Sufi metaphysics and Christian Orthodox trinitarism (Vincent Rossi)

The following is an excerpt from the article "Presence, Participation, Performance: The Remembrance of God in the Early Hesychast Fathers" by Vincent Rossi

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Schuon outlines above several dichotomies that will undoubtedly underlie all our discussions: metaphysics-theology, intellectual-sentimental, esoterism-exoterism, unitarism-trinitarism, metaphysical transparency of forms-opaque doctrinal formalism, and above all, Divine center-human margin. All these dichotomies, or rather, hierarchical dualities, for that is what they are in fact, are rooted in the fundamental epistemic duality: gnosis (knowledge)-pistis (faith), with the former standing higher on the epistemic ladder than the latter. Knowledge-faith, according to Schuon, is the basic duality of all religious expression. Merely noting these dualities, and mechanically putting each thinker or tradition we encounter into one or the other, does not automatically lead us to perfect clarity. For example, what Schuon calls “theology” or “sentimental metaphysics” is clearly not what the early Hesychast Fathers know as theologia, which as an expression indicating union with God transcends even what Schuon calls the “highest metaphysics”. Again, what Schuon calls “extreme trinitarianism” is characteristic of each and every one of the early Hesychast Fathers with whom we will be exploring the practice of the remembrance of God.

Sufi metaphysics, as represented by a thinker like Schuon, is grounded in a logically hierarchical and essentialist conception of reality: Beyond-Being, Being, Existence. Only the Absolute, the totally unqualified, non-manifest Essence, is Beyond-Being. This is That which is “the One”. The Trinity in this conception cannot represent the totally unqualified Essence. The Trinity necessarily stands at the level of Being, the equally non-manifest but proto-determined principle of Existence. Being is thus the “realm” of the “personal” God, which is the first determination of the Absolute, called by Schuon the relative Absolute. Since the hypostases of the Trinity in this view are determinations of the One, and relative to one another, they necessarily cannot be at the level of the absolutely Absolute, but must be relative to it, that is, to the Essence, yet still absolute with respect to the created world; hence Schuon’s notion of Being as the relative Absolute. Such an approach is highly congenial to and perhaps even entirely representative of the “highest metaphysics” of the Sufis, but it is unacceptable to the Hesychasts of the Christian East, whose own understanding of the highest metaphysics is paradoxically Trinitarian, hypostatic/personalist rather than logically essentialist. This explains Schuon’s implied criticism of Christians who are “extreme” trinitarians. He is critical, not of their trinitarianism per se, but of their illogical insistence that the Trinity is the most appropriate way to speak of the Absolute (“as if the three dimensions of space were to be willed into one dimension only”), and of their insistence that Person/hypostasis in God describes the Uncircumscribable better than an essentialist metaphysics. This insistence by the Christian hesychasts is inexplicable to the logically hierarchical metaphysics of the Sufi traditionalists, in which the intellectual principle of logical non-contradiction is primary; or it is explicable in Schuon’s terms only as the stubborn insistence by “bhaktic” theologians of a “Divine right” to irrationality and illogicality. Among the Hesychasts, however, the revelational principle of paradox and antinomy is superior to the principle of logical non-contradition. The Hesychasts were not ignorant of the paradoxical nature of their Trinitarian expressions, as even a cursory reading of the Corpus Areopagiticum or the works of St Maximos the Confessor must show. Hence their trinitarianism cannot justly be characterized as “devoid of metaphysical penetration” or as a form of “sentimental” or “bhaktic” theology, impervious to the subtle gleams of metaphysical light. Furthermore, in my reading of the greatest of the hesychast masters, saints such as Dionysios the Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor, or John of Damaskos, their insistence upon and expression of Divine unity in their trinitarianism seems in no way inferior to the most radical of the unitarists of Islam. Nor does one see in their writings (and it would be easy to supply dozens of texts showing this) the slightest indication that in their “trinitarism” they are guilty of that greatest of Islamic sins against Divine Unity, association or shirk. 

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The meaning of this passage pivots on the insight that for the hesychast, God is forever beyond human knowledge, and yet He somehow reveals Himself to those who seek Him with fervency and constancy. Further, though forever beyond human knowledge, to the Hesychasts of the Christian East, God is forever present, not as transpersonal Essence, which is imparticipable, or as the “first determination” of the Divine Essence, as traditionalist/Sufi metaphysics would have it, but as transcendent Person. This is the true meaning of the hesychasts’ “extreme trinitarianism”, which insists that the absolute Divine Essence, although totally beyond-being, is not an impersonal or non-personalized principle that transcends everything sequent to it, but subsists only as it is “enhypostasized” in the three Persons of the Trinity. For the hesychasts, Divine Personhood enhypostasizing the Divine Essence is the absolutely transcendent principle, not the Divine Essence as an unhypostasized principle standing alone. In the experience of the Divine presence, the Trinity expresses the absolute primacy of the trihypostatic God over the Divine Essence understood anhypostatically. Person essentialized and Essence enhypostatized, is the ultimate mystery. For the hesychasts, then, the Absolute is not transpersonal Essence, but the trans-essential and hyper-personal Godhead, that is, the tri-hypostatic hyper-essential One.

2) The certainty of the Hesychast that God is supremely present as Person leads us to the second question: Who is doing the remembering? The answer given by the Hesychasts is that the created person who is made in the image and likeness of God is capable of remembering God precisely because, like God, he is a person. A person, whether created or Uncreated, is a mystery, never totally circumscribed by a definition, that is, as an essence or a “what”. A person is not a “what” but a “who”, and “who” you are, just as Who God is, is ultimately indefinable, undetermined, and of infinite depth. To say “what” something is, is to circumscribe that something in terms of essence or essential definition; to say “who” is to speak, not of some “thing” which can be defined in terms of its essence, but of some “one”, an ultimately uncircumscribable and indefinable “who”. To say “one” in this sense is to say “who” not “what”. In this same sense, then, the Absolute One is the ultimately uncircumscribable, undetermined, indefinable Who, who is “infinitely beyond all being, potentiality, and actualization”.31 In the Trinity of the hesychasts, to repeat, essence does not transcend person but is always enhypostatized; neither does person transcend essence, as Orthodox personalist theologians like John Zizioulas seem to be saying32, but is essentialized: this is the balanced heart of the highest metaphysics of Christian theologia, not to be confused with the “sentimental metaphysics” that some Sufi traditionalists call theology. Yet the one made in God’s image may only approach God’s presence when his personhood becomes like God’s presence, that is, when his “who” becomes like God’s “Who”. Put in terms of hesychastic methodology, the human presence may be able to stand in the Divine Presence when the potentiality of the likeness to God inherent in the nature of the created person has been activated by acts of purification, asceticism, and prayer. [...] The presence of God as transcendent and uncreated Person, then, is not the conclusion of a rational judgment, but is experienced by a created person in a state of heightened or purified spiritual sensibility, and this cannot come about so long as the soul is dominated by passions of any kind. Transcendent Person gives itself to created person through an uncreated grace in which the created person participates according to the degree of his or her purification and illumination. This participation occurs through the synergy of the benevolence of the Transcendent Person and the efforts of the created person. The ultimate meaning and purpose of the human person created by God is the capacity to participate in the reality of the Divine Transcendent Person through the uncreated energies and attributes of Divine grace.

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Conclusion: The Path to the Heart through the Remembrance of God— Presence/Apophasis, Participation/Apatheia, Performance/Agape 

Let us attempt to summarize what we have discovered so far about the remembrance of God according to the early masters of Hesychasm. 

1) The remembrance of God for the early Hesychasts is intimately linked with the practice of hesychia. 

2) Hesychia—the peace and stillness of heart based on the undisturbed return of the nous (the intellect or eye of the heart) to the heart caused by the liberation of the powers of the soul from the passions—is the only sure way to attain theosis. 

3) The aim of the remembrance of God is theosis (divinization) or theopoisis (deification): participation by man in the uncreated grace of God, grounded in theoria or the vision of uncreated light and attained through the energy of grace by the operation of God and the cooperation (synergy) of man. 

4) The remembrance of God is both a practice and an experience. The essence of the practice is the method of invocation of the most holy name of Jesus. The essence of the experience is participation in the Divine presence, which is signaled by an unprecedented intensification of human energy called “suffering of heart”. 

5) The remembrance of God as suffering of heart is grounded in the remembrance of death, which is the conscious experience of the ever-present boundary between our sinful mortality and the unbearable limpidity of the immortal Divine Presence. Mindfulness of death is conscious experience of sin, desire for repentance, intense compunction that leads to the concentration of the soul’s powers on the contemplation of God.

6) The basic function of the Jesus Prayer in the remembrance of God is to unify human nature fragmented by sin, because God, Whose Presence is perfect Unity, can be realized only in unity. Without the unification of all the powers of the soul, rational, appetitive, and irascible, there can be no true remembrance of God but only ignorance, forgetfulness, and self-indulgent insensitivity. 

7) The invocation of the Name of Jesus moves through several stages, of which three are fundamental: first, attentiveness (prosoche), which requires vocal recitation of the prayer; then noetic prayer (noera proseuche), in which the attention is first internalized in the nous, which then descends into the heart and becomes self-activating; and finally, the incarnation of Jesus in the heart, in which the remembrance of God becomes the ceaseless presence of Christ in the heart.

The act, that is, the phenomenon, of the remembrance of God, if it is genuine, is a paradox walking on the invisible waters of an abyss. On the one hand, the Hesychast tradition insists on the radical unknowability of God. We can know that God is, the saints insist, but we cannot know what God is. On the other hand, the Hesychasts insist equally strongly, as we have seen in the Hagioritic Tome, on true gnosis: the real experience of God in the heart. It is a kind of knowing the unknowable through an unknowing knowledge.[...] As we bring to a close our interrogation of the early Hesychast Fathers on the meaning of the remembrance of God, we are hopefully beginning to appreciate that what they understand by remembrance involves something far deeper and more meaningful than the mere thought of God in the mind or even a pious devotional prayer. To them the remembrance of God is an utterly real experience, indeed a transformative experience. If the experience of the remembrance of God does not involve an actual transformative and transfiguring confrontation with the fire of the Divine presence, a searing awareness of God as a “consuming fire” that actually reveals sin in all its starkness in the soul as it burns it up while healing and transforming the inner man, then it is not really the remembrance of God, but a state of forgetfulness in which the soul indulges itself in the illusion of religious activity while being ignorant of its own radical insensitivity to the Divine presence.

Florovsky on Sophia

The following is an excerpt from the article  "ΕΝΕΡΓΕΙΑ vs ΣΟΦΙΑ The contribution of Fr. Georges Florovsky to the rediscovery of the Orthodox teaching on the distinction between the Divine essence and energies" by Stoyan Tanev 

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Interestingly enough, Florovsky rarely talks about Sophia. “It is particularly startling to discover that there seems to be absolutely nothing” in Florovsky’s lifetime corpus of published writing that could qualify as an explicit attack on sophiology.147 However, Florovsky’s writings abound in what can be characterised as indirect criticism of sophiology. Most of them were scholarly studies which aimed “to expose weaknesses in the theoretical or historical underpinnings of the sophiological edifice, doing so, however, without referring to the sophiological teaching by name.”148 One of the few places where Florovsky discusses the concept of Sophia is in a letter written to Bulgakov on July 4/22, 1926, where he argues that acquaintance with Palamas would have made his Sophia unnecessary: 149

“As I have been saying for a long time, there are two teachings about Sophia and even two Sophias, or more accurately, two images of Sophia: the true and real and the imaginary one. Holy churches were built in Byzantium and in Rus’ in the name of the former. The latter inspired Solovyov and his Masonic and western teachers - and goes right back to the Gnostics and Philo. Solovyov did not at all know the Church Sophia: he knew Sophia from Boehme and the Behmenists, from Valentinus and Kabbalah. And this Sophiology is heretical and renounced. That which you find in Athanasius relates to the other Sophia. And one may find even more about Her in Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, from which there is a direct line to Palamas. The very terminology - ousia and energeia has its beginning in Basil the Great. I see no difficulty in this terminology. Aristotle has nothing to do with this. The basic thought of Cappadocian theology can be reduced to a precise distinction of the inner-divine Pleroma, of the Triune fullness of all-sufficient life, and it is this that is the ousia, pelagas, tis ousias in Damascene, – and: the ‘outward’ [vo vne] direction of Mercy, Grace, Love, Activity - Energeia. The entire question (speculatively very difficult) is in this distinction. In the perceptible sense, this is the explanation of the very idea of creation, as a Divine plan-will about the other, about not-God. Ousia – according to Basil the Great and according to Palamas - is unreachable and unknowable, it is ‘in light unapproachable.’ But ‘the very same God’ (Palamas’ expression) creates, that is, offers another, and for that reason is revealed ‘outward’ [vo vne]. It is this that is ‘Energy,’ ‘Glory,’ ‘Sophia’ - a non-hypostatic revelation of “the same” God. Not ‘essence,’ not ‘personhood,’ not ‘hypostasis.’ If you like, yes, - Divine accidentia, but accidentia of ‘the very same’ God or God ‘Himself.’ And it is precisely to this that Palamas’ thought leads - the accent is on the fullness and full meaning tis Theotitos. If you like, Sophia is Deus revelatus, that is, Grace. Grace - this is God to the world, pros ton kosmon (and not pros ton Theon, as in John 1:1 about the Logos). Sophia is eternal, inasmuch as it is thought - the will of the Eternal God, but it is willed - a thought about Time. There is much on this theme in Blessed Augustine. Sophia - is not only thought, ‘idea,’ kosmos noitos, but is will, power… And in God there is not, God does not have non-eternal powers and wills, but there is will about time. Sophia never is world. The world is other, both in relation to grace and in relation to the ‘original image.’ Therefore ‘pre-eternity’ and ‘pre-temporality’ of will - thoughts about time does [sic] not convert time into eternity. ‘Ideal creation,’ ‘pre-eternal council,’ toto genere is different from real creative fiat. Sophia is not the ‘soul of the world.’ This negative statement distinguishes the Church teaching about Sophia from the Gnostic and Behmenist teachings about her. Sophia is not a created subject, it is not a substance or substrata of created coming-into-being [stanovleniia]. This is gratia and not natura. And natura = creatura. Sophia - is not creatura. Along with this, it is not hypostasis, but thrice-radiant glory.”

This letter is most representative for the identification of some of the key characteristics of Florovsky’s theological approach: the rejection of Solovyov’s legacy in Russian religious philosophy; the firm foundation of his theology in Patristics starting with the theological contribution of St Athanasius the Great; the clear distinction between Divine nature and will as well as the location of the solution of the sophiogical problematics in the Palamite distinction between Divine essence and energies; and last but not least, the relevance of the doctrine of creation for Christian theology in general. Florovsky will further develop his ideas in a number of future works.150

147 Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological controversy,” p. 75. 

148 Ibid., p. 76. 

149 The letter has been published in Russian: А.М. Пентковски, “Письма Г.Флоровского С.Булгакову и С.Тышкевичу,” Символ - Журнал христианской культуры при Славянской библиотеке в Париже, № 29, 1993, с. 205, and recently translated in English. The English version can be found online at: http://ishmaelite.blogspot.com/2009/05/palamas-florovsky-bulgakov-and.html (15.08.2010).

150 Georges Florovsky, “Creation and Creaturehood,” Chapter III of The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. III: Creation and Redemption (Belmont, Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 43-78; “The Concept of Creation in Saint Athanasius,” Studia Patristica, Vol. VI, Papers presented at the Third Conference on Patristic Studies, held at Christ Church, Oxford, September, 1959 (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1962), pp. 36-57; “The Idea of Creation in Christian Philosophy,” Eastern Churches Quarterly, Vol. 8, 1949, Supplementary issue on Nature and Grace; “St Gregory Palamas and the tradition of the Fathers,” Sobornost, Vol. 4, 1961, pp. 165- 176, and also in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. 1, pp. 105-120.

Excerpt from the article "The Universal Tradition" by Philip Sherrard

The following is an excerpt from the article  "The Universal Tradition" by Philip Sherrard

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What, though, is less convincing about Guenon's presentation of Tradition is the idea that behind the various forms of religious tradition as we encounter them in the world stands, what he calls, a primordial and universal—purely metaphysical—Tradition of which the various re ligious traditions are as it were but local and partial expressions. The idea appears to involve a kind of circular argument. You can only obtain true metaphysical knowledge, Guenon claims, by means of initiation into it through a particular tradition in which this knowledge is en shrined or embodied. You cannot, that is to say, while standing outside all traditions, survey them as it were impartially and come to the conclu sion that this one rather than that one enshrines the Truth to a greater degree, because a capacity to recognize and realize the Truth presup poses that you have already attached yourself to a tradition and been initiated through it into the Truth. This means that your idea of the Truth, in the absolute sense, is dependent upon the degree to which the Truth, in the absolute sense, is enshrined or embodied in the tradition through which you have received your knowledge of it.

Having received your knowledge of the Truth in this way—and it is, according to Guenon, the only way you can receive it in an authentic fashion—it is surely illegitimate for you to take a further step and say that the tradition through which you have recognized and realized the Truth enshrines the Truth in a way that is more complete than the way it is enshrined in other traditions, so that this tradition—your tradition— represents the primordial and universal Tradition, the Tradition par ex cellence, while other traditions are but adaptations made in order to cater for the limitations of the capacities and temperaments of the par ticular groups of humanity to which they are addressed. To do this is, as I said, to argue round in a circle, which is a game that anyone can play at. 

Yet this is what Guenon does in identifying the metaphysical Trad ition in a primordial and universal sense with the tradition of the Ved anta, seen in the perspective of interpretation given to it by Shankara, and in using the criteria provided by this tradition in order to judge the status, with respect to metaphysical Truth in its purest form, of other traditions. 

Moreover, to say that Vedanta represents the primordial Tradi tions, and is therefore the purest and most perfect of the traditions, be cause it is the original tradition of mankind in a purely chronological sense, is only to repeat the circular argument in another form. Here there are two things to be said. The first is that this assertion about the chronological priority of the Vedanta doctrine itself begs an absolutely vital question. Because although you may say that Vedanta is the oldest spiritual tradition known to mankind, you cannot avoid the question of who you choose to acknowledge as your guide and master in the matter of the interpretation of this tradition. Guenon in fact chose Shankara (rather than, say, Ramanuja); and Vedanta in the extreme non-dualist or monist form given to it by Shankara dates from the 8th century A.D. or thereabouts. 

Yet apart from this, you can only say that Vedanta enshrines most fully the primordial tradition because it is the original spiritual tradition of mankind in a purely chronological sense if you have already accepted a theory of time according to which man's highest state of spiritual re ceptivity, and hence his most pure and perfect form of metaphysical knowledge, coincide with the opening cycle of the great cosmic cycles; and this theory of time, and of the progressive degeneration of the cy cles, is of course part and parcel of the Hindu tradition and is taken from that tradition. If you take your theory of time from, say, the Christian tradition, there is nothing to support the idea that the original state of mankind, chronologically speaking, is the most perfect state. A certain condition of spiritual vacuum is needed in order to locate the most per fect and purest form of things in the remote past, just as it is needed in order to locate it in the remote future, in the manner of Karl Marx or Teilhard de Chardin. 

You can have an idolatry with respect to the past, just as you can have an idolatry with respect to the future. If the second leads to a kind of iconoclasm in which you destroy all inherited traditional forms be cause they represent so many obstacles in the way of man's progress into the future, the first can lead to a kind of stagnation which so ties the human spirit to the revolving wheels of the accumulated habit of cen turies that it becomes impossible for it to embrace new visions, not of the future but of the ever-renewing eternal realities themselves. This is the negative, the mechanical spirit of tradition, and it is in its own way as materialist as the dreams of a Utopian future. It is blindly pious, but not spiritual. It shuts the door of prophecy and consequently of the fa culty which is the correlative of prophecy, the Imagination. Is not this why the Ishopanishad says: "Truth is both finite and infinite at the same time; it moves and yet moves not; it is in the distant, yet also in the near; it is within all objects and without them"?

Also it may be said that Guenon's idea of metaphysical realization gives virtually exclusive pride of place to the intelligence, and, as one would expect from a disciple of Shankara, he regards knowledge as the primary means of deliverance. He does not, for instance, attribute to love any place in the process of transforming the human being into the likeness of God. In fact, for Guenon, love has no metaphysical status whatsoever. As he declared at a discussion in 1924, when he had already reached full maturity, love is merely something "sentimental and in con sequence secondary". That is to say, by definition love cannot for Guenon be that by means of which man can attain perfection, or that without which he cannot achieve wisdom—because love is inseparably bound to wisdom—or that in which he rises to the heights of true con templation. I cannot believe that this typifies Hinduism in general, however much it may typify certain forms of Hinduism. 

Indeed, behind Guenon's presentation of metaphysical doctrine I think one can discern a very distinctive principle at work, one which he applied to the formulation of metaphysical doctrine with extreme rigour. This principle is evident in the status he accorded with respect to such formulation to the human reason and its logic. Put in its simplest terms, for him metaphysic, although it stands above reason, cannot con tradict reason. This is to say that, when it comes to the question of repre senting metaphysical doctrine in terms that are accessible to the human intelligence, if you can demonstrate in purely logical and rational terms that a certain metaphysical principle is and must be superior—more all inclusive, less limited and determined—than another, then this first principle on that account must stand higher in the metaphysical order than the second. Since it can be demonstrated in a perfectly logical and unambiguous manner that the metaphysical principle which is totally unqualified, impersonal and does not admit any particularization or participation is and must be more all-inclusive, less limited and less de termined than any other principle than it is possible for the human mind and its logic to conceive, then, according to this view of things, that prin ciple must be the metaphysical Absolute.

Hence, in this perspective, any tradition which does not identify the metaphysical Absolute with a principle that is totally unqualified, im personal, and so on, must be of a lower order, metaphysically speaking, than a tradition which does identify the Absolute in this way. This, as I said, is quite unambiguous, given the assumption that underlies it. What is ambiguous is why one should accept in the first place the principle of rational and logical demonstration that leads to such a conclusion. The only intelligible answer to this question is to say that you accept it be cause it is an axiom of the tradition to which you have given your adher ence, and hence it determines the manner in which metaphysical know ledge is formulated within that tradition. But this is merely another example of the same circular argument about which I have been speak ing. Because, had you given your adherence to a tradition in which this particular idea of the relationship between logic and metaphysic—the idea, that is to say, that metaphysic cannot contradict reason—is not taken as axiomatic, you would be under no compulsion to reach the con clusion which it imposes.

Yet if this concept, of a primordial Tradition in the way in which Guenon envisages it, is so hedged about with a priori assumptions that it must be seen either as an act of faith or as purely arbitrary, this does not invalidate his idea of what constitutes the main features of Tradition as such. What it does mean, on the other hand, is that the claim to speak in the name of the Tradition, whether one calls it 'universal' or 'metaphysical' or 'primordial', must be treated with considerable care; and that correspondingly the idea of a universal religion, or the propos ition that 'all Truth is one', in itself neither resolves the question of which tradition enshrines the most total revelation of the Truth, nor es tablishes the equal authority and authenticity of all the traditions. 

One must not forget that the significance that a certain tradition has for one, and the degree and firmness of the assent one gives to it, depend not so much on its demonstrable probabilities, as on the strength of one's attachment to it, or faith in it, in the first place. This by no means exempts one from the necessity of the acceptance of, and faith in, a par ticular tradition, which fulfils the conditions, as described by Guenon, that constitute a tradition, if one is to realize the spiritual potentialities that lie in the depths of each one of us; nor does it exempt one from the necessity of directing one's primary loyalty towards the tradition of one's choice and to deepening one's experience of it. Yet it also imposes on one the obligation to respect and honour signs of wisdom, sanctity and grace wherever and whenever they occur, and whatever the tradi tion that has nourished them.