The Eastern and Western Churches have been travelling different courses for 1,000 years. When the Church was institutionally one, the Pope was regarded in the East as having primacy in a collegiate sense only, and it was the common decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils which decided matters.
Emperor Constantine legalised Christianity in 313, and built a replacement capital for the Roman Empire, which he called Constantinople. This set the scene for the division and parallel development of Greek and Latin Christian cultures. The empire was ordered in two halves after 345, but by 381, a common creed, the Nicene Creed, had been finalised. In the fifth century the last Roman emperor of the West was deposed, and Constantinople became the city of the empire, an increasingly Greek speaking Byzantine empire. From the sixth century, a Spanish (and then Western) addition to the Creed was demoting the importance of the Holy Spirit in Eastern eyes.
Then in 800, the Pope crowned Charlemagne ‘Emperor of the Romans’, and the Patriarch of Constantinople was soon withstanding Papal decisions, while Eastern missionaries moved into Russia. In the tenth Century the Germanic term ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ was being used, and in 1054 legates for Pope Leo IX excommunicated Constantinople. Leo had already died, but excommunication was rejected and reciprocated. Salt was put deeply into the wounds of schism in the early thirteenth century when Western crusaders took a detour in order to sack Constantinople and desecrate Eastern churches, including the Hagia Sophia Cathedral.
Loss of trust in the East and developing Papal worldly authority in Western Christendom made Unity too difficult, despite an official attempt at the council of Lyons in 1274, and another in the 15th century. It was 1999 before a Pope, John Paul II, visited an Eastern Orthodox country, Romania.
The Orthodox Catholic Church claims that the Roman Catholic Church departed from the apostolic faith, but this is not my concern. There are problems specific to Eastern as well as Western tradition, such as ingrained nationalisms.
All this time later I am interested in what the East preserved and developed. This could be a more holistic and spiritual theology which combines head and heart experientially, a beautiful liturgy which is penitential but not corporately penitential, a communal sense of Church and a corporate and optimistic eschatology. The history of monasticism is strong, and the suffering under communism would make a study in its own right.
But I cannot cover all this. Stereotypes are not truthful, but I am forced to talk of ‘East’ and ‘West’. I will concentrate on three features of Orthodox Christianity shocking to some Western Christians. But they offer a remedy to spiritual impoverishment following the ‘Great Schism’.
These are the doctrines of deification, or our becoming God, universalism, or the hope of everything being restored to God, and apophaticism, or the acknowledgement that our positive statements about God must be understood in a negative light. God is self-existing, but we are contingent and so are our thoughts.
When writing for a Western audience, this is how Gillian Crow, a leading lay member of the Russian Orthodox Church in Britain has put it:
“We are invited not to remember the events of the gospel but to be present at them … we are in God’s now, and this experience should transform our lives.
We do not seek to convince by argument, by logic, by any appeal to believe the unbelievable. We speak of what we know experientially. [This] does not make us slaves to a book … of an infallible prelate, or an academic process that reduces and deconstructs … created beings cannot understand the infinite.
Bigger! Further! Wider! Greater! God is beyond anything we can begin to understand with our finite minds. His paradise is not on the scale of a palm fringed Caribbean island. His thoughts are not confined to the Bible, nor to the canons; his presence is not confined to the church building.
To believe that our mental capacity is such that it could one day understand everything in the created universe, let alone the uncreated … is not a logical idea.”1
I will also touch on the relevance of Orthodox theology to an evolutionary world-view, another point of contact with the Western seeker.
But firstly deification. I still remember being startled to read a book in which pretentions to ‘imitate Christ’ were lampooned:
“When a monkey plays a saxophone, that doesn’t make him a musician. You can’t imitate Christ by imitating his external behaviour. You’ve got to be Christ. Then you’ll know exactly what to do in a particular situation, given your temperament, your character, and the character and temperament of the person you’re dealing with. No one has to tell you. But to do that, you must be what Christ was.”2
At that time I was not familiar with deification, and being Christ seemed a shocking heresy. The Jesuit in question was echoing Theresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now on earth but yours”3, and Gregory of Nyssa: “Likeness to God, therefore, is a definition of human blessedness.”4
Jesus says: “Why do you call me Lord and fail to do what I say?” (Lk 6:46) For Orthodoxy, being Christ is not strange because it: “sees salvation in terms of theosis, deification, rather than justification”.5
We are to become God.
This does not mean in the way Roman emperors became gods to demand allegiance. Nor does it mean becoming an Omnipotent universe creator. It does mean following the biblical calling in 2 Pet 1:4 to ‘take on the divine nature’. And this means acknowledging that as God took the form of humanity in Christ his son, our humanity can respond by receiving the full freedom of the image of God within us. The Father, the uncreated source of all material becomes both that which is perceived and that by which we perceive, and the uncreated Holy Spirit is apprehended in the very senses and concepts that make up who we are.
Although deification cannot be complete before physical death, this journey into theosis is a positive concept. Orthodoxy has not fallen into the Western theological trap of pitting faith against works. Seeing God means we must be changed, and we know not where the boundaries of this process of salvation are. We become immortal like Christ, as Adam in Genesis was supposed to be immortal, because we partake in the tree of Life, that is, in communion with God. It is in this sense we are God. We do not try to acquire knowledge of Life apart from God, as in the story of Adam and Eve, who partook of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil. Because that kind of knowledge is always a duality, while the knowledge of Life is always re-unifying.
In Orthodoxy it is the same with prayer. Particular things for people are not prayed for; but people are prayed for. Mother Gavrilia has described prayer as our saying: ‘I love you in the presence of God’.6 So while petitionary prayer is important and valid, in the East prayer is not primarily a:
“matter of asking for things … about what God has done for me … how he answered particular requests. It is rather a deep spiritual communion with God, the opening of oneself to him.”7
In this opening there is a metanoia, or repentance, but this is more than some negative kind of mere regret or apology. Metanoia is literally a change of mind, we might say a changed consciousness, such that one loses ones self-consciousness and grows into overflowing consciousness.
St Isaac of Syria (who incidentally suggested we should include demons in our prayer) described this spiritual silence:
“The saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory, so the mind, when it has been made worthy of perceiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here.”
In pure prayer: “all movement is at an end, and even prayer itself ceases. This is the perfecting of prayer, and it is called spiritual prayer or contemplation. It is absolute peace and rest.”8
“In it a man leaves his own being and is no longer conscious whether he is in this life or the world to come. He belongs to God and no longer to himself; he is his own master no more but is guided by the Holy Spirit.”9
“The more one is united to Him, the more one becomes aware of His unknowability, and, in the same way, the more perfect one becomes, the more one is aware of one’s own imperfection.”10
This involves a gnosis, or personal awareness, which is not to be confused with Gnosticism. There may be issues here for Western Protestantism, suspicious of asceticism as if it devalues grace by faith alone and entails contempt for the human body. This is an error. Manichean contempt for our bodily nature is alien to Orthodox asceticism, which affirms faith in grace. The embodied and created is good, and holiness is not a secret for the adept.
St Gregory Palamas affirmed:
“We do not apply the word man to body and soul separately, but to both together, for the whole man was created in the image of God.”11
But the body must be spiritualised, and become what St Paul calls pneumatikon soma, a ‘spiritual body’. (1 Cor 15:44) This is more than intellectual contemplation in this life because it is completed at the resurrection, but in this life a person resolves to co-operate in freedom with uncreated grace, and so (s)he moves past petition and beyond ecstatic experience to an understanding of the fundamental unity of human nature.
This holism also applies to the Eucharist. The popular maxim ‘we are what we eat’ is apt because there is no argument about the intellectual meaning of the Eucharist, in the way there was at the Western reformation. There is no attempt to use the intellect in opposition to the rest of life. Militant atheists today sometimes talk of religion as ‘intellectual suicide’. But this results from the Western habit of splitting off the intellect, following Descartes’ maxim: ‘I think therefore I am.’ Rather, religion should be the reintegration of the intellectual into the rest of existence, of life and of death.
Eastern theology has avoided the fall into individualism encouraged by some of Augustine’s doctrine, and then by some of Calvin’s. After Augustine the West was left thinking pre-destination was the only issue, but the idea of pre-destination is very unusual in the East. It developed out of controversy between Pelagius and Augustine.
Augustine had lived a morally questionable life, and there is a sense in his written ‘Confessions’ that his worst deeds have been ways in which God has managed to pull him back to himself. After conversion from Paganism, he reflected upon God choosing to save him, or ‘elect’ him.
But Pelagius was probably an ascetic moral reformer who arrived in Rome to find an enthusiasm for Christianity, but without a perceptible change in the life of the Christian. As a result he saw Augustine’s notion of God’s unmerited grace as an excuse for people not to take moral responsibility. If God hasn’t given me the unearned gift of grace and elected me, what can I do? So Pelagius emphasised effort and merit, but lost the argument.
Augustine, probably by over-playing his hand, seemed to over-ride the notion of our human freewill altogether. And related Western arguments continued in this vein. At the Reformation the argument was about justification through grace by faith alone versus payment to the Church in gratitude for forgiveness, which was perceived as purchase of God’s favour.
Meanwhile in the East, grace and human freedom were not separated out as opposites. They save in one action, theosis. This is our receiving and acquiring the Holy Spirit for ourselves, when we are co-operating with God’s grace.
“Grace is the presence of God within us which demands constant effort on our part; these efforts, however, in no way determine grace, nor does grace act upon our liberty as if it were external or foreign to it.”12
There is a synergy of our will with God’s will, a kind of keeping ourselves as fully tuned up as possible with the vibrations of his uncreated grace which we thereby enable ourselves to receive and be aided by. Asceticism is not opposed to grace and grace is not opposed to freewill. They are all necessary to one another in order for our salvation in the Holy Spirit to occur.
And this was similar to the understanding of Desert Father St John Cassian of Marseilles, the forerunner of St Benedict. Cassian took part in the Augustinian Pelagius debate, but because he was beyond the terms of the argument and not limiting his understanding to rational and dualistic either-or grace-effort terminology, he was “unable to make himself understood”.13
John Wesley understood. He was influenced by Eastern Fathers. In his journal he apparently regarded Ephrem the Syrian as: "the most awakened writer, I think, of all the ancients"14. Wesley used such influences to develop his own understanding of human-divine co-operation. This is reflected in the Methodist doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’, or ‘scriptural holiness’ which is John Wesley’s way to describe a spiritual transformation into perfection; and therefore arguably his own equivalent to theosis.
“It is understood as an experience of grace, subsequent to salvation, with the effect that the Holy Spirit takes full possession of the soul, sanctifies the heart, and empowers the will so that one can love God and others blamelessly in this life,” he wrote.
“One is justified and then sanctified-understood as communing with God, with the result that the holiness of God is actually imparted, not just imputed on the basis of what Christ accomplished on the cross. The power of sin in the believer's life is either eradicated or rendered inoperative as one participates in the higher life of the divine.”15
Sanctification is not an event. It is a process, and process had always been understood by Eastern Father Irenaeus, who brought in the idea of moral progress in response to Christians who wished to advance too quickly.
Irenaeus knew that although the bridging of the created and the uncreated is already understood as achieved historically by the incarnation, and individually through the potential of baptism, the reality of human experience remains:
“We actually find ourselves a long way from the vision of God which produces incorruption, and are very limited in our ability to attain it rapidly.
Human beings must attain to the divine likeness before they can overcome their mortality and realise the immortality that they possess potentially through baptism. And this involves the exercise of moral choice.
Because of God's infinite love he became what we are in order to make us what he is ... [but] it depends on our moral behaviour and on our participation in the sacraments ... adoption as sons makes human beings gods because it relates them by participation to the source of life. The progressive nature of this participation is frequently stressed ... on the moral level obedience to God produces the fruits of the spirit, for spiritual actions vivify man, that is, engraft the Spirit on to him.
Conversely, immoral behaviour impoverishes people by banishing the spirit and renders them the mere flesh and blood that will not inherit the kingdom."16
So deification or theosis is two wills becoming One, under the Holy Spirit. Christian deification was formally defined by Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk:
“The attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as is possible.”17
This was in the sixth century, but it is very likely that deification was used in a metaphorical sense long before then. So how did it develop?
The assertion in Ps 82:6 : “you are gods!”, is interpreted by Rabbinic Judaism as a call to become immortal by observing the Torah. The gods of this Psalm were understood as the Pagan gods being addressed by God for failing to prevent injustice. They were also understood as corrupt human judges.18
Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria talks of God granting “to the worthy a share of his own nature, which is repose.” And though the created nature remains, an intellect possessed by divine love will forget itself utterly. For Philo then, the supreme example of one who becomes divine is Moses. He bases this on an analogy in Ex 7:1.
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh’ and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.”
Wisdom of Solomon 2:13 talks of the righteous man calling himself “a child of the Lord”, and Hos 1:10 talks of Israel as “children of the living God”. This is the Jewish heritage St Paul takes up when he describes Christians as sons of God, and he continually expresses their participatory union with Christ, in terminology such as ‘in Christ’, ‘with Christ’, ‘Christ in us’, ‘one in Christ Jesus’. In the letter to the Hebrews, believers are ‘partakers in Christ’ and in Heb 2:11, ‘he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin.’ To my mind this last example sounds neo Platonic, a physical reality which is subject to a greater spiritual reality.
Since deification has a long history, it should be understood as a development. In 160, against a background of competition between Jews and Christians, Church apologist Justin Martyr supports the notion of deification by citing Ps 82:6. But he alters the Rabbinic exegesis mentioned earlier, and says instead that since the text goes on to mention gods falling like princes, it must have been addressed to Adam and Eve, because they fell, and Satan is a prince. He then goes on to combine this with 1 Jn 1:3, “our fellowship is with the Father and with his son Jesus”, and declares that Christians are the new Israel. Ps 82, Justin finally concludes, proved that:
“All human beings are deemed worthy of becoming gods and of having the power to become sons of the Most High, and will be judged and condemned on their own account.”21
They participate in God or not.
Justin’s pupil Tatian and after him Theophilus of Antioch also viewed the goal of human life as the spiritualization and transformation of the entire being towards resurrection by the living God. But when Irenaeus of Lyons took up the theme, he was countering the Gnostic idea of disciples escaping the corrupt material creation of an evil Demiurge, like they believed Christ had done. And the way he did this was inspired. He gave potential Gnostics a better alternative, by systematising St Paul’s idea of Christ’s becoming poor so that we might become rich. This resulted in the famous formalisation of Christian deification: “Because of his infinite love he became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.”22
Hippolytus borrowed from Irenaeus and insisted, also against the Gnostics, that a human being is not a failed god, but can become a god:
“Whatever sufferings you endured, being a man, these he gave you because you are a man, but whatever is connected with God, these God promised to bestow on you, because you have been deified and born immortal.
This is the meaning of ‘Know Thyself’, to have known the God who made you. For to ‘know yourself is concomitant with being known by him by whom you have been called.” 23
And then Clement of Alexandria develops the theme himself:
“And just as Isomachus will make those who attend to his instructions husbandmen … and Homer poets … and Aristotle men of science, and Plato Philosophers, so he who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him, is fully perfected after the likeness of his teacher, and thus becomes a god while still moving about in the flesh.”24
Clement adds that the ‘gods’ are ‘those who have detached themselves as far as possible from everything human.’25
But what can this mean? In our modern terminology, this kind of detachment from everything human is best understood not as a kind of aloof denial or pathological repression of human thought and feeling, but as a much fuller awareness of one’s own human thoughts and feelings in order that they do not then unconsciously control one’s actions, thus leading one to a fully spiritual humanity.
“In one who is perfect,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “there will remain no further room for the unconscious, for the instinctive or the involuntary, all will be illumined with divine light, appropriated to the human person who has acquired its proper character”26
Non-attachment to the world is not rejection or repression of the world.
“The passions are part of the ongoing course of the world ... love of riches; amassing of possessions; the fattening of the body … from which proceeds carnal desire; love of honours, which is the source of envy; administration of government; pride and pomp of power; elegance; popularity, which is the cause of ill-will; fear for the body. When these passions desist from their course, then correlatively the world ceases to exist.”27
One is in a dispassionate world as a result of not being ruled by one’s worldly passions. Love, from this point of view, is dis-interested and not demanding.
"Detachment without loving involvement would not be a sign of liberation but at best a form of indifferent complacency. And loving involvement without detachment seems but a barely concealed form of self-centredness."28
Origen had spoken of something like deification when he described us as contingent beings who take on the attributes of a self-existent being, or the Father, and of the intellect being deified by what it contemplates. But after his super spiritualising, Athanasius and Cyril sought to re-emphasise the role of the Church, the incarnation, and of our physical bodies partaking in the Eucharist.
It was Maximus the Confessor who then helped to establish deification as the goal of the spiritual life. He spoke of how God’s energies penetrate the world, and compared the two interpenetrating but unconfused natures of Jesus in Christology with the human and divine aspects of the Christian believer.
Finally, Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas emphasised the experiential aspect of deification in the Christian. It is a felt knowledge of and participation in the energies of God, but not in his essence.
But how is all this of use to Western Christianity?
It is sometimes stated that a belief in original goodness is a modern totem. But it is as old as the Bible and the Fathers, and I think it is something we need to recover. In Western secular society, sin has come to be seen as either meaningless, as in an advertising term which is used to sell ice cream perhaps, or as a by-word for sex. If it is remembered it is half remembered, as a polluted and purely condemnatory term used in order to deny our humanity. And probably it has been used this way. This is one reason so many spiritual seekers turn to non-Christian faiths, which seek to affirm our true potential first before allowing us to progressively see for ourselves what we must leave behind on the way.
But the notion of sin as a separation from our truest selves, the infinite ultimate and blissful reality some call God, is not only one which has meaning to Westerners seeking spirituality in a secular or non-Christian context. It is also Christian – and particularly Orthodox. When sin is communicated and understood as a separation from God in us, deification can be a positive and motivating driver. It is a potential incentive for us to be what we are meant to be – fully human, truly human, not super human. Christ is our role model in recovering our true nature as more than physical nature, as the image of God in us. Since Christ is the image of the invisible God, becoming Christ is how we are saved from ourselves.
On the apparent level, there is us, but on the actual level, there is God. But there is a peculiar difficulty, especially in the Western mind where God is conceived as wholly opposite, in trying to articulate the sense that the self is God or can ever be God. Did Christ ever say: “I am Lord”? Outside of the Hindu framework, can one ever say: “I am God” without also ending up outside the Church, on a metaphysical cross, in a tabloid, or on a mental health ward?
To put the question another way, in experience of selflessness, does the self exist? In 2 Cor 12:2-4, for example, St Paul writes:
"I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter."
To re-phrase the question once more - does ‘the soul’ really exist, or is the soul existence itself? In a spiritualised body, do we simply retain the convention of name form and identity, but in a deified ego-less way? Is this pantheism or pan-entheism? Does it matter?
The Orthodox answer seems to be that we are filled with God’s spirit, but are still perfected as creatures. Uncreated God and created creatures are One – and yet the Eastern doctrine of theosis became defined as ‘union (of energies) without confusion (of essence)’, in which the essential distinction between Creator and creature eternally remains. Orthodox Bishop Kalistos Ware encapsulates it well in this aphorism based on 1 Cor 15:28:
"In the Age to come, God is 'all in all', but Peter is Peter and Paul is Paul."29
This, once again, is a typically Eastern both-and, rather than a typically Western either-or. Gregory of Nyssa, a Church Father and Bishop who died in AD 395, when Augustine was 41-years-old, teaches that what humanity is doing is re-gaining its proper Self:
“The resurrection promises us nothing other than the restoration of the fallen to their ancient state. For the grace we look for is a certain return to the first life.”30
This proper Self is spoken of as Christ the bridegroom ‘restoring nature to virginal incorruptibility’, or as the soul regaining its ‘proper beauty’,31 and as the ‘original health’32 of humanity. It all gives the lie to modern Christian charges that Original Goodness is a new age import or something borrowed from ‘Buddha Nature’. On the contrary, participation in the goodness of God is central to this Church Father’s writing:
“The goodness of God is not to be found separated from our nature nor established far away from those who choose God, but it is always in each person, unknown and hidden, whenever it is stifled by the cares and pleasures of life, but found again whenever we turn our thought to him.”33
For Gregory, Gen 1:27 means there were two creations, first the creation of Adam, a generic and full ‘humankind’ in God’s image and foreknowledge, and following on from that, the continuing creation of corruptible male and female versions of this perfect spiritual body. Generic humanity in God’s image can be compared to the resurrected beings mentioned by Jesus in Lk 20:35-6, who neither marry or are given in marriage because they are equal to angels. Indeed:
“The creation of our nature is in a sense two fold: one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction [of sex]: for something like this the passage darkly conveys by its arrangement, where it first says, ‘God created man, in the image of God he created him’, and then, adding to what has been said, ‘male and female created he them’ – a thing which is alien from our conceptions of God.”34
Along with Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa believed that evil is ultimately unreality. But it took Augustine some time to discover this:
“If the devil is to blame, who made the devil? And if he was a good angel who by his own wicked will became the devil, how did there happen to be in him that wicked will … since a good Creator made him?35
Whence is evil? … I did not see the evil in my very search.36 … Where, then, is evil … Has it no being at all? Why, then, do we fear and shun what has no being? Or if we fear it needlessly, then surely that fear is evil--and indeed a greater evil since we have nothing real to fear, and yet do fear.
Therefore, either that is evil which we fear, or the act of fearing is in itself evil37 … Thou [God] didst procure for me … certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin.38
And I asked what wickedness was, and I found that it was no substance, but a perversion of the will bent aside from thee, O God, the supreme substance.39 And being admonished by these books to return into myself, I entered into my inward soul, guided by thee.40
And I viewed all things … They are real in so far as they come from thee; but they are unreal in so far as they are not what thou art … for that is truly real which remains immutable. It is good, then, for me to hold fast to God, for if I do not remain in him, neither shall I abide in myself.41
It was made clear to me that all things are good even if they are corrupted … either, then, corruption does not harm--which cannot be--or, as is certain, all that is corrupted is thereby deprived of good. But if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to be … Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all.42
Evil, then, ‘has no substance at all’, concludes Augustine.
But all the same, by the time of his later writing in ‘City of God’, the architect of Western Christianity was stating in no uncertain terms that the damned, human and angelic, without exception, are tortured without end:
“No reason more obvious and just, can be found for holding it as the fixed and immovable belief … that the devil and his angels shall never return to the justice and life of the saints, than that Scripture, which deceives no man, says that God spared them not, and that they were condemned beforehand by Him, and cast into prisons of darkness in Hell, (2 Pet 2:4) being reserved to the judgment of the last day, when eternal fire shall receive them, in which they shall be tormented world without end.
And if this be so, how can it be believed that all men, or even some, shall be withdrawn from the endurance of punishment after some time has been spent in it? How can this be believed without enervating our faith in the eternal punishment of the devils?”43
Despite his earlier saying evil has no substance at all, it is a distortion of good, Augustine’s teaching on the punishment without end of some human beings became the normative Western position, and Calvin even described it as pre-destined by God, the perfect Good.
Perhaps the numbness this vicious vision created later contributed to the wane of professed religion in Western Europe. Whatever the case, not all Western Christians promoted a preconceived and eternal damnation of human beings, or even eternal damnation. In the West, the unlimited hope of Universalism almost became a feminine theology, with women such as Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich and Therese of Lisieux quietly preserving it across the second millennium.
Even in the 20th century, it made the likes of Roman Catholic Karl Rahner appear unusual. As a professed Christianity, Universalism had almost been extinguished in the West.
In Orthodox theology however, “a hope of universal salvation, based on a conviction of the boundlessness of God’s love, has never gone away”.44
After Gregory of Nyssa it was picked up by Maximus the Confessor and Isaac the Syrian, and survives amongst modern Orthodox theologians such as Bishop Kallistos Ware.45 It is expressed very well in the following conversation between St Silouan (of the Russian monastery on Mount Athos, who died in 1938) and a fellow hermit:
“God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”
Obviously upset, the Staretz [Silouan] said: “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire--would you feel happy?”
“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit.
The Staretz answered with a sorrowful countenance: “Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”46
It should be emphasised here once again that the Eastern Orthodox are by no means all universalists, only that universalism has been more central in the ongoing development of their tradition than it has to the development of the Western tradition. In the Patristic age, Origen was Universalist, as were both Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius, and some sixth century anti-Chalcedonian writers.47 Origen and Gregory also had a dynamic rather than a static view of after-death states. (Universalism does not abandon judgement).
“I know a man,” says St. Symeon the New Theologian, “who desired the salvation of his brethren so fervently that he often besought God with burning tears and with his whole heart, in an excess of zeal worthy of Moses, that either his brethren might be saved with him, or that he might be condemned with them.
For he was bound to them in the Holy Spirit by such a bond of love that he did not wish to enter the kingdom of heaven if to do so meant being separated from them.”48
Gregory of Nyssa’s most common citation in support of Universalism is 1 Cor 15:28:
“God will be all in all, and all persons will be united together in fellowship of the good, Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.”49
Reflecting on Paul in 1 Cor 15:28 he says that Paul is asserting:
“the unreality of evil … Either [God] will not be in everything, when something evil is left in beings, or, if it is truly necessary to believe that he will be in everything, the existence of nothing evil is demonstrated along with this belief about him.”
His description of the eschaton depends upon his belief that the finite human soul is in perpetual progress, and that humanity is unified in the very fact of being humanity. This last point is something I suspect modern physics affirms.
“If love perfectly casts out fear…then will be found unity, the result of salvation, when all have been united with one another in being grafted onto the soul good… but all will become one, adhering to the one and only good; so that through the unity of the holy spirit…tied with the bond of peace, all will become one body, and one spirit, through one hope to which they were called.”50
Gregory believed in the restoration of all to the original condition, or ‘apokatastasis’:
“When, over long periods of time, evil has been removed and those now lying in sin have been restored to their original state, all creation will join in united thanksgiving, both those whose purification has involved punishment and those who never needed purification at all.”51
He also ruled out the idea that sinners would be annihilated rather than punished. If there was annihilation, it was the annihilation of sin, and not of humanity. Commenting on Ps 59, he observes how David says:
“‘do not kill them’ but ‘bring them down’ from the height of evil to the level and even region of divine citizenship.
We learn from these things that there will be no destruction of humanity, in order that the divine work shall not be rendered useless, being obliterated by non-existence. But instead … sin will be destroyed and will be reduced to non-being.”52
Gregory believes in a perpetual progress of the soul because he conceives of God as infinite and an ‘after-life’ state as dynamic. The soul rises to God through virtue. Writing in De Mortuis Oratio, he says:
“The goal and the end of the journey… is the restoration to the original state, which is nothing other than similarity to the divine.”53
Gregory’s concept of punishment is not retributive, but purifying:
“The approach of the divine power, acting like fire, effects the disappearance of the element which was contrary to nature … when those who are plunged in vice are restored to their original state, a chorus of thanksgiving will arise from all creation … For by mingling with humanity … he effected all the results … healing the very author of vice.”54
To allow free rein to a desire to advance to progressively greater participation in God is the only real freedom, and it is never completed. The freedom to belong to yourself however is an illusion, which can end.
“Individual persons,” says Vladimir Lossky, “cannot arrive at perfection without the realization of the fundamental unity of human nature. Love of God is necessarily bound up with love of one’s fellow man.
This perfect love will make a man like Christ, for, in his created nature he will be united to the whole of humanity, while in his person he will unite the created and the uncreated, the human complex and deifying grace.”55
Once again, care must be taken to avoid stereotypes, but apophatic theology, the knowledge that whatever we say about God is more unlike God than it is like God, and the awareness of the danger of idolatry in reifying our own abstractions, has I think been maintained in Eastern Christianity to the same extent that it has been lost in Western Christianity.
In some branches of Protestantism in particular, to say that language, including the Bible, originates in mystery, can be perceived as too threatening to a kataphatic (positive) expression of the ‘Word of God’, as if the Word is somehow not of God at all, but of temporal concepts and printed pages. Apophatic theology comes from the Greek word ‘apophanai’, which literally means to say no, but apophasis is really conveying the collapse or breakdown of language in the face of the infinite – a strategy of unknowing precisely in order to know better.
The irony is that the apophatic is thoroughly Biblical. It is quite possible that its greater emphasis in Eastern Orthodoxy is due to the more predominant influence of Platonic thought in the East. But nevertheless, the ineffability of ‘God’ does not come from Plato. We have already seen how in 2 Cor 12:2-6, Paul discovers that it is forbidden to express what he has experienced.
But in Exodus, seeing God is described as fatal, and representing him as an image or taking his name in vain is described as illicit or impossible. He will not show his face to Moses, and on Mount Carmel Elijah discovers he is only known in silence.
In Gen 32-39, God, in the form of an angel, suggests that Jacob should not ask for his name. In Ex 3:14, God mysteriously refuses to divulge his identity. In Judg 13:18, an angel of the Lord declares his name to be secret. In Isa 45:15 God is “a God who truly hides himself.”
Eph 1:21 says Christ is “far above every name that is to be named”, and Phil 2:9 says God has “given him a name which is above every name”.
Jn 1:18, 6:46, 1 Jn 4:12, 1 Tim 6:16, and 1 Cor 2:9, all written after the death of Jesus, nevertheless declare that no one has ever seen God. In Col 1:15, Christ is described as the “image of the invisible”… and anyone who has a mirror will know that something invisible has no visible image.
So in the Judeo-Christian Biblical tradition, God’s name is a no name. This understanding seems to have been best preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite my earlier pillory of the architect of Western Christianity, Augustine, he was also well aware of the problem of man’s trying to proclaim God:
“Have I spoken of God, or uttered his praise, in any worthy way? Nay, I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak; and if I have said anything; it is not what I desired to say. How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable? But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken.
And so God is not even to be called ‘unspeakable’ because to say even this is to speak of Him. There arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable.
And this opposition of words is rather to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech. And yet God, although nothing worthy of his greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept the worship of men’s mouths, and has desired us through the medium of our own words to rejoice in His praise.”56
In the final prayer of ‘De Trinitate’, Augustine even asks to be delivered of the abundance of words and vain thoughts that plague him, and so despite his concentrating on rhetoric and preaching and teaching, he must also have recognised its vanity and hollowness. But did he choose to remember this insight?
St Thomas Aquinas also acknowledged God’s inexpressibility. Despite being the Prince of Western Christian theologians for centuries, he said: “we do not know what kind of being God is”,57 and towards the end of his life, when he suddenly stopped his voluminous writing and went silent, he described all of his work as: “like straw”58.
There were of course Western Christian unknowers, such as Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, but they were always a minority voice. And then there was Eckhart, who was an endangered voice, because he was condemned. But then so was the Pope who condemned him. Poetic or Divine justice?
The Western scholastics thought we could know a great deal about God, but in the East, apophatic Christianity which had begun in Clement of Alexandria was never minority or sporadic, or simply acknowledged in passing. It was, and still is, a clearly understood central affirmation, and theology was known to be a mystery you only enter into in order to show how another stance is wrong. (Eunomious apparently even said God is so simple we can understand him as much as he can understand himself). Clement had handed apophaticism to Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, and it was very strong in St. John Chysostom. It was handed on in turn through Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor to Gregory Palamas, whose teaching on hesychast (stillness) spirituality became so strongly opposed that it became a real test case for Eastern Orthodoxy. Palamas won the case, allowing an unspeakable experience to remain quite a normative aspect of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to this very day.
The hesychasts believed that the divine light of the transfiguration that shone in Christ’s body is also revealed in Christians. This is not supposed to be the intellectual grasp of some external object, but an inner and inexpressible participation, and far more than a cognitive void or absence. It is nothing only in the sense that it is beyond the material or intellectual thing, but it is present.
“The human mind”, wrote Palamas, “transcends itself, and by victory over the passions acquires an angelic form … One sees, but not in a negative way – for one does see something – but in a manner superior to negation.
For God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing … although vision be beyond negation, yet the words used to explain it are inferior to the negative way.
Such explanations proceed by the use of examples and analogies, and this is why the word ‘like’, pointing to a simile, appears so often in theological discourse; for the vision itself is ineffable, and surpasses all expression.”59
Vladimir Lossky asserts that: “there is no theology apart from experience … he who imagines that at a given moment that he has known what God is has a depraved mind, according to St Gregory Nazianzen. Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion; the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to the truth.”60
And unknown truth can be disconcerting to people who have sought to find and maintain another type of security.
“Since the primary model of worthwhile knowing at the present day is provided by the natural sciences, in which it is man who controls, analyses, changes his environment, it is difficult to allow for that [apophaticism] being real knowledge, where man is less the knower than the known.”61
Richard Dawkins caricatures religion as the willingness to settle with mystery, and science as the willingness not to settle with mystery. This is an absurd parody, and it might be more accurate to say that both the militantly religious and the militantly atheist are unhappy with mystery. But it does raise the question about the type of knowledge we consider to be true. Experiential knowledge can be authenticating knowledge, just as David Jenkins once described it:
“That knowing which, in the very experiencing of the knower, carries in that experience the assurance that is indeed knowledge; i.e. that that which is thought to be being known is truly ‘there’ and is truly known. Hence it is not ‘derived’ but ‘direct’. One does not infer, or suppose, or even believe, that God exists. God is known to one as existing.”62
Experience then, a truth. The resurrection of the body of Christ in the Christian is true because it is experienced as true. This emphasis on experience does not become inherently unstable in Eastern Orthodoxy, which is paradoxically extremely conservative despite its provisional understandings. While Western Christian liberalism sometimes supposes that since there are other ways of thinking about God, we might as well abandon these ones, the Eastern Christian approach is more a case of emphasising the rather human expression of doctrine and therefore just accepting it.
Orthodox Faith illuminates everything else, it is not an alternative to everything else, and nor is it individualistic. The experienced truth of doctrine in Eastern Orthodox understanding is not supposed to be isolated from Christ, or from the wider community, or from the liturgy and sacraments, nor, for that matter, and I am quite sure Gregory of Nyssa would agree, is it supposed to be isolated from the wider communion of the universe and its One common uncreated and inexpressible ground.
This just leaves me to mention the evolutionary world-view. There is one Irenaean understanding of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve which is sometimes trivialised as a ‘fall upwards’.
There are however two ways to be innocent. The first way is as a young child. Everything is paradise, because you know no better. When children fall, it is because they don’t know what they are doing. But the second way to be innocent is to return to innocence, as a mature person who took a detour through evil before developing appreciation of Good. Humankind has ‘grown’ through suffering, aggression and lust. But why do you trouble yourself “in a house which is not your own”63, asked the Bishop of Nineveh. In an eternity, God could be at the door.
1 Crow, Gillian, Orthodoxy for Today, (London, SPCK, 2008), 1 – 33.
2 De Mello, Anthony, Awareness, (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1990), 96.
3 ‘Theresa of Avila, Reformer and Contemplative’ at The Society of Archbishop Justus: Biographical sketches of memorable Christians of the past, accessed at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/268.html on 7/5/08
4 Nysseni, Gregorii, Opera, In Inscriptiones Psalmorum, Heine, 84 (I. I. 6); cited in Ludlow, Morwenna, Universal Salvation, Eschatology in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner (Oxford, OUP, 2000), 55.
5 Crow, Orthodoxy, 48.
6 Gavrilia, Nun, The Ascetic of Love, (Katerini : Tertios, 1999.)
7 Crow, Orthodoxy, 114.
8 Lossky, Vladimir, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clark and Co,1957), 208.
9 Lossky, Mystical, 208.
10 Lossky, Mystical, 205.
11 Palamas, Gregory, P.G., CL, 1361 C, cited in Lossky, Mystical, 224.
12 Lossky, Mystical, 198.
13 Lossky, Mystical, 198.
14 Theosis and Sanctification, John Wesley’s reformulation of a Patristic Doctrine,
A. Ephrem and the Luminous Eye, from Wesley Centre Online : by Micheal J.Christensen, , accessed on 7/5/08 at http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/31-35/31-2-4.html
15 Christensen, Theosis and Sanctification.
16 Russell, Norman, Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, (New York: OUP, 2004), 107.
17 Migne, J.P (ed.), Patrologica Graeca, (Paris, 1857), 66, cited in Russell, Deification, 1
18 Russell, Deification, 11
19 Russell, Deification, 54
20 Philo, De Posteritate Cain, 27, cited in Russell, Deification, 61
21 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 124, cited in Russell, Deification, 108
22 Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses, 3.18, cited in Russell, Deification, 108
23 Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of all Heresies, cited in Russell, Deification, 111
24 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7. 101. 4, cited in Russell, Deification,126.
25 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2. 125. 5, cited in Russell,12.
26 Lossky, Mystical, 216.
27 Isaac of Syria, Isaac of Nineveh - On Ascetical Life (New York, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989)
28 Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, Buddhism and Christianity in Dialogue: The Gerald Weisfeld Lectures 2004, (London, SCM, 2005), 236.
29 Ware, Kallistos, The Orthodox Way, 168, cited in Christensen, Theosis and Sanctification.
30 Gregorii Nysseni, Opera, In Canticum Canticorum II, vi, 318. 9-10, cited in Ludlow, Morwenna, Universal Salvation, Eschatology in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner (Oxford, OUP, 2000), 17.
31 Ibid, cited in Ludlow, Universal, 51
32 Gregorii Nysseni, De Mortuis Oratio, 15. 64.27, cited in Ludlow, Universal, 51
33 Gregorii Nysseni, De Virginitate, SC 119, 412. 2-7, cited in Ludlow, Universal, 55
34 Gregorii Nysseni, De Hominis Opificio, v 16, 8, in H Wace H and Schaff P. eds, ‘A Series of Nicene and post Nicene Fathers’ vol. v, (Parker and Co., Oxford, 1893), cited in Ludlow, Universal, 46.
35 Augustine, Confessions Ch 3, 5, at Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed on 01/02/08 at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.x.html
36 Ibid, Ch 5, 7.
37 Ibid.
38 It is not clear which Platonist books Augustine is referring to, but they may be a reference to the Enneads by Plotinus: "The evil which overtakes us has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process and in the primal assertion of the desire for self-ownership" (V, 1:1) Marius Victorinus (q.v. infra, Bk. VIII, Ch. II, 3-5) had translated the Enneads into Latin. - Confessions Ch 9, Ethereal Library
39 Augustine, Confessions Ch 16, cited at Ethereal Library
40 Ibid Ch 10, 16, cited at Ethereal Library
41 Ibid Ch 11, 17, cited at Ethereal Library
42 Ibid Ch 12, cited at Ethereal Library
43 Augustine, City of God, Book 21, Ch 23, cited at Ethereal Library
44 Louth, Andrew, ‘Eastern Orthodox Theology’ in Jerry Walls ed., Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 245.
45 Ware, Kallistos: ‘Dare we hope for the universal salvation of all?’ in The Inner Kingdom, vol 1 of the Collected Works: (Crestwood, NY : St Vladimir’s Seminary press), 193 – 215, cited in Walls, Eschatology, 245
46 Sophrony Sakharov, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans., Edmonds, Rosemary (Essex, England: Stravropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1991) cited in Walls, Escahtology, 246
47 Daley, Brian E, The Hope of the Early Church, (Cambridge, CUP, 1991), 222.
48 Book of the Divine love, Homily LIV, I, Russian ed. of Mt.Athos, II, p. 11; Latin trans., P.G., CXX, 425, cited in Lossky, Mystical, 214.
49 Gregorii Nysseni, Opera, In Canticum Canticorum 15: 276; cited in Ludlow, Universal, 81
50 Gregorii Nysseni, In Canticum Canticorum 15: in Patrologiae: Series Graeca Prior, Migne, J.P. eds., 44 III6
51 Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration, 26, in Apokatastasis, accessed on 31 01 08 at http://www.apokatastasis.org/
52 Gregorii Nysseni, In Inscriptiones Psalmorum, Heine, 211 – 12 (2. 16. 282); cited in Ludlow, Universal, 80
53 De Mortuis Oratio, 60. 26-7, cited in Ludlow, Universal, 43,
54 Srawley, J.H, ed., Oratio Catechetica Magna: The Catechetcal Oration of Gregory of Nyssa, (Early Church Classics SPCK, London, 1917) cited in Ludlow, Universal, 85
55 Lossky, Mystcial, 215
56 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. Shaw, J.F, Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) cited in Franke, William, On What Cannot Be Said : Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy Religion, Literature and the Arts (Indiana, Notre Dame Press, 2007), 153.
57 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pt 1, qu. 12, art 13, ad I, cited in Cottingham, John, The Spiritual Dimension, (Cambridge, CUP, 2005), 159.
58 Thomae Aquinatis, Vitae Fontes Praecipuae, Ferrua, A. ed., (Alba : Edzioni Dominicane, 1968) cited in Franke, Apophatic, 251.
59 Allchin, A.M, The Kingdom of Love and Knowledge, the Encounter between Orthodoxy and the West, (London, DLT, 1979), 16.
60 Ibid
61 Ibid
62 Jenkins, David, Guide to the debate about God. (London : Lutterworth Press, 1966), 38-9, cited in Allchin, Kingdom, 17.
63 Orthodoxwiki : Isaac of Syria: accessed 10/06/08 at http://orthodoxwiki.org/Isaac_of_Syria
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