On the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

A Contemporary Icon, Showing the Importance with which many Eastern Orthodox see the Philosophical Contribution of Origen of Alexandria

By Bishop Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West) 

Introduction 

Christian mysticism has encountered many jolting changes in its history. The fundamental fault-line that runs through the foundations of the Christian experience is the basic contradictions of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, summed up so beautifully in the conflicting approaches of St. Paul and St. Peter regarding table fellowship, communion, which, ultimately, determines our ability to commune with God and reflect the shared nature of the Trinity, and informs our understanding of salvation as sharing within the Divine-Human Economy of the Church. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was a transcendent God, who revealed His otherwise unknowable will through the agency of Prophets, pictured mystically and ineffably in the Word of God, the declarations uttered by the inspiration of God’s Spirit, calling His People, His Covenant, back to repentance. Paradoxically, this transcendent and unknowable God wanted a relationship with His creation, could speak to men, and revealed Himself in Pillars of Fire and in the parting of the Red Sea. It was only through repentance and faith that these contradictions could be rectified and a life lived within the Promise of God could be realized.

This understanding and approach was at basic odds with the development of the Greek pagan mind, which is, essentially, represented in Greek sculpture and art and shows the parameters of an “incarnational” way of thinking. In their tradition of mythology, the Greek gods became human and their bodies were distinct from mortals because they were perfect. Thus, to exercise and become more perfect was to be “like the gods” - To be the same as the gods and share the perfect humanity was to have communion with the gods and maybe even be apotheosized, becoming deity through heroic deeds and by gaining the approval and attention of the Gods of Olympus! To be like the gods was the definition of goodness - not moral goodness, but through the likeness of the characteristics of divinity itself. Therefore, to have a beautiful body was the proof of inner goodness and divinity – As Dr. Nigel Spivey, famous Cambridge historian of aesthetics, declares of the Greeks, “If you looked good, you WERE GOOD!” Greek pagan worshippers, therefore, had to have a physical representation of physical beauty to worship their gods properly. Greek worshippers could honor the gods and develop their own inner divinity through physical exercise and the acquisition of beauty. These values were at the core of classical Greek culture, and informed centuries of controversy within Christianity.

It was from these profoundly different aesthetics and in the depths of absolute cultural and philosophical contradiction that Philo’s Alexandrian Jewish approach to a Hellenistic hermeneutic of the Old Testament arises, who saw basic unity being restored to the contradiction through the use of a simple narrative - Plato was a plagiarist and imitator of Moses! This allowed Philo’s appropriation and use of the Platonic System without any further questioning. This was the Alexandrian inheritance.

Remarkably, this perspective was brought into the Gospel’s themselves, as St. John’s used of Philo’s intermediary “Logos” as the identity of the pre-existing person of the Son at the very beginning of his Gospel, showing that there has always been a process of cross-cultural discovery and doctrinal development observable within the Christian Tradition. This process did not end, but continued through St. Clement of Alexandria’s continuation of Philo’s themes, and culminated in the most influential non-Apostolic Christian thinker in history – Origen of Alexandria, who created a system of perfect harmony between the revelation of Holy Scripture and the philosophical acuity of the Greek Mind. His work would inform the Trinitarian speculation of the Cappadocians, the Christological philosophy of St. Cyril of Alexandria, and would found St. Maximos the Confessor’s approach to defining God’s Will, and would be retooled in St. John Damascene’s catechetical and theoretical works to comply with the judgments of later councils.

For those with an interest in history and whose interests lie in the Syriac Tradition, the Eastern Orthodox approach to mysticism seems to do two things: 1) It insists on the superiority of the Greek mentality to the Jewish mentality, with an unquestioned bias towards language hammered out in the Greek philosophical tradition, rather than a loyalty to the revealed categories of the Old and New Testaments, and 2) it confuses political constructs, which are human and cannot be universally experienced, for a divinely revealed history – thus, placing Constantinople (or Rome) at the center of the process of doctrinal development and the ultimate authority on Christian experience. To a student of comparative culture and philosophy, these seem to be relatively universal to the self-understanding of all traditional systems, preempting examination of other “invalid” traditions with competing narratives, and insisting on correctness based upon the fact that “we are us and our system makes perfect sense to us.” Such an attitude cannot lead to anything other than the continuation of itself, which, if projected back into history, not only contradicts the evidence of internal development, but also would prohibit the culture from change (or, in the Christian context, conversion) to begin with. Such, clearly, cannot be the truth! The fact that much of the Eastern Orthodox mystical experience is a “distinctly Greek approach” is clearly a problem.

Vladimir Lossky, as brilliant and profound as he was, was an apologist for the Hellenic Christian Mind, a mind which formed around the center of Eastern Roman Christian polity due to the fact that it was itself an apology for that Christian political power, a Chalcedonian-style polity in which there were two “natures” but only one “hypostasis” – the Byzantine Empire as the Kingdom of God. (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 184-185) Lossky attempted to take what was an essentially political process, a Constantinople-based, conciliar authority of declaration, on issues that were understood by the Greeks to be essentially unknowable by anything other than a Hellenistic philosophical approach, a method that was devised for and by pagans, whose inspiration by the Holy Spirit would prove an insurmountable difficulty to the Church’s theory of revelation through Apostolic witness of the Gospel, holiness and right worship. Lossky then applied this authority to a contemporary context, in which this narrative functions as a defense of the heirs of the Byzantine system, the Russian Empire, which had fallen to Secularism and Socialism (the fruits of the West) and that prompted a great deal of soul-searching and appealing to history for the beauty and validity of that which was lost.

The Highly Influential Eastern Orthodox Text on Christian Mysticism in the Byzantine Tradition, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, by Vladimir Lossky

In this way, Lossky's work “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church” functions as one of the primary apologetic sources of defense against the West and its theological narrative, and it is the locus of all the distinctions that now make Orthodoxy think of itself as centrally important to the world. This apologetic shift moves the revelation of truth from the ancient, unified, pre-imperial, Nicene Church (the only Church Polity that was Orthodox based on an ontological and political taxis of Apostolic descent and relational functionality, rather than upon a cultural or dogmatic position) to the post schism Byzantine East, and reinforces the declarative authority of Constantinople/Moscow counter the Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Protestant claims. Such may be the case, but until Eastern Orthodoxy is itself clear as to the political usage of mysticism and its implications on the development of doctrine, the healing of schisms and further development and clarification of doctrine will be impossible, and all that will be left is a Church unable to deal with a changing world, absorbed in intra-Orthodox political squabbles, disguising ineffective ecclesiology and a relatively simplistic understanding of Hellenistic philosophy with an appeal to apophatic experience. 

Two Ways of Knowledge

Cataphatic - The Way of Revelation and the Person of Christ

God’s Word was revealed to us through the Prophets, the topic of God’s revealed law and the counter-cultural, counter-power message of the marginalized, rejected and defeated Prophets was the central process of repentance for the community. God rebukes and dethrones kings, leads His People into captivity for disloyalty and insincere and ceremonial faith, and constantly reminds them of their need for Him. The God of the Old Testament was not the god of a temple, the patron god of a king and a city, or a convenient political tool to be used by those in power: the God of Israel undermined kings, cast down one and exalted another, protected the widow and the fatherless, cared for the poor and oppressed, and sent His people into exile, away from their land, to prove His power as transcendent over the land, and to sow the seeds of faith amongst the nations, who were all being brought together as His People. Thus, faith in God required the rejection of human ideals – beautiful, powerful, perfect governments and national narratives, philosophical schools of thought and ethnic pride – and an embrace of reality, the fallen, pathetic, human world of foibles and struggles, which could only be overcome through repentance and obedience. This was the reality of the prophets of God.

This message was preserved for us in the testimony of Holy Scripture. Within the congregation of the faithful, the Scripture functions as the conduit for God’s revelation in the Faith Community, declared as the prophets declared it – crying out to the people.  

Fulfilled in the Divine-Human Person of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the Complete Revelation of Truth. Christ is the complete embodiment of Scripture, the fulfillment of the Law, and the center of a new, International, internal Faith Community, which enters into the reality of the Holy Spirit’s Presence through Baptism, and is centered around Church Eucharist in the same way that the Old Temple had been centered around the sacrifice of lambs and goats, and is guarded by the Apostolic succession of its rightly teaching Overseers and Elders. Saint Paul proclaims Christ’s New Law to the Gentiles, the Covenant of the Church, and the New Faith Community is established up and against the “spiritual centers” of Jerusalem and Rome. This New Covenant sees the People of God as a New Jerusalem, whose hope was in heaven, and who had no city or land to call their own, “strangers and pilgrims” of a “strange” and “called-out” people.

This initial vision was gradually replaced by a conviction that the success of Christianity had won the Roman polity, the vision of Empire that held the world together and gave it peace, and that an explanation of the Church’s work in “redeeming the world” (the "οἰκουμένη", united under the rule of the Christian Roman Emperor) needed to use the terms and categories of secular/pagan Hellenistic thought. This was the rise of the “economic” vision that replaced the “eschatological” vision of the Church, where the “Foretaste of the Coming Kingdom” was replaced by the “Present and Also Coming” shading of language that would fully transform the Church from an otherworldly polity with practical faith into a otherworldly faith behind a practical polity. Thus, almost unwittingly, a great project was started by Origen to bring these two divergent spheres in line, and while his work created what later generations could see what obvious heresy, the Origenizing, Gnosticizing, Platonizing logic of the Hellenic Mentality was reflected in St. Severus, St. Macarius, St. Maximus, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. John Climicus, Leontius of Constantinople, St. John Damascene, St. Symeon the New Theologian, and finally expressed in a finalized, political, infallible-by-council dogmatic position against the Latin Church by St. Gregory Palamas. This project was the employment of Pagan Philosophy for the support of the Christian Faith, undergirding a full-fleshed vision of a Christian political reality, that would be able to satiate the questioning of mature philosophical minds and guard the Christian Empire against the corrosive effects of a critical and philosophical gaze of Athens.

It is this Hellenized Christian inheritance that is understood as Eastern Orthodoxy today, called by Fr. Florovsky “Christian Hellenism”, and built up by Lossky as “the Mind of the Fathers” (Fr. Georges Florovsky, “The Byzantine Fathers”, Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 9). Even when it is approached as an “Apophatic Tradition”, these essential aspects are simple, systematized and political – they are “Cataphatic” in the truest sense of the word, in that they are ultimately knowable, substituting the certainty of biblical revelation itself for the certainty of the spiritual authority of its inheriting commentators. Unfortunately, with the political hardening of Christian Hellenism’s boarders, even early Latin Western Saints, such as St. Augustine of Carthage, St. Ambrose of Milan, and Boethius are under suspicion, even with similar attempts on their part to harmonize the Christian Tradition with the Platonic Science of the day.

The Aristotelian inheritance of the Syriac Tradition, with its reliance on historical and contextual hermeneutics and its defense of the original, Semitic cultural associations within the Old and New Testaments, has also been cut off from the Greek philosophical culture, despite attempts of the Syriacs to learn and cultivate Hellenic learning from the 5^th-8^th centuries. In the end, the Greeks couldn’t agree amongst themselves, with a more realistic, Antiochian attitude succeeding amongst the Chalcedonians through the influence of the Forbidden Antiochians, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Cyrus and the rehabilitated St. John Chrysostom, with out-and-out Platonism triumphing in the various Monophysite Churches, lead by the Copts, typified in the writings of Origen, St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Makarios the Great, and Abba Shanouda of St. Anthony’s Monastery.  Thus, while we have great depths of theological contemplation and speculation, these well-defined, Cataphatic systems have come at the price of unity and Apostolic Christianity is broken into many different epistemological approaches and schools. 

As Lossky openly admits, Cataphatic, revealed theological categories must be Christocentric, because it is only in Christ that we can know God. (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 65) This is what Christ Himself says when He insists, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man can come to the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) Therefore, an approach that depends on negative logic, no matter how theologically persuasive it is, or politically expedient, cannot replace the revelation of Christ’s Person, which should always be the central message of Christian Theology!

Apophatic - The Way of Philosophy and Abstraction – The Darkness of God’s Dwelling

The Essence of God, in that it is opposite of everything that we know, is absolutely unknowable, therefore, God revealed Himself in the Incarnation. We would have no basis for contemplation, other than the intuition of Yogis and Buddhist philosophers, were it not for the gift of the incarnation. Based upon the knowable nature of Jesus Christ, all other ideas and practices find a context and organic unity that transcends their philosophical definitions.

In the wake of increasingly fragmentary historical approaches to Christian contemplation (communal worship and Eucharist, solitary and cenobitic monks in Egypt, consecrated “Bnay Qyama”, “Sons of the Covenant”, in Syria), a new basis, other than the authority of bishops and texts had to be constructed, for the sheer necessity of the political unity of the Church, so that it could be administered by Emperors as other “departments” were and so that the bishops could be delegated princely authority, in order to make the Church into a political useful entity in the world of human affairs. This lead to the construction of a Christian theology based upon pre-Christian terms and categories, built on the shared and self-evident truth of the limits of human knowledge and the “darkness” (the void of space in which our material universe sits) that all human contemplation ultimately leads into. While Lossky rejects this “naturalistic” approach to Christian mysticism, it is the only approach that explains the evidence of a mysteriological shift in the theological approach of the Greek Fathers, now so clearly documented in Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s works. (Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “Introduction to Liturgical Theology”, p. 126-130) It is this new basis of philosophical contemplation that meets the needs of a rapidly Christianizing Roman Polity, making the dwelling place of God, where Christ is Revealed by the Holy Spirit, that space in which human intellectual endeavor proves itself self-defeating. This negation process is best stated in the Pseudo-Dionysius, but can be seen in the Capadocian Fathers, St. Maximus Confessor, St. John Damascene, and St. Symeon the Theologian, who come together to form a seamless jury of God-bearing witnesses in the later Palamite system. This was a very positive thing for the divine-human economy that the Byzantine polity represented, but it couldn’t develop in the same way in places where the emperor was not Christian, or where the episcopal authority became the medium of cultural association and authoritative identity, as it developed in the West.

Apophatic theology is a simple method of argumentation. As Creator of the universe, there is nothing in the universe to which God can be likened, His being existing above and beyond created existence. You may only say what God is not. Thus, within negation, God can be found in a contemplative method that rejects forms, similes, and analogies, and that embraces the only thing that we truly know exists in the exercise of our minds – unknowing darkness. (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 25, 27-29) It is believed that within this unknowing space, created from the realization of the futility of the human mind, that God supernaturally manifests His Light, which IS God, an energy of His Uncreated Being, and thus, humanity prepared and transformed by the process of coming to the end of one’s self, is able to interact with and “See” God, not in is essence, which is unknowable and of which we are unable to experience directly, but by the “Rays of the Sun” which warm and deify, even though we, in essence, eternally must remain human and created. (IBID, p. 67-90)

A blackboard illustration taught in Bp. Joseph's online seminary class

Lossky’s Presentation of Mystical Theology

Building on a Foundation of Sand - The Perilous Path of Justifying Pseudo-Dionysius as the Source Paradigm for Christian Life

The historicity of the Dionysian Corpus has been proven a forgery beyond a doubt, similar in philosophy to the Eastern Church to the Donation of Constantine in the ecclesiology of the Roman Church. Similarly, after the system has developed and the forgeries have become unquestionably “orthodox” through many generations of acceptance, they can never be questioned and their influence can never be expunged. Lossky builds his entire theology on “St. Dionysius”, saying that he quotes from Plotinus, when he is really quoting, word for word, from Proclus, who commented on both Plotinus and Plato, building up an “ascent of the spirit” theory of “Unification with the One” - which, at this time was a pagan theory of salvation and philosophical living, which was propagated in the School of Athens, promulgated by Julian the Apostate, and believed to be an alternative to popular and un-philosophical Christianity by Greek Intellectuals of the day. While arguing for its validity in “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church”, he then argues against a literalistic or simplistic approach to this theory in “In the Image and Likeness of God”, where he deals with the legitimate scholarly problems raised by scholars to his earlier works. His solution is that ultimately it does not matter, since usage by the Church proves its value, and that a position of “the intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites” must be held, where apparent contradictions are understood as indicators of a higher, unknowable reality shining through. “A kind of transcendence that remains unimaginable for non-Christians.” (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 27, 29)

St. Dionysius the Areogapite, the Pseudo-Epigraphic Author of the Dionysian Corpus on Christian Platonic Mysticism

By claiming early apostolic origins, this 5th century philosophical development was essentially “grandfathered” in to the Christian Tradition, and this allowed highly educated Greek Platonists to argue for a theology that was essentially based upon Platonic categories, processes, anthropologies and the Hellenic Worldview. Lossky does not address the problems with the Proclus inheritance, choosing to focus on Plotinus, his supposed reliance upon Ammonius, who is thought to be a Christian Platonic theologian, Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Origen. Thus, Christians, under questioning, have claimed Christian origins of Neoplatonic theories of Plotinus, the most famous example of whom is St. Clement of Alexandria, where “Plato borrowed from the Divine Revelation of Moses”. (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 18-22)

Lossky addressed the idea that Dionysius was Monophysite forgery with an appeal to Church authority and by subsequently downplaying the interpretation that the philosopher’s God, the En, trumps the “limited Trinity” of Divine Revelation...

·      Which Church authority? The Romans, who were fully Orthodox in communion at this time, and they did not accept Dionysius officially until anti-centrist, Hesychasm-fueled German and French mysticism started to use it much later? The Church of the East, who broke with the Greeks over what they felt was an illegitimate cultural and philosophical priority given to Hellenic thought didn’t use it?  A very limited world of Greek Speakers within a politically oriented, monastic Christianity, focusing mainly on the sphere created by the cultural interplay between Greek Byzantines and Alexandrian Egyptians, accepted the Dionysian Corpus. As such, it played an indispensible role as a philosophical lubricant that brought the post-Chalcedonian Church into closer contact with the Monophysites.

·      Political dependence upon Monophysites was a characteristic of ecclesiastical and philosophical movements within the times of heavy division and extreme doctrinal ambiguity, post Chalcedon, finding their fullest representation in the person of Emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora, who are also known for codifying law and anathematizing Antiochian Fathers who died in communion with the Church.

Understanding Lossky’s Mysticism in Context

Mysticism, then, is a loaded minefield of political constructs, created from hagiographical accounts produced by intellectual and political geniuses, either tearing down their enemy’s positions, or supporting their own. Into this crowded, weaponized field of ascetic endeavor, Vladimir Lossky walks, and usurps all of the political intentions of the Fathers to the service of an anti-Communist, Slavophile agenda. His was a mystical atomic-bomb that would explode in the West, but whose fall-out has continued to be felt in the writings of the Radical and Paleo-Orthodox, who now embrace narratives of Western cultural apostasy based on the fountainheads of grace being broken at one point or another, normally at a Council that was only much later recognized as important or “ecumenical”. This admirable political goal, while clearly in service of the Church and a necessary defense at the time, must not be taken outside of its historical context and understood to represent an absolute position.    This is ultimately a problem of focus and position within a political apology, with preference given to the “superior way of Apophatic Theology” and to “Christian Gnosticism” within the Greek world for the same reason it was important to the Alexandrian Coptic Schismatics - this theory of theological superiority precludes contradiction and helps to draw artificial distinctions. Only by understanding what is common between the East and West, between the Antiochian and Alexandrian positions, can we begin to grasp the original experience of the Church, heal a millennia of schism, and understand the problems and pitfalls of an overly absolute approach to that which is essentially “unknowable”.  

Vladimir Lossky, around the time of his publication of the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

Lossky’s motivation for glossing over this issue is also political and polemical, desiring to establish an alternative narrative to the ascendant Roman Catholic critique of the East and appealing to a readership to whom the whole historical context and culture milieu of the theological and philosophical issues at stake were foreign. In such an environment, it was essential to create an easy comparison between systems, with well-defined dogmatic spheres, and an insistence of continuity and faithfulness with the Fathers on one hand, and the causal dangers of Roman Catholic innovation and heresy on the other. It also came in an age when the prevalent secular ethos was anti-Thomistic, and the presentation of Orthodox Doctrine as “spiritual” and not dependent upon scientific theories allowed it to escape the petulant debate between Western Traditionalists – seen in how the Orthodox by in large escaped “modernization”, while the Roman Catholic Latin Ritualists (who were driving the rediscovery of liturgical history in France, a movement that the Orthodox appropriated through the St. Sergius Institute and the writings of Meyendorff and Schmemann) and Protestant Fundamentalism, came crashing down suddenly at the success of cultural secularism and evolutionary history, which expressed doubt in the hardened forms and constructs of dogmatic theology through the teaching of the Critical Method in seminaries around the world. This fault-line is commonly understood culturally in the terms of yet another council, Vatican II! 

Apologetic Reasons for Unknowing as a Political Source of Power - The Christian Gnosticism of ascent through “Not Knowing” necessarily implies a denial of the intellect. (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p.13) This is held, even though in the earlier Fathers, the intellect is associated with the principle of the “thought-will” of God, or the causal forms, making the intellect the “spiritual” or “logos” factor of the human person! This is a convenient sophistry that both allows it to maintain a distinction from pagan gnosis, which is otherwise identical, but also able to explain how contradictions and obvious inconsistencies could not only be tolerated, but sponsored within the system of highest purity and revelation. (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 94-100)

The Historical and Political Context of the Philosophical Method – Why Salvation became Restricted to Philosophical Hesychasm in a Culture Under Siege – The Hidden Political Underbelly of the Mystical/Scholastic Debate between East and West

1)    The Orthodox Church increasingly came under cultural siege due to its own lost vigor, political Islam, and the cultural and political success of the Latin West, whose combination of centralized religious authority and trans-Mediterranean trade created an unstoppable economic combination that directly, and ultimately, threatened Constantinople.

2)    Roman Catholicism proves increasingly viable and culturally stronger – Thomas Aquinas’ views quickly push down the Eastern Synthesis, with many converts to its system made amongst the Greeks, due to its organized and easy systemization, along with its effective delivery system through Venetian trade.

3)    The Filioque is unilaterally accepted by Western Council on the authority of the Pope’s proclamation at the Council of Lyon in 1274.

4)    Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Gregory of Cyprus responded to this heretical Roman move by writing his “Tomus”, explaining that the Glory of Tabor to be “Energy” of the Spirit resting on Christ, not proceeding from Christ, thus denying the Scriptural iconography used to defend the Filioque, but also denying that the “Glory” was the Spirit in essence.

5)    Barlaam the Celebrian dogmatically and politically attacks Hesychasm as a Semi-Massalian Practice without Patristic support, but which had many adherents at court. Barlaam unwisely thinks that doctrine trumps politics, without considering the testimony of Scripture, proving the opposite!

6)    Papal Primacy being pushed through, the Filioque being officially established, and Thomas Aquinas Proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in Quick Succession.

7)    Gregory Palamas stands as a defender of the Byzantine Monastic Practice, already highly influenced by Hesychastic Fathers, the superiority of the Greek Way, and the sovereignty of the Byzantine Court.

8)    Palamas uses heavy-handed political means to have his doctrine ensconced by a clearly flustered and biased court and the Synod of Blachernae, declaring Palamas’ doctrine to be the standard of the whole Church. This is zealously enforced by the “God-Bearing Emperors”, John VI Kantakouzenos, a personal friend of Palamas who later became a Hesychast monk in retirement.

9)    Civil war broke out in Constantinople between the supporters of the Palamite incumbent to the Throne of Byzantium, John VI Kantakouzenos, and the rightful Emperor and his supporters, John V Palaeologos, who, with the deposed Patriarch of Constantinople, John VI Andrinikos, held a staunchly anti-Palamite theological stance.

10) With full political support, Palamas changes the Liturgikon, writes vows of allegiance to the Palamite Doctrine into the Episcopal Vows, personally threatens all bishops who do not agree with his doctrine with excommunication, and is also canonized just a few years after his death, based on his value as a political figure. At the Council of Florence, however, the only ones who quoted Palamas or showed any true understanding of his work were the Latins!

11) Those who do not agree, including Palamas’ own friends and allies, who increasingly see the imbalances of the doctrine as introducing an essential division into the Godhead, creating an impersonal energy, and forcing a reinterpretation of classical Pnumatology, are forced into union with Rome, due to being anathematized by Palamite bishops and forced into exile by the Byzantine Emperor.

12) It is a universal consensus amongst scholars, while vehemently rejected by Palamite Monks on Mount Athos, that Palamism was essentially a political movement, dependent upon the appropriation of the Messalian Tradition, which had long stood on the outskirts of the Imperial Orthodoxy, and that a truthful historical vision must address the problems as well as the brilliance of the Hellenic philosophical solutions provided by St. Gregory Palamas’ theory of “Essence and Energies.”  

Negating the Positive Affirmations of Apophatic Union

Union through knowledge is impossible, being the coarsest form of Gnosticism, as is union through not-knowledge, or “agnosia” just becomes a new form of knowledge, knowledge of what God is not! Union is only possible through Christ, who united God to His Creation. When Apophatic theology becomes the guardian of irrationality, the unbridgeable chasm between “Orthodoxy” and “Heresy”, do we see the illegitimate uses of philosophy as a political mechanism for crushing opposing traditions?

Unfortunately, this seems to be the unspoken subtext of the “Neo-Patristic Synthesis”, which is primarily an anti-Western (Roman and Protestant) polemic. While unsuccessful at challenging Thomist or Jesuit philosophical models within Roman Catholicism, gullible Protestants, not schooled in the fine points of Platonic and Aristotelian thought and the essential differences in operation between a philosophy of revealed knowledge (which Christianity MUST be, employing classical philosophy only as an aid for hermeneutical and mystical contemplation) and the sophistry of the political Greek approach to theology, were brought into a narrative that dismisses the cataphatic approach as a degenerate form of Christian theology. The Byzantine Christian Tradition increasingly relied upon this approach in the East, as the authority of the Capadocians, Maximus Confessor, and John Damascene grew into the final Coup D’état of the Palamite “Universal Synod”, which was held and recognized only by Constantinople, as a final statement of defensiveness against the philosophical success of the West. What is even more astonishing is that this recent political shift has occurred atop the Protestant rediscovery of the Scriptures and the employment of comparative and contextual tools that allowed Christians to understand the meaning for the first time since the Byzantine anathematization of Theodore Mopsuestia, figure-headed by those who have taken Lossky, Romanides and Radical Orthodoxy as a counter-narrative to the evils of Western Consumer Culture!

The Apophatic Tradition allows two essential things to occur – it insists that anything you say about it is false, which is the ultimate “discussion ender”, allowing for the deeply ingrained and unquestionable self-affirmation of the system and its truth-claims to maintain a deeply conservative and self-referential locus of power, and secondly, it moves the locus of possible spiritual experience into the world of monastics, negating the goodness of the world in regards to experiencing God, and insisting on the superiority of the ascetic tradition above and beyond the world of mundane people and things. This move, so opposite in spirit and practice from Early Christianity and the Jewish Tradition, allowed Christianity to become a vessel for a culture it had initially rejected and anathematized, that of the Stoic Philosophers and Pythagorean Sages! As “Enosis” and “Thermaturgia” became the definitions of “Theosis” and “Theoria”, which terms themselves replace the “Salvation” and “Obedience” of the biblical paradigms, an unrecognizable world of Greek Philosophy impinged upon the world of Christian Revelation, and, ultimately, overcame it – replacing it with a form that was at odds with the culture and modality of Early Christians (the Early Christians suffered martyrdom for refusing to honor the image of the Emperor, and later St. Gregory Nanzianzus explains “glory” of the symbol with the heavenly prototype by comparing it to the veneration of the Emperor’s image – a passage that was later used to justify the veneration of icons!). As the Scripture and the Tradition increasingly became different spheres, Greek Philosophy bridged the gap by insisting that God was ultimately unknowable, thus stilling the questions of late Byzantine philosophers who were already questioning the validity of the Byzantine Church’s inconsistent interpretations. John Xiphilinus, John Italus, and Michael Psellus all brought powerful, Aristotelian challenges to this way of thinking, but all shined away from the political implications of trial and ostracism as heretics, and the issues were forced in the character of an “outsider”, the easily demonized person of Barlaam the Calabrian, who was a cultural traitor with a Latinate education who stood against the center of authority at the Constantinopolitan Court, where Gregory Palamas’ family held authority. Even after the Palamite victory, St. Gregory’s friend and student, Gregory Akindynos, resisted the Palamite insistence on a duality of energy and essence, pointing out that it did, indeed, set up a division within the existence of God in a way that was analogous to the Holy Trinity, but without the safeguards of the Divine Person. (Augustine Casiday, “Church Fathers and the Shaping of Orthodox Theology”, in “The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology”, edited by Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff, Published by Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 183) Even now, contemporary Orthodox theologians have a hard time balancing St. Gregory Palamas’ strong-arm techniques, his internal inconsistencies and his outright rejection of cautions lifted by those around him. (Adrian Agachi, “The Neo-Palamite Synthesis of Father Dumitru Stăniloae”, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, p. 50)

The Cover Page from an Early Printing of the Dionysian Text from the 1600's

Dionysian Worldview as Expressed by Medieval Scholasticism

The Beatific Vision, According to St. Dionysius the Areogapite

The great similarities between Hinduism, Buddhism and the Hesychastic theology were noticed by followers of Lossky, forming much of the interest in his works outside of the realm of Eastern Orthodox scholars and ascetics. (Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 9) With the terrifying revelation that Buddhism and Hinduism rely on much the same epistemology of negation and authority from personal/communal/traditional mystical experience of visions of light or heavenly fragrance, and with the realization that these experiences rely upon the same mechanism of constantly repeated formulas and the “shutting off” of the physical brain, the Athonite apologists have gone into over-drive, trying to forbid comparison before comparison is made. The reasons for this reaction are wise – because, no philosophical mechanism for an existential phenomenology exists, and when comparisons are made that are basically the same, the insistence must be made that the experiences are essentially different – without a metaphysical formula for establishing differences, other than dogmatic insistence and claims of authority. This kind of flustered, “my way or the highway” kind of thinking, relying on demonization, fear, and the promise of apocalypse betrays frustration and an inability to explain comparison through the philosophical paradigms that are established as the only correct paradigms. In this way, new cultural exposure and the predominant attitudes of fear and division that exist among the Orthodox, particularly amongst the “quiet” monks, should call for a renegotiation of the Tradition and a re-evaluation of the philosophical assumptions of what is “Orthodox” and revealed in the cataphatic Incarnation of Christ, and what is “cultural” in the Hellenic apophatic philosophical tradition.

Why Lossky’s Mystical Theology Cannot be Expressed in Terms of Intellect, Easily Disproving its Own Argument by Comparison to Pagan Philosophy and Gnosticism, But CAN be Understood in the Biblical Terms of the Will - 

1. God made man with the potential of perfection, created in the Image of God, which is reflected in our human freedom. To create us to become perfect, so that we might be perfected in love, God had to make it possible for us to also reject Him. Love is an action of the will for humans, reflecting how creation is an expression of God’s love. 

2. Man chose against God, so the Image within man’s nature was marred, its purpose was defeated, and the likeness of God (the actions accomplished by the will of man within the Will of God) was lost. 

3. Man’s purpose, which was found in his design as a reflection of God, was lost in the rejection of God. Our life, which was a gift from God and imparted by His Breath, was also marred, shortened, and could no longer reflect God - it would not be eternal, abundant, or transcendent over the material world. 

4. Adam's freedom now always tends towards sin and against the Perfection of God’s Image, and his will is expressed in our natural wills, which proceed thought, rational cognition, and language

5. We inherit the capacity and propensity to sin in Adam, the human prototype and origin of our shared human nature, which means that the will we express is our own, in that we express it and are dependent upon it for life, but that we are not the ones who originated it...

6. Our personalities are the result of our human nature (innate in our physical composition), our will to live, for power, for sexuality, which accumulates decisions, forms our future choices, and determines our memories (which is innate in our mind/nous).

7. Therefore, our human will arises from man’s common nature in the personhood of Adam. While will emanates from personhood, our primal will originates in the person of another, which is the difference between our (gnomic) inherited will and our personal free will, thus limiting our free will to those decisions made by our “Ante-type”.

8. St. Maximus Confessor taught that Christ had a human will, “movement according to nature”, but not the inherited, natural, broken gnomic will of Adam, a “movement according to reason” - Therefore, Christ’s will arose in His own Person, was completely attuned with the Will of the Father, and could have expressed self-will, but chose not to, and thus was an expression of human perfection. (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 125, and Maximus Confessor, “Questioniones Ad Thalassium, 21, Patria Gracea 91.312-316, “Disputations with Pyrrhus”, Patria Gracea 91.313D-316A, 337B)

9. This is why the Eastern and Western Churches expresses that Christ had two wills, one fully God and an expression of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos and Son, and the other was a fully human will. The human will is not evident because it was always expressed with God’s Will, and thus could not be differentiated from God’s Will. It was also effectively argued by the Father’s of the Syriac Tradition, which has a non-essential (non-Platonic) anthropological view (which sees the human person as a materially and causally receiving compound), that it was therefore Not Expressed, and that “self-will”, which is commonly understood as the human will, was a result of the Fall, and was therefore not present within Christ, who was, while a full expression of humanity, was a compound of body and soul formed around the essential and indivisible Person of the Son. It was then argued that Christ had only one will, one observable expression of action, and therefore, if expressing a human will, was expressing it as compound of the Will of the Single Person. In this way, the Syriac Tradition affirmed that Will issues from Person, implying “logos” and cognition, and is not primarily an expression of impersonal “nature”. (Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 102-107)

10.           In the sense of causality, therefore, to say that will precedes personality is correct, just as it precedes thought.

11.           The Capadocians insisted that God commanded man to "become god”. If we see this in terms of energy, expressed action, this entails our wills willing as God wills, and our actions to be aligned with God’s actions. This restores our purpose, which was created in the Image and Likeness of God and commanded to obey God. The call to obedience and divination are one and the same call. Thus, through surrender, obedience and submission to God’s will, cooperating with God, we become “gods by grace”, which, in no sense, alters our reality as created or separated from the essential being of God.

12.           Our broken wills keep us from doing this, from acting in harmony with God’s will, our wills naturally choosing what is not of God. Our own will is then the opposite of salvation. 

13.           To unite with the Will of God and the Works of God, the believer must make a choice, exerting his free will. Because of man’s “double-mindedness”, his inherited and broken gnomic will, then the will of the believer must constantly choose, based upon what has been revealed, not upon what is “natural”. This work must be constantly done throughout life so as to maintain this state of submission and cooperation up until death. This is why “he that endures until the end shall be saved!” 

14.           As the will is trained to do well through good habits, the process becomes simpler, and thus, the process of obedience to God is described as an ascent. It could just as easily be described as a “descent”, for man’s relationship with God becomes more obedient, more oriented towards repentance, more pliable and open to change, which makes man able to live like as God intended living according to his original purpose.

15.           It is in this sense, not in any other, that man becomes God, as he emulates and become one in action with God’s will. This oneness of action accomplishes God’s Will, which has already been revealed to us perfectly in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. To do God’s Will is to live within our purpose, and to live within our purpose is our mandate of authority, our primary point of attractiveness to others, and the balance point upon which family harmony and social justice become a moving icon of the heavens. This living harmony, mirroring the heavenly order of Christ’s throne room, was the original understanding of Christian Economy, and was thought to be the reflective value of icons, although this meaning was increasingly lost after the downfall of iconoclasm and the philosophy turned more towards and apology of the objects of veneration, rather than the function of actions to picture reality. 

16.     This is the outward manifestation. Inwardly, there is no change in essence, only in energy/action, and it is this that is the difference within the relationship. In relationship, we are, through Christ, as Christ is to God - we are God’s relationally through grace. While we never can become joined to the Trinity, we can, through God’s work of redemption and unconditionally, unlimited love for us, be treated as and relate to God the Father in the Son. This is how we are “joint heirs with Christ”, and how we can cry “Abba Father”, receiving the “spirit of adoption”. 

17.         We are kept in God’s love and held in life eternally by God’s Grace, His Presence, experiencing it either as Heaven or Hell, but we experience it according to our experience with God’s will: aligned and submitted to it, receiving it as life and light within ourselves, or closed to and rejecting it, experiencing it as external fire of torment, loneliness and alienation! 

Union with God

Realizing that knowledge and experience are not enough, that negations may just become a cheap from of affirmation that cannot be disproven in a debate, we must continuously tear down our false constructs, continuously change, continuously repent – This is the process of maintaining openness and self-negation that allows the Revelation of God, the Word, the Person of Christ, to manifest to us. This is why agnosia and metanoia, the continuous process of repentance and change of heart and mind, are really the same – one is an outward appearance, while the other is the inner state of heart. The only experience we can have with God, being created, less than God eternally, separated from God in a way that can only be categorized as “other”, must be cataphatic. This was why the Hesychast monks desired so fervently that their visions of light to be God, for only if we can experience God in a way that we comprehend does the discontinuity and political abstraction of the monastic life truly become better, more conducive to Christian life, than any other choice. We can only know God as God himself chooses to reveal himself to us! But to see God, as Christ said, all that is false, dead, and evil must be cleared from our eyes. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”, Christ said, and just as St. Paul had to be baptized for the scales to fall of his eyes, we must remember that this is what our baptism does, preparing us to see the light by the reception of the Holy Spirit into our hearts. It is not by any process that we are made “worthy”, but through constant repentance and self-emptying, we are made “ready” to see and experience the Glory of God, which shines from His Presence, the relationship we have with His Person! Only when we become a “nest”, a place without an essential core or identity, hollowed out by the realization that all our realizations lead to false narratives and false concepts of self – let alone “Other”- can God roost, brood over us, and can we, a pile of dead twigs, become warmed with the heat of the hen’s breast. 

Mystical Theology, Literal Scripture, and Creationistic Cosmology – 

Mysticism falls apart if there was not a literal Adam to function as the basis of the universal human form, a Fall to explain the discontinuity between physical nature and spiritual intuitions (the conviction that humans have an essential, inextinguishable spiritual existence, which is nested in the physical body, but not dependent upon it - giving life to the body, rather than receiving life and sustenance from it), and a literal Paradise Narrative, which explains our discontent and the desire to "return" to an idyllic state of happiness. Without this narrative and a real component, which, despite philosophy or physical evidence to the contrary, maintains its truth claims within Christianity, there are no solid foundational differences between this process and the Gnostic, Buddhist or Hindu processes of spiritual ascent, enlightenment and unification with Divinity. The claim that the inner continuity with the Biblical Creation Myth allows it to see itself as an exception to the rule is clearly an unexamined and faulty way in which to compare mystical experience.

In the other Mystical Traditions, we see the same process of physical disciplines - fasting and meditation – all of which prepare the devotee for a vision of light, which is a visitation granted only by the chanting of a divine name, ceaselessly and without mental entertainment of doubt or contradiction. By giving the mind fully to a state of suspended judgment and self abandonment, the brain shuts down a part of its normal function, and this allows the devotee to feel a profound sense of light, unity and peace. This is clearly a universal human experience. To insist that it is different because it conforms to the Genesis Story is like trying to insist that Christians are no longer human. To insist that the results of mystical experience somehow are salvation, and that salvation is no longer the Kingdom to Come, Universal Resurrection, and the Hope of Eternity with Christ is to substitute what the Apostles taught and what Christ accomplished for a relatively common, and not all too particularly Christian, psychological experience!

This approach fails if the narrative becomes figurative and humanity loses its literal prototype, the ιδεομ of Adam's form, because there could be no way that any of the mechanics would work out in a real sense. It would then, just as Buddhist meditation narratives claim to be, function as a "guiding story" that is meant to bring you into a mental state, but is not true in any real, historical sense. 

This approach also fails if the states of mind that are reached by hesychastic practitioner are proven to be the result of mental and physical changes that can be physically observed and explained, such as the studies done on Buddhist monks, showing that their experiences of "Light" and "Unity", "Compassion" and "Love" are definable mental processes, due to brain chemicals, and can be experienced artificially through psychologically acting drugs. 

While the question of "did these mystical components come into being by design, as a reward for spiritual focus, or did they develop as a survival mechanism in times of starvation, external stress and illogical situations?" has not been answered, it is obvious that to allow consideration of an evolved mechanism not only explains away mystical experience, but it shows it to be a shallow survival mechanism and the origin of all distressed peoples' prophesies (from Moses in the desert to Mohammad in his cave, from the Still Small Voice of Elijah to the continual wave of prophets and seers in China and South East Asia). 

Thus, too much of the spiritual authenticity of the Church's experience is challenged by a non-literal, science-appeasing attitude. Any insistence on the mystical inheritance of the Church must also, of necessity, be reinforced by a strongly anti-scienticism, anti-evolutionary dogma. Not to do so, as Lossky and the other champions of the "Neo-Patristic Synthesis" try to maintain, seeing mystical experience as something "apart" from science and not effected by the techniques of scientific inquiry, trying to stay relevant to contemporary science as the Christian Neo-Platonists and Origenists did, is a self-defeating proposition. 

Conversely, if literalism is to be undertaken in order to maintain the Church's authority, its obvious implications destroy the attempt to form a complete Hellenic/Biblical synthesis, taking us back to a cataphatic, revelatory and intensely earthy worldview in which we are, as a community, dependent upon the good graces of God's prophetic call and the intense limits of human knowledge. The philosophical hero disappears, as does the bright vision of divine energy filling the cosmos and sustaining the Icon of the Kingdom of Heaven, shining with its city on a hill, golden temple, and righteous God-King for all to see and believe! We are left with a broken world in which the Shekinah, the Glory of God, is a rare, particular and fiery experience that no one, not even our enemies can deny, and which we rarely survive!

Then, what we return to is a deflated view of man, his incorrigible and corruptible nature, the false way in which he uses religion to accomplish less than godly goals, and the prophetic imperative, not of experiencing divinizing ascent, but of reminding man that he is NOT God! The consistent message of the Prophets of God, bringing the DABAR, the Declared and Non-Negotiable Word of God, which was broken only by one man, Jesus Christ, who, we believe, truly WAS God and WAS God's Word. It forces us to realize that how and by what metaphysic Christ is all this we will never know. "For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so our my thought above your thoughts, and my ways above your ways!" This is true agnosia and true mysticism, one that the Early Church would recognize, one that the Hebrew Prophets would recognize, and one that the only Semitic Apostolic Church, the Church of the East, still acknowledged - for it negates the both treasured philosophy of the Greeks and the impassible Divine transcendence of the Hebrews, "both foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, but to those who believe, it is the power of God unto salvation!” 

Applied Mystical Theology to Christian Life -

1. An Apophatic Basis - To know that knowledge is limited by the Universe, the Un-God, that was the perfect statement of antithesis to God in its first moment. 
2. Therefore, the universe defines us, by our sun, the earth, and the first man… Adam becomes the bound in which we still have being, and his Person forms our personalities, there being no “humanity” outside of him.
3. Direct knowledge of God is impossible, because it would require us to associate names and forms, functions and likenesses with things in the universe, which is, in its nature, opposite of God in every capacity.
4. We then can only approach God by describing Him by what He is not...

5. God is outside of the universe, by revelation and by our observation (we cannot see God anywhere, and if He made the world, he could not be contained in it or “enter” into it in an essential and actual capacity. 

6. Hence, knowledge, Cataphatic interaction, is accomplished through Christ.

7. If Christ is transcendent God and bounded and universally inferior man, then His Person, this Union, is the Basis of All Transcendent Knowledge. 

8. Christ’s personal unification of God and man is both the field of energy that enlivens the mystical quest, but it also provides the prototype, making “Union with God” the ultimate goal of the quest of the spiritual athlete - the ascetic.

9. It then follows that this union is the basis of authority and culture (the Church).

10. If Christ has this kind of union with the ineffable and indescribable, then it follows that through and in Him (as we are in Adam, our prototype), by the work of the Holy Spirit, channeled by the sacramental invocation and heaven-earth meeting point of the Church, we also can be unified with God.

11. This unity is one of the will, because we are an expression of God’s will.

12. We also reflect God as a willing, projecting, interacting agent for change.

13. This then ties us into a continuum that, while not God, is dependent upon His “Anti-Existence” in every way.

14. This is why the path of mystery and contemplation is one of continual repentance and mind-change.

15. This process is a creative process, mirroring God’s own process, a moving icon of revealed reality. This mirroring process, reflective of light that is not our own, is the process in which the "union" metaphor is used. 

16. Because "union" is the goal, and man never will be God, then it is a call to continual, never-ending change, flex, self-criticism and mindfulness of our own “Un-God-Ness”.

15. Knowledge of our own deficiencies is an outer manifestation of an inner condition, which is a sensitivity, submission to, and a constant responsiveness to, the Holy Spirit. 

16. Knowing that we can never BE God but always trying, by a love, response, and striving for God, we embrace the fundamental mystery of Christ’s being, and manifest the Pnumatology, the Christology, and the Trinitarian Mystery within the context of living, struggling, imperfect human life. 

A Mirror or a Map? Understanding Theosis as a Biblical and Patristic Analogy

For those with an interest in the “Dismissed Tradition” as a counterpart to that of the Greek and the Latin perspectives, it is striking that in Lossky’s axial chapter, “The Way of Union” in his “Mystical Theology”, focuses on the spiritual experience of St. Isaac the Syrian, who was a bishop of the Church of the East, and whose writings are foundational to the understanding of mysticism in Christian Asia. While dismissing the Church of the East’s position as simple heresy in several places (the clearest presentation being in his “Orthodox Theology”, p. 96-98), he did not take the political issues or the recent discoveries of Nestorius’ own writings into account, that clearly shows later declarations of his doctrines to be false constructs used to support an Alexandrian dogmatic position.

St. Isaac’s expression of the theology of mysticism is a profound solution to the problems of a politicized apologetic. He insists, “As the saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory; so the mind, when it has been made pure for receiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here, and will no longer be moved by the thought of anything.” Lossky quickly moves on to the counter testimony of St. Symeon the New Theologian, attempting to explain how “little by little…his senses become accustomed… his soul no longer knows ecstasies: instead, it has the constant experience of the divine reality in which it lives.” (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 209) Outside of a very convenient excuse for why those who are supposedly great saints would live in an apparent fervor of passions, such as St. Cyril’s obvious struggles with pride, anger and corruption, this continued explanation serves very little purpose. St. Isaac’s experience still stands, and it is his experience that sums up the whole of the Tradition of Eastern Mysticism. The mind of the saint is a mind that is engulfed in glory, unmoving, and pure. It is, in other words, the mind of a mirror. “This state is called ‘pure prayer’. It is the end of ‘praxis’, since nothing inconsistent with prayer can any longer gain access to the mind, nor turn aside the will, which is now directed towards God, and united to the divine will. The synergy, the harmony of two, co-operating wills, continues throughout all the stages of the ascent towards God; but at a certain level when one leaves the psychic realm, in which the spirit is active, all movement is at an end, and even prayer itself ceases. This is the perfecting of prayer, and it is called spiritual prayer or contemplation.” (IBID, p. 207-208)

Trying to learn as much as possible, make associations of cause and effect, historical progression, and arguing for a self-evident directionality within history as a reception of Divine Revelation, is shown to be a truly futile exercise, according to this Syriac Tradition of contemplation. The truth of such a perspective is seen clearly in the combined spiritual experience of the East and West, within the Desert Fathers and the Hesychasts who followed them, as well as within the Augustinian and Benedictine mystics of the Western Tradition. The quest for reflection of God's Light might be different from a quest for an accurate form of knowledge, Christian Gnosis, after all. Maps are drawn, but can only be the product of sight processed by thought, not direct, accurate, able to change, or multi-dimensional. Reflections on a mirror, a mirror that is ground, rather than drawn and painted, is able to encompass all dimensions, changes with the angle, and depends on light, not its own structure, for functionality. Maps are less truthful than mirrors, because they show connections that their authors want them to show, not the thing as it actually is. Mirrors reflect the limitations of the perspective, but the images they show exist beyond themselves and are therefore real. It is this attribute that has been associated with the microcosm and the human process of bringing associative meaning to the universe. (Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 70)

Scholastic theology tries to build accurate, historical and philosophical maps within worldviews, to show the lay of the land, and trying to discern the pathways through it. They depend upon recorded memory and the abstraction of connections, interrelation of concepts - principles that tie disparate people, places, things, and ideas together. Syriac mysticism cannot show you where to go, but its Fathers show you where you are - accurately, without artificially linking anything together for the purpose of getting somewhere. The theology of St. Isaac, then, is a descriptive process of grinding a mirror through asceticism and prayer, not of showing where one must go or how things are related - these things all take place because of our wills, because of our intent, not because they reflect what exists beyond ourselves. 

The biggest problem with this understanding of knowledge then becomes its inherent contradictions with the "roadmap" of Orthodoxy - that, while teaching this anti-scholastic, anti-intellectual perspective, it asserts both a knowable abstraction of human experience with God, but it also affirms the falseness of other perspectives - showing that they are wrong paths that do not reach the final positions of Orthodox experience. It dogmatically rejects historical and theological knowledge in some contexts (such as addressing contradictions in its own system), but then strongly argues against the positions of those it sees as heretical and uses a strict map approach to presenting Orthodoxy to potential converts. How are these two forms - one a "mirror" and the other a "map", balanced within the teaching of a consistent Patristic approach, an approach that Lossky was trying to build? To the uninformed, it seems like a double standard in unfair debate, and also a cause for self-contradiction and disqualification. 

The obvious conclusion to this whole question is that clear mirrors can be used to make the best maps. Think of the maps we have today, built on reflections from outer space. The clearer the mirror, the more inward curved and emptied of self, and the further distance it is from the world, the more it can reflect and show the real lay of the land and allow us to make connections that need to be made, both through the application of historical research and of biblical revelation.

A Map…

1. Functions to carry marks and associations, opinions of the ones who created it.

2. Has an agenda and a predisposition, only showing where you must go, not giving options for reality. Only shows the roads you can walk, not the land you could navigate between the roads.

3. The light serves the map, carrying the message of the map, not carrying the message of the light. 

4. Never changes and cannot flex.

5. Exists with or without the light, but cannot be mistaken for light itself.

6. Only has attributes from itself and its innate markings.

7. A map is destroyed by fire, cannot be purified or corrected without obscuring and conflicting its message, and cannot stand grinding. 

8. A map “knows” everything, containing something is its highest quality, and thus must “know itself."

A Mirror…

17.           Carries no marks, is blank, and is black without light.

18.           Has no personal agenda or predisposition. 

19.           Serves the light and is useless in the darkness, having no other purpose.

20.           Is constantly in a state of flux and change. 

21.           Exists in unity with light, can be mistaken for the source of light, but never changes its nature or is itself confused as to the source of light.

22.           Exhibits attributes and powers that do not come from itself.

23.           A mirror is made through fire, purification and grinding. 

24.       A mirror doesn’t “know anything”, containing nothing as its highest attribute, and it thus doesn’t bother to “know itself”. A mirror dwells in complete “agnosia”, and thus, its consciousness dwells on another, upon the Origin of the Light.

St. Isaac, the Bishop of Nineveh in the Assyrian Church of the East, and Universally Accepted Father of the Church (In the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East, and the Anglican Churches

The Light in the Mirrors

All mirrors reflect in the same way

They all reflect One Light

Though they look different in their places

In many shapes, of many colors

They are separated, but they are not divided

Because they are unified in the light of the Sun

God has called out these mirrors from the fallen elements

By the Fire of Resurrection

Burning the chaff of wood, hay and stubble away

Leaving those whose works are of gold, silver and bronze

And these lumps lay in the fields and forests

Formless, blackened lumps of clay

They have been washed in living water by the Holy Spirit

And anointed with the oil of glory

So that the grinding could begin

The Living Flesh and Blood of the fiery Sun continually polishing these mirrors

Purifying and polishing away impurity to their Thanksgiving

So that they will be ready to reflect the Sun

As the Light shines more and more unto the Perfect Day

And thus, they are unified to one another

The images they carry

The authority they declare

Was all brought to them by the light

It is what is not the Sun

The world around the mirrors

Which they reflect by the nature of illumination

The light that falls on the evil and the good

And it is thus they differ, that they cannot recognize one another

In some fields, many mirrors lay together

They reflect the sun and one another

The light bounces back and forth between them

Creating a vocabulary of quotations

They recognize the mountains within their mutual reflections

They see the horizons that boarder their valley

And they say, “This is what mirrors look like”

"They all have the Sun’s Light and these hills”

But they only see the hills for the Light

The day of recognition will come

When all the mirrors are gathered together

When the mountains will be cast into the sea of glass

And they will reflect the Sun and one another

There will be no other images, no other horizons

No other colors reflected other than the pure light

And all the mirrors will recognize one another

They will rejoice in the brilliance of the light

Doing what mirrors were created to do

But now, together, as one, reflecting the Sun

Back to the Sun

Bibliography:

1.     Lossky, Vladimir, “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church”, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 1979

2.     Lossky, Vladimir, “Orthodox Theology: An Introduction”, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 1978

3.     Lossky, Vladimir, “In the Image and Likeness of God”, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 1974

4.     Hankey, Wayne J., Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 4, 2008

5.     Stang, Charles M., “Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: ‘No Longer I’", Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2012

6.     Milbank, John, “Sophiology and Theurgy: the New Theological Horizon”, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, 2012

7.     O’Rourke, Fran, “Being and Non-Being in the Pseudo-Dionysius: Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysic of Aquinas”, Leiden, 1992

8.     MacIsaac, D. Gregory, “Projection and Time in Proclus”, in “Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Islam, Judaism and Christianity”, edited by John Inglis, Curzon Press, 2002

9.     Matilal, Bimal Krishna, “Mysticism and Ineffability: Some Issues of Logic and Language”, in “Mysticism and Language”, edited by Steven T. Katz, Oxford University Press, 1992

10.  Rhodes, Michael Craig, “Frontiers of Reason: On Epistemology and Mystery”, Durham Theses, Durham University, 2008

11.  Carabine , Deirdre, “The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition : Plato to Eriugena”, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs, #19, 1995

12.  Lankila , Tuomo, “The Corpus Areopagiticum as a Crypto-Pagan Project”, Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, JLARC 5, 14-40, 2011

13.  Franke, William, “On What Cannot be Said: Apophatic Discourses
in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts”, University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, 2007

14.  Millsaps, Kevin Teed, “The Development of Apophatic Theology from the Pre-Socratics to the Early Christian Fathers”, East Tennessee State University, 2006

15.  Papadakis, Aristeides, “The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy”, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004

16.  St. Isaac of Nineveh, “St Isaac of Nineveh on Ascetical Life”, Translated by Mary Hansbury, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989

17.  Alfeev, Metropolitan +Hilarion, “The Spiritual World of St. Isaac the Syrian”, Cistercian Studies Press, 2000

18.  Spivey, Nigel, “How Art Made The World”, BBC One Documentary Series, 2005