“Oh, keep talkin’
You’re a hunter, I’m a wolf
Yeah, keep talkin’
I’m the preacher, you’re the fool”~ Fields of the Nephilim
“Preacher Man“
St Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonika, Defender of Hesychasm.
I.
It doesn’t take much to take a quote out of context, re-contextualize it, and have the original author say what you want him to say, no matter how disparate it may be from the original message. For instance, while I honestly don’t know just what the heck Carl McCoy was growling on about in the above-quoted song, it took all of six seconds to isolate a snippet from his 80′s goth-rock smash hit single that was sufficiently representative of this week’s theme, or rather where I want to take this week’s theme, to include it here.
Similarly, it doesn’t take much to isolate a piece of an integral whole at the expense of direct perception of the whole. Thus, a tiny piece, a detail of a Bruegel might lead you to think he was a painter of wooden sailing ships, totally destroying the possibility that one might get a sense of the terrible grandeur of the Tower of Babel in that moment.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Tower of Babel," c. 1563.
II.
The Tower of Babel, we are told, was a monument to mankind’s hubris in thinking Heaven could be taken by an act of architecture. (Coming a mere four generations after the Great Flood as it did, it is perhaps fitting that the founder of the city of Babel was named “Nimrod.”) In a mythical age devoid of scientific philosophy, the Tower of Babel was what passed in that time for the Ontological Argument, a formal proof attempting to locate God at the conclusion of a series of logical syllogisms: rather than build steps toward a conceptual goal based on reason, bricks were fashioned of dried mud for much the same purpose—to get to Heaven.
God, of course, put the kabosh on this silliness straightaway, and sent the inhabitants of the ill-fated city packing in all directions, saddled with an intercommunications handicap just for good measure. Maintaining the analogy between steps of logic and bricks of mud, it’s as though God was telling us that propositional knowledge of His existence (i.e., that the proposition “God” can be assigned a mutually-exclusive value of “true” or “false”) was insufficient for any meaningful knowledge of His being, that in fact such an approach to the mystery of God could well have negative repercussions.
This is unfortunate for the proponents of the propositionally-oriented perspective of such a man as Barlaam. Barlaam was a 14th-century Orthodox monk trained in the Scholastic method of dialectics, much more dominant in the Western churches than in the Eastern, and for whom knowledge of God came solely of the propositional variety. Indeed he strenuously regarded as outright heresy the view that God could be the object of a direct, experiential knowledge, a perspective he found put into practice by reclusive desert mystics called Hesychasts, another group of Orthodox monks resident at the self-governed monastic community located at Holy Mountain Athos in Greece. Such was Barlaam’s opposition to what the hesychasts purported to do, in fact, that the debate of propositional versus experiential Godliness came to be made the subject of three separate church councils, all of which ruled against Barlaam and for the Hesychasts’ defender, St Gregory Palamas.
This proved to be a watershed moment in the history of Christianity, insofar as Eastern Orthodoxy thereby officially recognized the direct, experiential knowledge of God to be not merely the domain of a few isolated mystics (often deemed heretical in their expression of such knowledge) as has generally been the case in Western Christianity, but rather as a proper object of Christian worship, suitable for any believing Christian (noting that the experience under discussion is inseparable from faith). The Western, more dialectically-inclined churches, on the other hand, with their near-constant state of schism beginning with the Reformation in the 16th century, provide an ample historical illustration of the splintering precipitated by the fall of the Tower of Babel.
To triangulate the point using a non-Christian tradition: the Buddha encouraged the destruction of all such dialectical detours on the road to holiness as Balaam and his Scholastic brethren insisted upon. In his work exploring The Doctrine of Awakening espoused by the earliest Buddhist texts (the Pali suttas), Julius Evola writes:
The premise from which the Buddhist Doctrine of Awakening starts is the destruction of the demon of dialectics; the renunciation of the various constructions of thought and speculation, which are simply an expression of opinion, and of the profusion of theories, which are projections of a fundamental restlessness in which a mind that has not yet found in itself its own principle seeks for support. … It is not that Buddhism intended to exclude some possibility of obtaining some answers to these [ontological] problems … It has, rather, wished to oppose the demon of dialectics and has rejected every “truth” that is based only on discursive intellect … It keeps its distance from “reasoners and disputers” for they “can reason well and reason badly, they can say thus and they can also say otherwise,” and they can deal with theories which are only their own excogitations. [pp. 38-39; all direct quotes taken from the Majjhima Nikaya.]
Returning Westward, Christ Himself prescribes the mental discipline of concentration necessary for the work of directly-experienced mystical insights in the Gospel of Matthew (5:27): “You have heard that the law of Moses says, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” [1] St Paul continues the advocacy of mental ascesis (Romans 8:5-6): “Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. If your sinful nature controls your mind, there is death. But if the Holy Spirit controls your mind, there is life and peace.” And in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs we read (15:11) “Not even the world of the dead can keep the Lord from knowing what is there; how then can we hide our thoughts from God?” and (4:23) “Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.”
In keeping with the Hesychastic objective of direct experiential knowledge of God, the primary means employed by hesychasts is a practice called the Jesus Prayer, which involves specialized breathing techniques and a regimen of concentration to empty the mind of all images—including images of God—in order to directly perceive His “uncreated light”:
… another feature of this prayer tradition deserves our attention, namely the attempt to overcome the dualistic system of Neoplatonic thought [as exemplified by the Scholastics] which has always prevailed in the Church. … At the very heart of the Jesus-Prayer lies the actual experience of the body as the temple of the Spirit. Hence the divine light of Mount Tabor is to be found within ourselves. If our body is the temple of the Spirit, and if the kingdom of heaven is to be found in ourselves and not outside, then the direction of prayer moves from without to within, from the many and the varied to the unifying and one. … The beginner is told to say the Jesus-Prayer slowly, gently and quietly. Each word is to be said without haste. To help and foster the natural flow of these words it became connected with the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. But the rhythm will also follow the rhythm of the heartbeat… [Dr. Gabriele Winkler, Prayer Attitude in the Eastern Church, p. 14-16]
Faux-Orthodox Icon of the Sacred Heart of Christ.
Moreover, the use of “the rhythm of the heartbeat” has a specific goal in mind: the displacement of the center of identity from the head to the heart:
“You must descend from your head into your heart,” Theophan insists. “At present your thoughts of God are in your head. And God himself is, as it were, outside you, and so your prayer and other spiritual exercises remain exterior. Whilst you are still in your head, thoughts will … always be whirling about like snow in winter, or clouds of mosquitos in the summer” (The Art of Prayer, p. 183). “All our inner disorder is due to the dislocation of our powers, the mind and the heart each going their own way” (ibid, p. 195), until the mind comes to an initial concord with the heart, growing eventually into a union of the mind with the heart. [Winkler, ibid, p. 19]
And this is a practice not unknown in other mystical contexts. As I quoted in a previous essay and here again reproduce for convenience:
The ritual mentioned here is connected with the practice of breathing … it is enough to know the meaning of the spirit, assumed in concentration and in silence, which, as an animating and sustaining essence of man, is symbolized by breath. Breath is necessary to bodily life, just as fire is indispensable to any form of physical life, hence “the breath of fire” in various symbolisms.
… after achieving the perfect rhythm of breathing in the abovementioned phases, so that this organic function may continue with absolute spontaneity and without requiring any particular attention, one descends to the roots of being through “concentration” and “silence.” When one reaches the supreme phase and frees the spirit, this is realized as a small flame burning in one’s heart. The body must be experienced as pervaded by a wave of subtle warmth, flowing through the veins and the nerves. The flame burns, stating: “I AM!” The heart will feel as if it is burning and will be dissolved in the element of the magical Fire.
In this process, the greatest difficulty (if “difficulty” is the most adequate term in relation to such an act of the spirit) consists in the consciousness’s, the spirit’s, or the Self’s descent into the heart. In fact, we are very accustomed to feel and to experience ourselves in the brain. Someone may even feel himself in a sense organ, when the perception is of such an intensity and violence that it attracts every attention toward a given point of the body. Thus, one momentarily feels like sinking, wherever the sensation of pain or pleasure has arisen. The process of descent into the heart is analogous to this, although none of those sensations is felt. [Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduction to Magic, pp. 42-43]
As we can see, the heart is not an arbitrary bodily location, nor is its function arbitrary to the pursuit of Godliness, as I have intimated previously (most recently here in addition to the above-linked essay). Given that God, as sole creator of all, necessarily thus lies at the center of all, the heart as the functional center of the human body (which was, after all, made in “God’s image”) is the microcosmic analogue of the Throne of Heaven. It is perhaps not coincidental that if one mimics the shape of the Christian cross by standing with legs together and arms outstretched, the intersection of the vertical with the horizontal occurs at a location very close to the heart.
III.
A tower constructed to impeach the heavens, and wrecked when it got too high, is a sterling example of the failure to discern the existence of the gateway to heaven within oneself. It is an isolation of something on the outside (an image of the heavens formed in one’s head) and mistaking it for the center, a hypertrophy of the periphery as it were, or the idolatry of the image. It is an over-emphasis on sheer altitude (the head), rather than an inward attitude (the heart), which displaces the likeliest location to have a personal encounter with the Divine. “Proving” God has absolutely zero to do with experiencing God, with much to testify that the attempt at the former actually interferes with the essential task of the latter.
In the Gospel of Mark (7:18-23), Christ tells us:
“Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods?” And He said, “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.”
The careful reader of this passage will not fail to notice that Christ here analogizes impure and vain thoughts, expressions and actions with the impure matter generated by the stomach: i.e., excrement. By contrast, the Orthodox Christian Hesychasts show us that taking refuge in the heart in simple humility, emptiness, and silence, and allowing the heart to harmonize its own spontaneous song with the song from God for all creation, leads one out of a state of defilement (or attachment to this, that, and the other thing outside of oneself: the objects of thought) and into a direct relationship with the Absolute.
Post scriptum: as the foremost example in the West of a “prayer of the heart,” the Jesus Prayer officially entered popular culture in 2001, when British composer (and Eastern Orthodox convert) Sir John Tavener set it to music specifically utilizing Bjork’s vocal talents (ably assisted by the Brodsky String Quartet), as a soundtrack to an exhibition of work by photographer Nan Goldin. Aim your browser and speakers accordingly, and “They that hath ears to hear, let them hear!”
Notes
1. If the emphasis on “lustfulness” seems an unnecessary moral overlay on what should be a purely mental discipline, it should be pointed out that even Buddhism has a similar focus in its Third Precept: “I undertake to abstain from sexual misconduct.” Why all the fuss over sex? The Buddha is purported to have said that, had there been another human drive as powerful as sexual desire, he could not have reached Enlightenment. Sex is the strongest enticement the physical world dangles in front of the would-be world-transcender, to remain attached to the evidence of the senses as the sole reality.
While there are various traditions such as the Tantric varieties of Hinduism and Buddhism which promote the use of sex as a means toward transcendence (an aspect of these traditions almost always over-emphasized in our hypocritically hypersexualized culture), the relevant Tantras always instruct that sexuality must be controlled and seen as a discipline, rather than serve as the outlet for simple sensual gratification typical of most of humanity, if the focus is to be on enlightenment or transcendence (what Eastern Orthodox Christianity terms theosis). Needless to say, control and discipline over something imply detachment from that thing, to the point where complete sexual abstinence would not present a problem for the experienced practitioner (in this context, sex is a ritual action like any other).
When read in this light, Biblical injunctions against “lust” and “fornication” (which one also finds in a non-theist orientation in Buddhist scripture) take on a different function and significance: prescriptive of acts of inner overcoming, rather than merely socially normative. Consider also the Orthodox Christian conception of sin: rather than a “crime” against God, sin is understood as simply “missing the mark.”
Mike,
Well written, thought out piece. The Bruegel picture is fantastic. Take a little umbrage at your reference to the Reformation since without it neither you nor I would understand the Latin the Catholic Church wanted to keep us enslaved to. Nothing like hearing scripture in your own language – a main tenent of the Reformation. Also, nothing like a little argument to get closer to the truth – you denigrate the intellect at your own folly. I must say I always feel a bit of an intellectual counter puncher in these exchanges, following up on your lead.
I think we can broadly agree that religious teaching poses the duality of the ego and the soul, and the death of the one leads to the life of the other. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a mercurial and brilliant man said that sacrifice is the highest principle of religious teaching. In that sense Christ must surely be seen as the highest form of religious expression.
But back to the text. While I laud your mystical interpretations of these texts, there is still a historical reality that must be acknowledged. You will note that Jesus doesn’t explain the meaning of his message to the crowd but only to his disciples in private. The reason he spoke enigmatically and in parables to the crowds was because he didn’t want to hand the Pharisees an easy propaganda victory to hand him over to the authorities as not being a good Jew. So the crowds thought he meant excrement but Jesus explains to the disciples afterwards in private that he means what comes from the heart.
Judaism surrounded for centuries by Pagans had developed elaborate purity codes to identify it as separate from the Pagan cultures that surrounded and dominated it. We know we’re Jews because we don’t eat Pork, etc. The Pharisees enforced these purity codes fanatically and it is primarily these codes that Jesus is taking on in this passage. The codes, he is saying, point to a deeper purity – a purity of motive. As Anglican scholar N.T. Wright says, “the poisoned wells of human motivation are the real problem to which the purity laws are pointing.” This argument with the Pharisees will culminate in Jesus arrest and crucifixion. Wright also says, ” The purity laws, he suggests, point to the real need of humans for a deeper purity, a purity of motive. Eating meat from crocodile to kangaroo to pig to porcupine won’t affect that.” So, this to me is the essential point of Jesus’s teaching. “Keeping the purity laws can be a way of papering over the crack; so can getting in touch with your feelings. If there is evil, it infects the whole. That’s what purity and impurity are really all about.”
As I’ve said to you before, you have to see Jesus in his Jewish context before you can get the whole message. You can’t just separate out what you want and isolate it into an isolated mystical teaching you have to see the teaching in its historical, religious context. Only then does it make sense. Loved the Fields of the Nephilim quote. I remember being 16 walking around London watching all the British goths with their Fields jackets. Ahh youth. Been listening to Sisters recently, “A devil in a black dress watches over, my guardian angel walks away.” Good stuff !Be well.
Hi Mike! Thanks for your thoughtful response.
Re. the Reformation: to be sure, I think a lot of good has come out of it, and the reasons for its existence are valid, esp. given the liberties the Catholic Church was taking (and still does take). But the Christian discourse need not be framed as solely Reformation vs. Catholic – as I tried to show here, there is a very real, very vibrant tradition in the East that gets almost no attention in comparison with the Western Churches, but which has, by my reading, much more faithfully preserved the original teachings.
The point I was trying to make using the Reformation as an example was that schism is nowhere near the extent of historical fact in the Orthodox East that it is in the Catholic and Protestant West – there is no equivalent to the Reformation in the history of the Orthodox Church (though there are and have been schisms, they have been minor affairs compared to the Protestant/Catholic split). And I ask: why? I believe it’s because of an overemphasis on the purely intellectual, dualistic methodology employed in the West (God is “out there” somewhere, not to be sought inside oneself). That was the whole point of the comparison between the Tower of Babel and the West.
Please note, Mike, that these aren’t just my own interpretations of the Bible. I’m relying on an Orthodox Christian reading of the same scriptures we all look to in order to reach my conclusions – did you read the fairly substantial excerpts I copied from credible sources (a woman holding multiple doctorates in theological studies discussing the thinking of some of the earliest Hesychasts and Fathers of the Church)? I understand and agree with your point with regard to the historical reality of the Jewish background of Jesus (nothing in this essay contradicts that), but those considerations, while they may be necessary, are not a sufficient condition for understanding the dispensation dependent upon Christ’s message and mission. There is nothing “isolated” about what I presented – it’s part of a 2,000-year old organic tradition, with roots in the Judaic tradition, as you point out, well before that. The Hesychasts are not my creation – if they are somehow “isolated,” then so are the Church Fathers with whom they had a great deal of cross-pollination, and whom we ignore at our peril.
Let’s look at a case study which neatly illustrates what I’m saying. Beginning in the late 60′s, a group of Protestants, representatives and members of entire parishes led by Peter Gillquist, came together to find the answer to one question, in keeping with the noble Protestant ethic of getting back to basics: “Whatever became of the New Testament Church – where did it go in history?” (quoted from What is the Orthodox Church? A brief overview of Orthodoxy by Fr. Marc Dunaway, 1995). Then in 1986, after many years of searching for the answer to that one seemingly simple question, he along with close to a thousand of his fellow Protestants were officially converted en masse to Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically the North American Antiocian Orthodox Archdiocese. To my knowledge, this event is unique in the history of Christianity, the only time such an interdenominational conversion on such a grand scale has ever happened. (The story is related in Gillquist’s own words here.)
Mike,
I think there can be some middle ground between us. In Luke Jesus says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.”
So lets not denigrate the heart or the mind. There needs to be an implicit trustworthy attitude towards God that Jesus likened to a child coming towards him. The heart must be involved. But the mind must also be involved to discriminate between false doctrines, to determine what the scriptures actually say, and perform resarch into the historical Jesus and his political and religious agendas. Mystical activity is important but it must be part of a holistic response of the person to Christ’s message. Intellectual understanding of the gospel is also paramount.
Take these issues of Jesus’s teachings on impurity coming from the heart rather than from what you eat. As I mentioned before, they come out of a specific argument with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were concerned with the outer appearance of what makes you a Jew, Jesus said the purity laws pointed to a need for a deeper motive, a purity of motive. The tension with the Pharisees is crucial because it has political implications. Around this time -supported by Pharisees- there were Jewish nationalist sects that believed in fighting Rome militarily and as you know most Jews considered the messiah to be a military one who would deliver them militarily from the Pagan powers that oppressed them.
But Jesus saw that this was going to end badly and his pacifism is partly a result of that specific historical milieu: if you keep on with this hardline violent, nationalist agenda the temple will be destroyed within a generation, he effectively tells them. And his prediction came true. So many of Jesus’s teachings like turning the other cheek, going two miles with a person who demands one of you, had direct implications on his historical situation – a method of dealing with an oppressive power. A whole new religious attitude towards the state was emerging. Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render to God that which is God’s. So a person could pay taxes, live a law abiding life but still live with his head held high not hypnotized by money or the power of this world – Caesar. It’s a very different attitude than what the Pharisees had. It’s a crucial development in the history of religious-political relationships and it has direct results on how you live your life today. But you won’t get that and other crucial issues if you merely concentrate on breathing exercises and emptying your mind. This goes back to my original point that Christianity is a religion that is engaged with the world as opposed to Buddhism that seeks to detach from the world. Christianity is also a highly practical religion and the intellect for me is a crucial part of the religious experience. I’m reading Mark for Everyone by N.T. Wright at the moment, part of a series of commentaries on the New Testament that I’ve found enlightening. Biblical commentaries have long been a feature of Protestant life. Highly recommended.
Hi Mike,
I fear we may be talking past each other, as I am not arguing against this: “Mystical activity is important but it must be part of a holistic response of the person to Christ’s message.” In my first reply to your comment I did, once again and for the record, acknowledge that the historical realities of Christ’s immediate milieu are an important consideration, but cannot be the sole consideration if the object is, well, to be a Christian. We seem to agree on this, so I’m not sure why you’re belaboring that point, which is the vast majority of your reply.
The point of the essay was that Western Christianity’s focus on the intellect (via Scholasticism) was largely at the EXPENSE of an understanding and revelatory experience of the heart (as there is no Western counterpart to the Hesychastic tradition), not that the latter ought to be extolled at the expense of the former. This would after all simply be inverting the error rather than correcting it, and would furthermore be exemplar of the very dualism I am decrying.
Let me again state that the DUALISM of the Western Church’s understanding of God is what I am critiquing (that knowledge of God can ONLY be propositional). Of course there is propositional dogma concerning God in Orthodoxy (indeed, a very rich theology approached from both apophatic and cataphatic perspectives), but what I am saying is Orthodoxy’s experience of God is not LIMITED to that understanding. Indeed a good book I am reading right now argues that mystical and dogmatic (propositional) theology arose co-simultaneously and interdependently among the Church Fathers:
“This formative period [i.e., the first 5 centuries A.D.] for mystical theology was, of course, the formative period for dogmatic theology, and that the same period was determinative for both mystical and dogmatic theology is no accident since these two aspects of theology are fundamentally bound up with one another. The basic doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, worked out in these centuries, are mystical doctrines formulated dogmatically. That is to say, mystical theology provides the context for direct apprehensions of the God who has revealed himself in Christ and dwells within us through the Holy Spirit; while dogmatic theology attempts to incarnate those apprehensions in objectively precise terms which then, in their turn, inspire a mystical understanding of the God who has thus revealed himself which is specifically Christian.”
~ _The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition_ by Andrew Louth, Oxford University Press
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199291403?ie=UTF8&tag=antarktos-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0199291403
So allow me to slightly edit a key sentence from my original essay (edits are in caps) so as to avoid any further misunderstanding:
“…propositional knowledge of His existence (i.e., that the proposition “God” can be assigned a mutually-exclusive value of “true” or “false”) was insufficient for any meaningful knowledge of His being, that in fact BEING CONFINED SOLELY TO such an approach to the mystery of God could well have negative repercussions.”
Again, I ask you to compare the respective histories of the Western and Eastern Churches, the amount of schismatic activity in each, and the unique fact of that Protestant mass-conversion to Orthodoxy which I mentioned in my last reply, to see if in fact I might be onto something.
After all, I can’t be arguing for a solely mystical understanding of *anything* given the dialectical means I am employing at this very moment, no?
Very well said Mike. I encourage you further in your explorations. We can continue this at a later date, after I’ve digested what you’ve said further. I’m a little at sea particularly in the piece you quoted from the book you are reading. I’ll have to mull that a little further and think about it.
As a Protestant I would simply stress the importance of the Bible in evaluating further church doctrine. The Bible is the foundational text of Christianity, the constitution, if you will, so any further elaborations mystical or otherwise must be compared with what the scriptures actually say. That’s standard operating procedure. I would stress to first know scripture and then you can hold your church hierarchy accountable to its teachings. The Reformation was among other things a democratizing movement.
As I’m not particularly informed on the traditions you speak of – and Eastern Orthodoxy in general – I’ll reserve judgement. Until next time. Looking slick in that photo by the way. Did you have a job interview ?(!)
love the article…i also love brug. in general “landscape w/ the fall of icarus” is fantastic.