The difference of the Jesus Prayer and other forms of Meditation

I used to be very involved with Centering Prayer and the Christian Meditation taught by Benedictine monk John Main.  I led weekly “Christian meditation” groups and retreats at parishes, coordinated retreats led by a well-known Benedictine monk, etc.  This was my life for many years.  In the final year of my involvement with this movement, I was in a period of novitiate as a Benedictine Oblate (one who tries to follow the Rule of St. Benedict while living in the world), trying to decide whether to take my final vows as an Oblate and remain in the Christian Meditation movement, or whether to enter the Orthodox Church.  As I entered more and more deeply into the discipline of Christian Meditation over many years and came to know others who were very experienced in this practice, and simultaneously studied the Orthodox faith and the tradition of the Jesus Prayer, I came to see that Christian Meditation/Centering Prayer were of a very different spiritual origin and orientation than the tradition of the Desert Fathers and its continuation in the Orthodox Church today.  I came to the conclusion that CM/CP were completely incompatible with the Orthodox tradition, and so in the end I had to make a choice of which to follow for the rest of my life.  

Christian Meditation (CM) and Centering Prayer (CP) were attempts to “Christianize” Hindu mantra meditation as taught by Swami Satyananda in Malaya (in the case of CM) and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (in the case of CP).  While abbot of Spenser Abbey in Massachusetts, Fr. Thomas Keating would invite Zen masters to teach his Trappist/Benedictine monks to meditate.  Since Christian Meditation/Centering Prayer methods come directly from the non-Christian East, there is no surprise that one would come to a similar experience by practicing these same methods even within different religions.  In fact, the experience is very much the same, which is why within the CM/CP circles it is very popular to believe that at their “mystical core” all religions experience the same thing and only describe this experience in different terms.  Some describe their experience in terms of “God” and “Love”, while others in terms of “Emptiness” or the “Absolute”, for instance, depending on the religious doctrines through which this same experience is interpreted.  

From my ever deepening engagement with Orthodoxy, I came to see that this “common experience” at the “mystical core” of all these practices is only the experience of our own created nature, our own created human spirit.  This experience of our own created spirit is often described in terms of experiencing “reality” outside of the consciousness of time and space, an experience of limitlessness, of eternity, of boundlessness, of oneness, etc.  This is a very enlightening and transformative experience for people, but it is purely the experience of created reality arrived at as a natural consequence of applying a certain psycho-somatic technique.  In other words, this experience has nothing to do with entering into communion with the Uncreated God through His divine and uncreated energies (grace).  But, is such an experience of one’s created spirit a bad thing?  

In Christian Meditation and Centering Prayer, one is often taught about the experience of communion with God, when in reality the practitioners of these methods are only being led to the experience of the limitlessness of their own created spirit.  When one experiences their own created spirit and mistakes this for the experience of the Uncreated God, this is a delusion, and this delusion becomes the greatest obstacle to actually knowing God and entering into communion with God.  This delusion, in fact, creates a greater obstacle to knowing God than even the grossest passions because one has been brought ultimately to the worship of his own self as God.  This is the experience of the Hindu that says “Atman is Brahman” or “Self is God”.  Through the belief that one’s own created spirit is God or equal to God, which is the same as mistaking your created spirit for the Uncreated Spirit, one falls into the same delusion as Lucifer at the time of his great fall.  

The contemplative movement in the West today, which is led primarily by the teachings of Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation, has at its core this spiritual deception and confusion regarding the experience of God and one’s own created spirit.  It is no wonder, then, that the leaders of this movement, from the famous Thomas Merton to the “teachers” of our own time, see no problem with Christians learning to meditate from Zen masters and Hindu gurus (I have met a few Roman Catholic religious who are also certified Zen Roshis, for instance).  The practice of these methods have led to a “New Christianity” which is not a return to the tradition of the Desert Fathers (which this movement tries to exploit for its own justification) and the early Church, but is rather a betrayal of the very foundation of the apostolic faith and the establishment of a new faith which lays the foundation for the future religion of Antichrist.  

It is very popular in the CP/CM teachings to refer to the Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Payer as being of the same tradition.  This, in fact, is how I first learned of the Orthodox Church.  As one looks deeply into each tradition, however, one will see that everything is approached very differently.  You can then see the continuity and consistency of the Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Prayer and its complete inseparability from baptism in the Orthodox Church and participation in an Orthodox sacramental life.  You can then compare this to the recently created traditions of Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation which have no living continuity with the early Church but which were revived only through contact with the non-Christian East.  You can then look for the fruits of these traditions, you can see the Desert Fathers of old and the contemporary Desert Fathers of the Orthodox Church that have the exact same tradition and worldview as the fathers of old; and compare this to the fact that the CP/CM movements have produced no such contemporary saints that are as the Desert Fathers.  The deeper you enter into these subjects, the more you will see their divergence, and yet only one of these traditions is consistent with the faith “once and for all delivered to the saints”.   

A few quotes from Elder Sophrony of Essex and Hieromonk Damascene of Platina from Hieromonk Damascene’s book “Christ the Eternal Tao”:

Fr. Damascene says concerning the experience of inner light: 

“Here we are treading on dangerous ground, so it is necessary to step lightly. This is where many who have practiced watchfulness have fallen into delusion over the centuries. Everything depends on the purity of one's intention in going within. If one's intention (conscious or unconscious) is not to face one's sin-condition, repent and thus be reconciled to God, but instead to "be spiritual" while continuing to worship oneself, then one can - upon becoming aware of the light of one's spirit - begin to worship it as God. This is the ultimate delusion.” 

Archimandrite Sophrony is then quoted as saying: 

"Attaining the bounds where 'day and night come to an end,' man contemplates the beauty of his own spirit which many identify with Divine Being. They do see a light but it is not the True Light in which there 'is no darkness at all.' It is the natural light peculiar to the mind of man created in God's image. 

"The mental light, which excels every other light of empirical knowledge, might still just as well be called darkness, since it is the darkness of divestiture and God is not in it. And perhaps in this instance more than any other we should listen to the Lord's warning, 'Take heed therefore that the light which is in you be not darkness.' The first prehistoric, cosmic catastrophe - the fall of Lucifer, son of the morning, who became the prince of darkness - was due to his enamored contemplation of his own beauty, which ended up in his self-deification."

Fr. Damascene then comments on this passage: 

“The darkness of divestiture of which Fr. Sophrony speaks is the state of having risen above all thought processes, which we have described earlier. If a person's motive is prideful, he will stop at this point, admiring his own brilliance; but that brilliance will still be darkness. He will think he has found God, but God will not be there. He will find a kind of peace, but it will be a peace apart from God.

“To go beyond thought is not yet to attain true knowledge. Such knowledge comes from the Word speaking wordlessly in the spirit that is yearning for Him; it does not come from the spirit itself. The Word will come and make His abode with the spirit only if the person approaches Him in absolute humility, for He Himself is humility, and like attracts like.” 

Fr. Sophrony writes further on those who go within themselves without humility: 

"since those who enter for the first time into the sphere of the 'silence of the mind' experience a certain mystic awe, they mistake their contemplation for mystical communion with the Divine, whereas in reality they are still within the confines of created human nature. The mind, it is true, here passes beyond the frontiers of time and space, and it is this that gives it a sense of grasping eternal wisdom. This is as far as human intelligence can go along the path of natural development and self-contemplation...

"Dwelling in the darkness of divestiture, the mind knows a peculiar delight and sense of peace... Clearing the frontiers of time, such contemplation approaches the mind to knowledge of the intransitory, thereby possessing man of new but still abstract cognition. Woe to him who mistakes this wisdom for knowledge of the true God, and this contemplation for a communion in Divine Being. Woe to him because the darkness of divestiture on the borders of true vision becomes an impenetrable pass and a stronger barrier between himself and God than the darkness due to the uprising of gross passion, or the darkness of obviously demonic instigations, or the darkness which results from loss of Grace and abandonment by God. Woe to him, for he will have gone astray and fallen into delusion, since God is not in the darkness of divestiture."

To experience the darkness of divestiture and the light of the mind, says Fr. Sophrony, "is naturally accessible to man," but to experience the Uncreated Light of the Divinity is given to man by a special action of God. These two experiences differ qualitatively from each other. Fr. Sophrony writes: 

"It has been granted to me to contemplate different kinds of light and lights - the light the artist knows when elated by the beauty of the visible world; the light of philosophical contemplation that develops into a mystical experience. Let us even include the 'light' of scientific knowledge which is always and inevitably of very relative value. I have been tempted by manifestations of light from hostile spirits. But in my adult years, when I returned to Christ as perfect God, the unoriginate Light shone on me. This wondrous Light, even in the measure vouchsafed to me from on High, eclipsed all else, just as the rising sun eclipses the brightest star."

Fr Damascene then comments on this passage: 

“We do not practice watchfulness so that we can become silent and peaceful. Rather, we become silent so that we can know the unpleasant truth about ourselves, and so that we "hear" the Tao/Logos speaking directly to our inward being. He does not speak in an audible voice; His voice makes no noise even in the mind... Scripture calls His voice still and small. We cannot hear it unless we tune in to it by separating from all the static noise in our heads.” 

After these words, Fr. Damascene then goes on to describe the Orthodox teaching regarding the Jesus Prayer.  

In the Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Prayer, the practice of the Prayer cannot be separated from the Orthodox sacramental and ascetical life.  Since the non-Christian meditation practices, such as are followed by Buddhists, Hindus, and many non-Orthodox Christians (in the tradition of Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, John Main, etc.) are primarily psycho-somatic techniques that lead to the experience of one’s created nature, these techniques can easily be practiced by different people regardless of their religion, and all who practice these techniques come to a similar experience.  In the Orthodox Church, however, man’s salvation, theosis, and his entire spiritual development begins with the reception of the Holy Spirit through baptism and chrismation in the Orthodox Church.  By entering and remaining in the Orthodox Church, man begins to receive and be deified by the Uncreated Energies of God as he grows in humility, virtue, and repentance while regularly receiving deifying grace through the sacraments of the Orthodox Church.  

Confession, repentance, humility, and self-control provide the fertile ground for the seeds of the Jesus Prayer to grow and bear fruit; while providing also the protective leaves that shield and preserve the fruit from the disease and scorching heat of pride and delusion.  For a tree to bear fruit, however, it is not enough to have good soil and leaves for protection, but sunlight is needed also for growth and vitality.  In the same way, along with confession, repentance, humility, and self-control, man needs the divine rays of uncreated grace from the sacraments of the Orthodox Church.    

[...]

 There have been many Eastern Catholics who have tried to make progress in the Jesus Prayer, but who eventually realized that they could not make much progress until they joined the Orthodox Church.  I have commented already on the fact that in the Orthodox Church man's spiritual development and theosis begins with baptism and chrismation in the Orthodox Church.  As I'm sure you know, the Orthodox Church does not consider baptisms or other sacraments performed outside of the Orthodox Church as true and grace-filled sacraments.  The Uncreated Energies of God operate through the sacraments of the Church, but when when a priest or bishop goes into schism and is broken off completely from the body of Christ, the sacraments performed cease to be effective and grace-filled.  This reality explains how so many abuses occurred in Roman Catholicism once they became separated from the Church, just as it explains the chaos of Protestantism and the absence in both of these groups of saints who are of the same spiritual stature and worldview (phronema) as the saints of the first centuries.  [...]

Regarding those who have converted to Orthodoxy from Eastern Rite Catholicism, and your assertion that some Orthodox have converted to Eastern Rite Catholicism, I am thinking particularly of people like Hieromonk Gabriel (Bunge) and Hieromonk Placide (Deseilles) who were patristic scholars and lived for decades as monastics on the Eastern Rite under the Pope before coming to the conclusion that they were on a dead end that could only be resolved by entering the Orthodox Church.  Do you have such people, who lived for decades as Orthodox monks and were renowned as patristic scholars, who came to the conclusion that they were in a dead end in Orthodoxy and so fled to the Pope? 

On the subject of judging the progress of others, my only point is that I have heard several accounts of those who sought to practice the Jesus Prayer in a serious way in Eastern Catholicism who found this attempt to be futile and so converted to Orthodoxy.  Fr. Theophanes of Kapsokalyvia, as one example, said after his conversion that he really wasn’t able to understand the Jesus Prayer properly until his conversion to Orthodoxy.  Other long-time Roman or Eastern Catholics have spoken of the great grace they received after entering the Orthodox Church.    

Within the Orthodox Church, we have many contemporary examples of hesychasts who labored day and night praying the Jesus Prayer and whose lives exemplified the same spiritual qualities as the Desert Fathers of old.  I have not heard of any contemporary hesychasts of Eastern Rite Catholicism whose lives were of the same spiritual character as our contemporary Orthodox saints and elders.  I have never seen a book on the Jesus Prayer by a contemporary hesychast of Eastern Rite Catholicism.  I assume that if an Eastern Rite Catholic wanted to seriously learn to pray the Jesus Prayer, he would find little support within Eastern Rite Catholicism and would need to turn to the books and counsels of living and reposed Orthodox saints and elders who do not consider Eastern Rite Catholicism as part of the Church and have no communion with Eastern Rite Catholics.  Of course, if I am wrong about any of this, please feel free to challenge me on these points.

Before I was Orthodox, the Benedictines trying to recover practices of “contemplative prayer” were always quick to point out that such a tradition died in Roman Catholicism after the Schism (though they would blame scholasticism rather than the Schism), but that a similar (to them) tradition of the Jesus Prayer remained a living tradition in the Orthodox Church from apostolic times until today.  For those who wish to truly learn this way of prayer, it is necessary to be part of this living tradition.

Written by the user "jah777" @    http://www.orthodoxchristianity.net/forum/index.php?topic=18458.45  

Mircea Eliade and Orthodoxy

The “Itinerariu spiritual” marks the first public adherence to the values of Orthodoxy and the church. This twenty-year-old Eliade considered Orthodoxy to resolve the dynamic antagonism between Jesus and Apollo-Dionysus. His Orthodoxy, however, was not the fruit of a personal experience, but of an ideological choice in the name of a new spirituality. The personal debate between magical voluntarism, which characterized him, and Orthodox mysticism, to which he aspired, was not yet over. He remains close to the “temptation” of magic, which had also a luciferian side (see the obsession of “Sfintul Diavol,” “the Holy Devil”). The passage from paganism to Christianity takes place only on the Ideological plane, not the existential, on which Eliade wanted to leave himself full liberty for experience. The two states of spirit live side by side in an unstable equilibrium.

The transformation of man into God continued to be his objective. Christian life meant for him a “heroic life.” Christ was viewed, not as Son of God, but as “the first and greatest hero” of Christianity. This is obvious in the article “Apologia virilititii” (“Praise of Virility,” Gdndlrea, August—September 1928, but written between August 1927 and January 1928). The virile personality is born through the tragic confrontation and synthesis of the Dionysian with the Christic. The restoration of man can be realized through a new virility sprung from the spiritual life. The core idea of this “new humanism” is the “personality,” understood as a spiritual organism constituted through a concrete and inner experience, as a new consciousness that transcends and survives the physical (Eliade, Virilitate si asceza, 227-243).

This is precisely why Eliade would have to deny the position in another article, “Virilitate si asceza ("Virility and Asceticism,” Cuvantul, October 11 and 17, 1928). Here he recognizes that the ascesis of “Apologia virilititii” was one of a magical kind: the asceticism of the Ego exalted through reflection upon itself, outside of divine grace, and of anything transcendent. At the end of one year of experiences, he announces that he has left this position behind: definitive ascesis cannot be fulfilled without grace. He preserves his position of ultimate asceticism, but by turning values upside down, that is, introducing grace and eliminating “self-creating personalism” (“personalismul autocreator”).

— Mircea Eliade Myth, Religion, and History - Nicolae Babuts

Fr Seraphim Rose on Thomism

Thomist philosophy and Catholic realism in general, inspires us [i.e. , Orthodox Christians—ed.] with a certain uneasiness. Why? In a word, because it is too much concerned with the things of this world. It overestimates the worth of the 'natural' in underestimating the corruption of the natural order and of the human intellect, by the Fall; the 'natural' we know is no longer fully natural. But more essential than this, it aspires to a knowledge and 'wisdom' that are 'heavy' with all the weight of the 'world,' that act as though—for all practical purposes—the world is eternal. The time of the Kingdom has come: in the light of this truth, which is central to Christianity, all the worldly preoccupations of Catholic realism seem almost a mockery. Does not this 'realism' say: Let man fulfill his 'natural' self, let him seek worldly knowledge and happiness and temporal improvement, and then look to the knowledge and happiness that lie above these, proceeding from what is humbler and more accessible to what is nobler and more hidden. But if the time of the Kingdom has come, is it not too late to be pursuing these worldly aims? And is it not inevitable that many who begin with the humble will never leave it? Seek ye first the Kingdom of God. The imperative to Christians seems all too obvious: put away all worldly things, and seek the Kingdom. The Kingdom has been 'delayed'; do we then return to our original path, that worldly wisdom to which Christ's message is folly? Alas, with 'Christian philosophy,' and how much more so with modern 'science,' we do just that. Christ is our wisdom, not the world; and in the end these two cannot be reconciled. A 'natural wisdom' subordinated to Christian Truth; a 'natural science' devoted to Christian uses (horror of horrors!)—these, in a 'normal' time, might be legitimate. But the fact that Christ has come marks our time as an extraordinary time, a time in which 'normal' concerns, wisdom and worldly knowledge, must be put aside, and we too must be crucified and made a scandal and folly to the world. Christianity stands opposed to the world. True, there is too the 'world' that is to be saved—but not by descending to its level. Christianity must teach art to paint Christ, not to paint the world in a Christian 'spirit'; science must place Christ in the center of the universe, though it crucify all its formulas to do so (it is in that case that the formulas, not Christ, are wanting). [...]

It is not surprising that many modern Catholic 'realists' find the traditional teaching of the reign of Antichrist shocking—too 'literal' at any rate. For one cannot believe that everything 'natural' is good and at the same time see a reign of evil as its historical outcome.

Hesychasm and Orthodoxy

We are here at the heart of ascetical psychology. We have a tripartite structure of the soul; we are going to free (or, cure) the soul from being dominated by the passions of two parts, anger and desire. Evagrius will mention that the mind (nous) is subject to its own passions of ignorance and delusion, although he does not call them ‘passions’.

Now, the important thing is this: the ascetical program is being set: we are to free ourselves from anger and desire—in what sense, we will see as we proceed. It should be understood that both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment rejected this program—vehemently. They do not accept the underlying anthropology and soteriology. This is the significance of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith: a rejection of the ascetical theology that is based on the anthropology that we are discussing. The Enlightenment, of course, went further, rejecting revealed religion; we saw this in the last chapter. In the West, only the Roman Catholic Church, until our own day, maintained, in its religious orders, this understanding. Here we see a fundamental point on which the Orthodox Church maintains a stance foreign to the wisdom of the West today. It is the Orthodox Church’s understanding of human nature and of the goal of the Christian: what the Christian does from the time of his conversion to Christ, from the time of his Baptism, until he dies. [...]

We say this to indicate the seriousness of what is here being asserted by St Macrina. Taking her to say that it is necessary for the ascetic to remove the passions of the irascible and desiring parts of the soul, to remove their operations contrary to nature, then we have a certain attitude towards those very passions, an attitude that many non-Orthodox Christians, and many non-Christians, do not share. Moreover, we view the difference between the Orthodox doctrine and the non-Orthodox doctrines that would be opposed to it as being fundamental aspects of different anthropologies, different images of the person in each of those doctrines.Moreover, those different anthropologies are tied to different soteriologies, different doctrines of what salvation is and how it is to be accomplished or attained.

We are here at the root of Orthodox anthropology, and any attempt to recast Orthodox prayer of the basis of another anthropology—perhaps a modern post-Enlightenment or post-Freudian or post-Jungian psychological system, or even a Protestant or Roman Catholic anthropology—is going to produce a man or monk quite different from the traditional Orthodox man or monk if the attempt does not respect this fundamental structure of Orthodox anthropology. In other words, an attempt to break off the methods of Hesychasm and plant them in a different philosophical or theological setting that does not respect the basic orientation of Orthodox anthropology is going to produce results quite different from those which are produced in the Orthodox ascetical tradition. [...]

And here is the problem for Western adepts of other faiths, to see that what St Hesychios is addressing in his discussion of sobriety and mental prayer in the heart flows out of Orthodox Baptism[9] and Orthodox Faith. To continue our metaphor, yes, we too, the Orthodox, have five fingers on each of our hands. But we worship God and what we build has a distinctly Orthodox character. Here, the rebuttal is normally: ‘It’s all the same; these are cultural differences in the architectural style of the temple you build.’ We say: ‘No. We receive the Holy Spirit in Baptism; it enlivens, quickens, enlightens, cleanses our mind (nous) and heart, so that we find our mind (nous) and heart different, and when we descend with our mind (nous) into our heart, that mind (nous) has been enlivened, quickened, enlightened and cleansed by Baptism, so that we see things differently. Moreover, when we are with our mind (nous) in our heart, the problem for us Orthodox is no longer to activate an innate structure so as automatically to undergo an experience of light, but, on the one hand, to pray in a certain way, and, on the other hand, to cultivate sobriety—this is the topic of St Hesychios’ work—which sobriety is bound up with the rebuttal of temptation that we have just outlined. So we, as Orthodox, with our mind (nous) in our heart have an Orthodox activity; we build an Orthodox building with our hands of five fingers.’

[...]

St Macrina uses the excellent metaphor of the iron moulded by the artisan: the iron is moulded towards whatever the consideration or judgement of the artisan who is executing the work would wish, becoming either a sword or an agricultural implement.

Earlier, in connection with the use of the Prayer of Jesus, we referred to innate structures of the human soul, taken in reference both to God and to the body, and alluded to the use of mantras in Hinduism and Buddhism, and even to the use of zikr in Sufism. Here we have an answer to the claim that all these methods are equivalent: it is the judgement or consideration of him who executes the work that determines whether the iron will become a sword or a ploughshare. Similarly, there may be innate structures that support the use of a mantra in Buddhism or of the Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox Church: that is the iron, these innate structures. But it is the judgement or consideration of him who executes the work that determines what will become of the iron: this is the Orthodox Faith, the Hindu belief system, the Buddhist belief system, the Sufi belief system. These differ. And what is made of the iron differs according to the judgement of him who executes the work: what is made of the Jesus Prayer, the mantra of Hinduism, the mantra of Buddhism, the zikr of Sufism, depends on the judgement—the faith, the belief system—of him who prays the Jesus Prayer, uses the mantra and so on. Hence, to say that all religions are the same, that they all lead to the same result, that they all do the same things to the same innate structures, is to say that all iron implements are the same, that they differ only in shape according to the culture of the artisan. The intention, belief and judgement of the artisan play their role however, and that is the difference among the religions of mankind.

The Psychological Basis of Mental Prayer in the Heart

Volume I: The Orthodox Doctrine of the Person

Fr Theophanes (Constantine)

On Divine Meditation (St Ignatius Brianchaninov)

St Dimitry of Rostov and St Tikhon of Voronezh practiced divine meditation —that is, holy reflection on the incarnation of God the Word, on His wonderful life on earth, on His terrible and saving sufferings, on His most glorious resurrection and ascension to heaven; as well as on man, his destiny, his fall, his renewal by the redeemer, and on the other deep mysteries of Christianity.

The holy reflections of the above saints are superbly propounded in their writings. St Peter of Damascus, in common with other ascetic writers, ranks such reflections among spiritual visions, and in the category of visions he assigns them to the fourth degree. Every spiritual vision is a sight of mysteries of some kind, which manifest themselves in the ascetic in accordance with his purification by repentance, as can be seen in the book of St Peter of Damascus. Repentance has its degrees, and spiritual visions have their degrees. The mysteries of Christianity are revealed to the ascetic by degrees, according to his spiritual proficiency. The divine meditations or pious reflections of Saints Dimitry and Tikhon serve as an expression of their spiritual proficiency. Let him who desires exercises in divine meditation read the writings of these saints. Such divine meditation will be the most immune to error and the most profitable for the soul. On the other hand, meditation becomes very wrong and harmful if, before purification by penance and without having any exact grasp of Christian doctrine, the ascetic allows himself self-willed reflection, which cannot fail to be erroneous and therefore cannot fail to produce harmful results and self-deception, cannot fail to lead to the precipice of fatal error.

The saints had been trained with all precision and detail in Orthodox theology, and then by their holy life they had risen to the height of Christian perfection. Divine meditation was natural for them. It is not natural for an ascetic who has no fundamental or precise grasp of theology, and has not been purified by penance. 

For this reason it was forbidden by the holy Fathers to novices, and in fact to all monks in general who had not been prepared for it by study and had not reached it by their way of life. St John of the Ladder says, “Deep is the depth of the dogmas, and not without risk does the mind of the hesychast caper among them. It is not safe to swim in one’s clothes, nor should a slave of passion touch theology.”2 Such words are a warning to hesychasts, and it is common knowledge that only proficient monks are allowed to practice hesychasm.3

In ancient times very many monks fell into fatal heresy solely because they allowed themselves to investigate dogmas beyond their powers of comprehension. “A humble monk,” St John of the Ladder again teaches, “will not meddle with mysteries, but a proud one will pry into the divine judgments.”4 Very true! In one who is immature and unfit for it, the desire to undertake divine meditation is the suggestion of conceit, is a proud and imprudent desire. Exercise yourself in prayer and in soul-building reading, and this exercise will be an exercise in divine meditation that is right, safe, and pleasing to God.

Just as our eyes of sense when healed of blindness see by their own natural property, so, too, our mind when purified of the disease of sin naturally begins to see the mysteries of Christianity. Rely on God in your efforts. If it is necessary for you and for the general benefit of Christianity that you should be a seer of deep mysteries and a preacher of them to your brethren, God will certainly grant you that gift. But if that is not the will of God, strive for that which is essentially necessary for your salvation and which fully satisfies the demands of that need. Endeavor to acquire pure prayer combined with a sense of penitence and mourning, with the remembrance of death, of God’s judgment, and of the frightful dungeons of hell where eternal fire blazes and eternal darkness reigns. Such prayer combined with such recollections is an unerring, excellent form of divine meditation, and of the greatest profit to the soul.

Theological language should always be apophatic (Christos Yannaras)

Theological language should always be apophatic. It should not claim to exhaust the truth in its expression. Words can only indicate the truth, they can never substitute it. By understanding the expression we do not necessarily recognize the truth, because truth is not simply intellectual like the Platonic logoi of beings. Truth in ecclesiastical theology is unrestricted by time, space, and the corruption of death: it is the persons and the energies of the persons, the otherness of the word or logos of what is brought about by the personal energy. And this truth can only be known in the experiential immediacy of relation.

 Language signifies relation, invites relation, and serves relation, but cannot replace the universality of relation, the experiential knowledge which creates relation. Linguistic expression can therefore only mark the limits of truth; it is always relative and suggestive of truth, functioning through poetic images. It does not obey rules of methodology and formal logic. In the language of ecclesiastical theology, mutually contradictory concepts can lead to their transcendence. By accepting contradiction, humanity can participate in reality, not just its representation. 

Apophaticism differentiates Orthodoxy from the West in clear, striking language. The West denied the apophaticism of theological expression, understanding truth as the "coincidence of meaning with the object of thought." It identified the power of knowing truth with the individual's capacity to understand concepts, with the capacity for correct thought. And it shaped a theological language utterly subject to this priority of individualistic intellectualism, which is the complete opposite of the Church's way of expressing truth in apophatic language and images. 

This did not come about by chance. Behind the denial of apophatic expression we may discern all the fundamental Western deviations from the Church's Gospel. The denial of apophaticism implies the rejection of the real nature of the Church, a falling away into an individualistic religiosity. The proclamation of salvation is no longer a call or invitation to change one's mode of existence, to withdraw from individualism and participate in the communion of personal relations, in the authentic life of the eucharistic kingdom. The proclamation of salvation in the language of individualistic intellectualism alienates it, turning it into a religious teach-ing which through the comprehension of individuals aims at an individualistic faith and an individualistic conformity to its moral requirements. 

The denial of apophaticism implies a reversal of the terms of Orthodox ontology, a reliance on the priority of the divine essence, which is accessible only intellectually, and not on the priority of the Person, who is known only in the experiential immediacy of relation and historical revelation. The denial of apophaticism implies a rejection of the distinction between essence and the essence's energies, a rejection of the creature's participation in the grace of the energies of the Untreated, in the Uncreated's mode of existence. Without apophaticism salvation only adds an inexplicable (created but "supernatural, grace to existence, which cannot explain how life is released from the bounds of nature, how existence is drawn from the freedom of relation. 

Briefly, a theological language without apophaticism, such as is characteristic of novel Western doctrines, can overturn the Church's Gospel. The language of individualistic intellectualism cannot express an empirical participation in the ecclesial reality of salvation. Apophatic language inoculates the Church from heresy and theology from ideology. 

From the book Orthodoxy and the West 

Jean Bies, Journey to the Holy Mountain

Jean Bies

From the book "Journey to the Holy Mountain"

First evening conversation, in a turkish pavilion

"An imitation of the nature of God"

Before recounting this meeting, I would like to transcribe the interesting remarks we had with Father Cyril, since they are from the days that preceded it and, by a final rational reflex, I still find myself respecting a certain chronology.

Am I really, in fact, when our two interviews take place even before our stay in Lavra, and we have to go back down to Philothéou for a while to get back the notes I forgot there? I find them as if by a miracle in the small turkish kiosk located nearby, which overlooks the foliage with its graceful fragility: my notes were lying on a bench, on the floor, mixed up by the wind, and I collected them, trying to lay out the sheets in order.

First there had been a long silence in which the revelations seemed to ripen, which were going to shake our consciences which had been too quiet, and all that had been built up in a peremptory style. There were also those slow minutes of "contemplation of nature", - an important aspect of Orthodox mysticism which has something Japanese about it, - I should say contemplation of the Logooe spermatikooe, those billions of immaterial seeds embedded in the hearts of creatures. The sparkling nature of these Logooe, the virgin nature corresponds to the primordial purity; it is a vegetal reminiscence of the earthly paradise and a prefiguration of the celestial paradise: a sanctuary, a heavenly refraction, the mysterious presence of the invisible in the visible.  Contemplating the beauty of Saint Athos, "that tabernacle not made by human hands", says the Palamas, on those evenings, we discovered the identity of essence between the cosmic manifestation and its principle. The fathers say admirably: "God wanted to manifest his Beauty, and He created matter." The Greek text of Genesis similarly says that after each creation, "God saw that it was beautiful" (kalon).

Around our panoramic viewpoint, blue and purple ravines, purple chasms sown with Judean trees, studded with lilacs and mimosas, formed through the mists like a collection of Far Eastern engravings. The pavilion stood among gardens glistening with the glistening light of a sudden summer rain, like a slender basket with Persian curves (the custom here of counting twelve hours in the rising sun was imported from Persia by the Georgians).

Cyril looked less at these things than at their 'flame', - the watermark of the universe - with the 'sweet tenderness', the katanyxis, and the 'awakening', the nêpsis, which inhabited his eyes, and which inhabit all Orthodoxy. His pacified gaze on this nature seemed to pacify it further, returning it to its origin, not the 'first' but 'unique'. (Thus, the first day of creation is not covered, but mia: not first in time, but plenary in order, out of any serial development.) Beneath his eyebrows, the elder seemed to wander motionless through these wild gardens and parks. He himself, concealed in his beard, would soon appear to us as the expression of that evidence which we have lost and which, for that reason, makes us claim that it does not exist.

- What is Christianity, Venerable Father?" we asked him first.

Father Cyril crossed himself and began with these words:

- Christianity, beloved brethren, is an "imitation of the nature of God", as Saint Gregory of Nyssa so beautifully put it.... But you see, brethren in Christ, before even asking ourselves what Christianity is, it is necessary to restore a Christian mentality. Until you have renounced the habits acquired in the University, and reinforced by the thousand conditionings of the secular world, that "abomination of desolation" - permanent criticism, exegesis, dialectic, systematic doubt, philosophical anguish that only leads to suicide - you will not be able to understand the essence of Christianity, which occupies a supra-rational level and uses an analogical and symbolic language.  You are pleasant students, but as such, victims of the drug of ratiocinations, of antithetical arguments, interchangeable constructions, which only lead to the negation of God, and then to the negation of man, his image. First look at the eternal beings, contemporaries of the logos; you will comprehend with your heart what the order of reason will never make you comprehend. Get rid of the historicist spirit of the people of Dysis - the West - atheists or believers, which tends to see only "events" and is only sensitive to the man Jesus, forgetting the pre-eternal Christ, denying miracles and Resurrection. Hence the so frequent temptation of your Churches to deal with history, then with politics, and to secularize themselves imperceptibly.

This beginning had all the desirable unusualness. Intrigued, curious, sceptical all together, we urged Father Cyril to clarify his thoughts.

- Truth, he continued, has been limited to the simple "fact"; the relative has been given an absolute character, and the Absolute itself has been discarded. As a result, the myth of the "sense of history" was created, of the indefinite progress of the species, which can be demolished by a simple survey of the civilizations of the past and a quick analysis of the human soul. The Blessed and Glorified Fathers were indifferent to the historical aspect of Christ the Savior, preferring to see in Him the Logos that existed before the centuries, the eternal Sophia. His earthly life, his actions, his words, they interpret them allegorically. If you turn your spirit in that sense, beloved brethren, you will begin to understand what it means to imitate the nature of God.

Paradosis - Paradeisos

Then I say this:

- Do you not think, Venerable Elder, that the Church may be led, while remaining faithful to the essence of its message, to modify its modalities according to the changes of the times or to adapt to certain circumstances?

The answer of the Elder did not take long to reply:

- Do you know what makes the Holy Orthodox Church respected?

That is because she doesn't allow herself to be manipulated or influenced. The Church does not have to adapt to "new things" which tomorrow will prove to be outdated and will be replaced by others, nor does she have to reform when in fact it is us who have to be reformed by her, nor does she have to conform to the spirit of the world, nor does she have to consult it, since the spirit of the world is nothing but the emanation of deviant darkness. She does not have to undergo the philosophical, political and scientific conditionings and seductions of this world destined to disappear like the grass of the fields. She, whom the Holy Fathers say is superior to the first creation, does not have to open herself to the world; but whoever enters her must leave this world and its prince at the door, if they refuse to enter by penance and the mortification of impudicity, greed and pride. Take the example of the so-called "social justice" extended to earthly space: it will remain an illusion until man has found God in his heart. Any other attitude is the beginning of decay.

Father Cyril resumed after a few moments:

- We are accused of excessive rigor, a refusal to adapt. But what does the lightening of fasting lead to? To its total disappearance. To what will lead the shortening of prayers? To their replacement by sacrilegious offices. To what will lead conformity to the times? The depopulation of churches and the fall of vocations. The more the Churches of the West come up with inventing new methods to attract young people, the more they lose faith!

- What then is the mission of the Church?

- To transmit the faith of the ancestors and the theophoric Fathers, an integral and pure faith. Even if it must displease the powerful of the day and provoke persecutions such as those of the Roman Empire are nothing in comparison. Orthodoxy is precisely fidelity to Tradition, a Tradition clearer than crystal, holy, sealed by God, not subject to variations; - it has the sense of a perfect continuity, without withdrawal or addition, - of a single word, of a single letter. St. John Damascene the Sublime said: "We do not change the eternal bounds which our fathers set, but we keep the Tradition as we received it." And St. Mark of Ephesus the Divine said, "No concession is permitted with regard to our faith." So we keep in the "clay vessels" of our unworthiness the unspoiled and unaltered deposit.

- But, Venerable Father, what then is this Tradition? Could you tell us a few words about it?

- It is the Transmission - Paradosis - of spiritual realities and marks the continuity of knowledge from the beginnings of the world, from Paradise. This Tradition is the faith given by the God-man, our Lord Jesus Christ, to his apostles, and taught by the Church to the generations. It is also the immense and immemorial heritage of the Bible, the Creed, the conciliar decrees, the writings of the Most Holy Fathers, the golden mouths of the Word, - the doctrinal and canonical treatises, the liturgical books, the holy images, the divine Liturgy.

- Don't you recognize the authority of all the Councils?

- The seven great and holy Ecumenical Councils have laid the definitive foundations of the whole Church; to them we submit with faith and piety. They normatively specified the Christological message of the Church, the mystery of Christ, true God and true man, the absolute unity of God inseparable from no less absolute diversity, the hypostases, the union in Christ of the two natures, the motherhood of Mary, the veneration of icons, the pledge of the Incarnation and the metamorphosis of matter into Spirit. The Councils that followed brought nothing else, or initiated the series of deviations and alterations of the Truth, source of life. The first seven Councils, the first and last of which took place in Ephesus, prove the totality of the Christic cycle. This septenary symbolizes the seven seals of the Spirit, the seven pillars of the faith of the Word on which rests the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Now, what the Fathers say, we also say.

- Yet not all Orthodox Patriarchs are so resistant to modern influences.

- Despite regrettable exceptions, due to a lack of doctrine and information, Holy Orthodoxy refuses to make a pact with the apostasy of today's world, the reign of the Antichrist.

And Father Cyril emphasized this sentence, which was for him definitive:

- The civilization of the Antichrist is nothing but the dehumanization of man.

The Antichrist and His Majesty the Man of Europe

We didn't intend to leave it at that. My friend asked:

- What, Venerable Father, is the Antichrist?

Father Cyril did not answer immediately, either because he was astonished at our ignorance, or because he hesitated to continue the conversation on this topic. Finally, he said:

- The antichrist, beloved children, is the one in whom the mankind will see its supreme benefactor, but who will be its worst enemy. It is for the sake of his coming that atheists work and many Christians who are unaware of the consequences of their actions, as well as people who happily share materialistic theories and follow the gospel from wolves turned by pastors (lykopoimenes) who are genuine tools of dark powers (hypokeiria ton skoteinon dynameon).

- The Antichrist does not want to abolish religion, he wants to take it into his service. But for this, he must abolish faith in Christ, the faith that the Lord Himself will have so much difficulty in finding when He returns, as He said. The antichristic strategy is to first make man forget all that allows him to ascend to the Infinite Living, God, and to replace it with technocratic conveniences, entertainment, social insurance: rubbish in the Eyes of God. His interest is to make people believe that the bread asked for in the Lord's Prayer is only the "daily bread" that he can distribute at his own discretion. (We can see how dull is the poverty of such a food). In fact, the speech in the prayer is about the super-substantial bread (ton arton ton epiousion), i.e. about the Holy Spirit. His interest is to suppress human persons and replace them with individuals, with an amorphous, anonymous and irresponsible mass, whose immediate instincts he satisfies while seducing them with idealistic slogans. Like a beggar, the Lord Christ was given the last place at the table of this world, while the first seats are reserved for politicians, intellectuals, sportsmen, bankers, to be acclaimed by thousands of newspapers and books that every day blaspheme the divine Majesty. Christ our Lord is ignored and mocked; the temples of a deicide culture have replaced his temples.

- Mount Athos is said to be the bastion against the Antichrist. Is that true, Holy Father?

- Of all Orthodoxy, it is true that the Holy Mountain is the most rigorous guardian of the Christian Tradition, passing through all the vicissitudes of human history with its spur: it survived the fall of the Byzantine Empire, escaped the crescent of Mohammed, refused the tiara of Rome and the sickle of Moscow, fighting tirelessly against all the heresies of the East and the West.

- But, tell us, you are a very small minority among today's Christians who think this way.

- The majority may be just a multitude of people who do not want to be informed and who think they know everything but do not know anything. Only one Person besides God, that is the Church, which has never promised an earthly victory, will exist until the end, even if it is reduced to a small flock. I know, beloved brethren, that it is said everywhere about us that we are nothing but a bunch of rotten, fanatical and ignorant monks, yet we are here, with all our filth and ignorance, only to bear witness to the Glory of the Almighty. Soon it will be said of us that we are only a sect, while the sum of all the heresies accumulated over twenty centuries will pass for the truth! But we accept to be hated by men as long as we are never separated from Theandric Love. Yes, we belong to the "little remnant" spoken of by the divine Paul, who never bent his knee before Baal. We know from Basil the Great that "it is not the multitude that will be saved", and from Nicephorus the Confessor, that "if even a small number remain attached to Orthodox piety, it is they who constitute the Church."

- You make us fully understand, Venerable Father, the unshakeable attachment of Orthodoxy to Tradition. And yet, rather curiously enough, there is in it, in addition to this hieratic and immutable aspect, something very modern, which the West ignores. We think, for example, of the use of vernacular languages in the Liturgy, the choice of the bishop by the people, or the marriage of priests.

- These are not two aspects, one ancient, the other modern, it is Tradition as it has always been. The obligatory use of Latin throughout Western Christianity has made it rigid and uniform, arbitrarily suppressing the diversity of liturgical manifestations. The marriage of priests has always existed in Orthodox Christianity, where the priestly order has not been confused with the monastic order. At the Council of Nicaea, a great Egyptian ascetic, Saint Paphnutius, emphasized the spiritual chastity of conjugal love and the full compatibility of priesthood and marriage. The latter, like the former, is the object of a sacrament. Discreet and devoted, the priest's wife is the mother of all the parishioners; there are generations of priests among us, just as there are generations of musicians. But this is something that the West has forgotten, just as it has forgotten the personal "rumination" of the Scriptures, the vivification of the Name, and many other points.

- You hold a strong grudge against the West, holy elder. Isn't the Roman Church, in spite of errors, "Catholic" - i.e. "Universal" - in the broadest sense of the word?

- It is precisely there that lies the confusion which wrongly equates Catholic in the sense of "universal", and Roman, a term used only to localize Caesar. It is in the same way that we are witnessing either a dissolution of the sacred in external commitments, or the reduction of the Church to hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Hence the pejorative expression "simple faithful"; hence the fact that the species of wine is reserved for clerics only. When those in the West speak of the Church, they mean much less the Mystical Body than a organizational hierarchy.

- You spoke earlier, Venerable Father, of the use of Latin extended to the whole of the Christian West. But this language cemented the Catholic nations together and consecrated Roman unity in the face of a certain orthodox anarchy.

- You take for anarchy, beloved brethren, the Pentecostal diversity. Roman unity is above all juridical, administrative and abstract, tending towards centralism. Orthodox unity, on the other hand, lies in the faith common to all the Autocephalous Churches; it is an interior, doctrinal and sacramental unity, that of the very first Christian communities helping one another while remaining free in relation to each other, with mutual respect for national languages and customs. It is unity in diversity, it is a symphony, not a monologue.

- So you hold the West responsible for the current crisis in Christianity?

- Alas! Yes, totally. His Majesty the Man of Europe built the religion of Man by exiling the God-Man in heaven.

- How did he do that?

- The humanism that emerged from ancient paganism proclaimed man as the supreme divinity. In his pride, European man claimed to be God, he claimed to be the measure of all things, he denied everything that was above him or that he could not understand in the light of his reason. If he still admits Christ, then it is as a man, not as the supreme God. This is a nail in the eye the Church, a Kakodoxy whose name is Arianism. Christ is true God, consubstantial with God the Father. That is why He is the Saviour, Redeemer and Lord. By denying consubstantiality, Arianism deprives God of divinity. It claims to explain God with the help of the fallen human mind only.

 However, "an explicable God would cease to be God," says St. Athanasius, the fiery tongue of the Holy Spirit. Logic is incapable of understanding the incomprehensible, of grasping the ungraspable. And today, modern thought, by reducing everything to man, including the Whole, has resurrected Arianism in its glory! The whole of Western culture is permeated by it, hence the struggle against the Spirit, the pneumatomachy (pneumatomachia) that it vigorously leads with the weapons of relativism and positivism. Hence the contemporary bankruptcy.

- Reason can be used to prove the Existence of God. Saint Anselm, as an example?

- God proves Himself by Himself, by His creation, His revelation and His Incarnation. Anselm begins to want to prove by deductions and ontological arguments: the scholasticism, the daughter of Arabized Aristotelianism, is born, which chooses Reason as its guide, which it prefers instead of the Most Holy Spirit. Rationalism is born in its turn, from which is born Protestantism, individualism and its "freedom of choice" (libre arbirtre), the rejection of metaphysics, the criticism of texts and scientism. Parallel to this dualistic West, the Greek world, born of Plato and Plotinus, will develop, under the biblical breath, a Christianity full of mysticism and poetry; the West will opt first for religious "culture", then profane; Greece will keep the "things that are beyond us", the profound knowledge, the gnosis.

The night had slowly surrounded us with shrouds of stars. It was the image of that divine Gnosis which is concealed in Orthodoxy, which is folded over its hidden treasures. Perhaps Father Cyril wasn't telling us everything. We know that Irenaeus, Basil of Caesareaea, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Evagrius Pontus and others allude in their works to an oral and secret tradition, emanating from Christ and transmitted by the apostles. We remember that Christ forbade casting pearls before the swine; and if several phrases in the celebration of the "dreadful mysteries" take place behind a veil, it must correspond to something. At the same time, however, we understood that by losing these esotericas, the West had lost the very meaning of what it is talking about, and that its downfall was surely more serious than we imagine.

But we stopped at the threshold of this vertigo. Blessed Hesychios dictated our conduct: "The highest conversation is nothing but gossip if it goes on too long."


http://angel.org.ru/1/bies.html (in russian)

http://orthodoxievco.net/bul/48.htm (in french)

http://orthodoxievco.net/bul/49.htm

Second evening conversation 

Calendar, Filioque, Roman Papacy

The words of Father Cyril certainly disturbed us and shook many false certainties within us. Curious to know more, we hastened to find the Elder, the next evening, in the same place. He stood there as usual, and was as patient and courteous to us as ever.

We began by asking Cyril what most differentiated Orthodoxy from heterodoxy. Father Cyril signed himself and began with these words:

- We Orthodox have not rejected the Epiclesis*; we ignore unleavened bread, indulgences, superrogatory merits, casuistry; we ignore the opposition of nature and grace, the distinction between nature and the supernatural. Also, the disputes between Papists and Lutherans are meaningless to us.

But it turned out that the three sources of fundamental disagreement were to be found elsewhere. First, in the famous question of the calendar.

- Our Julian calendar is thirteen days behind Gregory of Rome's civil calendar. Now, what were the reformers of the sixteenth century, next to the astronomers of the Church of Alexandria? Ignorant people, who simply destroyed Orthodox Paschalia to please the Jesuits, who wanted to definitively break with us by shifting the date of the feasts. In Italy itself, this reform was considered "childishness". - Our calendar may be astronomically inaccurate, but so is the other one, which some scientists would like to correct now. The error of our Paschalia does not exceed three hours in nineteen hundred years, and our calendar will not be wrong for another thousand years. Why do we have to worry about what will be in a thousand years, when we do not even know if we will be alive tomorrow? Our calendar is the lunar calendar of the Bible; according to this calendar the Lord was born, lived and died, and rose again on the 16th of Nizan. Now, says St. John Chrysostom, "neither angels nor archangels should change anything that has been commanded by God". It is this calendar that was kept "always, everywhere and by everyone", and it is this fidelity to the biblical calendar that causes us to be slandered and persecuted by the very people who claim to follow the Bible!

One of us asked:

- Aren't there also considerations relating to the Jewish Passover?

- Orthodox Paschal Law established as a rule that we do not celebrate our Passover before or at the same time as the Passover of ancient Israel, but on the Sunday after the full moon, at the time of the spring equinox. - This does not often happen according to the new calendar!... The new calendar is a diabolical innovation, added Father Cyril after a silence!

- But, tell us, Venerable Father, is not the Gregorian calendar based on scientific data?

- We have no need of the scientific point of view. The Church is above this astronomical time, which will be abolished. It is not a question of considering the revolutions that the earth makes around the sun, but the liturgical cycle of the earthly Church reflecting the celestial Liturgy, marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit. Eternal in nature, the Church is by grace beyond time.

A second point of disagreement: filioquism.

- We often hear about it, I would say, without ever knowing what it is really about.

- "The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father," declares the Nicene Symbol. However, as early as the sixth century, the Spaniards and the Franks added "and of the Son", (Filioque). The Popes resisted for a long time and maintained the first formula, inherited from the Fathers. John VIII still considered that anyone who added to or subtracted from the venerable and great Creed would be expelled from the Christian confession and equated with Judas. Leo III rejected the addition that Charlemagne wanted to impose upon him with theologically uncultured arguments. However, at the end of the tenth century, the Caesaropapism of the German emperors finally prevailed.  At his coronation in Rome, Henry II imposed on the Pope a mass mentioning the Filioque. Two centuries later, the Council of Lyon made the heterodox doctrine of Filioquism obligatory, thus officially introducing two principles into the Divinity. Once again, in the West, the spiritual bowed to the temporal. The East, for its part, opposed this arbitrary innovation, this cursed fabrication, from the very beginning, and refused to unilaterally subordinate the Person of the Spirit to that of the Son: the one and the other proceeds together from the Father. Orthodoxy evokes, on the one hand, the prohibition of the Ecumenical Councils against making any change in the Symbol without a meeting of another Council, on the other hand, the falsity of filioquism, which destroys the balance between the three Persons and introduces an erroneous conception of the role of the Spirit in the world. This is why the Holy Patriarch Photios condemned it as heresy.

- Wasn't that these theological disputes without much consequence for the current future of the Church?

- Dear friends, there are not important things and details in our faith! Remove a single stone, the building collapses. The consequences of the Filioque have been catastrophic. The scholasticism of the Latins, by insisting more on the unity of essence than on the Trinitarian Persons, has made God an abstraction, an impersonal Deity; and this is already, in germ, the God of the "philosophers". The Filioque mixes Persons, destroys the delicate antinomy of unity and diversity, accentuates indivisibility to the detriment of the Trinitarian aspect, and in doing so, leads to the monarchical institution of the "Vicar of Christ" and its priority over freedom in the Spirit and the universal priesthood. The Western Church has become an institution of this world, a temporal power; within this Church, unity has destroyed diversity, hence the excess of centralisation and authority. Little by little, the will of the Roman pontiffs will be transformed from a moral primacy, an "honorary presidency", into a juridical and authoritarian power. The Gregorian reform of the eleventh century prepared the way for "papal infallibility".

- So it was mainly the question of the Filioque that led to the separation of Constantinople and Rome?

- The dogmatic question of the Filioque contributed to this separation; but it is the question of the Papacy that completed the schism of 1054. It is from this fatal date that the popes arrogated to themselves an authority even in the East, establishing themselves heads of all the Churches: it is absolute power hypostasized. A feudal conception of the Church was developing in the West, and the Crusades arrived to ruin Thessalonica and Constantinople: a devastation so great that the Muslim conquest later turned pale. The Pope of Rome assumed the role of autocrat, even commanding secular leaders; the Church of the West became centralized, ours remained collegiate. Juridical concepts dominated papal Latinism, while our theology was worshiped. - The different points of view became increasingly divergent. The Latins saw in the One and Triune God the Unity of God, we, the triadic harmony of Persons. In the Crucifixion, some saw the death of Christ, - from which later the imposture of the "death of God" was born, - others saw the victory of Him who sits "on the throne of cherubic glory". Gregory VII had already completely changed ecclesial structures. He made the bishops mere representatives of the papacy, separated the Church into clerics and laity, teachers and professors, - which prepared the way for the later struggle between clericalism and secularism. He even predicted damnation to those who would not obey the Pope. Meanwhile, Christ's reasonable flock withdrew to their uncompromising fidelity and inner truth, jealously nurturing that faith which made the fragrant plant of humility grow in them.

All of this was not far from getting our support.

But we wanted to know the exact position of Orthodoxy with regard to the Papacy.

Father Cyril answered us: