New blog address

Eucharistic Grail

I will switch over my links tomorrow, deo volente.

More on theosis, maybe switching blogs

I used to think wordpress was cool.  But I can’t get my “tags” to show up on the side.  In this sense blogger is better, but my blogger account connected with my email acct was hacked last year by Muslims and NATO agents, so I will keep this for now until I set up a new email address.

Back to theosis,

“Nevertheless,” I replied, “I do not understand how I can be certain that I am in the Spirit of God. How can I discern for myself His true manifestation in me?”

Father Seraphim replied: “I have already told you, your Godliness, that it is very simple and I have related in detail how people come to be in the Spirit of God and how we can recognize His presence in us. So what do you want, my son?”

“I want to understand it well,” I said.

Then Father Seraphim took me very firmly by the shoulders and said: “We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don’t you look at me?”

I replied: “I cannot look, Father, because your eyes are flashing like lightning. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain.”

Father Seraphim said: “Don’t be alarmed, your Godliness! Now you yourself have become as bright as I am. You are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God yourself; otherwise you would not be able to see me as I am.”

Then, bending his head towards me, he whispered softly in my ear: “Thank the Lord God for His unutterable mercy to us! You saw that I did not even cross myself; and only in my heart I prayed mentally to the Lord God and said within myself: ‘Lord, grant him to see clearly with his bodily eyes that descent of Thy Spirit which Thou grantest to Thy servants when Thou art pleased to appear in the light of Thy magnificent glory.’ And you see, my son, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble prayer of poor Seraphim. How then shall we not thank Him for this unspeakable gift to us both? Even to the greatest hermits, my son, the Lord God does not always show His mercy in this way. This grace of God, like a loving mother, has been pleased to comfort your contrite heart at the intercession of the Mother of God herself. But why, my son, do you not look me in the eyes? Just look, and don’t be afraid! The Lord is with us!”

After these words I glanced at his face and there came over me an even greater reverent awe. Imagine in the center of the sun, in the dazzling light of its midday rays, the face of a man talking to you. You see the movement of his lips and the changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel someone holding your shoulders; yet you do not see his hands, you do not even see yourself or his figure, but only a blinding light spreading far around for several yards and illumining with its glaring sheen both the snow-blanket which covered the forest glade and the snow-flakes which besprinkled me and the great Elder. You can imagine the state I was in!

“How do you feel now?” Father Seraphim asked me.

“Extraordinarily well,” I said.

“But in what way? How exactly do you feel well?”

I answered: “I feel such calmness and peace in my soul that no words can express it.”

More on Hans urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov

Two books I am reading right now:  HuvB’s Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor and Bulgakov’s The Lam of God.  An underlying problem in both books (and in Christology in general) is how to solve “3rd term aporias.”  In other words, how do find a middle ground between the two natures of Christ (or between God and creation or between the persons of the Trinity) that prevents “autonomy” on one hand and introducing yet a new term on the other.  And Balthasar often uses “Sophia-like” language to solve the problem–and I am in full agreement with him.

Bulgakov became famous (infamous?) for his Sophiology.  Many thought he went pagan.  (While I disaprove of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ heterodoxy, his comment on the condemnations of Bulgakov are telling:  “They responded to Sophia the way the Greeks responded to Paul’s preaching on Anastasis–he is preaching a new goddess!).

At one point in Cosmic Liturgy Balthasar devotes several pages to attacking Bulgakov and Russia with all his might.  It’s weird, actually.  It’s obvious that his knowledge of Bulgakov is from 2nd hand sources. I think he would agree with most of it.  And then he goes on a weird rant on how eastern and Russian mysticism (exemplified by Bulgakov) led to Soviet terror.  I mean, I really don’t have a response to this except to, likewise, hit below belt back at him:  Balthasar is German-ish and wrote in the 1930s and 1940s and he liked Hegel; therefore, Balthasar’s writing led to Hitler!  Two can play at this game.

But to be more fair to Balthasar than he is to Bulgakov, Balthasar’s discussion of “natures” and “Hypostasis” scores big time.

 

Sergius Bulgakov: Russian Theosis

From Partakers of the Divine Nature

http://www.amazon.com/Partakers-Divine-Nature-Development-Deification/dp/080103440X/ref=pd_sim_b_1#reader_080103440X

By whose authority?

I found this gem in Emile Brehier’s book on the Middle Ages.

Metaphysical discussion in the early Middle Ages centered around preparing men for service to God.  While seemingly dull, this trained the minds to recognize and work with different levels of authoritarian texts–and how to apply those texts in concrete ways. It goes something like this, “Authority is not something simple; even the heretics based their arguments on authority (Scripture)…[St Vincent laid bare the thought of the Middle Ages for identifying authority: one should show preference for the opinion of the majority and look with distrust on private matters.     If heresy threatens to spread, however, one should cling to the opinions of the ancients, one should follow the decisions of an ecumenical council or, if no council has been held, question and compare Orthodox teachers and hold to the positions common to all” (11).

I didn’t see this one coming

Okay, I sometimes pick on anabaptists for being anarchists.  While fun, and sometimes true, I do grant them their consistency.  Anyway, I realized that for all Calvinists’ rhetoric about “godly social order” and a Christian rule of law, it’s really a joke.  I mean, I saw one guy defend America’s imperial wars.  He ridiculed the websites I used but never challenged my facts (or the fact that he made himself a bedfellow with Holbrooke, Biden, and Obama).

Liberating wildness of Classical Trinitarianism

Studying Orthodox and classical Trinitarianism and Christology is like drinking heady mead.  It fills one with a wildness.  If I–by the grace of God–can get this right, I really won’t err too badly on the doctrine of Church and salvation.

I used to always fret and worry in covenant theology.  There were so many dialectics and aporias.  This guy seemed to say this and be right.  The other said the contrary and he, too, had Scripture to back him.  Nary a word on the Trinity.  I always doubted, if all these guys claimed to be right, yet contradicted each other, how could I, a nobody, hope to get it right?

Then Jay Dyer told me that if I got Trinity and Christology correct, the rest would fall into place.  Now I don’t worry about being “an arminian” or a “calvinist,” and the bad implications of those two positions.  If I get the Trinity right, I can’t get too much wrong.

Books I need to finish before Christmas

Peter the Great by Robert Massie.  Manages to combine fair enough scholarship with a popular audience.  Massie can do something few (any?) scholars have ever done:  write in such a way that the common man can read you.   The book gives a decent overview of the change between Tsarism and Western Imperialism.  Also documents that Peter was inducted into the Masonic lodge.

Light from the East by Alexie Nesteruk.   about 30 pages into it.  Good so far.  Deals with science and faith from an Orthodox viewpoint.  He avoids simplistic reductions.  He doesn’t grab his ankles every time a Christ-hating scientist or secularist is offended by the faith, but he also avoids the perils of fundamentalist interpretation as well.

The Cosmic War by Joseph Farrell.  I know he gets slammed a lot, but most of the people who do the slamming aren’t really physics scholars (neither am I).  And his thesis about the pyramids is independent from the rest of hi work, so criticizing the Giza Death Star in no way invalidates other things he says (it’s amazing how people forget that).  Anyway, I am ultimately more interested in his work on alchemy and banking.

The Cosmic Liturgy by Hans urs von Balthasar.  While probably one of the best works on St Maximus, in many ways this is a terribly-argued book.  Balthasar is dealing from the bottom of the deck.  Much of the book is engaged in blatant special-pleading to show that St Maximus secretly rejected Byzantium and became a Roman Catholic.  While this book helped me on a number of issues dealing with the cosmos and transcendence, and summarizing St Gregory of Nyssa and Origen, it is a big let-down.

The Lamb of God by Sergei Bulgakov.  Aside from a few troubling remarks, this book has a number of good insights and in many ways is a vast improvement over von Balthasar. In fact, I will use Bulgakov’s work to blister parts of HuvB’s thesis.

Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor.  Pretty good summary of Western Europe.

The Idiot by Dostoevksy.  Harder to read than Brothers Karamazov.  I should have finished it by now.  Lots of good parallels to the redemption of Russia.

War and Peace by Tolstoy.  Really is a good book.  Still, when you are five hundred pages into it and Tolstoy is still setting up the story, well…you get it.

How do I get my “Tags” to show up on the side?

I am having trouble seeing my tags in the sidebar.  What gives?

Filioque or Triad?

I am rereading Lossky’s In the Image and Likeness of God.  I read it last year but really didn’t know the issues involved.  I need to really hammer down what I believe about Triadology.  Apostolic succession, Eucharist, liturgy–that’s wonderful but keeping the discussion at that level means that Roman Catholicism is just as viable an option–which it is not.  The Filioque, Triadology, and Absolute Divine Simplicity are the issues upon which the debate hangs.  They are “deal breakers.”  The following is from Lossky’s book. I am going to spend future posts unpacking these two pages.

According to St. Maximus, God is “identically a monad and a triad.”{24} He is not merely one and three; he is 1=3 and 3=1. That is to say, here we are not concerned with number as signifying quantity: absolute diversities cannot be made the subjects of sums of addition; they have not even opposition in common. If, as we have said, a personal God cannot be a monad– if he must be more than a single person– neither can he be a dyad. The dyad is always an opposition of two terms, and, in that sense, it cannot signify an absolute diversity. When we say that God is Trinity we are emerging from the series
of countable or calculable numbers.{25} The procession of the Holy Spirit is an infinite [85] passage beyond the dyad, which consecrates the absolute (as opposed to relative) diversity of the persons. This passage beyond the dyad is not an infinite series of persons but the infinity of the procession of the Third Person: the Triad suffices to denote the Living God of revelation.{26} If God is a monad equal to a triad, there is no place in him for a dyad. Thus the seemingly necessary opposition between the Father and the Son, which gives rise to a dyad, is purely artificial, the result of an illicit abstraction. Where the Trinity is concerned, we are in the presence of the One or of the Three, but never of two.

The procession of the Holy Spirit ab utroque does not signify passage beyond the dyad but rather re-absorption of the dyad in the monad, the return of the monad upon itself. It is a dialectic of the monad opening out into the dyad and closing again into its simplicity.{27} On the other hand, procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone, by emphasizing the monarchy of the Father as the concrete principle of the unity of the Three, passes beyond the dyad without a return to primordial unity, without the necessity of God retiring into the simplicity of the essence. For this reason the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone confronts us with the mystery of the “Tri-Unity.” We have here not a simple, self-enclosed essence, upon which relations of opposition have been superimposed in order to masquerade a god of philosophy as the God of Christian revelation. We say “the simple Trinity,” and this antinomic expression, characteristic of Orthodox hymnography,{28} points out a simplicity which the absolute diversity of the three persons can in no way relativize.