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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

First, a “person” is not at all the same as an “individual”. Isolated, self-dependent, none of us is an authentic person but merely an individual, a bare unit as recorded in the census. Egocentricity is the death of true personhood. Each becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for them and in them.

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

At the very heart of the divine life, from all eternity God knows himself as “I and Thou” in a threefold way, and he rejoices continually in this knowledge.

in him these things mean infinitely more than we can ever imagine.

But in the end the least misleading ikon is to be found, not in the physical world outside us, but in the human heart.

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.

Our human task as craftsmen or manufacturers is to discern this logos dwelling in each thing and to render it manifest; we seek not to dominate but to co-operate.

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.

All created things are marked with the seal of the Trinity.

As at the Annunciation, so in the extension of Christ's Incarnation at the Eucharist, the Father sends down the Holy Spirit, to effect the Son's presence in the consecrated gifts. Here, as always, the three persons of the Trinity are working together.

We think the Trinity, speak the Trinity, breathe the Trinity.

The Jesus Prayer is not only Christ-centered but Trinitarian.

So far from being pushed into the corner and treated as a piece of abstruse theologizing of interest only to specialists, the doctrine of the Trinity ought to have upon our daily life an effect that is nothing less than revolutionary. Made after the image of God the Trinity, human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven.

Each social unit—the family, the school, the workshop, the parish, the Church universal—is to be made an ikon of the Triunity.

Our faith in the Trinity puts us under an obligation to struggle at every level, from the strictly personal to the highly organized, against all forms of oppression, injustice and exploitation. In our combat for social righteousness and “human rights”, we are acting specifically in the name of the Holy Trinity.

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.

If I do not feel a sense of joy in God's creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the Way. I have not yet learnt to be truly human. For it is only through thanksgiving that I can become myself.

Joyful thanksgiving, so far from being escapist or sentimental, is on the contrary entirely realistic—but with the realism of one who sees the world in God, as the divine creation.

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

The purpose of the creation doctrine, then, is not to ascribe a chronological starting-point to the world, but to affirm that at this present moment, as at all moments, the world depends for its existence upon God.

But in “spiritualizing” the body, man does not thereby dematerialize it: on the contrary, it is the human vocation to manifest the spiritual in and through the material. Christians are in this sense the only true materialists.

In a variety of ways—through the cultivation of the earth, through craftsmanship, through the writing of books and the painting of ikons—man gives material things a voice and renders the creation articulate in praise of God.

God, as man, fulfills the mediatorial task which man rejected at the fall.

The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential stage upon man's journey from the divine image to the divine likeness.

According to his divine nature Christ is “one in essence” (homoousios) with God the Father; according to his human nature he is homoousios with us men.

Underlying the conciliar definitions about Christ as God and man, there are two basic principles concerning our salvation. First, only God can save us. A prophet or teacher of righteousness cannot be the redeemer of the world. If, then, Christ is to be our Saviour, he must be fully and completely God. Secondly, salvation must reach the point of human need. Only if Christ is fully and completely a man as we are, can we men share in what he has done for us.