What is Holiness from the Orthodox Perspective?
We have readily available to us, in good English translation, instructions from countless Orthodox saints and ascetics on the nature of holiness along with the practical means for achieving it. The first question to arise is this: do we have to become holy first, before we can talk about holiness? The Orthodox answer to this is: no, it is a struggle (ascesis) which we are all engaged in together. It is never an exclusively individual enterprise. At the same time, it is irreducibly personal.
The most obvious example of this is St. Paul—the murderer—whose own passionate appeals in his epistles are not without an intense personal witness to his own struggles. For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.
But what about Christ Himself? That He was perfect there is no doubt. But what does that mean in practice? Does it mean that He never struggled? What occurred immediately after His baptism? He fled to the desert – a universal symbol in our faith referring not only to the desert in the literal sense, but also to the desert of our innermost self. If we are honest about it.
What happened to Christ when He was fasting in the desert? He was tempted by Satan. And what was that temptation? It was to use his Divine Power and exercise His Divine authority to become the King of this world. For what purpose? To do good, to relieve mankind of its various sufferings. We know about this, not because He wrote this down, but because He told his disciples about it. So He shared the knowledge of His struggles with His followers. I am sure they struggled with this knowledge, and were likely deeply confused and troubled by the phrase, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Only much later, after Pentecost and much suffering, could they even begin to understand what this meant.
And what about Gethsemane? Perspiring drops of blood is evidence of struggle! Christ had more desire than any of us will ever have to do the will of the Father, and yet He still struggled.
Then there is the Cross of Christ. Christ’s physical suffering on the cross is relatively minor in comparison to what today we would call his existential suffering. He loves his mother. He loves his disciples. He loves mankind in a manner and depth that we cannot even imagine. He does not want to depart from them. He knows that this is the will of the Father. He knows that truly saving us requires that He suffer and die, because He knows that He will be raised from the dead and ascend to the right hand of the Father. There He prepares a place for us, just as Joseph descended into Egypt, faced imprisonment and likely death, only to rise to the right hand of Pharoah to prepare a place for his people when they faced starvation. Christ knows that He is the fulfilment of prophecy. Even so, He struggles.
The conclusion is that we cannot sit back and expect to be spoon fed holiness. It is possible to sit (or stand, but especially while seated) in Church all of our life and not have learned one thing about holiness, if we are not willing to struggle and to suffer! Christ shows us the way, because He suffered voluntarily, for no good reason, just as we must do. “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.” Which means that He suffered willingly.
So how is it possible that we can attend church services all of our lives, and receive communion regularly, yet be largely clueless regarding our sole purpose as Orthodox Christians? We all know that this is not an uncommon phenomenon.
Apart from the obvious fact that I am first among sinners, can we say anything about the peculiarly modern and contemporary sins and pathologies blinding our eyes to the truth? To answer this question, we need only to look at the phenomenon of “modern” psychology.
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Modern Psychology – We Have Forgotten God
Sigmund Freud developed a theory of neurosis that applied largely, almost exclusively, to upper class people, mostly women. He believed that civilization necessarily represses our instinctual desires. This repression causes shame for both thoughts and experiences, mostly sexual, that conflict with the demands of civilized society. The consequence is neurotic behavior. Through analysis, these shameful thoughts and experiences, mostly sexual, can rise from the subconscious and be confronted, without moral judgment, thus creating a psychological breakthrough for the patient.
A later, but parallel development, occurred among influential Protestant leaders, unable to offer the psychological tools provided by the sacraments available to both Catholic and Orthodox Christians, they noted the degree to which people in their communities were suffering from anxiety and neurosis. They developed various psycho-therapeutic techniques to act as a substitute. 20th Century American psychotherapy is a Protestant phenomenon.
Second only to Freud as an influential psychoanalyst was Carl Jung. Jung believed that all human thought and action originates in our genetic code. He developed a quasi-mystical theory of archetypes that was determinative. Only after his death was it revealed the extent to which he was a Nazi sympathizer and an all-round terrible person. But an astute observer would have recognized that his theories were right out of the SS handbook. Bill Moyer’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, a Jungian epigone, accidently reveals this. Needless to say, since the Nazi revelations, Jungianism has fallen on hard times.
The Neo-Freudian movement developed in the 1960’s with the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt school. Identified by most critics as a neo-Marxist movement, it was in opposition to Freud’s politically and culturally reactionary stance. The underlying motive of the school was to turn Freud on his head, by insisting that, if sexual repression was the underlying cause of neuroses, then the obvious solution is to eliminate sexual repression. Freud was not anti-religious per se (he arguably had an obsession himself about his own Jewishness). In opposition, Marcuse wanted to eliminate all vestiges of religious moral imperatives (Christian and Jewish), especially with respect to sex, so that people could engage in sexual license guilt free. And the so-called sexual revolution was born.
In recent decades psychiatry has become virtually indistinguishable from pharmacology. Drugs have been promised as a cure for virtually the entire spectrum of mental disturbance, even though extensive studies of patients suffering from anxiety and depression demonstrate no clinical difference in results between actual drugs and placebos. The consequence is that pill addiction in the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions (although not as bad as in France where the rate of use of anti-depressants is four times that of the U.S.).
There have been a few dissenters in the psychiatric community. Carl Menninger stated late in life that his one regret was that he had not sought out the advice and counsel of religious leaders, since he had arrived at the conclusion that what passes for mental illness, in many cases, was better explained as cases of demonic possession.
Peter Breggan is a psychiatrist who, for the past 40 years, has been the leading critic of drugging people for anxiety and depression. He has pointed out that there are enough cases of mania caused by these drugs to explain virtually all of the mass shootings that have occurred in America over the same period. He has argued that the primary cure for most mental illness is a combination of love and discipline, and that the primary cause of mental illness is the spiritual emptiness of our society. When we try to live in a spiritual vacuum, we inevitably become mentally ill in pathogenic numbers.
Which reminds us of a phrase, from the Kontakion for Forgiveness Sunday, describing God, among other attributes, as “the disciplinarian of fools.” We have foolishly forgotten God, and are paying a heavy psychological price.
The alternative, to all of the dominant psychological and psychiatric theories as to what ails us, is God’s love and discipline. Sadly, many in our Church, including too many of our clergy, are not aware of the fallacies of modern psychology. Nor are they aware of the profound psychological implications of the teachings of the Desert Fathers for our psychological well-being. When confronted with a member of the flock with psychological problems, all too often the first response of our clergy is to send the person to a psychotherapist. This seems to say that the Holy Spirit does not have the power to heal our minds. This is, in large part, a failing of their seminary educations. And there is no doubt a fear of liability in the minds of clergy. For example, if a person in their congregation comes to them with thoughts of suicide. Better to pass the buck to a psychotherapist.
Nor are our clergy given any instruction in how to recognize the signs of alcoholism or drug addiction. Some clergy have even stated publicly that an Orthodox Christian cannot be an alcoholic or a drug addict, because the Holy Eucharist inoculates him from these afflictions! Does the Holy Eucharist inoculate us against sin? If that were the case, then we would only have to go to church once, and receive the Holy Eucharist once, and we would be protected. St. Chrysostom was astute enough to recognize that “they hardly leave the narthex before they start sinning.” And so every time we prepare ourselves for communion we confess that we are “first among sinners.”
Tragically the Church seems to be lurching more and more toward a false therapeutic model. A young priest recently stated that the purpose of the sacrament of confession is to “confess our traumas,” with no mention of confessing our sins.
A Therapeutic Model That Works Along Orthodox Principles
It might be helpful to take a look at a therapeutic model that does work, but which is generally misunderstood: the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Many Christians are skeptical of AA because they believe that AA members believe in a false god: the Higher Power. But a closer look reveals that the AA “program” simply distills the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. In the early AA program, the primary focus is on asking God to remove anger and resentments. In the Fourth Step, the AA member is encouraged to conduct “a searching and fearless moral inventory.” In the later literature, the moral inventory is expanded to include the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice and Sloth. To that should be added the original eighth sin—acedia—which may be defined as melancholia or despondency or depression, which is a pathology especially endemic to addiction, but afflicts the whole of society as well.
AA generally, but not exclusively, uses the term “character defects” in place of the term sin. Why is this? The reason is that most alcoholics and drug addicts who come to AA are filled with anger and resentment toward God, and with a strong anti-religious bias as a result of a range of factors that are societal and cultural as much as personal. So AA employs somewhat neutral language as a means of drawing those into God’s orbit who are atheists, agnostics, or just angry and bitter. The term “Power greater than ourselves” is employed only once in the steps. God is explicitly referred to five times. What’s wrong with that? If only our Church would make the same effort to attract atheists and agnostics to a life of repentance!
Another objection that people make is the “disease concept” of alcoholism. This concept would tend to imply that the alcoholic is not responsible for his behavior because he has a disease. But alcoholism is not described as a disease in the early literature. It is defined as “a spiritual malady,” and the alcoholic is told that he cannot recover mentally and physically until he begins to recover spiritually.
AA tends to avoid the question of causality. It serves no useful, practical purpose to try to analyze why an alcoholic drinks, other than the obvious: he drinks for the effect! And after a certain point, he simply cannot stop. He is in the grips of a mental obsession which he is powerless to control. So he must turn to God, Who only has the power to heal him. The fact that many, if not most, AA members today use AA as a religious substitute is simply a sign of the times. The literature encourages the AA member to seek out a church or synagogue, and employ the help of a priest, minister or rabbi to supplement their spiritual guidance. The literature even goes on to say that if you are a Catholic you will, of course, want to make your Fifth Step (confession) to your priest! (It is doubtful the founders of AA ever heard of Orthodox Christianity).
We might at this point ask a few questions of ourselves. How many of us in the Church are functional atheists? How many of us are obsessing about our problems? How many of us are analyzing what we hear in church, rather than listening and obeying? How many of us think we know better than what God is trying to tell us in and through the Church’s teachings and worship practices? How many of us are satisfied with ourselves, convincing ourselves that because we go to church that makes us good people: see, look at me, I’m in church, I’m a good person! How many of us are seriously willing to look deeply within ourselves, examining our sins? How many of us have a sincere desire for holiness?
The fundamental difference between classical psychology (both Platonic and Christian) and modern psychology is that classical psychology focuses on orientation and modern psychology focuses on motivation. While examining our motives is certainly an important and necessary component of the holy life, it does not in itself lead to spiritual well-being, and can actually be destructive absent the right orientation. Our ancient forebears understood this. The key to the proper spiritual development of a mature human being is to re-orient one’s consciousness to the “one thing needful.”
We are all filled with a desire and yearning—eros—for God. What happens in each and every one of us is that we are tempted to seek satisfaction of that desire in worldly objects. The cause of this propensity is our fallen and corrupted nature due to disobedience. Historically our fallenness comes from Adam. Psychologically, it comes from an unwillingness to progress beyond the emotional level of a four-year-old.
In the AA program, the alcoholic is taught to continually examine his thoughts and actions throughout the day so that he does not react like a four-year-old to people and situations beyond his control. The typical AA member, no matter how long it has been since he had his last drink, obsesses about things beyond his control. The AA member is given the spiritual tools to have his obsessive thoughts removed, because one obsession leads to another. If the alcoholic continues to obsess, he will eventually return to drinking as the only solution.
AA does not suggest that our obsessions are caused by demonic influence. But we should admit as much. AA does not concern itself so much with the causality of these obsessive thoughts as with the appropriate actions, which are prayer and the practice of the virtues especially: simplicity, patience, kindness, forgiveness, generosity, faith and love. But the Desert Fathers teach us that for every tempting thought, there is a demonic influence. Therefore, we are instructed to become familiar with our demons, and with the step-by-step process by which our demons possess us. Sobriety refers to both the means and end for achieving freedom from demonic possession. To be sober (from the Greek word nepsis) means standing guard against the demons by constantly examining our thoughts, just as a shepherd stands watch against the wolves who want to eat his sheep.
But how effective is that imagery today? In more prosaic language, we might say that 98% of the holy life involves shoveling manure. The demons work 24/7 shoveling manure in our house. That’s their job and they are very good at it. Our job is to shovel it out! The more we are complacent and lazy, or lying to ourselves about the smell, the more the manure piles up until the accumulated methane gasses build up and explode. That’s when our thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior run out of control. We will try our best to present ourselves to the world as being in control, but inside, our house is a stinking pit of despair. So we examine ourselves every day and ask ourselves how we have been selfish and self-centered. When we are wrong we admit it, and any damage we have done, we try to make right. When we sin we do not blame others or wallow in self-pity. We rely on God. We understand that God created us simple, and that man’s complex problems are of his own devising. We don’t try to fix others, nor do we really try to fix ourselves. Rather, we rely exclusively on God’s power to relieve us of the oppression of the demons. When we become entirely, rigorously and even ruthlessly honest about our sins and confess our sins, the demons flee and then we can become a partaker of the Divine Nature.
Christ mystically liberated the world from bondage to Satan. But don’t think for a minute that Satan admitted defeat. Satan is the master of delusion and illusion. He deludes himself into thinking he is winning, and he is very good at deluding us into thinking that we are masters of our own destiny. That’s how he controls us, but that can only happen if we let him, through spiritual complacency and self-reliance, by failing to be observant, by our unwillingness to put our lives and our fate in God’s hands, and by refusing to confess our sins, turn away from our sins and re-orient our mind and will to God’s.
If we don’t get our demonology right, then we don’t get God right. If we demonize the world, or demonize society, and blame everyone else for our afflictions, then what do we become? We become control freaks. We will stop at nothing to avoid taking a serious look at ourselves, while doing untold damage to ourselves and others.
Every successful sermon contains an element of pathos. At what level do we all truly identify? It is at the level of suffering. Not everyone has acquired the Holy Spirit, let alone theosis, but all of us suffer. We suffer primarily from the sin of dishonesty. We lie to ourselves by thinking we are in control and when things go wrong we, like Adam, pass the buck. The truth is that we are all slaves to something. We are either slaves to our demons, or slaves to Christ. There is no middle way.
If 98% of the spiritual life is shoveling manure, what of the other 2%? One percent comprises moments of joy and ecstasy. And the final 1% is when we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “you fool!”
If we are sincerely inspired to seek a holy life, then we must be willing to suffer the same way Christ suffered: for no good reason. We elect to suffer, through self-denial. The beauty of all of this is that in each unique human being a drama is unfolding. I like to think of my daily existence as a performance of Night On Bald Mountain on a continuous playback loop, and I feel very sorry for anyone who thinks church is boring.
Seraphim – an Orthodox Christian
Read Seraphim’s article on Gnosticism is the Root of Modernity
Thanks to source:
https://orthodoxreflections.com/what-is-holiness-from-the-orthodox-perspective/
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