Let loving the beautiful be your morality

                                                

Without the power of desire there is no longing, and so no love, which is the issue of longing; for the property of desire is to love something. And without the incensive power, intensifying the desire for union with what is loved, there can be no peace.

—St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia

Orthodox Christian theologian Timothy Patitsas has written a beautiful book,The Ethics of Beauty. In the West, he says the intellectual sins like pride were taken as primary, while in the East, the sensual sins were taken as primary. 

In Orthodoxy, first the passions must be cleansed, then we can perceive and fall in love with true Beauty.

Moved by Beauty the will now desires to embrace Goodness.

Lastly, we are ready to bow down to Truth.

The modern world operates in the opposite way, stop being ignorant and just do the right thing.

It’s not about moral reform, to will yourself to do good. You’ll naturally wish to do good when you perceive it to be desirable. What causes you to desire something ? When you see it as beautiful . For that, you first need to cleanse the nous to perceive what’s truly beautiful and fall in love with it, thereby embracing the Good you now see as Beautiful.

The following are excerpts from an interview he did HERE :

“….in Orthodoxy first comes the battle with concupiscent passions, which we win by fasting—in other words, by falling in love with Beauty itself, and not with false beauty. But what is this real Beauty, but Christ himself in a moment of self-emptying love? And so through Beauty we learn the Goodness of the Cross—that is to say, Ethics—and we ourselves long to pour out our life for our brothers, sisters, enemies, and all of creation. To contemplate this good-ness, to be illumined, we must give alms. We are then illumined in both senses—we contemplate correctly, and our light “shines before men.”

The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies, and with falling in love with them. In other words, it begins with Beauty.

After this we can discuss Goodness. By embracing what we ind within authentic Beauty—the crucified Savior and the Cross—we attain Goodness and become good, and ind our communion to others restored.

Finally, through these two steps we are brought to the gates of Truth, by a purified feeling. I mean a theological sensing, the innate ability we have to recognize theophany even in its hidden manifestations. In relying on that intuition, or in recognizing that within the Beautiful story of Christ is goodness, and therefore almost certainly truth—we fall in love with beauty and step out in faith toward it.

Is faith any different than eros? Abraham stepped out of his land and onto  a journey of exile not because he worked it out intellectually, but because he had received a theophany! Perhaps faith is just the memory of theophany, the continuing to launch out towards that divine supernova when it seems to have gone dark?

And when we ind within Beauty the miracle of empathy, and contemplate this Goodness by imitating it, we see that the irst feeling is not left behind. Rather, it is amplified and becomes contemplation, a feeling that includes discursive thought—a faith that is expressed as reason. 

And Finally our sense of truth is but an amplification of our sense of Beauty and our sense of Goodness or morality. The three are just one clear channel, one pure stream—from feeling to contemplation to knowing Truth directly. 

This is why Orthodox theology looks the way it does, so pure and free, so elegant and aesthetically satisfying—rather than cold, logical, and hard.

Your sense of the beautiful is already an intellectual power, and your initial  knowing of truth will still be a falling in love with the beautiful through feeling. 

                                                       

This is why Orthodox ascetic struggle, and Orthodox theology and ethics, do not begin with intellect and truth, nor with the intellect investigating goodness. Or, they may temporarily begin there if challenged to do so, but they will always return to their real beginning, which is Beauty, followed by Goodness, then the appropriation of the self-revelation of God. We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and inally we investigate dogma.

Imagine an ethics that was nothing more than Truth investigating Goodness, with no thought for Beauty? Who would even care about what it discovered? But isn’t this exactly how we deine Ethics today?

Or, imagine a psychotherapy in which Truth investigates Truth, asking only whether what we feel is true, always seeming to denigrate concern for Beauty and Empathy in the form of its very practice? Can there even be a Truth without Goodness and Beauty? Well, this is just what we call “objectivity,” and it is just a kind of hell.

We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and finally we investigate dogma.

Purification, illumination, deification .

Deification comes not from moral struggle, but from ascetic struggle—the attempt to fall in love with Christ and him alone, to be chaste, to energize our eros. And Illumination is a contemplation not yet of theological truths, but of goodness, of the empathy and compassion at the heart of beauty. 

Thus to purify our reasoning, we emphasize not logic, but the giving of alms; only this will clarify our judgment about goodness and render us Illumined.

 Deification is not separate from the others. To attain Eros (Beauty; the first commandment of Christ's two greatest commandments) and Agape (Goodness; the second of these two commandments) is already to be Deified.

 Or, we must see that even the first rays of Beauty in our lives, represent the onset, incipient but real, of our deification. We know the theologian to be deified because when he speaks, it is God speaking with him, with one voice human and divine. He is theologos be-cause he has found his own logos in the Logos who is Theos. This could be anyone."

                       

Man as Microcosm Healing the Fractured Cosmos

                                                               

For most of the eastern religions the Cosmos is mind. So too for many quantum physicists and some idealist leaning Christians - all is consciousness.

If so, it offers an explanation of The Fall - that God’s energies were creating the Cosmos as pure gift. Everything filled with Logos - logic, ie every thing acting in accord to God’s will. Then something disrupted this flow of gifting. An intention arose in some being. 

To narrate this spiritual truth in images the Bible tells us that Man made a counter-intention to God’s will. Instead of accepting the fruit at the proper time when mature as a gift, Man took. This disrupted the flow of grace, and the Cosmos fell.

St Maximus tells us that Man is a Microcosm of the Cosmos, and within him is contained 5 fractures of being.

We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.

Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.

To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.

As Andrew Louth puts it,

“…through accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with God.”

The healing is also reflected in the Eucharistic liturgy, St Maximus tells us in his Mystagogia.

Basically these divisions are echoed by correspondences in the Church. Sanctuary/nave is reflected in invisible/visible, heaven/earth, soul/body, mind/reason, New Testament/Old Testament, meaning/text.

So the movement between sanctuary and nave in the liturgy interprets and is interpreted by movement between the other divisions.

So the liturgical movement celebrates the healing of the five divisions.

                         

Another way to think about it is that the cosmos is Mind, which is “funneled” (incarnated) into brains.

The disharmonious FALSE patterns of chaos in the cosmos (incarnated as passions and conflict) are attuned within us to the TRUE patterns in harmony with God’s loving will.




Think of it as being in accord with the Tao, the Way. What is “true movement?”

Well, right now we exist as biological beings, and get our energy from dead biological beings - animals and plants.

This is life as bios.

However there is another type of life energy : zoe, or spiritual life.

It’s often missed in translation, but Christ came to give us zoe, true life, which is eternal, and animates not our biological body but our soul.

Our biological body moves in three dimensions, up and down etc, and also in the fourth dimension, time.

Our soul does not move this way. Our soul moves by desire. Think of when you move toward someone in your intention, in love. This is an invisible movement of your soul.

This movement is exercised by virtue.

Order *IS* love.

The incarnation basically injected this harmonious pattern in perfect accord with God’s will (because Christ IS God) into the disharmonious patterns of our world and universe.

Kind of like a harmony injected into a cacophony that gradually harmonies all those discordant notes with God's perfect song.

As David Bentley Hart says HERE,

"...virtue is, he [Augustine] argues....is the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm; and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms not to the domination of others, but to their benefit. "

Christ then draws all contradictions into Himself, purifies and harmonies them.

In Jordan Daniel Wood’s superb new book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor, he puts it like this :

“Every creature’s motion, sinful or not, generates time.

False motion renders existence more crudely finite, slavishly borne along with the flow of phenomena.

True motion—the motion of virtue, knowledge, love of God in Christ—brings creaturely motion nearer its term and thus cessation, and hence takes leave of the provisional necessities of spatiotemporal existence…

But those logoi carry potentialities that are themselves actualized for the first time in one hypostasis, Jesus of Nazareth.”

.

Inability to Love & Avoiding God's Love

           
                             

Do You Know Yourself? Psychological Problems and the Spiritual Life by Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos is a wonderful book.

Fr. Symeon's main thesis is that many people are not making spiritual progress because they are stuck in psychological ruts.

Fr. Symeon uses the work of the psychologist Karen Horney. She posited that neurosis is comprised of three flawed "movements" that people make in relation to each other are: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people.

The solution is to detach from a false image of yourself.

I’ll concentrate on those who move away from others. In today’s psych jargon this type in the extreme might be labeled as having Dismissive Avoidant Attachment or being Love Avoidant. 

The following are excepts from the book on this type :

“We don't know what degree some people who remain unmarried fail to move toward marriage because God calls them to another life. It may be that they remain unmarried because they are afraid of marriage. They think they'll lose this freedom - this unhealthy freedom, however. They think they'll lose this independence - this unhealthy independence, of course. To be precise, they're afraid that someone else will enter the depths of their existence, and they don't want this at all. Certainly other needs exist that finally cause them to get married. For example, when a woman is looking for protection, affection, in the end she'll get married, but this shortcoming will exist. How is a communion of souls and persons possible in this marriage, then?

He doesn't want people to approach him, he doesn't want them to influence him, he doesn't want them to obligate him to do anything.

This type also has the tendency, among other things, to deaden his feelings, to suspend them, not to allow them to act, to operate. And he does this, as a rule, because every one of our feelings, this or that feeling, causes us to open up, to express ourselves, causes us to manifest ourselves. Precisely because this type of person is closed, however closed off even before his very self...

                     

This type, then, is the sort of person who can't open himself to God, who can't trust in God. He ends up being that Christian who is doing fine, just fine, but deep down - he feels it, he sees it, when he's paying attention - he still doesn't have communion with God, he still doesn't have contact with God. The light of God hasn't come into this secret darkness that exists inside him, into this double-locked shell of his.

....he wonders why he doesn't love other Christians, why he doesn't love other people. 

It's possible that the whole relationship between this "good" Christian and other people appears to be good, be ongoing, but at depth, however, his existence has no communion with other people, and this Christian doesn't feel that the other existences pass into him and his own existence passes into the other existences. That is, doesn't perceive his soul to be open so that the love of his brothers, his fellow Christians, and first and foremost the love of God passes inside him.

…a hyper-sensitivity is created in a certain way, like a defense mechanism, which is immediately set in motion, at work, in operation, as soon as something comes along and influences this soul at its depth, as soon as it comes along in some way to obligate this soul to do something (against its will) or as soon as it gives the appearance that it wants to oppress this soul.

For him it's a catastrophe to open up. We could say that this type knows one word - closed. Openness frightens him - and still more openness before God.

….[When] a person surrenders fully to God, this means that he accepts a visitor within him. He stops being fenced in and closed off. The unhealthy type, however, can't do this, because he seeks isolation, he has recourse to isolation in a compulsive way.

How is it possible for this person to receive grace? How is it possible for the light to come to such a soul? It isn't possible.

….it’s possible that we want away and we try to make it go away, and yet it doesn't go away.

Let me give you an example so that you understand,

It is difficult for granite to melt from an ordinary fire as for this situation to be resolved by ordinary efforts. In order for granite to melt, it requires a very high temperature. And in order for this situation to go away, for this wall to melt and the soul to open, it requires, to be sure, a great temperature of faith.

However, when this human being who has such an unhealthy condition understands how he himself is, deep down, and how he moves, and he can be given truly to Christ and truly be reborn in Christ, then he'll really be flooded with love, he'll become a true personality and will have a true, real relationship with other human beings."

Finally, from The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology :

                ".....the embodied historical struggle of every creature to discover and to be its true self, to communicate the vivacious idea at its core, is never left behind but is integral to its consummate realization, to its fullness of life. And as the creature fully lives into its self-communication, this true life surges past all false selves constructed by sin and prejudice and violence of every kind, and onwards into the inexhaustible self-sharing of its truth; for the truth at the heart of every creature is God's eternal and imperishable knowing and loving of it and this is the life from which it flows and which, Christians believe, God intends it to enjoy forever."

Robert Imbelli HERE comments,

"The death from which Christ saves us is far more than physical death. It is the very corroding of God’s image in us through fantasies of self-aggrandizement and hatred. These distortions of the generative divine ideas wreak havoc not only on individuals, but also on the whole human community and the rest of material creation. Sin falsifies divine communication and erects obstacles to the communion God desires. At its deepest, sin is refusal of Incarnation. For, in a sentence from Maximus the Confessor that McIntosh relishes, “the Word always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”

With the resurrection of Christ, God’s life-giving Word stands fully revealed. Christians are those whose converted consciousness perceives the fulfillment of God’s plan in the risen Christ and whose conduct seeks to further the restoration of all things in him. Immersed in Christ’s paschal mystery in baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, Christians are led “into a new communion with the divine ideas…a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things.”

Sisyphus or the Saints, ritual or rote, time accursed or graced ?

 

    

Contra Plato, I believe we must let the poets lie to us, but only with those lies that tell the truth. 

The poet Stephen Dunn wrote a series of poems on Sisyphus, that old Greek cursed by the gods to forever roll a boulder uphill, never to reach the top, never to rest, only endless struggle with no future change or end. Life feels like that. Our endless numbing days of rot and habit. The solution to time's curse ? It is ritual.

As an Orthodox Christian I try to follow the liturgical calendar, referencing days to events in the life of Christ, bodily entering the rhythms of His life. Mircea Eliade wrote about how myth and ritual redeemed "the implacable becoming that leads toward death" :

"The defense against Time which is revealed to us in every kind of mythological attitude, but which is, in fact, inseparable from the human condition, reappears variously disguised in the modern world, but above all in its distractions, its amusements.

It is here that one sees what a radical difference there is between modern cultures and other civilizations. In all traditional societies, every responsible action reproduced its mythical, transhuman model, and consequently took place in sacred time. 

Labour, handicrafts, war and love were all sacraments. The re-living of that which the Gods and Heroes had lived in illo tempore imparted a sacramental aspect to human existence, which was complemented by the sacramental nature ascribed to life and to the Cosmos.

By thus opening out into the Great Time, this sacramental existence, poor as it night often be, was nevertheless rich in significance; at all events it was not under the tyranny of Time. The true ‘fall into Time’ begins with the secularization of work. 

It is only in modern societies that man feels himself to be the prisoner of his daily work, in which he can never escape from Time. And since he can no longer ‘kill’ time during his working hours—that is, while he is expressing his real social identity—he strives to get away from Time in his hours of leisure: hence the bewildering number of distractions invented by modern civilization… 

The ‘fall into Time’ becomes confused with the secularization of work and the consequent mechanization of existence, and the only escape that remains possible upon the collective plane is distraction."

Dunn captures this well in his poem,

SISYPHUS’S ACCEPTANCE

These days only he could see the rock,
so when he stopped for a bagel
at the bagel store, then for a newspaper
at one of those coin-operated stalls,
he looked like anyone else
on his way to work. Food—

the gods reasoned—
would keep him alive
to suffer, and news of the world
could only make him feel worse.
Let him think he has choices;
he belongs to us.

Rote not ritual, a repetition
which never would mean more
at the end than at the start . . .
Sisyphus pushed his rock
past the aromas of bright flowers,
through the bustling streets
into the plenitude and vacuity,

every arrival the beginning
of a familiar descent. And sleep
was the cruelest respite;
at some murky bottom of himself
the usual muck rising up.

One morning, however, legs hurting,
the sun beating down,
again weighing the quick calm of suicide
against this punishment that passed for life,
Sisyphus smiled.

It was the way a gambler smiles
when he finally decides to fold
in order to stay alive
for another game, a smile
so inward it cannot be seen.

The gods sank back
in their airy chairs. Sisyphus sensed
he’d taken something from them,
more on his own than ever now.

Another thing about secular time, it is cursed. It is cursed because it is free. It has no form to contain spirit. We can do whatever we wish, even as it destroys us.

In his poem Sisyphus's Affair, he imagines the cursed Greek cheating on his wife, a portion reads :

For a moment he longed for the old days
when there were gods to take offense,

when a man who wanted too much
would be reduced to size
with a life-long redundancy or thunderbolt.
But, no, there’d be nothing so neat.
It came to a choice, and he chose everything.
He left almost everything behind.

                                          

Not faith vs works, but two different Torah communities

 

                

The great scholar and host of the OnScript Podcast Matthew Bates claims that here below we have the most important New Testament article of the last several years by Kevin Grasso.

The phrase “faith in” Jesus was one of Luther’s innovations.

The main contrast was between the interpretation of the Torah that vindicated Christ as God and the other interpretations of the Torah.

But both are "faiths" one can belong to and preach.

It is not a contrast between faith and works.

Paul simply has a different interpretation of the Torah.

The interpretation he thinks is wrong is the one where it is obedience to the commandments, or things like circumcision or food laws, ("works") that leads to righteousness and salvation.

A person will be righteous by virtue of being a part of the faith, the community and way of life of the Christ-followers, NOT merely his own "faith" that certain beliefs about Christ are the correct ones.

Link to a podcast of Bates intervening Grasso HERE

Link to Grasso giving a simple explanation HERE

And here is the Grasso's simplified version of his argument HERE

Dr Kevin Grasso sent me this response as a clarification:

".... It is both a message and a movement. Galatians 1:23 is instructive as to what this sense is. It says "He who use to persecute us is not preaching the faith (τὴν πίστιν) he one tried to destroy" (ESV). The verbs tell us a lot about the meaning of the 'faith' here.

It is something that can be both preached and destroyed. It is, therefore, a message (since it can be preached), and it is something that can be joined (the verb 'destroy' here always takes an object that refers to people). So it is a message that can be adopted and that would lead to a different way of life depending on the content of the message.

The content of the message is the Christ. The way of life was centered around Him rather than Torah. Being a part of the Christ-faith means to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and as Messiah, he is king. As king, we would owe our complete allegiance to him.

My take would be that Paul is reading Torah in such a way that it points to the Christ-faith as the means to righteousness rather than the commandments of Torah.

In this sense, Paul understood Torah more broadly than mere commandments. Abraham is Paul's example of someone who was righteous by πίστις (the response to the Christ-faith) but did not adopt the system of Torah-commandments because he was simply before the time of Moses.

This shows that the Torah actually supports righteousness by the Christ-faith and not by the commandments (this is how I read Galatians 3 and Romans 4--though that is, of course, an oversimplification)...."

                                    

To me, the makes sense and dovetails with Margaret Barker's work HERE where she posits that Paul was looking at the Jewish Scriptures for a type of Judaism that no longer existed in a complete form at his time...

The Pharisees were just one sect, faithful only to Moses's Torah and the commandments there, which were often about rituals and rules that initiated one into a more nationalistic cult where Yahweh was specifically a god for them (the book of Jonah makes fun of this, presenting Yahweh as God of all peoples, and interacting with them all).

The Judaism Paul has in mind includes more than just the 5 books of Moses, and reflects a Judism before King Josiah's reforms in Deuteronomy that made the cult specifically all about Moses and following his commands....

This was a more original faith, that worshiped a universal greater God.

Islam even came about claiming to be this ancient lost faith....

As David Armstrong writes :


The YHWH of these sources is diverse....But both portraits are of a corporeal, multiply embodied deity, with a divine retinue (inclusive of a goddess wife, Asherah, and numerous sons, though these make the later editors uncomfy). He is also, decidedly, much more cosmic and even supracosmic than the earlier El or YHWH. As Judah’s political fortunes waned between the vying Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian superpowers, a reform of the cult led to an exclusivist and aniconic form of Yahwism, where YHWH became Judah’s sole god, it became impermissible to depict the divine body, limits were placed on the monarchy’s power and self-conception, and a new legislative code were adopted, all under the reign of Josiah, Judah’s penultimate king."

So Paul thinks this ancient way was about faith (meaning loyalty) to a specific king and his way of life, for Paul Jesus Christ, instead of being loyal to Torah prescriptions that only applied to Israelite ethnic and national formation.

This was a major Isrealite trend before Josiahs reforms, when he made Judism all about worship in only one temple, and Yahweh as a God only for them....

When he did that, the Bible says a third ! of the Jews left....Many large Jewish sects at the time had probably never even heard of Moses....

Now that the Temple was gone, Paul naturally looked to other traditions in the OT.

This king will come and give eternal life and free us from the demonic gods that cause death and attack us with strife, and the ancient Isrealites that were loyal to this king, who Paul sees as Christ, were people like Abraham, and others Jewish cults...