As we prepare ourselves for the birth of Christ, our prayer and class theme are these three verses from Psalm 50:
“Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Do not cast me out from your presence, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. Give me back the joy of your salvation, and establish me with a sovereign Spirit.”
We are using a lot of materials from a 20th century Romanian saint recently canonized … St. Dumitru Staniloae. We are going to use a small booklet written by St. Dumitru for a lot of our class work as we prepare ourselves for Christ’s birth. The booklet is entitled ‘The Victory Of The Cross’.
In last week’s class, we explored three questions in some detail using quotations from a variety of Orthodox sources. Here were those questions
- What Is The Condition Of My Heart?
- What Is God’s Purpose For Us?
- Can Thirst For The Infinite Be Satisfied By The Finite?
As we explored that last question, John brought up the idea of the passions as enslavements. Here is a quote from St. Dumitru that reiterates this important point that John was making along with some of the key points we discussed last Sunday.
The passions represent the lowest level to which human nature can fall. Both their Greek name, pathi, as well as their Latin, passiones, show that man is brought by them to a state of passivity, of slavery. In fact, they overcome the will, so that the man of the passions is no longer a man of will; we say that he is a man ruled, enslaved, carried along by the passions. Another characteristic of the passions is that in them an unquenchable thirst is manifested, which seeks to be quenched and can’t be.
…Now the infinite thirst of the passions in themselves is explained this way. The human being has a spiritual basis and therefore a tendency toward the infinite which also is manifested in the passions, but in these passions the tendency is turned from the authentic infinite which is of a spiritual order, toward the world, which only gives the illusion of the infinite. Man without being himself infinite, not only is fit, but is also thirsty for the infinite and precisely for this reason is also capable of, and longs for, God, the true and only infinite (homo capaz divini – man capable of the divine). He has a capacity and thirst for the infinite not in the sense that he is in a state to win it, to absorb it in his nature – because then human nature itself would become infinite – but in the sense that he can and must be nourished spiritually from the infinite, and infinitely. He seeks and is able to live in a continued communication with it, in a sharing with it. But man didn’t want to be satisfied with sharing in the infinite, or he believed that he is such a center, he let himself be tricked by his nature’s thirst for the infinite.
The human being then,didn’t understand that the infinite thirst of his nature isn’t an indication of the infinity of that nature, because the true infinite can’t be thirst. It’s only a sign of its capacity to communicate with the infinite, which isn’t a property of his nature. So, the human being, instead of being satisfied to remain in communication with the true infinite, and to progress in it, wanted to become himself the infinite. He tried to absorb in himself or to subordinate to himself everything that lent itself to this relation of subordination: dead objects, finite things. Instead of quenching his thirst for the infinite, he sought to gather everything around himself, as around a center. But because man isn’t a true center in himself, this nature of his took revenge; it made him in reality run after things, even enslaving him to them. So passion, as a tireless chase after the world, instead of being an expression of the central sovereignty of our nature, is rather a force which carries us along against our will; it’s a sign of the fall of our nature into an accentuated state of passivity. Our nature, whether it wants to or not, still has to express its tendency for a center outside of itself. By the passions, this center was moved from God to the world. Thus the passions are the product of a tortuous impulse of our nature, or of a nature which has lots its simplicity and tendency to move straight ahead.
Orthodox Spirituality – The Essence Of The Passions p.77-79 By Dumitru Staniloae
We also discussed this simple cartoon that attempts to capture our separation from God and this enslavement which results from being self-centered in the isolation of our ego (easing God out) vs. the natural condition of being in communion, partnership and cooperation with Him.
Why What Is Natural Doesn’t Seem Natural?
In this week’s class we will focus on three new questions as we dig into St. Dumitru’s booklet ‘The Victory of the Cross’.
- Are we attached to the gifts of God or the Gift Giver?
- What is transcendence and how can our crosses help us find this transcendence?
- What do the crosses we experience in our relationships have to teach us?
Are We Attached To The Gifts Of God Or The Gift Giver ?
If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me
Luke 9:23
It’s pretty universal for us to think about gifts as we enter this time of year. St. Dumitru gives us a very different perspective on this relationship between His purpose for us … full communion with God .. and the cross of the reality we experience in the gifts of the world.
The world is a gift of God, but the destiny of this gift is to unite us with God, who has given it. The intention of the gift is that in itself it should be continually transcended. When we receive a gift from somebody we should look primarily towards the person who has given it and not keep our eyes fixed on the gift. But often those who receive a gift become so attached to the gift that they forget who has given it to them. But God demands an unconditional love from us, for God is infinitely greater than any gifts given to us; just as at the human level the person who gives us something is incomparably more important than what is given, and should be loved for himself or herself, not only on account of the gift. In this way every gift requires a certain cross, and this cross is meant to show us that they are not the last and final reality. This cross consists in an alteration in the gift, and sometimes even in its entire loss.
We can see many meanings in this cross imprinted on the gift of the world which God gives to us. St Maximus the Confessor said that ‘all the realities which we perceive with the senses demand the cross’; and ‘all the realities which we understand with our mind have need of the tomb’. To these words of St Maximus we can add this: that in our fallen condition we feel the dissolution of the present world and of our own existence as a pain, a suffering; feel it as a sorrow because we have bound the affections which form part of our very being to the image of this world which is passing away. This attachment to the things of this world is felt particularly strongly by those who do not believe that there is any further transformation of this world after the life which we now know.
The Christian, however, carries this cross of the world and of his own existence not only more easily but with a certain joy, for he knows that after this cross there follows an imperishable life. With this faith he sees the world as crucified and dead to him, and he and all his tendencies as crucified and dead to the present world. This does not mean that he is not active in this world, and that he does not exercise his responsibility towards it; but he works in order to develop in the present state of the world, destined as it is to dissolution and death, the germs, the seeds of its future resurrection. He longs that this world, and his own existence in it, may be crucified as Christ was crucified; that is to say he wishes voluntarily to undergo the suffering of the cross with the hope of resurrection into a higher world, an imperishable world, a resurrection which is truly with and in Christ.
The Christian does not see the transitory nature of the structures of this world and of his own existence as leading towards a crucifixion without hope, or as moving towards a definitive, final death. He see this situation and he lives it, anticipating the crucifixion at its end with hope, the hope of a higher and unchanging life.
However, it is not only the Christian who lives his own life and that of the world in anticipation of their crucifixion, lives them as nailed to the cross of the passing away of their present form; everyone inevitably does so. For everyone knows that those we love will die, and this certainty introduces a sorrow into the joy of our communion with them. Everyone knows that the material goods which one accumulates are transitory, and this knowledge casts a shadow on the pleasure one has in them. In this sense, the world and our own existence in it are a cross which we shall carry until the end of our earthly life. Never can man rejoice wholly in the gifts, the good things, and in the persons of this world. We feel the transitory nature of this world as a continual cross. But Christians can live this cross with the hope of the resurrection, and thus with joy, while those who have no faith must live this experience with increasing sadness, with the feeling that existence is without meaning, and with a certain despair which they cannot altogether alleviate.
Victory Of The Cross p.1 -3
What is transcendent and how can our crosses help us find this transcendent?
Let’s begin with the dictionary definition of transcendent
exceeding usual limits : surpassing: extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience
Archbishop Kallistos Ware has some wisdom here that may help us develop a more Orthodox perspective on the paradox of God’s closeness and distance.
“God is in everything and everything is in God.” God, in other words, is both immanent and transcendent; present in all things. He is at the same time above and beyond them all. It is necessary to emphasize simultaneously both halves of the paradox beloved of the poet Charles Williams: “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.”
Upholding this “panentheistic” standpoint, the great Byzantine theologian St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) safeguarded the otherness-yet-nearness of the Eternal by making a distinction-in-unity between God’s essence and His energies. In His essence, God is infinitely transcendent, radically unknowable, utterly beyond all created being, beyond all understanding and all participation from the human side. But, in His energies, God is inexhaustibly immanent, the core of everything, the heart of its heart, closer to the heart of each thing than is that thing’s very own heart. These divine energies, according to the Palamite teaching, are not an intermediary between God and the world, not a created gift that He bestows upon us, but they are God Himself in action; and each uncreated energy is God in His indivisible totality, not a part of Him but the whole.
By virtue of this essence-energies distinction, Palamas is able to affirm without self-contradiction:
Those who are counted worthy enjoy union with God the cause of all … He remains wholly within Himself and yet dwells wholly within us, making us share not in His nature but in His glory and radiance.
In this way, God is revealed and hidden — revealed in His energies, hidden in His essence:
Somehow He manifests Himself in His totality, and yet he does not manifest Himself; we apprehend Him with our intellect, and yet we do not apprehend Him; we participate in Him, and yet He remains beyond all participation.
…God both is and is not; He is everywhere and nowhere; He has many names and He cannot be named; He is ever-moving and He is immovable; and, in short, He is everything and nothing.
What St. Gregory Palamas seeks to express through the essence-energies distinction, St. Maximus the Confessor indicates by speaking in terms of Logos and logoi , even though the specific concerns of Maximus, and the context in which he is writing, are not altogether identical with those of Palamas. According to Maximus, Christ the Creator-Logos has implanted in each created thing a characteristic logos, a “thought” or “word,” which is the divine presence in that thing, God’s intention for it, the inner essence of that thing, which makes it to be distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards God. By virtue of these indwelling logoi , each created thing is not just an object but a personal word addressed to us by the Creator. The divine Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Wisdom and the Providence of God, constitutes at once the source and the end of the particular logoi, and in this fashion acts as an all-embracing and unifying cosmic presence.
Through Creation to the Creator by Bishop Kallistos Ware of Diokleia
What do the crosses we experience in our relationships have to teach us?
Our responsibility towards those who are near to us forms the weight of a particularly heavy and painful cross on account of the fragility of their life which is exposed to a multitude of ills, a multitude of difficulties which arise from the conditions of this world in its present state. Parents suffer intensely and very frequently because of the ills and difficulties of their children; they fear for their life, for their failure, for their sufferings. Therefore the life of parents becomes a life of continual concern, and the cross of the children is their cross. Our cross becomes heavier with the weight of the cross of those with whom we come in contact, for we share responsibility for the life of our children, our relatives, our friends, and even of all men with whom, in one way and another, we are in touch. We bear responsibility for all that can threaten the life of those for whom we have care, and we have the obligation, so far as we can, of smoothing their difficulties and helping their lives. Thus we can reveal and strengthen our love for them and their love for us; thus we can develop the seeds of a future life in strengthening our and their spiritual existence. In this responsibility towards our neighbour we live more intensely our responsibility towards God. Christ has shown this meaning of his cross, he who had pity on those who were suffering, and wept for those who were dead.
A second sense of the cross in relationships is this: the fallen world is often lived and felt as a cross to be carried until death through the fact that people sometimes act towards us in a hostile way, even though we have done them no wrong. They suspect us of having evil intentions towards them. They think of us as obstacles in the path of their life. Often they become our enemies even on account of the noble and high convictions to which we remain faithful. Our attachment to these convictions brings their evil designs into the light and their bad intentions to view even though we do not intend this. And this happens all the more because by the beliefs which we hold, and which we cannot renounce, we show our responsibility towards them, since we seek the security of their physical and material life and the true development of their spiritual being. This is a responsibility which we reveal in our words, our writings and our actions which become, as it were, an exhortation to them.
We also feel as a heavy cross the erring ways of our children, of our brethren, and of many of our neighbours and contemporaries. We carry their incomprehension of our good intentions and of our good works as a cross. Almost every one of our efforts to spread goodness is accompanied by suffering and by a cross which we carry on account of the incomprehension of others. To wish to avoid this suffering, this cross, would mean in general to renounce the struggle and the effort to do what is good.
Thus without the cross there can be no true growth and no true strengthening of the spiritual life. To avoid the weight of this cross is to avoid our responsibility towards our brethren and our neighbours before God. Only by the cross can we remain in submission to God and in true love towards our neighbours. We cannot purify or develop our own spiritual life nor that of others, nor that of the world in general, by seeking to avoid the cross. Consequently, we do not discover either the depth or the greatness of the potential forces and powers of this world as a gift of God if we try to live without the cross. The way of the cross is the only way which leads us upwards, the only way which carries creation towards the true heights for which it was made. This is the signification which we understand of the cross of Christ.
Victory of the Cross p.3-5
You can find this booklet in more of its entirety in the following links:
St John’s Adult Education 