By Walt Garlington
“Through this (theoria) a man is deified, not through reflecting on words or visible things, but taught by silence.”
— St. Gregory Palamas
Mr. Joseph Pearce gives a very good illustration of how the West has gone astray after leaving its first love, the Orthodox Church, for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. At the end of one of his essays he writes:
Unlike the possession of many things, which may prove perilous to the mind and the soul, the possession of more words only makes us richer. In short and in sum, the wealth that words bestow upon us is the power to better understand who we are and where we fit into the wider scheme of things: our purpose and our place in the cosmos.
To conclude on a metaphysical note, we can say that the beauty of words is that they give us access to the goodness of truth. In the beginning was the Word and words are the way that the Word can be better understood and communicated. It is for this reason that the learning of words should be at the heart of all true education.
Now, words are indeed wonderful things, and a Southerner has a great love for them as shown in the abundance of his songs, stories, etc. But there is a limit to the good they can bestow on us. In the end, it is not our words and concepts that reveal the highest Truth to us (the error of rationalism), but our abandoning them for a higher level of knowledge, that which is bestowed on us in the mystical union with God. This renunciation of words, images, etc., of the rational mind is what the Orthodox call apophaticism, and it is the path we must all walk if we want to know God as a Person and not as a theory. Metropolitan Bishop Kallistos Ware says in “The Orthodox Way” (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979/1995, pgs. 14, 15):
We do not simply proceed from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge, but we go forward from the light of partial knowledge into a greater knowledge which is so much more profound that it can only be described as the “darkness of unknowing.” Like Socrates we begin to realize how little we understand. We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. Quoting Psalm 8:1, “O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is thy name in all the earth”, St Gregory of Nyssa states: “God’s name is not known; it is wondered at.
Yet the “thick darkness” into which we enter with Moses turns out to be a luminous or dazzling darkness. The apophatic way of “unknowing” brings us not to emptiness but to fullness. Our negations are in reality super-affirmations. Destructive in outward form, the apophatic approach is affirmative in its final effects: it helps to reach out, beyond all statements positive or negative, beyond all language and thought, towards an immediate experience of the living God.
Bishop Kallistos a little later gives this important warning:
Faith in God, then, is not at all the same as the kind of logical certainty that we attain in Euclidean geometry. God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem. To believe in God is not to accept the possibility of his existence because it has been “proved” to us by some theoretical argument, but it is to put our trust in One whom we know and love. Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there (p. 16).
However, what the West has done after its abandonment of the Orthodox Faith of the Holy Apostles is precisely what the Metropolitan said not to do: Make man’s knowledge of God rest not his personal union with the All-Holy Trinity but rather on a process of rational reasoning; i.e., turn God into a theory to be proved. This is strikingly clear in Anselm, who was one of the early post-Schism, Roman Catholic archbishops of Canterbury installed after the papal/Norman conquest of England (1066), whose proof of God’s existence relied solely on man’s reasoning ability:
… On a fairly neutral or consensus reading of the argument (which I shall go on to reject), Anselm’s argument goes like this. God is “that than which a greater cannot be thought”; in other words, he is a being so great, so full of metaphysical oomph, that one cannot so much as conceive of a being who would be greater than God. The Psalmist, however, tells us that “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). Is it possible to convince the fool that he is wrong? It is. All we need is the characterization of God as “that than which a greater cannot be thought.” The fool does at least understand that definition. But whatever is understood exists in the understanding, just as the plan of a painting he has yet to execute already exists in the understanding of the painter.
So that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the understanding. But if it exists in the understanding, it must also exist in reality. For it is greater to exist in reality than to exist merely in the understanding. Therefore, if that than which a greater can be thought existed only in the understanding, it would be possible to think of something greater than it (namely, that same being existing in reality as well). It follows, then, that if that than which a greater cannot be thought existed only in the understanding, it would not be that than which a greater cannot be thought; and that, obviously, is a contradiction. So that than which a greater cannot be thought must exist in reality, not merely in the understanding.
The God-bearing Elder Sophrony Sakharov’s (+1993) critique of this kind of overly rationalistic speculation about God is devastating. Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos writes:
I believe that on the contrary, contemporary theology is conjectural, rationalistic. It is based on the “wealth” which is reason. What Archimandrite Sophrony says is characteristic: “One other kind of imagination about which we wish to speak, is the attempt of intelligence to penetrate the mystery of being and apprehend the Divine world. Such endeavours inevitably involve the imagination, to which many are inclined to give the high-flown label, divine inspiration. The ascetic, devoting himself to active inner silence and pure prayer, resolutely combats this “creative” impulse within himself because he sees in it a “processus” contrary to the true order of being, with man “creating” God in his own image and likeness” (47).
Archimandrite Sophrony also writes: “The theologian who is an intellectual [logician] constructs his system as an architect builds a palace or a church. Empirical and metaphysical concepts are the material he uses, and he is more concerned with the magnificence and logical symmetry of his ideal edifice than that it should conform to the actual order of things.
“Strange as it may seem, many great men have been unable to withstand this [rationalism], in effect, artless temptation, the hidden cause of which is pride. … One becomes attached to the fruits of one’s intelligence [rationalism] as a mother to her child. The intellectual [logician] loves his creation as himself, identifies with it, shuts himself up with it. When this happens no human intervention can help him – if he will not renounce what he believes to be riches, he will never attain to pure prayer and true theoria” (48).
Those in the South will see a similarity in this quotation with what their own kinsman Prof. Richard Weaver warned against in “Visions of Order,” i.e., giving too much deference to form over substance.
As we said above, words have an important part to play in the life of man, both within the Church and outside of her, whether it is the decrees and canons of the Ecumenical Councils or great literature for our neighbors or etc. However, when Christianity degenerates to the level that it has in the West (as typified by the jumbled mental gymnastics of the quote preceding on Anselm), when union with God is no longer the goal of the Christian life but merely the satisfaction of the Father’s wrath; when words, the discursive reason, or the imagination are seen as the ultimate revealers of reality, then one ends up with mountains of bone-dry tomes from people like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin that repel people from the Church and lead them into agnosticism and atheism. Or, seeking something to replace this deadness, they turn to howling mad, deluded, self-harming “saints” like Margaret Mary Alacoque (on the Roman Catholic side) or to snake-handling, tongue-babbling Pentecostals (on the Protestant side), which likewise repels those seeking healing for the disordered passions of body and soul.
Within the Orthodox Church, however, where union with the Grace/Light/Energies of God is taught by the Apostles themselves (St. John’s Gospel, ch. 17; St. Peter’s 2nd Letter, ch. 1), and by their successors, from St. Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century) to St. Macarius the Great of Egypt (4th cent.); from St. Gregory the Great of Rome (6th-7th cent.) to St. John of Damascus (8th cent.) to St. Symeon the New Theologian (10th-11th cent.); to St. Gregory Palamas (14th cent.) to St. Seraphim of Sarov (19th cent.); to saints of our own day like Elder Joseph the Hesychast (+1959) and Elder Ephraim of Katounakia (+1998) – one sees a steady, unbroken line of saints bearing the same character of kindness, balance, and wholeness, whether in the saints we have just named or in others, like Sts. Martin of Tours, Brigid of Kildare, Keiran of Saighir, or Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, to name a few from the Orthodox West before the Schism. As someone we cannot recall wrote recently, the existence of God is proved much better by the action of His Grace in His saints than by the reasoning of man.
Another Orthodox saint of the West, St. Emilian of Rome, shows what is possible for the West if she would repent of her separation from the Orthodox Church:
Saint Emilian of Italy (in the world Victorinus) was a Roman by birth, and until he was an old man, he led a sinful life. He finally repented, withdrew to a monastery, and became a monk with the name of Emilian. For the remainder of his days he humbly served God, astounding the brethren by his uncomplaining obedience and strict fasting. The monks noticed that at night Emilian secretly visited a cave near the monastery. Once, the igumen followed him and found Saint Emilian in the cave, praying with tears of contrition, and illumined by an unearthly light. He heard a Voice saying, “Emilian, your sins are forgiven.”
Deeply moved by all that had happened, the igumen after morning services asked the Elder to tell the brethren his secret, and the saint told everyone of God’s great mercy toward him. Then the igumen said to the brethren, “The Lord could have forgiven him his sin in secret, but for our sake He revealed His mercy with light and a voice, so that we might behold His grace and mercy toward sinners who repent.” Saint Emilian spent the remainder of his days in spiritual joy, and peacefully departed to the Lord.
The South, and all the Western folk, if they “pray with tears of contrition” will also be “illumined by an unearthly light” (i.e., God’s Uncreated Grace) and hear the words “Your sins are forgiven.” There will always be plenty of room in the Orthodox Church for them, if they will only leave their pride and walk across the threshold.
Until then, even the architecture of post-Schism Western churches, with their high vaulted ceilings inside and their pointed roof steeples outside, proclaim the absence of God from their lands, replaced instead with only a cold emptiness and pointing to the heavens where they have exiled Him.
For the South, therefore, what is crucially needed is not more Hillbilly Thomists, but instead something quite different, Hillbilly Hesychasts, which is an all-together more natural pairing than the former.
For further reading:
• Celtic Christian Spirituality
• Hesychia: Our Method of True Healing
• British and Celtic Orthodoxy
• Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life
• Desire, Stillness, and the First Murder
• How Simple Peasants Became God-Seers
• Differences Between Catholicism and Orthodoxy
• Differences Between Protestantism and Orthodoxy
One final disclaimer: None of this is written to be ugly to Roman Catholics and Protestants. Many of our family, teachers, friends, etc., are amongst their number. It is only meant to be a lament for and a warning against the dire effects that follow upon the adoption of those religious systems. Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Originally published March 12, 2021, at Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. Feature image thanks to Appalachian Orthodox.
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
