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.
--
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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