There is a certain type of mind, usually labelling itself a “realist,” that is disturbed by differences of perception wrought by alterations in consciousness. Noticing that in states of joy or love the world appears more fair, more beautiful and profound than in states of apathy or depression, such a mind recoils and declares that only the most dispassionate gaze, the most hardened eye, can see things as they truly are. Such people often attempt to reduce feelings of love or awe by insisting that they are reducible to otherwise indifferent or illusory changes within the world they perceive through their “objective” lens. The appearance of beauty, they might say, arises from the evolutionary advantage of certain landscapes; love, they might intone, is merely the effect of quite loveless chemicals upon the nervous system. For them, the sublime means nothing, the most transcendent and important of experiences reveal only one’s own blindness, and truth is realized in the sobriety of complete indifference. Such people disbelieve many of the most basic realities of human experience, trusting rather in the cold rationality of abstract, impersonal principles and cynicism in an effort to determine what is real.
While misguided, such an attitude is laudable in its desire for truth and in certain respects resembles the ascetic attitudes of a number of the Church Fathers, and indeed of a great plethora of figures within the Christian tradition. The connection is a relatively slight one, and yet there is a correspondence in the rejection of a certain kind of attachment in the name of truth. For the so-called realist, the plethora of phenomena and the influence it has upon one’s desires are inherently suspect; the interested gaze appears clouded. Of course, such a perspective fails to differentiate between the harmonies of genuine love and the baser modes of involvement, but the desire to put aside the apparently true for a clarity of vision represents a genuine spiritual yearning. Similarly, for the Christian ascetic, the world of phenomena, with all its psychic pulls and snares, is treated with suspicion, albeit for a radically different reason. Rather than seeking to flee desire for phenomena to dwell within the cold caves of indifference, the Christian ascetic seeks to avoid it in order to cultivate a higher kind of love. “Love (agapē) is begotten of detachment (apatheia),” writes Maximus the Confessor, “detachment of hope in God.”1 This “detachment,” however, is not a cold indifference to reality, but rather equanimity, a stability of the soul in its longing for God.
Thus the similarity between the realist who rejects all attachment to the world and the Christian are in truth radically different. The former seeks to retreat into an abstract “objectivity” whereby the world as we experience it is reduced to the impersonal. For the Christian, subjective relation to the world is one intrinsically corrupted by the passions, which hold the soul back from its more primordial longing for the divine. Yet it is not that loving the world as we experience is fundamentally wrong. Rather, the world is understood as contingent, as incapable of satisfying the true ends of the soul and its most basic longings. The world, understood as the domain of the passions, must be rejected in favor of a relationship to that upon which the foundations of the world rests. Moreover, it is only in this pursuit, in the eros for the transcendent, that one can come into proper relationship with the world; without this proper ordering of desire, the soul becomes subservient to perversities alien to the soul as God intends it and so becomes blind to truth, which properly belongs to God.
Gregory of Nyssa articulates this understanding of the world and its relationship to God neatly in his exegesis of Ecclesiastes. Gregory arrives at the verse that states, “What is it that has been? That which will be. What is it that has been done? That which will be done,” and finds in it a statement of the eternal principles upon which all of reality is based.2 This is not at first sight a particularly obvious interpretation, but the steps he uses to arrive there are orderly and comprehensible. First, obviously enough, one must examine the question of that which exists. In keeping with his exegesis of Ecclesiastes up to this point, Nyssen is certain that all the things of the world that are termed vanity do not, properly speaking, exist: “If ‘all is vanity,’ it is clear that not one of things things which has no foundation has been. For that which is vain has no existence, and no one would consider that which has no existence as among that which has been.”3 That which is vain, moreover, is that which is subject to change, which alters and decays with the vagaries of time. Of course, this includes much of what we would normally consider as the contents of existence.
If this is so, what is it that truly exists? The answer lies in considering the implications of the origin and the end. For that which has been is that which was at the beginning, and that which will be is that which is present at the end. These are not to be understood merely as temporal signifiers, but as having metaphysical import. The archē, the “beginning,” is also the “principle,” the origin in the metaphysical sense, just as the end, the telos, is the completion, the perfection, of a given being. This can be understood in relation to the human person: “If in every way you give to your soul the form of good traits, if you remove yourself from every of evil . . . what will you become through such beautifying? What sort of form shall you put around yourself? . . . You will learn that which was among the first things, which is truly what will be, that which is according to the image and likeness of God.”4 In other words, when considering what one might become in one’s perfection, one finds one’s primordial truth, the self that is God’s will for one to be, namely, the self as the image and likeness of God. It is this self, moreover, that God is working ceaselessly to bring forth, and so it is at once the true origin of the self in the creative intentions of God and the future of one’s being that God is working to realize. It is only in the interval between these terms, wherein one has failed to realize that which is simultaneously one’s origin and end, that one’s existence becomes vanity, for in the vagaries of sin that disconnect a being from its true foundations, said being becomes something foreign to itself, a non-entity with no foundation.
As with human beings, so too with all other creatures. The archai (plural of archē), which Maximus calls the logoi, are the “ideas of God,” the creative intentions that form the foundation of all that exists and represent the end toward which all created beings are called. And it is these principles that truly exist, for they are rooted in the eternity of God and are thus unchanging, not vain: “Outside of the archē there is nothing. . . . If anything is outside of its archē, it is wholly nothing, but merely something thought.”5 The world as we generally experience it, then, is not in fact the real world—it is an illusion, a mist of nothing. Yet it is not entirely unsubstantial, for it has as its basis the principles of God’s intention, and the degree to which it is real at all is the degree to which it conforms to those principles. In a state of fallenness, this conformity is damaged, and so nothingness eats away at reality, and this nothingness, this wasting disease of creation, is what we call evil. This evil exists in the corruptibility of the world—death, destruction, disease, and so forth—but it also exists in the subjectivity of created beings as an ignorance that spawns a wrong relation to the world; in short, it generates the passions as a twistedness of otherwise good natural dynamisms, and these passions must be resisted in order to attain to a proper understanding of the world, of God, and of oneself.
Thus, we have arrived at where we began: at the need to reject a certain kind of relation to the world. Yet this rejection has been revealed not as a means to shun the world, but only the illusion we too often take for reality. In so doing, we encounter the true foundation of all things and thus receive back the world we thought we had rejected. Rather than annulling love, then, Christian ascesis bolsters it, gives it a sure foundation, so that we see things not as falsehoods, but as what they really are, which is to say what God intends them to be, which is their truth even when they are in a state of degeneration in which their basis has been deeply buried under waste and rubble.
It is for this reason that one cannot love God without loving one’s neighbor. For at the deepest foundations of being, one’s neighbor is in a certain sense identical with the divine in that each creature has as its foundation the loving creative intention of God. The archē of each thing is in fact God’s will to share himself with the finite reality of this creature, this neighbor, and it is this act of sharing which constitutes that being’s very reality. At the same time, to love one’s neighbor ought not to mean that one loves his or her fallenness under present conditions. To love does not mean to condone or embrace perversity. “The one who loves God cannot help but love also every man as himself even though he is displeased by the passions of those who are not yet purified,”6 as Maximus says. Rather it is to recognize the wellspring of goodness that forms each person’s (and indeed each being’s) beginning and ultimate end and to desire the realization of that end in the perfection of the beloved. And yet to love also means to recognize the primordial, divine foundation of all things, and so nothing can appear to such a lover except as essentially lovely and good even when marred by the vagaries of sin and dilapidation. Thus, in rejecting the world for the sake of God, one receives the world back again, but transfigured in the light of its true identity, as the shining outpouring of the divine into the created, of the infinite into the finite. Embracing God, one embraces the world as it truly is in its metaphysical foundation, which is to say as a finite revelation of God.
It is not, then, in the cold light of an absolute impartiality that we can know the world properly, but only in the world-surpassing love that flies to the divine, in which the true world resides and from and to which it is coming to be even as it is not yet. In embracing God, we embrace the world that he eternally wills to create in his act of self-giving love, which we are called to imitate. This perfect love is one that seeks the best for all things, which aims for the consummation of God’s will for the creation that has fallen so deeply. As St. Isaac of Syria tells us, a merciful heart, the great achievement of the saints,
is a heart aflame for the whole of creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons—for all creatures. He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes becoming filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion that seizes his heart, a heart that is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being inflicted upon a creature. This is why such a man never ceases to pray also for the animals, for the enemies of the Truth, and for those who do him evil, that they may be preserved and purified. He will pray even for the reptiles, moved by the infinite pity that reigns in the hearts of those who are becoming united to God.
Maximus the Confessor, Four Hundred Chapter on Love 1.2, trans. George C. Berthold.
Interestingly, Gregory reads the Greek text here as two questions and answers, which is not how it is presented in modern versions of the Septuagint, as far as I am aware.
Homilies on Ecclesiastes 2, my translation.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Maximus the Confessor, Four Hundred Chapter on Love 1.3, trans. George C. Berthold.