Teachings

These teachings I received from others. Through these teachings and others, I found Christ.

Person, Operation, & Nature

It is common to refer any number of vices to “human nature”. In fact, the problem with this kind of thinking is the failure to distinguish between person, operation, and nature. Nature is that which is common to all members of a species. There is one nature of human beings, another of dogs, another of sheep, etc. There is no such thing as a nature that is not enhypostasized as a person. Person is that which is utterly unique to the individual and is not duplicated in any other member of the species. Operations are those functions and activities proper to a particular nature, and visible only in persons. It is human nature to have a body, to be either male or female, etc. By nature, man has the capacity to reproduce, has a mind, a will, etc. Operations proper to human nature include reproduction, thought, the exercise of the will, and so on. The person is the absolutely unique individual member of the species. Each person is a whole universe, utterly unique, absolutely distinct as an individual.

Confusing person, operations, and nature results in such mis-constructions as “sin nature” (confusion of operation and nature) or the claim that greed is in our nature (confusion of operation and nature). In fact, it might be said that each proper operation of human nature can be perverted into one of the passions. Lust, for example, takes the place of love. Likewise, the failure to see the absolutely distinct individual, confusing a person with an idea, is a confusion of person and operations. Every genocidal dictator has done this, killing off the “enemies of state”, the “extremists”, the “terrorists” or what have you. Substituting operations for persons dehumanizes the individual and is the first step to justifying genocide. In fact, the very confusion may be considered a form of genocide since it destroys, in our consciousness, the realization of each person as such. Doctrinal genocide is the hallmark of heterodox forms of “Christianity”.

In theology, the confusion between one operation and another, dissolving each into facets of nature, leads to the perrenial heterodox debates over such things as predestination vs. free will, since it confuses foreknowledge (knowledge) with foreordaining (an act of will). Likewise confusing all of the divine “attributes”, or more properly energies, e.g. goodness, beauty, love, justice, etc. leads to such pagan and romantic constructions as the notion that the beautiful is the good. The persistent attempts to confuse human attributes with divine counterparts, as though the Creator were analogous to the creation, rather than simply the reverse, reduces (or exalts) all such constructions as absolutes with pretentions to divine sanction. An ugly face or lowliness, poverty, or illness, then become a divine curse, while a beautiful body or great wealth or high position or health are regarded as signs of divine blessing. All this thinking is pagan, rather than Christian.

Time

Time is a creature. Nothing ever co-existed with God. Not souls, not matter, and not time. Rather, it is these things that Christ took upon Himself, Incarnate for our sake.

Symbol

Symbol (symbole in Greek) is not in ancient Greek language and conception and in Holy Orthodoxy merely a representation of something, as it came to be thought of in the West. A symbol is both a representation of a thing and the thing itself. So, when we say that anything is symbolic – the Water of baptism as The Holy Spirit, the icon of a Saint as the Saint, the Bishop as Christ, we are saying that something is both represented and is also mystically or liturgically present.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy in ancient Greek language and conception and in Holy Orthodoxy is not a vertical hierarchy. It is not a series of greater and lesser authorities. Rather it is horizontal. The signifance of a person, whether Bishop, Priest, or Layman, whether male or female, is different/horizontal rather than greater-lesser/vertical. It is different with respect to roles. Whereas in Roman Catholicism, a priest may celebrate communion completely alone, with no one else present, this is forbidden in Holy Orthodoxy. There can be no Holy Eucharist without the laity, without at least one layman present and one priest. We are none of us without the Bishop, and man is not without woman or woman without the man. We are all essential, indespensible, irreplaceable. We have different roles; there is an order to things; there is preference of honor, but there is no greater significance than any one individual.

Matter

Matter is good, being the creation of God. We are matter. We are not merely a soul that lives in the body as in a shell or a house. Rather the body is us and was meant to be inseparable from the soul. In fact, spirit, in one sense, is precisely that integration of body and soul which man possessed at his creation. Man is body and man is mind, will, and emotion. To lose any part of this is destruction and death. For any part of man to be separated from another is death. Therefore, for us to be saved, our bodies must be saved along with our minds and our wills and our emotions. No part of us must be lost, or else salvation becomes destruction, and the creation of God was then not good or else is not the recipient of the Grace we receive through His Incarnation.

Death

The universal problem is not sin but rather death which came by sin and yet causes sin. Sin is an act and, far from receiving any kind of “sin nature” as an inheritance from Adam (an act cannot be inherited), we received Death which has spread to all. Death is not merely the expiration of things or mortality. After all, man was always mortal, and never had by nature immortality, in the sense not that he was destined for death, but that his existence was contingent, finite, having been created and not having co-existed eternally with God. Rather death included the expiration of the body, so that man might not live forever in his individual sins, but also involved the more comprehensive disintegration of man. Disintegration means to dis-integrate — to fall apart — to lose integration. Death is evident not only in the loss of body, over time through sickness, decay, and final expiration into dust, but also in the internal conflict between man’s mind, will, emotions, and between these and the body. The frustration of man’s individual will is one sign of death — that men want what they cannot have and have wants we cannot satisfy. Likewise that we have wants that conflict with the wants of others is a sign of death. The death of all else, of plants and animals, and even the decay of the universe into entropy, are products of our own death with which we infected the world. We are the slayers not only of ourselves but of all things. Death is both a mercy, allowing us to live in time in which we may be redeemed, but also is our destroyer. Death is our torment and our torturer. Death is also the cause of our sins, the passions being the signs of death at work in us. It is death that is the cause of all suffering of any kind, and it is death from which we need redemption.

Economia

The Economy is unique to the individual. Each individual is so unique as to be a whole universe unto himself, so that salvation is unique to each individual. Each person is so unique that his sins, even if another is said to have committed the same sin, have never been committed by anyone else anywhere. Salvation then is wholly individual, wholly unique to the person. So, when the Church exercises economy (economia) in the case of an individual, it is for that person alone and no other. One person may be forbidden to drink wine, while another person encouraged to do so. One person may be required to keep a strict fast while another may be allowed dairy or meat. salvation is ultimately individual. The corruption of this is the notion that salvation is wholly personal, in the sense that one makes one’s own rules for it, apart from the Church. Far from being an affirmation of the Economy of Christ, this is a repudiation of it since it denies that Christ was in fact incarnate and his Body is the Church apart from whom there is no salvation. The Economia is the Incarnation, the entirety of God’s action toward His Creation. Theology, by contrast, is God in and of Himself apart from any created thing. The entirety of the Incarnation is a condescension to us, to our weakness and depravity, even to death. Likewise, the Incarnation is only truly redeeming if it involves our individual minds and wills, or else the mind or will would be overcome, destroyed, and not redeemed. Salvation by the Incarnation is individual, as are all applications of Economia within this Great Economy.

The Redemption of Creation

Man is made from clay, so that all the aspects of matter are in him. In becoming man for our sakes, Our Lord Incarnate, redeemed not only man, but through man brought redemption to all things in which man participates — that is, all things. All of creation is recapitulated in Christ’s recapitulation of man, and so through us, through Christ, all things can be redeemed.

The Holy Trinity and The Incarnation: Theology and Economy

God is unknowable, inexpressable, unapproachable, indescribable, incomparable. So that even such appelations as these must not in fact be speaking of God. If one says that God is beyond undescribable, one must then say “beyond being beyond indescribable” and beyond that, and beyond that, ad infinitum. All things said of God which pretend to describe God’s essence are in fact not speaking of God at all, but of our own attempt to conceive He who cannot be contained in human thought. As such, all such thought and speech is idolatry, representing not God but constructs of the human intellect. All such thought and speech is heresy, false, and wholly fails to indicate God, or even whether God exists. In fact, if God exists, then I do not and, likewise, if I exist, then God does not. Such is the incomparability of God, that I cannot find any analogy between God and man. If it were possible, then God would be contained in a created concept rather than be the Creator of all. By describing God, we repudiate anything that we could rightly mean by “God”. We participate in the construction of an idol, naming it God, the God of our imagination, and we then worship it. In this sense, then, all things said of God are false, and no true thing can be said. This is why we do not permit the veneration of statues. A statue, as a three-dimensional construct, implies that one can circumscribe its subject, that one can know from all sides its fulness, as when we attempt to contain in created minds He who is beyond being contained and beyond human conception.

Orthodox theology is apophatic, meaning it consists in denials of known and knowable things, rejecting these as God. Only in cataphatic theology, by contrast, can one say “God is this” or “God is here or there” or “God exists”. This is not the Orthodox way, and may only be used like baby’s milk to guide someone into a more ethical life or from paganism into the beginnings of contact with Orthodox theology. Rather than making pronouncements that presume to identify God, Holy Orthodoxy continually seeks to reject created notions of God. A goal of prayer is to remove from one’s thoughts all images of God at all, intellectual or otherwise. If God is, then I could not know it, nor discover it by any means, nor would God have any relevance to me, unless God revealed Himself. This is our preparation for the Incarnation.

Orthodox theology confesses three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided. To be undivided and one, or wholly simply, means that there is nothing distinguishable, analagous, knowable. The essence of God cannot even be spoken of. It is not simply that we must not, but that in fact we cannot. The Persons are knowable because they have been revealed by the Son who, in the old covenant, was to come, and in the new covenant has come to us. If god cannot be compared to anything, is not analogous to anything known, the only way that God could be known by his creation or have any relationship to us, would be for God to become what I am, to become man, and participate in those things which I do know, time and history, matter and flesh, soul and body. This is precisely the Incarnation of Christ. The manner in which Christ has come is to become something He was not. God became man. The Incarnation is the Son, the Creator entering his creation, the timeless entering time, the immaterial becoming matter. The Incarnation is simply that God became man. Without the Incarnation, any talk of God is nonsense. Even so, for God to become what I am yet remain what He is — unknowable, unapproachable — he must become man while remaining God. Again, this is exactly what the Incarnation is.

The reason this can be confusing to Westerners is the Western confusion of person with energies and with essence. We say that God is Three Persons, one Essence. Unknowable in essence, but revealed in Persons through the Incarnation of the Son. When we speak of God’s goodness, his love, his kindness, we are speaking of the uncreated energies of God – His Grace. This is God’s relational action toward man – God’s energia. God – Three Persons – remains unknowable in the one essence, revealing himself through energies (through His Grace), as Three Persons, and most explicitly by His Son, Incarnate for us.

Christ is one person, two natures, one person, who participates in, fulfills, recapitulates, is and remains all categories proper to man and all categories proper to God. The Son then, remaining always God, unknowable in essence, became man, two natures (God and man), one person (Jesus Christ), so that man could be united to God (theosis/deification/divinization) in Christ, Himself being God and man united one person. The purpose of the Incarnation is likewise the union of God and man (theosis) for all those who partake of Christ’s flesh. It is, in short, that we may know God through union with God in the person of Christ, receiving the fullness of His energies, while God remains in essence ever unknowable. We become united as persons to the person of Christ, without loss or destruction of our minds, will, emotions, bodies, and our natures are so divinized by this perfect union with distinction that we become God. As the Fathers teach, God became man by nature that man might become God by grace. Theosis, the process of salvation, means man’s nature becoming so divinized in the union, that man becomes God.

All of our lives then, are meant to become a synergy, a united energy of man and God. Just as all miracles and mysteries involve both Creator and the created matter, so our lives are to be the full salvation by union with God in Christ of our bodies and souls, so that spirit and spirituality for us is the perfect destroyer of death, of that fragmentation which ripped body and soul, that disintegration of flesh, mind, will, emotion into enmity. For us, salvation from Death is the reintegration of body and soul, so that nothing of us is lost, by divinization of body and soul in Christ Incarnate.

The Jesus Prayer

When you say the Jesus prayer, the proper wording is “the sinner” not “a sinner”, because each person’s sins are unique, and while we may have each committed anger, our anger is wholly unique to us. Even the priest says, when giving us Holy Confession, “I the unworthy priest… who has committed sins like these”

When you say the Jesus prayer for others, the proper wording is “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon ([if Orthodox:] the servant/handmaiden of God) __________, and by his/her prayers save me.” This is to avoid presumption on our part. Even when praying for the non-Orthodox, we do not presume upon whether and how God answers them, and we pray in sure hope of their Salvation.

The Apostolic Succession

The Succession does not consist in the mere legal fact of concecration or succession from the Holy Apostles. Rather, the Succession consists in 1) The concecration proceeding unbroken from the Holy Apostles, 2) The continued transmission of the Apostolic creed (expressed at Nicea), 3) The continued transmission of the microcanon of the Apostolic scriptures (the canon of books expressed at Nicea), 4) The macrocanon of the Apostolic scriptures (i.e. the apostle’s actual intepretation of the scriptures). Without any one of these elements, there is no succession. The bishop, to be a bishop, must be the possessor and guardian of these things. It takes no legal decision to defrock a bishop who departs from succession, rather such a one has defrocked himself already, and the Church has already witnessed to this.

Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

The filioque is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the one sin that will not be forgiven.