The Orthodox Way

by Kallistos Ware

Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey—in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.

“A God who is comprehensible is not God.” A God, that is to say, whom we claim to understand exhaustively through the resources of our reasoning brain turns out to be no more than an idol, fashioned in our own image. Such a “God” is most emphatically not the true and living God of the Bible and the Church. Man is made in God's image, but the reverse is not true.

These, then, are the two “poles” in man's experience of the Divine. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than anything else. And we find, paradoxically, that these two “poles” do not cancel one another out: on the contrary, the more we are attracted to the one “pole”, the more vividly we become aware of the other at the same time.

God is both end-point and starting-point. He is the host who welcomes us at the conclusion of the journey, yet he is also the companion who walks by our side at every step upon the Way.

And so it proves to be for each one who follows the spiritual Way. We go out from the known to the unknown, we advance from light into darkness. We do not simply proceed from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge, but we go forward from the light of partial knowledge into a greater knowledge which is so much more profound that it can only be described as the “darkness of unknowing.”

We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

If we say that he is good or just, we must at once add that his goodness or justice are not to be measured by our human standards. If we say that he exists, we must qualify this immediately by adding that he is not one existent object among many, that in his case the word “exist” bears a unique significance.

So the spiritual Way proves to be a path of repentance in the most radical sense. Metanoia, the Greek word for repentance, means literally “change of mind.”

So, in the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.

In the Creed we do not say, “I believe that there is a God”; we say, “I believe in one God.” Between belief that and belief in, there is a crucial distinction. It is possible for me to believe that someone or something exists, and yet for this belief to have no practical effect upon my life.

Faith in God, then, is not at all the same as the kind of logical certainty that we attain in Euclidean geometry. God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem.

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

Because faith is not logical certainty but a personal relationship, and because this personal relationship is as yet very incomplete in each of us and needs continually to develop further, it is by no means impossible for faith to coexist with doubt.

Yet doubt does not in itself signify lack of faith. It may mean the opposite—that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it.

“The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.” As Thomas Merton rightly says, “Faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace.”

As The Cloud of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”6

St Dimitrii of Rostov: Come, my Light, and illumine my darkness. Come, my Life, and revive me from death. Come, my Physician, and heal my wounds. Come, Flame of divine love, and burn up the thorns of my sins, kindling my heart with the flame of thy love. Come, my King, sit upon the throne of my heart and reign there. For thou alone art my King and my Lord.9

God, then, is the One whom we love, our personal friend. We do not need to prove the existence of a personal friend. God, says Olivier Clément, “is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.” If we believe in God, it is because we know him directly in our own experience, not because of logical proofs.

First, there is the world around us.

We find a second “pointer” within ourselves.

A third “pointer” is to be found in my relationships with other human persons.

To say to another, with all our heart, “I love you”, is to say, “You will never die.” At such moments of personal sharing we know, not through arguments but by immediate conviction, that there is life beyond death.

These three “pointers”—in the world around us, in the world within us, and in our inter-personal relationships—can serve together as a way of approach, bringing us to the threshold of faith in God. None of these “pointers” constitutes a logical proof.

Faith in God enables me to make sense of things, to see them as a coherent whole, in a way that nothing else can do. Faith enables me to make one out of the many.

The essence, then, signifies the radical transcendence of God; the energies, his immanence and omnipresence.

On the contrary, the energies are God himself in his activity and self-manifestation. When a man knows or participates in the divine energies, he truly knows or participates in God himself, so far as this is possible for a created being. But God is God, and we are human; and so, while he possesses us, we cannot in the same way possess him.

By virtue of this distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, we are able to affirm the possibility of a direct or mystical union between man and God—what the Greek Fathers term the theosis of man, his “deification”—but at the same time we exclude any pantheistic identification between the two: for man participates in the energies of God, not in the essence. There is union, but not fusion or confusion. Although “oned” with the divine, man still remains man; he is not swallowed up or annihilated, but between him and God there continues always to exist an “I—Thou” relationship of person to person.

Such, then, is our God: unknowable in his essence, yet known in his energies; beyond and above all that we can think or express, yet closer to us than our own heart.

There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There is in God something analogous to “society”. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or “The One”. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love.

The final end of the spiritual Way is that we humans should also become part of this Trinitarian coinherence or perichoresis, being wholly taken up into the circle of love that exists within God. So Christ prayed to his Father on the night before his Crucifixion: “May they all be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, so may they also be one in us” (John 17:21).

Hell is not other people; hell is myself, cut off from others in self-centeredness.

Father, Son and Spirit—so the saints affirm, following the testimony of Scripture—have only one will and not three, only one energy and not three. None of the three ever acts separately, apart from the other two. They are not three Gods, but one God.

Each of the three is fully and completely God. None is more or less God than the others. Each possesses, not one third of the Godhead, but the entire Godhead in its totality;

The Trinity is not a philosophical theory but the living God whom we worship; and so there comes a point in our approach to the Trinity when argumentation and analysis must give place to wordless prayer. “Let all mortal flesh keep silent, and stand with fear and trembling” (The Liturgy of St James).

The third person is the Holy Spirit, the “wind” or “breath” of God. While appreciating the inadequacy of neat classifications, we may say that the Spirit is God within us, the Son is God with us, and the Father, God above or beyond us.

The three persons, as we saw, work always together, and possess but a single will and energy. St Irenaeus speaks of the Son and the Spirit as the “two hands” of God the Father;11 and in every creative and sanctifying act the Father is using both these “hands” at once. Scripture and worship provide repeated examples of this:

1. Creation. “By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the Breath of his mouth” (Ps. 33:6). God the Father creates through his “Word” or Logos (the second person) and through his “Breath” or Spirit (the third person). The “two hands” of the Father work together in the shaping of the universe.

2. Incarnation. At the Annunciation the Father sends the Holy Spirit upon the Blessed Virgin Mary, and she conceives the eternal Son of God (Luke 1:35). So God's taking of our humanity is a Trinitarian work.

Divine grace does not destroy human freedom but reaffirms it.

3. The Baptism of Christ. In the Orthodox tradition this is seen as a revelation of the Trinity.

The Transfiguration of Christ. This also is a Trinitarian happening. The same relationship prevails between the three persons as at the Baptism. The Father testifies from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him”

The Eucharistic Epiclesis. The same Triadic pattern as is evident at the Annunciation, the Baptism, and the Transfiguration, is apparent likewise at the culminating moment of the Eucharist, the epiclesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit.

Immediately before reciting the Creed in the Eucharistic Liturgy, we say these words: “Let us love one another, so that we may with one mind confess Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided.” Note the words “so that”. A genuine confession of faith in the Triune God can be made only by those who, after the likeness of the Trinity, show love mutually towards each other. There is an integral connection between our love for one another and our faith in the Trinity: the first is a precondition for the second, and in its turn the second gives full strength and meaning to the first.

“The most perfect rule of Christianity, its exact definition, its highest summit, is this: to seek what is for the benefit of all”, states St John Chrysostom. “…I cannot believe that it is possible for a man to be saved if he does not labour for the salvation of his neighbor.” Such are the practical implications of the dogma of the Trinity. That is what it means to live the Trinity.

Love is the kingdom which the Lord mystically promised to the disciples, when he said that they would eat in his kingdom: “You shall eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:30). What should they eat and drink, if not love? When we have reached love, we have reached God and our journey is complete. We have crossed over to the island which lies beyond the world, where are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: to whom be glory and dominion. May God make us worthy to fear and love him. Amen.19 St Isaac the Syrian

However oppressed by my own or others' anguish, I am not to forget that there is more in the world than this, there is much more.

Rather than say that he created the universe out of nothing, we should say that he created it out of his own self, which is love. We should think, not of God the Manufacturer or God the Craftsman, but of God the Lover.

Creation is an act not so much of his free will as of his free love.

God's love is, in the literal sense of the word, “ecstatic”—a love that causes God to go out from himself and to create things other than himself.

God is all that he does, and so his act of creating is not something separate from himself. In God's heart and in his love, each one of us has always existed. From all eternity God saw each one of us as an idea or thought in his divine mind, and for each one from all eternity he has a special and distinctive plan. We have always existed for him; creation signifies that at a certain point in time we begin to exist also for ourselves.