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.