In some of my writings, I talk about what I call the two modes of imagination: specter and presence. Specter is undead, a hallucination, an abstracted lesser reality—like the fantasies of the Underground Man, or what WIlliam Blake calls the realm of Ulro. But presence is alive; it is a deeper reality, the illuminated water within the clay. In terms of my circle, specter hovers outside the circumference in a no-man's land, but presence is the genuine realization of the area and the center. Sometimes, in a gesture of linguistic subversion, I suggest that "transcendence" is a lie and that immanence is all there is: immanence understood as not mere clay, but rather the deepest spiritual infrastructure of this flesh.
When a caterpillar evolves, it doesn't merely get inside a sack and grow some wings; it digests itself into goo and then becomes recomposed at almost the cellular level. That is pretty wild.
I think of something Sherrard said somewhere (which I think, of course, many others have more or less said as well, including Blake in his own way): "There IS another world: This one."
Ah, good eye, Zac -- thank you! Well, I got the quote from Olivier Clement's Roots of Christian Mysticism (p 76), and he indeed cites Gregory Nazianzen's Eulogy of Basil the Great, Oration 43 (which he finds in Patrolia Graeca). I wonder if this is an example of English-language Orthodox culture as a whole acting like chatgpt does with the texts in its training set...maybe Basil the Great didn't say it -- and maybe Gregory Nazianzen didn't even say that Basil the Great said it -- but it's the kind of thing Basil would have said, or should have said -- and that's good enough to have said it? Memory, especially cultural memory -- but even memory in the individual human body -- is definitely not photographic, but kaleidoscopic.
The "animals who have received the vocation to become God" quote from St Basil may possibly be spurious. I looked it up since I had seen many quotes attributed to Saint Basil on similar themes that have no basis in his writings, and the only reference I can find to where this is supposedly recorded is in St Gregory of Nyssa's Oration 43 (his funeral oration for St Basil), however the quote is definitely not found there.
From my understanding, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but probably best not to attribute it to St Basil!
When I saw the Hebrew word cha-bod, I thought of dad-bod. Both weighty. But anyway, the "new" taxonomies of beings within a cosmic hierarchy that the Orthodox vision offers refreshes a mind worn out by the overly technical--and controllable--categories presented in modern thinking. Too much of our modern thought is dominated by reductions that seem to promise comprehensive knowledge-so-called. Bring me back to the ancient mind so I can see like a human sees again. That's what this one did for me.
Also -- do you know that Zen poem, "Song of the Grass-Hut Hermitage"? There's a line in there that keeps resonating in me: "Let go of hundreds of years / And relax completely" ... there's a lot of super smart people out there tackling the West's self-imposed meaning crisis in all kinds of interesting ways...for myself, I'd love just to hold down the "let go of hundreds of years and relax completely" side of things -- you know, just get up and walk straight back to the ancient mind and rest there, without complications. thank God we still have bodies, thank God we still have the Earth -- our bodies and our planet have their own memories of God, through which we can bypass a lot of this mess, if we want to...
The abbess reminded me of Samson who when the Spirit came upon him did feats of strength and Elijah running ahead of the chariot of King Ahab when the power of the Lord came upon him.
Yes, definitely! -- a vision of true human strength (which comes when we are in proper relationship to our Source). I think of St. Herman of Alaska hauling massive logs by himself, also...
The resurrection body of Jesus was so solid the walls and locked doors the disciples were hiding behind were immaterial in comparison as he would come and stand among them. In the beginning God created and at the end of this cosmos he will de-create and gloriously re-create a new one even more wonderful. The present New Jerusalem above, the bride of Christ, made of our living stones will be what is carried from this creation to the next. Jesus returned to construction and carpentry after the ascension - John 14:1-4
I love that way of thinking about it, Jeff! Yeshua so solid, the walls were like vapor...scripture definitely goes to great lengths to assure us that his resurrected body was NOT a ghost -- what I think we'd call a hologram today -- it portrays him asking for, and eating fish with his mouth -- and Thomas touching the wounds in his hands and side, etc. He was not an apparition, not a hallucination--but very, very solid--more solid than we can understand. At the same time, yes, passing through walls, etc--so not just a merely resuscitated body, either.
Beautiful. You write of things that some of us often sense at times, sometimes very strongly, but fail to enunciate. I know I can get caught up in endlessly dissecting the looming darkness of our times. As if that will save me. Yours is a much needed antidote. Thank you.
I appreciated the language of spiritual and material as relative terms like high and low. A helpful way of putting it.
You're reminding me that I wrote a term paper in seminary about "the eschatology of the body" using St. Symeon as one of my main sources. I had thoughts at the time of expanding it into a thesis, but for various reasons that never happened. On a related track, do you know Anestis Keselopoulos' "Man and the Environment: A Study of St. Symeon the New Theologian?"
I found myself thinking of another passage from St. Paul: "Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body" (1 Corinthians 6:13). This is an important statement about sexual morality, but it isn't just that. To extract from it a more general principle, we might say: "Your body (and the whole material creation) exists for an infinitely beautiful purpose, but that purpose is not what your fallen desires might make you think it is." The whole Christian ascetic tradition looks like a denial of the body and the material world because our distorted desires make us misconstrue what matter and bodies are for; what looks like a denial of them is just turning them away from the false purposes to which we put them so their real purpose can shine through.
And I meant to say -- no, I haven't read Keselopoulos before, but that book looks really interesting. Looked for it in our library system, but of course they don't have it...
Yes, wonderful, Father! I think what Sherrard says in his little bombshell of an essay "A Single Unified Science" complements your thoughts here on Paul's theology of the body, and Simeon's eschatology of the body: "We have reached the point not only of thinking that the world which we perceive with our ego-consciousness is the natural world, but also of thinking that our fallen, sub
human state is the natural human state, the state that accords with our nature as human beings. And we talk of acquiring knowledge of the natural world when we do not even know what goes on in the mind of an acorn. This dislocation of our consciousness which defines the fall is perhaps most clearly evident in the divorce we make between the spiritual and the material, the esoteric and the exoteric, the uncreated and the created, and in our assumption that we can
know the one without knowing the other...Such a debasement of the physical dimension of things is tantamount not only to denying the spiritual reality of our own created existence, but also, through depriving natural things of their theophanic function, to treating a Divine revelation as a dead and soulless body. And in this case it is not only of a kind of suicide that we are speaking; we are also speaking of a kind of murder." -- to turn around and go the completely opposite direction looks really, really insane to the world -- but from the *inside* it feels like truly coming alive for the first time!!
On Keselopoulos: I've been meaning to re-read his book, and maybe this'll give me the motivation actually to do it. Sherrard's _The Rape of Man and Nature_ remains my favorite book on the topic, but Keselopoulos gives (for me at least) a bit more sense of what it might actually look like for a society to live according to the Orthodox ascetical vision of things rather than the secular consumerist one. Worth a read. And it does focus heavily on St. Symeon, although it draws on lots of other sources as well.
Have you been to Athos? And, if so, do you have at least the general sense that this monastic republic -- in theory, a polity more or less coherently Orthodox -- gives more or less a good example of "what it might actually look like for a society to live according to the Orthodox ascetical vision of things"? I mean, in just a basic sense, do they more or less have a grip on how to avoid both deforestation and nihilism as two sides of the same coin? Two, why is it so hard to find people like Keselopoulos and Sherrard? Or is it just hard to find thinkers like this in English?
1. I have, but not for a very extensive visit. I think they're at least doing a better job of it than most of the rest of us, but it'd be good to explore that with someone who's spent more time there. It certainly has its problems like anywhere. But there's kind of a question 1a implicit here: provided that the Monks of Mt. Athos do have at least a better grip than most of us on avoiding deforestation and nihilism as a community, to what degree is the way that they do it translatable to a non-monastic setting? I'm sure it is to some degree, but also that it isn't completely, and exactly what ways it is and isn't is a question over which I've mulled a good bit without a lot of definite conclusions.
2. It depends a little bit on who counts as "people like Keselopoulos and Sherrard." Jean-Claude Larchet is a less radical thinker than Sherrard, certainly, but his "The Spiritual Roots of the Environmental Crisis" is along largely the same lines. There's a group called the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration that's sort of a motley assortment of people who think along these lines and people who use Orthodox theology to shore up a kind of bland mainstream environmentalism. Elizabeth Theokritoff has a book on the subject that I haven't read but have heard is good. I have a lovely collection of essays by Bp. Ignatije Midic that doesn't really deal with the environmental side of things but has some remarks about Christian community that I think point in similar directions. Probably, as you said, more who haven't been translated into English. But the implications of this way of thinking are pretty staggering in terms of how different our lives would look if we fully embraced them, and most of us who try to "talk the talk" end up falling pretty far short in our actions; hard to blame people too much for just not talking about it in the first place. But I think more people are starting to think and talk about these things, and maybe we'll all do better at living them too. I hope so, because we're going to have to.
Thanks for the additional reading recommendations!
I had come across the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration before and perused their website, etc, for awhile, but got the same sense you did -- it's a "shoring up a kind of bland mainstream environmentalism" -- i.e. taking the framework of mainstream environmentalism as more or less a given, and then backfilling it with some Orthodox stuff. What is so attractive about Sherrard is the degree to which he elevates the conversation, dismantling the mainstream frame and providing a new, higher, deeper one in which to work. I'm no Sherrard, and never will be, but I find that kind of project much more inspiring -- and urgent. Re: Athos & how much can be translated to non-monastic contexts -- it seems with the destruction & swallowing up of what would have just been normal, human-scale Orthodox villages -- where there is a church, and there are farms, and people do farmwork until the bell rings, and then they go to church together, and that's how life goes -- we're in this weird either/or (especially in America), where either you're a monk and your life involves a lot of fresh air, meaningful manual work, quietness, and prayer, or you're a layman and your life is urban mania. I'm interested in just going back to regular human Orthodox life with a bunch of not too exciting married people with diapers to change, fires to start, meals to cook, etc -- living close to each other, working close to the Earth together, praying together, but it's not such a big deal -- just come together and do the liturgy, eat together, go back and chop firewood, do normal human stuff. This is kind of what we're working on up on our 40 acres in northern MN; God willing, we'll see how it works out. But a lot of people don't have 40 acres of woods to mess around with. It seems that there should be a way to recover human Orthodox normalcy in the city, too -- I'll be thinking about that aloud here a lot, God willing. It'll begin more obviously 2 essays from now; but, I can't map it all out alone, obviously -- one reason why I want to do this on substack in community, rather than in a book, in solitude.
My impression of the Fellowship of the Transfiguration stuff I read was that it got off to a really good start theologically and then kind of fell flat in the "what does this really look like" area. Your "backfilling" interpretation makes some sense.
What you say about the weird either/or is definitely a frustration of mine. I spent a summer at a monastery at one point and loved it, but I realized that the things I really loved about it were the things that theoretically ought to be part of wholesome Orthodox communities in general, not the specifically monastic things. My eventual decision not to become a monk involved some other things as well, but that was a big piece of it. Of course, finding that sort of wholesome Orthodox community of which you speak is hard outside of monasteries, and I suspect that establishing it in a way that's sustainable is going to take lots of hard gradual work -- radical "do it all right now" attempts have a way of burning themselves out -- but it's something to keep striving for!
Oops, Larchet's book is called "The Spiritual Roots of the *Ecological* Crisis." Sorry for any confusion. His "Theology of the Body" is also probably relevant to some of the topics here, and another book I've been meaning to re-read. So many things to read, and so little time for it, I'm afraid.
Truly a sunflower of prose that sometimes overflows into poetry. I love the way you dive right into the passage from Simeon so ripe for misreading by our "addicted, reactive, manipulative" minds and give us, instead, a song that vibrates with its still flowing true and vital life. All glory to God and His gift of a tradition and liturgy able to teach us how to see, hear and speak the truth "this world" would deny or hide. Onward!
Truly astounding words. Thank you Graham . It fills me with immense hope. Unhacked Heaven( Paradise ) vs hacked Heaven ( Utopian technocracy ) lies like a fork in the road ahead of us. Is this division of sheep and goats taking place in real time, right now faster than ever? Sounding the alarm with you. Beauty will save the world.
In some of my writings, I talk about what I call the two modes of imagination: specter and presence. Specter is undead, a hallucination, an abstracted lesser reality—like the fantasies of the Underground Man, or what WIlliam Blake calls the realm of Ulro. But presence is alive; it is a deeper reality, the illuminated water within the clay. In terms of my circle, specter hovers outside the circumference in a no-man's land, but presence is the genuine realization of the area and the center. Sometimes, in a gesture of linguistic subversion, I suggest that "transcendence" is a lie and that immanence is all there is: immanence understood as not mere clay, but rather the deepest spiritual infrastructure of this flesh.
When a caterpillar evolves, it doesn't merely get inside a sack and grow some wings; it digests itself into goo and then becomes recomposed at almost the cellular level. That is pretty wild.
I think of something Sherrard said somewhere (which I think, of course, many others have more or less said as well, including Blake in his own way): "There IS another world: This one."
Ah, good eye, Zac -- thank you! Well, I got the quote from Olivier Clement's Roots of Christian Mysticism (p 76), and he indeed cites Gregory Nazianzen's Eulogy of Basil the Great, Oration 43 (which he finds in Patrolia Graeca). I wonder if this is an example of English-language Orthodox culture as a whole acting like chatgpt does with the texts in its training set...maybe Basil the Great didn't say it -- and maybe Gregory Nazianzen didn't even say that Basil the Great said it -- but it's the kind of thing Basil would have said, or should have said -- and that's good enough to have said it? Memory, especially cultural memory -- but even memory in the individual human body -- is definitely not photographic, but kaleidoscopic.
The "animals who have received the vocation to become God" quote from St Basil may possibly be spurious. I looked it up since I had seen many quotes attributed to Saint Basil on similar themes that have no basis in his writings, and the only reference I can find to where this is supposedly recorded is in St Gregory of Nyssa's Oration 43 (his funeral oration for St Basil), however the quote is definitely not found there.
From my understanding, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but probably best not to attribute it to St Basil!
When I saw the Hebrew word cha-bod, I thought of dad-bod. Both weighty. But anyway, the "new" taxonomies of beings within a cosmic hierarchy that the Orthodox vision offers refreshes a mind worn out by the overly technical--and controllable--categories presented in modern thinking. Too much of our modern thought is dominated by reductions that seem to promise comprehensive knowledge-so-called. Bring me back to the ancient mind so I can see like a human sees again. That's what this one did for me.
Also -- do you know that Zen poem, "Song of the Grass-Hut Hermitage"? There's a line in there that keeps resonating in me: "Let go of hundreds of years / And relax completely" ... there's a lot of super smart people out there tackling the West's self-imposed meaning crisis in all kinds of interesting ways...for myself, I'd love just to hold down the "let go of hundreds of years and relax completely" side of things -- you know, just get up and walk straight back to the ancient mind and rest there, without complications. thank God we still have bodies, thank God we still have the Earth -- our bodies and our planet have their own memories of God, through which we can bypass a lot of this mess, if we want to...
Love it, brother! That's it, exactly.
The abbess reminded me of Samson who when the Spirit came upon him did feats of strength and Elijah running ahead of the chariot of King Ahab when the power of the Lord came upon him.
Yes, definitely! -- a vision of true human strength (which comes when we are in proper relationship to our Source). I think of St. Herman of Alaska hauling massive logs by himself, also...
The resurrection body of Jesus was so solid the walls and locked doors the disciples were hiding behind were immaterial in comparison as he would come and stand among them. In the beginning God created and at the end of this cosmos he will de-create and gloriously re-create a new one even more wonderful. The present New Jerusalem above, the bride of Christ, made of our living stones will be what is carried from this creation to the next. Jesus returned to construction and carpentry after the ascension - John 14:1-4
I love that way of thinking about it, Jeff! Yeshua so solid, the walls were like vapor...scripture definitely goes to great lengths to assure us that his resurrected body was NOT a ghost -- what I think we'd call a hologram today -- it portrays him asking for, and eating fish with his mouth -- and Thomas touching the wounds in his hands and side, etc. He was not an apparition, not a hallucination--but very, very solid--more solid than we can understand. At the same time, yes, passing through walls, etc--so not just a merely resuscitated body, either.
Graham-
Beautiful. You write of things that some of us often sense at times, sometimes very strongly, but fail to enunciate. I know I can get caught up in endlessly dissecting the looming darkness of our times. As if that will save me. Yours is a much needed antidote. Thank you.
-Jack
Thanks, Jack!!
I appreciated the language of spiritual and material as relative terms like high and low. A helpful way of putting it.
You're reminding me that I wrote a term paper in seminary about "the eschatology of the body" using St. Symeon as one of my main sources. I had thoughts at the time of expanding it into a thesis, but for various reasons that never happened. On a related track, do you know Anestis Keselopoulos' "Man and the Environment: A Study of St. Symeon the New Theologian?"
I found myself thinking of another passage from St. Paul: "Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body" (1 Corinthians 6:13). This is an important statement about sexual morality, but it isn't just that. To extract from it a more general principle, we might say: "Your body (and the whole material creation) exists for an infinitely beautiful purpose, but that purpose is not what your fallen desires might make you think it is." The whole Christian ascetic tradition looks like a denial of the body and the material world because our distorted desires make us misconstrue what matter and bodies are for; what looks like a denial of them is just turning them away from the false purposes to which we put them so their real purpose can shine through.
And I meant to say -- no, I haven't read Keselopoulos before, but that book looks really interesting. Looked for it in our library system, but of course they don't have it...
Yes, wonderful, Father! I think what Sherrard says in his little bombshell of an essay "A Single Unified Science" complements your thoughts here on Paul's theology of the body, and Simeon's eschatology of the body: "We have reached the point not only of thinking that the world which we perceive with our ego-consciousness is the natural world, but also of thinking that our fallen, sub
human state is the natural human state, the state that accords with our nature as human beings. And we talk of acquiring knowledge of the natural world when we do not even know what goes on in the mind of an acorn. This dislocation of our consciousness which defines the fall is perhaps most clearly evident in the divorce we make between the spiritual and the material, the esoteric and the exoteric, the uncreated and the created, and in our assumption that we can
know the one without knowing the other...Such a debasement of the physical dimension of things is tantamount not only to denying the spiritual reality of our own created existence, but also, through depriving natural things of their theophanic function, to treating a Divine revelation as a dead and soulless body. And in this case it is not only of a kind of suicide that we are speaking; we are also speaking of a kind of murder." -- to turn around and go the completely opposite direction looks really, really insane to the world -- but from the *inside* it feels like truly coming alive for the first time!!
That quote does about sum it up.
On Keselopoulos: I've been meaning to re-read his book, and maybe this'll give me the motivation actually to do it. Sherrard's _The Rape of Man and Nature_ remains my favorite book on the topic, but Keselopoulos gives (for me at least) a bit more sense of what it might actually look like for a society to live according to the Orthodox ascetical vision of things rather than the secular consumerist one. Worth a read. And it does focus heavily on St. Symeon, although it draws on lots of other sources as well.
Father, two follow-up questions for you --
Have you been to Athos? And, if so, do you have at least the general sense that this monastic republic -- in theory, a polity more or less coherently Orthodox -- gives more or less a good example of "what it might actually look like for a society to live according to the Orthodox ascetical vision of things"? I mean, in just a basic sense, do they more or less have a grip on how to avoid both deforestation and nihilism as two sides of the same coin? Two, why is it so hard to find people like Keselopoulos and Sherrard? Or is it just hard to find thinkers like this in English?
1. I have, but not for a very extensive visit. I think they're at least doing a better job of it than most of the rest of us, but it'd be good to explore that with someone who's spent more time there. It certainly has its problems like anywhere. But there's kind of a question 1a implicit here: provided that the Monks of Mt. Athos do have at least a better grip than most of us on avoiding deforestation and nihilism as a community, to what degree is the way that they do it translatable to a non-monastic setting? I'm sure it is to some degree, but also that it isn't completely, and exactly what ways it is and isn't is a question over which I've mulled a good bit without a lot of definite conclusions.
2. It depends a little bit on who counts as "people like Keselopoulos and Sherrard." Jean-Claude Larchet is a less radical thinker than Sherrard, certainly, but his "The Spiritual Roots of the Environmental Crisis" is along largely the same lines. There's a group called the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration that's sort of a motley assortment of people who think along these lines and people who use Orthodox theology to shore up a kind of bland mainstream environmentalism. Elizabeth Theokritoff has a book on the subject that I haven't read but have heard is good. I have a lovely collection of essays by Bp. Ignatije Midic that doesn't really deal with the environmental side of things but has some remarks about Christian community that I think point in similar directions. Probably, as you said, more who haven't been translated into English. But the implications of this way of thinking are pretty staggering in terms of how different our lives would look if we fully embraced them, and most of us who try to "talk the talk" end up falling pretty far short in our actions; hard to blame people too much for just not talking about it in the first place. But I think more people are starting to think and talk about these things, and maybe we'll all do better at living them too. I hope so, because we're going to have to.
Thanks for the additional reading recommendations!
I had come across the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration before and perused their website, etc, for awhile, but got the same sense you did -- it's a "shoring up a kind of bland mainstream environmentalism" -- i.e. taking the framework of mainstream environmentalism as more or less a given, and then backfilling it with some Orthodox stuff. What is so attractive about Sherrard is the degree to which he elevates the conversation, dismantling the mainstream frame and providing a new, higher, deeper one in which to work. I'm no Sherrard, and never will be, but I find that kind of project much more inspiring -- and urgent. Re: Athos & how much can be translated to non-monastic contexts -- it seems with the destruction & swallowing up of what would have just been normal, human-scale Orthodox villages -- where there is a church, and there are farms, and people do farmwork until the bell rings, and then they go to church together, and that's how life goes -- we're in this weird either/or (especially in America), where either you're a monk and your life involves a lot of fresh air, meaningful manual work, quietness, and prayer, or you're a layman and your life is urban mania. I'm interested in just going back to regular human Orthodox life with a bunch of not too exciting married people with diapers to change, fires to start, meals to cook, etc -- living close to each other, working close to the Earth together, praying together, but it's not such a big deal -- just come together and do the liturgy, eat together, go back and chop firewood, do normal human stuff. This is kind of what we're working on up on our 40 acres in northern MN; God willing, we'll see how it works out. But a lot of people don't have 40 acres of woods to mess around with. It seems that there should be a way to recover human Orthodox normalcy in the city, too -- I'll be thinking about that aloud here a lot, God willing. It'll begin more obviously 2 essays from now; but, I can't map it all out alone, obviously -- one reason why I want to do this on substack in community, rather than in a book, in solitude.
My impression of the Fellowship of the Transfiguration stuff I read was that it got off to a really good start theologically and then kind of fell flat in the "what does this really look like" area. Your "backfilling" interpretation makes some sense.
What you say about the weird either/or is definitely a frustration of mine. I spent a summer at a monastery at one point and loved it, but I realized that the things I really loved about it were the things that theoretically ought to be part of wholesome Orthodox communities in general, not the specifically monastic things. My eventual decision not to become a monk involved some other things as well, but that was a big piece of it. Of course, finding that sort of wholesome Orthodox community of which you speak is hard outside of monasteries, and I suspect that establishing it in a way that's sustainable is going to take lots of hard gradual work -- radical "do it all right now" attempts have a way of burning themselves out -- but it's something to keep striving for!
Oops, Larchet's book is called "The Spiritual Roots of the *Ecological* Crisis." Sorry for any confusion. His "Theology of the Body" is also probably relevant to some of the topics here, and another book I've been meaning to re-read. So many things to read, and so little time for it, I'm afraid.
Truly a sunflower of prose that sometimes overflows into poetry. I love the way you dive right into the passage from Simeon so ripe for misreading by our "addicted, reactive, manipulative" minds and give us, instead, a song that vibrates with its still flowing true and vital life. All glory to God and His gift of a tradition and liturgy able to teach us how to see, hear and speak the truth "this world" would deny or hide. Onward!
Truly astounding words. Thank you Graham . It fills me with immense hope. Unhacked Heaven( Paradise ) vs hacked Heaven ( Utopian technocracy ) lies like a fork in the road ahead of us. Is this division of sheep and goats taking place in real time, right now faster than ever? Sounding the alarm with you. Beauty will save the world.