The one who takes upon himself
the humiliation of the people
is fit to rule them;
the one who takes upon himself
the country’s disasters
deserves to be king of the universe.
The truth often sounds paradoxical.
Tao te Ching #78
The spiritual life is full of paradoxes and seeming contradictions. For example, the Hindus teach that even though God pierced the senses to look outward, the wise look inward, and it is there that they see the deathless Spirit. My favorite example of paradox is the Tao te Ching, that ancient Chinese book of wisdom. It teaches things like (#63): Practice non-action; work without doing; taste the tasteless … reward bitterness with care. The demands of the Gospel are just as paradoxical, too; as I like to say, they are like swimming upstream: love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you; give to those who cannot pay you back––things like that. Everything about Jesus’ royalty is as paradoxical as the Tao te Ching. (By the way, the Tao te Ching was written as a kind of instruction book for rulers, so very a propos to quote it in this context.) The Tao says, Great straightness seems twisted; great intelligence seems stupid; great eloquence seems awkward. Jesus says, The greatest among you is the one who serves, the one who lays down his life as ransom.
Some time ago I heard someone on the radio offering a commentary on the era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, making comparisons to our own day and age. There was a lot of talk in that era about a “muscular Christianity,” and that the reason we were involved in certain military conflicts in the world was to “Christianize” those parts of the world with our muscular Christianity. It was a disaster in that time for complicated reasons. But the very term “muscular Christianity” made me wince a little, when I see it against the context of the Gospel portrait of Jesus. Jesus categorically rejected violence as a means of accomplishing anything for the kingdom of God. Peter writes that (1Pet. 2:23), When Jesus was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; and Paul says (1 Cor 1:25), God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. What Jesus ultimately conquered was death itself, and everything that leads to death, and all forms of death, and any form of violence or anger or retribution or vengeance or retaliation or exclusion that leads to death. Death, he said, has nothing to do with God––this is a God of the living!
When we get some kind of image that we can really hold on to, we hold on with all our might! Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, another one of those feasts we can really grab on to. After all the demands of the Gospel, all the paradoxes and non-sequiturs, after all the fuzziness of mystical theology, we can finally breathe a sigh of relief: now here is a God we can understand: Christ the King! It conjures up images for us of a “muscular Christianity.” Even for we Americans who have not been raised with royal blood lines, we still can conjure up images, like the Kennedy family or the Bush family, or rock stars, movie stars, sports figures. Jesus Christ Superstar! I think right away of the great churches in Europe, either the huge frescoes on the ceilings of basilicas, or the mosaics in the apses of the churches that were influenced by Byzantine Christianity––huge Christ figures, holding banners, flanked by angels and people falling to the ground overcome by his majesty and power, trumpets and timpani.
This could be kind of a muscular feast, Christ the King. Do not be fooled by it; let’s not think like the world. Let’s not be seduced into any kind of triumphalism. This feast may help us conjure up an image of a sleek and strong Jesus, which gives us a certain comfort. But Jesus is not sleek and strong in the Gospel we heard today. Jesus is the suffering servant hanging on a cross. Behold your king, the soldiers jeer. Behold your king comes, John’s Gospel quotes the prophet Zechariah when it tells the story of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem quoted on Palm Sunday, riding on a donkey. Behold your king, Pilate says to the Jews, beaten and crowned with thorns and a mock purple cloak. Only the criminal, the scum of the earth, recognizes that this is actually where the real power is.
Jesus was put to death not because he was a rival superpower; he was put to death by the political super-power because he chose to be powerless. Jesus wasn’t put to death because he was upholding some kind of an objective code of moral or ritual behavior. He was put to death because he refused to condemn sinners, because he chose mercy over sacrifice; Jesus was put to death because he said, Be merciful, as your Father is merciful. Jesus was put to death because he said, Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. “The world,” the “rulers of this age” couldn’t and can’t stand to hear that, just as we can't stand to hear it when we think in the way of the world.
For me, just like talk about snow and winter and sleigh bells can totally distract us from the real meaning of Christmas, I think all those images of Christ as King can distract us from how Jesus is the King of the Universe. In contrast to those images of royalty, blue blood and superstardom, let’s remind ourselves again of the images of how Jesus was and is a king. He was born in a barn (that used to be the way my mother scolded me when I acted rudely in the house, “What were you born in a barn?”); no wife or family; he seemed to have been a wandering beggar, at least a mendicant preacher. But these teachings, those are what really give us insight into the kind of king Jesus was, those same paradoxical teachings we mentioned above, but add to that things like, “The greatest among you must be the ones who serve,” which we hear over and over again in the Gospels, especially in the Gospel of Mark, because the disciples just couldn’t get it. Jesus had to keep telling them over and over again (and so he tells us!), “Whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all.” We imagine a king having servants and slaves and everything he wishes for and yet Jesus says of himself, “I have come not to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many”; what kind of king is that? Then in the passion narratives––some kind of king!––at the last supper he takes off a cloak and wraps a towel around himself and washes his disciples’ feet. Some kind of king! What a disappointment! And it was therefore that God raised him on high and gave him the name above all other names. And then of course the greatest image right around the passion itself. The whole thing was a sarcastic mockery: the purple cloak, the crown made out of thorns, the sign over his head on the cross proclaiming him king, and offering no resistance as the thief next to him notes sarcastically. This is what the church would have us remember today, why she asks us to read this Gospel––because this is the kind of king Jesus not just was but is. Because, to follow up on that, when he comes back from the dead, if that were one of us, the first temptation would be to climb to the top of that parapet and say “Who’s king of the mountain now?” and reek a little revenge. But no, he comes back without revenge, without anger and says, “Peace.”
This is where Jesus is really a Taoist master: #78 says, The one who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people is fit to rule them; the one who takes upon himself the country’s disasters deserves to be king of the universe. The truth often sounds paradoxical. Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians which we just heard, In him all the fullness was pleased to dwell. This is a marvelous word in Greek, pleroma, the fullness of divinity. But the only way to access that fullness, this source of the universe with which Jesus was filled, was emptiness, utter poverty. And it is because of that emptiness, poverty, total availability to the Spirit in thought word and action, and acceptance of the whole of the human condition, with its joys and griefs and pain and death shames and disasters, without offering any resistance to it, that Jesus was the king of the universe. That’s the kind of king Jesus is.
Ilia Delio in her book “The Humility of God” like no one else has pointed out to me not only how Jesus shows us what God is like (as Jesus says to Phillip in the Gospel of John, “If you have seen me you have seen the Father!”), but specifically what Jesus is witnessing to us is the humility of God, God’s choice to be powerless among us. When we look at Christ crucified we are learning something about God the Father as well. Ilia writes that “God is most God-like in the suffering of the cross.” What is shown to us in the cross is that the power of God is the “powerlessness of God’s unconditional love.” This is a love that “cannot be overcome by human power” and cannot “be conquered by human force.” God’s unconditional love, as shown to us in the weakness and powerlessness of the cross, is the power to heal and, beyond that, the power to transform death into life. (Delio, p. 96) And then she quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing before he was martyred about how the humility of God is such that he even allows “himself be pushed out of the world on the cross.” God on the cross “is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which [God] is with us and helps us.” The Scriptures point us precisely to God’s powerlessness and suffering, because God can only help the suffering.
At the end of the church year, we fix our minds on the last things, and we start to look forward to how Jesus will come again. Let’s not waste too much time staring in the sky waiting for a sleek and strong Jesus to come riding in his Hummer; more important is to do what Jesus has said to do now, and to realize that Christ is here now as he said, not in any sort of muscular way, not in the sleek and the strong. God, in Jesus, is still here among us, not beating anybody up, but rather seeking out the lost, bringing back the strayed, binding up the injured, healing the sick. Christ is here, as he himself says, in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the stranger, in the naked, the sick and the prisoner. Jesus is here whenever the fruits of the spirit are being manifested: wherever there is charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, modesty evidenced in our relations with the world. Mother Teresa to me is a better example of muscular Christianity, gnarled up toes from walking the streets of Calcutta, beat up fingers from spending her days wiping filth and excrement from the filthy bodies of people dying in the streets, and calloused knees from hours of prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament; and, as we have come to find out, going on despite years of spiritual darkness. That’s muscular Christianity, and those are the same muscles we should be developing. And the muscle of our brain, our mind, letting it be transformed by the Gospel. This is how we are meant to triumph.
Let’s remember that this feast is also about us: our Baptism anoints us to be prophets, priests and kings (and queens) in Jesus’ image. Do you remember the famous hymn of Lucien Deiss (of happy memory) that was sung so often some years back that was taken from the first letter of Peter? “Priestly, people, kingly people, holy people!” I love to remind people of this when we celebrate Baptisms that at our Baptism we were anointed along with Jesus, prophets, priests and royalty, that we use the sacred chrism on the infant, the same oil that is used to anoint prophets, the same oil that is poured over a priests hands when he is ordained, the same oil that is poured over a queen or king’s head when they are anointed (as we heard in the story of David’s anointing from the book of Samuel). Just as we share in the prophecy and priesthood of Jesus by virtue of our Baptism, so we share in his royalty. That’s why the church has us listen to St Paul letter to the Colossians on this feast also, to remind us that this feast is not just about Jesus: we give thanks because God has made us fit to share in the inheritance of the holy ones in light, and transferred us into the kingdom of Jesus. Paul says that the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Jesus bodily, and the Gospel of John begins by telling us that from the fullness we have all received, grace upon grace (Jn 1:16). So let us pray that we too would be royalty as Jesus was a king––broken and poured out––so that we can exercise our dominion in the world in the way our king does, from the cross, the greatest as the servants, with the towel around our waist washing each other’s feet.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
SANGHA TALK: desert monasticism 3: origen
ORIGEN
We skip back in history a little bit to talk about Origen, before we go to Evagrius, because he is going to be foundational for Evagrius, as well as John Cassian.
• (c. 185-c. 254) born in Alexandria, Egypt;
• his father was martyred during persecutions in 202, and he was only prevented from running after martyrdom himself by some kind of ruse by his mother
• received a great Greek education and became the head of Catechetical school in Alexandria
• even though he wasn’t a monk he lived a strict ascetical life of fasting, vigils and voluntary poverty––according to history even mutilated himself at one point: “If your eye causes you to sin…”
• he was imprisoned and subjected to prolonged torture under the persecution of Decius and eventually died in prison.
The charge has been made that Christian mystical theology is nothing but baptized Platonism, but it is with Origen that we begin to discuss specifically Christian mystical theology.
• He is definitely a student of Plato himself––he had the same teacher as the great neo-Platonist Plotinus––but what’s important is that Origen studies Plato as a Christian.
• Other great thinkers of the era such as Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria converted from philosophy to Christianity, but Origen comes at Platonism as a Christian.
• For most of the writers of this era, what we call the Patristic era, the mystical life is nothing other than “the ultimate flowering of the life of baptism,” the ultimate fruition of our sharing in Jesus’ death and risen life by virtue of having been baptized in water and the Holy Spirit.
• The same holds true for Origen: the mystical life is simply the working out of Christ’s union with the soul that has already happened with Baptism, the realizing of the communion between God and the soul that is already there, a dialogue between Christ and the soul. And Origen expresses this in language drawn from the great philosopher Plato.
But let’s state right up front: though highly influential Origen is condemned for a few things, and this is why, even in spite of being martyred, he has never been declared a saint:
• He believed in the pre-existence of souls and so was accused of metempsychosis––transmigration of souls, or re-incarnation!
• Denial of identity between the mortal body and the resurrected body
• Accused of interpreting Scripture only allegorically
• He also has a theory that was picked up later by Hans Ur van Balthasar called Apocatastasis: that death does not decide the ultimate fate of the soul (again similar to re-incarnation) but in the end all creatures, even the Devil, will be saved. This of course is what Holy Saturday and Jesus’ descent into hell is all about.
• This condemnation and suspicion will have a lasting effect. Evagrius is a student of his thought, and so was held in suspicion; and John Cassian is a follower of Evagrius and the desert tradition, and he too will never be canonized, though all three of them will have great impact on Christian mystical theology, and none so much as Origen himself.
the three stages
This is a favorite model of mine when speaking of the spiritual life. It will receive its most eloquent aritculation many centuries later from St John of the Cross. But here is Origen's version of it:
In the prologue of his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen had written about how the philosophers (that is, the Greeks, Stoics and Middle Platonists) had taught of a three-fold ascent of the soul to union with the Divine.
• The first stage is ethike, as in the word “ethics,” which deals with the manner of life and the habits of virtue;
• then comes the stage of physike, like the word “physics,” which deals with the inner nature of things, their essential form;
• and finally comes enoptike, a very strange word to us, translated sometimes as “inspective” but roughly meaning the same as metaphysics.
o As Origen writes enoptike is “that by which we go beyond things seen and contemplate somewhat of the things divine and heavenly, beholding them with the mind alone, for they are beyond the range of bodily sight.”
o I hope that last bit sounds familiar because we are again in the area of the apophatic––those things which are beyond the range of bodily sight.
Origen is deeply rooted in the Scriptures; for him the encounter with the Divine comes through an encounter with the Word.
• He is concerned with the soul being one with the Word, who we know to have been made flesh in Jesus.
• Origen first proposes the three levels of meaning of Scripture: literal, moral and allegorical (of which he preferred the last which got him in trouble); later in the tradition of lectio divina this developes into the four levels of meaning of Scripture: literal, allegorical, moral (tropological) and unitive (anagogical)
• Origen finds this same pathway, the three stages of the soul’s ascent, in the Scriptures. He uses three Wisdom books as examples: the Book of Proverbs, he says, deals with ethics; physics is dealt with in Ecclesiastes, and finally, of course, enoptics, the contemplation of God, is what the Song of Songs is all about. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs he writes
"The soul is not made one with the Word of God and joined with Him until such a time as all the winter of her personal disorders and the storm of her vices has passed so that she no longer vacillates and is carried about with every kind of doctrine … Then also she will hear ‘the voice of the turtle dove’, which surely denotes that wisdom which the steward of the Word speaks among the perfect, the deep wisdom of God which is hidden in mystery. "
Origen also insists on the idea of a progression through these stages, that they are successive, and even writes about Jesus going through them. Let’s talk a little about each of stage.
The first stage of the soul’s ascent, ethics, is the formation of virtues, which is actually pretty obvious, but we will deal with it more a little later.
• By the time it reaches St John of the Cross, this stage will be known as the purgative stage. (release!, yamas)
• The second, physics, is the stage of “natural contemplation,” a seeing into the true nature of things. We know it best as the illuminative stage (receive). This is two-fold, negative and positive.
o On the positive side, Origen teaches that the only way we can know anything of divine reality is through some image, some hint found in created things. God has placed in all creatures some teaching and some knowledge of invisible and heavenly things through which the soul can climb to spiritual understanding. We will see this come to full fruition in Francis of Assisi for whom everything in creation is a sign of the wonder and love of God. This is natural contemplation, in which the wisdom of earth leads us to seek the source of those things.
o On the negative side, at some point in life we also realize the transience and futility of all created things. Perhaps this is why Origen chose Ecclesiastes as emblematic of this second stage, because it begins:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities!
All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
All things are wearisome; more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Like Plato, Origen thinks that the aim of these first two ways is to subdue the body to the soul, to order the body through the mind. So far, there is no problem, but as we move on we run into trouble area.
• After the body is subdued to the soul, we are then to “free the soul from the body.” And so the final stage, enoptike, what St John of the Cross will call the unitive stage, is mainly something the soul looks forward to after death, when the soul becomes nous and is free to contemplate invisible reality.
• Now perhaps you can see the impetus behind him mutilating himself, and the trouble with his thinking that the mortal body and the resurrected body have nothing to do with each other. Christianity is about the redemption of the body, the flesh and all creation!
• We have to be very careful with this language about “freeing the soul from the body”! This is Platonic language, not biblical language! In here is hidden an easy tendency to see the body as a “tomb for the soul” as Plato did instead of a temple of the Holy Spirit as Jesus did. It is easy to see the body as an anchor weighing down the soul instead of an instrument of salvation.
• Here is where we really need to Christianize our language, and to root everything in the Incarnation of Jesus: the flesh is not bad! Otherwise the Word never would have paid it the great compliment of taking it! Let’s remember that Christianity is based on the fact that Jesus came back from the dead with a glorified body––it was the body that was raised from the dead, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father.
• In our efforts to de-mythologize these events in the life of Jesus in our modern era––just like Origen’s tendency to prefer only the allegorical meaning of Scripture––we might be at risk of throwing out the whole point of the Incarnation!
Let’s balance this out and maybe apply a corrective to the imbalance of Origen.
I have been very struck lately by the language that my confrere Bruno Barnhart has been using especially in his book, The Future of Wisdom. He suggest that the language of “ascent,” which we are using here in the soul’s ascent to God, must be complemented by the language of “descent.
• This is also the move from Baptism to Eucharist: perhaps the experience non-duality with the Divine being a good descriptor of the baptismal experience, but then we move to be broken up for and passed out to the world in world and service, and incarnating that union with the divine in our lives.
• To balance this teaching let’s remember that the ascent is only the first part of it, the foundation, the beginning and not the end.
• The movement then gets set up in the spiritual life of Baptism–Eucharist, breathing in-breathing out, knowledge of our identity becomes power in us, power to co-create and to participate.
• There is a common tendency in all spiritual traditions to become removed from the body, from matter, from the earth, but this is a salient feature of the Judeo-Christian tradition (in spite of the early monks’ neo-Platonist tendencies): that we are concerned with incarnating the incarnation.
Some notes from Bruno to end:
The working out of the Christ event takes place at an incarnation depth beyond the level of our consciousness and thought.
• The marriage of East and West ultimately is to be found in the event of the Incarnation through which the human person awakens to the non-dual divine light as one’s own identity
• and consequently to the divine power within oneself as one’s own generative freedom, the capability of creating a human world. (FW, p. 143)
• In the course of history this wisdom (participatory consciousness) has been eclipsed by human rationality.
What comes from this is a certain marvelous freedom or autonomy and with it the related sense of a distinct identity, of a personal self based on these two things––the non-dual divine light as my own identity and the generative freedom that divine power gives me.
• That freedom-autonomy, that sense of distinct identity, with its concomitant energy, become the pivotal transitional point on the way from Christianity to the modern secular West (FW, p. 122)
• of course that is what disappears in the reditus of the eastern contemplative enstasy, samadhi, absorption, in the soul’s interior ascent to God of the Greeks, of the rishis, of the Buddhists, of the Taoist hermits.
• But if instead of seeing it as the peak of the mountain we see it as the fountain of life-giving water, the summit becoming the source, then our exitus, our going out of ourselves in participation the eucharistic movement can truly lead to ecstasy, and the summit becomes again the source.
• This could be specifically Christianity’s contribution to the conversation, because Christ’s basic gift to humanity is this autonomy and freedom based on the knowledge of Being.
We skip back in history a little bit to talk about Origen, before we go to Evagrius, because he is going to be foundational for Evagrius, as well as John Cassian.
• (c. 185-c. 254) born in Alexandria, Egypt;
• his father was martyred during persecutions in 202, and he was only prevented from running after martyrdom himself by some kind of ruse by his mother
• received a great Greek education and became the head of Catechetical school in Alexandria
• even though he wasn’t a monk he lived a strict ascetical life of fasting, vigils and voluntary poverty––according to history even mutilated himself at one point: “If your eye causes you to sin…”
• he was imprisoned and subjected to prolonged torture under the persecution of Decius and eventually died in prison.
The charge has been made that Christian mystical theology is nothing but baptized Platonism, but it is with Origen that we begin to discuss specifically Christian mystical theology.
• He is definitely a student of Plato himself––he had the same teacher as the great neo-Platonist Plotinus––but what’s important is that Origen studies Plato as a Christian.
• Other great thinkers of the era such as Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria converted from philosophy to Christianity, but Origen comes at Platonism as a Christian.
• For most of the writers of this era, what we call the Patristic era, the mystical life is nothing other than “the ultimate flowering of the life of baptism,” the ultimate fruition of our sharing in Jesus’ death and risen life by virtue of having been baptized in water and the Holy Spirit.
• The same holds true for Origen: the mystical life is simply the working out of Christ’s union with the soul that has already happened with Baptism, the realizing of the communion between God and the soul that is already there, a dialogue between Christ and the soul. And Origen expresses this in language drawn from the great philosopher Plato.
But let’s state right up front: though highly influential Origen is condemned for a few things, and this is why, even in spite of being martyred, he has never been declared a saint:
• He believed in the pre-existence of souls and so was accused of metempsychosis––transmigration of souls, or re-incarnation!
• Denial of identity between the mortal body and the resurrected body
• Accused of interpreting Scripture only allegorically
• He also has a theory that was picked up later by Hans Ur van Balthasar called Apocatastasis: that death does not decide the ultimate fate of the soul (again similar to re-incarnation) but in the end all creatures, even the Devil, will be saved. This of course is what Holy Saturday and Jesus’ descent into hell is all about.
• This condemnation and suspicion will have a lasting effect. Evagrius is a student of his thought, and so was held in suspicion; and John Cassian is a follower of Evagrius and the desert tradition, and he too will never be canonized, though all three of them will have great impact on Christian mystical theology, and none so much as Origen himself.
the three stages
This is a favorite model of mine when speaking of the spiritual life. It will receive its most eloquent aritculation many centuries later from St John of the Cross. But here is Origen's version of it:
In the prologue of his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen had written about how the philosophers (that is, the Greeks, Stoics and Middle Platonists) had taught of a three-fold ascent of the soul to union with the Divine.
• The first stage is ethike, as in the word “ethics,” which deals with the manner of life and the habits of virtue;
• then comes the stage of physike, like the word “physics,” which deals with the inner nature of things, their essential form;
• and finally comes enoptike, a very strange word to us, translated sometimes as “inspective” but roughly meaning the same as metaphysics.
o As Origen writes enoptike is “that by which we go beyond things seen and contemplate somewhat of the things divine and heavenly, beholding them with the mind alone, for they are beyond the range of bodily sight.”
o I hope that last bit sounds familiar because we are again in the area of the apophatic––those things which are beyond the range of bodily sight.
Origen is deeply rooted in the Scriptures; for him the encounter with the Divine comes through an encounter with the Word.
• He is concerned with the soul being one with the Word, who we know to have been made flesh in Jesus.
• Origen first proposes the three levels of meaning of Scripture: literal, moral and allegorical (of which he preferred the last which got him in trouble); later in the tradition of lectio divina this developes into the four levels of meaning of Scripture: literal, allegorical, moral (tropological) and unitive (anagogical)
• Origen finds this same pathway, the three stages of the soul’s ascent, in the Scriptures. He uses three Wisdom books as examples: the Book of Proverbs, he says, deals with ethics; physics is dealt with in Ecclesiastes, and finally, of course, enoptics, the contemplation of God, is what the Song of Songs is all about. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs he writes
"The soul is not made one with the Word of God and joined with Him until such a time as all the winter of her personal disorders and the storm of her vices has passed so that she no longer vacillates and is carried about with every kind of doctrine … Then also she will hear ‘the voice of the turtle dove’, which surely denotes that wisdom which the steward of the Word speaks among the perfect, the deep wisdom of God which is hidden in mystery. "
Origen also insists on the idea of a progression through these stages, that they are successive, and even writes about Jesus going through them. Let’s talk a little about each of stage.
The first stage of the soul’s ascent, ethics, is the formation of virtues, which is actually pretty obvious, but we will deal with it more a little later.
• By the time it reaches St John of the Cross, this stage will be known as the purgative stage. (release!, yamas)
• The second, physics, is the stage of “natural contemplation,” a seeing into the true nature of things. We know it best as the illuminative stage (receive). This is two-fold, negative and positive.
o On the positive side, Origen teaches that the only way we can know anything of divine reality is through some image, some hint found in created things. God has placed in all creatures some teaching and some knowledge of invisible and heavenly things through which the soul can climb to spiritual understanding. We will see this come to full fruition in Francis of Assisi for whom everything in creation is a sign of the wonder and love of God. This is natural contemplation, in which the wisdom of earth leads us to seek the source of those things.
o On the negative side, at some point in life we also realize the transience and futility of all created things. Perhaps this is why Origen chose Ecclesiastes as emblematic of this second stage, because it begins:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities!
All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
All things are wearisome; more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Like Plato, Origen thinks that the aim of these first two ways is to subdue the body to the soul, to order the body through the mind. So far, there is no problem, but as we move on we run into trouble area.
• After the body is subdued to the soul, we are then to “free the soul from the body.” And so the final stage, enoptike, what St John of the Cross will call the unitive stage, is mainly something the soul looks forward to after death, when the soul becomes nous and is free to contemplate invisible reality.
• Now perhaps you can see the impetus behind him mutilating himself, and the trouble with his thinking that the mortal body and the resurrected body have nothing to do with each other. Christianity is about the redemption of the body, the flesh and all creation!
• We have to be very careful with this language about “freeing the soul from the body”! This is Platonic language, not biblical language! In here is hidden an easy tendency to see the body as a “tomb for the soul” as Plato did instead of a temple of the Holy Spirit as Jesus did. It is easy to see the body as an anchor weighing down the soul instead of an instrument of salvation.
• Here is where we really need to Christianize our language, and to root everything in the Incarnation of Jesus: the flesh is not bad! Otherwise the Word never would have paid it the great compliment of taking it! Let’s remember that Christianity is based on the fact that Jesus came back from the dead with a glorified body––it was the body that was raised from the dead, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father.
• In our efforts to de-mythologize these events in the life of Jesus in our modern era––just like Origen’s tendency to prefer only the allegorical meaning of Scripture––we might be at risk of throwing out the whole point of the Incarnation!
Let’s balance this out and maybe apply a corrective to the imbalance of Origen.
I have been very struck lately by the language that my confrere Bruno Barnhart has been using especially in his book, The Future of Wisdom. He suggest that the language of “ascent,” which we are using here in the soul’s ascent to God, must be complemented by the language of “descent.
• This is also the move from Baptism to Eucharist: perhaps the experience non-duality with the Divine being a good descriptor of the baptismal experience, but then we move to be broken up for and passed out to the world in world and service, and incarnating that union with the divine in our lives.
• To balance this teaching let’s remember that the ascent is only the first part of it, the foundation, the beginning and not the end.
• The movement then gets set up in the spiritual life of Baptism–Eucharist, breathing in-breathing out, knowledge of our identity becomes power in us, power to co-create and to participate.
• There is a common tendency in all spiritual traditions to become removed from the body, from matter, from the earth, but this is a salient feature of the Judeo-Christian tradition (in spite of the early monks’ neo-Platonist tendencies): that we are concerned with incarnating the incarnation.
Some notes from Bruno to end:
The working out of the Christ event takes place at an incarnation depth beyond the level of our consciousness and thought.
• The marriage of East and West ultimately is to be found in the event of the Incarnation through which the human person awakens to the non-dual divine light as one’s own identity
• and consequently to the divine power within oneself as one’s own generative freedom, the capability of creating a human world. (FW, p. 143)
• In the course of history this wisdom (participatory consciousness) has been eclipsed by human rationality.
What comes from this is a certain marvelous freedom or autonomy and with it the related sense of a distinct identity, of a personal self based on these two things––the non-dual divine light as my own identity and the generative freedom that divine power gives me.
• That freedom-autonomy, that sense of distinct identity, with its concomitant energy, become the pivotal transitional point on the way from Christianity to the modern secular West (FW, p. 122)
• of course that is what disappears in the reditus of the eastern contemplative enstasy, samadhi, absorption, in the soul’s interior ascent to God of the Greeks, of the rishis, of the Buddhists, of the Taoist hermits.
• But if instead of seeing it as the peak of the mountain we see it as the fountain of life-giving water, the summit becoming the source, then our exitus, our going out of ourselves in participation the eucharistic movement can truly lead to ecstasy, and the summit becomes again the source.
• This could be specifically Christianity’s contribution to the conversation, because Christ’s basic gift to humanity is this autonomy and freedom based on the knowledge of Being.
the good gets better
(Reflections on Malachi 3:19-20 & Luke 21:5-19)
Here on earth we suffer…
the attacks of monsters, owls and savage beasts.
But terrible though these attacks are,
behind them God is acting
and giving us something of the divine
which will give us the brilliance of the sun,
for here below both body and soul
are refined and fashioned like gold and iron, linen and gems.
Like these things,
our soul and body will not attain their full beauty
until they have been trimmed and shaped
and changed from their original form.
All they have endured in this life at the hand of God
––and he is love itself––
is meant only to prepare us for eternal bliss.
The truly faithful soul,
well versed in the secrets of God,
lives in peace, and,
instead of being frightened by what happens to it,
is comforted, for it is quite certain that God is guiding it.
It accepts all things as a manifestation of God’s grace,
ignores itself and thinks only of what God is doing.
Love inspires it to perform its duties most carefully and faithfully.
A soul completely abandoned to God
sees nothing clearly except the action of grace…
de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
Huston Smith teaches that, whereas he South Asian-Indian religions––Hinduism and Buddhism––concentrated mainly on psychological development of the individual; and the east Asian religions––Confucianism and Taoism––concentrated on the social dimension of the human person, the concentration and therefore gift of the Abrahamic family of religions has been its attention to the natural world and the created order. And because of that what grows out of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are three marvelous gifts: modern science, the idea of progress and the notion of the individual and his or her individual rights. It’s the second of those two that the concerns me today, the notion of progress, which comes directly from its sense of time.
Huston Smith further suggests that because the Abrahamic family of religions took its shape from a people who for most of their history were either displaced persons or oppressed persons, it is a tradition forged by social underdogs, and there is only one direction for an underdog to look––up! In their formative periods the Jews were constantly filled with hope amidst their oppression; they were always a people of waiting––to cross over into the Promised Land or for something to throw off the yoke. This then gave the Judeo-Christian-Islamic perspective of history an “upward tilt of expectation” that eventually was to lead to the idea of progress, because progress has an obvious relation to time. When they witnessed the novelty that time brought with it, there arose a sense of the possibility that that which is novel or new might be better than what is old. As a friend of mine likes to quote (from the recent movie Into the Wild), “The good gets better.” When this took shape in the Jewish mind it crystallized into the doctrine of the coming of the Messiah; when it moved into Christianity that changed into the second coming of Christ. Huston Smith goes so far as to say that when it moved into a secular version in the 17th century it became the doctrine of historical progress; and finally in the 19th century even Marxism, for all its heretical tendencies, converted this same sense of optimism about time into the idea of the coming classless society. (My confrere Bruno might say another child that forgot who its parents were.) But the idea is the same: that there is going to be a great day.
I think it is important to keep this in mind as whenever we talk about the end of the world or the second coming as Christians do in the days just before and early in Advent. One of the things that separate Christians from other traditions is our sense of time. We don’t think that time just goes round and round in circles––“just one &#%@ thing after another,” as Winston Churchill said. For us time is going somewhere; history is going somewhere; evolution is going somewhere. It’s not simply about me working out my salvation either––in this lifetime or in another re-incarnation: all of human history itself, the evolution of the human race is going somewhere, heading toward something. The great Franciscan saint John Duns Scotus was one of the first theologians to articulate an evolutionary view of Christology. He taught that history and creation were like a pyramid whose capstone is Jesus; Jesus is the height of the evolution of the human person, and of human consciousness. And all of history is now heading toward that height as well, when, as St Paul says, God will be all and all in Christ. Time is going somewhere; history is going somewhere; all creation is going somewhere––that’s why we pray “world without end, Amen!” Where is it going? St Paul says in 2 Cor (3:18) “from one degree of glory to another.” That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come!” God will be all in all in Christ. The good gets better.
It’s this essential optimism, this sense of the benevolence of the universe that we should carry in our hearts, and that should characterize our attitude toward the world. We don’t freak out about world events, even when planes fly into buildings full of people, even when our candidate does or does not look like he or she is going to win the election. We could concentrate on the blazing fire of God that is going to reduce all things to stubble (as we hear in the prophet Malachi); or we could concentrate on the fact that that same fire will become in us the “healing rays” of the sun of justice (as we also hear in the prophet Malachi). The fire of God that is coming on the earth is the fire of love! Jesus says, “I have come to bring fire to the earth! How I wish it were already blazing!” That fire––facing the unconditional love of God––might be punishment to the enemies of God but it becomes healing for God’s friends and, as Abba Moses said, if we want we could be all fire.
We could concentrate on all the calamities that may or may not surround our day and age; or we could concentrate on the faith that tells us that “not a hair on our head will be destroyed,” and that “by our perseverance we will secure our lives.” Among scared people there’s always a temptation to divide the world into the good and the bad, as we hear Malachi doing by separating the proud and the evildoers. That too in a sense comes out of our lack of trust in the benevolence of the cosmos that God has created, our failure to see goodness at work even in things that may seem dark to us at first. But the line that separates the good from the wicked isn’t between us and others––it crosses right through the middle of our own hearts. The root and stubble that is going to be burnt is going to be burnt out of my own heart, and then my real self created in the image of God will arise, the sun of justice will rise in our hearts, and we will be all fire, light for the world.
I focus in immediately on the last line of the Gospel: By your perseverance you will secure your lives. What are we persevering in? Faith, hope and love, those three cardinal virtues. We persevere in faith in the Gospel, a leap of faith in the beatitudes that tell us that the meek shall inherit the earth. We see calamities and insurrections and wars; it appears that evil is overcoming and we are tempted to give up on the Gospel; we are tempted to compromise the demands of the Gospel––even in the name of the Gospel! But Jesus says, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” We persevere in hope in the benevolence of the universe. Earlier in the Gospel of Luke Jesus has said, “Do not fear my little flock. The Father is glad to give you the kingdom!” While everyone else is running around saying the sky is falling, by your perseverance you will secure your lives. We persevere in love, love for this big blue marble and all its creatures, for our earth and all the sacraments of the earth, all the myriad ways that God shows us love, all the means God has put at our disposal to work out our salvation, not the least of which being time and history themselves. By our steady perseverance on this long slow road we will secure our lives.
Many people in this day and age come along giving us quick easy answers to very complicated questions, quick fixes and political expediency, from the left and from the right. Paul tells us what our attitude should be: we don’t freak out; we don’t worry. We work, quietly. We mind our business and work toward bringing the reign of God’s justice to the earth. It may not be anything fancy nor look heroic. It’s the long slow, boring, tedious work of faith in the Gospel of Jesus as the bedrock on which we base all of our decisions and actions; of letting that hope permeate our attitude and outlook on life; the long suffering work of learning how to love, a love that is patient, kind, slow to anger. By our steadfast perseverance we will save our lives and aid others in their salvation as well.
Here on earth we suffer…
the attacks of monsters, owls and savage beasts.
But terrible though these attacks are,
behind them God is acting
and giving us something of the divine
which will give us the brilliance of the sun,
for here below both body and soul
are refined and fashioned like gold and iron, linen and gems.
Like these things,
our soul and body will not attain their full beauty
until they have been trimmed and shaped
and changed from their original form.
All they have endured in this life at the hand of God
––and he is love itself––
is meant only to prepare us for eternal bliss.
The truly faithful soul,
well versed in the secrets of God,
lives in peace, and,
instead of being frightened by what happens to it,
is comforted, for it is quite certain that God is guiding it.
It accepts all things as a manifestation of God’s grace,
ignores itself and thinks only of what God is doing.
Love inspires it to perform its duties most carefully and faithfully.
A soul completely abandoned to God
sees nothing clearly except the action of grace…
de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
Huston Smith teaches that, whereas he South Asian-Indian religions––Hinduism and Buddhism––concentrated mainly on psychological development of the individual; and the east Asian religions––Confucianism and Taoism––concentrated on the social dimension of the human person, the concentration and therefore gift of the Abrahamic family of religions has been its attention to the natural world and the created order. And because of that what grows out of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are three marvelous gifts: modern science, the idea of progress and the notion of the individual and his or her individual rights. It’s the second of those two that the concerns me today, the notion of progress, which comes directly from its sense of time.
Huston Smith further suggests that because the Abrahamic family of religions took its shape from a people who for most of their history were either displaced persons or oppressed persons, it is a tradition forged by social underdogs, and there is only one direction for an underdog to look––up! In their formative periods the Jews were constantly filled with hope amidst their oppression; they were always a people of waiting––to cross over into the Promised Land or for something to throw off the yoke. This then gave the Judeo-Christian-Islamic perspective of history an “upward tilt of expectation” that eventually was to lead to the idea of progress, because progress has an obvious relation to time. When they witnessed the novelty that time brought with it, there arose a sense of the possibility that that which is novel or new might be better than what is old. As a friend of mine likes to quote (from the recent movie Into the Wild), “The good gets better.” When this took shape in the Jewish mind it crystallized into the doctrine of the coming of the Messiah; when it moved into Christianity that changed into the second coming of Christ. Huston Smith goes so far as to say that when it moved into a secular version in the 17th century it became the doctrine of historical progress; and finally in the 19th century even Marxism, for all its heretical tendencies, converted this same sense of optimism about time into the idea of the coming classless society. (My confrere Bruno might say another child that forgot who its parents were.) But the idea is the same: that there is going to be a great day.
I think it is important to keep this in mind as whenever we talk about the end of the world or the second coming as Christians do in the days just before and early in Advent. One of the things that separate Christians from other traditions is our sense of time. We don’t think that time just goes round and round in circles––“just one &#%@ thing after another,” as Winston Churchill said. For us time is going somewhere; history is going somewhere; evolution is going somewhere. It’s not simply about me working out my salvation either––in this lifetime or in another re-incarnation: all of human history itself, the evolution of the human race is going somewhere, heading toward something. The great Franciscan saint John Duns Scotus was one of the first theologians to articulate an evolutionary view of Christology. He taught that history and creation were like a pyramid whose capstone is Jesus; Jesus is the height of the evolution of the human person, and of human consciousness. And all of history is now heading toward that height as well, when, as St Paul says, God will be all and all in Christ. Time is going somewhere; history is going somewhere; all creation is going somewhere––that’s why we pray “world without end, Amen!” Where is it going? St Paul says in 2 Cor (3:18) “from one degree of glory to another.” That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come!” God will be all in all in Christ. The good gets better.
It’s this essential optimism, this sense of the benevolence of the universe that we should carry in our hearts, and that should characterize our attitude toward the world. We don’t freak out about world events, even when planes fly into buildings full of people, even when our candidate does or does not look like he or she is going to win the election. We could concentrate on the blazing fire of God that is going to reduce all things to stubble (as we hear in the prophet Malachi); or we could concentrate on the fact that that same fire will become in us the “healing rays” of the sun of justice (as we also hear in the prophet Malachi). The fire of God that is coming on the earth is the fire of love! Jesus says, “I have come to bring fire to the earth! How I wish it were already blazing!” That fire––facing the unconditional love of God––might be punishment to the enemies of God but it becomes healing for God’s friends and, as Abba Moses said, if we want we could be all fire.
We could concentrate on all the calamities that may or may not surround our day and age; or we could concentrate on the faith that tells us that “not a hair on our head will be destroyed,” and that “by our perseverance we will secure our lives.” Among scared people there’s always a temptation to divide the world into the good and the bad, as we hear Malachi doing by separating the proud and the evildoers. That too in a sense comes out of our lack of trust in the benevolence of the cosmos that God has created, our failure to see goodness at work even in things that may seem dark to us at first. But the line that separates the good from the wicked isn’t between us and others––it crosses right through the middle of our own hearts. The root and stubble that is going to be burnt is going to be burnt out of my own heart, and then my real self created in the image of God will arise, the sun of justice will rise in our hearts, and we will be all fire, light for the world.
I focus in immediately on the last line of the Gospel: By your perseverance you will secure your lives. What are we persevering in? Faith, hope and love, those three cardinal virtues. We persevere in faith in the Gospel, a leap of faith in the beatitudes that tell us that the meek shall inherit the earth. We see calamities and insurrections and wars; it appears that evil is overcoming and we are tempted to give up on the Gospel; we are tempted to compromise the demands of the Gospel––even in the name of the Gospel! But Jesus says, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” We persevere in hope in the benevolence of the universe. Earlier in the Gospel of Luke Jesus has said, “Do not fear my little flock. The Father is glad to give you the kingdom!” While everyone else is running around saying the sky is falling, by your perseverance you will secure your lives. We persevere in love, love for this big blue marble and all its creatures, for our earth and all the sacraments of the earth, all the myriad ways that God shows us love, all the means God has put at our disposal to work out our salvation, not the least of which being time and history themselves. By our steady perseverance on this long slow road we will secure our lives.
Many people in this day and age come along giving us quick easy answers to very complicated questions, quick fixes and political expediency, from the left and from the right. Paul tells us what our attitude should be: we don’t freak out; we don’t worry. We work, quietly. We mind our business and work toward bringing the reign of God’s justice to the earth. It may not be anything fancy nor look heroic. It’s the long slow, boring, tedious work of faith in the Gospel of Jesus as the bedrock on which we base all of our decisions and actions; of letting that hope permeate our attitude and outlook on life; the long suffering work of learning how to love, a love that is patient, kind, slow to anger. By our steadfast perseverance we will save our lives and aid others in their salvation as well.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
the ego deified
Yield and overcome;
bend and be straight;
empty and be full;
wear out and be new;
have little and gain;
have much and be confused.
Tao te Ching #22
Those who exalt themselves will be humbled.
Those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Lk 18:14
(reflections on the Pharisee and the Tax Collector Lk 18:9-14)
I must admit to you that my idea about this story came from a high school student, something which neither the kid’s teacher (who passed it on to me) nor I had ever noticed before. The story says that the “Pharisee spoke this prayer to himself.” He spoke the prayer to himself. He was praying to himself, he wasn’t praying to God.
There is a beautiful passage from a book called The Wound of Love by an anonymous Carthusian monk that I have carried around for years. He wrote that in one sense only the atheist can truly believe in God; meaning, he thought that for all of us God has to die at a certain moment. And then he goes on to list the God that must die:
the God who stands alongside the cosmos as some ‘thing’ else,
the God who stands alongside my neighbor as someone else;
the God of whom it suffices to know the general moral rules
in order to do his will;
the God infinitely above creatures' pains
in a transcendence beyond reach;
the God-judge, who punishes in accord with
a justice conceived along human lines;
the God who blocks the spontaneity of life and love.
But the one that sticks in my craw is this: he says that the God of our imagination must die too, the God of our projections and desires must die because that God is quite often nothing other than our own ego deified. And that is this man––he was saying this prayer to himself, saying this prayer to his own Ego projected onto a large screen.
It baffles me how often people have a religious conversion experience and suddenly become belligerent and confident and cocksure of how the Universe operates and exactly how every one in it is supposed to behave, and who’s in and who’s out. There is another reaction people have when they come face to face with the divine, an inner movement more similar to the monks of the desert or St Francis of Assisi, that is something akin to the experience of love, when we love someone or when someone loves us, when we experience the outpouring of pure gratuitous unconditional love. At times being love doesn’t make us feel good at all, but instead makes us see ourselves with all our warts and imperfections. As St John of the Cross teaches, God’s light is so bright it is like darkness to us. Like turning the light on in an otherwise dark room¬––¬suddenly all the dusty dark corners are lit up. We know who we are, we know where we have come from, we know the hardness of our own hearts, our petty gripes and compulsions. Perhaps for a moment we might even think we are unworthy of the love, we might think, “If you really knew me, would you still love me?” That experience in turn can lead two different reactions. We could run from it. “Oh please, don’t look at me anymore, turn the light off, don’t make me reveal anything else about myself,” and we can hide back in our little comfortable nest of self-protection, behind our mask. Or we can do what this tax collector does––we can recognize, acknowledge, and mourn what we have become. Of course we hopefully don’t stop there either. That mourning hopefully leads to repentance, conversion, “turning around,” getting on to the road that leads to us becoming who we are meant to be.
The eyes of love do not lie; they challenge, but they do not lie. These are God’s eyes, eyes that weep for us, that long for us, that pull us forward to participate in the Divine nature. They are mirrors, show us exactly who we are, in all our fragile beauty and in all our beautiful fragility. And that is what humility really is––truth, reality. We don’t have to trump anything else up to be humble, what we call “false humility.” Just knowing who we are and who we could be, who we are and who we could have been, is enough to humble us and can be that which spurs us forward.
But this is also a great place to be, this initial moment of mourning, so let’s not dart off too soon. It’s the moment we get to at each Eucharist when we say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Because this is the moment when we are like Jesus, who emptied himself. Where would Jesus be in this story? Jesus would be there in the back row with the tax collector, not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at.
So like Jesus, we empty ourselves. First of all we empty ourselves of our projections and our desires, our plans and agendas, our ego deified. Don’t worry: as soon as we are that empty, God fills us again. As soon as we say, “I am not worthy,” God and those who really love us say, “Yes, you are. When will you come to see you like I do, and know you like I do, and love you like I do?” As the Carthusian monk continued, when that other God dies,
it makes room for a God who is
totally beyond our grasp
and nevertheless strangely close to us and familiar;
when that God dies, it makes room for a God
who bears a human face––that of Jesus, my brother;
when that other God dies, it makes “room for a God who is love
in a way that defies all our human notions of justice;
a God who is generosity, overflowing life,
gratuitousness, unpredictable liberty…”
Perhaps all of our theological speculation, not to mention our inter-religious dialogue, needs to be based on this kind of humility too, recognizing the ineffable mystery of who God really is. It’s not that we don’t know God at all, but I think we know God more by the little things than the big ones. We especially know God in the breaking of the bread which is not just the sacred elements but everywhere the Incarnation happens, especially, as John’s Gospel shows us, in service––when we wash each other’s feet and lay our lives down for one another, whenever two or three are gathered, and whenever equality and inclusivity triumph over hierarchy and exclusion, when mercy triumphs over our petty systems of justice, all of which the breaking of the bread is meant to symbolize. We know God when we are like God for each other, and “love in a way that defies all our human notions of justice, generosity, overflowing life, gratuitousness, unpredictable liberty…”
bend and be straight;
empty and be full;
wear out and be new;
have little and gain;
have much and be confused.
Tao te Ching #22
Those who exalt themselves will be humbled.
Those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Lk 18:14
(reflections on the Pharisee and the Tax Collector Lk 18:9-14)
I must admit to you that my idea about this story came from a high school student, something which neither the kid’s teacher (who passed it on to me) nor I had ever noticed before. The story says that the “Pharisee spoke this prayer to himself.” He spoke the prayer to himself. He was praying to himself, he wasn’t praying to God.
There is a beautiful passage from a book called The Wound of Love by an anonymous Carthusian monk that I have carried around for years. He wrote that in one sense only the atheist can truly believe in God; meaning, he thought that for all of us God has to die at a certain moment. And then he goes on to list the God that must die:
the God who stands alongside the cosmos as some ‘thing’ else,
the God who stands alongside my neighbor as someone else;
the God of whom it suffices to know the general moral rules
in order to do his will;
the God infinitely above creatures' pains
in a transcendence beyond reach;
the God-judge, who punishes in accord with
a justice conceived along human lines;
the God who blocks the spontaneity of life and love.
But the one that sticks in my craw is this: he says that the God of our imagination must die too, the God of our projections and desires must die because that God is quite often nothing other than our own ego deified. And that is this man––he was saying this prayer to himself, saying this prayer to his own Ego projected onto a large screen.
It baffles me how often people have a religious conversion experience and suddenly become belligerent and confident and cocksure of how the Universe operates and exactly how every one in it is supposed to behave, and who’s in and who’s out. There is another reaction people have when they come face to face with the divine, an inner movement more similar to the monks of the desert or St Francis of Assisi, that is something akin to the experience of love, when we love someone or when someone loves us, when we experience the outpouring of pure gratuitous unconditional love. At times being love doesn’t make us feel good at all, but instead makes us see ourselves with all our warts and imperfections. As St John of the Cross teaches, God’s light is so bright it is like darkness to us. Like turning the light on in an otherwise dark room¬––¬suddenly all the dusty dark corners are lit up. We know who we are, we know where we have come from, we know the hardness of our own hearts, our petty gripes and compulsions. Perhaps for a moment we might even think we are unworthy of the love, we might think, “If you really knew me, would you still love me?” That experience in turn can lead two different reactions. We could run from it. “Oh please, don’t look at me anymore, turn the light off, don’t make me reveal anything else about myself,” and we can hide back in our little comfortable nest of self-protection, behind our mask. Or we can do what this tax collector does––we can recognize, acknowledge, and mourn what we have become. Of course we hopefully don’t stop there either. That mourning hopefully leads to repentance, conversion, “turning around,” getting on to the road that leads to us becoming who we are meant to be.
The eyes of love do not lie; they challenge, but they do not lie. These are God’s eyes, eyes that weep for us, that long for us, that pull us forward to participate in the Divine nature. They are mirrors, show us exactly who we are, in all our fragile beauty and in all our beautiful fragility. And that is what humility really is––truth, reality. We don’t have to trump anything else up to be humble, what we call “false humility.” Just knowing who we are and who we could be, who we are and who we could have been, is enough to humble us and can be that which spurs us forward.
But this is also a great place to be, this initial moment of mourning, so let’s not dart off too soon. It’s the moment we get to at each Eucharist when we say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Because this is the moment when we are like Jesus, who emptied himself. Where would Jesus be in this story? Jesus would be there in the back row with the tax collector, not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at.
So like Jesus, we empty ourselves. First of all we empty ourselves of our projections and our desires, our plans and agendas, our ego deified. Don’t worry: as soon as we are that empty, God fills us again. As soon as we say, “I am not worthy,” God and those who really love us say, “Yes, you are. When will you come to see you like I do, and know you like I do, and love you like I do?” As the Carthusian monk continued, when that other God dies,
it makes room for a God who is
totally beyond our grasp
and nevertheless strangely close to us and familiar;
when that God dies, it makes room for a God
who bears a human face––that of Jesus, my brother;
when that other God dies, it makes “room for a God who is love
in a way that defies all our human notions of justice;
a God who is generosity, overflowing life,
gratuitousness, unpredictable liberty…”
Perhaps all of our theological speculation, not to mention our inter-religious dialogue, needs to be based on this kind of humility too, recognizing the ineffable mystery of who God really is. It’s not that we don’t know God at all, but I think we know God more by the little things than the big ones. We especially know God in the breaking of the bread which is not just the sacred elements but everywhere the Incarnation happens, especially, as John’s Gospel shows us, in service––when we wash each other’s feet and lay our lives down for one another, whenever two or three are gathered, and whenever equality and inclusivity triumph over hierarchy and exclusion, when mercy triumphs over our petty systems of justice, all of which the breaking of the bread is meant to symbolize. We know God when we are like God for each other, and “love in a way that defies all our human notions of justice, generosity, overflowing life, gratuitousness, unpredictable liberty…”
Monday, October 22, 2007
SANGHA TALK: desert monasticism 2: antony the great (outline)
(This is the second of a series of talks I am giving on the desert monasticism, aiming toward a focus on Evagrius, and Anselm Gruen's book, "Heaven Begins Within")
ANTONY the GREAT: The prototype of the monk
• His biography Vita Atonii is written by the great Alexandrian theologian and bishop Athansaius who had met Antony himself
• Is considered one of the most important works of early Christianity, certainly for the spread of monasticism, but also as an explication of orthodox teaching (polemics against Arianism are contained in it) and Christian anthropology, as we shall see.
La Vita Antonii
1. At the age of twenty (c. 270)––he is an orphan. Athanasius seems to be at pains to let his know that he is unlearned, illiterate. Keep this in mind.
• He hears the Gospel proclaimed: “If you would be perfect, go sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and come and follow me.” He obeys, but keeps a little money from the sale of family goods for care of his sister, but shortly after hears another Gospel read, “take no thought about tomorrow”; puts his sister in a Parthenon––a house of virgins, gives the rest away and moves into a pigsty or cowshed at the bottom of the garden of the family home.
• At this stage he himself is a devotee; he gets advice from another old devotee in the area, probably keeps to the full round of liturgical worship and listening to Scripture read (so much that he is said to memorize it); works with his hands––making ropes, mats, baskets, sandals, the kind of things his successors in the desert will do
• Athanasius does not call him a monk at this time
2. He then withdraws to live in the tombs near the village, to be even more strenuous in the ascetical work that is uniquely his: battling the demons (more on that later): once he has cast the temptations (demons) out his own mind, the demons begin to attack him from without––like Jesus in the wilderness 40 days.
3. At age 35 he retires into the desert completely;
• his old ascetic master refuses to go with him, this was not done yet in that day
• spends next phase living in a deserted fort on the confines of the desert; bread is brought to him twice a year
• after twenty years his friends break down the gate and he comes forth: “as from some inmost shrine, inititae into the mysteries and God-borne”
• his friends marvel to his that his body has neither grown fat from lack of exercise nor deteriorated from fasting and fighting with demons
• he is “all balanced, as one governed by reason and standing in his natural condition”
• in Athnasius’ Life of Antony this is when the bulk of the book takes place, a long discourse on the monastic vocation and battling demons/temptations
• it is here that Athanasius uses the words monk and monastery––monachos and mone; later they come to mean someone who lives in community and the community itself; but originally the strict etymological sense is a solitary and a solitary cell.
• Note: the flowering of desert monasticism in Egypt, as I said, is going to take place after the persecution ended and the Edict of Milan (313), but Antony is a frontrunner
4. As persecution arises in Alexandria, Antony leaves his monastery and lends support and encouragement to the “confessors,” those who are being persecuted for the faith, but he is not persecuted himself and so retires back to the desert;
• the persecution ends and suddenly he is flooded with visitors, which he does not want.
• He meets a band of Saracens (Arabs) wandering through the desert and goes with them until he finds a new place to be in seclusion, which he calls his “Interior Mountain,” somewhere between the Nile and the Red Sea
• “he traveled with them three days and three nights and came to a very high hill… Anthony, as though moved by God, fell in love with the place…”
• “lovers of the place”: Francis Kline, referring to Trappists, but to monks in general
• Evagrius (in the Practica ad Anatolium) reports him saying, “My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and it is present when I will, for me to read the words of God.”
• The Arabs bring him food from time to time, his disciples come ‘round once in a while, but he does not want to be dependent: he sows his own grain, and he persuades animals not to disturb his garden or his peace (VA, 50)
• Some suggest that he was actually a boskos––a wanderer and grazer in the wilderness.
Lessons learned: anthropology
1. Main thing: the words used to describe Antony coming out of the tombs are very important: he is healthy and psychically sound: the words in Greek––kata physin
a. This is an argument against dualism; soon on in the monastic tradition there will be much polemic against the body, influenced by the neo-Platonists: Porphory says of Plotinus that he was “a man ashamed of being in his body.” But here Antony’s life of asceticism and virtue have led him to physical vigor as well as psychological balance.
b. This is a theme that abides in the eastern Christina tradition, a return to our natural condition––there will be the saying, “In the desert a garden,” meaning a return to Paradise, the Garden of Eden. And so you see, also the relationship with animals has been restored.
2. The other word in Greek is telios––Antony has become perfect. This is a Gospel term, a Pauline term, but also a term familiar to Greeks especially those “initiaties” familiar with the secret rites of the Eleusinian mysteries.
a. Antony has become a real initiate into the divine mysteries.
Many will flock to Antony for his advice; and many more will flock to the desert to imitate him, especially after Athanasius’ Vita comes out, like the influence of Merton’s Seven Story Mountain.
The one theme of Antony’s that I think is important and enduring for the tradition has to do with this battling of the demons, but really at the root of it is Self-knowledge:
• “Have fun storming the castle!” We must understand that this is ascetical solitude, not just being alone because of being an introvert, solitude that is a fast, a tapas. And the major ascetical work of solitude is self-knowledge.
• A maxim that Anthony frequently repeats is that “the knowledge of ourselves is the necessary and only step by which we can ascend to the knowledge and love of God.”
• going to remain in the desert tradition as the essential work of the desert solitaries, the basis of monastic asceticism, the practice of the desert fathers––self-scrutiny, self-knowledge or what Columba Stewart calls “radical honesty about the self.” For Anthony and the desert fathers this is the essential first step toward any other wisdom.
• In the famous passage recorded by Athanasius, Anthony lays it out this way: St Peter says don’t let the sun go down on your anger––Anthony says don’t let the sun go down on any sin of ours;
• … and the best way to avoid this is to “Examine yourself and test yourself. Daily let each one recount to himself not only his actions of the day but also the stirrings of the souls,” the secret thoughts of the heart, the breeding ground for sin.
• Anthony is of course famous for his bouts of battling with the demons. Even this is really here a metaphor for his work of self-scrutiny. The demons themselves are very subtle, and suggestive of just those psychological temptations to which individual monks are most susceptible, pointing out the importance of self-scrutiny as an essential and continuing part of progress in virtue. Going to be important when we get to Evagrius.
• Anthony has to go it alone. Besides the little instruction he gets from a few elders in his early days basically his hard work of self-knowledge is done alone, Athanasius records that his only Abba is an angel who is a sort of mirror image of himself. Perhaps this is where Anthony gets the idea later to tell his disciples that when they examine themselves even then they should pretend as if they were laying themselves bare to another:
• “...we record our thoughts as if reporting them each other. Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that, blushing as much to write as to be seen, we might never be absorbed by evil things.”
• Important: It is by laying the thoughts bare that we are able to avoid the actions themselves.
This theme of the radical honesty about the self will pass on from Anthony and also the means by which one works toward this honesty.
• The principal element of the process among the desert fathers was the offering of the secret’s of one’s heart to another person for discernment, especially in the relationship between the abba/amma and his disciple.
• The abba is not someone who is lofty and sits as a judge. The abba is another human being who has suffered the same weaknesses, has done his or her own self-examination and can speak from experience as another human being. The desert elder is certified by his or her own experience, having had the shock of seeing oneself as a sinner, which gave them the ability to tease the secrets of others’ hearts as encourager and witness, rather than as judge. Not even necessarily to give advice or commentary: it is often just the very experience of opening the heart that brings healing and insight.
• Has more in common with Twelve Step spirituality than confession
• Perhaps this is why Athanasius stresses so much Anthony’s lack of learning; he doesn’t have facility in speech and argument, but his training has served to return his soul to its original state and this gives him clear faith and plain reasoning that can even silence scholars and sages.
But more importantly, this theme will pass into the desert tradition from Anthony, this radical honesty about the self becomes the heart of the desert quest.
• These monks staked everything on the effort to destroy illusion and deception. All of their asceticism was really intended to help cut through the garbage of lives that are hooked on the deception, hooked on materialism, hooked on our false self, and stuck in all the games we play with ourselves.
• First there is breaking from the illusion of self-sufficiency, a pose which encourages self-absorption, and can lead to a ‘devouring conscience’ in the words of Abba Poemen. There’s an old recovery adage that says “We’re only as sick as our secrets.” The desert fathers would say a sin that is hidden begins to multiply: one becomes tapped in obsessive and compulsive patterns.
• Second, there is the connection with humility. Abba Anthony said, “I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, “What can get through from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me “Humility.”
• So for the desert fathers, the ability of a monk freely expose the secrets of the heart, and especially to open his heart to his abba/amma (or to any other) indicates a growth in humility. What one of us if we laid the secret thoughts of hearts bear would have any room for boasting, any room for grandiosity?
• “A calm clear heart allows for a clear eye, and humility becomes the basis for contemplating the rest of creation and then the Creator.”
• “The desert itself gave them a landscape which mirrored what they sought for their own hearts: an uncluttered view through clear air.”
ANTONY the GREAT: The prototype of the monk
• His biography Vita Atonii is written by the great Alexandrian theologian and bishop Athansaius who had met Antony himself
• Is considered one of the most important works of early Christianity, certainly for the spread of monasticism, but also as an explication of orthodox teaching (polemics against Arianism are contained in it) and Christian anthropology, as we shall see.
La Vita Antonii
1. At the age of twenty (c. 270)––he is an orphan. Athanasius seems to be at pains to let his know that he is unlearned, illiterate. Keep this in mind.
• He hears the Gospel proclaimed: “If you would be perfect, go sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and come and follow me.” He obeys, but keeps a little money from the sale of family goods for care of his sister, but shortly after hears another Gospel read, “take no thought about tomorrow”; puts his sister in a Parthenon––a house of virgins, gives the rest away and moves into a pigsty or cowshed at the bottom of the garden of the family home.
• At this stage he himself is a devotee; he gets advice from another old devotee in the area, probably keeps to the full round of liturgical worship and listening to Scripture read (so much that he is said to memorize it); works with his hands––making ropes, mats, baskets, sandals, the kind of things his successors in the desert will do
• Athanasius does not call him a monk at this time
2. He then withdraws to live in the tombs near the village, to be even more strenuous in the ascetical work that is uniquely his: battling the demons (more on that later): once he has cast the temptations (demons) out his own mind, the demons begin to attack him from without––like Jesus in the wilderness 40 days.
3. At age 35 he retires into the desert completely;
• his old ascetic master refuses to go with him, this was not done yet in that day
• spends next phase living in a deserted fort on the confines of the desert; bread is brought to him twice a year
• after twenty years his friends break down the gate and he comes forth: “as from some inmost shrine, inititae into the mysteries and God-borne”
• his friends marvel to his that his body has neither grown fat from lack of exercise nor deteriorated from fasting and fighting with demons
• he is “all balanced, as one governed by reason and standing in his natural condition”
• in Athnasius’ Life of Antony this is when the bulk of the book takes place, a long discourse on the monastic vocation and battling demons/temptations
• it is here that Athanasius uses the words monk and monastery––monachos and mone; later they come to mean someone who lives in community and the community itself; but originally the strict etymological sense is a solitary and a solitary cell.
• Note: the flowering of desert monasticism in Egypt, as I said, is going to take place after the persecution ended and the Edict of Milan (313), but Antony is a frontrunner
4. As persecution arises in Alexandria, Antony leaves his monastery and lends support and encouragement to the “confessors,” those who are being persecuted for the faith, but he is not persecuted himself and so retires back to the desert;
• the persecution ends and suddenly he is flooded with visitors, which he does not want.
• He meets a band of Saracens (Arabs) wandering through the desert and goes with them until he finds a new place to be in seclusion, which he calls his “Interior Mountain,” somewhere between the Nile and the Red Sea
• “he traveled with them three days and three nights and came to a very high hill… Anthony, as though moved by God, fell in love with the place…”
• “lovers of the place”: Francis Kline, referring to Trappists, but to monks in general
• Evagrius (in the Practica ad Anatolium) reports him saying, “My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and it is present when I will, for me to read the words of God.”
• The Arabs bring him food from time to time, his disciples come ‘round once in a while, but he does not want to be dependent: he sows his own grain, and he persuades animals not to disturb his garden or his peace (VA, 50)
• Some suggest that he was actually a boskos––a wanderer and grazer in the wilderness.
Lessons learned: anthropology
1. Main thing: the words used to describe Antony coming out of the tombs are very important: he is healthy and psychically sound: the words in Greek––kata physin
a. This is an argument against dualism; soon on in the monastic tradition there will be much polemic against the body, influenced by the neo-Platonists: Porphory says of Plotinus that he was “a man ashamed of being in his body.” But here Antony’s life of asceticism and virtue have led him to physical vigor as well as psychological balance.
b. This is a theme that abides in the eastern Christina tradition, a return to our natural condition––there will be the saying, “In the desert a garden,” meaning a return to Paradise, the Garden of Eden. And so you see, also the relationship with animals has been restored.
2. The other word in Greek is telios––Antony has become perfect. This is a Gospel term, a Pauline term, but also a term familiar to Greeks especially those “initiaties” familiar with the secret rites of the Eleusinian mysteries.
a. Antony has become a real initiate into the divine mysteries.
Many will flock to Antony for his advice; and many more will flock to the desert to imitate him, especially after Athanasius’ Vita comes out, like the influence of Merton’s Seven Story Mountain.
The one theme of Antony’s that I think is important and enduring for the tradition has to do with this battling of the demons, but really at the root of it is Self-knowledge:
• “Have fun storming the castle!” We must understand that this is ascetical solitude, not just being alone because of being an introvert, solitude that is a fast, a tapas. And the major ascetical work of solitude is self-knowledge.
• A maxim that Anthony frequently repeats is that “the knowledge of ourselves is the necessary and only step by which we can ascend to the knowledge and love of God.”
• going to remain in the desert tradition as the essential work of the desert solitaries, the basis of monastic asceticism, the practice of the desert fathers––self-scrutiny, self-knowledge or what Columba Stewart calls “radical honesty about the self.” For Anthony and the desert fathers this is the essential first step toward any other wisdom.
• In the famous passage recorded by Athanasius, Anthony lays it out this way: St Peter says don’t let the sun go down on your anger––Anthony says don’t let the sun go down on any sin of ours;
• … and the best way to avoid this is to “Examine yourself and test yourself. Daily let each one recount to himself not only his actions of the day but also the stirrings of the souls,” the secret thoughts of the heart, the breeding ground for sin.
• Anthony is of course famous for his bouts of battling with the demons. Even this is really here a metaphor for his work of self-scrutiny. The demons themselves are very subtle, and suggestive of just those psychological temptations to which individual monks are most susceptible, pointing out the importance of self-scrutiny as an essential and continuing part of progress in virtue. Going to be important when we get to Evagrius.
• Anthony has to go it alone. Besides the little instruction he gets from a few elders in his early days basically his hard work of self-knowledge is done alone, Athanasius records that his only Abba is an angel who is a sort of mirror image of himself. Perhaps this is where Anthony gets the idea later to tell his disciples that when they examine themselves even then they should pretend as if they were laying themselves bare to another:
• “...we record our thoughts as if reporting them each other. Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that, blushing as much to write as to be seen, we might never be absorbed by evil things.”
• Important: It is by laying the thoughts bare that we are able to avoid the actions themselves.
This theme of the radical honesty about the self will pass on from Anthony and also the means by which one works toward this honesty.
• The principal element of the process among the desert fathers was the offering of the secret’s of one’s heart to another person for discernment, especially in the relationship between the abba/amma and his disciple.
• The abba is not someone who is lofty and sits as a judge. The abba is another human being who has suffered the same weaknesses, has done his or her own self-examination and can speak from experience as another human being. The desert elder is certified by his or her own experience, having had the shock of seeing oneself as a sinner, which gave them the ability to tease the secrets of others’ hearts as encourager and witness, rather than as judge. Not even necessarily to give advice or commentary: it is often just the very experience of opening the heart that brings healing and insight.
• Has more in common with Twelve Step spirituality than confession
• Perhaps this is why Athanasius stresses so much Anthony’s lack of learning; he doesn’t have facility in speech and argument, but his training has served to return his soul to its original state and this gives him clear faith and plain reasoning that can even silence scholars and sages.
But more importantly, this theme will pass into the desert tradition from Anthony, this radical honesty about the self becomes the heart of the desert quest.
• These monks staked everything on the effort to destroy illusion and deception. All of their asceticism was really intended to help cut through the garbage of lives that are hooked on the deception, hooked on materialism, hooked on our false self, and stuck in all the games we play with ourselves.
• First there is breaking from the illusion of self-sufficiency, a pose which encourages self-absorption, and can lead to a ‘devouring conscience’ in the words of Abba Poemen. There’s an old recovery adage that says “We’re only as sick as our secrets.” The desert fathers would say a sin that is hidden begins to multiply: one becomes tapped in obsessive and compulsive patterns.
• Second, there is the connection with humility. Abba Anthony said, “I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, “What can get through from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me “Humility.”
• So for the desert fathers, the ability of a monk freely expose the secrets of the heart, and especially to open his heart to his abba/amma (or to any other) indicates a growth in humility. What one of us if we laid the secret thoughts of hearts bear would have any room for boasting, any room for grandiosity?
- The link between these two things, manifestation of thoughts and humility, gives us a pretty good understanding of what monastic humility is all about: it is the quality of someone who has begun to see as God sees, and who has started with the self.
- “If you have not sinned, avoid boasting; instead, persist in the good, and don’t become careless nor condemnatory of a neighbor, nor declare yourself… leaving the judgment to the Lord let us treat each other with compassion, and let us bear one another’s burdens.”
• “A calm clear heart allows for a clear eye, and humility becomes the basis for contemplating the rest of creation and then the Creator.”
• “The desert itself gave them a landscape which mirrored what they sought for their own hearts: an uncluttered view through clear air.”
SANGHA TALK: desert monasticism 1: intro. to desert monks (outline)
(This is the first of a series of talks I am giving on the desert monasticism, aiming toward a focus on Evagrius, and Anselm Gruen's book, "Heaven Begins Within")
THE DESERT MONKS
The roots of the Christian mystical tradition and the roots of the Christian monastic tradition are virtually the same
• Before we read Evagrius, I want to trace his lineage: Antony the Great, father of monasticism (c. 251-356); Origen (185-254), in some ways the first Christian mystical writer; Evagrius (c. 345-399), himself a desert monk and a student of the writings of Origen; John Cassian.
• Antony is the father of the desert tradition; Origen, though not a monastic, is a great thinker who is going to have an strong influence on Evagrius, but Origen will be condemned. So both Origen and Evagrius’ thought go underground and it surfaces among other places in a man named John Cassian whose Conferences and Institutes will carry the theology of these two in a hidden way,
• Also have a major influence on St Benedict, the father of Western monasticism: Benedict requests that John Cassian be read to the community each night. But notice that neither is John Cassian ever made a saint––same suspicion, of Origenist tendencies.
• I want to bring up one salient point from each of these traditions, Antony, Origen and John Cassian as we dig into Evagrius.
We’re going to mainly be talking about desert monasticism, which many consider to be the first Christian monks but to be fair…
• there was another strand of monasticism developing at this time, more urban in character:
• from the earliest days of Christianity there were some members of the church who were more committed than the majority, who wished to live a life of particular asceticism and commitment, even to the extent of renouncing marriage and family ties: the order of virgins and celibates; quite often living as solitaries, recluses, hermits even in cities––“urban hermits”
• these came to be known by various names especially such as devoti, the devout; the Greek word monachos is not used for them
• by the 3/4 century such devoti, although continuing to celebrate in the local church, also began to live in community rather than as individuals, and had begun to evolve strong liturgical characteristics of their own, especially in Syria
But now to the desert… Adelbert de Vogue:
"When the threat of bloody death ceased to hang over every christian head, the monk tried to give his whole life here blow the value of martyrdom. The break with the world no longer consisted in defying the law and confronting torture, but in leaving society and living for God alone far from [people]… Christ's appeal for continual prayer resounded with more force than ever. Thereafter, to pray without ceasing was no longer to be one of the Lord’s directives among others; it was to be the raison d'etre of lives freed from every temporal preoccupation…"
"In the fourth century, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Arabia were the forcing ground for monasticism in its Christian expression; every form of monastic life was tied, every kind of experiment, every kind of extreme. Monasticism is of course older than Christianity, but this was the flowering of it in its Christian expression and in many ways it has never been surpassed… The great center was Egypt. By AD 400 Egypt was a land of hermits and monks." (ref., In the Heart of the Desert)
In Egypt in the 4th century there were three great monastic centers located south of Alexandria in the Libyan desert
• remember that lower Egypt is actually north of upper Egypt because the Nile flows north!
1. Middle Egypt was the land of hermits, strict literal solitaries, of whom Antony the Great, about whom we shall speak is the prototypical example.
2. Lower Egypt: Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis: groups of ascetics
• the most important is Scetis, located about 65 miles northwest of modern day Cairo
• this is the lavra or skete form of monasticism where several monks lived together, often as disciples of an abba
• It was a meeting place between the desert and the world where visitors could make contact with the traditions of the desert
• Douglas-Burton Christie (A Word in the Desert) was surprised to find out actually how close they were to the towns
• A more learned, Greek influenced type of monasticism grew up here.
• Evagrius of Pontus is the most famous son of this lineage
3. Upper Egypt/coenobites:
• These men lived in a less remote part of Egypt.
• main center was Tabennisi in the Thebaid.
• main figure here is Pachomius (290-347), who is credited with being the creator of organized monasticism
• was a young pagan that was led to Christ by the charity of some villagers giving food to destitute prisoners
• he also lived as a hermit under the authority of a master but then went on to …
• found cenobitic foundations around 320 at Tabennesi in the Nile Valley of the Thebaid, the area north of Thebes.
• not hermits grouped around a spiritual father, but communities of brothers united in work and prayer: cenobites as opposed to hermits
All chronicled most extensively in the Apophthegmata––the sayings of the desert Fathers and Mothers (though one must admit there were fewer mothers, at least fewer mothers recorded).
As I said, the eccentric flight of hermits into the desert is going to have its influence on these urban monks:
• Guiver: “considerably sharpened the whole picture, raising the business of commitment to a more dramatic and aggressively challenging plane."
• besides leaving behind an incredible wisdom tradition, the desert monks brought a new and surprisingly radical commitment to prayer, taking very literally St Paul's admonition to pray constantly
• the Egyptian type of monasticism (the desert fathers) will spread to Europe, finding particularly sympathetic soil among the British and the Irish Celts (who tended to be rather dour and very disciplinarian), but in the end will fade out without any direct heirs
• it is the devoti who would become the model for western monks in the future, even though heavily impregnated with ideals and to some extent practices of the Egyptian monks, because as soon as these devoti (what we are calling “urban monasticism”) began to distance themselves from their parish base, they came to discover some of the virtues of the Egyptian way of prayer
• it is then in this type of monasticism¬¬––the urban devoti influenced by the desert monks of Egypt––that a hybrid develops, with a mixture of "cathedral" style (because they are originally attached to cathedrals and participating in cathedral "offices" with their accompanying practices) with monastic style, and it's going to set the parameters for the future of monastic worship and lifestyle
• Mainly this is going to happen through John Cassian
I think we can safely say that the wisdom of the desert monks was one of those things that got buried, forgotten like so many other elements of our wisdom tradition, for centuries. Happily, with the revival of so many other things in the past few generation, the recovery of sources and fonts, there has been a great revival in the study of the desert fathers.
• Buried except for in at least one place where it was incarnated at least, if not talked about much: the Camaldolese reform: Romuald was heavily influenced by eastern monasticism and the hermit tradition that was burgeoning again all over Italy and when he started founding houses they were imitations of the lavra, communities of hermits around a main church
• But also you see, in his Brief Rule, the mention of watching your thoughts––watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watches for fish–¬– which we will see is a direct lineage of the desert tradition.
THE DESERT MONKS
The roots of the Christian mystical tradition and the roots of the Christian monastic tradition are virtually the same
• Before we read Evagrius, I want to trace his lineage: Antony the Great, father of monasticism (c. 251-356); Origen (185-254), in some ways the first Christian mystical writer; Evagrius (c. 345-399), himself a desert monk and a student of the writings of Origen; John Cassian.
• Antony is the father of the desert tradition; Origen, though not a monastic, is a great thinker who is going to have an strong influence on Evagrius, but Origen will be condemned. So both Origen and Evagrius’ thought go underground and it surfaces among other places in a man named John Cassian whose Conferences and Institutes will carry the theology of these two in a hidden way,
• Also have a major influence on St Benedict, the father of Western monasticism: Benedict requests that John Cassian be read to the community each night. But notice that neither is John Cassian ever made a saint––same suspicion, of Origenist tendencies.
• I want to bring up one salient point from each of these traditions, Antony, Origen and John Cassian as we dig into Evagrius.
We’re going to mainly be talking about desert monasticism, which many consider to be the first Christian monks but to be fair…
• there was another strand of monasticism developing at this time, more urban in character:
• from the earliest days of Christianity there were some members of the church who were more committed than the majority, who wished to live a life of particular asceticism and commitment, even to the extent of renouncing marriage and family ties: the order of virgins and celibates; quite often living as solitaries, recluses, hermits even in cities––“urban hermits”
• these came to be known by various names especially such as devoti, the devout; the Greek word monachos is not used for them
• by the 3/4 century such devoti, although continuing to celebrate in the local church, also began to live in community rather than as individuals, and had begun to evolve strong liturgical characteristics of their own, especially in Syria
But now to the desert… Adelbert de Vogue:
"When the threat of bloody death ceased to hang over every christian head, the monk tried to give his whole life here blow the value of martyrdom. The break with the world no longer consisted in defying the law and confronting torture, but in leaving society and living for God alone far from [people]… Christ's appeal for continual prayer resounded with more force than ever. Thereafter, to pray without ceasing was no longer to be one of the Lord’s directives among others; it was to be the raison d'etre of lives freed from every temporal preoccupation…"
"In the fourth century, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Arabia were the forcing ground for monasticism in its Christian expression; every form of monastic life was tied, every kind of experiment, every kind of extreme. Monasticism is of course older than Christianity, but this was the flowering of it in its Christian expression and in many ways it has never been surpassed… The great center was Egypt. By AD 400 Egypt was a land of hermits and monks." (ref., In the Heart of the Desert)
In Egypt in the 4th century there were three great monastic centers located south of Alexandria in the Libyan desert
• remember that lower Egypt is actually north of upper Egypt because the Nile flows north!
1. Middle Egypt was the land of hermits, strict literal solitaries, of whom Antony the Great, about whom we shall speak is the prototypical example.
2. Lower Egypt: Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis: groups of ascetics
• the most important is Scetis, located about 65 miles northwest of modern day Cairo
• this is the lavra or skete form of monasticism where several monks lived together, often as disciples of an abba
• It was a meeting place between the desert and the world where visitors could make contact with the traditions of the desert
• Douglas-Burton Christie (A Word in the Desert) was surprised to find out actually how close they were to the towns
• A more learned, Greek influenced type of monasticism grew up here.
• Evagrius of Pontus is the most famous son of this lineage
3. Upper Egypt/coenobites:
• These men lived in a less remote part of Egypt.
• main center was Tabennisi in the Thebaid.
• main figure here is Pachomius (290-347), who is credited with being the creator of organized monasticism
• was a young pagan that was led to Christ by the charity of some villagers giving food to destitute prisoners
• he also lived as a hermit under the authority of a master but then went on to …
• found cenobitic foundations around 320 at Tabennesi in the Nile Valley of the Thebaid, the area north of Thebes.
• not hermits grouped around a spiritual father, but communities of brothers united in work and prayer: cenobites as opposed to hermits
All chronicled most extensively in the Apophthegmata––the sayings of the desert Fathers and Mothers (though one must admit there were fewer mothers, at least fewer mothers recorded).
As I said, the eccentric flight of hermits into the desert is going to have its influence on these urban monks:
• Guiver: “considerably sharpened the whole picture, raising the business of commitment to a more dramatic and aggressively challenging plane."
• besides leaving behind an incredible wisdom tradition, the desert monks brought a new and surprisingly radical commitment to prayer, taking very literally St Paul's admonition to pray constantly
• the Egyptian type of monasticism (the desert fathers) will spread to Europe, finding particularly sympathetic soil among the British and the Irish Celts (who tended to be rather dour and very disciplinarian), but in the end will fade out without any direct heirs
• it is the devoti who would become the model for western monks in the future, even though heavily impregnated with ideals and to some extent practices of the Egyptian monks, because as soon as these devoti (what we are calling “urban monasticism”) began to distance themselves from their parish base, they came to discover some of the virtues of the Egyptian way of prayer
• it is then in this type of monasticism¬¬––the urban devoti influenced by the desert monks of Egypt––that a hybrid develops, with a mixture of "cathedral" style (because they are originally attached to cathedrals and participating in cathedral "offices" with their accompanying practices) with monastic style, and it's going to set the parameters for the future of monastic worship and lifestyle
• Mainly this is going to happen through John Cassian
I think we can safely say that the wisdom of the desert monks was one of those things that got buried, forgotten like so many other elements of our wisdom tradition, for centuries. Happily, with the revival of so many other things in the past few generation, the recovery of sources and fonts, there has been a great revival in the study of the desert fathers.
• Buried except for in at least one place where it was incarnated at least, if not talked about much: the Camaldolese reform: Romuald was heavily influenced by eastern monasticism and the hermit tradition that was burgeoning again all over Italy and when he started founding houses they were imitations of the lavra, communities of hermits around a main church
• But also you see, in his Brief Rule, the mention of watching your thoughts––watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watches for fish–¬– which we will see is a direct lineage of the desert tradition.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
prayer and violence
Surely those who see all creatures in themselves
and themselves in all creatures
know no sorrow.
How can the wise, knowing the unity of life,
seeing all creatures in themselves,
be deluded or sorrowful?
Isha Upanishad
I was so troubled by the readings I had to preach on today (Ex 17; Lk 18:1-8). The first was that story of the people of Israel at war with the Amalekites. They had the better of the battle as long as Moses held his arms up, and so he did with the help of Aaron and Hur on each side holding him up. And so Joshua was able to “mow down Amalek and his people”! The Gospel is beautiful, but I think all of it could give us the wrong idea––that if we just pray hard enough God will help us wipe out our enemies, which is obviously contrary to the Gospel, and/or we will always get our way in court, which simply doesn’t happen, as a matter of fact St Paul tells us “why not let yourself be cheated!”
I decided that if I could have lunch with the Pope one of the things I would ask him would be to please take this Moses story out of the lectionary completely. But since “all Scripture is inspired,” and has something to teach us, what this combination of readings is really about, which the lectionary only clumsily conveys, is contained in the first line of the Gospel: “Jesus told his disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary.” That’s what our readings are about today––the need to pray constantly.
There has been quite a lot of controversy over the use of the Hebrew Scriptures and especially the psalms at various times in the history of Christianity, even to this day, because they speak so often of condemning, cursing and destroying our enemies, and paint a picture of God destroying armies and peoples, and wiping out countries who did nothing more wrong than be in the way of the Chosen People, which, again, is obviously contrary to the Gospel and the teaching of Jesus who handed himself over to his enemies and then prayed for them on the cross. What writers did in the patristic era of the church is re-interpret the violence in the psalms in another way––and St Benedict, the father of western monasticism, also writes of it––that the enemies that we speak of now are the enemies are not outside of is, but inside of our own selves––the evil thoughts that lead to evil actions.
Here Christianity and Islam agree. If I understand it correctly, this is what the Islamic concept jihad is really about. There is a story told about Mohammad who had once dispatched a contingent of the army to the battlefront, and when they returned he said to them:
‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?’ the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’ (Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 19, p. 182, Hadith no. 31)
In Arabic this is known as jihad al-nafs, the “struggle against the self,” the struggle against evil ideas, desires and the powers of lust, anger, the struggle insatiable imagination, placing them all under the dictates of reason and faith in obedience to God's command, and finally, purging all evil ideas and influences from one’s soul. In the Christian tradition we call this “purity of heart,“ one of the main themes of the monastic tradition. And this struggle is considered to be much more difficult than fighting on the battlefield, the struggle to understand God’s will by removing kheb-pride, defeating haughtiness and arrogance so that we can submit to God’s will, because it is only by conquering pride and having purity of heart that we can understand God’s will!
It is only after conquering this battle of the self that the jihad rises to the level of social responsibility, jihad of the tongue, to be able to speak the truth even when it is against one's own interest––the level of the prophets. Then comes the third level, the jihad of the hand. This is where it definitely can become very political, because every person has a right, a duty and a social responsibility, even a divine responsibility, to protect self, property and religious values. But still remember, I do not think that it is possible for us to really understand the will of God unless we achieve this jihad al-nafs-conquering the self.
This theme is common in other religious traditions of the world as well. Jainism for instance teaches refer to their ascetics as warriors who are battling their “own belligerent instincts and warding off the bad effects of the aggression” because they think that violence is the characteristic of unenlightened people. They believe that ascetics win as much glory for themselves and their families by their life of ahimsa–non-violence as do soldiers on the battlefield. The Jain community is even referred to as a gana, meaning a “troop,” a troop of spiritual warriors. “To become a Jina required the valor, determination, and ruthlessness toward oneself that was the mark of the true hero.” (Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, p. 287)
What does this have to do with prayer? Well, interesting enough these were the two main themes of the ancient monks: first, battling the self, that is demons, passions, inordinate attachments, what we might call today addictions and compulsions, the jihad al-nafs; and second to pray without ceasing. We cannot remove the addictions and compulsions that lurk in us without the spiritual help provided by prayer; we replace those inordinate passions with something else––prayer, which leads us to the font of life and healing within us. In the desert monastic tradition, these two things always went together, knowledge of self (sometimes called “battling the demons”) and unceasing prayer, so as to achieve the purity of heart that we all need in order to line ourselves up with the will of God.
Prayer does not increase our ability to mow down our enemies at all, nor does it guarantee that we will always succeed in getting our rights. Prayer teaches us to pray for our enemies, and it is very difficult to commit any violence of thought, word or deed against someone you are praying for. What prayer actually leads us to is discovering our unity with other beings. There is a beautiful quote from John of Kronstadt of the eastern orthodox tradition, that by cleaving to God in prayer, I become one spirit with God, and I unite with myself those for whom I pray, for the Holy Spirit acting in me, also acts at the same time in them. Prayer leads us to discover our unity with all other beings. As the Isa Upanishad teaches,
Surely those who see all creatures in themselves
and themselves in all creatures
know no sorrow.
How can the wise, knowing the unity of life,
seeing all creatures in themselves,
be deluded or sorrowful?
So instead of praying for our rights, or for victory over our enemies, let’s just pray––for purity of heart so that we would know God’s will; for our enemies as Jesus commanded, and for all those in need so that we would discover our spiritual unity with them; pray to have conscious contact with the Spirit who gives us the power to live upright and holy lives. And if we grow weary in our prayer, let’s hope that the prayers of those around us, our community, our church, would carry us for a while as Aaron and Hur held up Moses’ arms, and let’s pray that we could be that for each other as well.
and themselves in all creatures
know no sorrow.
How can the wise, knowing the unity of life,
seeing all creatures in themselves,
be deluded or sorrowful?
Isha Upanishad
I was so troubled by the readings I had to preach on today (Ex 17; Lk 18:1-8). The first was that story of the people of Israel at war with the Amalekites. They had the better of the battle as long as Moses held his arms up, and so he did with the help of Aaron and Hur on each side holding him up. And so Joshua was able to “mow down Amalek and his people”! The Gospel is beautiful, but I think all of it could give us the wrong idea––that if we just pray hard enough God will help us wipe out our enemies, which is obviously contrary to the Gospel, and/or we will always get our way in court, which simply doesn’t happen, as a matter of fact St Paul tells us “why not let yourself be cheated!”
I decided that if I could have lunch with the Pope one of the things I would ask him would be to please take this Moses story out of the lectionary completely. But since “all Scripture is inspired,” and has something to teach us, what this combination of readings is really about, which the lectionary only clumsily conveys, is contained in the first line of the Gospel: “Jesus told his disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary.” That’s what our readings are about today––the need to pray constantly.
There has been quite a lot of controversy over the use of the Hebrew Scriptures and especially the psalms at various times in the history of Christianity, even to this day, because they speak so often of condemning, cursing and destroying our enemies, and paint a picture of God destroying armies and peoples, and wiping out countries who did nothing more wrong than be in the way of the Chosen People, which, again, is obviously contrary to the Gospel and the teaching of Jesus who handed himself over to his enemies and then prayed for them on the cross. What writers did in the patristic era of the church is re-interpret the violence in the psalms in another way––and St Benedict, the father of western monasticism, also writes of it––that the enemies that we speak of now are the enemies are not outside of is, but inside of our own selves––the evil thoughts that lead to evil actions.
Here Christianity and Islam agree. If I understand it correctly, this is what the Islamic concept jihad is really about. There is a story told about Mohammad who had once dispatched a contingent of the army to the battlefront, and when they returned he said to them:
‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?’ the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’ (Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 19, p. 182, Hadith no. 31)
In Arabic this is known as jihad al-nafs, the “struggle against the self,” the struggle against evil ideas, desires and the powers of lust, anger, the struggle insatiable imagination, placing them all under the dictates of reason and faith in obedience to God's command, and finally, purging all evil ideas and influences from one’s soul. In the Christian tradition we call this “purity of heart,“ one of the main themes of the monastic tradition. And this struggle is considered to be much more difficult than fighting on the battlefield, the struggle to understand God’s will by removing kheb-pride, defeating haughtiness and arrogance so that we can submit to God’s will, because it is only by conquering pride and having purity of heart that we can understand God’s will!
It is only after conquering this battle of the self that the jihad rises to the level of social responsibility, jihad of the tongue, to be able to speak the truth even when it is against one's own interest––the level of the prophets. Then comes the third level, the jihad of the hand. This is where it definitely can become very political, because every person has a right, a duty and a social responsibility, even a divine responsibility, to protect self, property and religious values. But still remember, I do not think that it is possible for us to really understand the will of God unless we achieve this jihad al-nafs-conquering the self.
This theme is common in other religious traditions of the world as well. Jainism for instance teaches refer to their ascetics as warriors who are battling their “own belligerent instincts and warding off the bad effects of the aggression” because they think that violence is the characteristic of unenlightened people. They believe that ascetics win as much glory for themselves and their families by their life of ahimsa–non-violence as do soldiers on the battlefield. The Jain community is even referred to as a gana, meaning a “troop,” a troop of spiritual warriors. “To become a Jina required the valor, determination, and ruthlessness toward oneself that was the mark of the true hero.” (Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, p. 287)
What does this have to do with prayer? Well, interesting enough these were the two main themes of the ancient monks: first, battling the self, that is demons, passions, inordinate attachments, what we might call today addictions and compulsions, the jihad al-nafs; and second to pray without ceasing. We cannot remove the addictions and compulsions that lurk in us without the spiritual help provided by prayer; we replace those inordinate passions with something else––prayer, which leads us to the font of life and healing within us. In the desert monastic tradition, these two things always went together, knowledge of self (sometimes called “battling the demons”) and unceasing prayer, so as to achieve the purity of heart that we all need in order to line ourselves up with the will of God.
Prayer does not increase our ability to mow down our enemies at all, nor does it guarantee that we will always succeed in getting our rights. Prayer teaches us to pray for our enemies, and it is very difficult to commit any violence of thought, word or deed against someone you are praying for. What prayer actually leads us to is discovering our unity with other beings. There is a beautiful quote from John of Kronstadt of the eastern orthodox tradition, that by cleaving to God in prayer, I become one spirit with God, and I unite with myself those for whom I pray, for the Holy Spirit acting in me, also acts at the same time in them. Prayer leads us to discover our unity with all other beings. As the Isa Upanishad teaches,
Surely those who see all creatures in themselves
and themselves in all creatures
know no sorrow.
How can the wise, knowing the unity of life,
seeing all creatures in themselves,
be deluded or sorrowful?
So instead of praying for our rights, or for victory over our enemies, let’s just pray––for purity of heart so that we would know God’s will; for our enemies as Jesus commanded, and for all those in need so that we would discover our spiritual unity with them; pray to have conscious contact with the Spirit who gives us the power to live upright and holy lives. And if we grow weary in our prayer, let’s hope that the prayers of those around us, our community, our church, would carry us for a while as Aaron and Hur held up Moses’ arms, and let’s pray that we could be that for each other as well.
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