Month: May 2008

To brood on evil makes the heart brazen; but to destroy evil through self-restraint and hope breaks the heart

There is a breaking of the heart which is gentle and makes it deeply penitent, and there is a breaking which is violent and harmful, shattering it completely.

Vigils, prayer, and patient acceptance of what comes constitute a breaking that does not harm but benefits the heart, provided we do not destroy the balance between them through excess. He who perseveres in them will be helped in other ways as well; but he wo is slack and negligent will suffer intolerably on leaving this life.

A self-indulgent heart becomes a prison and chain for the soul when it leaves this life; whereas an assiduous heart is an open door.

‘The iron gate that leads into the city’ is a hard heart [Acts 12.10]; but to one who suffers hardship and affliction the gate will open of its own accord, as it did to Peter.

There are many differing methods of prayer. No method is harmful; if it were, it would be not prayer but the activity of Satan.

A man wanted to do evil, but first prayed as usual; and finding himself prevented by God, he was then extremely thankful.

When David wanted to kill Nabal the Carmelite, but was reminded of the divine retribution and abandoned his intention, he was extremely thankful. Again, we know what he did when he forgot God, and how he did not stop until Nathan the Prophet reminded him [cf. 1 Sam 25; 2 Sam 12].

At the times when you remember God, increase your prayers, so that when you forget Him, the Lord may remind you.

St Mark the Ascetic. On the Spiritual Law, 17-25. Philokalia volume 1, pp 111-112

As a certain strong wind blows in a dark and gloomy night and strikes all the plants and seeds, moving them this way and that in shaking agitation, so also man, who has fallen under the power of the night of the devil of darkness, also lies in night and darkness, and is moved, buffeted, and shaken by the stiff blowing wind of sin, and through all his nature (namely, in his soul, thoughts and mind) is thoroughly affected. All the members of the body are shaken; not one part of the soul or the body is immune from the passions of sin dwelling in us. In a similar way there is a day of light and the divine wind of the Holy Spirit, breathing through and refreshing souls who live in the day of the divine light. It passes through the whole nature of the soul, the thoughts and the entire substance of the soul and all the members of the body, as it recreates and refreshes them with a divine and ineffable tranquility.

This is what the Apostle said: “We are not sons of the night nor of the darkness, for you all are sons of light and sons of the day.” And just as in that other state of error the old man put on the whole, complete man and wears the garment of the kingdom of darkness, the cloak of blasphemy, unbelief, audacity, vaingloary, pride, avarice, concupiscence, and all the other similar adornments of the kingdom of darkness, ragged, impure and contaminated, so here, on the contrary, all who have put off the old and earthly man and from whom Jesus has removed the clothing of the kingdom of darkness have put on the new and heavenly man, Jesus Christ, so that once again the eyes are joined to new eyes, ears to ears, head to head, to be completely pure and bearing the heavenly image.

And the Lord has clothed them with the garments of the kingdom of unspeakable light, the garment of faith, hope, love, joy, peace, goodnedd, human warmth, and all the other divine and living garments of light, life, and ineffable tranquillity. The result is that, as God is love and joy and peace and kindness and goodness, so too the new man may become by grace.

And just as the kingdom of darkness and sin are hidden in the soul until the day of resurrection when the very body of sinners will be covered over with the darkness that is now hidden in the soul, so also the kingdom of light and the heavenly Image, Jesus Christ, now mystically illumines the soul and holds dominion in the souls of the saints. Indeed, Christ is hidden from the eyes of men. Only with the eyes of the soul is he truly seen, until the day of resurrection, when even the body itself will reign with the soul, which now, having attained the Kingdom of Christ, rests and is illumined by the divine life.

Glory to his compassion and mercy because he shows pity on his servants, illumines and frees them from the kingdom of darkness. And he bestows on them light and his kingdom. To him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

Macarius, Homily 2, end.

Χριστος ανεστη

When reading, one must “look at oneself and reflect on one’s soul as in a mirror”. Here Symeon follows the teaching of Mark the Monk about “attributing everything written in Scripture to oneself”. The Bible is a message addressed to the reader personally; it is not just a book which someone reads to demonstrate his erudition to others.

This is why Symeon would reject what we now call the historical critical handling of Scripture. He regards the Bible not as an object of critical analysis but as prophetic inspiration leading to ever more profound faith:

Let us now lay aside all vain and useless research . . . Let us obey the Master who says: “Search the Scriptures”. Search them but do not discuss them too much. Search the Scriptures but to not organize arguments concerning their external meaning. Search the Scriptures in order to learn about faith and hope and love.

Secular scholars who dare to interpret Scripture without having received the grace of God are very often an object of Symeon’s sharp criticism:

When without having received grace from the Spirit consciously and knowingly, I run to interpret Scripture without any shame and give myself the rank of teacher with no other claim to it than this falsely-called knowledge [ψευδωνυμω γνωσει], will God leave such conduct unjudged and demand no account of me? Certainly not.

. . . How can one achieve a true understanding of Scripture? Symeon compares Scripture with a house built “in the midst of secular and Hellenistic knowledge”, and a true understanding of Scripture with a closed chest, which is impossible to open using only human sagacity. There are two keys to open it: the fulfilment of God’s commandments and the grace of God. The first depends on man, the second on God: there is a συνεργεια (co-operation) of man and God in opening the hidden meaning of Scripture. When the chest is unlocked, one gains access to true “knowledge” (γνωσις), and “the revelation of mysteries that are hidden and veiled in the letter” of Scripture.

Therefore the mystery of Scripture is opened only to those who try to embody what is read by practicing it and who receive a revelation from God. In fact, Symeon incorporates here the notion of the true gnostic who possesses knowledge hidden from the majority. He quotes a maxim, in which God is the speaker: “My mystery [belongs] to Me and to My own.” There are God’s “own” people, to whom the meaning of Scriptures is opened, and “others”, from whom it is concealed:

For the divine things . . . are recorded in writing and are read by everybody, but they are disclosed only to those who have warmly repented, and who through sincere repentance have been well purified . . . For them the depths of the Spirit are revealed, and from them flows forth the word of God’s wisdom and knowledge . . . But for others it is unknown and concealed, and in no way is unlocked by Him Who opens the mind of the faithful to understand the Scriptures.

. . . Thus the reading of Scripture becomes a source of mystical inspiration. We can distinguish several steps by which, according to Symeon, one can ascend to such a level of understanding of Scripture. On the first step a man reads the Bible, paying attention to the “words and their combinations”, that is, trying to understand the literal meaning of the book. On the next step he starts to attribute scriptural texts to himself and to fulfil the commandments as if they were given to him personally. The more carefully he follows the Gospel in his life, the deeper his knowledge of the “hidden” meaning of Scripture becomes. Then God Himself appears to the man, and, by the grace of the Holy Spirit and through communion with the divine light the man becomes γνωστικος, that is, acquires perfect knowledge of the mystical meaning of Scripture.

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev. St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2000. Selections from pages 49-50, 51, 52.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing:
thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness

Rejoice! His Eminence Archbishop Hilarion of Sydney, Australia and New Zealand has been elected Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which election has been confirmed by His Holiness Patriarch Alexy of Moscow and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, along with his elevation to the rank of Metropolitan. His Eminence the Most Reverend Hilarion, Metropolitan of Eastern America and New York, will be enthroned this coming Sunday 18 May 2008.

Είς πολλά έτη Δέσποτα!

The earliest confession of Christian faith — κυριος Ιησους — meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), page 1

There are several problems here:
1.) It is a stretch to call κυριος Ιησους “the earliest confession of Christian faith.” A title and name do not a confession make.

2.) It is not “Christ’s peace” that suffered rejection upon the Cross, but Christ Himself. Nor was this “peace” raised up, but Christ Himself was. A work in which an “Eastern Orthodox theologian” loses focus on Christ on page 1 is not promising.

3.) “…an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history…” — buzzwordy blather. That “incomprehensibly present” is a classic. How would you comprehend it to note its presence were it incomprehensibly present? Incomprehensible polysyllabic pseudo-postmodern piffle is more like it. I can see how this book gained so much attention, now!

4.) “…because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world…” — uh, no, it hadn’t, nor has it yet, but it will someday, when there’ll be no mistaking that it is God’s final judgment.

5.) “…in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.” — Wrong. In the theology of the Orthodox Church “Jesus of Nazareth” didn’t need “vindication,” being God and Man. The statement smacks of adoptionism.

Five strikes in one sentence on the first page. This book can wait.

This boundless, magnificent garden formed by the deep furrows of the waves, bordered by the caves and rocks of the sea, its surface mirroring the dome of heaven, is no ordinary garden. Just as Yannios’s garden-plot, softly caressed by the sea-breezes which crease it into seductive, innumerable lines, as on the forehead of some king’s lovely bride displaying a capricious temper, so the liquid garden of the sea, the unpredictable sea, displays a childish temper and obstinacy, at times furious and at other times seductive. The sea is the garden, and Yannios’s donkey, plunging ‘its feet among the coll petals which waved and rustled around its hooves’, is no ordinary donkey but a little boat: when he tethers it to a post, he is actually securing it in some spot of the harbour, and when he untethers it he is taking it into the sea in order to harvest his ‘vegetables’, ‘cauliflowers and melons’, ‘the fruits of his labour’, fruits de mer, as the gastronomically-informed French would have it.

Homer is invoked from the beginning of the story with his comparison of the waves of the sea with the waves of undulating wheat in an unharvested field. Elsewhere Homer has compared the foamy waves of the sea with a flock of little white sheep. Although not of the same etymology, the affinity between skáros, the sleeping quarters for a flock of sheep, and skarí, the name usually given to a large boat, evokes in modern Greek a common homophonic derivation between terms referring to the worlds of both land and sea. A similar analogy can be seen between skáfos (skiff) and skáfi (wash-tub), confirming the ancient association where the lines between the two elements are blurred. This correspondence can also be seen in Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ (oinops pontos), and in the representations on Attic vases of Dionysos sailing on a boat whose mast is a grape-covered vine seemingly growing out of the ship’s hull. The land enters into the sea and the sea into the land. Papadiamadis takes this correspondence one step further by turning the sea into the land. In a horizontal sense, the expanse of the sea is the garden and in a vertical sense the dome of heaven is mirrored in the sea; the sun at the end of its laborious course plunges through this dome to rest at the bottom of the sea, and the moon grows ever more radiant over it and the distant light of the Pleiades sparkle in its unexplored depths.

This is an ancient, primeval garden that dates ‘from the beginning, from the creation of the world’, and contrary to the assertion of Bacon according to whom nature is an open book in which everyone can read the history of creation, this primeval Homeric garden is ‘an open book written in hieroglyphic characters’ that ‘you cannot read . . . unless you are a seer’. The antiquity of the garden is further emphasized by the hieroglyphic characters in which it is described as well as the cryptic sayings of Homer, who is then conjured again become those ‘hieroglyphs’, literally ‘sacred engravings’, are compared with the ‘”emblems of sorrow”, the cracked lines engraved on the naked skulls of the dead, of which it is said that although they indicate the fate of the dead person, you cannot read them unless you are a seer . . . and anyhow it is too late then, since the dead man’s life is over.’ Unless this passage is read in an eschatological way it is totally devoid of meaning. How can anyone read the engravings on the skull while the person is alive? The engravings, like the hieroglyphic characters, have no useful purpose since the reveal the fate of the dead person post mortem, when nothing can be done about their life. It is the same with the scriptural garden. Death cannot be read in the garden of Eden which is full of life. But in the fallen garden, which is marked by death, the remnants of this once living garden can be read eschatologically, for the emblems of sorrow are there for all to see and interpret.

Yannios’s hardships have revealed to him the meaning of exile from the living garden; the garden that he finds in the sea is but a vestige of the original garden of life; it is a garden that is harvested with toil, with the sweat of one’s brow, that yields its once living fruits as dead ‘vegetables’—all the sea-urchis, oysters, octopuses—as a reminder that in the fallen garden it is necessary to consume dead matter in order to live. And it is this garden which is rife with the ’emblems of sorrow’ for the seer who knows how to decipher their meaning, one which is inhabited and epitomized by the solitary, sorrowful figure of a woman, her head covered with the black scarf of mourning, whose body is coated with weeds and scales as with a coat of skin (see Genesis 3:21), the ‘oyster-covered bride with shells for eyes’, who becomes unmarried Yannios’s ‘unbedded’ companion, the once living garden that will threaten to engulf the life of a drowning child and spew it out as dead matter. It is for all these reasons that the book, albeit open, retains its eschatological meaning hidden within its sacred engravings, and must be read as signs of the Kingdom of God, of our exile from this Kingdom which will be given back to us. For the unfortunate Yannios, who has suffered so much in this exile from the lost garden, the meaning of the earthly garden has already been revealed as in ‘a book written in shining capital letters, clear, intelligible . . . .’

An explanatory endnote from editor Lambros Kamperidis on Alexandros Papadiamandis’ short story “Black Scarf Rock,” in The Boundless Garden: Collected Short Stories, volume 1 (Limnia, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2007), available here.

The stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis are brimming with bright sadness. What else is there to say, but, “read them”? Though we will not enjoy in this volume (except vicariously through such notes as above) the elaborate intermillennial wordplay of Papdiamandis’ Greek which defies labeling much less translation, we can still appreciate his mastery of the short story format. These stories are certainly gems. Whether we call them pearls from the deep or peas from Yannios’ boundless garden, they are beautiful. This collection is a labour of love for those involved, and their loving selection of the best of Papadiamandis’ myriad stories is appreciated, leading more of us to love this author.

The volume is beautifully printed on smooth, creamy paper, a delight to the touch as well as the eyes, and the softcover is a gently textured thick paper, something like watercolor paper, actually. Publisher Denise Harvey has done a wonderful job in not only producing a beautiful selection of stories in translation, but a beautiful book. This first volume of English translations of Papadiamandis’ stories is also volume seventeen of Harvey’s Romiosyni Series, a series of apparently English works (whether translations or originals) involving the history, culture and ethos of post-Byzantine Greece. I’ll certainly be looking for more of the volumes of the series, myself, if this volume is any indication of the quality of the others. My thanks to all involved.