors. To curse them is to curse ourselves. We cannot make it be that we have no father or mother. We can extend the light of Christ even to our past and our foundation, or we can make ourselves stand on a foundation of darkness – a deeply dangerous thing to do.

The world largely lives in a communion of darkness. This is the character of life outside of Christ. It is also the character of many whose lives profess Christ as Lord and Savior. The call to everyone, believer and unbeliever, is to walk in the light. For some such an invitation comes as a relief. To others, it can be heard as a threat or a burden too hard to bear.

Christ has not offered us threats and has asked us only to share in the burden which He Himself carries. Our part of the load is miniscule – such is His mercy.