Author: Anna

Next session on Philokalia, Friday, March 15, at noon.

The path to purification and the attainment of dispassion are not linear processes of elimination and decrease. They are rather akin to peeling layers to uncover and free a hidden treasure, far more precious than what these layers contained: true spiritual knowledge and union with God.  What’s more, as St. Maximos tells us, this union is not one-dimensional and passive but participatory in that it does not abrogate self-hood. On the contrary, it frees us from distractions and delusions and “reintegrates” us with the true self that we once lost.

It is said that he who does not first reintegrate himself with his own being by rejecting those passions which are contrary to nature will not be reintegrated with the Cause of his being – that is, with God – by acquiring supranatural blessings through grace. For he who would truly unite himself with God must first separate himself mentally from created things.

What then is our true self? When driven by passions we simply do not know. We are trapped by these passions in a dream within a dream and cannot escape. We become attached to our own logic and conceptual images which we superimpose on created things and are unable to discern the underlying principles that reveal their true nature.

It is the devil’s practice maliciously to confound the forms and shapes of sensible things with our conceptual images of them. Through these forms and shapes are generated passions for the outward aspects of visible things, and our intellectual energy, being halted at the level of what pertains to sense-perception, cannot raise itself to the realm of intelligible realities. In this way the devil despoils the soul and drags it down into the turmoil of the passions.

Passions create an ever-widening spiral that increasingly closes in on us. Without discernment, we mistake evil for good. We look for ecstasy in intoxication with wine or drugs instead of a life of virtue that leads to spiritual knowledge.

The vine produces wine, the wine drunkenness and drunkenness an evil form of ecstasy. Similarly the intelligence – which is the vine – when well-nurtured and cultivated by the virtues, generates spiritual knowledge; and such knowledge produces a good form of ecstasy which enables the intellect to transcend its attachment to the senses.

We can only free ourselves by conforming ourselves to God’s will rather than our own, following a life of virtue and detaching ourselves from our own logic and conceptual images of things.

By so doing [one] places himself utterly beyond the reach of everything that seeks to entrap him, and so is not attracted through some sensory image towards the death that lies in the passions.

However, even though “the intellect has by nature the capacity to receive a spiritual knowledge of corporeal and incorporeal things,” we can only receive spiritual knowledge and union with God through Grace

Who is the person who is reintegrated with his true self? It is:

The person who with the clear eye of faith beholds the beauty of the blessings of the age to be readily obeys the command to leave his country and his kindred and his father’s house (cf. Gen. 12:1), and he abandons the flesh, the senses and sensory things, together with passionate attachments and inclinations. In times of temptation and conflict he rises above nature because he has put the Cause of nature first, just as Abraham put God before Isaac

 

There will be a Philokalia session tomorrow (March 8) at noon

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, we are gripped by the passionate story of the heroine who abandons an oppressive marriage to flee with her lover, Count Vronsky. We follow the triumph of passion over banal domesticity until we witness the eventual unravelling of Anna’s life that, stripped of meaning and virtue, leads to her tragic suicide. The antithesis to her character is a shy and awkward landowner, named Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, for whom farming and rural life are the greatest pleasures in life. As Anna succumbs to a downward spiral that eventually leads to death, Levin embraces Christian love and ascends upward to a union with God, transforming his life from one of loneliness and atheism to one of love, marital companionship and faith.

For St. Maximos, Anna Karenina’s course in life would represent her choice of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (cf. Gen. 2:9), and rejection of the tree of Life. Levin, in contrast, takes a journey in the opposite direction, abandoning the tree of knowledge and embracing the tree of life.

There is “a great and unutterable difference” between these two trees, St. Maximos says. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is “the seat of mindless impulses” while “the tree of life is the soul’s intellect, which is the seat of wisdom.”

The problem with the tree of knowledge is that, judging by our senses alone, we can only discriminate between pleasure and pain. We, therefore, naturally cleave to pleasure and avoid pain. Ironically, we live in a society that has embraced the same choice. In it avoidance of pain of any sort and the pursuit of comfort, convenience and pleasure are the ultimate goals and are treated as inviolable rights.

In contrast, by embracing the tree of life, we are able to discriminate between the eternal and the transitory. Our purpose is not simply to avoid pain and increase pleasure but to “cleave to the glory of what is eternal as something good and avoid the corruption of what is transitory as something evil.” Hence, we often choose to accept pain for a higher good.

Yet the real tragedy of limiting knowledge to the senses is not only that we succumb to passions. It is that our perception of the world becomes blurred and illusory. Our understanding becomes corrupted and distorted so that, unknowingly, we embrace death rather than life.

If a man exercises only sensory discrimination between pain and pleasure in the body, thus transgressing the divine commandment, he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is to say, he succumbs; to the mindless impulses that pertain to the senses; for he possesses only the body’s power of discrimination, which makes him embrace pleasure as something good and avoid pain as something evil. But if he exercises only that noetic discrimination which distinguishes between the eternal and the transitory, and so keeps the divine commandment, he eats from the tree of life, that is to say, from the wisdom that appertains to his intellect; for he exercises only the power of discrimination associated with the soul…

 

An even greater tragedy is when our corrupted, limited, sensual understanding forgets and reverses the true distinction between good and evil. As we immerse ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, we see our choices—whether becoming workaholic, possessive, obsessed with praise or material good—as good, and use our intellect in the wrong way, to justify our actions.  All of us are vulnerable to this corruption of perception and lack of discrimination.

Nazi Germany justified the holocaust as economic necessity and scientific progress; ordinary citizens were in denial about the extent of the evil surrounding them; slave-owning societies saw slavery as the divine order of human relations. This is why St. Maximos sees the pursuit of pleasure as a grave danger and evil distortion of God’s intention for the capabilities he endowed us with:

He who persuades his conscience to regard the evil he is doing as good by nature reaches out with his moral faculty as with a hand and grasps the tree of life in a reprehensible manner; for he thinks that what is thoroughly evil is by nature immortal.

Anna Karenina justified her choices in terms of the freedom to love and act. It was only later that her lonely existence, on the fringes of good and decent society, and deep despair were revealed for the evil that they were.

Unquestionably, the tree of life is productive of life; the tree that is not called the tree of life, and so is not productive of life, is obviously productive of death. For only death is the opposite of life.

 

 

Reminder: book study session this Friday noon, March 1, at St. Mary’s

The path to spiritual knowledge and salvation is not a linear, vertical path, St. Maximos shows. Instead, it is a process of ascendance that involves synergy and cooperation.

God, for example, “sets the bounds of each man’s life, in the manner which He wills, leads every man, whether righteous or unrighteous, towards the final end he deserves.” Rather than being deterministic, however, the course of our life is cooperative. It is man’s actions that, along with God’s will, determine what it is he “deserves.”

Similarly, there is cooperation between matter and spiritual knowledge. To ascend into higher levels of spiritual knowledge, we do not simply reject and cut ourselves off from material things but transform them into instruments for our union with God; rungs in our upward journey.

St. Maximos’ allegorical interpretation of Paul’s encounter with the storm elucidates the processes of cooperation and transformation.

The dark storm which befell St Paul (cf. Acts 28:1-4) is the weight of involuntary trials and temptations. The island is the firm unshakeable state of divine hope. The fire is the state of spiritual knowledge. The sticks are the nature of visible things. Paul gathered these with his hand, which I take to mean with the exploratory capacity of the intellect during contemplation He fed the state of spiritual knowledge with conceptual images derived from the nature of visible things, for the state of spiritual knowledge heals the mental dejection produced by the storm of trials and temptations. The viper is the cunning and destructive power hidden secretly in the nature of sensible things. It bites the hand, that is, the exploratory noetic activity of contemplation, but without harming the visionary intellect; and this, with the light of spiritual knowledge, as if with fire at once destroys the destructive power that arises from the contemplation of sensible things and that attaches itself to the practical activity of the intellect.

The relationships and order among these elements are essential.

Without hope Paul could not even discern the path to salvation and begin the journey of healing from temptations. Throughout the journey, he is driven by the quest for spiritual knowledge—the fire. Everything else is subordinate to this quest. For example, he neither rejects “sensible things,” nor is he sidetracked by them by mistaking them for the goal of his pursuit. Instead, he puts them into the right use by transforming them into fuel for keeping the fire of spiritual knowledge going.

His journey is not linear in that it does not culminate with the making a fire. Instead, it involves a continuous process of converting desires and passions into divine fuel for the fire. It is this constant spiritual warfare, driven by hope, that will allow us to resist the attack from the viper when it arises.

St. Maximos delves into our soul to demonstrate the need for cooperation among our three powers that dwell there: “the intelligence, the incensive power and desire.”

 With our intelligence we direct our search; with our desire we long for that supernal goodness which is the object of our search; and with our incensive power we fight to attain our object. With these powers these who love God cleave to the divine principle of virtue and spiritual knowledge. Searching with the first power, desiring with the second, and fighting by means of the third, they receive incorruptible nourishment, enriching the intellect with the spiritual knowledge of created beings.

Using these God-endowed powers the way God intended, we cooperate with God on fashioning the end we each deserve.

In these paragraphs, St. Maximos explores the relationship between faith and knowledge.

“Faith,” he tells us, “is knowledge that cannot be rationally demonstrated.”

Yet faith is not passive, unquestionable subservience.  It results from a state of direct union with God.

It is “a supranatural relationship through which, in an unknowable and so undemonstrable manner, we are united with God in a union which is beyond intellection.”

Faith does not come to us automatically, neither does it remain within us without deliberate effort and spiritual warfare. St Maximos reminds us of the fragility of faith if we lack alertness and focus. Union with God allows our state of mind to be “completely in abeyance” with Him and, hence to pass beyond nature and become God “by participation.” Yet, as soon as we drift back to the created world and think in terms of its categories, doubt sets in.

To fend off doubt, a person must be free from  “his soul’s attachment to the body through the senses” so that he does not “separate himself from the union with God which faith has brought about in him through the intellect.” With faith, and freedom from doubt, “all things are possible.”

Faith is not passive then. We have to actively seek things that contribute toward union with God. St. Maximos lists specific things through which man can enter into union with God and thus “attain knowledge of God and virtue:”

… deliverance from passions, patient acceptance of trials, the inner principles of virtues, the practice of methods of spiritual warfare, the uprooting of the soul’s predilection for the flesh, the breaking of the senses’ attachment to sensible objects, the utter withdrawal of the intellect from all created things…  

St. Maximos even gives us a concrete methodology.

We “first seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness’ (Matt. 6:33). That is, seek the knowledge of truth before all things…” With our hearts and souls trained on this pursuit, we equip ourselves for the battle “and therefore seek training in appropriate methods of attaining it.”

When we enter into union with God, we see and perceive the world differently since we have ourselves become gods through participation. We are able to adopt a different framework of understanding beyond the categories of the created world. We abandon temporal time and the need for instant gratification so that one

 …first spiritually imbibes those principles and then by means of his actions feeds upon the whole body of the virtues. In this way he transposes to the plane of spiritual knowledge actions which take place in the sensible realm.

Faith then requires our active participation and a path of continuous spiritual warfare. It is not a passive attribute but the result of “training in appropriate methods” to achieve union with God and participate in His nature outside temporal, created categories.

Our next session of  Patristic study will be on Friday, February 22 at noon. There will be no session this Friday, Feb. 15.

 

[Reminder: Next Session on 2/8/19 at noon]

#1-7

In this passage, St. Maximos talks about the attainment of divine knowledge. As usual, he elucidates the meaning and experience of this divine knowledge through a series of contrasts and guides us through a progression from the external to the internal—from definitions and clarifications of the nature of divine knowledge, to the process of acquiring it, to the actual experience and its implications that transcend words.

First, St. Maximos confronts us with the paradoxical relationship between truth, “divine knowledge” and virtue,  “the struggles for truth on the part of those who desire it.” It is the sequence between the two that reflects intention and, ultimately, defines outcomes.

It is only by leading a life of virtue for the sake of truth, rather than glory, that we will achieve divine knowledge…” because virtue exists for the sake of truth, but truth does not exist for the sake of virtue. Thus, he who practices virtue for the sake of truth is not wounded by the arrows of self-esteem…

Conversely, attempting to pursue the truth directly and only practicing virtue for the sake of appearance or mere compliance, can lead to vainglory and conceit.

…but he who pursues truth for the sake of virtue does harbor the conceit which self-esteem generates.

Thus, Maximos enters more deeply into the participatory nature of knowledge and its dependence on our relationship with God.

We simply cannot get to divine knowledge and illumination by skipping virtue. Most importantly, we cannot achieve it on the strength of our own will alone but only through the grace of God.

We can’t will the truth. God may reveal it to us if we live a life of virtue without expectations.

A man who endures the labors of virtue for the sake of such knowledge is not vainglorious, because he knows that truth cannot be grasped naturally through human effort. For it is not in the nature of things for what is primary to be circumscribed by what is secondary.

Taking us to an even deeper level, St. Maximos now gives us another set of antitheses through which to contemplate the meaning of divine knowledge: surface vs. substance, theory vs. action, visible vs. invisible.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is empty and only gets us to the “image,” rather than the reality and experience of truth.

 

 He who seeks only the outward form of knowledge, that is, knowledge which is merely theoretical, and pursues the semblance of virtue that is, a merely theoretical morality, is puffed up, Judaic-wise, with the images of truth.

Without God-given, divine knowledge we are doomed to only see:…”the letter, the outward appearance of things, and the senses, all of which possess quantitative distinctions and are the negation of unity.”

Unable to discern the underlying principles of created things, we are subjects to passions—greed, envy, lust, despondency, boredom, fear—as we mistake the surface for substance; the tools as ends unto themselves.

Through divine knowledge man…does not view the ritual of the Law with his senses alone, but noetically penetrates every visible symbol and thoroughly assimilates the divine principle which is hidden in each, finds God in the Law. For rightly he uses his intellect to grope among the material forms of the Law, as among litter, in the hope of finding hidden somewhere in its body that pearl or principle which utterly escapes the senses (cf. Matt. 13:45-46).

Delving even beyond contrasts, St. Maximos now takes us to the realm of theosis, beyond words.

Nature alone is created and thus limited. Without God’s grace, our perception is limited to “the nature of visible things to what [our] senses alone can observe, and it cannot by itself lead to divine knowledge.” With God’s grace, our intellect is restored to its divine purpose and “searches after the essence which lies within every creature, [and] also finds God. For from the manifest magnificence of created beings he learns what is the Cause of their being.”

Divine knowledge is not simply the acquisition of information or wisdom but the agent of regeneration and transformation. It returns us to the image of God and restores our capabilities to their original purpose. This is why Maximos alludes to terms such as “blindness” and “forgetfulness,” not simply “ignorance,” to describe a state without divine knowledge.

But if a man compounds the letter of the Law, the outward appearance of visible things, and his own senses with each other, he is ‘so short-sighted as to be blind’ (2 Pet. 1:9), sick through his ignorance of the Cause of created beings.

And he quotes Peter:

2 Peter 1:9 But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.

 

Without the attainment of divine knowledge, and a driving longing for it, we are doomed to a life of blindness and forgetfulness, trapped at the surface and never venturing to the true essence of things.

Suffering, St. Maximos tells us, may be a result of our own choices to sin or may fall upon us without apparent cause. In either case, suffering is a chance to exercise patience, rather than spend lives consumed by anger or bitterness; an opportunity for change and spiritual growth.

Many times, our afflictions are direct and logical consequences of our own actions, such as, indulgence in passions, reliance on material things, praise or acceptance by others for our lives to seem worth living.  In this case, we should accept suffering with a sense of gratitude as a much-needed corrective.

Beyond the idea of suffering as just punishment, however, St. Maximos sees it as an opportunity – perhaps our only opportunity–for redemption.

To recognize “the principle of divine providence” in our affliction and discern its capacity to heal us, allows us to accept “the affliction with joy and gratitude,” and to correct “the fault for which [we are] being disciplined.”

Anger at afflictions that stem from the choices we make in life, means that we justify our choices and blame the consequences on someone or something else. This robs us of the opportunity for transformation; the chance to make corrections in our lives and progress spiritually. Instead, justification and anger enslave us in the passions that, unchecked, lead us to despair

But if he is insensitive to this treatment [of accepting afflictions joyfully], he is justly deprived of the grace that was once given him and is handed over to the turbulence of the passions

 St. Maximos next shows us that, in order to understand “the principle of divine providence” in our afflictions, one must be able to see beyond appearance—to the inner essence and cause of material things. Seeing beyond appearance will reveal the true nature of created things, that is, that by nature everything is good, and nothing is unclean unto itself. It is only we, who ill-use things of the world, making them into ends unto themselves rather than means of glorifying God, upending the natural balance, distorting our view of good and evil and perception of reality.

If, instead of stopping short at the outward appearance which visible things present to the senses, you seek with your intellect to contemplate their inner essences, seeing them as images of spiritual realities or as the inward principles of sensible objects, you will be taught that nothing belonging to the visible world is unclean.

Without purification and a view of the principles beyond appearance, we experience constant turbulence–happiness when our passions are satisfied and misery when they are not.

The alternative and end goal that St. Maximos presents us with, is dispassion and a path to theosis.

He who is not affected by changes in sensible things practices the virtues in a manner that is truly pure. He who does not permit the outward appearances of sensible things to imprint themselves on his intellect has received the true doctrine of created beings. He whose mind has outstripped the very being of created things has come, as a true theologian, close to the One through unknowing.

As always, Maximos follows a passage on a difficult road ahead with a passage of hope.

God gives each of us the capacity for fulfilling a commandment, he reassures us. And he does this by treating us as distinct individuals, rather that undifferentiated masses–—each at a different stage of his/her journey and with different abilities. This is why:

God reveals Himself to each person according to each person’s mode of conceiving Him. To those whose aspiration transcends the complex structure of matter, and whose psychic powers are fully integrated in a single unceasing gyration around God, He reveals Himself as Unity and Trinity. In this way He both shows forth His own existence and mystically makes known the mode in which that existence subsists.

In these few paragraphs, St. Maximos explores the sources and nature of evil and its relationship to God and man through four sets of relationships and resulting actions.

He sets the “stage” by explaining the nature of good.

Good represents our true nature. It is the baseline we start or depart from. Good is active. Faith, in fact, is real only when it is “manifest and active.” Echoing the concept of “active virtue” in previous chapters, he reiterates the seamless connection between intellect and action in the manifestation of virtue.

Freedom from Passions through Purification and Illumination

Passions are what break and distort this connection and lead us away from a life of active virtue. Maximos shows how the exercise of free will and nature of our relationship with God determine our state of freedom or imprisonment through an allusion to St. Peter. In the story, passions are depicted as the prison guards that prevent Peter from ever reaching the “gate” that leads to the city.

St Peter is guarded by two squads of soldiers and shut in by an iron gate. The two squads signify the attacks suffered by the intellect from the activity of the passions and from the mind’s assent to the passions.

St. Peter, however, was able to free himself from this “obdurate and stubborn attachment of the senses to sensible things” and pass through the gate “through spiritual contemplation of the inner essences of created beings.” Without spiritual contemplation—that is, without the stages of purification and illumination– we remain trapped in the prison of our own attachments that become increasingly deeper.

Having shed the addiction to passions, however, our vision becomes clear. We can now see through spiritual eyes and, instead of being tempted by created things, we are able to discern their inner sense and cause of existence under the surface. We can see our way to the gate and translate understanding into action to pass through it.

Imprisonment though Total Surrender to Passions

What about those who can never open the gate to reach the city? How is it possible for us to choose prison over freedom? St. Maximos dissects the process by which false desire becomes addiction, clouding our vision and leading to despair.

The architect of evil and tempter to passions is of course the devil. St. Maximos presents the relationship between God, man and the devil through paradoxes.

The devil hates God. Somehow, however, “in his hatred for God [he seems] to have acquired a destructive love for us men.”

His destructive love is manifested through distortions and reversals of good into evil, natural into unnatural. This notion of evil as distortion and reversal is not new, for example:

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Romans 1:24-32

St. Maximos, however, dissects the gradual process of engagement with passions and their conversion into addiction and, finally, into despair. He also presents the dynamic and complex relationships among, God, man and the devil.

The devil does not put evil in our way with one, fell stroke. On the contrary, he is patient and engaged in a long-term relationship with us “persuading us by means of sensual pleasure to assent to the passions within our control…”

The Devil’s Punishment

At first, we are seduced by pleasure, but when our pursuit of pleasure becomes habit and addiction, the devil has succeeded in seducing “our soul’s desire separating us utterly from divine love and making us willing enemies of Him who made us.” Once we have succumbed to the devil, he” lays bare his hatred for us and demands our punishment.” And the cruelest punishment is when “the soul, sinking down enervated by the weight of such painful calamities, may cut itself off from the power of divine hope, regarding the onslaught of these calamities not as a divine admonition but as a cause for disbelief in God.”

Where does the devil find the mandate to torture and destroy us? St. Maximos makes it clear that it does not come from God. The devil does not act with “the intention of fulfilling God’s command, but out of the desire to feed his own passion of hatred towards us.” Yet, while God does not generate or command evil, he allows it to take place, so we can learn from it and exercise our free will.

Without divine permission, even the demons themselves cannot assist the devil in any way at all

However, Maximos makes it clear that it is our personal actions and choices that bring about our punishment.  We, alone, “willingly accede” to the passions that destroy us. As a result, “It is entirely fitting and just that those who gladly accept the devil’ s cunning suggestions to commit sins through their own volition should also be chastised by him.”

God’s Love and Hope

The final element in the complex interrelationships that Maximos explores in this section is love. God makes it possible for us to return to purity and virtue. In fact, God actively wants us to be saved. This is why, according to Maximos, he heals us from passions by allowing us to experience their destructiveness, first-hand—the way that being vaccinated with a virus gives immunity to it.

Because of his love for us “he allows the devil to afflict us with suffering and chastisement. In this way He scrapes the poison of past pleasure from our souls; and He seeks to implant in us a hatred and complete revulsion for the things which belong to this world and pander to the senses alone, by making us realize that once we have acquired them, we gain nothing from their use save chastisement.”

In Corinthians, Paul similarly lifts us from affliction through God’s love that gives us hope. No burden is impossible to bear or overcome with God’s help:

No temptation[a] has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. Corinthians 10:13

St. Maximos here elucidates the process of deification through yet another set of metaphors, and frames it through the contrast between passivity and action, good and evil.

Evil does not exist unto itself and we do not have the capacity to generate it. When we suffer evil, it is because we ill-use our will and abuse our intelligence to surrender to something contrary to our nature.

However, as our nature is inherently good, we possess the natural capacity for “actualizing the virtues.” St. Maximos calls this “active accomplishment” because it requires intentional action from us—the exercise of free will and the correct use of our intelligence “whose natural task is to accomplish the virtues.”

St. Maximos next dissects the paradox of the state of passivity and brings out the duality within it.

Passivity can be either good or evil he explains. It can involve either surrender to God’s will or abandonment to evil. Yet, paradoxically, while it takes deliberate activity to exercise the virtues, it takes passivity to ascend beyond virtue to deification.

“The principle of passive suffering,” he tells us, “signifies experiencing either the grace of what is beyond nature or the occurrence of what is contrary to nature.”

While we are able to actively exercise the virtues, we cannot raise ourselves to the higher level of deification on our own, without divine grace. The exercise of virtue is still within our nature and our own abilities. It requires action on our part. To ascent beyond what is achievable within our own nature and capabilities, however, we must engage in passivity.

“But, when raised to a higher level, we experience deification passively, receiving this experience as a free gift of grace.”

Through the gift of grace, “we experience things passively,” discerning the inner Cause, without effort on our part.  “We are able to experience created things “in a manner which is beyond conception to the Cause itself of created beings, and there suspend the activity of our powers, together with all that is by nature finite.”

Our nature, in itself, “does not possess the power to grasp what transcends nature.” Through deification our struggles and efforts at active achievement cease. “We become something that is in no sense an achievement of our natural capacities,” and “Grace irradiates nature with a supranatural light and by the transcendence of its glory raises nature above its natural limits.”

Only God can bestow Grace and through it, deification. Yet God is not a passive being who grants deification at appointed times and then disappears. He reveals himself and the inner “principles of created beings” through images and the practice of virtues. And by constantly imbuing created things with “divine blessings,” “God continually becomes man,” in them.

St. Maximos draws a picture of unspeakable promise, hope and love here. The universe is inhabited by God and God is in a continuous relationship with man. He constantly reveals to us clues of His presence, communing with, and becoming one with us.

 

Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice , First Century, #67-75

St. Maximos here uses yet another metaphor to describe the perpetual ascent toward theosis: the shift from the Old to the New Testament. It is a shift from the external to the internal–“from the sight of material things to the vision of spiritual realities.” Even so, Maximos makes it clear that no destination is a static end point and that there is eternal growth in perfection.

Abandoning one’s “former passion-dominated way of life” is a beginning step but acquiring “stability in the practice of the virtues” is a higher step. Ascending to a state of perfection is the ultimate destination that drives and makes worthwhile our journey. A state of perfection means to “have already been initiated mystically into contemplative theology: having purified their intellects of every material fantasy and bearing always the stamp of the image of divine beauty in all its fullness, they manifest the divine love present in their hearts.”

A driver and presupposition for our journey upward is fear.

“Those who are beginners and stand at the gate of the divine court of the virtues (cf. Exod. 2 7: 9) are called ‘ God-fearing’ by Scripture (cf. Acts 1 0: 2; 1 3: r 6, 2 6).”

St. Maximos differentiates between two kinds of fear: fear of punishment for wrong doings and what he calls “pure” fear—the fear “rooted essentially by God in creation;” the constant awareness of the “awe-inspiring nature” of Him that “transcends all kingship and power.”

Impure fear is temporary. It disappears as soon as the threat of punishment recedes. Yet the pure fear of God, St. Maximos writes, “is always present even apart from remorse for offences committed” because the profound wonder of God’s nature never leaves our hearts. This is why he who “has acquired the fear that endures forever,” will “lack for nothing.”

It is the shift from the practice of virtue to the mystical contemplation of the spiritual realm that Maximos elucidates in these chapters.

A state of spiritual contemplation and divine love is transformative. In this state, the created world is no longer a trap for temptation and sin but a manifestation of God. Our view of living things reveals the underlying reason for their being

“From created beings we come to know their Cause; from the differences between created beings we learn about the indwelling wisdom of creation; and from the natural activity of created beings we discern the indwelling Life of creation, the power which gives created beings their life – the Holy Spirit.”

 And here St. Maximos gives the most elucidating explanation of the Holy Spirit I have ever read.

“The Holy Spirit,” he says, “is present unconditionally in all things, in that He embraces all things, provides for all, and vivifies the natural seeds within them.”

 This means that it is possible, even for a non-Christian to become aware of the true nature of material things and their origins in God because the Holy Spirit:

“Being God and God’s Spirit, …embraces in unity the spiritual knowledge of all created things, providentially permeating all things with His power, and vivifying their inner essences in accordance with their nature.”

The presence of the Holy Spirit in all things is not a disembodied, pantheistic embodiment of God. On the contrary “He is present in a specific· way in all who are under the Law, in that He shows them where they have broken the commandments and enlightens them about the promise given concerning Christ.” In revealing the true nature of created things, he uncovers the nature of virtue and evil and “in this way He makes men aware of things done sinfully against the law of nature and renders them capable of choosing principles which are true and in conformity with nature.”

Above all, however, the role of the Holy spirit in the eternal move toward deification points to love. “The Holy Spirit is present unconditionally in all things” because God, “yearns for the salvation of all men and hungers after their deification…He does this s o that they may prefer to be righteous in reality rather than in appearance, discarding the cloak of hypocritical moral display and genuinely pursuing a virtuous life in the way that the divine Logos wishes them to.”

 Rid of that cloak and with the knowledge of the true nature of created things (including ourselves), we will be able to reveal the “true state of our soul” to God.