The Orthodox Christian.
The Orthodox Christian is a member of the Church of Christ. He has been
baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity and upholds the ideals and
beliefs of the Scriptures and Sacred Tradition. He believes that God
Himself has been revealed in the Bible through the Prophets and
especially in the Person of Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, Who is
man's Saviour.
The Orthodox Christian beholds the rich Christian heritage of the past
and proclaims that he belongs to the Church undivided. He believes in a
living and loving God, Whose Grace protects and guides him in the path
of redemption. He especially believes in the Incarnation of Christ as
God-Man, in His Crucifixion and Resurrection, in His Gospel and
Commandments.
===============================
THE EXPERIENCE OF ORTHODOXY
by Guthrie E. Janssen
[reprinted from B & R Reviews, Fall 1987]
Hymn of Entry, Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church, by Archimandrite
Vasileios of Stavronikita, trans. from the Greek by Elizabeth Briere;
St.Vladimir's Seminary Press,139 pp. $6.95.
The Freedom of Morality, by Christos Yannaras, trans from the Greek by
Elizabeth Briere; St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 278 pp.,$12.95.
Being as Communion, Studies in Personhood and the Church, by John D.
Zizioulas, St.Vladimir's Seminary Press, 269 pp.,$12.95.
The Deification of Man: St.Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition;
by Georgios I. Mantzaridis, trans. from the Greek by Liadain Sherrard;
St.Vladimir's Seminary Press, 137 pp.,$7.95.
The Communion of Love, by Matthew the Poor; St.Vladimir's Seminary
Press, 234 pp.,$8.95.
On the fourth of July, A.D. 1054, a star exploded, a supernova
so brilliant that for twenty-three days it was visible thruout the
northern hemisphere in broad daylight. Eventually it subsided to become
what we know today as the Crab Nebula in the constellation of Taurus.
Twelve days later, on the 16th of July, delegates from Pope Leo
IX, who may have been acting under duress as a prisoner of the Normans,
entered the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople,
advanced to the great altar during a celebration of the Eucharist, flung
down the Pope's sentence of excommunication of the Orthodox Catholic
Patriarch, and departed, shaking the dust off their feet as they went.
The Emperor, who was conciliatory toward the West, nevertheless,
convoked a synod of Orthodox Catholic bishops that promptly
excommunicated the papal legates. Thus was sealed the Great Schism of
Christendom that persists to this day. The super-nova may or may not
have been a sign from heaven, but it dramatically underscored the cosmic
importance of the event. For in rending the two great branches of
Christendom, the Schism of 1054 was to adumbrate many future fracturings
of the Church that Christ had prayed might be forever one -- the
fourteenth century Schism of the West with its "antipopes," the
Reformation, the repeated splintering of Protestantism, and the human
suffering that was to follow in religious wars in the West.
The East also suffered. One hundred and fifty years later, in
1204, the knights of the Fourth Crusade in what the Byzantine historian
Sir Steven Runciman has called "the greatest crime in history" burned,
raped and pillaged Constantinople. For years they shipped back to
Venice and other cities of the West an immeasurable loot of Byzantine
gold, jewels and art treasures, at a time when Rome had been reduced to
a muddy backwater of empire. The Crusader's sack of Constantinople was
motivated as much by jealousy and monumental avarice as by any
theological scruples. However, Byzantium's loss introduced the West to
Greek culture and laid the foundation for the Renaissance and the
subsequent flowering of Western civilization. It is ironic that the
West was to adopt not the profound patristic theology and spiritual
perceptions of the East but, in a roundabout way, the pagan culture of
ancient Greece, and in particular Aristotelian philosophy, which it then
used to shape and define the peculiar Western epistemology and
theological methods characteristic of both Roman Catholic and Protestant
thought. We will have more to say about this later, for these
differences were the crux of the East-West schism and remain so today.
Rome's repudiation of the East has been superfically attributed
to language and cultural differences, politics, theology and a dispute
over the locus of authority in the Church. Latin had become the
theological language of the West while the East had retained Greek, and
there were difficulties of translation. The West emphasized Christ's
suffering as "atonement" for man's sin, the East His "frenzy of love" in
which He took on human nature and thru His death, resurrection and
Ascension made possible the "deification" of man. The West asserted the
absolute authority of the Pope, the East perceived him as a primus inter
pares. The West had tampered with the Creed by adding the filoque
clause (the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son); such
tampering was anathema to the East. And political motives lurked on the
periphery. Rome, by arrogating to itself absolute ecclesiastical
authority could control as well the temporal affairs of Europe against
the twin threats of the northern barbarians and the "caesaropapism" of
the Carolingian emperors. In that enterprise the East had nothing to
offer but nagging interference. Thus an East/West cleavage was all but
inevitable.
Today of course most of the historic reasons are long past, and
we in the West are prone to treat the Great Schism as an accident of
history. But as the historic causes have disappeared, so now the extent
of underlying doctrinal and "philosophical" differences is becoming more
apparent. At the same time in the West, where churches are being
increasingly invaded by worldly counsels of compromise and expediency,
and where the faith is constantly being diluted by a variety of
syncretions, there is a growing curiosity about the understandings of
Orthodoxy, which are derived from apostolic and patristic teaching and
experience. There appears to be a hankering after the ancient vitality
and depths of the faith which nothing in the West, not even (perhaps
especially not) the Church of Rome, seems able to satisfy. Thus we find
such an erudite Protestant and thoroughly Western scholar as Paul
Tillich writing:
"...the Eastern Church represents something which we have
lost.... We should not imagine that we have nothing to learn from them.
It may happen that with centuries of more intimate contact, the
dimension of depth may again enter Western thinking." [Paul Tillich, A
History of Christian Thought, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968, p.97]
Meanwhile Orthodoxy in America is shedding much of the ethnic
wrapping in which it was imported and is increasingly emphasizing its
essential perceptions. Today it is as large as some mainline Protestant
denominations, and growing, with converts accounting for between thirty
to fifty percent of its membership.
Yet the West remains largely ignorant of Orthodoxy. For a
Western scholar to write as Paul Tillich did is unusual; most have
either a distorted view of Orthodoxy or dismiss it as just "mysticism,"
which it is not. As for reconciliation, the popular attitude in the
West is that the differences are nothing but a matter of style, and if
we will just sit down in a spirit of mutual forbearance, a little give
and take will heal the great breach. But that very attitude typifies
the problem. The West is prone to overestimate what can be achieved by
verbal fiat framed in a spirit of naive good will. The East says,
"Talking is not knowing. You must experience the depths of the truth in
the Liturgy." Vasileios quotes the pseudonymous Dionysius the
Areopagite, "...what is known is known only thru participation in it."
This, in Orthodox understanding, is "doing the truth" (John 3:21).
Words, not even the words of scripture, are enough, for as St. Paul
wrote, it is the Church, a living entity, not scripture (which is of
necessity words) that is the 'pillar and foundation of the truth'" (1
Timothy 3:15).
Furthermore, while a strong "spirituality" is justly attributed
to the East, Orthodoxy places yet greater emphasis on the incarnational
-- experiencing the reality of the godhead in its divine-human
hypostasis, which is Jesus Christ. Because the East is older, its
perspective longer, it stresses the apophatic nature of God -- His
undefinability in human "philosophical" terms, least of all those of
Western scholasticism. Scripture it perceives and venerates as the
written apostolic witness to Christ in the stream of living tradition,
which is the Holy Spirit alive and at work in the continuity of the
historic Church. Reconciliation will require some Western
acknowledgment and appreciation of all this.
Fortunately, Orthodoxy is awakening to the need to explain
itself, not only to the West but to its own people, many of whom remain
bound to a blind ethnic traditionalism. And if the experience of the
Liturgy cannot be expressed in words, it can at least be illuminated by
some felicious descriptions of the mind of Orthodoxy now being published
in the United States.
An especially bright aura of illumination is being cast these
days by a series being published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press under
the general rubric, "Contemporary Greek Theologians." Four volumes have
appeared to date, and a fifth is projected. Although they are scholarly
works, they are well within the grasp of a moderately informed
layperson. The authors present no innovative theology, for the
wellspring of their understanding is the early Fathers. They will seem
novel only to the extent that many in the West are unfamiliar with the
light the Fathers shed on what they took from the beginning to be the
Christian intendment: the deification of humanity thru God's mighty
incarnational act. But for those with an eye to see and to accept, the
sense of novelty may quickly turn into an illuminating and rewarding
experience.
As the title of his book suggests, Vasileio's Hymn of Entry
links liturgy with theology, and both with life in the body of Christ,
which is Church. Each mirrors the other two. If to the Western mind
this seems "mystical," it is no more so than the Lord's Prayer or Jesus'
commands to eat His flesh and drink His blood. Bear in mind what we
said earlier about liturgy and life in Orthodoxy as not mysticism but
experience. The experience is not that of the intellect nor the
emotions," least of all in passions, which are of the fall, but of
living the liturgical life of the Church in all that it implies of
quiet, humble obedience to the commands of Jesus Christ. Thus excessive
reliance on cerebral formulations must be curbed. Vasileios is
emphatic:
"This theological life and witness is a blessing which sweetens
man's life. It is a food which is cut up and given to others; a drink
poured out and offered in abundance for man to consume and quench his
thirst. In this state one does not talk about life, one gives it. One
feeds the hungry and gives drink to the thirsty. By contrast,
scholastic theology and intellectual constructions do not resemble the
Body of the Lord, the true food, nor His blood, the true drink; rather
they are like a stone one finds in one's food. This is how indigestible
and inhumanly hard the mass of scholasticism seems to the taste and the
mouth of one accustomed to the liturgy of the Church, and it is rejected
as something foreign and unacceptable."
It is apparent at once how alien this is to the traditional
thought patterns of the West. The implications are far-reaching. A
strong case can be made for saying that every time Orthodoxy has
seriously stumbled it has been because of an invasion from the West of
Aristotelian-Thomist scholasticism or its many cousins, all of which
tend to defeat the spirit and essential understandings of Orthodoxy.
That is not to say that the Greek Fathers were ignorant of Aristotle.
On the contrary, they knew him intimately, being thoroughly schooled in
classic Greek philosophy. But unlike Western theologians, they
perceived its total inadequacy as a basis for defining theology. Human
philosophy must itself pass thru the baptism of Golgotha.
A Protestant may at this point interject, "But in breaking with
Rome, we rejected scholasticism." Technically, perhaps yes, but not
really. The thought patterns derived from pagan philosophy remain. The
verbal manipulation of technicalities characteristic of scholasticism is
no less characteristic of much of Protestantism, especially in
Evangelical-Fundamentalist camps, where dependence on scripture (words
of necessity) and verbal rationalities deduced therefrom (still words)
prevails over the experience of "taste and see." So great, however, is
human yearning after experience that in the West we are witnessing a
growing "charismatic" movement that seeks non-verbal realizations of
spiritual truth. It is the stones crying out against the sterile
rationalism of the seminaries and of much preaching, both Roman and
Protestant. The experience of Orthodoxy, on the other hand, stresses
silence. It is aware that "the thoughts of men are all miserable"
(Wisdom 9:14). Vasileios asserts,
"Patristic theology is an area of silence; it is a heavenly
affirmation, a state. It is not an occasion for an exchange of blows or
for verbal battles. It is the "Yes" and "Amen" of eternity."
And he quotes Abba Isaac of Syria (sixth century), "Words are an
instrument of the present age; silence is a mystery of the age to come."
Orthodoxy proclaims that "the age to come" begins here and now in the
experience of the living Church.
Ask almost anyone schooled in Western habits of thought, "Where
will I find theology?" and they will say, "Why, in books, of course; or
in seminaries; or in the minds of scholars." "No," says Orthodoxy, "that
is not theology but only a superficial, argumentative aspect of it.
Theology is not a head trip. It embraces the whole person,
experientially. Every Christian is to be a living textbook of
theology." The "depth" of which Tillich spoke is hinted at in Vasileio's
explanation that "Orthodox theology ... does not assert a proposition;
it bears witness. It is not contradiction, but confession;" "...it
seeks the person and his salvation;" and, "How beautiful it is for a man
to become theology."
Today on Mt.Athos, a vast peninsula of ancient monasteries in
northeastern Greece often called "The Holy Mountain," there is a
burgeoning renewal -- an influx of young Orthodox monks from many
nations seeking to live their theology in total dedication and prayer.
Archimandrite (his title) Vasileios is Abbot of Stavronikita Monastery
and one of the pioneers of this modern revival. As we mentioned
earlier, the theology here is not innovative but a reassertion of what
was known in apostolic times and immediately following. Nor is it
unique even now, for a number of modern Orthodox writers in Western
Europe and the United States have set forth the ancient insights in
their works. However, even some of the most knowledgeable of Roman
Catholic and Protestant scholars remain only too likely to regard their
views somewhat askance, as a peculiarly Eastern "aberration" to which
they accord a certain charitable indulgence. But who is indulging whom?
To the Orthodox the West is the aberration, having strayed from
apostolic understanding into a theology bearing in virtually all its
aspects the stamp of pagan philosophy. Perhaps the super-nova was no
accident -- heaven was alarmed.
The Freedom of Morality is likely to prove even more exciting to
Western minds than Hymn. It reveals that the Orthodox, and truly
scriptural (uninfluenced by philosophy) understanding of freedom and of
passions is in certain crucial aspects the very antithesis of Western
understanding. This will alarm some and gratify others.
Throughout my own Calvinst upbringing it was implicit in all I
was taught that the truth of the Bible is to make you virtuous. Sermons
were packed with exhortations to "right" behavior. That this curbed my
earthly freedom was obvious on the face of it. Imagine, then, my
astonishment at reading for the first time the two quotations from the
Fathers with which Yannaras introduces his book:
"Virtue exists for truth; but truth does not exist for virtue."
(Maximus the Confessor, d.655).
"When you enter upon the path of righteousness, then you will
cleave to freedom in everything." (Abba Isaac the Syrian)
Is Orthodoxy topsy-turvy? Or is there here a greater depth of
insight into the fallen and redeemed states? Already, the answer has
been suggested by Vasileios in a chapter headed, "Spirituality as
'Bondage' to Freedom." For perfect freedom is to love; it is "an exodus,
a departure from the narrow prison of self-love for the promised land,
the land of the Other." Vasileios even goes so far as to suggest that
the human attitude reflected in Calvinist "morality" is a kind of
heresy, because of it s self-assurance, "its attachment to human
reasoning and sanctity which are its idols." Could this be one reason
for youthful rebellion against conventional "morality"? Yannaras, for
his part, pulls no punches:
"Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a
particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is
increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the
least worthy of human demands -- conformity, sterile conservatism,
pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing
which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary
decoration of social decorum. The people who really thirst for life,
who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle
desperately to distinguish some light in the sealed mystery of human
existence -- these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is
primarily and most especially addressed, and inevitably they all remain
far removed from the rationalistically organized social conventionalism
of established Christianity."
And he adds:
"What distances man from Christ and the Church is falsity of
life, the "existential lie" of the masks of the superego, and conformity
to the external formalities of conventional behavior."
It appears that Orthodoxy, ancient though it is, can indeed
explain much of the confrontational attitude and alienation of today's
youth, and may possibly hold a cure for it.
But the Westerner will at once ask, "Of what, then, does
morality consist?" Yannaras answers that it is not even a measure of
character or behavior but the ultimate expression of human freedom, "the
dynamic response of personal freedom to the existential truth and
authenticity of man."
And how is that "authenticity" to be found that is so eagerly
sought at vast cost in the consulting rooms of psychologists, and
psychiatrists and by youth in their rebellious capers with forays into
drugs and sex? Orthodoxy insist that the only way is thru humility
learned in suffering, by death to self-will and self-love, letting
Christ lead us by way of the cross, for His command was: follow me! As
Yannaras writes:
"...one has to make the fullness of the saving truth incarnate
in oneself. The shocking freedom of the fools ["fools for Christ"] is
first and foremost a total death, a complete mortification of every
individual element in their lives. This death is the freedom which can
break and destroy every conventional form; it is resurrection into ...
the life of love which knows neither bounds nor barriers."
It is also ultimate morality. Nor is death such a bad thing,
for it generates love. Yannaras quotes Isaac the Syrian concerning the
person who has died to all self-desire and surrendered to the will of
God: "... striving, fear, trouble and toil in all things pass from
him. And he is exalted above nature, and attains love."
A Westerner will naturally ask, "What about worship then? If
Orthodox worship does not consist of exhortations to morality, and
proclamation of the word is peripheral, then of what does it consist?"
It consists of the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharist, which gives life, for
Jesus said that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood we have no
life in us (John 6:53-58). Yannaras offers this succinct statement of
the relevance of the Orthodox understanding of this in our time:
"Orthodox worship is a direct answer to the peculiarly modern
quest for immediate, experiential knowledge of God, beyond any abstract
intellectual schemes or anthropocentric sentimental elevations. In the
Orthodox eucharist nothing is theory, autonomous doctrine or abstract
reference; all is action, tangible experience and total bodily
participation."
The Orthodox notion of freedom cannot be fully explained without
some understanding of the Orthodox notion of passions. To the Western
mind, passions are the affective part of our nature, the more personal
part of us, linked with the warmth of feelings and emotions. Thus
American youth are likely to insist that they are most fully realizing
themselves when they have the "freedom" to indulge their passions,
whatever these may be. This posture dates back to the "Enlightenment"
and its "free t hinkers," of whom Rousseau was a chief exemplar, a man
who regarded his periodic bouts with venereal disease as the price to be
paid for his exercise of personal "freedom." The age sought a return to
"nature," and to pursue one's passions was deemed me rely "natural."
This is precisely the opposite of the Orthodox understanding of
the meaning of "freedom," "passions," and "natural," and while Yannaras
does not treat of it at any length, it is implicit in all that he says.
The Fathers listed dozens of passions, as many as a hundred: avarice,
lust, gluttony, every inordinate desire, hate, fear, envy, and so on.
Love is emphatically not one of them. Not even an emotion, it is,
rather, an act of will, a commitment, a decision taken in freedom to
concern one-self solely for others. It is obedience to the "new
command" of Christ that we love one another in exactly the same way that
he loves us (John 13:34). If love were a passion or an emotion, it
could not be commanded of us. Rather, it is commitment and obedi ence
to love that quenches passions. Passions are to the Fathers an
unnatural state, a consequence of the fall. The committed Christian is
dispassionate, as spelled out by Georges Florovsky, another prominent
Orthodox writer:
"Passions are always impersonal; they are a concentration of
cosmic energies which make the human person its prisoner, its slave.
They are blind and they blind those whom they possess. The impassioned
man, "the man of passions," does not act on his own, but is rather acted
upon: fata trabunt. He often loses the consciousness of being a free
agent. He doubts the existence and the possibility of freedom in
general. He adopts rather the "necessarionist" concept of reality
[psychological determinism] ... And as a consequence, he loses his
personality, his personal identity. He becomes chaotic, with multiple
faces, or rather -- masks. The "man of passions" is not at all free,
although he can give the impression of activity and energy. He is not
hing more than a "ball" of impersonal influences. He is hypnotized by
those influences which actually have a power over him. Arbitrariness is
not freedom" (George Florovsky, "The Darkness of Night," in Creation and
Redemption, Vol. 3 of Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Belmont,
MA.: Nordland, 1976, p.87)
Christos Yannaras is a leading Greek lay theologian and
Professor of Philosophy at Panteios Institute, and the author of over a
dozen books on ethics, theology, and modern religious theology. John D.
Zizioulas is an academic colleague of his, Pro fessor of Systematic
Theology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and a major Orthodox
spokesman in ecumenical discussions. Yannaras is a member of the
editorial committee in charge of the Contemporary Greek Theologians
series, together with Bishop Kallistos (Timothy Ware) of Diokleia, who
is one of the most articulate Western authorities on Orthodoxy. The
book by Zizioulas, Being as Communion, is of particular significance to
those desiring to understand and appreciate the spirit and experience of
Orthodoxy.
Being is in some respects a more technical and more difficult
work than Hymn and Freedom. Complex and extremely sophisticated in its
argument, it probes the depths of Orthodoxy even further than the other
two, though still within the capacity of an informed layperson. Its
far-reaching implications are likely to shock Westerners schooled to
think in terms of categories, of either/or dichotomies and the
exaltation of the individual, for being in the Orthodox understanding
consists not of sterile entities but of persons related to one another
in communion. "A human being left to himself cannot be a person." The
model is the Holy Trinity, a communion of persons. St. Paul expresses
it in Ephesians 4:25: "... we are members of one another." This is the
"grand co-inherence" of all in Christ so familiar to the Fathers.
Individualism is of the fall, and ultimately fruitless. As Antony of
Egypt put it, "Your life and your death are with your neighbor."
The implications of this can carry us far into the depths of
Orthodox theology. "Truth as communion ... [leads] to the affirmation
of otherness in and through love" ...the fall consists in the refusal to
make being dependent on communion, in a rupture between truth and
communion." For truth is not a "concept," nor even primarily a matter of
epistemology "but is connected with what we might call life," and if we
are to have life and truth we must, in a reciprocal relationship of
love, identify ourselves with the person of Jesus Christ who asserted
that He was in Himself truth and life (John 14:6). "His knowledge is
nothing other than His love. If He ceases to love what exists, nothing
will be. Being depends on love. The substratum of existence is not
being but love," and love by its very nature implies relationship.
Such is the thesis of Being. In addition Zizioulas delves yet
further into themes of Vasileios and of Yannaras already mentioned:
freedom of love in morality and obedience, theology as praxis (doing the
truth), the distortions of scholasticism and of pagan philosophy in
general, and much else. Heavy sledding, but well worth the effort.
Deification is in a sense yet more difficult, and the work lacks
something of the excitement of the other three. Its subtitle is St.
Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition. Interestingly, the author
holds the chair of Moral Theology and Christian Sociology in the
Theological School of the University of Thessalonki, which was Gregory's
home ground.
Gregory, however, was not the source of the notion of
"defication," which is very ancient, harking back to Genesis and Adam
and Eve's having been made "in the image and likeness of God," and to
St. Paul in Galatians 2:20, "...it is no longer I who live, but Christ
lives in me..." and to the great Athanasius who in the fourth century
summed it up saying, "God became man that man might become God." This
has never ceased to be the "ideal" of Orthodoxy and the "chief aim" of
the Church.
Gregory's role had to do once again with scholasticism. He
resisted Barlaam of Calabria, who in the fourteenth century came to
Constantinople attempting to impose scholasticism on the East, believing
that "a knowledge of pagan wisdom was an indispensable prerequisite for
human perfection." Gregory denied this, and prevailed, and Orthodoxy was
spared the straitjacket of over-intellectualization.
The West, however, still predominantly cerebral in its approach
to the faith, tends to have deep misgivings about the notion of
"deification." It is not, however, that we as created beings are to
become part of the Holy Trinity, but rather that w e become identified
with Christ, who was also God. Mantzaridis explains:
"...the deification of human nature was accomplished for the
first time in the person of Jesus Christ. His human nature was united
with the Logos of God...Christ's human nature became the vessel for
uncreated divine energy, and henceforth communicates this grace in the
Holy Spirit to all believers...Christ's uncreated life and energy became
the property of the man who is united with Him, and in whose person
Christ Himself lives and operates."
Any repair of the East-West schism will require the West's
somehow coming to terms with deification (or theosis), which as Bishop
Kallistos says in his "foreward" is no "abstract theory" but "the living
experience of the saints." This volume expounds it well for those
desiring to comprehend it.
The author of Communion of Love (Foreward by Henri J.M.Nouwen)
is in a sense a "living saint." A pharmacist by profession, he owned
several stores in Cairo and was quite successful by age 29, when he felt
Jesus's call to "follow," obeyed the command to "sell what you have" and
became a Coptic monk. Today, as head of Deir el Makarios monastery in
the desert 50 miles southwest of Cairo, he devotes himself to the
ascetic life and delivers short homilies to as many as 500 persons a day
who come to hear him.
This collection of the words of "Matthew the Poor" holds meat
and drink for the mind of every searching Christian. Nothing
innovative, it simply articulates Orthodox understanding in a lucid and
cogent way deeply satisfying to modern hunger. "There is no
intellectual means of entering into the Gospel," he says, "for the
Gospel is spiritual." And, '...spiritual understanding expands with the
knowledge [experience] of the truth, and the truth, in its turn, opens
up 'all the fullness of God'." He reiterates the powerful Orthodox theme
of Dionysius mentioned earlier that what is known is known only thru
participation in it:
"God is truth and life and everlasting light.The knowledge of
truth is participation in the truth; the knowledge of life is life; the
knowledge of light is illumination. Man, thru his loss of the knowledge
of God, has lost the truth within himself, and has lost eternal life and
light."
Matthew is as eminently quotable as he is readable. In the end
he sums up why Christ's Church has not achieved the "catholicity," the
all-embracing unity that Jesus intended, and again the spoiler proves to
be human reliance on fallen intellect:
"It has not yet conceived its divine concepts as pure and
elevated above logic or human reason; i.e., its concepts are still bound
to articulate and philosophical interpretations which hinder the vision
of the serenity of the catholic nature of Christ."
All this we now find to be linked to the present day in a rather
startling way. Science, it is often admitted, has taken on for us the
character of deity, as Zizioulas writes in Being:
"If theology creatively uses the Greek patristic synthesis
concerning truth and communion and applies it courageously to the sphere
of the Church, the split between the Church and science can be overcome
again."
An eminent science writer, D.E.Thomsen, intimates that "the
history of science represents in some ways an emancipation from the
Hellenic intellectual heritage." (Science News, Vol.131, No.12, March
21, 1987, p.184). Orthodoxy escaped that entrapment. How ironic, then,
if Orthodoxy, thought by many to be so ancient and passe should in our
computer age turn out to be exceedingly up to date.
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