Imago Dei--The Anthropomorphite Controversy & St Gregory the Great

In large part because of my great devotion to St John Cassian and his writings, I have long taken a keen interest in the 4^th- to 5^th-century ‘Anthropomorphite-Origenist’ controversy in Egypt, and for the same reason I have for the most part tended to identify heavily with the ‘Origenist’ side of the controversy. St Cassian’s points in Conference 10 in fact seem fairly uncontroversial, and the ‘anthropomorphite’ position seems fairly indefensible from an Orthodox perspective.

This view was beautifully complicated for me by Bishop Alexander’s contribution to the festschrift for Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware)—‘The Vision of God & the Form of Glory: More Reflections on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of AD 399’ (see an earlier contribution by His Grace to the subject here). While I definitely appreciated His Grace’s ‘final word’ attempting to ‘make up a little for the injustices I may have done a Cassian, an Origen, or an Evagrius in the course of making my argument’ [1], I also appreciated in a different sense his main argument that the simplistic ‘Serapion’ of Conference 10 may not be entirely representative of the anthropomorphites themselves or of their position.

Well, today I was finally getting round to reading Tim Vivian’s introduction to his little volume for the SVS Popular Patristic Series—Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt & Macarius of Alexandria. Vivian—in his discussion of Evagrius’s emphasis on imageless prayer and its possible role in the controversy—seems to hold a nuanced understanding of the controversy very similar to that of Bishop Alexander and informed by some of the same sources. Among others, he also refers to an essay by Fr Georges Florovsky that I don’t believe I have yet read myself entitled ‘Theophilus of Alexandria and Apa Aphou of Pemdje’. Vivian quotes Fr Georges’s explanation of the position of one of the ‘anthropomorphites’:

The sting of his argument was directed against the denial of God’s image in man, and there was no word whatever about any ‘human form’ in God. Aphou only contended that man, even in his present condition and in spite of all his misery and destitution, had to be regarded still as being created in the image of God, and must be, for that reason, respected. Aphou was primarily concerned with man’s dignity and honor. Theophilus, on the other hand, was embarrassed by man’s misery and depravity. [2]

I found this connection between the anthropomorphites’ emphasis on the imago Dei in man and the Origenists’ rejection of an imago hominis in God particularly interesting in light of something I had just read this morning in an author rather far removed in time and place from the controversy: St Gregory the Great. In his Homilies on Ezekiel, St Gregory links the human soul and God Himself in the process of mystical ascent, describing a kind of likeness between the two, but specifically rejecting the conception of not only the latter but of the former in terms of images. I shall quote this passage at length:

For we often wish to ponder the invisible nature of Almighty God but by no means avail, and the soul, wearied by the very difficulties, withdraws into herself and makes for herself and from herself the steps of her ascent, so that she first considers herself, if she can, and then examines insofar as she can that nature which is above her. But our mind, if spread out in carnal images, by no means suffices to consider itself or the nature of the soul because it is led by as many thoughts as it is, so to speak, blinded by obstacles. [3]

It is then that St Gregory begins to discuss precisely how God and the soul are connected and why they must both be approached without images. In the next passage the ellipses indicate where I have attempted to shorten the quote without, I hope, obscuring the argument.

9. Then the first step is to compose oneself, the second to see the like of this composure, the third to rise above oneself and by intention submit to the contemplation of the invisible Creator. But one by no means composes himself unless he has first learned to curb the apparitions of earthly and heavenly images from his mind’s eye and cast out and tread down whatever of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste occurs to his bodily thought, in order that he may inwardly seek such as is free thereof….Then all things are to be driven away by the hand of discernment from the mind’s eye so that the soul may regard herself as she was created, above the body but below God, so that being quickened by her superior she may quicken the inferior which she administers….And when she performs such different actions through the senses she arranges them not by a diversity, but by that one reason in which she was created. When therefore the soul thinks of herself without bodily images she has already entered the first door. But this door leads on to the other in order that something from the nature of Almighty God may be contemplated. So the soul in the body is the life of the flesh, but God Who quickens all is the life of souls. Then if the quickened life is of such magnitude that it cannot be comprehended, who avails to comprehend with his understanding how great is the majesty of the Life which quickens? But the very consideration and discernment thereof is already to enter to some extent, because from her appraisement the soul gathers what she perceives of the uncircumscribed Spirit which incomprehensibly rules those things which He incomprehensibly created. [4]

Now, this is a very difficult passage, in part because St Gregory seems to be speaking of a lofty mystical experience which most of us have not shared. But I note that even in speaking of what one might call the contemplation of one’s own soul, he teaches that images must be driven out. The necessity of imageless contemplation of God, then, is even greater, for if the creature is incomprehensible, how much more the Creator?

What’s interesting to me about this is that it clearly appears to belong to the Origenists’ tradition (I’d be interested to see research on what St Gregory knew of Origen and Evagrius), and yet it does not—as one might expect from the quoted passage from Fr Georges’s essay—deny the imago Dei in man. Indeed, St Gregory seems to make much indeed of the divine image in the human soul—ascribing to it the very incomprehensibility that for the Origenists required the cultivation of total imagelessness in prayer to its divine Prototype.

[1] Bishop Alexander (Golitzin), ‘The Vision of God & the Form of Glory: More Reflections on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of AD 399’, Abba—The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West: Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos Ware, ed. Fr John Behr, Fr Andrew Louth, & Dimitri Conomos (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2003), p. 295.

[2] Fr Georges Florovsky, ‘Theophilus of Alexandria and Apa Aphou of Pemdje’, Aspects of Church History, Vol. 4 of Collected Works (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975), p. 119; qtd. in Tim Vivian, Introduction, Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt & Macarius of Alexandria (Crestwood, NY: 2004), p. 45.

[3] St Gregory the Great, The Homilies of St Gregory the Great On the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, tr. Theodosia Gray, ed. Presbytera Juliana Cownie (Etna, CA: CTOS, 1990), p. 209.

[4] Ibid., pp. 209-10.

Acedia Revisited

Five and a half years ago I wrote a post on the 'deadly sin' of acedia, traditionally identified with the 'noonday demon' of Psalm 90:6 (LXX) and later translated as 'sloth' but expressing something much more complex than what we typically mean by that English term. In that post I primarily quoted some descriptive passages on the symptoms of acedia from Evagrius of Pontus and his disciple, St John Cassian. In the end, despite Helen Waddell's identification of the vice with what Thomas Gray refers to as a 'white melancholy', as well as with 'the sullen lethargy that is the sterile curse of the scholar and the artist', [1] I ventured the opinion that there was something particularly spiritual or religious about acedia that distinguished it from the scholar's lethargy on the one hand or from the largely medical problem of depression on the other. Although I did not say so at the time, I was tempted to regard acedia as something typical of desert monastics and probably not too relevant to modern men and women living in the world.

I have since had a major change of opinion. I think my former beliefs stemmed in part at least from a failure to realize the true nature of the ailment of which the Fathers wrote so eloquently about the symptoms, and thus a failure to recognize how those symptoms might translate in a more than superficial way to the life of a non-monastic who lives in a city rather than a desert. The book that helped me with this more than any other was Hieromonk Gabriel (Bunge)'s slim volume, Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia. Fr Gabriel ventures 'despondency' as a better translation of the Greek term than 'sloth', though he insists as well that 'repulsion, boredom, inertia, indolence, lassitude, dislike, [and] dejection' be retained as other possible shades of meaning. [2]

But more importantly, Fr Gabriel offers an Evagrian pathology of the vice which I did not recall having encountered previously. Two passages in particular struck me, one from Evagrius's commentary on the Psalms, and the other from his twenty-seventh epistle, neither of which to my knowledge has yet appeared in English translation. I shall quote both of them:

Acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present. [3]

Alone among the thoughts this one is an 'interwoven' one, since it results from hatred and desire. A despondent person hates precisely what is available, and desires what is not available. [4]

Although the English terms 'anger' and 'desire' may at first appear deceptively simple, in Greek they are in fact technical terms with a long and venerable philosophical history. [5] Evagrius is describing acedia in terms of the traditional Platonic tripartite soul, made up of the logos, or intelligent aspect, the thymos, or irascible, incensive aspect, and the epithymia, the appetitive or desiring aspect--which C.S. Lewis simply calls the head, the chest, and the belly. [6] The chest begins to resent 'what is at hand', which is always of course that which has been given us for our salvation, and to wish for 'what is not present' or available. The resentment of the former produces the torpor or boredom, while the desire for the latter produces the restlessness of the traditional descriptions. This was the key, I realized, to explaining what seemed like contradictory symptoms--the lethargy and inertia on the one hand, and the restlessness and inability to stay put on the other.

It also helped me to see at last the relevance of acedia to life outside of 4th-century desert monasticism. It is perhaps more apparent to a teacher with a three-month summer vacation than to most. One sits at home, knowing that there is reading and lesson preparation that needs to be done to prepare for school, but one simply cannot do it. One scrolls through Facebook, occasionally refreshing it, but this is done in the most listless spirit and fails to give any real enjoyment. The only prospects that appeal at all are leaving the house, hanging out with friends, or watching movies or television. If none of these are pursued the likeliest result is falling asleep.

But then it becomes more apparent how pervasive this two-fold ailment is in our lives. We avoid the things we need to do, and seek out distractions among things we don't need. Kathleen Norris helped here. The noonday demon lurks in all of the quotidian tasks left undone, and all of the pointless ones pursued or dreamt of. Norris writes:

One of the first symptoms of both acedia and depression is the inability to address the body's basic daily needs. It is also a refusal of repetition. Showering, shampooing, brushing the teeth, taking a multi-vitamin, going for a daily walk, as unremarkable as they seem, are acts of self-respect. They enhance the ability to take pleasure in oneself, and in the world. But the notion of pleasure is alien to acedia, and one becomes weary thinking about doing anything at all. It is too much to ask, one decides, sinking back on the sofa. This indolence exacts a high price. [7]

I shall stop there for now. I plan to post more on this subject, particularly on the question of the relationship of acedia to depression, on its distortion of the true functions of the tripartite soul, and on its remedies, both patristic and more modern. In the meantime I suggest having a look at the descriptions in this post.

[1] Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers (NY: Vintage, 1998), p. 163.

[2] Hieromonk Gabriel (Bunge), Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia, tr. Anthony P. Gylthiel (NY: SVS, 2012), p. 46.

[3] Ibid., p. 54.

[4] Ibid., p. 57.

[5] They appear memorably in Republic 436a-b when Socrates asks, 'Do we do these things with the same part of ourselves, or do we do them with three different parts? Do we learn with one part, get angry with another, and with some third part desire the pleasures of food, drink, sex, and the others that are closely akin to them' (Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper with D.S. Hutchinson [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], p. 1067)? Furthermore, I think they can safely be identified with the charioteer and the two horses of the soul in Phaedrus 246a (ibid., p. 524).

It seems like a strange oversight that in her book Deadly Vices Gabrielle Taylor completely misses this connection of acedia by definition to the tripartite soul. I would argue that it leads her to overemphasise the effect of acedia on the chest at the expense of the belly. It is identified too closely with mere sloth or indolence, and not at the same time with the longing for something else. Taylor also seems to see the traditional teaching on acedia too largely in terms of behaviours, right or wrong actions, rather than of disordered thoughts or states of the soul, an identification she then feels compelled to try to correct or deepen. (Gabrielle Taylor, Deadly Vices [Oxford: Clarendon, 2008], pp. 16-20)

[6] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (NY: HarperOne, 2001), p. 24.

[7] Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life (NY: Riverhead, 2008), p. 14.

'Quickly to Saint Elias'

Today, 20 July on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Prophet Elijah the Tishbite (believed to have lived in the 9th century BC). I did a full post on St Elijah way back in 2009 when I was still a relatively new blogger. This will not be a full post in the old Logismoi style, but merely a couple of things I thought of posting related to the Prophet. 

First of all, it has long been noted that St Elijah has been taken as a type of the Christian monk. William Harmless has, for instance, pointed out the Elijah typology in St Athanasius’s famous Vita Antonii (which David Hicks at the CiRCE conference called his favourite book by St Athanasius): 

The most significant biblical type for Antony is Elijah. Athanasius says that Antony ‘used to tell himself that from the career of the prophet Elijah, as from a mirror, the ascetic must always acquire knowledge of his own life’ (VA 7). [1] Like Elijah, Antony is called a ‘man of God’ (VA 70; cf. 1 Kgs 17:18; 2 Kgs 1:9-13). Like Elijah, he dwells in the desert and is described as ‘seated in his mountain’ (VA 59, 60, 66, 84, 93; cf. 2 Kgs 1:9). Like Elijah, he win [sic] duels against those who worship false gods and foretells the death of a military commander who comes out to the desert to seize him (VA 86; cf. 1 Kgs 18, 2 Kgs 1). In 2 Kings, Elijah hands down his cloak to his disciple Elisha; in the Life, Antony has two Elishas, so to speak, handing down one sheepskin and his cloak to Athanasius and the other sheepskin to Serapion (VA 91; cf. 2 Kgs 2:13 ff.). In the preface, Athanasius says that he learned all that he could of Antony from a longtime disciple who had ‘poured water over his hands’, an allusion to 2 Kgs 3:11, in which Elisha is described as pouring water into the hands of Elijah. This Elisha-like informant was, presumably, Serapion (VA praef.). [2] 

Somewhat along the lines of the comment Harmless cites from VA 7, St Macarius the Great seems to find a deeper significance to the connection between the Prophet Elijah and the monastic life than the external desert life per se. In Homily 6.2, St Macarius writes: 

It is not becoming a servant of God to live in a state of disturbance, but rather in all tranquility and wisdom as the Prophet said, ‘Unto whom shall I look but unto him that is meek and quiet and that trembles at my words?’ (Is 66:2). And in the times of Moses and Elijah we find that in the visions granted them, even though there was a great display of trumpets and powers before the majesty of the Lord, still, amidst all of these things, the coming of the Lord was discerned and he appeared in peace and tranquillity and quietness. For it says: ‘Lo, a still, silent voice and the Lord was in it’ (1 Kgs 19:12). This proves that the Lord’s rest is in peace and tranquillity. For whatever foundation a person lays and whatever beginning he makes, he will continue in that until the end. [3] 

So the experience of the Prophet Elijah on Mt Horeb is taken as a model of the contemplative (theoretic) life—indeed, of hesychia itself. 

It is interesting to note that in the West, the model of the Prophet Elijah eventually became connected especially with an order that—while it later became part of the movement of mendicant friars, along with Franciscans and Dominicans—was originally a collection of hermits living in the Holy Land on Mt Carmel itself during the Crusades. As Thomas Merton observes: 

The Carmelites were originally hermits. And of course their life was the traditional hermit life known to the East from the earliest centuries of the Church. They lived as the desert fathers had lived eight hundred years earlier....They were in fact simple laymen, living as solitaries in a loosely connected group, in caves and huts on the side of Mt Carmel. Their manner of life was not yet institutionalized, and even when [c. 1209-1214] they first asked for a Rule, from the hands of the [Latin] Patriarch of Jerusalem [Albert of Jerusalem], that Rule was, as we shall see, deliberately kept simple and uncomplicated....In the words of the Rule itself, [the purpose of the Carmelite life] was: ‘Let each one remain in his cell or near it, meditating day and night on the Law of the Lord, and vigilant in prayer, unless he is legitimately occupied in something else.’ [4] 

And on the connection with the Prophet Elijah, ‘the symbolic adoption by the Carmelites of the prophet Elias as their “Founder”’: 

It is quite true that the hermits living on the slopes of Mt Carmel, near the ‘spring of Elias’, where the prophet himself had prayed and dwelt alone, and where the ‘sons of the prophets’ had had a ‘school’, [5] could themselves claim to be descendants of the ancient prophets. It is quiet true that Elias, in a broad sense, was the ‘founder’ of this way of life since he had in fact been the inspiration of those countless generations that had lived there in the places hallowed by his memory and stamped with his indelible character. [6] 

Finally, Merton notes that the Carmelites too found a deep typology in the Prophet of what appears to an Orthodox reader as an almost hesychastic contemplative experience of their own: 

The author of that moving ancient text on the spirit of Carmelite prayer and contemplation, the Institution of the first Fathers, interprets the retirement of Elias in typical medieval style. To hide in the torrent of Carith (2 Kgs 17:3) is to embrace the ascetical life, which leads to the perfection of charity by one’s own efforts, aided by the grace of God. To drink of the torrent is to passively receive the secret light of contemplation from God and to be inwardly transformed by His wisdom: ‘...to taste, in a certain manner, in our heart, and to experience in our spirit the power of the divine presence and the sweetness of the glory from on high, not only after death but even in this mortal life. That is what is really meant by drinking from the torrent of the joy of God...’ [7] 

One wonders if these Latin pilgrims had perhaps learned something from Orthodox monks that may have been living in the area. 

Finally, to bring the consideration of St Elijah down to the level of the ordinary life of traditional Christian laymen, in her fascinating book, Cosmos, Life & Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village, Juliet du Boulay writes: 

...there is a hint, in a poem to the Prophet Elias (Elijah) quoted later, that mountain tops are regarded as openings to the heavenly world. This prophet customarily has his churches on the tops of hills and mountains, so the invocation of Elias is the invocation of one who, as the inhabitant of the mountain peaks, lives at the point where earth meets heaven. [8] 

Eventually, du Boulay makes good on her promise to quote the poem, sung by young girls who perform a traditional folk ritual in traditional Greek villages on 1 May: 

Quickly, quickly,
Quickly to Saint Elias;
And Saint Elias to the sky
So that God will send rain
For the wheat, for the barley,
For all the grains of God.
Holes, holes for the wine,
Channels, channels for the water.
The farmer with his mattock
To stop the water running out. [9] 

In du Boulay’s words: 

The song takes the form of a call to the village to appeal to the Prophet Elias, previously noted as having his churches on mountain tops in reflection of his vision of God on Mt Horeb, so that he will intercede ‘for all the grains of God’, and its structure is parallel with a similar prayer made every week in the Divine Liturgy during the Litany of Peace: ‘For temperate weather, for abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful seasons, let us pray to the Lord.’ The structure in both is of an intercession made directly to a holy figure, and what is prayed for, translated as temperate weather (εὐκρασία ἀέρων), means precisely a good mixture or a good balance of the atmosphere, whose consequence is fruitfulness. Thus the symbolic language, which could be ambiguous on its own, is in the song and the mime that accompanies it made into a pattern of words and actions which is continuous with the pattern of prayer offered in church. [10] 

Although I’ve never witnessed this little ritual, I did have the good fortune once to attend a Divine Liturgy on the Feast of the Prophet Elijah at one of these little hilltop churches du Boulay mentions. My chief memories are of a woolly Pontian priest whose Greek dialect I couldn’t understand at all, and of the lingering breakfast in the cool shade just outside of the church. 

[1] This remarkable comment is found on p. 37 of Robert Gregg’s translation—St Athanasius the Great, The Life of Antony & The Letter to Marcellinus, tr. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980), p. 37. 

[2] William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford U, 2004), p. 70. I've added the citations from VA and from Scripture to the text, whereas Harmless had them in endnotes. 

[3] St Macarius the Great, Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies & The Great Letter, tr. George A. Maloney (NY: Paulist, 1992), p. 76. 

[4] Thomas Merton, ‘The Primitive Carmelite Ideal’, Disputed Questions (NY: The New American Library, 1965), p. 168. 

[5] Merton notes here: ‘Schola not only in the sense of a place where one learns, but in the more original and etymological sense of a place of leisure, quiet and retirement, where one can think deeply’ (ibid., p. 169, n. 2). 

[6] Ibid., p. 169. 

[7] Ibid., p. 172. 

[8] Juliet du Boulay, Cosmos, Life, & Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2009), pp. 33-4. 

[9] Ibid., p. 88. 

[10] Ibid., p. 89.

Papadiamandis's 'All Too Human Habits'

My apologies for the lengthy hiatus. Now that we’ve got a new wi-fi router at home, I’m hoping I’ll be able to start posting once or twice a week over the summer. My first order of business is to fulfill a promise I made here, and offer a brief post on the renowned Greek writer, Alexandros Papadiamandis.

Amid the rising current interest in Papadiamandis among Anglophone readers—particularly converts to Orthodoxy—which began with the publication of The Boundless Garden, I recalled something I came across some time ago that doesn’t seem to come up much in what I’ve seen about the Skiathan in English or in Greek (the latter being mostly a few brief essays by my graduate advisor, Anestis Keselopoulos [1]). In the short ‘Biographical Note’ prefacing The Boundless Garden, I note the following observation: ‘He relieved the incredible strain he subjected himself to by frequenting wine shops and chain-smoking but these all too human habits did not prevent him from regularly attending church services in which he acted as chanter and beadle.’ [2]

Now, it’s odd that ‘frequenting wine shops and chain-smoking’ might be thought to ‘prevent him from regularly attending church’, but contrast the relatively tame wording and tone of this statement with some comments from George Pappageotes’s The Story of Modern Greek Literature that I came across years ago:

Although he was better off now, he continued to dress in old clothes and frequent the taverns in the poor districts of Athens. There is an anecdote of a banker who took him for a beggar. His drinking companion of this period was the monk Nephon who had come from Agion Oros.

…

After the death of his friend, Nephon, he had become a solitary drinker. His brother’s death in 1904, his sickness and his alcoholism made him more unsociable than before. [3]

Perhaps Pappageotes is exaggerating, perhaps he’s repeating gossip, or perhaps he’s engaging in the kind of psychological diagnoses biographers seem to enjoy and hasn’t really understood Papadiamandis. It doesn’t really matter.

My point is that while I am perfectly willing to accept that drunkard or not Papadiamandis was not only a great writer but also a fairly saintly man (the ‘alcoholism’ label notwithstanding, Pappageotes even entitles his chapter on the Skiathan, ‘The Lay Monk’), I have a sneaking suspicion that many American Christians—including Orthodox converts—will be troubled by this. I can’t help but recall various comments or even tones of voice in which I’ve heard it implied, among a certain crowd, that if a body can’t ‘get their life together’ there must be something deficient in a body’s Christianity. I think it’s pretty clear that whatever the truth is about Papadiamandis’s ‘alcoholism’, he certainly never ‘got his life together’. If that makes certain people uncomfortable, I find it comforting. I’m not sure that I’ll ever entirely have my own life together.

All of this reminds me of my favourite passage from Brideshead Revisited, which came as something of a revelation when I first read it and has come to my aid on a number of occasions since. When the protagonist, Charles Ryder, learns from his old friend Sebastian’s young sister that her brother is an alcoholic living in a monastery in North Africa (he is a ‘lay brother’, much like Papadiamandis the ‘Lay Monk’!), we read the following exchange:

‘Poor Sebastian!’ I said. ‘It’s too pitiful. How will it end?’

‘I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favourite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, “Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,” and then he’ll come back disheveled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly….If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.’

I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ I said. ‘I suppose he doesn’t suffer?’

‘Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him….’ [4]

The atheist Ryder feels keenly that Sebastian’s is a ‘wasted life’, and regrets his friend’s not being able to ‘get it together’. The pious Cordelia, however, thinks that any life that brings one closer to God’s grace is not wasted at all, whatever loss of material success, loss of dignity, or even real suffering one may undergo on this earth.

The irony is that many American Christians seem closer to Ryder’s attitude than to Cordelia’s. ‘God has a plan for me’ we think, and of course He does, but God’s plan is for our salvation, which may or may not include marriage, children, a nice job, etc. Whether or not our problems are as socially stigmatized as Sebastian’s, it is more than likely that the majority of us will continue to struggle with the same sordid sins right up till our dying day. We shall have need to recall a saying of Abbas Sisoes:

A brother asked Abbas Sisoes, ‘What shall I do, abba, for I have fallen?’ The old man said to him, ‘Get up again.’ The brother said, ‘I have got up again, but I have fallen again.’ The old man said, ‘Get up again and again.’ So then the brother said, ‘How many times?’ The old man said, ‘Until you are taken up either in virtue or in sin. For a man presents himself to judgement in the state in which he is found.’ [5]

If we recall this for ourselves, and if we don’t think harshly or, God forbid, pityingly or patronisingly about others’ attempts to ‘get up again’, perhaps we too will be fortunate enough to hear the words Marmeladov expects:

‘…And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, “You, too, come forth!” He will say. “Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!” And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there….And the wise and the reasonable [and perhaps, the respectable?] will say unto Him, “Lord, why do you receive such as these?” And He will say, “I receive them, my wise and reasonable ones, forasmuch as not one of them considered himself worthy of this things…”...' [6]

Addendum: For all those interested in more about Papadiamandis, I recommend following the blog Papa-Pantelis Blessing the Whorehouse (the title is based on one of the Skiathan writer’s short stories: ‘The Whorehouse’). There’s also this old post that I did back in 2009.

[1] These are contained in a collection of his papers on literary figures: Anestis Keselopoulos, Apo ton Papadiamandi ston Pentziki (Thessaloniki: To Palimpsiston, 2003), pp. 15-163. Dr Keselopoulos is of course most well known outside of Greece for his full-length monograph on Papadiamandis, recently translated by my good friend, Herman Middleton: Greece’s Dostoevsky: The Theological Vision of Alexandros Papadiamandis (Protecting Veil 2011).

[2] Kamperidis, Fr Lambros, & Denise Harvey, ‘Biographical Note’, The Boundless Garden, by Alexandros Papadiamandis, ed. Fr Lambros Kamperidis & Denise Harvey (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2007), p. xi.

[3] Pappageotes, George C., The Story of Modern Greek Literature: From the 10th Century to the Present (NY: Athens, 1972), pp. 169-70.

[4] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1945), pp. 308-9.

[5] This saying is Sisoes 38 in the Gerontikon, Benedicta Ward, tr., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984), pp. 219-20; Hypothesis 1.D5 in the Evergetinos, The Evergetinos, A Complete Text: Book I, ed. & tr. Archbishop Chrysostomos, Bishop Auxentios, et al. (Etna, CA: Center for Traditonalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), p. 6. I have taken the above translation from Ward.

[6] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime & Punishment, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Knopf, 1993), p. 23.

A Homily on the 'Inheritance of the Saints in Light'

Here’s the latest homily, which I gave yesterday, 15 November. The readings were Colossians 1:3-12, and St Matthew 9:18-26. Again, I’ll try to remember to add the—in this case, few—references later.

12 Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The verse I quoted is the twelfth verse of the first chapter of Colossians—the last verse of today’s Epistle reading. I’d like to talk about what St Paul means when he refers to being made ‘partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light’.

First of all, the use of the word ‘partakers’ by the King James translators is reminiscent of 2 Peter 1:4, where St Peter refers to our becoming ‘partakers of the divine nature’. Partaking of the divine nature, via the uncreated light or energies of God, has marvellous effects in our lives, and we can get a glimpse of these effects in the various miracles of Christ’s earthly ministry.

Two examples can be seen in today’s Gospel, from St Matthew 9:18-26: first, the healing of the woman with an issue of blood—the miracle story within the miracle story; and second, the raising of the ruler’s daughter from the dead—the pièce de résistance.

Of the woman with an issue of blood, the Greek text literally says, ‘I shall be saved’, ‘thy faith hath saved thee’, and ‘the woman was saved’. The translators of the King James Version, however, chose the expression ‘made whole’, which is of course a beautiful and rich expression in its own right. Now, what’s so suggestive about these descriptions of a healing from a physical malady is that physical illness can be seen as a metaphor for sin—the sin and the sinful passions that afflict us are in fact illnesses of the soul. The ‘issue of blood’, in fact, is a particularly apt metaphor for sin. I am reminded of one of the famous stories of the Desert Fathers, wherein St Moses the Black used a leaky jug to illustrate the way our sins ‘run out’ behind us and we do not see them.

But in the raising of the ruler’s daughter we see perhaps the most dramatic effect of partaking of the divine nature, that is the inheritance of the Saints in light—deliverance from death. St Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:26, ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’ And later on in that chapter, inspired by the power of Christ’s Resurrection, St Paul actually taunts death when he writes, ‘O Death, where is thy sting’ (I Cor 15:55)?

The various raisings from the dead in the Gospels—such as that in today’s reading, or that of Lazarus—are a foretaste of this final destruction, of which Shakespeare wrotes, ‘And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then’ (Sonnet 146). This destruction of death has been effectively accomplished in Christ, ‘who gleams like lightning in the unapproachable light of the Resurrection’, and this is the inheritance of the Saints, of which St Paul says we partake. Until Christ’s return, ‘there’s no more dying’ in sin if we repent and follow Him. Bl Theophylact, commenting on the last verse of today’s Gospel reading, Mat 9:26, writes, ‘And you, O reader, who are dead in sins, He will also resurrect when He puts outside the crowd and its tumult and takes you by the hand so that you might act.’ But when Christ returns, ‘there’s no more dying’ in the body, since we are transformed.

Although it’s not part of today’s Epistle reading, in verse 13 of Colossians 1 St Paul contrasts the light imagery of verse 12 with what he calls ‘the power of darkness’:

13 Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:

The two healings in today’s Gospel illustrate vividly this deliverance from the power of darkness. St Gregory of Nyssa identifies the ‘garments of skin’ with which the Lord clothes Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:21 with the physical and spiritual effects of the Fall, in other words, the power that darkness has over us. But Christ ‘hath clothed mortality with incorruption’, and St Gregory, speaking of the future condition of the Church in the final Resurrection, says, ‘If we will not be wearing that skin, how shall we preserve the conditions which come from it?’

Now, in our own day, those conditions may seem formidable, even insurmountable. It may seem impossible that we should ever overcome sickness and death, particularly in the last one hundred years when it has finally become physically possible to wipe out all human life on this earth. This state of things can be worrisome and disturbing. Indeed, one of the great but lesser-known spiritual figures of the twentieth century, the Russian theologian Fr Sophrony of Essex, was deeply troubled by this as a young man. Fr Sophrony prayed with anguish of soul for God to deliver him from despair, and in reply he was vouchsafed to be a partaker ‘of the inheritance of the saints in light’. He writes, in We Shall See Him as He Is, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006):

And lo, on Easter Saturday, . . . the Light visited me after I had taken communion, and I felt it like the touch of Divine Eternity on my spirit. Gentle, full of peace and love, the Light remained with me for three days. It drove away the darkness of non-existence that had engulfed me. I was resurrected, and in me and with me the whole world was resurrected. The words of St John Chrysostom at the end of the Easter Liturgy struck me with overwhelming force: ‘Christ is risen and there are no dead in the grave’. Tormented hitherto by the spectre of universal death, I now felt that my soul, too, was resurrected and there were no more dead . . . If this is God, then quickly let me abandon everything and seek only union with Him [ellipsis in the original]. (p. 178)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Auctoritas in Hugh's Didascalicon

Per Joseph Patterson’s recommendation, I bought (for less than $6!) and am now reading Ivan Illich’s fascinating In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Though I am already nearly finished, I couldn’t resist the urge to go back to the very first chapter for a brief post. There, Illich discusses the first sentence of the Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor: Omnium expetendorum prima est sapientia, in qua perfecti boni forma consisti. In Jerome Taylor’s translation, which Illich calls ‘a masterpiece’, this is rendered, ‘Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.’ [1]

First, Illich points out, ‘By connecting wisdom with “the form of the perfect good”, [Hugh] signifies that he accepts the meaning of Varro’s definition [of the good], but as it was received and changed and handed on by Augustine.’ [2] But of course, the statement itself comes most immediately from Boethius, ‘who subtly but significantly modified Augustine’. [3] So in De consolatione philosophiæ III.10 we read, Omnium igitur expetendorum summa atque causa bonum est, [4] which Illich quotes as, ‘Of all things to be sought the first and the reason why all others [sic] things are pursued is the Good . . .’ [5]

But the most interesting bit to me was at the end of this section on the opening sentence, where Illich introduces the mediæval idea of auctoritas. He writes:

For the contemporary reader the incipit was immediately recognized as an auctoritas, a sentence worthy of repetition. When Cerimon the Lord of Ephesus in Shakespeare’s Pericles ‘by turning o’er authorities’ has ‘built such strong renown as time shall ne’er decay’ (Pericles, act 3, sc. 2, lines 33, 48), he does not say that he had subverted established power, nor that he had consulted weighty authors, but that reflecting on a number of authoritative sentences he had established his reputation of mighty wisdom. Authorities, in this now obsolete sense, are sentences which created precedents and defined reality. When Hugh picks this auctoritas as his keynote, he does not appeal to Boethius for his prestige. The sentence states an obvious truth precisely because it had been disembedded from the discourse of this or that particular author; it had become a free-floating statement. As such a verbal institution, the auctoritas quoted by Hugh became an exemplary testimony to untouchable tradition. [6]

It may not be that they disagree entirely, but I find Illich’s focus on the notion of auctoritas a significant difference from C.S. Lewis’s references to the notion of the auctour in The Discarded Image. Lewis speaks of ‘the overwhelmingly bookish or clerkly character of medieval culture’, calling the Middle Ages ‘the age of authorities’, and noting, ‘Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one.’ [7] Lewis in this passage certainly seems to be speaking of ‘weighty authors’ and not ‘authoritative sentences’, and certainly, as an illustration of the ‘bookish or clerkly character of medieval culture’, it is far from Illich indeed. A significant part of the latter’s thesis is that what he calls ‘the new clerical culture’ was a rather late development (mid-1100’s) and it seems that the shift of focus from words to their authors could be part of that development. [8] Perhaps when Lewis speaks of ‘medieval culture’ he really means, or is speaking more truly of, late mediæval culture.

But at any rate, I find the idea of ‘authoritative sentences’ serving as ‘exemplary testimony to untouchable tradition’ a fascinating one which seems to demonstrate the continuity of the earlier part of the Western Middle Ages with the culture of the Desert Fathers (as described, for instance, in Douglas Burton-Christie’s The Word in the Desert).


[1] Jerome Taylor, tr., The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts (NY: Columbia, 1991), p. 46.

[2] Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1996), p. 9.

[3] Illich, p. 12.

[4] Boethius, Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, tr. H.F. Stewart, E.K. Rand, & S.J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 2003), p. 282.

[5] Illich, p. 12.

[6] Ibid., p. 13.

[7] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), p. 5.

[8] Illich, p. 84.

Greek Wandering

Many English-speaking Orthodox are familiar with the Russian term prelest, commonly used to mean ‘spiritual delusion’. Not as many are familiar with the corresponding Greek term πλάνη, which can be transliterated plani, or plane. In Modern Greek, besides the spiritual connotation, it can also mean simply ‘error’ or ‘fallacy’. [1] But all of these meanings are somewhat metaphorical accretions to the original one. Liddell and Scott define πλάνη as ‘a wandering or roaming about, straying’. [2] It is interesting to note that this is the root of the word ‘planet’, derived from planetes asteres, or ‘wandering stars’. [3]

In a chapter on the monastic ‘cell’ in his fascinating study of the Desert Fathers, Stelios Ramfos asks ‘a naïve question’: ‘Why is the cell, the desert, described as a place and not the city? Is the city not a place? Do not people inhabit it? And if it is not a place, then what is it?’ [4] I found that his answer aided my understanding of the word ‘plani’, but it also inadvertantly led me slightly ‘astray’, if you’ll pardon the pun. He writes:

The cell, the desert, are topoi, ‘fixed positions’ or ‘places’, because the city constitutes plane, a ‘wandering away’ or ‘deceit’. Plane in monastic usage indicates worldly distraction, constant exposure to temptation. How can the city be a place, when instead of living face to face with God there I find myself bound to changing circumstances and things? The anchorite seeks a stable spot in the desert in order to put down roots in an environment without deceit, without distractions, and alone with himself to find God. Monks and lay people move about constantly because they donot fit into the place, and they do not fit into the place because their Ego is unruly. All these things sound strangein our restless times. People today regard purposeless wandering as plane because they do not think of calling topos a type of relationship with a particular space. By contrast, the desert fathers call topos and plane types of the external world’s impassioned relationship with the soul. Delusion is plane, perception of the real is topos.

It is at this point that I became confused, though not through any fault of Ramfos’s:

The meaning of these words is very different from that which they have today. Our reference to place has a Cartesian background: the body is seen as an extended object and the soul as its independent thought. Our conception of place as an abstract field extended in various directions, being of Cartesian provenance, is inevitably mechanical or psychological. The desert fathers, on the other hand, conceive of place as a kind of relationship. In the perspective of body and soul viewed as a psychosomatic unity, the state of the body reflects above all the condition of the soul, highlighting the yawning gap between our modern plane and the plane of the fathers. [5]

Now, although I knew that the Greek word plane meant ‘delusion’ or ‘error’, what confused me here was the introduction of the Cartesian ‘abstract field’, which reminded me of the English word ‘plane’, i.e., ‘the simplest kind of geometric surface’. [6] Thus, when Ramfos wrote of ‘the yawning gap in meaning between our modern plane and the plane of the fathers’ (in Russell’s translation), I imagined the gap between a geometrical ‘plane’ and spiritual plane. This connection lodged in my mind for some time, until I finally decided to look up the etymology of the geometrical term specifically for this post. [7] It turns out, of course, that it derives from the Latin word planus, meaning ‘level ground’. [8]

But I still like the plane/planet connection, as well as Ramfos’s contrast between plane and topos in desert spirituality.


[1] See Niki Watts, The Oxford Greek Dictionary, American ed. (NY: Berkley, 2000), p. 154.

[2] ‘πλάνη’—Henry George Liddell & Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. Henry Drisler (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1875).

[3] ‘πλάνης’—Liddel & Scott.

[4] Stelios Ramfos, Like a Pelican in the Wilderness: Reflections on the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tr. & abgd. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 2000), p. 32.

[5] Ramfos, pp. 32-3.

[6] William Little, H.W. Fowler, & J. Coulson, The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles [hereafter OUD], 3rd ed., rev. with add., rev. & ed. C.T. Onions (NY: Oxford U, 1955), p. 1515.

[7] Ibid., p. 1515.

[8] Harper Collins Latin Concise Dictionary (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 163.