Doubt and Faith Series
by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
YouTube Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAEAB36D0C61F8115
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Transcript Source: http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/2001-10-04-1-E-E-C-EM05-007Talk1OnFaith&Doubt.html
Transcripts
Talk 1
4 October 2001.
... a series of talks in which I want to say things which have accumulated in my mind and heart over the years but I don’t know whether I will be able to do it properly. So I will do my best to express things and I will ask you to do your best to hear beyond the words in your heart and your experience of life what I ought to have said.
A number of years ago I was invited by the BBC to give a talk on believing and when I finished my talk the person responsible said to me: “Bishop Anthony, we shall never invite you again to speak on our religious programs”. And I said: “Was my talk so desperately bad?” He said: “No, it isn’t that but we don’t want any of your certainties. What we want is doubt and questioning”.
And I think we are at the moment at a point where not only the BBC, not only people without a faith, but people who have a faith - religious, philosophical or people who believe in life, in truth, in man are shaken by what is going on. I am not speaking only of the horror that had seized upon America and has spread all over the world. I am speaking of a gradual loss of faith, a gradual diminishing in the number of people who wish to come to Church and an increasing number of people both within the Church and outside it who ask earnest questions, searching questions about their own faith and the faith which they have inherited. How can one believe in man? How can one believe in all those things we should proclaim about God? What is faith? And we are at the moment at the/a turning point which I believe is very important for us to face because knowingly or not the whole world is facing it. What is faith? What is doubt? What is questioning? Can one claim to be a sincere and honest believer and question things? Can one claim to be a believer that is to believe in God and say: “I can’t understand You”? This is something which Job said centuries and centuries ago, not quite in these words but faced with the problems of life he asked God.
And the same question was asked not so long ago, within my lifetime at least, by Staretz Siluan who fought for fourteen years to break through a wall of separation between him and God and in the end, at the end of his strength, no longer able to find his way he said: “Lord, You cannot be prevailed upon”. And at that moment, as he says in one of his letters, at that moment something broke in him, a last resistance, a last human hope and he became aware of the presence of Christ. Christ was standing there with him. And he says he read in the expression of His eyes, in His all countenance such love, such compassion and mercy that he could never forget it and he continued to live with this awareness of Christ having become, as it were, inseparable from Him even at moments when Christ was not making Himself manifested, present.
And so I would like to insist on the fact that when a doubt comes, when hesitation comes, when we began to question what seemed to be so simple and clear at other moments, we are not committing a sin. I was about to say: it is our right and more than this – it’s our duty. A right and a duty because we are called by God to be His friends: “I no longer call you servants, I call you friends because a servant does not know what his master wants and I shared with you all there was to know”. These are approximately His own words in the Gospel. He wants us to understand but He does not expect us to understand or to see at any moment of our life with ultimate clarity and it is infinitely important for us to realise that at every step of our life our faith may be complete to the extend, to which it corresponds to our spiritual maturity, but it is incomplete, imperfect when we look at yesterday with today’s experience and at the end of our life at the way we have trod.
I would like to insist on this question of questioning and of doubting and of asking questions. I make an artificial distinction between questioning and asking questions because we can ask questions in all simplicity ready to receive an answer and to accept it or we may question things because the answers which we have had thus far do not satisfy or fulfil us. And that is very important. We must be honest with God and with ourselves. God does not want to be surrounded by credulous people but by people who know Him enough to trust Him at times beyond the limits of their knowledge.
Where does faith come from? What is faith? One can understand faith in different ways. On one hand faith is a certainty. When the saints spoke of their faith in God they spoke of their inner certainty concerning the God they had met at the depth of their soul. But faith has got also other nuances: faith means faithfulness. What we have discovered of God and ourselves, what relationship has been established between Him and us one moment if it is true, if we believe it is true, must develop into a way of life in the same way in which when we make friends with a person we have the joy of friendship but we must also live up to this friendship. Basically it means to be worthy of the friendship which is offered and given without reluctance, generously and at times at a cost. In our human relationships this happens time and again: we make friends and then we prove incapable of living up to the friendship which has been given us as a most precious present. But our friend does not turn away from us, he endures, he remains faithful, even if we waver, even if from time to time other friendships, other things attract us more than the precious friendship which we have gained once. This happens supremely in relationship between husband and wife, between children and their parents.
Faith, therefore, is certainty of things unseen because a relationship, an encounter at the depth of our soul cannot be put into words, it is an experience. Now, if we ask ourselves about the nature of faith I would like to refer you to a passage of St. Macarius of Egypt. In one of his writings he asks himself: where does faith begin? Because, he says, faith is not identical with the experience which gives it birth. We may have an experience of a deep moment of communion with someone or with God and then this experience itself fades. What is left in us of it? And he gives an image which I find very beautiful and telling. He says: suppose that on a night you float away on the river. The night is dark, the sky is deep filled with stars, the silence, the quiet pervades you completely, the waves carry you and at the same time, like a mother holding a child, hold you moving. You feel such deep communion with what you see, with the silence, with the beauty and you feel carried by these waves like a child in the arms of a mother. And then the little skiff settles on the sand and for a moment you still feel the movement of the waters in your body although you are no longer floating. You have the certainty that what you experienced a moment ago was real and when you walk afterwards on a hard ground you carry with you this certainty and this experience: this experience of the beautiful night, of the deep sky and you are certain that you have experienced it because somehow it lived within you. I have made a long discourse about a comparatively short quotation of Macarius of Egypt. May he forgive me for it.
The same is true with us in our experience of God. There are moments when, and I will come back to this, we perceive God’s presence somehow directly or communing with others. And then we are left alone, not quite alone because this experience continues to exist within us. We not only remember it, we almost perceive it. There are moments when this experience is clear and strong, and there is no doubt, and there is joy. There are moments when suddenly it fades or disappears altogether. To illustrate this I would like to tell you a children story from India. A child says to her mother: “Mother, how is it that there are moments when I feel that God is there, quite close and I am so happy with Him and then He fades away? Why has He gone? How can I find Him?” And the mother says: “Look, we have been playing ‘hide and seek’ with you. You close your eyes, I go and hide in the bushes or behind the tree and then call out: U-hu, u-hu. You open your eyes and look round and you begin to ask yourself: now, where did the sound come? And you go in this direction. At times you find me immediately and you fall into my arms and you are so happy and we laugh together and we hug. But at other moments you begin to search and you cannot find me. And for a moment you feel: What if mother had gone away leaving me here? And fear comes. To begin with, you look round but you look round in a more and more tense manner and a moment comes when I can perceive your fear and I come out of my hiding place and you run to me and I take you in my arms and you are happy again. So is it with God: He gives us an experience of His presence and then He tells us: And now live with what you have learned. Live as though I was with you, live so that I could be proud of you and you’ll be happy with Me. But He watches from behind the bushes, as it were, from behind a tree to be sure that there is a moment when you will feel you have lost touch and then He will call, He will not obligatory come out but He will call somehow. You will meet someone who will tell you about God, you will be taken to the temple and pray with others and feel: yes, He is here. He is here with all these people and me among them”.
So is it with us also. We begin with an experience and this experience may fade and calls us to ask questions. The first question is: But where has He gone? The second question is: But was He ever here or have I had simply a delusion, perhaps, there was no God? And then fear comes and doubt comes. And it is very important for us to be prepared to face these situations. Each of us in a different way, to which I will come if I can, at a certain moment has had a sense of God. And then there are other moments when we loose this sense and we must at that moment have faith, be certain that the experience which we had was real.
An example of a different kind: at every stage of our spiritual development, growth we can perceive and we can know only what is on our scale. God is infinite, His depth is immeasurable, the light that shines from Him is such that St. Gregory of Nissa could say: “This light is divine darkness because when I try to look at it I go blind”. At every moment we can say: “That much I know from experience, beyond it – not yet, but others may know”. It is true even for us among ourselves: the experience which each of us has of his or her humanity, of life, of God, of the Church, of sacraments is very varied, greater or smaller but also infinitely different. At every stage we are who we are today and we must be who we are today with all our faith and wholeness because it is the only way in which we can go beyond this. If we are not true to ourselves today we cannot grow into a tomorrow, in which we will be true to ourselves or to God. And there is something wonderful in questioning, in becoming aware of the limitations of our knowledge, of our experience and of the wonder that even so small an experience is so rich, so deep.
I will give you an image. Before I was a priest I studied science and then medicine. And I remember Prof. Curie in his lectures on physics telling us that we must do our research very earnestly, with total honesty, not trying to proclaim an answer which we have not yet got but when we have found a complete image of what we are searching the first thing we must do is to say: this is true on the level on which I was up today, now let me ask questions about it. To begin with, we collect all the facts and all our understanding into a complete picture and now has come the time to look for that in a picture which is incomplete and imperfect, to look for the imperfection of our picture to explode if necessary the harmonious image, which we had developed, because only then can it open up to a wider and deeper knowledge.
That is what the scientist does. When he has got a clear image of a scientific point he asks himself: and what is wrong in my reasoning? Have I been totally honest in building this image? And if he can say: yes, then let me look for those facts that will explode it because my image is too small for reality. This, I believe, is something of immense importance because it applies to our relationship with people, to the image we have of them, it applies also to our understanding of God. At every point our knowledge of God may be true but it may be the truth of this moment which corresponds to our spiritual width and depth and growth. And we must rejoice in what we know. I know that gradually new elements will come into our understanding and the image of God will become infinitely more wonderful and infinitely more puzzling. And we must not be afraid to say: Lord, I thought I understood and I don’t understand any more. What can I do? And the answer is: live, live through prayer, live through communion with other people, live in deep communion with your own self, in integrity, in honesty, don’t try to protect the image that was so consoling and beautiful because if you have doubted it one moment it means that you have outgrown your image, not God’s reality, indeed not, but the image which you have formed of it. And questioning comes there as part of our spiritual growth, of our discovery of God, of our increasing knowledge of God.
At times, when I speak in such terms someone says: “How sad. Does it mean that I am so poor in my knowledge of God, in my knowledge of self, in the knowledge of people around me? How can I rejoice?” And the answer I believe is this: at every step you are fulfilled, you are complete and you can rejoice and say: if immature, small as I still am, I can know God as I do, I can venerate Him as I do, I can turn to Him as I do or I can do, then how wonderful it will be when having matured I will outgrow my present condition, my knowledge of God will increase, become wider and deeper and my joy in Him will be ever greater.
So that questioning is not a lack of faith. One can question only if one has truly faith and confidence and say: All I know, all the images I have formed, all I have heard and read, all I have been imparted is nothing compared with the width, the depth, the height, the greatness of the living God and how wonderful it is that I realised that my image is true but it is the image that a child forms and which will gradually become richer, ever richer with years and with time.
Now, I would like say one or two more things. The knowledge I have today can fill me to the brim and it can fill me to the brim only if I live in accordance with what I have already been given. It will break only if faith does not become faithfulness because if I am not faithful to what I already know, to what I already am, we can not grow beyond unless something catastrophic comes, something shakes me to the ground of my being, something which questions me totally. It is very important to realise this.
Now, in my next talk I would like to speak to you about the way in which different people have discovered what is their faith and what it means to have made this discovery. I was thinking of the way in which the disciples of Christ met Him when He was a Child. What did they see in Him? The way in which they met Him as grown up people – Nathaniel, who in response to a very simple question or remark: “I have seen you under the tree”, - says: “You are my God”. How? Why? The way in which Peter says: “Thou art the Son of God” – at a moment when nothing was said about it. And way in which people discovered Christ at a depth that does not find expression in words. I will come to that next time and I suggest that we keep quiet for a few moments. I would like also to apologise for speaking so slowly but apart from being tired it is a subject that is not easy to speak about.
Talk 2
God is love.
18 October 2001.
As I said in my last talk the aim of this series is a sort of self-examination, questioning ourselves, questioning also (May I say that your machine is working at the same time as I, I am sorry) I was saying that the aim of this year’s talks was a self-examination, of what we mean by believing, by having a faith and also, perhaps, a daring, perhaps, an arrogant examination of our attitude to God because we very often assert things in our prayers which I am not sure we truly feel. And so I want today to start to reflect on what it means to believe, take a few examples and ask ourselves how it applies to us. First of all faith means truly believing, believing with the sense of certainty. Secondly it means faithfulness to both what we believe and Him in Whom I believe. And both these two things it is important to remember because the one does not go without the other.
And so I have been asking myself from meeting people in the course of a life that is long now what people mean by believing and how they come to it. And I want to give you a few examples. The first example that comes to my mind is that of an old man whom I met in Russia many years ago. He had been an unbeliever for the course of all his life, he did not believe in God and he had lost faith in man also because he had met no revelation of God, nothing that opened a door to him in believing but also he could not believe what men said about their faith looking at the way in which they treated him or they behaved in their own lives.
And he told me that after having frequented people believers and unbelievers he strayed one day into a church. He expected nothing, he wanted simply to see what it looked like inside and what the people looked like who came to it. And he said a thing which he never afterwards could forget was the sense that all these people who had gathered there gathered in good will, gathered with mutual openness, gathered with whatever amount of mutual love they could afford. He had never met a collection of people, a congregation of people who were gathered together in the name of a common faith and who as a result loved each other, were open to each other. O, he did not mean that they were angels on earth, that there was pure kindness between them – there were rough gestures, there was impatience but basically he felt these people who consider the unknown person who stands by them as a friend, as a brother, as a sister. It impressed him so deeply that he began to come again and again. And the only reason he could give was that he felt a hunger, a need to be among people who loved one another. He was not naive, he knew what these people were in ordinary life: the tensions, the difficulties, their fears but there in the church something happened to them and the church was a place where it happened. It did not immediately turn his mind and heart towards the knowledge of God or belief in Him. It turned him towards the people who were there and he tried to become one of them, to share their mutual attitude, he felt relaxed, he felt at peace, he felt it was a place where nothing but mutual good-will existed. And that was for him the beginning of the discovery of Him Who gave this peace: “My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives, do I give”.
A second example of the same type occurred here: a number of years ago a man came to this church loaded with a parcel for one of the parishioners. He was an unbeliever rather impatient, almost aggressive and he had made calculations so as to arrive here when the service was over because he wanted to deliver his parcel but he did not want to have anything to do with what was going on inside these walls but providence has thought of it differently. He arrived before the Vsenoshnaya, the evening service was over. Impatiently he settled at the back of the church with his parcel.
And then something happened to him because when he had delivered his parcel and everyone had gone and I was going round to check everything I found him sitting at the back and I mildly suggested that it was time for him to go home. He said: “No, you must explain something to me: what is happening here? What is it that has affected me, that has impressed me? I am an unbeliever, I am certain that God does not exist and yet something was happening. Is it the effect of the candlelight? Is the mournful singing of your choir? Is it the quiet that is here which one does not meet in the street? What was it?” I shrugged my shoulders and said: “I would say it’s God’s presence but if you believe that there is no God you must look for another explanation”. He said: “Yes, I want to come here some time when no-one is in this church so that the collective hysteria of your people does not affect me. And if I come I want you to make yourself scarce because I don’t want to be influenced by your presence”. I said: “Yes, come again”.
He came several times, sat for a long while and one day he said to me: “You know, when there is no-one, when you have made yourself scarce there is still something in this church which I have not met or found anywhere. Supposing it is God Who lives here and that in His presence people feel well, peaceful, comfortable, warm to one another, what does it really matter? You have provided Him with lodgings, He lives here comfortably, He makes yourself welcome when you come and what then?” I said: “I don’t know, come again and find out”. And he came again and one day he said to me: “You know, I have noticed something: when people come to the church there is worry in their faces, there is tension in their behaviour, when they go they are still. One can have a feeling that they are at peace with themselves and with one another. And then there is another thing which I simply can’t understand. People who come in a morning service to the steps that are now behind me and receive something from a cup with a spoon they come with one face, when they turn round, their faces are absolutely changed, there is light in them, there is light in their eyes so that your God must be not only a Host in this building, He is an active God, He does something about people and something which I wish someone could do for me.” I said: “Yes, how do you want to proceed?” “I want you to talk to me and to explain things to me which I don’t understand or know”. And for a while he came regularly, then he came to services and he stood still and quiet and one day he said: “I know now that God, your God is an active God Who transforms people, I need being transformed. Could I be baptised?”
Here was another experience in which a congregation, which you know perfectly well, made of very ordinary people, none of us is a saint, we all have our tensions, our problems but collectively and in the Presence and under the power of God something was happening: this man became a believer because he had discovered something here he had not met anywhere else. And when I say anywhere else I don’t mean in any other church, I mean simply outside the Church.
In the first case what the man in Russia discovered is that a community of people who have discovered God in their own time when they gather together they shook off as it were, like dust, all that was superficial, all that was small, all that was ugly in them and stood with all the beauty there was in them. Some with little of it, some with more of it but the dust was left outside. In the second case the provocation, if I may use this word, was even stronger and this man discovered the reality of God through what He was doing to people.
Now, this raises several problems and I will mention only one for the moment. It is the fact that what St. Paul said: “We carry holy things in earthen vessels, in broken vessels, in unworthy vessels”, - happens to be so true. This man, these two men discovered that we, this congregation of ours, which is made of most ordinary people, imperfect, sinful, still had discovered a dimension which he did not know, a dimension of divinity, of eternity, of holiness, of love and that they carried something of it out of this church when they went into the world.
Now, I have asked myself a question which I will present to you rather than expound because I do not think I have a real answer to everything I am saying. What happened to the disciples who met Christ? What happened to the crowds that were around Him and around them? The first question I have asked myself it this: Christ was God come into the world in the flesh. From the beginning of His life on earth as a new-born Child, as a Boy, as a Youth He was the Son of God incarnate and He was surrounded by people who did not know that but they know Him. How could they see Him?
I know that there are a number of what one calls the Gospels of the Childhood of Christ in which fantasy plays a great role. They do not correspond to history or, perhaps, even to reality. But a thing that strikes me is that He was a Boy like other boys, a Child like other children, He had a relationship with His Mother and with Joseph. How did people perceive Him then? Certainly not like an image of piousness and saintliness, which the Gospels of the Childhood try to convey. He must have been a normal, healthy, sane little Boy. And yet, those of His disciples who knew Him as a Child, who lived in the villages near-by, in Capernaum, in other places around must have met Him and seen in Him a normal Child and yet something more, something else: perhaps, a purity, a perceptiveness, a capability of loving, a capability of giving Himself to others and for others which was not their own experience in themselves. From the very beginning they must have been in the presence of God incarnate revealing Himself step by step at the various moments of a child’s growth and development. This is something which we could not really comprehend or imagine but it is something real: God was present in Him in a fullness of His divinity and He was a normal Child of his age. He may have had a perceptiveness, an understanding which others did not possess to a degree which was beyond them certainly. You remember the story of Jesus being left behind by His parents and discovered by them in the Temple of Jerusalem where He was sitting with the teaches and the elders, who were asking question and listening with amazement to His replies. He had a knowledge of God, a knowledge of things divine which He expressed probably in words of His age or rather, perhaps, in ageless words of truth and of beauty.
And then some of those who had known Him in Nazareth and in the pilgrimages met Him later. Nathaniel was one. Jesus was speaking to others and then turning towards Nathaniel He said that here is a Jew without fault, as it were, I can not find the word, and Nathaniel said: “How do You know me?” They have never met. And Jesus said: “When you were under the tree I saw you”. What does it mean? It may mean of course that Nathaniel was, perhaps, kneeling and praying and Jesus noticed that but Jesus must have met more than one man or woman or child praying. And a response of Nathaniel was far beyond the simple observation of a man in prayer. He said: “My Lord and my God”. And in the comments of early days we are told that that means that he was then praying to God and the words of Christ made him see that Jesus was the God to Whom he was praying without knowing Him. This was one meeting that made him into an absolute believer in Godhead of the incarnate Son.
Then we meet other of His disciples, ordinary, normal people, not trained to be something in religion, fishermen. Christ saw them, they had known one another in Galilee as children, as youth, as young men. And He sees them by the sea and He turns to them and says: “Follow Me”. And they leave everything and follow Him. What is this act of complete trust, what did they perceive in Him that they could abandon everything they had and were doing to follow Him in His footsteps, to accompany Him on a journey of which they knew nothing? And one cannot say that from the first moment the disciples were possessed of a faith comparable to that of the saints whose lives we read because time and again there were problems: their humanity still unredeemed, as it were, played a decisive role. When later Jesus was standing before judgement Peter renounced Him three times for fear of being recognised of His disciple. And then something happened: he had walked out of the courtyard having betrayed his Friend for the third time and he looked round and Christ turned His head and looked at him. Their eyes met and Peter dissolved in tears.
And then their humanity prevailed more than once: by the Cross there was only John, the youngest of them all, who was, if I may put it that way, nothing but a loving heart, and the Mother of God. And the Mother of God was there knowing Who Her Son was, knowing that She had born Him unto death, knowing that now She could not say a word of prayer to save Him from dying for the salvation of the world. She was brining Him as a living offering without a word to gainsay. That was an act of faith, She trusted God’s promise but God had not promised Christ’s Resurrection, He had only promised that He was the Saviour of the world and not in such clear terms. And by the Cross we find the Mother who is offering Her Son unto death because He was born for that hour, and a young disciple whose love was so simple and entire that he stood by sharing the horror, the pain of the Mother and the dying of His beloved Master. Faith was then faithfulness, it was not yet what we call our religious faith. He was faithful to his Friend, and as his Friend was his God his faithfulness to his Friend was beyond earthly faithfulness.
But where were the other disciples? Judas had hanged himself. He had betrayed Him and he had not waited for his own redemption and salvation. But the other disciples were gathered together in fear. Peter was one of them feeling that he was a traitor. And the other ones that they had fled in cowardice, and Thomas was not there at all. And Christ appeared in their midst. And they were full of joy because Christ was alive, that death somehow had not conquered and Christ gave them evidence that He was risen from the dead and not a ghost. And their joy was such. And then Thomas came. What did he see? He saw ten of his companions rejoicing in the Resurrection of Christ but somehow unchanged. Instead of fear there was joy, but they were the same men. He could not believe that had they met the Risen Christ they would be the very same men from whom he had parted on his journey. And he said: “Unless I test His Resurrection, I will not believe”. And when Christ appeared he was made to test it but he did not. Seeing Christ he knew that He was the Risen One, he became a believer in the Resurrection.
But it is only later, when the Holy Sprit came upon His disciples, that they changed in such a way that everyone could recognise in them messengers of God for better or worth. The ones saw them as messengers of truth and of life and followed them, others saw them as preachers of a false God, of an untruth and killed them and their disciples also but the experience was such that there was absolute certainty.
When we think of ourselves, where do we stand, each of us? On the one hand we are that congregation in which an unbelieving man discovered something of the divine Presence. Each of us is a broken earthen vessel and yet there is a drop of life eternal given us by God and when we meet here we shed by the door, as it were, all it is intentionally unworthy of God. I say intentionally because so much in each of us is unworthy of Him but the intention is, the desire is, the longing is, the determination, indeed, is to be worthy, to be worthy in our faithfulness of the God Who is faithful. But each of us must ask himself who is he, where does he stand in this line. On the one hand each of us has touched the hem of Christ’s garments, has seen Him pass, has heard Him speak, has been moved by something and has become a follower, I don’t say a disciple, because a disciple is more than a follower. There were crowds following Christ in search, in search within themselves and within the others of life eternal. And each of us also has discovered a certainty that, yes, God exists, that yes, Christ is the Son of God, that, yes, the Holy Spirit comes upon us and teaches us. But there is a dimension which God claims from us or rather which is essential for us to grow into another dimensional fullness. It is not only certainty, it is faithfulness. If what we know of Christ is true, if His teaching is the Truth then how can we be alien day in day out to His teaching?
This is a question to which I want to come next time by looking at our lives on the one hand and the prayers which we use on the other hand. I hope that this talk of mine has not been too confused. Try to think it out and bring it to clarity because it is important and I am groping for understanding. Do the same.
I will end my talk now and we will have a short period of silence as usual after which I will ask you contrary to our habit not to come up to a blessing because I have got a bad flue and I claim it for myself. I want to keep it for myself and not to share it with anyone else. So after prayer I will disappear and you try to go without sharing my cold.
Talk 3
1 November 2001.
As you know, my intention in this series of talks is to speak on questioning, at times on doubt. And whenever one touches upon that kind of subject, one is rightly to be criticised severely for undermining other people’s faith in its simplicity, in its wholeness. And yet I am deeply convinced that each of us has got questions which are unresolved in his or her life and heart and experience of life. And most of the time we close our eyes on the problem. We say: “I will find an answer later”, or “It must be true because the Church says so, or because someone whom I trust says so”. And the result is that we never mature ourselves either in a daring trust of God or in an ever-deepening understanding.
What I am trying to do is not to undermine anyone’s faith but to force myself and others, perhaps, to look at what we believe to be true and to ask ourselves to what extend am I personally certain of the truth, which I proclaim. This is paramount important for a priest who must proclaim God’s own truth but is confronted every time not with doubt but with a hesitation: Can I from the (?...city) of my experience, from the limitations of it proclaim God’s own truth? On the other hand, each of us, all of us, we are confronted with the prayers of the Church. The Church is a very complex body of people. On the one hand, it is the place where God dwells, on the other hand, it is made of people, who are frail and in the making. To a certain extend we all are God’s people, because all of us we have touched the hem of His garment, even if we have not gone deeper into our acquaintance with Him if our meeting has not been a revelation. But on the other hand, together, in our togetherness we possess more truth, more knowledge, more experience than anyone of us singularly, separately. And in that sense the Church is a wonderful body because at the heart of it (? stands) the Lord Jesus Christ with the revelation, the proclamation, the embodiment of God’s truth and the Holy Spirit, Who breathes on us and helps us to understand.
On the other hand, as I have said already, there is in each of us an incompleteness because we have not yet reached the maturity which is that of the saints and which even in the saints is not fulfilled until the end of their life, perhaps, until the end of history.
And I wanted today to attract your attention to a certain number of things. As I have said, we all read the prayers in which the experience of saints is embodied. This experience may be extremely deep, almost a complete knowledge and yet it is expressed in words that are our own words with all the limitations of a human vocabulary. Moreover, when we read these prayers, we read them in one language which is ours, which is not the language in which they have been coined out of an experience, which is beyond the words themselves. And so we must, when we read the prayers, take in what they have got to say to us and at the same time whenever we have a chance to ask ourselves: “Are the words which we are using, do they mean really what we read in them?” I will give you an example: we use the word ‘sinner’ time and again and to us ‘a sinner’ is someone who contravenes the commandments of God, which is perfectly true, but there is something deeper and more tragically important in the notion of sin.
St. James in his epistle tells us that to sin means to cross from God’s territory to the territory of his adversary. If you want an image: a river, separating two regions, two kingdoms – the one belongs totally, exclusively to God. The other one has been betrayed into the hands of evil by human unfaithfulness. To sin consists in crossing the river, away from the realm of God into the realm of doubt, of twilight and of evil. On that level, yes, there is the danger of evil-doing, of contravening the commandments, which God gave us to protect us against the consequences of our betrayal but the essence of it is our readiness to leave the realm of God, to enter into another realm.
We never think of sin in those terms. We think of sin in concrete terms of evil-doing, of lying, etc., not in terms of our unfaithfulness to the One Who has created us in an act of love and Who in an act of love has become one of us in order to share our life and to die of our own sins. This is one example and I don’t want to dwell on many others. I will come back to the notion of love because often or continuously we say that God is love. But do we know at all what love is, what it means? We think of love legitimately in human terms but is that all there is to it? We will come back to that in a moment.
To begin with I would like us to dwell for a short while on a prayer which is read by the priest during the singing of the Great Litany in the Liturgy. It is so easy to pronounce these words, to read them, to approve of them, to agree with what they say. And then, suddenly one may discover that we stand, as it were, before the judgement of the words which we have just pronounced: “O, Lord, our God, Your glory is insuperable, Your mind is immense, Your mercy is infinite, Your love of man is infinite also (my translation by memory is not precise, but it says what lies in it). When we think of God and we say that His glory shines so that we are blinded by this shining, that His power is so mighty, it seems to us that we say something simple, understandable. Do we? What do we know about the shining of God?
St. Gregory of Nyssa speaking on the subject says something to the effect that the shining of God is such that it blinds us because we cannot look at this intensity of light and we should then speak of the divine darkness, so that subjectively, in reality God shines but in our experience the nearer we come to seeing the glory of God, the more we are blinded, the more it becomes inaccessible to us, invisible. Are we aware of it? If we think of the glory, of the shining in simple terms, it is easy to imagine a God brilliant, shining, like the stars in heaven, like brightness of the day but can we look at the sun straight and not be blinded? What do we know about what it means that God’s shining is beyond words? Have we ever thought of this? The same is true about His might: of course it is easy to say that God’s might is infinite, that if He is God He can do anything and yet, look at the world in which we live, look at the evil there is in this world, beyond this, look at the story of the Incarnation: the Almighty God in order to defeat evil gives His Son unto death. Where is this insuperable strength and might? There is something more to it than simply might as we see it in history at the hands of kings and warriors. His might is infinite and yet He is defeated, defeated by everything which is evil in us: thought, desire, words, action - individual, collective. So when we start reading this prayer we must ask ourselves: what do I know, what do I know, what do I understand? And if I don’t understand, why can’t I just say: “Lord, I stand in awe between the incomprehensible, I stand in awe, in silence and in adoration because the words I have used only tell me that I understand and know nothing except one: I know You, o Lord, not in this glory, not in this light but in Your humility of Your Son’s incarnation, in the generosity of Your gift of Your Son for my salvation. O God, how can that be?” Or if you prefer, think in this way: a love which can grow to that measure is something which is beyond comprehension, something so immeasurably great that I can only fall on my knees and adore.
But then there are the further words: “Thy mercy is infinite, Thy love for man also”. And then we say these words, because somehow, from the experience of the Church, from the depth of our own very limited but real experience we know that these words are true. And yet at times we doubt them: “Your mercy is infinite? Lord, I look at the world around me, a world which You love and the horror of it is such that I can’t understand how You can endure it. You gave the world, men in particular, freedom and the result is this horror of history. How can I understand You? Is that an act of love, that love for mankind, that mercy?” When we think of it theoretically as I am trying to do now it is awkward, it’s unconvincing, perhaps to you but I will give you an example. A believing Russian woman had a grandson. At the age of seven he died of illness and I remember her telling me: “I don’t believe anymore in God. If He had any mercy in Him He would not have allowed my little grandson to die after a long and painful illness”. I was young, insensitive and sharp and I said to her (that was immediately after the war): “Have you never thought of the thousands of children who have died of illness, of murder during this war and in the course of all human history? Didn’t that prevent you from believing in God?” And she looked at me with a candor which I still am amazed by, she said: “What did that matter to me? It was my grandson who died”.
This example is very sharp, crude, but ask yourselves if in the course of your life short or long you have not been confronted with that kind of dilemma? You could recognise the love of God, the mercy of God, all the positive qualities of God until of a sudden one thing happened to you or to someone whom you love far beyond yourself and all that certainty and trust collapsed. Most of the time when it collapses we shut our eyes and we do not go straight to the consequences. We do not say: “And therefore I don’t believe in God anymore”. We say : “How can that be? How terrible!” We shut ourselves, we shut our eyes, our mind and heart. But take this short prayer, four words – “the glory, the power, the mercy, the love of mankind”, - each of them confronts us with a problem of our own faith and our own experience. We can resolve the problem up to a point by saying: “I believe, Lord, forgive my lack of faith”. If it is sincere, if it is really a cry of pain in our own heart, then it is alright, it is the beginning of a relationship of truth between God and me. But if it is simply a way of (shaking?) responsibility, shrugging our shoulders and saying in words of the Gospel: “What can I do, so it is, unless You help me, I stay with my unbelief”. But these words which are not in the text which I have added: If You don’t help me, - our/are? words addressed to God, to Christ and saying: You must help or else You are in the wrong.
I give you, perhaps, a dark image of things now, but whenever we read a prayer it forces us if we are attentive and honest to ask ourselves: Where do I stand, what do I know from experience? How much do I know God personally to be able to trust Him in this context? And at times we could add a cry of gratitude to God that in spite of our doubts, our lack of understanding, more than this, of our turning away from Him, He remains faithful. I have heard people tell me that there is a solution: in the Book of Revelation there is a passage in which all the horrors of the reign of anti-Christ are described, the death of the martyrs. And when everything is over, the martyrs turn to God and say: “You were right in all Your ways, our martyrdom was right, our suffering was right, the horrors through which we have gone was right, we bless You”. But who of us has the faith, the courage, the greatness of heart that would allow him or her to say these words?
I have taken as an example this very simple little prayer, which I read for years with a sense of joy and beauty and which gradually grew in my experience, in my mind and heart as a challenge, as a challenge that stands at the threshold of the liturgy. It follows the words: “Blessed is the Kingdom…” and it is read by the priest during the litany. It is the very beginning.
Now, in morning prayers, evening prayers, I have already mentioned that but I will just repeat it shortly, we say words and express thoughts and share feelings that belong to the saints. We cannot always identify with them but at times, we have an inkling, we have an incipient experience of what a saint said and we can therefore share the whole words of prayer because we know that I know enough of it to able to say the whole. But at times, I think, we find it practically impossible because these prayers which we read in morning prayers, in evening prayers, and akathists and so on and cannons, express the experience of life, experience of God, experience of self, of one saint after the other and we must be realistic enough, I don’t even use the word ‘humble enough’, to understand that if we can identify with one of these prayers, we can thank God for it. But can we identify with ten-twelve prayers that constitute the evening and morning prayers? Can we identify in succession with St. John Chrysostome, with St. Basil, with so many other saints and say: yes, I contain them all? No, we can’t. And we must then, when we read these prayers, read them with thoughtfulness and understanding. We must take a phrase and say to ourselves: that I can say from within my small experience but with all my heart and mind. I may not know all the depth of it, I may discover a depth in it which I don’t yet even perceive but what I perceive – yes, I can identify with. But this next phrase I can’t really understand. I can turn to the saint and say: “You used these words: I don’t really understand the experience which lies at the root of them but they sound true, so I will repeat them and you pray with me and bring them before the face of God because it is your experience in which I am trying to merge. It is your experience that perhaps carries me for a short while like a river carries a little skiff.
And then there are other things which we can not honestly say and we must be able, we must be honest enough to turn to God and say: “Lord, this saint - Basil, John, Metaphrasis, whoever else, Symeon the New Theologian - knew that what he says is true, I don’t”. At times it is better to say: “I can not read these words because it will be a lie on my part”. At times we can say to God: “I will read them because I believe there is truth in them and perhaps they will reach me and transform me inwardly”. But we cannot simply read them because they are written.
As an illustration of the effect of a prayer I will tell you something of our experience in this very church. We had in the choir an elderly man who sang with the most beautiful bass voice. At a certain moment he fell ill, was taken to hospital with cancer. I went to see him daily and daily he waned. And one day I came and the maiden said to me: “What an unfortunate day it is: he has lost consciousness and so you will not be able even to pray with him but what is also terrible is that his wife and daughter who had been away for all these months, unable to come to him, have arrived today and they cannot enter into contact with him”. I went to see them. The wife and daughter sat together on one side. And I thought, if all the prayers which he has sung have settled at the depth of his being, are interwoven with everything in him these words must bring him back. And I knelt down and began to sing – oh, how imperfectly, miserably psalms from Holy Week and Easter. And as I sang one could feel life (?) up in this man. And a moment came when he opened up his eyes and I said to him: “Your wife and daughter have come to say ‘good by’ to you, look left.” He looked left, saw them, they kissed one another, they said good by and I then said to him: “And now, go in peace”, and he sank back and died. The words which have been singing throughout his life, the words which had reached him in different ways and degrees, were so interwoven with his soul and being that hearing them sung so imperfectly as I did brought him back to earth.
This is to say that even if we are not capable of understanding every word of the prayers we should read them, read them attentively, thoughtfully, putting all our heart and mind to it, trying to understand. And in the course of the day at other moments, recapture one phrase or another and ask ourselves: what does it actually mean? How does it affect me? What do I say to God when I repeat with this saint the words he spoke? And gradually through the words, through the images, through sharing the experience which is put in a limited way in the words of the prayers we may outgrow ourselves and enter deeper into the knowledge of God.
But at this point I want to say, to repeat what I said earlier that the prayers which we read in English or in Slavonic practically always were written in another language and the translation which we give to the words of these prayers made limited their meaning, may (?) and therefore we must begin with using these words and allow them as they are to reach us in mind and heart and then begin to ask ourselves: what did they mean to those people who wrote them? What did these words mean in the language, in which they were written? I will give you an example. We use the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”. It is a perfect prayer as it is but in the original, it is not ‘a sinner’ but ‘the sinner’ it says.
I don’t know whether you perceive immediately the difference of impact but ‘a sinner’ means ‘I am one of the many-many-many, and I turn to You with my cry’. If I say ‘the sinner’ it means that I am more unfaithful, more imperfect than anyone else because I was given so much and respond so little. And in each prayer there are words that in the original had another meaning, another nuance and so we must not be prisoners of the words we use. If using words of the prayer of one saint or another we feel constricted, we feel: there is more to it, let us try to understand what more there is from our own poor and yet true experience.
I think I will stop at this point and next time I would like to go on with this search for meaning, for truth and bring to you as example the beginning of Genesis and other passages from the Holy Scriptures because they reveal to us by the variety of understanding which the Fathers of the Church have put in their comment something at times very important but to this I will come next time. Let us keep quiet for a while and pray together.
Talk 4
God is love
20 December 2001.
To begin with I want to apologise to you for having missed several talks but I was not well enough to do it. Now, I am going to give one or two talks that some of you may find questionable and I want to introduce this peculiarity of these talks by telling you something which I told a certain number of you already. I got several months ago a letter from a monastery in Russia with an enquiry. It said: “We are warned against the theology of our Western Orthodox theologians. Three stand out in particular as a danger to our souls. Of two we know the names and know who they are. They are Fr. Alexander Shmeman and Fr. John Meyendorf. The third one we don’t know who he is. Could you enlighten us? His name is Anthony Bloom”.
Well, I could not give very convincing evidence to these people but what I have got to say may possibly provoke that kind of reaction because I want to question certain number of things or at least to show that there are several approaches to things. In my last talk which you do probably not remember I tried to show how the experience of saints expressed in the prayers, which they left for us, questions us. At /?/ every prayer which we read must force us to ask ourselves: “Can I say these words truthfully, that is from within my own experience, truly and sincerely, or can I say some of the words with belief, either with knowledge already acquired or in an act of trust?” Other passages we may also treat in the same way by saying: “If the saint thought that way and expressed that way his experience of God it must be true and although I do not know it from my own experience I can say these words trusting him and trying to find within my own spiritual experience, within my own thoughts something approaching the depth and greatness of what he says”.
But we must be honest and we will then find that certain of the saint’s words we cannot pronounce with total faith and conviction, moreover, that at times we should say: “No, I can not believe it, it is beyond me, but more than that, there is in me such sinful experience or such immaturity that forces me to say: I can not believe these words, I can not say these things because it would be lying before God”. I insisted on these things in my last talk and I am not coming back to it but I want to underline the fact that we all, all without exception, when we use the prayers of the saints should use them truthfully, saying with complete conviction the things that are true in our experience, tentatively those things which we believe are possible and then tell God that these words I cannot possibly say sincerely.
This applies not only to prayers of course. It applies to passages of the Gospel, of the Old and the New Testament, in which things are said, which are certainly true because they have become and remain unshaken (?) the faith of the whole Church but which still remain a problem to us. And again in the same line there are words and expressions which in our colloquial language are familiar to us but which may not mean exactly in the context of the Scriptures or in the experience of the saints what we mean by them. One of such words, which we use lavishly and which we must ponder on very seriously is the word ‘loving’. When we say that God is love what do we mean? The simple answer is to say: “God loves each of us so tenderly, so openly that whatever we do if we come back to Him and say: I am sorry, forgive, - He will take us into His arms and bless us”. And to a certain extend this is true, except that our return to God must be something much more serious than a momentary reversal of our previous behaviour or feelings.
At times also it is so easy to deceive ourselves if not one another by using the word in a very strange manner. I remember a conversation I had number of years ago with a priest, why not name him, with Vladika Vitaly who became the head of the Church in exile. We were speaking of God and of love in particular and he was speaking very sharply of anyone who did not share his views and opinions. And I said to him: “Aren’t we called by God in the Gospel not only to love one another generally but to love our enemies?” And he brightened up and said: “Indeed, and I love my enemies but I hate the enemies of God”.
So you see that even the notion of love can be adulterated in a strange and terrible way. There is another approach to this notion of love: one can say that love is the readiness and indeed not only a theoretical readiness but a readiness embodied in action in the whole of our life to serve our neighbour. And when I say ‘our neighbour’ I do not mean universally everyone without paying a sufficient attention to the individual neighbour but readiness to respect him, to serve him, to devote our lives to him and indeed if necessary to offer our death for him. To love everyone, anyone without distinction in a way is simple. It is a concrete person who is a problem and those of you who have read Solzhenitsyn may remember a passage in one of his books, in which speaking of one of the heroes, the characters, he says: “He loved the whole of humanity and this is why he hated every individual that uglified, that made ugly this perfect image, which he had”. We do not express ourselves so sharply and we don’t always feel so sharply but don’t we to a greater or a lesser extend share this attitude so that even a word like ‘loving’, our love of God, our love of our neighbour requires from us a very deep, earnest and severe examination of our own soul and of our own behaviour?
When we say that God is love we don’t mean to say that He is all sentimentality, all tenderness, we know nothing about love when it is God Himself. We know however that if we ask ourselves, how has God ever shown us that He loves, we can say: He has called into existence a whole world, which has set before Him serious and dangerous problems. And the most dangerous of the problems is the creation of man. If God had created man as a mechanic that functions well once started, then there wouldl be no love in that. It would be inventiveness, genius, perhaps, but in the case of man there is one feature in man, indeed in all His creations, that is tragic. It is the fact that man was given by Him freedom, the right to be himself as he chooses with consequences that rebound on everyone else determining the response and the choice of everyone but also rebound tragically on God Himself. The right which man had to determine himself, his destiny, his relationship to God, his relationship to self and to the neighbour has resulted in the incarnation of the Son of God. And the incarnation of the Son of God, and I have quoted this phrase more than once, means that God has accepted to pay the cost of the human betrayal of self, betrayal of his vocation, betrayal of his Creator. And the result of it is the incarnation of the Son of God Who became one of us to save us.
Love understood like this is something very different from sentimental tenderness or friendship, it means the readiness to take upon Himself all the consequences of His creative act, indeed, but also of what every single creature of His will make of his own life. It is tragic and the thing which we forget very often and which decades ago Fr. Lev Gillet, a French Orthodox priest, pointed out in an article: “God is tragic. The life of the Holy Trinity is glorious, yes, but it shines in and through tragedy”. This is something which we forget, which indeed we do not speak about: a tragic God, because it seems to us very often that if we use such phrase about God we belittle Him, we make Him, as it were, vulnerable instead of being the great, omnipotent, glorious God and we forget that He is infinitely more glorious in His sacrifice of self than He would be in the immutability of a serene life observing the tragedies of the created world. We have got a tragic God because this God is the God of love.
You may say: Is it possible that man has introduced tragedy into the Godhead, is it possible that God can be acted upon, wounded by a decision of man? No, not quite, because what makes it even more tragic, more serious is that there is tragedy in the very being of the Holy Trinity. At the beginning of the Vsenoshnaya, the Vigils either on Saturday or before a feast the priest stands before the Holy Table and pronounces the words: “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”, and at that moment when he pronounces these words with the scencer in his hand he makes a sign of the cross, writing in the cross into the very proclamation of the Holy Trinity. We may ask ourselves: How is that possible? We are not the first ones to ask the question. St. Gregory centuries ago asked the question and he had his own answer for it. He was asking it indirectly: Why is it that God is not one arithmetic unit but the Trinity, and he says if God is love, to be one, that is a unit, is impossible because He than could love no-one but Himself. If God was made of two Persons, they would love one another and there will be no space for anything else. They would be like a couple who hold one another embraced, look into one another’s eyes, rejoice in one another and exclude everything else that will brake the intimacy of this unique meeting. He goes on to say that God is Trinity because the presence of the Third One brakes down this false unity but in a very particular way. He explains that in order that each could love each other at every moment one of them must accept to step out and to remain, if I may use this phrase, in the (?) so that two could love one another without interruption, without anyone intruding, contemplate each other and rejoice in each other, and the third one is ready to step out and to be alone.
But if God is love this becomes true for each Person and for the three at the same time. The two who were inseparably at one turn in their turn towards the one who made the sacrifice of his very existence for them to be alone and two are again at one while the third one is ready to step out. It is a tragic God, a God in Whom love and death are identical as it were, in Whom mutual love means mutual total, ultimate sacrifice. And so in this context if we have a God Whom we call the Holy Trinity and Whom we see as an image of perfect love we must realise how tragic this God is within Himself and how glorious this tragedy is, how glorious the sacrifice and their integration are. I think it is important for us not to see God as a glorious being seated on a throne far above us, so far that we can, perhaps, lift up our eyes towards Him, lift our hands towards Him, cry Godwards without ever knowing the mystery of love, of God. And we know it within ourselves because to the small extend to which we are capable of loving one another we begin to become an icon of the Holy Trinity.
Think of a mother, a father and a child, think of the way in which each parent, at times not only proves ready but actually sacrifices himself in whatever way it means for the child. That is an image, it can not be pursued totally but even within the limits of our experience we know that if there is love between us it holds two together in an embrace that makes the two one and at the same time these two let it go of their embrace in order to love and serve the third one. And this is a mystery of the Trinity reflected in mankind, reflected poorly because we are very far from this sacrificial, crucified and resurrecting love but we know something about it. We know something at times not only in terms of father, mother, family but of the readiness to sacrifice what is more than me.
I have quoted, I think, to you the example of this officer who during the war sent on a perilous mission his own son who was a junior officer in his unit. The chances to come back alive were practically null and another officer speaking to the father said to him: “How could you sent your son unto death?” And the father replied: “I could send my son, I could not possibly have sent anyone else’s son”. This is a reflection of the sacrificial love which is the Trinity and it is at the same time the glory of God as it is the glory of humans when they prove capable of acting a similar manner. God and mankind in a strange, incomprehensible way are akin to one another. Mankind is in the making, mankind is not ready. Yes, that is true, but basically, substantially mankind and not only in the Church but in its totality is an icon of God One in the Trinity, supremely in saints, to lesser degree in the concreteness of the Church, not in what the Church is in essence because the Church is the place where God and mankind dwell together, are united, are one, but in the whole becoming of mankind and of each of us. This is an important thing for us to realise. When we look at the history of mankind we see light and darkness because we are not perfect, we have not yet become a pure and perfect image of the God one in the Trinity but there is something of it in each person to the extent and in the way in which each person relates to each other person and to the whole body.
Now, when we read the Old and the New Testament we hear God speaking to us in a language which we can understand. This is a terribly important thing to realise that what the Gospel says to us is true but is an expression of the truth which we are capable of understanding. I would just make a remark.
The Gospel as the Old Testament is full of parables. For us ‘a parable’ is ‘a simile’, ‘an image’ but the word is so much richer. Those of you who have notion of mathematics know that a parable is a geometric figure very peculiar which could enlighten us in the understanding of what spoken parables are. I will try to explain what in geometry a parable is. If you take a circle it has a centre. If you press the sides of the circle it becomes an ellipse and the centre that was one is divided into two because each of the half-circles that form the ellipse needs a centre. If you continue to press on the sides and the circle brakes, the arms extend right and left, at one end the centre remains at the core of the image but the second centre is projected into infinity. And what strikes me in the parables, of the sagas, of the Gospel, of the Old Testament is that we are given an image which we read at the centre of the limited semicircle, in which we live, and as we grow spiritually, as we grow in experience and intellectually we can go farther and farther, as it were, in pursuit of the second centre that has moved into infinity. And this is why every parable of the Gospel or of the Old Testament or indeed the parables given to us by the sagas throughout the centuries are clear and simple as a story on the level in which they are told but when we grow into them, when we spiritually expand, when we become more and more partakers of the wisdom that created this image we go beyond and beyond the image itself. Well, the image remains true but the truth of it becomes so extraordinarily wonderful.
I would like to conclude this talk by something that will be a bridge with the next one. If in addition to what I have said about the parables you remember a remarkable phrase of Fr. Sergey Bulgakov who said that the beginnings of the Book of Genesis is not history, it is meta-history, that is it tells us in the language of the fallen world which is ours the mysteries of the world before its fall. And therefore what it says is true, but it has got another dimension than the factual truth of what we were told. And to this I would like to come in my next talk because we are accustomed to read the beginning of Genesis in the first four-five chapters as though it was simple history, a series of facts while there is a great deal more to them than this and that there were number of interpretations of these passages which do not all coincide with one another. Habitually in the catechism and in books for children and grown-ups we have one image that prevails. Are there other images that we should examine without denying the first one but taking into account that there are other ways? I will come back to that in my next talk.
I am sorry that I have been so slow and more tiring to you than habitually but I don’t think I could manage otherwise. So look at the timetable of talks and I will continue this idea of meta-history and apply it to the beginnings, to the first four chapters of Genesis introducing elements of which I have never spoken before.
Could we now be silent for a short while and then pray together?
Talk 5
Creation – Fall.
17 January 2002.
As you know the general program of my talks this year has been questioning. And questioning includes doubt, includes also overcoming doubt and questioning in two ways: on one hand at times by an act of faith. One could express it by saying: at times I have no answer to my question but knowing God however little I know Him I can trust Him and therefore I will behave with certainty, with confidence until I have matured enough, grown sufficiently in spirit, in experience of life, in knowledge to be able to understand what is to me at times is beyond understanding. And this is a normal process, it is true in all the fields of human knowledge. This is why and how we learn of normal human life, how we meet school and university and how we meet the problems of life; but also in the case of our facing God it requires at times a heroic readiness to trust Him in spite of the fact that everything is against this trust.
Such a statement may seem to be almost blasphemous but at times, indeed, things which we see around us are so terrible, so terrifying that we may say: How can God allow such a thing? What is His responsibility for them? - because to allow in a certain sense is tantamount to acquiesce, let them happen. And this is the point which I would like to raise tonight, perhaps, very awkwardly because I have been trying to understand and I have certainly not understood as much as I should.
In a previous talk I tried to show how we are challenged by the word of God and by the faith of the saints. We are challenged, we are questioned, we have got earnestly to look into things and learn. But there is one point which I would like to rise with you, which is never raised, which is taken for granted and which in a sense is the beginning of the problems.
When we read the beginning of Genesis, we read that God planted in the Garden of Eden two trees: the tree of the knowledge of God and the tree of knowledge. By feeding on the one Adam and Eve were called to grow into an ever-increasing knowledge of God by communion, but eating of the other they were advised not to and that is the point at which temptation came to them. We are told in the first chapter of Genesis that Satan came up to Eve and said to her: “God commanded you not to touch the fruit of this tree because if you do so you will become like Him: knowing all things”. At that point we always read in the commentaries that Eve was tempted and that was the beginning of the Fall.
I would like to attract your attention to one or two things. First of all Eve at that moment was still sinless, pure, without fault and the words addressed to her by the serpent could not be addressed to whatever evil there could be in her. It was addressed to her innocence, to her purity, to her candeur and she responded by trusting the serpent not because she found the idea of breaking God’s commandment attractive but because she thought that here was one who was giving her good advice, because God had commanded them in the act of creation to know Him and to know all things. The only thing is that to know all things there are two ways: the one is such oneness with God, such perfect communion with Him that what is in His mind should become ours. It is the growth in communion with God from holiness to holiness.
In the case of the temptation offered to Eve there was another element. It was a desire indeed to fulfil the commandment of God but in a way that was simpler: eat of this fruit and you will know as God knows. Now, this eating of the fruit of course is an image and there are comments which are not habitually brought into the picture, in which we are told that eating of the fruit meant a sort of communion with and the suggestion which was made to Eve at that moment was: identify with the world which is ambient, which surrounds you and you will know it as God knows. What God has offered was: Commune with Me and you will share My knowledge. In a sort of formal way we may say: it is the same thing with the difference that to know things in God, as God knows them, by communing with Him in mind and life was one thing, describing the things of God independently of Him was another thing. And here we come upon a remarkable passage in the works of St. Iraeneus of Lyon, which came to my knowledge through an article written by Olivier Clement a certain number of years ago.
Iraeneus of Lyon says (I am sorry, one minute) that there were two ways of acquiring the total knowledge which God wanted to impart on us: the one was total communion with Him and the other – an ever-deepening and increasing communion with the created world. In itself there was no rejection of the will of God but in fact it meant a long, torturous, difficult way of discovery. In God all knowledge rested, by communion with Him one was in a position to know all things as He knows them, indeed, not immediately, but as we progress in this common life with Him. What was offered to Eve was to discover all things but by human endeavour.
You may find what I say difficult to follow and I don’t find it easy to express but I will give you an example, an image. We may know a person by communion in heart and mind with this person, a person whom we love deeply, whom we trust unreservedly, in whom we are deeply happy and with whom we share our thoughts and his thoughts. This is a direct communion and a direct knowledge through communion. But on the other hand we can acquire a deep and true knowledge about a person through his works. I am thinking at present about icons and icon-painters.
Every icon-painter expresses his knowledge of Christ, of the Mother of God, of the saints, of the angels, of the world from within his experience. Certain of these icon-painters were great in spirit, certain of them were less but one way or another it was a vision which was given them, which they expressed in their painting but it is not only the vision which we are confronted with, it is the painter and the person. You know that in ancient icon-painting and indeed in modern icon-painting we can very often say: this is the work of Theophane the Greek, this is the work of Rublev, this is the work of Uspensky, this is the work of one or another of the icon-painters. It is the same vision which is expressed by the experience, within the experience of a given icon-painter. And the idea which Iraeneus of Lyon tries to convey to us is that if we go deep with a pure heart, with an enlightened mind into all things created, we gradually will discover the Creator Himself. Indeed, it is a roundabout way, it is a long way, it has not got the directness, the simplicity, the decisiveness of communing with the Creator Himself and yet it is a way that can lead us to the goal. But here we must remember two aspects of the same problem: when we struggle to commune with God we are hampered by our sinfulness and by sinfulness I do not mean to say because we are so evil and so bad – because we are so imperfect, imperfect as the result of the original loss of communion with God in our first parents.
And so when we look at God’s creation we do not see Him as He truly is because the image is blurred. There is a passage in St. Paul in which he says to us that we see things as though through a darkened piece of glass. It is translated at times ‘in a mirror’ but I think the original text is clear: instead of seeing directly or through a clear window we see through a pane of glass which is grey, soiled, confusing. And this applies both to our knowledge of God and of spiritual things and to the knowledge which we acquire of the ambient world.
Now, there is an additional problem here. We live in a world that belongs to the post-fall period. We do not know the world as it was created originally, we could not even imagine it. We can only know that God created all things perfect and that the Spirit of God was breathing on all things and bringing them to their fulfilment. We live in a world in which that is finished. Even in the Church, even in the saints we can say daringly, perhaps, arrogantly, we can say: we carry the holy things in earthen vessels. There are moments when the holy things shine in a blinding way through a person but otherwise it is a twilight that reaches us. Think, for instance of all the saints of whom we are aware: there are moments in their lives when suddenly the glory of God shone through them. I am thinking at present of course of Motovilov’s vision of St. Seraphim when Motovilov asked St. Seraphim: “What happens when the grace of God, the Spirit of God comes upon a man?” And then without a word it happened, and Motovilov closed his eyes with his hands and Seraphim said to him: “Why do you do that?” “Because I am blinded by the resplendence of your face”. At that moment, he said later, that the face of St. Seraphim was a human face, his face but, as it were, shining through a blinding sunshine. He was blinded by the light of it and Seraphim said to him: “This is what happens when the Spirit of God touches us”. But we do not see even the saints all the time in this glorious manner. When you read the lives of saints you see a humanity, at times a noble, a beautiful, a glorious humanity, at times a frailty so wonderfully frail that the grace of God prevails and it is God Who acts and not the person. So we must remember this when we think of our trying to understand the difference between the direct communion with God and communion with God through the vision of His works.
But there is more to it: Fr. Sergey Bulgakov said once that the beginning of Genesis is not history, it is not an adequate description in historical terms of what happened before the Fall. He says, it is meta-history and by this he goes on to explain that the events spoken of, indeed, had taken place but we have no language in a fallen world to express adequately what happened in the world before the Fall. And so all the imagery of the beginning of Genesis it true in the sense that it conveys things but describes them not.
This is why I believe that the idea expressed by St. Iraeneus of Lyon is very important. It is one possibility, one of the possible understandings of this beginning but it is a creative one, it is one that can fill us with hope. Habitually we are told that the serpent spoke to Eve and beguiled her into eating of the fruit of knowledge and that she found the fruit appetising and ate of it. And then having already through her act of distrust of God lost her wholeness, she turns to Adam and offers him part of this fruit. And he eats and falls. And then God comes, as it were, to the rescue: there is a chance. He calls: “Adam, where are you?” - because Adam had hidden. “Have you eaten of the fruit?” And Adam answers: “Yes, but it is the wife whom You gave me, who gave me to eat”. And habitually we see in it a new fall, a way in which Adam accuses God Himself of being the cause of the Fall: not only did He plant this tree, not only did He allow the serpent to be in it, not only did He allow Eve to be tempted but He allowed her to tempt him and they are fallen now together.
I think we can see things differently. We can see that when God asked Adam His question Adam said: “It is the wife whom You gave me”. He recognised in her God’s own gift and it is in togetherness that they will continue to live their human destiny. He does not turn against God accusingly; he recognises the greatest gift which God had given him: Eve, - Eve which etymologically means ‘life’.
And they both now are in a world that has been shattered by the disobedience or the candeur, the trustfulness of both Adam and Eve and they will continue in it but they do not turn away from God. I think there is a greater beauty in seeing things in the way in which I have presented them, which some of you may see as fantasies and some as untrue to comments which I had read but the passage of St. Iraeneus stands in me as something of primary importance.
And then things develop. To begin with Adam was alone, then Eve was brought into existence. And here, perhaps, I would like to say something which I have already mentioned. One always speaks of Eve being born, made of a rib of Adam but in the ancient languages the idea of rib corresponded to the notion of the side. In old Slavonic for instance, to sleep ‘on one’s ribs’ meant ‘to lie down on one’s side’. And Eve was not made simply out of a small bone extracted from Adam, Eve was half of him. There are lovely commentaries on the idea of the rib. I remember a Hebrew commentary in which we are told: “Of course, it was a rib because a rib is the part which is nearest to the heart”. But this is lovely but I think the idea that the total man, the ‘ανθρωπος’, ‘the chelovek’ that was created first because the word ‘Adam’ means simply ‘man’ in the sense of ‘human being’, divided in two and remained one, because when Adam looked at Eve who had become an independent part of him as it were, he says: “She is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh and she will be called”, - and in translations it makes no sense, - “woman, because she was born of man”. But in Hebrew the word used is ‘ish’ and ‘isha’ – “I am ‘he’, she is ‘she’. She is the feminine of the masculine and I am the masculine of the feminine”. And it is only after the Fall that they discover one another as being two different persons, they discover that they are naked, which they did not know because one does not know one’s own nakedness. Nakedness was discovered because they were no longer one.
And so we live in a world in which we use images and words that do not apply adequately to the beginnings of the Old Testament because these beginnings should be expressed in words that do not exist anymore for us. We live in a world that is no longer that one.
I am afraid I will have to end my talk at this point and if you have the courage and the patience to come next time I have quite a lot more to say about these beginnings, what is the puzzlement and what is a light and a joy and a wonder. I would like to speak not only of Adam and Eve, of man in the sense of ‘chelovek’, ‘ανθρωπος’ and Eve in the sense of ‘life’ but also of Abel and Cain and of their generation and what happens in a context, in a manner which, I think, is not usual and which, I hope and I believe, is not a lie, a fantasy of mine.
Could we now keep silent and quiet for a short while, then I will read prayers and then I will ask you to come for a blessing if you want to but not to linger too much because I haven’t got much strength left.
Talk 6
The Fall.
31 January 2002.
... to come back today to certain points which I made last time because they seem to be unclear to a certain number of you. And I had questions addressed to me in that (Can you here? Let us then stop and wait). As I have said a moment ago after my last talk I had a certain number of questions asked (You see, you need much more that than me as a speaker). I have been asked a certain number of questions because what I said seemed to be unclear. So I will come back quickly to one or two points and then continue.
The point that seemed to be most unclear was the idea I expressed, not my own indeed, but following people like Fr. Sergey Bulgakov, Lossky, Florovsky and others that the beginning of Genesis could not be considered as a historical description of events but, to use an expression of Fr. Sergey Bulgakov, as meta-history by which he meant that historical events, things that actually did happen could not be expressed in the language of our days because they belong to a world that did not exist anymore. And so whatever was said in this beginning of Genesis was true as to the essence but not an adequate description of what had happened. This I think is very important for us to remember because then we can understand that a number of Fathers had divergent and different comments or explanations of what we read in the first five-six chapters. The reason for it, for this notion of meta-history, is that the world of which we are spoken in the first chapter of Genesis and up to the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth chapter is a world that did not exist anymore, a world that had not fallen away from God, that was alien to sin, that had not yet become the world which we know. And we have not got even a vocabulary to speak about a world of that kind. And I will give you one or two images for you, perhaps, to understand it more clearly.
There are things which one can convey in one language to people who know the language and also know the reality of things of which it is spoken but not otherwise. The first example that comes to my mind is something that struck me many years ago: when the Gospel was for the first time translated for Eskimos a problem arouse when it came to the words that Christ is the Lamb of God because the Eskimos had no lambs, had never seen one and the phrase meant nothing at all. And in this early translation instead of using the word ‘lamb’ they used the word ‘seal’: He is the little Seal of God. To us it sounds strange and, perhaps, even offensive to some, but in fact it was the only way, in which one could convey what the Gospel said.
Another example is from my memory. I remember a report written many-many years ago about early missionaries to Central Africa, to that part of Africa which is always scorched by a sun, hot and never had an experience of frost, of snow or of ice. And when the first missionaries spoke of the experience they had in this country and in another countries of Europe about water coming down from heaven but not liquid and not warm but in the form of flakes white, cold and of water that was ice, in other words, solid and frozen, they were not believed. And it is only when one of them came on a boat to this country and discovered that snow exists and that ice exists that they began to understand what it was spoken about.
We are in the same position with regard to the very beginning of Genesis. It is a world that had not yet broken away from God. It is a world in which darkness did not exist yet, it is a world in which God and His creatures were in communion and alive to one another. And when the authors of Genesis try to convey to us the events of the Creation and the early days of it they had to use a vocabulary which is that of our fallen world, which means that it is inadequate in a sense, inadequate in the sense that it does not describe exactly the situation what happened. It conveys to us enough for us when we commune with God more deeply to begin to understand. On the other hand in the course of history spiritual writers, the Fathers, the theologians have tried to understand what the beginnings meant, the text, no longer what was beyond the text but the text itself. And a variety of comments and explanations were given for different passages. The more simple, the more obvious, the more uncomplicated for our world was given in the story of the Fall. And yet as I tried to convey to you last time, there is a great problem arising from this way of explaining things because if God has created in paradise, on His own territory, as it were, two trees – one that brings life and the other that brings death and has left Adam and Eve facing both of them and we are told that the tree of death was attractive and not frightening, it forces us to ask a question: what is then His responsibility for the Fall of man? And that is a very serious question because if God is responsible for our fall, then the whole history of redemption becomes different, acquires a different meaning, it is no longer an act by which a God of love gives His life for creatures that have strayed and fallen and died but a God Who bears the consequences of His own decision to create a realm of death. And this we cannot accept because it is not the God Whom we know. We know a God of love, a God of life, a God Who created all things for life eternal and for fulfilment, not for destruction.
For a very-very long time I have struggled with this idea until I came as I told you last time upon this passage in the writings of St. Iraeneus of Lyon who reached me through a French theologian called Olivier Clement in an article about this saint, in which St. Iraeneus says that God had created the Garden of Eden, had planted there, as it were, that is imagery of course, two trees as two possibilities to fulfil one’s human vocation and to find one’s human fulfilment. The one, the tree of life, let us call it that way, is the way that consists in renouncing, turning away from everything except God Himself, communing with Him, acquiring what St. Paul calls, the mind of Christ, discovering God, discovering God’s creation including oneself and mankind in and through communion with God, through the mind of God, through being at one with Him. And the other one is the possibility of making the same discoveries but by looking deeply, trying to understand the world that surrounds us, find the Creator through His creation.
And this would have been a very simple proposition in a way if the creation had remained pure, unstained and unshaken from its harmony. But the tragedy of it lies in the fact that thanks to the choice made by man, and I will come back to this, the creation has become a problem, and one can find God by examining this creation, by communing with it, by living with it but in a slow, struggling manner. And the example, the image which I gave you last time is the way in which we can discover an artist through his works. When we look at an icon we would say: “O, this is the work of Theophan the Greek, this is the work of another icon-painter be it even a modern one like Uspensky or Krug”. We can recognise them in their painting. In the same way we can recognise by contemplation, by going deep into the understanding of God’s creation the Creator Himself. This is not the direct, the simple way in which one can discover Him by communing with Him directly, through prayer, through contemplation, through silence, but it is a way that can lead either an individual or perhaps, a whole generation, or the whole of mankind, it does not matter in a sense, to the knowledge of the same God but through ups and downs. And these ups and downs result in the fact that we commune imperfectly, we discover things imperfectly, we hesitate, we believe and disbelieve but ultimately we can trust God that has created a world that is an icon, an image, that will lead us to the knowledge of Him.
I have presented you this idea of St. Iraeneus a little, perhaps, developed by me and, perhaps, spoilt by my presentation for you to see that God did not create a tree of death but a tree of search. Death comes into it because we are not eternal but it is God Whom we meet in the end and it is therefore possible to go into the knowledge of the created world in order to find its meaning and the God Who created it. This makes us look quite differently at the world in which we live, the material world, the world of thought, the world of knowledge, the world of science because all these elements can lead us to understanding God or else, before we come to an understanding, come to a point in which you are puzzled, deeply puzzled and ask ourselves ultimate questions: What is beyond what we know? How can we understand a world which seems to be ever more complex and beyond understanding? Is it a way in which we are taking away from God? Or is it a way in which we will discover God, generation after generation because simultaneously with this discovery of God through His works the other way is not closed to us. A scientist may be a believer, a scientist may not be a believer but in desperate search for meaning and this gives us such hope that the world is not open only to the ascetics and to the saints, that all the roads may lead to the discovery of God.
This is what I wanted to try and convey last time and perhaps, didn’t I convey today but I think it is very important for us to look at the world, in which we live, with interest, with concern, with hope that even if what we do is not a purely spiritual activity, if we study the world, in which we live, from any angle we study the handy work of God. And beyond the material discovery we may discover the Author in the same way in which we can recognise the author of a poem, of a painting, of an icon, of a piece of music. We do not confuse them, we listen and we say: “O, this is only so-and-so who could have written that”. It is true about God and we must from generation to generation, it is a matter for the whole of mankind, to work in that direction, from generation to generation we must search and in the end unfold wider and wider, deeper and deeper our knowledge of the works of God and through it of God Himself, partly because of the marvel, the sense of amazement we have when it unfolds before us and we discover its depth, I was about to say: its harmony – no, because we do not discover only harmony, we live in a world that has lost total oneness and communion with God and therefore there is not only harmony and beauty – there is frightening ugliness. It is not only mortality, it is horror at times. When we look at the world in which we live, it is enough to be aware of what happens in one country or another with volcanoes, with fires, with floods and what happens also through human blindness, hatred. And we must work through it all because this is the way in which we, humans, have damaged, are damaging the world of God but are incapable thanks to Him of destroying it. I am presenting to you views which are probably not customary and probably some of you will find that I am teaching, no, I am not teaching, that I am presenting to you views which are incompatible with their harmonious vision, which they possessed thus far.
Think, I am not an unbeliever, on the contrary, but I believe passionately in the communion with God which is offered us in prayer, in a life worthy of His holiness and His love for us, of all He gives us; but also we are merged and we are part and parcel of a fallen world and it is in this turmoil that we must find our way. Remember in the Gospel the story of St. Peter drowning while he was walking towards Christ. The disciples have left one side of the sea of Galilee and were moving to the other side. They were almost by the shore but they were tossed by a storm and of a sudden at a very centre of the storm, at the point of equipoise of all the violence of it they saw Christ walking on the sea. They cried for fear because they thought it was a ghost. And Christ said: “Don’t fear, it is I”. And then Peter whom we see always ready to move in an élan, said: “Let me come to You if it is truly You”. And Christ said: “Come”. And as long as Peter was looking at nothing but Christ he could walk on the seas. But of a sudden he became aware that he was no longer walking on solid ground, that water was under his feet, that he could drown at every moment and the moment he turned towards himself he began to drown but at that moment the Lord Jesus Christ took him by the hand, saved his life and he discovered that they were all in the boat and at the shore. That is the way in which mankind and each of us has got to proceed: we are like Peter. There are moments when we can go Godwards, not thinking of anything else, not even ourselves, there are other moments when we start and remember the dangers of the world and begin to drown. That happens in major ways but it happens also in very simple ways when someone gets into despair, feels there is no hope, life is so hard, life is so incredibly cruel. How to live? And then of a sudden God enters into our life.
If I may say something which probably is irrelevant. I belong to a generation that has known the First World War and the revolution and the emigration and number of hardships attached to these events and when I was a boy I had formed the impression that the world of men was like a jungle, that I was surrounded by wild beasts, that the only way of survival was to be totally insensitive and capable of fighting or ready to be devout or destroyed. And at certain turn of my life, I was fourteen then, Christ entered into it, and I remember that in a first reading of the Gospel I opened it on a passage from St. Mathew that was saying that God shines His light on the good and the evil, loves the good and the evil, the ones with joy, the other ones with crucifixion. And I remember I sat back and thought: “I want to be with God and so even if I am burnt alive I will love the people who do that because I want to be with God”.
And I think this is the position in which we all are: through science, through literature, through art, through music, through human relationship, in peace and in war, in health and sickness, we are walking on this sea on which St. Peter walked, and at time we walk because we think of the God of harmony, at times we begin to drown because we remember ourselves, our frailty, the danger in which we are and at that moment it is Christ Who takes our hand and we found ourselves safely on the shore. This what we can learn from this beginning of Genesis and also from what follows.
And then we must reconsider our habitual vision of things. To put it in a very primitive way, we always think of Adam and Eve in paradise living in perfect harmony between themselves and in perfect harmony with God but there are two trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. And we are habitually told that Eve looked at the tree of knowledge and found it attractive and the devil was there who said to her: “Take of this tree and eat from it. It is a tree of knowledge, you will acquire knowledge like God”, - leaving her to understand – “Is it not that what God told you: to begin to know all things as I know them?” And Eve eats of the fruit and immediately the world changes for her: it is not a world pervaded with the life and the light of God, it is a world that has become the material world. And she turns to Adam and offers him also to test, to taste of this fruit and to discover the world as he had never seen it. And then they both look at one another and as Genesis says, they see that they are naked. Before that they did not see they were naked because as we know from the same book of Genesis, when they were created, they were one personality in two persons, they did not see one another in opposition as different. When Adam saw Eve he says: “I am he, he is she, I am I and she is I in feminine, as it were”. He did not see her as an alien body but as himself revealed in incredible beauty. It is only after the Fall that they look at one another as being different, not I, and they see one another’s nakedness. And then the Lord says: “Adam, where are you?” And Adam says: “I heard You walking in the Garden and I hid because I am naked”. “And who told you that you are naked? Did you eat of the tree of knowledge?” “The wife who You gave me gave me to eat”. And the commentary which habitually presented is that Eve was beguiled, she ate of the fruit of the tree, she shared it with Adam, they discovered that they were naked, in other words, alien to one another, unity was broken, oneness was no longer there, and when God appeared, they were afraid and when challenged Adam said: “I am in that condition because of the wife You gave me, it is Your fault”.
Well, this is something which I think, we can reconsider. I don’t mean to say that I am right. I am offering you an alternative vision of things born of what I have said to you about St. Iraeneus text. Eve tastes of the tree, her eyes open no longer with the vision which God has of His creation but a created vision of the created world. She offers the same fruit to Adam and he also sees the world no longer in the light of God but in the twilight that has come upon them. And what I find remarkable is these words: “It is the wife whom You have given me”, - because he does not renounce her, he remains at one with her, even in the fallen world they are not separated, they enter tragedy together and God enters tragedy together with them because this is the turning point which will condition the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.
I find this passage so deeply moving because instead of being simply an act of disobedience, of rebellion, of challenging God, of turning away from Him, it is a moment of real tragedy. But then you may ask another question: we are told that the devil came and tempted Eve. It means, it implies that there was something wrong, because he had been created an angel of light, why had he become an angel of darkness? Ancient writers have tried to give explanations which I find unsatisfactory. The ones say that some of the angels sinned by pride, looking at themselves, finding themselves so beautiful, pride came into them and broke their wholeness and their unity with God. Some say that the Fall came after the creation of man and jealousy came: how is it that another creature is made which is as beautiful, as wonderful as we are? Especially if they became aware of the Divine Counsel that the Son of God will become the Son of man. But that it is to me in both cases unsatisfactory because it presupposes in them the possibility of evil and this possibility could have been implanted only by God because it could not have been born out of a perfect being. I have found in one of the ancient writers an explanation, which satisfies me, perhaps, not you.
Lactantius writes that the angels of God once created, communing with God through worship, through love, through admiration, through communion became more and more partakers of divine light, they were gradually pervaded with that light which was God Himself, as it were. And at certain moment some of them, one in particular, looked at himself, saw himself fragrant with the light of God and could no longer in an act of wisdom, perhaps, see that his beauty was God’s beauty reflected in him and not his personal own beauty and he exclaimed: “I am like God”. This was the one who is called ‘Lucifer’, ‘the carrier of light’, ‘dennitsa’ in Slavonic. And with him all those who like him having looked at themselves and found themselves incredibly glorious felt they have attained total final fulfilment without realising that there is no limit to fulfilment, no limit to growth, that however fragrant this light was in them it was only part of the divine shining and so they fell away because they closed upon themselves instead of remaining totally open to God and it is one of them who came up to Eve and beguiled her in a way to follow his own example: he had learnt what it means to be created beauty and he had not, perhaps, truly understood that it implied the loss of communion with the only One Who is Beauty and the Creator.
And so we find ourselves almost with an alternative vision of things, it includes the other which I mentioned before but with such hope, such hope that even partaking of the tree of knowledge is a way of gradually through the knowledge of God’s creation to discover more and more the Creator not at a future date, no, but in a process while it takes place simultaneously, the growth into the knowledge of God through the tree of life and the knowledge of God through the tree of knowledge, through His works, through His deeds, through His wisdom and ultimately through His becoming man and His Crucifixion, His Resurrection and opening to us in a new way, the simultaneous knowledge of the world created by Him but from within the knowledge of God given us through communion with Him.
To this I will come next time. I hope I have not troubled your consciousness too much, I hope that you will think of what I have said and, perhaps, criticise it and find new ways and perhaps, can we a little later when I have moved a little further along the line of my talks have a meeting at which we could have a free discussion of these things, but to me it is such wonderful joy to think that the created world is a living revelation of God and that the knowledge of the created world does not preclude the direct communion with God, on the contrary, communion with God gives us light to understand the created world. I will end my talk at this point.
Talk 7
On knowledge.
21 February 2002.
... which I have been presenting to you, which are not a teaching but which are my own reflections and questioning about matters of faith not in the sense that I doubt things in the negative sense but I want to be true and I want to understand and where I don’t understand I want to be frank and open with God, with myself and with you. So I will continue to ask questions and hope that they will mature in you and that you will find answers which, perhaps, I have not yet found and may never find.
You probably remember, or possibly remember that last time I said to you that the beginning of Genesis can be seen either in the habitual way which is taught in the Catechisis, and at school, and at the theological schools concerning the fall of man and that this theme hurt me very much because it raised a question that was insoluble for me. If God had planted in the Garden of Eden that is in the place of fellowship, peace, mutual love between God and man and between Adam and Eve not only the tree of life that would give them eternal life through communion with life divine but also another tree, a tree of knowledge that had within itself the power not only to reveal the meaning of things but also to lead the newly created couple astray unto death. And my question has always been, for some time rather than always: how could it be, does not it make God Himself responsible both for the Fall and for the appalling consequences of it? The Fall means the breaking up of the human couple, to this we will come back, the breaking up of all: the harmony and structure of the created world, death come upon not only the humans but all existing beings, a total destruction. Could it be possible? And this I could not accept: that God had created death and planted it right in the middle of the Garden of life and that this tree of death produced fruits that were beautiful to see and attractive and also that into this Garden could come an angel of death, one of the fallen angels.
For a long time it was a real serious problem and then I /found/ the quotation which I have already quoted to you and I am sorry if I repeat myself, but I want you to understand how acute the problem is for me. A quotation of St. Iraeneus of Lyon in which he said that apart from the tree of life, which meant direct communion with God feeding on all that God could give and eventually all that God was because He wanted us so to commune with Him as to become partakers of the divine nature, there was this second tree, the tree of knowledge and this tree of knowledge was not a tree of death but an alternative way for humanity and the created world to find its fulfilment, its completion and ultimately its total communion with God. But this meant that mankind and as a result of it the whole created world would have to walk a long-long way of searching to find step by step the truth about God and enter into an ever-deeper communion of understanding and communion of life with Him. I gave you a quick example or an image by saying that in our limited world we can know a person through the fruits of his thinking or of his activities. I gave an example that if you look at a variety of icons although they represent the same Lord Jesus Christ and the Mother of God and the saints, the hand that painted them is different and you could say: “This icon is Theophan the Greek, this icon is Leonid Uspensky, this icon is Rublev, this icon is Fr. Gregoriy Krug, etc”. It does not mean that they are untrue to the basic subject but it means that each of them communed with God, received a knowledge of God through this, in this communion and projected it on canvas or on wood. And each of them has something absolutely true to say but it is true as seen by a given painter. It does not mean that each of them is incomplete in a sense that none of them is the true image of Christ, of the Mother of God, of one or another saint and that is quite obvious because it is only the person himself or herself who is the true image of the self. And in that respect there is something analogous that we think of Christ in His incarnation. We paint icons that are vastly different from one another and none of them is an adequate similitude of Christ Himself. Each of them represents Christ as I see Him, Christ as I know Him and it is a wonderful thing that we have not got a photographic image of Christ that would give us an extremely momentary and limited vision of what He looked and made Him a stranger to anyone knowing Him in a different manner. To use a vocabulary which is (current?) and simple there is the Russian Christ and the Greek Christ and the English Christ but there is also the Black Christ and the Chinese Christ because each nation when they wanted to represent their God become man, God in the flesh, could represent Him only in the features of his own nation otherwise this God incarnate would have been a stranger, an alien, have nothing really to do with the people whom He had come to save in one region or another. It is something which I believe is of great importance for us to remember that we have not got a portrait of Christ as He was. He was the universal man, yes, He had temporarily human features but these features changed, as it were, in the eyes of those who looked at Him.
I have seen icons of Christ, of the Mother of God painted by black believers, they were Christ but they were Negroes. I have seen the same thing happening with icons of Christ painted by Chinese or Japanese icon-painters: it was Christ on each occasion but in features that everyone could recognise because He was like this although He was also different.
I do not know whether I make myself understandable but I think it is very important for us to realise that an icon is the vision of a given man or woman, of Christ, of the Mother of God of the saints which is conveyed through a person, through a direct experience or through a borrowed experience and does not claim to be an adequate image. The same is true when we speak of God. All the saints have spoken of Christ, of the Mother of God, of saints, of God altogether and each of them not from a different point of view but with a different nuance, in a way that was not identical. They knew Him at times as a Judge because they saw Him at that moment in the context of their own sinfulness and they could not see Him otherwise than the Judge and then, when they repented, when they changed their lives, they saw in Him the merciful Saviour, the One Who had chosen to die for them to live. And what is true in icon-painting is also true in all the ways in which we try to convey things concerning God and the spiritual life. Indeed I could extend this thought by saying it is also true about the way in which we convey to one another what we know about a third person. How often it happens that two persons know a common friend and speaking of him or her they discover that this person is seen in a quite different manner by the other. You must have this experience. And not because the person had treated them differently but because the message was received in a different way. Now, if the message was received in a different way, an image has come to my mind which was given me some decades ago: if you look at the reflection of trees or houses, or persons in a pond or in a lake, you will see it very different at different moments. First of all the image will be coloured by the fact that the pond or the lake simultaneously reflects not only this person’s face but the sky, for another thing the waters of the lake may be still, and then the features are regular and peaceful. And a little wind comes and little waves and the object becomes quite different: the tree is no longer what it was, the face is no longer what it was. So we must be aware of the fact that even within our experience there are moments when we see God, His saints, the Mother of God and one another and ourselves in a quite new and different way. And it would be untrue to say that one way of seeing is right and the other one is not because the object has not changed, what has changed is my perception due to circumstances but due mainly to maturity and to my inner condition.
Leaving aside icons and direct images there are a variety of ways in which experience is conveyed to us. I have spoken more than once in past about the fact that a composer starts with an inner experience which is beyond words, beyond sound, beyond any form of expression, which pervades him, fills him, changes him and then this experience begins to take shape. And this shape is something he experiences concretely as beauty, as horror and then he tries to convey it to others and to do that if he is a musician, he must use sound and this sound will again be one step lower, perhaps, or less adequate to the original than the silent, unutterable experience or the experience perceived and put into word or sound for himself but when it is put into sound it is for others within limits of what musical sound can do. And then eventually this musical experience finds itself expressed on a sheet of paper in conventional signs. And people approach them, see them the ones without any understanding, the other one with approximate understanding and gradually those who are particularly gifted, particularly capable of entering in communion with the original experience of the artist begin to commune with the experience itself.
So that is another way in which we reach out to the understanding of God. Icons yes, but also the music of the Church and beyond the music of the Church what we hear of the sounds of the world: the wind in the trees. I remember a psychologist touring Europe from America and asking people the same question or rather two questions: the one was - what is silence and the other one was – what is a tree. And I remember being questioned myself and having given awkward answers I turned to one of our young people here, an educated, the son of a cultured family and said: “What is a tree”. And his answer baffled me. His answer was: “A tree is wood for the kitchen”. He saw nothing else in tree. And I asked afterwards a very simple uncultured young girl and she smiled at me with a radiant smile and said: “A tree? But it is a beauty: the shape of it and the wind blowing through it and producing a whole harmony of sounds and rain falling and creating music – this for me is a tree”.
So is it also the way in which we experience God. Who is He for me, for each of us here? Is He simply a Creator? Or is He the One Who loved me so before I was born that He called me into existence? Is He the One Who watches my life ready to punish me for betraying His expectation or is He One Who gave me the freedom to do right and wrong but has become man Himself in order to die and save me? And this applies, I believe, to all forms of art and all forms of expression and to science. And I will give you one more example, which probably is unexpected both in itself and coming from someone so heavy mentally and perceptively as I. There is a passage in one the great ascetics. It is either St. Ephrem of Syria of St. Isaac of Syria I can’t remember at this moment, but he says in one of his writings that the eternal occupation of the angels is the dance. When we think of the dance you know what we think of. How could the dance be the eternal occupation? And in another passage he explains that the dance is rooted in such deep silence that it can not find expression otherwise than in itself but also that this silence can be expressed by motion, by harmony, by the beauty of motion without any interrupting noise, any interrupting thought, any interrupting words. I had this in mind – o, that what about more than forty years ago, when I met a Greek theologian. He had never been in Russia. He worked for the World Council of Churches and on return from his first visit to Russia he said to me: “You know, I know now what prayer is”. I was surprised because he was teaching theology, he was a man of faith, a man whom I admired for his integrity. And I said: “Where did you discover it: in one of the churches, in one of the monasteries or by meeting someone who is the carrier of faith and prayer?” He said: “No, I discovered what prayer was when I went to the ballet and saw one of the ballerina’s dancing because there was total silence within her and this silence was expressed in perfect gesture and movement”.
This is a modern illustration of something that, as I mentioned it to you, was said in the sixth century of our era. So that even there we must be able to look for a revelation of truth. Obviously, dancing like painting, like thinking, like singing, like speaking can be a destruction, a barrier, but in itself there it is: it is a depth of silence that can express itself only in the harmony of a gesture. In the same way this tree of knowledge speaks to us of the discovery of the mysteries of the created world, of the world created by God knowingly, in science. Science is now developing, widening in an incredible manner. It becomes very mysterious to the non-initiated and every decade changers it. I was trained in science. My Professor of physics was Maurice Curie, the nephew of the great Curie. I should know something about physics and I know now that I know nothing. In his last lecture, it was in 1931 I think, no - 1932, Maurice Curie said to us: “Had we just discovered one more atom for Mendeleev’s table, the atom shall never be split because if it be split, the whole world would explode”. He was one the greatest atomic scientists of his day.
So that here again we see science whether it is physics or other sciences expounding in width and in depth and in mystery forcing us to look at the world in which we live, shall I say in terms of an icon. The visible revealing to us the invisible and more often as far as science is concerned, the visible challenging us to search for the invisible, to stand before the mystery of the world and ask ourselves questions. All this is the result of this phrase of St. Ireaneus of Lyon working in me and of the joy, the incredible elation it gives me to think that the tree of knowledge planted by God right in the middle of paradise was not a tree of death, was not an act of God condemning to death His creatures but a tree that would make us commune to the whole created world for thousands of years, perhaps, discovering more and more and understanding perhaps less and less, asking ourselves questions but no longer charging God of having placed death side by side with life and said: “You chose what is more attractive to you”.
The result of it is a sense of hope, a sense of faith, a joy because side by side with the knowledge which the visible world looked at by us, studied by us, communed to by us can give us, we are not deprived of the other way of discovering God and ourselves. This is the greatest wonder and yet two things coincide: on the one hand, when mankind, all of us search the created world as we can examine an icon, listen to a piece of music, look into the beauty of the world, try to understand the mystery in scientific terms, whenever we do that we are at the same time searching for the living God. Not all of us obviously, there are some who are creative artists or scientists who are totally involved in their search but at the heart of their search whether they know it or not there is the original act of God that made things what they are and allow them to unfold before us in understanding, in meaning and in beauty.
At the same time the way of knowledge of God through communing with the tree of life is not taken away from us. We still can commune with God in prayer, in faith, in trustfulness, in faithfulness to His commands which really are the way He advises us on our way to salvation, in our way to knowledge of Him, of discovery. And the two ways are (our?) to follow. This is one of those wonderful things which I feel and then trying to convey it to you and I hope what I say is true. If in your experience you discover that my vision of things is wrong - reject it, but if you reject it help me to see the truth. And in this process there are several things that occur: the first one is that when mankind is in search of the Truth with the capital ‘T’ through the tree of knowledge the absolute clarity of vision which could belong only to total communion with the wisdom of God becomes vague. It is no longer clear and it affects also our experience of God Himself and our spiritual life. It is a twilight that has descended upon the whole of creation, a twilight in which there is light but where there is also darkness of/or? confusion. It is only when we turn to the saints that we discover men and women and children, indeed, who communed to God in such a way that they began to see things as they truly were or are, while we see things as I said in a twilight. We see moving shapes, we see things as we would see a tree reflected in a pond, the waters of which are stirred up by the wind. What we see is true but it is not the absolute, serene, revealing truth.
So that there is no need for us to be horrified by one way and long to belong exclusively to the other. We live in a world in which we no longer can partake to nothing but the tree of life but we can partake to this tree of life. The light of God still shines and illumines the other aspect of things.
The result of this we must look at from different angles and I would like to dwell one moment on one aspect as an introduction to what I want to say next time. Man as understood as ‘chelovek’, ‘anthropos’, not the male but mankind has changed as the result of this duality of search. Man is no longer searching for the plenitude of truth from the tree of life but he still searches for the plenitude of truth and there is no other plenitude of truth than God. Something has happened to man in this process and we must come to this.
But something which has struck me and moved me greatly is the destiny of Cain and of his children and successors and the destiny of mankind outside of this direct vision. I will stop at this point because it would take me, I don’t want to be too brief and at the same time, I want to express fully what I have got to say but if you read the first chapters of Genesis you will see that there is a variety of events occurred as a result of this decision of Adam and Eve to taste of the tree of knowledge. The change in each of them, the change between them and also what happens afterwards. But we tend to think that what happens afterwards is nothing but destruction calamity and yet we discover that it is the son of Cain and his successors, indeed, Cain and his family who began to build cities, we discover an industry who created art and music. All that could not have been done out of nought and out of evil. To that I want to come next time.
I hope you will forgive me for repeating things in one context and another but I am searching myself for a clear and indeed a true understanding and I want to share with you the interrogation marks which I have but also the incipient understanding which accompany them. Let us then keep quiet for a few moments, then pray.
Talk 8
Searching, Cain, Thomas, Judas.
7 March 2002.
As you know from previous talks the subject for the moment at least this year is questioning, asking oneself questions which very often we keep aside because we are afraid that they may shaken or disturb our confidence in life, in God, in the Church. And I want to continue on the same line. Those who were here last time probably remember that basing myself of a quotation from St. Ireaneus of Lyon I underlined the fact that God had offered us two ways: the way of life by communing with Him unreservedly, totally in faith and in life and another way, which is the way of knowledge, which is not a way of perdition but a discovery of the ways of God through His creation, discovering the Maker through what was made. The first one belongs to the saints and is open to each of us and each of us to a certain degree more or less completely, more or less wholeheartedly, more or less successfully discover God through prayer, through communion with Him, through fulfilling His will, through sharing His ways but many, millions of people for one reason or another do not have access to this directness of communion with God. Among the Christians not every one has the wholeness of purpose, the courage, the integrity of faith that would allow him or her to face God, to stand face to face with Him always and to learn Who He is through the direct communion of prayer when God opens Himself to us while we open ourselves to Him. I have mentioned to you that one of the things which we must learn before we start morning or evening prayers consists in taking our stand silently in His presence and say to Him and to ourselves: “Lord, I do not yet perceive Your presence, but I know that You are here and I stand there thanking You that in Your humility, Your compassion for me and for others You are there for me to stand in Your presence. If such be Your will, make me feel it, perceive it but otherwise Iknow for sure that it is so”. And then keep quiet for a while in His presence, in the certainty that He is there.
I have quoted in the past a passage of the life of one of the Western saints of the XVIII century, the curé D’Ars who was a true saint of God and a priest in a minute little village in the region of Dijon in France. He came time and again to his church and found an old man sitting there, immobile, doing nothing and one day he said to him: “Granddad, what are you doing hour after hour in the church: your lips are not moving in prayer, you fingers are not running along your rosary. What are you doing here?” And the man looked at him and said: “He looks at me and I look at Him and we are so happy together”. This is the direct way in which we can commune with God and learn about Him when His life flows into us, when His knowledge is not intellectual but direct, simple knowledge, which on another level we have of people whom we love and who love us when we can sit silently together and be happy communing in our mutual openness to one another and love.
But the other way which I have mentioned, the way of knowledge consists in looking at what God has made and His ways in life and in history. It is a roundabout way in a sense but it is also a way that can lead us to a profound knowledge of God. I have given you examples: we can recognise the hand of an icon-painter in an icon and not only see that this is an icon of Christ but say: this icon was painted by such and such man or woman. The same applies to all forms of cultural and creative experience. And for pursuing this idea I have underlined to you the fact that if you read the beginnings of Genesis you discover that the way which took certain people away from God was not yet a way of perdition. I will come back to this but I want to mention it again for those who were not there when I spoke of it because I believe it is immensely important to remember: Cain after the murder of his brother was commanded to go away from the divine presence, he could not combine the joy of communing with God with the hatred that had pushed him into murder. And he went. But what we read in the Book of Genesis, which we forget very often is that he went together with his family and that they are the people who first built cities and invented the arts. So it is not a complete destruction, they had to find their way tragically, in a divine absence, rejected as it were, by God, forbidden to imagine that they still were His own people while they have chosen to act contrary to everything that God is. This is an important point. I will come to this in another context but what I wanted to say about it is that this discovery of God through beauty, through science, through all what is human but what is not divorce from God because there is nothing human which is alien to God in essence but it allows us to understand that God had not planted a tree of life and a tree of death and that the fact that mankind to a very great extend has chosen the way of the tree of knowledge does not mean damnation, alienation from God. It is a long roundabout way in a history of mankind and we can see it in the Old Testament and in the history of the whole world. To that I want to come back.
But in this context I pointed out that things being such, God is not the cause of our destruction: if God had planted a tree of life and a tree of death attractive, alluring He would be responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve. In the context of St. Ireaneus quotation we can look at it with hope but there is another situation, which is also tragic, which was brought to my attention years ago and which has come again to my attention after my talk. It is the case of Judas.
What we see in the case of Judas is this: Christ chooses twelve disciples to be with Him, to listen to His teaching, to accompany Him everywhere and see His works, to be integral part of His act of salvation of mankind and among them there is one called Judas and he in the end delivers Christ to His enemies and to death. It is something so frightening, so tragic. We know that the disciples were not always heroic in their faithfulness. There were moments when they were afraid: you probably remember how having left Jerusalem after a conflict with the synagogue Christ turned to them and said: “We must return”. And the disciples said: “But the Jews wanted to murder You!”. And He said: “Yes, but Lazarus has died”. And then there is silence except for one of the disciples who says: “Let us go with Him and die with Him”. And this one is Thomas, Thomas whom so often we define as the Doubter because after the Resurrection when the other disciples told him that they have met Christ and He was risen he could not believe it. We see only that moment in his life and yet there is another dimension to it. He was away when Christ appeared to the ten disciples, Judas having already hanged himself. And disciples were filled with joy and this joy they wanted to share with Thomas. And Thomas looked at them and he saw men who were exultant with joy but were the same, they had not changed, it was the same men whom had known all the time except that their mood had changed from fear into joy, from uncertainty to assurance. And he said: “If I don’t see Him risen I would not believe”.
Later when people saw the disciples of Christ, it is not their words that convinced them of the truth of their message, it was their presence. They spoke with the power of the Holy Spirit Who had indwelled them, it was God proclaiming the truth through them. But at that moment it had not yet happened, it was ten men who a moment ago were hiding in a house of John Mark, hiding there for fear and who now were reassured and more than reassured – so gloriously happy that the Master whom they had loved above all was alive but they were not yet changed. Thomas was right – the testimony of words of their joy was not enough for him and that is why Christ appeared to him and made him discover Himself, the Resurrection. Thomas had doubted but he had met Christ. Judas had hanged himself. But another disciple had also denied Christ. When Christ was in the presence of the judges a young servant came up to him and said: “But you were also one of them”. And he was afraid. His Master was now a prisoner, what could he hope for, he was afraid and said: “I don’t know that Man”, - and it repeated itself twice and in the end he walked out of the courtyard because he could not face it. And at that moment Christ turned his eyes on him and looked at him. And Peter began to cry.
Christ and Peter met again when the risen Christ appeared to His disciples. They met again and Peter could receive forgiveness, know that he is still loved totally and that he has a right, yes, a right to be a disciple because now after what had happened he was most solidly establishing his faith than he had been before. There was a certainty of another kind in him. He had been the friend of Christ, now he was the friend again of the Son of God risen from the dead.
But what of Judas? Judas had hanged himself. Is there any hope for him? Was there any hope for him? And if not how tragic because it is Christ Who had chosen him to be one of the disciples and on the Last Supper Christ turned to him and said: “Go and do what you intend to do and do it quickly”. And what Judas intended to do was to betray his Master and deliver Him unto death at the hands of his enemies. Or was it not?
I think we can look at the situation again and ask the question we have just formulated: was it not this? Is it that according to someone whom I respect and admire, wasn’t it something different that happened? Wasn’t it that Judas felt that the moment of final crisis had come and it was time for the resolution to happen and that his intention was to provoke the crisis and ensure the revelation of Jesus as a victorious Saviour? He did not mean to murder Him, he intended to create a crisis in which the Lord would manifest Himself and show Himself for what He was: the Lord of victory, the Saviour, the Son of God become the Son of man. He did not understand the ways of God but he did not mean to (? thwought) the divine purpose.
And the remarkable thing is that in the Gospel he comes with a crowd to the Garden of Gesthemany, he comes with the crowd and he was asked to show to the persecutors, to the enemies of Christ who of the ten men that was there was Christ. Now, according to Old Testamental law you should (?) brought a testimony against someone you had to put your hands on his head and proclaim your testimony and them if your testimony was mistaken or false you would undergo the punishment which the accused person, the person you accused deserved according to the law. He did not do that. He came and showed to the crowd who it was by a kiss because he did not want to accuse Him of being an enemy of the law, a betrayer.
Christ was taken. Judas expected at that moment the victory of God instead of which he saw the defeat of his Master. Christ was taken and then comes the judgement in front of Pilate, the judgement in front of Caiaphas, the way to the Cross, the Crucifixion. He had intended to provoke a final confrontation and a victory of Christ and as he saw it there was nothing, he had done but a total destruction of his Master. The Master was no longer there for him to ask for his forgiveness. He hanged himself. And here we are confronted with a last question: Does it mean that everything was over? All the disciples one way or another at different moments had proved afraid, unfaithful but they all have had time to come back to their Master, to open their hearts, to beg for forgiveness, to recognise their errors. Judas had no time, - or?.. It is a question which I asked years ago from a bishop whom I admire and respect. And he looked at me and said: “All disciples met Christ and found peace in this encounter but why do you think that Judas did not?” “When?” “Well, after His death Christ descended into Hades, into hell, into the very place where Judas was and they met. Can’t we hope, can’t we hope with all the pain and joy of our heart that at that moment Christ turned to him and said: you intended to achieve My victory and you have achieved it but you did not know how. Come and may peace be upon you”.
I want you to reflect on that because it is so easy to call Thomas a doubter and Judas a betrayer. And then you look at the Gospel and you see that he was one who had the greatest courage at moments of crisis, when we think of Thomas, and who is the most tragic person of the Gospel when we think of Judas. I would like you to think of it. I am sharing with you, as I told you from the beginning, my own thoughts, my own gropings. I am in search as you are and I am sharing with you my search and the conclusions to which I have come up to date, but how much hope it gives.
I will end at this point today’s talk but I would like you to think of what I have said today. Much of what I have said is a repetition of things which you have heard but you must be accustomed to the fact that I repeat myself very often but in different context that give a new meaning, a new significance to what I say at least for me to reflect on it, reflect on the tree of knowledge and a way in which the whole history of mankind, the whole culture of mankind, the whole glory and tragedy of mankind is also the way of mankind in the discovery of God and of Christ.
And remember also that when we speak of these two trees it is not a matter of choosing the one and rejecting the other: both are interconnected. By going along the search for the truth in history, we live in the very history which contained the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is part of it. To this I will come back again and again because I am groping for a way of expressing it but I feel it is so important for us to have faith in the history of mankind, to have faith in the destiny of the world and that all that happens in the world is part of its gradual growth with ups and downs and tragedies and glories to the revelation of God when He comes.
We will now keep quiet as usually for a few moments, then pray and then I will be happy to give God’s blessing to everyone who will wish to receive it from God through the sign of the cross which I will make on him or her.
Talk 9
Adam and Eve. Man and woman.
28 March 2002.
Continuing our reflection and our questioning I thought first of coming back today to my last talk and reading aloud a couple of letters which I have received as a reaction to what I have said. They present what I have spoken of in a slightly different way or in a very different way and it rejoiced me because the purpose of my talks is to try and have us all, each of us reflecting on what seem to us obvious, so habitual that no questioning comes to our mind and yet which is full of mystery and requires not only intellectual reflection but also a continuous spiritual growth that would allow us to understand with new depth what is revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures in the light and by the power of the Holy Spirit acting within us because it is not a matter of scholarship, it is not a matter of simple knowledge of the Scriptures. The Scriptures are infused with the grace of God and it is only by communing with this divine grace, by receiving the Holy Spirit to Whom we say daily: come and abide in us and cleanse us from all impurity, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of life, that we can understand the Holy Scriptures which at times seem to be so simple and clear to our superficial understanding and at times so obscure to our (benighted ?) mind very in much in the way in which a person at times to us seems to be crystal clear because we do not in this crystalline transparency see the mystery and the depth of a person or on the contrary seems to be so obscure and beyond understanding because it is only the externals that strike us. This I will leave for another occasion because before we come to this I would like tonight to say something about the destiny of man, of man understood as anthropos, as chelovek, the human being; look at what the Scriptures tell us about it.
To begin with let me remind you that we are told that God by His word called into existence all things that are, indeed, all things that have been and that to begin with what He had created was, what the Scriptures calls, chaos. When we think of chaos we think habitually of destruction, of a city destroyed by bombs, of an earthquake. We never think of chaos as a primeval condition, and yet I think, it is very important for us to realise that the chaos of which the Old Testament speaks is the condition of the first created world, in which everything was possible: a world of potentialities that had not yet taken shape, that has not yet become a form, and we are told that on this immense, immeasurable potentialities the Spirit of God was breathing, bringing out all the potentialities that gradually became mature and one after the other all the potentialities created by God began to emerge. I am not going to describe this because it is known to all of us and easy to read in the Bible but what is important for us is to realise that the Spirit of God was calling out all that was possible, and all that was possible gradually began to emerge in a first harmony.
And then a moment came when all the potentialities, which naturally could emerge under the guiding hand of God, under the Spirit of God, had been practically fulfilled and one more step was to be taken which was not simply one more progress of the created world. It was as it were, a jump, a movement forward, upward, towards the depth, something that was not simply a progression but a change: man was created. And the difference between the creation of man and all other beings lies in the fact that God breaths His life into him. Man is different from all other creations because of this act of God. And man in the sense of the human being was as it appears, as it is understood by some or most writers, was simultaneously carrying all the possibilities of male and female. It was not two beings, it was one being, still infinitely complex in which the two potentialities have not divided themselves, have not evolved to their fullness and did not yet exist separately. And yet he was created in an image of God: God - One in the Trinity, man - one in duality. What happened in the growth and progression of man is not described but something must have happened because gradually a moment came when it was time for something to happen to this being who held within himself all the potentialities of male and female.
The Bible tells us that God brought to his eyes all the created animals and a thing that struck man, the anthropos, the chelovek, was that all of them were pairs, he was the only one who was alone. And when he became aware of this, of the fact that there was something new that must happen to him, the moment had come for God to divide this complex being into male and female. We are told that God brought a deep sleep upon Adam and divided man into Adam and Eve. What strikes me in this story is that what happened was not a one-sided act of God. It came as a result of the discovery by the anthropos, by the chelovek, by man that something more could happen to him, that he was not yet fulfilled and it is then that God divided, separated within the one being the two sexes.
What is remarkable is that when Adam saw Eve in front of him he did not (?) at a new being, as it were, saying: “Who is she? She is different from me”. What he said: “I am I and she is she, she is the feminine of the masculine of which I am,” - ish and isha in Hebrew. He saw in her himself, as it were, mirrored. But a mirrored vision is not a person, while here it was a person who was both him and the fulfilment of him. As one Russian theologian has put it, it was one personality in two persons. One personality: it was the human being that had reached the maturity that allowed this separation into two who could look at one another and recognise one another as self. Nothing separated them, there was no opposition, there was only a vision of fulfilment, a fulfilment that could not take place within one of them because the richness that was possible could not be expressed within one being. This was a wonder: they saw in one another themselves in wonderful beauty. They saw themselves fulfilled in the other, they saw that together they were one person. And that was the beginning of their being together and this is something which we know only through the Scriptures, of which we have inklings from time to time. These inklings we find in the whole of history and indeed in the life of people around us when two persons through loving one another with purity of heart, with purity of instinct become one and yet remain unique to each other.
One of the remarkable things is that they saw one another as themselves, they did not see one another as being in opposition but as fulfilment. It is only after the Fall, and of that we have already spoken, it is only after the Fall that they looked at one another and saw one another as the other one. Again as a Russian writer has put it, when they were created they looked at one another as the alter ego, the other myself. When sin entered into their relationship, they looked at one another and saw themselves as ego, I and the other one is alter, the other one. And this is what is signified, again according to certain writers, in the passage in which we are told that Adam and Eve saw that they were naked. When they were one in two persons, there was no nakedness, it is only when they were different that they discovered that they were alien to each other and naked. That is something which is remarkably important in our understanding of one another. We can not go back beyond the Fall but we can go beyond the Fall in the other direction: by the grace of God, within the redemptive work of Christ, within the mystery of the Church that makes us into a oneness beyond words, we can discover that we are one.
Speaking in terms of experience and of literature, we know from literature many stories of passionate relationships in which one of the two or both on each other prey like beasts of prey, want to acquire possession of the other, to use one another but we also learn from the same literature that a mysterious thing which we call chastity comes between people who love one another with a love, which is not hunger, which is not desire of possession but which is openness, gift of self and not an effort to possess the other. Two persons uniting in mutual love, both heart to heart and mind to mind but even body to body not of beasts of prey but of beings that give themselves to one another totally as a most precious gift. But when the Fall came this was not the situation. It is only through the grace of the Holy Spirit, through a long struggle of mankind that this was discovered fuller and fuller in Christ and in the Spirit.
At that moment they discovered that they were naked, that is they were alien. One does not see oneself as naked, one can see only the other one in terms of opposition. And then their whole relationship changed. The Bible tells us that Adam knew Eve, not in the sense of a more perfect and a deeper knowledge but in the colloquial sense of a sexual possession. That was a new relationship, they were one in the beginning, as I have tried to explain, and now they became one but on a quite different level. And this level varied, I am no longer speaking of Adam and Eve but of humans in general, between preying like beasts of prey on one another and giving oneself bodily and in soul at each other. These are the two extremes, in the interval there was love, which at moments is a gift of self, at another moment - a moment of hunger. This is the situation of the fallen world. There is still divine light in it. There is still purity in it but it must be conquered in order to be the whole of a human being and a human relationship. It must be conquered by a renunciation to what happened at that moment that divided the one personality that were two persons into two persons that must grow into one personality.
And the relationship is described in the Book of Genesis as a new relationship. It is no longer Adam or Eve saying to one another: “You are my own self revealed to me in a beauty which I never suspected”. It is a new relationship in which God says that her longing will be for him and his overpowering presence will be over her. It is not a condemnation, the ‘shall’ which we find in the English translation is not an order, a decision of God, it is simply a fact that these two powers are now in an uncertain relationship that can change from evil to perfection.
I have said in previous talk that the situation in which we are in this world is a twilight situation. What God has once given, He never takes away. His image in us remains but it remains veiled, it remains in the twilight or to use an image which I gave you once it is like the reflection of the trees in the water: when the water is perfectly still one can see the reflection of the trees identical to the trees but it is enough of a little breeze of the water to begin no longer to be still and then what is reflected in it becomes blurred. So is the whole situation of mankind: a mist, a twilight, a blurred situation. The things themselves are there and this is the wonder of it but we can no longer see nothing but the perfection of it.
And then gradually death enters into the destiny of mankind. As long as they were one, one personality in two persons in the image of the Holy Trinity as long as they were one (I am sorry, one minute) there was no opposition between them and death had no power over them because death came as a result of this unity being broken like an icon being cleft into two. And death began to conquer mankind. If you look later in the beginnings of Genesis you will find a list of the ancestors of Christ with ages that baffle us. Were they real ages or approximations, or an attempt at expressing things in figures we don’t know but what we can see is that these figures that began to be great begin to grow smaller and smaller. The life on mankind grows short and there is a passage in the Bible that says: “And death conquered gradually”. To begin with there was still a powerful remain of the original fullness and then as it was gradually frittered away by sin, by imperfection death became more and more powerful. And this is the situation in which we are. We live in a world that is as I said already in a mist, in twilight, like a trembling reflection on the face of the waters but a world into which as a result of it death has come with power.
And yet for us death is not the last word. This is the wonder of the Incarnation and the wonder of what happens through it and through the gift of the Holy Spirit and through the fact that God and mankind have never been ultimately separated from one another by human sin. Human sin proved incapable of separating us from God because our oneness with God, our closeness to Him is based on the divine love and not ours.
I am afraid, I am very tired today. I hope you will forgive me if I make an end to the talk now. We will keep quiet for a while and pray together and then I will be glad to give a blessing, Gods blessing to everyone who will wish to receive it.
Talk 10
Gill Crow’s letter.
World in twilight.
11 April 2002.
...remember because I have mentioned more than once: the purpose of our talks is questioning, questioning ourselves, looking at what seems to be so simple and so clear and then at times becomes such problem, such challenge. And after my last talk I received a letter commenting on what I have said which I find so valuable and interesting that I have asked the author today before I give my talk to read it aloud for you to take in and eventually a little later when we have one or two evenings of questions, answers and discussion to take it into account. So I will ask Gill Crow to come and I have her text here…
I have just put my criticism of what the Bishop had said. The first point was about the tree of knowledge. If I understand you rightly, perhaps, I don’t, you were saying that it would have been uncharacteristic of a loving God to have planted in Eden a tree of death. But according to Genesis God certainly planted or allowed Satan to be there so we can’t get away from the fact that death has come into the world. But death was in the world long before, it seems to be a natural part of Creation. I don’t know what the Church says about this but the death after eating of the tree of knowledge is a different death, destructive, unnatural death, which is subsequently abolished in Christ. The world that God created exists by this striking principle that you can’t live unless you eat other living things whether plants or animals. And it is taken by all religions that plants and animals and even human beings should be sacrificed to God. And that seems to me to be the whole Biblical process, a wonderful mystery, all the Old Testament is offering to God. And finally God gives Himself to us. This is opposite to the world around us: God should be at the top of the food chain eating us. The whole process of death and eating points to the mystery of Christ Himself.
The other point I made was on Judas. The bishop told that Judas intention was not to betray Christ but to bring situation to the crisis. I can’t understand how one can derive it from the words of St. John, when Christ says to Judas: “That thou doest, do quickly”. Apart from these words St. John’s Gospel says: “Satan entered into Judas”. And the whole passage speaks definitely of betrayal and earlier remark of Christ, where He says that the person who betrays Him better never been born, that surely not the fate of someone who intends to provoke a crisis. The Book of Acts speaks clearly of Judas evil intentions. There is also the testimony of the Gospels that Judas was dishonest with money. Money was one of his motives for betraying Christ, he negotiated price from the Chief Priest. When returning thirty pieces of silver he admits his betraying an innocent Man. Then the fact that Judas showed Christ by a kiss and not by the sign of legal accusation. Is not that Judas deliberately was being used by Chief Priest as a scout. They had already assembled their own opinion, that is not what they needed from Judas. And I think Church agrees this by saying before communion: “I do not give you a kiss like Judas”. The clergy give each other a kiss before communion. Logically one might expect the Church to assign the kiss to the work of the devil. This is a mystery and illogical forgiveness of God. I think there is a compelling argument for Judas as traitor from human experience, from the times, I am sure we all feel like Peter when he denied Christ and we also have a beautiful experience of Christ’s forgiveness. But there also times, and I am certainly speak for myself here, when we feel like Judas, when we enter the experience that it was not only Judas to betray Christ in total sense. It is surely the combination of the human desire to free ourselves from God by destroying Him utterly and to water it down to Judas provoking a crisis seems to me to miss the most tragic aspect of the passion. Surely Judas summed up all the wilful, murderous godlessness which existed through ages and in which we too are partaking. And we must be aware that what we do is not provoking God in some kind of action but as an act of real betrayal. The encounter of God with Judas in hell is something so awesome and so true to our faith in the God of love.
I am very grateful to Gill Crow for her reaction so clear and so vehement to something which I have said and which, I think, was at least incomplete and in more than one way wrong. And so think out what she have said and put it as a correction to what I had said in my last talk because I think it is very important to be true and as I said the aim of these talks is to think things out and come to the right conclusions. Whether she is right in everything she said or not is something which each of you must assess and as I said, after a couple more talks we might, perhaps, divide in groups to discuss not only this particular talk and her response to it but also the other talks which I have given.
I will now come to continuation of my talks. If you remember we have come to a point when we saw that (?) before we enter into what, I think, I called the twilight of history, the clear, brilliant, all-pervading and all-revealing of light which was the beginning of Genesis, which was the Creation of the world, which was the breathing of the Holy Spirit upon all things that have been brought into existence by the word of God, that at that moment this fullness of light was no longer there. We enter into a twilight which the whole history of mankind and which will be resolved by a new light at the end of time.
Now, if we look into what happened you remember that last time I spoke of man, of the human being, the anthropos, the chelovek, of the way in which a human being that was one personality in two persons broke into two and instead of seeing in each other him and herself revealed in glory and perfect beauty a human being looked at the other as the alter ego, the other myself. And this word ‘other’ is very frightening because it is a recognition that the other one is, yes, indeed, it is myself, but it is the other, it is not me, there is a difference, there is a distance, there is an alienation between us. And therefore the wholeness of man was broken into two entities. These entities were not total destruction, these two entities continued to be possessed of a great amount of what was given in the beginning and also called to greater things because ultimately from the woman Mary the Son of God was born. But the whole of history in a way, as I said more than once, is a twilight. What was absolute clarity we can see hesitatingly with a degree of uncertainty, we see one another as the alter ego, the other myself, perhaps, however close we come it is only through an ever-deeper communion with God, through the reception of the Holy Spirit, through communion with Him, through transfiguration that we begin to come back and beyond that to a new relationship between ourselves. But then this happens only to persons, it does not happen at once or immediately, totally to mankind and therefore at the same time as some reach holiness in their own person and holiness in their relation to others there are others who fall lower and lower. And this expresses itself in more that one way.
We see in the beginning of Genesis in the fifth-six chapters the story of catastrophies, of men and women who fell away from God more and more and became alien to their primeval call and vocation: remember, those people about whom the book of Genesis says that they were so ingrained in the material world, that they so alienated to the spiritual, the divine that God looked at them and said: “These people have become nothing but flesh”. Nothing is left except materiality in them, they cannot continue to exist as human beings. You remember the story of Sodom and Gomorrah: how evil took hold of two cities and how the evil became such that only their destruction saved humanity from a complete pollution. You remember the story of the Flood so that we can see that there was after the Fall and it continues to be like this humans that are still open to God, commune to the Holy Spirit, become close through Christ to their vocation and there are such who fall away farther and farther. And this affects not only the human beings because we are told in a frightening phrase of the way in which the rest of the creation is wounded, destroyed by human sin. Speaking of the humans who emerged out of the Flood, the Book says: “Now all animals are delivered into your hands. They will be your food and you will be their terror.” This is the moment when humans began to feed on murder: the murder of animals. It was not intended to be such, it is the result of the human fall, of alienation from God and the inability of humans to live by the grace of God. And since the whole world has remained such: humans feed on it in a destructive, in a murderous manner. In the beginning we are told about the way in which humans feed on animals like beasts of prey, become their terror but since it is not only on animals, it is on the whole of creation that humans have begun to feed destructively.
You know better than I probably, what humans do now, the way in which all that is the created world is being exploited in a monstrous way by humans not even for the needs of humans but for their advantage, for their pleasure. So that the Fall has attained as a wound, as a destructive power everything through man and this is what is so frightening and it is through man that things must be restored. In Christ a beginning is made but what is the response? We are believers in Christ, we are His disciples, we live in the light of grace divine and yet when we think of ourselves can we say that we are images of Christ, can we say that anyone meeting anyone of us can look and say: “I have seen Christ shining through this person”?
If we turn to the text of the Gospel we are told that the believers will have such and such characteristics. Have we got any of them? We are content in proclaiming the truth which saints have experienced and which reaches us intellectually. We are prepared to live according to the truth to a limited extent but can we say that we are truly the envoys of God, people sent by Christ into the world to transfigure it, not to re-organise it but transfigure it into another world, into Christ’s world. If we read the Gospel is it not clear that we cannot claim to be disciples, faithful disciples of Christ? We believe and that is where it ends so often. I do not mean completely but with great extent. We believe in love, we believe in forgiveness, we believe in mercy, we believe in our calling to give our lives for others, we believe in proclaiming the truth but also living by the truth. Do we, when we think of ourselves personally, individually? And so there is a question here which stands before us very acutely: Are we witnesses of Christ or not? It is not enough that we feel that the grace of God is at work in us, keeping us alive, making us, up to a point, disciples. How does it affect others? Meeting us, do people meet the Lord Jesus Christ?
There is a passage in an article by C.S. Lewis, in which he thinks aloud of what believers are and he says: “When people meet a believer they should look at him and see: a statue has come to life, a statue in a sense that each of us are made in the image of God but we are like statues – stone, potentiality, possibility. There is the calling to a certain extent beauty is written, but life: is it there? When we meet saints we have got a different experience. They are not obligatory beautiful in a sense in which a statue is but they are alive. St. Seraphim was not a beauty, St. Francis of Assisi was not. Of St. Paul people in his time said that he was extraordinarily ugly and yet we are told that when he spoke his all countenance changed: it became luminous, it became beautiful. Can one say that this is something that happens to us in a way in which we relate to one another, in a way in which we relate to the surrounding world? It is a twilight. The whole Christian world is in twilight but not simply in twilight in which some of the light that has gone with the Fall has survived. The Church is something more extraordinary than this. The Church as was defined by several theologians is a Body: simultaneously and, yes, equally human and divine - the fullness of God and the fullness of mankind and the fullness of the created world united together by the love of God, by the sacrificial gift of self in Christ, by the outpouring of the Spirit, Who transforms and transfigures His (his being ?), by the hunger, longing, hope of the fallen ones, the ones who believe and not only believe concretely in such and such doctrines but believe in Life with the capital ‘L’, believe in God, believe in what they do not know but which they sense.
And here a question comes. I remember bishop Alexis van der Mensbrugge saying to me: “The whole world is like an immensity in which a candle is alight. The candle is light and fire, and warmth, and revelation. It is God’s own presence and also the presence of those who are in God, something like the Burning Bush which Moses saw. But this light spreads, it spreads farther and farther and even when it is no longer perceptible for us it pervades the darkness. And therefore we must never, never, - said bishop Alexis, - loose faith and hope in those whom we see as it were in the darkness. This light reaches them although we don’t see it and they don’t perceive it, but the light is there”. So that the world of twilight in a way is the world in which the accent should be put on the idea of light. We do not (? know) when we see it, it is there. There are moments when barriers fall, there are moments when we see the glory of God, there are moments we see the glory of God embodied in saints, there are moments when we see the shining of the divine presence in ordinary people and then we should stop judging because we do not know whether the experience of one person or another which is not couched in Christian terms or in terms of belief, whether it does correspond to an understanding between them and God which we could not perceive.
I may have already quoted the example of this young officer who came up to me in Russia and asked me whether I was a believer. “Yes,” - I said. “Well, - he said, - I am an atheist”. And I said: “I am sorry for you.” “And what have I in common with God that I should believe in Him?” And I said to him: “Do you believe in anything at all?” And his face shone and he said: “Yes, I believe in man.” And I said: “That you have in common with God with the difference that God believes in man as you have never yet learned to believe. He believed in man in such a way that He created man knowing that man will fall from Him, knowing that the Only-Begotten Son will have to become Man and die of it. Have you ever thought of that?” And he looked at me and said: “No, I must think of it.” So here was a man who had in common with God a total love of man, a faith in man to the extent to which he understood and here suddenly he began to understand something more. And this leads me to another point.
We tend to reject all religions and faiths which we call pagan. Where do they come from? When you read them, when you look at the people who profess them, where are the roots? I have said so often that we live in a twilight of forgetfulness and this is an important thing. After the Fall mankind could remember what was before it but not with clarity. To remember it with clarity one had to be there, to speak of it with clarity one had to remember the reality of it. Mankind began to remember glimpses of memory and if you read the context of the pagan faiths of the very early times you can see that there are glimpses of truth and spaces of loss of memory or also that in the world, the fallen world it was no longer possible to express adequately what could be only known and expressed in a world before the Fall. And so we can look at the pagan religions of antiquity and of our times not as enemies but as the faith of people who have dormant memories, glimpses into the past and which try to make a (? ) system of short glimpses and therefore of course can not have a complete picture.
I have told you I think already of the conversation I had many years ago with one of the most wonderful theologians because he was a man of prayer, of silence and the word he spoke came from the heart and experience - Lossky. We spoke of pagan religions and he said to me: “There is no real knowledge of God outside of Christianity”. I was too young to argue with him, yet I could not accept his statement, so I went home, we lived in the same street in two opposite houses. I copied out eight passages from the Upanishads, the most ancient writings of India, brought them to him, and may God forgive me for being a liar, I said to him: “I had been reading the Fathers and I always put down quotations that struck me particularly. I always write down also the name of the author but here are eight quotations of which I have forgotten to indicate the author. Could you have a look?” He looked and within minutes under each of the quotations of Upanishads he had written the name of one of the greatest saints: Gregory of Nazians, Basil the Great, John Chrysostome, Simeon the New Theologian and when he had finished I said: “Yes, and all that is from the Upanishads.” And he looked at me and said: “I must rethink all that I have thought thus far.”
It does not mean that there is no difference between pagan religions and Christianity, it means that there is not one pagan religion which has not a glimpse of memory of what there was before the Fall. But a glimpse is not enough and a person can not live of glimpses. We all try to make a system intellectual, emotional of everything and we add explanations, we add characteristics, where there is nothing but an emptiness. So let us look at the world that surrounds us: believers, unbelievers, pagans, people of all persuasions and all times and ask ourselves not what is there in them which is wrong but what is there which is a last glimpse, perhaps, a last spark of the vision of the world before it had fallen.
To certain of this things I will come later. I will end my talk today at this point. Let us therefore be silent for a while, then pray together.
Talk 11
Light, darkness and twilight.
25 April 2002.
...talks the word ‘twilight’. And I want to come back to it because it is important in the kind of vision I have of things. Twilight we experience most of it as lack of light. But at the same time twilight means strictly speaking something which is between light and darkness or is it as we see in the history of Creation and our expectation for its future, is it a period of imperfect light between two moments of brilliant light, of a light without a shadow? When we think of the Creation of the world we can think of God pronouncing a word: “Come, I love you”. And the world emerges out of naught. It is a moment when all things created are immersed in the light of God, in the love of God. There is not an element of darkness, there is not a shadow: all is light and we are told that Christ was the Light of the world, He was the Word, He was the Creator.
So that was the first moment when all things emerged out of non-existence into a plenitude of light and of light that was coincidental with existence itself. There was nothing but light, nothing but beauty, nothing but joy, nothing but communion with Him, Who is light itself. And then we are expecting in the end of time, we don’t know when but one day, that God shall be all in all, that history will have run its course, that good and evil will have fought their frightening fight and one day God will have conquered and there will be nothing left but divine light pervading, filling and fulfilling all the creatures He has called into existence, all those who ever lived and were.
Between these two extremes of light perfect without a shadow because it is God’s own light or, perhaps, should I say, this light is God Himself that stretches the whole history of Creation. We see in the beginning of Genesis how God created all things: He looked at them and saw that they were all good, all capable of carrying the light, of communing with the light and then came the Fall. The light did not disappear but something happened to the creation on several levels and I want to come to those levels in a moment. The first level was that mankind lost its wholeness and therefore could not commune totally, perfectly to light divine. I told you last time and unfortunately I must have said it more than once that when Adam was created he was created like the total human being containing, as it were, within himself all the potentialities of man and woman, all that was humanity and then he developed, he grew, he matured and the moment came when the variety of possibilities that were in him could not live simultaneously in a same being and God brought to him all the created beings and he saw that all beings were male and female, that they were not an arithmetic one but they were two that were one at the same time.
And at that moment man became capable of becoming, as I mentioned last time, I think, one personality in two persons. When the primitive human was divided into Adam and Eve they looked at one another and they did not say: “O, that is another one, like me.” The remarkable thing in the Hebrew text is that they looked at one another and they said: “This is ish and this is isha”, - it is me in the feminine, it is me in the masculine. It was one personality, one whole in two persons and that was a wonder because there was no separation and yet there was in each of them what the other one could not contain to the full.
And then came the Fall. And as you remember Adam and Eve looked at one another and saw they were naked. That is a moment which indicates in the Bible that they no longer looked at one another and saw themselves fulfilled to perfection: they saw another one, what one of the saints of old describes as alter ego, the other myself, yes, myself but the other one. It is not me in the full sense in which I have experienced the other one in the beginning. And that is a moment when the fullness of light was no longer there again. The fullness of light had gone because it could exist only in the perfect union of the two spreading all around. I am not going to describe all that the Bible says about the beginnings of this couple but just one or two things. The first one is that, as I have just said, they saw one another as the other one. And as such they were alienated to one another to a certain degree while they were attracted to one another in another sense. They still longed for each other and yet they were separated. And the Bible tells us that Adam knew Eve, Eve knew Adam, it was no longer oneness revealed, it was an attempt at reconstructing oneness on the level of nature, of affection but no longer this ontological absolute oneness that was there. And because they no longer were this oneness revealed, an icon of the Holy Trinity, if you want to, because the Holy Trinity is three Persons in one Person, while they were two persons in one personality. Because that happened, the whole world became in their eyes and through their action divided into individuals or into groups alien to another. There is a passage in, I think, the third or fourth chapter of Genesis in which as a result of the fall of man because they no longer were oneness incarnate, their relationship to the created world changed. The Lord said after the Flood: “All beasts are delivered unto thee for food. They will be your food but you will be their terror”. Man was no longer the guide of the created world to the plenitude to which it was called, it was he who had broken it and it was he who introduced a new terror – the terror of murder, of killing into the created world.
All that is what I meant when I spoke of the twilight, of a period between the glorious creation when there was not a shadow and a glorious fulfilment at the end of time when God shall be all in all. And the whole of history stretches between these two extremes. But between these two extremes the light and the shadow, the darkness and the light combine in different ways at different degrees. There were periods when the light shines so bright, so beautiful that one forgets the darkness, there are periods on the contrary, when the darkness accumulates in such a way that one asks oneself: “But where is the light?” – in terror, in fear, in horror. At one extreme we find love, on the other extreme we find hatred, at one extreme we find the emergence of life in its plenitude, on the other extreme we find murder. Between these two there is this period which I insistently call twilight because I want to underline one more feature: we live in a world which we can not imagine to be nothing but light but it is not either darkness and nothing else. And this is the wonder of it. The light which shone in the beginning has been dimmed. The harmony has been broken but it still exists, it is there. And when we think of human beings you can see on the one hand human beings full of evil, of hatred, of murder accomplished or imagined and on the other hand, saints shining with divine light. On the one hand we find sin, which means separateness from God, on the other hand we find redemption and saintliness, which is the beginning of the time when God shall be all in all. And this is the time in which we live and this is what we are. If we look at one another or even, perhaps, more justly at ourselves, we can see that within each of us there is light and within each of us there is degree of darkness. There is light because we are capable of seeing, appreciating beauty and rejoicing in it and at the same time we participate in darkness because there is in us a lack of love, a self centeredness that prevents us from being one with the other, loneliness resulting from it and beyond that all the dark feelings of dislike, of hatred and so on. The world is in this condition of twilight but we must always remember that even if the fullness of light is no longer there light is shining and with the Incarnation it shines in the world with renewed creative redemptive power. It shines in the saints. We can see in so many of the saints of East and West light, the light of love, the light of God shining, poring out of someone who has given himself to God, opened him or herself to God, in whom divine life abides, grows, shines.
Remember the vision of Motovilov of St. Seraphim of Sarov. He was talking to him about the spiritual life and he could not understand what it all meant. And of a sudden in the course of his explanation St. Seraphim appeared to him different than he was a moment ago. He was shining with such brightness that he could not sustain the vision of it. He was shining in a blinding way and he was afraid and Seraphim said to him something which we must remember because it is one of the great consoling words of history. He said to him: “Why are you afraid?” And Motovilov said to him: “Because you are all light”. And Seraphim said to him: “Yes, but you could not see me as you see me now if you yourself were not in the same light as I at this moment”. And this is a wonderful thing because we do not see ourselves or one another in this blinding light and then of a sudden there is a moment when you look at a person and we see in the eyes, on the face, in the whole being of this person light. I do not mean material light although that also is there but we can perceive something which is beyond the created. And we can see in the lives of so many saints this very phenomenon: light. And the world in which we live is in twilight but the light is there.
If we ask ourselves what is the Church, how it appears, we can easily say that on the one hand the Church is the presence of God right in the middle of His creation, right in the middle of His creation. So in the Incarnation God has become part and parcel of this created world and has brought with Him, in Him all the light divine which we miss and loose. And it is by communion with Christ that we become partaker of this light. On the other hand, the whole fullness of the Trinity abides here: the Father is never separated from the Son and we receive the grace of the Holy Spirit, we commune to all the mystery of the Holy Trinity. O, in very different degrees of understanding, of perception, but things do not depend only on our perceiving them and our understanding them. We may be blind to the light which surrounds us, we may be insensitive to the immensity of love divine which is granted us. We may not be aware of the action of the Holy Spirit within us transforming us, reworking us, making us capable of becoming living, live members of the Body of Christ. And in a way almost more than this: the world in which we live contains this presence divine although the presence divine contains the whole world within itself. The world is the place where this Presence is.
And there is not one place to which the light of God, the warmth of love divine does not reach. I have quoted to you a phrase which has deeply touched me one day when bishop Alexis van der Mensbrugge, someone who had been a Roman catholic Benedictine monk and became an Orthodox and eventually a bishop of the Russian Church said: “At the centre of things there is a fullness of light but the light is present in the world in the way in which, if you light a candle, this candle is fire and light but around this light and this warmth there is an ever-decreasing amount of light as you go farther and farther but the moment you have lit a candle the whole world up to this extreme distances partakes to this light. We do not perceive it anymore because it is beyond our perception but the light reaches the extreme of the world”. And the same is true about the presence of God through the Church, in the Church: it is there.
Can we say that we, members of the Church, always perceive this presence? No we can’t. We can not say that. There are moments when we are opaque, incapable of perceiving it, there are moments when we suddenly perceive the light, the warmth, the presence but this light, this warmth, this presence is extended to the whole world, there is not one creature, one created being or object which is not touched by it.
And already now something which could move us so deeply and which we perceive so little takes place in the liturgy. I have mentioned it, perhaps, to you and, perhaps, in my Russian talks because again it is something that I find so wonderful. The consecration of the bread and wine: what is this bread? This bread is made of wheat, which was sawn by a human being, perhaps, without any thought of making of it a sacred object. This wheat was sawn, it fell on the earth, it was accepted by the earth, fed with moisture and gradually it became a little plant and it grew to become, I can’t find the word, an ear of wheat. And all that was done by human being who did not think of creating something sacred. He could, if he was mature enough to understand that to create life is a sacred action, but he might have done that simply to have wheat for bread and yet this wheat was a creation of God. And one day some of it was made into bread and was brought to Church by a believer in order to become part of the liturgy. The believer very often does not really realise what he is doing: he brings bread but this bread is a fruit of the earth giving life of God Who give life to the earth and to the wheat, it is brought in the sanctuary and there it is consecrated. What happens then? It is taken by the priest and shaped in a form of a cube that is an icon of Christ. This icon, this cube will be cut: “The Lamb of God is immolated”. And at that moment this bread has become a tragic image of Christ because in the world in which we live it was death that came upon Him. And then the service goes on and a moment comes when by the power of the Holy Spirit in response of the faith and the prayers of the faithful the Holy Spirit descends upon this bread and this bread becomes the Body of Christ. In what sense? There is a passage in Khomyakov, which is worth remembering, he says: “ We speak of the body of Christ, we do not say, - and he used the word itself, - we do not meet the meat of Christ. It becomes Christ – how? because the whole world is called to become the place of the Incarnation, Incarnation itself visible, perceived, accomplished”. And when we look at this bread after the consecration we can see a little particle of the created world that is now so united to Christ that it has become the body of Christ and Christ has become part and parcel of this simple piece of bread. And when we receive communion we commune to this bread, which is Christ Himself. And here we can see how from the twilight of the field in which a seed was sawn, through the work that was not even intended to create sacredness, through an action that took something neutral, pure, unstained, because the world in which we live is a victim of human sin, not sinful itself but a martyr of our sinfulness. It is brought back to God and there it is reintegrated to the unity of God which was there in the beginning and to unity which will be there even more gloriously at the end of time. Do you see how wonderful these things are? I can not express them, I am sorry, I am sorry but it is so beautiful to think and to know that in this world of twilight, in which we live, there is this plenitude of fulfilment, of light. We do not see it because we are blind, we do not see enough but there are saints to whom it was given to see.
I remember a saint of Russia, I can not remember his name now, he was the only priest in a monastery and for years he had not celebrated because there was another priest and he felt it was too terrifying to celebrate a liturgy. And one day there was no priest, he was asked to celebrate. After long enteritis he accepted to do it and after the service he came out and said: “It is the last time I have celebrated. Even if you need a priest find him elsewhere because I can not experience what I have experienced today and remain alive”. He had entered into the world to come, he had seen creation transfigured, he had seen bread become Christ, Christ Who had become us through the Incarnation.
So that when we think of the twilight in which we live we must remember that there is a degree of darkness but there is light and if we only, only looked at one another knowing that in this person whom I do not even know, in this person whom I do not understand, this person whom I do not even love or like there is always incipiently the dawn of life, of light, of eternity. How we would treat one another, how we would look at each other, how much would mean to each other? We would not only think of one another as icons, that is a sort of painting representing something, no, but a real presence in this person, insignificant, misunderstood by us, beyond our understanding, the mystery of unity with God is at work. In that sense the twilight is there because the person is not yet fulfilled, even St. Seraphim of Sarov was not yet fulfilled in a way in which he became fulfilled after his death but this person is already incipiently, invisibly very often, perceptively very often already pervaded with light and life divine. Can we not try and look at one another in this light, try to look at one another beginning with those who we love dearly and beyond our human tenderness, our human admiration, our human affection, go deeper in an act of worship: this person is a place where God is alive. One of the Fathers of the desert said: “Who has seen his brother has seen his God”. Yes, he had perceived that. He knew that every person is already incipiently but really the Incarnation. Let us think of that.
I will continue on this subject of the twilight in the context of history in my next talks and I hope that these talks may one day or perhaps, already now make some sense to you because they mean so much to me. Let us now keep quiet for a moment, pray and disperse.
Talk 12
We live in a twilight in which light shines in the darkness.
16 May 2002.
In a way I slightly hesitate to continue my talks in the line which I had chosen from the beginning because I have a feeling that certain number of people are troubled by the kind of approach to the faith and to ourselves which I have suggested. I have received recently from Russia a certain number of letters saying that I am not an Orthodox in my teaching, that what I say is either simply heretical or not thought out. And yet I want to share with you the way in which I think, what I have come to believe to be true in a course of many years of life.
There was time when I clung to the letter passionately and then gradually I began to discover that the letter is only an approximation, an attempt at conveying to us things which are far beyond the letter and the speech. There is a passage in St. Paul in which he says that we see things as though we were looking through a dark glass. This corresponds to what I have said several times in the last talks that we are in a twilight: the things are real but we do not always see them, we can not always see them as they really are and I would like to come back to this point because it is important for us if we want to grow in spirit to be more and more God’s friends and companions, to have both humility and daring.
What St. Paul has said I have translated by saying that we live in a twilight between the glorious light of the beginning of Creation when nothing, no shadow had yet come between God and us, when there was no darkness, when everything was light and translucent. And then we are waiting for a time when all things will be fulfilled and when the light will shine with perfect fullness, with perfect clarity, when God should be all in all. Do we realise what it means: ‘all in all’? It does not mean that He will be present everywhere only, it means that everything will be pervaded with this divine presence. To a certain degree very really but in a way which we do not always perceive we have an approximation of this experience in the holy liturgy.
A thing that has struck me once to the heart and has remained with me and which I come back to every time the liturgy is celebrated is that when the consecration takes place the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ in a sense which we do not always understand rightly or understand at all. Shall I say that I am nearer to not understanding at all but I would like to share with you what I perceived then. The grace of the Holy Spirit descends upon this bread and upon this wine and transforms them not into flesh and blood but into the Body and Blood of Christ. When we look at this consecrated bread we see a minute particle of created world which is already filled with divinity, has attained the fullness of vocation and when we receive communion to this bread and wine, to this Body and Blood of Christ we partake to the redeemed creation, already there, in the same way in which the fullness of God was present in the Incarnate Son of God become the Son of man. There are moments like these when in the twilight we can perceive already the glorious light and if we think of the nature of the Church we must remember that the Church is a Body equally and simultaneously human and divine. It is human in us with all the frailty, all the imperfection, the unfulfilled condition which is ours but it is also divine because one Man in the Church is the Lord Jesus Christ. In Him we can see humanity perfect, fulfilled, united with the Father and filled with the Spirit. And together with the Son the Father is present and the Spirit breaths upon us. So that in a sense already now although we are too blind very often to see it clearly the light is dawning, has dawned and is spreading more and more. It is not everyone of us who can perceive it, it is not always as radiant and clear at one moment as it is at another moment but the light which we are waiting for, the moment when God shall be all in all has already been (? kindled) by the Incarnation and descent of the Holy Spirit. We live in a world in which the twilight is not simply lack of the primeval, original light of Creation: the light which is in the world is already the light of fulfilment, the divine presence, the presence of God longed for, made real and received by the believers. The twilight in which we live in that sense is not an absence of light, it is a gradually growth towards it, into it or rather it is the light that gradually pervades us and all things. And yet when we want to speak of these things we have not got the right words, we have not got the right words because we can not express in the language of the fallen world the mysteries or the condition of the world before the Fall. We use words where one should use contemplative silence. I will try to convey that to you in a way.
When we speak of things divine we try to understand with our mind, we try to understand taking advantage of the frail, imperfect experience, which we have but in the beginning both the experience and the understanding were deeper and vaster. We can have an approximation to understanding by hearing what for instance St. Gregory Palamas says about the condition of the angels. He calls them ‘vtorie svetochi’ – ‘second lights’, not in the sense that they are below but he goes on to explain that they are totally open to God, totally transparent to Him and that the light of God which flows from Him pervades them, fills them so that they shine with light divine, nothing less. This light is not their own, it is God’s and yet they are filled with it, pervaded by it. This is the way in which we should know God, this is the way in which we should know all things but with the Fall there is a degree of knowledge, of communion which we still possess and there is also a greater degree, alas, of lack of understanding - the twilight.
And when we try to express things we must be aware of what we are doing. So continuously we hear particularly in the Protestant Churches but also in our own that the Bible, the Gospel is the word of God. Yes, it is the word of God. God is revealing in the Scriptures such things which we could not ourselves have discovered and understood but we understand these things to the extend to which we are ourselves enlightened by the light of God. The angels who are light divine received, not possessed but received and lived by can understand a great deal more than we do because it is not in words and by words that they capture their knowledge and their understanding or express it. When we think of the beginnings of Genesis we find there expressed in the language of the fallen world the events of a world that was totally in God and knew nothing of alienation to Him. So how can we reach out an understanding? We can reach out by communing with God and receiving from Him the understanding which we can not create ourselves. And then we must also remember that we use words and that this words vary from one time to another, from one nation to another, from one generation to another. I have given you once an example that seemed to be very crude but very realistic: when the Gospel was first translated for Laplanders a difficulty was found by the translator: they had no lambs in Lapland and the passage that said ‘the Lamb of God’ they translated by using the name of a local little animal because it had to convey the meaning, because Christ was not a lamb in zoological sense of the word. And so the same thought could be expressed in a different way. Also the meaning of words change and very often we do not understand a passage from the Scriptures and we remain in the darkness instead of growing out into the light by this lack of understanding. I would like to give you a couple of examples.
There is a passage in the Gospel in which we are told that no one who does not hate father and mother and those who are of his blood can not be a follower of Christ. The phrase is monstrous because we put into it the meaning of our time. But if you take ancient languages (I am rather ignorant of them by now but I have a certain knowledge of Russian), it says: “Ashe kto ne voznenovidet”. Nowadays ‘nenavidet’ means ‘hate’ actively, positively but originally it meant ‘turn his gaze away’, ‘not look towards’. And then the phrase acquires a quite different meaning: if anyone who has to choose between looking at God or looking at his nearest and dearest can not follow Christ. One must wholeheartedly look Godwards and only by communion with God Who loves those whom we leave behind can we unite ourselves with Him and discover that we are one also with them.
Another word which is a stumbling block, I believe, is the word ‘love’. We all know what romantic love is, we know how we use this term but when we think of what it is in essence, to love means so to appreciate a person or people as to be prepared to forget oneself completely up to the readiness of giving one’s life for them. This is the way in which God loved us, He created us for us to enter into the fullness of His own life and He knew that we would fall away from it, and He gave His only begotten Son to die for us to find our way. So that to love means a total respect, veneration of the other person to the point of being ready to give one’s life. And there is in St. Gregory the Great a passage concerning God Himself which, perhaps, can help us understand or make us understand better. He says that how can we understand the Holy Trinity? What does it tell us about plenitude of life and death? He said God could not be an arithmetic One, a Unit, because it would mean that He can love only Himself, He could not be either a couple, because a couple would exchange mutual love and remain alien to all the world around them. To be perfect love God must be in three Persons but at that moment tragedy comes into it: in order that two of them could love one another totally, perfectly, the third one must accept to step out, as it were, to die, to go into non-existence for the two to be face to face without hindrance, without intrusion. This applies of course to each Person of the Trinity, it is not only One of Them Who is the sacrificial victim, each of Them steps out ready not to be for others to be fulfilled.
I do not know how to explain it or to present in a meaningful way. Reflect on it, think of what it would mean if three of you: father, mother and child or friends chose to secure the plenitude of communion of two by stepping out and then being recovered, recaptured, drawn back into this plenitude by the love of others.
So that in the twilight in which we live we have got great difficulties in understanding what the Scriptures tell us about world of God before the Fall. But also we find it very difficult at times to understand the world in which we live and even more, perhaps, the statements which are made about God, about the Church because they are made with words that belong to a fallen world, while we speak of those who are beyond the Fall. Is not there a way then in which we can understand? Yes, there is a way because as I said time and again, you must be tired of it, we live in a twilight, in which the light shines in the darkness, the light; and it is only by communion with the light that we can understand the approximations to which we come in words. No-one understands what love is unless he has experienced it. No-one can understand what a gift of self can signify unless he has seen it and acted, lived through. It is only by experience that we can understand the meaning of words. And when we say that the Scriptures are the word of God, yes, they are but before we can understand them we must grow into communion with God Himself not with a dictionary, not simply search the meaning of words but search the heart from which they come and the heart into which they fall, that is our own heart.
In that sense all that is written in the Scriptures may be totally obscure for the one and clear for another. It may be obscure for me today and become luminously clear tomorrow. This depends of our communion with God, not with the text, not with words and this is where the tragedy of the dividedness of Christians comes to the fore because it is about words which we fight. When we accuse one another of heresy we accuse wordings but what do we do about the person? What do we do about the way in which this particular person communes with God, lives by God, lives in God’s name? It is important for us to remember simultaneously that there is such a thing as the truth. I do believe that the Orthodox faith to the extend to which it can express things is true, but I could not believe anymore after many years of life that someone who does not embrace it can not find salvation. In one of the letters which came to me two days ago written by a monk from the Ukraine he says: “No one can be saved but an Orthodox and what you teach is contrary to the faith because everyone who is not an Orthodox will perish in hell.” This I can not believe, I can not believe it because life has taught me something. I have already given this example on occasions how during the war an officer who was not an Orthodox and I do not know whether he was a believer or not came out of a protected corner six times to bring back into safety soldiers who had been wounded and could not crawl back. He was brought to hospital dying, in fact he did not die, he survived. He was not an Orthodox but didn’t he manifest a love, a depth, a degree of love which many of us are incapable of embodying? And also so often people can not believe in what we believe to be true because we are to them a prove that our words are not true. When we speak of love and manifest none, when we speak of giving our lives as Christians for others, and I am sure we do not give anything, can anyone believe that this is the truth? So that there is a problem here or rather there is a challenge, not a problem, that we can not say that it is enough to proclaim a truth couched in words to be within the truth. We can be within the truth only if we live it.
I remember again this letter which I have mentioned to you several times and I thought when I read it: here is a man who says he is an Orthodox, he is sure of entering into the Kingdom of God, he is sure that everyone who is not an Orthodox will perish in hell and yet, take the end of St. Mark’s Gospel and here are the signs of the believer: they will heal the sick, restore to life the dead, etc. Against this background can he say that he is a believer at all? I can not. I can say that with all my longing I am carried Godwards, to the extend to which I am capable of it I love Him. To a small degree I serve Him, I worship Him but I can not say that I am a believer in the sense in which Christ puts it. And if that is the case, how can we judge our neighbour?
I have moved away from my main theme by these remarks but I think it is important for us to realise that in the twilight, in which we live, between the light that has gone partly out with the Fall and the light which is dawning in the coming of Christ and the end of things we must learn to commune with God through life, through prayer, uniting ourselves with Him with all our being and not be content with the words which we use because they may not express what they were meant to express. And in that context I think it is, perhaps, possible not only to have a more thoughtful judgement about people of other Christian denominations but also about the pagan religions of antiquity and of our times because the whole of humanity is possessed of glimpses of memory and these glimpses of memory are incomplete, imperfect, confused. The Bible gives us the clearest image of it but others give us approximations that at times are true also, however incomplete, and when we meet people of different persuasions I think we must ask ourselves: How much in what he believes in is the truth of God and how much is it a confusion established by the Fall and the gradual destruction of wholeness of the experience of God in humanity? And also: How much does he live by what he believes? I think that we would be impressed to see how certain people live by what they believe, the little they believe in a greater way than we do with the great amount which has been revealed to us.
I will end my talk at this point, I will come back to certain of its points in my next talk. I apologise for the confusion of what I have said. It is difficult for me to put it in a clear form, but reflect on it. I have tried to give you hints: think and form your own views, be free to think, while at the same time you remain faithful to the teaching and the life of the Church in prayer, in mutual love, in communion.
Let us now be quiet for a few moments and then we will pray together after which I am afraid I will not stay to give a blessing to all of you because I do not feel well enough to do it.
Talk 13
What is to be a believer, a Christian, an Orthodox.
30 May 2002.
I want to start my talk at a point which I have mentioned already last time but just as a starting point. I told you that someone wrote to me that no-one could enter into eternal life unless they were Orthodox. And this is something which we must not question but understand because if you think, as the person who wrote the letter, that it is enough to have been baptised in the Orthodox Church and blindly to accept anything it has proclaimed in the past and is standing for in the present we are in a very difficult position with regard to the whole world of believers.
The first question which we must ask ourselves: What is it to be an Orthodox Christian? Is it enough to proclaim blindly the Creed, to read the prayers, to be present at liturgies, even to receive sacraments or is there something more, something more decisive that is needed?
I remember Fr. Vsevolod Shpiller telling me that before a baptism he asked whether the prospective godfather was an Orthodox. And the answer was: yes. - Was he baptised? Yes. - Did he believe in God? “No, I am an atheist,” — he replied. “Why did you get baptised then?” — asked Fr. Vsevolod. He looked at him with surprise and a degree of indignation and said: “I am not a dog not to be baptised.” Here was a man who claimed to be a full member of the Orthodox Church, who did not believe in God, who have been baptised very light-mindedly if he was already a grown-up or as a child because grandparents had brought him to baptism. Can one say that this man could claim what my correspondent called being an Orthodox?
On the other hand, we have examples of people who are not Orthodox technically speaking, but whose faith is in no way different from ours. I will give you a couple of examples. The first question which I feel we must ask ourselves is, and I say ourselves, is how much do we understand the faith which we proclaim as an Orthodox faith and how much do we live in accordance with it. If you take the Creed and ask a person to comment on it, to explain it, do you think that each of us can do it in a way that makes sense of every passage in it? I doubt it. If you compare the Creed, as we pronounce it, with the Creed, as it used in the West, with the addition of what one calls technically ‘filioque’ that is the assertion that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son, who in the Orthodox Church, speaking widely, not in this select congregation but in the wide Orthodox world, would be able to explain it or see the importance of it? So that here again anyone who proclaims the Creed with the addition which I have mentioned is not an Orthodox. Can one say that such a person can not enter into the Kingdom of God?
I remember a passage in the writings of St. Philaret of Moscow who says: “The little walls that divide us do not reach Heaven. They are on our level and for our size. We are divided because we make assertions, state definitions, which are true or less true, but there is another dimension in the life of a person which is far beyond it.” Ask yourselves how often in the course of one day the definitions of the Creed play decisive role in your actions? How often does the differences, the diversions that exist between our Creed and the Creed of the West make a difference to our behaviour? Can one therefore say that we are divided to such an extent and in such a way that there is no possibility for us to be together, at one in eternity?
I remember that many years ago when I was asking myself questions on that kind of level I spoke to a remarkable priest, a Frenchman, who had become an Orthodox, Fr. Lev Gillet, whether one could make an element of faith, the certainty which he had, which I had and others have that it is not only people who are technically Orthodox who enter the Kingdom of God. And he gave me an answer which I found very moving. He said to me: “There are things which are matters of faith but there are things which are matters of hope and hope is not any less than faith in the eyes of God.”
I thought in that period on the subject and I imagined a world in which only the few, the very few who are Orthodox would be in Kingdom of God. Can one imagine that we would be judged on nothing but the Creed which we proclaim without very often, most of the time attaching a total importance to its content? On the other hand, to proclaim a faith does not consist in believing or signing blindly a Creed or a system of beliefs. It is a question of how we live accordingly or not. Do we live according to the Gospel? I hope I have quoted to you last time this passage of the Gospel of St. Mark that those who believe will be able to perform miracles, to do this and that, to resurrect the dead. Who of us would dare call himself a believer if that was the criterion of our belief? On the other hand, Christ said also in the Gospel that it is not those who will have said throughout their lives: “Lord, Lord”, — and proclaimed in that way, in words their faith in Him who will enter the Kingdom of God but those who will have lived accordingly. So that we are all confronted with this problem: we are labelled Orthodox, we believe in the Orthodox faith, we belong and we believe in the Orthodox Church but this is not enough for us to say: the Kingdom of God is ours. The way in which we live will be, perhaps, more decisive than what we proclaim because at times one can proclaim very little for lack of culture, for lack of education and live accordingly.
I have already quoted to you in the past this passage from a short story of Tolstoy in which a missionary in Siberia comes upon a minute little settlement where three brothers live together. He talks to them and discovers that they are Christian, that they are believers. And what do they know about their faith? Nothing. “But how do you pray to God? Do you know the Lord’s prayer?” “No.” So he settles to teach them the Lord’s prayer and with great pain in the end they manage to recite it. And then he says to them: “But all this time how did you pray?” “Well, we prayed as we could: There are three of You, there are three of us, have mercy upon us. And that is all we could say”, — proclaiming that way their faith in the Trinity and their hope of salvation. The missionary had taught them the Lord’s prayer. He left in a boat and suddenly he saw with amazement that three men running on the waves. They reached the boat and he said: “But what do you want? How is that you could run like this on the waves?” And one of them said: “O, father, we had to come back to you, we can’t remember exactly the words of the Lord’s prayer.” And the missionary said to them: “Go back and continue to pray to God as you did: “Troye Vas, troye nas, Gospodi, pomiluy nas.”” Here we see of this example that it is enough to be totally at one (?) one’s faith in one small part of it and live accordingly to really to belong to God.
Fr. George Florovsky was one of the most severe classical Orthodox theologians but he did not believe that the proclamation of the Creed was enough for us to be Orthodox: to be Orthodox was to be something, not to proclaim something.
I have thought of that when I was much younger, when I was told about the danger of being punished by eternal torment for being unworthy of my faith and I could not believe in it. I could not believe that the same God of Whom I was told that He is love, that the same God Who became man and died upon the Cross for me to be saved would just reject me because my faith was imperfect, because I pronounce a Creed that was not the right one or because I did not even know the Creed.
And I remember an image that came to my mind: the Kingdom of God, at the very centre of it – God, in all His glory, in all His perfection, perfect love, shining; and then in concentric circles people who were nearer Him and less near and a little farther not because they had not proclaimed the truth according to the book but because they had not been at one with Him in the mystery of love, of self-sacrificing love, of a love that gives itself and gives all it possesses. And then I saw in my imagination that the farther you are from the centre, the less possessed of love you are, the nearer you are to the limit of the Kingdom of eternal glory and happiness. And I thought: impossible. Can I imagine that my mother would come to this barrier between eternal light and eternal darkness, eternal life and eternal death, look over the barrier, see me in the fire of hell and say to me: “Didn’t I tell you?” I can not imagine that, I can not imagine that she could possibly feel in divine bliss looking over and seeing me in eternal torment.
And thinking further in the same direction I thought: “If my mother would feel so desperately miserable seeing me in eternal damnation, the saints who had even greater love than she could possess would feel more miserable and at the end, at the centre the One Who was love perfect, God, would be the most miserable of all the beings because He would never be able to console Himself of the eternal damnation of people whom He had called into existence, whom He had willed into existence, for whom He had given His Son unto death and who had not been able to respond.
So this are the images that occurred to me when I think in these terms, and I think, you should think of them because it is very easy to feel that people are in error and therefore are alien to us.
If we ask ourselves what it means to be a believer, a Christian, an Orthodox, I think, we can say that it is a matter of the heart and of faith understood not as blind acceptance of a Creed handed over century after century that had become more and more complex and whose very wording is less and less understandable to people, that the centre of it is our direct relatedness to God. Do we love Him? Do we venerate Him? Do we know Him as a person? Are we faithful to this love of God and to what we call our love for Him? This is the measure. I do not believe that what I am saying is contrary to the Orthodox faith, on the contrary, I think when we read the lives of saints and their teaching we would discover that they had a passionate confidence and faith in the salvation of people, that Christ had died for all.
I was asked a few days ago whether one could pray for people who had not been baptised or people who simply belong to one of the non-Christian faiths. Technically speaking, if you read the rules, you will be told you must be baptised in order to be prayed for liturgically in the Church. And there is something which I always remember related to this, which was a joy to me when I was a very young man. There was in the West an old Russian bishop. He had been a parish priest before the revolution, then he became a bishop and was one of the ancient man. He was very strict in his faith and uncompromising. And I remember a letter he wrote in response to a question asked of him on this very matter: “Can one pray for people who were not Orthodox and when?” He said: “We can pray for everyone if we can do it from the heart, in compassion, in solidarity, in love but there is one moment, — and here he will probably have shocked many classical believers, — there is one moment at which I believe, — he said, — we can pray for everyone even the enemies of God, speaking of people who in the course of their lives have been actively enemies of the Church and of God, it is in the Proscomidia, in that part of the preparation for the holy liturgy, in which the Lamb of God is slain for the salvation of the world.” He said: “This moment is the moment of the Crucifixion and Christ died upon the Cross for the salvation of the whole of mankind not only for those who then, the few, very few believed in Him.” I am sharing with you this thought of his because it has been to me an encouragement and a hope, and a joy: there is a moment in the liturgy, which is Calvary, a moment when Christ is dying upon the Cross for the salvation of all.
You may accept the views of Vladika Elevferiy or not but here is a man who was brought up in pre-Revolutionary Russia, who became a bishop, the only bishop together with Vladika Veniamin Fedchenkov who remained faithful to the Russian Patriarchate at the moment when practically the whole emigration joined Constantinople and who remained a rock.
So that when we ask ourselves who can be saved, we can leave it to God to know but be sure that if He became man and died for all those who need the salvation we can hope. We can not declare it, perhaps, as a statement of the Creed but we can describe it as a statement of our hope in God. But this leads us, perhaps, even farther because then we must ask ourselves: how much do the theological variations not only in the Creed but in the theology matter. And the answer, my answer, unworthy answer, theologically, perhaps, unsatisfactory is that we can hope, hope and hope, hope passionately for the salvation of all people. If we can be heartbroken for the destiny of a person – how much more God.
But the question then is this: what matters, what is it that unites us to God in such a way that we can hope? It is not the text of the Creed which so many people recite without much understanding and so many people do not know. It is not the statements which we find in the books, it is the way in which we relate to the living God by our living faith, our living approach to Him. Faith means certainty that He exists but it also means faithfulness to Him in the same sense in which we can be faithful to one another, loyal to one another to the last with all our being, all our life. And when we think now of the statement of Philaret of Moscow that the barriers that separate our confessions do not reach the Heavens, indeed, we can see that when we read the lives of the saints of the West and the East: how much they have in common. I remember Prof. Zander writing a small booklet in which he shows the analogies that exist between the personality and the teaching, and the being of St. Seraphim of Sarov and of St. Francis of Assissi. Neither of them was an intellectual theologian, both of them knew God in such a way that others came and discovered God through them because the light of God shone through them.
You remember certainly the story of Motovilov talking to St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. Seraphim suddenly appearing to him shining with eternal light. And Motovilov shuts his eyes in terror and St. Seraphim said: “Do not be afraid: you could not see me as I am now if you yourself at this moment were not filled with light divine.” Let us look round and see the light and rejoice in the light. The statements that have accrued gradually in the course of centuries show how much people have thought and tried to understand and express in ways that were accessible to themselves and to others our faith but beyond it there is a direct knowledge which is beyond words: the faithfulness of the heart and the knowledge of the heart. When you read the Gospel and you see Calvary, what do you see there? Christ nailed to the Cross, dying for the salvation of the world, next to Him – His Mother who is connected with Him by total love and faith; St. John, young disciple who loved, and at a certain distance a few paces away – the women who had faithfully followed Him from Galilee throughout His peregrinations. But where are the disciples? They had fled. Judas had hanged himself, Peter could not face Christ because he had renounced Him, the other ones had found shelter in a house of Mark and were there in fear of their lives because their Master seemingly was now defeated. It is the people of the heart who remained unshakable in their unity with Christ. And this is the claim which is laid upon each of us. I do not mean to say simply because I am myself an ignorant in theology that theology does not matter – no, it does. It is an attempt at understanding, knowing deeper and ever deeper what God has revealed of Himself and of the world and of man; but there is another level, the level of wholehearted faithfulness and love which makes the other things possible.
And if you think of what the early writers said about their faith you will see that the first image is that of the sun, the sun that is fire, a fire that can not be approached, a fire that would consume anything that comes near it but from this fire comes light and from this fire comes warmth. And when they spoke of the Holy Trinity they spoke of God as the sun, of Christ as the light, of the Spirit as the warmth that pervades. That was understandable to people. When they tried to explain the relationship between the Persons they also tried to have images that made sense. St. Gregory writes in a passage that Lossky quotes and enlarges upon. He says that God could not be an arithmetic one because He could not be love, He would be self-love and nothing else; He could not be simply a couple, because it would be two loving one another and ignoring the whole world around. God can be understood as Trinity because a Third One is there. And he says in a very tragic way that at every moment One of the Persons of the Trinity, as it were, makes Himself forgotten by the others so that the Others can be totally at one with each other and then He is recaptured in by an act of love and so it goes on. A love that accepts not to be that others should be to the full and the others restoring Him to the plenitude of being. These are images which people coined in the early years, in the early centuries because they made sense of things to them and later things became more complex. And the moment philosophy intervened, the moment the criteria was the human intellection, then separation came between the Christians.
But there is more to it and I will keep your attention a little bit more. There are the pagan religions. I have said more than once that we live in a world of twilight: the absolute clarity of knowledge of vision which was before the Fall is gone. We have dim recollections, images that come and go and when we read what the pagan religions have got to say about God we tend very easily to condemn them as blasphemy, as ignorance, as folly. It is a reminiscence but a reminiscence in the twilight of people who try to remember and who remember something and then there are gaps, which they try to fill, but from time to time someone emerges that has said something so decisively true. About 2,5 thousand years before Christ there was in Egypt a Pharaoh called Akhenaton. He rejected all idols and he said: “The only image of God is the shining sun and even this is inadequate.” And there was a tribe in Siberia before the revolution, I do not know what has happened to it, in which they had such sense of the greatness and the mystery of God that they had no word for God and refused to coin one but when in speech they had to speak of Him they stopped and raised their hands towards heaven because that was the only way in which they can convey God without making Him a prisoner of a word which is always a limitation and imprisonment.
And so we come to a point which I will touch upon next time, the problem of Christian disunity, the way in which, on the one hand, we are rooted together, on the other hand, we are separate, and on the various ways of which, I believe many are mistaken and few are true we can begin to rediscover the oneness of the one and undivided Church of God.
At this point I will end today’s talk. Let us keep quiet for a while, then pray together.
Talk 14
Orthodoxy and various Christian bodies.
13 June 2002.
...to touch upon a last element of this series on doubt, of confusion and of questioning in the context of what I have already said more than once that we live in a world of twilight when the light shines and at the same time when we are not always able in this light to discern the absolute. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not been able to quench it and that is the world in which we live.
And today I want to speak of the problem of Church and churches, of Christianity and other faiths because this is also an element of our questioning, at times of doubt and certainly for many of twilight. For some there is no problem, all the problems are resolved in the idea that Orthodoxy is the truth, all the truth and there is no truth outside of it, that there is no knowledge of God outside of it, that there is no real life in God or with God apart from it. It gives to those people who believe that way a sense of assurance, of confidence, of certainty in their own salvation. I have quoted to you last time this letter of a deacon from the Ukraine who said to me that he can not understand how I do not believe that only the members of the Orthodox Church will enter eternal life. I pointed out last time on that subject that it is really a question of understanding what it means to be a member of the Orthodox Church: to take without thought, without understanding the truth presented in the Creed and in the writings of the spiritual guides of Orthodoxy without understanding is not enough to be an Orthodox and to proclaim the Orthodox faith and least of all it is enough to proclaim these things without living up to them.
So that I will leave today this question aside as I have sufficiently expounded on it last time and I want to present you with the problem of the dividedness in Christendom. This comes particularly aptly now because last week on Saturday and Sunday there has been a gathering at Windsor of representatives of the various Christian Churches at which Bishop Basil represented us, in which something was discussed which could have been a boring repetition of what we have heard endlessly: the question of our separateness and of what unites us and of the possibilities of coming ever closer together. But it was not like this: for once something has happened – a sort of crack has occurred, a break through because the conclusion of the meeting was that the going on of these discussions was no longer useful. All the elements of the discussion have been examined, all the points have been discussed and yet, no progress has been made except in those bodies who, I believe, wrongly, have shrugged their shoulders and said: “What do all these declarations and all these formulations matter? Let us be together because we are all disciples of Christ”.
There is a great deal of truth in that approach but it is not sufficient and I want to speak a little on that subject. So far we have been discussing between the various Churches the formulations that separate us, trying to find out the rootedness in Holy Scripture particularly in the Gospel or in the writings of the spiritual fathers and the tradition of the Church and it always was a comparison between statement against statement. The progress which I see is occurring now is that while we continue of course to examine the statements and ask questions about them we are prepared to move beyond it. And I want to make a digression at this point.
Many, many years ago Prof. Leo Zander who was a Russian theologian, a faithful disciple of Fr. Sergey Bulgakov in Paris wrote a book Vision and Action in which among other things he examines the question of the way in which the various Christian bodies got split, separated from one another, distanced themselves from each other, and what next? And the way he describes it I found both interesting and convincing. When together with Lossky, Florovsky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev and other of these great names I found myself for the first time in an ecumenical context in this country about 55 years ago. What he says is this: “What happens between people is that they live a life in communion as long as they are linked with one another with mutual love, mutual respect and mutual interest in the way in which the other one thinks and expresses himself. But a moment may come when the way in which two persons express their experience is so different from one another that they do not recognise the same experience in a two (?) formulations. To begin with they discuss, later they argue, later on they feel they are separated more and more because the more they argue the more they bring in intellectual considerations instead of speaking of a deeply rooted experience in God Himself.
And a moment comes when they feel they do not belong together anymore. And Zander has a expression which impressed me very much then: they turn their backs on one another, they still can feel their shoulder blades touching each other and yet, because they look in opposite directions they are infinitely far from each other, they do not see one another any more. They are moving away into infinity. And so they move and in a process several things happen: on the one hand, their thought matures and crystallises, the more argument there was the more they try to find reasons to support their point of view and the more formulations are formed which are incompatible with the views of the one who was, perhaps, their closest friend but who is undergoing the same process in his or her moving away from them. And gradually the formulations become hardened, crystallised, they are supported by quotations of course, they are supported by the views of people respected by the ones and the others and they become in themselves a faith complete. At times these formulations are very complex, rooted in the philosophy of the time, this is what has happened very much between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy; at times the formulations are different because the language is different, because the same words do not mean the same thing. And there are other ways in which the formulations connect with philosophy of the time and then the philosophy takes over from the direct personal experience of the believer. And so the two friends, the two who were one in faith and have broken their link and their unity part more and more from each other. And in the process the bitterness, the anger that separated them grows thinner, less and a moment comes when they begin to think of their friends from whom they have parted at times so sharply, so violently, with such cruelty, insensitively is remembered as a person, is remembered as someone whom they loved, whom they admired as long as they did not argue about philosophy or theology. And they begin to see that they had more in common than they imagined and they ask themselves: has this process taken place also for my friend, does he also think of me with new warmth trying to remember what united us and not what separated us? And a moment comes when the two friends turn round and look into the distance and they see in the distance a shapeless form: it was their friend but they are too far for them to discern features. And then the memory of old friendship and curiosity and interest prompts them to move towards one another in the hope to meet again and to ask one another: What have you become since we have parted? What have you learned about God, about yourself, about the created world, about all the things that we had in common and which have estranged us from each other. And as they move from one another this shapeless form begins to acquire a shape, they begin to discern a person, they come nearer and then looking at the features they see: yes, it is the friend whom I have loved so much, with whom I had so much in common but he has aged, has changed. What has changed? What are these marks on his or her face? Is it evil that has marked it? Or is torment, or is it deep thought that has marked his forehead, changed the expression of eyes that were young and brilliant into eyes that are now deep and quiet, has changed an expression of assertiveness that was the cause of our separation into expectation, into a warm expectation. And then they come and face one another and if they ask the right question there is a possibility of coming together. And the question is: What have you learned about God, about yourself, about life, about the Church since we have parted? Not what you have invented, not what formulations have you coined but what have you learned at the very depth of your being about the things that are absolutely essential: God himself, you in connection with Him, your own depth and life and the created world and its tragic destinies in which separatedness, enmity coincide, live together with sacrificial love, with the sacrificial love of the Son of God and of those who were the saints of these separated groups.
We think very often in the terms of separation and many, many years ago I was very surprised when the same Prof. Zander wrote a book in which he shows in parallel the sanctity of St. Francis of Assissi and of St. Seraphim of Sarov. And when you look at the different saints of East and West how often we find that they have so much in common, not obligatory in their theology if they express themselves in theological forms but in their knowledge of God, in their faith in God, in their faithfulness to God. And that is where I think we are gradually moving: towards a point when we say: yes, we have parted at the moment when we were in search, when we were asking questions, we were giving answers that could at times be incompatible with one another because they were rooted in different experiences, in different languages, in different philosophies, now we have begun to understand one another language, now we have begun to understand that the various philosophies which entranced our ancestors were only human attempts at understanding but there was something greater – God’s Revelation and life in God and we can begin to talk on that level: What have you learnt about God, about yourself, about the world God has created, about the mystery of salvation, about the horror of sin, about the desperate situation of separatedness of people for whom Christ gave His life. He died for me, He died for you and we are killing one another. O, perhaps, not always with a knife or with a gun but with a word: in our heart you are dead and I am dead in yours. Is that compatible with the faith we have in Christ, in a God Who has become man, lived, taught, suffered, died for each of us? And so we are in a period now, o, it may be in the beginning of it, when this is a question that comes to the fore. The philosophies of the past we can still consider but not take them as the root and the rule of our faith. The logic which we used in the past may be replaced by another logic - God’s own logic, God’s own vision of things, the way He presents things, He conveys them to us: mutual love, mutual respect, at times mutual admiration. When we forget that we are separated by formulations and meet a person without asking questions, simply a person is a person, we may discover such depth of truth and reality in him or in her. This is what we must do more and more between ourselves because we are all separated more or less from each other by lack of communion with God and communion with one another in God but also with others outside.
Can one say that it is only those who share our Creed, our views, who are God’s own people? We can not. When we look at the lives of people around us we can only say that so many people who do not share our views or our convictions live a life which is more worthy of God than our own. I am speaking for myself, I am not insulting you but I doubt that any one of us would dare say that we live up to the God Whom we proclaim and we worship Him not only in words and gesture in liturgical ceremonial but through all our actions in life and our feelings.
I have quoted to you already an officer of ours during the war who came out six times out of a protected corner to bring back soldiers that have been wounded. He was brought to us, I was then a military surgeon, he was brought to us pierced through by bullets. He was not an Orthodox but could I look at him and say: “Ha, a heretic.” No, he was a man who had learnt from Christ what Christ stands for, what Christ is: to love to the point of giving one’s life and one’s death for another to be saved.
And this that I am saying about our Christian brothers can apply, I have no time to go into various denominations and examples, but apples also to people outside. I have quoted to you already a conversation I have had with Vladimir Lossky. When I was very young he said to me that true knowledge of God is possible only in Orthodoxy. I did not feel that way because my context was different: I had lived among people who were not Orthodox more than among Orthodox, I had come to the Church late, I had admired and loved people who were strangers to Orthodoxy but I could not argue with him. He was him and I was noting but I went home and I took the book of the Upanishads, the oldest religious writing of India, copied eight quotations from it and came back (he has forgiven me for the deception), came back to him and said: “When I read the Fathers I always copy passages that impressed me particularly and put the name of the author at the end. Here are eight quotations and I have forgotten to put the names down. Could you recognise who the Orthodox Fathers are who wrote these things?” He took my sheet of paper and within two minutes he had put the names of the greatest spiritual guides of Orthodoxy: St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostome, St. Simeon the New Theologian and so forth. And when he had done it I said: “Vladimir Nicolaevich, this is the Upanishads.” And he looked at me and said: “I never knew that. I must read them and change my attitude.”
And I gave you already in past also an example about this young officer who came up to me and said that he was an unbeliever. And I said: “It is your loss.” “And what have I got in common with God that I should be interested in Him not to speak of believing in Him?” And I said: “Do you believe in anything?” He said: “Yes, I believe in man.” I said: “That you have in common with God. And God believes in man far beyond your belief because He created man, because He loved man before he existed, He became Man to save us when we have fallen away, He died on the Cross to save us. That is the way in which God is concerned with man and loves man. What about you?” He looked at me and said: “I have never thought of that. I must go and think.” I do not know what happened to him but here was a man who had in common with God something absolutely essential because to believe in man to the point of giving one’s life as this officer whom I have quoted or devoting one’s life to the service of men as the other young officer was concerned makes you partaker of the mystery of faith.
But we can go (I will detain you a little bit more than habitual) we can go also beyond this point, and I will not be able to enlarge sufficiently but I want to indicate a few things. If it is true what I said in the beginning that when the Fall occurred the world that preceded the Fall disappeared from the experience and to a great extent from the awareness and understanding of man. The world in which we live is no longer the world of full glorious light that it was. I have said far too often that we live in a twilight. Now, when man try to remember what happened before, Adam and Eve, when they found themselves on an Earth that was no longer paradise, how often did they try to remember what it was to be in a world that knew no sin, that was totally in communion with God in which God Himself was life and reality? They tried to remember, to describe it to themselves, not to forget, to hand it over to their children, and from generation to generation to others but the memories faded. What was a hesitant memory for Adam and Eve became the reminiscence of what Adam and Eve had said to others and gradually the clarity, the absoluteness of vision that had disappeared even in them became more and more darkened. But there is an old saying: Nature does not put up with emptiness. Whenever there was no way of remembering, when there was a gap that needed understanding people began to fill the gap not with invention but with an attempt at imagining what had happened.
And if you read the content of the ancient religions of mankind, perhaps Mesopotamian more because it is a place from which Abraham came to discover God, you will discover that so much is made of glimpses of truth which are carried as wood is carried by the water by connecting/ed imaginations. These connect/ed imaginations may be right or wrong but there are still elements of truth that are floating there. And at times of a sudden someone appears who has somehow a perception which was lost by others. I have quoted to you last time, I think, an Egyptian king who felt that God could not be named or represented in any way and he said that the only image of God that could be acceptable was to say that He is like the sun. He believed in a God that was inexpressible but not unknowable. After his death it was forgotten but a moment more than two thousand years before Christ an Egyptian Pharaoh had perceived that.
I have quoted to you also a tribe of Siberia who has disappeared since the Middle Ages in whom they felt that one could not give a name to God because God was too holy and when they wanted to mention Him they stopped and raised a hand to heaven to signify: it is Him Whose name we do not know and Whom we would not even dare pronounce if we knew it. And the same is true at times about philosophies or views that seem to us so alien to Christianity, to the Gospel, even to the Old Testament because there is a grain of truth or there is a little truth here and there or a lot of it, which is framed in imaginations or attempts at explaining things. So we are in a period when we can look at our Christian brothers and sisters and say: “We belong together, we believe in the same God, One in the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We have spoken of these Three Persons in human, I was about to say, debased terms, debased compared to God Himself, and that has separated us. Let us talk less and live more, be with God at one, live in God, live for God and gradually our unity will be achieved not on the level of intellectual but on the level of knowledge and life.
But when we look round at the non-Christian religions we must also instead of trying to find out what is wrong in them we must look and say: “What is there which is true knowledge of God, which is expressed in ways that depend on their culture, on the lack of knowledge, of so many incidents, what is there that makes us brothers in a God Who for them has no name and for us also because when we say that God is One in the Trinity we do not name Him. He is like the sun – unknowable. The Fathers spoke of the Son of God as being the light that makes visible everything, and the Spirit as the warmth that pervades and transfigures everything but that is as far as we can go, we, with the knowledge of God which we have. No, we can go beyond that. We can go beyond that if we accept, on the one hand, our lack of intellectual ability to express the inexpressible and our vocation to live according to the Gospel, to be worthy of God, to be at one with Him in everything He has told us so that by living according to His will we become akin to Him and from within this kinship we begin to understand and know Him in a way in which we did not know Him before.
I will stop my talk at this point and if I do not change my mind I will conclude next time this series of talks by saying something about certainty and a way in which we can live by and learn certainty concerning God, concerning ourselves, concerning our neighbour, concerning the world He has created, live in a certainty which is God Himself.
Shall we keep quiet for a moment and then pray.
Talk 15.
27.06.02
In the course of this year I have been speaking to you almost exclusively of questioning, of doubt, of uncertainty, of the way in which since the Fall, since the moment when total, perfect communion has ceased between man and God we are living in a twilight. St. Paul, as you remember, said that we see things as though it was through a darkened glass. We see the things, at the same time they have not got a clarity, the luminous quality, which is theirs in reality but which we can not see because our eyes are darkened. And when I say our eyes I do not mean our physical, fleshly eyes but the vision which we have of things through our soul, through our total perception of things.
I would like today to speak of another aspect of things in this concluding talk of mine: about certainty because twilight implies two things, implies that there is not fullness, plenitude, perfection of vision through the light but it also means that in spite of the darkness, the cloud there is light and there is vision. We are told in St. John’s Gospel that things are surrounded by darkness and yet darkness has not swallowed them up, there is light. And the purpose of our spiritual life is, on the one hand, to learn to discern what is dark and what is light but also to live by what is light, to live in the light. And I would like to say something about it now, about this aspect of things.
Throughout the Old and the New Testament we find people, ordinary people, people who became great only after the event, as it were, who were like everyone else and who at a certain moment found themselves face to face with a light or a truth, or a beauty, or a meaning that transformed things for them.
Remember a man like Moses: he was in the wilderness and of a sudden he came upon a sight he could not understand or explain. There was a Bush standing in the sand and aflame. And something very peculiar about it: it was all flames and yet it is not (?) disintegrate in ashes. He came up to it and a voice said to him: “Dare not step on this ground with your shoes. Come barefoot because this ground is holy.” He had seen, as it were, an icon, an image, a message that God even in the world in which we live could set things to flames and the things were not consumed. Speaking materially, it is a simple image, speaking spiritually of the experience of mankind and of each person, to a very great difference each of us is confronted with moments, when he sees in the ordinariness of life a light which is beyond the natural. You remember probably, the lives of saints in which an ordinary person met a saint face to face and saw a light in his eyes, a light on his face that was more convincing than any words this man or woman could have spoken.
I remember in the lives of the Fathers of the desert the story of three men who came to a hermit to ask the questions that have accumulated in their minds in the course of life. Two of them asked one question after the other and got replies that made sense to them intellectually, not in terms of convincingness of a man who had better arguments than theirs but what they (he ?) said was of another dimension: they saw things small, limited, colourless. He gave colour, dimension to these things and they saw now their problems and their lives and the world around them in greatness instead of seeing nothing but the small created dimension. The third one sat and asked no questions, said no word and at the end of the encounter, the hermit said to him: “Your companions have been asking questions from me, you have not asked me anything, why?” And this man said to him: “I have been looking at you and that was enough for me.” He was not contemplating a physical beauty, he was looking at a man in which the life of God had established a serenity, a peace, a depth, through whom understanding shone. It was enough for him.
This happens also in our days. In the context in which I speak it is impertinent to give a personal example but I will do it because we are friends, we are so united that we can share everything. When I was seventeen years of age for the first time in my life I went to one of our churches in Paris. It was the only church, about 30 to 40 people who have not renounced allegiance to the Russian Patriarchate. I intended to come to the service but I was working and I was late. The service was over. The Church was in a basement, there was a wooden staircase leading to the front door, and coming up this staircase there was a man, a monk tall and vigorous. I looked at him and what I saw moved me deeply: I had never seen anyone in whom concentration was so total. He was all inside of himself, he was all in an incredibly deep silence of prayer. I did not know who he was, I came up to him and said: “I do not know who you are but I beg you: become my spiritual father.”
Number of years later he was dying and three days before he died, he sent to me a note saying: “I know now what the depth of contemplative silence is. I can now die.” And on the third day he died. There was no outer shining, there was nothing in him that was in my experience a vision, it was a direct perception of the depth of inwardness, of silence, of prayer, if you want to use this word, that conveyed to me a world. We have other examples, more frapant, perhaps. You all know the story of St. Seraphim of Sarov speaking to Motovilov, who was asking him questions about the spiritual life and of a sudden he saw St. Seraphim shining with light in such a way as he describes it himself in his memoirs that he could not look at his face because it was so luminous and he said: “It was as though I was looking at the sun in its full glory and inside of this sun a human face, which was shining with this glory, but I could not look and see it because it was continuously moving, changing and yet it was St. Seraphim.” And he turned his gaze away thinking that he can not endure this, one can not see that and stay alive. And St. Seraphim said to him: “Don’t be afraid, you could not see me as I am now unless you yourself were not shining with the glory of God.”
This is a very important phrase because at times we meet someone that strikes us, perhaps, not with the absolute power of St. Seraphim’s vision but strikes us in a same direction, as it were, and we have a feeling that - how can that be? And the answer is: “You can see it because you also commune to this light.” This is of the immense importance for each of us because each of us love one saint or another particularly and even beyond this, love a person or another with a depth which is unique and sees a beauty and a greatness which, perhaps, others can not perceive. This means that between this saint or the shining light that is alive in this person whom we have met and us there is something in common: we also are partakers of this light. We can ask ourselves about the saints whom we admire and venerate. If we are asked to give intellectual reasons: what is so wonderful in this one or that one we can usually give reasons but they are not the reasons why. As if we can be asked how is it that you love this person so deeply and revere this person so deeply, give us reasons. And we can not give these reasons because the reason is in the mystery of communion. There is in this person, in this saint or on this ordinary person something which awakens in us a similar condition, makes us partaker of the light which is within this person.
This is so wonderful because on the highest level it is happening between the saints and God, a step lower is happening between the saints and us. Why is it that such saint is so meaningful to me? Why is it that I see in him such incredible beauty while others may see in him one of the many great men of God? Because there is between us a resonance, there is between us a similarity. It is terrifying in a way to think that I can be profoundly moved by one saint or another or by the Mother of God or by Christ because between him or her or them and me there is something that responds. But if that is true we must think of ourselves and look at ourselves with respect and when I say with respect I do not mean with pride and illusions of grandeur, of greatness, no, we must look at ourselves and say: “I as a humble human being have been created in such a way that I can perceive that.” An image that was given me once was that of a musical instrument: the instrument itself is nothing but wood or strings and yet touched by a hand full of experience, capable of conveying beauty, it begins to resound and convey to others all around to the extent, to which they can understand it, the experience of the one who has touched its strings or its keys.
If that is true then how careful must we be about ourselves. If we have veneration for a saint, if we have respect, tenderness, love to a person, if some passages of the Scriptures, of the Gospel, if the person of Christ as He appears in the Gospel reach us and move us and transform and transfigure us - how careful must we be about ourselves. We are not just a dead instrument, we are not just an object upon which light divine has shone, we are a being into whom the divine light has shone, has poured, has transfigured us. O, it may be for one moment of vision but it is not true that it is only for one moment. We perceive it as an extraordinary, unrepeatable, wonderful moment but in reality it is something that has gone to the very core of our being and is there: “The gifts of God are never taken away,” – says the Scripture. If once we have had this extraordinary experience then it means that it is within us. We can be secure, yes, secure, sure that nothing can take it away from us. It can be obscured, we may loose sight of it, we may be incapable of perceiving it, finding it in ourselves again but it is hidden in the very depth of our being. It will one day come to the surface. It is a wonderful thing but also what responsibility is put upon us by it. We have not got the great visions, the great mystical experiences of the saints but each of us we have got an experience of God, of the Mother of God, of His saints, of one another in the beauty, which is God’s beauty in us and we must treat this experience with reverence, with what depth of reverence and what gratitude both to God Who gave us this experience and to the person who is conveying it to us even for one moment because we can not continuously be in the state of a visionary but having seen once we have seen forever, having perceived once we have perceived forever, it has become our experience, it is us.
In the history of the Church we find people who met God and Christ in a variety of ways. I have mentioned Moses and the Burning Bush. Moses saw something incredible: a bush that was burning and was not consumed and this in a way was an icon that says to us: God can set us into flames and we will not burn, we will shine and become light and fire ourselves. This is the vocation of each of us, of everyone whom God has ever created. How careful, worshipful, reverent we must be to what is going on in ourselves and in others. In others as we see them, but in others as we intervene in their lives. How terrible it is when we bring into someone’s life a patch of darkness, a wound, increase the twilight, block the way, and how wonderful it is to see some people who open a door. In the Gospel we also find people who meet God in Christ.
I would like to remind you of one example which struck me very much, is that of Nathaniel. He meets Christ, he is around (?) people who tell him that this is a prophet, a man of God and he doubts. And Christ says to him a very simple phrase: “While you were praying under that tree, I saw you.” Nathaniel was probably not kneeling by the tree with his hands upward, he was by the tree and his heart was with God and when Christ said to him: “When you were there by the tree praying,” – where no one could see it, Nathaniel thought: “He must be the God to Whom I was praying.” And he bowed before Christ and said: “My Lord and my God.” This is one of the most moving passages in the Gospel of one who was standing in prayer before God invisibly and he discovered that he had been seen by Christ because it was to Him that he had been praying; and he became His disciple.
If you read the lives of the different apostles you will see the same: each of them at a certain moment met Christ but met Christ not as a wandering preacher but as One within Whom there was something that was not there in anyone else. “To whom should we go?” - says one of the disciples.
Now, if that is the case we must look each of us at our own lives because we are not here by chance. It is not simple curiosity or idleness that brought us here. It is because we have, each of us, perceived something that brought us to this place. I can give you an example, o, very simple, I have mentioned it years back and some of you may remember it. A man came to this church with a parcel for one of the parishioners. He was a convinced unbeliever, so he had done all he could to arrive when the service was over. God had decided otherwise because when he came the service was still on and this man impatiently put down his parcel on the bench at the back of the church and sat to wait for the end of it. The end came, he gave the parcel to the person for whom he had brought it but he did not go away. I was going round the church, putting things right, ready to lock it up and I saw this man sitting there. And I said to him: “Are you waiting for something?” He said: “No, but I am puzzled. I don’t believe in God, God does not exist and yet, there is something in this place which I have not met ever anywhere else. What can that be? Is that the mournful singing of your choir? Is it the shining of the candles in the half-darkness? Is it the collective hysterical condition of the people who come here? But there is something I had never experienced before. How do youexplain that?” – he said. I shrugged my shoulders and said: “You see, I believe in God so I would say, it is God’s presence but of course if God does not exist I have no reply for you.” He looked at me and said: “Yes, but I am still puzzled. May I come again?” I said: “Of course come again.” And he came a couple of times and he had the same experience with the difference: he came for a liturgy and he said to me: “What is happening to people? When they come their faces are dull, when they go there is another life and light in their faces. And the people who go up to the screen and receive something with a spoon from you, when they come down their eyes are shining in a way in which eyes do not shine normally. What can that be?” I shrugged my shoulders and said: “To my benighted mind, it is God, but of course if there is no God...” He said: “Look, there is something here which all these people have and which I do not possess. I want to possess it also. What should I do?” I said: “Come, sit, see and if you want to talk you can talk to me.” He said: “No, I don’t want to talk to you because you may influence me. What I want is come one day, settle on this bench, sure that you are not about and that you can not hypnotise me or influence me in any way and see what happens.” So I said: “Come.” He sat there, I disappeared, then, when I met him again he said: “You know, whether there are people in this place or none, whether you are here or not, it is the same: there is here something like a presence, something I can not describe. I want to discover what it is. What shall I do?” So I offered him to talk to him about the Christian faith and eventually after a year or so he was baptised. But here it is: it was not the mournful singing of the choir, it was not the glittering of the candles, it was not the collective hysterics of the congregation, it was not my evil influence, it was God’s own presence and this is what made him into a believer, a believer in God, not in the Church as an organisation or a place where services are held that are moving, beautiful, no. It was God Whom he met.
And I think this is something which we must all remember. One of the important things in our lives, if we want in the twilight of life to have the certainty that it is light which is at the core of it, we must look for God. All the rest may be conducive to it or on the contrary, prevents us from meeting it. We may be carried away by beauty, whether the icons, by the singing, by the services, we may be carried away by the wisdom, expressed by writers, but beyond it there must be a point at which we come in silence and face to face with a depth which is a Presence: God’s own presence. And when we have discovered that all the rest takes its place: it may become essential as a living expression of what we have discovered, it may become superfluous, it may become occasional, it may be our weekly or daily experience if we can or choose to come to church, it may also become unnecessary if we think of the ascetics who went into the desert to be alone with God. But also those ascetics who had rooted themselves in God in such a way that they could be with people without loosing God.
In the life of St. Arsenius the Great there is a story of him and another ascetic. He lived alone in the desert, received no visitors and he was asked: Why? He said: “Because I am incapable of being simultaneously with God and with people and I want to be with God and therefore I run away from people.” “But how is it that the ascetic Paul who lives a few miles away has established his hut by the roadside and receives all the passers-by, washes their feet, gives them water to drink, shares his food with them?” “I do not know,” - said Arseny. And when they asked Paul he said: “Whoever comes this way I look at him and I see an icon of Christ and come up worshipfully to wash his feet, to give him a draught of water, to feed him if he needs it, to offer him rest in my cell and all my life I am in the presence of Christ.”
Two absolutely opposite ways but all absolutely real. We are not in a position to choose one way or the other in this total and absolute sense but we can understand it, we can understand that there are moments when we need be alone with God without anyone helping or hindering, and there are other moments when being with God and being with someone or people is identical.
I remember being taught about praying by Fr. Afanasiy who said to me: “When you want to pray, shut your door, take your stand before God and be absolutely quiet and silent, saying nothing except one thing: thank God that He in His humility accepts to be in your presence and accepts you to be in His presence and stand there knowing that God and you are standing face to face. You may perceive something: peace, depth or you may perceive nothing. Do not try to perceive anything. It is enough for you to know that God is there. You may be unworthy of perceiving Him, you may be incapable of perceiving Him but He is there and you need not be afraid of His apparent absence, just stand there and thank Him for allowing you to stand in His invisible, imperceptible presence. And then a moment will come, perhaps, when of a sudden you will become aware that God is there: your whole self, your inner self will come to life in a way in which it was not alive before and you will know that you have met the Lord. But do not try to keep this experience, to hold to it, let God be free; never forget, keep in your heart, in your memory what you have experienced. And then deepen your experience of these encounters with God by reading and trying to understand, trying to understand, this is essential, the prayers of the saints. These prayers where written by people from within this very experience. They expressed what they perceived, they did not perceive everything, each of them perceived what he could, what was akin to him and he put it down: read and try to understand from the experience of saints something about God. But remember that these words are their words and you can not repeat them truthfully unless they are true for you and within you. Read them but comment on them, say words and say: “Yes, Lord, this I can say with all my heart, this is the truth as I know it and in another passage...” (end of side A)
... I will remember it, I will meditate on it, I will try to understand how that can be but I can not identify at the moment and I must be true and say: No, this is beyond me. And there are passages of which we can have a glimpse, yes, in the twilight and say: Yes, I understand something of it but very little. And there are moments when we will have to make an act of faith, say: I do not believe but in this desperate need or, perhaps, trivial need in which I am, I will make an act of faith, in other words, I will trust God, I will have confidence in Him, I will hope that I will not be deceived. And then we may discover that, yes, indeed, we were right trusting the Lord Himself or the saint whose prayer we read.
All that are elements of certainty, of a certainty that varies. It may appear for a moment and then disappear, we may find ourselves again in the twilight but we will remember if we are careful enough that we have seen the light and that we can not hold it forever. And if we are honest, if we struggle truthfully then gradually the twilight will become brighter and brighter with the light of God. This is the way in which certainty may replace searching and doubt, a certainty which is trusting God, being sure of Him, a certainty which means trusting Him enough so that at moments of darkness we still can remain with Him. And gradually this trust, this incipient growing certainty may become faith in the full sense of the word: a certainty that never wavers in us and also that leads us to be faithful, to be His. Faithful in the sense and in a way in which friends can be faithful to one another, not betraying one another. And here comes not the problem but the reality, the importance of being true to what is in the Gospel or, if you prefer, to live in such a way that God may believe that we are faithful to Him. And on that we can grow more and more one with Him and then the twilight matters less and less because what matters is the light. The darkness that surrounds becomes like a mist through which one can walk because one knows that beyond the mist there is the perfect light of the sun.
I will end at that point this talk of mine and the talks of this year and I hope that what I have said in the course of these talks will help you however little to find your own way, your own way, each of you, the unique way which makes you one with Christ our God.
Let us keep quiet for a while and then let us pray together.
