Father and Abbot Tryphon ~ Bashing Heads (Troublesome passages of the Old Testament)

BASHING HEADS
Troublesome passages of the Old Testament
It is important when reading the Old Testament, to remember that it was written as an account of a peoples journey to God. As the Israelites journey continued, they came to know God, little by little, through God's self-revelation to their prophets, and their understanding of God expanded. Christ, as the Logos (the Word of God), was from the very beginning, and identified Himself as the Alpha and the Omega. Thus, the Old Testament can only be properly understood in reference to Christ's resurrection.
The God of the Old Testament can only be understood in light of the New Testament, so we should not take too seriously the troublesome accounts of God telling His people to kill their neighbors, and bash their enemies children against the rocks. Alleged historical accounts of the wrath of the Old Testament God should not be an issue with us, for it is only in light of Christ's revelation that we can truly comprehend Truth.
Various Church Fathers saw the dashing of infants in these Old Testament accounts as representing the passions, and the rock representing Christ. As believers we dash our thoughts on the Rock, as the way of making sure our passions do not return to overwhelm us. Many of the psalms have similar allegories as an invitation to guard the walled city of our hearts and preserve the spiritual treasures we have received from Our King and Our God.
Historical literalism is not important when confronting the revealed true nature of God, and our turning from a literalism in our interpretation of Scripture, is not a capitulation to modernism. The Church has always known how we should read the Scriptures, for the Truth of the biblical account can only be known in light of Christ, as revealed by His Church.
The Fathers of the Church recognized the human component in the Scriptures, since the Holy Spirit enlightened the human authors without them ever losing themselves, as a sort of trans-medium. These writers of the Scriptures were not some sort of conduit of the Holy Spirit, for they wrote within the context of their human experience of God, within the context of their cultural and tribal experience.
There was a certain synergy happening, as they attempted to cooperate with God. The Old Testament writers were speaking to the people of their times, and their tribal culture, all within their own identity as people of their age. Accounts of a brutal and angry God, as perceived by these writers, must be taken into account as reflective only of the age in which they lived.
"God did not invent death, and when living creatures die, it gives Him no pleasure. He created everything so that it might continue to exist, and everything He created is wholesome and good. There is no deadly poison in them. No, death does not rule this world (Wisdom I:12-14)." This God of the Old Testament did not command governments and armies to kill, otherwise He would be contradicting the Ten Commandments, wherein He told His people they should not kill.
References to capital punishment say nothing of His people killing anyone, but only that consequences of sin was death. The accounts of stoning sinners, bashing the heads of children against rocks, and slaughtering their neighbors, originated in the sin and darkness of a people who were only beginning to receive the revelation of God's love. This love had it's crescendo in the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, and the banishing of the power of death, once and for all.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon


Source:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=797855603586137&id=104578182913886&substory_index=0

Why Sola Scriptura Doesn’t Work ~ Gabe Martini (Ancient Faith Radio)

Orthodox Christians do not hold to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. Instead, we view the scriptures as the pinnacle or summit of Holy Tradition, neither separating the two as wholly distinct nor eliminating one or the other. The reason for this is simple. The scriptures are witness to Divine Revelation given from God to mankind, and specially to God’s holy people, first Israel and now the Catholic Church. Holy Tradition refers to the totality of this Divine Revelation, and includes our liturgical hymns and prayers and services, the lives of the saints, the writings of our Fathers, the decrees and canons of the ecumenical councils and so on. Atop this foundation rests Holy Scripture, so to divorce scripture from tradition, or visa-versa, is to both needlessly and dangerously tear apart the whole of Divine Revelation.
Fr. John Whiteford and his helpful tract on sola scriptura writes,

Taken from it’s context within Holy Tradition the solid rock of scripture becomes a mere ball of clay to be molded into whatever shape its handlers wish. It is no honor to the scriptures to misuse and twist them even if this is done in the name of exulting their authority.

So, even when sola scriptura is given nuance to make room for creeds, confessions and councils, the final arbiter is still a person’s interpretation of the Bible. So while one might hold to a document such as the Westminster Confession of Faith if they are Presbyterian, when doctrinal disagreements arise a consistent biblicist will come down in favor of a particular interpretation of the Bible over and against that Confession. This has led to some difficulties over the years for certain Protestant churches, but I believe that the nuance is ultimately, if we can be frank, pointless.
But why? One example, let’s say somebody confesses a creed that states Jesus is a bunny rabbit. While this belief could theoretically be held by many, anybody could deny it as being contrary to the Bible, which it obviously is, rendering that creed both incorrect and even unnecessary. So it doesn’t really matter what creeds or confessions say, so long as the Bible, or someone’s interpretation of it, is held to be the final authority.
This foundationalist or positive-ist approach might seem tidy, but a tree is known by its fruit. And what we have are hundreds of different denominations, and that number keeps growing, especially with the non-denominational movement of the last decade or so, and many splits within these major confessional gatherings now as well. And so even with the best of intentions sola scriptura is a doctrine of confusion not union, which would seem to contradict 1 Corinthians 14—33.
It’s worth noting that sola scriptura presumes both faith and piety can be deduced from, and reduced to, a set of propositions. The chief mechanism for this investigation is human reason aided by rational tools like exegesis, hermeneutical methods, historical critical scholarship, contextual studies and more, all of which are really potential traditions of men. But if the scriptures are a witness to the Divine Revelation given to God’s people the Church, then their understanding can only take place within that community, and as a consequence of the interpreter’s union with God. Fr. Whiteford continues in his tract on this point saying,

In the Orthodox approach to scripture, it is the job of the individual not to strive for originality in interpretation, but rather to understand what is already present in the traditions of the Church. We are obliged not to go beyond the boundaries set by the Fathers and creeds of the Church, but to faithfully pass on the Tradition just as we have received it. To do this requires a great deal of study and thought, but even more, if we are to truly understand the scriptures, we must enter deeply into the mystical life of the Church.

At the ecumenical councils such as at Chalcedon in 451, the synodal decisions are outlined in what is called, in Greek, the ***horos. This is sometimes translated ‘definition’, but is more accurately a ‘boundary’. In other words, the Church sets the boundary for Orthodox belief in her creeds, liturgies and cannons, but there is a great deal of freedom within this boundary for scholarly investigation, dialogue, and even debate. For example, the Church does not have a single, infallible interpretation for every single verse of the Bible! So while one should not strive for originality in interpretation, or to go beyond the boundaries set by the Fathers, this is not a call to intellectual suicide, nor should it be seen as an attempt by the Church to be always stuck in the past.
There is still much to be said so long as it does not contradict the apostolic faith. But if there remains much to be said regarding the scriptures within the boundaries of Orthodoxy, who is capable of rightly dividing that word of truth. Can anyone do this, is this something for the intellectual elite alone? Saint Augustine describes the type of person fit for the proper study and understanding of scripture on Christian doctrine. Fr. Whiteford summarizes for us in this helpful tract saying that such a person

One: Loves God with his whole heart and is empty of pride.
Two: Is motivated to seek the knowledge of God’s will by faith and reverence rather than pride or greed.
Three: Has a heart subdued by piety, a purified mind dead to the world, and neither fears nor seeks to please men.
Four: Seeks nothing but knowledge of, and union with Christ.
Five: Hungers and thirsts after righteousness, and
Six: Is diligently engaged in works of mercy and love.

Absent from this description in Saint Augustine is the kind of PhD a person has acquired, the university that granted it, or a mastery of the finer points of ancient near-Eastern history. While all these things are great in their own right, they neither guarantee nor even suggest that a person with that sort of experience is equipped to understand the scriptures as part of Holy Tradition. Without rejecting scholarship we must be careful to balance scholarship with the necessary holiness, piety and mystical union with Christ which can only take place in His body, the Apostolic and Catholic Church of the interpreter.
If we truly believe that the scriptures are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit then their right understanding can only be the result of theosis or deification. If our salvation is an acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov says, then with that acquisition comes the mind of God, a mind that is attuned to the breath of the Spirit as he breathes through the life of the Church.
The Church is not some other competing academic institution alongside seminaries and universities. Those led astray by the academy can be tempted to subvert tradition for the sake of, let’s say, academic merit-badges. But rather than pitting the Church against the scholarly community, we must learn to appreciate both in their proper context, reminding ourselves that the qualities of a true interpreter of Divine Revelation are more related to holiness than they are to academic credentials. If a scholar’s primary goal is to blaze new trails, be controversial or directly subvert Holy Tradition, they are not seeking the mind of Christ.
The Church is the very body of Christ as 1 Corinthians 12-27 says. If it is the fullness or the pleroma of God as it says in Ephesians 1:23, and as Paul writes in 1 Timothy 3:15, it is the pillar and ground (or foundation) of truth.
It is only in the life of that mystical, theanthropic, or divine human communion, that a person can ever hope to acquire this mind, and to both read and understand the scriptures rightly as the precious summit and anchor of God’s revelation to His people.


Source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/commentaries/why_sola_scriptura_doesnt_work

Quote by St. Isaac the Syrian ~ Remembrance of death

St. Isaac the Syrian died ca. 700
Prepare your heart for departure. If you are wise, you will expect it every hour. Each day say to yourself: “See, the messenger who comes to fetch me is already at the door. Why am I sitting idle? I must depart forever. I cannot come back again.” Go to sleep with these thoughts every night, and reflect on them throughout the day. And when the time of departure comes, go joyfully to meet it, saying: “Come in peace. I knew you would come, and I have not neglected anything that could help me on the journey.” (Homily 65[64] tr. Wensick, 309)


Source of quote:


http://classicalchristianity.com/2013/05/24/st-isaac-on-the-remembrance-of-death/


audio of quote:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/faithencouraged/good_grief_real_grief_and_christian_hope

around the 1hr:23m mark

Father and Abbot Tryphon ~ Demons

DEMONS
Never converse with demons
In 1986 I spent fourteen days in retreat at Saint Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. Staying in the monastic quarters, I had two weeks of wonderful fellowship with fellow monastics, worshiping in their temple, eating with them in trapeza, walking the trails through their forest, praying in their large Orthodox cemetery, and visiting the seminary bookstore.
One night I was awakened around two in the morning with a knock at the door, with someone calling my name. Startled out of a sound sleep, I realized my name was being called in unison by three voices, in a mocking tone, and that the knocking was not on the door to my cell, but on the outside wall. Frightened, I reached out in total darkness, grabbing my prayer rope from the night stand. The voices called out, "Father Tryphon, Father Tryphon, Father Tryphon", from the other side of the door, then moving to a wall opposite my bed. The knocking continued from the outside wall.
I said nothing, for I immediately realized the voices were demonic, and mocking me by calling with three voices, since Tryphon means, "three voices". I was too frightened to get up, but continued praying the Jesus Prayer for about an hour. Once the voices stopped, I managed to reach for the light which was next to the door, got up to light a lampada before the icons, and returned to bed, where I continued the Jesus Prayer.
Following the morning service, I went outside to see if there was a tree branch that had been tapping against the outside of my room. There were not only no trees, but there were no footprints in the snow which had fallen the day before.
During trapeza that next afternoon, I told the assembled monks what had happened, and my recounting was met with silence. I spent the rest of the day thinking they all were thinking poor Father Tryphon must be mentally ill.
Later that evening while sitting with one of the monks in the kitchen, eating a microwaved potato, he brought up the subject. He said the silent response from the monks was the result of shock, for it had happened to the last monk who had stayed in that cell. He went on to tell me that the cell next to mine had been used as a storage room for years, following an exorcism service that their bishop had performed a number of years earlier. When the second need for an exorcism arose, the room was abandoned.
I share this experience in order to remind my readers that demons do exist, and they are the enemies of God, and the enemies of human kind. They use trickery and deception to bring us down, and they serve the devil, who is the great deceiver. It is important that we never enter into conversation with them, and never answer them, whether they speak to us directly as happened to me, or tempt us through evil thoughts. They can have no power over us unless we give it to them. Our God is more powerful than the devil and all the fallen angels, and they can be dispersed by calling upon the Holy Name of Jesus.
When those demons called out to me, had I responded, they would have gained power over me. By remaining silent, and calling upon the name of Jesus, they left me. We blessed my room with holy water that evening, lit the lampada before the icons, and they were gone.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon


Source:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=789657557739275&id=104578182913886&substory_index=0

Quote by Alexander Schmemann ~ On Religion

Orthodoxy is not a religion. Orthodoxy is the cure for religion

~ Alexander Schmemann
(1921-1983)


Source of radio quote:


http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/faithencouraged/good_grief_real_grief_and_christian_hope

Quote by Aristotle ~ benefits of the author over the critic

 

Aristotle's Dictum," John Warwick Montgomery in History and Christianity (p. 29) summarizes his dictum as

 

“The benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself."

 

--- Aristotle

 

In other words, the author probably knows more about the event than the critic does, and so we should allow him the benefit of the doubt unless we have clear evidence to the contrary.

Does God Play Favorites? ~ Fr. Thomas Hopko

I recently received an email from a woman, a mother, who sent this email, and it’s a very wonderfully written email, very powerful. She says she’s a wife and a mother and she works. She has employment, that’s what she tells us, and she wrote this email, and she called it—in the email the subject was, “Why Does God Play Favorites?” And she writes, “Dear Fr. Thomas, the subject line of this email is the question that I hope you will be kind enough to address: why does God play favorites?” Then she continues, and I will read the entire letter. She says…

Some people seem to come out of the womb with a spiritual silver spoon in their mouths, and, yeah, maybe they have huge trials, but they’re also holy from their childhoods. They have all the advantages that leave them inclined to make good use of all the graces they have been showered with. Others get to be used and abused and never even have a choice and never get to be saints, because they’re just too damaged.
If, as the Church teaches, God calls us all to be saints, why is it that he lets some people get so damaged by life that the best they can do is stumble around the rocks at the foot of the spiritual mountain, never able to trust God enough to make it up the mountain, while others go sailing up. Even in his human life, Jesus had his favorites: Lazarus, Mary, Martha, Peter, James, and John, who were the only ones of the apostles allowed to witness the Transfiguration, while the rest of the apostles were left out with the rest of the schmucks.
Our churches are full of ordinary people who chatter in the communion line and quibble over petty parish issues as if their lives depend on them. Why aren’t they being showered with the kind of grace that made St. Seraphim of Sarov or St. Sergius of Radonezh? Serial killers have no conscience. In most cases because their parents abused it out of them. What chance did they have?
St. Lucy was protected in the brothel, but unaccounted little girls are trained by their own fathers to be sexual accessories. A life of virginity was never a choice that they could make, as their chastity is torn from them by the very one whose job it is to protect it. I grew up in an alcoholic family. I never learned how to trust the people I can see and do talk to me, much less a God I can’t see and doesn’t talk to me. I’m not asking why evil things happen. Evil things happen because there are evil people doing them. What I’m asking is: why does God make people who don’t have a snowball’s chance on a hot plate of having a kind of relationship with God that the Church teaches we’re all supposed to have?
We’re all supposed to be saints, but there aren’t any examples for ordinary people who don’t have the option of abandoning their spouses and children and running off to a monastery or into the desert. We’re lucky if God answers a prayer for something ordinary, like “Help one of our young adult children find a job,” much less something extraordinary like a prayer for physical, mental, or emotional healing for a friend or a family member. We stumble along doing our best, and then we’re told, it’s dangerous to want a closer relationship with God. The devil can use that to lead us into delusion. For Pete’s sake, can we win for losing?
Where’s the totally ordinary lay woman, married to a lay man, who gets to have anything like a relationship with God? I keep trying, but I haven’t even had a moment of sweetness, just ordinary sweetness, in prayer, for 15 years. Heaven is silent, and I certainly don’t have anything I could even call a relationship with God. And people like me are the majority, stumbling along in the rocks at the foot of the mountain, no hope of ever ascending. Is God too busy with the few he really likes to bother with the rest of us? I know you’re a very busy man, but I’d really appreciate it if you would answer this, if it even can be answered. Thank you, if you have read this so far.

And then she signs her name. I’m going to try to say some things in response. I know it’s bold, but I’m going to try. Not on the basis of my own personal experiences, of course, but on the basis on the Holy Scriptures, and how I understand the witness of the saints and the Scriptures.
I can’t answer for God. God’s going to have answer for himself.
And why he deals with us the way he deals with us, he’s going to have answer himself. And I think it’s possible to say without simply reverting to pietisms and rationalizations, that [God] has answered us in the person of his Son, Jesus the Messiah—crucified, rejected, vilified, beaten, ridiculed, spit upon, slapped, whipped—who took all this upon himself, which might even be somehow, even we might say, what seems to be the injustices of God.
You know, there are some kind of wacky Russians—Russian thinkers, I call them wacky because they’re so bold and they’re so out there—that they even claimed that God had to justify himself for creating the world the way he created it, and he justifies himself in the crucifixion of Christ. So somehow, in the crucifixion of Christ, that is the way God himself gets “off the hook.” Now, I think there’s some truth to that, but I think that can be very misleading also. So what I’m going to do, I’m just going to go through the letter and try to respond to the specific questions at each point as well as I can. We pray that God will help me to do this and to do it right, but God himself is going to have to answer.
I would just begin with one theological affirmation. And here I can’t resist saying how there are some people out there who say, they say this: “What is a theologian? What is a Christian theologian? What particularly is a theologian or a teacher of dogmatic theology?” Dogmatic theology, because that’s what I used to teach when I was a teacher. In the course of dogmatic theology, we tried to answer these questions. In fact, I used to say in the class, “No question is out of order. What we’re trying to do in this class is to answer every possible question we can possibly think of in the light of the gospel of Christ. Some we are not going to be able to answer. Some are beyond the capability of being answered in the present state that we are, in this corrupted world.”
But some people would always say not only that dogmatic theology teachers are very boring—H.L. Mencken said “as boring as a teacher of dogmatic theology,”—but some people say a dogmatic theologian is a person who can rationalize anything, can explain away anything. You bring any problem, and they’ll find a way to get out of it, to explain their way out of it, even to justify God and to try to defend Christianity by their rationalizations. So the listener and the auditor has to decide—I hope the woman who wrote the email is listening, I will certainly email her back and ask her to listen. I haven’t done that yet—but I would ask you to decide whether or not this is a rationalization. Is this just some kind of guy who spent his whole life teaching theology which is to explain away all the difficult problems and to get Christianity off the hook and to try to make sense of Christianity and the Christian teaching where no sense can possibly be made? Well, you have to decide that, again, the ball is in your court. You have to decide.
But I’ll go through the letter, and I’ll try to respond as I can. But I do want to begin with one clear theological affirmation and that is that God—I’ve said this many times on the radio, but I’ll say it again. I believe it is a Christian teaching that God, in deciding to create and particularly in deciding to create a world of human beings, and, even, I would say, deciding to create a world of angelic beings, bodiless powers, what the Greek fathers called kosmos noetos, God decided to create a purely spiritual world—the world of what we call, generally speaking, the angels, cherubim, seraphim, and so on—but he decided also to create a world, at least on the planet Earth, you know people always discuss what God is doing in other places of the universe with the hundred thousand billion stars and all that, but we don’t know. But if we ever run into somebody from out there, I guess we’ll find out.
But right now, we’re just concerned with humanity on the planet Earth, and that is what this woman, this wonderful woman, who wrote this wonderful letter, that is what she’s asking. She’s asking about human beings on the planet Earth. And why is it that God plays favorites? Does God play favorites? It looks like he plays favorites. But we want to say from the beginning, again, that God decided to create. He decided to create humanity, and he decided to create it the way it is. Or, to be more accurate, he decided to create it, knowing what creatures—and here we’re talking about human beings—what human beings would do with it. And God, in creating, decided to create human beings who are all deeply, inextricably interconnected, that we are all—you know there used to be a telephone ad in New York State: “We’re all connected: New York Telephone.”—but I think Christians would say we’re all connected human beings, human race.
Every single human being is connected to every single human being on the planet Earth, and we’re even connected to all the plants, all the animals. We’re connected with everyone and everything. We’re connected with the angels. The whole of creation is interconnected. We’re interconnected with demons. We’re interconnected with everything. And, therefore, each one of us is who we are in interconnection with other people as they are. Therefore, we’re not only members, one of another, as Scripture says, but we are victims of other people’s sins and evils. We are recipients of other people’s graces and blessings. And we are who we are in the exact relationship that we have with all the other creatures, and beginning with those closest to us. We are who we are because of our parents and their parents and their parents. We are who we are in our relationship with the people we meet in life. We are who we are with, if we’re married, with the persons that we’re married to. We are who we are in relationship to our children. Our children are who they are in relationship to us.
Now, this theological affirmation would say that God created us this way knowing that we would all mess it up, and the theological meaning of this so-called “original sin,” which is actually a Western concept, a Western— it’s St. Augustine who used that expression. In the Eastern Tradition, we usually call it the “forefather’s sin” or “the ancestral sin, or whatever, but what that means theologically—you know we’ll talk other places about what it might mean biologically, historically, maybe in the Darwin talks—but here we have to say, in responding to this letter, that God created us knowing that humanity would mess it up from the beginning, and that there would be evil, there would be injustice, there would be alcoholic families, there would be abused children, there would be all these things, and there would not be justice in the universe. There would not be justice, certainly from a human perspective.
We could certainly say it’s just plain not fair. Just not fair the way things are. And there’s not one word in the Holy Scripture that God said that it is fair. In fact, even Jesus has teachings like, to whom much is given, much is expected. He has teachings like about the talents, one gets one talent, one gets three talents, one gets five talents, two talents, whatever. Certainly Jesus, on the earth, was able to interact and to choose some people who were capable of following him. He even chose one who he knew would betray him. You know, so this story is kind of complicated, but I think the point I want to make from the beginning is a point made clearly by St. John of Damascus when he synthesized the Scripture and the Church Fathers’ teaching somewhere there in the 8th century, maybe the beginning of the ninth, I’m not sure, right around the time of iconoclasm, he lived. But in his treatise on the Orthodox faith—that’s what he called it, On the Orthodox Faith: Complete Exposition of the Orthodox Faith—he said that when we think of the will of God, we have to think of two aspects of the will of God.
There’s the will of God that God really wants from the beginning that will ultimately triumph for those who want it at the end, and you might call that the “essential” or “ontological” will of God, the fundamental, primary will of God, and that would be that God does not want injustice, he does not want suffering, he does not want death, he does not want abused children, he does not want gulags, he does not want holocaust, he does not want Haitian earthquakes. God does not want that at all. But in order to have the kind of world that would be a human world, where there would be human beings who are really free, and really responsible, and really have to decide do they want God or do they want the devil or themselves? In other words, God creates it knowing that there can be a choice for evil. And certainly one of the things that is connected with the doctrine that human beings are made according to the image and likeness of God is that that gives us the possibility to sin. It gives us the possibility to try to destroy ourselves as made in God’s image, not to want to be in God’s image, not to use God’s image to grow in the divine likeness as the Holy Fathers say, but use that very image to grow in un-likeness, contrary to God, and to make the world more unjust, more unhappy, more sinful, more evil.
So, St. John of Damascus, summarizing Orthodoxy, Orthodox Christianity, said God does not want that. He didn’t create it for that, and the whole Adam and Eve story is proof of that, but the greater proof is the incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, because Jesus says, God does not want that. And Jesus takes it all upon himself, expiates it on the cross, dies the death of crazy, corrupted, apostate, ridiculous unjust creatures to recreate the whole creation and to create a creation where justice will reign, where righteousness will reign, where everything will be fair, where everything will finally be the way God wants it to be, and that, according to Christians, is the age to come. That is when Christ comes again in glory. I’m making this recording just after the Sunday when we read in Church the parable of the Last Judgment. It wasn’t a parable; it was a teaching about the Last Judgment. Of course, it’s defined parabolically: the king sits upon his throne and that king is the Son of Man who is crucified. They all come before him, everybody gives an answer, you know. And then, we answer why what we did with our life, how we lived it. And God knows what that is, and God knows what to expect from each creature.
So, it, in the end, there will be peace, joy, justice, glory, holiness. Everyone from the least to the greatest will share the divine holiness, and here it would be the teaching that in the kingdom of God, everybody has the same kingdom. The lowliest person and the greatest person. Everyone will have what the Theotokos has. Everyone will have what St. Seraphim of Sarov has. Everyone will have what St. Sergius of Radonezh has. Everyone will have everything exactly the same, at the end, according to Jesus’ parable, everyone gets the same reward if they work from the first hour, the third hour, the sixth hour, the eleventh hour, and they will all, everyone will get their reward by how they used what was given them, how they dealt with the situations of their life. And of course, some people’s situations of their life are really horrid. Alcoholic fathers, abused in childhood, sexually abused, sexually molested, you know, all my life I’ve interacted with people who were sexually molested as children, both boys and girls, and that marked their whole life and it led them to be very sexually profligate themselves, because they figured “I’m ruined anyway” and so on.
So, it’s a horrid, horrid thing. So, John of Damascus says this is not God’s will from the beginning, and it will not be what God wants at the end, and it will all be cleared up by the blood of Christ.
But then he also says there is a kind of existential providence, a providential will of God, and here—this would be a Christian teaching—that God deals with the world according to how human beings deal. God doesn’t ask everything the same from every person. God knows who’s been abused. God knows And you could say, well why didn’t God stop that abuse in the first place? And the answer would be: because he’s not a magician. And that abused person would not be the person who they are unless they had that abusive father. That’s who they are. That’s their cross. That’s what they have to bear. That’s the way it is. And you could say, “Gee, who wants that?” Well, there’s plenty of people who say, “I don’t want that, that’s crazy, that’s nonsensical,” but I’m afraid if we believe in the gospel, we have to say, not only we don’t want that, God doesn’t want that. But God can’t do anything about it except redeem it, save it, and recreate it. He can’t make us act differently than we act if we have our freedom, and he can’t just clean up this particular part of humanity or that particular part of humanity.
I think that you can even say that God created a humanity and a world that was beyond repair, once it has fallen. It had to die, and it had to be started all over. It had to be recreated. It could not be patched up. And God can intervene, and God does intervene, and he does intervene as he knows how, and that’s probably where the biggest mystery lies. Why doesn’t God intervene this way in certain cases and that way in other cases? But one thing is for sure, God cannot intervene by transgressing the realities that we actually live in. God cannot simply intervene and make an abused child, or let’s say a child who was born with brain defects and so on, God can’t turn that child into St. Paul or St. Seraphim. He can’t. He’s got to save that child by his blood for everlasting life. But in this world, he can’t miraculously come in and heal that person. Well, he probably could and maybe even in some rare cases, in some sense, he may even do such a thing, but that’s not God’s normal nor normative way of behavior. And even when that happens, that person who would be healed still has to live. Then they have to use their freedom in order to be holy.
St. John Chrysostom says if anyone in this life feels that God has intervened and miraculously healed them and made their life happy—let’s say gave them a good job or something, or healed them of a physical disease—then they have to answer to God for how they use that. And he says, when that happens, it always happens for more crosses, for greater suffering, for more service, for greater repentance, but it doesn’t have anything to do with who goes to heaven at the end, as such. And it doesn’t have to do with who may have some kind of experiences of God on earth before they die, as such. I don’t think that we can say that. I don’t think that that’s warranted to be said according to the Holy Scripture. And we do believe that God cannot save one individual person without saving the whole thing because we’re interconnected. That’s why when we say in church, things like “he came to save Adam,” it means he saves the whole of humanity and that’s why the saints say, “if anyone is saved, everyone is saved with them and in them,” somehow, interconnected, but then they have to deal with that fact. That’s why the prayers of holy people and the actions of holy people, they either contribute to the salvation of others, or, to use a scriptural expression, they pour more burning coals on their head because that person does not accept it.
So what we have to say is that there’s a fundamental will of God, but there’s a providential will of God. And the providential will of God is exactly what this letter is about. Because this wonderful woman is saying, why is my providential will of God this way and someone else’s providential will of God the other way? And why does God deal with this person this way and that person that way? And I think, again, the rationalization answer—God forgive me, I don’t think it’s a rationalization—but I think the truth of the matter is because you are you and I am me and he is he and she is she. And, you know, I’ve had people say to me, “Oh, Fr. Tom, why couldn’t I have been your child? Why was I someone else’s child and my own father was so horrid? And I didn’t have a nice father like you are, and you’re a nice father for your children.” “Well, I would say two things. Number one is: because you’re not my child. If you were my child, you wouldn’t be you. You are who you are because you are that guy’s child and that woman’s child, and you are produced by them, and they were produced by their parents and produced by their parents. I would also say, ask my kids how nice it was to be my child. I’m sure you’ll get an answer that will blow your mind what it meant to be my child.”
I mean, but still as Fr. Alexander Schmemann used to say, life for every human being on this earth is: how do we deal with what we’ve been dealt, and what we’ve been dealt makes us who we are; it makes us how we are. I am who I am, what I am, how I am, why I am, with whom I am, from whom I am because I was born from John and Anna Hopko on the north side of Endicott in 1939. That’s who I am. And then God will ask me at the last judgment, “What did you do with what you’ve been given?” But God also may ask that, will ask that same question in some sense—we heard it in the Liturgy on Meatfare Sunday—he’ll ask that same question to some—let’s try to think of somebody—son of a communist in the Soviet Union or some child of a mafia worker in the Bronx or something.
But God is not going to ask the same thing from each one. How could he? He wouldn’t. And my guess is that God is not even going to ask anything of certain people on this earth because their life was so damaged that he’s just going to love them, embrace them, and take them to paradise; and so the very fact that you just simply survived and endured, even though you yourself did lots of evils yourself perhaps—because as the saying goes “hurt people hurt people”; if you’ve been hurt, you’re going to hurt others; if you’ve been loved, you’re going to probably have a better chance to love others. But in the sight of God, the one who has had what you might consider a lucky or fortunate birthright—let’s say born into people who are basically sane, virtuous and believing, and who are trying to keep God’s commandments. Yeah, if that happens, that’s great! But then God still asks that person what they did with that. But that person is not better or worse or more gifted or treated more wonderfully by God. That’s not the teaching, not the teaching at all.
It doesn’t at all mean that if a person is born, like the woman writes in the letter, in an alcoholic family where there was just rage and abuse and sadness, it doesn’t mean that that person is worse in the eyes of God. And that person would not be asked by God to go out into the desert like St. Seraphim and kneel on a rock for 15 years. That’s not their calling. That’s not their vocation. They have to do something else with what they’ve been given. And maybe the best that that person can do is endure it, and endure it with some kind of faith, hope, and love. And even maybe endure it without too much faith, hope, and love, but still endure it. And maybe they’ll do lots of sins, but they’ll still be pretty good in God’s eyes compared to some other person who is greatly gifted. So I think that we have to deal with this issue of God’s basic will and God’s providential will. And the providential will, I agree totally, is a great mystery.
But one thing’s for sure that we must really, I think, just accept: you can’t say, “Why couldn’t I have been that other person? Why couldn’t I have had some other parents? Why couldn’t I have lived in some other time? Why couldn’t I have lived in some other place? Why couldn’t I have lived with other conditions?” Well, the simplistic answer would be: because if you did, you wouldn’t be you! You would be somebody else. That was not your vocation. That was not your cross. That was not what you have to bear in your earthly life, and we should remember how fleeting earthly life is. That’s one of the teachings of Scripture, too.
The Apostle Paul says that the glory of the age to come can’t even be compared to the afflictions that we suffer on this earth. Now, I know you could say, tell that to someone who is suffering, tell that to someone who wants to be St. Seraphim but is in fact a struggling mom with a difficult situation. Well, I would be careful not to say it so easily and glibly, but I think what would have to be said to that mom in a difficult situation is: you really must believe that God didn’t call you to be St. Seraphim—or St. Seraphima, if you’re a lady. He didn’t. He called you to be who you are and to enter into what you have to do. But what about sweetness in prayer, what about those kind of things?
Well, let’s now just go through the letter and try to answer what the woman writes, line by line, so to speak, almost, paragraph by paragraph. First of all, she says,

Some people seem to come out of the womb with a spiritual silver spoon in their mouths. Yeah, maybe they have huge trials, but they also are holy from their childhood. They have all the advantages that leave them inclined to make good use of all the graces they’ve been showered with. Others get to be used and abused and never even have a choice. And never get to be saints, because they’re just too damaged. If, as the Church teaches, God calls us all to be saints, why is it that he lets some people to get so damaged by life that the best they can do is stumble around the rocks at the foot of the spiritual mountain, never able to trust God enough to make it up the mountain?

First of all, I think a couple things could be said. The saints aren’t only those who are canonized. That’s really important. There are millions of more saints than those who are in the Menaion in church. The ones who are in the Menaion in church are particular people who used what they had in the best way that they could. Some of them were born with, you might say, a spiritual silver spoon in their mouth. The Theotokos was. I think you can say that. To be the child of Joachim and Anna is better than being the child of Jezebel, or some prostitute somewhere. Sure. But then, they have to be what God wanted them to be and St. Silouan on Mt. Athos, he said this. He said, “the greater the love, the greater the knowledge, the greater the suffering.” So, those who are saints in the Menaion, they just didn’t have more trials, they had greater suffering. And many times, they suffered even feeling the absence of God.
Our Lord Jesus Christ screamed from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The feeling of abandonment, of temptation, of being lost, of being in the devil’s hand, of being in hell, many of the canonized saints, even those born with the silver spoon in their mouth—and St. Silouan had a pretty good father, it’s reported. You know, he did. He loved his father. His father was a very good Christian. He was very humble, but once he saw him eating meat on a fasting day and he didn’t tell him for a whole year, and a year later, he said be careful what you prepare and try to remember what day of the week it is. If you’re a good Christian, you want to fast.—but, he had a good father, but he went to Mt. Athos and suffered from every kind of demons, and God told him the only way he could endure was to keep his mind in hell and not to despair.
So, you could have saints who had mystical visions and so on, but they’ve also had the taste of Gehenna. Isaac of Syria speaks about the “taste of Gehenna,” of having been in hell, the sense of self-loathing, the sense of the injustice of God, the sense of how people suffer even when they don’t, all this is tremendous suffering. But one thing we should know though, still, is that the great majority of the saints—way-great majority, huge, you know 99%, probably—we never even know who they are. They’re the hidden people. They’re the small people. They’re the wives and the husbands who work like heck and go to work and suffer all kinds of things and try to take care of their family. And they’re the kids who have to put up with troubled parents and maybe alcoholic parents, and they went to church one day, and they heard the gospel and they said, “I have to endure this. I have to suffer my father how he is. I have to forgive my father. I have to forgive my mother. I have to make the best of my life as I can,” and a person can hear the gospel and that can happen, but maybe sometimes they’re so abused and misused that they don’t have the antenna even to hear. Maybe they’re never even brought to the church in their life even to hear that there is a God who loves them.
Or they may be brought and say, like one guy said to me once up in Canada, western Canada, I was giving a retreat, and he says, “Father Tom, when you say, ‘God loves us, God loves us.’ You know there’s a lot of people out there who say, ‘Yeah, he loves other people, but he doesn’t love me. If he loved me, then he wouldn’t give me this life.’ Or: ‘I’m a loser. I’m at the foot of the mountain. I’m one of the schmucks, you know? I don’t have a chance for anything and I’m certainly not going to be known for anything. Boy, I’d love to have my icon on the icon screen, but that ain’t never gonna happen.’ ” Yeah, well, that’s possible, but God will know what to do with that person. But I do believe there are lots of people in the lives of the saints who didn’t have exactly such terrific parents either.
St. Barbara was killed by her father. You know, those things happen. St. Theodosius of the Kievan Caves, his mother bugged him and didn’t want him to be a monk, whereas St. Seraphim’s mother and St. Sergius’ mother sent their boys off to become monks, but that was their calling. But it’s very interesting that the parents of St. Sergius and the parents of St. Seraphim or the parents of St. Silouan, they were not called to be monks, but I’m sure that they’re in heaven with God. In fact the Church even canonized—I don’t know how many years later, 700 years later—they canonized the parents of St. Sergius. They were canonized in the 20th century although St. Sergius lived in the 14th. But canonization in that sense doesn’t mean these people are better and the other people are worse. It doesn’t mean that God decided to “play favorites” and choose these folks and reject other folks. The other folks aren’t rejected. They had just different vocations.
Now, when the woman writes that “all we can do is stumble around the rocks at the foot of the spiritual mountain, never able to trust God enough to make it up the mountain,” I would dare to say, maybe that’s the vocation. And if a person still stumbles around the foot of the mountain, and they’re still at the foot of the mountain, and they still have enough sense to know that they’re never going to make it up, my guess is that that person is a saint. That person will be saved. Man, according to the Holy Fathers, if you know that you’re a sinner and you can’t do anything, you’re already saved. You’re saved. If you’re stumbling around the foot of the mountain, you’re saved. You’re a saint. Who knows, maybe you’ll get on an icon one day. Probably not, but that doesn’t matter. It really does not matter. It shouldn’t matter in any case, and if it does matter, then 99.9% of us are in huge trouble if that’s what matters. It doesn’t matter.
Another thing about saints is this. In the New Testament, everyone is made a saint by Christ. We are klitoi agioi, called to be saints. But we are called “saints,” not only called to be saints, but called “saints.” “To the saints in Corinth,” “to the saints here”—we’ve been made holy by God. And those who are canonized are only people who know they were made holy by the grace of God, who use their human conditions in the best possible way, hopefully for his glory and for the good of other people like you and me and the lady who wrote the letter. I’m so happy that there’s a St. Seraphim and St. Sergius and a St. Silouan. I’ll never be one and I’m not one. For sure. Just ask my wife and kids, if you don’t believe me. But, I can honor them, I can emulate them, I can try to be like them. I can try to consecrate my little stinky life as well as I can. I can’t fast like one hundredth of what they did. I don’t pray at all the way they do. I don’t do anything. But the Holy Scripture also says that if I honor them, if I recognize who they are and what they do, that’ll be enough. God will give me their reward.
You know, Jesus says, “he who honors a prophet because he is a prophet will receive the prophet’s reward” [Matthew 10:41]. So if I could go through life honoring St. Silouan, St. Seraphim, St. Sergius, and telling people what they said and what they did, I believe God’s going to give me their reward. He said that he would. Now, I can’t do it to get the reward. That would be impure and that would be yucky. But I at least have to hope that if I can’t do it myself and that’s not my vocation, it can be part of my vocation to honor them, and to try to tell people what they taught and what they said. And St. Seraphim himself, he called every jerky Russian “my joy, my treasure,” and he said to everyone, if you say “Our Father” three times a day, “Rejoice, Theotokos” three times a day, say the Nicene Creed every day to remember you’re baptized and try to remember God in between times, you will be saved, and you will be a saint. Because if you’re saved, you’re a saint, and if you’re saved and a saint, then you get what every saint gets, and then the justice rules. Then the justice reigns in God’s kingdom, no doubt about it.
Now, when the woman writes that Jesus only took Peter, James, and John, they were the only ones “allowed,” as she writes, “to witness the Transfiguration.” The rest were left “with the schmucks.” It’s not because they were allowed to witness it. That’s not the way we understand it. Now, they had to be able to be those who could bear it. They had to be those who ultimately would come to understand it. They had to be those who were ready to preach it and to die for it—and they all got killed, every single one of them, Peter James and John all got killed, so I don’t know where the fairness is there because evil people are living long, and the apostles get killed—but they had a hard time because they saw that too. Peter ended up denying him after beholding the Transfiguration. Holy smokes! Then he had to be reinstated, but God, Lord Jesus Christ, took those three because that was part of the providential plan for the salvation of all the rest of us. There had to be a Transfiguration, and there had to be someone who saw it. There had to be someone who bore witness to it so that we could all understand it and be with it and believe in it and be saved by it, but it’s not because they were better. It’s not because the others were schmucks. That’s not the case at all.
In fact, in the gospel, you have a woman who was a prostitute who washed Jesus’ feet. And Jesus said about her, she just loved much in this little act and wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she did would be said about her. Yeah. I don’t know if she had any mystical visions at all. I don’t know if she knew the uncreated light of Tabor. And of course, we don’t even know which one it was, because the gospels have different stories about the woman washing the feet. In John’s gospel, it’s Mary, the sister of Lazarus, whom the woman refers to in the letter: Mary, Martha, Lazarus. Some Scriptures say it was Mary, but in Luke 7, it’s not Mary, it’s a whore. And I don’t think Mary, the sister of Lazarus, was a whore. She washed his feet for his passion, but there was another woman who washed his feet, too, and watered them with her tears and wiped them with her hair, and she’s in the Kingdom of God. That woman is in the Kingdom of God, and she was not Mary or Martha. She wasn’t. We don’t even know her name. But she’s in the Kingdom of God with Mary and Martha.
So, the woman continues in her letter, “our churches are full of ordinary people who chatter in the communion line, quibble, and so on, why aren’t they being showered with the kind of grace that made Seraphim of Sarov and Sergius of Radonezh.” The answer’s very simple. They were incompetent for doing that. They wouldn’t have received it even if it were given. God doesn’t waste his graces and his energies on people that are not capable of using them. Take the example of the conversion of St. Paul. He didn’t just decide, “I think I’ll convert Saul/Paul and make him the great Christian evangelizer and apostle.” No. Paul had to have all the capabilities of being called and of being an evangelizer and of completing the task that [God] called him to do, and he was capable and willing to do it, otherwise God would never have knocked him down on the Damascus Road. You can’t say to me—
You know, we had a guy in the seminary who used to make booze in his room and read porno when I was a student—he got kicked out, by the way. Freddy, his name was. I’m sure he’s with the angels now, God rest his soul—But Freddy used to say, “If God wants to convert me like St. Paul, he can just convert me, but in the meantime…” Well, there ain’t no meantime. Freddy wasn’t able to be St. Paul. In fact, Freddy was not able to even become a priest, actually. That wasn’t his vocation. I hope he’s saved, but in any case, you can’t sit around watching porno books and drinking booze and say, “If God wants to change me, he can change me.” That’s not Christianity. God is not a magician. He’s not a mechanic. He’s not a fairy godmother. No! He has to deal with us as we are.
So, some people are capable and other people are not, but that does not mean that the capable people are apples in the eye of God and the incapable people are not. That doesn’t mean that those who are capable of being a Paul are favorites in God’s eyes, where other people who are not capable of doing what Paul did are not favorable in God’s eyes. We used to say in seminary, “The Last Judgment’s not on a curve.” God doesn’t compare people. It’s not like the top 50 percent of favorites go to heaven. No. That’s not the teaching. Everyone is absolutely unique and just have to be and do what God would want them to be and do, and Dostoyevsky even has a story about how a woman just gave someone an onion and she was brought out of hell because of that onion. But when she screamed, “That was my onion, not your onion,” she’d fall back into hell. You may know the story. Bishop Kallistos Ware loves to tell that story. It’s wonderful. But in any case, you can’t say this one was protected, this one was not, but there is an openness to God. But I still will say, there is a mystery how it works. I can’t explain the mystery of how it actually works, practically, you know, but we do have to believe that it is how it works.
Now, I’ll read the next sentence. She writes, “St. Lucy was protected in the brothel, but uncounted little girls are trained by their own fathers to be sexual accessories. A life of virginity is never a choice they could make as their chastity was torn from them. I grew up in an alcoholic family. I never learned how to trust people, the people I can see and do talk to me, much less a God I can’t see and doesn’t talk to me.” Well, here I would ask the lady a question. If that’s the case, why are you writing me this letter? And why are you talking about being in a communion line in church? Somehow or other, you’re in the Church. Somehow or other, you’re struggling with these issues, God bless you, it’ll make you a saint. That’s your vocation. But you’re still there, somehow. So you can say, “I was brought up by an alcoholic, but I somehow made it into the Church.”
Am I a favorite in God’s eyes because my friend Josie across the street was also raised by an alcoholic father and was abused as a child, and she never made it into the Church, and she never wrote a letter to a priest over at Ancient Faith Radio. I don’t even know where she is now. Well, all I can say is this: God knows. And God will have mercy on her, and God has saved her by the blood of Jesus, and you aren’t any more favored or better because you made it into Church into a communion line capable of criticizing the ordinary people who chatter and quibble, where another person didn’t. God knows all of that, but it’s certainly not because you’re a favorite and the other one is not a favorite. It’s just that by the circumstances of your life, by one way or another, with the freedom that was given to you and the possibility that you had, which is different for every other person, you somehow ended up in the communion line. You did.
Now, to be a saint—in this next paragraph, I won’t read it because I’m going on here too long—but I think that you have to say, “We’re all supposed to be saints. But there aren’t any examples for ordinary people who don’t have the option of abandoning their spouses and children and running off to a monastery.” Well, maybe there are no examples because maybe that’s not how exemplary saints work. But I don’t know. Should the Church go looking around for exemplary married people and so on? The chances are a married person, I would even go so far to say I believe that it’s the truth: that a married person cannot have the mystical experience of a Seraphim or a Sergius, because we’re too caught up in things, and that’s our vocation. God is not going to say to me, “Fr. Tom why did you never see the uncreated light?” I do hope that he’ll say to me, “Fr.  Tom, you did the best you could with what you had, and it was pretty tough, but you did the best with what you got. Enter into the Kingdom of God.” And I’ll say to the Lord, “I’m not worthy. I’m a sinner,” and he will say, “Your sins are forgiven for the blood of Christ.” That’s what I hope in, but I don’t think that we can say— I had a student in class once who said, “If you don’t see the uncreated light in this life, you’re not going to go to heaven, you’re lost.” That’s simply not true! Whoever could get such a kind of an idea?
You wouldn’t get it from the people who saw the uncreated light because they don’t say that. They say something completely different. They say if you are who you are and say the Lord’s Prayer three times a day and think about Jesus in between and try to do what you gotta do, you will have the rewards of the Theotokos. That’s what they tell us. And only they could tell us because they were in the desert. If I told that to someone, they’d say, “Who are you to say that, Fr. Tom? You’re a schmuck.” I’d say, “Okay, I’m a spiritual schmuck, but the guys who weren’t said it. The women who weren’t said it, and I trust them.” And I trust also that when they tell me, “You’re not a schmuck, you’re loved by God. It’s just not your vocation to be that kind of a person,” I have to humbly accept it, and humility is everything. Humility is everything. But when we get into the area of we’re lucky if God answers a prayer for something ordinary like help for a young adult or for children to find a job, or prayer for physical, mental, emotional healing for a friend, here we can get into the whole issue of prayer, and I’ll take that up at another time: the issue of petitionary prayer and divine providence. I’ve been preparing a talk called “petitionary prayer and divine providence.” How do those two things interrelate?
So I’m not going to address it right now, but what I have to say here is, again, it’s a mystery, and we don’t know how it works. But you can pray for a person who may want to be healed, you can pray for a person who doesn’t want to, at least spiritually and emotionally. And you can pray for a person, and God simply says, “It’s not my will. I want that person to suffer. I even want that person to die, because if that person doesn’t die, some other people aren’t going to be saved.” So that person’s got to die. That person’s got to suffer, and I can’t tell God what he’s going to do with that. I really can’t, but we’ll talk about that some other time. But the tough one that we still have to try to say a few words about is: “I haven’t even had a moment of sweetness, just ordinary sweetness in prayer for 15 years. Heaven is silent, and I certainly don’t have anything I could even call a relationship with God. And people like me are the majority: stumbling around the rocks at the foot of the mountain, no hope of ever ascending. Is God too busy with the few than to bother with the rest of us?”
No. I would say God is bothering with you just as much as them. I already said that maybe your vocation is to just stumble around the bottom of the mountain and to write an email to Fr. Thomas on Ancient Faith Radio. Maybe that’s your vocation. Why God doesn’t give you sweetness, I don’t know. But then again, it might be because we’re looking for sweetness. Some woman once said to St. Ambrose of Optina, “I go to Holy Communion and I pray and I never have any feeling.” Do you know what he said to her? He said, “Stop looking for the feeling. Stop looking for the sweetness. Just go there and say to Christ with the prayer of St. Macarius the Great: ‘Lord, as you know and you will, have mercy on me.’ And then whatever sweetness you need, you’ll get.” And when this woman, this nice woman says, “I don’t have anything I could even call a relationship with God,” I would simply say, that’s just plain not true. You have a relationship to God, but this is the relationship: the relationship is the struggle with him, fight with him, question him, write emails to Ancient Faith Radio. That’s maybe what God wants you to do.
And of course, in our time, we have a terrific example that Mother Theresa of Calcutta—admittedly a Roman Catholic, but certainly a holy woman—she said that she had very great experiences of God as a young woman. She claimed even to see Jesus and to see the light, and then when she finally got permission to make the Missionaries of Charity and to start her order and then she said, “I’m going to love God more than anybody, I’m going to serve the poorest of the poor, I’m going to do this and that,” you know what happened? She had no sense of sweetness from God for the rest of her life. And if you don’t believe it, just read the book that was written about her just recently: Come Be My Light. Where God took away the sweetness from her, and I guess maybe that was what her vocation was: to do all these things without ever feeling the sweetness of God. But maybe also the way she was trained and formed in the Roman Catholicism of her day, and maybe even in her kind of boldness of saying, “I’m going to offer myself as a holocaust and nobody’s going to love God as I love God and I’m going to love God more than anybody,” maybe that’s why God did it. I don’t know. You have to ask God, but Mother Theresa said that was her life. She did not have the sweetness.
But I think at some point, we have to say, it ain’t about the sweetness. It’s not about the sweetness. It’s about the Cross. It’s about being who we are. It’s about accepting our own vocation. It is about being a schmuck if God wants us to be a schmuck and that’s what we think of ourselves. That’s what it’s about. It’s about stumbling around at the foot of the mountain, if that’s what God wants from us. But one thing is for certain, that doesn’t mean that he loves the Theotokos and St. Seraphim and St. Sergius more than you. It doesn’t mean that. More than us, I should say. I’ll include myself with the woman. It doesn’t mean that. It doesn’t mean that if I don’t have some euphoria and mystical experience of the presence of God, which many saints had but then was taken away from them and then they had to suffer. St. Silouan had that. St. Simeon the New Theologian had that. No, and we don’t know always what was in the interior heart of many of the saints.
No one would have said that Mother Theresa was experiencing inner darkness when she was doing what she was doing, because her presence was so full of light and joy and peace, and that’s all she was thinking and speaking about, and witnessing in her act. Whereas she had to bear the cross, and she even died with the words: “Jesus, my love, you ask too much from us. You ask too much from us.” But God asks what he asks because of who we are, who our parents were, who their parents were, what our providence is, and so we’ve got to be the one God created us to be. We can’t say, “I want to be somebody else.” But once we accept who God wants us to be, then we can be at peace. And then also, we will really come to know that the truth of the matter is that God does not play favorites. In God’s eyes, each schmucky-yucky person is his favorite as much as any of the greatest of the saints that we know about.


thanks to source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/does_god_play_favorites

The Filioque ~ Fr. Thomas Hopko

At this time of year, when we celebrate Pentecost, we think about the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. And we know that we must think about the Holy Spirit if we are Christians and if we are those who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior and Redeemer of the world, and everything that we say about Jesus Christ, we realize that we can’t say anything about him without saying something about the Holy Spirit and about God himself, God the Father himself. We simply cannot think of Christ, have a relationship with Christ or read about Christ in the Scripture, teach about Christ, without teaching about God the Father and about the Holy Spirit, what came to be called very early in Christian history the Holy Trinity.
That word, “trinity” is not in the New Testament, but certainly the witness to God the Father, to the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit is in the New Testament. And, if we take the Bible as a whole, certainly you cannot at all speak about the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the prophets, the God of Israel, the God of the Scripture without speaking about the Word of God that Christians confess is incarnate as the man Jesus and is, in fact, God’s very own Son. Jesus is God’s Son and Word and Image, Icon. And the Spirit: you can’t read the Bible without also always hearing about the Spirit of God, the breath of God.
If we put it very, very simply, we would say, first of all, about Jesus: Jesus being God’s son immediately makes us think about God the Father and what are the qualities and characteristics of God in his activity. When we think of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the Savior, when we read about him in the Scripture, we know that he was conceived of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was upon him as he grew in stature as a man on earth. He’s baptized in the Jordan River, and the voice of the Father says, “This is my Son, my beloved,” and the Spirit in the form of a dove descends and remains and rests upon him. Then it says the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness.
Then we know that Jesus began, in Luke’s Gospel, his public ministry by reading from Isaiah where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to proclaim the glad tidings and freedom to those in captivity and the good news to the poor” and so on. And then, when Jesus begins preaching and teaching, the claim is: it’s all being done by the Holy Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit by which Jesus says and does everything he says and does, to the glory of God, his Father, and to reveal God, his Father, and to do the work of God, his Father, to speak and to be the Word of God the Father in human flesh, and to accomplish the Father’s will. And Jesus even refers to “the one God and Father and the Holy Spirit” in St. John’s Gospel as the two who bear witness to who he is as God’s Son and as the Messiah and as the Lord.
But just generally speaking, when we think of Jesus Christ, we certainly cannot think of Christ without the Holy Spirit. Then, of course, we know that Jesus promised to give the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of truth, to his disciples, and that as a matter of fact, he did. He says that when he is glorified, when he is crucified, raised, and glorified, that the Holy Spirit will come upon his disciples. He will send the Holy Spirit that is from God the Father, or God will send the Holy Spirit through the world, through him.
And here, let’s just read a couple of texts from the Holy Scripture. St. John, the theological Gospel, that simply say this in so many words. First of all, in John 14, Jesus says:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, another Paraklētos, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

So it’s this: the Father will give you the Spirit. God the Father will give you the Spirit. In that same 14th chapter, 25th verse, it says:

These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you, but the Counselor, the Comforter, the Paraklētos, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and he will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

So Jesus says the Father will send the Holy Spirit in his name, the name of Christ, to bring to remembrance all that Jesus himself has said, and even to give the understanding [of] what Jesus himself has done. In the 15th chapter of St. John, you have the same thing repeated. I’ll read it: “But when the Counselor comes”—again, that word “Counselor, Paraklētos, Advocate, Comforter”; it’s translated various ways—“whom I shall send to you from the Father…”
And here Jesus says, “I will send to you from the Father.” Before, he says, “The Father will give you, the Father will send to you through me and in my name.” Here he says, “I will send to you the Spirit of Truth from the Father.” The Spirit of truth that comes from the Father, I will send to you, and then he says, “Even the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father.” You have that sentence there: “Who proceeds from the Father.” “And he,” meaning the Holy Spirit, “will testify, will bear witness to me, and you also are my witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
In the 16th chapter, you have this very same teaching again, repeated. Jesus says, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor”—again, the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Advocate—“will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” So here again, he says, “I will send him to you.” “When he comes, he will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” And then he goes on and says:

I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now, but when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will deliver to you the things that are to come. He (the Holy Spirit) will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine, therefore I said he will take what is mine and he will declare it to you.

Now, of course, in the New Testament, the Spirit is called the Spirit of God. He’s called the Holy Spirit. He’s called the Spirit of the Lord: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” He is called the Spirit of Christ. So you have this witness to the Spirit in the New Testament. Now if you take the Old Testament, right from the very beginning in creation, you have God always speaking and acting by his Word and by his Spirit. He creates the world through his Word, according to Genesis, but on the first pages of Genesis, it says, “The Spirit of God, the breath of God, the wind of God,” because “breath” and “wind” and “spirit” are all the same word in Hebrew: the ruach of God “is brooding over the abyss.” And in the Old Testament Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, accomplishes everything that God does, and the agent of God’s accomplishment, even in the Old Testament, is his Word.
The Word of God, in Hebrew, the word “word,” it doesn’t just mean a concept or a spoken word; it means an act; it means a thing. The very same word means “word,” “act,” and “thing.” So God is doing his thing, he is doing his action by his word. Isaiah says, “The word of God will come and accomplish that for which it has been sent.”
Not only is God creating the world by his Word and his Spirit, his breath and his wind, but if you read the entire Old Testament, you will see that every time God speaks, his word, his revelation, his truth, is vivified by his very own Spirit. And wherever the Spirit of God comes, he brings the Word of God. St. John of Damascus, who was a Semitic man, a middle-Eastern man, although he wrote in Greek, he said in the Biblical symbolism, whenever God speaks, his word he breathes, and every time he breathes, he gives a word, he gives a meaning.
The word of God is not dead; it’s alive, it’s living, and it’s active. That’s what the Letter to the Hebrews will say in the New Testament: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword.” But it’s living and active because it’s a live Spirit, because the Spirit of God is within the Word. And then, the Spirit of God itself is not dumb. It is not Word-less. God is not Word-less. God is not Spirit-less. God is the living God who speaks, who acts, who touches. And this is the vision that we have of God in the Bible.
So the one, true, and living God of the Law and the Prophets is the God who is always acting, as St. Irenaeus said in his writings (a Christian bishop of the third century). He said: the two hands of God: the Scriptures speak of God working with his hands. Well, his two hands: one is his Word and one is his Spirit, and the Spirit and the Word are always together. And we see that in the New Testament when the Word becomes flesh and the Holy Spirit is in Jesus, on Jesus, with Jesus, acting through Jesus, and everything that Jesus does as the incarnate Word of God to reveal God, to show God, to bring God to the world, the God who is his Abba, Father, is done by the activity of the Holy Spirit. And, of course, the people who were against Jesus, they said, “He does these things by the devil,” and he says, “No, they are by the Spirit of God.”
Now, the prophets themselves in the Old Testament, the Creed says about the Holy Spirit, “He spoke through the prophets.” So the prophets announced the word of God. They say, “Thus says the Lord,” but they do it because they’re vivified by the Holy Spirit. Even the Law itself, the Torah of Moses, it is God’s word because it is inspired, it is God-breathed, it’s breathed by the very Spirit of God. So the Scriptures show the Trinitarian character of God. They are the incarnate word of God in words inspired by the Holy Spirit. The prophets do the same thing. They speak the word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit.
So you have the Word of God and the Spirit of God, and Jesus is the Son and Word and Icon of God, never devoid of the Spirit of God. And that same Spirit is sent upon the Christians by the risen Christ so that they could be christs and sons of God themselves, that we could be sons of God. St. Paul says this: God pours his Spirit into our heart, crying, “Abba, Father!” And the Apostle Paul will say no one can call God “Abba, Father,” no one can call Jesus the Son of God and the Lord, unless he be inspired by the Holy Spirit.
So we receive the Holy Spirit as a gift as Christians. The personal gift of the Holy Spirit is given to us so that we could have all the qualities of God: love and peace and joy and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness, that we could know the truth, that we could have wisdom, because the Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom; that we could live forever, because he’s the life-creating Spirit; we would know the truth because he’s the Spirit of truth. So the Spirit is there at all times.
What happened in Christian history which is what we want to discuss particularly today is about the origin of the Holy Spirit and the activity of the Holy Spirit and the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the one God and Father and the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. In the earliest Church, when the Christians were formulating the faith, particularly formulating credal statements to be used at baptisms, so that the people who were being baptized could confess the faith in a brief form, usually called a symbol or symbolon of faith, a credal statement, a creed—“creed” comes from the word “credo, I believe”—what was said about Jesus Christ we know. First of all, what was said about God, we know: “We believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” And then we confess we also believe:

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only-begotten Son, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, of one very same divinity with the Father, who for us men and our salvation came from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became human.

And then he was crucified, he died, he was buried, he was raised, he is glorified, and he will come again in glory. Now that was said at the Council of Nicaea which then ended its definition, simply, “And we also believe in the Holy Spirit.” That was the year 325; that’s the Council of Nicaea.
In 381, which we now call the Second Ecumenical Council, an addition or the completion of the Creed was made, where a statement was made, a very brief statement, about the Holy Spirit. It said, “And we believe”—and we say when we’re baptized, we say at the Divine Liturgy, “I believe”—“in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.” That is what the Creed says. And then, of course, it continues:

And I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I acknowledge (or confess) one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.

And there you have the Creed. There you have the Symbol of Faith.
Now, about the Holy Spirit, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that was written—the first part in Nicaea, the second part in Constantinople; 325, 381—that’s our statement of faith. And about the Holy Spirit, it said, again: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life.” “Lord and Giver of life” has to mean that he’s divine. “Kyrios” is the divine Name. He’s the Lord. He’s called the Lord in the Holy Scripture; certainly by St. Paul, he’s called the Lord. And the life-giver, the vivifier, the one that makes things alive, as the Christian prayer, the ancient Christian prayer which we still use in the Orthodox Church will say, “O heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, you are everywhere and you fulfill all things,” you do all things, you accomplish all things; you fill all things and you fulfill all things, “you’re the treasury of the good things, the giver of life,” and then we pray that this Spirit would “come and abide in us.”
What happened in Christian history, however, which is very, very sad, is that, in the Western Church, a word was added to this Creed that changed the teaching. It changed the teaching. And it had to do with the Holy Spirit. And that word is “filioque.” It’s one word in Latin, and it means “and the Son.” And the term “filio” is the ablative case of “filius,” which means “son,” and so when the Creed said, in Latin, “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, the Spirit who proceeds from the Father—ex Patre procedit is what it said in Latin originally: ex Patre procedit—they added the term: ex Patre filioque procedit. That the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father filio-que, and from the Son. “Filio” means “the Son,” or “from the Son,” and “-que” on the end of a word means “and”; it just means that you have an “and” there.
So this one word was added to the Creed. Now, the question is: where was it added to the Creed, why was it added to the Creed, and is it proper and fitting that it would be added to the Creed, and, if it is added to the Creed, how is it to be understood and certainly how is it to be understood in relationship to what the Creed originally said? And then, of course, the question also has to be very clearly asked: was it in the original Creed and was it dropped, or was it not in the original Creed and was it added?
Everybody in the whole world today knows and always did know, except, I think, at one certain period in history which we’ll talk about in a second, that it was not in the original Creed. It was added to the Creed. Now, where was it added, why was it added, and is it right to be added? This is what we want to talk about now for the next few minutes, because the addition of that word, filioque, to the Creed caused a real theological division between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches on the one hand, and the Orthodox Churches in the East, both the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Eastern Churches, the Oriental Orthodox, who do not accept the formulation of the Council of Chalcedon.
And some people really believe that, together with the Roman Catholic doctrine about the papacy, the infallibility of the pope, the filioque was, not only the major doctrinal, dogmatic, theological controversy that caused the division between the Churches when there was a real disagreement on how to understand Christ and God and the Holy Spirit and their relationships to each other, it became a real Church-dividing issue. And it’s a Church-dividing issue to this very day, although in recent time, the Western Churches are confessing pretty much that it wasn’t in the Creed, it shouldn’t have been there, it’s better to put it out, and even the Roman Catholic Church, that still has it, and the Protestant churches that still have it and still use it, say it’s okay if the Orthodox [Churches] don’t have it.
But the Orthodox Churches, generally, still say the Western Churches should not have it either because it is wrong. It is theologically and doctrinally wrong to say, and, also, it should not have been put intot he Creed in the first place, and also, in the Creed itself, it was a quotation of Holy Scripture. So if you add it, you’re changing the meaning of the Scripture, because the claim is that that sentence in the Creed, where it says, “the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father,” that “who proceeds from the Father” is a quotation of St. John’s Gospel. I already read it to you. It’s in the 15th chapter, 26th verse: “But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me,” Christ says. So it says that you’re adding words not only to the Creed, you’re adding words to the Bible, because the Bible does not say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
How did all this happen and how are we to understand it? Well, it’s a very complicated issue. It’s a very difficult issue. There’s a lot written about it, and I would just mention two books that are very important if you’re really interested in this. There’s a book written by Richard Haugh. It was published in 1975. Richard Haugh was a young Christian scholar at the time, and he wrote the book called Photius and the Carolingians. Why I mention that book is because this whole issue came to a head in the ninth century when St. Photios the Great, the Patriarch of Constantinople, simply said to the Western churches, “You should not have this in your Creed,” that it is wrong to have.
And then the Western Christians, particularly the Carolingian theologians—those were the barbarian theologians, the Franks and the Germans who had converted to Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church, but they were not Latins; they were Franks and Germanic people—they defended very strongly and radically the filioque, and even defended that it belonged in the Creed and even defended that it was in the Creed in the first place.
So a huge, big… There was a turmoil before, there was discussion earlier, but it really broke loose in the ninth century, in the 800s, and then it finally led to a formal division between the churches at the beginning of the 11th century when the Creed, with that word in it, was sung in Rome by the bishop of Rome in the Latin Church, of the Western Church. In other words, it won the day, and it created… It was a great contributing cause to the division between the Latin Church (the Roman Church, the Roman-Frankish Church, Germanic Church) and the Eastern Churches, particularly Greek-speaking, Syriac, and so-on-speaking churches. And it’s a cause of contention down to this present day.
Now, this book, Photius and the Carolingians by Richard Haugh, it really gives a very nice history of this whole issue and how it did come to a head, beginning already in the seventh, eighth, ninth centuries, and then how it led to this division and what the story was about.
There’s another book published by the World Council of Churches. I can’t remember the exact date now, but it was called Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, and it was a study by high-ranking theologians from virtually all the Christian churches—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants—about this issue. And basically, that particular statement, Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, the papers in that book—it’s published in Geneva; you could find it online, I’m sure; it’s called Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: World Council of Churches Papers—it really came out and said, “This word should never have been added to the Creed, and it’s better that this word not be there, and for the sake of Christian unity, it would be better if it were simply dropped from the Creed and none of the Christians who used the Creed would use this word any more.
But of course, that did not happen, although some of the Protestant churches did drop the word, and the Eastern rite churches in communion with Rome no longer use that word, but, nevertheless, the Latin, Roman Catholic Church, of the Latin rite, and virtually all of the Protestant churches that use credal statements would still use the Creed with the filioque in it if they use the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But there was also an earlier creed, sadly, misleadingly called the Athanasian Creed, that did have a sentence that said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and that was very early already in the fourth, fifth century.
So what’s the story? Let me try to make this as simple and as clear as I can for you. And in some sense, it really is not very complicated. If you read it carefully, even in the details, you can see that there’s a pretty clear pattern that’s really rather hard to dispute in what actually happened. This is it in a nutshell: The greatest theologian in the Western Church was St. Augustine of Hippo. And Augustine wrote a book, De Trinitate, and it was a very, very bad book, theologically.
In fact, St. Augustine, he wrote this, he said, “This is my opinion. Maybe I’m mistaken; maybe it should be corrected.” And the joke, when I was a theological student and a teacher was, “and the Christians of the East have been correcting it ever since,” because, simply, it is a very poor formulation about the doctrine of the Trinity. There’s many good biblical things in there, many good psychological, spiritual things, but metaphysically, theologically, it isn’t very good. And, without getting into why or how, but in any case, for the sake of our little talk here, St. Augustine clearly taught that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, that the Father and the Son together are both God, and the Spirit is the Spirit of God, it’s the Spirit of Christ, therefore the origin of the Holy Spirit is in the Father and the Son.
But already in St. Augustine, there was a mixing together of what would be called, traditionally in [the] Eastern Church, theologia and oikonomia. In other words, what do we say about the Godhead from all eternity and the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and then, what is said about Christ in the oikonomia on earth, of salvation, when he sends the Holy Spirit from the Father to his disciples? Because what will happen is that when Jesus will say, “I will send you the Holy Spirit,” the simplistic answer was, “Oh, then the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, too.” But actually, even in the Scripture it says, “I will send you the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father.”
And then, the Scripture says a lot of times that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Son. And the Son really is divine with the same divinity as God the Father. That’s the teaching of Nicaea. Therefore, if the Spirit is the Spirit of God and proceeds from God the Father, then the Spirit should proceed from God the Son as well. And then it even developed that, since the Son is “Light from Light and true God of true God,” and he is really divine, so you could say the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as if from one principle, that the Father and the Son form like one originating principle of the Spirit of God who is sometimes even described as the love between the Father and the Son: the Father loves the Son, and that love is the Spirit; the [Son] loves the Father, that love is the Spirit, and the Spirit is a kind of a divine force or Person that unites the Father and the Son.
So there’s a lot of Biblical exegesis and metaphysics and Platonism and all kinds of things involved, but in any case, what we want to see is that St. Augustine did teach that you could say and teach and be right that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. However, when Augustine was in Church and the Creed was being read, it did not have the filioque in it. It simply said, “I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father.” And then, as St. Augustine said, “Yes, but you can further explain if he proceeds from the Father, he must proceed from the Son, too, because the Son is God from God and Light from Light and he’s really divine with the same divinity.” But then, the whole thing started getting very mixed up and confused.
Well, to add to the confusion, the barbarian invaders in the West, particularly the Goths and the Visigoths, had been converted to Christianity as Arians, as Arian Christians, not as Orthodox Christians. And the Arian Christians denied the divinity of the Son and Word of God. They denied the divinity of Christ. They said, “Yes, God has a Spirit, and a Word, but the Word and the Spirit are not divine in exactly the same way as God the Father. They are somehow lesser gods, if gods at all.”
And then the extreme Arians even said that the Word of God and the Spirit of God are creatures: God made his Word; God created his Spirit. He kind of willed them into being, that they are not part of his very being, and therefore they are not God. So the Arians were Unitarians, and only God the Father was really God. The Son and the Spirit were not really divine and were not really God.
Now, when the Orthodox Catholic Christians of the West, the Romans, were fighting against these Arianizing Goth Christians, they wanted to really affirm the divinity of Christ. They wanted to be really Nicaean, because [the] Council of Nicaea said that Jesus Christ is God. He is God from God. He’s the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages. And so, even though they had the Creed that said about the Holy Spirit “who proceeds from the Father,” they interpolated the Creed, they somehow added to it, they wanted to clarify it especially to insist on the divinity of the Son of God and Christ by putting the word “filioque” into the credal statement itself.
And so there is a council in Spain, 589, where that council in the West actually, in some sense you might almost say “officially,” placed the filioque into the Creed, and the Creed there was taught in the Western Church, and they thought that it came from a Creed that was from St. Athanasius. It was called the Athanasian Creed, or called Quicumque in Latin, where it says, literally, “The Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, not made, not created, nor begotten, but proceeding.” And it says, “He who wishes to be saved should think thus of the Trinity.” And again saying that the Spirit is from the Father and the Son in its origin.
Everyone would have said the Spirit comes from the Father and the Son in the mission to the world, its origin is in God the Father, it’s the Spirit of God; but the Spirit proceeds from the Father, it rests in the Son of God. The Son of God comes on earth as Jesus, and he gives the Holy Spirit to his disciples. He breathes on them and gives them the Spirit that is in fact the Spirit of God that he himself has received eternally from God the Father.
What happened was that this council in Toledo, where it was going against the Visigothic kings and so on, wanted really to insist that the Spirit came from the Father and the Son, to insist on the divinity of the Son. Now, it admitted in the very canons of the council and according to the form of the Eastern Churches that has to be chanted in the church, the 150 Fathers in Constantinople, the Second [Ecumenical] Council, said that you should say, “the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father,” so let’s continue to say that, but we have to believe that that means the Spirit comes from the Son as well. And then the word actually got put into the Creed in order to make this affirmation.
So there you have a problem. You have Fathers teaching that the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and the Son, but not saying it in the Creed because the original Creed did not have it, but still teaching it, still somehow believing it. And then there were some, including many popes, who said, “Yes, it’s right. St. Augustine is our holy father,” and all the holy theologians who followed Augustine said, “Yes, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,” but they still were against putting it in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in church. They said you can teach it, it’s a theological doctrine, it’s perfectly fine, but let’s keep the Creed the way it was originally written.
Those who had been trained in the theology of Augustine in the West—and that meant just about every one of the Western Fathers: Ambrose and Gregory the Great, even Pope Martin in the seventh century, the great friend of St. Maximus, who was killed and arrested by those heretics of the seventh century—they all were pretty much teaching the filioque, but denying that it should be put in the Creed. And there was even the pope named Hadrian, Pope Hadrian, in the eighth century, who said that the teaching of the filioque is in the perfect accord with the Roman see, and he even stressed that the doctrine can be taught in Latin and Greek Fathers, and he quoted selections of Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary, Basil, Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, Pope Leo the Great, Pope Gregory the Great, Sophronius of Jerusalem, St. Augustine of course.
But St. Augustine is the main guy here, the main teacher. But these others, they more or less said these things in passing, and the Western Fathers had received this theological tradition, so you had this anomaly. They were teaching that the Holy Spirit is proceeding from the Father and the Son, or comes from the Father and the Son, is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. They weren’t too technical about it; they weren’t insisting too much about it. And, at the same time, in church, at the Liturgy, they were not saying “filioque.” It was not in the Creed at all. It simply was not there.
What happened at the time of the Carolingians was that the Carolingian theologians, the Germanic and Frankish theologians—and all of this began… they’re called “Carolingian” because of Charlemagne, Charles the Great, and so on—they needed to have the filioque in the Creed, not only because they really believed that it was true, but because they wanted to be against the Easterners whom they knew did not have it, and in their ignorance they accused the Easterners of having dropped it, because they were all convinced, because it was so traditionally taught, and since Toledo, it was even in some credal statements, that it simply was a classical teaching of Christianity. They just didn’t know.
In the year 800, Charlemagne, Charles the Great, who wanted to reestablish the Empire in the West, was crowned as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in Rome, by the pope of Rome, and it was the beginning of what came to be called in history the Holy Roman Empire, which the English historian, Gibbon, says was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” It was not very holy. It certainly was not Roman; it was Frankish, it was Germanic, it was barbarian, using the language of the time. It was not traditionally Latin. And it was not even an empire.
Now, this Charlemagne, he had to affirm himself as an emperor in the West. He had his seat in Achen. He had his theologians like Alcuin. They were all Augustine-trained, -minded theologians. So he had to accuse the East of heresy. He couldn’t say that the Eastern Church wasn’t there. He couldn’t say that there wasn’t an emperor in Constantinople. So he did two things: he accused the Eastern Church of worshiping idols because of the icons and he accused the Eastern Churches of distorting the doctrine of the Trinity by dropping the word “filioque” from the Creed, because the filioque was sung in all the Germanic, Frankish churches at that time, but it was not sung in Rome.
Interestingly enough and very important is that the popes of Rome knew very, very well that the Frankish theologians and emperors were wrong. And so you had popes like Pope Leo III in the year 810—I already mentioned Hadrian in 772-795; later there was Pope John VIII, [872-882], at the time of St. Photius—who were… this is how they were dealing with it: they said you can teach it theologically, you can explain the Trinity as the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, and they based it simply on the texts that Jesus breathed on the people; gave the Spirit; the Spirit is called the Spirit of Christ; the Son was God, the Father was God, so the Spirit is the Spirit of both of them.
So they didn’t see anything particularly wrong with teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, but they were adamantly opposed to inserting it illicitly into the Creed. They said—the Council of Ephesus, the Council of Chalcedon both said that you cannot amend or change or alterate either the meaning or the words of the Creed. Now, they would argue, “We’re not really changing the meaning; we’re just explaining it better and fuller and interpolating it more deeply, but as far as the words go, we have no right to change it.”
It’s interesting that both Pope Leo III and John VIII, they made shields, they made plaques of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed written without the filioque in it, in both Latin and Greek, and had them publicly displayed on the doors of St. Peter in Rome and publicly saying, “Teach this, but don’t sing it and don’t say it when you say the Creed in the church, because we must keep the Creed as originally formulated.” So they actually saw it as a kind of a theological distinction, but not something to be really pressed. And they certainly were for not changing the Creed.
But to make the story very short and very quick right now, is that that didn’t persist. It didn’t hold, so to speak. That position did not hold. Little by little, this use of the filioque spread. It became part of the polemics. The German missionaries like, for example, dealing in Bulgaria, they wanted to say, “We have the true Creed with the filioque; the Greeks have a false Creed without the filioque. The Greeks don’t have the full doctrine of the Church. We are not changing the meaning of Nicaea. We are increasing it, we are explaining it, we are making it clearer.” And the Easterners were saying, “No, you’re not. You’re distorting it. It’s terrible. You shouldn’t do it.”
So what happened was a real clash. The leader of the Eastern Church, theologially, came to be a very famous patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, the 800s, named Photius the Great. And Photius really took on this issue theologically, and that’s why Professor Haugh’s book was called Photius and the Carolingians, because he faced it directly, and he simply said, “Not only is it wrong to have it added to the Creed,” which all the popes would agree with, and St. Photius would even argue against this theology; he said, “Your own popes of Rome do not have it. Leo III, John VIII, they made shields, plaques, without it. They’re telling you you’re not supposed to add it.”
And he’s very much insisting that the Roman popes were very, very to be praised and glorified for not adding this word to the Creed, even though they permitted it and even sometimes supported it as being taught, following the Trinitarian philosophy of St. Augustine and his disciples through history, whose theology, according to Photius the Great and subsequent Eastern teachers like Gregory of Cyprus and so on, that it simply was wrong. It really did distort the doctrine.
The arguments of the Eastern Church, particularly of Photius the Great, without getting into the big metaphysical teachings about how a Spirit can come from two different sources or from two sources as one and so on, put it in the most simplistic form, the teaching was simply this: the Bible says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, period. It’s a quotation; you can’t change that. And anyway, it’s not right that it proceeds from the Father and the Son. It is right to say that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, because everything that the Father is and has is given to his Son, but that does not mean that the metaphysical, ontological origin of the Spirit of God is the Son of God. It’s not the Son of God; it’s the Father alone. And Photius would use that expression: “from the Father alone,” not from the Father and the Son together, even not together as if from one.
If the Spirit came from the Father and the Son together as if from one, what is that one? Is it a fourth Person of the Holy Trinity? Do you have the Father alone, the Son alone, and then the Father and the Son together producing the Spirit as some kind of new reality? It just is a distorted doctrine. It’s just unnecessary, unBiblical, and doesn’t make sense whatsoever.
Photius also would say you could certainly say that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, because he is: proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son. That will become the great formula: proceeds from the Father, rests in the Son, and through the Son and by the Son is given unto us in the oikonomia of salvation when Christ is on earth.
So Jesus can say, “I will send you the Spirit,” because the Spirit is his Spirit, but it’s the Spirit of God that is in Jesus because he’s the Son of God. The Word of God and the Spirit of God are both of God. The Cappadocian Fathers—Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa—will simply say the archē of divinity, the principium divinitatis in Latin, the archē theotitos, is the Father alone. The Father is the cause. The Father is the source of the Spirit and of the Son: the Son, by way of generation or procession, being born, he’s a Son; and the Holy Spirit, breathed forth or proceeding from God the Father.
St. John of Damascus will say, and had said before Photius, a century before, that the begetting of the Son of God, in all eternity, and the procession of the Holy Spirit, they are simultaneous acts, although there’s no time in God. He called it “symparomartoun.” He had a special Greek word, saying, when the Father begets the Son, he breathes forth the Spirit, and in breathing forth the Spirit, the Son is generated, and the Son is generated by the power of the Spirit, and the Spirit is on the Son within the Trinity. And we know all of this because we contemplate how the Spirit relates to Jesus Christ in the Incarnation.
As far as God’s mission in the world of salvation is concerned, it is certainly true that the Spirit of God is in and on Jesus Christ, the Son, and the Son of God gives the Holy Spirit to his disciples. He sends the Holy Spirit to his disciples. But the Father gives the Spirit through him. The origin of the Spirit is not the Son, but the Son is the agent by which the Spirit is given to human beings. That is certainly correct, and that is how Photius the Great understood the Christian Fathers of the East and of the West when they appear to be, so to speak, “soft” on filioque. When they said, “Oh, yeah, you can understand it that way. It’s okay to understand it that way, because basically what it means is that, in the activity of God toward the world, that this Holy Spirit is given to us by Christ. Christ gives us the Holy Spirit. It’s the Spirit of God that’s in and on him, and then he gives it to us.” So this is how Photius and those who formulate it said that it was right.
Photius admits that there are passages… Of course, he did not like St. Augustine’s teaching at all, but there are passages in other holy Fathers, like Ambrose of Milan or Cyril of Alexandria, even Maximus the Confessor, because Maximus the Confessor knew that St. Mark, the one who suffered and died with him for the Christological heresy of that time was kind of teaching a filoque teaching, practically. But St. Maximus said, “All he is saying is that the Spirit is given to us in and through and by Jesus Christ, but the Spirit is still the Spirit of God alone.”
When you can quote those Fathers of the East and the West who may have taught it, what Photius says is that they were not strict enough. They were not disciplined enough. They weren’t dealing with the same issue as was now being dealt with, namely, the relationship of the Son and the Spirit to the Father from all eternity in the Godhead. They were mixing together what the tradition would call theologia—that’s the eternal relationships of the Persons—and the oikonomia—the activity of God in history for our salvation. And that’s what led them astray.
There is a marvelous sentence of St. Photius which I’d like to read to you now, where he says why some of the holy Fathers might have been mistaken on this point, and they were mistaken because they didn’t realize what was really at stake, which only became clear later. This is what he said:

If certain Fathers had spoken in opposition when they debated the question [which] was brought before them and had fought it contentiously or had maintained their opinion and had persevered in this false teaching…

In other words, if they were somehow teaching a doctrine that the Holy Spirit somehow proceeds from the Father and the Son.

...and when convicted of it, had held to their doctrine until death, then they would necessarily be rejected together with the error of their mind.

So he said if these Fathers knew what was at stake and had been questioned and would have held to it, then they would be mistaken and they would have to be rejected.

However, if they spoke badly or for some reason not known to us, deviated from the right path but were not strictly questioned, no question was put to them nor did anyone challenge them in order to learn and clarify the truth, we admit them to the list of holy Fathers as if they had not said it, because of their righteousness of life, their distinguished virtue, and their faith, and their being faultless in other respects.

Like for example, Pope St. Martin. He was absolutely faultless in his teaching about Jesus Christ being perfect God, perfect man, two natures, two energies, two wills, and got imprisoned and killed for holding that. But nobody questioned the issue of the Holy Spirit and so on to him, and it was never really raised. In fact, it was never even raised to St. Augustine himself. It just simply never happened. So St. Augustine may have been faultless in many other respects, but not in this one. St. Photius continues:

We do not, however, follow their teaching in which they stray from the path of truth.

So St. Photius says some of the holy Fathers may have strayed from the path of truth.

We, though, who know that some of our holy Fathers and teachers strayed from the faith of true dogma, do not take as doctrine those areas in which they have strayed, but we embrace the holy men. So also, in the case of any who are charged with teaching that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. We do not admit what is opposed to the word of the Lord, but we do not cast them from the ranks of the holy Fathers.

So he says the issue wasn’t clear, it wasn’t debated, it was very murky, it was very mixed. Theology was being mixed with soteriology, the teaching of God in relation to salvation. There were Scriptural texts that had to be clarified, he said, so that can happen. But once it is clear what is being said and what is happening, then you have to be clear. And he said, theologically it is very clear that the Holy Spirit proceeds originally and in his origin from the Father alone.
The Son is born of the Father alone, but the Son is born from the Father by the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, and the breathing-forth of the Spirit is done by the cooperation of the Son, and even somehow the agency of the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father, rests in the Son, and through the Son is given to us in this world. And the Holy Spirit is the one who enacts and accomplishes all the activities of God, the agent of every activity being the Son of God, from creation to salvation to redemption to deification. And the Spirit is taking what belongs to Christ and it’s given to us, and Christ has everything he has from God his Father. So that’s the clear teaching.
So the conviction would be: filioque is wrong. It should not have been added to the Creed in the first place, but it may have been explained acceptably as far as the mission of the Spirit in the world is concerned, but it cannot be justified theologically, and it certainly cannot be justified Scripturally by proper exegesis of the Bible. You just cannot do it.
Well, the West persisted in it. And to make the story really short, by the beginning of the 11th century, the first decade of the 11th century, around 1004, it actually was accepted in Rome, and it was sung at the Mass in Rome. Then Rome, who was in a high point at this point, and putting out its power, claimed, “You must have the filioque in the Creed, or you are wrong.” And so, at the Council of Lyons in the 1270s, in the Council of Florence in the 1430s, the Latin Church insisted you must have filioque in the Creed, and you must explain it in the way the Latin scholastic theology explains it, following St. Augustine, or you are heretical.” And the Eastern Churches in response said, “If you explain it that way, you’re the ones who are heretical. You are teaching the false doctrine.” And so this has just remained up to the present time.
In the last century, there were a lot of meetings, discussions about this, and it seems that the theological community, even in the Roman Catholic Church, would say that filioque does not belong in the Creed, and the explanation of the procession of the Spirit, metaphysically, is from the Father alone, but you can say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son relative to us and to our salvation. So filioque would actually be interpreted as “per filium, through the Son” or “by the Son” or “by agency of the Son,” but that the Son would in no way, either alone or together with the Father, in any sense be the origin of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of God the Father alone, but that very Spirit is the Spirit of the Son of God from all eternity, because everything that God the Father is, he gives to his Son, and he even gives the Spirit to the Son of God divinely in all eternity, and then, when Christ is on earth, the Spirit of God descends and remains on him, and he does all of his activity as a man by the Holy Spirit as well.
This is what that filioque is all about. It was about an addition of the word to the Creed, which should never have been done, which may be explained, when it’s explained kind of sloppily and mixing everything all together; it might be justified, but when you become very strictly articulating theological truth, then it is not justified at all. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, although it’s sent into the world, given to the world, through the agency of Christ, and the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ.
The Carolingian theologians, by the way, they made a big deal that Scripture says the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. They said, “If the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, then he proceeds from Christ.” The Greek theologians, the Eastern theologians, said, “That’s nonsense. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, but the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ because first it’s the Spirit of God the Father from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds and from all eternity dwells and rests in the Son of God from all eternity in the mystical unity of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
So if you’re interested in this, I would simply suggest to you the book Photius and the Carolingians by Richard Haugh, and I would suggest to you to get that World Council of Churches paper, published, I believe, in the 1980s, called Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, where scholars of all the churches really show what is at stake and basically justify the Eastern Orthodox ancient position, even the position of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, that the filioque, at best, can be used and explained in a very particular way concerning the activity of the Spirit coming through Christ for the sake of our salvation, but in absolutely no way can it be accepted in the Trinitarian theology of God from all eternity.
It would be Orthodox dogma that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, proceeding from the Father, resting in the Son, as the Spirit of the Son, and through the Son is given to us.

Thanks to Source:
red and Blue lettering are mine
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_filioque