Maximos Lavriotis
Peterhouse
Cambridge
The Revelation of God
The crucial difference in Eastern and Western theology
Hopton, Derbyshire November 21, 1998
In the very first chapter of Genesis, God fully reveals Himself to the first human couple. Both Judaism and Christianity are traditionally styled as revealed religions and Jews and Christians alike would admit that in their holy books one can not easily distinguish between the narrative itself and God’s revelation. Throughout the Bible, God remains on such intimate terms with mankind — not only before the fall, but even after man’s banishment from the garden — just as though nothing had intervened. He appears to Adam before and after the fall and reveals Himself to Cain after he had killed his brother, leaving one to infer that there are no moral boundaries that prevent God from revealing Himself to His creatures.
The most significant aspect of biblical revelation is the mere fact that God manifests Himself. The medieval and modern idea that revelation aims to inextricably convey a message and that, somehow or other, God has to reveal Himself in order to impart that message to mankind (as well as sanction it), cannot be founded on the Bible. Biblical revelation is primarily God’s Self-manifestation.
God Himself is, in fact, the message. In biblical revelation it is not man’s perception of the Event that really matters, but the event itself as man’s intimate contact with the uncreated actuality. The consequences of such contacts might be summarized in certain messages, or might later constitute a comprehensive message, but the mere fact for which one cannot find a substitute, or turn it into a message, is the divine presence, the real contact between the uncreated actuality of God and the created reality of man. This is the very element that has been so utterly dropped from modern theological thinking, while the message itself has been accorded the utmost importance. Modern theologians think primarily of the message and pay no attention whatever to the real event — that is, the profound fact that God has revealed Himself to His own creatures. In this study I hope to show the significance of this difference in approach.
First, we must seriously consider the divine initiative: It is always God Who displays initiative and reveals Himself in a mode that enables man to enter the uncreated actuality of God, the divine realm. It is never man’s initiative. Apart from the unique case of His incarnation, God never enters the created realm in the very act of His constant revelations. He never speaks to man in created terms, in terms of this world. This happened only in the case of Christ, yet without diminution or condescension of the uncreated element. Both elements were there in a mysterious way; as Dionysius the Areopagite has said: ‘Christ’s self-manifestation remained as hidden as every revelatory act of God; more accurately, in manifesting Himself ‘in the flesh’ Christ remained so hidden that one can only describe His Self-revelation as incomprehensible. Whatever we may think or say of it, His Self-revelation in fact remains an arcanum.’ (P.G.3,1069B). Even in God’s revelation in Christ, the inaccessibility of the divine realm remains intact - this even extends to His humanity. Rather than being God’s temporary concession to the terms of the creation, it is an everlasting immanence of His humanity within the uncreated realm.
There is no revelation without real contact between created beings and the Uncreated God. In the Hebrew language such contacts were distinctly expressed without the risk of being misconstrued. Unlike the Greek and modern languages, the term ‘Word of God’ in Hebrew has never acquired intelligent connotations identifying the Word of God with either divine intellect, created words, utterance or, even, revelation of messages. The Word of God (in Hebrew, Davar Yehwa), always remains a divine entity. This is why we read that ‘The Word of God came unto such and such prophet’ — meaning He appeared before them (c.f. John 10:34). In the book of Isaiah, we read that the prophet saw the Word (2:1), as did the eye-witnesses in Luke (Luke 1:2). So this Word (easily confounded with ‘wording or ‘utterance’) is mainly a vision in the Old Testament (Nahum 1:1) and a tangible Deus absconditus in the New Testament (John 1:1). It comprises the ultimate experience of a real contact with the uncreated realm of God — an encounter for which faith is not a necessary prerequisite. As St. John Chrysostom so succinctly points out in his sermon On Abraham, the only requirement for all recipients of God’s appearances is their human integrity, which is the ultimate fidelity to their vocation of sustaining His image and likeness. Despite all the unrelenting demonic and human attempts at adulterating (by means of delusion and fake apparition), God’s Self-manifestations, the latter always remain uniquely Self-authenticating. Every contact, every absorption of certain people into the uncreated realm, remains an ineffable, incomprehensible and incommunicable mystery.
One may report such events, but just reporting the event does not automatically make anyone else a partaker in the event. By reading in the bible that God appeared to Abraham, we do not reach the point of attaining to Abraham’s experience, when he had these revelations. The bible itself consists of created words and concepts, and all concepts that the human brain can possibly conceive of are of created origin. The human brain can only function within the limits of space and time and it can neither perceive of God’s uncreated realities, nor understand them. Just as no created words or concepts can ever contain the actuality of God, so, too, is it inevitable that all existing created testimonies, such as the bible (or whatever else evinces divine revelation, e.g. holy icons), fall far, far short of the divine actuality Itself and of what God manifests in His actual revelation to human beings. To rely upon created concepts and language in order to express or apprehend the uncreated actuality of God is a grotesque methodological error, as there is absolutely neither analogia entis nor analogia fidei between created and uncreated realms. Within our created realm, there is nothing that can faithfully duplicate divine actuality.
St. Paul adduces the primary evidence of this when he begins his letter to the Galatians by stating, "I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man, for I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it. But by the revelation of Jesus Christ." (Gal. 1:11). From the scholastic period to the present, theologians have paid very little attention to this caveat; and from the middle ages to the present day, the Revelation of God has been solely identified with a certain ‘divine message.’ Both Jew and Christian alike has been busy ever since with understanding and interpreting the message, but little thought has been spared for the revealer Himself. As the message gathered importance, so God was gradually rendered insignificant.
However, in the early Church, divine revelation as an uncreated actuality emerging from within (i.e. from the body of the resurrected Christ) was the ultimate reality and, as such, was silently treasured in adoration. Talking about this was deemed to be improper, even impious, at least while the apostles were still alive. After the age of the apostles, conflict erupted over whether Christ could still be visible by the second generation of His disciples. Those unable to see Him were poignantly debating the true meaning of Christianity by endorsing diverse gospels and letters of ambiguous provenance. Normally, as St. John Chrysostom appositely expressed it, Christians should never have been in need of written sources. This happened only because of their failure to be true to their vocation - as Chrysostom says ‘The revelation of God should take place in our hearts and should be written there by the Holy Spirit (II Cor. 3:3). We should never have been in need of turning back to the bible, yet it is utterly necessary for those who have fallen into doctrinal or moral error, or into mistakes or sins, to be reminded again of the Holy Writ,’ (Commentary on St. Matthew 1:1). So now the Church has four gospels after four men, whereas St. Paul said that his gospel was not after man!
It is profoundly significant that, in Orthodox worship, people never say, ‘This is the gospel of Jesus Christ,’ as is said at the end of the lessons in the Western traditions. Nor do they say in Orthodox services, ‘This is the word of God,’ as is done in other Christian denominations. The congregation, East and West alike, unanimously exclaims ‘Glory be to God,’ or ‘Amen.’ In Orthodox worship they say, ‘Glory be to Thee, O Lord, Glory be to Thee,’ yet they never identify the biblical text (consisting of created concepts and created wording) with the uncreated Word of God. In the Eastern tradition, the Word of God is the second person of the Trinity — the Logos and only-begotten Son of God Who became incarnate. To identify a created entity, such as a holy book, with the uncreated actuality of the second person of the Trinity was unthinkable in the early Church as it confounded the two realms and supported heretical readings into New Testament Christology. The Nicene Creed distinctly declared the Word of God as ‘begotten, not made,’ and thus succinctly indicated that to beget and to create (or make) was not one and the same divine action — otherwise the creation of the world and the generation of the Son of God would have been one and the same divine act, which is precisely what Arianism has so sternly maintained.
In the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians Paul reminds the Corinthians of his gospel, and that it comes directly form revelation and not after man or any human instruction. He says: ‘I have taught you according to this gospel, that Jesus Christ died and rose again the third day.’ Yet Paul’s gospel concludes neither with the resurrection nor with any sort of Pentecost. He goes on to say, ‘And He then appeared to Cephas and afterwards to the twelve; then He appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then He appeared to James and afterwards to all the apostles. It was only lately and after all the apostles - as if to a foetus aborted - that He also appeared to me.’ (I Cor. 15:3 - 8).
The perpetual presence of Christ among His people — those worthy ones who could partake in His divine revelation — seems to be the most important ingredient of Paul’s gospel. God’s Self-manifestation to the Old Testament saints, prophets and righteous has been replaced by the revelation of the resurrected body of Christ in the New Testament. There was no differentiation in early Christian understanding between God’s appearances to Abraham, Moses, Daniel and all the prophets and saints of the O.T. and the appearances of the resurrected body of Christ before His beloved ones in the New Testament. On the evidence of St. Paul’s letters, it is the non-conceptual, uncreated gospel that is identical with the vision of God and is the real content of Christianity and which, in both Testaments, leads directly to real union with Him. Throughout the scriptures, salvation has always been construed as the real contact with God Himself. In the Old Testament it was the vision of the not-as-yet-incarnate God and in the New it is of the now-incarnate and resurrected God. In Genesis, we have Jacob saying after his tremendous all-night wrestling with the angel of the Lord, ‘I have seen God face to face and my life has been preserved.’ (Gen. 32:30). The Septuagint translation reads, ‘ . . . and my soul has been saved.’ Salvation has been understood in its very essence as a real contact, with the deifying actuality of God.
St. Irenaeus, one of the most important theologians, summarizes man’s destiny in one terse quotation: ‘Man ought to have first come from non-being into being, grown, matured, multiplied, prevailed in virtue and then be glorified and finally, have seen his own Master; for God Himself is the One to be seen and the vision of God assigns incorruption to humanity, and incorruption maintains perpetual union with God.’ (Adv. Haer. IV 38:3). Apparently the ultimate reason for which one would join the early Church was the vision of God and it was Paul’s gospel that led directly to this vision by enabling its recipients to see the resurrected body of Christ wherever His members gathered in His remembrance.
More than five hundred people had seen the resurrected Christ while Paul was still alive and the number of beholders increased day by day. St. Seraphim of Sarov is one of those who found themselves on the same blessed list, as the list is being filled in down the centuries up to now and until Christ comes. This is quite a different understanding of divine revelation (as God’s Self-manifestation), as opposed to a written message found in a book and requiring interpretation. St. Peter the Apostle became the leader of all those who had received the direct vision of the resurrected body of Christ, yet too many people in the early Church, for several reasons, were not in a position to see Christ. They had no access to immediate revelation and quite soon two very different schools of thought were formed. The Petrean school supported the primacy of Peter, based on the fact that he was the very first one to see the resurrected body of Christ (according to the earliest New Testament evidence (I Cor. 15:5)) — not that he was entrusted with the keys to a created kingdom. It was St. Paul who established the Petrean authority and hence the school which pays attention to the primacy of vision and enjoys this vision in their congregations. This is why St. Matthew’s gospel ends with the assertion, ‘I am with you all the days until the end of the age,’ (Greek original). This was not just a vague promise, but a matter of fact for the existing Christian communities which produced St. Matthew’s gospel.
Not everyone in these communities was able to follow up this line. As time went one, there was a major reaction and a second school of thought, the Johannine, that asserted the primacy of faith over vision, became much more popular amongst well-educated converts. Suddenly, at the end of the first century, we find established the view that those who believed without having seen, were much more blessed than those who had had the revelation of the resurrected body (John 20:29). These two schools were, inevitably, to clash in a laborious conflict that would last for 400 years. The debate was about visibility and invisibility of God and the struggle to strike a balance between His transcendence and His immanence in the body of Christ.
Judaeo-Christian tradition has attested to the primacy of vision over faith and upheld as its fundamental principle the distinction between created and uncreated realms. Orthodox Jews and Christians alike would never confuse the two realms or make God somehow part of His creation.
The Christian school that supported the primacy of faith was strongly influenced by Greek philosophical elements, particularly by the writings of Philo the Jew, the famous first century author. These philosophers paid no attention to the distinction between the uncreated and created realms, but followed the Platonic model of the pyramid of being (the top of which is God Himself, possessing in Himself, the fullness of being) which attributed different degrees of being between God and the created world. For them the most important theological distinction was the one between material and spiritual realms, a purely pagan philosophical distinction held by Plato and other Greek philosophers. Since God is the only One Who possesses the fullness of being, all other beings are less and less true and real, as they possess the lesser being. These philosophers were, unwittingly, putting into jeopardy the creation of God, since the less the creatures are, the less the creation exists! This line of thought leads one to wonder whether or not the creation is real, and tempts us to draw conclusions that are similar to the Hindu view of the creation as an illusion (Maya). For example, we find expressions of this in the 5th century writings of Augustine, such as, ‘If He is, we are not,’ when comparing God to creatures (Enar. In Ps. 143,11; 38,6; 134,6. De civ. Dei 8,12. De Trin. 5,2; 5,3. Contra Secundinum, 15 cf. The chapter: God alone IS in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, pp 212 - 213).
The possible consequences of such thought are quite disturbing as in the Orthodox Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition nobody could ever doubt the reality of God’s creation. The uncreated God and His creation are to the same extent real. The creation is not considered less real than God since the will of God is strong enough to substantiate creation and so bring it about from non-being — otherwise God would have been proven unable to create, but only able to deceive. The culmination of this debate came with the Arian controversy in the 4th century. The Word of God was declared in the Nicene Council (325 A.D.) to be uncreated and consubstantial with God the Father.
Following the Philonic tradition, the opponents of the Nicene Creed posed as their main argument (underestimated even by modern scholars) that no visible being whatsoever could ever be utterly divine. The main attribute of God and the most important characteristic of the divine realm is invisibility. And so, whatever is made flesh and is visible or tangible can never be God in Himself at the same time. As a result of this view, Arians could never accept that Christ was divine, even though — and this is of paramount importance — the theological methods of the Arians and anti-Arians were the same. Both sides agreed that in order to solve their problem they should approach the actuality of God not directly, as God cannot be tested, but through God’s Own activities — as a being’s activity reflects its own nature. Both sides also agreed that God acts only in an uncreated mode and, as such, indicates that He has uncreated nature or essence. A being who acts in a created mode is, inevitably, a creature. The Arians could only acknowledge created activity in Christ (because of His visible humanity). However, the Nicene Council had been able to discern the revelation of God Himself within the earthenware jar of Christ’s humanity and so declared that Christ was both created and uncreated (the ultimate contact uniting both realms), as He possessed all those activities pertaining to each of His natures. This particular doctrine was elaborated in later ecumenical councils, but the Arians considered it impossible for God’s uncreated actuality to ever become visible. (In fact it never did — as it remained hidden within Christ’s humanity). The Orthodox, on the other hand, maintained not only that the Word of God became visible flesh, but that His uncreated glory can, by grace, become visible to the faithful as well.
This was a crucial moment in the history of Christianity as, for the very first time, it became clear that visibility could no longer point to mere created reality, and invisibility was no longer identical with the uncreated actuality of God. There are many invisible creatures (such as souls and angels) and, as the Nicene Creed states, God still remains ‘maker of all things visible and invisible.’ It was also apparent that the uncreated Glory of God can, by grace, become visible. This was the case in the appearances of God in the Old Testament and in the appearances of the resurrected Christ in the New Testament and whenever Christ has taken human beings into His uncreated realm and allowed them to see His uncreated glory. It was this same uncreated glory that Christ revealed to His three disciples on Mount Tabor, and to many people after His resurrection.
Unfortunately, the Arian view was never well understood in the West (except by Sts. Ambrose and Hilary) as the main debates were in the East — and in Greek. The Arians spread their teaching up into Spain, and later to Northern Europe, where they faced the Church in the West. Even though he misconstrued their argument, Augustine saw quite clearly that the crux of the Arian argument was Christ’s visible nature and so he declared the Holy Trinity to be utterly invisible and unable to become visible. As a result of this attitude, he was faced with the need to solve another problem: How, if at all, did God make contact with the O.T. prophets? Augustine argued that there had been many created (and then destroyed) apparitions of God, or of His angel, which God used as the means to communicate with mankind. Moreover, he insisted that each particular theophany (in both Old and New Testaments) was specially created and constructed by God for each occasion, and then destroyed when it was no longer of any use.
This view, translated into Eastern patristic terms (and especially into the terms of the ecumenical councils that had construed that activities betray the nature of the acting ones), could only mean that in the course of the Heilsgeschichte, God the Father had created thousands of Sons or angels of His glory (who could no longer be ‘only begotten’) and had destroyed them immediately after their having conveyed His messages to the people. Because this scenario dealt principally with the nature of the Holy Trinity Itself, it was becoming increasingly incongruous in the West to think of a Father having a unique co-eternal and only begotten Son. Besides which, it was now doubtful as to whether the appearing and disappearing origin or generation of the Son made any difference to the creation of any other creature — which is precisely what the Nicene Creed had precluded by enunciating ‘begotten, not made.’
If Augustine’s view was right, it would mean that God the Father had to create many Sons (or angels) of His glory, only to destroy them once their ‘mission’ was complete. Any one of these creatures could have been the Word Incarnate eventually sent to us in human flesh. This even surpassed in folly the Arian theologians’ errant teaching on Christ’s pre-existence — and what is even more surprising is that no one in the West appeared to object to this nonsense. In fact Augustine went on to say that not only were there many created and destroyed apparitions of these messengers of the Lord, but even the grace itself which God sends to us must be of created origin, simply because God is utterly transcendent and cannot have a real contact, or get in touch, with the created world. In his commentary on Psalm 82, which begins with the verse, ‘God standeth in the congregation of gods (Septuagint); He judgeth amongst the gods,’ Augustine thought that the real God of the bible descended to earth, met all the existing sculptures and effigies of pseudo-gods, and told them: ‘you are just idols, effigies and sculptures; I am the true God.’ (F. Dolbeau, Sermons inedits de Saint Augustin, 1993).
If we read the Greek patristic interpretation of the same verse (P.G. 90,1136C) we see that ‘other gods’ (in the midst of which God stood) are all those saints who made a real contact with Him in this life and have become gods by grace because of that contact (cf. John 10:34). Anyone who has been taken into the Divine realm in order to enjoy divine revelation must inevitably become identical with the One who manifests Himself to them; otherwise there can be no revelation. From these vastly differing interpretations of just this one text (Psalm 82:1) we can appreciate how far apart the two schools had already become by the 5th century.
In the 8th century, we find yet another startling event that characterizes the mentality of the time. After Muslim theologians (Assarhites) had held lengthy discussions with St. John of Damascus, Islamic theology received a great impetus to discern between created and uncreated realms. Out of these discussions, a new school of Islamic hermeneutics developed which contended that the archetype of the Koran was uncreated and co-eternal with Allah. This school continued for 150 years before dissolving, but it is most significant that even Islamic theologians felt the need to place the origin of God’s revelation within the uncreated realm.
Meanwhile in the West, the impact of Scholasticism upon revelation became apparent with the doctrine of Divine Transcendence; the Incarnation of God became a theoretical and philosophical impossibility as the Scholastic system had no way to integrate the created and the uncreated elements. Augustine had already interpreted Colossians 2:9 (‘For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily’) as a metaphor and suggested that it is impossible for the Godhead to dwell in a human body (De Gen. Ad lit. 12,17). Consequently, the Scholastics could not accept that God’s uncreated, absolute and immutable Being could condescend to mutability and relativity and so become a creature. Thomas Aquinas clearly stated that the second person of the Trinity should be called Filius genitus et creatus (begotten and made) (S.T. 1,43,3). From the mere fact of the Son’s eternal generation from the Father, Thomas construed that He was created through being generated — so here again, contrary to the Nicene doctrine, we find ‘begotten’ being identified (and confused) with ‘made.’ According to the Nicene criteria, such a Christ could not have uncreated powers or energies. Thomas, however, went on to say that He has these energies, but that He is unable to communicate them to mankind. Instead, he says, Christ can only communicate His potestas excellentiae (possessed by Him by reason of His humanity) as a created grace. Thomas then extrapolates that Christ could give this power to human ministers of the sacraments by granting them such fullness of created grace that their merits would be operative toward the sacramental effect! (S.T. 3,64,4).
This view was not unprecedented. J.S. Eriugena, basing his contradictory arguments on Platonic principles, became the first to contend that it is impossible for an uncreated being to create — God the Father being uncreated was unable to be Creator and He would need some intermediary in order to first conceive within its idea the archetypal ideas of all creatures. This ‘intermediary’ was His uniquely created or only-begotten Son, whose idea ‘creatur et creat’ (De Divisione Naturae 2,2 P.L. 122,529).
It is significant that Christ came to be identified with the eucharistic host, which, though seen as a mere creature, could still be Christ Himself through transubstantiation — a doctrine that would seem only to divide Christ’s divine nature from His humanity. Indeed the earliest promulgation of this doctrine (in the fourth Lateran Council in 1215) distinctly specifies that the eucharistic elements are transubstantiated ‘to the effect that we receive from what is His in what He has received from what is ours’ (ut . . . . accipiamus ipsi de suo, quod accepit ipse de nostro); certainly He never received divinity from us and therefore we may never receive divinity from His eucharistic body . . . . .
Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter Mysterium Fidei (1965) tends to vindicate Christ’s division by stressing the point that the transubstantiated host contains ‘Christ, whole and entire in His physical reality . . . bodily present.’ As physical reality normally precludes the uncreated essence of God from being also bodily present (according to Augustinian and scholastic Christology cf. Col. 2:9 above) - then Christ could not be the great exception to the rule, as no one in the West had ever seen the need to mention it!
Of course, it is hard for those still following the early Christian school of faith to admit that Christ’s uncreated nature is also partaken of by the faithful communicants of the host, when the created grace (gratia creata), which transubstantiates the host, is absolutely unable to cause uncreated effects . . . The Mysterium Fidei asserts that the transubstantiated Host contains ‘a new reality, which we may justly term ontological,’ but by no means uncreated. Obviously such ontology can comfortably accommodate itself within the Platonic pyramid of being and Aristotelian metaphysics, but never in the context of the Nicene Creed.
It is no surprise, then, that the following contention of the Council of Trent (1551) is duly repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1377): ‘The eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the eucharistic species subsist.’ One wonders whether Holy communion takes place at all within the bodies and the souls of the communicants as a real and perpetual contact between Christ’s uncreated actuality and the very members of His body. (I Cor. 12:27).
After this, the Church could now substitute the blessed sacrament for Christ Himself and even ignore the existence of His resurrected body as seen by true Christians. Indeed, since the 12th century, the host has been worshiped in special services, such as the Benediction and the Feast of the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi).
The birth of Sacramentalism had dire implications on the medieval mind, of which two examples are:
1) God cannot really love the world as He would no longer remain inaccessible and transcendent. According to Platonic philosophical positions already held by the early Christian school of faith and now adopted by Scholasticism, it was impossible for God to love the world as love would cause God to have a real dependency on the world.
2) Scholastic theologians were faced with the problem: They must either accept an absolute pantheism identifying the creation with the Creator Himself, or accept that there was a created intermediary (be it grace or causalitas) which mediates between the two and ensures that creation does not become identical with God. From this they came to construe divine transcendence as meaning that neither Divine actuality nor any of the divine attributes were able to be transmitted to any creature — the belief being that this would lead directly to pantheism. They were right, especially since Aristotelian metaphysics imposed the perception of God as actus purus so that all theological distinctions between ‘begetting’ and ‘making’ became totally blurred and meaningless, and divine activity itself could only consist of divine essence! Subsequently, the main task of medieval Western theology was to insure that God and His creation are always, and by all means, kept apart.
When we look to the East (where they faced the very same problem) we come across St. Maximus the Confessor’s definition of the Kingdom of God which he offered in the 7th century: ‘God’s imparting to us by grace whatever belongs to Him by nature, is the Kingdom of God.’ In the East, there was no doubt that God indeed imparts to us by uncreated grace whatever belongs to Him by nature. In the West, the Kingdom of God had already been identified with created reality (as per Augustine’s ‘The City of God’) and, apparently, is being realised on earth in order to be taken up into heaven in due time.
Sacramentalism never developed in the East before the 17th century and no worship of the Holy Gifts has ever occurred. The expression ‘Holy Communion’ (common in both East and West) signified precisely that — the Koinonia (communion) of the faithful with Christ Himself, rather than with what had happened to the Holy Gifts after their consecration. This is why the resurrected body of Christ remains the ultimate Revelation to be made fully manifest to all (I Cor. 15:28) in His second coming.
In his encyclical letter, Mystici Corporis (1943), Pope Pius XII summarised the crucial difference between East and West as it has been maintained into modern times. In this letter, he speaks about the body of Christ and membership in it. He says, interalia: ‘Any explanation of this mystical union (with Christ) is to be rejected if it makes the faithful in any way pass beyond the order of created things, and so trespass upon the divine sphere that even one single attribute of the eternal God could be predicated on them in the proper sense.’ Here we can witness the ultimate difference between what St. Maximus taught and what neo-scholastic ontology maintains even now.
The 13th century theologian Meister Eckhart was immediately condemned by the Pope when he pioneered the idea that salvation must be a real identicalness with God. But, if real union with God (i.e. divine revelation) is deemed impossible, how is one to understand salvation? This is when the notion of imitation and a personal relationship with God was introduced. This speculation posited that man can be personally related with God, and can develop a personal relationship with Christ without necessarily involving any real contact with divine actuality. Therefore it should only be a ‘habit’ — something like learning from a distance — and of course, only an imitation. The Western Church taught that the more virtuous a Christian becomes the more they can attain to the faithful imitation of Christ. In other words, there will always be a proximity (a nexus amoris) to God, but never identicalness with Him (deification).
In the 14th century, the Palamite controversy erupted in the East. It was St. Gregory Palamas’ contention that real contact with God involved being in union with God through real identicalness with the uncreated light emanating from the resurrected Body. One of the relevant documents on this issue is the ‘Declaration of the Mount Athos Fathers’ which has been recently translated in the Philokalia. The correct translation of an important passage in it reads: ‘Anyone who declares that perfect union with God is accomplished merely as imitation of Him and relationship with Him, without the deifying grace of the Spirit (as though it were a relationship of human persons who share the same disposition and love one another) is a heretic.’ (It must be obvious to everyone just how ‘trendy’ and pivotal this pan-denominational terminology of personal relationship with God has become in modern ‘theology’).
God never makes contact in personal terms, but rather penetrates the creation by His nature. This is why the Eastern fathers defined the immense diversity of God’s uncreated activities as His natural powers or energies, ‘innumerable in their multitude, ineffable in their magnitude’ (St. Basil the Great). The Declaration continues: ‘Whoever follows that line and holds that the deifying grace of God is a state of our intellectual faculty acquired by imitation alone — not an uncreated illumination and an ineffable and divine energy beheld invisibly and conceived inconceivably by those privileged to participate in it — must know that he has fallen unawares into the delusions of the Messalians.’
This epitomizes the polarised attitudes between East and West and these epitomes are personified in St. Gregory Palamas and his Augustinian-Thomist counterpart, the monk Barlaam. In their dispute, Barlaam was championing all those trendy ideas about mutual love, personal relationship and the imitation of Christ, and keeping in touch as a person with the person of Christ, while St. Gregory was offering the most significant contribution in the history of Christianity on the question of maintaining a real contact with God.
He wrote: ‘Since everything that actually exists, indeed partakes in God, and yet God’s supersubstantial essence remains utterly incommunicable, there must be something between God’s incommunicable essence and His partakers, by virtue of which everything that actually exists continues, in fact, partaking in God. But if you do away with whatever lies between God’s incommunicable essence and His partakers, what a loss! You made us part from God by getting rid of the very bond between us and God and thus fixing a great impassable gulf between Him and the creation as well as between His providence and whatever actually exists. Consequently, we must now seek after some other God — not just an Absolute Being, Self-moving and Self-beholding — but also an ultimately good one. For it is precisely in His abundance of goodness that He will be content neither with moving only toward Self-beholding, nor with being only in want of naught, but rather with being superabundant towards us. For only in this case should He will to do good, He would not prove Himself unable; nor should He be immovable, but movable as well — for only in this case would He be immanent in all creation through His creative and providential advances and activities. And, quite simply, we must seek after a God Who is somehow or other communicable, so that by partaking in Him each one of us (according to the extent we appropriate Himself within us) will enjoy ourselves in abiding existence, life and even Divinity . . .’ This text leads us inevitably to the dismal conclusion that East and West ended up believing in two profoundly different Gods. But this was only for a short while, because, yielding inadvertently to scholastic philosophical predominance as well as losing sight of the resurrected body, the Eastern school of empirical vision absorbed almost entirely the Western speculative theology of faith in one incommunicable God and, to this day, has yet to acknowledge it . . . . .
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Archbishop William Temple was perhaps the first modern theologian in the West to notice that divine revelation has nothing to do with the ‘communication of propositions about God. It is in fact a confrontation of God with man through actual historical events.’ Of course it is questionable as to what extent theophanic events are truly ‘historical,’ since revelation occurs only as absorption of creatures into the uncreated realm. Temple went on to say: ‘What is disclosed in a revelation is not truth concerning God, but the living God Himself.’ (The Guildford Lectures, 1934; Nature, Man and God; p. 232). This was a tremendous step back towards the early Christian experience.
From this point of view we may approach the confrontation with the living God Himself in an historical incident that Orthodox Christians know very well and to which they have paid little or no special attention. It is the dialogue between St. Seraphim of Sarov and his disciple Nicholas Motovilov in late 18th century Russia. People have read the story and have perhaps noticed its importance, but its real significance has never been fully appreciated in either East or West. The following passage is from the book ‘Flame in the Snow’ by Julia de Beausobre. St. Seraphim speaks first about prayer. He says that even if a Christian is not able to go to Church, they can still pray all the time — there is no difficulty in praying, ‘it is always at hand . . . . This rising stream of supplication so easily brings down as answer the holy breath! Then, once the Comforter has come, our prayer is pure rejoicing and where those who rejoice come together, there is the Church. And there the joy of each is no longer a fleck of golden dust. All dust, even gold dust, scatters before an adverse wind. But in the Church all the flecks of gold are fused into a mighty block that stands against all the wily or rabid onslaughts of the evil host — a mighty block that no storm can shatter and no downpour wash away. As is known to those of whose joy it is made, the block is a golden ship, seaworthy as no other and its snow-white sails, woven by my Lady, are filled with the holy breath, the shining glory.’ Motovilov: ‘If I could only see it once! That glory!’ Seraphim: ‘Whenever we consciously do His will, we stand within it. We have grown blind to it, but it is there all right. Just as in the days when men said ‘We went and the Holy Ghost went with us,’ and ‘We and the Holy Ghost decree . . . ’ Motovilov: ‘But how can I be certain of it, in these days?’ Putting down his axe, Seraphim came forward and Nicholas arose. The saint gripped him by the shoulders and said: ‘We are both in the Spirit now. Look at me!’ Motovilov: ‘I can’t! It hurts my eyes.’ Seraphim: ‘Fear nothing. Look.’ In the centre of a huge radiant sun, the well-known and well-loved face smiled. Nicholas saw the speaking lips move, the expression in the deep blue eyes change. He heard the voice, felt the grip of hands. But these hands, as well as Nicholas’ own shoulders and Seraphim’s body were lost in the brightness that obliterated them and inundated the whole clearing, burnishing the flakes of falling snow and the snow on the ground to a glowing whiteness.
Motovilov: ‘How lovely!’ Seraphim: ‘In what way lovely?’ Motovilov: ‘So quiet, such peace — in me and around me.’ Seraphim: ‘What else?’ Motovilov: ‘Such sweetness!’ Seraphim: ‘What else?’ Motovilov: ‘Such joy, my heart rings with it.’ Seraphim: ‘What else?’ Motovilov: ‘Warmth, a glowing warmth.’ Seraphim: ‘What else?’ Motovilov: ‘A heavenly scent.’ Reflecting the Light, Seraphim’s eyes sparkled: ‘The grace of God is in you and you are in it. If you could only see how your face shines! Will you always remember the grace that has been lavished on you, my joy?’ Motovilov: ‘And me not even a monk!’ Seraphim: ‘That’s nothing. It is to the man, not to his state or condition, that God says: "Child, give me your heart." If we give it, He comes.’
Even within Orthodox communities people have yet to appreciate the fact that both of them (Seraphim and Motovilov) experienced this revelation; both of them enjoyed the very same Divine and uncreated Light; and we still call to mind Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but never Saint Nicholas Motovilov. This shows how modern Orthodox churches have distanced themselves from their own revelationary experience. The most important aspect in the case of Sts. Seraphim and Motovilov is that not only in God’s direct encounter with a saint, but also in a saint’s encounter with another saint, the fact that the saints become identical with God Himself is verified.
It is the same thing with fire or light; whatever joins up with the fire becomes fire and whatever joins up with the light becomes light. Revelation does not always occur as a direct encounter between God and man; it is sure enough to occur as an encounter between two or more saints as well (Matthew 18:20). Even this aspect has not, as yet, been fully appreciated in modern Orthodox theology. Whenever saints manifest God’s uncreated glory, God makes Himself manifest. This is the proof that divine revelation is neither just a way of approaching God, nor of being personally related to Him — it can only be identicalness with Him. It is only by being (by grace) identical with God and saturated in the divine Light that men receive true revelation — and this is what was later described as ‘deification.’
We do not find the term ‘deification’ in early church documents, simply because the term ‘Revelation’ of God tacitly implied it. There is no way for divine revelation to take place without causing deification to its recipients. Divine revelation can only take place when the recipient becomes, by God’s grace, identical with God Himself (otherwise, divine revelation cannot take place at all!) The proof that modern Orthodox churches have lost their revelational orientation lies in the fact that they no longer venerate saints like Motovilov, but instead tend to venerate popular heroes (such as the last Tsar Nicholas and his family) who never, in their lifetime, found themselves in the divine Light.
St. Symeon the New Theologian, however, makes a clear distinction between those who see the Light and those who dwell in it. The former are purified and illuminated Christians still on their way towards full integration with the resurrected Body, while the latter have already become identical with the Body of Christ ‘and members in particular,’ (I Cor. 12:27). Since God imparts to us, by grace, whatever belongs to Him by nature, all those receiving divine revelation become uncreated by grace — omnipotent, omniscient, without beginning and without end — just as St. Maximus the Confessor describes them in his Contemplation on Melchisedek (P.G. 91,1137-1141). It is this true identicalness with God that guarantees that true revelation (as a divine initiative - not as mere imparting of information) has indeed occurred to them. Only through such graceful absorption in God do the saints see the divine Light of revelation — and certainly not with their bodily eyes. It is the power of the Holy Spirit that makes the vision possible. That is why those standing by the saints, who had had revelations, were unable to see anything (Acts 9:7). These visions have nothing to do with the senses, as they are absorptions of human beings into the Divine realm.
Sts. Seraphim and Nicholas Motovilov saw this Light saturating each other’s bodies. The conventional perception of holiness today, even amongst Orthodox Christians, has only to do with moral values and personal achievement, rather than with being absorbed into God’s uncreated Kingdom. The significant distinction between a saint and a hero has been lost. East and West alike nowadays identify saints with heroes and men of great achievement. This is why, for instance, a great philanthropist or politician, or someone who offered to die in the place of another in a concentration camp, may qualify for sainthood — virtue and heroic behaviour have been confounded with sanctity.
In fact, the deification of man (the only way a human being may receive holiness by the grace of God) has nothing to do with morality. Deification postulates the restoration of humanity into a way of immaculate existence according to its creation, so that human beings are elevated into the uncreated realm of God’s holiness and fully partake in Hm. It is what God had originally created in His image and likeness that is sanctified and not what man achieves as moral compliance with certain principles and laws. This is not to imply that immorality is acceptable by God, but to show that morality in itself, is inadequate to bring about holiness. Living according to one’s own nature is the only condition leading people to sinlessness. Human beings returning, by the grace of God, to the way of life in God’s image and likeness (the way that they had initially been created), cannot remain sinful.
Living according to one’s own nature not only precipitates divine revelation, but also keeps one sinless after the first revelational experience. Motovilov was never able to commit sin after his experience of the uncreated Light because evil thoughts can not cross the mind of those who have, even once, been saturated by the divine Light. This is the important difference between human beings whose restored nature is elevated into the uncreated realm of divine glory and those who merely maintain moral standards by relying on their own efforts. People who sustain a high degree of morality have no guarantee that, despite the great effort they may constantly take, no evil thought will ever cross their mind. There are people succeeding and people failing in this unseen warfare, but either way, no one can escape the ordinary sinful level — except in the case of true sanctification where the whole body, soul and mind are saturated in the uncreated glory and remain pure according to human nature ever after (and beyond any risk of falling back into sin). This is the aspect of restored humanity which today has been lost by all Christian denominations. It is therefore inevitable that all sorts of good and morally diligent people have been elevated into sainthood and venerated accordingly.
There are three possible states which human beings can find themselves in: (i) the state of being according to nature (i.e. in the image and likeness of God) in which they remain sinless by dismissing any attack of the adversary; (ii) the state against nature, i.e. a sinful condition in which all evil thoughts cross the human mind and precipitate evil deeds and words; and (iii) the state beyond the limits of human nature which is always God’s initiative in order to unite Himself truly with His creatures in immediate Self-manifestation (i.e. precisely what happened to Sts. Seraphim and Motovilov during their encounter).
There is no way for human beings to avoid these three states altogether. We now find (a) people living according to nature (very rare nowadays); (b) people living against nature (which would appear to be the norm); and (c) people finding themselves beyond the limits of their own nature for a while (i.e. in ultimate union with God) as a foretaste of the life to come. In the life to come, all human beings without exception will find themselves by the grace of God beyond the present limitations of human nature.
According to St. Mark the Hermit, ‘Abstaining from sin is the very function of human nature, not a ransom in exchange for the Kingdom of God.’ Human nature has the divinely inherent ability to abstain from sin. The question is: How can this happen in practical terms? The way by which human nature is purified (as a necessary condition for approaching sanctification) is through ascesis. The ascetic life requires bodily and intellectual discipline to enable people to reach divine illumination — a state which is not a mere mental improvement. Unlike the Augustinian-Thomist approach, which somehow conceives illumination to be a natural property of the human intellect, it is rather a divine activity within the human body and soul which keeps people sinless, through the synergy of human effort and divine grace. The next state is divine revelation or deification which is due entirely to the uncreated power of the One Who identifies Himself directly with His Own creature.
Human beings must have the right understanding of sinfulness and sin, in order to awaken themselves to their natural capacity for sinlessness. Sin is not an inescapable condition of the fallen human nature - as Augustine has thought and taught - but remains inert in a humanity functioning in the image and likeness of God; nor is the main reason for the existence of the Church simply to redeem human sin, as if a sinless humanity would have no need for the Church. In the Middle Ages, the sacrament of penance was considered of paramount importance in the West — almost as if the Church was indirectly enticing people to sin in order for them to have something to do with the Church. Even if nobody had ever openly admitted to it, it was customary for the Church to treat human beings as already condemned sinners. This was because of the Augustinian doctrine of inherited original sin, wrongfully attributed by him to St. Paul’s teaching in his letter to the Romans. Augustine equated humanity with sinfulness and people were expected to feel guilty of being human; nobody would consider sin as a defect of a humanity created in the image and likeness of God. Augustine himself had taught that even baptism, along with all other sacraments, was unable to restore original innocence in mankind. Acknowledging ‘one baptism for the remission of sins’ in the Creed no longer meant a sinless human condition ever after, as concupiscence was empirically proven to be much stronger than Divine grace; yet nobody appeared to be particularly annoyed by such Divine weakness and therefore, being unable to do away with sin, the medieval church did away with Christianity itself!
The early Church could not promise that sins committed after baptism could be forgiven before the last judgment. Only Christ Himself could do that at any time to sincerely repenting people, but no Church authority on earth could undertake such responsibility — apart form those ascetics and confessors who had endured and survived (without apostatizing) torture for Christ’s sake and who had already reached deification. Bishops of such prominent sees as Rome or Alexandria were denying any authority in forgiving the lapsi (fallen ones) who had sacrificed to the idols (and thus denied Christ) during the periods of persecution. Only holy men, truly united with God through torture or ascetic labour could receive Revelation of which of the lapsi had been forgiven (cf. Dom. Gregory Dix, The Ministry in the Early Church, in Kenneth E. Kirk, The Apostolic Ministry, London 1947, p.224 ff).
The Church at that time did not appear to know of ritual forgiveness of sins committed after baptism. Today, the rite of absolution of sins is professionally performed in all Christian churches. Every priest is considered to possess the power of absolution at his own disposal precisely as John of Paris had taught in 1290 AD (De potestate regia et papali, XII). Bishops, and especially the bishop of Rome, claimed, as a particular prerogative of their own, the forgiveness and absolution of all sins of already baptised believers. But in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter himself appears as neither entitled to do this (when Simon the Magus asked for it) nor willing to make use of the very privileges given directly to him by Christ. Instead he succinctly indicated that only God Himself could perhaps forgive Simon, as he was already baptised (Acts 8:22).
This leads us directly to a proper understanding of what we call apostolic succession and authority in the Church. Because of the serious misconception that divine revelation is somehow the imparting of information, theologians in the middle ages came to believe that apostolic succession could be obtained by the laying on of hands (in the very same magical way that Simon thought in the Book of Acts) and thereby make people successors of the apostles. There is nothing further from the truth. Laying hands on baptised people in the New Testament era was indicative of the fact that divine revelation (i.e. the vision of the resurrected Body) had already taken place and, in recognition of such an event, hands were laid on those who remained filled with the Holy Spirit because of that vision (Acts 6:6, 13:3; I Tim. 4:14). This should not be confused with the laying on of hands directly after baptism (Acts 8:17).
Anyone who receives the true revelation of God in the divine Light becomes not just Peter’s successor, but successor of Christ Himself, because of their identicalness with Him at the moment of deification. It was deification that assigned St. Peter his apostolic status; it is therefore obvious that all the saints, including Seraphim and Motovilov, partake in the same apostolic status as St. Peter himself (both men and women — as can be shown by St. Philip’s four daughters (Acts 21:9)).
To be a prophet in the early Church was a status of great importance, as it ascertained divine authority and was, in fact, a higher status than being a bishop or a patriarch (or even pope!). Normally in the presence of such prophets nobody else could offer the Eucharist in early Christian meetings. According to St. Paul’s list of apostolic successors, ‘God has set in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets,’ (I Cor. 12:28). Non-ordained charismatics like Sts. Peter and Paul were the true princes of the early Church. Ordained Christians were the servants of the Church. This is why the popes of Rome used to sign in early times as ‘Servus servorum Dei’ — not just a humble expression, but a realistic attitude towards their ministry.
Early Christians could become true members of the resurrected body of Christ only through identicalness with Him in the state of deification. This was the only way for them to partake in apostolic succession as apostolicity was understood as the full participation in divine revelation in the incarnate and resurrected Christ. Nobody could stand for, or ‘succeed,’ Christ and His apostles properly, without becoming identical with the resurrected body in the divine Light. This is the appropriate meaning of St. Paul’s assertion, ‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular,’ (I Cor. 12:27). Nobody else can ever become a member of the resurrected body without real union in divine revelation, nor could they have apostolic succession without having seen the resurrected body: ‘Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Christ?’ (I Cor. 9:1) St. Paul exclaimed appropriately in that sense. The ultimate proof of authority in the early Church was based on divine revelation. It was not a matter of place, dignity, ordination or special privilege attributed to a particular see that granted one the inheritance of apostolic succession. Apostolic succession and membership in the body of Christ is one and the same reality, assigned equally to men and women of all ages regardless of any discrimination and guaranteed through the Self-manifestation of the resurrected Christ, especially at eucharistic meetings.
As time went on, Christians ceased being sinless and it was no longer possible for them to attain to apostolic succession. The necessary condition for Christ’s actual presence in the eucharist was that the human nature in those gathered to become true members of His body should function properly. The very function of human nature is abstaining from sin, and there was never any reason for those so functioning to be deprived of His glory. In St. Gregory Palamas’ sermon on the first Sunday after Easter, we come across these very important insights that reflect his own experience: ‘Once the Holy liturgy has finished and you have received Holy communion, go directly into your room, shut the doors and windows firmly (as the disciples did before Christ’s appearance) and I can guarantee to you that He will come in the same way as He did then (the doors being shut). He will stand before you and will give the very same blessing as He did to His disciples, and then you will see the real miracle (which nobody could have described unless they had experienced it) — precisely the opposite of what we experience in a house with windows open, so as to have the house lit from the outside. The wounds in His hands and His feet function like windows beaming Light out from the interior of His bodily temple, illuminating with uncreated flashes all those standing before Him and enjoying His manifestation. They are all engulfed by the Light pouring out of His wounds.’
This passage reflects St. Gregory’s own experience of the resurrected Jesus continuing appearances — no longer to congregations (because they are not all worthy to see Him); yet He still manifests His resurrected body to all those who are worthy and saturates people with the very same uncreated Light as He did to Seraphim and Motovilov. This leads inevitably to the conclusion that the ultimate authority in the Church is to be found in the beholders of the uncreated glory of the resurrected Christ - apostles, prophets, teachers, miracle workers, healers, helpers, guides and tongue speakers (I Cor. 12:28) – who comprise the one holy catholic and apostolic church. This means that all those united with the resurrected Body become inevitably prophets and apostles without necessarily having to exercise their ultimate Authority (i.e. plenitudo potestatis) over anyone on a regular basis. The naïve medieval misconception that such authority can be obtained through episcopal consecration or any other ritualistic process could only remind early Christians of Simon the Magus’ case…
There is ample evidence in the patristic texts that, at least in the East, and until the reign of Peter the Great, no Orthodox believer ever thought that the Bible was an authority in the Church. The most startling text comes from St. Maximus the Confessor in which he explains how the saints always had immediate access to divine revelation: ‘In order to acquire the beatific knowledge of God, the saints never develop our materialistic and grovelling perception either of the creation or of the scripture — no mere sensory data or superficial observation of shapes and forms could ever restrict their vision. Nor to this end did they ever use texts and concepts (from which all error and fallacy occur, especially in judging the truth), but only their all-purified mind, set free from any materialistic gloom.’ (P.G. 91,1160). Their all-purified mind was the only instrument they needed to have direct access to God because all letters and concepts lead directly to error.
St. Gregory Palamas reiterates the same thing: ‘Our own knowledge of God boasts God Himself as its master; for it is no angel, nor human being, but the Lord Himself Who has both instructed and saved us.’ Through the centuries there have been thousands upon thousands of Christians who have never received instruction through books and mental concepts (because they were illiterate), but only from God Himself. This is the case with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Daniel etc. before the incarnation and of many thousands of ascetics, confessors and martyrs since. They needed no texts and they had no access to books, which is why Christianity is the proper ‘religion’ for the illiterate rather than the educated. To add a voice from the Russian tradition, we may turn to St. Nilus Sorsky who said: ‘Without intelligence, even good can become an evil. Many things have been written in the bible, but not everything that is written is divine. That is why we must test what we read, and only follow it when it corresponds with the requirements of truth.’ (Louis Bouyer, History of Christian Spirituality, Vol. 4, p. 21).
Christ will eventually grant to all human beings, without discrimination, His divine revelation in His second coming. No one is to be excluded. St. Maximus described it well: ‘Human nature does not contain the inner principles of what is beyond itself any more than it contains the laws that are contrary to nature. When I say ‘what is beyond nature,’ I mean the divine and inconceivable pleasure that God naturally produces in those found worthy of being united with Him through grace. By ‘contrary to nature,’ I mean the indescribable pain brought about by the privation of such pleasure. This pain God naturally produces in the unworthy when He is united with them in a manner contrary to grace. For God is united to all men according to the underlying quality of their inner state and He provides for each one the capacity to receive and sense Him with Whom all are to be inescapably united at the end of the ages,’ (4th Century, various texts, 20). Divine revelation is meant for all, but is always offered in uncreated terms and deifies in both ways all those who partake in it, as St. Paul observed when he said: ‘But he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.’ (I Cor. 3:15). We know too that: ‘Our God is a consuming fire,’ (Hebrews 12:29). There are two ways for all men to receive divine revelation and to experience divine actuality immediately (without any concepts or intermediaries.) One is the ineffable pleasure of being worthily united with Him and the other is the ineffable pain of being unworthily united with Him. Jesus Christ, Who is determined to unite Himself with mankind before all ages, is Himself, simultaneously, heaven and hell and His resurrected body is to incorporate all mankind in eternity.
When we turn to the present situation, we wonder what the Orthodox Churches believe about divine revelation today. After Peter the Great ordered the translation of German Lutheran catechisms into Russian, substantial elements of both Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrine became incorporated into the Orthodox tradition and faith. Because of this co-mingling, all Orthodox Churches adopted the fundamental fallacy that Christianity is rooted in created sources of divine revelation. In full accordance with the ‘Holy Ecumenical and General Council of Trent – Fourth Session, Decree on Sacred Books and on Traditions to be received (1546) - all Orthodox theologians accepted that Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition of the Church are the two undisputed sources of all divine revelation. The Orthodox Church has completely ever since forgotten the criteria of the first Nicene Council on the uncreatedness of all revelations of God.
As a result of this negligence, all Orthodox Churches today firmly believe in what, according to the Nicene criteria, is a created God — precisely because they believe in a created divine revelation. Some of the most startling evidence can be taken from Timothy Ware’s book ‘The Orthodox Church’ (Penguin Books, 1987). The chapter on the Orthodox tradition (p. 203) as a source of Orthodox faith begins with a quotation from Vladimir Lossky: ‘Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.’
Let us examine this statement in light of the Nicene criteria. If the Holy Spirit is uncreated, then the life the Holy Spirit leads is also uncreated. If this uncreated life coincides with the tradition of the church, then the Church has an uncreated tradition which should inevitably coincide with an uncreated eternal power or energy of the Holy Trinity Itself. But we know that the Church itself is not uncreated and its tradition began in time and space. If, indeed, the Holy Spirit’s life is the tradition of the Church, then the Holy Spirit lives a created life; and if His life is created, then the Holy Spirit cannot belong to the uncreated realm. Lossky’s statement clearly implies that the Holy Spirit Itself is a creature! It is a Eunomian statement of faith which tacitly rejects the Nicene Creed: The uncreated Spirit can only have uncreated life! Tradition can not be uncreated and can in no way be the life of the Holy Spirit inside or outside the Church. Such blunders are rife in Lossky’s writings and there are innumerable blunders in the works of contemporary Orthodox writers on the subject of divine revelation — in fact, more than enough to explain the ultimate confusion prevailing on this issue amongst the Orthodox today.
In the same book, George Florovsky is quoted as defining tradition as ‘the Spirits’s unceasing revelation and preaching of good tidings,’ (p. 206). The Patristic criteria which helped a great many Orthodox generations to discern properly between error and truth in Christian doctrine seem to have been abandoned.
Let us see what the Orthodox believe nowadays about the bible. I quote from the same book: ‘The bible is the supreme expression of God’s revelation to man. And Christians must always be People of the Book. Orthodoxy believes this just as firmly, if not more firmly, than Protestantism . . . Orthodox believe that the changes in the Septuagint were made under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and are to be accepted as part of God’s continuing revelation.’ (P. 207 - 208). Paradoxically this is precisely Augustine’s understanding of the Septuagint and it is pertinent to note that Augustine ascribed pre-eminent authority to the Septuagint because he firmly believed that God had provided that version for the instruction of the gentiles even as He had provided the Hebrew text for the instruction of the Hebrews. This is why, according to Augustine, the Holy Spirit inspired the Septuagint translators to deviate at times from the Hebrew text because only by doing so could they express the truth in the manner in which God willed it to be expressed to the gentiles. (On Christian Doctrine, 2, 15-22; The City of God, 18,43).
Perhaps the author has some excuse for such views offered in his book ‘The Orthodox Church,’ precisely because the Church into which he was received, fervently maintains the very same attitudes. He faithfully depicts the situation he found within that Church, when he joined it, but is he not embroidering the truth by contending that ‘the distinctive characteristic of that church is its changelessness, its determination to remain loyal to the past… the living continuity with the church of ancient times’? (p. 203)
One wonders whether there is any point at all in Western Christians converting to ‘Orthodoxy’ as long as the fundamental criteria in which Christianity consists remain identical East and West, as they appear to have done since the age of Peter the Great. The recent publication of a new Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) amply proves this identicalness. In Section I, Chapter 2, Article I, entitled ‘The Revelation of God,’ we find that: (a) the Divine plan of revelation is realised simultaneously by deeds and words (53); (b) God communicates Himself to man gradually (53); (c) God makes Himself known in the beginning . . . with constant evidence of Himself in created realities (54); and (d) the Son is His Father’s definitive Word, so there will be no further revelation after Him (73).
In Article 2 we read that ‘sacred tradition and sacred scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God, in which, as in a mirror, the pilgrim Church contemplates God’ (97); and also that ‘the people of God as a whole never cease . . . . to penetrate more deeply . . . . the gift of divine revelation’ (99). In Article 3 it states: (a) ‘Through all the words of sacred scripture, God speaks only one single Word, His one utterance in Whom He expresses Himself completely’ (101); (b) ‘In the sacred books, the Father Who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet His children, and talks with them’ (104); (c) ‘God speaks to man in a human way . . . . in the bible’, yet He sets Christians the task ‘to discover the sacred authors’ intention!’ (110); (d) the sacred scriptures contain the Word of God’ (135), ‘God acts in them and by means of them’ (136); and (e) the Church has always venerated the divine scripture as she venerated the body of the Lord’ (141).
In Section II (Article I, Par. 2), entitled ‘the Father,’ we read: (a) ‘The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the One true God reveals Himself to men,’ (234); and (b) ‘God has left traces of His Trinitarian Being in His work of creation and in His revelation throughout the Old Testament’ (237).
On the evidence of the above statements it is obvious once more that modern Catholics - just as modern Orthodox - believe in a God Whose Word, revelation - even some vestigial Trinitarian traces (?) - plan for salvation, means, deeds, words, talks, meetings and, especially, gifts, are all created. How on earth then, could He Himself be uncreated? As the catechism itself clearly admits: ‘God’s works reveal Who He is in Himself; the mystery of His inmost being enlightens our understanding of all His works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions,’ (236). People who know God almost to the extent He knows His inmost being, do not see the need for union with Him in the uncreated Light, as everything (including God) stands revealed before their eyes . . . . .
In the book ‘Divine Revelation’ (1997) the editor, Paul Avis, notes significantly that: ‘Divine Revelation is one of the most fundamental of all theological questions; indeed some might say if we could be clear about whether there is a revelation from God, where it is located, what form it takes, and who has the authority to interpret it, we could solve all other theological problems.’ But are there still Christians able to provide succinct answers stemming purely from their own tradition? All the evidence cited above vindicates a negative verdict. Modern Christians have not woken up to the fact that divine revelation is wrongly perceived as resting upon created concepts and means, as if the Revealer Himself were a creature. There is only one appropriate vehicle to convey divine revelation to mankind and that is the human body — the only creation that has been privileged to become uncreated by grace. This is the ultimate reason for God Himself assuming it in Christ. Only those whose bodies have been deified can properly reveal in themselves God Himself.
This explains why the Declaration of Orthodoxy which has been read out in Orthodox churches since 842 A.D. on the annual celebration of the restoration of the Holy Icons (Sunday of Orthodoxy) makes no mention of the bible or other created means as mediators or factors of divine revelation. It reads: ‘We believe in and confess and preach Christ our true God exactly as the prophets have seen Him, as the apostles have taught about Him, as the Church has received Him, as the Fathers and teachers have decreed of Him, as the truth about Him is made manifest, as error is expelled, as Wisdom has declared Itself with boldness, as Christ Himself has ruled.’
This declaration proves the perfect certainty of the Church that apostolic succession is being shared by all those who, as real members of the resurrected body of Christ, become uncreated by grace regardless of sex, education, race, etc. They are traditionally called Holy Martyrs, Apostles, Prophets, Holy Fathers and Mothers and they comprise the choir of the Saints. This also explains why all Ecumenical Councils declared the Holy Fathers as the ultimate authority in the Church by beginning their doctrinal promulgations with the phrase: ‘Faithfully following our Holy Fathers we believe . . . .’
Despite such clear inheritance from the Patristic age, all Orthodox theologians today believe that the ultimate authority in the Orthodox Church is the institution of the Ecumenical Councils and not the deified bodies of the saints. They do not even perceive that, by holding to such a fallacy, they implicitly pronounce their own Church as being deprived of authority, as no Ecumenical Council has been convened in the last one thousand years . . . .! Such secular institutions of Imperial Christendom as the Ecumenical Councils (convened by emperors in order to maintain the unity of an ‘Orthodox State’) obviously cannot become uncreated by grace and therefore they are incapable of functioning as agents of divine revelation. The true agents of God’s revelation are only those Holy Fathers of the Church whose bodies and minds have been deified and, as such, have lent authority to those Councils — Ecumenical or not — in which they participated.
Secular institutions such as the Churches of Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury, Greece and Russia can in no way be identified with the resurrected body and, because of this inability, cannot be the One, Catholic and Apostolic Church, as this Church utterly coincides with the resurrected body itself. This body still exists and will continue to exist unto the ages of ages ‘and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ (Matthew 16:18). To imagine that geographically- and ethnically-defined institutions (as these above mentioned Churches are) will be perpetuated in the life to come is a mere utopia.
Since the age of the Scribes and Pharisees, mankind is being tried by the ultimate dilemma — whether to take the side of the scripture or the side of the Church. Those who opt for the latter still find themselves under pressure of deciding to which Church they should belong — the secular institution (inevitably dominated, as everything else in this world, by the prince of darkness Luke 4,5-6) or the resurrected body of Christ.
St. Symeon the New Theologian offered a realistic criterion as to how people can discern where exactly they stand. He said: ‘If there is truth at all in Christ’s declaration that He is the Light of the world, then whoever in this life fails to see that Light, is certainly blind.’
Christianity on this earth can be meaningful only as long as the uncreated Light endlessly engulfs the faithful, causing union with the resurrected Body. As St. Epiphanius of Salamis said in his 4th century refutation of Arianism: ‘The Holy Trinity ever manifests Itself in an uncreated manner.’