Simplicity

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heresy, Oration 38, Politics, Science, St. Gregory the Theologian

While Section 7 of St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 38 might seem like the most difficult to decipher of anything yet encountered in this homily on Christmas, it is something we ought to be paying attention to. St. Gregory is talking about the nature of God. Given that he is only one of three men in the entire history of the Orthodox Church to be given the title Theologian — one who knows God — what he has to say in Section 7 is extraordinarily important when it comes to understanding how the Orthodox Church approaches who God is.

There are two key elements to St. Gregory’s exploration of God’s nature in Section 7. Intriguingly, they say as much about ourselves as they do about God.

The first key is that “He is only sketched by the mind, and this in a very indistinct and mediocre way, not from things pertaining to himself but from things around him.” In other words, our minds cannot begin to grasp the nature of God. This flies in the face of modern man’s understanding of himself. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that, through our rational capacities, we can and should be able to understand and control everything around us. Our scientific world view, our dependence upon technology and our desire to save the world through various applications of science, technology and political theory speak to this self image.

In contrast, St. Gregory humbly declares that such an understanding of humanity is foolishness. Our rational powers cannot begin to comprehend the nature of God. Indeed, the only thing he is willing to concede that we truly know about God’s nature is that it is without limit. Thus, one cannot approach God with our modern self image. It severely limits not only who we are, but our ability to understand who God is.

God, the ungraspable, can only be grasped through a personal encounter. He draws us towards Himself so that we may catch glimpses of Him. It is through these encounters that He purifies us. It is through the personal relationship we have with God that we are able to learn how to become like God.

The second key comes from St. Gregory’s statement “Let us inquire further, for simplicity is clearly not the nature of this being.” St. Gregory lived at a time when the philosophy known as Neo-Platonism held a huge sway in the way people of the Roman Empire looked at the world. So much so that, at the very least, Christians had to frame their discussions about God in Neo-Platonic language. Some, however, let Neo-Platonism color and even determine their approach to an understanding of God.

Neo-Platonism holds that what is Good (aka Divine) is simple. The more complex something is, the further away from the Good it gets. Thus, for example, the flesh is further away from the Good than is the soul.

A mistake made by Christians throughout the ages is that we have a tendency to approach God with a philosophical presupposition. In other words, we have an idea of what we want God to be and then try to make God fit our idea of what we want. Since God is beyond the mind — a mediocre instrument for understanding God — approaching God in a philosophical way will necessarily lead to errors. Indeed, one can trace every heresy in the history of the Church to a philosophical presupposition.

At the time St. Gregory was preaching, the primary philosophical presupposition that was causing error and heresy was the Neo-Platonic concept of simplicity. Thus, he dismisses it by pointing out that not only is the mind too mediocre to begin to understand God, but that the concept of simplicity flies in the face of the Church’s experience of God. No philosophical concept can contain that personal relationship.

Thus, we cannot approach God with what we want Him to be. Rather, we must accept Him as He is. This is why God revealed His name to be “The One Who Is” (O ΩΝ, the Greek translation of God’s name revealed to Moses at the burning bush). He reminds us that no human concept can determine or contain the nature of God.

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Oration 38 Section 7

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Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, Section 7:

God always was and is and will be, or rather always “is,” for “was” and “will be” belong to our divided time and transitory nature; but he is always “he who is,” and he gave himself this name when he consulted with Moses on the mountain. For holding everything together in himself, he possesses being, neither beginning nor ending. He is like a kind of boundless and limitless sea of being, surpassing all thought and time and nature. He is only sketched by the mind, and this in a very indistinct and mediocre way, not from things pertaining to himself but from things around him. Impressions are gathered from here and there into one particular representation of the truth, which flees before it is grasped and escapes before it is understood. It illumines the directive faculty in us, when indeed we have been purified, and its appearance is like swift bolt of lightening that does not remain. It seems to me that insofar as it is graspable, the divine draws [us] toward itself, for what is completely ungraspable is unhoped for and unsought. Yet one wonders at the ungraspable, and one desires more intensely the object of wonder, and being desired it purifies, and purifying it makes deiform, and with those who have become such he converses as with those close to him, — I speak with vehement boldness — God is united with gods, and he is thus known, perhaps as much as he already knows those who are known to him.

For the divine is without limits and difficult to contemplate, and this alone is entirely graspable in it, namely that it is without limits, whether one supposes that to be a simple nature is to be wholly ungraspable or perfectly graspable. For what is a being whose nature is simple? Let us inquire further, for simplicity is clearly not the nature of this being, just as composition alone is clearly not the nature of composite entities.

Thanksgiving

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Christmas, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian, Thanksgiving

The first line of Section 6 in St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 38 deserves a bit of attention. In the average parish in the Greek Archdiocese, it might come as something of a shock that one of the Three Hierarchs has such a low opinion of Greeks and their festivals. One has to understand that if St. Gregory thought of himself as anything other than a Christian, he might call himself Roman, but never Greek. To the Christian of the Eastern Roman Empire the term Greek meant non-Christian and pagan.

It would do us well, however, to consider his words in the modern context. Despite the condemnation of phyletism in 1872 by the Orthodox Church, terms like Greek, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Arab, etc. hold as much of our attention as does the word Orthodox. How do our non-Orthodox neighbors know our parishes? Is it because we hold festivals, feed them ethnic food and entertain them with ethnic dance? Or is it because of our faith? Of course it is very possible that first can lead to a discovery of the second, but we still must be honest with ourselves about why the pomp and the festivities.

This line of questioning can also be leveled at America as a whole on this very American Holiday of Thanksgiving. St. Gregory challenges all of us to ask whether we celebrate today with our stomachs or our hearts. Do we seek to satiate ourselves at the table we set for ourselves, or the one set by our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ?

St. Gregory invites us to partake of the feast in which he is the host. The meal that he presides over is one in which strangers can feed people wholly unlike themselves and in which the poor can satisfy the rich. For, every time we gather as the Church to partake of the Eucharist — which literally means Thanksgiving — we partake of Christ Himself.

The stranger can find unity with the radical other because they both share the same humanity that Christ clothed Himself with. The poor can satisfy the rich because the treasures offered by God make the treasures of the wealthy look like a dung heap (to use St. Gregory’s imagery).

I realize that not every parish will celebrate a Divine Liturgy today, but we all should be. Which table would you rather eat at and celebrate Thanksgiving — the one we set for ourselves, which only ends with turkey sandwiches from leftovers (if we can afford a turkey at all) and maybe a nap on a recliner in front of a football game (if we own either a recliner or a TV) or the one in which Christ Himself offers to tabernacle in each of us, joining us to Himself in an astonishingly intimate way?

I will grant that time with family over a festive meal can be a time of warmth and love, but imagine how much more warmth and love that meal might have if it began gathered around the table set out for us by Christ.

I pray that we all have a blessed Thanksgiving and that we all have a chance to partake of Thanksgiving Himself.

Oration 38 Section 6

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Christmas, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, Section 6:

But let us leave these things to the Greeks and to Greek pomps and festivals. They name as gods those who enjoy the steam rising form the fat of sacrificed animals and correspondingly serve the divine with their stomachs, and they become evil fashioners and initiators and initiates of evil demons. But if we, for whom the Word is an object of worship, must somehow have luxury, let us have as our luxury the word and the divine law and narratives, especially those that form the basis of the present feast, that our luxury may be akin and not foreign to the one who has called us.

Would you like me — for I am your host today — to set before you, my good guests, a discourse as abundant and lavish as possible, that you may know a stranger can feed the local inhabitants, and one poor and homeless those brilliant in wealth? I will begin from this point; and purify for me your mind and hearing and thoughts, you who enjoy luxuries of this kind, since the discourse is about God and divine things, that you may depart having truly received the luxuries that are not empty. This discourse will be at the same time very full and very concise, so as neither to sadden you by its poverty nor cause distaste through satiety.

The Illusion of Progress

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Christmas, death, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

One of the most difficult lessons I have ever had to learn in my life I learned from Thucydides, the ancient Greek who is regarded as the grandfather of historians. His record of the Peloponnesian War is the first known to be an attempt at an objective record of an historical event.

The Cold War was still going on when I began reading his history, and I was stunned at how little had changed in twenty-three centuries. Substitute “U.S.S.R.” for Sparta and “U.S.A” for Athens and one would be hard pressed to tell the difference between A.D. 1986 and 431 B.C. The axiom that more things change the more they stay the same came to life on those pages. The idea that humanity progresses is an illusion.

For further proof, one need not look further than Section 5 of St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 38. In it, he describes with stunning accuracy the way that 21st century secular America celebrates Christmas:

• Wreaths on front doors
• Street decorations
• Parties with music, alcohol, dancing, gourmet foods and desserts
• Fashion that has as its main feature inutility
• Pursuit of gifts, luxury and comfort
• Not to mention that there are still those who are in hunger and want

Modern man likes to fool himself that because we have technologies that allow us to accomplish amazing tasks (like posting on a blog that can be read by anyone in the world, or instantly talking to people who are miles away virtually anywhere on the globe) that we are better than all those other humans who didn’t have the internet or cell phones.

I will grant that context and technology change but consider this for a moment: do we know how the pyramids were built or the Moai of Easter Island were moved or how the Nazca Lines were made? We might have our guesses, but the reality is that these technologies are lost to us. The knowledge that we have today may be affected by the knowledge of the past, but it isn’t built upon it. Why else would we need to guess at how these ancient marvels were accomplished?

At a very fundamental level, humanity is as it has always been: we are vessels of clay. The fundamental problems of 21st century Americans are no different that 4th century Greeks. We all suffer. We all age. We all die. Our pursuit of luxury, comfort, riches, power and technology may very well delay the inevitable suffering and death, but we all suffer and die in the end.

Thus, deluding ourselves that technology makes us superior to all of those fellow vessels of clay who suffered and died before us is an illusion. As a result, we spend much of our lives trying to deny the reality of death.

St. Gregory the Theologian, therefore, is calling out through the centuries to every generation that we no longer have to delude ourselves and try to avoid the fact that we are vessels of clay doomed to break and die. A child has been given that defeats death and removes its sting. We no longer need fear. We no longer need to maintain illusions to fool ourselves that suffering does not exist. We can stand up and face the realities of the fallen world head-on. We can look upon the suffering of our fellow human beings and encourage them that they, too, no longer have to fear.

Christ is born. Glorify Him.

Oration 38 Section 5

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Christmas, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, Section 5:

And how will this be? Let us not put wreaths on our front doors, or assemble troupes of dancers, or decorate the streets. Let us not feast the eyes, or mesmerize the sense of hearing, or make effeminate the sense of smell, or prostitute the sense of taste, or gratify the sense of touch. These are ready paths to evil, and entrances of sin. Let us not be softened by delicate and extravagant clothing, whose beauty is its inutility, or by transparency of stones, or the brilliance of gold, or the artificiality of colors that falsify natural beauty and are invented in opposition to the [divine] image; nor by “revelries and drunkenness,” to which I know “debauchery and licentiousness” are linked, since from bad teachers come bad teachings, or rather from evil seeds come evil harvests. Let us not build high beds of straw, making shelters for the debauchery of the stomach. Let us not assess the bouquet of wines, the concoctions of chefs, the great cost of perfumes. Let earth and sea not bring us as gifts the valued dung, for this is how I know to evaluate luxury. Let us not strive to conquer each other in dissoluteness. For to me all that is superfluous and beyond need is dissoluteness, particularly when others are hungry and in want, who are of the same clay and the same composition as ourselves.

The Astonishing Love of God

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Christmas, Cross, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

If there is an iconographic image to illustrate what St. Gregory the Theologian is trying to explain in Section 4 of his Oration 38, it is this close-up of the Icon of the Nativity:

Please note how Christ is depicted in the manger. He is not lying in a feeding trough lined with hay nor is he wrapped in swaddling clothes. Rather, He is lying in the dark, beneath the earth and in a tomb swathed in burial wrappings. This is what we celebrate on Christmas — Christ crucified and buried.

The entire purpose of Christ’s Incarnation is His suffering and death so as to intimately identify Himself with our suffering and death. That way we can pick up our cross, die with Him and allow His humanity — which knows no corruption — can become our humanity. So that, as St. Gregory puts it, we may lay “aside the old human being [so that] we may be clothed with the new, and that as in Adam we have died so we may live in Christ, born with Christ and crucified with him, buried with him and rising with him.”

The Orthodox Church depicts the Nativity with Christ in the tomb to visually remind the world that “where sin abounded, grace superabounded.” Death has no sting. We don’t celebrate those things that we want or that we think we need (what St. Gregory calls sickness), but rather the healing that the Cross and Crucifixion bring. We celebrate the astonishing love of God.

Oration 38 Section 4

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Christmas, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, Section 4:

This is our festival, this is the feast we celebrate today, in which God comes to live with human beings, that we may journey toward God, or return — for to speak thus is more exact — that laying aside the old human being we may be clothed with the new, and that as in Adam we have died so we may live in Christ, born with Christ and crucified with him, buried with him and rising with him. For it is necessary for me to undergo the good turnaround, and as painful things came from more pleasant things, so out of painful things more pleasant things must return. “For where sin abounded, grace superabounded,” and if the taste [of forbidden fruit] condemned, how much more does the Passion of Christ justify? Therefore we celebrate the feast not like a pagan festival but in a godly manner, not in a worldly way but in a manner above the world. We celebrate not our own concerns but the one who is ours, or rather what concerns our Master, things pertaining not to sickness but to healing, not to the first molding but to the remolding.

Theophanies

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Christmas, Entrance into the Temple, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian, Theophany

When I see St. Gregory the Theologian talking about the Nativity and Theophany being celebrated at the same time, I am sorely tempted to talk about when and where Christmas began to be celebrated as its own unique feast, the fact that Epiphany has a longer provenance in the East than does Christmas, and that all of this is quite interesting given that evidence suggests that Constantinople started to celebrate the Nativity on its own about the time St. Gregory began preaching there.

For those who are interested in a discussion of when Christmas became a Christian feast (particularly in context of the Christianization of the pagan winter solstice) I would direct you here; however, given that we have just celebrated The Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple — a Great Feast of the Orthodox Church just as the Nativity is — I am more interested in the main point St. Gregory makes in this third section of Oration 38: the Nativity of Christ is a Theophany.

One point about Christmas that I think cannot be emphasized enough is that it is a revelation of God. He demonstrates to us His love and the lengths to which He will go in order to intimately identify Himself with His creation. God becomes man. Christ Himself is a Theophany.

Thus, it is possible to describe all of the 12 Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church as Theophanies — God reveals Himself to us. When one considers feasts like Epiphany, Pentecost and Transfiguration, this idea of Theophany is quite easy to see because God Himself is visibly active in each case. This premise, however, is far more difficult to see with the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple.

Firstly, this event is not recorded in Scripture — the record of God’s revelation of Himself to us. Secondly, this celebration focuses on the Virgin Mary, not Christ. The Hymnody of the Church (this from the Doxastikon from Great Vespers of The Entrance), however, helps us to understand how The Entrance is, in fact, a Theophany:

After you were born, O Bride of God and Sovereign Lady, you came to the temple of the Lord to be brought up in the Holy of Holies, as one holy; and Gabriel was then sent to you, the all-blameless, bringing nourishment to you. All the Heavens were astonished, beholding the Holy Spirit make His dwelling in you. Wherefore, O spotless and undefiled Virgin, who are glorified in Heaven and on earth, O Mother of God, save our race.

The Church explicitly states that the Theotokos, as a young little girl, entered into the Holy of Holies. The three OT readings from Great Vespers (Exodus 40:1-5, 9-10, 16, 34-35; Third Book of Book of Kings [1Kings in the Masoretic] 8:1, 3-4, 5 ,6-7, 9, 10-11 and Ezekial 43:27-44:4) make it very clear that such a feat is impossible. In both the Tabernacle built by Moses and the Temple built by Solomon, a cloud descended upon the Holy of Holies so that no one could enter.

This image is reinforced both by Ezekial who states, “Behold, the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord; and I fell on my face” and Paul in the Epistle reading from Hebrews who explains that “only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood which he offers for himself and for the errors of the people” (Hebrews 9:7).

Thus, the Holy of Holies was the place where God’s glory resided, making it impossible to enter save for the High Priest and only once a year with a blood sacrifice. Yet, the Theotokos as young girl is able to freely enter. The answer as to why is from the same hymn above: All the Heavens were astonished, beholding the Holy Spirit make His dwelling in you.

This is a Theophany. God demonstrates His intention for all of humanity: that the Holy Spirit dwell in each and everyone of us so that we, too, can enter into the full glory of God. This reality, of course, is made possible through the life and cooperation of the Theotokos: Let it be done unto me according to your word.

Thus, through our own efforts of preparation (such as the Nativity Fast) and our own cooperation with God we are capable to behold the full glory of God and of entering into the Holy of Holies just as our Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary did as a young child.

Oration 38 Section 3

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Christmas, Oration 38, St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, Section 3:

These things come later. Now is the feast of the Theophany, and so also of the Nativity; for it is called both, since two names are ascribes to one reality. For God appeared to human beings through birth. On the one hand he is and is eternally from the eternal Being, above cause and principle, for there was no principle higher than the Principle. On the other hand for us he later comes into being, that the one who has given us being might also grant us well-being; or rather that, as we fell from well being through evil, he might bring us back again to himself through incarnation. The name Theophany, since he has appeared, and Nativity, since he has been born.