Father George Aquaro on the Occult and Demonic part I

Father George Aquaro about the attractions and dangers of the metaphysics and practices of what is called the occult. From seemingly benign astrology to ghost-chasing, and Father George speaks extensively about these practices and what is behind them from the Orthodox Christian perspective.

Thanks to Ancient Faith Radio:

http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/the_occult_shining_light_on_satans_shadow


Kevin Allen: Welcome to this edition of The Illumined Heart on Ancient Faith Radio. Our current cultural climate has been called neo-pagan, with the resurgence of many ancient heresies and traditions claiming new adherents, many of whom are unfamiliar with the teachings of traditional Christianity, and the occult and so-called occult arts and magic are having a resurgence in popularity, too. We see this in the media, with movies like the Twilight series, TV programs like Ghost Whisperers, and reality shows about ghost hunters, not to mention the all-popular Harry Potter series of books and movies, which more youth have read than the Bible itself.
In this program today, we will be discussing the resurgent neo-occult movement. My guest on the program has studied this movement extensively, and has written a paper on the subject, for the purpose of helping clergy to understand what the demonic arts are. My guest is Fr. George Aquaro. Fr. George is the pastor of St. Matthew Antiochian Orthodox Church in Torrance, California. I am pleased to be speaking with him in the studio today. Fr. George, it’s great to have you. Welcome to The Illumined Heart.
Fr. George Aquaro: Thank you very much for having me.
Kevin: How did your interest in and concern about the occult begin?
Fr. George: I grew up in Los Angeles, and it’s a hard topic to avoid. L.A. has always been known—I guess the whole West Coast, sometimes called the “Left Coast”—as full of all kinds of crazy religious movements. Both of my parents left the Catholic Church in their early days and my mother took an interest in it, so I was actually raised around the topic throughout my childhood. It came up periodically throughout my life. At one point I lived in Japan. Japanese culture breaks down into Buddhism on one side, and Shinto on the other. Shinto is very much what we would consider a shamanistic religious system, so there were lots of things with the demonic and ghosts. So it’s kind of come up. Then later on, becoming a Christian, I tried to avoid all of that, but discovered that it’s not something that we can really get away from that, actually; it’s a topic that is all around us.
Kevin: I didn’t know that was your background. Interesting. Very, very interesting. Can you give us an overview, Fr. George Aquaro, of what the occult is, how you would define it, and what some of its best-known practices and methods are?
Fr. George: The meaning of the word really is “what is hidden.” The idea of the occult is that there are energies, forces, powers, that exist in the world—be they spiritual energies that are bodiless forces, or things in plants, trees, objects. These energies can be harnessed. What occult practices are about are harnessing energies, or in more advanced practices, harnessing beings, for the purpose of enhancing our self-will—getting what we want out of things.
Kevin: You write in your piece, “There are depersonalized energies free in the universe which may be harnessed, either through natural abilities, or mechanical means. In this view, those that practice it see God either as a generalized energy force, or a disinterested party to their activities.” That’s the underlying assumption, then, of those involved in the occult, that there is not a personal creator God, and that these energies are just floating out there ready for you to harness?
Fr. George: Right, because if you had a personal God, there would be a natural question, which is: What are you doing tampering with his stuff? But the idea is that the world has no ownership; there isn’t anybody who is really, really in charge, there are forces that sort of battle for territory. You can either have a mentality that it’s a feudal system, where there are forces fighting for power, or that it’s the wide open frontier, that anything that you can get is yours.
When we speak of different practices of the occult, we tend to have three general categories that one can use. The first one is what we would consider to be psychical abilities. These are people that have natural talents, let’s say. You find these in people who are folk healers, or people who are psychics, certain types of mediums, who are people who speak to the dead—and these are considered to have natural-born abilities.
Then on the opposite extreme is what we would consider to be wizardry. You don’t have any natural talents to be a wizard; it’s somebody who finds a book. For example, in medieval Europe there were books called “grimoires.” They were basically instructions on how to harness these occult forces in the universe, and it’s strictly a cookbook, you know, the eye-of-newt, bubbling-cauldron practices.
Then somewhere in between is what we would consider to be classical witchcraft, which is someone that has natural, let’s say, magical abilities, on the one hand, but then they also learn how to harness them, how to use them—the classic case of Hogwarts, right? They bring little children in that have these abilities, and then they teach them more stuff, all of this occult knowledge, to enhance the abilities, or even given them new ones, but they have to at least have the potential to be able to use them, in themselves.
Kevin: I want to come back and ask you about Harry Potter in just a minute, but sticking on this track that we are on, this underlying assumption of depersonalized energies free in the universe, obviously conflicts very directly and specifically with traditional Christian teaching?
Fr. George: Absolutely.
Kevin: Would it be safe to say, Fr. George Aquaro, that there is really no spiritual vacuum out there in the unseen world?
Fr. George: Yes, when you take the biblical perspective; God makes everything, and the creation is his, and he doesn’t give it up. That’s why, even in the Fall, the world is not lost to God. He’s still here. It is still our world, in that he has given it to us, we are to tend it, but it is still his. The forces of Satan, the fallen spirits and everything else, are squatters. The created realm is not for them; it’s for us.
This is the first thing that we learn as Christians: it’s that, if you are talking about energies of God, or powers, you have to ask, “Where do they come from?” God does not bless something, and allow it, with his blessing, to be used for evil. Our definition in the Church of “sin” is something that is good that is turned against its purpose. These things, if they are taken, are stolen. That means the original owner still owns them. When we are trying to tamper with these forces, we have to ask, “Where do they come from?”
The Church teaches us something very different, and that is that there aren’t depersonalized forces. Everything is attached to a person. Let’s say, for example, you are engaged in some type of occult practice. You are casting a spell; you think, “I am getting this energy, and I am using it.”
What the Church teaches is no, no, no, no, no. Somebody is giving you the appearance that you are doing something, but really, what it is is it’s a force, you’ve gained its attention by your incantation, your magic act, and whether it introduces itself or not, it’s the one doing these things. This is the start of that demonic temptation. You see, the demonic temptation is: yes, there are these depersonalized energies and they are just out there for you to grab…
Kevin: Neutral energies, if you want to call it that.
Fr. George: Yes, “neutral” forces that are just out there, and you can do whatever you want, and there’s no repercussions, and there’s no payment due. That is the beginning of— when you talk about a vacuum, remember, a vacuum pulls stuff toward itself. The real vacuum, spiritually speaking, is that initially we get drawn into magical practices, just thinking, “This is all for free, there is no cost to this.” But we discover later on there is a cost, because there is somebody that we are indebting ourselves to.
Kevin: It is so interesting to me, Fr. George, when you think about these “impersonal” and “depersonalized” energy theories, that you get sometimes in some forms, not all forms, of Buddhism, and so on, really, when you come down to it, and correct me where you think I am wrong, there’s no such thing. The idea of an impersonal anything is just an idea. We are persons. There is no way to think impersonally. There is no concept of “impersonal.”
Fr. George: Exactly.
Kevin: Except some maybe apophatic, opposite-of personhood, which isn’t an idea. It is the thought that you’re contradicting the only thing you know. This idea of impersonal forces and impersonal states of being—what is it? It is really kind of a false notion, no?
Fr. George: It is, because it’s a notion where God is divorced from the universe. Let’s say you see a river, and you want to dam up the river and make a lake. Well, it’s just a river, and nobody owns this, and it’s just out there for me to grab, so I dam up this river and I make this little lake. Well, somebody is going to come and say, “Hey, this is my property. What are you doing damming up my river?” “Well, you weren’t here, I didn’t see you.” But the ownership is still there, and the owner says, “Well, now that you’ve done this, you owe me. You owe me something.”
Kevin: Now are you speaking of God in this sense? Or are you speaking of the unseen forces that may also feel that they have ownership?
Fr. George: Both. When we talk about the demonic, and their powers that they have— all of us are given, by God, in our creation, certain powers. We, as human beings, we have the power to use our senses, to think. We have reasoning; we have talents. We are given certain things. It’s the same thing with spiritual beings, and when you hear about “a third of the heavenly host fell,” they retained their abilities, and they can do stuff. The demonic still retain all of their forces, because these are the forces that God created them with. They can go out and do these things, but what has happened is, what witchcraft and magic really involve, in their core, is obedience. Whom do you obey?
When you pick up a magic book, and you are doing these incantations, you are obeying the author of the book. The question is: Who told the author that these things work? Who is it who has passed down this supposed knowledge, this information? We are put in a place where we begin to obey these beings. The being says, “I will come if you do this. I will come if you draw this particular circle and you put these inscriptions around it, and you burn these colored candles. I will come, and I will do what you want me to do.”
But it always begins with our obedience to their instructions; you have to follow the instructions. And you start obeying these things, you see, and now you have put yourself under them. Eventually, when you have put yourself on this path of obeying them, there is a point where that obedience is no longer reversible, where you’ve gone a bit too far, and now you want to come out, and they say, “No, no, no, no, you see, you should’ve asked, ‘How do I get out of this?’ before you started.” Literally, it is a spiritual version of “Let the buyer beware.”
Kevin: Wow. You wrote in your article that the occult really boils down to obedience, either to God, or to our own desires. I was struck by that, and thinking of the famous, or infamous, rather, Alistair Crowley, the great Satanist. One of his famous quotes—I don’t recall the book now, he did not write that many, maybe the one book that he wrote—the quote was, “Do what thou wilt.” This was his congealing, if you will, of all of the information and knowledge that he claims that he got. “Do what thou wilt,” speaking of self-will.
I also want to defer a little bit to a conversation I would like to have with you about how the modern self-actualization, self-realization movements may tie into this, and let’s get to that in a minute.
So the root of the occult is, then, in all cases, the demonic?
Fr. George: Yes. In all cases, where we see unseen powers at work, we always ask the question, “Who is doing this?” One situation that I worked with in the past had to do with a person who went to a witch. Now, this person was from an Orthodox country, so it was an Orthodox witch. Now, what does that mean? Well, this person knows the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, but this person is talking to angels, and the angels are giving this person these incantations and rituals to do. So you ask, “Why wasn’t this done in the Church?” That’s where you get the silence, and “Well, you know, the priests, they don’t do these things the way that I do them.”
Kevin: This is a real blending of “religion and the shamanistic,” or “native-istic.”
Fr. George: Yes. Let’s say you go to church, you are really concerned, let’s say you get sick, or your child gets sick. “Oh, my child, I have to do something.” And I go to the church, and I ask the priest, “Pray for my child, and anoint him with the holy oil.” We see lots of examples where the priest is clearly not a healer, because he goes and visits everybody and not everybody recovers.
Kevin: Or he prays and the child doesn’t get healed.
Fr. George: Right, so the parents say, “But I really want my child to be healed.” Well, what’s the next stage? Well, there is this person over here, and this one says she can heal, and there is a temptation, “Maybe God has blessed her to say these incantations and do all of this stuff.” But, the question that remains is: why is she operating outside of the Church? Why is it that she’s doing this on her own?
All of the services in the Orthodox Church are acts of obedience to God. This is one thing I want to really emphasize: there is a difference between the obedience in the Church and the obedience to the self. When you pick up a magic book, you’re going through this thing saying, “I want to do this, I want to do that, oh, and here’s these things that’ll help me do it.” In the Church, we obey God, in that we have a system where we have been called to serve the services, not because we feel like doing them, but because we have to do them, we have been called to obedience.
The priest does not say on Sunday morning, “You know, I just do not feel like doing this whole Liturgy thing.” Well, some of us are tempted to do that, (laughter) but we don’t. You still get up out of bed, and you get dressed, and you go to the church, and do the service. Why? Because you are commanded to do it. This is what you must do. We, as priests, when somebody comes to us and says, “I am sick,” we are commanded, you go to this page of the book, and this is the service that you do.
Kevin: And it is God’s will.
Fr. George: What happens past that point is up to him, but we do it; we’ve been called to obedience. Throughout the Scriptures, for example, Elisha worked great miracles, and yet, he was afflicted. He died with diseases, that easily, if it had been somebody else, he could have healed them, but it was not for him to use the powers for himself, you see. He was called to obey God, and do what God called him to do.
The services of the Church are an obedience to God, in which the self-will is removed as much as possible. That’s why there are standards for when you use these things, how you use these things, and it’s always for the benefit of another.
Kevin: And for the salvation of our souls.
Fr. George: Absolutely.
Kevin: Without entering into danger.
Fr. George: Right, because our wills are broken. That’s what the fallen nature is, that our human will is broken, and so we don’t perceive things properly, we don’t get all of these things.
Kevin: Interesting.
Fr. George: So it is always to another person. That is why I do not hear my own confessions. I can only hear somebody else’s confession.
Kevin: Interesting.
Fr. George: It is a check on our will, so the will does not remain in the self.
Kevin: The fallen will is within the realm of the fallen man.
Fr. George: Absolutely.
Kevin: So when you are depending upon it, you’re dealing in the realm of that which is fallen, as opposed to that which is divine.
Fr. George: Right.
Kevin: How interesting. A question, though, about that, Fr. George Aquaro: Is there a distinction that can be made between what we’ve been discussing and what others might call the “paranormal” and the “occult”? Or is it the view of the Church that all, and anything, that would be within “paranormal,” is necessarily occult and demonic?
I ask the question, and just let me make a very brief question follow-up, because it seems to me that sometimes we operate at such a low level of normal consciousness that perhaps some of what might be called the paranormal is nothing more than the widening of the parameters of what God has given us, in terms of human consciousness. Am I off-base there?
Fr. George: No, the question isn’t really, “Do these things exist?” It’s: “Who’s doing them?” In the Church, we believe in miracles. When you come on Sunday, we say, “Bread and wine: Body and Blood”—how’d that happen? And it goes on from there. If you talk about, for example, the idea of ghosts, well, if you go back to the desert Fathers, you see where there’ve been apparitions of the dead. When the witch of Endor raises Samuel, Samuel actually appears.
Kevin: Was that an apparition, or was that a demonic being masquerading as an apparition, and where are we on ghosts?
Fr. George: Well, there are numerous examples of the dead asking the saints, the living saints for prayer. This isn’t really a disputed issue in the Church. Samuel appears in a type of appearance that one could call an angel of sorts. The root “angelos,” is “messenger,” and in fact, some of the early saints said that when we die and we are of Christ, that we go to school and literally become types of angels.
That doesn’t mean that we become bodiless powers; that’s a different category. The dead can bring messages for the living, but it’s under very restricted cases, and these are cases where, number one, there isn’t any necromancy going on. Necromancy is raising the dead.
If you pull our Ouija board out, you will not get Grandma Ethel. She is not going to come to your Ouija board, because that’s not what God has the communication between the living and dead for. It’s not to find out what your lottery number is. These are set cases where God may, in certain circumstances, allow the dead to contact the living for either the request of prayers, so that their souls may go to rest, or to deliver a particular message. This is sometimes called a psychopomp. A pomp is a procession. It’s somebody escorts the soul to the place of rest. For example, you’re dying, and you are holding onto this life, because you are afraid of dying, and God will send someone that you know to come and say, “Hey, look, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. I’ll be with you, to go through this process. Yes, it is scary, but …” You know, God is very merciful.
Kevin: So the answer is, and do not let me put words in your mouth, there are some apparitions who are truly those of our departed, but this is under the operation of, if you will, the mercy and the economia of God, not self-will and not magical forces?
Fr. George: Right, right.
Kevin: Did I understand you correctly to say that there are some paranormal activities, maybe, that we might call “clairvoyance,” or whatever, that could be within the realm of the natural, just an extension of it? Maybe some of us are sleepwalking half the time and we are not tapping our natural God-given resources? Or are they always occult?
Fr. George: Well, there are examples of saints who appeared to have what we would consider paranormal abilities.
Kevin: Yes, out-of-body clairvoyance, bilocation healings, foreknowledge, etc., etc.
Fr. George: Right, and those are things that God blessed those people with. Who are we to say whom God is going to bless and whom he isn’t? But again, you have to look at what does that person do with those things, under what circumstances? In the case of these saints who had these powers, they were very holy people. They were very well-healed people, so they weren’t going to use these things to— “Hey, watch this, I am going to really spook my cousin. Watch me, I am going to levitate across the room.”
Kevin: Or, “Look how holy and wonderful I am because of these powers that I have,” i.e., pride.
Fr. George: Exactly, these powers aren’t unheard of. In one case I dealt with someone who claimed to have a lot of psychic abilities—precognition, the ability to have visions of the future that were coming true, lots and lots of activity, but there were some mixed things that were happening along with it, and that is always a bad sign, where some of these beings appeared to be rather sinister in how they were acting. My advice to his person was: “Pray against these things, reject them,” and as soon as this person started to reject these powers, all kinds of things started to happen in their house…
Kevin: Negative things?
Fr. George: Very negative things.
Kevin: They didn’t like being rejected, they weren’t going to be rejected.
Fr. George: Exactly. All of a sudden this apparent “personal gift” that this person had— all of a sudden the gift disappears, and suddenly it became this highway for these demons to start attacking the family and the household.
Kevin: Scary, scary. Father, let me ask you this question. Most of the occult practices that you outline in your paper are ancient. We’ve talked about magic, necromancy, the use of so-called “natural powers,” foreknowledge, and so on, but you have said that these practices and their magical symbols are also alive today in our culture, even having resurgence in popularity. Why do you think that is? Why are they having a resurgence in popularity today, and can you give us some examples of some of these ancient methodologies that we can see around us, even if we don’t realize that they are occult?
Fr. George: I think one of the reasons why these things are becoming more popular is that our society, as a whole, has lost its spiritual strain. We, as human beings— we’re body, soul, and spirit. Part of us has that spiritual thirst for God, and a lot of this phenomenon is going on around us. How many people have said, “Oh, that house down the street is haunted”? Or they’ll go to someone’s house late at night and they decide, “Hey, let’s get out the Ouija board.”
But we now have an utterly materialistic philosophy in our modern culture. We have sort of bought into Marx’s dialectic materialism—“There is only the material, this is all that there is”—and people are naturally hungry for something more, something profound.
This is the problem with the boredom of modern Christianity. It’s boring. That is why everything now has become about entertainment—the televangelist, or the rock band in your church. It has to make it exciting because it’s so boring. It’s banal. “Okay, well, I have said the magic incantation, I am now saved, Jesus is going to give me everlasting life, because I said this certain prayer that somebody gave me.”
Kevin:” What do I do now?”
Fr. George: Yes. “Is that all there is?” I remember before I converted to Christianity, one of the reasons that I swore that I would never become a Christian was: there was a story about this young man who had murdered his family, and there was some boneheaded pastor who said, “Well, you know, a week earlier he gave his heart to Jesus, and I know that he killed his family, and then ended up killing himself, but I know that he’s in heaven right now, because he gave his heart to the Lord.” And I said, “Wait a second! He gave his heart to the Lord one day, and the next day he does this horrible act.” And I think to myself, “What is going on here? Is God that stupid?”
Kevin: Bad doctrine.
Fr. George: It was horrific, and because we are surrounded by, as you put it, “bad doctrine,” people get this stuff in their mind, but they know that there is something more out there, and they start looking for it on their own, because these figures that they look to who are supposedly “their church,” are not giving them the whole story of the world and how it really is.
Kevin: “Devoid of true wisdom,” let’s say.
Fr. George: Absolutely.
Kevin: Devoid of true wisdom. Can you give us some examples of modern extensions? I was fascinated, by the way, in your article, to read about the Starbucks logo. I have to ask you about that.
Fr. George: (laughter)
Kevin: I almost want to stop drinking… I am sorry Starbucks, I know, whatever, but, please…
Fr. George: If you look at the history of the Starbucks logo, originally they had a rather graphic portrayal of a mermaid with two tails, and it is an old fertility symbol. Now, as Starbucks has gotten gradually more corporatized and [has] cleaned up its graphics, now it is just sort of a lady, and sort of a little bit of her hair, and all that, but it’s an old fertility image. This image was also used to ward off the evil eye.
There is a type of image that this is sort of based on which is called a “sheela-na-gig,” which was usually a picture of a woman giving birth. It was a type of fertility image that was used to contradict infertility, thus bad luck. So it’s an old lucky charm, let’s say. It is the same as a horseshoe over your doorway. It’s a symbol, but it’s slapped on a cup of coffee, and when I tell people, particularly young people that are not really interested in having children right now, that, yes, there is a fertility logo on your half-caff latte, you should see how quickly they put it down! (laughter)
Kevin: I wonder why they went with that. Was it because they picked that character from Moby Dick, and he was into all that sort of stuff?
Fr. George: I’ve never really looked into why they picked it, but it gets into something that you brought up a little bit earlier, and that is: the occult is very aesthetically pleasing, because that is part of how it attracts our interest.
Kevin: And we are naturally drawn to the transcendent.
Fr. George: Absolutely, and when you have an appealing image, when you take a look at, for example, the power of the Nazi art, and how it drew Germans in: the swastika—well, the swastika is an image from Hinduism that goes back 4000-5000 years, and it’s such a powerful image that you see it in Native-American art, you see it in Greek art: the tetra-gamma, the four gammas that come together to make that swastika pattern—that graphic image has such an effect on us that it pops up in unrelated cultures. This is what the power of the occult is, that it harnesses our natural attractions to things, and turns them against us. It is a romance.
Kevin: And we are visual, we are auditory, and we smell, and so all of these sensual prompts, maybe, can lead us in those directions. I shop at health food stores, and I am interested in evangelizing to the New Agers and all that kind of stuff. What about Reiki?
Fr. George: Well, that’s, again, a very old idea that the body has these energies that are out of balance, and you have to bring them back into balance, and it’s a kissing-cousin to the idea of, “Your humors are off balance, and you have too much blood, and so we need to bleed you.”
Kevin: Is that just bad science, or is that occult?
Fr. George: In the case of Reiki, it really goes into the occult. This idea that I can come up to another person and pull energies out of them with my hand…
Kevin: Messing with “the auras” and all that sort of business?
Fr. George: Yes, you are right to pull out the idea if this is bad science. Well, it is absolutely bad science, but, at the same time, it also gets into these impersonalized energies. The question is, if you are sick, where is God in your illness?
Kevin: Yes, okay, I get that. Also, too, we learn all about, in our culture, certain yogas and chakras, and all of this, meditation practices, and so on. We will talk a little bit more about that, as well. Father, I see that we are coming up to the time limit on our first program, so let me close with this question. Take what time you need, then we will close and come back later, because I realize this is going to be two parts, and I am extraordinarily interested in this. I’m sure our listeners will be, too, so I don’t want to rush us.
You said something interesting in your article that I’d like you to close on. You claim that the failure of modernism that came out of the European Enlightenment, and which set the stage for post-modernism—where we don’t trust anything absolute, and we’ve lost our hope, if you will, in some of these postulates of modernism—post-modernism provided the cultural, philosophical environment within which modern magic can flourish: can you explain what you mean, as we close on that? How does post-modernism allow for modern magic to flourish?
Fr. George: In an earlier part of this interview we talked a little bit about the human yearning for the spiritual, and modernism is a very depersonalized, very mechanical approach to the world. It’s utterly materialistic. People are searching for these spiritual truths, these spiritual realities. Post-modernism jumps in as a response to it, because those needs, those desires, were never quite fulfilled.
The failure of Marxism has always been that you give people everything that they are supposed to have, you give everybody an equal share, and they’re still unhappy. Human beings have a need to be happy far beyond a roof over our heads or foods in our tummies. Post-modernism, then, in rejecting the absolutes of the modernist ideal, says, “Now you need to look after your own happiness yourself. You need to find whatever your own truth is.” Modernism produces a technocratic system that’s supposed to make everything right.
Kevin: Which fails and failed.
Fr. George: It failed, and so now, you cannot depend on anybody else. No church…
Kevin: Got you: a rejection of everything absolute, a rejection of everything historically traditional?
Fr. George: Well, what you can do then, is you can take all of those little traditions and pick out what you like. “I like Byzantine icons, so I put Byzantine icons on my wall, but you know, I kind of like some of that Hinduism, it is really neat with the yoga, so I am going to do yoga in front of my Byzantine icon, but you know, the Byzantine music, it’s a little spooky, I kind of still like my Christian rock, so I will listen to that.” That is what happens: you pick up the things that you like.
Kevin: Or, “I like their angel thing, I’m going to pray to the angels.”
Fr. George: Sure. I remember there was a TV show about, supposedly, these women who were angels, and my question always was, “Well, who runs the show there, are the angels just doing things on their own, or do they have a boss? With Charlie’s Angels, you’ve got Charlie, but on this TV show, who’s your boss?” “Well, we don’t want to talk about that.” It is interesting that angels are not controversial, but God is.
Kevin: Yes, that is very, very interesting. The point is that post-modernism opened the door to this kind of eclecticism, if you want to say it that way, and the search for one’s personal spirituality.
Fr. George: Yes, the locus of truth in modernism was always the scientific fact. Science has never been able to really produce human happiness. This is the failure of pharmacology, this is the failure of psychology, it’s the failure of even the marketing approach to business. All of these things ultimately fail, so then the post-modernist says, “I am going to reject the systems, I am going to reject the facts, and I am just going to look for what makes me happy,” and this flings the door open.
You see, modernism tries to destroy the Church by rejecting the spiritual, and making everything about business, and then post-modernism tries to keep the Church from standing up, by saying, “You don’t have to follow a system, you don’t have to follow an institution, you don’t have to listen to anybody else, just do what your heart guides you to,” and you are right back to self-will.
Kevin: With that, Fr. George Aquaro, let’s end Part I. My guest has been Fr. George Aquaro. He’s the pastor of St. Matthew Antiochian Orthodox Church in Torrance, California. We have been speaking about the resurgence of occultism in the neo-occult movement. Fr. George, a fascinating, wonderful part one. I am really looking forward to part two. Thanks for being my guest.
Fr. George: Thank you very much.

Christ the eternal Tao part III

Transcript, source, and thanks to:

(audio)
http://ancientfaith.com/specials/episodes/christ_the_eternal_tao_-_part_3



Host: Now, Father Damascene is going to be concluding the talk, and he will be speaking, specifically, on the watchfulness of prayer, and the deeper aspects of prayer and unification with our Lord Jesus Christ.
Father Damascene: In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For those of you who have been following the outline that we gave out, we will go right into the subject of watchfulness now.
In order for us to grow in the life of prayer, and on the path of union to God, we must cultivate the virtue of watchfulness, which is a state of inner vigilance, attention, and spiritual sobriety. Due to the corruption of our human nature that began at the fall of man, we are inclined toward sin, and our consciousness is broken up and easily influenced by our imagination, which is often inclined toward sinful thoughts.
Therefore, we need to stand guard with our minds against these sinful thoughts, and cut them off when they arise. During time set aside for prayer, we must cut off, not only sinful thoughts, but also all thoughts which distract us from prayer.
Christ spoke much concerning watchfulness. “Take heed to yourselves,” he said, “lest at any time your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting or drunkenness, and the cares of this life.”
To further impress upon the people the need for watchfulness, he told parables about it, such as the story of the five wise virgins, who trimmed and guarded their lamps. “Let your waists be girded about,” Christ said, “and your lamp burning, and you, yourselves, like men who wait for their Lord, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks, they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He comes, shall find watching.”
As I mentioned last night, before his trial and crucifixion, when a time of great temptation was about to come upon his apostles, Christ told them, “Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak.” He says watch, and then pray while watching.
Prayer cannot be pure if the mind is actively engaged in following thoughts. For prayer to be pure, it must arise from a pure spirit, and this can only occur when one first stands watch and thus rises above thoughts and images. That is why Christ said, “Watch and pray.” Prayer and watchfulness are inseparably bound together. Also, as I mentioned last night, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov said, “An essential and dispensable property of prayer is attention. Without attention, there is no prayer.”
St. Simeon the New Theologian provides one of the best explanations of the relationship between watchfulness and prayer. He writes:

Watchfulness and prayer should be as closely linked together as the body to the soul. For the one cannot stand without the other. Watchfulness first goes on ahead like a scout and engages sin in combat. Prayer then follows afterwards, and instantly destroys and exterminates all the evil thoughts with which watchfulness has already been battling. For attentiveness alone cannot exterminate them. This, then, is the gate of life and death. If by means of watchfulness we keep prayer pure, we make progress. But if we leave prayer unguarded, and permit it to be defiled, our efforts are null and void.

Through attention, or watchfulness, we continually make our eye single, to use Christ’s words. We continually rise above all sensory forms and images, all conditioned thoughts and emotions. We continually allow our nous, or mind, to rise in its journey to receive purification, and thus be united with its creator.
We continually stand guard so as not to let in any thoughts or images that will pull it down to the realm of the senses, and we continually burn away, in the light of understanding, all forms and images of desire, together with all the resentments hiding in the recesses of our souls.
In order to gain attention, we must, as the writers of the Philokalia teach, “go within ourselves.” St. Nicephoros the Monk writes, “We cannot be reconciled with God and assimilated to him, unless we return, or rather, enter into ourselves, insofar as this lies within our power. For the miracle consists in tearing ourselves away from the distraction and vain concerns of the world, and in this way, relentlessly seizing hold of the Kingdom of Heaven within us.”
Closing our eyes and not focusing on outward sensory impressions, we stand or sit at attention before God in prayer. Almost immediately, we find our fallen, fragmented consciousness filling our head with thoughts, images, fantasies and memories. But as we continue to realign our will toward Christ, yearning to have his mind, and be filled with his life, rather than our own, gradually our awareness will begin to separate itself from our thoughts.
St. Theophan the Recluse writes, “Little by little, you will separate from your thoughts. You will find that you have strayed far from your first created image.” Of course, we spoke at length in the last talk this morning about what that first created image is.
Above all, our inward attention should be directed at thoughts. This is because, in the words of St. Theophan, “Sinful passions and desires rarely attack by themselves. They are most often born of thoughts.” From this we can make a rule: Cut off thoughts, and you will cut off everything.
When thoughts come, we should not attempt to get involved or argue with them. For such struggle only binds us to them. As St. Silouan of Mt. Athos affirms, “The experience of the holy Fathers shows various ways of combating intrusive thoughts, but it is best of all not to argue with them. The mind that debates with such a thought will be faced with its steady development, and, bemused by the exchange, will be distracted from remembrance of God, which is exactly what the demons are after. Having diverted the mind from God, they confuse it, and it will not emerge clean.” Here he is speaking specifically of intrusive thoughts that come during prayer.
Struggle against thoughts is vain and futile. It is enough simply to observe the thoughts as they arise, and then let them go without reacting to them or following them. “When someone is in the beginning of his spiritual life,” says Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos, “he should not study a lot, but instead watch himself and observe his thoughts.”
A thought cannot exist for long under the light of direct objective observation. If we do not align our will with it, it naturally disappears. As the ascetic Abba Poimen teaches in the fifth century, “If we do not do anything about thoughts, in time they are spoiled, that is, they disintegrate.”
Many ancient Christian teachers speak of a struggle with thoughts. It is vital that we understand what they mean by this. Our struggle is not against the thoughts, for as Christ said, “Resist not evil.” Rather, out struggle should be to rise toward our source of knowing, that is, toward God, who is beyond thought.
In other words, we do not engage the thoughts, but instead, struggle to keep our attention lifted above them in stillness of mind. Each time we catch ourselves in a sinful thought, we should just return our attention to what is above it, to God. We do not validate the thought by giving it any more attention. This is already to repulse or to cut off the thought without directly struggling against it. It is active, not passive, for the action does not involve movement towards the distracting thought.
To raise our attention to our creator is simply to humbly yearn for him, to look up to him with the eye of our soul, and in many cases, to express our yearning with words. “Never allow your mind to be dragged down,” says St. Macarius the Great of Egypt, “but always raise it on high and God will help you.”
Raising our minds to God does not mean trying to imagine God. To deliberately create images in the mind is only to create more distraction, and it can lead to delusion. In watching over our thoughts during times of prayer, we should not focus on them, but rather de-focus from them. We should not try to analyze them, for analysis involves us in the very thing from which we are seeking to separate ourselves. Once again, it means we are trusting in our own powers, rather than in God’s powers. Therefore, we should be simple. Just watch the thought disappear, as if we were an objective, disinterested spectator, and they will pass, one by one.
Above all, we should not be agitated by the appearance of thoughts, for this also enables them to steal our grapes. As Abba Barsanuphius of the 6th century writes, “If a thought comes, do not be alarmed. The bad thing is not that a thief enters the house, but that he takes what he finds in the house.”
Even in times of prayer, we should not try to force our mind to be empty of thoughts. Instead, as I just mentioned, we are to watch the thoughts arise and disappear as we focus our attention on prayer. We will thereby come to recognize that the thoughts are not who we are.
St. Theophan the Recluse says, “It is a great mistake, and a common one, to honor everything that comes up in us as the property of our own blood, for which we take a stand, as for our own selves.” He is speaking about thoughts. It is a great mistake to honor the thoughts, the ideas, the opinions that come in us as the property of our own blood, for which we take a stand as is for our own selves.
We tend to identify with our thoughts. Descartes had the famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” during the Enlightenment, where rationalism took precedence over faith, and in our Orthodox faith, of course, we do not believe that our thoughts are who we are, that we just simply let them go, not attaching ourselves to them.
Although it is wrong to try to determine the source of every thought, we should realize the primordial enemy of man—the devil—is constantly at work to divert us from our path to union with God, and that he does this by making suggestions to us in the form of thoughts.
St. Theophan the Recluse writes:

The enemy has a law, not to begin suddenly, with a passion, but with a thought, and to repeat the thought often. Continual thoughts are onerous and murderous. To them, more than others, belongs the name, Tempting. Concerning them, it is necessary to know, they are not from nature, although they are similar to it in character, but are always from the enemy. These are temptations such as blasphemy, despair, and unbelief. The main thing is to never incline towards them, never adopt them, and to keep the heart free from them, separating them from yourself.

It is also crucial to remember that the fallen spirits, or the demons, have no power over us unless we give it to them by consenting to their suggestions. St. Theophan expresses it this way:

When the soul is bright, the demons are unable to look at it, like bats who fear the light. They look at it only when it begins to darken. They run in packs everywhere, and as soon as they notice a darkened soul, they immediately fall upon it, and begin to twist it to and fro with thoughts, passionate desires, and disturbance of feelings. They even attempt to creep up to bright souls, but are struck down by rays of light, as if by an arrow.

In watching over our thoughts, we will be able to cut them off before they develop into passions. In the Philokalia, the growth from a thought into a passion is described with scientific precision. First comes the provocation of the thought, then the conjunction of the thought with emotion, then the joining or agreement of the will with the thought. If the soul does not pull back at this point, the thought becomes a habit, and the mind is constantly preoccupied with the object of his passionate urge.
Finally, the person falls into the captivity of the urge, and rushes gladly and violently to satisfy it. For this reason, it is much better to cut off the sinful thought when it first rises up in us, before it turns into a sinful passion. Just as it is much easier to pull up a tree when it is a seedling than when it is full-grown, so it is much easier to cut off thoughts in the beginning.
As I mentioned earlier, it is not only obviously evil thoughts that should be passed over during times of prayer. Even seemingly good thoughts should be left behind. “Impassioned thoughts,” said St. Hesychios, “follow hard upon thoughts that appear to be innocent and dispassionate. The latter open the way to the former. This we have found through years of experience and observation.”
Continuing to this practice of going within and standing apart from thoughts, we will continue to shed layers of our compulsive thought patterns. At unexpected moments of the day, we may suddenly become aware of aspects of our corrupted condition that had previously been hidden from us. Buried resentments will come to the surface where we can at last repent and be free of them.
Above all, we will begin to realize our secret rebellion against God, which we reveal each time we condemn another person, or feel dissatisfaction. As we become aware of our wretchedness, tears may come to our eyes, cleansing our inward filth. We may not know from where these tears come, for they may not be related to anything in particular, but rather, they are related to who we really are.
As St. Niketas Stethatos in the 11th century writes,

Once you come to know yourself, a kind of supra-rational divine humility suddenly descends upon the soul, bringing contrition and tears of fervent compunction of heart. To know yourself means that you must guard yourself diligently from everything external to you. It means rest from worldly concerns and cross-examination of a conscience. This is true humility, the humility that teaches us to be inwardly humble, and makes our heart contrite. If you do not know yourself, you cannot know what humility is. To know oneself is the goal of the practice of the virtues.

When we go within ourselves and truly begin to stand apart from thought, we begin to trust the calculations of our egotistical minds. We begin to grow sick of our stupid judgments. Throughout the life of our ego, we have become habituated to trusting the opinions and calculations of our minds, which are often the mere servants of our emotions. To practice watchfulness is essentially to practice distrusting them. Once we have begun to become aware of who we really are through entering within ourselves, we will realize what a weak tool is the calculating machine of the human brain, how low its form of knowledge.
For us who have been conditioned by the modern Western mentality, “I think, therefore I am,” it is especially difficult to begin to distrust our thoughts, since our society has been built precisely on reliance on human reason. But this is precisely what we must do if we are to conform our minds to the mind of Christ.
The aforementioned Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos, a beautiful, innocent soul, and a much loved spiritual father of our times, once said, “The devil does not hunt after those who are lost. He hunts after those who are aware, those who are close to God. He takes from them trust in God, and begins to afflict them with self-assurance, logic, thinking, criticism.” A very interesting statement for our times. These are things we are told that we are supposed to have: Self-assurance, logic, thinking, criticism. We all should be critics. He says that the devil takes from people trust in God, and begins to afflict them with these things.

Therefore, we should not trust our logical minds. Never believe your thoughts. Live simply, and without thinking too much, like a child with his father. Faith in God, without too much thinking, works wonders. A logical mind hinders the grace of God and miracles. Practice patience, without judging with a logical mind.

A spiritual son of Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos recalls, “The elder always tried to have good thoughts. He said to us, however, that it is not necessary to make this our final aim, namely, having good thoughts, because our souls should be purified, even of them, and be left naked, clothed only in the divine grace which we received for free in holy baptism.” The first stage is to cultivate good thoughts. The final stage is to be purified even of good thoughts, to just be enlightened by the grace of God.
Elder Paisios counseled,

We ought always to be careful, and be in constant hesitation about whether things are really as we think, for when someone is constantly occupied with his thoughts and trusts in them, the devil will manage things in such a way that he will make the man evil, even if by nature he was good.
The ancient fathers did not trust their thoughts at all, but even in the smallest things, when they had to give an answer, they addressed the matter in their prayer, joining it to fasting, in order to some way “force” divine grace to inform them what was the right answer according to God. And when they received the “information” they gave the answer.
Today, I observe that, even with great matters, when someone asks, before he has even had the time to complete his question, we interrupt him and answer him. This shows that not only do we not seek enlightenment from the grace of God, but we do not even judge with the reason that God gave us. On the contrary, whatever our thoughts suggest to us, immediately, without hesitation, we trust it and consent to it, often with disastrous results.
Almost all of us view thoughts as being something simple and natural, and that is why we naively trust them. However, we should neither trust them, nor accept them. Thoughts are like airplanes flying in the air. If you ignore them, there is no problem. If you pay attention to them, you create an airport inside your head, and permit them to land.

Above all, judgmental thoughts block us from God, since in the very act of harboring them, we are trying to take the place of God, who alone is judge. When we feel an exhilaration by seeming to get on top of someone through judgment, then sooner or later this will lead to inward conflict. If the source of the conflict, which is the soul playing God, is not eradicated, then it can lead to depression and to despair, and even to physical sickness.
The person who is truly following Christ will immediately recognize that the indulgence of a single judgment separates him from God. Therefore, when judgmental thoughts intrude upon his mind, begging to be attended to, and promising the exultation of pride, he immediately cuts them off and lets them pass into oblivion. It does not matter how sagacious, how compelling, how profoundly psychological such judgments appear to him. He wants God above all else, and these thoughts deprive him of God, and so he rejects them.
The 19th century Russian elder, St. Ambrose of Optina, gave this practical advice to his spiritual daughter: “Look at everything simply. Living simply means not judging. Do not judge anyone. For example, ‘Here comes Elikonida. She passed by, and that is all.’ This is what thinking simply means. Otherwise, at seeing Elikonida passing by, you could think about her bad side—she is such and such, her character is thus and so—that is not simple.”
It is not only people that we can judge. We can pass judgment on our surrounding circumstances, or even on life itself. In doing so, we are at heart judging God, himself, often without even knowing it. This, too, is a way of playing God, and so it separates us from him, the source of our life.
I mentioned earlier that to cut off a sinful thought, it is enough just to turn our attention away from it and toward God. We can do this without words, or we can do it with the help of words, calling upon God from our hearts. Often a short phrase will be enough, such as “Lord, have mercy” or “Lord, forgive me.”
St. Theophan the Recluse explains:

Whenever we appeal directly to the Lord, with fear, reverence, hope and faith in his complete activity, without entering into a verbal battle with a passionate thought, the passionate thought then moves away from the mind’s eye, which is fixed on the Lord. When it is cut off from the mind through such attention, the passionate thought departs of its own accord, if it has been naturally stimulated. If the enemy is involved, however, then a discerning ray of light that comes from contemplation of the Lord strikes him. It happens that the mind immediately calms down from passionate violations as soon as it turns to the Lord and calls upon him.

There are times when, such as after a passion or demonic temptation has begun to get a hold on us, an especially fervent appeal is in order. St. John Climacus advises:

For those who have not yet obtained true prayer of the heart, violence in bodily prayer is a great help. I mean, stretching out the hands, beating the breast, sincerely raising the eyes to heaven, deep sighing, frequent prostrations. If possible, go apart for a brief space; hide for a while in some secret place; raise on high the eyes of your soul, if you can, but, if not, your bodily eyes. Hold your arms motionless in the form of a cross in order to shame and conquer the unclean spirit by the sign. Cry to him who is mighty to save, not with cleverly spun phrases, but in humble words, preferably making this your prelude: “Have mercy on me, for I am weak.” Then you will know by experience the power of the most high, and, with invisible help, you will invisibly drive away the invisible ones, that is, the demons.

Now having laid more of a foundation by discussing what prayer is and how it is connected with watchfulness, let us look more closely at the Jesus Prayer. “The action of this prayer,” says St. Barsanuphius of Optina, “is always hidden in the greatest mysteries. It does not consist merely in speaking the words, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ but reaches the heart and mysteriously settles there. Through this prayer, we enter into relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. We become accustomed to him. We merge with him into one whole. This prayer fills the soul with calm and joy amidst the most difficult trials, in the midst of every oppression and human vanity.”
As St. Ignatius Brianchaninov teaches, the essence of the Jesus Prayer was indicated by Christ himself, shortly before his crucifixion. He writes, “The use of the all-holy divine name, ‘Jesus,’ in prayer, and prayer in his name, was appointed by our Lord Jesus Christ himself, when Christ said, ‘And whatsoever you shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you shall ask anything in my name, I will do it. So far, you have asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive it, that your joy may overflow.’ “
What is it that will be given to a person who prays in the name of the Lord Jesus, that can fill him to overflowing with joy? He will be given, we reply, in the words of our Lord, “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.”
St. Gregory of Sinai affirms that the Jesus Prayer is one of the primary ways by which one can cultivate the seed of grace given at baptism. He writes, “The energy of the Holy Spirit is manifested to those under spiritual guidance, through the continuous invocation of the Lord Jesus, repeated with conscious awareness, that is, through mindfulness of God.”
St. Gregory says that this means can be more effective than others

if one diligently and persistently learns how to dig the ground and locate the gold. Thus, if we want to realize and know the truth, let our aim be to make the energy of prayer alone active in our hearts, for it brings warmth and joy to the soul, and sets the heart alight with an ineffable love for God and man. It is on account of this that humility and contrition flow richly from prayer, for prayer in beginners is the unceasing noetic activity of the Holy Spirit. To start with, it rises like a fire of joy from the heart. In the end, it is like light made fragrant by divine energy.

When doing the Jesus Prayer as it should be done, one does not merely say the words, but actually prays them from the depths of one’s being, speaking person-to-person, always returning to the awareness that one is addressing someone. Here is an analogy that might make it a little more clear: I have a telephone, and I turned it off, so it is just a dead piece of metal, so I can talk on this phone, I can be saying something, but I know that nobody is listening on the other line. If I know nobody is listening, I can just talk and I am just talking into nothing. But if the phone is on, and I have called somebody, and I know that the person is on the other line, and when I am talking he or she is listening to what I am saying, then I know, and I am conscious, that I am addressing someone.
This is the way we have to be in prayer. In other words, we should not just repeat the prayer by rote: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” We should be concentrated on the words of the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ.” We are addressing Christ, we are conscious of him, we are affirming that he is the Lord, that he is the Christ, he is the Messiah, that he is God, and we ask him to have mercy on us, which means to give us all that we need for our salvation and deification, and by extension, not only on us but on everyone around us.
We are conscious of this and we are conscious of the words of the prayer, but more so, on a deeper level, we are conscious of the one that we are addressing in the prayer. We are addressing Jesus Christ. We are not speaking into a dead telephone. We are speaking to someone who is present with us, who is before us, who is closer to us than our own soul, who within, is inside of us, all around us, and so we are addressing a live, living person. This is the consciousness of addressing someone that we need to have.
St. Archimandrite Sophrony says, “The name of Christ must not be detached from the person of God, lest prayer be reduced to a technical exercise, and so go against the commandment, ‘You shall not take the name of your Lord God in vain.’ “
Elder Nikodim of Karoulia, a practitioner of the Jesus Prayer, who died in 1984 on Mt. Athos, says,

You have to turn to the Lord with your mind. Don’t just pronounce the words. You have to see the Lord himself in the prayer. It is our designation to be like angels. Angels gaze unceasingly upon the Lord, and we have to strive for this—to see the Lord in the words, with our mind to look upon him, but if with our mind, we only say the words, then we will not look upon the Lord, and this is not enough for prayer. But this seeing is without images. It is with the spirit. God is a spirit.
As he explained to the Samaritan woman, “You will worship in spirit.” We pray in spirit to the Lord, Himself. How is this? When I turn to the Lord, and right then believe and feel that I am looking upon the Lord, and the Lord is looking upon me, the Lord is ceaselessly looking upon me. You have to look upon the Lord with faith. Look upon the Lord and believe that the Lord is looking upon you, in spirit. Pray in spirit.
God demands worshipers who worship him in spirit. God is a spirit, and one must worship him in spirit. We, with our spirit, pray to God the Spirit. Our spirit is united with God. When we turn to God the Spirit, with faith, then the Lord will look upon us, and the human spirit will be united with the Spirit of the Lord at the time of prayer.
You have to practice this. As always, when you pray, immediately turn to the Lord. You must address the Lord and sense the Lord. Then there will be an echo. You will receive a response. Mercy will come to you. This is all by faith. It is accomplished by faith, by faith and compulsion. That is what it is. “Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” This is a very good prayer. From one utterance of the prayer, you already sense and taste God’s mercy, and the further you go, the greater it gets, if it is with attention. At the time of prayer, if you go through the whole prayer rope, then tears will begin to flow, contrition will come, and then warmth of heart will set in.

Elder Porphyrios, another holy elder of recent times who lived on Mt. Athos, speaks of the love and longing with which one should say the Jesus Prayer. He says,

Pray to God with love and yearning and tranquility, with meekness, gently, and without forcing yourself. And when you repeat the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” say it slowly, humbly, gently and with divine love. Pronounce the name of Christ with sweetness.
Say the words one at a time: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” smoothly, tenderly, affectionately, silently, secretly, mystically, but with exultation; with longing; with passion; without tension, force, or unbecoming emphasis; without compulsion and pressure, in the way a mother speaks to the child she loves: “My little boy, my darling girl, my little Johnny, my wee Mary,” with longing. Yes, with longing. That is the whole secret. Here is the heart speaking, “My little child, my joy—my Lord, my Jesus, my Jesus, my Jesus.”

Here he is relating this to parents speaking to the child. Obviously, he is not saying that we should pray to God, “My little child, my joy.” He is saying that, as a parent says this to a child, we should say, “My Lord, my Jesus, my Jesus, my Jesus.”

What you have in your heart and in your mind, that is what you express with “all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.”

That is from the gospel according to St. Luke [Luke 10:27].
While doing the Jesus Prayer, as all other kinds of prayer, we are to practice watchfulness—to stand guard against a mental takeover by thoughts. The Jesus Prayer is especially conducive to watchfulness, since it is such a short, one-pointed prayer, which one can more easily focus one’s attention on.
As Father Sophrony writes,

While saying the Jesus Prayer, a Christian is to face thoughts, and then exterminate them by shutting the door of his mind, and stationing his mind on guard like a sentinel, unfettered by imagination and cogitation, but armed with prayer and the name of Jesus Christ. By keeping one’s mind enclosed in the words of the Jesus Prayer, and by directing the yearning of one’s heart toward Jesus Christ, one can cut off the thoughts that lead to sinful passions. One can learn to stand apart from thoughts, while keeping one’s attention fixed firmly on Christ, and can cut off thoughts with the aid of the words of the Jesus Prayer, itself.

As Elder Nikodim stated in the passage I read earlier, the Jesus Prayer, and all other kinds of prayer, for that matter, should be entirely without the deliberate formation of mental images, pictures of Jesus coming, and so on. The creation of mental images pulls one down to the level of the fallen imagination, and as I have mentioned, it can lead to delusion.
Such images become idols. Elder Porphyrios teaches, “With an image, the focus of prayer is easily lost, because one image can easily be displaced by another, and the evil one may intrude images, and we will lose grace. Also, when saying the Jesus Prayer, one should be careful not to idolize the prayer itself, as if one can be saved by words, rather than by Jesus Christ himself.”
St. Theophan the Recluse writes,

Hold no intermediate image between the mind and the Lord when practicing the Jesus Prayer. The words pronounced are merely a help, and are not essential. The principle thing is to stand before the Lord with the mind and the heart, that is, this, and not the words, is inner spiritual prayer.
The words here, are as much, or as little, the essential part of the prayer as the words of any other prayer. The essential part is to dwell in God, and this walking before God means that you live with the conviction, ever before your consciousness, that God is in you, as he is in everything. You live in the firm assurance that he sees all that is within you, knowing you better than you know yourself.
This awareness of the eye of God looking at your inner being, must not be accompanied by any visual concept, but must be confined to a simple conviction or feeling. A man in a warm room feels how the warmth envelops and penetrates him. The same must be the effect on our spiritual nature, of the all-encompassing presence of God, who is the fire in the room of our being.
The words, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” are only the instrument, and not the essence of the work, but they are an instrument which is very strong and effective, for the name of the Lord Jesus, is fearful to the enemies of our salvation, and a blessing to all who seek him. Do not forget that this practice is simple, and must not have anything fanciful about it.

Archimandrite Sophrony indicates a certain sequence in the development of the Jesus Prayer. He says:

First, it is a verbal matter. We say the prayer with our lips while trying to concentrate our attention on the name and the words. Next, we no longer move our lips, but pronounce the name of Jesus Christ, and what follows after, in our minds, mentally.
The third stage, mind and heart combined to act together, the attention of the mind is centered in the heart. The prayer is said there. Fourthly, the prayer becomes self-propelling. This happens when the prayer is confirmed in the heart, and with no especial effort on our part, continues there, where the mind is concentrated.
Finally, the prayer, so full of blessing, starts to act like a gentle flame within us, as inspiration from on high, rejoicing the heart with a sensation of divine love, and delighting the mind in spiritual contemplation. This last state is sometimes accompanied by a vision of light.

Now we will speak more about praying in the heart, what Archimandrite Sophrony talks about when he talks about prayer being “stationed in the heart.” As prayer grows and deepens in us, it descends into the heart. This leads to what is called, in the Philokalia and other Orthodox spiritual writings, “prayer of the heart.”
The heart, say the writers of the Philokalia, is the secret place, or inner chamber, of our mind, or nous. This is, in fact, the traditional understanding of the heart, which we find in ancient cultures, such as the Hebrew, the Chinese, and the Greek. As the Chinese painter and author, Mai-mai Sze, points out, in Chinese, “mind” is denoted by the character “xīn,” which is “heart,” and, in Chinese thought, the heart was regarded as the seat of spiritual and moral intelligence and perception, its function being to control the emotions.
The form of the Chinese character “sī,” which means “to think” or also “thought” which is composed of a pictograph of a head, in the form of a skull, placed above that of heart, suggests that thinking is guided by the heart and originates from it, and is more important intuitively, than intellectually. This is an understanding of the heart found in many ancient cultures.
In many places of the gospels, Christ spoke of the heart as a center of spiritual awareness. “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” he said, and that people should “understand with their heart,” he said in another place. And again he said, “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart.”
This ancient understanding of the heart was passed on to the Greek fathers of the Philokalia, who would at times use the word, kardia, or heart, and nous, or mind, interchangeably. They taught that the nous resides in the head, and at the same time, is active in the heart. The nous is united to the body, but it is not entirely within or without the body, for it is bodiless. [In] the Philokalia, the heart refers to the physical organ, but it also refers to the spiritual center of man’s being. In watchfulness and prayer, one’s mind first descends to the physical heart, and then one’s metaphysical or spiritual heart.
Father Sophrony writes:

The ascetic learns the great mysteries of the spirit through pure prayer. He descends into his inmost heart, into his natural heart first, and thence to those depths that are no longer of the flesh. He finds his deep heart, reaches the profound spiritual, metaphysical core of his being, and, looking into it, sees that the existence of mankind is not something alien and extraneous to him, but is inextricably bound up with his own being.

From his long experience of praying in the heart, Elder Nikodim speaks on the heart as a center of spiritual awareness. He says:

We pray with the heart. We are aware through the heart. But with the mind we can only know that we are praying. If I am praying, then I realize I sense that I am praying. I bring myself to an awareness. Then the feelings become manifest, and when the feelings appear, then tears flow. Without consciousness, without feeling, not one little tear will roll out.
If you only know in the mind that you are praying to the Lord, that is one thing, but when it is with the heart, then you sense that it is the Lord himself whom you are addressing. When a person prays with his heart, he is praying and has prayer of the heart. But if he does not have the awareness that he is addressing the Lord, then he is only praying with his head. He knows that there is a God and remembers that he is addressing God, but he does not realize it.
But awareness leads a man to feeling, and when feeling comes, then he begins to weep. True repentance is then revealed. He becomes aware of his sins, and begins to repent sincerely. “Forgive me, forgive me, have mercy on me.” Everything concludes in the heart. That is how the Lord created us. He gave us a heart, our life. That which you pronounce in prayer, be aware of it with your heart.
It is not only with the mind, but I hear and understand when I am pronouncing the words. No, with the awareness. Our awareness is located in the heart. This is the feeling of the heart. When you pronounce the words, be aware, as if you felt them. You have to practice this.
What we have called the descent into the heart, is at the same time, a unifying of mind and heart. The separation of the mind from the heart, and their opposition to one another, have resulted from the fall of man. This separation is overcome when our nous, distributed throughout our being, unites its power in drawing closer to its creator. Then we can truly love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, as with a single, unified force.

In the Philokalia, one will also find instruction on how, while mentally saying the Jesus Prayer, one can lead the mind into the heart with the aid of one’s breathing. Father Sophrony writes of this method:

The monk, having suitably settled his body, pronounces the prayer, with his head inclined on his chest, breathing in at the words, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and breathing out at the words, “have mercy on me, a sinner.” During inhalation, the attention, at first, follows the movement of the air breathed in, as far as the upper part of the heart. In this manner, concentration can soon be preserved without wandering, and the mind stand side-by-side with the heart, or even enters within it.
This method eventually enables the mind to see, not the physical heart, but that which is happening within it—the feelings that creep in, and the mental images that approach from without. With this experience, the monk acquires the ability to feel his heart, and to continue with his attention centered in the heart, without further recourse to any psychosomatic technique.

Because the misapplication of this method, without proper guidance from a spiritual father in the Orthodox Church, can also lead to bad consequences, ascetic elders of recent centuries have generally steered people, especially lay people, away from the technique, and toward a safer, and simpler, practice. Thus, Father Sophrony writes:

This procedure of following one’s breath to the upper region of the heart can assist the beginner to understand where his inner attention should be stayed during time of prayer, and as a rule, at all other times, too. Nevertheless, true prayer is not to be achieved thus. True prayer comes exclusively through faith and repentance accepted as the only foundation. The danger of psychotechnics is that not a few people attribute too great a significance to method qua method.
In order to avoid such deformation, the beginner should follow another practice, which, though considerably slower, is incomparably better, and more wholesome—to fix the attention on the name of Christ, and on the words of the Jesus Prayer. When contrition for sin reaches a certain level, the mind naturally heeds the heart.

In the same manner, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov teaches, “The essence of the matter consists in the union of the mind with the heart during prayer, and this is achieved, by the grace of God, in its own time, determined by God. The above mechanism is fully replaced by the unhurried enunciation of the prayer, by a short rest or pause after each prayer, by gentle and unhurried breathing, and by the enclosure of the mind in the words of the prayer.”
As St. Ignatius goes on to explain, “As we continue to say the Jesus Prayer in this way, our heart will enter into closer sympathy with our praying mind. At first, this is felt as contrition. Tears come to our eyes. In our heart, we feel a certain soreness, a pain which is not unpleasant, and which helps to draw the mind’s attention to the heart.”
About this pain, St. Theophan the Recluse writes, “Constant effort will achieve this quickly. There is nothing peculiar in this. The appearance of this pain is a natural effect. It will help you to collect yourself better, but the chief thing is that the Lord, who sees your effort, will give you help and grace in prayer. A different order will then be established in the heart.”
Ultimately, the union of the mind and the heart comes about through divine grace, when God wills to grant it. “It is natural for divine grace,” writes St. Ignatius, “when it stretches out its finger to heal a man, crushed and broken to pieces by his fall, to join together his severed parts, and to unite the mind, not only with the heart and soul, but even with the body, and to give it a single true ardor for God.
With the union of the mind and heart, the ascetic receives the power to resist all passionate thoughts and passionate feelings. Can this be the result of any technique? No. It is the result of grace. It is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, who overshadows the unseen labor of the Christian ascetic, and it is incomprehensible to carnal and natural people.”
Elder Porphyrios, likewise states, “Prayer of the heart is prayed only by a person who has attracted the grace of God. It must not be done with the thought, ‘I’ll learn it, I’ll do it, I’ll acquire it,’ because in this way we may be led to egotism and pride. Not only experience and genuine desire, but also wisdom, care, and prudence are required if our prayer is to be pure and pleasing to God. A single seductive thought, ‘I have really made progress,’ for example, brings everything to nought. Why should we be proud? We have nothing that is our own. These are very delicate matters.”
Many holy fathers, St. Theophan, and others, say that we are not to try to measure our progress in the spiritual life, because the minute we start to think that we are achieving something, then we have lost it, so, as Elder Porphyrios just said, “When through divine grace, the mind is united with the heart in prayer to Jesus Christ, one’s heart is filled with irrepressible love for God, for man, and for all creatures.”
Elder Porphyrios described this experience:

Only through grace can you pray. No prayer can occur without divine grace. (This, again, goes back to what I was saying before about the synergy between our free will and God’s grace, that obviously we turn to God in prayer through our free will, but God’s grace assists us.) When grace comes, then when love comes, you say the name “Christ,” and your mind and heart are flooded.
This love, this craving, also has degrees. When you experience this love, you desire to acquire spiritual things. You desire to do everything within the embrace of love, to move within this love. You wish to engage in every effort out of love for God. You feel love and gratitude towards God, without having in mind to achieve anything specific. The sense of love floods through you, and unites you with Christ. You are filled with joy and exultation, which shows that you have the divine perfect love within you. Divine love is selfless, simple, and true.
I repeated the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” and new horizons would open up. Tears of joy and gladness would flow from my eyes on account of Christ’s love and his sacrifice on the cross: insuperable longing. In this, the whole greatness is concealed—Paradise itself. Because you love Christ, you repeat this prayer, these seven words (in Greek it is five words), with craving, and with your heart. And gradually, the words are lost.
The heart is so replete that it suffices to say two words—My Jesus—and ultimately, no words at all. Love is better expressed without words, but when a soul truly falls in love with the Lord, it prefers silence and spiritual prayer. The flood of divine love fills the soul with joy and exultation.

Here again, it can be seen that the highest pinnacle in the practice of the Jesus Prayer occurs not through human effort alone, but it is given by divine grace. As Elder Porphyrios, and others who have experienced this, testify, “Man’s soul becomes flooded with the light of divine grace.”
This leads us to the final section of this talk, which is on the end of our Christian life—union with God. As we have seen in the Orthodox Christian tradition, grace is known to be not merely a created energy, or merely created effects on the soul, but rather the uncreated energy of God, in which God himself is fully present. In being filled with God’s grace, we are filled with God himself. We are filled with his life. We become one with God, not by essence and sonship, as only Jesus Christ was and is, but rather by grace and by adoption.
This union with God by grace is what we have called theosis, or deification. One might say that when one is baptized and chrismated into the Orthodox Church and receives Holy Communion, one is already deified, since through these mysteries, one receives the grace of the Holy Spirit united with one’s soul, as Adam had it before the Fall. However, as we discussed earlier, this is only in potential. A seed of grace has been implanted in the soul, which must be nurtured and cultivated by the baptized Orthodox Christian.
The Romanian Orthodox theologian, Fr. Dimitru Staniloae, calls this “deification in the broad sense.” That is, every person who is baptized, chrismated, receives Holy Communion in the Orthodox Church, is deified in the broad sense of the word. There is even a prayer of St. Simeon the New Theologian, which we read before Holy Communion, in which we talk about Christ’s deifying Body and Blood.
But as Fr. Dimitru Staniloae goes on to say, “Deification, in the strict sense, is given by God to a soul that has been purified of simple passions and has drawn closer and closer to God through watchfulness and prayer. In deification, in the strict sense, one’s human powers are taken over, as it were, by God’s divine power, and one is wholly interpenetrated by God’s life, energy, or grace.”
Orthodox saints and elders who have experienced the grace of deification, in the strict sense, often speak of it as an experience of light—not a physical, created light, but the uncreated light of God. Such an experience of grace is not limited to those who are practicing the Jesus Prayer at the time of the experience. Nevertheless, in the Orthodox Church, the experience of the grace of deification is seen most commonly in the hesychast tradition, and, as we have seen, this tradition is strongly associated with the practice of the Jesus Prayer.
I would now like to read to you an account of this experience of grace, written by a modern holy elder, Archimandrite Sophrony, whom I have quoted at length above. Five years before his repose in England at the age of 97, he recorded his experiences of uncreated light. These experiences had begun many years earlier, when he had been living as a monk on Mt. Athos in Greece, and, like all Orthodox monks, had been practicing, daily, the Jesus Prayer:

Now at the close of my life, (he writes,) I have decided to talk to my brethren of things I would not have ventured to utter earlier, counting it unseemly. At the beginning of my monastic life on Mt. Athos, the Lord granted me unceasing prayer. I will relate what I remember well enough, since we are talking of the prayers which marked me indelibly. This is how it often used to be:
Towards evening at sunset I would shut the window and draw three curtains over it, to make my cell as quiet and dark as possible. With my forehead bent to the floor, I would slowly repeat words of prayer, one after the other. I had no feeling of being cooped up, and my mind, oblivious to the body, lived in the light of the gospel word. Concentrated on the fathomless wisdom of Christ’s word, my spirit, freed from all material concerns, would feel flooded, as it were, with light, from the celestial sun.
At the same time, a gentle peace would fill my soul, unconscious of all the needs and cares of this earth. The Lord gave me to live in this state, and my spirit yearned to cling to his feet in gratitude for this gift. This same experience was repeated at intervals for months, perhaps years. Early in the 1930s—I was a deacon then—for two weeks, God’s tender mercy rested upon me. At dusk, when the sun was sinking behind the mountains of Olympia, I would sit on the balcony near my cell, face turned to the dying light.
In those days, I contemplated the evening light of the sun, and at the same time, another light, which softly enveloped me, and gently invaded my heart, in some curious fashion making me feel compassionate and loving towards people who treated me harshly. I would also feel a quiet sympathy for all creatures in general. When the sun had set, I would retire to my cell, as usual, to perform the devotions preparatory to celebrating the Liturgy, and the light did not leave me while I prayed.
Under the influence of this light, prayer for mankind and travail possessed my whole being. It was clear that the inescapable, countless sufferings of the entire universe, are the consequence of man’s falling away from God, our creator, who revealed himself to us. If the world loved Christ and his commandments, everything would be radically transformed, and the earth would become a wonderful paradise.

Elsewhere, Father Sophrony attempts to describe the indescribable:

The soul feels apprehensive at approaching the subject of the light which visits the man who craves to behold the face of the eternal. Its nature is mysterious. In what terms can it be described? Incomprehensible, invisible, yet it may sometimes be seen by the physical eye. Quiet and gentle, it draws heart and mind to itself, until the earth is forgotten, one’s spirit caught up into another sphere. It can happen in broad daylight as in the blackness of night. It is a soft light, yet more powerful than all around.
In strange fashion, it embraces from without. You see it, but your attention is drawn deep within the inner man, into the heart, burning with a love, now compassionate, now grateful. It may happen that one is not aware of the material world of external circumstances, and one sees oneself as light. Aches and pains disappear. Earthly cares fade away. Anxieties are absorbed into a sweet peace. The light used, at first, to appear like a thin flame, healing and cleansing, consuming both within and without, everything not in harmony with it, but calmly, hardly making itself felt.
This holy light, coming in strength, brings humble love, banishes all doubt and fear, obliterates every earthly consideration, the whole pyramid of secular grades and hierarchies. The repentant man becomes a nobody, as it were. He no longer stands in the way of his brother, seeks no place for himself in the world.
This light is, in itself, life imperishable, suffused by the peace of love. It brings to our spirit knowledge of another indescribable being. The mind is stayed, above reflection, by the very fact of its entry into a new form of life. Weightless, more finely attuned than anything the earth knows, the light conveys to the soul invulnerability, making her safe from everything that hitherto weighed her down. Death flees from this light. Our spirit exults. This light is God—God almighty, and at the same time, indescribably gentle. Oh, how discreet is its approach. It will heal the heart broken by despair, the soul bruised by sin. It will inspire with a hope of victory.

A millennium earlier, in the 9th century AD, the same kind of experience was described by St. Simeon the New Theologian, in his Hymns of Divine Love. St. Simeon writes:

I am sitting on my couch, all the while beyond the world. Being in the middle of my cell, I see him present, the one who is beyond the world. I see him, and I speak with him. I—dare I say it? I love him, and he, in turn, loves me. I nourish myself with this contemplation alone, forming one with him, I transcend the heavens. That is true, I know, and yet, where my body is, I do not know.
I know that the one who remains unmoved, descends. I know that the one who remains invisible, appears to me. I know that the one who is separated from all creatures, takes me inside himself and hides me in his arms, and then I find myself outside the whole world. Yet, in turn, I who am so insignificant in this world, I contemplate in myself, completely, the creator of the world. I know that I will not die, since I am inside of life. All of life surges within me. He is in my heart, yet he remains in heaven. Here and there, equally dazzling, he reveals himself to me.
How can all of this come about? How can I accurately understand it? How would I be able to express all that I understand and see? In truth, these are indescribable things, utterly ineffable.

In similar manner, but with even stronger expression, St. Simeon speaks of this in another hymn. He writes:

He himself is discovered within me, resplendent inside my wretched heart, enlightening me from all sides with his immortal splendor, shining on all of my members with his rays. Entirely intertwined with me, he embraces me entirely. He gives himself totally to me, the unworthy one, and I am filled with his love and beauty. I am sated with pleasure and divine tenderness. I share in the light. I participate also in the glory. My face shines like that of my beloved, and all my members become bearers of the light.

This illumination, this deification, that Christ offers, does not end with this life, nor is it static in the life to come. It is only the beginning of a progress that will never end. “Indeed,” says St. Simeon, in the passage that I read last night, “over the ages, the progress will be endless, for a cessation of this growing toward the end-without-ending, would be nothing but a grasping at the ungraspable. The one on whom no one can be sated, would then become an object of satiety. On the contrary, to be filled with him, and to be glorified in his light, will cause unfathomable progress.”
This eternal progress was originally intended for man, who was ever to rise in a vision of God, but man lost that possibility when he departed from the way. Through Christ, who was called the New Adam, this possibility is once more open to mankind in his Church.
But it is not only man’s soul which can experience everlasting deification, everlasting progress towards God. As we discussed earlier, through his redemptive work, Christ destroyed, not only spiritual death, but also physical death.
These two types of death are overcome, in turn, by Christ, the New Adam, just as they were introduced into the world through the first Adam. Because of Adam’s fall, first, spiritual death entered the world, then physical death. Likewise, spiritual death is first overcome by Christ, then physical death.
We can experience the overcoming of spiritual death, in other words, a spiritual resurrection, even now, in Christ’s Church, by experiencing the life of God within us, vivifying us, transforming us into his likeness. And finally, in the general resurrection, which has been made possible by Christ’s resurrection, we will experience the overcoming of physical death, as well—our physical resurrection.
It is in the general resurrection that all the fruits of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, are to be fully revealed. At that time, because Christ rose from the dead, becoming the first-fruits of those who slept (or who had fallen asleep, according to the words of St. Paul), the unnatural separation of the soul from the body at death, which began at the Fall, will be overcome for all mankind, and man will experience everlasting physical life in bodies that have been made, once again, incorruptible. “The dead shall be raised incorruptible,” writes the apostle Paul, “and we shall be changed.” Moreover, the entire visible creation will be recreated and become incorruptible, along with man, since it exists for man’s sake.
But again, it was not only to restore what the first Adam had ruined, that the second Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, came upon this earth. Christ also came to accomplish what the first Adam had failed to accomplish. Man had been created for deification. As St. Simeon the New Theologian, writes:

If Adam and Eve had not fallen, the soul of each would have become brighter, and the perceptible and material body of each, altered and changed into an immaterial and spiritual one, into something beyond sense perception. And man would have been led up, in due time, to a more perfect glory and transformation, drawing nearer to God, and to the rays which spring from his divinity.

As we have seen, through his redemptive work, Christ has already granted to man the possibility to experience such a deification of soul, in and through his Church—a deification that is to grow and become more perfect in the life to come. In the general resurrection, however, he will do more than this. In reuniting man’s soul with his body, he will raise man in a body that is not only incorruptible, but also spiritual, and will grant an everlasting deification to man’s body, together with his soul.
Furthermore, he will make the entire cosmos to be a spiritual dwelling-place for man, and will grant unending deification to the entire cosmos, together with man. God will be all in all. All this, and the immutable glory of the future age, has been made possible by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Through the totality of Christ’s redemptive work, man is spiritually united with God and deified, man can attain to paradise and heaven after death, and at the general resurrection, man’s body and the entire creation are to be renewed as an incorruptible, spiritual, and divine, deified dwelling-place.
Our Orthodox Christian faith is eschatological. That means we look forward to faith and hope to the future age that will come into being through Jesus Christ. But as we have seen, the union with God that Christ has made possible for man does not begin at the general resurrection. It is possible for us begin the way to this union, even now, and to experience foretastes of it, even in this life. We have abundant counsels and testimonies of those who have endured to the end on the narrow path toward union with God, and who are enjoying it eternally in the heavens, even now.
Images of them are depicted all over church. These holy ones beckon us to follow them, and they pray for us to reach the blessed realms in which they now live. What hinders us? Only our laziness, our stubborn attachment to our sinful passions. Let us, therefore, cut off these passions at the root, by cutting off the thoughts which engender them. Above all, let us continually turn our minds and hearts to him who has the power to save us from our sins, and to grant everlasting deification to our souls and bodies.
May we place our whole life and hope in his hands, which were outstretched to us and to the whole world on the Cross. May we gratefully accept his loving invitation, “Abide in me, and I in you,” forever drawing closer to him who is the Resurrection and the Life, our only true life. Amen.

Christ the eternal Tao part II transcript

Thanks to Ancient Faith Radio.
Source audio and transcript:

http://ancientfaith.com/specials/episodes/christ_the_eternal_tao_-_part_2

moreover:

St. Alexander of Svir, who died 500 years ago. His body was hidden away somewhere during the Soviet area and they recently found it again, and it is completely incorrupt. All the flesh is there, it is soft, it is white.

We read about some saints who were saying the Jesus Prayer with their head down on their chest, and they were praying in their heart, and then incorrupt fragrance of Heaven will come forth from their chest. These kinds of signs are given in the Church, these rather beautiful little miracles that are given in which God opens up the other world, and gives a sense and foretaste of the incorruption that He has planned for the whole creation, and also the incorruption that was there in the beginning of the creation.

Host: Last evening’s lecture introduced to us the work of Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, and a spiritual apprehension that only became clear with the revelation of Christ centuries later. In Part II today, Father Damascene will speak of the first created state of man, the fall, redemption, and the future age. Then he will speak about how Christ’s saving work is actualized in the Church through the Holy Mysteries, and through various types of prayer. After the lecture, there will a time for questions and we will take a lunch break, and a BBQ lunch will be available, as I said earlier, so please stay with us. Now it is my honor to introduce our guest speaker, again, Father Damascene.
Father Damascene: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today’s over-arching theme is the Orthodox Christian teaching on union with God, and so, as was said in the beginning, I will outline the Orthodox Christian world view, by which we are to understand what it means to have union with God, and how we are to have this, and the reasons, or rather the cause, the possibility that we have for union with God.
As well, I will be speaking about the state of man before the fall, the fall and its consequences, and our redemption from the consequences of the fall by Christ. Then I will be speaking about how we can actualize these possibilities that have been made real for us by Christ through His redemptive work, through our life in the Church, and I will go into most detail when talking about watchfulness and prayer as a path to union with God.
And then finally, I will talk about the state beyond the resurrection, in which all the consequences of Christ’s redemptive work are realized, and man is restored to his original state, and the state that man was supposed to attain in the beginning is also brought into being through Christ.
So let’s begin by looking at the spiritual state of man before the fall. In this talk, I will be going through a few of the handouts. l will be going through part I in this morning’s talk, and in order to give more time for watchfulness and prayer, will go partway into part II. We will talk about cultivating the seat of divine energy, foundations of the path to union with God, introduction to prayer, and then the afternoon session, we will devote entirely to watchfulness and prayer and union with God.
First of all, we will talk about the spiritual state of man before the fall. According to the world view of the Orthodox Church, as found in the Holy Scriptures and the writings of her holy fathers, the entire visible universe was made for the sake of man, and man was made for union with God. This is really key to the whole presentation today, and I also brought this up yesterday. We have to keep in mind that this is the reason that we were created, for union with God, and everything was created for us, and we are to bring the entire creation into union with God, as well.
The holy fathers teach that “man was created in divine grace, and that the glory from above garbed Adam and Eve better than any garment.” Those are the words of St. John Chrysostom. My patron saint, St. John Damascene, states that, “In paradise, Adam had the indwelling God as a dwelling place, and wore Him as a glorious garment. He was wrapped about with His grace.”
As I mentioned last night, the Orthodox Church understands grace to be the very energy of God, distinct, yet inseparable, from the divine essence. God is wholly present in His energies. Therefore, when man was created in grace, he had God, himself, within him. He was meant to participate in God’s life through the divine energies, to be fully and perfectly penetrated by grace, and thus to attain to union with God through love, a union which the holy fathers do not hesitate to call deification, or theosis.
St. John Damascene teaches that Adam was not deified at his creation, but was created for deification. In St. John Damascene’s words he was to complete the mystery by being deified through reversion to God—this, however, not by being transformed into the divine essence, but by participation in the divine illumination. This is what I brought out last night, that we do not believe that we are absorbed into God, or that we become God by essence, but we believe that we can become one with God through His grace, or His energies.
We do not become sons of God by nature, like Christ was, but we become sons of God by adoption, by grace. According to the teaching of the Orthodox holy fathers, based on the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, both man and the entire cosmos, the entire visible creation, were incorrupt, or without decay, in the beginning. It was only later, at the fall of man, that death entered the world and the creation was made subject to the “bondage of corruption,” as we read in the epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to the Romans.
It is the unquestionable testimony of the Church that Adam and Eve were created conditionally immortal. That is, if they had not sinned they could have lived forever in incorrupt bodies, partaking of the Tree of Life in Paradise, and eventually attaining to Heaven, as well. There was no necessity either in their remaining incorrupt, or in their falling into corruption. Their free will was the determining factor. Originally, the incorrupt bodies of Adam and Eve did not have, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, “the coarser flesh, mortal and resistant,” that our bodies now have.
In the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, “they did not have the temperament which makes the flesh denser, mortal and tough.” It was a different kind of body, and a different kind of flesh. From the writings of many holy fathers, we know that before the fall, Adam and Eve were free from the bodily needs of shelter and clothing, and even of sleep. They had no sexual relations, or even sexual passions. They had no afflictions, infirmities, illness, disease, physical defects or maimings of the body. They knew no difficulty, sorrows, labors, sweat, hunger or thirst. They did not experience physical pain. They were not subject to cold or heat, or to the elements. Therefore, in the words of St. John Chrysostom, before the fall, man’s existence was akin to that of the angels.
From St. John Chrysostom we learn that Adam was originally created with ineffable intelligence, which endowed him with a capability to name all the animals, and with prophetic grace which enabled him to prophecy about Eve after her creation.
St. Gregory of Sinai speaks of man’s memory in the state before the fall. The memory, St. Gregory says, was originally simple and one-pointed, but as a result of the fall, its natural powers have been perverted. It has lost its recollectedness in God, and has become compound instead of simple, diversified instead of one-pointed.
We are told by a more recent holy father, St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, that before the fall, the human mind was not held under the sway of imagination. In the theology of the holy fathers, the imagination is seen as a faculty belonging to the irrational part of the soul, which stores up images like treasures and brings them forth interiorly, even where there is no corresponding body present. These are the words of St. John Damascene and St. Gregory Palamas.
Drawing from the common patristic teaching on the imagination, St. Nicodemus writes, “The first-formed man was created by God without imagination. His mind, pure and unified, functioned as mind, and so had, itself, acquired no impression or form under the influence of the senses, or from the images of sensory things. Making no use of this lower power of the imagination, he did not visualize the outline, color, shape or dimension of things, but with the higher power of the soul, that is, the intellect, he contemplated, immaterially, purely, and spiritually, only the bare, simple essences (or in Greek, logoi) of beings.
It might be surprising to hear that imagination is a lower part of the soul, or irrational part of the soul. But if you think about it, animals, which are considered by the holy fathers to be irrational creatures, have imagination. You might have seen your dog having a dream, having a nightmare. Well, he is imagining things, he is having images in his mind. So the holy fathers say that this imagination did not influence man’s mind in the beginning. He just beheld things, perceived things as they were.
This was the condition of man in the beginning. By drawing ever closer to God in love, by naturally directing his desire and longing to Him, rather than unnaturally turning it aside to the things of the senses, man was to become ever more holy and spiritual, ever more in the likeness of God, ever more transformed by the grace of God.
Earlier, we quoted the words of St. John Damascene, that man was to complete the mystery by being deified. Expanding on this theme, St. Maximus states that man, by freely following God’s commandment in Eden, would have become a deified Son of God, a God not by nature, but by grace. So, if man would have followed the commandment of God, stayed in the Garden of Eden, he would have eventually become deified and become spiritual, as well.
St. Symeon, the New Theologian, gives us an image of what life would have been like if the first people had fulfilled their original calling. Just think, he writes, what sort of life and way of living we might have had, if we had been preserved incorruptible and immortal in an incorrupt world, going through life manifestly without sin or sorrow, free of cares and untroubled.
Think, too, how by progress in keeping God’s commandments, and the putting into practice of our good intentions, we would have led up, in due time, to a more perfect glory and transformation, drawing nearer to God and to the rays which spring from His divinity. The soul of each would have become brighter, and the perceptible and material body of each altered and changed into an immaterial and spiritual one, into something beyond sense perception.
He was saying that eventually, we, and the entire cosmos would have become spiritual, beyond sense perception, and we would have become deified if we had kept the commandment of God.
Later, at the end of this seminar, we will talk about how eventually that will be brought into being in spite of man’s fall, by the coming, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This will come into being, of course, at the time of the general resurrection.
Although the first created world was made incorrupt in the beginning, as was man, it was, again, like man, not created in its final and perfected state. Since the visible creation was made for man, according to God’s ordering of His creation, it was through man that the creation was to reach its final condition, possessing both body and soul, man was the link between the originally incorrupt material world, and the noetic, or spiritual world, of the angels. As he became spiritualized and divinized, by drawing closer to God in love, man was to lead all of creation into such a spiritualized, divinized state, as well.
Such was man’s lofty original calling, but as we know and experience every day, the first man fell from this state and brought himself, and all of creation, into a state of corruption and death, again, what St. Paul calls the bondage to corruption in the 8th chapter of Romans. In partaking of the fruit that God had forbidden him to eat, man acted in a way contrary to his own nature, which had been created very good by God, as we read in the book of Genesis. With the entrance of sin through the free decision of Adam and Eve, human nature became corrupted.
St Cyril of Alexander writes of this in the 4th century, as follows: “Our forefather, Adam, by neglecting the commandment given him, struck out against God, for he slipped down into corruption. Then was sin also driven into the nature of man.
Thus many were made sinners, according to St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans. “Thence forward, pleasures and filthiness invaded the nature of the flesh, and there arose then, the savage law in our members. Our nature thus became diseased by sin through the disobedience of one, that is, of Adam. Hence, all were made sinners, not as co-transgressors with Adam, for they did not yet exist then, but because they were of his nature, which had fallen under the law of sin. In Adam, human nature became sick with corruption through disobedience, and therefore the passions entered in.”
Here, we might make a distinction between the Orthodox theology and the theology which developed in the West, where there was an idea that was put forth that we share the guilt of Adam’s sin, but as we read here in this teaching of St. Cyril of Alexandria, we do not believe that we share in the guilt of his sin. We are not co-transgressors with Adam, because we did not exist then. Adam and Eve bear the guilt of their own sin. We do not bear that guilt. However, because we are of one nature with Adam and Eve, we all come from them, we bear the consequences of their sin, and our nature became corrupted.
These consequences I will talk about now. At the fall, Adam and Eve acquired a tendency, or inclination, toward sin, and all their descendants, that is, all of us, inherited that inclination. In man’s now corrupted state, his mind, while still possessed of the faculty of reason, fell under the sway of the imagination, which, as we have seen, is a lower, irrational power of the soul.
St. Nicodemus of Mount Athos writes about this. “Just as the man-slaying devil fell through the imagination, that is, imagining himself to be God, so he caused Adam also to form in his mind that he was equal to God, and to fall through this same imagination. And thus, from that noetic, angel-like, unified, rational, and formless life of the mind, the wretched man, that is, Adam, was cast down to this sensory, many-sided and multiform imagination, and to the state of irrational animals. For imagination is a trait proper to a irrational animals, and not to rational beings. After man, through one act, fell to such a state, who can tell to what passions, what evils, and what delusions he was cast down by means of the imagination?”
The reason I am going into so much detail about the imagination, here, is because it relates very closely to what we will be talking about later, on the subject of watchfulness.
“Because of the corruption of his nature at the fall, man lost the grace in which he had been created. He became separated from God. Grace was not foreign to his nature, and so it did not dwell within him as it had before.”
St. John Damascene, who, as we have seen, said that man was wrapped about with God’s grace at his creation, says later in the same work, that man was stripped of grace at the fall. This stripping of grace constituted a kind of spiritual death in the first created man. In the book of Genesis, God told Adam, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
In fact, Adam did not die physically on the day he ate from the tree. According to the patristic teaching, however, God’s words were true. Adam did die on the day he ate of the fruit. He experienced spiritual death, the death of his soul. As St. Gregory Palamas writes, “It was, indeed, Adam’s soul that died by becoming, through his transgression, separated from God, for bodily, he continued to live after that time, even for 930 years.”
Elsewhere, St. Gregory Palamas speaks further on what is meant by the death of the soul. “The death of the soul is when God leaves the soul and is separated from it, although in another way, the soul remains immortal. Once separated from God, it becomes more ugly and useless than a dead body, but unlike such a body, it does not disintegrate after death.” That is, the soul lives on, but it is not true life because the soul is separated from God.
Here it should be noted that the death of the soul that man suffered at the fall did not destroy the image of God in him. St. Gregory Palamas says that the human soul possesses the image of God inalienably, even if it does not recognize its own dignity or think and live in a manner worthy of the creator’s image within it.
As Vladimir Lossky says, in the book I showed you last night, the image of God in us is indestructible. Even the worst sinner, the worst criminal, still bears the image of God. So also, we do not believe in the idea that developed in Western theology, of complete depravity. We believe that our nature is corrupted, but still we have the image of God preserved in us. We still have an innate goodness in our being and in our soul.
At the fall, man’s spiritual death, which is the separation of the soul from God, made him, in turn, subject to physical death, which is the separation of the soul from the body. St. Gregory Palamas writes of this as follows: The death, however, that befell the soul because of the transgression, not only crippled the soul and made man accursed, it also rendered the body, itself, subject to fatigue, suffering, and corruptability, and finally, handed it over to death.
As indicated in the passage of St. Gregory Palamas, physical pain and fatigue were introduced into human experience, together with bodily death. We find this expressed in the Genesis account in a sentence that God pronounces on Adam and Eve after their fall. Addressing Eve, God says, “I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy groaning. In pain thou shalt bring forth children.” And to Adam he says, “Cursed is the earth in thy labors. In toil shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life. In the sweat of they face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the earth out of which thou wast taken, for earth thou art, and unto earth shalt thou return.”
Also, in being given over to pain and death, fallen man has also been given over to physical corruption or decay after death. St. Maximus the Confessor says, “God, at the very moment that man fell, gave the body the capacity to suffer, undergo corruption, and to be wholly dissolved.”
When man fell from his original state of incorruption, his body became more grossly material. In the words of St. John Damascene, after the primordial fall, man was clothed in the roughness of this wretched life, and put on death, that is to say, the mortality and the grossness of the flesh. He was excluded from Paradise by the just judgment of God, and was condemned to death and made subject to corruption or decay. In such a condition of bearing grosser or denser flesh, man became subject not only to pain, death and corruption, but also to the bodily needs that we know today. St. John Chrysostom goes so far as to say that God refashioned man’s body at the fall to accord with his new condition and needs.
In addition to changing man’s spiritual and physical condition and handing him over to physical death and decay, man’s fall into corruption also determined the state of his soul after death, making it unable to partake of eternal union with God. Adam had been barred from Paradise during his earthly life, and he remained barred from both Paradise and heaven after death. After physical death the souls of Adam, Eve, and all their posterity went down into Hades where they continued to exist in a state of spiritual death.
Now, let’s look at the question of why God allowed the entrance of death and suffering into the world. Although the holy fathers declare, along with St. Paul, that death is an enemy which is to be destroyed, as we read in I Corinthians, they also affirm that the introduction of death was allowed providentially by God. Death, as we have said, was not part of God’s original ordering of His creation. However, after the fall, God used it for the benefit of man.
St. Irenaeus, a holy father of the 2nd century A.D., sees God’s love toward mankind in the fact that he allowed death to enter the world. St. Irenaeus writes, “God also drove Adam out of Paradise and placed him far from the Tree of Life, not because he envied him the Tree of Life, as some dare to claim, but because He pitied him, and did not desire that he should persevere forever as a sinner, nor that the sin which surrounded him should be immortal, and evil unending and incurable, but He set a bounds to man’s sin by interposing death, thus causing sin to cease. So death puts an end to sin, so evil is not immortal.
St. Gregory the Theologian says the same, “Hereto he, Adam, makes a gain, namely death, and the cutting off of sin, in order that evil may not be immortal. Thus his punishment is changed into a mercy, for it is in mercy I am persuaded that God inflicts punishment. So God does not inflict punishment for the sake of inflicting punishment, He does it out of mercy, for good.
Just as God used death for the benefit of man in his fallen state, so also did He use the other physical consequences of the fall: suffering, bodily needs, labor, disease, etc. Like death, itself, these other consequences serve to humble man and bring him to repentance. At the fall, man succumbed to the temptation of pride expressed in the serpent’s words, “Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”
All the physical consequences of the fall serve to remind man that he is not God, but a created being who is dependent upon God. Adam and Eve, indeed, succumbed to pride in partaking of the forbidden fruit, but that was not the only source of their fall. As will be recalled, in the first sin they also turned their desire away from God and toward created things, seeking pleasure in them as an end in itself.
This, too, is expressed in the Genesis narrative. “And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, and a tree beautiful to contemplate.” That is, the forbidden fruit. Thus, the temptation that brought about man’s fall was two-fold. In the words of St. Mark, the Ascetic, in the Philokalia, all vice in the world is caused by self-esteem or pride, and sensual pleasure. Because of this, God employed the physical consequences of the fall as a two-fold remedy, not only to quell a man’s pride, but also to dampen his desire for created things, and his pursuit of sensual pleasure for its own sake.
Physical death, then, puts an end to physical pain and labors. Here again, we see God’s mercy, for in allowing the entrance of physical death so as to prevent sin from being immortal, God also prevented bodily pain and labor from necessarily lasting forever. Furthermore, in His foreknowledge of man’s eventual salvation through Christ, God allowed man’s body to die so that it could be refashioned at the general resurrection.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa writes, “By divine providence death was introduced as a dispensation into the nature of man so that sin, having flowed away at the breaking of the union of soul and body, man, through the resurrection, might be refashioned sound, passionless, stainless, and removed from any touch of evil.
Man’s death opened the way to his refashioning into a better state. The actual refashioning of man, however, would occur not through the death of sinful men, but through the death and resurrection of the sinless God-man, Jesus Christ. Death, the ultimate physical consequence of man’s fall, would thus become a means by which God would redeem mankind from all the effects of the fall, spiritually and bodily.
As we read in the Holy Scripture, St. Paul writes in Hebrews, “Christ is the mediator of the New Covenant, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” By means of death the redemption is accomplished.
Now, let’s look more at the Orthodox doctrine of our redemption and deification. How are we to understand this mystery of man’s redemption through Christ’s death and resurrection? To begin our examination of this question, let’s turn again to the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas on man’s fall. As you will recall, St. Gregory taught that through Adam’s one spiritual death, both spiritual and physical death were passed on to all men.
The same saint, however, affirmed that it is by means of death, Christ’s death, that the power of death is destroyed. He explains that as spiritual and physical death entered the world through Adam’s one spiritual death, so both kinds of death are overcome through Christ’s one physical death and His subsequent resurrection.
That is, Christ did not die spiritually on the cross, as some more modern Western theologians say, because he is God and His divine nature is inseparable from His human nature. In order to die spiritually, His divine nature would have to be somehow ripped away for a time from His human nature, which was impossible. So Christ did not die spiritually, He could not die spiritually, but by the providence of God, He died physically.
So, through His one physical death He overcame the consequences of the fall, which is both spiritual and bodily death. Out of His infinite love for us, Christ died on our behalf so that we could be given eternal life, both of soul and of body. In the words of St. Paul, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Also St. Paul says, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, should taste death for every man.”
Speaking of the awesome mystery of His redemption of the world, Christ told His apostles, “The Son of man came to give His life as a ransom for many.” The image of Christ giving up His life as a ransom was later taken up by the Apostle Paul and also by the Orthodox holy fathers.
In the following passage, St. John Damascene makes use of this image of ransom, adding to it, the image of Christ’s body as bait attached to the hook of divinity. St. John Damascene writes:

Since our Lord Jesus Christ was without sin, He was not subject to death, since death came into the world through sin. He dies, therefore, because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes himself an offering to the Father for our sakes. For we had sinned against Him and it was meet, or fitting, that He should receive a ransom for us, and that we should thus be delivered from the condemnation. God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant, that is, the devil. Therefore death approaches, and swallowing up the body as a bait, is transfixed on the hook of divinity, and after tasting of a sinless and life-giving body, perishes and brings up, again, all whom of old it had swallowed up. For just as darkness disappears on the introduction of light, so is death repulsed before the assault of life, and brings life to all, but death to the destroyer.

He gives the image of a fish, and the fish here represents death. St. Gregory Palamas uses the same image and in his account the fish represents the devil. So death, or the devil, swallows every person who had ever lived, every person who lived after Adam dies. Death swallows them up, the devil swallows them up, and brings them down into Hades. All the souls from the time of Adam and Eve until the coming of Christ were, as I said, dragged down to Hades, which was a place of separation from God. And because sin is the proper food for death, and because all are sinners, and all are separated from God, all deserve to die, and then to go down into Hades.
When Christ died, and the devil helped to instigate that, of course, the death of Christ—when Christ died, the devil, or death, was just waiting to receive him into Hades, because that is where everybody else went. The devil really thought that he had defeated Christ, and Christ was there to mess of the devil’s plans, the devil’s operations. He thought he defeated Christ by causing Him to die. So the devil is here represented as a fish, just waiting to grab Christ, pull Him down into hell.
In this image, the flesh, or the body, of Christ, is the bait on the hook, that death, or the devil, is ready to grab. The devil sees the bait, but he does not see the hook. The hook is the divinity of Christ. When the devil, or death, grabs the bait, he also grabs the hook, which is the divinity of Christ, and because hell, or Hades, cannot hold God, obviously, death cannot hold God, therefore the fish basically explodes, it blow up. It destroys the power of death and the devil, and the devil has to basically release or cough up those that he had received into Hades.
We believe that not all the souls that were in Hades between the time of Adam and the time of Christ were delivered from hell, but all the righteous ones, or the ones who were turned toward God, were delivered from that state, and we will talk about that a little bit later.
St. Gregory Palamas calls forth the same image of the bait and the fish, and also uses the image of ransom. “The Lord patiently endured, for our sake, a death that He was not obliged to undergo, because He was sinless. To redeem us who were obliged to suffer death from servitude to the devil and death, by which I mean both of the soul and of the body to [??] eternal. Since He gave his blood, which was sinless, and therefore guiltless, as a ransom for us who were liable to punishment because of our sins, He redeemed us from our guilt. He forgave our sins, tore up the record of them on the cross and delivered us from the devil’s tyranny.”
The devil was caught by the bait. It was as if he opened his mouth and hastened to pour out for himself our ransom, the master’s blood, which was not only guiltless, but full of divine power. Then, instead of being enriched by it, he was strongly bound and made an example in the cross of Christ.
Here he brings out, also as St. John Damascene did earlier, that everybody who lives is a sinner, and therefore is deserving of death. But Christ, because He was sinless, did not deserve death, and that is another reason why the devil could not hold Him in hell, and He could not be held in the tomb in death.
So there are two reasons why He conquered death, and both of these reasons are inseparably bound together—first of all, because Christ is God, and secondly, because He was sinless. It is because He was God that He was sinless, because, as I said earlier, Christ’s human nature was, and is, inseparably, but unconfusedly, bound with His divine nature.
In order to sin, Christ’s human nature would have to be parted from His divine nature, because sin is separation from God. Because Christ’s human nature and divine nature are inseparable, therefore, Christ not only did not sin, but also He could not sin. He did not, and could not sin, even in thought. Therefore, Christ, because He was God, was totally sinless, and because of this, both because of His divinity, and consequently because of His sinlessness, He overcame the power of sin and death through His death on the cross, and His resurrection.
St. John Chrysostom further highlights this teaching with an image of his own. He says, “It is as if, at a session of a court of justice, the devil should be addressed as follows: “Granted that you have destroyed all men because you found them guilty of sin, but why did you destroy Christ? Is it not very evident that you did so unjustly? Well then, through Him the whole world will be vindicated. “
From these, and the other teachings of the holy fathers based on scripture, the Orthodox doctrine of man’s redemption through Christ’s death and resurrection might be briefly stated, as follows: Death is the consequence of sin. When Christ died on the cross, He took upon Himself this consequence. However, since He was wholly without sin, He was undeserving of death, and since He was divine, He was unable to be held in the bonds of death and Hades.
Thus, the spiritual and physical death that had entered the world through the fall of man were abolished through Christ’s death and resurrection, and all mankind was given the possibility of being delivered from them both.
The consequences of Christ’s redemptive work could pass to all people because, as we have noted, concerning the consequences of the first man’s sin, human nature is one. St. Paul writes, “If by one man’s offense, death reigned by one, that is, Adam, much more, they which received abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness, shall reign by one, Jesus Christ.”
St. Cyril of Alexandria speaks specifically on how the consequences of Christ’s death on the cross, like the consequences of Adam’s fall, were able to pass to all men due to the unity of human nature. St. Cyril writes, “We were crucified with Christ at the moment when His flesh was crucified, because it somewhat included universal human nature in itself, just as universal human nature contracted the sickness of the curse in Adam at the same time that he drew upon himself the curse. In Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, all the consequences of the fall are overcome. These consequences, however, are not overcome all at once, but in a certain order, corresponding to the order in which man first experienced them.
St. Symeon, the New Theologian, teaches that, just as Adam experienced first the spiritual death, and later, physical death, so likewise, Christ first overcame spiritual death in His own person, when He resurrected, brought to life, and deified the human soul at His incarnation. And then He later overcame physical death in His person at His resurrection from the dead.
St. Symeon goes on to say that the same order of redemption, first of the soul, and then of the body, was observed in those who had died before Christ. For immediately after Christ’s death, and while His body lay in the tomb, His soul descended into Hades, freed the souls of the saints held captive there, in everlasting bonds, raised them up, and established them in a place of rest and light without evening, but not yet their bodies, for those He allowed to remain in the grave until the general resurrection.
So he is saying the resurrection already begins to occur when Christ dies, right when He dies, when His body is still in the tomb, and those of you who are Orthodox know that in the Church, while Christ’s body is still in the tomb, before Pascha, we are already wearing white vestment, or in some traditions, red vestments, representing Pascha. The time of the resurrection has already begun, although Christ’s body is still lying in the tomb, His soul is in Hades, resurrecting, spiritually, all the righteous ones who had died between the time of Adam’s fall and Christ’s coming. In the Epistle of St. Peter, we read that even some of those who died in the global flood of Noah’s time were delivered from Hades at that time while Christ’s body was in the grave.
Finally, St. Symeon teaches this order of redemption is also observed in the life of each Christian. Man is first spiritually resurrected in the Church through the Holy Mysteries that have been made possible through Christ’s redemptive work, and only later does he experience the physical resurrection that Christ also made possible. The beginning of our renewal, writes St. Gregory Palamas, is the mystery of holy baptism, wherein we are cleansed of sin through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. St. Gregory writes, Christ tore up the handwriting of our transgressions on the cross and made guiltless all those who are buried with Him through baptism.
In baptism we die and are buried with Christ, thus partaking of the saving power of His death, which frees us from sin. The Apostle Paul writes, “Know ye not that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death. Our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed.”
The mystery of baptism, however, does not only mean dying with Christ, it also means rising with Him and being given new life. The Apostle Paul affirms, “Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so, we should walk in newness of life.”
This spiritual resurrection in Christ is the uniting of man’s soul once again with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Because man is cleansed of sin in Holy Baptism through Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, grace is no longer foreign to his nature, and he becomes a fit receptacle of the Holy Spirit. In the mystery of baptism, together with the mystery of Chrismation that follows upon it, man receives the grace of the Holy Spirit, as he had it before the primordial fall—that is, the grace of the Holy Spirit united with his soul and his inward being.
St. Symeon, the New Theologian, explains how baptism, together with Chrismation, is both a death and resurrection for man, both granting man forgiveness of sins, and imparting to him the grace of the Holy Spirit that he had lost at the fall. St. Symeon writes:

The Son and Word of God, having become incarnate, offered Himself in the flesh as a sacrifice to the divinity of the Father, and of the Son, Himself, and of the Holy Spirit, in order that the first transgression of Adam might be benevolently forgiven for the sake of this great and fearful work, that is, for the sake of the sacrifice of Christ, and in order that, by its power, there might be performed another new birth and recreation of man in Holy Baptism, in which we are also cleansed by water mingled with the Holy Spirit. Christ called it being born again of water and the spirit.
From that time people are baptized in water, or immersed in it, and taken out from it three times, in the image of the three-day burial of the Lord, and after they die in it, to this whole evil world. In the third bringing out from it, they are already alive, as if resurrected from the dead, that is, their souls are brought to life, and again receive the grace of the Holy Spirit as Adam had it before the transgression, they are anointed with Holy Myrrh, or Holy Chrism, and by means of it are anointed with Jesus Christ, and are fragrant in a way above nature.

Two things occur in Holy Baptism. First, we are cleansed of sin, the consequences of sin, and secondly, we receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. I’m not talking chronologically, but those two things occur at the same time. Because we are cleansed of sin we can once more receive the grace of the Holy Spirit as Adam and Eve had it before the fall.
St. Symeon continues to write about how those who are baptized and Chrismated into Christ’s Church are united to God through the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion. He says, “Having become, in this way, worthy of being associates of God, they taste His flesh and drink His blood, and by means of the sanctified bread and wine, become of one body and blood with God, who was incarnate, and offered Himself as a sacrifice.”
In a similar vein, St. Nicholas Cabasilas, holy father of the 14th century, speaks of how we partake of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross when receiving Holy Communion. He says, “Since therefore, the only begotten Son has left nothing undone which pertains to the Father’s glory, He alone has broken down the middle wall of division,” from the words of St. Paul, “and clears many from his sentence, that is, the sentence upon him for sin.
Christ’s body, then, is the only medicine against sin and His blood the only ransom from offenses. This is the body that was slain upon the cross. It paid the penalty of death, and that upon the cross. The blood springing out from the wounds darkened the sun and shook the earth. It hollowed the air and washed the whole world clean of the filth of sin.
Therefore,” St. Nicholas concludes, “the labors and tears of those who repent of sins after the baptismal washing, and plead for grace, stand in need of the blood of the new covenant, and of the body which was slain, since the labors and tears are of no avail without the body and blood.”
Elsewhere, St. Nicholas affirms that in the Holy Eucharist we also partake of Christ’s resurrection since we receive the risen one, Himself, the very benefactor, Himself, the very temple whereon is founded the whole compass of graces. Spiritual resurrection of Christ, uniting of man’s soul with the divine grace, reopens the way to deification, which had been closed to man at the fall. Through deification, or union, with God, we are to become, in the words of the Apostle Peter, partakers of the divine nature, from the second epistle of the holy Apostle Peter.
Christ, the incarnate God wishes us to be united with Him in love. He wishes us to dwell in Him, and He in us. He said to His disciples, “If a man love Me, he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and We will make Our abode with him.” A little later He said, “Abide in Me,” or “Live in Me, and I in you.”
Throughout their lives, Orthodox Christians are to grow toward a more full deification, a more perfect participation in God’s life. This participation in God is never to end, but passes into everlasting spiritual life in the Kingdom of Heaven. As will be remembered, mankind had been cut off from both Paradise and Heaven at the fall. Now through Christ, both have been opened again to man.
When parted from the body at death, the souls of those redeemed by Christ not only pass to Paradise, which St. John Damascene describes as luxuriant, with ever-blooming plants, filled with fragrance, flooded with light, for they also pass through Heaven, the place in which the angelic powers dwell, and which is also described as a place full of light.
What we have described is only the first kind of resurrection, spiritual resurrection that has been made possible by Christ. The second kind, physical resurrection, will occur at the second coming, through the saving power of Christ’s resurrection. This accords with the order of redemption outlined by St. Symeon above. We will return to the subject of the physical resurrection at the end of the seminar.
Now we have completed part I of the seminar today, and as I said earlier, before ending this session I will read the first couple of sections of part II, but now, since we have covered this theme and it is fresh in your minds, I would like to see if you have any questions on this, and then maybe about 15 minutes of questions or so, and then I will continue and read the first two sections of Part II.
Questioner #1: If Adam and Even did not fall, would we exist?
Father Damascene: Yes, we would. Yes, somehow we would exist, or more people would exist. A number of holy fathers, St. John Chrysostom, St. John Damascene, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Blessed Theodore of Cyrus, and I can’t remember, there might be a few others—they say that if Adam and Eve had not fallen, then God would have increased the human race by some other means, not sexual reproduction, some other means He would have found.
St. John Chrysostom says that God created many angels, He did not need sexual reproduction, He created many angels. He created Eve out of Adam’s rib. The holy fathers do not say exactly how the human race would have increased, but they do say that there would have been increase of the human race, by some other means.
Questioner #2: I was wondering about the irrational part—imagination? I come from a Protestant background, with the idea that we are to share in God’s creative energy, so I always tied that closely with imagination, of thinking new things. How does that work in Orthodoxy? Not clear?
Father Damascene: Well, about the uncreated energy, I am not sure, like thinking of new things is part of the uncreated energy?
Questioner #2: No, I am speaking of imagination—I consider that as being very creative, but you are saying that is a lower form?
Father Damascene: Well, the Holy Fathers, when they talk about imagination—in Greek it is phantasticon or fantasia—they are referring to the formation of mental images after the corresponding body is not present. You can see something and then you can imagine it in your mind. After the fall, man’s mind came under the sway of the imagination.
The imagination can be used in all different ways, but it is not quite the same as the creative faculty. Adam did give names to all the animals and St. John Chrysostom says that God endowed Adam with ineffable intelligence, so that he could name all the animals and remember all the names, and describe the qualities of those animals with the names.
St. Ephrem the Syrian says that this was also with God’s inspiration that he was able to name the animals. So you could say that there was a kind of creative faculty in Adam, but he did not do it through the imagination. In other words, the imagination is something between the reality and the mind. When you have an image of something, it is not the reality, itself. You can remember that thing through the imagination, but it is not the reality, itself.
What St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain was saying is that Adam and Eve, before the fall, could perceive the essences, what we call the logoi, of the created things, directly, without the use of the imagination. Again, there was a creative faculty in Adam, but not through the imagination.
Questioner #3: I have a question in regards to the restoration and deification, with both the spiritual and the physical, the soul and the body, and in regards to when that is happening with the soul, and as you say, with the body that is not going to happen until total restoration of mankind. I am not sure how to pose the question, but is it an accepted pattern, or a state of being, that as the soul is restored more, or coming closer to Christ, the physical might tend to be more corrupted because of that growth? Is the physical just going to be where it is going to be, or is that affected as the soul is…?
Father Damascene: Like the soul of a Christian coming closer to God, is that what you are talking about?
Questioner #3: Correct.
Father Damascene: St. Symeon the Theologian says that in this order of redemption that he talks about—and you rightly recapped what I was saying—first the spiritual death came in through Adam’s fall, and then as a result of that, physical death came in. Christ first overcame spiritual death, and then He will overcome physical death in the future. So, for now, all Christians and even the greatest saints die, but God does grant, in some cases, a certain relative incorruption to the bodies of the saints.
That is why we have these incorrupt bodies of the saints in the Church. Some are quite amazing, like St. Alexander of Svir, who died 500 years ago. His body was hidden away somewhere during the Soviet area and they recently found it again, and it is completely incorrupt. All the flesh is there, it is soft, it is white.
There are some amazing cases like that, and also, we have cases of myrrh-gushing relics. Recently, in Greece, on the island of Andros, there is a whole series of relics that were uncovered where there was gushing myrrh. This is an indication from God, or rather a foretaste, or foreshadowing, of the future incorruption. It is not a complete incorruption, obviously, but it is a relative incorruption. So there is something we can speak about, in terms of incorruption, even now, but it is obviously not complete.
I think that the saints, even during this earthly life, can partake, to some degree of that incorruption. We read about some saints who were saying the Jesus Prayer with their head down on their chest, and they were praying in their heart, and then incorrupt fragrance of Heaven will come forth from their chest. These kinds of signs are given in the Church, these rather beautiful little miracles that are given in which God opens up the other world, and gives a sense and foretaste of the incorruption that He has planned for the whole creation, and also the incorruption that was there in the beginning of the creation.
Another account I could give you is the account of Euphrosynos the cook. Many Orthodox Christians have in their kitchen an icon of St. Euphrosynos the cook, patron saint of kitchens and cooking. St. Euphrosenus the cook was a monk, I believe, in Palestine, and he went to Paradise in spirit. His abbot had a dream in which he saw St. Euphrosynos in Paradise. St. Euphrosynos was there and the abbot asked him if he would give him something to take back and St. Euphrosynos gave him two pieces of fruit, I think apples, or something, and they were wrapped in a cloth. When the abbot came out of his reverie, there in his cell where these two pieces of fruit. They were somehow brought back from Paradise in a mystical manner. Paradise still exists. When Christ died on the cross, before He died He said to the thief, “You will be with me together in Paradise.” So Paradise still exists, although we can’t see it. It is a more spiritual, rarified realm.
Somehow these pieces of fruit were brought back from Paradise and they had this miraculous, heavenly fragrance. The abbot cut them up into little pieces and people came from miles around who were sick and had various diseases, and they partook of these pieces of the fruit, and they were healed. In other words, in this way, that incorrupt realm, which still exists, kind of impinges every once in a while, by God’s allowance, or God’s grace, His providence, by His will, upon this world, and we can somehow partake of that. Again, the same thing with the myrrh-gushing icons, that incorruption is made manifest to us, even in this fallen, corrupted state that we live in.
By the way, about St. Euphrosynos, the cook, after this happened he disappeared, because he knew he was found out that he was going to Paradise, and all these people wanted to go see him, and he became a celebrity, so he left to another monastery. He is considered a great saint of the Church and we have from him that image of the Paradise that still exists and there are others that have been to Paradise, as well—St. Andrew, Fool for Christ, and many others.
Questioner #4: In today’s talk you were talking about the state of man’s body before the fall and last night we were talking about God’s energies. As Orthodox, we believe in theosis and becoming like Christ. Looking at the lives of the saints, I just finished reading Father Arseny’s book, about his life, and about how when he was put into solitude with the other prisoner, Father Alexi. They should have died, they should have frozen to death, and they prayed and they survived. Were they allowed to be in the state before the fall, as though that was what our nature, our physical body was to be outside of the fallen state of the world?
Father Damascene: That is a good point, that is a good way to look at it. You are kind of reading into the text, but I think that is a good way to do that, because when miracles occur, when the order of the fallen creation, or the laws of the fallen nature, of the fallen creation, are changed by the will of God, then we do get a glimpse of that incorruption in which the world existed before the fall, which it will exist in after the fall, and the incorruption that man used to enjoy, and will enjoy after the resurrection.