Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Chapters 4-12. Translated by Members of the Fellowship of St. Albans and St. Regius. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1957 [1944].

 

Passing from a discussion of God’s being or ‘nature’ to His manifestations, including creation ex nihilo and the Christian Church, Lossky undertakes “a sort of apophaticism in reverse.” Those familiar with ancient philosophy know that it “knows nothing of creation in the absolute sense of the word”; the god of the philosophers is a natural force that orders inchoate primal matter, which exists eternally. In antiquity, the Bible alone posits creation, the appearance of “an entirely new subject, with no origin of any kind either int he divine nature or in any matter or potentiality of being external to God.” In creating, “God ‘makes room’ for something which is wholly outside of Himself,” something “entirely ‘other'” than Himself, and emphatically not an extrusion or diffusion from Himself—which would be a neo-Platonic, not a Biblical notion. Creation is “a work of will not of nature,” of free will. It is not, however, an arbitrary act but a rational one, as indicated by John the Apostle in his statement that in the beginning was the Logos. Creation is an act of “thought-will” or “volitional thought.” “The divine ‘willings’ are the creative ideas of things, the logoi, the ‘words.'” And creation “is an act proper to a God who is personal, to the Trinity whose common will belongs to the divine nature and operate according to the determination of thought.” Lossky distinguishes thought-will from the Augustinian and Thomistic understanding, that the ideas are “the eternal reasons of creatures contained within the very being of God”; nor, one might add, are they the arbitrary intentions of Allah, the god of the Muslims. They are, one might say, in-between those two claims. They express not God’s being but His willed manifestations, his energies. “If the divine ideas are not the essence of God itself, if they are thus as it were separated from the essence by the will, then it follows that not only the act of creation but also the very thoughts of God Himself can no longer be considered as a necessary determination of His nature and part of the intelligible content of the divine Being”; creation isn’t “a poor replica of the Godhead” but “an entirely new being,” “willed by God and the joy of His Wisdom,” what Gregory of Nyssa calls “a marvelously composed hymn to the power of the Almighty”—and also, quite likely, to His wisdom, justice, and grace.

The created world is a world of change, of becoming. The end or purpose of the phenomena is “outside themselves,” as “God alone remains in absolute repose; and his perfect inviolability places Him outside space and time,” “produc[ing] in creatures the love which makes them tend towards Himself.” “Every created thing has its point of contact with the Godhead; and this point of contact is its idea, reason or logos which is at the same time the end towards which it tends”—the ultimate end being the Logos Himself, “the second person of the Trinity who is the first principle and the last end [as well as the origin] of all created things,” as ordained by the one will of all three Persons of the Trinity. This is what Lossky means by the “deification” of created beings. God can be known by His creatures through His creation but also directly by the “mystical contemplation” of the few Christians, the true saints, who have “abandoned all” the things of the world for a glimpse of the divine thought-wills themselves.

More comprehensively considered, each of the three Persons causes created being, but in different ways. The Father is “the primordial cause”; the Son is the “operating cause”; the Holy Spirit is the “perfecting cause.” That is, “it is by the will of the Father” that created beings exist, the creative work of the Son that they “come into existence,” and by “the presence of the Spirit that they are made perfect.” All of these are acts of grace, which is “implied in the act of creation itself.” The philosophers’ understanding of nature is truncated because their “experience reaches only to nature in its fallen state.” They do not know, cannot know without divine revelation, that “created beings have the faculty of being assimilated in God because such was the very object of their creation.” Even in “the condition of mortality which is the consequence of the coming of sin, the spiritual nature of the soul maintains a certain link with the disunited elements of the body, a link which it will find again at the moment of the resurrection in order that the parts may be transformed into a ‘spiritual body,’ which is indeed our true body, different from the grossness of those we now have.” This is why the Orthodox Church “has never entered into alliance with philosophy in any attempt at a doctrinal synthesis.” It can “make use of philosophy and the sciences for apologetic purposes,” but has no need “to defend these relative and changing truths as she defends the unchangeable truth of her doctrines.” So, for example, “revelation remains for theology essentially geocentric,” even if natural physics has long abandoned that notion, because human beings find their salvation “under the conditions which belong to the reality of life on earth.” Philosophy can at most only “grasp the whole under the aspect of disintegration which corresponds to the condition of our nature since the fall,” while “the Christian mystic…entering into himself, and enclosing himself in the ‘inner chamber’ of his heart, finds there, deeper even than sin, the beginning of an ascent in the course of which the universe appears more and more unified, more and more coherent, penetrated with spiritual forces and forming one whole within the hand of God.”

Created nature consists of the intelligible universe and the sensible universe. The sensible universe consists of the heavens and the earth. The earth is the home of ‘man,’ male and female. The first man, Adam, was created in order to reach “perfect union with God and thus grant the state of deification to the whole creation,” of which he was ordained to be the ruler. “Man had only to give himself” to God “in a complete abandonment of love” to achieve this purpose. He failed, and so “it is in the work of Christ, the second Adam, that we can see what it was meant to be.” Just as Adam might have been “able to transform the whole earth into paradise,” into the Garden of Eden, so will Christ transform “the whole cosmos disordered by sin” into a new heaven and a new earth, an earth populated by those saved and transfigured by God’s grace. The path to this deification goes through the Church, inasmuch as “the history of the world is a history of the Church which is the mystical foundation of the world,” a “new body, possessing an uncreated and limitless plenitude which the world cannot contain,” energies that “appear as the grace in which created beings are called to union with God.”

Before considering the Church more fully, Lossky addresses the question of what the Bible means by saying that man was created “in the image of God.” “The Biblical narrative gives no precise account of the nature of the image,” although it does make it clear that this characteristic distinguishes man from other created beings. Orthodox theologians decline to identify the image of God as any one characteristic of human beings: his rule over the earth, his mind or his reason or his freedom or the immortality of his soul. It is all of these things, no one of them. More precisely, the image of God is the soul’s mingling with the Holy Spirit, its condition of being “helped by something greater than itself,” its intimate connection with divine grace. “It is a participation in the divine energy proper to the soul,” its “communion with God,” which “is meant by the phrase ‘part of the deity.'” It is therefore “impossible to define what constitutes the divine image in man,” any more than it is impossible to define, to find the limits of the God Who is limitless, infinite. This does not mean that man is God; man is still a created being, even if his soul is immortal. 

Man is therefore “not controlled by nature,” not an entirely physical entity operating whose actions are determined entirely by natural law. He has freedom. He is a person. “We do not know the person, the human hypostasis in its true condition,” its prelapsarian condition, “free from alloy.” As persons, we are distinct from nature. As “individuals,” we are mixtures of persons “with elements which belong to the common nature.” “The man who is governed by his nature and acts in the strength of his natural qualities…sets himself up as an individual, proprietor of his own nature, which he pits against the natures of others and regards as his ‘me,’ thereby confusing person and nature,” the latter being tainted with sin. Hence human egoism. But the person “is free from its nature, is not determined by it.” The “root principle of asceticism” is the intention of breaking egoism, ‘individualism,’ by renouncing “one’s own will,” which is “the mere simulacrum of individual liberty, in order to recover the true liberty, that of the person which is the image of God in each one.” “Far from realizing himself fully, a person who asserts himself as an individual, and shuts himself up in the limits of his particular nature, becomes impoverished. It is only in renouncing his own possession and giving itself freely, in ceasing to exist for himself, that the person finds full expression in the one nature common to all,” “enriched by everything which belongs to all.” This is “the foundation of all Christian anthropology, of all evangelical living,” a life lived in “imitation of the nature of God,” the God Who speaks to him Person to person.

Lossky cites St. Maximus, who distinguishes the natural will, “the desire for good to which every reasonable nature tends”—the human nature described by Aristotle—from the “choosing will, which is a characteristic of the person.” By nature, we desire, will, act; as persons, we choose, “accepting or rejecting what the nature wills.” Only the perfected person, the saint, has seen such a transformation in his nature that he “has no need of choice,” knowing “naturally what is good” because his nature has been thoroughly transformed by the grace of God within him. Since human nature is “overclouded by sin,” not knowing “its true good,” it “is always faced with the necessity of choice”; “this hesitation in our ascent towards the good, we call ‘free will.'” To make that ascent, “the concurrence of two wills is necessary”: God’s and man’s, “the human will which submits to the will of God in receiving grace and making it its own, and allowing it to penetrate all its nature.” “As the will is an active power of rational nature, it acts by grace to the extent in which nature participates in grace.” 

Just as grace enters us through our will, by the will of God, so “evil entered into the world through the will,” a will or perhaps more accurately a mind deceived, “tak[ing] a mere shadow of the good for the good itself.” “The Serpent me beguiled,” Milton’s Eve says. Evil “had its beginnings in the spiritual world,” in “the will of the angelic spirits” who intended to negate creation and indeed God in “a furious hatred of grace,” the first instance of what we now call ‘nihilism.’ Because God prevents them from destroying all of creation, “they seek to destroy creation from within, by turning human freedom towards evil.” Three wills, then, operate in man: God’s, “perfect and saving”; man’s, “not necessarily pernicious, but certainly not in itself a saving will”; and demonic, “seeking our perdition.” If the human will refuses repentance, attempting instead to justify the ways of man to God, attempting to absolve itself of its own guilt, it “hardens, and shuts itself off from God.” “Man has obstructed the faculty in himself for communion with God, has closed up the way by which grace should have been poured out through Him into the whole creation.” God accordingly limited human sin by “allowing it to end in death.” Only Christ, the second Adam, can restore the vocation of the first Adam. “In breaking the tyranny of sin, our Savior opens to us anew the way of deification, which is the final end of man.”

“What man ought to have attained by raising himself up to God, God achieved by descending to man,” by becoming man while remaining God in what St. John the Damascene calls “a mode of economic condescension.” The virgin birth of Jesus “suppressed the division of human nature into male and female.” His crucifixion unites paradise, Adam’s “dwelling place,” with the fallen earth upon which the sons of Adam now dwell, telling the thief who acknowledges Him as his Savior, “today thou shalt be with Me in paradise.” His ascension after death unites earth first with the sensible heaven and finally with the spiritual heaven, “the world of mind.” He finally “presents to the Father the totality of the universe restored to unity in Him, but uniting”—but not ‘synthesizing,’ as in Hegelianism—the “created to the uncreated.” Such divine providence, such divine love for man, “make[s] men profit greatly from all the vicissitudes of their wanderings, provided that man understands how to recognize the will of God.” By His providence, God “govern[s] the fallen universe by accomplishing His will without doing violence to the liberty of creatures.” The incarnation, the virgin birth, was itself both the work of God and, in the words of Nicolas Cabasilas, “the work of the will and faith of the Virgin.” “In the person of the Virgin, humanity has given its consent to the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell among men.” Thus, while the Word became flesh, “deity did not become humanity, or was humanity transformed into deity.” Jesus took on the limitations, indeed the penalties, of fallen human nature—suffering, death—without becoming sinful Himself. This is why He could redeem human beings from their sin, by paying the penalties justly incurred for sin without having committed any sin. “While in the Trinity there is one nature in three hypostases, in Christ there are the two natures in the one hypostasis.” This hypostasis is defined apophatically: without sin, without mingling, without change, and without destroying either of the two natures. In a way, this also registers in the “self-emptying” character of agapic love, exemplified on the human side by saintly asceticism and on the divine side by Christ’s “renunciation of His own will in order to accomplish the will of the Father by being obedient to Him unto death and unto the cross,” by submitting not only to suffering and death but to abasement. “The outpouring, self-emptying of Himself only produces the greater manifestation of the deity of the Son to all those who are able to recognize greatness in abasement, wealth in spoliation, liberty in obedience.” 

Death by crucifixion followed by the Resurrection, revealing “the incorruptibility of nature” at its core as a work of the Creator-God, complete the work of Christ. But although “the work of Christ is consummation,” the “work of the Holy Spirit is waiting for accomplishment.” Christ has founded his Church, His assembly, but He has a co-Founder, the Holy Spirit. “The work of both is requisite that we may attain to union with God.” The Church is Christ’s “body”—one might suggest the politeuma, a ruling body or assembly. The Holy Spirit is he ‘that filleth all in all,'” as the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians. That is, the Holy Spirit “quickens” the Church, animates it, “fills her with divinity, for the Godhead dwells within her bodily as it dwelt in the deified humanity of Christ.” This, too, is part of God’s economy or manifestation in this world. As St. Symeon the New Theologian writes, the Holy Spirit “fulfils through the Son that which the Father desires as if it were His own will; for the Holy Trinity is indivisible as to its nature, substance and will.” “Christ returns to the Father so that the Spirit may descend,” bearing witness to the Son invisibly, in contrast to the Son, Who made Himself visible, taking on human flesh. Invisibly, the Holy Spirit reveals the Trinity, making the truths God imparts “luminous, manifest, almost tangible to us.” God’s grace “signifies all the abundance of the divine nature, in so far as it is communicated to men.” Whereas the work of Christ centers on human nature, which he “recapitulates in his hypostasis” and redeems, the work of the Holy Spirit “concerns persons, being applied to each one singly.” He does so “in a manner which is unique, ‘personal,’ appropriate to every man as a person created in the image of God.” St. Basil compares the Holy Spirit to a sunbeam, “whose gracious influence is as much his who enjoys it as though he were alone in the world, but which also blends with the air, and shines over land and sea.” enabling “all things that partake of Him [to] enjoy according to the capacity of their nature, not according to the extent of His power.” While Christ is “the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity,” the Holy Spirit “grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.” Christ unifies, the Holy Spirit diversifies, the first “lend[ing] His hypostasis to the nature, the other giv[ing] His divinity to the persons” by dwelling within each soul who accepts Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit, witness of Christ. In this, the Holy Spirit bestows “the common energy of the Holy Trinity which is divine grace upon human persons.” With this, “the divine life” opens up “within us in the Holy Spirit,” who as it were “substitutes Himself…for ourselves,” as “the will of God” becomes “no longer external to ourselves” but internal, though remaining distinct from our still-fallen nature. The Spirit manifests Himself outwardly insofar as “our human will remains in accord with the divine will and cooperates with it in acquiring grace, in making it ours.” In this way, the Holy Spirit, in “communicating Himself to each member of this body, crates, so to speak, many Christs, many of the lord’s anointed.” Christ is the solid Rock, the cornerstone of the Church, while the Holy Spirit is “the source of personal deification”—dynamic, teleological.

The Church may appear to be a ‘totalitarian’ institution, with no individual rights respected, “but, at the same time, each person in this body is its end and cannot be regarded as a means,” unlike the way of modern tyrannies. The Church rules, after all, by the consent of the governed; no one is forced into it, and “the ultimate aspirations of each one are in accord with the supreme end of all, and the latter cannot be realized at the expense of the interest of any.” The human persons, not ‘individuals,’ can “only attain to perfection within the unity of nature,” and the Incarnation is “the foundation of this unity of nature,” while the Pentecost, the celebration of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the Apostles, is “the affirmation of the multiplicity of persons within the Church.” This makes the “catholicity” of the Church more than simply universal, as it “comprehends not only unity but also multiplicity”; “each part possesses the same fullness as the whole.”

This is not to say that all persons within the Church share equally in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. As “giver of wisdom He is hardly present in them all but only in those who have understanding, that is to say, in those who by their struggles and labors in God have become worthy of the deifying indwelling of the Holy Spirit.” All persons within the Church are “sons of God,” all saved, but the saints of the Church are few. Put another way, “in the Church our nature receives all the objective conditions” of the union of our persons with God, but “the subjective conditions depend only upon ourselves.” We have the freedom to pursue the Christian life more or less ardently and consistently. “We are called to fulfill and to build up our persons in the grace of the Holy Spirit,” “in the words of St. Maximus) “to reunite ‘the created nature to the uncreated nature through love, causing them to appear in unity and identity through the acquisition of grace.'” Lossky cautions that no one, not even the saints, can attain “perfect union with God” before the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, with one exception: Mary, the Mother of God, who “entered into perfect union with the deity” on the day of the Pentecost. “In the two perfect persons—the divine person of Christ and the human person of the Mother of God—is contained the mystery of the Church.”

In terms of its ruling persons and visible practices, Lossky considers the status of Church bishops and the significance of icons, so conspicuous in Orthodox worship. “The bishop acts by divine authority: in submitting to the will of the bishop one is submitting to the will of God.” However, unlike the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church, an Orthodox bishop is not infallible with respect to doctrine. “If he has not himself acquired grace, and if his understanding is not enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” he might act “according to human motives” and “err in the exercise of the divine power which is conferred upon him.” If so, he is not only “responsible to his actions before God.” If he acts “contrary to the canons…he becomes the promoter of schism and places himself outside the unity of the Church.” As to the icons, like the consecrated objects in the Roman Catholic service, they exist not “simply to direct our imagination during our prayers” but form “a material center in which there reposes an energy, a divine force, which unites itself to human art” in still another manifestation of God

But of course these and other ruling institutions of the Church provide the framework for “the true end of the Christian life,” the “acquiring of the Holy Spirit.” By “acquiring” Lossky means an ever-increasing acquisition, inasmuch as all Christians have faithfully consented to the entry of the Holy Spirit into their souls. The place of good works in this continuing quest is simple: “only those good works which are done in the name of Christ…bring us the fruits of the Holy Spirit,” as “a work is good in so far as it furthers our union with Giod, in so far as it makes grace ours.” Genuine virtues are not natural qualities aiming at eudaimonia, as in Aristotle, but “the outward manifestations of the Christian life,” products of the “synergy of the two wills, divine and human, a harmony in which grace bears ever more and more fruit.” Aristotelian virtue is “rational” (both Pelagius and Augustine, his critic, ‘rationalize’ the virtues, as does Aquinas); Orthodoxy takes its bearings from grace, which is a mystery, inasmuch as it comes from God, Who does not explain why He grants it. There is no reason to suppose God’s grace to be irrational, only that we do not know what His reasoning is. The closest human beings can come to the perfection of virtue in this life is in the ascetic life of monasticism, the life of ardent hearts and calm spirits. By “heart” Lossky means “the center of the human being, the root of the ‘active’ faculties, of the intellect and of the will,” what St. Macarius of Egypt calls “a workshop of justice and injustice.” By the grace of God, the spirit (nous) guards the heart. “The spirit is the highest part of the human creature,” the “contemplative faculty by which man is able to seek God.” Contemplation is “the seat of the person, of the human hypostasis which contains in itself the whole of man’s nature—spirit, soul, and body.” “Without the heart, which is the center of all activity, the spirit is powerless. Without the spirit, the heart remains blind, destitute of direction” or almost inevitably churning off in the wrong direction. “The practice of spiritual prayer in the tradition of the Christian East consists in making the heart ready for the indwelling of grace by constantly guarding its interior purity.”

The ascent “towards perfect union” with God proceeds “simultaneously on two different but closely interrelated levels”: action and contemplation, as befits the transformation of the whole person, the experience of “spiritual realities,” the gnosis which consists in “the purifying the heart” in the person’s “active life,” cooperating with the “contemplative faculty,” which “coordinat[es] and unit[es] the human being in grace.” Taken together, activity and contemplation in this life make the human spirit “vigilant,” attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, exhibiting “the faculty of discernment and of the judgment in spiritual matters which are characteristic of human nature in its state of wholeness.” This begins with the penitence, “the conversion of the will” from worldly things to spiritual things, continues with the addition of purification or “liberation from the passions.” Without discarding either continual penitence or continual purification, the final condition is perfection, “that perfect love which is the fullness of grace.” In this life, repentance, purification, and perfection “can have no end.” 

In this Christian life, prayer is even “more perfect than the practice of the virtues,” since “the virtues cannot possibly be assured if the spirit is not constantly turned towards prayer.” Agapic love or charity is “the greatest of the virtues” and “is itself the fruit of prayer” because “in prayer man meets with God personally—he knows Him and he loves Him.” A Christian’s prayer life begins with petition, with asking God for blessings, but petitioning ends “when the soul entrusts itself wholly to the will of God” in a condition of “absolute peace and rest.” In such a life, “prayer must become perpetual, as uninterrupted as breathing or the beating of the heart,” a condition achieved by the monks dedicate themselves, a “complete spiritual science.” This is ‘ek-static,’ a reaching out not only beyond the world but beyond oneself to God. This goes beyond the ordinary notion of ecstasy, which is temporary, a sort of ‘peak experience’ achieved rarely, the person who contemplates God has opened himself to His steady and perpetual love, a love that owes nothing to created nature, the realm of change. In keeping with the Great Commandment of Jesus, “love of one’s neighbor is the sign of having acquired the true love of God.” As St. Isaac the Syrian has it, such persons, if “cast into fire ten times a day for the sake of their love of mankind, even this would seem to them too little.” Such self-sacrificing love is not the imitatio Christi commended in the West but “a life in Christ,” the most intimate gnosis, knowledge of God. “Only a spiritual life that is fully aware, a life in constant communion with God, is able to transfigure our nature by making it like the divine nature, by making it participate in the uncreated light of grace, after the example of the humanity of Christ who appeared to the disciples on Mount Tabor clothe in uncreated glory.” The Church provides the conditions of such an ascent, but the Christian himself must bring “a firm resolve.” 

By “renouncing his own will and his natural inclinations,” the person who takes “the way of union” with God does not diminish himself. “It is just by this free renunciation of all which by nature belongs to it that the human personality comes to its full realization in grace” since “what is not free and definitely conscious has no personal value.” Consciousness or gnosis grows with his advance toward spiritual union. It is lack of awareness that is Hell, “the final destruction of the person.” As St. Macarius has it, God, being Light, “strengthens the rational powers,” “fill[ing] at the same time both intellect and the senses, revealing itself to the whole man, and not only to one of his faculties,” surpassing them all and “changing our nature.” “The blessed will see God face to face, in the fullness of their created being,” living “a conscious life in light, in endless communion with God.” Lossky quickly adds that “few, even of the great saints, reach this state in their earthly life.” It is rather in the parousia, the return of Christ to earth and His creation of a new heaven and a new earth, that “the whole created universe will enter into perfect union with God.”

That is, God “is more than an essence: He overflows His essence, manifests Himself beyond it, and, being incommunicable by nature, communicates Himself” through His energies, “pour[ing] the fullness of His deity upon all those who are capable of receiving it by means of the Holy Spirit.” His Church, His politeuma on earth, bears witness to this “fullness of the Holy Spirit.”

 

 

Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Chapters 1-3. Translated by Members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Original French version published in 1944.

 

Lossky begins by stating his intention: an exposition of “a spirituality which expresses a doctrinal attitude.” That is what he means by “mystical theology.” In this, he insists on a sane balance: “in a certain sense, all theology is mystical, inasmuch as it shows forth the divine mystery,” namely, “the data of revelation”; however, mysticism must not be understood as utterly unknowable, entirely personal or ‘subjective,’ which would put it beyond theology—beyond a logos about God derived from God’s revelation. Properly understood, “theology and mysticism support and complete each other,” inasmuch as “the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith,” while “theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone.” Neither ‘subjectivism’ nor ‘objectivism’ will do: “Outside the truth kept by the whole Church personal experience would be deprived of all certainty, of all objectivity. It would be a mingling of truth and of falsehood, of reality and of illusion: ‘mysticism’ in the bad sense of the word. On the other hand, the teaching of the church would have no hold on souls if it did not in some degree express an inner experience of truth, granted in different measure to each one of the faithful”—if its noetic content did not change souls, reorient them in a manner that manifests itself in practice, in life. The purpose of theology is what Lossky calls “deification,” which most decidedly does not mean that human beings can become gods, as the Gnostics imagined. What it can do is aspire to “union with God,” but only thanks to the grace of God. The nature of that union needs careful inquiry, which Lossky seeks both to provide and to spur in his readers. Throughout its long history of opposing heresy, the Church addresses “the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God.”

‘Church’ means ‘assembly,’ and ‘assembly’ implies a regime, a ruling organization. Every regime has a purpose, and the purpose of the Church regime can only be to uphold the doctrines of the Church in order to change souls, bringing them closer to God. To understand the regime of the Orthodox Church, one must not fall into the error of taking it as “a federation of national churches, having as its basis a political principle,” namely, “the state-church.” This error is understandable, inasmuch as one speaks of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and so on. But “the view that would base the unity of a local church on a political, racial or cultural principle is considered by the Orthodox Church as a heresy, specifically known by the name of phyletism,” Greek for tribalism. Tribalism or nationalism obviously contradicts Christian universality or catholicity; Orthodox Christianity is no less catholic than Roman Catholicism. The territories governed by the Orthodox bishops or patriarchs “do not necessarily correspond to the political boundaries of a state,” a modern nation-state. At the same time, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Christians have no equivalent of the Pope even if the Patriarch of Constantinople “enjoys a certain primacy of honor, arbitrating from time to time in disputes, but without exercising a jurisdiction over the whole body of the ecumenical Church.” Church unity primarily “expresses itself through the communion of the heads of local churches among themselves”; its catholicity “is realized…in the richness and multiplicity of the local traditions which bear witness unanimously to a single Truth.” It is true that this has led to a “restless and sometimes agitated” ecclesiastical life, but Lossky regards this as “the price paid for religious vitality.” 

The apex of Orthodox Christian mystical theology may be seen in monasticism, “the most classical” of the “forms of the spiritual life,” whereby monks seek “union with God in a complete renunciation of the life of this present world.” The way of life of the monastic regime harmonizes contemplation and activity in two ways: “the ascetic rule and the school of interior prayer” themselves “receive the name of spiritual activity“; moreover, the physical work the monks undertake in order “to overcome their rebel nature” and to “avoid idleness, the enemy of the spiritual life.” In order to “withstand all the assaults of the enemy,” Satan, and “every irrational movement of our fallen nature,” the monks must exercise “an unceasing vigil.” More, “human nature must undergo a change; it must be more and more transfigured by grace in the way of sanctification, which has a range which is not only spiritual but also bodily—and hence cosmic.” The monasteries have exerted “religious and moral influence” on political life, without aspiring to direct rule. Obviously, this influence cannot mean direct access to the monk’s spiritual life by outsiders, as “the way of mystical union is nearly always a secret between God and the soul concerned, which is never confided to others unless, it may be, to a confessor or to a few disciples.” Rather, by their fruits you shall know them, as the monks may transmit “wisdom, understanding of the divine mysteries” via “theological or moral teaching” to their fellow monks or to the laity. But the “inward and personal aspect of the mystical experience…remains hidden from the eyes of all.” Eccentricity does not arise because “the inner experience of the Christian develops within the circle delineated by the teaching of the Church: within the dogmatic framework which molds his person.” To show how this is possible, Lossky points to the way in which ‘secular’ political regimes do the same thing. Likely thinking of malign effects of tyrannical ideology in his lifetime, he observes, “Even now a political doctrine professed by the members of a party can so fashion their mentality as to produce a type of man distinguishable from other men by certain moral or psychical marks.” More broadly, as political philosophers have understood, regimes generally foster certain human types, often by habituation in accordance with custom: the Roman centurion, the Yankee trader.

To elucidate Orthodox mystical theology, Lossky turns to the fifth-sixth century writer who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, thereby associating himself with the teaching of a first-century disciple of Paul who served as an Athenian judge, and eventual Bishop of Athens. Lossky considers Dionysius’ book, Concerning Mystical Theology, to be “a text inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Dionysius distinguishes “cataphatic” or “positive theology” via “apophatic” or “negative theology.” Of the two, negative theology is superior. Since “God is beyond all that exists,” one can only approach Him by “deny[ing] all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is.” One proceeds by negations of what one knows, through the senses or through reasoning about what we know through the senses—the way of classical philosophy—ascending “all that can be known,” all “knowledge of created things,” “in order to draw near to the Unknown in the darkness of absolute ignorance.” In the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas “reduces the two ways of Dionysius to one, making negative theology a corrective to affirmative theology,” but for Dionysius and the Eastern Orthodox Church generally, apophaticism is “the fundamental characteristic of the whole theological tradition.” “It is necessary to renounce both sense and all the workings of reason, everything which may be known by the senses or the understanding, both that which is and all that is not, in order to be able to attain in perfect ignorance to union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge,” abandoning “all that is impure and even all that is pure.” Dionysius finds in Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai and his meeting with God a series of events, of “detachments,” in which the prophet “is freed from the things that see and are seen,” and reaching out to “what is entirely untouched and unseen: “he is united to the best of his powers with the unknowing quiescence of all knowledge, and by that very unknowing he knows what surpasses understanding.” At this ultimate level of ascent, Moses conceives of God not as an object of knowledge, not as an ‘object’ at all; he achieves “mystical union with God, whose nature remains incomprehensible.”

Lossky carefully distinguishes Dionysius from the neo-Platonists whom he resembles, contrasting Concerning Mystical Theology with Plotinus’ Sixth Ennead. Plotinus is a philosopher. The neo-Platonic ascent to God negates, abstracts, detaches itself from “the realm of being,” which is “necessarily multiple,” to comprehend “the absolute simplicity of the One.” That is, “the God of Plotinus is not incomprehensible by nature. Plotinus does not transcend being in the manner of Dionysius; Plotinus reduces being “to absolute simplicity.” The God of Dionysius is absolutely incomprehensible, neither One/Unity nor Many: “He transcends this antimony, being unknowable in what He is.” Thus, “the God of revelation is not the God of the philosophers,” not a nature but a Person. (Although Lossky too-generously describes Origen as a “great Christian thinker,” it should be clear that he is fundamentally a Neo-Platonist, on precisely the grounds that he conceives of God as “a simple, intellectual nature.”) It is also crucial to understand that this ascent cannot be undertaken by divinely ‘unassisted’ human effort but only by grace, by what Clement of Alexandria calls “God-given wisdom which is the power of the Father.” 

God is unknowable in part because He is infinite. Unlike a natural object, unlike nature in its entirety, the cosmos, the soul in union with God does not thereby reach a telos, an end in the sense that it no longer desires, achieving noetic satisfaction. “Filled with an ever-increasing desire, the soul grows without ceasing, goes forth from itself, reaches out beyond itself, and, in so doing, is filled with yet greater longing” in an ascent that “becomes infinite, the desire insatiable.” In the words of John Damascene, “All that we can say” about God is that, in His revelation, He “does not show forth His nature but the things that relate to His nature,” or, as rabbis say, He ‘does not lack wisdom,’ ‘does not lack justice.’ Atheists who deny the existence of God are correct, but they fail to see that God is “above existence itself.” Nor does God’s unknowability imply agnosticism, suspension of belief. Nor does it imply nihilism, the assertion of nothingness by means of willful destruction. Gregory of Palamas puts it this way: “If God be nature, then all else is not nature. If that which is not God be nature, God is not nature, and likewise He is not being if that which is God is being.”

In terms of the soul, in Platonism and Neo-Platonism alike the ascent on Diotima’s ladder, the purification of the soul necessary for that ascent, the conversion or ‘turning around’ of the soul is “above all of an intellectual nature,” a turning away from the idols of the Cave that represents the opinions that rule the polis, with reason ruling the spirited and appetitive elements of the soul. In his “refusal to accept being as such, in so far as it conceals the divine non-being,” in renouncing “the realm of created things in order to gain access to that of the un-created,” Dionysius aspires to an “existential liberation involving the whole being of him who would know God” by acknowledging that “the only rational notion which we can have of God will…be that of His incomprehensibility.” Socrates know that he knows nothing but never supposes that he has achieved union with God thereby, having no revelation of God as Person. That is the most important difference between Socrates and Dionysius. “There is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man,” to become ‘deified’ not in pride, in the Machiavellian or Baconian sense, but in humility, giving oneself and all else up to God, a “communion with the living God.” “He who, in following this path, imagines at a given moment that he has known what God is has a depraved spirit”; apophaticism is “the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.” In this, apophaticism utterly rejects idolatry, even the highest idolatry of Being, seen in philosophy. “There is no philosophy more or less Christian. Plato is not more Christian than Aristotle. The question of the relations between theology and philosophy has never arisen in the East.”

Where, then, does “cataphatic” or affirmative theology fit in? Instead of ascending toward God, affirmative theology “is a way that comes down to us” from God, in the “manifestations of God in creation.” The perfect such manifestation is “the incarnation of the Word,” Jesus Christ. “The Super-essential was manifested in human substance without ceasing to be hidden after this manifestation,” Dionysius writes, “or to express myself after a more heavenly fashion, in this manifestation itself.” It is also manifested in His Creation, in nature seen as a manifestation of His will.

This suggests that most Christians will never ascend to union with God in this life, even as they remain Christians. It is true, Gregory Nazianzen writes, that “the multitude” of men are “unworthy of [the] height of contemplation” reached by a Moses. Let such a lesser soul “remain below and listen to the voice alone, and the trumpet, the bare words of piety.” Lossky comments, “This is not a more perfect or esoteric teaching hidden from the profane, nor is it a gnostic separation between those who are spiritual, psychic or carnal, but a school of contemplation wherein each receives his share in the experience of the Christian mystery lived by the Church”—the same “divine Wisdom,” but “practiced in varying degrees, with greater or lesser intensity,” largely by the grace of God. It leads neither to One nor to Many but to the Holy Trinity, to a discussion of which Lossky now turns.

Although God evidently manifests Himself as a Person in Biblical account, Lossky demurs.  While Orthodox apophaticism “is not an impersonal mysticism” along the lines of the ‘Eastern’ religions, its goal emphatically is “not a nature or an essence,” since the Trinity “transcends all notion both of nature and of person.” If the Trinity is neither a ‘what’ nor a ‘who,’ if it is beyond “what the mind can conceive,” how can one speak or write about ‘it’? 

Created being changes, but “the Trinity is an absolute stability.” The “Godhead” or divine Essence cannot be contained by “created intelligence.” Created intelligence can approach rather than comprehend the Trinitarian Godhead by means of created intelligence’s very motion, “pursuing now the one, now the three, and retuning again to the unity,” “swing[ing] ceaselessly between the two poles of the antinomy, in order to attain to the contemplation of this threefold monad.” “Those unimaginative and pedestrian souls who are incapable of rising above rational concepts” must reconcile themselves to being left behind. The antimonies of reason are dualities, but the Trinity obviously is not: “Two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity.” Lossky cautions that “there is no question here of a material number which serves for calculation and is no wise applicable in the spiritual sphere, where there is no quantitative increase.” It is divine grace, not the human power of reason, that lifts the soul to the contemplation of the Trinity. The human mind inclines toward Sabellianism, the thought that the Trinity is “the essence [ousia] of the philosophers with three modes of manifestation,” three personae; alternatively, the mind might divide the Trinity “into three distinct beings, as did Arius.” But “Revelation sets an abyss between the truth which it declares and the truths which can be discovered by philosophical speculation.” That is, philosophy must admit, like Socrates, that it knows that it does not know.

So, how to speak about this? In the words of St Basil, “adoring the God of God, confessing the individuality of the hypostases, we dwell in the monarchy without dividing the theology into fragments.” Again, how? “It was a question of finding a distinction of terms which should express the unity of, and the differentiation within, the Godhead, without giving the preeminence either to the one or to the other.” For this, Greek philosophic vocabulary needed to be ‘baptized’ or ‘born again’ to fit the revealed Word. Ousia now means “all that subsists by itself and which has not its being in another.” Although hypostasis is sometimes used as a synonym for ousia, for the Church Fathers the difference is that “between common and particular.” The particular entities or hypostases that constitute the Trinity share the same ousia. “Though the Latins might express the mystery of the Trinity by starting from one essence in order to arrive at the three persons; though the Greeks might prefer the concrete as their starting point (that is to say, the three hypostases) seeing in them the one nature, it was always the same dogma of the Trinity that was confessed by the whole of Christendom before the separation” of West and East, Rome and Byzantium. The Father is “unbegotten”; the Son is “begotten” by the Father; the Holy Spirit is “proceeds” from the Father. These hypostases “dwell in one another,” while distinct from one another, but not in the manner of distinct human persons, whose works and wills are distinct, each from another. The works of the ‘persons’ that are the Trinity are those of “a single will, a single power, a single operation.” 

What, then, is this matter of unbegotten, begotten, and proceeding? John Damascene rejects the inquiry. “You hear that there is generation? Do not waste your time in seeking after the how.” Orthodox theologians nonetheless distinguish their doctrine from the Roman Catholic doctrine, which holds that the Holy Spirit “proceeded from the Father and from the Son.” This was the filioque (i.e., ‘from the Son’) controversy that arose in the 9th century AD, “the primordial cause, the only dogmatic cause of the breach between East and West.” Otherwise, the ways of West and East “were both equally legitimate so long as the first did not attribute to the essence a supremacy over the three persons, nor the second [Person or Entity] to the three persons a supremacy over the common nature.” But the Eastern Church “saw in the formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son a tendency to stress the unity of nature at the expense of the real distinction between the persons.” That is “the principle of unity in the Trinity is the person of the Father,” the “Source of the relations whence the hypostases receive their distinctive characteristics.” The Roman Catholic doctrine of the filioque “seems to impair the monarchy of the Father.” “The Father—source of all divinity within the Trinity—brings forth the Son and the Holy Spirit in conferring upon them His nature, which remains one and indivisible, identical in itself in the Three.” And so, as Gregory Nazianzen puts it, “When we look at the Godhead, or the First Cause, or the Monarchy, that which we conceive is One; but when we look at the Persons in whom the Godhead dwells, and at those who timelessly and with equal glory have their being from the Frist Cause—there are Three whom we worship.” As to the originating Father, he “derives from Himself His being” as “the beginning and cause of the existence of all things both as to their nature and mode of being.” “It is the Father who distinguishes the hypostases ‘in an eternal movement of love,’ according to an expression of St. Maximus,” conferring “His one nature upon the Son and upon the Holy Spirit alike,” although conferring that nature differently in each one. And so, for example, one can ‘know’ the Son only by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Lossky is quick to insist that the Father does not occupy a position of superiority over the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each Person of the Trinity is equally God, “each God when considered in Himself,” as Nazianzen writes. The Holy Trinity is the “primordial fact, ultimate reality, first datum which cannot be deduced, explained or discovered by way of any other truth; for there is nothing which is prior to it.” This is what Orthodox theologians mean when they speak of the “incomprehensibility” or “unknowability” of God; there is nothing to explain him by, nothing behind or above Him. Everything else is ‘beneath’ Him—created by Him. His human creations can approach Him not by apprehending His nature but by “deification,” that is, by “possessing by grace all that the Holy Trinity possesses by nature,” by their “participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity.” This approach, “deification,” participation is the path of “apophatic ascent,” a kind of crucifixion of the human-all-too-human elements of our nature, by discarding ‘worldly’ things. “This is the reason why no philosophical speculation has ever succeeded in rising to the mystery of the Holy Trinity” but can “receive the full revelation of the Godhead only after Christ on the cross had triumphed over death and over the abyss of hell.”

How is this mystical union, this “deification,” possible? In one sense, we can participate in the divine nature, in another sense we obviously cannot really become God. God is both “totally inaccessible and at the same time accessible.” His nature is what is “inaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable,” but His “energies or divine operations, forces to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself,” are revealed to His human creatures. Gregory Palamas expresses the distinction: “to say that the divine nature is communicable not in itself but through its energy, is to remain within the bounds of right devotion.” Lossky distinguishes the term “theology,” which refers to teaching “about the divine being itself—the Holy Trinity,” from “the exterior manifestations of God—the Trinity known in its relation to created being—[which] belong[s] to the realm of economy.” The term Logos refers typically to this manifestation, this “economy,” which “is” God as Son, as Christ, from and of God the Father. “The very name of the Word—Logos—attributed to the Son is itself primarily a designation of the ‘economic’ order, proper to the second hypostasis as manifesting the nature of the Father.” Lossky quotes John Damascene: “all we can say positively of God”—i.e., not apophatically—manifests “not His nature but the things about his nature” that He chooses to reveal. These energies are not created things but energies that “flow eternally from the one essence of the Trinity,” “determined by a decision of the common will of the three Persons.” Creation ex nihilo is the first manifestation of divine will and energy. And the energies manifest God’s many “names”: Wisdom, Life, Power, Justice, Love, Being, indeed the name “God” itself. The name Logos “is the exterior manifestation of the nature of the Father by the Son.” And as for the Holy Spirit, it is by him that we know Christ, the Son. But we know the Trinity through the manifestations of the single will that they share, not directly, not noetically. That is why “the Trinity can remain incommunicable in essence and at the same time come and dwell within us,” thanks to divine grace. In receiving this gift, “the deifying energies, one receives at the same time the in-dwelling of the Holy Trinity.” “The union to which we are called is neither hypostatic—as in the case of the human nature of Christ—nor substantial, as in that of the three divine Persons: it is union with God in His energies, or union by grace, making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God.” Christ became Man by His incarnation; we humans are already incarnate, but we can ‘become’ God, or more precisely participate in godliness, thanks to this indwelling of God in our souls.

 

 

 

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Books, 2011. [1811].

Part Three: Rhodes, Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea.

Part Four: Jerusalem.

Part Five: Jerusalem—Continued.

Part Six: Egypt.

Part Seven: Tunis and Return to France.

 

Chateaubriand voyaged to Jerusalem on a ship with some 200 Greek pilgrims, joyful at the thought of visiting the Holy Land, fearful of Mediterranean storms on the way. (“The ancient Greeks were, in many respects, no more than delightful credulous children, who passed from sadness to joy with extreme fluidity; the modern Greeks have retained aspects of that character: happy at least in having recourse to levity to combat their misery.”) Listening to his fellow passengers, he observed, “the chanting of the Greek Church possesses considerable sweetness, but lacks gravity,” although he admires “the sadness and majesty” of the Kyrie eleison, “doubtless a remnant of the ancient singing of the primitive Church.” He was disappointed that the captain refused to land near the plain of Troy (“though our agreement obliged him to do so”), as “it is a rare destiny for a country to have inspired the finest verse of two of the world’s greatest poets,” Homer and Virgil, neither a singer lacking in gravity. But on balance, “Who could not bless religion, whilst reflecting that these two hundred pilgrims, so happy at this moment, were nevertheless bowed under an odious yoke?”—the yoke of the Ottoman Turks. “They were traveling to the tomb of Jesus Christ to forget the lost glories of their homeland, and find solace from their present evils.” As for himself, “I was about to reach a land of wonders, the source of the most astonishing poetry, places where, even speaking of mankind alone, the greatest of events occurred, that changed the world forever, I mean the coming of the Messiah.” Contemporary reality nonetheless intrudes. Along the coast off Caesarea, he saw “Arabs, wandering the coast, follow[ing], with a covetous eye, our ship passing by on the horizon, anticipating the spoils of shipwreck on the same coast where Jesus Christ commanded us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”

He lodged at a monastery, where the monks “were lively but modest—; familiar but polite; no pointless questions, no idle curiosity,” concerned only with his trip, especially “on the measures needed for me to complete it in safety.” They well represented “the land where Christianity and charity had their birth.” He should not go to Jerusalem alone, they tell him, as the Arabs will rob and possibly kill him. Go with some guides, disguise yourselves as poor pilgrims. The Arabs’ avariciousness results from tyranny. Although the soil “appears to be extremely fertile,” “thanks to the despotic Muslims, the ground on all sides offers only thistles and dry withered grasses, interspersed with stunted patches of cotton, sorghum, barley and wheat.” Still, “if I live a thousand years, I shall never forget that desert which seems to breathe again the greatness of Jehovah and the terror of death (our old French Bibles call death the king of terror).” As a Frenchman, he thinks not only of the prophets and saints of the Bible but of the Crusader, Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the triumphant First Crusade against the Sunni Muslim Turks of the Seljuk Empire and briefly King of Jerusalem. His successor, Baldwin I, built the strong walls of the next monastery Chateaubriand lodged in, which “could easily resist a siege against the Turks.” He arrived in Bethlehem. The monastery in the place of Jesus’ birth housed “three or four thousand skulls, those of monks massacred by the infidels” over the centuries. From the monastery, he could see Jerusalem, “a heap of shattered stone,” a “city of desolation, in the midst of a desolate solitude,” truly “the Queen of the Desert.”

Moving next to the shores of the Dead Sea, “we found ourselves on the paths of the desert Arabs, who gather salt from the sea, and wage pitiless war on the traveler,” following a “Bedouin morality [that] has begun to deteriorate through too much traffic with the Turks and Europeans,” permitting them to “prostitute their daughters and their wives, and slaughter travelers, whom they were once content merely to rob.” They resembled the Amerindians physically, but “in the Americas everything proclaims the savage who has not yet reached the state of civilization; amongst the Arabs all proclaims the civilized man fallen once more into a state of savagery.” He prayed on the banks of the Jordan River, drinking from it; “it did not seem as sweet as sugar, as a good missionary has said,” but a bit salty, potentially improved “if purged of the sand it carries.” 

In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher burned down a year after Chateaubriand’s return to France, so he takes care to describe it as it was, a building “roughly in the form of a cross,” with a dome that was supported by cedar beams from Lebanon. Inside, priests from eight Christian sects abide: Latins, Abyssinians, Greeks, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, Nestorians (from Chaldea and Syria), Georgians, and Maronites. The priests rotate in and out, with two-month stints, since the staleness and “unhealthy coolness” of the air would make any longer stay dangerous. Nonetheless, Chateaubriand met a solitary Franciscan who had lived there for twenty years, busily maintaining the many lamps and keeping the holy places clean. The Sepulcher encompasses the place Jesus was crucified and the tomb where He was resurrected, although these claims have been disputed. Chateaubriand will have none of that. “It is, indeed, with the Bible and the Gospel in our hands that we must travel to the Holy Land. If one wishes to bring to it a spirit of contention and argument, it is not worth the trouble of making the long journey to Judea.” For himself, “all I can state is that in sight of that victorious tomb I felt only my own feebleness.” Death, where is thy victory? “Where might one find anything as moving in all antiquity, anything as wonderful as the last scenes of the Gospel? Here are not the bizarre adventures of some deity alien to mankind: here is a story filled with pathos, a story that not only causes one to shed tears at its beauty, but of which the consequences applied to the universe, have changed the face of the earth.”

Outside the Church, he does not fail to stop at monuments to Godfrey and Baldwin, “those royal knights, who deserve to rest near to the great sepulcher they had delivered.” As always, Chateaubriand mixes reverence for the universal Church with patriotism: “Those ashes are French, the only ones buried in the shadow of the tomb of Jesus Christ. What a badge of honor for my homeland!”

Nearby, Chateaubriand saw the ruins of a church dedicated to Mary, where, as Church tradition has it, she met her Son carrying the cross. “Saint Boniface says that the Virgin fell like one half-dead, and could not utter a single word.” “Faith is not contrary to these traditions: they show how the marvelous story of the Passion was etched in the memory of mankind,” and in the eighteen centuries since the Crucifixion, seeing “persecutions without end, endless revolutions, ruins ever falling,” nothing could “efface or hide the traces of a mother come to mourn her son.” Chateaubriand himself followed the Via Dolorosa. At Gethsemane, he recalled “the terrible degradations in life” that Jesus suffered, degradations “that virtue itself finds difficulty in overcoming,” requiring an angel “to descend from heaven to support Divinity, faltering under the burden of human misery, that merciful Divinity is betrayed by Mankind.” But after this torture and death, “while the world worshipped a thousand false deities under the sun, twelve fishermen, concealed in the bowels of the earth,” in the caves to which they had fled, “uttered their profession of faith on behalf of the human race and recognized the unity of God, the creator of those stars beneath which they dared not, as yet, proclaim his existence.” “And yet they would overthrow [the] Roman’s temples, destroy the religion of his fathers, alter the law, politics, morality, reasoning, and even the thoughts of mankind.” From these facts, Chateaubriand concludes, “Let us never despair then of the salvation of nations”; even today, Christians “mourn the waning of faith,” but “who knows if God has not planted in some neglected place that grain of wild mustard seed that multiplies in the fields?” 

Far from a credulous believer, Chateaubriand doubts that a footprint in the rock on the spot where Jesus ascended into Heaven is really His, despite the assertions of Saints Augustine, Jerome, Paulinus, and other authorities. He concedes that even Descartes and Newton never denied such traditions; Racine and Milton “repeated them in poetry.”

Recounting Jerusalem’s subsequent history, Chateaubriand defends the Crusades, portrayed in “an odious light” by the Enlighteners of the eighteenth century and, it might be added, by many in the centuries after Chateaubriand wrote. “The Christians were not the aggressors.” “If the subjects of Umar,” the great caliph, father-in-law of Mohammad, “leaving Jerusalem, eventually descended, after ranging through Africa, on Sicily, Spain, and even France itself, where Charles Martel destroyed them” at the Battle of Tours in 732, “why should the subjects of Philip I, emerging from France, not range through Asia Minor, as far as Jerusalem, to take vengeance on the descendants of Umar?” Moreover, the Crusaders weren’t “simply armed pilgrims seeking to deliver a tomb in Palestine.” “It was not only a question of the holy tomb, but also about which [religion] would prevail on earth, a religion which was an enemy of civilization, systematically maintaining, ignorance, despotism, and slavery, or a religion that revived the spirit of ancient knowledge in the modern world and abolished slavery,” a religion of “persecution and conquest” against a religion of “tolerance and peace.” For eight centuries, Christians endured the Muslim conquest of Spain, the invasion of France, “the ravaging of Greece and the two Sicilies,” and “the whole of Africa enchained.” “If, ultimately, the cries of so many slaughtered victims in the East, and the barbarian advance to the very gates of Constantinople, awakened Christendom and roused it to its own defense, who would dare claim that the Crusaders’ cause was unjust? Where would we be if our fathers had not met force with force?” Chateaubriand has already shown where Europe would be: it would be in the condition of Greece under “the Muslim yoke” of the Turks. Would “those who applaud the progress of enlightenment today…wish to see a religion prevail among us that burned the library of Alexandria” and “considers it a merit to trample mankind underfoot”? Far from shameful, “the era of these expeditions represents the heroic age of our history,” the “age that gave birth to our epic poetry,” with Tasso, a Christian Homer or Virgil. (“Above all a poem for soldiers, Jerusalem Delivered “breathes valor and glory.”) All that cloaks a nation with wonder ought not to be despised by that nation itself,” and “there is something in our hearts that makes us love glory,” human beings being more than utilitarian calculators of “their own good and ill.” 

The Muslim Saladin, Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, besieged and reconquered Jerusalem in 1187. Nominal legitimacy in Jerusalem passed to several European monarchs, and rule over the city was contended for, until 1291, when “the Christians were driven from the Holy Land, utterly.” “Is it any surprise that a fertile country was turned to a wasteland after such devastation,” having been sacked seventeen times? After that, Muslim empires contended for it, with the Turks finally seizing it from Egypt and Syria in 1516—this “pile of rubble, called a city.” As Chateaubriand understates it, “the people of the East are much more familiar than we with the ideas of invasion,” although Europeans of Napoleon’s time are sufficiently familiar with them. As a result of their violent geopolitical experiences, Asians have become “accustomed to follow the destiny of some master or other,” with “no code binding them to concepts of order and moderation; to kill when you are the stronger seems to them a legitimate proceeding; they submit to it, or exercise, it, with a like indifference…. Freedom, they do not know; rights, they have none: force is their god.” Back at the monastery, Chateaubriand encountered an example of such moeurs in the form of two drunken soldiers of the Pasha’s army, who tried to push him around. He returned the insult, with no further troubles. “A Turk once humiliated is never dangerous, and we heard nothing more of it. The monks, “guardians of the tomb of Jesus Christ,” have been “uniquely occupied, for several centuries, in defending themselves” against similar “kinds of insult and tyranny,” the “most bizarre inventions of Oriental despotism.” He notices also the Jews of Jerusalem, similarly subject, yet “fortified by their poverty,” “clothed in rags, seated among the dust of Zion, looking for insects which they devour,” but with “their eyes fixed on the Temple” and never neglecting to study the Pentateuch with their children. 

Chateaubriand does not neglect to provide an outline of Jerusalem’s ruling offices. The regime consists of a military governor, a minister of justice, a mufti (both a religious leader and “head of the legal profession,” since the city is under the sharia or Muslim law), a customs officer, and a city provost. “These subordinate tyrants all belong, except the mufti, to a tyrant in chief, and that tyrant in chief is the Pasha of Damascus,” himself appointed by the Turks. “Every superior in Turkey…has the right to delegate his powers to an inferior, and those powers extend to control over property and life.” As for the mufti, when he is “a fanatic or a wicked man, like the one found in Jerusalem during my visit, he is the most tyrannical of all the authorities as regards Christians.” This remained so more than a century later, as seen in the tenure of Grand Mufti Mohammad amin al-Husayn, the Nazi ally during World War II. Since mounts and Bedouins stand between Damascus and Jerusalem, protests against local tyranny are often impossible to lodge, which is rather the point: the rulers “want mute slavery.” The current Pasha, “driven by sordid avarice, like almost all Muslims,” enriches himself by inducing the merchants to close their shops, thereby starving the people; when permitted to reopen, the merchants “bring in food at extraordinary prices, and the populace, dying of hunger for a second time, are forced, in order to live, to strip themselves to their last garment.” The Pasha thus takes his cut of the profits and keeps the people down. In a more straightforward maneuver, the Pasha used his cavalry to plunder Arab farmers of their livestock, which he then sold to Jerusalem butchers at exorbitant prices, which they were forced to purchase “on pain of death.” “After exhausting Jerusalem’s resources, the Pasha withdraws,” along with his soldiers, leaving the city governor with inadequate resources. Gangs of thieves take over and neighboring villages resume blood feuds previously suppressed. Once he regroups, in a year or so, the governor imposes peace by “exterminat[ing] whole tribes.” “Gradually the desert spreads further.” Walking the streets of the unpaved and deserted streets of the city, where “a few miserable shops display their wretchedness to your gaze,” the only sound to be heard is a horse bearing a Janissary “who brings the head of some Bedouin, or who is off to rob the fellahin.” Chateaubriand can leave Jerusalem, without having delivered it. For the foreseeable future, from the perspective of 1806, no human being will.

Still, “I confess that I felt a certain sense of pleasure, in considering that I had accomplished the pilgrimage I had meditated for so long.” He expected his return to France through Egypt, the Barbary States, and Spain to be easy. “I was wrong, however.” Back on the Mediterranean, he praises the adventurousness of the sailor’s way of life, with its “continual passage from storm to storm, the rapid change of land and sky,” which “stimulate the voyager’s imagination”: “It is, in its unfolding, the very image of man here below; forever promising himself to remain in port, and forever spreading his sails; seeking enchanted islands which he will never reach, and where if he landed he would only experience ennui; speaking only of repose, yet delighting in the tempest; perishing in the midst of some shipwreck, or dying an old pilot on the shore, unknown to the young voyagers whose vessels he regrets being powerless to follow.” Chateaubriand’s immediate future would confirm those observations.

Egypt is “the country where civilization was born, and where today ignorance and barbarism reign.” In Alexandria, once “the sanctuary of the Muses, and which echoed in the darkness to the noisy revels of Antony and Cleopatra,” “a fatal talisman has plunged into the silence of the people,” the talisman of despotism, “which extinguishes all joy an allows not even a cry of pain.” Ancient Alexandria had a population of three million; today, a million remain, “a sort of palpitating trunk that has not even the strength, between the ruins and the tombs, to free itself from its chains.” The beautiful Nile, with its magnificent Delta, lacks only “a free government and a happy people. “But no country is beautiful that lacks liberty: the most serene of skies is odious, if one is chained to the earth.” “The only thing I found worthy of those beautiful plains was the memory of my country’s glory. During the Seventh Crusade, in 1250, the French army under the command of Louis IX—Saint Louis—were defeated by Egyptian forces, which captured the king. The French knights “were avenged by the soldiers at the Battle of the Pyramids” in 1798, in one of the very few Napoleonic ventures Chateaubriand can bring himself to praise. The brief French occupation (they were expelled by the British in 1801) saw the founding of the Institut d’Égypte, institutionalizing research on ancient Egypt; it saw the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, whose bilingual texts enabled scholars to translate hieroglyphics much more fully; and it enabled the establishment of Egypt’s first newspapers, giving Egyptians a chance at self-government. But self-government is a long way off. Now a land infested with “Albanian brigands” and “foolish Muslims,” once a country “where so industrious, so peaceful, so wise, a people once lived, a people whose customs and morals Herodotus and above all Diodorus Siculus were pleased to describe for us,” Egypt illustrates what difference “the rule of law can make between men.” 

To the past, then. Ancient Egypt’s pyramids excited Chateaubriand’s imagination. “I know the philosopher may well smile or groan at the thought that the greatest monument built by human hands is a tomb; but why see in the pyramid of Cheops only a heap of stones and a skeleton?” The pyramids are monuments not to death but to immortality, “mark[ing] the entrance to life without end, it is a species of eternal portal built on the edge of eternity.” As Diodorus Siculus remarked, the pyramid builders “give little thought to the furnishings of their palaces, but with regard to their burial they display every zeal,” unlike modern men who “prefer to believe that all the monuments had a material purpose,” never imagining “that nations might possess a moral purpose of a far superior order, which the laws of antiquity served.” “Why complain that a pharaoh sought to render that lesson eternal?” And do not such monuments, “an essential part of the glory of all human society,” not bear “glorious witness to [a nation’s] genius”? Cheops was no vain fool but “a monarch possessed of a magnanimous spirit.” “The idea of vanquishing time by means of a tomb, of forcing the sea of generations, customs, laws, ages to break against the foot of a coffin, could never have arisen from a common mind. If it is merely pride, at least it is magnificent pride.”

No such great-souled monarch rules modern Egypt. Chateaubriand had an audience with the Pasha’s adolescent son, who was “seated on a carpet in a dilapidated room, surrounded by a dozen obliging servants who hastened to obey his every whim. I have never seen a more hideous spectacle”: the future master of the Egyptians, nurtured “on a diet of the most extravagant flattery” by servants who “degraded the soul of a child destined to lead men.” “Although I may have delighted in Egypt,” with its natural beauty, its noble monuments, its excellent wine, the capital, Alexandria, “seemed the saddest and most desolate place on earth.” 

Christmas Day of 1806 brought him in the waters off Malta, but off Tunis, where they arrived a few days later, the sea roiled for eighteen days, and they nearly ran aground on the island of Lampedusa. Two British warships sank in that storm, but “Providence saved us,” as the wind changed and carried them into the open sea. Eventually, they reached the Kerkennah Islands, where they remained at anchor past New Year’s Day. “Under how many stars, and with what varied fortunes, had I witnessed the birth of years, the years that pass so swiftly or last so long!” From the New Year’s days of childhood, “when I received parental blessings and gifts, my heart beating with joy,” to this “foreign vessel, in sight of a barbarous land, this day arrived for me without witnesses, without pleasure, without the embrace of a family without those tender wishes of happiness for her son that a mother utters with such sincerity. This day, born in the womb of storm winds, brought to my brow only worries, regrets and white hair.” He and the crew nonetheless marked the occasion by slaughtering some chickens and offering a toast to France. “We were not far from the island of the Lotus Eaters, where Ulysses’ companions forgot their homeland: I know no fruit delightful enough to make me forget mine.”

Safely in Tunisia at last, Chateaubriand enjoyed the hospitality of a French family; “the ashes of Dido, and the ruins of Carthage, were regaled with the sounds of a French violin.” The regime of ancient Carthage has not won the favor of later generations. If one wonders why “no one thinks of the eighty thousand Carthaginians slaughtered on the plains of Sicily,” in alliance with the Persians, “while the whole world speaks of those three hundred Spartans who died obeying the sacred laws of their country,” one might consider that “it is the greatness of the cause, not the means, which leads to true fame, and honor has been in all ages the most enduring feature of glory.” And even if Hannibal is “the greatest general of antiquity,” as Chateaubriand judges him to be, “he is not the one we love most.” “He had neither Alexander’s heroism nor Caesar’s universal talent; but he surpassed both as a master of war.” Animated “solely by hatred,” crossing the Pyrenees, Gaul, and the Alps, he crushed Roman forces in four consecutive battles. With unquestionable “superiority of mind and strength of character,” he nonetheless “lacked the noblest qualities of the spirit: cold, cruel, heartless, born to overthrow and not to found empires, he was much inferior in magnanimity to his rival,” Scipio Africanus. With Scipio “begins that Roman urbanity, which ornamented the minds of Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar, and which in those illustrious citizens replaced the rusticity of Cato and Fabricius.” Driving the Carthaginian forces south, through Spain, Scipio defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. “Hannibal had been away from his homeland for thirty-six years; he left as a child, and had returned at an advanced age,” nearly a stranger to his country. “Blind with envy,” his fellow citizens sent him into exile. “When services rendered are so exceptional they exceed the bounds of understanding, they reap only ingratitude.” He “had the misfortune to be greater than the people amongst whom he was born.” Bounced out of the prime minister’s office in 1946, discarded by French voters in 1969, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle number among the more recent examples of these phenomena. As for Scipio, Chateaubriand accepts the possibility that he died by an assassin’s hand. 

As for France, Saint Louis arrived with his troops in 1270, his Crusaders admiring “the beauty of the country covered with olive trees.” “The chaplain of a king of France took possession of the site of Hannibal’s city with these words: ‘I proclaim the rule here of our Lord Jesus Chris, and Louis, King of France, his servant.’ This same place had heard declarations in Gaetulian, Tyrian, Latin, Vandal, Gree and Arabic, and ever the same sentiments in varying language.” After the French army drove out the Saracens, “the great ladies of France established themselves in the ruins of Dido’s palace.” 

The occupation didn’t last. The Muslims had machines that could raise the hot sand of the surrounding deserts into the wind blowing toward the French, “an ingenious and terrible design, worthy of the wilderness that gave rise to the idea, and show[ing] to what point mankind can take its genius for destruction.” Struck by a disease that had already carried away a beloved son, Louis left a testament to his eldest son and heir. “If God send thee adversity, receive it in patience, and give thanks to Our Lord, and thin that thou hast deserved it, and that He will turn it to good. If He give thee prosperity, thank heaven with humility; that through pride or otherwise thou mayest not be the worse for that which should make thee better. For one should not war against God with His own gifts.” And “study how thy people and thy subjects may live in peace and honesty under thee.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Happy are those who can glory in that, and say: ‘The man who wrote these instructions was my ancestral king.'” And “the ambassadors of the Emperor of Constantinople were present at the scene: they could tell all Greece of a death which Socrates would have admired.”

“I have nothing more to say to my readers; it is time for them to return with me to my homeland.” “I have written enough if my name should live on; too much if it is fated to die.”