The tiny stone church of Osios
David, named for a saint who lived in a nearby tree, is up a steep hill in the
Ano Poli neighborhood of Thessaloniki, Greece. It’s thought to have been built
in the late fifth or the early sixth century as part of the long-gone Latomou
Monastery. It now seems to serve as the neighborhood parish, but the nave is so
small that it couldn’t hold many people even if they were to spill out onto the
pretty terrace, which I assume they do on feast days.
The
mosaic of Christ in the semi-dome of the apse is the main attraction. It’s from
the same era as the church’s construction, thus it’s one of the rare examples
of a large Christian image that pre-dates the iconoclastic controversy of the
eighth and ninth centuries. It’s said to have been successfully hidden from the
anti-image activists under a goatskin. A few hundred years later, it was
plastered over by the Muslims who prayed there during the Ottoman period, only
to be rediscovered in the 1920s around the time of the exchange of populations
between Turkey and Greece that took place then, when many of the churches that
had been made into mosques were restored to their original purposes.
The Divine Liturgy was in progress when I
arrived, with about twenty people crowded into the cramped space. I had read
that the church had originally been cruciform, but that at some point the
bottom part of the cross was lost, so it’s now a sort of inverted “T” shape, with the nave like a narrow hallway
oriented north-to-south and the altar occupying the upper part of the cross. I
maneuvered myself into a spot in front of the iconostasis that allowed me as
good a view as possible of the mosaic above and behind it.
Though
it’s marvelously, miraculously, intact, the image is still somewhat hard to
read apart from the main figure, whether that’s because the peripheral figures
are so subtly colored, or because it’s need of cleaning, or just because the
church is dark, I don’t know. It’s an
image based on the vision of the first chapter of Ezekiel: Christ appears in the middle of a bright
mandorla that serves as his chariot, seated on the arc of a rainbow. Peering
from behind the bright circle (if the mandorla were a compass, at northeast,
southeast, southwest, and northwest) are
the beasts that came to symbolize for Christians the four evangelists: a winged
man, a bull, an eagle, and a lion. Each holds a book.
It’s
the lion, the symbol of St. Mark, at the southwest that first caught my attention.
He looks to the side with an un-lionlike demeanor that combines elements of
intelligence, obedience, and possibly weariness. I get the feeling that he
doesn’t need this Divine manifestation, but he’s dutifully lending a hand in it
anyway. He waits, a ferocious beast
become an obedient kitten, to see what happens next. He might be growling, but
he might also be purring.
The
lion is only one of the elements of this exceptionally affecting image that
goes against the grain of my expectations. For one thing, its color and
composition don’t fit perfectly with the medieval-and-later iconography that
fills my mental image banks. But it’s
the face of Christ that completes the disorientation: he is beardless, like a
youth or an angel—neither Semitic sage nor Pantocrator. His descent into the cosmos seems to reveal
that he was never absent from it, and this Christ seems human enough to share
in our surprise in this. His descent is a reminder of the glory that’s already
there more than it is an inauguration of anything new.
The
image struck me as a visual reference to Logos,
that principle that gets translated from Greek into English as Word, and that might be identified as that
aspect of God1 through whom the cosmos is created or
sustained—though I think that phrase is far enough off as to be
misleading. I take Logos to be one of
our attempts to put words on the reality to which the word God
refers—that reality for which words can be only provisional.
Logos
is identified with Christ in the opening lines of the Gospel of John, where, in
a preview of the paradoxical language that must plague theology, it is asserted
to be both God and with God. I’m not sure, but I think it might have been
St. Athanasius of Alexandria who first identified the Logos with the second person of the
Trinity, in that age when Christians were struggling to deal with the
conviction that God could not accurately be spoken of as monad. But the notion of Logos had been brought up
by Greek philosophers half a millennium or so before Christ to speak of a kind
of reason or principle that permeates the universe and orders it. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria
picked the term up from Greek philosophy and started speaking of Logos both as
Divine pattern and even as a kind of intermediary between God and humankind.
The idea resonated with Hebrew notions of God’s word or wisdom having some sort
of independent identity. Perhaps it was a way to make sense of the fact that,
though God was taken to be so far beyond our ability to comprehend that it was
best not even to speak his name, experience showed that there were
comprehensible things about God as well.
Logos
helps us makes sense of the confounding encounter with God. Experience confirms
to me that this encounter is above or beyond anything I can comprehend—to the
extent that I can’t even speak of “it” in terms of “reality” or even
“existence.” Ineffable or Uncreated
may be among the most useful noun/adjectives, even though they fall short.
Neither my body nor my mind (all I’ve got) are capable of comprehending it
fully. Yet I’m confronted by the
impression that God is also profoundly intimate with creation, and closer to me
than I am to myself (closer to me than my own jugular vein, to use a famous
image from the Qur’an). To identify the
aspect of this God-beyond-all-knowledge that's intimate with creation and name
it Logos helps in talking about it. But then, the very act of identifying Logos
reveals that there can be no division between God-the-expressed and
God-the-ineffable. There are no parts.
Though
it’s as imperfect a way of speaking about God as any other, I believe the
Logos-Ineffable distinction and the inevitable blurring of the distinction that
follows point to an experience everyone ultimately moves toward—anyone who isn’t
hijacked along the way by the seductive comfort of idolatry in its myriad
forms. I see what I take to be attempts to describe it throughout the religious
traditions and outside them as well.
Something like the Intimate/Ineffable experience is reported by most of
the people who get labeled mystic in
any religion. It especially resonates in me with the concept of Tao that so
influenced Chinese philosophy and later Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen: the
unproduced producer of all that is, invisible in itself, but from which all
appearance derives. The opening lines of
the great Taoist classic Tao Te Ching declare that:
The Tao
that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name
that can be named is not the eternal name
But then just a couple lines
further down that:
The
nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth.2
It’s not surprising that the Greek word
Logos was rendered “Tao” by the
Nestorian Christian missionaries who first translated the Gospel of John into
Chinese.
We
Christians say, along with that Gospel, that the Logos became flesh and dwelt
among us. But that often seems to be taken to mean that God didn’t dwell among us before the Christ
event, other than for a few spectacular manifestations perhaps meant to make us
aware of his existence and to scare us into participation with him through hope
or analogy. If this is indeed the Church’s teaching (and there’s pretty good
evidence for it in the iconography and the hymns), it’s a point I disagree
with. The Incarnation seems to me
something more like a reminder. Maybe
the astonishing thing about it wasn’t so much that God was seen in an intimate
fashion, but that he was revealed to have been with us all along. The
separation between Divine and human was an illusion we perpetrated
ourselves. Wisdom and Compassion had
always flowed relentlessly toward us who were inured to them. That is to say, things weren’t really so much
different than they are now.
This
revelatory reminder is what the mosaic of Osios David represented to me:
Christ’s right hand, raised in blessing, calls our attention to the God-infused
glory that can never be absent. The lion, not particularly in need of the
reminder but along for the ride, already understands.
▼
As
I stood staring at the image, an old woman came up to me. “Orthodoxos?” she asked. I nodded, which seemed to please her and
possibly kept me from losing my spot in front of the iconostasis. It was one of
those situations in which I’d have been more comfortable just saying no, but I
decided to tell the truth.
The
odd combination of feeling at home in an Orthodox church combined with an
accompanying feeling of being profoundly out-of-place goes back to the first
time I walked into one for a service back in Kodiak, Alaska, in the
mid-1970s. There was an instant
impression of such familiarity that my mind struggled in vain to find a memory
to explain it. Accompanying this was the much more reasonable impression that I
had no business being in that exotic environment apart from tourism. My
reception into the Church in 1979 did nothing to alter the dual impression of
intimacy and alienation, and the passage of time didn’t change things much
either, despite the increasing flow into the Church of converts like me. This
may have something to do with my reaction to the extremes of good and evil I
encountered there. But it may also just be related to the fact no matter how
deeply the Church became home for me, I was never able to leave behind where
I’m from. Not that I ever wanted to.
I’ll always be a kid from the San Joaquin Valley, where incense is never
smelt in churches, and from an extended family that was hardly ever inside one
anyway. An ancient church like Osios
David is a place where it’s natural to hit the intimacy/alienation experience
head-on with particular force. These
people have the Orthodox faith in their blood in a way a grafted branch like me
never will. This is neither good nor bad. There are advantages and
disadvantages.
Judging
from subject matter of the little silver votive offerings, or tamata,
attached to the main icon of the church's patron, St. David seems to
specialize in interceding for those in need of spouses or children. Though I
have no problem with asking for the saints’ prayers, I register a bit of a
negative reaction to the tamata, just based on the superstitious
mind-set I’ve encountered a few times among those into such things (like the
idea that if you don’t leave a little offering on the icon, the saint will
probably punish you with a divorce or take the child away, or something like
that). Maybe this church occupies the
site of an earlier pagan temple, and similar offerings were made to whatever
deity was associated with it. Maybe he
or she was also a specialist in romance or fertility and the requests simply
got transferred to St. David at some point. Maybe the Muslims who prayed in
this edifice for several hundred years asked the same favors of some Sufi saint
here, as they sometimes do.
One
often hears Orthodox Christians, highly regarded and influential ones, repeat
the meme that our faith is not a religion. By this they mean that the word religion
refers to an enterprise that’s concerned with something other than communion
with the ineffable God and each other. By implication, those who participate in
religion are misguided. How do those who hold this view regard what they
probably see as the “religious” aspects of our church, like practice of asking
God or the saints to give us what we think we want, and all the superstitions
that sometimes go with that?
In the case of the tamata, their
judgments probably range from the idea that the practice was made holy by
Christ and that asking the saint for a husband is essentially different from
asking Aphrodite for one—all the way to scorn for such things as pagan
survivals that need to be expunged (and good luck with that). But then, what about the other questionable
beliefs and practices we came up with all on our own that are much worse, that
seem even antithetical to the experience of God? Labeling as religion anything that doesn’t have the God-encounter at heart and
then eschewing it would work only if we had incontrovertible knowledge of what
leads to that encounter and what doesn’t. I don’t believe we can be confident
about having that sort of knowledge.
▼
If
you follow the street from Osios David directly down the hill toward the
harbor, you’ll pass the cathedral in which lie the earthly remains of St.
Gregory Palamas (1296–1359).3 St. Gregory, a one-time Athonite monk
of the Great Lavra who later became bishop of this city (with numerous
adventures before, during, and after) is known as the theologian of
hesychasm, as the one who articulated
the experience of God of those who practiced unceasing prayer according to the
Orthodox tradition. It’s an experience that articulation doesn’t
serve, and the only reason to attempt saying anything about it at all is in
response to some untruth about it that’s being said. That was exactly the
reason for St. Gregory’s theological battle with Barlaam of Calabria, an
opponent of the hesychasts, who seemed to argue that God’s transcendence made
him effectively unknowable by us other than possibly through analogy.
The
experience of those who prayed showed otherwise. The non-thing we talk about
when we say “God” is so beyond our created existence that “he” could be said
not to exist, “his” otherness too radical to be grasped by the mind. Yet, there is an equally radical experience
of intimacy that can’t be denied: of that ineffable, ungraspable, uncreated
non-thing being closer to me than the aforementioned jugular vein; intimate
enough that I’m compelled to speak of “him” in the personal terms that have
been used throughout history. St. Gregory made sense of this in words through
his famous distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. If I understand it correctly, he meant
something like this: that aspect of God in which we participate, of which we
have intimate knowledge, he identified as God’s energies, which he was able to distinguish from God’s essence, which remains beyond being,
knowledge, and so forth. But in making the distinction between essence and
energies, one must acknowledge that God can’t be separated into two parts. This was a way of putting in words the experience
of those who prayed: God as radically other and
intimately knowable. What’s
especially interesting to me is that St. Gregory recognized that our knowledge
of God is in itself supra-rational. God is above knowledge, and our
knowledge of him happens beyond knowledge too (everything in this realm sounds
paradoxical when you try to put words on it). The perception is beyond or above
our created bodies or minds, beyond intellect, beyond emotion, even while none
of those aspects of us is negated or unaffected. Indeed, we employ them all in approaching
God. They are, as I noted before, all we’ve got.
How
does the experience of God articulated by St. Gregory relate to religion,
whatever religion is? It seems to me
that the God who is beyond ideas and concepts is indeed beyond religion too, including
the Orthodox Christian religion in which I participate. But I don’t believe this excludes Orthodox
Christianity from the category of religion. I wonder if the relationship
between religion and the encounter with God might in some way be analogous to
the relationship between essence and energies, or to the relationship between
the Logos and the Ineffable. Seen that way, religion can be taken to be
creaturely phenomenon infused with the uncreated, a phenomenon capable of
waking us up to the reality of the Uncreated.
The
problem with religion is that it so seldom moves us in the direction of that
awakening, or if it does, we too often end up snagged on a concept about God
that misses the point. Or sometimes religion acknowledges the ineffable God while
denying the possibility of communion with him (effectively reviving the
position of Barlaam of Calabria). Or sometimes it acknowledges the
supra-rational knowing St. Gregory described, but only as something properly to
be left to the experts (in our church, usually monastics or academic
theologians) and not appropriate for us ordinary people. It’s no wonder that those who’ve encountered
God often want to dissociate themselves from religion, or to describe what they’re
about in something other than religious terms (or to reject “God” altogether,
of course). But I find the whole realm of religion too complicated to make such
a distinction myself. If religion doesn’t
lead to God, it sometimes teaches people to be kind and ethical, and even
aspiring to those qualities can’t help but set us in a God-ward direction, even
if we get misled along the way by one of the religious teachings that sets up a
roadblock. Kindness is never
misdirected.
Religion,
Orthodoxy included, often serves people simply as a source of comfort, God
being envisioned as some sort of invisible, ever-empathetic friend who can be taken
to be on our side or who can be appealed to give us what we think we want. It’s
a fairly childish view, but there’s some truth in it, and my encounter with
people of a sincere, childlike faith makes it impossible for me to dismiss
it. Religion also serves the useful
function of identity or community, or it provides a language of symbols to use
in making sense of psyche and cosmos.
It’s inevitable that religion serves this function, as psyche and cosmos
are much in need of being made sense of.
The trinkets hanging from the icon of St. David fit in there somewhere.
Some of
these above-noted functions are what likely come to mind for the Orthodox who
claim that what they’re doing isn't religion (though the claim is, amusingly, cross-traditional. My
Buddhist friends never seem to tire of making the identical claim). But I don’t
find it useful to draw a line between what I do and what others do, and then to
identify what others do by the word religion. In my experience, to draw such a line—in
religion or any other matter, other than for convenience’s sake—and then to
cling to that division, generally leads me into a lie. The lie in this case would have to do with my
denial of what is good and true about religion and of my own participation it.
This is complicated by the fact that
much—maybe most—of religion has little to do even with the matters of value
mentioned above, and much of the work of religious people is to be abhorred:
from pogroms to puritanism, from fundamentalism that denies the intellect to
intellectualism that makes an idol of itself, to the successful selling of
hatred as compassion and stupidity as wisdom, as so often happens these days. The current crop of newly unashamed atheists
who write with such wit do a good work in exposing religion as a perversion of
truth and for empowering people to think critically about it. I agree
wholeheartedly with most of what they say.
But
I’m kept from joining their ranks because I must confess that it was religion,
the religious tradition of Orthodox Christianity specifically, that first
pointed me in the direction of intimacy with God that’s beyond reason and
understanding yet that doesn’t leave reason or understanding behind. It’s the experience to which the words of
St. Gregory Palamas point, as does the arrangement of those tiny bits of stone
in the apse of Osios David. It’s the experience that can’t even be called
“experience” and for which reflections like this one struggle to point to
without ever succeeding. Maybe, instead of distinguishing religion from
not-religion, I can more accurately say that religion serves its purpose
whenever it leads us that way too, and misses its purpose when it leads
elsewhere, as it usually seems to. That keeps me from making the false
distinction, and it keeps me from placing an unfair judgment on religious
people of good will.
When
I think of religion, I’m reminded of the Zen admonition to think of the teachings
as a finger pointing at the moon: one is told to avoid the trap of focusing on
the finger as though it were the moon—focusing on religion as though it were
God, one might say. It’s such an easy trap to fall into. But I think there’s a corresponding trap that
has to do with disregarding the finger, even scorning it, because it’s, well,
not the moon. Without the finger, few
find the “moon,” and for that reason the finger is of inestimable value. As wildly problematical as it is, I find
religion to be of inestimable value.
Like the finger pointing to the moon, I
believe, the Orthodox Christian faith is capable of leading us to the encounter
with God, but as soon as it’s focused on as an end in itself, it leads
elsewhere. And it’s easy to make
religion into idolatry and our God into an idol about as useful as Baal or
Marilyn Monroe—that is, useful, but to a limited degree. This temptation to
idolatry in religion isn’t limited to such things as praying to St. David for a
wife. It hovers around the most exalted of concepts. One can read the words of
St. Gregory Palamas or exult in the beauty of the Christ of Osios David and
still participate in the idolatry. It’s possible to immerse oneself in theology
or iconology even to the point of becoming an expert while allowing the
truthful words and images to obscure God like a veil. It happens all the
time. And I think religion, even unenlightened, superstitious “folk”
religion can probably lead to God. It seems presumptious to think
otherwise. Perhaps someone, sometime,
through entreating St. David for love or fertility, discovered her desires to
be insubstantial before God. And thus, perhaps through her very desire for
something earthly, she had her eyes opened to that journey that transcends
everything earthly. It’s possible to
imagine one of those little silver tamata
to be an offering in gratitude for just such an experience. Such considerations
further disincline me to draw a line between religion and God.
If
it’s true—as is often said by people with radically different agendas for
saying so—that the God-man Jesus had no intention of founding a religion, my
guess is that he knew that it was inevitable that one would arise out of our
encounter with him anyway. I even imagine
him pondering it. Say it came to mind during his sojourn in the wilderness
after his baptism, after his temptation by Satan, after his time with the wild
beasts referred to in the Gospel of St. Mark (maybe there was a lion). He knew that at its best this religion could,
through words, images, and practices,
preserve the experience of
intimacy with the Ineffable that he embodied and that it could lead people in
that direction. He also knew that at its
worst (and, if he was omniscient, he knew it would mostly be worst) it
would cause people to latch onto the words, images, and practices in a way that
inhibited or even angrily prevented the encounter. And he saw that there was a lot of space in
between those two possibilities too.
Maybe he shrugged, sighed, and said to himself, “Well...what can I do?”
as he headed back into Galilee to offer himself to the world.
▼
After the Liturgy there was a panikhida, and several bowls of kolyva, the sweetened boiled wheat for
commemoration of the dead, were blessed.
I stood for a while looking at the image, clinging to the feeling that
it aroused in me, which was made more poignant by the knowledge that I might
not see it again. I took a photograph of it, which didn’t turn out very well,
and which conveyed nothing of the experience I had in seeing it. The same old lady who'd inquired about my
religion beckoned me out onto the terrace where the kolyva was being spooned into little paper cups and distributed
among those who remained. When we determined we had no language in common, we
smiled at each other and sat down on the terrace to eat it together.
Notes/Excurses
1. I use the word God to refer to that
reality-beyond-reality that words belie. I understand the baggage that word
carries, and I understand why the myriad unworthy concepts it has come to stand
for cause many people to reject it. Among those who have abandoned the word, I
notice a striving for some other word that has fewer negative associations. The
“Universe” is a popular modern substitute I hear people use a lot, but I find
that effort to expand the concept only serves to limit it more, since what
we’re referring to is beyond universe (and, interestingly, when I hear the
“Universe” invoked, it’s usually by someone asking the Universe for employment,
material success, or a romantic partner, just as “God” might have been entreated for those things
previously). But I don’t use the word God
provisionally or simply for convenience, because it’s the word (along
with its equivalent in other languages) that has been used by the people who
are my ancestors in this faith, for whom I can have nothing other than gratitude.
And I recognize that words are not irrelevant. And in the word God I see the ages-old collective
process of our coming around again and again to be surprised by the reality the
word points to, to have our ideas about it smashed and transcended. And I see
that ongoing process in myself as well, and this word helps me not to lose
sight of that.
2. This is Derek Lin’s translation
from www.taoism.net, but there
are many other English translations, all worth reading and comparing, since the
original Chinese is said to be so wonderfully rich with possibilities that
multiple translations make much sense.
3. Most of us non-academics who
know anything about St. Gregory’s theology, do so through the work of Fr. John
Meyendorff of blessed memory. Fr. John is the person responsible for reviving
interest in St Gregory in our time and for making known the critical importance
of his articulation of our church’s theology of prayer.
In
his Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, St. Gregory emphasizes
that the Christian experience of God is unique, and that it should be carefully
distinguished from anything that happens outside the Christian faith. It’s an
us-them attitude that goes back to the early Church, seen in such anti-Gnostic
works as Irenaeus of Lyon’s Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely
So-Called (does the title signal that it might not be a fair
treatment?). It’s discouraging to
me that, six hundred years after St. Gregory, this Christian tradition of dismissing
the possible wisdom of non-Christian traditions without making the slightest
effort to understand them isn’t challenged, even by someone as brilliant as Fr.
John. Fr. John is careful to dismiss the
physical methods of the hesychasts (involving breathing and concentration) even
as he acknowledges them, and to note “the gulf that separates hesychast
mysticism from Hindu nirvana.” (St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox
Spirituality, p. 109). “Hinduism” is a term that refers to an extremely
diverse range of religious philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, so diverse
that it’s impossible to refer to a single sort of religious experience among
them. And nirvana—the blowing out
of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion—is a concept from Buddhism. It’s my hope that Fr. John belongs to the
last generation of Christians for whom it will be acceptable not to care about
getting things right about “paganism” or to assume that Christ has nothing to
do with the experience of any of our brothers and sisters who seek what’s true.
Such a dismissal seems to me to have to do with a kind of fear that has nothing
to do with the life in Christ. If “Hindu nirvana” turns out to be in some way
related to what we experience in Christ, it won't be a challenge. And if it turns out not to be the same thing
we’re seeking, we can identify that fact without being afraid of it or making
it into a straw-man. Such
fear-reduction, it seems to me, could be one of the great blessings to come
from our new, inevitably multicultural, world.
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