John Cassian: The Institutes of the Cenobites and the Remedies for the Eight Principal Vices. Boniface Ramsey translation. New York: The Newman Press, 2000.

 

Born in Dacia around 360 AD, not long before its conquest by the Huns, John Cassian traveled widely—to Bethlehem, Alexandria, Constantinople (where the Patriarch, John Chrysostom, made him a deacon of the Church), Rome (where he was ordained to the priesthood by Pope Innocent I), and eventually to Marseille, where he founded two monasteries, writing the Institutes as a guide for the monks, recalling the practices he had seen in the monasteries of Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. “Institutes” are the principles that guide the practices.

In his preface, he thanks the local bishop, Castor, for summoning him, a foreigner, to “collaborate in your great work”: building a “true and spiritual temple for God,” a “community of holy men” in whose souls dwells “Christ the king.” “You are concerned that the simple life of holy men be explained in simple language to the brothers in your new monastery.” To this task, Cassian brings “experience and practice alone,” since “such things could never be handed on or understood or conjured up by men of leisurely meditation or verbal teaching”—the stuff of philosophizing—but by a person “who has striven to learn” the “reasoning of what was done” in the monasteries with the same “zeal and effort” as displayed in those Christian temples. Saints Basil and Jerome reported on these practices but did not experience them; in all humility, I have.

The book moves from the “outward appearance” of the monks, their garb, to their “inner worship,” including their spiritual warfare against sin and the demons who tempt them to sin. With respect to clothing, “it is proper for a monk always to dress like a soldier of Christ, ever ready for battle, his loins girded.” The Old Testament prophets Elijah and Elisha “were responsible for the beginnings of this profession.” Elijah wore a leather belt, “a kind of trademark of his”—girt loins indicating his chastity—and only sufficient clothing as to serve as a covering for “the shame of nakedness” and for protection from the cold, “not such as nurtures seeds of vanity or pride.” On the contrary, a monk’s clothing “should be grimy with filth accumulated by neglect,” and nothing should differentiate him from the other monks while everything should differentiate him from the world. The small hoods they wear remind them “to hold constantly to the innocence and simplicity of small children,” very much in contrast with the laurels sported by imperial dignitaries. The cords that extend from the neck to the armpits free their arms and hands for work, as he who does not wish to work shall not eat. For the rest of the body, the monk dresses in goatskin, which “signifies that, once all the turbulence of their carnal passions has been put to death”—the goat being the traditional symbol of lust. In all, he “must abide in the most elevated virtue,” with none of “the willfulness or wantonness” of youth. His belt, made with “dead skin,” indicates Elijah-like chastity. He carries a staff, as did Elisha—another outward sign of spiritual warfare, warning him that he “must never go out unarmed in the midst of the numerous barking dogs of the vices and the invisible beasts of the evil spirits.” Whereas the monks of southern regions he had observed wore only sandals, “we ourselves,” here in the north, should adapt our footwear and other clothing to the climate, so long as we dress “in keeping with the humility of our profession” as well as “the character of the climate.” 

In this appropriate clothing, monks have prepared themselves for their most spiritually important activities: praying and singing, both night and day. These practices must be ruled aright. “Many persons in different places—following their own ideas and possessing, as Aristotle says, ‘a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge’—have stablished different models and rules for themselves in this matter.” But the Egyptian monastics adhere to traditions upheld by “a succession of elders.” For example, “no one is allowed to rule over a community of brothers, or even over himself, unless he not only gets rid of all his possessions but also recognizes that he is in fact not his own master and has no power over himself,” ready to obey as a child would do, “because he is beginning afresh.” As for his superiors, “no one is chosen to rule over a community of brothers unless, before he himself exercises authority, he has learned by obedience how he should command those who will be subject to him and has understood from the institutes of the elders what he should pass on to the young.” The person willing to undergo the strictest of obedient discipline possesses “a most lofty gift and a grace of the Holy Spirit.” 

Night prayers and psalms follow a regular order: twelve psalms followed by two readings, one from the Old and the other from the New Testament. “This number, which was set in the distant past and which is inviolate in the monasteries of those regions even until now, has been kept for so many centuries because the elders declare that it was not established by human whim but was given to the fathers from heaven by the teaching of an angel.” Nor should this surprise anyone today, in the fourth century, as it was the Apostle Mark himself who first ruled as Alexandria’s bishop over a “multitude of believers.” The Apostle “had one heart and one soul” in pursuing not only the way of prayer but the way of “rigorous abstinence,” worshipping with “such fervor that the very appetite and memory of food only disturbed them every second or third day.” The monks amounted to a spiritual aristocracy, mirroring the civil-social aristocracy that characterized the ancient world around them. “When the faith of the few had not yet been spread among the multitude and grown lukewarm, the venerable fathers, reflecting with unceasing concern on those who would follow them, came together to discuss what form daily worship would take throughout the whole body of the brotherhood,” establishing the practices that prevail to this day. In their prudence, they limited the number of psalms so as not to cause the monks to become distracted by bodily discomfort; “it is not a multitude of verses but rather the understanding of the mind that pleases them.” As to the prayers, they were kept brief but frequent, again to avoid distraction—a “pointed brevity” enabling the monks “to be able to dodge the lurking devil’s darts.”  

When they are not praying and singing, the monks work with their hands throughout their waking hours at night, “offering a sacrifice to God” in so doing. This also ensures “that the hateful enemy, jealous of our purity and always lying in wait for it and continually attacking it, might not by some phantasm of sleep sully the cleanness that we have acquired by nightly psalms and prayers.” And even when no such assault occurs, sleep induces grogginess upon awakening, often “produc[ing] heaviness and torpor in the mind for the whole day, dulling its vigor and clouding that clarity of intellect and impoverishing that richness of heart which would make it possible for us to remain wary and strong throughout the day in the face of all the enemy’s snares.” In all, the monks “practice equally the virtues of body and soul, balancing the profit of the outer man with the gain of the inner.” This is what has preserved the monastic regime in its unity for so long, with none of the schisms that distraction from God’s teachings and traditions might flourish in a condition of idleness. Even while working with his hands on whatever task he has been assigned, the monk will review a psalm or scriptural text in his mind, “giv[ing] none of his talents or his time to harmful schemes or to wicked plots, nor even to idle gossip, since both his mouth and his heart are constantly busied with spiritual meditation.” If a lapse does occur, the monk suffers internal exile, with no one permitted to “pray with him until he has done penance on the ground and his reconciliation and pardon for the thing committed have been granted publicly by the abba, in the presence of all the brothers.” He must be humbled, lest by “a destructive consolation he hardens his heart more and more.”

The daytime hours go similarly—prayer, psalms, work. The pacing of these activities differs, however, with prayers and psalms at the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day, three psalms each time. Each hour commemorates an event seen in the Gospel: The Holy Spirit first visited the apostles in the third hour of the day; Jesus mounted the cross at the sixth hour, and Peter received his commission to preach to the Gentiles at that hour, too; at the ninth hour, Jesus harrowed Hell, Cornelius the centurion “learned from an angel who spoke to him that the offering of his prayers and alms had been received by the Lord, and Peter received “the sacraments of the call of the Gentiles” that had been revealed to him at the sixth hour. That is, the timing of daytime prayer and song reminds the monks of their calling, of Christian sacrifice, of the guarantees God makes to the faithful, and of their obligation to preach the Gospel. As with the brevity of nighttime prayer, the division of these periods of devotion allows for “the body’s frailty” and the mind’s need for refreshment.

Cassian describes the conditions of admission to communities formed according to such a strict regime, along with the training undergone once the renunciates are admitted. The seeker must lie outside the monastery for at least ten days, giving “an indication of his perseverance and desire, as well as of his humility and patience” by embracing the knees of each brother who goes by, enduring their rebukes and insults, bearing inspection for any money that may be secreted on their person. The monastery accepts no money from him, lest “he might be puffed up with self-confidence from having mad this offering,” holding himself above “his poor brothers.” Not only would such a person “never stoop to the lowliness of Christ,” but if he could not endure the regime he might demand his money back. 

Once admitted, each renunciate is assigned a supervisor, a spiritual father. The renunciate must never “hide any of the wanton thoughts in their hearts but to reveal them to their elder as soon as they surface,” accepting his judgment of them without question, so that “it never happens that the clever foe is able to get the better of a young man as if he were inexperienced and ignorant, or to deceive him by some trick.” All of their actions, including “attend[ing] to their common and natural necessities” and “leav[ing] their cells” for any reason, must be done only with “the knowledge and permission of their superior.” He shall obey the superior’s orders without question, whether or not the task assigned is physically possible; he must still attempt it and accept failure. If “he prefers reading to obedience” he must repent publicly. At meals, he must remain silent, with his hood “drawn lower than [his] eyebrows,” preventing a “free view” that might “facilitate a roving curiosity.” Cassian tells the story of one renunciate who was commanded to roll a huge rock over to his superior. “He little weighed the impossibility of the command or of the deed in his reverence for the old man and in his sincere and simple dutifulness, which led him to believe with absolute confidence that the old man could give no order that was purposeless and unreasonable.” Nor was it, having been issued to test his obedience. A much more extreme and unsettling case was that of the renunciate who was admitted along with his eight-year-old son. They were separated, perhaps in accord with Jesus’ prediction that obedience to Him would sunder families. But worse, the child was “purposely neglected, clothed in rags rather than garments, and so covered over and marred with filth as to shock rather than delight his father whenever he could see him.” The boy was also subjected “to the blows and slaps of different persons.” Cassian invites us to admire the father’s heart, “unmoved out of love of Christ and the virtue of obedience.” Finally, in imitation of God’s command to Abraham for the sacrifice of his son, the father was told to throw his son into the river. While the monks rescued the child from the water and “the man’s faith and devotion were so acceptable to God that they were immediately confirmed by divine testimony,” one does wonder what effect all of this had on the boy. As a reward, the abba of the monastery designated the man as his successor. We hear nothing more of the son.

Cassian ends his account of the monastic practices with an exhortation delivered from one monk to another. “Renunciation is nothing else than a manifestation of the cross and of a dying” to the world; “he lives in you who was crucified for you,” and you crucify yourself out of the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom, of that discernment that recognizes the traps set for you by Satan. You thus “prepare your soul not for peace or security or pleasure” but to experience the “trials and difficulties” you will encounter on your way to the highest regime, the Kingdom of God. Scripture teaches that “the gate is narrow and the path is strait which leads to life, and few there are who find it,” but you are “one of the chosen few”; “do not grow cold through the example and the lukewarmness of the multitude, but live as do the few, so that with the few may deserve to be found in the kingdom.” This path of humility and obedience, walked steadily and long, will bring the humility and obedience of action into your soul, ingrain it there, so that “the things that you used to do out of a certain dread of punishment you will begin to do without any difficulty, as it were naturally, and no longer with a view of punishment or fear of any kind, but out of love for the good itself and out of pleasure in virtue.” Foolish in the eyes of the world, you will attain “purity of heart”; “with purity of heart the perfection of apostolic love is possessed.” 

Let the spiritual warfare begin, then. Cassian turns to the eight sins that must be overcome, listing them in the order of difficulty in combating them. They are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Sins are “harmful passions” that “claim dominion for themselves,” exercising “a most cruel tyranny over our mortal body.” It is God’s Word that can, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, break “the iron bolts of the vices that shut us out from true knowledge” and “lead us to our concealed secrets”—concealed from others and very often from ourselves. “Thus, penetrating the dark shadows of our vices with the most pure eyes of our soul, we shall be able to expose them and bring them to light,” discern their “causes and natures,” and “bedewed with spiritual remedies,” be “led to a place of refreshment and perfection.” Even then, no one monk will have all the virtues; Christ is present “when all are assembled.” That is the spiritual advantage of the regime of the holy community.

Gluttony, “the desire to gourmandize,” must be counteracted by fasting. No “uniform rule concerning the manner of fasting” can “easily be kept because not all bodies have the same strength.” But while metabolisms vary, there is nonetheless “one rule of discipline for everyone with regard to an abstinent and virtuous mind.” Do not eat until sated, either with respect to the quantity or the quality of your food. “The mind that is suffocated and weighed down by food cannot be guided by the governance of discretion,” the rule of reason both natural and spiritual. “Too much food of any kind makes it stagger and sway and robs it of every possibility of integrity and purity.” Gluttony wasn’t Sodom’s only sin, but it was its first. “The surfeit of bread…set ablaze” the Sodomites’ lust. Therefore, “eat only as much as an unyielding discretion with respect to temperance judges sufficient to maintain [your] life, and not as much as [your] appetite demands.” Set times for eating; set portions proper to your condition; “more than anything else,” respect the judgment of your conscience. “Integrity of mind is closely connected with an empty stomach.” Abstinence is necessary if not sufficient to achieve such integrity, but “the desire to gourmandize…is the first thing that we must trample upon.” Like Olympians, spiritual athletes must attend first to their diet in order “to compete in the higher contests.” No less a saint than the Apostle Paul “wrestl[ed] strenuously with his flesh.” Such a man strives “to make himself pure for God so that he may deserve to welcome Christ in himself as his guest” in his heart. While doing so, do not concentrate on your ‘self’ alone, as so many ‘dieters’ do. “It [is] better to practice the virtue of hospitality and love than to display the strictness of our abstinence and daily rigor of our chosen orientation” to our visitors.

Our “second struggle” is the “savage war” against fornication, a war “longer than the others and of greater duration,” “completely won by only a few.” This passion “gains in strength by the weakness of both body and soul,” since fasting alone cannot cure it but must be “preceded by a contrite spirit and by persevering prayer against this most unclean spirit,” along with “toilsome manual labor,” which “restrains and recalls the feckless wanderings of the heart.” As with the cure for any vice, the contrite spirit must first be animated by “true humility” within the heart, which commands the flesh. And abstinence alone will not do; chastity, “a disposition of integrity and incorruption,” a virginity not only of the flesh but of the mind, must prevail. Humility is indispensable because “the soul cannot escape being attacked by this vice until it realizes that waging this war is beyond its own powers,” that it needs “the assistance and protection of the Lord” if it will win the victory. We will know that we have achieved this “if either no unlawful image occurs to us as we lie at rest and relaxed in slumber or at least, when one does surface, it does not arouse any movements of desire,” since “the character of our thoughts…is made trial of in the calm of night,” when relaxation of the mind brings to the surface “the hidden depths of the soul,” the “hidden fevers of seething emotion.” 

Avarice or the love of money differs from gluttony and fornication because it is not natural, not “inborn.” The other passions at least have their root in God-given necessity: gluttony is a deranged desire for food, fornication a deranged desire for replenishing the earth, and so on with the rest of the sins. But “this disease arrives later and comes upon the soul from without”; in this, its only simulacrum is envy.  And once it enters the soul it is “much more dangerous than all the others and is that much more difficult to get rid of,” becoming the proverbial root of all evils. Avarice sneaks up on us, beginning with making a brother “concerned about a very small sum,” providing him with “certain justifiable and, so to speak, reasonable grounds for holding money back and keeping it for himself”: Does he not need more than what the monastery supplies in order to maintain his health? Does he not need to travel in order to relieve himself of his restlessness behind the narrow confines of the monastery? Does not the prospect of infirm old age ruin his sense of security? “And so the unhappy soul is agitated and tied up in serpentine entanglements.” Hoarding, then desiring material goods, then an attenuation of zeal for holy goods will put him into retreat from the spiritual war. In the end, he will “not shudder to commit a crime of lying or perjury or theft, nor to break faith, nor to be filled with the guilty fury of wrath.” Instead of conforming his way of life and their way of thinking to “the meaning of Scripture,” he will “adapt the power of Scripture to their own wanton desires by looking to harmonize it with their own opinions.” After all, if it is more blessed to give than to receive, must I not have something to give, the more the better? In my now lukewarm faith, I then “refuse to be satisfied with either manual labor or the frugality of the monastery.” Instead, “not only the possession of money” but “even the desire itself should be utterly cast out of one’s mind.” Do not be a Judas, ready to “sell the world’s redeemer and the author of human salvation for thirty pieces of silver.”

Anger is a “deadly poison” that “must be totally uprooted from the depths of our soul” because it “blinds our mind’s eye with its harmful darkness”—the mind being the nous, reason. Wise Solomon’s Book of Proverbs admits that “anger destroys even the prudent.” Biblical references to God’s anger are not to be taken literally. “The disturbance of anger (not to mention wrath) cannot be attributed to that immutable nature without monstrous blasphemy,” any more than the ascription of physical attributes—God’s “mouth,” His “eyes,” His “hands,” His “arm,”—can be literally applied to a purely spiritual Being. God’s “mouth” denotes “that conversation of his which he is wont to carry on softly in the inmost recesses of our souls, or what he spoke to our fathers and to the prophets.” His “eyes” refer to his capacity to see all things, “the fact that nothing that is done or will be done or that is thought by us is hidden from him.” His “hands” is a metaphor by which “we should understand that providence and activity by which he is the creator and author of all things,” while His “arm” refers “to that power and governance by which he sustains, directs, and rules all things.” God’s anger and wrath have nothing to do with “lowly human disturbances,” denoting instead his role as “judge and avenger of every wicked deed in this world,” one we should fear “as the terrible repayer of our acts,” anything we do “against his will.” This is the import of Jesus’ command to remove the “beam of wrath” from your own eye instead of complaining about the speck in the eye of another. Be indignant at your own sins, “the wanton movements of our heart,” at “things that we are ashamed to do or to say in the sight of human beings but that have found their way into the recesses of our heart.” Consider the bad example of irascible souls, who “turn the poison of their wrath back to their own destruction, brooding over it in their hearts and in glum silence digesting it within themselves.” Their anger blocks them from prayer, and especially from prayer for their enemies, which God commands us to do. And further, “as long as we attribute our own wrongdoing to other people,” as long as we resent, “we shall never be able to get near to patience and perfection.” On the contrary, our anger is under “our own power,” quite apart from what others do or say. And “lastly,” never abuse prayer, never pray to God “when we are anger,” when we are likely to petition Him for our enemy’s ruin. “Keep before our eyes the uncertain state of our human condition,” which dictates that we will die, abandoning all the earthly goods we are so indignant to lose.

“A consuming sadness” is also a sin, inasmuch as Christians eventually will see God in eternity and, in the meantime, “it cuts us off totally from the vision of the divine contemplation” while “weaken[ing] and oppress[ing] the mind itself,” discouraging it from “carry[ing] out its prayers with its customary eagerness of heart” and blocking it from “dwell[ing] upon the remedies of sacred scripture.” Sadness can follow sustained, frustrated anger or the failure to achieve “some gain.” “Occasionally we are even provoked to fall into this misfortune for no apparent reason.” Patience remedies sadness, in particular when we seek to win over someone we have offended or injured. So does rightly directed hope, as the natural benefit of sadness comes “when we conceive it out of repentance for our sins and are inflamed by a desire for perfection, and by the contemplation of future blessedness.” 

Acedia is the term for “a wearied or anxious heart.” Similar to sadness, “it makes a person horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a slight distance,” rendering him “slothful and immobile in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling.” Acedia causes the mind to fill “with a kind of irrational confusion.” David suffered from it, as seen in Psalm 119:28: “My soul slept from weariness” or “heaviness.” It cannot “be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.” To do so, don’t compare yourself with your brother monks, pay no attention to gossip, work with your hands, “walk honorably for the sake of outsiders,” and “desire nothing of anyone.” Take your stand on the Word of God, on His promises of salvation, on your coming entry into His regime, the Kingdom of God.

Vainglory is a spiritual rather than a fleshly sin. Indeed, “persons who could not be deceived by carnal vices are all the more brutally hurt as a result of their spiritual successes”; their lack of sin tempts them to sin. Vainglory is accordingly more complex than many of the other sins. “Multifarious, multiform, and varied,” it conceals itself under virtues. It pursues souls even into solitude. “One [man] is tried because of his great knowledge, another because he reads much, still another because of his frequent vigils.” For these things, he is likely to be praised, even flattered. For this reason, “a monk must by all means flee from women and bishops.” Or, if an academic, from women and deans. Do not boast, and “avoid those things that could set us apart from others and that would gain us praise from human beings, as if we were the only ones who could do them.” Do not “do for the sake of human beings what we should have done” for the sake of God.

In many ways, Cassian has commended humility as the cure for the sins. The eighth and final sin is pride, “the final one in the combat with the vices” but “first in terms of origin and time.” Unlike most of the other vices, it cannot rest satisfied, however temporarily, when it achieves its telos. Nor does it confine itself to the corruption of one virtue, as gluttony corrupts moderation, lust charity, anger patience. “Like a most savage tyrant it lays waste and overturns the whole city from its foundations.” Rebellious Lucifer would have destroyed the Kingdom of God. His pride made him rely “on the power of his free will”; he no longer believed that he needed God. He tempted Adam into sharing it with him, bringing the first man to believe “he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort.” But genuine theosis depends entirely upon understanding that our virtues are gifts bestowed upon us by the grace of God. This is why monks are so vulnerable to pride; they can easily suppose that their spiritual victories are their own. On the contrary, we must remind ourselves of our dependence upon Him.

“How great the evil of pride is, that it deserves to have as its adversary not an angel or other virtues contrary to it but rather God himself!” The cure for it may be seen in the words of the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians: “Not I, but the grace of God in me.” “A person cannot be cleansed of his carnal vices if he does not realize that all his efforts and attempts are insufficient in view of the great end of perfection, and if he does not recognize that this cannot be grasped apart from the compassion and help of God.” “Never will a person’s own effort and human diligence be equal to the divine gift, if it has not been granted by the divine compassion to the one who desires it.” To say this does not “nullify human effort” or redirect men from “diligence and intense toil.” Indeed, “God’s mercy and grace are bestowed only on those who toil and labor,” “given to those who will and those who run,” to those who ask for God’s blessing, knock at God’s door, search for God. But one must hope for “the rewards of the life to come not by reason of [one’s] own works but on account of the Lord’s mercy,” giving themselves “no credit for the great circumspection of heart that they [have] in comparison with others.” Do not flatter yourself. God was the one who “created us rational, gave us the power of free will, bestowed on us the grace of baptism, and granted us the knowledge and help of the law,” protecting us from evil by His providence. 

“This is the true humility with respect to God, this is the unspoiled faith of the most ancient fathers, which remains pure in their successors up to the present day.” Not by philosophy, with its “dialectical syllogisms,” or rhetoric, “Ciceronian eloquence,” but by the “experience of an unspoiled life and by the most upright behavior, as well as by the correction of their vices and, to speak more truly, by visible indications,” the fathers of the faith “learned that the nature of perfection is contained” in “simplicity of heart.” 

 

Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part 3, chapters 9-12, Conclusion. Notre Dame: University Press of Notre Dame, 2026.

 

Every political community needs bonds that hold it together, preserve its union. These include laws, customs, and acts of force. There is also patriotism, love of country, often expressed in the patriotic defense of self-government against foreigners. At the same time, an earlier form of the ‘love of one’s own,’ familial love, can serve as a building-block of the city or as its competitor, as seen in Sophocles’ Antigone. [1] The alliances and tensions between aristocratic families and the centralized modern state inform all of Shakespeare’s ‘history plays.’ Hancock remarks the emphasis the Greeks placed on self-government, the emphasis the Bible places on family. These emphases register in their different approaches to the things transcending the city and the family: the impersonal, first-mover, natural god of the Greeks; the Father-God of the Israelites. “The Christian tradition undertook to synthesize these two orientations toward what is highest, rational order and love, in what Pope Benedict XVI named the ‘personal logos.'” Personal logos in turn leaves room for “moral agency.” But “our Christian response to the ‘woke’ exhaustion of liberalism matters only if Christianity bears something essential of what Pascal named ‘the truth about man.'”

Hancock would “extend Manent’s efforts to affirm the primacy of the practical” by showing that “every understanding of the ‘highest good’ or of ‘heaven’—that is, every conception of transcendence—involves some mingling of what we call ‘the same’—what we affirm as intelligible and in principle present to our articulate experience—and ‘the other’—that which surpasses, while somehow addressing, our understanding and our experience.” This formulation contrasts noticeably with the notion of ‘the other’ in ‘woke’ socialist ideology, wherein it refers merely to human beings who are not ‘us’—not of the same sex, race, nation. Hancock’s ‘other’ is radically ‘other,’ not merely unknown or poorly understood but at least in some respects unknowable by human efforts alone. “What is ultimate,” what divinity is, “must be other than ordinary experience, or it would not be transcendent and would not offer the hope of some condition free of the burdens, the conflicts, the confusions, the tensions, or the simple boredom of our mundane existence.” Yet this “other” cannot be entirely unknowable, entirely removed from “our actual experience, or the promise of such goods would have no meaning or attraction for us.” This goes both for Greek philosophy and Biblical faith, although from different starting points and different results, at least initially.

Hancock of course well knows that what he calls the Christian synthesis of Greek and Jew, a distinction the Apostle Paul describes as having been erased fundamentally by Christ, has been challenged repeatedly. The Straussian scholar Thomas Pangle criticizes biblical transcendence, considering it incoherent, violative of the logical principle of non-contradiction. [2] Considering the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, Pangle argues that Abraham either knew that God would reverse his command to kill his son, “so it was not really a sacrifice,” or Abraham did not know that, and was willing to kill his son out of blind obedience. “It seems biblical obedience must either be purely calculating and thus not at all ennobling, or else it is simply mad and humanly meaningless.” Against this, Hancock cites Leon Kass, who writes that “God does not finally require that men choose between the love of your own and godliness,” between fatherhood and the Father of all. God “wants not the transcendence of life but rather its sanctification.” Choose life, the story teaches, but life on God’s terms, not yours; if you do, God will graciously, providentially protect you and yours. Such a God redirects love of one’s own by sanctifying it, by pointing it towards the love of the gracious God. Pangle’s “rationalist teleology,” his ‘Greekness,’ “cannot account for love as a good that enriches the lover only when he releases his rational hold on it, his claim of secure possession,” ‘his own.’ 

Augustine of Hippo makes an early attempt to synthesize Greek and Biblical love. Augustine responds powerfully to the ‘democratic’ aspect of Christianity. “Any true way to the liberation of the human soul,” the souls of ‘the many,’ humans ‘as such,’ “must, at least in principle, be available to human beings as such and not only to a few philosophers.” Admittedly, “there can be no logical objection to the proposition that only certain superior human beings can be raised above the limitations of the human condition.” Rather, the Bible holds that “there is something of eternal significance in human existence itself and not only in the perfection of the rational faculty but something in our humanity as such that must have some eternal significance and destiny,” a “spiritual dignity that does not depend on…being philosophers and…[is]not limited to rationality per se.” Augustine writes, “The Savior took upon himself the man in his entirety.” This means that human souls have not only a nature but an even more important ‘history,’ a story—one that occurs within the larger story of God’s creation of Man, His punishment of Man, and His redemption of Man, “the everlasting salvation of the individual person.” Whereas “Platonists measure God by the standard of human reason,” the Logos that is God encompasses and transcends human logos. Therefore, “philosophy as a way of life cannot stand by itself” finally, at the ‘end of (our) history.’ Because it isn’t only the rational ‘part’ of the soul but the whole soul and indeed the whole man, including man’s body, that matters to God, human bodies too can be saved. Salvation purifies and sanctifies even the corrupted flesh. 

The Protestant theologian Denis de Rougemont distinguishes Greek eros from Biblical agape as two loves that work at cross-purposes. [3] De Rougemont contrasts the erotic love of the medieval ‘romances’—seen, for example, in Tristan and Iseult—with the agapic love seen in Christian marriage. Erotic love waxes, wanes, disappears; marital love is permanent, and therefore not a ‘sentiment’ as ordinarily understood. The twain seldom meet, because erotic loves desires to possess, whether it desires a woman, wisdom, or a Mercedes-Benz. Agapic love aims not at possession but at giving; it is ‘charitable,’ seeking the good not of oneself but of someone else, even as God’s love seeks the good of His creation, to the extent of sacrificing His only Son, Abraham-like, for the sake of redeeming human individuals from their sins, even as he of course ‘saves’ his self-sacrificing Son by the Resurrection; this Isaac, too, must not die. 

Against this account, Hancock places the Catholic stance of Benedict XVI. Citing the first sentence of the first chapter of the Book of John, Benedict considers “the God who is Logos” as the guarantor of “the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, reason’s accord with God, and God’s accord with reason.” “For Benedict,” Hancock elaborates, “God is somehow both continuous with reason or logos as human beings know and experience these ideas, yet also, in some sense, infinitely beyond our understanding.” God’s revelation to John raises another question, however. It is one thing to say that logos is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, dividing nature into parts or “kinds” that are distinct from one another, that cannot simply be blended together either in thought or ‘in themselves.’ It is another thing to say that God, the supreme Person, is more than impersonal nature, more than a ‘kind,’ and nonetheless still reasonable—that there is “personal logos.” Personal logos “must be respected as an aporia that reminds us of the partly clear and partly mysterious character of our existence,” a fundamental and permanent problem. And yet this Person commands us, requires us to obey Him as “a touchstone of fundamental practical guidance,” a guidance that we will not comprehend if it is not logical. The story of Abraham and Isaac finds a reasoned explanation in Kass’s exegesis, which offers a rational purpose for God’s unexplained but not inexplicable command.

Hancock’s emphasis on the practicality of God’s guidance recalls him to Manent’s critique of the “hypertrophy of theory” in modernity and the need to discern the logic inherent in human action. “An ultimate, architectonic concept such as ‘personal logos’ is always at the risk of being overtheorized at the hands of ecclesiastical theologians or ambitious intellectuals and thus becoming sterile and instrumental to the authority of one or another system of thought.” One might attempt an Origen-like subordination of “personal” to “logos,” reducing Christianity “to the status of a junior partner to an intellectualist Platonism or Neo-Platonism, with its ruling idea of a rational-impersonal-necessity.” Or one might do as ‘moderns’ incline to do, “embrace the standpoint of the human person, all desires and passions included, and reduce logos to a mathematical construct, projecting an understanding of ultimate reality as a pure object of human mastery for all-too-human ends.” Benedict avoids both of these errors. The word “Eros” “appears only twice in the Bible,” both times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, never in the New—a point de Rougemont makes much of, it should be added. As Aristotle sees, eros aims at human happiness, the culmination of nature, of human nature, in the fulfillment of the aim of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, as it seeks to know itself and to know the whole, however incompletely. So far, no agape. But it is the seeking or searching quality of eros…that makes possible the synthesis”—a word to be used advisedly, as will become clear—Benedict “envisions with the sacrificial and other-regarding quality of agape” by its longing for the transcendent reality, not nature but the Creator of nature who, as Creator, did not acquire but gave. Neither the noble ethics and politics of Plato and Aristotle nor the ignoble ‘politics of acquisition,’ of material acquisition, commended by Machiavelli for his ‘prince’ can fully satisfy human longing, human eros. Human eros reaches for the agapic Person, God, although it does not by itself know what it is looking for, and hence depends upon the agapic reaching out of that Person for its fulfillment. When God reaches out in response to human eros, He does what He does for Abraham’s intention, sanctifying it. “Eros redeemed by agape elevates individuality to eternity.” Benedict calls this “the true discovery of the other.”

And, now returning to de Rougemont’s theme, marital love, “the unification of man and woman, signifies the unification of body and soul and the transcending of the dichotomy between eros and agape.” Do the married man and woman love one another erotically? Very often so, at least for a while. But do they also love one another agapically? Yes, insofar as they understand their marriage as permanent, an act performed ‘in the sight of God’ and carried on in His sight. In Hancock’s words, “true love honors both the character of the same and that of the other in the human orientation toward the good,” which both receives erotically and gives agapically. Since God and human beings are persons, love can extend both to bodies and souls, to ‘whole persons.’ After all, did not God become Man? Benedict (a German in addition to being a Catholic and a pope) goes so far as to say that with God’s grace eros is not only “supremely ennobled” but “at the same time…so purified as to become one with agape.” This looms as a bit more ‘German’-Hegelian than Christianity actually is. (And, indeed, Hegel regards marriage as an example of what later Hegelians would call the ‘synthesis’ of opposites.) Hancock more accurately describes these loves as complementary, ‘political’ in the Aristotelian sense, with agape as the unequal partner in the mutually loving rule. This rule, being political within the family, can also be politically within the polis, the political community itself. Human choice, human “agency,” is “necessarily moral-political agency,” choice responsible “in contexts always defined by mediated moral law as well as natural necessities.” 

“Moral agency in a concrete community is the essential complement to the idea of love as the gift of the self to the other.” If they fail to acknowledge the “human source” of “our interest in the heavens or the whole,” philosophy and theology miss their calling, “not only morally or religiously but rationally and philosophically.” In philosophy, this is what Socrates understood, and it is why “he brought philosophy down from the heavens to consider politics and ethics.” Hancock does not mean that the human source of theological and philosophic eros can be reduced to the ‘merely’ human, whether it be convention, socioeconomic class interests, ‘gender,’ or any other such category. He rather means that human nature, filtered through such supportive but potentially distorting phenomena, points us to a “higher purpose” than material interests. “First philosophy cannot spare itself the labor of self-reflection, and, thus, of reflection on the human sources and conditions of philosophy.” There will always be “an irremediable gap between what is first in itself and what is first for us, for human beings,” but that does not relieve us of our responsibility to ourselves and to God to bridge it, at least some of the way. “‘Theology’ might be derisively defined as the pretension to speak of things beyond human capacity,” but then philosophy may be defined as “the love of a wisdom we never fully possess.” “The line between the pretensions of theology and the modesty of a Socratic philosophy becomes very fine indeed.” For philosophy to succeed, philosophers must come down to earth; for religiosity to succeed, God must.

Beyond the challenges to knowledge posed by human circumstances, is the human soul itself capable of perceiving truth and, if so, to what extent? Hancock begins to address this question with a discussion of Michael Davis’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. The soul “has a form and limits, a structure, and, if you will, a ‘nature,'” Davis observes; in attempting to know itself, the soul reveals what it is and to some degree shapes itself through, for example, habituation. The soul seeks not only to know itself but to know the world around it, ultimately to know the whole, which includes “the knowing and desiring soul.” The soul is in but not entirely of the world; it differs from the rest of the whole. “This connectedness between the soul and the world is to be understood, Davis proposes, ‘in the end as philosophy.'” This means that some souls are better at knowing than others—better ordered, better ruled internally than others. But if there is, as Davis writes, “a political aspect to the soul” (as seen most clearly in Plato’s Republic) then, Hancock asks, is there not “a political aspect also to philosophy”? Is philosophy not a ‘partisan,’ albeit a partisan of reason? 

If so, then it must be open to critique by Christians, who claim a position beyond such partisanship. “One might say that Christianity attempts to overcome the essential partisanship of classical philosophy” by maintaining “that existence must lie somehow at the heart of being, that the whole would not be whole without its manifestation in human existence.” We are back to Hancock’s gloss on Barney’s mom in The Music Man: what the movie’s producers expect us to see as a comic manifestation of love of one’s own might also manifest love of a person as a person. “For truth and mineness to be reconciled, it would have to be the case that my very mineness, my existence as a person, would have a correlate at the origins of peak of the whole. God would have to be a person…or, let us say, more cautiously, there would have to be something personal about the divine.” (How, for example, could persons arise out of impersonal matter in motion?) Admittedly, “this Christian move is irreparably problematic as well, from a philosophical point of view, because the only ‘persons’ we know are people, and we cannot really know what we are talking about when we say that the Creator and Sustainer of the whole is a ‘person.'” “Christianity wants to hold together the beauty of sacrifice with the good of fulfillment, to hold together the call of otherness and the satisfaction of self-possession. And who can blame it?” Evidently, Davis can, as he regards Christianity as one of the most influential, and therefore most distorting, of the human conventions. Hancock replies that Davis has not “shown the superiority of the Greeks to the Christians (as he would wish) as to have brilliantly traced the fundamental aporia in which we must stand regarding the fundamental question of Athens/Jerusalem.”

Davis intends to answer the question. “For Socrates, he writes, love of oneself means love of whoever draws him out of himself,” whoever his dialectical interlocutor is. At the same time, Socrates will not imitate the interlocutor, make himself into a new ‘self’—precisely the invitation Christians are beckoned to accept in the imitatio Christi. For Socrates, self-rule and self-knowledge inheres not in the imitation of a person but “in fidelity to a kind of primordial and evanescent moment in which the self necessarily produces some ‘image’ of the whole” in dialogue with another. With this, Hancock remarks, “Davis seems to me to have identified very precisely what would be required to establish the supremacy of the classical viewpoint.” But he replies, “Is it not plausible that what draws me out is the personal logos?” That is, why must the impersonal image of the whole be what is drawing me out? “I remain, I confess, more attracted to the possibility of being drawn out…toward the good or toward God, toward the logos of the personal,” toward the Person who is “the ground” of either an impersonal whole or a personal destiny or calling.”

Very well, but then have we not returned to Strauss’s Jerusalem and Athens problem, to zeteticism, to “awareness of the fundamental problems”—another way of ‘privileging’ philosophic inquiry over what many of us take to be divine revelation? True, Hancock concedes, but such awareness “cannot answer for the goodness of those problems.” The modern answer is to brush them aside and to go ahead and conquer nature for our own immediate, material purposes, conceiving of the non-human elements of the world as “the pure object” of human mastery. But how is that “project,” that set of actions, to be seen as good? This is why he again invokes Manent, the “grammar of action,” the “microstructure of moral agency itself.” If action has moral implications built into it, then the conquest of nature must be ‘judgable.’ That grammar, that microstructure, “provides the only touchstone by which we may honor both the love of truth and the truth of love”; it is “our best clue to understanding personal logos, our privileged point of access both to what is high and to what is universal.” For one thing, the logic of action points us back to the actor, the ‘subject.’

“The modern discussion of ‘mineness’—of the soul’s relation to itself—centers on the concept of the ‘subject’ or of ‘subjectivity,'” with its attendant problems of ‘epistemology,’ of self-knowledge and of knowledge of all that is outside itself. Further, is the human subject obligated or simply forced to surrender its agency “to some nonrational power, whether naturalistic or divine”? Hancock contends that “the only alternative to the abyss opened up” by this prospect “is the soul’s acceptance of the mediation of a politics and of a poetry respectful of the mutual dependence between the order of the soul and the order of the whole” since “we can never fully possess ourselves—that is, grasp our subjectivity immediately and transparently,” given our situation within a family and a political community eager to tell us who we are. In pursuing this inquiry, Hancock will consider Tocqueville, Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, but “only Tocqueville, I hold, appreciates the appeal of both aristocratic pride and democratic-universalist subjectivity,” honoring both “elevation” and “justice.” 

Poetry, philosophy, politics: these are “the three human possibilities.” (There is also the not-so-human possibility of religion, which has hovered over the argument from the start, often classified by the classical philosophers under the categories ‘poetry’ and ‘politics’ but perhaps susceptible to philosophic management.) Human beings make poetry in the sense that “we cannot exist without acting, we cannot act without imagining—that is, without conceiving purposes.” Conceiving purposes entails “conceiving (however dimly and implicitly) some understanding of the whole, of the way things are, and of our place in the whole among the things that are”—as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton in fact do. Philosophy “is the natural (albeit rare) extension of this natural interest in conceiving the whole” and of “understanding our place in the whole.” And politics “is the natural (albeit not effectively universal) extension of our awareness that the conventional whole whose authority precedes us can be conceived as an arena of human reflection and choice,” as Publius reminds his readers. “What of religion? We are beings open to—or vulnerable to—the claims of revealed religion because neither poetry nor philosophy nor politics can fully respond to our interest in understanding the whole and our place in it, in grasping what is, and in grasping ourselves.” The classical philosophers, one recalls, puts religion together with philosophy and politics under the rule of prudential if not always theoretical reason. For Christians, however, logos bows to Logos.

If Aristotle’s Politics consists of a sort of dialogue between an oligarch and a democrat, Tocqueville continues that dialogue in the world of the modern state. In terms of poetry, aristocracy concentrates attention of “what is concrete and particular,” thus “reinforc[ing] the meaning of purposive action within a largely inherited world of meaning.” Aristocratic imagination inclines toward the elevated, the mythic, heroic conflicts between demigods and monsters. Democratic poetry is real-worldly, seen first in the nature-poetry of a James Thompson, but finally in down-to-earth human action—not to elevation but to extension, to humanity, to pantheism, to Walt Whitman. In response too aristocratic poetry’s verticality it ‘goes horizontal.’ Courtly love disappears; tender lyrics addressed to real women proliferate, veering toward the vulgar (an old-fashioned term for the people) in soap opera and pornography. But this vulgarization has been preceded by a vulgarization of the whole, which was reconceived as an object of conquest by Machiavelli and Bacon.

Poetry and politics, then, provide a “natural mediation” between human nature and nature as a whole. Christ’s mediation provides a supernatural mediation between them, and between the Father-God behind both. But Christ is not only God but Man, and so can only be understood, insofar as He is Man, by “some natural interpretation of the human.” As for His godliness, “can God’s kenosis or self-emptying escape the negativity of the modern subject/self without drawing upon the natural understanding, upon political poetry, or poetic politics?”

Levinas argues that self-emptying is indeed the foundation of ethics. Levinas is Jewish, so he doesn’t take Christ as the model for this, drawing instead “on a parallel Jewish theme of ethical law as the absolute obsession of the self by the other” which takes “the very constitution of the self or subject” as “the ethical bond to the other.” This amounts to “a radical break with the Western rationalist tradition,” although, as Hancock sees, this makes his thought align with “modern secularism” or wokeness, with its privileging of ‘the other.’ Levinas claims that “consciousness precedes reason, and conscience grounds consciousness.” Conscience produces ethical conduct and “ethics is thus first philosophy,” raising the question not of why there is something rather than nothing but why being is good, “how being justifies itself.” Hancock wonders, how does this respond “to the questions of the basis of knowledge and the purpose of life?” “Can such a primordial ethics either illuminate or guide human choice?” He finds no real answer to those questions in Levinas’ profound-too-profound theory. Levinas may (or may not) have discovered the foundation of freedom, but it is a freedom from which no one could derive any particular action. Levinas therefore substitutes “obsession with the other” for choice. Sober Hancock prefers not to ground ethics on obsessiveness. Further, this obsession is encapsulated in the Jewish proverb Levinas valorizes: “The material needs of the other are my spiritual needs.” But that, Hancock remarks, means that “there is no choice above necessity,” above material choice. Levinas has reconstituted Marxism as a spiritual endeavor. Sure enough, his beau ideal of a statesman is Léon Blum, the kindly French socialist who flourished between the world wars. But “can an expression of progressive idealism be judged apart from a consideration of its conception of the common good?” The obsession with ‘the other’ “cannot evade some reference to the meaning of the world in which human beings find themselves,” and so Levinas “falls back into the technological and progressive or historicist attitude,” a sort of Heideggerianism of the Left. Tocqueville would not be surprised.

Returning briefly to Strauss, Hancock recalls “the fragility of [his] claim “of the self-sufficient happiness of the philosophic life,” with its understanding of the reason-revelation aporia and its difficulty in proving that the philosopher really is motivated by the eros for wisdom rather than the desire for recognition, as Kojève charges. This is especially true since for Strauss there is no guarantee that there is “a God who could verify the philosopher’s purity of heart,” and surely no ‘history’ that judges anything, only an impersonal nature that can limit but cannot observe the inner workings of any human soul. “He hesitates in his dismissal of the biblical critique of aristocratic [that is, philosophic] pride.” At the same time, Strauss resists any coordination of Athens and Jerusalem because “he abominates the modern synthesis,” historicism. This brings Hancock back to Tocqueville, who does want coordination if not synthesis between aristocracy and democracy, calling upon aristocrats to “guide” democracy, moderate it, guard it from its excesses. But Tocqueville, who lived only into middle age and pursued an active political career, did not “propose a comprehensive vision that might hold together and sustain the bonds between freedom and law and divinity.” Building upon the work of Tocqueville, Aquinas, and Manent, Hancock pushes ahead, asking, “What understanding of the whole and of the divine would accord with (while, of course, transcending) the ‘grammar of action’ that has emerged from my reflection on Manent’s understanding of natural law?” and “What vision of God, the soul, and true community would reasonably extend and support Tocqueville’s exquisite equilibrium between the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ dimensions of human being” and, what is still more, “What answer to the perennial question of political theology, the question which theory and practice ultimately must converge—that is, ‘Quid sit Deus?’—would honor and account for Strauss’s bracing pagan response to the Christian and democratic subversion of philosophic nobility while remaining open to the biblical truth of subjectivity and universality, to the mysterious, infinite value of the human person under a personal God?”

Large questions beg for a large answerer. Hancock has one ready at hand, Thomas Aquinas. As a student of both Aristotle and the Bible, Aquinas understands “that Providence must be understood as holding open the space of human prudence” under the auspices of what his erudite contemporary follower, Benedict XVI calls “personal logos.” Under the Christian dispensation, rightly understood, “the good must be both in action”—part of its grammar, its logic—and “above it”—superintended by Logos seen as a ‘Who,’ not a ‘What.’ While “real, practical action…must be respected and not sacrificed to the inherent tendency of theory and theology to hypertrophy,” “the nobility of practice, of moral agency, must not assert itself as some absolute and transparent ground of meaning but must be held open to some glorious plenitude that transcends it” along the lines of Tocqueville’s “moral analogy.”

To address these questions, Hancock has recourse not only to moral analogy but to the longstanding Thomistic topic of the analogia entis, the analogy of being. This question initially arose with regard to the problem of how to describe God, the Being who is in some sense beyond our necessarily finite, human terms, a Logos far greater than our logoi. How can we human-all-too-humans say that God is good, wise, just, when we can’t comprehend Him? It is the story of Abraham and Isaac, again. Hancock’s suggestion is to put “moral analogy” and “analogy of being” together, to think of “the essential bond between ideas and practical existence,” morality, at the same time as we think of “the linkage between divinity and humanity.” They are “two approaches to the same fundamental moral, political, philosophical, and theological problem” because “sound morality and politics need the support of some understanding of the whole.” When human beings use their own necessarily limited vocabulary to register attributes of God, they are doing what they must do to think about God at all: winnowing a human meaning, “meaning for personal beings who are embodied agents in the practical world,” from what they hear about a Being whom no one can see and live. 

Hancock traces the problem of the analogy of being to Greek philosophy, to the dichotomy between Parmenides, who claimed that “reality is one, and…plurality and change mere illusions” and Heraclitus, who claimed that “the only reality” is “ever-changing manyness.” Plato and Aristotle would “navigate between these extremes,” locating life between being and nothingness, between stable forms and changing phenomena. Aristotle brings this insight to language, seeing analogy “as a kind of mean between univocity (a word’s meaning is always the same) and equivocity (one usage of the word in question is absolutely different from another)” and identifying two kinds of analogy: one in which “various usages are associated together owing to a common point of reference,” as when we call a human being healthy, a dog healthy, a medical treatment healthy, and so on; another, “the analogy of proportion,” which “involves the comparison of two different proportions, as with numbers and also with words, in metaphors, the proportion usually illustrated by saying ‘A is to B what C is to D.’ In Thomistic theology, there is an analogy of proportion “between the being of God” (‘A to B’) and “the being of creatures” (‘C to D’). The contemporary adept of the analogia entis is Erich Przywara, who argues that an analogy exists between “mutable and finite things” such as ourselves “are grounded in their ultimate essence in something immutable and infinite, which is essentially distinct from them.” Thus, as Hancock straightforwardly puts it, “the creature is the image of the Creator, and thus an analogy of the Creator,” since “God is incomprehensibly beyond all things, yet ‘tangibly present’ in all things.” In terms of things thought, “the paradox extends to the very relationship between reason and revelation, between, on the one hand, a purely natural and rational theology and, on the other, theology understood as dependent upon revelation and grace.” That is, the “natural, rational insight into the character of reality bears within itself the invitation to an openness to what necessarily transcends nature and reason.” That is, the analogia entis means that “the divine is at once in and beyond the natural world of human experience,” seen in the Book of Genesis in the account of God “breathing life” into clay in order to make Man, an act that enables Man by nature to think towards God, even after being expelled from Eden. At the same time, Hancock acknowledges the insistence of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, that the Creator-God’s dissimilarity to His creations must be understood to be greater than His similarity to them—that the analogy must break down at some point. 

But not before performing some indispensable work for us creatures. Przywara is a music man, but obviously no charlatan. For him, “a theology of analogy must remain as much a kind of poetry or music as a self-contained propositional system” which “evoke[s] actual human experiences of one kind or another as natural pointers to supernatural reality” while remaining “ever vigilant against the pretension of theory of theology to favor one pole or the other, the natural or the supernatural, and thus to risk the collapse of the musical tension.” While Przywara inclines toward the esthetic dimension of these “natural experiences,” Hancock argues for “the prominence of the ethical.” For Christians and Jews, humility stands at the center of morality, given the analogy but also the profound difference between Man and God. As analogous to God, Man has been endowed with the capacity to know Him to some small but salvific extent; as undivine beings who may, through theosis, be substantially improved, we must humble ourselves before Him. Our God-endowed capacities give us the basis for a proper pride, really a sort of self-respect, even as we must rigorously attempt to overcome wrongful pride, Satanic rivalry with God. Modern pride, the pride of ‘Old Nick’ Machiavelli, pretends “to transcendence of the common condition of humanity…not based on a positive analogy or continuity between human and divine natures, but on the assumption of a standpoint of absolute otherness” regarding our fellow creatures, whom we set out to conquer. “The boundless and incoherent presumption of modernity is that which somehow claims (at least implicitly) the standpoint of God while pretending to prove”—with its doctrine of materialism—that “human beings are nothing but animals.” Tocqueville draws the “practical conclusion,” the moral and political conclusion that “this modern, democratic age is no time to teach humility” to men inclined to conceive of themselves as brutes; “what we need now is pride,” pride of the right sort, self-respect as beings distinct from other creatures but part of a created whole, a cosmos, that we should not view as a thing to be manipulated regardless of our obligations to it, and to the One who created it. “It remains the case that humility is a Christian virtue.” We “created beings exist not of [our]selves but only through the act of creation,” creation ex nihilo.  

Although “the idea of God’s creation of the world from nothing has, at best, a debatable scriptural basis,” it was crucial as a response to the Neo-Platonist philosophy current in the world of the early Church Fathers. The Neo-Platonists contended that the analogy between ‘divinity’—no Person but “an impersonal first principle”—and the many beings was very tight, indeed. The many beings owe their existence to an “eternal emanation” from the first principle: “from the eternal self-identity of the one, there emanates the logos, and from the logos, the cosmos”; “there is nothing truly new under the sun,” reality being essentially timeless. The Fathers understood the God of the Bible as He manifests Himself there, as a Person both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘free,’ with the power to create everything we perceive, including ourselves, our capacity to perceive, and with the freedom to exercise that power unconstrained by anything or anyone. “To wrest a personal God from the Greek categories of rational impersonal necessity, freedom embraces nothingness,” since pure ‘somethingness’ would entail necessity. At the same time, unlike Muslims, Christians denied that God in his freedom proceeded arbitrarily, that God is pure will. This would leave “human freedom with no standard but will. Not so: God is Logos. He endows his creatures with the capacity to reason, if not with His capacity to reason, His intimate knowledge of the cosmos, of the whole, and of the purposes to which He has intended to put it.

This is what Przywara calls, following Aquinas, the doctrine of secondary causes. God, the Person who is the First Cause, has called human beings into existence while also gratuitously, graciously endowing them with “the power also to be causes themselves.” And so he can tell Adam to give names to the creatures in Eden and to avoid eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Hancock intervenes to remark this as a call, faithfully echoed by Przywara, “to inspire men and women of faith and goodwill to the cultivation and application of their best faculties.” That is, God calls us to virtue, not a call to “service to human beings understood as beings for whom morality and law” merely serve as “temporary necessities on the path of technological and democratic progress,” but as “constitutive of their being.” Those who heard Jesus teach understood humanity as “unthinkable apart from questions of what is intrinsically good and bad, right and wrong,” being descendants of the ‘first parents’ who disobeyed God and knew—knew good and evil not only intellectually but in the intimate, Biblical sense of knowledge. This was no ‘religion of humanity.’ Jesus requires that creatures serve God as well as themselves, even if they conceive of serving themselves as compassionate service to neighbors.

To do this, not esthetics alone but preeminently the natural law “structured according to a hierarchy of natural finalities (self-preservation, reproduction, natural sociality, and knowledge of God)” must be acknowledged and followed. The natural law points human beings not only to the beautiful but also to the true and the good. This points us to practice first, without denying the importance of either philosophic theory or theology. “A truly good and truly beautiful understanding of the analogy between humanity and divinity, I propose, would have to honor both the grounded pride and the sacrificial humility of action,” the understanding that neighbors are intrinsically loveable, creatures of God despite their sins, and therefore worthy of sacrificing for. In so understanding the human condition, we exhibit “the capacity to receive grace,” exercising our natural powers strengthened and refined as virtues (especially the virtues of prudence and harmlessness, which is perhaps analogous to Aristotelian moderation) in the service of supernatural ends insofar as God reveals them. As in Aquinas’ De veritate, “the ultimate end is located in the supernatural, while the right content or substance is in the natural,” the relation of means and ends in which the exercise of virtue is both good in itself, an end in itself, and in service to purposes beyond ourselves. The supernatural incorporates the natural but the natural incorporates the supernatural, as God’s Spirit resides in the human heart, once the heart opens itself to Him. As Aquinas affirms, grace perfects nature by enabling it to achieve a substantial degree of “self-sufficient actualization,” the “prideful classical reason” Aristotle commends, and to open itself to the “possibility of ecstatic,” self-emptying self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ, an endeavor “far beyond the reach” of such reason, no part of Aristotelian ethics.

This dual moral obligation distinguishes classical “achievement” from Christian “participation” in Christlike self-sacrifice. Participation by definition is more than “sheer receptivity in the sense of passivity,” instead implying activity. “The human, natural pole” of the duality follows Aristotle, as Aquinas indeed does, his natural law being “human participation in eternal law,” which is “indistinguishable from God’s being and goodness,” God’s being and goodness being the ground of our own being and goodness, insofar as we have not marred them. We have not entirely marred them; had we, we could not even perceive God’s call to Himself. “There must be some positive content in the human language by which we reference God…or else our doctrines and our praise are strictly meaningless.” With the theologian Thomas S. Hibbs, Hancock finds divine goodness “deeply consonant with the highest human practical virtue,” prudence or practical wisdom, whose divine analogy is Providence. With God, Providence allies closely with techne, art, which cannot fail, given God’s power. Human artistry can of course fail, but it is sufficiently ‘creative’ to produce narration not only of the past but of an intended future which, so long as it is guided by prudence, will not succumb to wrongful pride. That intended future should take “the path of return to God,” and that requires “some understanding” of God as a Person. 

But what is a “person”? To answer that question, I can only begin with myself and the human beings around me. Christian individualism “must not forget” the “political nature of humanity,” since “we gain an understanding of what is good and best for us by imitating the exemplars of human action embodied in the practices of our community,” practices which are at least said to be “oriented to the good as presented in the common good,” beyond my good as an individual. This suggests, as it does to still another Thomist, Jean-Rémi Lanavère, that the political community provides human beings with “the natural mediation” between them and the natural law, itself an instantiation of eternal law. That is, “the rational creature participates in eternal law—that is, in divine providence—not only as a recipient but also as an active, provident agent,” as one ruled but also ruling. “This active participation is the natural law.” It is not only a set of general rules but of attention to particulars; the classical concern with the limitation of law—that its generality does not necessarily do justice to particular circumstances—finds exemplary correction in Christianity’s personal God, who issues general commands but also governs individuals from ‘without’ and from ‘within,’ the latter via justice-oriented conscience and prudential reasoning. “natural law itself is by no means received passively by the human agent; rather, natural law is constituted by human reason, and then fulfilled—not distorted, or compromised—in its particular application. This leads Hancock to “the surprising and marvelous conclusion” that human law, a convention, “is tied more intimately to eternal law, to the divine mind itself, than is human reason in its work of constituting the general principles of the ‘natural law,'” and that human law completes natural law and “human beings are God’s intermediaries in the actual execution of human government.” 

Well, they should be.

Mosaic Law was God’s law given to the Israelites. The new law of grace, which in no way rescinds Mosaic Law for the Jewish people, summarizes the Mosaic Law in the two Great Commandments while graciously leaving Gentiles’ politics, including lawgiving, to the deliberation, decision, and execution of human beings. What Manent calls “archic” prudence “cooperates with God’s providence in determining and commanding what natural law left indeterminate,” instantiating “the responsibility of reason under God.” Rightly understood natural law and rightly conceived and enacted conventional law both serve purposes that are supernatural. Hancock identifies his own purpose as “recover[ing] an understanding of the natural, political beings to whom Christian revelation is addressed and whose nature must not be canceled by the revelation of grace and of a supernatural purpose.” But as he also sees, human beings can “say No to God.” Saying No to God is the definition of evil. The decision for “good versus bad depends upon [the decision for] good versus evil.” “We are by grace alone free to choose freedom and eternal life, liberty under God and the laws.” In this sense, Adam and Eve’s fall from grace was “fortunate,” despite the curses God heaped upon them because it “inaugurated this history of freedom as a divine-human partnership.” (Inveterate bourgeois that I am, I for one would have been content with obedience to God regarding the initial choice, also free, which our first parents made, but I take Hancock’s point.)

Returning to the present day, Hancock asks, “How can Christianity speak to the morality and politics of a definitively secular age,” where “modern societies and states flirt dangerously with totalitarian temptations,” temptations in which slavery disguises itself as freedom? Hancock regards Pascal’s treatment of this question as too anti-philosophic, an attitude he ascribes not only to the great mathematician’s ardent Christian faith but to his modern, mathematical (mis)understanding of the cosmos, which makes the whole as infinite and therefore incomprehensible as a sequence of numbers to which one can always add one more. He regards Strauss’s treatment of the question as finally too philosophic, too rationalist-naturalist, but nonetheless promising because Strauss was Socratic, recognizing “a kind of knowledge of the human soul that begins with a practical awareness of the souls ends” as “the key to whatever partial theoretical knowledge of the whole may be possible.” “By adopting an essentially Cartesian metaphysics,” Pascal “risks abetting Descartes’s technological project,” but as “the Christian virtue,” (and also the Jewish virtue, anav), humility “depends upon some minimal residue of the pride essential to human agency, upon a certain confidence in a heterogeneous order of the whole” that Socrates perceives “in some way analogous to the substantial heterogeneity of human ends.” “As is the case with Descartes’s thinking subject, Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ remains a wholly unintelligible exception, a speck of mysterious heterogeneity suspended within an otherwise undifferentiated whole.” Hancock doubts “whether this place is indeed a humanly livable one, one that provides sufficient orientation for human action.” Pascal contends that Christian love suffices, but “I have asked whether the supernatural virtue of charity must not shelter or make space for the rule of prudence, the ‘god of this lower world.'” [4] As noted earlier, Jesus Himself thinks so (Matthew 10:16). “Christianity must not attempt to secure the absoluteness of its own elevation by subverting the natural basis of our very sense of elevation.” In Tocqueville’s terms, ‘democracy’ should accept some balance with ‘aristocracy.’ Aristotle is right: the ‘mixed regime,’ duly appreciated on the level of morality as well as politics, really is the best practicable regime, the truly political one that best reflects the relation of God and Man.

Accordingly, Hancock concludes by calling for a “prideful Christianity”—a “purposely provocative and paradoxical formulation.” “The Christian warning against the sin of pride or presumption against God”—genuine evil—must “not be interpreted so as to undermine the natural and necessary confidence in the intrinsic goodness of virtue.” “The archic, initiating, commanding, and thus, in a certain sense, necessarily prideful, character of moral agency is essential to our humanity,” and God’s curses inflicted upon us have not altered that. They have made moral choice more urgent and more knowing. Christians can conscientiously accept “moral and political responsibility understood within the practical frame of our common life.” Such an approach is “‘impure’ both from the standpoint of a pure liberal-democratic theory” as conceived by someone like John Rawls “and from that of a rigorously Protestant or radically Pascalian theology.” (Woodrow Wilson could be said to hover angelically somewhere between the two.) It is nonetheless indispensable for making life in the City of Man propaedeutic to life in the City of God. As Manent sees, the Greeks “understood everything that was essential to understand of human things, and they said it with incomparable sobriety and force,” but “they could not give voice to ‘the inconceivable proximity between human fragility and divine holiness.'” Doubtless recalling Barney’s mom, Hancock quotes Isaiah 49:15-16: “For can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”—a moral and divine analogy illustrating the continued, faithful love of God for the human beings He created. Strauss was right to see that “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality'”; he was right to imply that individuality traces back to Christianity, just as Tocqueville was right to trace modern democracy to Christianity. Both were right to think that Christianity leaves humanity vulnerable to ruin, to inhumanity, when twisted into the paths of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, and finally historicism. Hancock simply replies that this is not Christianity rightly understood.

“Only Manent has, I think, in our times, proposed the indispensable task of reconciling or coordinating Christian anthropology with liberal-republican self-government and its insuperably Aristotelian dimension” by “situating the natural grammar of action, with its element of commanding pride, under a Providence that is a friend of human beings as individuals, personal beings of eternal significance.” That is, “grace is not meant to stand on its own without or apart from nature.” If Satan could not utterly destroy God’s Creation, surely human sinners cannot. At the same time, “elevated by grace, virtue rises above mere honor and the boast of self-sufficiency.” The political nature of human beings most decidedly does not issue in political theology, either in the Machiavellian sense of a moralistic cover for Realpolitik schemers or a politics somehow deduced from a “high-minded but apolitical theological system,” as seen in “integralism.” Rather, Hancock “propose[s] to coordinate the deepest premises of the Christian faith, the foundations of our conviction, whether Christian or post-Christian of the ultimacy of love, with our most sober moral and political judgments regarding the necessity and beauty of virtue.”

 

Notes

1. See “Gods of the Family, Gods of the City: The “Antigone,” on this website under the category “Nations.”
2. See Thomas Pangle: Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
3. For a discussion of de Rougemont, see “The Derangement of Love in the Modern World,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
4. Hancock cites Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening as a contemporary Protestant instance of a Christianity neglectful of the need not only for “competence”—a Cartesian-inspired standard—to live in this world but for the ‘pride’ or self-respect that virtue incorporates. See Mitchell, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (New York: Encounter Books, 2020). Nor can Yuval Levin’s ‘institutionalist’ and Kantian approach to liberal democracy suffice; see Yuval Levin: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again (New York: Basic Books, 2024) and Hancock’s critique (pp.249-254). For a discussion of Pascal’s Pensées and of Pierre Manent’s commentary thereon (Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition) see “A Sure Thing: Betting on Pascal”; “Pascal on Humanity and Its ‘Justice'”; “The Greatness and Misery of the ‘Self'”; and “Pascal on Christ and His Offer of Salvation,” all on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”

Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life. Anonymous translation. Mount Athos: Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorius, 2023.

 

The translator defies theosis as “personal communication with God ‘face to face.'” Such communication can only come with godliness, perfection, righteousness, since no merely human being can look upon the Lord and live. A human being can attain such spiritual elevation through membership in the Christian Church, the New Israel, the spiritual Israel, a Church in which “all humanity” can and should find welcome. “The Orthodox Church has retained this original message of Christ unchanged.” Against the sola Scriptura claim of Protestantism, the Orthodox Church maintains that “Christ’s teachings could not be arrived at from the Holy Bible alone; we would simply project our modern concepts onto the early Church” if we struggled to understand Scripture without the interpretive guidance of the early Fathers of the Church as faithfully transmitted from those centuries to our own. “Theosis stems from this tradition in which the early Church, Traditional Christianity, and Orthodoxy are identical.” The early Church Synods, notably “the seven Oecumenical Synods, the Synod of S. Photios of 867 and the Palamite Synods of the fourteenth century,” expressed doctrines already “fully present within the Church from the day of Pentecost” and, crucially, determined which books now recognized by Christians as the New Testament. Thus, “the dual task of Orthodox Theology is to define and also to protect from human distortion the teachings of Jesus Christ,” teaching not merely ‘academic,’ a matter of intellectual apprehension, but of whole-souled “living faith,” a way of life. The translator denies that Western Christianity fully believes and practices original Christianity because “over one thousand years separate it from this tradition”—the centuries since the Great Schism.

Theosis is central to Orthodox Christian doctrine; it is the telos, the purpose, of human life. “Theosis is the Pearl of Great Price alluded to by Christ” and it “can become a present reality for those who are willing to tread the path, and so it is not exclusively an after-death experience.” The Apostle Paul expresses this experience in saying “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” victory over death.

In his book, Theosis, George Kapsanis, Archimandrite of the Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorious at Mount Athos, provides a succinct explanation of this overarching purpose that God has set down for His human creatures. Archon means ruler; mandra means enclosure: an archimandrite rules a large monastery or group of monasteries; the human ruler thus writes of the ruling purpose of human life. Archimandrite George lists seven purposes in writing his book: to identify “the highest and ultimate purpose of our life; that for which we were created”; to uphold is conviction that “the only truly Orthodox form of pastoral guidance is that which is intended to lead to Theosis,” to “quench the depth of the psyche’s thirst for the Absolute, the Triune God” [1]; to prompt readers to “overflow with gratitude toward our Maker and Creator for His great gift to us, Theosis by Grace”; to have us “realize the irreplaceability of our Holy Church as the only community of Theosis on earth”; to reveal “the magnificence and truth of our Orthodox Faith…as the only faith that teaches and provides Theosis to its members”; and finally, to console our psyches, “for regardless of the degree to which they have been poisoned and darkened by sin, they yearn for the light of Christ’s face.”

Theosis is the purpose for which we were “placed on earth.” In the words of St Gregory the Theologian, a human being is an animal “in the process of Theosis.” Man is the “only one which can become a god” because he is the only animal created “in His image.” God’s image means “the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God,” namely, nous, conscience, and “individual sovereignty” (“freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God”); self-awareness—in sum “everything that makes man a person.” The Archimandrite defines nous as “man’s highest faculty,” both the “eye” and the “energy” of the psyche, both what enables the psyche to perceive God’s teachings and commands (it is “cognitive, visionary, and intuitive,” capable of “perceiv[ing] God and the spiritual principles that underlie creation”) and to act in obedience to them. Man’s “fall,” resulting from his first sinful act, fragmented his psyche, causing the nous to “identify itself with the mind, the imagination, the senses, or even the body,” preventing man from achieving “a personal union with his Creator.” Philosophies and “psychological systems” thus fail to “correspond to man’s great yearning for something very great and true in his life.” 

What is this psyche, which yearns for God while no longer knowing how to reach him? The Archimandrite calls it “the most important and least understood of all Biblical words.” Orthodox Christians define it as “a pure unalloyed essence which animates the body and gives it life; it is our immaterial nature, created yet eternal, comprising our cognitive, conative, and affective aspects, including both the conscious and the unconscious.” This implies that “psychic health precedes salvation”; theosis requires continual and victorious spiritual warfare, not mere conversion and baptism. Psyche encompasses “the meanings of five English words: ‘soul,’ ‘life,’ ‘breath,’ ‘psyche’ (“as in modern psychology”), and ‘mind.'” In the West, soul, life, and breath have become estranged from psyche and mind, as in such locutions as the ‘mind/body problem’ in philosophy. “This dislocation is indicative of a deep spiritual malady in Western man” or, more precisely, in Western man following Greek antiquity. The Archimandrite asserts, implausibly, that the ancient Greek philosophers were “very pious and god-fearing people,” that the “Tradition of the Greeks” is a tradition “of piety and respect for God.” In making this claim, he refers to the Greek “yearning for the unknown God,” the temple noted by the Apostle Paul; one may rather suspect that Paul has alertly turned a Greek inscription to his evangelical purposes. The Archimandrite concurrently demotes the Old Testament, admitting that one “find[s] many jut and virtuous people” there, but no “full union with God.” This could only become possible and could only be achieved “with the incarnation of the Divine Logos” described in the New Testament in the mediating Person of Jesus. 

By logos, ancient Greek philosophers meant a variety of things, including order, reason, and knowledge. The Archimandrite transforms these nouns into related verbs: think, reckon, speak, perhaps to make them consonant with a Creator-God, a God of action as well as of words. The Apostle John “completes the philosophical truths of the Ancient Greeks by connecting them to the Hebrew Tradition of his day,” in the striking first sentence of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”—Jesus Christ. “It is in the Logos that creation finds its reason, cause, and purpose.” While “the human race could have been taught to become morally better by the philosophers, by the righteous men and teachers, or by the prophets,” moral virtue does not suffice for salvation. That is especially true since Adam and Eve “desired to become gods not through humility, obedience, or love but through their own power, their own willfulness—egotistically and autonomously.” This led to knowledge of Good and Evil, to the foundation of moral thought, but not to God. On the contrary, the first humans separated themselves from God, suffering not only physical death but “spiritual death.” There was now “a need for a new root for humanity,” for “a new man, who will be healthy and able to redirect the freedom of man towards God.” Jesus met that need as the embodied Logos. “The God-Man Christ, the Son and Logos of God the Father, has two perfect natures: divine and human,” joined, in the words of the Fourth Holy Ecumenical Synod at Chalcedon, “without change, without confusion, without separation, and without division.” “This definition forms the whole theological armory of our Orthodox Church against Christological heresies of all kinds throughout all ages.” With Jesus, “human nature is irrevocably unified with the divine nature because Christ is eternally God-Man”; “human nature is now enthroned in the bosom of the Holy Trinity,” where nothing can “cut human nature off from God.” Individual human beings can “unite again with God” if the repent of the sins that separate them from Him. Sin is “estrangement from Life,” from the Creator-God. Repentance is a “change of nous aiming at “clearing the nous and the heart from sin.” Because sin is so stubborn, now engrained in our nature, repentance and redirection must be continual. The prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” is no one-time-spoken thing. As Lord, as supreme ruler or King of Kings, Jesus can grant mercy not only because He is omnipotent but because He sacrificed Himself for human beings, taking on their sins and dying on their account for us. 

Jesus enables theosis without being the only person enabling it. He could not be fully human without being born of a woman, “the new Eve, the Panagia” or All-Holy One, “who put right the wrong done by the old Eve by becoming the Theotokos or God-birthgiver,” a person “necessary and irreplaceable” to human salvation. Jesus “would not have been able to incarnate if there had not been such a pure, all-holy, immaculate psyche as the Theotokos, who would offer her freedom, her will, all of herself totally to God so as to draw Him towards herself and towards us.” In an Orthodox Christian Church, the picture of the Theotokos is placed in the apse of the altar “to show that God comes to earth and to men through her” as “the bridge by which God descended” and the one “who conducts those of earth to Heaven.” Similarly, although not so exalted, the depictions of Christian saints placed around Jesus the Pantocrator, the All-Ruler, show congregants “the results of God’s incarnation,” namely, “deified men.” The Church is “the place of man’s theosis,” the “body of Christ,” a union not with the divine essence—God’s essence (ousia) is His own, alone, as the one God, “inaccessible and unknowable to us,” an eternal mystery—but “with the deified human nature of Christ.” What we can know, what Christians mean when they say the ‘know God,” are “His energies,” the energies of a Person with whom we can “achieve intimate and personal communion.”

As members of Christ’s body, His Church, through baptism, through being ‘born again,’ “we are not followers of Christ in the way that one might perhaps follow of philosopher or teacher.” This is much more than being “followers of a code of morality,” although it is also that. As a Christian, your spiritual condition determines whether you are a living or a dead member of Christ’s body; “even as dead members, we still do not cease to be members of Christ’s body.” To revive, one needs to do what one did in becoming a member: to repent. “We could not be deified if Christ did not make us members of His body; we could not be saved if the Holy Mysteries of the Church did not exist.” And “if man did not have the image of God in himself, he would not be able to seek its prototype.” This makes the Church different from other organizations. True, like them it has a regime, a ruling order—a Ruler, a set of ruling institutions, a way of life, a telos or purpose. But no other order can bring us to theosis. “Only within the Church can man become a god, and nowhere else.” Of course, as a regime consisting of human beings not yet fully cleansed of sin, “it is possible for scandals to happen in the bosom of the Church.” “We are becoming gods, but not yet.” Scandal is evil but does not excuse any Christian from remaining a member of the Church. God being both essence and energy, and the Church being the living, ‘energetic’ Body of Christ, it is there that human beings can partake of eternal life, preliminarily. If, per impossibile, a human being could see God’s essence, he would die, just as he would die if he touched a bare electric wire, “but if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated”; “let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God.” We will never become gods in essence, only through Christ’s energies in His Church. Pantheistic religions claim the opposite, that God pervades the world not as its Creator, essentially separate from the beings created by Him, but as immanent in all things. And complementarily, if God had only essence and not energies, “He would remain a self-sufficient God, closed within himself and unable to communicate with his creatures.” “God comes out of Himself and seeks to unite” with His human creatures via His uncreated energies; his grace is among those uncreated energies. By those energies he has created and preserved the cosmos, illuminates, sanctifies, and finally deifies man in the limited way described. Because God “has the divine energies, and unites with us by these energies, we are able to commune with Him and to unite with His Grace without becoming identical with God, as would happen if we united with His essence.” “This is the mystery of our Orthodox faith and life.” The Archimandrite insists that the “Western heretics” reject the distinction between God’s essence and His energies and thus “cannot speak about man’s Theosis.” That this is not the case may be seen in the writings of (for example) Pascal. But again, a reader might not come to the Archimandrite when seeking understanding of the teachings of the ‘Western’ churches.

And so, “a Christian is not a Christian simply because he is able to talk about God. He is a Christian because he is able to have experience of God.” This requires desire, struggle, preparation, which make us “worthy, capable, and receptive enough to accept and guard this great gift from God, since God does not wish to do anything to us without our freedom.” The Archimandrite lists three qualities that Christians must cooperate with God in order to enhance their spirituality, to bring them farther along the path to theosis. The first is humility. “Without humility, how will you acknowledge that the purpose of your life is outside yourself, that it is in God?” For some reason, he claims that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are man-centered, not God-centered, a charge that might correctly be leveled at Aristotle, who considers eudaimonia or happiness of a well-ordered psyche in a well-ordered polis as the purpose of human life. For Christians, however, God must be central because only His grace enables us to continue on the right path, the right regime, the way of life of the Kingdom of God.

The second needed quality is asceticism. “You cannot receive the Holy Spirit if you do not give the blood of your heart in the struggle to cleanse yourself from the passions,” to repent fully, “acquir[ing] the virtues” by giving up your passions. What, then, is the “heart”? It is not, or not simply, “an emotional center,” much less a physical organ of the body. It is “a receptacle for all good and evil,” man’s “psychosomatic center, the deepest and most profound part of our being,” our “inner man,” closely related to but distinct from the nous and the psyche. The heart motivates the man, serving as the battleground of the spiritual warfare between God and Satan, angels and demons. The psyche, in closely related contrast, consists of reasoning powers, the passions, and the appetites—rather as in Plato’s logos, thumos, and epithumia. To walk the path towards theosis, we must will to cleanse our reason by watchfulness, “the continuous guarding of the nous from evil thoughts, cleanse our passionate part by love, cleanse the appetitive part by “self-control,” by moderation.

The third and final needed quality is the willingness to partake of Christ’s “Holy Mysteries,” which are “Holy Baptism, Chrismation, Holy Confession, and the Divine Eucharist.” All of these are necessary because “the passions cover Divine Grace as ashes bury a spark,” and the Mysteries brush the ashes away. So does prayer. The Jesus Prayer, for example, “helps us to concentrate our nous more easily,” enabling the Christian to get a taste of “the sweetness of communion with God,” who is “not an idea, something that we think about, that we discuss or read about” only “but a Person with Whom we come into living and personal communion.” In walking along the way of life of the Christian regime, with the Person who is Christ, we “receive experience” from Him, rather than from those we might otherwise walk with—typically, the wrong crowd. The religions of the Far East—Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like, with their practices of meditation and yoga—can undoubtedly lead the nous away from “the various considerations of the material world,” but they do not lead us to “a dialogue with God.” Without that dialogue, the soul remains trapped in its anthropocentrism, even as it imagines itself to be freed from it.

“Experiences of theosis are proportioned to the purity of man.” This can be achieved gradually, by stages. After tears of repentance for sins, the nous is illuminated by God, now “see[ing] things, the world, and man with another grace.” Tears of love for God result in “theoria,” “in the course of which [stage] man, having already been cleansed from the passions, is illumined by the Holy Spirit,” resulting in theosis, “the vision of the uncreated light of God.” “Those who are very advanced in Theosis see this light, very few in each generation”; such persons are depicted iconographically by halos. “The Grace of Theosis preserves the bodies of the Saints incorruptible, and these are the holy relics which exude myrrh and work miracles,” relics and also icons, graves, and the Churches of the Saints which Orthodox Christians venerated (but do not worship) because they “have something of the Grace of God which the Saint had in his psyche because of his union with God.” 

Such experiences obviously must never be confused with demonic or merely psychological ones, by which “many people have been deluded.” Orthodox Christians should consult their Spiritual Father, who “will discern whether these experiences are genuine or not, and…give appropriate direction to the psyche who is confessing.” Indeed, “our obedience to the Spiritual Father is one of the most basic points of our spiritual path,” the path along which “we acquire an ecclesiastical spirit of discipleship.” “Within the Church we are not isolated members but a unity, a brotherhood, a fraternal community—not only among ourselves, but also with the Saints of God, those who are living on earth today and those who have passed away.” And of course “the head of this body is Christ Himself.”

“Our holy God molded us for Theosis, so if we are not deified, our whole life is a failure.” Causes of such failure include attachment to “the basic cares of life,” including too much time “learning, studying, reading,” working, and socializing, with no time to “pray, to go to Church, or to confess and take Holy Communion.” Such activities “have real and substantial value when undertaken with the Grace of God,” aiming at His glory. “Only when we continue to desire Theosis as well” do “all these find their real meaning in an eternal perspective” and prove “of benefit to us.” Moralism is another snare. “Guidance that only aims for moral improvement is anthropocentric,” making it seem “as if it is our own morality that saves us, and not the Grace of God.” But even an atheist can be moral. Speaking of which, some are blocked from theosis by adopting false doctrines such as anthropocentric humanism, “a socio-philosophical system which is separated from and made independent of God,” leading “contemporary man to a civilization based on selfishness.” Not egocentricity, not ‘class consciousness’ or ‘race-consciousness’ or ‘gender-consciousness,’ not nationalism or even humanitarianism but only ‘theocentrism’ can bring human persons to theosis. It “brings great joy into our life when we know what a great destiny we have, and what blessedness awaits us.” More, “as long as we are closed within ourselves—within our ego—we are individuals but not persons.” “That is to say that when our ego encounters the Thou of God, and the ‘you’ of our brother, ten we begin to find our lost self.” The Divine Liturgy within the Orthodox Christian Church teaches human beings “to overcome the narrow, atomistic interest in which the devil, our sins, and our passions compel us, and instead learn to open up to a communion of sacrifice and love in Christ.” The Archimandrite deplores “the tolerance of the state,” earthly regimes, wherein demi-citizens “squander the precious time of their lives, as well as the powers which God gave them for the purpose of achieving Theosis, in hunting for pleasure and carnal worship.” Archimandrite George is no enthusiast of Church-State separation, although it must be said that Church Establishment carries its own dangers, as contemporary Russia has so tellingly demonstrated.

 

Note

1. Oddly, the Archimandrite claims that “Western Christianity” in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, “aimed at a moral perfection for man which does not depend on God’s Grace.” He is mistaken, but one does not read his book to gain knowledge of Western Christianity.