Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Holiness: Church, Pope, and Bible


The idea of holiness in the West has become greatly deformed over the years.  Once she knew what it was and experienced it deeply, but because of her sundering from the Orthodox Church, she has forgotten. 

Holiness in the Orthodox Church

True holiness is not a product of a legal transaction, Christ’s merits vs our sin debt, nor simply a matter of doing the right thing in all situations.  It is achieved by actual union with God, with the Uncreated Light that pours forth from the Holy Trinity.  To achieve such a oneness we must make use of all the resources the Church offers us:  the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Mysteries (Sacraments), prayer, the Holy Scriptures, ascetic exercises (standing, bows, prostrations, fasting, etc.), holy icons, the lives and teachings of the Holy Fathers and Mothers, and so on.  Through them, the body, soul, and nous are purified and made ready to receive the Holy Light, the Grace of God.  And this is what we see over and over again in the Saints of the Orthodox Church, men and women shining with this Grace, just as the Holy Prophet Moses did.  Here is an account from the life of a recent Saint, the Holy Elder Joseph the Hesychast (+1959, celebrated 15 Aug.):

The future Elder yearned to pray unceasingly, but had great troubles - he could not find a spiritual father, and the indifference of many monks towards unceasing prayer.

"I was inconsolable because I was longing so ardently to find what I had set out for in search of God; and not only was I not finding it, but people would not even being helpful."

In the midst of this experience, however, he was granted a vision of the uncreated light, and the gift of ceaseless prayer was given to him.

"At once I was completely changed and forgot myself. I was filled with light in my heart and outside and everywhere, not being aware that I even had a body. The prayer began to say itself within me... "

During this time, he spent time in remote places to recite the Jesus Prayer. . . .

In 1938, seeking solitude from the increasing number of monks who sought his advice, he went to a cave at Little St Anne's, where the brotherhood grew to seven monks.

["On one occasion it was a feast of the Lord, I think Epiphany, and Father Arsenios and the Elder Ephrem went to a vigil nearby, as was their custom. Our Elder, however, did not go, but stayed in his artificial cave occupied with inwardness and prayer. ‘As I was sitting there immersed in myself,’ he told us, ‘and noticing the sweetness of the prayer, all of a sudden I was filled with light – not like the daylight we see, of course – and then it grew so that the whole place became light. Suddenly there appeared three little children, about six to eight years old, completely alike in appearance so that it was impossible to make out any distinguishing feature. They were so charming and so lovely that the sight of them captivated all my senses. I did not feel anything else, I just admired them. They were a short distance from me, a few yards away, walking towards me with the same rhythm, the same step, the same movement. All their movements and their features were as if they were one, and yet they were three. And they were singing, very melodiously, the verse, ‘As many as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ, alleluia’. When they were very close to me, so close that I thought I could have touched them if I had stretched out my hands, they moved rhythmically back again, without turning their backs, and continued the same hymn; and at the alleluia they blessed me with their little hands, as a priest does’.

When I asked him, out of curiosity, what he was thinking during those moments, he told me that there are no thoughts or questions at that time, because the mind that is held captive by contemplation and suffused with light by divine grace does not have any activity of its own. ‘The only thing I remember’, the Elder went on, ‘is that I was in such a state of bliss that I felt something akin to what Peter said, “It is good for us to be here” (Mt 17:4), and I was wondering, how do they know how to bless when they are so young? This lasted as long as the divine grace and love for mankind wished it, and then the light went away along with the trio of little boys; then I came to myself and saw that my usual time had gone past, because the alarm had gone off a long time before without my hearing it.’"


Holiness in Roman Catholicism

When the bishop of Rome broke communion with the rest of the Orthodox Christian world in 1054, subtle yet profound changes took hold in the West.  The nous, the faculty of the soul that allows for the super-rational union with God, was forgotten, reducing mankind to a dyad of body and soul (or mind), with the emphasis usually on the mind.  The Orthodox teaching of salvation (theosis) as an ongoing and ever deeper union with God, the Holy Trinity of Love Who invites mankind to share in the unutterable bliss of the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was therefore also replaced with a new soteriology of atonement:  appeasing a wrathful Father, Who is infinitely offended by man’s sin, through the torture and death of His Son. 

Salvation takes on a legalistic character:  acquiring enough of the infinite merits of Christ to offset the debits of our sins.  The more merits we attain, the better off we will be in the afterlife.  Acquire enough merits, and we can escape the pains of hell and purgatory (ratified by the post-Schism Papacy as a true doctrine) and earn a good place in Heaven where we can view the essence of God forever (an impossibility according to the Orthodox Fathers; no one can know the essence of God) in a static sort of happiness, to borrow from Fr John Romanides.

All the facets of the Christian life, the Mysteries, the ascetic labors, etc., are no longer a means of purifying ourselves in preparation for union with the Uncreated Light of Tabor; they are a means of acquiring Christ’s merits.  The idea of a saint still exists in the Roman Catholic system, but they are transformed from healed human beings who have beheld the Glory of God to exceptionally good or virtuous people.  Likewise, the sobriety, watchfulness, and humility that characterize the Orthodox saints are replaced by an unbalanced vainglory that leads to bizarre acts of self-mutilation (stigmata and others) and demonic visions and voices and sounds.

Holiness in Protestantism

This twisting of the Apostolic teaching of the Orthodox Church by the Papacy led understandably to the Protestant Reformation.  But instead of returning to the original Church of the Orthodox, they went their own way.  Consequently, rather than correct the errors of Rome, they worsened some of them.  Satisfying-the-wrathful-Father paradigm of salvation remained, but now instead of earning Christ’s merits by virtuous actions - almsgiving or going on pilgrimage, for instance - we receive an infinite abundance of them merely by professing faith in His atoning work to save us from our sins.  The Mysteries/sacraments are de-emphasized; Grace is transmitted mainly by preaching from the Bible.  Sainthood is expanded to embrace all Christians who accept Protestant teaching.  However, a trace of the old veneration of saints remains, as some continue to dedicate their churches to saints, name their children after them, and so on.  Sanctification is boiled down to perfectly keeping the commandments.

Holiness in Post-Protestantism

Christianity in the [u]nited States undergoes a further deformation with the ‘revivals’ beginning in the 18th hundredyear (the 1st and 2nd Great Awakening, Cane Ridge Revival, the burned-over district in New York, etc.) and continuing on to today.  This constitutes what Harold Bloom calls ‘post-Protestantism’ in The American Religion.  What little remained of Orthodox teaching and practice is lost.  Sacramentalism and the creation, community and history:  These no longer have any relevance for ‘Christian America’.  The individual encounters God in isolation from everything and everyone.  The ecstatic, emotional ‘worship experience’ is the goal of American post-Protestantism, and creeds and organized religious congregations only get in the way of it.  Any sense of historical continuity is overthrown; the New must reign.  Training the senses to be subservient to the soul via fasting and so forth, for the sake of purifying and healing the whole man, is looked down upon; gratifying the senses is encouraged instead. 

Those honored as saints in this dispensation (since the concept of sainthood is mostly forgotten in it) are mostly pop culture figures of the current moment:  sports stars (Dabo Swinney of Clemson), rock and roll singers (John Cooper of Skillet), businessmen (Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A), and such like.  Post-Protestants usually do not read about the Lives of the Saints of previous generations, those great works lovingly put together by St Gregory of Tours, St Gregory the Great, St Bede, and, more recently, St Dimitri of Rostov or St Nikolai Velimirovich, and others, or the works about the saints (as Protestants defined that term) such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.  Most don’t even know about the heroes of their own sects - Luther, Calvin, Knox, and so on.

Salvation is defined in terms of acquiring a peculiar sort of knowledge:  They know that Jesus has saved them and will take them to Heaven one day.  Since they are already quasi-divine, chosen beings, even the Bible loses its relevance in their lives as they make their ascent back to God.

Most all of this points once again to the sad truth:  Americanism is Gnosticism.  Americans think they have discovered something new in the world, but they have only revived something very old:  an ancient heresy the Church struggled against in her early days.  And now they are making ready the way for the chief servant, Antichrist, of mankind’s most ancient foe, the devil.  And they do not even realize it.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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