In these chapters St. Maximos talks about how to understand the nature of God and enter into a union with Him.

1. BEYOND HUMAN CATEGORIES

He first addresses a major challenge in our relationship to God. God is uncreated, unoriginate and uncontainable. Yet we try to understand Him through the limited categories of the created world that we know. This contradiction is the tragedy of our human condition. We long for God and the peace and unity that union with Him would confer. Yet we are doomed to an incomplete, fragmented perception of God and the world around us if we are not united with him and see through His eyes and not ours.

As long as we understand God in the flesh, through symbols and the letter of the law, we still perceive reality in fragments and be unable to achieve full knowledge of God

St. Maximos reminds us that there is a grave danger in mistaking our own perceptions for the truth; becoming so preoccupied with the symbols and words of the scripture that we lose sight of its essence.

Hence a person who seeks God with true devotion should not be dominated by the literal text, lest he unwittingly receives not God but things appertaining to God; that is, lest he feel a dangerous affection for the words of Scripture instead of for the Logos.

2. THE PATH TO THEOSIS

The solution is to progress in our spiritual knowledge so that there is no longer separation between God and us. He dwells within us and we participate, in part, in his divinity. This stage in our relationship with God is called theosis. St. Maximos’ writings on theology all concern themselves with the lifelong process of achieving theosis and the stages within it.

Conventionally, there are three stages of spiritual growth: purification, illumination and glorification. St. Maximos repeatedly shows that these stages are not static destinations but pivots for the next phase and pieces of a transformative journey to theosis.

We first renounce the “flesh.” We next rise higher through “ascetic practice/practice of virtues;” and we finally reach the stage of mystical contemplation/complete union with God.

St. Maximos uses a great variety of metaphors and perspectives to depict the stages—each time unveiling a different dimension and level of meaning. In these chapters he frequently brings up parallelisms with the Old Testament.

3. PURIFICATION AND THE VIRTUES

Our journey begins with purification—getting rid of worldly passions and attachments or there will be no space for God to enter our soul. Yet purification is not enough. It must be followed by the lifelong cultivation of virtues and a life lived in God’s commandments.

We cannot reach union with God on our own, but only through the grace of God. What we can do on our part is to cultivate virtue and nurture in our hearts the true desire for spiritual contemplation of God. It is then that we may experience the grace of God when we least expect it.

 “For he who lives not for himself but for God, is filled with all the gifts of Grace which were not previously apparent to him because of the disturbance of passions.”

4. THE MIDWAY POINT

St. Maximos sheds light on the dynamics of our individual paths to theosis by pausing to highlight the struggles at the midway point. Our journey, he says, can be compared to that of Abraham’s, from the land of the Chaldeans, which signifies passions, to the promised land which symbolizes theosis. Before reaching the promised land, Abraham makes a stop at Haran. The Israelites have succeeded in abandoning passions (the land of the Chaldeans). Yet Haran is only “the intermediate state between virtue and vice – a state not yet purified from the delusion of the senses.”

How many of us find ourselves in some way or another in that midway state; between and betwixt? Not totally lacking in faith but not totally committed to it either; admiring the principles yet unwilling to practice them; loving yet not submitting to love fully, without judgment and control.

Many may be tempted to stop the journey halfway and settle for the success they have achieved so far. This is not what we are called to do as Christians, however.

Settling for the middle means making do with a fragmented view of the word and a diminution of Christ to man-made measures. As long as I remain imperfect and refractory, neither obeying God by practicing the commandments nor becoming perfect in spiritual knowledge, Christ from my point of view also appears imperfect and refractory because of me. “For I diminish and cripple Him by not growing in spirit with Him, since I am ‘the body of Christ and one of its members’ (1 Cor. 12:27).”

St. Maximos shows the consequences of spiritual laziness:

Whoever does not advance towards God by these means remains paralyzed until the Logos comes to teach him how he can obtain prompt healing, saying to him, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’ (John 5:8); that is to say, the Logos commands him to upraise his intellect from the love of pleasure which dominates him, to shoulder the body of the virtues and to go home, that is, to heaven.

5. CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPLETE UNION WITH GOD:
   1. Simplicity and Wholeness

St. Maximos describes the state of unity with Christ as one in which advance “altogether beyond intellection,’ and beyond duality so that we can dwell in unity.”

Perceiving the universe through our intellect alone and through our own, worldly categories produces a multiplicity of “intellections; for it is marked by the form of each intelligible object that it apprehends.” This multiplicity prevents us from true union with God. We struggle with doubt, competing principles, confusion, faulty conclusions and passions. We are unable to discern the essence of things through conflicting allegiances, racing thoughts on past grievances and future uncertainties that rob us of the present, futile efforts to control and script our lives and that of others.

When we are united with Christ, we transition from fragmentation and multiplicity to unity. We can suddenly see the truth clearly and, hence, we are not torn by conflicting dualities.

St. Maximos brings up parallels with the Old Testament to get us to see the process of theosis from still another perspective.

According to the scripture, he tells us, “the Law instituted the Sabbath…so that your ox and your servant might rest (cf. Exod. 20:10). He sees the ox and the servants as symbols of the body. During the stage of “ascetic practice/practice of virtues,” while we have purified our senses, we are still in the realm of the created universe because our body, “the ox,” is still “led by the intellect, undergoing deprivations and discipline to attain virtue.”

However, when we ascend to the level of spiritual contemplation, our bodies and souls are no longer separate entities. “When we advanced spiritually, the duality between body and intellect is erased.” Antithetical categories no longer have meaning.

In the beginning of our journey, our intellect rejects material things to be beautified. At the stage of theosis body and spirit are united through participation in God “Rather than being passively subjugates, the body is now a participant in intellection.”  And we have now reached the Sabbath:

“…the Sabbath signifies the final goal pursued by them throughout the ascetic and the contemplative life, and so it provides for both of them a fitting rest…The Sabbath is a virtuous, dispassionate and peaceful condition of both body and soul. It is an unchanging state.”

Once we enter “the Logos, who is beyond intellection,” Maximos tells us, “then the intellect contemplates only its own immutability, and rejoices with an unspeakable joy because it has received the peace of God which transcends all intellect, and which ceaselessly keeps him who has been granted it from falling (cf. Phil. 4:7).”

2. Contemplation

Maximos sees contemplation, not as erudition or engagement in complex, abstract thoughts but, on the contrary, as a respite and utter simplicity.

One can think of mystical contemplation as a state of silence and inner stillness; a stage in our relationship with God beyond words, symbols or logical categories. It is, as St. Maximos tells us, a state in which we are able to contemplate God “in His true simplicity, in His principial state with God the Father (cf. John 1:1-2).”

“When a man passes from the life of ascetic practice to the stage of spiritual knowledge, he is absent from the flesh (cf. 2 Cor. 5:8). Caught up as on clouds by the more lofty conceptual images into the translucent air of mystical contemplation, he is able to ‘be with the Lord for ever’ (1 Thess. 4:17).

 

 

 

Love, along with faith and hope, is located at the last and ultimate rung in St. John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent. The Ladder depicts the transformative process of climbing 30 steps, through which we renounce passions and cultivate virtues, to attain theosis– a complete union with God, in other words, a state of perfect love.  Love is at the heart of St. Maximos’ teachings. He, in fact, devotes four chapters exclusively on love.  Below is a review of key themes in these chapters.

“Love,” St. Maximos tells us, is not a mere emotion but “a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things.” Achieving such love is not the result of any one action but an ecosystem of interrelated actions and a process of continuous, spiritual ascension and transformation.

In these chapters, St. Maximos reiterates many of the principles he repeats in his other writings, for example.

• There is a synergistic relationship among passions and a progression from the lesser to the most destructive of them. For example, greed is the chief enabler among them and opens the floodgates for the rest of them.
• Thoughts are the subtlest and, hence, most dangerous of the demons assailing us: “for the war which the demons wage against us by means of thoughts is more severe than the war they wage by means of material things.”
• We have a major role in allowing sin into our souls by first “assenting to it, before actually committing it and then gradually submitting to them until they dominate our soul and drive our thoughts and actions.”
• Total assent to sin is when desolation sets in.

PERFECT LOVE

The opposite of this desolation brought about by passions, is perfect love.

To reach the ultimate rung of theosis–perfect love and union with God—it is not enough to purify passions and lead a virtuous life. It takes a mystical and total immersion in love for God that transcends both actions and intellect.

Throughout all his writings, St. Maximos constantly explains the state of theosis, each time from a different angle and through different metaphors.

The intellect alone can only take you so far because it is still human and limited by our imperfect human nature that can never fully grasp God. To reach the state of perfect love and union with God, we have to transcend intellect and participate mystically in God’s nature.  Union with God is not manifested through intellectual understanding but through inner transformation and the ability to suddenly see the world through God’s eyes.

When we are in this state of perfect love, we are able to discern God in everything around us— not to “descry God’s inmost nature,” which is not possible, but “to discern, as far as possible, the qualities that appertain to His nature – qualities of eternity, infinity, indeterminateness, goodness, wisdom, and the power of creating, preserving and judging creatures, and so on.”

WHAT IS CHRISTIAN LOVE?

Perfect love in Christ is not simply a “feeling” or “emotion.” There is no “cuteness” or romance associated with it; no soft music playing in the background. On the contrary, as St. Maximos says, “Love of God is opposed to desire, for it persuades the intellect to control itself with regard to sensual pleasures.” Through love, we reach a state of dispassion as our hearts are free of jealously, judgment, the desire to control, possess or manipulate that block true love.

Love is a state of total union with God that allows us to perceive the world as unified with Him and ourselves as participants in that unity. Instead of focusing on our personal agendas, jealousies, recriminations, ambitions and other created things, “love impels [our intellect] to concentrate its whole natural power into longing for the divine.”

UNITY RATHER THAN SEPARATION

We often mistake passions, such as lust, the desire to control and possess, with love. In fact, we frequently dehumanize others by seeing them as mere commodities to compare ourselves to and benchmark our successes or failures against.  The remedy St. Maximos outlines is to separate the resentment from the thought and view others in the fullness of their humanity rather than through the filter of our passions, thus opening our hearts to compassion and love.

Trough love, we give an end to alienation and separation through passions and perceived our shared humanity with others.

For him who is perfect in love and has reached the summit of dispassion there is no difference between his own or another’s, or between Christians and unbelievers, or between slave and free, or even between male and female. But because he has risen above the tyranny of the passions and as fixed his attention on the single nature of man, he looks on all in the same way and shows the same disposition to all. For in him there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, bond nor free, but Christ who ‘is all, and in all’ (Col. 3:11; cf. Gal. 3:28).

With love, we never again feel estranged from others and God. Love “makes it difficult or, rather, makes it utterly impossible for the intellect to estrange itself from the tender care of God.”

Love is distinguished by the beauty of recognizing the equal value of all men.

The nature of love is the nature of God and the nature of God is unity rather than fragmentation.

TRANSFORMATION

Perfect love is not an emotion toward an object but a transformative perception of, and relationship with, God and the world around us.

What does this mean? As Maximos says, when one experiences perfect love, he “sees things clearly in their true nature. Consequently, he both acts and speaks with regard to all things in a manner which is fitting, and he is never.”

And so, love is the light of our souls rather than limited to specific occasions and one on one relationships. It is the fulfillment of God’s promise of “eternal blessings” and “the pledge of the Spirit in your hearts (cf. 2 Cor. 1:22).”

With love, we become partakers of God’s nature and live in unity rather than alienation.

The nature of love is the nature of deluded God and the nature of God is unity rather than fragmentation.

(Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice Third Century #31-40)

St. Maximos begins this section with the dynamic interrelationship between love, truth and faith.

“Love,” he tells us, begins with the longing to participate in goodness which results in our “unfailing pleasure and indivisible union.”   Love is intrinsically connected to, and enabled by, truth—”the fulfillment of all spiritual knowledge and of all the things that can be known.” Like love, truth takes us from fragmentation and conflict to a state of indivisible union. Truth “transcends all things, truth admits of no plurality, and reveals itself as single and unique…”

When we are able to discern truth, we escape the anguish of ambiguity, doubt, conflicting realities and contradictions because we are now able to see clearly that there is only one simple, all-encompassing, self-evident truth. To experience truth, however, one must have faith.  Real faith is, in fact, truth in that it is “free from all falsehood.”

With our souls calmed and purified, we are then able to experience love because “a good conscience confers on us the power of love, since it is not guilty of any transgression of the commandments.”

OUR PART IN THE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

In this divine ecology of interrelated “puzzle pieces,” man is not merely a passive recipient but an active participant in constant interaction with God.

In the first place, God has endowed us with natural capabilities for receiving:

“for, corresponding to every divine gift, there is in us an appropriate and natural organ capable of receiving it – a kind of capacity, or intrinsic state or disposition.”

For example, “he who purges his intellect of all sensible images receives wisdom. He who makes his intelligence the master of his innate passions – that is to say, of his incensive and desiring powers – receives spiritual knowledge.”

Secondly, virtues, like truth, are not abstract concepts, frozen in a tableau, from which we can pluck them randomly. Instead, God, matches them to our individual needs and levels of preparedness.

“On some it bestows lucid spiritual knowledge of the grace they have lost, and to others it grants, through an indescribable mode of perception and by means of participation, clear understanding of the goodness for which they long.”

Thirdly, we exercise free will for the choices we make and, hence, bear responsibility for them and the state of our soul.  For example,

“our actions disclose the measure of our faith, and the strength of our faith determines the measure of grace that we receive. Conversely, the extent to which we fail to act reveals the measure of our lack of faith, and our lack of faith in turn determines the degree to which we are deprived of grace.”

This means, St. Maximos tells us, that envying others for their virtuous lives and the peace they experience is “more than misguided, for the choice of believing acting, and of receiving grace according to the measure of his faith, clearly depends on him and not on anybody else.”

THEOSIS AND THE SEVEN SPIRITS

Having shown how these virtues are interrelated and dependent on our level of preparedness and willingness to receive them, St. Maximos “deconstructs” the pieces to enable us to understand them in the context of ascendance to theosis by interpreting them in terms of the seven spirits that rest “upon the Lord. (cf. Isa. 11:2):”

• the spirit of the fear of God
• the spirit of strength
• the spirit of counsel
• the spirit of cognitive insight
• the spirit of spiritual knowledge
• the spirit of understanding
• the spirit of wisdom,

These are not merely static elements to be checked off a list. There is a logical sequence in the seven spirits, transforming them into a ladder by which we ascend to God.

First, St. Maximos says, we start our journey “by abstaining from evil because of fear;” next we “advance to the practice of virtue through strength.” By committing to practicing virtue, we advance to the ability to discern good from evil through the spirit of counsel. Cognitive insight “is an unerring perception of the ways in which virtue is to be practiced;” we understand the relationship between virtuous thought and action and enter into “a settled state of virtue.” We next ascend to the higher level of understanding in which we truly grasp and conform to “the divine principles of virtue that we have come to know.”  From this, St. Maximos writes, “we advance to the simple and undistorted contemplation of the truth that is in all things. From this point of vantage, as a result of our wise contemplation of sensible and noetic beings, we will be enabled to speak about the truth as we should.”

Far from being static, virtues are dynamic and interrelated, with each building new capabilities in us and setting the ground for the next, more advanced level of our relationship to God.

By choosing to follow this path of ascendance, we rise “step by step from what is remotest from God, but near to us, to the primal realities which are furthest from us but near to God.”

Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice, Third Century, #22-30

Building on the theme of gratitude that he introduced in the last few pages, St. Maximos makes us look at our relationship to God, and the path to complete union with him, through a number of different lenses.

STILLNESS

First, he depicts the state of true inner stillness of both thoughts and senses that the death of passions, the practice of virtues and gratitude enable.

Truly blessed is the intellect that dies to all created beings: to sensible beings by quelling the activity of the senses, and to intelligible beings by ceasing from noetic activity.

While purifying ourselves from dependency on worldly things is a first step, restraining our thoughts is another, even more difficult task. It involves resisting the temptation of dwelling on the “what if’s,” the “why not’s” and the “why me’s” that St. Maximos calls “outlandish speculations” that “disturb [our] contemplative activity.” They clutter our intellect and enmesh us into the ever-deepening pools of discontent, self-pity, resentment, depression, anger and desire to control.

Only through such “death of the intellect” –freeing ourselves from the tyranny of circular thinking– can our intellect become “able to receive the life of divine grace and to apprehend, in a manner that transcends its noetic power, not simply created beings, but their Creator.” This is when we will be able to understand and experience God’s goodness and truth.

GOODNESS AND TRUTH

Goodness, St. Maximos tells us, is more than practicing virtuous deeds. We experience it when the goodness of our actions is mirrored by the goodness dwelling in our hearts. Goodness represents “the lull expression of divine activity within us” not just on the outside.

The complement of   goodness is truth, “the simple, undivided knowledge of all the qualities that appertain to God.”

Goodness and truth, then, are not extrinsic qualities, foreign to our nature, but part of nature. They are not intellectual abstractions but dwell in our hearts and link action with the intellect, “nous.”

With our intellect purified and renewed, we can experience goodness and truth and partake of God’s holistic, integrated universe in which practice is united with action, and contemplative life with natural truth.  By rejecting created things, we have paradoxically reunited with them on a deeper level by looking past appearance to discern their inner essence and intrinsic goodness.  And by attaining spiritual knowledge, we transcend intellect itself.

“When goodness and truth are attained,’ we move more easily toward true union with God because “nothing can afflict the soul’s capacity for practicing the virtues, or disturb its contemplative activity with outlandish speculations; for the soul will now transcend every created and intelligible reality, and will enter into God Himself, who alone is goodness and truth and who is beyond all being and all intellection.”

TRANSFORMED RELATIONSHIP TO GOD ON THE PATH TO THEOSIS

Yet nothing can be attained without the grace of God, St. Maximos reminds us. To “enter into God Himself,” we must have experienced gratitude for his grace and, hence, restored our relationship with Him to the proper balance and proportions.

“Blessed is he who knows in truth that we are but tools in God’s hands,” St. Maximos says. “…that it is God who effects within us all ascetic practice and contemplation, virtue and spiritual knowledge, victory and wisdom, goodness and truth…All the achievements of the saints were clearly gifts of grace from God.

While we are but “tools of God,” we are engaged in a dynamic relationship with him in which we are far from passive. Though “we contribute nothing at all” to our achievements, there is one exception: our willingness and desire; “a disposition that desires what is good.”  And while our contribution is small, in relationship to God’s, it requires an arduous, lifelong journey of continuous ascendance and transformation.

Even though a saint does not achieve anything by himself, St. Maximos says,  but only through “the goodness granted to him by the Lord God according to the measure of his gratitude and love… what he acquired he acquired only in so far as he surrendered himself to the Lord who bestowed it…”  

Our journey then is not solitary but relational, transformational and synergistic.

OUR JOURNEY TO LOVE AND UNION WITH GOD.

As we ascend toward theosis, our vision is transformed, revealing more of God’s true nature and giving us a glimpse of his unspeakable beauty.

“In goodness the beauty that is according to God’s likeness is made manifest.”

Our purified intellect, now free of obsessive thoughts, achieves spiritual knowledge which “makes manifest the dignity of the divine image in a wholly unsullied state.”  

In other words, a different world is gradually revealed to us because we no longer rely on our limited, human intellect. Through “the life of divine grace,” our intellect has transcended itself and its own “noetic power.” We are now able to comprehend “not simply created beings, but their Creator.”

This is not the same world we experienced when were torn apart by anguish, anger, disappointment, discontent and despair. In this transformed reality, we become one with God as goodness and truth “give rise to the love that unites men with God and with one another. This love wrests the soul away from all that is subject to generation and decay and from all intelligible beings that are beyond generation and decay, and – in so far as this can happen to human nature – it intermingles the soul with God Himself in a kind of erotic union, mystically establishing a single shared life, undefiled and divine.

 

 

 

 

Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice, Third Century, # 11-22

In existentialism, freedom is the ability of individuals to define their own meaning of life despite the absurdity of a meaningless universe. St. Maximos tells us that salvation is a process of reunification with God and that confining the world to the limitations and loneliness of one’s own self, is enslavement and death.

Far from being random and meaningless, the travails of the human condition are opportunities for cultivating humility, growing spiritually and coming closer to God.

For St. Maximos and other desert fathers, achieving victory over passions and adversities is not transformative unto itself. To affect transformation, events or actions must contribute to a fundamental reorientation of self, such as when we convert victory into gratitude. Instead of enabling fragmentation between ourselves and an absurd and capricious universe surrounding us, we experience unity with God and full participation in divine intelligence, when we acknowledge God’s help in achieving this victory.

Providence has implanted a divine standard or law in created beings, and in accordance with this law when we are ungrateful for spiritual blessings we are schooled in gratitude by adversity and brought to recognize through this experience that all such blessings are produced through the workings of divine power. This is to prevent us from becoming irrepressibly conceited, and from thinking in our arrogance that we possess virtue and spiritual knowledge by nature and not by grace.

When victory over passions or adversity increases our delusion of power and hardens us with arrogance, gratitude is replaced by a sense of entitlement and growing distance from God.

…For when conceit about one’s virtue is left undisciplined it naturally generates arrogance, and this induces a sense of hostility to God.

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, charismatic Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky leads a life of reason and success yet one devoid of gratitude and joy. He rids himself of his habitual cynicism when once, on the battlefield, he gazes on the vastness of the night sky and is lost in contemplation. He senses the transformative nature of his encounter with a universe so much more enormous than himself and vows to change his life. But without accepting Christ and humbling himself to him, he misinterprets the signs, believing that he must now live for himself alone and not for others. As a result, he isolates himself further, hardens his heart and narrows his vision, losing his interest in war and politics and refusing to forgive his then fiancée, Nastasha Rostova, for her unfaithfulness.  It is only on his deathbed that his cynicism leaves him. He is suddenly filled with gratitude over Natasha’s tender nursing of him and forgives her. He sees his life as a gift and experiences love. After a dream in which death is revealed to him as an awakening to a new life, he dies peacefully.

St. Maximos sees ingratitude as fragmentation and gratitude as wholeness and union. Acknowledging the self as the ultimate authority and desired destination is tantamount to willingly locking oneself in a dark and narrow jail cell. Conversely, instead of being confining, true gratitude and submission to God opens the gateways to freedom.

Think about it. People, like organizations, become stale when self-satisfied and confident. In my experience as consultant, organizations that lacked curiosity about their customers and the outside world; were devoid of “hunger” and were indifferent to continuous learning and improvement, were those that stagnated and died. St. Maximos made similar observations about the state of our souls:

He who thinks that he has achieved perfection in virtue will never go on to seek the original source of blessing, for he has limited the scope of his aspiration to himself and so of his own accord has deprived himself of the condition of salvation, namely God. The person aware of his natural poverty where goodness is concerned never relaxes his impetus towards Him who can fully supply what he lacks.

He who has perceived how limitless virtue is, never ceases from pursuing it, so as not to be deprived of the origin and consummation of virtue, namely God, by confining his aspiration to himself. For by wrongly supposing that he had achieved perfection he would forfeit true being, towards which every diligent person strives.

In Eastern Orthodoxy we believe that man was originally created in communion with God and that the path to salvation is a continued journey toward theosis—union with God. Anything that disrupts this unending journey is an obstacle to salvation. St. Maximos tells us that ingratitude, and the belief that you are the sole author of your achievement, impedes the journey upward and returns us from the pursuit of life in God’s likeness to the isolation of a jail cell, inhabited only by us. Salvation is not achieved by our own will but though the grace of God. Gratitude for his grace fuels and re-energizes our journey, opens the gates to continuous spiritual growth and increases our desire for theosis.

(Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice Third Century)

Continue reading The Perpetual Movement Upwards in St. Maximos

(Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice, Second Century #89-100)

St. Maximos recounts for us the stages of sin and pits them against the stages of spiritual contemplation that lead to salvation.

He starts by clarifying that “appetites and pleasures” are not sins unto themselves. They are “in accordance with nature” and “not reprehensible, since they are a necessary consequence of natural appetency.”

It is the devil’s perversion of nature, not nature itself, that creates confusion and enslaves us to sin. St. Maximos compares the devil to the kingdom of the Assyrians (cf. 2 Kgs.18:11) that “has organized a war against virtue and spiritual knowledge, plotting to pervert the soul through the soul’s innate powers.”

His focus is not on static stages but the often-imperceptible processes of evolution as experienced by the senses and intellect. First, the demonic force “stimulates the soul’s desire to develop an appetite for what is contrary to nature and persuades it to prefer sensible to intelligible things. Then it rouses the soul’s incensive power to struggle with all its might in order to attain the sensible object which it desires. Finally, it teaches the soul’s intelligence how to contrive opportunities for sensual pleasure.”

This is why, though the created world is not evil, itself, he who has not yet achieved spiritual knowledge “is trying to escape from the confusion of sin” by renouncing passions since he is vulnerable to being overcome by them.

What a great tragedy that, lost in confusion, we are unable to see “the true nature of visible things” and discern in them “the divine and incorporeal essences of noetic realities;” the “images of His unutterable glory…”

Our only hope is to replace the perversion of the intellect that the devil brings upon us with the restoration of the true, God-given nature of creation through spiritual contemplation. St. Maximos presents to us the stages of such contemplation. Unlike the process of perversion and fragmentation that leads to our subjugation to sin, the ascent to theosis is one of integration, oneness and transformation. Renunciation of sin must be accompanied by the practice of virtue; word must be backed by deed:

If the words of God are uttered merely as verbal expressions, and their message is not rooted in the virtuous way of life of those who utter them, they will not be heard. But if they are uttered through the practice of the commandments, their sound has such power that they dissolve the demons and dispose men eagerly to build their hearts into temples of God through making progress in works of righteousness.

No matter how far along the path of spiritual contemplation we are, we can never fully hope to comprehend God’s essence. Instead of forcing understanding of the eternal God through the limited lens of temporal reasoning we participate in God through his energy. By leading virtuous lives, cleansing our souls of passions and engaging in spiritual contemplation we reach a state of dispassion in which they way we perceive and experience the world around us is radically transformed.

Instead of the kingdom of the Assyrians and subjugation to passions, we dwell in, and rule over, the “Jerusalem” of dispassion:

“every intellect crowned with virtue and spiritual knowledge is appointed like the great Hezekiah to rule over Jerusalem (cf. 2 Kgs. 18:1-2) – that is to say, over the state in which one beholds only peace and which is free from all passions. For Jerusalem means ‘vision of peace.’ “

Instead of allowing material things to dominate and lead us to sin, we see in them God’s image and a bridge to Him.

“…through natural contemplation an understanding of the nature of visible things – a nature which offers through you as gifts to the Lord the divine essences dwelling within it, and presents to you, as if presenting gifts to a king, the laws that lie within it – then you are ‘magnified in sight of all nations’ (2 Chr. 32:23).”

Instead of being trapped into a downward spiral, we rise “above natural bodies” to unite with God:

“For you are now above all things: through the practice of the virtues you have risen above natural bodies and the passions of the flesh, and through contemplation you have passed beyond the indwelling spiritual essences and qualities of all sensible forms.”

 

(Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice, Second Century) #77-89

The Trap of Natural Contemplation

Have you ever experienced situations when, remembering a perceived injustice against you or angered at life not conforming to your expectations, you rehash the situation in your mind over and over? Did you find that each recollection fans the flames of resentment or self-pity until they dominate your soul?

This is an example of what St. Maximos calls “natural contemplation”—keeping your mind on the natural, created world around you. He warns us against natural contemplation before achieving spiritual knowledge.

When our intelligence becomes “stupefied” (Όταν άνους ο λόγος γέννηται) ιt is incapable of looking past temporary passions to eternal truths and exercising discernment and self-control. Without spiritual knowledge, we are stuck in our passions, as in a tar pit. We cannot get past anger, resentment, self-pity or lust We allow them to dominate our souls and define our lives. We become, as St. Maximos calls it, “entangled.”

As always, St. Maximos does not leave us with statements and aphorisms but delves into the psychological progression of sin in our souls. Over time, without the resistance and self-control that spiritual knowledge enables, our submission to unexamined passions becomes a habit.  We become so used to, and invested in, a state of passion that we mistake it for normalcy and truth–who we really are; the inevitable outcomes of a situation or the way anybody else would react, after all.

Eventually, we come to justify our behavior and decisions so we can indulge in these passions, thus confusing falsehood with truth, evil with good.

For it was the devil who insinuated this habit into you and, relying on it, he boastfully approached your soul, vilifying truth with proud thoughts

[You] may deceive the intellect with what seems to be good and secretly turn its desire away from God, drawing its understanding, which seeks what is good, towards what is bad, because it has mistaken the bad for the good.

This is when our souls are most vulnerable, and our lives can spin out of control into misery and despair.

Guarding the Walls of the City

St. Maximos compares our soul to a city and admonishes us to guard its walls from the senses.

The mature intellect must with spiritual knowledge escape from invisible entanglements. While it is being provoked by evil powers it must not engage in natural contemplation or do anything but pray, tame the body with hardship, diligently bring the earthly will into subjection, and guard the walls of the city, that is, the virtues which protect the soul or the qualities which guard the virtues, namely, self-control and patience

The person who courageously closes his senses by means of the deliberate and all-embracing practice of self-control and patience, and prevents sensory forms from entering the intellect through the soul’s faculties, easily frustrates the wicked schemes of the devil and turns him back, abased, along the way by which he came..

Unity and Synergy

Yet guarding the city is not enough. God does not ask us to cut ourselves off from the natural world. After all, He created it and intended it to be good. Rather than rejecting it altogether, we are charged with restoring it to its true form, in unity with Him.

Theosis is achieved only by Συνεργία – synergy and cooperation between man and God, finite and infinite. When we possess spiritual knowledge, natural contemplation will reveal God’s purpose, instead of entangling us in passions. It will allow us to see the principles beneath the surface and understand how the material universe is connected to God:

The intellect reaps true knowledge from natural contemplation when, in a way that conforms to nature, it unites the itself by means of the intelligence.

St. Maximos further illustrates how unity comes about by making use of Hezekiah, and the story of his blocking of the springs outside the city, as a metaphor for the relationship between soul and matter. He tells us that:

When Scripture speaks of the springs blocked up by Hezekiah outside the city (cf. 2 Chr. 32:3-4. LXX), the city signifies the soul and the springs the totality of sensible things. The waters of these springs are conceptual images of sensible things.

The city and the springs cannot achieve fulfillment, however, without synergy and cooperation between them. To achieve these, “the river that flows through the middle of the city” acts as intermediary.

St. Maximos sees the river as a metaphor for “knowledge gathered in natural contemplation from these conceptual images of sensible things.” With the intellect alert and in the state that God intended it for, can now clearly discern between truth and falsehood, good and evil. With the knowledge we acquire we can see the true essence of created things and their connection with God, free of delusion.

This knowledge passes through the middle of the soul because it links the intellect and the senses. For the knowledge of sensible things is not entirely unconnected with the noetic faculty, nor does it depend altogether on the activity of the senses.

Submitting to passions is passive. Guarding the city is active spiritual warfare. Uniting is active and transformative action.  While the river acts as “the intermediary between the intellect and the senses and between the senses and the intellect,” it also serves as an active agent of change. It “brings about the union of the two with each other,” ποιείται την προς άλληλα τούτων συνάφεια.

It is when we discern God in sensible things and are able to see connections among seemingly disparate realms that:

Ineffaceable knowledge, whose spiritual gyration around God’s infinitude is unconditioned and beyond intellection.

 

#68-77

In St. John Climacos’ Ladder of Divine Ascent, we finally reach the uppermost and ultimate step of theosis through a process of purification and illumination that requires r an arduous climb of 33 steep steps. At the end of the journey, we are not rewarded by perfect wisdom, complete emptiness or absolute power but by the triad of faith, hope and love.

Similarly, St. Maximos makes a definitive declaration:

68. Without faith, hope and love (cf. 1 Cor. 13:13) nothing sinful is totally abolished, nor is anything good fully attained.

“Faith,” he tells us, “urges the beleaguered intellect to press on towards God and encourages it by equipping it with a full range of spiritual weapons.” With faith, it becomes possible for us “bravely to withstand the spate of trials and temptations, sought or unsought.” After all, who would climb 33 long steps toward union with God without faith? Faith, therefore, is the motivation, reason and first step in our journey upwards. It enables the glimmer of the light that we begin to discern at its end.

In patristic writings, especially in St. Maximos, no element is static and solitary. They interact with each other and engender transformation.

Faith is not a passive attribute. Once it enters our hearts, belief in the Resurrection transforms us by allowing the miracle of Resurrection to materialize within us.

It “is the first resurrection within us of the God whom we have slain through our ignorance.”  This is why “faith, rightfully expressing itself through the fulfillment of the commandments…”

Hope “is the intellect’s surest pledge of divine help and promises the destruction of hostile powers.”

It is possible for hope to dwell in us and replace darkness with light because our hearts have been resurrected through faith.

The return to God clearly implies the fullest affirmation of hope in Him

Despair is characterized by darkness and shortsightedness. We simply cannot see an alternative to current misery. We are trapped in the present of our misery and are unable to visualize and believe in a future in which we will feel different than the present moment. Some will choose to take their life because they perceive the current situation as permanent.

Hope, however, “brings future things before us as if they were present, and so it assures those who are attacked by hostile powers that God, in whose name and for whose sake the saints go into battle, protects them and is in no way absent.

Love

Love in Christ is not simply a “feeling” or “emotion.” There is no “cuteness” or romance associated with it; no soft music playing in the background. It is a state of total union with God that allows us to perceive the world as unified with Him and ourselves as participants in that unity. Instead of focusing on our personal agendas, jealousies, recriminations, ambitions and other created things, “love impels [our intellect] to concentrate its whole natural power into longing for the divine.”

With love, we never again feel estranged from others and God. Love “makes it difficult or, rather, makes it utterly impossible for the intellect to estrange itself from the tender care of God.”

Love in Christ is not only present in our relationship to loved ones. Because our hearts have been purified by passions and we have heightened spiritual knowledge, we can see others through the eyes of God and recognize them as equally worthy.

 “Love is distinguished by the beauty of recognizing the equal value of all men.”

“Those who by grace have come to recognize the equal value of all men in God’s sight and who engrave His beauty on their memory, possess an ineradicable longing for divine love, for such love is always imprinting this beauty on their intellect.”

Yet in the ever-ending journey toward theosis, understanding and experience are not adequate unto themselves without action. Here St. Maximos introduces the theme of total alignment between our will and purpose, and the right ordering between the two.

Intelligence begets spiritual knowledge which, in turn, begets faith. From faith springs hope and from hope love. Yet in addition to the interrelationships among these elements, there have to be powerful drivers that cut across and move us to action: desire, will and purpose.

72. Nothing so much as love brings together those who have been sundered and produces in them an effective union of will and purpose. Love is born in a man when his soul’s powers – that is, his intelligence, incensive power and desire – are concentrated and unified around the divine.

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

 

 

Next Session, Friday, March 29

“In Scripture,” St. Maximos tells us, “hearts capable of receiving the heavenly gifts of holy knowledge are called cisterns (cf. 2 Chr.26:10). To become a cistern, we need God’s Grace, in addition to our own efforts.  Yet not everyone is worthy of God’s grace.

In previous passages in the same chapter, we learned that “while every valley shall be filled,” not every valley is qualified to be filled (#53).

Similarly, while we all have the capacity to receive spiritual knowledge, not every heart has the capabilities to do so and become cisterns.

According to the dictionary: “Capacity is the ability that exists at present whilst capability refers to the higher level of ability that could be demonstrated under the right conditions.”  We are caught between God-given given ability and the potential of higher capabilities for fulfilling and directing this ability to God.

In these few paragraphs and elsewhere, St. Maximos talks about how to break this logjam and prepare for God to dwell within us and transform us into cisterns.

To become cisterns, we need God’s grace. To be worthy of his grace, however, we need to purify our souls from passions and choose a life of virtue.

This is not simply a matter of performing virtuous acts, however, or follow the Lord “superficially.” Rather it is a matter of a complete and transformative re-orientation. It shifts the presence of God from the margins (when your chores are done, and you are not busy) to the center of your life. God is now your sole focus, frame of reference and cherished destination. There is not a moment when you do not remember God’s presence and discern his principles under every created thing.

62. So long as the intellect continuously remembers God, it seeks the Lord through contemplation, not superficially but in the fear of the Lord,

St. Maximos frequently contrasts a life on the surface, limited to what one can see and sense, to a God-driven life of endless depth in which we can enter “hill-country’ (Deut. 11:11” —  the higher form of the spiritual contemplation of nature. Those who are being made into cisterns will achieve this if God teaches them “the qualities of the commandments and reveals to them the true inner essences of created beings.”

In this new life, nothing is a mere commodity because we can discern the underlying reasons and principles of the existence of every created thing.

When we see the essence of things beneath the surface, everything around us is transformed and we can see the higher purpose of things. Suffering is a bridge to God. Ambition or passion is not a mere personality characteristic to be leveraged for profit but a tool for doing God’s will. The particulars—a bird’s song, sunny day or a boring chore– are not random, disconnected phenomena. In them we discern shared universal principles and understand them as the interlinked building blocks and manifestations of God’s creation. Seeing the inner essence of things means that we are no longer living in a fragmented world. We perceive the connections and are, thus, connected to God. Our perception of the world is not fragmented but holistic and participatory.

To fully participate in God, however, we have to do so through both thought and action “by practicing the commandments. For he who seeks Him through contemplation without practicing the commandments does not find Him… The Lord guides to success all who combine the practice of the virtues with spiritual knowledge:”

To encourage us, St. Maximos depicts and makes concrete the rewards of this preparation:

60. He “hew[s] out cisterns in the desert, that is to say, in the world and in human nature. He excavates the hearts of those who are worthy, clears them of their material sordidness and arrogance, and makes them deep and wide in order to receive-the divine rains of wisdom and knowledge. He does this so that they may water Christ’s flocks, those who need moral Instruction because of die immaturity of their souls.