The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative? (Kallistos Ware)

An Entry into Freedom? 

"Asceticism means the liberation of the human person," states the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1873-1948). He defines asceticism as "a concentration of inner forces and command of oneself, and he insists: "Our human dignity is related to this." Asceticism, that is to say, leads us to self-mastery and enables us to fulfill the purpose that we have set for ourselves, whatever that may be. A certain measure of ascetic self-denial is thus a necessary element in all that we undertake, whether in athletics or in politics, in scholarly research or in prayer. Without this ascetic concentration of effort we are at the mercy of exterior forces, or of our own emotions and moods; we are reacting rather than acting. Only the ascetic is inwardly free. 

The Roman Catholic Raimundo Pannikar adds that asceticism frees us in particular from fear: "True asceticism begins by eliminating the fear of losing what can be lost. The ascetic is the one who has no fear." The prisoner Bobynin, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, expresses a genuinely ascetic attitude when he says to Abakumov, the Minister of State Security, "I've got nothing, see? Nothing! ... You only have power over, people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's free again." How much more free is the one who has not been robbed of everything but with ascetic freedom has given it up by his own choice! 

While Berdyaev regards asceticism as an entry into freedom, another Russian Orthodox thinker, Father Paul Florensky (1882-1943), links it with beauty: "Asceticism produces not a good but a beautiful personality." He would surely have welcomed the fact that our conference is devoting two of its sessions to the "aesthetics of asceticism." In the eyes of Jacob of Serug (c.449-521), the asceticism of Symeon the Stylite - altogether horrifying by our standards - made possible a revelation of the saint's beauty: "Good gold entered the crucible and manifested its beauty." Even Symeon's gangrenous foot was from the spiritual point of view an object full of beauty: "He watched his foot as it rotted and its flesh decayed. And the foot stood bare like a tree beautiful with branches. He saw-that there was nothing on it but tendons and bones." 

In Greco-Roman antiquity, ascetic practice was regarded equally as the pathway to happiness and 'joy. The Cynics saw rigorous self-denial as "part of askesis (training) for happiness." Philo's Therapeutai assembled at great festivals "clad in snow white raiment, joyous but with the height of solemnity," and celebrated the feast by dancing together. The same joyful note re-echoes in the mimra attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian (c.306-373), On Hermits and Desert Dwellers: 

There is no weeping in their wanderings and no grieving in their gatherings;

the praises of the angels above surround them on every side. 

There is no distress in their death, nor walling at their departing;

for their death is the victory with which they conquer the adversary. 

Freedom, beauty, joy: that is what asceticism meant to Berdyaev, Florensky, and the Syrian monks. But most people in our present-day world have a radically different perception of what asceticism implies: to them it signifies not freedom but submission to irksome rules; not beauty but harsh rigor; not joy but gloomy austerity. Where does the truth lie? The case against asceticism is often stated, and is thoroughly familiar to all of us. Rather than restate it once again, let us try to discover what can be said in defense of the ascetic life. This we can best do by considering two basic components in ascetic practice anachoresis (withdrawal) and enkrateia (self-control). Our primary questions will be: 

1. Does anachoresis mean simply a flight in order to escape, or can it sometimes signify a flight followed by a return? What if, in fact, there is no return? 

2. Does enkrateia mean the repression or the redirection of our instinctive urges? Does it involve "violence to our natural appetites" (Durkheim) or their transfiguration? 

Obviously these are not the only questions to be asked about asceticism, and in seeking to respond to them I make no claim to provide any overarching cross-cultural framework. My answers will be given, not as a sociologist, but as a theologian and church historian, specializing in Greek Christianity. But the questions themselves have a wider scope, for they are applicable to the Christian West as well as the Christian East, and to non-Christian as well as Christian traditions.

A Flight Followed by a Return? 

In itself anachoresis can be either negative or positive, either world-denying or world-affirming. Often it is the world-denying aspect that seems to be dominant. When Abba Arsenius asks, "Lord, guide me so that I may be saved," he is told: "Flee from humans, and you will be saved." Arsenius's motive here seems to be exclusively his own salvation, and this involves an avoidance of all contact with his fellow humans; he does not appear to be interested in trying to help them. When a high-ranking Roman lady comes to visit him and asks him to remember her in his prayers, Arsenius answers brusquely: "I pray to God that he will wipe out the memory of you from my heart." Not surprisingly, she departs much distressed. When asked by Abba Mark, "Why do you flee from us?," Arsenius gives an answer that is only slightly more conciliatory: "God knows that I love you, but I cannot be both with God and with humans." There still seems to be no suggestion that he has any responsibility to assist others and to lead them to salvation. Abba Macarius of Egypt is equally inexorable. "Flee from humans, he says; and, when asked what that means, he replies: "It is to sit in your cell and weep for your sins." A monk, so it appears, has no duty toward his neighbor; he must simply think about himself and repent his own offenses. Texts such as these, taken in isolation certainly suggest that monastic anachoresis is something introspective and selfish. When Paul the First Hermit withdraws into total and lifelong seclusion, what possible benefit did this confer on society around him? 

Yet this is not the whole story. In other cases the ascetic undertakes, not simply a flight in order to escape, but a flight followed by a return. This pattern can be seen in particular in the immensely influential Life of St. Antony of Egypt (231356), attributed (perhaps correctly) to St. Athanasius of Alexandria. At the outset, Antony withdraws gradually into an ever increasing solitude, which reaches its extreme point when he encloses himself for two decades in a ruined fort, refusing to speak or meet with anyone. But when he is fifty-five there comes a crucial turning point. His friends break down the door and he comes out from the fortress. During the remaining half-century of his long life, Antony still continues to live in the desert, apart from two brief visits to Alexandria. Yet, even though he does not go back to the world in an outward and topographical sense, on the spiritual level he does indeed "return." He makes himself freely available to others, he accepts disciples under his care, and he offers guidance to a constant stream of visitors, serving "as a physician given by God to Egypt," in the words of his biographer. Palladius recounting the story of Eulogius and the cripple, provides a vivid picture of how in practice Antony exercised this ministry of spiritual direction. His description is strikingly similar to the account-written fifteen centuries later-of the Russian staretz Zosima surrounded by the pilgrims, in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. 

Here, then, in St. Antony's case, there is a flight into the desert which turns out to be not world-denying but world-affirming. Although he begins by avoiding all contact with fellow humans, he ends by accepting great numbers of them under contact with his fellow humans his pastoral care. If the portrait of him given in the Apophthegmata (sayings/stories) is to be trusted, Antony felt an intense compassion for others, a direct sense of responsibility. "From our neighbor is life and death, he said; "if we gain our brother, we gain God, but if we cause our brother to stumble, we sin against Christ." Such is the pattern of Antony's life: silence gives place to speech, seclusion leads him to involvement. 

This same pattern - of a flight followed by a return - recurs repeatedly in the course of monastic history. It marks the life of St. Basil of Caesarea in fourth-century Cappadocia, of St. Benedict of Nursia in sixth-century Italy, of St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) in Palaeologan Byzantium, and of St. Sergius of Radonezh (c.1314-1392) and St. Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833) in Russia. In all of these instances, the ascetic starts by withdrawing into seclusion and ends by becoming the guide and leader of others, a spiritual father or soul friend. What is more, these two stages - solitude, followed by leadership - are not merely juxtaposed in time but are integrally connected with each other. It is precisely because they first withdrew into solitude that these ascetics were afterwards able to act as spiritual guides. Without the ascetic preparation that they underwent in the silence of the wilderness, St. Antony, St. Benedict, or St. Seraphim would never have been able to bring light and healing to others in the way that they did. Not that they withdrew in order to become guides and spiritual masters to their generation; for they fled, not in order to prepare themselves for any other task, but simply in order to be alone with God. When St. Benedict hid himself in a cave near Subiaco, he wanted simply to save his own soul, and had not the slightest intention of saving Western civilization. But his solitary quest for personal salvation did in fact exercise in the long term a profoundly creative effect on European culture. Often it is precisely the men and women of inner stillness - not the activists but the contemplatives, fired by a consuming passion for solitude - who in practice bring about the most far-reaching alterations in the society around them. 

In the case of saints such as Antony, Benedict, or Seraphim, the flight was followed by a return. Yet what is to be said of the many ascetics who, after the model of the legendary Paul the First Hermit, never actually "returned" but remained to the end in solitary isolation? Were their lives entirely wasted? Was their anachoresis simply negative? Not necessarily so; it all depends on our criteria. In speaking earlier about Arsenius I was careful to use the words "seems" and "appears." When Arsenius flees from his fellow humans, it may indeed seem to the modern reader that he is doing nothing to help them. But, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, he was in fact doing something extremely positive in the solitude of the desert: he was praying. Significantly, Arsenius, the Desert Father who represents anachoresis in its most uncompromising form, is depicted in the Apophthegmata as, above all, a person of unceasing, fiery prayer: 

"A certain brother went to the cell of Abba Arsenius in Scetis and looked through the window, and he beheld the old man as if completely on fire; for the brother was worthy to see this.... They also said about him, that late on Saturday evening he turned his back on the setting sun, and stretched out his arms towards heaven in prayer; and so he remained until the rising sun shone on his face. And then he sat down." 

Such, then, is the service which the solitary ascetic renders to society around him. He helps others not through active works of charity, not through writings and scholarly research, nor yet primarily through giving spiritual counsel, but simply through his continual prayer. His anachoresis is in itself a way of serving others, because the motive behind his withdrawal is to seek union with God; and this prayerful union supports and strengthens his fellow humans, even though he knows nothing about them; and they, on their part, are unaware of his very existence. 

The point is effectively summed up by Palladius in the phrase "guarding the walls.'" In his chapter on Abba Macarius of Alexandria, whom he met around 391 CE during his early years in Cellia, he recounts: "Once, when I was suffering from listlessness (akedia), I went to him and said: 'Abba, what shall I do? For my thoughts afflict me, saying: You are making no progress; go away from here.' And he replied to me, 'Tell them: For Christ's sake I am guarding the walls.' " The monks keep watch like sentries on the walls of the spiritual city, thus enabling the other members of the church inside the walls to carry on their daily activities in safety. Guarding the walls against whom? The early Christian ascetics would have had a clear and specific answer: against the demons. Guarding the walls by what means? With the specific weapon of prayer. In the words of the Historia Monachorum: "There is not a village or city in Egypt and the Thebaid that is not surrounded by hermitages as if by walls, and the people are supported by their prayers as though by God himself." 

The positive value of flight into the desert is evident when we take into account the meaning that the desert possessed for these early Christian ascetics. It had a twofold significance. It was both the place where God is to be found - here the classic prototype was Moses, who met God face to face in the desert of Sinai - and at the same time it was the place where the demons dwell. The second meaning is vividly emphasized in the Life of Antony: as Antony withdraws into the deep desert, he hears the demons shouting, "Depart from our territory. What business have you here in the desert?" So the solitary, in withdrawing into the desert, has a double aim: to meet God and to fight the demons. In both cases he is not being selfish, and his purpose is not to escape but to encounter. He goes out to discover God and to achieve union with him through prayer; and this is something that helps others. Equally he goes out to confront the demons, not running away from danger but advancing to meet it; and this also is a way of helping others. For the devil with whom he enters into combat is the common enemy of all humankind. Thus there is nothing self-centered in his act of anachoresis. Every prayer that he offers protects his fellow Christians, and every victory that he wins over the devil is a victory won on behalf of the human family as a whole. Such, therefore, is the positive value of anachoresis, even when it is not followed in any visible or explicit fashion by a movement of "return." Of course, many twentieth-century students of early Christian literature do not believe in the existence of demons or in the efficacy of prayer; but such persons need to recognize that the authors of the literature that they are studying believed keenly and intensely in both of these things. 

According to the early Christian world view, then, the solitaries were assisting others simply by offering prayer-not just through prayer of intercession, but through any kind of prayer:

Civilization, where lawlessness prevails, is sustained by their prayers,

and the world, buried in sin, is preserved by their prayers. 

In the words of an Orthodox writer in Finland, Tito Colliander: 

"Prayer is action; to pray is to be highly effective. . . . Prayer is the science of scientists and the art of artists. The artist works in clay or colours, in word or tones; according to his ability he gives them pregnancy and beauty. The working material of the praying person is living humanity. By his prayer he shapes it, gives it pregnancy and beauty: first himself and thereby many others."

The ascetic in the desert, that is to say, helps his fellow humans not so much by anything that he does, but rather by what he is. "First himself and thereby many others": he serves society by transforming himself through prayer, and by virtue of his own self-transfiguration he also transfigures the world around him. By weeping for his own sins, the recluse is in fact altering the spiritual situation of many others. 

The rationale of ascetic anachoresis is concisely summed up by St. Seraphim of Sarov: "Acquire the spirit of peace, and then thousands around you will be saved." Perhaps the more a monk thinks about converting himself, and the less he thinks about converting others, the more likely it is that others will, in fact, be converted. St. Isaac the Syrian (seventh century) goes so far as to maintain that it is better to become a solitary than to win over "a multitude of heathen" to the Christian faith: "Love the idleness of stillness above providing for the world's starving and the conversion of a multitude of heathen to the worship of God.... Better is he who builds his own soul than he who builds the world." That is to put the point in a deliberately provocative way; but in fact he who "builds his own soul" is at the same time building the world, and until we have ourselves been in some measure "converted" it is improbable that we shall ever convert anyone else to anything at all. Actually, solitaries did on occasion prove quite effective as missionaries, as is shown, for example by the story of St. Euthymius (377-473) and the Bedouin tribe, but this is exceptional. 

In this way the solitaries, through their ascetic anachoresis, are indeed cooperating in the salvation of the world; but they do this not actively or intentionally but existentially-not through outward works but through inner perfection. In the words of Father lrenee Hausherr: "All progress in sanctity realized by one member benefits everyone; every ascent to God establishes a new bond between him and humanity as such; every oasis of spirituality renders the desert of this world less savage and less uninhabitable."

Repression or Transfiguration? 

Anachoresis, then, can be world-affirming as well as world-denying. The flight of the solitary from the world may be followed by a "return," in which he or she acts as a spiritual guide, as a "soul friend"; and, even when there is no such return', the hermits are helping others by the very fact of their existence, through their hidden holiness and prayer. What then of enkrateia? Often in Eastern Christian sources this seems to imply an attitude toward material things, toward the human body, and toward members of the other sex, that is little short of dualist. But is this invariably the case? Cannot ascetic enkrateia be likewise affirmative rather than negative? 

First of all, early Christian ascetic texts insist repeatedly on the need for moderation in all forms of abstinence and self-restraint. Doubtless this was necessary precisely because so many ascetics were immoderate; yet it is nonetheless significant how often the best and most respected authorities issue firm warnings against excess. What distinguishes true from demonic fasting, states Amma Syncletica, is specifically its moderate character: "There is also an excessive asceticism (askesis) that comes from the enemy, and this is practiced by his disciples. How then are we to distinguish the divine and royal asceticism from that which is tyrannical and demonic? Clearly, by its moderation." As regards food, the Apophthegmata and other early sources regularly discourage prolonged fasting, and state that the best course is to eat something every day. If we want to fast in the right way, affirms John of Lycopolis, the golden rule is never to eat to satiety, never to stuff one's belly. According to St. Barsanuphius of Gaza, we should always rise from the meal feeling that we should have liked to eat a little more. The same principle applies to the drinking of water: we should restrict our intake, stopping well short of the point where we feel that we cannot possibly drink any more. Sober advice of this kind serves to counterbalance the stories of spectacular and inhuman fasting. 

Moderation, however, is a vague term. To render our evaluation of enkrateia more exact, let us take up a distinction that is made by Dom Cuthbert Butler between natural and unnatural asceticism: 

"The mortifications recorded of the Egyptian solitaries, extraordinary and appalling as they were, were all of a kind that may be called natural, consisting in privation of food, of drink, of sleep, of clothing; in exposure to heat and cold; in rigorous enclosure in cell or cave or tomb; in prolonged silence and vigils and prayer; in arduous labour, in wandering through the desert, in bodily fatigue; but of the self-inflicted scourgings, the spikes and chains, and other artificial penances of a later time, I do not recollect any instances among the Egyptian monks of the fourth century. "

What basically distinguishes natural from unnatural asceticism is its attitude toward the body. Natural asceticism reduces material life to the utmost simplicity, restricting our physical needs to a minimum, but not maiming the body or otherwise deliberately causing it to suffer. Unnatural asceticism, on the other hand, seeks out special forms of mortification that torment the body and gratuitously inflict pain upon it. Thus it is a form of natural asceticism to wear cheap and plain clothing, whereas it is unnatural to wear fetters with iron spikes piercing the flesh. It is a form of natural asceticism to sleep on the ground, whereas it is unnatural to sleep on a bed of nails. It is a form of natural asceticism to live in a hut or a cave, instead of a well-appointed house, whereas it is unnatural to chain oneself to a rock or to stand permanently on top of a pillar. To refrain from marriage and sexual activity is natural asceticism; to castrate oneself is unnatural. To choose to eat only vegetables, not meat, and to drink only water, not wine, is natural asceticism; but it is unnatural intentionally to make our food and drink repulsive, as was done by Isaac the Priest, who after the Eucharist emptied the ashes from the censer over his food, and by Joseph of Panepho, who added sea water to the river water that he drank. Incidentally, such actions surely display a curious disrespect to God as creator; for we are not to disfigure the gifts that God confers on us. 

Unnatural asceticism, in other words, evinces either explicitly or implicitly a distinct hatred for God's creation, and particularly for the body; natural asceticism may do this, but on the whole it does not. The official attitude of the church, especially from the fourth century onwards, has been entirely clear. Voluntary abstinence for ascetic reasons is entirely legitimate; but to abstain out of a loathing for the material creation is heretical. The point is firmly made in the Apostolic Canons (Syria, c.400 CE):

"If any bishop, presbyter or deacon, or any other member of the clergy, abstains from marriage, or from meat and wine, not by way of asceticism (askesis) but out of abhorrence for these things, forgetting that God made "all things altogether good and beautiful" (Gen. 1:31), and that he "created humankind male and female" (Gen. 1:27), and so blaspheming the work of creation, let him be corrected, or else be deposed and cast out of the Church. The same applies also to a lay person."

The Council of Gangra (Asia Minor, c.355 CE) likewise anathematizes those who censure marriage and meat eating as essentially sinful. The motive for asceticism must be positive, not negative: "If anyone practices virginity or self-control (enkrateia), withdrawing from marriage as if it were a loathsome thing and not because of the inherent beauty and sanctity of virginity, let such a one be anathema. When we fast, so Diadochus of Photice (mid-fifth century) insists, "we must never feel loathing for any kind of food, for to do so is abominable and utterly demonic. It is emphatically not because any kind of food is bad in itself that we refrain from it." We fast, not out of hatred for God's creation, but so as to control the body; also fasting enables us to help the poor, for the food that we ourselves refrain from eating can be given to others who are in need. 

Natural asceticism, it can be argued, is warfare not against the body but for the body. When asked by some children, "What is asceticism?," the Russian priest Alexander Elchaninov (1881-1934) replied, "A system of exercises which submits the body to the spirit"; and when they inquired what was the first exercise of all, he told them, Breathe through the nose. Our ascetic aim is not to impede our breathing through some forced technique, but simply to breathe correctly and so to let the body function in a natural way. "The important element in fasting," Father Alexander added, "is not the fact of abstaining from this or that, or of depriving oneself of something by way of punishment"; rather its purpose is the "refinement" of our physicality, so that we are more accessible to "the influence of higher forces" and thus approach closer to God. Refinement, not destruction: that is the aim. 

In contrast, then, to the unnatural variety, natural asceticism has a positive objective: it seeks not to undermine but to transform the body, rendering it a willing instrument of the spirit, a partner instead of an opponent. For this reason another Russian priest, Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), used to say (employing the word "flesh" in its Pauline sense, to signify not our physicality but our fallen and sinful self): "Kill the flesh, so as to acquire a body." As for the body, so far from killing it we are to hold it in honor and to offer it to God as a "living sacrifice" (Rom. 12.1). The Desert Father, Dorotheus, was surely wrong to say of his body, "It kills me, I kill it;" and he was tacitly corrected by another Desert Father, Poemen, who affirmed: "We were taught, not to kill the body, but to kill the passions." There is an eloquent assertion of the intrinsic goodness of the body in the hymn already quoted, On Hermits and Desert Dwellers: 

Their bodies are temples of the Spirit, their-minds are churches; 

their prayer is pure incense, and their tears are fragrant smoke... 

They greatly afflict their bodies, not because they do not love their bodies, 

rather, they want to bring their bodies to Eden in glory.

It is reassuring in this connection to find that the earliest and most influential of all Greek monastic texts, the Life of Antony, adopts a markedly positive attitude towards the body. When Antony emerged after twenty years of enclosure within a fort, his friends "were amazed to see that his body had maintained its former condition, neither fat from lack of exercise,, nor emaciated from fasting and combat with demons, but he was just as they had known him before his withdrawal.... He was altogether balanced, as one guided by reason and abiding in a natural state." There is no dualistic hatred of the body here; asceticism has not subverted Antony's physicality but restored it to its "natural state," that is to say, to its true and proper condition as intended by God. This natural state of the body continues up to the end of Antony's long life. Although he lived to be more than a hundred, his eyes were undimmed and quite sound, and he saw clearly; he lost none of his teeth-they had simply become worn down to the gums because of the old man's great age. He remained strong in both feet and hands." So according to the texts, enkrateia enhanced rather than impaired Antony's bodily health. 

"We were taught, not to kill the body, but to kill the passions," says Abba Poemen. But is he right? Cannot even the passions be redirected and used in God's service? Our answer will depend in part on the meaning that we attach to the word pathos (passion). Are we to regard it in a Stoic sense, as something fundamentally diseased and disordered, a morbid and pathological condition, or should we rather follow the Aristotelian standpoint and treat it as something neutral, capable of being put either to evil or to good use? The manner in which we understand pathos will also influence the sense that we give to the term apatheia (dispassion, passionlessness). But this is not simply a linguistic issue; for the way in which we employ words influences the way in which we think about things. It makes a considerable difference what we say to others and, indeed, to ourselves: do we enjoin mortify" or "redirect," "eradicate" or "educate," "eliminate" or "transfigure"? 

Philo adopts the Stoic view of pathos, and many Greek Christian fathers follow him in this, regarding the passions as "contrary to nature" and even directly sinful. This is the position of Clement of Alexandria, Nemesius of Emesa, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius of Pontus, and John Climacus, to mention only a few. But there are significant exceptions, and both Theodoret of Cyrus and Abba Isaias of Scetis adopt a more positive attitude. Desire and anger, says Theodoret, are "necessary and useful to nature": without desire we would experience no longing for divine things, no appetite for food and drink, no impulse towards "lawful procreation, and so the human race would perish. Anger in its turn has a positive function, he says, for it prevents our desire from passing beyond due limits. Isaias likewise argues that the different passions can all be put to a positive use that is "in accordance with nature." Desire, employed aright, impels us to love God; jealousy (or zelos [zeal]) spurs us on to make greater efforts in the spiritual life (cf. 1 Cor. 12.31); anger and hatred prove beneficial, if directed against sin and the demons; even pride can be used in a constructive way, when we employ it to counteract self-depreciation is not to suspend despondency. The aim of the ascetic, then, press these passions but to reorient them. St. Maximus the Confessor (c.580-662) follows the same approach when he describes love for God as a "holy passion." In similar terms St. Gregory Palamas speaks of "divine and blessed passions"; our objective is not the nekrosis (mortification) of the passions but their metathesis (transposition). 

Even in those authors, such as Evagrius, who speak of pathos (passion) in pre-orative terms, the notion of apatheia (dispassion) is by no means unduly negative. Evagrius himself links it closely with agape love. It is not an attitude of passive indifference and insensibility, still less a condition in which sinning is impossible, but it is on the contrary a state of inner freedom and integration, in which we are no longer under the domination of sinful impulses, and so are capable of genuine love; apathy" is thus a particularly misleading translation. Adapting Evagrius's teaching to a Western audience, St. John Cassian wisely rendered apatheia as puritas cordis (purity of heart) a phrase that has the double advantage of being both scriptural in content and positive in form. To denote its dynamic character, Diadochus employs the expressive phrase "the fire of apatheia." It is no mere mortification of the passions, but a state of soul in which a burning love for God and for our fellow humans leaves no room for sensual and selfish impulses. 

From all this it is evident that enkrateia, although often understood in a negative manner-as hatred of the body, as the destruction of our instinctive urges-can also be interpreted in more affirmative terms, as the reintegration of the body and the transformation of the passions into their true and natural condition. Again and again, when the patristic texts are carefully analyzed, the Greek fathers turn out to be advocating not repression but transfiguration.

A Vocation for All 

Our explanation of the terms anachoresis and enkrateia has made clear that askesis signifies not simply a selfish quest for individual salvation but a service rendered to the total human family; not simply the cutting off or destroying of the lower but., much more profoundly, the refinement and illumination of the lower and its transfiguration into something higher. The same conclusion could be drawn from an examination of other key ascetic terms, such as hesychia (stillness, tranquility, quietude). This too is affirmative rather than negative, a state of plenitude rather than emptiness, a sense of presence rather than absence. It is not just a cessation of speech, a pause between words, but an attitude of attentive listening, of openness and communion with the eternal: in the words of John Climacus, "Hesychia is to worship God unceasingly and to wait on him.... The Hesychast is one who says, 'I sleep, but my heart is awake"' (Song 5.2). 

Interpreted in this positive way, as transfiguration rather than mortification, askesis is universal in its scope-not an elite enterprise but a vocation for all. It is not a curious aberration, distorting our personhood, but it reveals to us our own true nature. As Father Alexander Elchaninov observes, "Asceticism is necessary first of all for creative action of any kind, for prayer, for love: in other words, it is needed by each of us throughout our entire life.... Every Christian is an ascetic." Without asceticism none of us is authentically human.

Notes

1. In Donald A. Lowne, Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Anthology (London, 1965), pp. 86-87 (translation altered). 2. The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (New York/London, 1973), p. 66. 3. The First Circle, trans. Michael Guybon (London: Fontana Books, 1970), pp. 106-107. 4. See Nicholas O. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy (New York, 1951), p. 182; cf. Paul Florensky, Salt of the Earth: Or a Narrative on the Life of the Elder ofGethsemane Skete Hieromonk Abba Isidore, trans. Richard Betts, edited by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (Platina, 1987), p. 11. 5. Jacob of Serug, Homily on Simeon the Stylite, trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, in Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Minneapolis, 1990), pp. 21-22. 6. Leif A. Vaage, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, p. 117. 7. Philo, On the Contemplative Life 8.66, trans. Gail Paterson Corrington, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, p. 149. 8. On Hermits and Desert Dwellers, lines 329ff., trans. Joseph P. Amar, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, p. 75. 9. Arsemus 1, in The Desert Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Alphabetical Collection, trans. B. Ward (New York, 1975); also in J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiaecursus completus: Series Graeca, 65 vols. (Pans, 1857-1866). 10. Arsemus 28. 11. Arsenius 13. 12. Desert Christian . . . Alphabetical Collection, Macarius 27: cf. Macanus 41. 13. See the Vita by Jerome, trans. Paul B. Harvey, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, pp. 357369. Paul himself may be legendary, but his story is typical; there must have been many historical figures who fled like him into the desert, permanently breaking off their contacts with other humans. 14. For bibliography on the authorship of the Life of Antony, see Alvyn Pettersen, Athanasius and the Human Body (Bristol, 1990), p. 33, note 69. 15. Life of Antony 87 (PG 26.965A). 16. The Lausiac History of Palladius, ed. Cuthbert Butler (Cambridge, 1898), 21:63-68. 17. The Brothers Karamazov, book 2., chapter 3, "Devout Peasant Women." Dostoevsky was not simply inventing an imaginary scene but reproducing what he had actually seen in the Optina hermitage; cf. John B. Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky's Staretz Zossima (Belmont, Mass., 1972).

18. Desert Christian, Antony 9. Similar statements can be found in the (perhaps authentic) Letters attributed to Antony (trans. Derwas J. Chitty, Fairacres Publication 50 [Oxford, 1975]); cf. Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Ongenist Theology, Monastic Tradition and the Making of a Saint (Lund, 1990). 19. There can of course be "spiritual mothers" as well as "spiritual fathers": the Alphabetical Collection of Apophthegmata contains 3 ammas alongside 117 abbas, so women are certainly represented, although in a minority. Cf. Sister Benedicta Ward, "Apophthegmata Matrum," in Studia Patristtca 16 (Berlin, 1985), pp. 63-66; reprinted in Ward, Signs and Wonders: Saints, Miracles, and Prayers from the 4th Century to the 14th, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 361 (Brookfield, 1992), section I. 20. Anmchara (soul friend) is a term found in Celtic Christianity. Cf. Kenneth Leech, Soul Friend: A Study of Spirituality (London, 1977), p. 50. 21. Arsenius 27 and 30. 22. The Lausiac History 18:58. 23. Histona monachorum in Aegypto, prologue 10; cf. Norman Russell, trans., The Lives of the Desert Fathers (London/Oxford, 1980), p. 50. 24. Life of Antony 13 (PG 26.861C). 25. On Hermits and Desert Dwellers, lines 509ff., trans. Amar, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, p. 79. 26. The Way of the Ascetics, new ed. (London/Oxford, 1983), pp. 57, 59. 27. Ivan Kologrivof, Essai sur la saintete en Russie (Bruges, 1953), p. 430. 28. Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, trans. A. J. Wensinck (Amsterdam, 1923), pp. 32, 298; The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Dana Miller (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984), pp. 32, 306 (translation altered). 29. Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 10 and 15, in R. M. Price, trans., Lives of the Monks of Palestine, Cistercian Studies 114 (Kalamazoo, 1991), pp. 14-17, 20-21. 30. "L'hesychasme: Etude de spiritualite," in Hausherr, Hesychasme et priere, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 176 (Rome, 1966), p. 181. In the discussion above, anachoresis has been understood in its exterior sense, as a physical withdrawal into solitude. The term can also denote an inner, spiritual state, as when Abba Isaias of Scetis (died 489 CE) states: "The ancients who were our fathers said that anachoresis is flight from the body and meditation upon death," in Logos 26.3, ed. Monk Avgoustinos of the Jordan (Jerusalem, 1911), p. 184. Compare John Climacus: "Withdrawal (anachoresis) from the world is a willing hatred of all that is materially prized, a denial of nature for the sake of what is above nature," in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 1, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, 1982), p. 74. 31. Alphabetical Collection, Syncletica 15. Now see translation by Elizabeth Castelli, "The Life and Activity of the Blessed Teacher Syncletica," in Wimbush, ed., Ascetic Behavior, pp. 265-311. On the dangers of excessive asceticism and the need for relaxation, see ibid., Antony 8 and 13. 32. See, for example, ibid., Ammonas 4 and Poemen 31. 33. Historia monachorum in Aegypto 1.29, p. 56. 34. Questions and Answers, ed. Sotinos N. Schoinas (Volos, 1960), 84; trans. Lucien Regnault and Philippe Lemaire (Solesmes, 1972), §158; cf. §511. 35. See Evagrius, Practicus 18, eds. Antoine Guillaumont and Claire Guillaumont, Sources chretiennes 171 (Paris, 1971), p. 542; cf. Historia monachorum in Aegypto 20.16, p. 107. 36. See, for example, the story of Macarius of Alexandria at Tabennisi in The Lausiac History 18:52-53.

37. The Lausiac History 1:188. The wearing of chains is, however, occasionally found in Egypt, as with the body of Sarapion, discovered at Antinoe: see Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford, 1966), p. 17, note 36. It is, however, far more common in Syria: cf. Theodoret of Cyrus, Historia religiosa 10.1, 15.2, 23.1, eds. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-Molinghen, Sources chretiennes 234, 257 (Paris, 1977-1979), 1:438; 2:18, 134. But initially ascetic practices in Syria were relatively moderate; severe feats of mortification only begin to appear in the late fourth and early fifth centuries (cf. Amar, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, p. 67). 38. Apophthegmata, Isaac the Priest 6, Eulogius the Priest 1. 39. Apostolic Canon 51, in Pericles-Pierre Joannou, Discipline generale antique (IVe-IXes.), 1.2, Les canons des Synodes Particuliers (Grottaferrata, 1962), pp. 35-36; trans. Henry R. Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church: Their Canons and Dogmatic Decrees, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2d series, vol. 14 (Oxford/New York, 1900), p. 597. 40. Canon 9; cf. Canons 1-2, 4, 10, 14, in Joannou, op. cit., pp. 89-95; trans. O. Larry Yarbrough, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, pp. 451-453. The Council of Gangra also forbids women to wear men's clothing (Canon 13). 41. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 43, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kalhstos Ware, The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1 (London/Boston, 1979), p. 266. 42. The Diary of a Russian Priest (London, 1967), p. 213. 43. Ibid., pp. 129, 187. 44. Cf. Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), "Body and Matter in Spiritual Life," in A. M. Allchin, ed., Sacrament and Image: Essays in the Christian Understanding of Man, The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius (London, 1967), p. 41. 45. The Lausiac History 2:17. 46. Apophthegmata, Poemen 184. 47. On Hermits and Desert Dwellers, lines 97ff., 189ff., trans. Amar, in Wimbush, Ascetic Behavior, pp. 70, 72. 48. Life of Antony 14 (PG 26. 864C-865A). On the significance of this passage, see Chitty, The Desert a City, p. 4. 49. Life of Antony 93 (PG 26. 973 AB). 50. See Kallistos Ware, "The Meaning of 'Pathos' in Abba Isaias and Theodoret of Cyrus," in Studia Patnstica 20 (Leuven, 1989), pp. 315-322. 51. Theodoret, The Healing of Hellenic Maladies 5.76-79, ed. Pierre Canivet, Sources chretiennes 57 (Paris, 1958), pp. 251-252. 52. Logos 2.1-2, ed. Avgoustmos, p. 5. 53. On Love 3.67, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2 (London/Boston, 1981), p. 93. 54. Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 2.2.22; 3.3.15, ed. Jean Meyendorff, Spictlegmm Sacrum Lovaniense 30-31 (Louvain, 1959), pp. 367, 723. 55. Practicus 81, ed. Guillaumont, p. 670: "Love is the offspring of apatheia." 56. Cf. Owen Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1968), p. 102. 57. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 17, trans. Palmer et al., vol. 2, p. 258. 58. Ladder 27, trans. Luibheid and Russell, pp. 263, 269-270. 59. The Diary of a Russian Priest, pp. 177, 188 (translation altered).

Scholasticism and Orthodoxy: Theological Method as a Factor in the Schism (Bishop Kallistos Ware)

A faith without miracles is no more than a philosophical system; and a Church without miracles is no more than a welfare organization like the Red Cross. - BISHOP NIKOLAI OF OCHRID

Between the end of the 11th century and the end of the 12th, everything is changed in the West. - FR YVES CONGAR

The Disintegration of our Common Tradition

'The differences arise from a disintegration of a common tradition, and . . . the problem is to find the original kinship in the common past.' So the late Fr Bernard Leeming, paraphrasing and making his own a statement of Archpriest George Florovskii, has summed up the essential relationship between Orthodox and Catholics, between Greek East and Latin West.[1] It is in this perspective that we can most helpfully approach the question of 'Orthodoxy and the West', posed in such challenging fashion by Dr Yannaras in his original article, [2] and now taken up by Mr Bonner in his carefully argued response, 'Christianity and the Modern World-View'.

To speak in terms of the disintegration of a common tradition is to affirm by implication two things about the dialogue between Orthodoxy and the West. First, it is misleading and unhelpful to pose the question starkly in black and white, contrasting 'East' and 'West' as two independent and self-contained worlds, as two opposed and mutually exclusive blocs; for this is to ignore our original kinship in a shared past. Fortunately neither of our two contributors has done that, but the risk of such a distortion must never be forgotten. In the second place, it is equally misleading and unhelpful to go to the other extreme to suggest that no more than relatively superficial 'non-theological factors' are involved, and that on the intellectual, dogmatic and spiritual level there is no genuine difference between the two sides. For this to overlook the tragic disintegration - not total, but none the less far-reaching — that our common tradition has in fact undergone.

'Far-reaching' is a vague word, and it is important to establish more precisely the depth and limits of the disintegration. Is it as grave as Dr Yannaras imagines? Or can it be claimed that, despite the rationalism of the Scholastics, despite the Renaissance and the scientific discoveries of the 16th-17th centuries, despite the Industrial Revolution, the West has never lost a sacramental and eucharistic view of the universe, empha-sizing the cosmic consequences of Christ's Incarnation, of his Transfigura-tion and his Resurrection (themes so dear to the Orthodox conscience)? This is a line of thought which I had hoped that Mr Bonner might pursue; perhaps some future contributor to ECR will enlarge on this theme, with detailed illustrations. In all our comparisons between East and West, we must take the utmost care not to contrast the best on one side with the second-best on the other. This is a pitfall into which many Western admirers of Orthodoxy have tripped unawares; Fr Robert Murray has wisely drawn attention to the danger.[3] Furthermore, in all our comparisons we must strive to be exact and definite, eschewing — as Mr Bonner rightly urges — one-sided selectivity in our use of evidence, simplification and over-generalization.[4]

It is the contention of Dr Yannaras that modern Western technology is the child of medieval Scholasticism. Three points emerge from Mr Bonner's response :

(1) Dr Yannaras's analysis of the medieval West is over-simplified; there were other currents in Latin thought during the Middle Ages besides the type of Scholasticism that he is criticizing.

(2) Dr Yannaras has failed to allow sufficiently for the changes, above all in scientific method, which occurred in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries.

(3) Modern technology is not something which, as 20th-century Christians, we are free to accept or reject. It is a basic fact of our human environment, and we cannot opt out from it. Instead of seeking ways of escape, we should search for God in and through the world-view of con-temporary science.

Not being a specialist in medieval Scholasticism and never having been taught science at any stage in my education, I feel unqualified to discuss these matters in detail. Regarding the first two points, I would only say that, even supposing Dr Yannaras's diagnosis to be one-sided, that does not make it entirely untenable. Mr Bonner has at most indicated that the basic thesis of Dr Yannaras needs to be qualified. Over the third point I am in substantial agreement with Mr Bonner; and so, perhaps, is Dr Yannaras — who is (I suspect) not as negative in his attitude to modern technology as Mr Bonner imagines.

My own contribution is more restricted in scope, and even peripheral to the main debate. I wish to take up the opening section of Mr Bonner's article, and also the remark of Sir John Lawrence : 'It looks to me as if from the time of Anselm Western Christian philosophy expected human reason to be able to do more than it can.' [5] Mr Bonner, while not himself entirely agreeing with them, has quoted a number of passages from con-temporary Western medievalists which bear out Sir John's view. Now it could be argued that Dr Yannaras when he criticizes Scholasticism, and historians of our own day when they insist on the intellectual and spiritual changes which ensued in the West around the year 1100, are expressing a specifically modern point of view. Are such theories perhaps no more than a 20th-century reconstruction of the past? How far did men of the Middle Ages, either Greek or Latin, feel conscious of these changes? It is my contention that a succession of thinkers in the Christian East, from the 15th century onwards, did in fact take issue with the West over the nature and methods of Scholasticism.

Discussions between East and West, at the Council of Florence and in more recent times, have generally concentrated on specific points of doctrine, such as the Filioque, the Papal claims, Purgatory, the Immaculate Conception, or the Palamite teaching on the Uncreated Glory of Mount Tabor. But there is evidence to suggest that from the 15th century, if not before, some Byzantines had come to feel that the Latins were at fault, not only over particular points of doctrine, but more broadly in their entire approach to theology and their method of arguing.

What is theology? What kind of questions are we entitled to ask in theological inquiry, and what kind of answers should we expect? What is the place of discursive reasoning in theological discourse? Such were the queries that arose in Greek minds when confronted by Scholasticism. Clearly they are fundamental. Before we start to play tennis or chess, we must agree about the rules of the game; and before we can profitably discuss the distinction between the Essence and the Energies of God or the Procession of the Holy Spirit, we must agree about our theological method. As a result of intellectual developments in Western Christendom during the 11th-12th centuries, the Latins had in fact altered their inter-pretation of the rules of the game. By slow degrees, although not immediately, perceptive Greeks became uneasily aware of this.

Before considering what such Greeks said, it will be helpful to look a little more closely at these intellectual developments in the West. To Mr Bonner's collection of modern authorities, let us add one more — a Roman Catholic witness, Fr Yves Congar.[6]

From Monastic to Scholastic Theology 

As Fr Congar sees it, there is a major watershed in Western spiritual history, 'a decisive turning-point', around the start of the 12th century. He endorses the view of Dom A. Wilmart : a believer of the 4th or 5th century would have felt more at home in the forms of piety (and, we may add, of theology) of the 11th century, than a believer of the 11th century would have felt in those of the 12th. This, of course, is true only of the West; in the East up to 1453 men continued to pray and theologize in a basically Patristic fashion. Latin Christians, on the other hand, began to teach and study theology in a new way, and so to an ever-increasing extent a common 'universe of discourse' was lost. Even in fields where East and West still seemed to agree, the same affirmations came to be felt and interpreted differently. The shared tradition was disintegrating. To Fr Congar it seems no accident that the rise of Scholasticism should have coincided chronologically with the hardening of the schism between Constantinople and Rome.

The change from the Patristic to the Scholastic world-view is summarized by Fr Congar under three main headings :

(1) It was a change from a predominantly 'essentialist' and exemplarist view of the world, to a 'naturalist' view, interested by existence. It was a change from a universe of exemplarist causality, where things are envisaged as receiving their reality from a transcendent model in which they participate, to a universe of efficient causality, where men search for truth in existing things themselves and in their empirical determina-tions. (Here, surely, we may see a connection between Scholasticism and modern scientific method.)

(2) It was a change from symbolism to dialectic; from 'synthetic perception' to an attitude of inquiry and analysis. When theologians start drawing distinctions and posing questions — quis, ubi, ad quid? — the Scholastic era is truly born.

(3) It was a change from a monastic to a university or 'scholastic' way of study. Before the 12th century, theological teaching and study existed mainly in the environment of the monastery; and so theology tended to be traditionalist, contemplative, and closely integrated with the liturgical life. With the rise of Scholasticism, the outward setting of theology shifts from the cloister to the lecture room and stress is laid upon personal research and analysis rather than the acceptance of tradition.

Thus far Fr Congar. At some risk of over-simplification, it might be said that in the West from the 12th century the theologian has appealed primarily to reason and argument, to logical proofs. Needless to say, Eastern theologians also employ deductive reasoning, [7] but for most of them the main emphasis lies elsewhere in an appeal to Tradition : Tradition as embodied in the Fathers and the conciliar canons; Tradition as expressed also in the experience of the saints and holy men living in our own time. The Latin Scholastics also revered the authority of the Fathers, and there may well be a higher proportion of citations from Dionysius the Areopagite in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas than in the Triads of Palamas. But the Latins analysed Patristic texts, arguing, questioning and distinguishing, in a way that most Greeks did not. Theology became a 'science' for the medieval Latins, in a way that it never was for the early Greek Fathers and their Byzantine successors.

The emphasis on the personal experience of the saints is a point of key importance.[8] While there is doubtless a mystical side to Thomas Aquinas which should not be under-estimated, the appeal to mystical experience is not very prominent in his two Summae. St Gregory Palamas, on the other hand, in his Triads regularly invokes the living experience of holy men : it is they who are the real theologians; as for those who are trained to analyse and discuss, who are skilled in the use of words and logic, they are at best theologians in an altogether secondary and deriva-tive sense. As Evagrius of Pontus insisted, theology is a matter of prayer, not of philosophical training : 'If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.'[9] The Serbian Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) of Ochrid spoke in a characteristically Eastern way when at the first Faith and Order Conference in Lausanne (1927) he insisted on the experience of the saints. During a discussion on the sacraments, he stated before a predominantly Protestant audience: 

If anyone should think that perhaps Baptism and the Eucharist (or other two or three of the seven Mysteries) are the only Mysteries, the only Sacraments, well - let him ask God about it; by fasting and praying tears let him ask God, and he will reveal to him the truth as he has always revealed it to the saints. .. . All that we have said about the great Christian Mysteries is not an opinion of our own (if it were an opinion of our own it would be worth nothing), but it is the repeated experience of the Apostles in the ancient days and of the saints up to our own days. For the Church of God lives not on opinion, but on the experience of the saints, as in the beginning so in our days. The opinions of intellectual persons may be wonderfully clever and yet be false, whereas the experience of the saints is always true. It is God the Lord who is true to himself in his saints.[10]

To one accustomed to the principles of Scholastic reasoning, this may seems an emotional and sentimental way of arguing. To an Orthodox, on the other hand, it is precisely the experience of the saints that constitutes the final criterion in theology.

Byzantine Strictures on Scholasticism 

`A faith without miracles is no more than a philosophical system. . .' Bishop Nikolai's words, chosen as the epigraph to our article, express the reaction of many Byzantines when confronted with medieval Scholas-ticism. They felt that the appeal to the saints, to the miraculous action of God as experienced by holy men, had been forgotten, and that Latin theology had become altogether too philosophical and rationalistic, too dependent on merely human modes of thought and methods of argument.

This question of theological method, while never a main topic at the Council of Florence, emerges several times in the course of the debates. When a Latin spokesman had invoked Aristotle, one of the Georgian envoys exclaimed in exasperation : 'What about Aristotle, Aristotle? A fig for your fine Aristotle.' When asked whose authority he accepted, he replied : 'St Peter, St Paul, St Basil, Gregory the Theologian; a fig for your Aristotle, Aristotle.' [11] This is the typical Orthodox appeal to Holy Tradition, to the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils, rather than to syllogistic reasoning. The humanist Bessarion, though accepting the union with Rome, did so on Eastern rather than Scholastic grounds : 'The words [of the Fathers] by themselves are enough to solve every doubt and to persuade every soul. It was not syllogisms or probabilities or arguments that convinced me, but the bare words [of the Fathers].' [12]

Opposition to Scholasticism, and in particular to the Scholastic use of philosophy, is expressed with some asperity by two eminent Byzantines who died in the decade immediately preceding the Council of Florence. Joseph Bryennios (tc. 1431 /2) affirms: 

Those who subject the dogmas of the faith to chains of syllogistic reasoning strip of its divine glory the very faith that they strive to defend. They force us to believe no longer in God but in man. Aristotle and his philosophy have nothing in common with the truths revealed by Christ. [13]

The liturgist Symeon of Thessalonika (t 1429) protests in much the same terms: 

You are a disciple not of the Fathers but of the pagan Greeks. If I wished, I too could produce syllogisms to answer your sophistic reasonings _ and better syllogisms than yours at that. But such methods of argument I reject, and take my proofs from the Fathers and their writings. You will answer me with Aristotle or Plato or one of your modern teachers; but to oppose you I will invoke the fishermen of Galilee, with their simple preaching and their true wisdom which to you seems foolishness. [14]

In Greek eyes, Latin religious thought had grown altogether too self-confident, and was insufficiently sensitive to the necessary limitations of all human language and conceptual thinking. In the Latin West, so it seemed to many Greeks, everything is cut down to size and classified according to man-made categories; the mystical and apophatic aspect of theology is too little appreciated. This is the complaint of Patriarch Nektarios of Jerusalem in the mid-17th century:

You have expelled, so it seems to us, the mystical element from theology. . . . In your theology there is nothing that lies outside speech or beyond the scope of inquiry, nothing wrapped round with silence and guarded by piety; everything is discussed. . . . There is no cleft in, the rock to confine you when you confront the spectacle on which none may gaze; there is no hand of the Lord to cover you when you contemplate his glory (Ex. 33 : 22-23). [15]

But, it may be objected, is Latin Scholasticism really as unmystical and anti-apophatic as Patriarch Nektarios alleges? Did not Thomas Aquinas affirm, 'God is known as unknown', and does he not quote repeatedly from the Areopagitic writings? True; but that does not automatically make Thomas into an apophatic theologian in the Eastern sense. It is necessary to assess the way in which he understood Dionysius, the theological context in which his Areopagitic citations are placed, and the part which they play in his argument. Is the Dionysius of Thomas the same as that of Maximus or Palamas? As Archpriest George Florovskii has so justly pointed out: 

It is utterly misleading to single out certain propositions, dogmatic or doctrinal, and to abstract them from the total perspective in which they are meaningful and valid. It is a dangerous habit to handle 'quotations' from the Fathers and even the Scriptures, outside of the total structure of faith, in which only they are truly alive. 'To follow the Fathers' does not mean simply to quote their sentences. It means to acquire their mind, their phronema. The Orthodox Church claims to have preserved this phronema and to have theologized ad mentem Patrum.[16]

Our question, then, is this : How far has Aquinas preserved this phronema? When he appeals to the Mystical Theology of Dionysius and to other apophatic texts, is he truly theologizing ad mentem Patrum? [17]

Against Nektarios and others who accuse the Latins of 'expelling the mystical element from theology', it may also be objected that there was a rich flowering of mysticism in the West during the later Middle Ages: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Lady Julian in England; and many others in Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy. To this 'rich flowering' Mr Bonner rightly draws attention. But how far were this mystical tradition and the theology of the Schools integrated into a single whole in the medieval West, in the way that mystical and dogmatic theology were integrated by Palamas and the Byzantine Hesychasts? In the late medieval West there seems to be an increasing dichotomy between theology and mysticism, between liturgy and personal devotion. It is precisely this that has disturbed many Orthodox. [18]

A century after Patriarch Nektarios, the lay theologian Eustratios Argenti of Chios sees Latin Scholasticism, and more specifically the Scholastic use of Aristotle, as the root cause of the separation between East and West:

More than a thousand years after the birth of Christ, there arose the heresy of the Scholastic Latin theologians, who wished to unite the philosophy of Aristotle with Christian theology. Nevertheless they did not imitate the holy teachers of the early Church, who made philosophy fit theology; but the Scholastics did the opposite, making the Gospel and the holy Christian faith fit the doctrines of the philosopher Aristotle. From this source there arose in the Latin Church so many heresies in the theology of the Holy Trinity, so many distortions of the words of the Gospels and the Apostles, so many violations of the sacred canons and the divine councils, and finally so many corruptions and adulterations of the holy sacraments.[19]

Argenti's point is reaffirmed, with a slightly different emphasis, by the 19th-century Slavophiles in Russia. In the words of Ivan Kireevskii: 

Rome preferred the abstract syllogism to Holy Tradition, which is the expression of the common mind of the whole Christian world, and in which that world coheres as a living and indissoluble unity. This exaltation of the syllogism over Tradition was in fact the sole basis for the rise of a separate and independent Rome. . . . Rome left the Church because she desired to introduce into the faith new dogmas, unknown to Holy Tradition, dogmas which were by nature the accidental products of Western logic.[20]

Here let us pause for a moment to consider what precisely Kireevskii is asserting. His allusion to 'Western logic' recalls to my mind a conversation which I once overheard between two Anglicans, both ardently pro-Orthodox, the one a Patristic specialist and the other a philosopher. Replying to a point made by the philosopher, the Patristic specialist exclaimed : 'We don't want that kind of Latin logic.' There's no such thing as Latin logic', the philosopher retorted. 'There's good logic and bad logic.'

The point may be generalized. In vindication of the Scholastics, should it not be said that their use of syllogisms and philosophical categories is no more than an attempt to think clearly and to speak coherently? While there is a place in theological discourse for paradox and poetry, [21] there is no place for mere inarticulateness and mental laziness. The mysterious has a vital role to play, but that is no excuse for muddle and mystification. If God has given man powers of reasoning, must he not use them to the full, and is this not exactly what the Latin Scholastics were aiming to do? When they employed distinctions and technical terms taken from Aristotle or other philosophers, this was as an aid to lucid thinking. What is wrong in that?

Such a line of defence, while in itself legitimate, fails to answer the main point that Symeon of Thessalonika, Argenti and Kireevskii are concerned to make. What they are deploring is not the employment of human logic as such but the failure to allow for its limitations, and the failure to recognize the unique character of the subject matter of theology. They are attacking the application of discursive reasoning to fields where it should play only a secondary role, strictly subservient to a 'synthetic perception' of reality, to an intuitive and mystical awareness of the Divine. Argenti has no objection to the use of philosophy as a tool, and he acknowledges that the Greek Fathers employed it in this way. But in the case of Latin Scholasticism, as he sees it, the tool has become a determin-ing standard; the servant has become the master.

If these charges are to be convincing, they must be formulated with greater precision and fully supported with evidence. The Orthodox critics of Scholasticism must show what are in fact the limits of human reasoning in theology. They must indicate, with specific reference to the sources, how and when Anselm and Abelard, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas applied logic to matters beyond logic's scope. They must indicate in detail how Aquinas relied on philosophy in a way that the Cappadocians and St John of Damascus did not. It is impractical to attempt this in a short article. But enough, I trust, has been said to establish that the view-point of the Byzantine anti-Scholastics needs to be taken seriously. Even if their strictures are not always objectively justified, it remains true that the rise of Scholasticism and the changes in theological method which it entailed have contributed permanently to the alienation between Orthodoxy and Rome. It is a significant factor in the disintegration of our common tradition.

Byzantine Thomists 

One important qualification must here be added. Neither the Latin West nor the Greek East has ever formed a uniform and monolithic whole. Throughout the medieval period there were Western writers who protested, as vehemently as Bryennios or Symeon of Thessalonika, against the Scholastic use of secular philosophy. [22] And, alongside the Byzantine anti-Scholastics, there were enthusiastic and distinguished Byzantine Thomists.[23] Following the translation into Greek of large parts of the two Summae by Demetrius Cydones (c. 1325-c. 1398) and his brother Prochorus (c. 1330-c. 1370), Thomism became for a time almost fashionable at the Byzantine court. On the eve of the Council of Florence, educated Greeks had a better understanding of Thomism than the Latins had of Palamism; for the Latins knew of Palamism almost exclusively from the writings of Palamas's bitter opponents, whereas the Greeks knew of Thomism from the works of Aquinas himself. What many Byzantines admired in Aquinas was not primarily his doctrine or his conclusions, for on matters such as the Procession of the Holy Spirit a number of them considered him to be in error.[24] It was his theological method that impressed them - his systematic arrangement of material, his careful definitions and distinctions, the rigour of his argumentation; in a word, his 'Latin logic'. This should prevent us from hastily concluding that the Byzantines were exclusively 'apophatic'!

It should not be assumed that all the Byzantine Thomists were in favour of union with Rome. If we try to range the Greek intellectuals of the 14th-15th centuries into two opposed 'teams' — on the one side, the Platonists, the Palamites and the anti-Unionists; on the other, the Aristotelians, the Thomists, and the Unionists — we quickly discover that the real situation is far more complicated. True, in the 14th century the brothers Cydones are anti-Palamite, Thomist and unionist. But Palamas himself showed no systematic animosity against the Latin West, and was less anti-Roman than his opponents Akyndinos and Gregoras. [25] Barlaam the Calabrian was anti-Palamite, but also anti-Thomist. In the next cen-tury, while St Mark of Ephesus was Palamite and anti-unionist, his suc-cessor as head of the anti-unionistparty, George (Gennadius) Scholarius, was to the end of his life a dedicated Thomist. Plethon the Platonist opposed the union; his Platonist disciple Bessarion supported it. The Aristotelian George of Trebizond favoured the union but disliked Bessarion. 'Even in the last agony of Byzantium each of its scholars went his own individual way.'[26] No easy classification is possible. 

The Things of the Age to Come 

'Accurate designations', remarked St Isaac the Syrian (7th century), 'can only be established concerning earthly things. The things of the Age to Come do not possess a true name, but can only be apprehended by simple cognition, which is exalted above all names and signs and forms and colours and habits and composite denominations. When, therefore, the knowledge of the soul exalts itself above this circle of visible things, the Fathers use concerning this knowledge any designations they like, for no one knows their real names. . . . As the holy Dionysius says, we employ riddles.' [27]

Using an eschatological perspective, St Isaac has here expressed the basic standpoint of the apophatic and mystical theologian. Natural science and secular philosophy are concerned with 'earthly' and 'visible' things, with the realities of the 'Present Age'. This means that in the field of science and philosophy there can be established a certain system of `accurate designation' (although never, of course, absolutely accurate); it means that certain man-made methods of logical argument, of analysis and verification, can here be legitimately applied. The Christian theologian, on the other hand — to use a phrase of St Isaac — 'breathes the air of the Age to Come'. All his thinking and his speaking should be permeated by the spirit of the Future Age which, since the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is already inaugurated and at work among us as a present reality. In consequence, theology can never be a `science' in any comparable sense to philology or geology, because the subject matter of theology is radically different. It has its own forms of understanding, by 'simple cognition' rather than discursive reasoning; it has its own ways of analysis and verification, and the methods of natural science and secular philosophy cannot here be applied without drastic modification, without a fundamental metanoia or 'change of mind'. 

The Byzantine authors that we have quoted felt that, in Latin Scholasticism, no sufficient metanoia had occurred, and that as a result theology had been assimilated too closely to earthly science and to human philosophy. They considered that Latin Scholasticism had neglected the transforming presence of the things of the Age to Come. How far were these Byzantines right?

Notes

[1] B. Leeming, sj, 'Orthodox-Catholic Relations', in A. H. Aimstrong and E. J. B. Fry, Re-Discovering Eastern Christendom: Essays in Commemoration of Dorn Bede Winslow (London 1963), p. 19.

[2] ECR iii (1971), pp. 286-300.

[3] A Brief Comment on Dr Yannaras's ECR iii (1971), p. 306.

[4] Mr Bonner seems momentarily to forget his own warnings, when he writes towards the end of his article : 'Is there any reason to think that Orthodoxy is any better equipped to speak to modern secular man than Roman Catholicism or Protestantism? The present writer sees no reason to suppose that his English fellow-countrymen are more likely to be impressed by Orthodoxy than by the forms of Christianity with which they are familiar.' Would it not be safer to avoid generalizations about 'modern secular man' and 'English fellow-countrymen'? `Modern' men, Eastern or Western, English or Greek, differ enormously among themselves. Several 'secular' Englishmen among my personal acquaintances have been immediately impressed on first encountering Orthodoxy. Stifled by urban technology, they have responded at once to the Orthodox interpretation of inward prayer, to the Orthodox use of liturgical symbolism and insistence on the spirit-bearing potentialities of material things. But I would not wish to generalize. Others among my English friends find Eastern Orthodoxy picturesque yet irrelevant.

[5] ECR iii (1971), p. 491.

[6] Y. M. -J. Congar, 'Neuf cent ans après: Notes sur le "Schisme oriental", in 1054-1954, L'Eglise et les Eglises: neuf siècles de douloureuse séparation entre l'Orient et l'Occident. Etudes et travaux . . . offerts à Dom Lambert Beauduin (Editions de Chevetogne, 1954), vol. i, pp. 43-48.

[7] Few texts, for example, could be more elaborately (not to say, tediously) syllogistic than the three Logoi Antirritikoi of St Theodore the Studite (MPG, xcix, cols 328-436).

[8] On the appeal to personal experience in Byzantine theology, see A. M. Allchin, 'The Appeal to Experience in the Triads of St. Gregory Palamas', in F. L. Cross (ed.), Studia Patristica viii (Texte and Untersuchungen Berlin xciiii: 1966), pp. 323-8; and K. Ware, 'Tradition and Personal Experience in Later Byzantine Theology', in ECR iii (1970), pp. 139-40.

[9] On Prayer, 60 (MPG, lxxix, col. 1180B).

[10] Cited by N. Zernov, 'The Eastern Churches and the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth Century', in R. Rouse and S. C. Neill (ed.), A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (2nd ed., London 1967), p. 655.

[11] J. Gill, sj, The Council of Florence (Cambridge 1959), p. 227.

[12] Letter to Alexander Lascaris (MPG, clxi, col. 360B), quoted in Gill, loc. cit.

[13] Cited in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, vol. ii (Paris 1903). col. 1159. Compare M. J. le Guillou, Mission et Unité. Les exigences de la communion, vol. ii (Unam Sanctam 34: Paris 1960), pp. 35-36; and T. [Kallistos] Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule (Oxford 1964), pp. 110-11.

[14] Adv. omn. haer., 29 (MPG, clv, col. 140Bc).

[15] Peri tis Archis tou Papa Antirrisis (Iassy 1682), p. 195.

[16] In Keith Bridston (ed.), Orthodoxy, A Faith and Order Dialogue (Geneva 1960), p. 42; quoted by Leeming, 'Orthodox-Catholic Relations', art. cit., p. 21.

[17] On, the subject of apophatic theology, I accept Mr Bonner's distinction between (i) apophaticism as an intellectual discipline, complementing cataphatic theology, and (ii) apophaticism as an attitude of adoration, accompanying the mystical union. (On this distinction, cf. C. Journet, 'Palamisme et thomisme. A propos d'un livre récent', in Revue Thomiste lx [1960], pp. 429-53, esp. p. 431.) But the two types of apophaticism are parallel and interconnected.

Mr Bonner is of course right to protest against an excessive apophaticism. An exclusive use of negative theology would be self-defeating, ending in silence and intellectual nihilism. The Greek Fathers never used negative theology in this way. Dionysus wrote other works besides the Mystical Theology, and in any case he is by no means representative of the Patristic tradition as a whole. My own reading of the Greek Fathers, however, from St Clement of Alexandria to St Gregory Palamas, leads me to suspect that they are more apophatic than Mr Bonner allows.

[18] Compare Peter Hammond, The Waters of Marah: The Present State of the Greek Church (London 1956), pp. 16-17: 'Orthodox Christendom has never undergone an upheaval comparable to that which shattered the unity of the western world in the sixteenth century, not on account of the glacier of Turkish dominion which descended upon it a hundred years earlier, but because it had never known that separation of theology and mysticism, liturgy and personal devotion, which - when all is said as to the influence of political and economic factors - is required to explain the all-engulfing cataclysm of the Reformation.'

[19] Syntagma kata azymon (Leipzig 1760), pp. 171-2.

[20] Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. i (Moscow 1911), p. 226. I owe this reference to Dr J. H. Pain, of Drew University, Madison, N.J.

[21] On the importance of the poetic element in theology, cf. Robert Murray, sj : 'All theology starts with the human mind reaching out to evoke some echo or reflexion of the ineffable by means of poetic imagery, knowing that the ineffable cannot be pinned down. . . . The peaks of theological poetry remain to inspire us again - Ephrem, Dante, Milton, Blake, T. S. Eliot. It would be good for the Church if they were put more in the forefront of theological study' (ECR iii [1971], p. 384).

[22] For details, see le Guillou, Mission et Unite, vol. ii, p. 277, note 55.

[23] The impact of Thomism on the Byzantines is discussed briefly but perceptively by R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (The Pelican History of the Church, vol. Harmondsworth 1970), pp. 79-82. For further details, see S. Salaville, 'Un Thomiste Byzance au XVe siècle : Gennade Scholarios', in Echos d'Orient xxiii (1924), pp. 129-36; M. jugie, 'Demetrius Cyclones et la theologie latine a Byzance aux XIVe et XVe siecles', in Echos d'Orient xxvii (1928), pp. 385-402; G. Mercati, Notizie di Procoro e Demetrio Cidone, Manuele Caleca e Teodoro Meliteniota ed altri appunti per la storia della Teologia e della Letteratura Bizantina del secolo XIV (Studi e Testi 56: Vatican 1931). The fullest and most recent treatment of the subject is in the three works of S. G. Papadorpoulos: Metaphraseis Thomistikon Ergon: Philothomistai kai Antithomistai en Byzantio (Athens 1967); Synantisis Orthodoxou kai Scholastikis Theologias (en to prosopo Kallistou Angelikoudi kai Thoma Akinatou) (Analekta Vlatadon 4: Thessalonika 1970); Kallistou Angelikoudi kata Thoma Akinatou (Athens 1970).

[24] One nameless Greek reader wrote in the margin of his copy of the Summa Theologica 'O Thomas, would that you had been born in the east and not in the west! Then you would have been Orthodox and would have written as truly about the Procession of the Holy Spirit as about all the other questions which you here treat so well.' A marginal gloss in another manuscript says of Aquinas: 'A Latin by race and belief, he differs from us on the points where the Roman Church differs; but in all else he is wise and exceedingly useful to the reader . . .' (Salaville, art. cit.. pp. 132-3). Nilus Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonika, while attacking Thomas's views on the Filioque yet conceded (according to Demetrius Cydones) that he was 'a holy man and the most valuable teacher that there has ever been in the Church of God' (jugie, art. cit., p. 398). 

[25] See J. Meyendorff, Introduction a l'etude de Gregoire Palamas (Patristica Sorbonensia 3: Paris 1959), pp. 122, 313. 

[26] S. Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge 1970), p. 84. 

[27] Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, translated from Bedjan's Syriac text by A. I. Wensinck (Amsterdam 1923), pp. 114-15 (translation adapted).

Hallucinations among the Roman Catholic saints

Not only hallucinations, but also illusions, pervade the whole history of Christian mysticism and are not excluded even on the earthly life of the saints.

This presupposition is exposed in the work especially made for the official stages of the canonization processes, "De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione", by Próspero Lambertini, Pope from 1740 to 1758, in fourteen dense volumes.

Supported by Lancicio, Benedict states textually that devout people, when they fall into ecstasy, often make mistakes and take as divine revelation what is the fruit of their own imagination. Not only the "most devout", but the saints who have been properly canonized, in great numbers, so much so that the Holy See for centuries had to prohibit the publication and archiving of parts of the publications of many saints (cf. De Servorum, 1. 3, c.53, n.17).

A thought not introduced into canonical reasoning by Benedict XIV, but much older than him, had already worried Pope Gregory XI, who lamented on his deathbed having listened to pious mystics who with their visions influenced him to drag the Church to the margins of a schism. The mystics in question were probably no less than Saint Brigida of Sweden, Saint Catherine of Siena and Friar Pedro of Aragon.

There is no consensus among visionary saints about the age of the Blessed Virgin Mary when she ascended to the blessedness of heaven. Some have affirmed that it was fifteen years after the Passion (Saint Brigid), others are precise in the imaginative speculation taken as a reality and they say it was  twenty-one years, four months and nineteen days (Maria de Ágreda), while others - notice, almost always women - dispute between thirteen years (Anna Catherine Emmerich) and one year and a half (Saint Elizabeth of Schoenau).

There are thousands of more emblematic cases: Saint Francesca Romana allegedly received the divine revelation that the sky was literally made of crystal, and vehemently affirmed that such a crystalline kingdom was situated between the sky of the stars and the empirical sky, which the blue seen by us is due to the corporeal sky where the stars are fixed (cf. Des Grâces d'Oraison, by Father Augustín Poulain, chapters 23 and 24).

Saint Catherine of Siena affirms that it was Our Lady herself who revealed to her that she had not been immaculate in her conception, and Pope Benedict XIV officially endorses the hypothesis of the most simple hallucination, since the idea was one of common sense of the social environment of mysticism. The Pontiff is emphatic: "Magnis Hallucinationibus" (cf. De Servorum, 1. 3, c.53, n.17).

Blessed Josefa Maria de Santa Ines, on a day of carnival, reports that Christ appeared to her, and, addressing the sacrarium of that Church, took oranges from it, which he threw to the saint who was in the chorus (cf. Agustinos Amantes de la Sagrada Eucaristia, Pe. Corro del Rosario, p.212)

St. Vincent Ferrer was convinced of the great closeness of the Last Judgement: "what was affirmed in the centuries in a generalized or proverbial way, I say it proprie et stricte loquendo". Regardless the stubbornness, he affirmed that the angel announced by Revelation was himself, and that the Antichrist had already been born nine years ago. All this he concludes on the basis of his own visions and those of other particular revelations (cf. Apariciones, pe. Carlos María Staehlin, p.324 e 325).

Finally, it is said that every healthy and balanced person can suffer from illusions and hallucinations, especially women and emotional saints or non saints, as we have just demonstrated. The investigations of canonical status of situations of this nature are supported and given first place to natural causes.

When among the people it is claimed that the saints could not carry diseases or a mind susceptible to self-deception, it is forgotten that a myriad of them were in fact neurasthenic, hysterical or simply unbalanced at times, as the most orthodox Catholic doctrine well recognizes. A great number of ignorant people believe and spread the idea that internal and external hallucinations are exclusive to a sick person, devoid of reason and moral sense. Not infrequently, those who deal with such disinformation advocate their own cause and also present themselves as mystics elected by the heavens, holders of charisms, and open up a fierce persecution to public health and psychiatric ministry, using books that for reasons of prudence should never have an end in their hands. Apart from the evidently sick aspect of the obstinate, their incapacity in the face of the most elementary principles of psychiatry and in neurology remains evident, a phenomenon of collective dumbness that easily takes proportion among so many others equally emotional.

The author of the above text, Mario Umetsu, is a Roman Catholic, hypnologist and a parapsychology researcher.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/umetsumario/posts/490714498433589

'Transdimensional' aliens from the 666 Beast and the dawn of the "New Age" (Gianluca Marletta)

Chapter two of the book entitled "UFOs and aliens: origin, history and prodigy of a pseudo-religion", by Gianluca Marletta

His name is still venerated in occult circles and even among many fans of the rock and underground culture of the 1970s, but it can be rightly said that much of the contemporary culture and mentality is indebted to his thinking. We are talking about the Englishman Edward Alexander Crowley (1875-1947) - better known by the Celtic nickname "Aleister" - who is perhaps the most famous among the "magicians" and occultists who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Poet, writer, traveller, bisexual hedonist, narcissist, assiduous drug user, preceded by the disturbing reputation of being a "powerful sorcerer", genius provocateur, loved or denigrated depending on the case, Aleister Crowley can be considered, among other things, as one of the inspirers of that hippie and libertarian-radical movement that, from the 1960s onwards, will transform the way of thinking and living of the entire Western world. It is especially some of his libertarian claims, his "atheistic" occultism oriented towards the self-divinization of man, the exaltation of sex and drugs seen not only in their playful aspect but also (presumably) from the spiritual point of view, that have made him an idol and a precursor of much of the "alternative" culture and the New Age of the following decades.

Less well known, however, is his decisive contribution to the structuring of the "alien myth": a contribution that we may perhaps define as "unintended"-since the "alien beings" Crowley speaks of have nothing to do, in themselves, with the "interstellar astronauts" of the popular version of the myth-yet fundamental in many respects. Aleister Crowley is the descendant of a fundamentalist Protestant family from Victorian England and grows up in an atmosphere of rigid fanaticism that may, at least in part, explain his continued debauchery and particularly violent hatred of all religions, especially Christianity.

At Cambridge University, where he is enrolled, the young Aleister leads a very dissolute life, characterized by frequent heterosexual and homosexual relationships and by the compilation of his first literary works (especially pornographic stories), up until the "occult illumination" in 1896.

From that moment on, Crowley began an extraordinary career, first in the occultist society Golden Dawn - where he learned and perfected magical practices of both eastern and western origin - and, later, in the Ordo Templi Orient (O. T. O.), a Masonic organization founded a few years earlier by the austrian Karl Kellner, in which would participate, among others, the future Nobel Laureate in Literature William Butler Yeats and the physicist and chemist William Crookes, inventor of the cathode tube.

It is during these years that the provocative british magician begins to present himself as the "Master Therion", the Beast 666, assuming the figure of the Antichrist of the Apocalypse of Saint John. In the following years, Crowley spent time in Switzerland, Egypt, the United States, Sicily and Cephalus, where he founded the famous "Thelema Abbey", a sort of magical-sexual cenacle where adults and children live together in total promiscuity, which will become the ideal model for many of those "communes" that will promote, some decades later, the so-called "sexual revolution." (1)

Probably connected with the various secret services of several European powers, controversial and often ambiguous in his relations with other occultists of his time (famous are his disagreements with former collaborators in the form of "curses" and "black magic"), Crowley ended his existence in England, consumed by his excesses and by drugs, to which he had become addicted, in 1947. But his legacy, as has been said, continues to materialize in the following decades, becoming one of the "hidden masters" of contemporary culture.

The Aeon of Horus and the End of Christianity 

Aleister Crowley's doctrine is often defined as "satanist", but if this term can certainly be adapted to the more "sinister" and dissolute characteristics of his thought and practice, it is also true that such an expression deserves further definition. What Crowley defines as "Satan" is not so much a personal entity but rather a symbol of one's ego. In fact, Crowley's occultist philosophy is, in a way, definable as a kind of magic atheism that rejects, besides the existence of God, also that of a Satan understood as a person (2). In Crowley's magic system, the reference to Satan is only the symbol of a libertarian and super-humanist vision, an ideal of self-divinization and absolute freedom. Thus, for example, Crowley expresses himself in his Hymn to Lucifer "There is no other God other than man.  Man has the right to live according to his law, to live as he wishes, (...) to die when and how he wishes (...) Man has the right to love as he wishes: to have all the love he wishes, when, where and with whom he wishes. Man has the right to kill those who wish to deny him these rights"(3)

This doctrine knows its "messianic" application in expectation of a New Age (a new "eon") in which the restrictions imposed by the old law and by the idea of "sin" will be completely eliminated. Such a doctrine is resumed in the so-called Book of the Law, from which Crowley claimed to have received inspiration from an entity whose name was Aiwass in 1909. According to this book, the law of the New Age (the Aeon of Horus that comes to replace and destroy the preceding Aeon of Osiris, as distinguished from Christianity and the "oppressive and patriarchal" religions) will be based on the supposed "do what you will!" This is the essence of Thelema's Law, but to reach the new world it is necessary that the cults and rites of the "old age" be destroyed. From this point of view, "the entity Aiwass", who had dictated to Crowley the Book of the Law, expresses itself in unequivocal terms: "With my hawk's head I pluck out the eyes of Jesus while he is on the cross (...) May the Virgin Mary be condemned to the torture of the wheel: And by her all the chaste women despised among you! " (4) 

According to Crowley, however, the great revolution that will sweep through Christianity (and the other "old religions" such as Islam, Judaism and Hinduism itself) will happen not only through a "cultural" change, but also (perhaps especially) through the evocation and opening of "doors" from which the "entities" destined to bring about the New Age will be able to break into this world. And it is the most properly magical-operational aspect of Crowleyan thought that deserves to be deepened in our context.

Aleister Crowley and the revelation of the "alien" Lam 

Crowley had defined them as Operations Amalantrah: or a series of magical evocations that, in his opinion, had ended up "opening portals" that would allow contact with "non-human intelligences" that could help man "evolve" towards the New Age. Such non-human beings were defined by Crowley as "trans-dimensional", belonging therefore to "non-physical" dimensions, but whose location remains vague, ambiguous and, in fact, intermediate between the subtle and the material dimension. In 1944, in one of his reflections, Crowley stated: "My observation of the Universe convinces me that they are beings of far greater intelligence and power than anything we human beings can conceive, that they are not necessarily based on the brain and nerve structures we know, and that the only possibility for mankind as a whole to advance is that individuals make contact with such beings." (5)

The real link between Crowley and the "alien myth", however, has its origin in a particular rite performed by the English "magician" during his stay in the United States: the entity contacted on that occasion - a trans-dimensional being who introduced himself under the name Lam - will be portrayed and exhibited by Crowley himself during a demonstration at Creenuncli Village in New York in 1919, "The Dead Souls Exhibition". What strikes immediately from the "portrait" of the entity Lam, however, is the remarkable resemblance to the characteristics of "aliens" - especially the category defined by urologists as the "greys" - which will become common in the so-called "close encounters" starting in the second post-war world: a highly developed and "curved" skull, a very small mouth and a chin that tends to form a kind of "V".

Lam's image can be defined as a real and proper forerunner of the "alien" imagery that will become popular from the 1960s onwards, but the link between "Crowleyan" doctrine and practice and extraterrestrial myth will be even more evident from the works of some of his "disciples".

Portrait of LAM by Crowley.
Note the similarity with the typical image of the "gray" alien. 

The missile engineer who played with the demons. 

The link between the world of the occult, the world of technology and modern science is closer than one would like to admit. Magic power and technological power, in fact, often become the object of interest on the part of the same individuals, so it is not surprising that there are figures in whom these two fields seem to be indissolubly linked.

One of these figures is certainly that of the American aerospace engineer Jack Parsons (1914-1952). Parsons is a figure with extremely interesting implications, central to the understanding of the phenomenology linked to UFOs. The story of his life, together with those characters that accompanied him, is fundamental for understanding the ambiguous and complex climate in which a certain modernity is developed.

In the early 1930s, a very young but already a brilliant engineering student, Parsons comes into contact with Robert Goddard, the pioneer of American missile technology. Goddard, like other scientists of his time, is both a cold rationalist and an enthusiastic visionary: convinced that he could build rockets that would eventually allow man to reach other planets (and particularly Mars, where, according to some suggestions of that time, there would have been an extraterrestrial civilization), he founded in 1930 the first American base for missile experiments in Roswell, New Mexico (just the place that will become famous in the postwar period for the alleged "incident" of an extraterrestrial spacecraft that will transform it the Mecca of ufologists). Parsons, who quickly reveals himself as a brilliant mind, is called to work with the famous professor of Hungarian origin Theodore von Kármán, to whom the direction of the GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology) had been entrusted in 1936. Von Kármán is also a character with heterogeneous interests: passionate about both technology and occultism, he will proudly include among his ancestors Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who lived in Prague in the 16th century, of whom it was said that he had created a "Golem", a kind of automaton generated through the use of magic arts and carrier of a "spirit". Parsons was also very interested in occultism, and when in 1936 he decided to found the Jet Propulsion Loboratory, the laboratory in Pasadena (California) would become the most important American study center for space technology. He chooses as the date of birth of the new society the day of Halloween, which in the Celtic tradition coincides with the feast of Samhain, when it is communicated that the world of the dead can come into contact with that of the living. Parsons had also decided to make wax statues of the founders that were reproduced according to the arrangement they had in a photo taken that day and was presented once a year as a scene of the "Nativity", in an obvious parody of the Christian cribs.

The turning point in Parsons' life occurred in 1939, with his "conversion" to Aleister Crowley's thelemic doctrine and his entry two years later into the Californian branch of the O.T.O. Following Crowley, who had nicknamed himself The Beast 666, Parsons attributed to himself the nickname of Antichrist and, in 1946, decided to undertake a magical operation that, in his opinion, could have been a fundamental moment in the transition to the New Age. The aim of the operation would have been to generate an "elemental" spirit, an entity of the "invisible world", in human form, by implanting it in the foetus of a pregnant woman in the course of specific rituals (it is probably this story that will inspire director Roman Polanski years later in the story of the film Rosemary's Baby).  The name of the experiment will be Operation Babalon, because the birth of this child would have incarnated the forces of Babalon - Babylon, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, which in the occultist circles symbolizes the dawn of the Horus Eon, the New Age. The "predestined" for the experiment would be Parsons' partner, Marjorie Cameron, and the assistant to that effort would be L. Ron Hubbard, who later founded the Scientology movement.

Marjorie Cameron, who was unaware of the nature of the project that was taking shape inside her, will recount years later that, in order to have the proof that she was predestined, Parsons led her into the desert where, if affirmative, the woman should have the vision of a "silver UFO in the shape of a cigar" (6): but for Jack Parsons, those he called "flying cigars" were not spacecrafts but subtle manifestations.

Precisely in those years, on the other hand, those phenomena that will give life to the "saga of the UFOs" will begin to manifest themselves massively, but Parsons' conviction - unlike the "popular myth" that would have begun to see in these manifestations the proof of the "visitation of extraterrestrials" - was that such "objects" were, in reality, subtle entities, penetrated into this world to begin the change that will inaugurate the New Era.

According to Francis King, an occultist friend of Parsons, who in 1973 published the O.T.O. rituals, Parsons "felt" that flying discs "would play an important role in converting the world to 'crowleyanity'". M. Cameron himself then stated that UFOs were not high-tech objects but rather "the restoration of elemental powers" (7). Also the occultist Kenneth Grant, one of the most important popularizers of Crowley's work and great protagonist of the "cultural revolution" of the Aryans 60-70, would have affirmed that: 'Acting with the formulas of thelemic magic, Parsons made contact with extraterrestrial beings of the order of Aiwass. (8)

In its progressive structuring, therefore, the "extraterrestrial myth" will be configured in a double parallel doctrine: an external and "exoteric" doctrine, where the beings descended from the sky will be seen in the same way as the "spaceship" publicized by the media and the cinema, and an "esoteric" doctrine, exclusive and cultivated in more restricted environments, that will see, on the contrary, the UFO and "alien" phenomenology as a manifestation of "subtle", immaterial beings, carriers of a "new spirituality" and a New Age.

These two parallel doctrines, moreover, will often end up meeting and being confused in an ambiguous cauldron where the only common point will be "the messianic waiting" of the "aliens" (whether biological or subtle), destined to transform the way we see our world and to destroy the old religions (especially Christianity).

As the Aiwass entity reportedly "inspired" Crowley in the Book of the Law: "It is their God and their religion that I hate and want destroyed!" (9) 

[1] Regarding the influence that Crowley's doctrine has had on the founder of the "sexual revolution" and of the gender ideology Alfred Kinsey, see E. Perucchiettij/G.Marletta, Unisex. Cancellare l'identita sessuale: la nuova arma della manipolazione globale, Ed. Arianna, Cesen a 2015, pp. 42-45. 

[2] "The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant confusion" (A. Crowley, Magick, New York Beach 1974, p. 296). 

[3] A. Crowley, Hymn to Lucifer, reprinted in The Equinox, vol. III, n. 10, p.144. 

[4] Il Libro della Legge, III, 51. 

[5] cit. in C. Barbera, LAM - Colui che va. Una possibile genesi del fenómeno UFO, en http://www.arcadia93. org/coluicheva. html 

[6] J. Carter, Sex and rockets the occult world of Jack Parsons, Feral House, Port Townsend USA 2005, p. 135. 

[7] Ibidem, p. 188. 

[8] Grant, Aleister Crowley e il Dio Occulto, Astrolabio Ubaldini, Roma 1975, p. 65 

[9] A. Crowley, Prefazione a Il Libro della Legge, op. cit., p. 31. 

* * * 

Bellow is the spanish version of the chapter (originally posted at the blog Sanatana dharma tradicional). 

Alienígenas 'Transdimensionales' de la besta 666 y los albores de la "Nueva Era" (Gianluca Marletta)

Capítulo segundo del libro titulado "Ovnis y allenígenas: origen, historia y prodigio de una pseudo-rreligióna, Gianluca Marletta, Trad. Ángel Fernández Fernández, Ed. Hipérbola Janus, 2019 

TODAVÍA hoy su nombre es idolatrado en los ambientes ocultistas e incluso entre muchos fans de la cultura rock y underground de los años 70, pero se puede afirmar con razón que gran parte de la cultura y de la mentalidad contemporánea es deudora de su pensamiento. Estamos hablando del inglés Edward Alexander Crowley (1875-1947) -mejor conocido con el sobrenombre céltico de «Aleister» - que es quizás el más célebre entre los «magos» y ocultistas que vivió a caballo del siglo XIX y el siglo XX. 

Poeta, escritor, viajero, hedonista bisexual, narcisista, consumidor asiduo de drogas, precedido por la inquietante fama de ser un «brujo poderoso», genial provocador, amado o denigrado según el caso, Aleister Crowley puede ser considerado, entre otras cosas, como uno de los inspiradores de aquel movimiento hippie y libertario-radical que, a partir de los años 60, transformará el modo de pensar y de vivir de todo el mundo occidental. Son especialmente algunas de sus afirmaciones libertarias, su ocultismo «ateo» orientado hacia la la auto-divinización del hombre, la exaltación del sexo y de la droga vista no solo en su aspecto lúdico sino también (presumiblemente) desde el punto de vista espiritual, las que lo han convertido en un ídolo y un precursor de gran parte de la cultura «alternativa» y el NewAge de los decenios sucesivos. 

Menos conocida es, sin embargo, su aportación decisiva en la estructuración del «mito extraterrestre»: una aportación que quizás podremos definir como «involuntaria» -dado que los «seres alienigenas» de los que habla Crowley no tienen nada que ver, en si mismos, con los «astronautas interestelares» de la versión popular del mito - fundamental, sin embargo, en muchos aspectos. Aleister Crowley es el descendiente de una familia protestante fundamentalista de la Inglaterra victoriana y crece en una atmósfera de rígido fanatismo que puede, al menos en parte, explicar el sucesivo libertinaje y el odio particularmente violento hacia todas las religiones, en especial hacia el Cristianismo. 

En la Universidad de Cambridge, donde está matriculado, el joven Aleister lleva una vida de lo más disoluta, caracterizada por frecuentes relaciones heterosexuales y homosexuales y por la compilación de sus primeras obras literarias (especialmente relatos pornográficos), hasta la «iluminación ocultista» acontecida en el año 1896. 

Desde aquel momento en adelante, Crowley comienza una extraordinaria carrera, primero en la sociedad ocultista Golden Dawn (Rama Dorada) -donde aprende y perfecciona prácticas mágicas de derivación tanto oriental como occidental- y, posteriormente, en el Ordo Templi Oriente (O. T. O), una organización masónica fundada algunos años antes por el austriaco Karl Kellner, de la que formarán parte, entre otros, el futuro Nobel de Literatura William Butler Yeats y el fisico y químico William Crookes, inventor del tubo catódico. 

Es durante estos años cuando el provocador mago británico comienza a presentarse como el «Maestro Therion», la Bestia 666, tomando la figura del Anticristo del Apocalipsis de San Juan. En los años sucesivos, Crowley hizo estancias en Suiza, Egipto, Estados, Unidos, Sicilia y Cefalú, donde funda la célebre «Abadía Thelema», una suerte de cenáculo mágico-sexual en el cual conviven adulto y niños en total promiscuidad, en lo que se convertirá en el modelo ideal para muchas de aquellas «comunas» que impulsará, unas décadas después, la llamada «revolución sexual» (1) 

Probablemente estuvo vinculado con los diversos servicios secretos de varias potencias europeas, polémico y, a menudo, ambiguo en sus relaciones con otros ocuttistas de la época (son célebres sus desencuentros en tomo a «maldiciones» y «magia negra» con excolaboradores), Crowley termina su existencia en Inglaterra, consumido por los excesos y por la droga, a la cual se había vuelto adicto, en 1947. Pero su legado, corno se ha dicho, continúa para materializarse en los decenios sucesivos, convirtiéndose en uno de los «maestros ocultos» de la cultura contemporánea. 

El eón de Horus y el fin del cristianismo 

La doctrina de Aleister Crowley es definida a menudo como «satanista», pero si este término puede, ciertamente, adaptarse a las características más «siniestras» y disolutivas de su pensamiento y de su praxis, también es cierto que tal expresión merece una mayor definición. Aquello que Crowley define como «satanás», en realidad no es tanto una entidad personal como, más bien, un símbolo del propio ego. De hecho, la filosofía ocultista de Crowley es, de alguna manera, definible como una suerte de ateísmo mágico que rechaza, más allá de la existencia de Dios, también aquella de un Satanás entendido como persona (2). En el sistema mágico de Crowley, la referencia a Satanás es solo el símbolo de una visión libertaria y super-humanista, un ideal de auto-divinización y de libertad absoluta. Así, por ejemplo, se expresa Crowley en su Hymne to Lucifer "No existe otro Dios que el hombre. El hombre tiene derecho a vivir según su ley, de vivir como quiere, (...) de morir cuando y como quiere ( ) El hombre tiene derecho a amar como quiere: toma todo el amor que quieras, cuando, donde y con quien quieras. El hombre tiene derecho a matar a aquellos que quieran negarle estos derechos"(3) 

Esta doctrina conoce su aplicación «mesiánica» a la espera de una Nueva Era (un nuevo «eón») donde las restricciones inducidas por la vieja ley y por la idea de «pecado» se verán completamente eliminadas. Tal doctrina es reasumida en el llamado Libro de la Ley, del que Crowley afirmó haber recibido la inspiración de una entidad cuyo nombre era Arwass en 1909. Según este libro, la ley de la Nueva Era (el Eón de Horus que viene para reemplazar y destruir el precedente Eón de Osiris, diferenciado del Cristianismo y de las religiones «opresivas y patriarcales») estará basada en el supuesto «iHaz lo que quieras!». Esta es la esencia de la Ley de Thelema, pero para llegar al nuevo mundo es necesario que los cultos y los ritos de la «vieja era» sean destruidos. Desde este punto de vista, «la entidad Aiwass», que habría dictado a Crowley el Libro de la Ley, se expresa con términos inequívocos: "Con mi cabeza de halcón arranco los ojos de Jesús mientras él está en la cruz (...) Que la Virgen María sea condenada a la tortura de la rueda: Y por ella todas las mujeres castas despreciadas entre vosotros!"(4) 

Según Crowley, sin embargo, la gran revolución que arrasará a través del Cristianismo (y las demás «viejas religiones» como el Islam, el Judaísmo y el mismo Hinduismo) no sucederá sólo mediante un cambio «cultural», sino también (quizás especialmente) a través de la evocación y la apertura de «puertas» a partir de las cuales las «entidades» destinadas a propiciar la Nueva Era podrán irrumpir en este mundo. Y es el aspecto más propiamente mágico-operativo del pensamiento crowleyano el que merece ser profundizado en nuestro contexto. 

Aleister Crowley y la revelación del «alienígena» Lam 

Crowley las había definido como Operaciones Amalantrah: o una serie de evocaciones mágicas que, a su parecer, habían terminado por «abrir portales» que permitirían el contacto con «inteligencias no humanas» que pudiesen ayudar al hombre a «evolucionar» hacia la Nueva Era. Tales seres no humanos eran definidos por Crowley como «transdimensionales», pertenecientes entonces a dimensiones «no físicas», pero cuya ubicación permanece vaga, ambigua y, de hecho, intermedia entre la dimensión sutil y aquella material. En 1944, en una de sus reflexiones, Crowley afirma: "Mi observación del Universo me convence de que son seres de una inteligencia y de un poder mucho mayor que cualquier cosa que podamos concebir los seres humanos, que ellos no están basados necesariamente en las estructuras cerebrales y nerviosas que conocemos, y que la única posibilidad para el género humano de avanzar en su conjunto es que los individuos tomen contacto con tales seres." (5) 

El verdadero vinculo entre Crowley y el «mito extraterrestre», sin embargo, tiene su origen en un rito particular efectuado por el «mago» inglés durante su estancia en Estados Unidos: la entidad contactada en aquella ocasión -un ser transdimensional que se presenta con el nombre de Lam- se verá retratada y exhibida por el mismo Crowley en el curso de una manifestación en el Creenuncli Village de Nueva York en 1919. «La exhibición de las almas muertas». Aquello que golpea inmediatamente del «retrato» de la entidad Lam, sin embargo, es la notable semejanza con las características de los «alienigenas» -en especial la categoría definida por los urólogos como los «grises»- que se convertirán en una constante de los llamados «encuentros cercanos» a partir de la segunda posguerra mundial: un cráneo muy desarrollado y «abombado», una boca muy pequeña y un mentón que tiende a formar una suerte de «V» 

La imagen de Lam puede ser definida como una verdadera y justa precursora de la iconografia «alienígena» que se hará popular a partir de los años 60, pero el vinculo entre la doctrina y la praxis «crowleyana» y el mito extraterrestre será todavía más evidente a partir de las obras de algunos de sus «discípulos» 

El ingeniero de misiles que jugaba con los demonios. 

El vínculo entre el mundo de lo oculto, el mundo de la tecnología y de la ciencia moderna es más estricto de cuanto se querría admitir El poder mágico y el poder tecnológico, de hecho, se convierten a menudo en objeto de interés por parte de los mismos individuos, por lo que no debe sorprender que haya figuras en las que estos dos ámbitos parecen unirse de forma indisoluble. 

Una de estas figuras es, ciertamente, aquella del ingeniero aero-espacial americano Jack Parsons (1914-1952) Parsons es un personaje con implicaciones extremadamente interesantes, central en la comprensión de la fenomenología vinculada a los OVNIS. La historia de su vida, junto a aquellos personajes que lo compañarán, es fundamental para comprender el «clima» ambiguo 'Y complejo en el cual se desarrolla cierta modernidad. 

A comienzos de los años 30, jovencísimo pero ya un genial estudiante de ingeniería, Parsons entra en contacto con Robert Goddard, el pionero de la tecnología de los misiles americana. Goddard, al igual que otros científicos de su época, es, al mismo tiempo, un frío racionalista y un visionario entusiasta: convencido de poder fabricar cohetes que finalmente permitan al hombre alcanzar otros planetas (y en particular a Marte, donde, según algunas sugestiones de la época, habría existido una civilización extraterrestre), fundó en 1930 la primera base americana para experimentos con misiles en la localidad de Roswell, en Nuevo México (justo el lugar que se hará famoso durante la posguerra por el presunto «incidente» de una nave extraterrestre que hará de ésta la Meca de los ufólogos). Parsons, que se revela rápidamente como una mente brillante, es llamado a trabajar con el célebre profesor de origen húngaro Theodore von Kármán, al cual le había sido confiada en 1936 la dirección del GALCIT (Guggenheim Aerotuiutical Laboratoru en el California Institute of Technology). También Von Kármán es un personaje de intereses heterogéneos: apasionado tanto de la tecnología como del ocultismo, contará rgullosamente entre sus antepasados con el rabino Judah Loew ben Bezalel, que vivió en Praga en el siglo XVI, del cual se contaba que había creado un «Golem», una especie de autómata generado mediante el uso de artes mágicas y portador de un «espíritu». También Parsons estaba muy interesado por el ocultismo y, cuando en 1936 decide fundar el Jet Propulsion Loboratory, el laboratorio de Pasadena (California) se convertirá en el centro de estudio americano más importante para la tecnología espacial. Elige como fecha de nacimiento de la nueva sociedad el día de Halloween, que en la tradición céltica coincide con la fiesta del Samhain, cuando se comunica que el mundo de los muertos puede entrar en contacto con aquel de los vivos. Parsons también había decidido hacer estatuas de cera de los fundadores que se reproducían según la disposición que tenían en una foto tomada ese día y se proponía una vez al año como escena de la «Natividad», en una evidente parodia de los pesebres cristianos 

El punto de inflexión en la vida de Parsons llegará en 1939, con su «conversión» a la doctrina thelemita de Aleister Crowley y su ingreso dos años después en la rama californiana del O.T.O. A raíz de Crowley, que se había apodado La Bestia 666, Parsons se atribuye el sobrenombre de Anticristo y, en 1946, decide emprender una operación mágica que, a su parecer, habría podido constituir un momento fundamental en el tránsito hacia la Nueva Era. El objetivo de la operación habría sido aquel de generar un espíritu «elemental», una entidad del «mundo invisible», con forma humana, encallándola en el feto de una mujer embarazada en el curso de unos rituales específicos (probablemente sea esta historia la que inspirará años después al director Roman Polanski en la trama de la película Rosemaru's baby). El nombre del experimento será Operación Babaron, porque el nacimiento de este niño habría encarnado las fuerzas de Babaron - Babilonia, la Mujer Escarlata del Apocalipsis, que en los círculos ocultistas simboliza el alba del Eón Horus, la Nueva Era. La «predestinada» al experimento será la compañera de Parsons, Manorie Cameron, y el asistente de ese intento sería L. Ron Hubbard, quien más tarde fundó el movimiento Scientology. 

Marjone Cameron, que ignoraba la naturaleza del proyecto que estaba tomando forma en su interior, relatará años después que, para tener la prueba de que estaba predestinada, Parsons la condujo al desierto donde, en caso afirmativo, la mujer debería tener la visión de un «OVNI plateado con forma de cigarro» (6): pero para Jack Parsons, aquellos que él llamaba «cigarros volantes» no eran astronaves sino manifestaciones sutiles. 

Justo en aquellos años, por otro lado, comenzarán a manifestarse masivamente aquellos fenómenos que darán vida a la «saga de los OVNIS», pero la convicción de Parsons -a diferencia del «mito popular» que habría comenzado a ver en estas manifestaciones la prueba de la «visita de extraterrestres»- era que tales «objetos» fueron, en realidad, entidades sutiles, penetradas en este mundo para dar inicio al cambio que inaugurará la Nueva Era. 

Según Francis King, un ocultista amigo de Parsons, que en 1973 publicó los rituales del O T O, éste «sintió» que los discos volantes «jugarían un papel importante en la conversión del mundo a la «crowleyanidad» La propia M. Cameron afirmó a continuación que los OVNI no eran objetos high-tech sino, más bien, «la restauración de las potencias elementales» (7). También el ocultista Kenneth Grant, uno de los más importantes divulgadores de la obra de Crowley y gran protagonista de la«revolución cultural» de los arios 60-70, habría afirmado que: 'Actuando con las fórmulas de la magia thelémica, Parsons tomó contacto con seres extraterrestres del orden de Aiwass." (8) 

En su progresiva estructuración, por lo tanto, el «mito extraterrestre» se configurará en una doble doctrina paralela: una doctrina exterior y «exotérica», donde los seres descendidos del cielo se verán de la misma manera que la «nave espacial» publicitada por los medios y la cinematografía, y una doctrina «esotérica», exclusiva y cultivada en ambientes más restringidos, que verán, por el contrario, la fenomenología OVNI y de los «alienígenas» como una manifestación de seres «sutiles», inmateriales, portadores de una «nueva espiritualidad» y de una Nueva Era.

Estas dos doctrinas paralelas, además, terminarán por encontrarse a menudo y confundirse en un caldero ambiguo donde el único punto en común será «la espera mesiánica» de los «extraterrestres» (ya sean biológicos o sutiles), destinados a transformar la forma en que vemos nuestro mundo y para destruir las viejas religiones (en especial el Cristianismo).

Como habría «inspirado» la entidad Aiwass a Crowley en el Libro de la Ley: "iEs su Dios y su religión lo que odio y quiero destruidos!" (9) 

Retrato de LAM realizado por Crowley. Nótese la semejanza con la imagen típica del alienígena «gris». 

[1] Respecto a la influencia que ha tenido la doctrina de Crowley sobre el fundador de la «revolución sexual» y de la ideología de género Alfred Kinsey, cfr. E. Perucchiettij/G.Marletta, Unisex. Cancellare l'identita sessuale: la nuova arma della manipolazione globale, Ed. Arianna, Cesen a 2015, pp. 42-45. 

[2] «El Diablo no existe. Es un nombre falso inventado por los Hermanos Negros para implicar una Unidad en su ignorante confusión» (A. Crowley, Magick, New York Beach 1974, p. 296). 

[3] A. Crowley, Hymne to Lucifer, reeditado en The Equinox, vol. III, n. 10, p.144. 

[4] Il Libro della Legge, III, 51. 

[5] cit. in C. Barbera, LAM - Colui che va. Una possibile genesi del fenómeno UFO, en http://www.arcadia93. org/coluicheva. html 

[6] J. Carter, Sex and rockets the occult world of Jack Parsons, Feral House, Port Townsend USA 2005, p. 135. 

[7] Ibidem, p. 188. 

[8] Grant, Aleister Crowley e il Dio Occulto, Astrolabio Ubaldini, Roma 1975, p. 65 

[9] A. Crowley, Prefazione a Il Libro della Legge, op. cit., p. 31.