Bearing Weapons in Church

Q & A with Fr Job, installment VI:

Question: Is it canonically forbidden to bear weapons in church?

Answer: There is no canonical rule, but there is a tradition that was born back in the early Byzantine period. Not only soldiers, but even the Emperor, would remove any weapons before entering a church.

Gilead, Revisited

Two years ago I wrote the following:

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is by far the most profound and truly edifying piece of fiction I have read for a very, very long time. Robinson's novel, to my mind, is comparable in spiritual depth to anything written by Chekhov, Flannery O'Conner, or C. S. Lewis. It is also the first novel I have read whose hero is a genuinely good person (something that no less an author than Dostoevsky was unable to accomplish). While a novel of genuine religiosity, there is nothing sanctimonious, saccharine, or sentimental about it. It, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 -- which, given its explicitly Christian nature, really rather surprises me. The theology can be a bit Calvinist at times (the protagonist's main theological influences are Calvin and Barth, with Feurbach as his foil), but none of this distracts from the book's profundity. It is, in O'Conner's words, both unexpected and believable.

I have just completed my second reading of Gilead, and remain every bit as impressed and moved as I was upon my initial reading. This is just the sort of slow, meditative book that stands boldly opposed to the sort of instant fix we get on our screens, whether computer or television. To read it is to be reminded of what it is to remember, to contemplate, to pray. It is a book of unusual grace – both in the theological sense and in the aesthetic sense – and of Christian sensibility and charity. Its vision of the world is profoundly sacramental. At its heart is the story of forgiveness and blessing between generations. I can’t think of another novel to which I can compare its depth of thoughtfulness and reflection. It receives my highest recommendation.

Here are two passages I especially enjoyed, in both of which the Rev. John Ames, who is in his seventies, is addressing his son, who is seven. First:

Another morning, thank the Lord. A good night's sleep, and no real discomfort to speak of. A woman in my flock called just after breakfast and asked me to come to her house. She is elderly, recently a widow, all by herself, and she has just moved from her farm to a cottage in town. You can never know what troubles or fears such people have, and I went. It turned out that the problem was her kitchen sink. She told me, considerably amazed that a reversal so drastic could occur in a lawful universe, that hot water came from the cold faucet and cold water from the hot faucet. I suggested she might just decide to take C for hot and H for cold, but she said she liked things to work the way they were supposed to. So I went home and got my screw-driver and came back and switched the handles. She said she guessed that would do until she could get a real plumber. Oh, the clerical life! I think this lady has suspected me of a certain doctrinal sloughing off, and now will be sure of it. The story made your mother laugh, though, so my labors are repaid.

Second:

This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven – one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather's grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.

'Thou was in Eden, the garden of God; ever precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond.'

While I'm thinking of it – when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one's sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing – only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.

Amen!

When Does the Fast Begin?

Q & A with Fr Job, installment VI:

Question: The Church day begins at six o’clock on the evening. When should one begin to fast, for instance, for Wednesday: at six in the evening on Tuesday? And it ends when -- at six o’clock Wednesday? Or does it begin with the new 24-hour period at 0:00 Wednesday and end at 24:00 Wednesday?

Answer: The Church day begins in the evening. Not at six o’clock, but with the beginning of the assigned service of the daily cycle: Vespers. The New Testament Church took this from the ancient Jews, whose days lasted from the setting of the sun on the first day until the setting of the sun on the following day (c.f., Ex. 12:18; Lev. 23:32). The foundation for this was the account of the days of creation in the book of Genesis: And the evening and the morning were the first day (Gen 1:5). For the Greeks the boundary of the day was midnight. In distinction to the liturgical day, the fast begins and ends at midnight.

Making Up for Heaven's Losses

(This post is a repeat from last year, but I think it worth revisiting.)

St Gregory the Dialogist, in Homily 21 ("The Mystery of the Resurrection"), writes:

The women who came with spices saw the angel seated on the right side. What does the left side mean except this present life, and what does the right side mean except eternal life? Hence it is written: 'His left hand shall be under my head, and His right hand shall embrace me' [Song 2:6]. Since our Redeemer has already passed beyond the corruption of the present life, it was right that the angel who had come to proclaim His everlasting life should be seated on the right side.

The angel appeared in a white robe to proclaim the joy of our festive day, since the whiteness of the garment declared the splendor of the solemnity. Should I say our solemnity and the angel's? To speak truly I must say that it belongs to both. Our Redeemer's Resurrection was our festival day because it led us back to immortality, and also a festival day of the angels, because by recalling us to the things of heaven it completed their number. Therefore on our festival days, and theirs, an angel appeared in white garments, because our restoration to the things on high by the Lord's Resurrection makes up for the losses of the country of heaven.

Passages such as this remind me of just how richly imaginative (in the best sense of that word) and daring the writings of the Fathers so often are. Who would speak in such terms today? Even the best modern sermons seem awfully thin and tame in comparison.

Vegetarianism and the Church

Q & A with Fr Job, installment V.

Question: How does the Church relate to vegetarianism?

Answer: Vegetarianism is a teaching and movement which sees the fundamental way towards the resolution of moral and social problems in abstinence from animal products (from the Latin vegetalis -- vegetable). This is a false approach. It sows an illusion. The Lord calls people to salvation. There is one way to Him: the fulfillment of God’s commandments. In the words of the holy Apostle Paul: For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of men (Rom. 14:17-18). The Holy Fathers teach that authentic fasting means restraining from evil. The bodily fasts that our Church has laid down are not ends in themselves, but only means to obtaining the virtues. Experience demonstrates that not a few people who ate only vegetable products were still filled with the passions. Christian fasting, intended not only as physical restraint but as the guarding of the soul from sinful actions, leads man to purity and spiritual perfection.

Bloom on Dostoevsky

Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, has this to say regarding Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in his book How to Read and Why:

Absorbing as Crime and Punishment is, it cannot be absolved of tendentiousness, which is Dostoevsky's invariable flaw. He is a partisan, whose fierce perspective is always explicit in what he writes. His design upon us is to raise us, like Lazarus, from our own nihilism and skepticism, and then convert us to Orthodoxy. Writers as eminent as Chekhov and Nabokov have been unable to abide him; to them he was scarcely an artist, but a shrill would-be prophet. I myself, with each rereading, find Crime and Punishment an ordeal, dreadfully powerful but somewhat pernicious, almost as though it were Macbeth composed by Macbeth himself.

What I find most curious in this passage is that Professor Bloom singles out for his fundamental criticism of Dostoevsky -- whose greatness he recognizes -- the very thing that makes him most attractive to Orthodox readers. We applaud precisely his tendentiousness, his partisanship, his excoriation of nihilism and skepticism, and his desire to convert the reader to Orthodoxy. Reading Bloom is exhilarating in that in him we find an interlocutor with whom it is always instructive to disagree.

The Hagoritic Tome

What was St Gregory Palamas defending in "The Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defense of Those Who Devoutly Practice a Life of Stillness," otherwise known as the "Hagoritic Tome"? I will first briefly place the text in its historical context, then analyze its argument section by section, and conclude by offering some synthetic conclusions.

Although we will take the Declaration as our primary text and not consider the secondary literature, it will prove helpful to locate the text's historical context. St Gregory Palamas wrote the Declaration in 1340 during the latter stage of his dispute with Barlaam, though the Calabrian is nowhere mentioned by name. The issues raised in the Declaration should therefore be considered in the light of St Gregory Palamas' ongoing dispute with Barlaam, though it should be noted that there is no mention of their earlier disagreement concerning the use of apodictic reasoning as a theological method, as was raised in their exchange on the Latin teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit. Nor is there any mention of somatopsychic practice, though the role of the body in prayer is emphasized. It appears their earlier disputes over these issues were not of sufficient importance to necessitate a counciliar, doctrinal refutation. Rather, the Declaration focuses on the Hesychasts' claim of the reality of man's participation in God's uncreated, deifying energies.

The structure of the Declaration is as follows: first a Prologue in which the key issues are set forth; then a series of six statements, each condemning a doctrinal assertion while offering a positive teaching; then a statement by the Athonite monks declaring the uniformity of these teachings with Holy Tradition and explicitly supporting the work of Palamas; as series of signatures endorsing the test; and finally the signature of the local bishop, declaring a break in communion with those not in agreement with the Declaration. We will briefly analyze each of these sections.

The argument of the Prologue may be stated as follows: Just as the mysteries of the Mosaic law, later revealed to all through the Gospel, were known only by the Prophets, so too the mysteries of the Gospel, which will be revealed in the age to come, are now known by those to whom it has been disclosed prophetically. Those who have not been purified by virtue will regard the prophetically disclosed teaching of the Gospel as impious. As such, two "strata" of Christian doctrine could be said to exist: one consisting of those "which are openly proclaimed" and another consisting of those "which are mystically and prophetically revealed by the Spirit to such as are accounted worthy." The latter, prophetic doctrines have been revealed to those "who have been initiated by actual experience." Others may learn of these esoteric doctrines through their "reverence, faith and love' for those initiated saints. Citing Saints Dionysius and Makarios the Great, Palamas concludes by stating that the deifying, uncreated grace of God is manifested to the saints in an "ungenerated and completely real" light.

We see here that St Gregory Palamas presents the saints as prophets who have been initiated by experience into a mystical knowledge that would strike those who are not purified as impious and blasphemous. Although he leaves it to the reader to draw this conclusion, it follows that these contemporary prophets are his fellow Hesychasts, while Barlaam and those in agreement with him remain both unpurified and irreverent towards those who have been initiated by actual experience. Put rather crudely, the doctrine Palamas and the Hesychasts are defending is one that is known by all the saints and those who at least follow their experience faithfully, but rejected by those foreign to virtue.

In the first of six statement of faith, Palamas attacks anyone who "condemns as Messalians those who declare this deifying grace of God to be uncreated, ungenerated and completely real." Anyone who makes such a claim is "an adversary of the saints of God," and risks excluding himself from God. Those who trust the saints, even if they have not experienced the mystery, should "not refuse to enquire and learn from those who do possess knowledge." Here the central assertion is that the deifying grace of God is uncreated."

In the second statement, Palamas places in the ranks of the Messalians those who declare that "perfect union with God is accomplished simply and in an imitative and relative fashion, without the deifying grace of the Spirit," and say this grace is "not a supernatural illumination and an ineffable and divine energy behind invisibly and conceived inconceivably by those privileged to participate in it." Anyone who believes this is invited to "lay aside his presumption and learn from persons of experience or from their disciples" that this deifying grace is above nature, vision, and knowledge, as St Maximos taught. The central claim is that deification is by supranatural illumination, not by mere imitation.

Palamas, in the third statement, argues against the claim that "those who regard the intellect as seated in the heart or in the head" are Messalians. While Saints Athanasios, Makarios, and Gregory of Nyssa may have located the intellect variously, the Fathers "say that the intellect is in the body because it is united to it, and thus they state the same thing in a different fashion; in more modern terms, we might say there is no clear topography of the human person. The central affirmation of the section is that the intellect is embodied.

The fourth section asserts that one who maintains that the light of Tabor was an apparition, a passing symbol with no real being and inferior to comprehension, "clearly contends against the doctrines of the saints." The light has real being and surpasses comprehension. In Christ's Transfiguration He was seen in the glory tat is naturally His; He was Transfigured "by the manifestation to His disciples of what He really was." An analogy is made to the light of the sun, but with the warning that "this image is imperfect, since what is uncreated cannot be imaged in creation without some diminution."

In the fifth section, Palamas contends against those who "maintain that only God's essence is uncreated, while His eternal energies are not uncreated, and that as what energizes transcends all it activates, so God transcends all His energies." Palamas cites St Maximos to the effect that all "qualities that contemplative vision perceives as substantially appertaining to God, are realities of God which did not begin to be in time." Palamas, building on St Maximos, argues "there are some things issuing from God," meaning, I imagine, energies, "that are without beginning." The divine energies are uncreated and do not contradict God's "supraessential simplicity."

The sixth section is directed against those who do not "acknowledge that spiritual dispositions are stamped upon the body as a consequence of the gifts of the Spirit" abiding in the soul and also against those who regard dispassion as a "deathlike condition of the soul's passible aspect" rather than "a state of aspiration for higher things." Instead, the soul "communicates its joy to the body too, and this joy which then fills both soul and body is a true recalling of incorruptible life." Those saints who have acquired grace "see both with the sense of sight and with the intellect that surpasses both sense and intellect." The body participates in the deifying energies, and this is an eschatological foretaste of the resurrection of the body.

The final section, which appears to have been written by the signers, affirms that all the above has been taught by the Scriptures and the Fathers as well as confirmed by their "own small experience." Palamas' treatise is judged to be "fully consistent with the traditions of the saints" and the Athonite fathers adjoin their signatures "for the assurance of those who read this present document." Following the signatures, Bishop Iakovos of Hierissos and the Holy Mountain adds that they shall have no communion with anyone who is not in agreement with the saints and their immediate predecessors.

At the risk of oversimplification, we could summarize the argument as follows: The Hesychasts, exercising a prophetic role, have been initiated by experience into mysteries of God that may appear impious to those without such experience. This experience of deifying grace is communicated by means of a vision of divine light. This deifying grace is 1) is uncreated; 2) is brought about by supranatural illumination; 3) is experienced by an embodied intellect; 4) is manifest in a light that has real being and surpasses comprehension; 5) "issues" from God as energies having uncreated reality; 6) is participated in by the body as an eschatological foretaste.

We could therefore say that St Gregory Palamas is defending the reality of the revelation of the mysteries of the Spirit to those purified through virtue and deified by the uncreated energies or grace of God revealed in the vision of the uncreated light and participated in by both intellect and the senses and communicated to the body.

But the heart of the Declaration is not so much an abstract doctrinal assertion as it is a defense of the experience of the Hesychasts. Throughout the document we see that the true source and demonstration of the doctrinal assertions is the prophetic, mystical revelation that is actually experienced by mystical initiation. Those who have not had this experience should at least trust those who have. Those who object to the teachings of the Hesychasts lack proper reverence, have not been purified by virtue, and are stuck in ignorance. Like the Jews of old they will accuse the new prophets of blasphemy. Those Athonites who signed the Declaration were convinced of its truth not only from its conformity to Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers, but from their own experience as well.

We may then conclude that St Gregory Palamas, in the "Hagoritic Tome," is first and foremost defending the experience of the Hesychasts, for the specific theological claim that he is defending -- the reality of the deifying vision of the uncreated light by both body and intellect -- is experiential.

Without in any way meaning to question the authority or Orthodoxy of the Declaration, I would like nonetheless to point out certain problems of a critical nature. The first is the problematic nature of basing doctrinal assertions on personal experience. How can one verify the authenticity of experience? And how does one argue against the claims of the "initiated"? And may not the existence of two "strata" of Christian doctrine undermine the primary kerygma? Can there even be such a thing as "esoteric" Christian doctrine revealed prophetically and mystically only to the initiated? How does one in fact distinguish between openly proclaimed doctrine and prophetic doctrine?

I will cite one contemporary case as illustration. According to Fr Nicholas Sakharov, the late Archimandrite Sophrony of Essex criticized Lossky's use of the Dionysian image of divine darkness in these terms: "Fr Sophrony is reserved in using the term 'darkness' and disagrees with a literal interpretation of the term, on the basis of his own ascetic experience of the divine light: 'To talk about the 'divine' vision is entirely a figure of speech, for God is Light in whom there is no darkness at all. He always appears as light.' " How is one to argue with this? Both Lossky and Fr Sophrony make appropriate reference to the patristic sources, but the latter seeks to trump Lossky by citing his own experience. Is this legitimate theological discourse?

The second is the problematic nature of the appeal to Tradition. None of the patristic authorities that Palamas cites say quite what he represents them as saying. For instance, in the fifth section, Palamas takes St Maximos' statement that all that substantively appertains to God, such as goodness, are uncreated realities and then extends this claim to apply to the divine energies.

Yet we cannot expect a brief declaration of faith to respond to all these questions; its aim was not to articulate a comprehensive, systematic presentation of the theological vision of Hesychasm. But we do find a coherent defense of the Hesychasts' experience of God's uncreated and deifying grace.