Knowing God

Which gives greater knowledge of a thing, an outside examination of it or union with it?  When it comes to the knowledge of God, the former is the way of Roman Catholics and Protestants; the latter is the way of the Apostles, of the Orthodox Church.

To know God, the Roman Catholics have tended to employ philosophical methods of inquiry, while the Protestants have tended to study the books of the Bible they take as canonical.  Both are useful in this quest, but neither is the pinnacle of theology.  The true theologians are those who have been united to God.

But the non-Orthodox sects claim that no union with God is possible.  They have placed instead a form of created grace between God and man:  For the Roman Catholics this is mediated through their seven sacraments; for the Protestants it is mediated through the Bible, its sole sacrament.  For these confessions, their sacraments can impart external knowledge of God and can help one live a virtuous life, but the unbridgeable chasm between God and man remains, which leads to the agnosticism and atheism that is spreading all across the post-Great Schism West.

For the Orthodox Church, there is no such problem.  Union with God is not only thought possible but is proclaimed to be the end for which mankind, and the cosmos, was created.  In the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist, of the Lord’s Supper, we eat the Holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and become one with Him:

 . . . St John [Chrysostom] hears Christ speaking to him:  ‘I am not simply joined with you; I am interwoven, I am eaten, I am attenuated little by little, so that the mixing, the interweaving and the union can be greater.  For things that are joined preserve their own boundaries, whereas I am interwoven with you.  I do not want there to be anything between us.  I want the two to be one.’  Between Christ and the Christian there is no longer anything intervening.  Everything dissolves in the light of His love:  ‘We and Christ are one’ (Hieromonk Gregorios, The Divine Liturgy, tr. Theokritoff, Columbia, Mo.: Newrome Press, 2012, p. 24).

Those who partake of this Mystery obtain a knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity that transcends anything our rational minds can conceive.

The Protestants think they have fully unveiled God by reading the Holy Scriptures with their own eyes, but they have deceived themselves.  The Bible can help us attain a certain level of lesser communion with God, but it is only through the Holy Mysteries, and particularly through the Mystery of Mysteries, the Holy Eucharist, that the deepest knowledge of God may be experienced (not simply understood with the mind) by man.

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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!