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.

Vance on the ordo amoris

J.D. Vance decided to stick his nose into Christian theology the other day, summarizing his understanding of the ordo amoris (‘order of love’) thus:

‘There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.’ (interview on Fox News, 29 January)

I don’t have a problem with the idea that there is an order to love (ultimately, this comes from Augustine and Aquinas, though their treatment of love in this way owes more to Plato and Aristotle than it does to Scripture). But Vance and those Christians who have spoken up in his support have gone wrong in two important ways: they have made the ordo prescriptive, and they assume that love is finite and essentially static.

Misunderstood in this way, the order of love suggests that love of family takes priority over everything else (the old lie, ‘charity begins at home’). Next in importance comes love of one’s immediate neighbours, then love of the wider community, then love of one’s nation. Only then, might one consider loving people beyond the boundaries of our own ethne. Add to this the assumption that love is essentially finite and it suggests that those beyond our borders are only worthy of the dregs of love that may or may not be left over after we finished loving everyone closer at hand (and most like ourselves).

Against this, I would argue first that the order of love should be understood as descriptive. Yes, love begins with the family. That is where we first experience love and where we learn to love. But as we grow, our horizons expand – we go to school, join clubs, attend church, leave home, perhaps go to university, perhaps emigrate – and our experience of love expands with our expanding horizons.

But, more importantly for the Christian, love is not merely a finite human faculty. It is also a gift of God. And as we exercise that gift, God increases our capacity for love. Since God is utterly unbounded, there are literally no limits to this love. We see this quite clearly in Scripture where Jesus commands us to love our enemies. And in the Orthodox tradition, we find examples of love extending even beyond the limits of this world (e.g. St Isaac the Syrian speaking of the compassionate heart praying even for demons).