Knowledge of God (Kyriacos C. Markides)

My role as chauffeur to Father Maximos paid rich dividends. Driving him around the island for his various errands was a unique opportunity to spend many hours alone with him exploring various aspects of Christian spirituality. Dionysios, a young theologian and a novice, complained to me half-jokingly that I had spent more time alone with Father Maximos in a few days than he had during an entire year. Being alone with the abbot outside the more formal context of spiritual counseling and confession was considered a great privilege. I was therefore fully ready and energized when he asked me whether I could drive him at four in the morning to Saint Anna, a women’s monastery. It would take us two hours to get there through mountain roads and he wished to start his work with the sisters no later than six in the morning.

Once a week Father Maximos made the long trip to Saint Anna, spending the entire day with the nuns who had adopted him as their elder. During this time he saw each one of them individually, a process that usually took until nightfall.

We started our journey when the fathers, as Father Maximos referred to his monks, began reciting the Six Psalms (King David’s Psalms) at exactly four in the morning, as was the custom. The air was cool and the stars were still bright in the dark, clear sky above. I kept my eyes on the winding mountain road as Father Maximos sat next to me in his customary casual and unassuming way. We would be together for two hours without any distractions, except for the occasional hare racing in front of us, confused and frightened by the car lights. I lost no time in starting up a conversation about spiritual issues and pushed the button on my minirecorder, which I routinely kept on the dashboard.

I began by reminding him of the talk he had given a few days before to a group of pilgrims from Greece, which I found quite informative. But several questions had lingered in my mind that I didn’t get a chance to ask during that encounter. Father Maximos responded that this would be a good time to raise them. He warned me, however, that he had no idea what he had talked about. On a different occasion he had explained to me that he never prepared for talks. He surrendered to the discretion of the Holy Spirit after praying for the particular event.

“You mentioned in your talk that Christians are misguided to assume that Christ taught that we should be unquestioning believers; that it was a mistake to believe that we should exert no effort in searching for evidence of the reality of God. What did you mean exactly?”

“Oh yes, now I recall. That would be a gross misunderstanding. In fact, Christ urged us to investigate the scriptures, to investigate, that is, God,” Father Maximos responded as he remembered to buckle up. “God loves, you see, to be investigated by us humans.”

“So,” I continued while keeping my eyes firmly on the road, “when Christians recite the Creed, that does not imply that we should accept God’s existence blindly without testing whether in fact God is a reality or an illusion.”

“That is absolutely true. It would be foolish to do so.”

“For an academic like myself your words are very comforting. But the immediate question that comes to my mind,” I continued, “is that if God indeed urges us to be inquisitive, how are we then supposed to conduct our research? Are we to turn to science, to philosophy, or to theology as our starting point?”

I went on to elaborate further what was on my mind. Do we begin our search for God by observing nature? This was Aristotle’s approach. By observing nature and by using his mighty logic, he concluded that there must be a Creator, an “unmoved Mover,” a primal cause that set everything into motion. His four proofs for the existence of God became the foundation of Western theology after Saint Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotelian philosophy into theology.

I noticed a smile on Father Maximos’s face. Avoiding a direct answer, he proceeded instead to raise further questions. “Let’s make things simple. Let’s assume that we wish to investigate a natural phenomenon. As you very well know, in order to do so we need to employ the appropriate scientific methods. If we wish, for example, to study the galaxies, we need powerful telescopes and other such instruments. If we wish to examine the physical health of our hearts, then we need a stethoscope. Everything must be explored through a method appropriate to the subject under investigation. If we, therefore, wish to explore and get to know God, it would be a gross error to do so through our senses or with telescopes, seeking Him out in outer space. That would be utterly naive, don’t you think?”

“Yes, if you put it this way,” I replied. “Can we then conclude that for modern, rational human beings, metaphysical philosophy like that of Plato and Aristotle or rational theology is the appropriate method?” As I raised the question I thought I knew what Father Maximos’s answer would be.

“It would be equally foolish and naive to seek God with our logic and intellect. But we have talked about this before, have we not?”

I nodded as Father Maximos continued. “Consider it axiomatic that God cannot be investigated through such approaches.”

“So, Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics are not the way to know God.”

“But of course not. That’s the message given to us by all the elders and saints throughout history. Logic and reason cannot investigate and know that which is beyond logic and reason. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes. That’s what the mystics have been saying time and again. That God cannot be talked about but must be experienced. But what does that mean? Does it mean that God cannot be studied?”

“No. We can and must study God, and we can reach God and get to know Him.”

“But how?” I persisted.

Father Maximos paused for a few seconds. “Christ Himself revealed to us the method. He told us that not only are we capable of exploring God but we can also live with Him, become one with Him. And the organ by which we can achieve that is neither our senses nor our logic but our hearts.”

Father Maximos reminded me while I strained my eyes on the narrow road that according to the tradition of the holy elders, a person’s existential foundation is the heart. In addition to being the indispensable physical organ that keeps the body alive, he claimed, the heart is also the center of our psychonoetic powers, the center of our beingness, of our personhood. It is therefore through the heart that God reveals Himself to humanity. This is what the holy elders have taught throughout the ages, that God speaks to human beings only through the heart, the optical organ through which one can experience the vision of God. Therefore, those who yearn to see God cannot possibly do so through other means such as by reading Plato and Aristotle or by doing science. Great as their philosophy might be, it is not the way to God. It is only the cleanliness and purity of the heart that can lead to the contemplation and vision of God. This is the meaning, Father Maximos argued, of Christ’s Beatitude, “Blessed be the pure at heart for they shall see God.”

“Do you understand what that means? Those who wish to investigate whether God exists must employ the appropriate methodology which is none other than the purification of the heart from egotistical passions and impurities. If people manage to cleanse their hearts and still fail to see God, then they are justified by concluding that indeed God is a lie, that He does not exist, that He is just a grand illusion. Such people can reject God in all sincerity by saying, ’I followed the method that the saints have given us and failed to find God. Therefore, God does not exist.’

“Don’t you think we would be utterly misguided,” Father Maximos continued, “if we believed in a God for whom there was no evidence of existence, a God that was utterly beyond our grasp, a God that remained silent, never communicating with us in any real and tangible way?”

“But that means,” I concluded, “that most believers are in fact blind believers, or as you called them ’religious ideologists,’ that is, they believe in the ideas about God that they themselves concocted that may have little to do with God. No wonder there are so many problems with religion, so much religious fanaticism.”

“Can you imagine how foolish we would be,” Father Maximos expanded, “and how foolish the hermits and saints would appear, to carry on with their spiritual struggles simply because they believed in an imaginary God, or an utterly unapproachable and distant God? That would not be serious. In fact, one could call it pathological.”

“I have no doubt that most modern secular psychotherapists and psychiatrists would view the monastic, eremitic lifestyle as another form of psychopathology,” I pointed out. Then in a more serious tone I asked: “Are we to assume that the philosophical quest for God, one of the central passions of the Western mind from Plato to Immanuel Kant and the great philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has in reality been off its mark?”

“Yes. Completely.”

We remained quiet. Father Maximos gazed out the window as I became tense while driving over a narrow dirt road. I shifted to first gear and as the engine moaned we slowly began climbing a steep curve that was to link us with another road. The Troodos Mountains are crisscrossed by such dirt roads, created by the forest service. A prayer by a venerated holy man, I thought with some nervousness, would be most appropriate now. Driving in the dark up an unpaved narrow passage at the edge of a precipice was definitely unlike cruising down Interstate 95 in Maine. But having Father Maximos sitting next to me gave me a feeling of reassurance. Heaven was watching.

“So, when during the liturgy we recite the prayer ’I believe in one God . . . ,’ ” Father Maximos went on after I shifted to second gear, “we try in reality to move from an intellectual faith in God to the actual vision of God. Faith becomes Love itself. The Creed actually means ’I live in a union of love with God.’ This is the path of the saints. Only then can we say that we are true Christians. This is the kind of faith that the saints possess as direct experience. Consequently they are unafraid of death, of war, of illness, or anything else of this world. They are beyond all worldly ambition, of money, fame, power, safety, and the like. Such persons transcend the idea of God and enter into the experience of God.”

“But how many people can really know God that way?” I complained.

“Well, as long as we do not know God experientially then we should at least realize that we are simply ideological believers,” Father Maximos replied dryly. “The ideal and ultimate form of true faith means having direct experience of God as a living reality.”

I went on to mention that experiencing God may be as “simple” as seeing God in the beauty and complexity of nature. Father Maximos agreed but pointed out, however, that the experience of God is something much more profound than that, impossible to pin down with words or poetical constructions.

“If this is true,” I reasoned, “then the Creed within the Christian tradition does not mean what most people assume to be its message, that is, a blind faith in the idea of God.”

“That’s a popular fallacy with all its disastrous consequences. True faith means I live with God, I am one with God. I have come to know God and therefore I know that He truly Is. God lives inside me and is victorious over death and I move forward with God. The entire methodology of the authentic Christian mystical tradition as articulated by the saints is to reach that stage where we become conscious of the reality of God within ourselves. Until we reach that point we simply remain stranded within the domain of ideas and not within the essence of Christian spirituality which is the direct communion with God.”

There was an aura of authority around Father Maximos as he spoke those words. I felt that he spoke with the implicit assumption that he himself had had a taste of God, and that what he was telling me was not just the result of book learning and the assimilation within his mind of the spiritual tradition in which he found himself.

The morning light was beginning to break through the pine trees as I noticed some snow on the ground, a leftover of winter. The monastery of Saint Anna’s was on the western side of the Troodos Mountains toward Paphos and beyond the village of Prodromos. Therefore we first had to climb to a higher elevation, closer to the summit of Olympus where there is usually plenty of snow during the winter months, and then descend on the other side.

“My next question may be naive, but I need to ask it for the sake of clarity,” I pointed out. “When you say ’we can see God,’ you don’t of course mean that we can see God as a person, with facial characteristics, as God is usually depicted in icons and religious paintings.”

“Oh, that goes without saying. It is of course possible that under certain circumstances God may appear to us in the image of a human being. Of course, this has happened historically with the Incarnation. But God in His Essence is amorphous, beyond all images and anthropomorphic characterizations. He does not have a physiognomy. Yet at the same time God is a Person insofar as He has the possibility and power to commune with human beings on a personal basis. After all, that is why as the Christ Logos He came down to us in the flesh, fully God and fully Human.

“The spiritual methodology developed by the saints,” Father Maximos explained, “aims at offering us the possibility of the direct vision of God. When that happens, as I have said many times, it is no longer a matter of belief in the existence of God but a direct recognition of the eternal and unbroken relationship that exists between God and humanity.

“And of course, the essence of that relationship,” he added, “is Love, which first emanates from God to humans and then from humans to God. It may sound scandalous to some people, but the full flowering of that relationship is the attainment of a deeply erotic relationship with God that lies far beyond the most intense and the most passionate erotic rapture between human beings. That state of ecstasy is what Saint Maximos the Confessor called the eros maniakos [maniacal eros]. Do you know what I am speaking of?” Father Maximos asked and turned toward me with a quizzing look on his face.

“I am afraid I don’t,” I said softly. Having been blessed only with the experience of human eros, I could not possibly fathom what the eros maniakos might feel like. I could only imagine such a state intellectually. I could accept, for example, that all erotic relationships at all levels of intensity from the grossest to the most sublime are different manifestations of the all-consuming love of the absolute God. It is like the sun emanating its rays. Human eros is the experience of the rays. Eros maniakos must be the entrance into the sun itself.

I remember that when I first encountered that idea, my reaction was one of bafflement. How could Christian saints who deny eros in their personal lives establish an eros maniakos with God? Father Maximos’s answer was simple. It is a matter of shifting your energy exclusively in the direction of God. Then through continuous prayer and spiritual practices something begins to happen within the consciousness of the praying person. One of his elders from Mount Athos described such a state in an autobiographical essay as follows:

When Grace is energized in the heart of the one who prays, then the love of God floods his entire being to such an extent that he may not be able to take more. Then this love is transferred to the love of the world and the human person. His love becomes so powerful that he asks to take upon himself all the suffering and unhappiness of the others so that they themselves may be relieved. He suffers with those who are in suffering even for the suffering of animals, so much so that he sheds bitter tears when he becomes aware of their pain. These are attributes of Love. But you must keep in mind that it is prayer that energizes them and causes them. That is why those who have advanced in the prayer never stop praying for the World.1

It was daylight by the time we reached Prodromos and began the descent on the western slope of the Troodos Mountains. The monastery of Saint Anna was now only a few miles away. As we continued our conversation on how to know God, Father Maximos claimed that whatever existential angst human beings may suffer from comes to an end once God manifests Himself in their hearts. Any doubts, questions, philosophical dilemmas, and puzzlement about God’s existence that are “natural to the fallen state” simply evaporate with such direct contact. Fortunately, he said, the tradition of the saints survived through the centuries, showing us the method and the way to know God. The saints provided us with the tools to purify the heart from its illnesses so that it can experience the vision of God and attain its ultimate therapy.

After the split of humans from God, Father Maximos said, after the Fall, the heart was invaded by illnesses, the real meaning of original sin. We as human beings, by virtue of our humanity, carry as our inheritance these illnesses that are an integral part of our human condition. He then pointed out that the Christian Church, the Ecclesia, must function and be seen as a spiritual hospital for curing the maladies of the heart that obstruct our vision of God. And the Ecclesia has as a proof of its therapeutic efficacy the experience and the life of saints, those human beings who have, through arduous efforts, purified their hearts and were therefore able to heal the split between themselves and God. The Bible, Father Maximos claimed, would be inadequate by itself to lead us toward God. Without the experience and the testimony of the saints about the reality of God, the Bible would be an “empty letter.”

When Father Maximos made these comments about the Bible, I realized how radically different his position about its value was from both religious fundamentalists as well as secular Bible scholars. The former confuse the letter for the truth, while the scholars focus exclusively on the Bible’s historical accuracy, never tiring of unearthing contradiction after contradiction between the four gospels. But for Father Maximos the Bible had to be seen first and foremost as a tool, a guidebook on how to conduct our lives so that we may be helped to reestablish our connection with God. He once quoted John Romanides, his former American-born professor at the University of Thessaloniki, a celebrated and controversial theologian and an ordained priest, who gave the example that if you wish to evaluate the importance of a medical text on surgery, you don’t give it to a group of butchers. You must send it to well-trained surgeons. They are the ones qualified to offer an expert’s opinion. Likewise, the role of the Bible must be seen as a therapeutic tool to heal our existential alienation from God. And those who can offer an expert’s opinion about its worth as a handbook for union with God are neither the fundamentalists nor the Bible historians, but the saints who have extensively put it to practice. Furthermore, Father Maximos added, the Bible by itself is not adequate as a guide to reach God. One must take into consideration the entire experience of the Ecclesia, the entire corpus of the spiritual tradition as articulated in the lives, aphorisms, homilies, spiritual methodologies, and written testimonies of the saints. And this tradition is being tested and retested by the experiences of the saints. The Russian Athonite elder Saint Silouan, one of Father Maximos’s spiritual heroes, went as far as to claim that even if all the sacred books and written records of the Christian religion including the Bible were lost in a massive earthquake or fire, they could be rewritten because they are stored deep in the hearts of the saints and can be brought out anytime when conditions permit it.

The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality -  Kyriacos C. Markides

Western and Eastern Mysticism - M V Lodyzhenskii

And it was precisely amid these favorable conditions that the mysticism of the East was placed. As the result of the correct laying down of the foundations of the Eastern Church, the mysticism of the East grew freely in its striving to-ward the great spiritual sun—Logos, and it developed more freely than the mysticism of the West, fettered by the prejudices of the earthly desires of the Catholic Church, fettered by the ways of papism and the spiritual prerogatives of the clergy.

From the books of the Philokalia, and also from the life of the Orthodox St Seraphim of Sarov that we have just studied—we see that Eastern mysticism has one main goal: it strives toward the acquisition of the Holy Spirit and proceeding firmly toward this acquisition, and it senses in advance the future fullness of the kingdom of God's Spirit in eternal life. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Western Church, and after them the whole Catholic Church, in their conceit have already appointed themselves the realization of God's city on earth, and besides, a city governed by earthly power. Because of particular historical conditions, Catholicism tolerated within itself the following abnormalities: It placed between Christian mysticism—a light-loving plant—and the Logos, the sun of this plant, an opaque partition. It placed between God and people an earthly sovereign—the pope—and by this obscured the attainment by Catholics of direct spirituality in the realm of the Logos. According to Catholics' historically established prejudice, inculcated in them by their religion, the pope is Christ's vice regent on earth, a person infallible, divine. In the very era of the flourishing of the earthly power of Catholicism in the thirteenth century (in the era of Francis's spiritual endeavor), the pope was even in effect a ruler of earthly kingdoms and peoples. Such an organization of religion, its being reduced to earthly sovereignty, the atmosphere in which Catholics were raised, was the main cause hindering the correct development of Catholic mysticism; here mysticism developed under abnormal conditions. It was allured not so much by the elements of the life of the spirit as by the elements of the life of forms it was attracted away from the true Light by mental and sensual elements. And this leavening of the Catholic world estranged it from the Eastern world. 

Thus, the main reasons for the religious separation of the East and West consists not in the dogma of the Filioque, not in ritualistic and formalistic arguments, but chiefly in papism and in those mystical directions that manifested themselves so differently in the spiritual endeavors of both churches. Powerful mystical leaders of the Western Church, such as, for example, Ignatius Loyola, set as their purpose service to the pope, the earthly Christ. Their ideal of spirituality was obscured by striving to realize the earthly power of Christ, whereas the spiritual athletes of the Eastern Church always remained faithful to the pure service of the heavenly Logos, and received the spiritual Christ within themselves. As a result, it turned out that western mysticism, bound by the burden of papism and along with it the striving toward human power, could never rise to the heights of Eastern mysticism, although among the saints of the Catholic world there were great spiritual strivers, in their lofty impulses and innate mystical ability.


from M V Lodyzhenskii - Light Invisible - Satisfying the Thirst for Happiness

The honor of René Guénon and Eastern Orthodoxy (Thierry Jolif)

René Guénon's honour is to have been proved right against his times, but also to have not deviated from the meaning of his mission; namely: "to reorient" what could be reoriented in the modern world. The fact that, strictly speaking, modernity is, in fact, "westernization" itself has already been widely debated and, while some, attentive readers of Guénon, may have thought it appropriate to state that the Guénonian vision of the East was too partial, even partial and subjective, it is nonetheless indisputable that what has been "modernist" in Eastern civilizations for the last hundred years or so does indeed originate in the West, in the broadest sense.

Apart from this reservation, it is also a common idea today that each one of those who write about and in connection with Tradition, should include a small "personal" chapter on Guénon's error, i.e. his "analysis" of Christianity and of Christian esotericism in particular. It seems, indeed, that a certain number of readers of René Guénon experience some trouble in their "attempt" to reconcile Christianity and "Guénonism", as if both might have a common measure.

It seems, indeed, that a certain number of readers of René Guénon experience some trouble in their "attempt" to reconcile Christianity and "Guénonism", as if both had something in common.

We would like to recall here, first of all, two essential facts. Firstly, it is the simplest to say and to hear: "guenonism" precisely does not exist and does not even ought to exist. René Guénon "called" those who could to re-establish a living contact with their, or a living tradition. He explained very clearly, and masterfully in our opinion, why and how! Secondly, he has, precisely, exposed and explained this to the particular intention of "Westerners". We have already, and with force of reason, written, and said, that the work of René Guénon is useless, even superfluous, for example, for a monk of Athos, a Sufi or Taoist initiate or a Buddhist lama. On the contrary, is it strictly necessary for Westerners who, logically, are supposed to be Christians...

The problem, if there is one, is precisely here; for, when René Guénon was writing and still living in France, what was it that he encountered in this respect? Christians of course, but on the one hand Freemasons, Gnostics, "hermetists", symbolists or occultists and, on the other hand, neo-thomists... And René Guénon, "witness and bearer of Tradition", wrote for or against these people in a very special way. Negatively in order to oppose to all deleterious influences to the clarity of the sapiential teachings; positively in order to remind energetically the properly essential, therefore eminently vital, aspect of these teachings.

Logically, if this had to be done, then something was missing! The confusion of orders and domains was the result of this cruel lack. And we can affirm with René Guénon that what was missing was, in the final analysis, the sense of Tradition, its presence and the link that unites it. As for knowing where and when this loss came from ... the answer was also lacking!

The East is vast. The Orient to which René Guénon drank was that of India, that of Muslim Humma, of Taoism too ... but it lacked that of Orthodoxy!

To reproach him for it today would be abusive, all the more so since he had, moreover, wisely identified the causes of the problem raised by the understanding of Christian esotericism in the West.

It seems, in fact, that the passage to the "monotheistic" path was not lived as painfully in Greece, then in the Slavic countries, "when Byzantium spread the flame of faith in the Hyperborean space", to use Serge Bulgakov's happy formula; whereas it was so in the West where, moreover, it happened that, later, Christianity was incorporated, more than elsewhere, into Roman legalism. Even before the glorious advent of the Christic way, all the more or less orthodox initiations stood, in Rome, in front of this "politico-religious legalism " and opposed to its ritualism, certainly necessary, all the spiritual paths aiming at nothing less than the internalization, by each initiate, of the most subtle teaching of the Universal Knowledge.

The Church, therefore, by virtue of her "universal", "unifying" vocation, had to find and try to maintain a subtle balance between "political and legalistic religiosity" and a living spiritual path and "interiorizing" doctrine. Two attitudes asserted themselves which soon opposed each other, to the point of rupture ... "the sewless dress was torn"! [1]

In his book, The Roman Grail [2] Nikos Vardhikas, Nikos Vardhikas, captures accurately the myth and legends... of the Holy Grail as a final spark of the undivided Tradition ... The Celtic origin, now recognized, of these legends seems to give reason to this " presentiment ". Indeed, the so-called Celtic Churches, kept, apart from the respect and obedience owed to Rome, a deep relationship with the Eastern Church and its theology. The Greek was, for example, on an equal footing with Latin, the language in which the theology was spread in Ireland (some parishes practised even Liturgies in the Greek language ...)[3] … We know enough about the differences which opposed the supporters of the "Roman" tradition and those of the Irish (or Celtic), about the date of Easter, the Liturgy and even the conception of monasticism ... but it is all too often observed that it is after the acceptance of the "Roman" norms that the Arthurian legends begin to flourish, it is also shortly after the great schism4 ... But we also find in this continuity the origins, admitted by some, of organized Freemasonry5 , which is linked, most often, and without "tangible proof", with the Order of the Temple .... But we won't have time here to go any further down this road. However, we want to draw the attention of our readers to precisely this point, that René Guénon was indeed right to recognize Christian esotericism in the proliferation of these stories... what was missing was the essential, namely the possibility of reviving the teaching they contained. But the choices made by the Church of the West, instead of bringing these precious teachings back to her and in her, distanced them even more from her, and they crystallized in different forms, according to the milieu in which they were encountered, and led to the flagrant opposition of an exotericism and an esotericism, both of which were seen as "absolute and unique " [6] . And that, René Guénon noticed! What some criticize him today is due to the fact of this historical and spiritual reality ... the honor of René Guénon was to have taken into account these realities in the perspective and mission that were his ...

In order to support our point we would like to dwell on the notion of "Spiritual Fatherhood". Indeed, if René Guénon has continually insisted on the importance of the traditional transmission of the purest spirituality, it is not by chance and, if this notion is at the heart of the Arthurian narratives, even if it is sometimes masked by adventurous developments, it is not by chance either ...

Orthodox spirituality, however, has always offered the possibility of the blossoming of this primordial notion.

The counsels of the various hermits to the knights, in the Arthurian accounts, all resemble, closely or remotely, the tradition of perpetual prayer and theosis. These holy characters, in any case, belong to the commonly accepted image of the "Spiritual Father".

Ignatius Brianchaninov calls spiritual fatherhood the "sacrament of filiation". He also specifies, in accordance with Orthodox tradition, that a spiritual Father is not "a master who teaches but a 'father' who begets".

Moreover, the Church recognizes, in her use of the word "father", two distinct traditions: on the one hand the "functional paternity" (which goes back to St. Ignatius of Antioch) which makes one call "father" any Bishop or priest according to his priesthood; on the other hand the "spiritual paternity", properly speaking, which goes back to the Fathers of the desert, monks or laymen (St. Anthony, for example, was a layman). Closer to us in time, Paul Evdokimov will recall, for his part, that the essential condition which legitimizes a spiritual Father is "to have first become pneumatikos himself". Saint Simeon the New Theologian used to say: "To give the Holy Spirit one must have it".

It is thus revealed, through this use of the term "father", two practices which join what René Guénon called, for lack of a better term, in his own admission, exotericism and esotericism, or, functional religion and the spiritual path of interiorization, identification and union, the two being, in this case, in no way in contradiction or opposition to the other [7] .

Paul Evdokimov also recalled, and very opportunely, that, according to the Fathers: "every believer can become an 'interiorized monk' and find the equivalent of the monastic vows, in exactly the same way, in the personal circumstances of his life, whether he is single or married". This is perfectly affirmed by the Eastern Church in which every baptized person passes, during the sacrament of the chrism anointing, through the rite of tonsure which consecrates him entirely to the Lord. This rite, analogous to the monastic rite, invites each one to rediscover the sense of "interiorized" monasticism which the sacrament teaches to all but which not all can realize ...

These brief reflections will contribute, God willing, to make it appear that, contrary to what a current trend in Western Europe would like to make us believe, the traditional "thinking" revived by René Guénon is in no way opposed to the true Christian tradition, but that, on the contrary, it could, quite opportunely, enlighten the latter (in the Western world) on what it has failed to preserve in the course of its "evolution".

In conclusion, all this, it seems to us, demonstrates to all who knows deeply the message of René Guénon, how perfectly the latter is in full conformity with the "oriental" tradition of Christianity!

In conclusion, all this demonstrates well, it seems to us, to those who know, in depth, the message of René Guénon, to what extent the latter is completely in conformity with the "oriental" tradition of Christianity!

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L’honneur de René Guénon et l’Orient Orthodoxe - Thierry Jolif

Notes
1 The Sages of a traditional doctrine possess the Spiritual Authority, therefore the Temporal Power, and only when the life cycle of a tradition reaches critical times, is the Temporal Power delegated (to kings), and then it rebels against its legitimate guardianship. External action finds its form of expression and its Justice only in Spirituality. There can be balance between two elements only if they are on the same plane, but since the Temporal Power proceeds from Spiritual Authority there can be no relation of equality between two different dimensions. The line is not comparable to a plane. When these considerations come up there is a sign of degeneration of the normal functioning of a tradition (note by Wou Ming).

2 Nikos Vardhikas, The Holy Grail novel, 1997, Jean Curutchet / Editions Harriet...

3 For example, the Greek literally says "triade" for Trinity ... which was certainly attractive to the early theologians and mystics of the Church of Ireland.

4 The theory of the two Swords and the conception of a holy empire are foreign to the traditional doctrines of the Celts. The Celtic conception of Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power was much closer to that of the Byzantine Empire and the Symphony of Powers. Roman and Germanic traditions, dominated by a kshatriya-oriented spirituality, imposed their perspectives on spiritual and temporal domains. They forged the West!

5 In Scotland, moreover, a country with Celtic origins ...

6 If the Pope does indeed possess the attributes of Janus, god of initiations, why then should these need to be organized outside the Church, looking for an ark other than the Ark? The Orthodox bishops, chosen from among the monks, have kept on their pastoral staffs the Caduceus ... a "hermetic" and, therefore, esoteric symbol if any ...

7 "We shall say that if a mystery is not a secret, it is particularly true for the Christian mystery, continuing the very condition of the Incarnate God, at the same time offered in his plenitude to everyone and invisible for those who cannot see him. One is, essentially, in a different universe than the one of the esoteric doctrine, protecting, by a secret initiation, its “universal truth” against the psychic and the hylic people. The distinction, itself external, between esoteric and exoteric, does not make any sense here, as it is not about a hidden and time-denying continuation of a sacred past, but instead about a continuation of a Presence, at every moment creative and invigorating, - one would say a contemporaneity of the Spirit." Monsignor André Scrima, quoted in "Etudes et documents d'Hésychasme", Michel Valsan, Etudes Traditionnelles.

Roman Catholic Prayer Practices and Erotomania - AF Losev

C) Other Latin dogmas and prayer practices

A) I will not speak here of other dogmas of the Catholic Church, but I insist that they all have as their basis the Filioque and that the Filioque is not something accidental, obscure, superfluous or external. First of all, on the basis of Filioque, the Catholic doctrine of original sin was built where we find mainly two forms of positivism - either Augustinian fatalism, or Anselmo-Scotus "juristic" theory. By virtue of the Filioque, there is the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary: the birth of Christ by the Virgin from the Holy Spirit for Catholics is poorly justified, due to the depreciation of the Holy Spirit role, for the sake of which, a positive-empirical purification of the human nature of the Virgin Mary is required (причем лжедогматическое ослепление не видит тут дурной бесконечности: so that if Christ is completely pure, we must recognize the immaculate conception of His Mother; to recognize the virgin birth of His Mother, we must recognize the Immaculate Conception of Mary parents, etc.). On the juristic theory of redemption, the doctrine of supererogatory merits and, next, the indulgences is based. (сверхдолжных заслугах и, след., об индульгенциях). The rationalistic synthesis of abstract agnosticism and formalistic positivism shows up in the dogma of the pope infallibility: only in the order of agnostic abstractness can one speak of the infallibility of any mortal person; As for the legal formalism of papal authority, when it identifies itself with state power, and the positive inquisitional absolutism of its practice, when "the end justifies the means," распространяться не приходится. It is also necessary to classify the doctrine of purgatory, trying to replace dialectics and the antinomy of eternal torments with formal logic and the rationalism of universal salvation.

B) But the most tempting and most seductive of all is the prayer practice of Catholicism.The Platonic Mystic, like the Byzantine monk (after all, both of them, mostly Greeks), sit quietly at the height of int elective prayer, immersed in themselves, and the flesh ceases to act in them, and nothing moves either in them or around them (for their consciousness). The devotee is not himself for himself; he exists only for the glory of God. But look at what is done in Catholicism. Temptation and deceitfulness of the flesh leads to the fact that the Holy Spirit appear to blessed Angela and whispers to her such enamored speeches: "My daughter is sweet to me, my daughter is my temple, my daughter is my delight, my love, for I love you, much more than you love me." 97 The saint is in a sweet languor, can not find a place for her loving longings. And the Beloved is everything and more and more kindles her body, her heart, her blood. The cross of Christ is represented to her as a marriage bed. It is through this that she enters God: "And it seemed to me that I was in the middle of the Trinity ... " She asks Christ to show her at least one part of the body crucified on the cross, and here He shows her... His neck" "And then He showed me His neck and hands, and immediately my former sorrow turned into such joy and so different from other joys that I could not see or feel anything other than that." The beauty of His neck was such that it was inexpressible. And then I understood that this beauty comes from His Divinity, He did not show me anything except this neck, the most beautiful and sweetest, and I do not know how to compare this beauty with anything, or with any color existing in the world, but only with the light of Christ's body, which I see sometimes when Im lifted up."99 What could be more antithetical to the Byzantine-Muscovite austere chaste asceticism than these continual blasphemous proclamations: “My soul was received into uncreated light and carried up,” those passionate gazes upon the Cross of Christ, the wounds of Christ, … those forcibly evoked bloody spots on her own body, and so on and so forth? Finally Christ embraces Angela with His arm that was nailed to the Cross, and she, outside herself with rapture, torment, and happiness, says, “Sometimes, from this bodily embrace, it seems to my soul that it enters into Christ’s side. I cannot retell the joy and brightness which it receives there. They are so great that I could not stand on my feet, and lost the power to speak.… And I lay there, and my tongue and members lost the power to move.”[25]

C) This, of course, is not prayer or communion with God. These are very powerful hallucinations on the basis of hysteria, i.e. prelest. И всех этих истериков, которым является Богородица и кормит их своими сосцами; All these hysterics, in whom, at the appearance of Christ, the sweet fire passes over the whole body and, among the other things,  the uterine musculature shrinks; all this confusion of erotomania, demonic pride and Satanism - one can, of course, only anathematize, together with the Filioque, lying at the heart of the every catholic dogma, basis of their internal dispensation, and their practice of prayer. In prayer, all the untruth of Catholicism is experienced. According to the teachings of the Orthodox ascetics, the prayer coming from the tongue to the heart should not fall below the heart, while the Flioque agnosticism and positivism, being translated into prayer, requires 1) abstraction of the divine essence and 2) positively perception of its energies. But when the subject of knowledge is abstract, and the process of his cognition is very vital and tense, then due to the unsatisfactoriness of the object itself, fruitless inflammation and fever of this process is formed and the inability to be satisfied happens instead of a calm vision and possession of the hesychasts' "sacred silence". Orthodox prayer is in the upper part of the heart, not lower than it. To the prayer and ascetic experience of the East the infusion of the prayer in some other place in the body always result in a prelest state. Catholic erotomania is connected, apparently, with the violent excitation and heating of the lower part of the heart. "Trying to set in motion and inflame the lower part of the heart sets in motion the power of lust, which, in proximity to the genitals and according to its properties, sets in motion these parts. The ignorant use of corporeal benefits will be followed by the strongest burning of carnal desire. What a strange phenomenon! Apparently, the devotee is engaged in prayer, and the occupation engenders lust, which should be put to death by occupation."103 This bloody burning is generally characteristic of all mystical sects. The burning blood leads to the most incredible gestures, which in Catholicism are still somehow restrained by general church discipline, but which in sects reach incredible forms.104

D) I will give two judgments that depict the difference between the Orthodox and Eastern elements from the Catholic West, one ascetic and the other, the scholastic.

"The effect of blood on the soul is quite obvious with the action of passion, anger and thoughts of anger on the blood, especially in people prone to anger. What a frenzy comes a man inflamed with anger! He is deprived of all authority over himself; enters into the power of passion, the power of spirits, hungry for his death and want to destroy him, using a gun in the crimes of his own; he speaks and acts like a mindless person. Evidently, the effect of blood on the soul is also evident when blood is inflamed by the passion of the extravagant. The effect of other passions on the blood is less obvious; But it exists. What is sadness, what is discouragement, what is laziness? This is a variety of actions on the blood of various sinful thoughts. Avarice and greed will certainly have an effect on the blood: pleasure that produces dreams of enrichment for the person, what else, than a seductive, deceptive, sinful playing of blood? Spirits of wickedness, vigilantly and insatiable thirst for human destruction, affect us not only thoughts and dreams, but also a variety of touches, touches our flesh, our blood, our heart, our mind, trying all ways and means to pour into us their poison... Various inflammations of the blood from the actions of the various thoughts and demonoic dreams create that fiery weapon that is given at our fall to the fallen cherub, which it rotates inside us, forbidding us to enter the mysterious paradise of God's spiritual thoughts and sensations." "Special attention should be paid to the effect of vanity in us, whose action on the blood is very difficult to perceive and understand. Vanity almost always acts together with subtle voluptuousness and delivers to the person the most subtle sinful pleasure. The venom of pleasures are so subtle that many recognize the enjoyment of vanity and lust as the consolation of conscience, even as an act of divine grace. The ascetic, enraptured by this pleasure, gradually comes to a state of self-delusion; recognizing self-delusion as a state of grace, he gradually enters the full power of the fallen angel, who constantly assumes the form of an angel of the light, becomes an tool, an apostle of the outcast spirits. From this state, entire books are written, praised by the blind world and read by people who are not cleansed of passions with delight and admiration. This imaginary enjoyment is nothing other than the enjoyment of a refined vanity, arrogance and lust. Non-pleasure is the destiny of the sinner: his destiny is weeping and repentance. Vanity corrupts the soul in the same way that the fornication destroys the soul and the body ... That is why the holy fathers are invited to do common work for all the monks, especially those engaged in prayer and wishing to succeed in it, with holy repentance, which acts directly against vanity, spiritual poverty. Even with a significant exercise in repentance, the vanity effect on the soul is seen, very similar to the action of fornication. Such passion teaches us to strive for unacceptable copulation with the strangers flesh and to be obedient to it, even one delight with impure thoughts and dreams, changes the composition of the soul and body; vanity leads to unlawful association with the glory of man and, by touching the heart, leads to the unruly sweet movement of blood - this movement changes into a total dissolution (arrangement) of a person, introducing him into a connection with the wicked and gloomy spirit of the world and thus alienating it from the Spirit of God " 105. "When the divine grace dawns on the prayer feat and begins to connect the mind with the heart, then the actual blood heat will completely disappear. The prayer then completely changes; It becomes, as it were, natural, completely free and easy. Then there is another heat in the heart, subtle, insubstantial, spiritual, not producing any kind of burning-on the contrary, cooling, enlightening, irrigating, acting as a healing, spiritual, anointing, leading to the unspeakable love of God and men. " 106  "Due the spiritual actions, the actions of the blood on the soul are finally weakened, the blood enters the departure of its natural ministry in corporal composition, ceasing to serve, outside of its natural purpose, as a instrument of sin and demons." The Holy Spirit warms the person spiritually, together irrigating and cooling the soul."107

The bloody heat in the intelective-hearted prayer is the Filioque. It is the necessary logical conclusion from Filioque.

F) But what I have now uncovered as the nature and style of both types of mystical experience, Orthodox and Catholic, the same can be formulated in general with regard to Eastern and Western thought, Eastern and Western theology.

"We can point out two traits that stand in relation to one another, as a characteristic of the Augustinian in the sense of a certain trend of theological thought: a psychological point of view, defining the very essence of the character of Augustine's speculation, and the absorption of particular significance of the principle of rational knowledge in relation to the theme of faith, accompanied by attempts to carry out a greater or lesser extent, this principle in practice. "

"В то время как античное эллинское миросозерцание отличается характером объективности, преобладанием интереса к миру внешних явлений, и, даже обращаясь к явлениям внутренней жизни, грек лишь переносит в эту область приемы изучения внешних явлений и более всего интересуется ее интеллектуальной стороной, в то время как и в восточном греческом христианстве главное внимание обращается на объективную сторону религии, – для Августина, напротив, не внешний объективный мир представляет интерес, а внутренний мир душевной жизни, и не на интеллектуальную сторону этой жизни обращает он особенное внимание, не на ум, как способность отражать внешнее объективное бытие, а на внутреннейшие силы духа, которыми изнутри движется процесс психической жизни, волю и чувство. Он не ограничивается простым наблюдением факта и объективною передачею его, за которыми совершенно отступает на задний план личность самого наблюдателя, но на первом плане у него стоит отношение к факту самого субъекта, его чувствования и стремления. Он предполагает, что самый этот субъективизм должен иметь, так сказать, объективное значение, потому что психическая природа у всех одинакова. Ум не сам себе должен создавать проблемы, а должен решать задачи, которые выдвигаются самою жизнью. Главною же и внутреннейшею потребностью человеческой природы является потребность религиозная, которою определяется все направление духовной жизни человека. Этой потребности и должно служить знание, и именно чрез самопознание человек может прийти к сознанию этой потребности. Только чрез самопознание он может убедиться в своем бессилии в области нравственной деятельности и в необходимости искать высшей помощи; только на самопознании может основываться истинное смирение, лежащее, в свою очередь, в основе всей религиозной нравственной жизни"¹⁰⁸.

"Теоретический характер Востока, как сказано, нашел выражение, так сказать, и в методе и в содержании восточного богословия. Между тем как у бл. Августина отношение человека к Откровению, как источнику знания, представляется как отношение испытующего и даже сомневающегося, только еще ищущего истины исследователя, причем жизненное значение истины определяется собственным пережитым опытом и свидетельство человеческого сознания является последним критерием при ее оценке, – в восточном богословии это отношение представляется как отношение ума созерцающего или воспринимающего существующую объективно истину и полагающего ее в основание своих выводов как нечто само в себе достоверное. Ум (νους), способность созерцания, по греческому воззрению, есть главная способность человека и употребляется для выражения понятия духа. По своему содержанию восточное богословие хочет быть прежде всего развитием данных, заключающихся в Откровении, чрез применение к ним логических операций ума, а не рефлексиею над опытом собственной жизни и деятельности человека. Делая исходным пунктом Бога и Его откровение, при невозможности для человеческого ума обнять откровенную истину во всей полноте восточные богословы естественно начинают при уяснении понятия о Боге с самых абстрактных¹⁰⁹определений, опираясь на результаты греческой философии (александрийская школа и платонизм), чтобы потом уже, по мере раскрытия богооткровенного учения, наполнить их более определенным содержанием (Иустин-философ, Климент Алекс, Ориген). Абстрактные определения продолжают существовать и в позднейшее время"¹¹⁰.

f) Онтологизм Востока и психологизм Запада – вещи совершенно очевидные. Надо только уметь провести эту антитезу по всей догматике обеих религий. Восточному монаху не важен он сам, почему тут и мало "описаний" внутренних состояний подвижника. Западному же подвижнику, кроме Бога, важен еще и он сам. Эта позитивистическая плененность собственной личностью онтологически выражена, прежде всего, как Filioque; затем она выражена как учение о непогрешимости папы (в то время как на Востоке не только патриарх погрешим, но бывали и "разбойничьи" соборы, и ни правильно поставленный патриарх, ни правильно собранный собор нисколько не гарантирует истины, и об истине свидетельствует только она сама, истина); она выражена в догмате о беспорочном зачатии; и т.д. и т.д., – вплоть до истерического беснования в лжемолитвенных состояниях. Этот эффектный субъективизм и психологизм, соединенный с формалистической строгостью дисциплины (агностицизм и позитивный формализм, как доказано выше, диалектически предполагают одно другое), всегда бывали завлекательной приманкой для бестолковой, убогой по уму и по сердцу, воистину "беспризорной" русской интеллигенции. В те немногие минуты своего существования, когда она выдавливала из себя "религиозные чувства", она большею частью относилась к религии и христианству как к более интересной сенсации; и красивый, тонкий, "психологический", извилистый и увертливый, кровяно-воспаленный и в то же время юридически точный и дисциплинарно-требовательный католицизм, прекрасный, как сам сатана, – всегда был к услугам этих несчастных растленных душ. Довольно одного того, что у католиков – бритый патриарх, который в алтаре садится на престол (к которому на Востоке еле прикасаются), что у них в соборах играют симфонические оркестры (напр., при канонизации святых), что на благословение папы и проповедь патеров молящиеся отвечают в храме аплодисментами, что там – статуи, орган, десятиминутная обедня и т.д. и т.д., чтобы усвоить всю духовно-стилевую несовместимость католичества и православия. Православие для католичества анархично (ибо чувство объективной, самой по себе данной истины, действительно, в католичестве утрачено, а меональное бытие всегда анархично). Католичество же для православия развратно и прелестно (ибо меон, в котором барахтается, с этой точки зрения, верующий, всегда есть разврат). Католицизм извращается в истерию, казуистику, формализм и инквизицию. Православие, развращаясь, дает хулиганство, разбойничество, анархизм и бандитизм. Только в своем извращении и развращении они могут сойтись, в особенности, если их синтезировать при помощи протестантско-возрожденского иудаизма, который умеет истерию и формализм, неврастению и римское право объединять с разбойничеством, кровавым сладострастием и сатанизмом при помощи холодного и сухого блуда политико-экономических теорий.

http://psylib.ukrweb.net/books/lose000/txt107.htm

Perichoretic East and Aristotelian West (James L. Kelley)

This participatory union of Christ’s two natures (Christology), mirrored in the participation of God and man (soteriology), is analogous to the union of soul with body in man (anthropology). Man is not primarily a disembodied soul; rather he is wholly soul and wholly body. The Patristic writers in various places unambiguously affirm that the soul is what is invisible about the body, and the body is what is visible about the soul. The Incarnation of the Logos is participation par excellence; the Incarnation is the archetypal participation upon which all other instances of communion are predicated: man’s soul-body coherence; man’s communion with other humans; man’s interpenetration with the world of created beings; and man’s divinization, that is, his partaking in the very life of God. 

So, how and why did Western Christianity, which began with the same communal/participatory vision of God, man and cosmos as that of the Christian East, deviate from this once common path? Some modern Orthodox theologians who have tackled the question of the origin of the schism between the Christian West and the Christian East have singled out the teachings of Augustine of Hippo as the foundation of the deviation. Sherrard agrees that Augustine’s deficient teachings on sin and free will precluded a fully-fledged, Orthodox conception of Christology (and thus anthropology); he also cannot help but be aware of the crippling effects that the Augustinian formulation of “prevenient grace” has had upon the bishop of Hippo’s Western successors up to the present day [18]. However, the historical pivot point for Sherrard is the irruption of Aristotle’s philosophy into Western Christian theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Because scholastic theology explicitly replaced the original theological standard— that of personal experience of God in the liturgical and ascetical life of the Church —with a new criterion—that of Aristotle’s philosophy—the result was a drastic veering away from the Orthodox Catholic tradition that Sherrard feels was already becoming progressively attenuated in the West from the fourth century on [19].

A Tale of two Unities: Perichoretic East and Aristotelian West 

Since some may find much about which to quibble in Sherrard’s handling of figures such as Plato and Aristotle (namely, his seeming lack of nuance and his general unconcern for scholarly apparatus), it may be helpful to recall the words of the late Rick Roderick: “I don’t read Kant to find the truth; I read him to see what I can do with him.” Sherrard uses the classic texts of philosophy and theology in this sense; that is, his sole purpose in examining the writings of the great thinkers of the past was elucidation of what was for Sherrard the central metaphysical theme—the interrelation of God and creation. Needless to say, a reader not open to Sherrard’s overall aim (or at least open to trying to understand Sherrard’s overarching purpose) may feel that justice is not being done to such towering names as Heraclitus or Proclus. With this caveat in mind, we will proceed to outline Sherrard’s versions of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism, our focus being the significance—in Sherrard’s eyes—of the “isms” involved for the crisis of Modernity and for its possible solution in Sacred Ecology.

 According to Plato, Forms exist in the intelligible realm, and can be participated in by humans whose purified souls have achieved a likeness to the intelligible. For Aristotle, by contrast, “forms” inhere within individual beings. The individual human being—and indeed, each and every being in the universe— is locked inside his or her essence in the Aristotelian scheme, seemingly cut off from other essences as essences. The idiosyncratic notion of “unity” that undergirds Aristotle’s “substantial form” is the key to understanding later Western developments. There is no place for a unity of concrete particulars for Aristotle, since unities are identified with individual beings’ goals or inner purposes: each existing thing has a telos that is its own destiny, its own set of potentialities that beckon to be actualized. 

Since Sherrard bases his theology, above all else, on the “union without confusion” of the divine and human natures “in the single, undivided person of Christ incarnate” [20], it is easy to understand why he objects so stridently to Aristotle’s pseudo-monadic notion of substantial unity. Aristotelian substances are unities because they are impressed with a single form that contains within itself— in potential—all future possibilities of development. As such, there can be no “composite substances” [21] Indeed, substances “cannot be shared or participated” [22].

 It should also come as no surprise that, considering Sherrard’s emphasis on communion and participation, Aristotle’s universe should appear to him a rather bleak house. The Logos cannot become Incarnate within its confines; Christ cannot become its inhominated savior, since two natures cannot interpenetrate in Aristotle’s universe without either 1) destroying the “lower” human nature, or 2) creating a freakish tertium quid, a demi-god who is neither God nor man, neither uncreated nor created [23]. What is more, God cannot be present in each created being’s logos; Christ cannot be the Logos to the logoi, to the uncreated “predeterminations” of all beings. The Stagirite’s universe, viewed through Sherrardian spectacles, is more infernal than cosmic, since each and every one of its constituent beings is bereft of anything like a common nature that would allow for methexis, for participation between, on the one hand, man and neighbor; and, on the other hand, between man and God.

Aquinas’s Children: Immortal Soul to Thinking Substance

 In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas sought to systematize Roman Catholic theology by reformulating its doctrines along Aristotelian lines. What resulted was nothing short of a theological revolution in Europe, a development that, for Sherrard, sealed the fate of the Western Church, and pointed inexorably toward today’s waking nightmare of “spiritual, mental, and cultural degradation” [24]. We already remarked above that Aristotle’s notion of substantial unity did not allow for a perichoretic Christology, wherein Christ’s human and divine natures are united without mixture or confusion in the one hypostasis of the Logos. In considering its further implications for ecology, Sherrard notes that Aquinas’s Aristotelian-inflected Christology can include no Logos-logoi component whereby “the divine can be actually present in all things without those things on that account losing their own substantial identity” [25]. As for the efficacy of the saving mission of Aquinas’s Christ, Sherrard voices concern that, for Thomas, the deification of Christ’s human nature does not seem to include the human counterpart—the deification of both man and the cosmos over which He is priest. Instead, the Incarnation is “something that occurred only in the unique case of the historical figure of Jesus” [26]. 

The full, disastrous import of Aquinas’s Aristotelianism is revealed in the Dominican’s anthropology. Sherrard’s Aquinas reduces man to a soul-body in which the former component’s knowledge is of the “purely rational” variety [27]. “Moreover, lacking any faculty through which he can know and experience things, including himself, as they are in God, man is forced to depend for his knowledge, including…spiritual knowledge, on sense perception” [28]. Aquinas is revealed as the forebear of Enlightenment rationalism once we boil his anthropology down to the following axiom: Thomist man is that animal that can acquire knowledge only through ratiocination based solely upon sensory data. Here the reader cannot help but detect tendencies toward over-generalization and overstatement in Sherrard's unflattering vignette of Aquinas' theology. In order to determine if any compensatory insight is offered in Sherrard's reading of the great Dominican, we turn to the staid Londoner's account of the Thomist “immortal soul.”

The Orthodox Christian tripartite anthropology of body-soul-nous is quashed by St. Thomas into a bipartite mind-body. In place of a Logos-nous as a principle of communion between soul and body, Aquinas posits the soul as the “unique substance of man[;] the indwelling principle of his unity as a composite being” [29]. However, Aristotle held that the soul is material, in that it exists only as the form of the matter that makes up a given being. Once the being dies, the form dissolves as the body of the individual decomposes. Thus, the Aristotelian framework to which Aquinas was bound called for a soul that was just as material, and hence just as corruptible, as flesh and blood. In order to affirm this Aristotelian notion of soul while yet denying that the soul is extinguished at death, Aquinas re-defined the human soul as a “self-subsistent spiritual substance, one that receives the act of being in itself, and so is by nature immaterial, incorruptible and immortal” [30]. The body does not have its own substantial reality, but exists merely because the real man, the immortal soul, possesses certain powers that can only be exerted somatically [31].

 But, Sherrard underlines, we must realize just how drastically Aquinas’s conception of the soul-body differs from the Orthodox view. For the Orthodox, man is a soulbody whose integrity even death cannot dissolve utterly; for the Aristotelian Aquinas, the soul transcends the body, though the soul has need of a body for its specific purposes, for the working out of its own inner “idea.” In Sherrard’s words: “…[W]hereas before St. Thomas it was possible to think of the soul as the most important part of man, after St. Thomas it was possible to think of man as complete without a body at all, because what the body contributes as an organic and material instrument is already present within the soul in a spiritual form and as a spiritual exigency” [32].

 Indeed, Aquinas’s soul-body lives a bizarre, two-tiered existence that might be termed Nestorian or Apollinarian, depending on one's vantage point. Considered apart from the body, this Thomistic soul contains within its totally transcendent, immaterial substance the reasons for its composition as a soul-body. The flesh-and-blood human body does not have reasons or energies of its own that require realization in order that its destiny or telos is met. Instead, “in the Thomistic view man is a function of the soul, not soul a function of man” [33]. For Aquinas, the structure of the soul is such that it needs a kind of material double to develop bodily capacities that mirror certain of its soul capacities. However, a kind of anthropological asymmetry is introduced by the Angelic Doctor, since the soul contains potencies that have no counterpart in the body: “For St. Thomas man qua man…does not have a nature: he only has a history. Man is but an accident, a phase, in the history of his soul” [34]. 

Though a bodily resurrection is insisted upon by St. Thomas, Sherrard remains concerned that Aquinas’s anthropology provides no compelling reason why the soul-body conjunction should continue after death. Thus, Sherrard blames Aquinas for the ghostly, disembodied soul that has peopled so many theological tomes since the Middle Ages. The development is complete once we reach Descartes, who reproduced the Thomistic parallelism of soul and body, but with an important twist: The odd stratification of energies within the soul—Aquinas’s flimsy justification for a body-soul nexus—is now gone. Sherrard notes with irony that Descartes leapfrogged over Aquinas only to recover a purer Aristotelian notion of essence. The Cartesian human soul has no need of a body at all, or of anything whatsoever exterior to itself. Here Sherrard’s analysis brings us full circle, Descartes’s res cogitans being a recapitulation of the Stagirite’s totally selfsufficient substance [35]. In fact, Descartes reduces the body to a kind of carnal puppet, “entirely without [the] spiritual or psychic forces or qualities” that are natural to the soul [36]. 

If space allowed, we could follow Sherrard's comments on Newton and Boyle, who are viewed as the flowers that bloomed from the Cartesian bud. Descartes’s notion of man’s body as “a hydraulic automaton” [37] pushed about by a thinking substance that can approach the cosmos only in a functionalist manner sets the stage for the Scientific Revolution, with its ominous cry “Let Newton Be!” and its exultant echo “Viva la revolution!”


From the essay Orthodox Theosophy and The Reign of Quantity by James L. Kelley 

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The Way of Knowledge (Alexander Kalomiros)

Today, atheism as well as Protestantism might be turned against Orthodoxy. But this assault is based on a deception. They detest Orthodoxy because they see her with their own criteria, with their own mentality. They see her as a variant of Catholicism. This is not due to an ill disposition on their part, but to a total inability to judge by other standards and to think with another mentality.

Catholicism, Protestantism, and atheism are on the same level. They are offsprings of the same mentality. All three are philosophical systems, offsprings of rationalism, that is, of the notion that human reason is the foundation of certainty, the measure of truth, and the way of knowledge.

Orthodoxy is on a completely different level. The Orthodox have a different mentality. They regard philosophy as a dead end which never led man to certainty, truth, and knowledge. They respect human reason as no one else, and they never violate it. They regard it as one of the useful factors in detecting falsehood and uncovering error. But they do not accept it as capable of giving man certainty, of enlightening him to see the truth, or guiding him to knowledge. 

Knowledge is the vision of God and of His creation in a heart purified by divine grace and the struggles and prayers of man. «Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God». 

Truth is not a series of definitions, but God Himself, «Who appeared concretely in the person of Christ, Who said: «I am the Truth». 

Certainty is not a matter of intellectual harmony; it is a deep assurance of the heart. It comes to man after inner vision and is accompanied by the warmth of divine grace. Intellectual harmony, which is the outcome of a logical ordering of things, is never accompanied by this assurance.

Philosophy is characterized by conceptualization. The human intellect cannot accept reality as it is. It transposes it first into symbols and then elaborates upon the symbols. But the symbols are counterfeit figures of reality. The concepts are as distant from reality as a picture of a fish from a live fish.

The truth of the philosopher is a series of figures and images. These symbols present one great advantage; they are comprehensible. They are cut to man’s measurements and satisfy the intellect. But they also present a great disadvantage; they have no relation to living reality.

Living reality does not fit into the categories of the human intellect. It is a condition above reason. Philosophy is an attempt to transpore the suprarational into rational. But this is counterfeit and fraudulent. That is why Orthodoxy rejects philosophy and does not accept it as a way to knowledge.

The only way to knowledge is purity of heart. It alone permits the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in man. In this way alone is God and His whole creation known, without being conceptualized. He is known as He really is without becoming comprehensible and without being diminished in order to fit into the stiffing limits of the human intellect. Thus the mind (nous) of man, living and uncomprehending, comes into union with the living and incomprehensible God. Knowledge is the living contact of man with the Creator and His creation, in mutual love.
 

The experience of knowledge is something which cannot be expressed in human words. When the Apostle Paul came to know, he said that he had heard unspeakable words - something which is impossible for man to express. 

Such is the deeper Christian theology - inexpressible. Dogmas are helpful formulations. But they are not actual knowledge; they simply guide and protect from error. A man can have knowledge without knowing the dogmas, and he can know all the dogmas and accept them without having knowledge. This is why, beyond the affirmative theology of dogmas, the Fathers placed the deep mystery of negative theology where no definition is acceptable, where the mind is silent and ceases to move, where the heart opens its door to receive the Great Visitor «Who stands at the door and knocks», where the mind sees Him Who Is.
 

And let no one think that these things are true only in regard to the suprarational knowledge which is a movement of God towards man. Man can know nothing with his reason, and he can be certain of nothing - neither of himself, of the world, nor even of the most ordinary and common things.

Who honestly waited to hear Descartes’ syllogism «I think, therefore I am» to be certain that he truly exists? And who waited for the philosophers to prove that the world around him is real in order to believe that it is? Besides, such a proof has never existed and will never exist, and they who are engaged in philosophy well know it. No one has ever been able to actually prove by his reason that our thoughts and our own selves, as well as the world around us, are not fantasies. But even if someone were to prove it logically, which is impossible, that logical proof would not be able to assure anyone.

If we are certain that we exist and that our friends are not figments of our imagination, this is not due to the proofs of the philosophers, but to an inward knowledge and an inward consciousness which gives us certainty of everything without syllogisms and proofs.

This is natural knowledge. It is the knowledge of the heart and not of the brain. It is the sure foundation for every thought. Reason can build upon it without fear of toppling. But without it, reason builds upon sand.
 

It is this natural knowledge which guides man in the way of the Gospel and enables him to separate truth from falsehood, good from evil. It is the first step which raises man to the throne of God. When man his free will ascends the first steps of natural knowledge, then God Himself leans over and covers him with that heavenly knowledge of the mysteries «which are not permitted for man to utter».

The preaching of the Apostles and Fathers, the Prophets, and the Gospel, the words of Christ Himself, are directed to man’s natural knowledge. This is the province of dogmas and affirmative theology. It is the manger where faith is born. 

The beginning of faith is the heart’s ability to grasp that the truth speaks in the small book called the Gospel, that in that commonplace church of poor and faithful people, God descends and dwells. When fear takes hold of one because he steps on the earth which the hand of God laid out, because he gazes at the great and broad sea, because he walks and breathes, then his eyes will begin to shed tears - tears of repentance, tears of love, tears of joy - and he will feel the first caresses of unspeakable mysteries.

Natural knowledge exists in all men, but it is not of the same purity in all. Love of pleasure has the power to darken it. The passions are like a fog, and that is why few men find the road to truth. How many people have been lost in the maze of philosophy, seeking a little light which they shall never see?

In this maze it is not important if one is a Christian of atheist, Protestant or Catholic, Platonist or Aristotelian. There is one common identifying mark on them all - darkness. Whoever enters the cave of rationalism ceases to see. And whatever garments he is wearing, they take on the same dark color. In their discussions they understand each other very well because they have the same presuppositions, the presuppositions of darkness. But it is impossible for them to understand those who are not in the maze and who see the light. And no matter what those on the outside tell them, they understand everything with their own presuppositions and cannot seein what way the others might be superior.

Against False Union - Alexander Kalomiros