On silence and silence

This is another essay that I wrote a few years ago, shortly before I became Orthodox, and never got to publishing. I thought that it may be worth publishing it here as it relates to things that I also keep coming across here and so have expanded and updated it slightly in the hope that it may be helpful.  Of course, there is more that can be said on related matters if I ever get to it…

A few years ago, while I was still in the Netherlands, I became aware of a certain media interest in monasticism. Despite their declining numbers and the secularization of society, monasteries continued to fascinate people and had even become rather fashionable destinations for those in search of some sort of inner peace.

What struck me then about this phenomenon was that it was fundamentally redefining monasticism. I read an article that managed to explain the meaning of monasticism for a broad public without once mentioning God or Christ. Instead, it told us that monastics withdraw from society in order to search for silence, for the heart of their life is concerned with what happens in this silence.

That silence is important for the monastic life is indisputable. But for a concept such as “silence” to come to define monasticism, even to the point of replacing any reference to God, is at the very least rather problematic. For Saint Benedict, the necessary condition for becoming a monk was that one truly sought God. Silence can be an important means by which we seek God, but we also need to ask ourselves what silence means. Is silence something neutral? How and with what is silence filled? What is the relationship between word and silence? Is the silence of a Christian monastery different to that of a Buddhist monastery? And what is it that actually happens in the silence?

Since coming back to South Africa, I have become aware that there is a similar dynamic at work among many people who are seeking after “spirituality” – something that I keep hoping to write more about. All too often I have seen references to retreats, courses, groups, and “inspirational” quotes (I could name names but I won’t) that originate in a Christian context but would seem to replace any specifically Christian content with a reference to silence, or solitude, or the absolute. An experience of this silence is what we are told that we need to seek, often by contrasting it to dogma which is invariably viewed in negative terms. But, once more, what is this silence? What is its relationship to Christian tradition and to dogma?

 

The mark of the Spirit

When St Basil was attempting to define the hypostatic qualities of the Holy Spirit, he could find no other words than hagiasmos or hagiosyne, meaning “sanctification” or “holiness.” It is difficult, therefore, to speak of the Spirit without taking into account his work of sanctification, but it is no less difficult to speak of the Church’s holiness without evoking the Holy Spirit, the source and power of sanctification. It sheds light on the whole final section of the Creed: the communion of saints, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Sanctification is not only moral sanctification, it is the sharing of divine life, of eternal life, of the resurrection. It is the very mark of the Spirit on the flesh itself, on all of human nature, the gift of incorruptibility, of deification.

Father Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 133.

I haven’t started reading this book properly yet, but was looking through it today, came across this, and thought it worth sharing!

 

Transparent to the action of the Spirit

What is essential to remember, here [in the thought of St Irenaeus], is, on the one hand, the double movement of the Father who sends the Spirit on creation through the Son, but also of the Spirit who returns and brings the creature back to the Father, also through the Son. The Son will always be the mediator in all things; man’s entire life, his most incarnate, most fleshly human existence, will be summoned and made capable of being transparent to the action of the Spirit. Consequently, the Holy Spirit knows no boundaries in His work of permeating, of penetrating, precisely, this flesh or this human being He must soften, which He must constitute into one bread, one body, the Body of Christ. … It is the same action of the Holy Spirit on the Son and on the Church; it is the same action of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments and in man himself. Man too, to the degree that he becomes conformed to Christ, in the Church, through the Holy Spirit, becomes, in turn, “sacrament”: he becomes a sacrament of the new life, which means that his body rediscovers why it was created. The totality of the human psycho-physical composite, our entire created reality is capable of being penetrated, of being filled with the divine life. If the sacraments are symbols, if they are signs, they are this because the human body, man’s natural being, is this in the first place. I would call this the anthropological finality, and the continuity of the sacraments in the life and in the building up of the new man.

Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999) 205-206.

 

A growing space

The Spirit is the Great Forerunner of Jesus whose coming into our heart He prepares; He hides behind His own gifts: the new state of grace, of sweetness and joy, of the good fragrance of Christ whose aroma the Spirit is. Lastly, the Spirit constitutes the mystery of the human person, in the image of the One Hypostasis of the Incarnate Word. In this human person, the Spirit blends, fades out and asserts Himself; He prays in us (Gal 4:6) and Rom 8:26) and we in Him (Rom 8:15); he hollows out in our being a growing space where the Kingdom of Jesus is renewed, where “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:2).

Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999) 194

 

On eschatology and Pentecost

Orthodox as well as Catholic and Protestant scholastic theologies have been greatly distorted when they present eschatology as being concerned exclusively with the end of man and the world, in a perspective that is strictly linear and futuristic – either individual, or cosmic, or universal, but always “far away” and unreal. The gap between this futuristic eschatology of our textbooks, and frequently of our teaching, and the inaugurated or realized eschatology of the New Testament and of the ecclesial and liturgical life is enormous and dramatic. In our day, Fr. Alexander Schmemann has been able to reevaluate the eschatological dimension of worship and of the Eucharist. After him, John Zizioulas has endeavored, in turn, to emphasize the eschatological aspect of the eucharistic gathering of the Lord present in His Church.

To summarize in a few words the meaning of the New Testament and ecclesial eschaton (end), in order to apply it to the liturgical reality, I would translate it at the same time by the term “ultimate,” but also “end” (telos) and lastly, “fullness” (plêrôma). The conjunction, or convergence of these various meanings allows us to give the biblical eschaton its qualitative as well as its linear content. This qualitative sense of fullness and end characterizes the coming of the Savior, His entire work of redemption, and His life-giving presence in the Church. It is to this last aspect, the ecclesial and permanent mode of eschatology, that is, to the presence of the One who comes, that I would like to devote this chapter.

The Ascension of the Savior and the historical Pentecost (Acts 2) are two events that mark a boundary between the evangelical mode of the presence of Christ (manifested in the flesh, 1 Tim 3:16), and the ecclesial mode of this presence. If during the time of His life on earth, the Savior was the favourite, plenary locus of the presence of the Spirit, from then on the Spirit, who animates the ecclesial body of Christ, is, in turn, the locus, the proper space of the presence of Christ, of “the One who is, who was, and who is to come.” John Zizioulas recalled forcefully the “constituent” role of the Holy Spirit in the human life of Christ, on the one hand, and, on the other, in His sacramental and ecclesial presence.

…believers find themselves imprisoned in a space, a hermetically closed temporality, according to which the multiple existence of Christ concerns us, certainly, but as if from the outside, because Christ anticipates us, precedes us in history, overarches us in His heavenly glory and lets us wait for Him, without too much impatience, in a second coming that is ultimately very distant, even unreal. Such are the contours not only of our religious psychology, individual or collective, of our ecclesial societies – but such is also the hallmark of our cold, conceptual, scholastic theologies.

All this is, alas, in the “natural” order of things. It is difficult to speak abstractly of the ecclesial presence of Christ, to profess it apart from the fire of the Spirit, just as it is only in the blazing of the eucharistic Pentecost that “boldly and without condemnation we may dare to call upon God the Father, and to say, ‘Our Father.’”

Only in the liturgical action of the Eucharist does the One whose existence seemed far away and abstract, come near, in the liturgical action of the liturgy and in its inner and caritative correlations, that is, in the liturgy of the heart, and in the liturgy of mercy. Only then are the tight, spatial-temporal boundaries of the past, of the celestial and of the future, abolished in the presence of “the One who is, who was, and who is to come.”

Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999) 169, 170-171.

 

Consubstantial and heterogenous

The theological undertaking is always conditioned by the human problems – political, cultural, philosophic, religious – in which theology moves, and in which are as many question marks, existential, not theoretical, about the faith and the Gospel. Through such questioning, the Church is contested in her ultimate hope and in the expression of her faith. This contestation occurs at the precise point where the Church and the world meet – a world to which the Church is simultaneously consubstantial and heterogenous, leading to a necessary ambiguity, an unavoidable tension.

This whole situation of the Church and of theology at the frontier between God and the world will be reflected particularly in the language of theology, where the Church gives an account of her faith, of her hope, of her knowledge of the trinitarian God. This language is “capable of God” (capax Dei), but, at the same time, always inadequate, having to undergo itself the baptism of fire, of dying to human wisdom, to be reborn to “God’s folly” (1 Cor 1:25), even to the point of martyrdom and the profession of blood.

Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999) 197.

 

Interview with Father Boris Bobrinskoy

I am told: “Father Boris, you specialize in the Holy Spirit!” What horror! I specialize in the Holy Spirit. . .How is this to be !!! You feel that you want to laugh and cry! Here one must be very careful and at the same time to know that a genuine theologian, coming towards his personal experience and that of the whole Church which he absorbs within himself and at the same time does not have an aversion for scholarly research. One thing helps the other to make certain that erudition does not overshadow spiritual experience and humility.

The whole problem of our theological development results in that the individual becomes a complete being through the union of reason, will, love and faith. The Lord waits for us to open our hearts to him When we open our hearts to the Lord, he gradually enters into it and it is from the heart that the fecundation and enlivening of every cell of the brain, nerves and feelings comes from. A gradual enlightenment and tranquility of our being is engendered. A genuine spiritual experience is from the heart which does not at alll mean something sentimental or something felt. The heart is the root of spiritual being. Thou shalt love your Lord and God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind! When we speak of the heart, we speak about that place which embraces and unites our whole being. When we come under God’s will, God is revealed through the Word which penetrates to the depth of the heart, and God’s Word needs to grow within us, and be united with us as one. When the Word of God dwells within us then every word of ours becomes a reflection of God’s Word.

…

We are responsible for the world, for people, for those who have not as yet encountered Christ or who rejected him, who struggle with him or renounce him. In this respect the Church must generate in us a sense of compassion, a feeling of profound responsibility for the world which God so loved that he sent his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. Thus you see, if we are in Christ then, being in Christ we love and experience the fate of the whole world. In this sense we should reflect on the words of the Elder Siluan or some parts in Isaac Syrene. These saints burned with love for the whole of humanity and the whole creation.

Father Boris Bobrinskoy, in an interview with Alexander Nikiforov in which he discusses theology, Christian life, the Church, developments in Russian theology, and participation in the Eucharist. Translated by Fr. Alvian Smirensky, and kindly posted by Bishop Seraphim here.

 

The end of a series

The last post was the final post in my reading of Father Boris Bobrinskoy’s The Compassion of the Father. I have added it to my “Completed Series” page and include the links to all the posts here for those who are interested. 

(Please note that my posting on Father Alexander Schmemann’s The Eucharist Sacrament of the Kingdom: Sacrament of the Kingdomis temporarily suspended as I was reading a borrowed copy which I had to leave in the Netherlands. But I fully intend getting my own copy once I can afford it and I hope that posting will continue before too long!)

The Compassion of the Father

Posts from my reading of Boris Bobrinskoy’s The Compassion of the Father. (Crestwood, N.Y., St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). (June-October 2009)

Introduction
Towards a Transparency to the Holy Trinity: The Life and Work of Father Boris Bobrinskoy, by Maxime Egger

• Introducing The Compassion of the Father and its author (I)
• “The transparency of the icon and the gaze of the saints” : Introducing The Compassion of the Father and its author, continued (II)



Facing Evil and Suffering

1. The Lamb of God Takes upon Himself Human Suffering

• Pursuing human degeneration to the end…
• Exorcising the human heart

2. Love for Enemies in the Gospel

• “The one who does not love his enemies does not have the grace of God”

3. The Mystery of Forgiveness

• Repentance as the key to forgiveness

The Liturgy of the Heart

4. The Prayer of the Heart and Suffering

• “Our prayer must enlarge to the measure and to the image of Jesus”
• A heart filled with the misery of the world
• “The grace of the Holy Spirit has taught him love”

5. The Art of the Invocation of the Name

• Celebrant at an altar of inner sacrifice

6. The Inner Eucharist

• The Inner Eucharist
• The Inner Eucharist (continued)

Towards the Knowledge of God

7. Theology and Spirituality

•  Theology and spirituality
•  “The one who prays is a theologian; the one who is a theologian, prays.”
• The baptism of the intellect

8. The Theology of Language and the Language of Theology

• On Word, Silence and Image
• A theological vision from the eucharistic chalice
• Restoring language to its first vocation
• The divine-human language that leads to communion
• “Quotation marks are a modern invention, unknown to the Fathers”

9. Sacred Tradition and Human Traditions

• Words that come from “an unexpected depth”
• “What is transmitted is fire”
• “The entire Church is divine-human”
• “A deposit of great price enclosed in a good vessel”

 

 

“A deposit of great price enclosed in a good vessel”

Father Boris Bobrinskoy continues his discussion of Tradition in the ninth chapter of The Compassion of the Father by citing Father Georges Florovsky on the need for an “ecumenism in time” in addition to the “ecumenism in space” that had come to dominate the ecumenical movement, for “the Church is not only defined in space, but also in time, with respect to our Fathers and the two millennia of Christian life in the communion of saints.” (165) While Protestantism has tended to downplay tradition, and Roman Catholicism has tended to place Tradition above Scripture and to emphasise “the fundamental and prime magisterium of the pope,”

In Orthodoxy, the Tradition is alive. It is a permanent miracle in which the Church does not pretend to possess the truth, but rather is possessed by it. The Church does not hold the truth but manifests it in fullness and in permanence, in a eucharistic relationship, an epiclesis, where it invokes the Holy Spirit so that He penetrates the gifts – the bread and the wine – the assembly, and, consequently, the very mouths of those in charge of keeping the Church and the entire people of God in the faith and in truth.

This dimension of the invocation – of the epiclesis – of the dependency of the entire Church upon the Holy Spirit, is a reality we forcefully maintain. The entire people of God are found permanently in the influential sphere of the Spirit. Thus, all dimensions of the Tradition converge in the one crucible of holiness, for the possession of the truth is inconceivable without personal and ecclesial holiness. The reality of the truth, known and preserved in the Church, must be defined as the responsibility of the entire people of God. (165-6)

While Orthodoxy does not offer a “recipe” for evaluating human traditions, Father Boris suggests certain principles that it offers us. These include the desire to be faithful to the Church, a sense of the mystery of the beyond which is aware that human concepts cannot exhaust the fullness of the apostolic faith, a process of spiritual growth leading to a maturation of the instinct for truth, a listening to the prophetic Spirit, and brotherly love, especially towards the week. This means that Orthodoxy is both profoundly the same and profoundly diverse.

It is the same in the sense that we recognize one another – without needing an external authority, a common magisterium that dictates teaching and doctrine – as identical in faith, worship, spirituality, and testimony. It is diverse in the sense that the tonalities of Orthodoxy, its language and preoccupations, may vary greatly from one place to another. (167)

However, faithfulness to the Tradition does not mean that it cannot be questioned. Indeed the Fathers sometimes had to oppose certain notions of Tradition in order to assert the mystery of the faith. Father Boris gives the examples of the use of non-traditional terminology in the struggle against Arianism, the defence of icons, and the development of hymnography and feasts. In the same way, contemporary Orthodoxy is in need of self-reflection and purification and topics for consideration include questions of married bishops, the iconostasis, the “secret” prayers during the Divine Liturgy, the frequency of the reception of Holy Communion, and the female diaconate. Such questions mean that

The Church concretely must ponder over the actualization of Tradition at the end of the second millennium of Christianity. For this, we must be listening to the Spirit, in whom Tradition and newness are allied, the permanence of the message of salvation and renewal of the ecclesial structures. Only in the Holy Spirit may the complete fidelity to the received Tradition and the most radical freedom of the children of God be realized and maintained without contradiction. (170)

Father Boris ends by quoting Saint Irenaeus who wrote:

This faith, which we have received from the Church, we preserve carefully, because through the action of the Spirit of God, like a deposit of great price enclosed in a good vessel, it rejuvenates ceaselessly, and causes the vessel containing it to renew its youth also. (170)

 

“The entire Church is divine-human”

Father Boris Bobrinskoy continues the ninth chapter of The Compassion of the Fatherby pointing to the subtle dialectic between the direct action of the Holy Spirit and listening to our fathers in the faith. We see this in the experience of Saint Paul.

Following his “enlightenment” on the road to Damascus, and after spending three years in Arabia – a stay of which we know nothing – St Paul wanted to return to Jerusalem to meet James and Kephas (Peter), the pillars of the Church at that time. This intervention is very interesting because it reveals that, from the beginning of the Church, two basic moments co-existed: on the one hand, the direct illumination of the road to Damascus where St Paul met the living Christ and was taught by the Spirit; on the other hand, the concern to verify his teaching, his knowledge, his preaching, and his language with the apostles, with the Church.

In this way, the Church lives in the permanent breath and the permanent fire of the Pentecost of the Holy Spirit. If this fire does not set us aglow, then all the truths of the Tradition would forever remain as dead, alien externals to us.

In the Christian faith, we should never omit any dimension of the spiritual begetting, whatever the relays of transmission may be: the “father,” the “charismatics,” those who are “filled with the Holy Spirit.” For we have only one Lord: Jesus Christ; one Master: the Holy Spirit; and one Father: our heavenly Father. The more we mature in the faith, the more the apostolic and ecclesial Tradition becomes our own. Then the gospel is accomplished, when Jesus tells His disciples: “I no longer call you servants; … Instead, I have called you friends, for everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15). (162-3)

Thus the Tradition is not simply the transmission of the living faith, but is also the content of faith. It has an objectivity that parallels our own subjective faith.

Objective faith is basically the mystery of Christ, the revelation of this mystery in Jesus, transmitted by the apostles and evangelists: the announcement of the good news. This is what St Irenaeus calls “the deposit of the transmitted faith,” which has remained unchanged over the centuries. This deposit crystallizes in ecclesial doctrine, a doctrine which we have a tendency to call “orthodoxy” and which cannot be separated from worship, prayer, and adoration. Two dimensions are included in the word “orthodoxy”: doxa not only means thought, prayer, and opinion, but also glory and praise. Consequently, only to the extent that our praise is true does doctrine emerge from inside the language of Christian worship.

We can go even further: doxa is not only the glory given to God, but also the glory of God. Thus “orthodoxy” is above all the glory of God who communicates Himself to us in the life of the Church, that is, the living experience of God, crystallized at the same time in the language of worship and in theological thought.

Theology acquires a genuine objectivity in the dogmas, the definitions of the councils, the teaching of the magisterium, and the authority of the Church. That is very important, for it is there that we touch upon the basic mystery of the Church where the Body resembles the Head, Christ being the Head. The entire Church is divine-human or “theanthropical.” In other words, everything in the life of the Church is divine-human: worship, the sacraments, the icon, and theological language, taking into account our approximations. From this point of view, the doctrine of the faith acquires a genuine objectivity; the human word becomes capax Dei (“capable of God”), that is, capable of transmitting, carrying, and singing (rather than reciting) the truth of God, His mystery. (163-4)