My Lenten reading

I intended to reread John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent but failed hopelessly. Even switching to Papavassiliou’s modern rendering of it (Thirty Steps to Heaven) was no help. I think I find the mindset and context of sixth-century monk living in the Sinai desert too alien. It is not something that can be easily mapped onto the life of a layperson living in an affluent Western society in the twenty-first century.

So, perhaps inevitably, I reverted to rereading Tito Colliander’s Way of the Ascetics. In 26 short chapters he offers a practical introduction to Orthodox spirituality largely in the form of extracts from the writings of the Church Fathers. I like it because it is so practical and, having been written by a layman for twentieth-century laypeople, it is directly applicable to our context. It is much easier to read than Climacus but just as challenging if read properly.

As for my other reading during Lent, I have been carefully working my way through Andrew Jackson’s Maximus the Confessor and Evolutionary Biology. I know some Orthodox theologians are a bit sniffy about non-Orthodox studies of Maximus, but this is a must read for anyone interested in relating modern science and Christian theology. At the moment, I am preparing a review of it, which will appear in a future issue of the journal Science & Christian Belief. But it also looks highly relevant for a paper I hope to write for this year’s ORIC conference.

I have also been reading Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of St John. My main reason has been so that I can take part in the regular ORIC seminar. It has reaffirmed my sense that I do not like Origen as a theologian. I dislike his belief that the material universe exists only as a punishment for essentially spiritual beings. And his hierarchical view of Christians – most are carnal (i.e. they know Christ and him crucified!) and a small elite are spiritual (i.e. they have gone beyond the letter of Scripture to its spiritual sense) – makes me deeply uneasy.

Blogger’s block?

It has been more than three weeks since I last posted here. In that time, several ideas have drifted in and out my head before I could get round to writing them down. My excuse is that a toxic combination of health issues and current affairs has left me unable to concentrate on writing anything coherent.

Christians as resident aliens

The phrase ‘resident aliens’ has become associated with Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon since they wrote a book of that title nearly forty years ago. But the idea is as old as Christianity itself. John Climacus, whose treatise on the spiritual life is read by many Orthodox Christians every Lent, begins his account of the ascent to God with renunciation of the world. And the second-century Letter to Diognetus puts it starkly

Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. . . . They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. . . . They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. (Letter to Diognetus, ch.5)

This is a far cry from the heretical ‘Christian’ nationalism that seems so popular nowadays. Christians are called to obey the laws of the land as far as they can without compromising their faith but always to remember that they are resident aliens, citizens of another kingdom.

Flickr update

I have recently uploaded 20 more photos to my Flickr account. It’s a mixture of colour and black & white shots taken over the past decade or so but mostly edited over the past few months. I have mostly used Adobe Lightroom for the basic editing and created the black & white images using Nik Silver Efex.

The depths of the human heart

In a homily traditionally attributed to St Macarius the Great, we find the following description of the human heart:

the heart itself is but a small vessel, yet there also are dragons and there are lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. And there are rough and uneven roads; there are precipices. But there is also God, also the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the Apostles, the treasures of grace—there are all things. (Pseudo-Macarius, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 43.7)

His warning about the dark side of the human heart reminds me very much of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems where he says: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.’

I think it would be a great error to read these passages as if they were suggesting that somehow ‘it’s all in the mind’. Rather, I think they remind us that the heart, the seat of the personality, is not closed in upon itself but is open to the transcendent – what kind of transcendence depends on how we orient our heart.

Not all theologians are liars

Given what I said in the last entry, it was inevitable that I would want to qualify it: all theologians are liars, but there are exceptions. In a lecture given in 2012, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware drew on St Gregory Palamas to outline three categories of theologian:

St. Gregory Palamas of the 14th Century distinguishes three kinds of theologians. First he says, there are the saints. They are those who possess personal experience; who have themselves beheld the divine light, and these are the true theologians. Secondly, there are those who lack such personal experience but who trust the saints and learn from them. And they too may be good theologians, albeit on a lower level. Thirdly, there are those who lack personal experience and who do not trust the saints, and they are bad theologians.

The ‘bad theologians’ are those self-styled theologians who are more interested in their academic prowess than in the pursuit of truth. They may court controversy to bolster their standing or boost their book sales. They may put personal bias before the truth of the gospel. But generally they presume that the Infinite can be grasped and analysed by finite human reason.

Then there are what Metropolitan Kallistos calls the ‘good theologians’. They may lack the kind of personal experience of God enjoyed by the saints, but they are at different stages on the path to that kind of experience. They know only too well their own finitude and sinfulness and they recognize the truth of Gregory of Nyssa’s suggestion that any unqualified statement about God is a lie.

Finally, the ‘saints’  or ‘true theologians’ are, as St Gregory puts it, those who have directly experienced the divine Light. Or, following Evagrius of Pontus, they are those whose prayer is true. But by no means all saints have attempted to articulate their experience and relate it to Scripture. In fact, in its 2000-year history the Orthodox Church has granted the title ‘Theologian’ to just three saints: St John the Apostle, St Gregory of Nazianzus, and St Symeon the New Theologian. However, this category can be expanded to include those Fathers of the Church who have been recognized as saints. St John is in a class of his own, since his writings form part of the New Testament. Otherwise, these theologians are regarded by the Orthodox Church as authoritative rather than infallible. And these are the theologians who might reasonably regarded as exceptions to my previous entry.

All theologians are liars

I am a theologian. Therefore, …?

St Gregory of Nyssa put it rather more gently: ‘anyone who attempts to portray the ineffable Light in language is truly a liar – not because of any abhorrence of the truth, but merely because of the infirmity of his explanation’ (quoted in Jean Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, p. 105).

Every positive statement we can make about God is utterly inadequate and dangerously misleading. Ultimately, whenever we state confidently that God is X, we are setting up an idol.

And this leads us directly to the apophatic tradition in Orthodox theology. The encounter with God forces us to admit the inadequacy of all our images of God. It calls us to repent of all those confident positive statements and to confess that God is infinitely greater, more dynamic, more alive than any of those statements suggest. So, for example, when we say ‘God is love’, we must immediately admit that the ‘love’ referred to is something infinitely greater than we can imagine given our limited and deeply flawed understandings of love.