Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 10: Angels

There is an unseen spiritual world and it usually escapes our senses. That idea lies behind the discussion of angels. It is an ordered world that is meant to glorify God. It’s an angelic world that was created “in silence.” There are two worlds created for each other and which work together toward singing praise to the Holy Trinity. Angels act in heaven and on earth. They surround God and us; they fill the invisible world. They are mediators, ministers, and messengers. They are assigned to guard the smallest to the most important people, and they even have been given territories and zones on earth to watch over us. They will return at the Second Coming to gather up the faithful and separate them from those who rejected the Kingdom of Heaven. Angels are also ranked and ordered, according to St. Isaac the Syrian, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Gregory the Theologian. Another important idea, then, is that the natural and spiritual worlds have an ordered existence. All creation is centered around the Light of the Holy Trinity.

Angels reflect and transmit the Light throughout creation. The three main ranks of angels are: Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. God is seated in glory and rests on the Thrones of Angels, the Cherubim stand in for the eyes of wisdom and knowledge, and the Seraphim’s six wings burn with the Light of God. The tradition of the scientific community usually treats these subjects within the category of miraculous blind faith and superstition. But in a homily on July 5, 2020, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, Metropolitan Hilarion spoke about faith as the source of miracles, not miracles as a source of faith, which is knowledge of God. Some may ask whether or not angels have bodies. It’s reasonable to believe, within the patristic tradition, that angels do have angelic bodies, but they do not hold physical bodies exactly like humans. With a kind of body, all of the angels have a way of transmitting the Divine Light. Angels and humankind are meant to receive and send out Beauty from the source of and procession of all Beauty, the Holy Trinity, as Dionysius the Areopagite says. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 9: Creation

From Mike Brown.

The heavens declare the glory of God; 

The firmament shows the creation of His hands. 

Day to day utters speech, 

And night to night reveals knowledge. 

--Psalm 18:1-2 (19:1-2)

Imagine a universe where there is nothing else but what is in the universe.  All things, stars, planets, trees, lakes, fish, birds, deer, skunks…every living thing and every non-living thing consists solely of stuff made up of the elements (carbon, hydrogen, etc.)—“star stuff,” as Carl Sagan used to say.

There is good news in this kind of universe: if we are able to understand math, physics, and chemistry well enough, we will be able to predict everything!  If my thinking is only a product of chemical reactions in my brain, then by knowing my DNA and my specific chemical make-up, you would be able to predict my path through life.  We could eliminate crime and control behavior by manipulating DNA and tweaking a person’s chemical balance.  Perhaps we could create a utopian society if we could discover the right DNA sequence and chemical formula for the perfect human.  (Making a “perfect man” in our image.)

There is more good news: we would have the answers to the biggest questions of humankind. What is my role in human history? What is the meaning of my life? What does it mean to be in love? Where did I come from?  But, in this kind of universe we might not like the answers.

The view I’ve just described is called philosophical materialism…there is nothing outside material universe.  It is a philosophical viewpoint held by many.

Think of the loss in such a world.  Such things as love, altruism, poetry, art, literature, discovery, and heroism would not be the product of a human spirit, because there would be no such thing as a “spirit.”  We would not be made in the image and likeness of God because there would be no God. Creation would have no inherent beauty reflecting the Beauty of the Creator; it would be the result of chance.

In this chapter, the author quotes St John Chrysostom, who asks:

…what could be more pitiful and stupid than people coming up with arguments like this, claiming that beings get existence of themselves, and withdrawing all creation from God’s providence?  How could you have the idea that…so many elements and such great arrangement were being guided without anyone to supervise and control it?

This chapter follows the development of the Orthodox perspective on Creation; that “the act of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s procession are manifestations of God’s essence.  The creation of the world, on the other hand, occurred in time and is the consequence of God’s activity, his energy.” (p 187).

While the Orthodox Church does not enter the debate between Creationists (old or young Earth) and Evolutionists, the Church does hold that (p 191):

·       God is the Creator and Artificer of all

·       Humankind did not come from apes or other animals

God made the universe, in the words of Irenaeus of Lyons and Isaac the Syrian, that Goodness be moved beyond contemplation of itself and spread forth outward…that intelligent creatures might join in the glory of God’s divine nature.

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every bush afire with God.

But only he who sees takes of his shoes,

The rest sit around and pluck blackberries…

--“Aurora Leigh,” book 7

Stop and take time to really see creation; the glory of God is being declared all around us.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Ch 8: God in the Works of the Church Fathers pp.148-179

The Love of God, The Essence and Energies, the Divine Light of God, and the Procession of the Holy Spirit

This chapter ends Part Two with the sections: The Love of God, Essence and Energies, the Divine Light of God, and the Procession of the Holy Spirit. St. Isaac the Syrian says that “the beginning and end of his relationship with us” is love. We can experience love through how God acts in creation and in our hearts. God’s love is seen in how he bears with our mistakes and sins, how he created the world for us, and how he relates to us as a Father to his children, and even the angels keep the rank that they’ve been given. Behind judgment and discipline, says St. Isaac the Syrian, is God the Father’s love and mercy. A drawback to theologies that seek only to safeguard absolute justice is its inevitable collision with the teaching that God is all-merciful. The “just judgment” that must be done cannot be carried out at the same time as mercifulness so that “fairness belongs to the realm of evil,” as St. Isaac teaches. Righteousness goes beyond what people call fair, and it becomes a form of mercifulness, not justice for each weight on the scale of human actions. 

We experience God’s love through his works in the world. That is different from his essence that is both nameless and not understandable through any system of thought or effort. The word “energy” (work) is used from the Greek language to describe how God’s revelation comes to us in a personal way. These energies are not the same as the “emanations” of God or pieces of God as if they exist in some kind of pantheism. His energy is distinct but not separate from His essence, as St. Gregory Palamas teaches. That means that Love is not a separate divinity from the Holy Trinity; rather, it is “God himself” and not a kind of middleman or fourth person added to the Trinity. When we use the word “God,” or theos in Greek, we use it as a word for the energies of God. In 1341 AD, the Council of Constantinople anathematized the leading rival of St. Gregory Palamas, Barlaam of Calabria, who stood against this teaching about the essence and energies of God. This issue, however, did not begin in the 14th c. but in the Old Testament experience of the Jewish patriarchs and prophets in their seeking the name and essence of God. Just as God’s love can be felt through purification and prayer, so can His Light, for which there are no words that can grasp it or circumscribe it. 

Before 1054 AD, the Eastern Church Fathers knew about the teaching of the Filioque, meaning “and from the Son” in Latin, that uncanonically entered into the Creed in the West over time. While Maximus the Confessor did not see a clear break in theology with the filioque, Patriarch Photius drew out the issues with the wording and inconsistencies behind the Filioque. Many of the different liturgical and ascetical practices in the West were also being drawn out among Greek and Syrian Christians. But, overall, the main issue that the Eastern Church Fathers took the hardest was not the differences in liturgical dress, fasting rules or language, but the changing of the wording of the Creed by adding the Filioque, and that disagreement developed over the centuries along with other differences in practice. Metropolitan Hilarion points out an important fact that there is no support from the Holy Scriptures on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. There were a few eastern fathers (St. Cyril of Alexandria) who spoke similarly to Latin theology. In the Council of Florence-Ferrara, they agreed with the Eastern Church Fathers about the procession of the Holy Spirit, although the wording still gave the impression of a different theology. St. Mark of Ephesus stood alone in disagreeing with the identification of the Filioque with Orthodox teaching about the Trinity. He explained that this introduction brought confusion into the idea of the “monarchy” of the Father, and the Latin teaching inevitably brought about “two causes” and “two principles” into the Trinity. For that reason, the Eastern Church Fathers had to reject the Filioque. The procession of the Holy Spirit only is sent from the Father just as the Son is only-begotten so that Personhood remains intact. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Ch 8: God in the Works of the Church Fathers 129-147

The Names of God and the Qualities of God

An outgrowth of the principle of God’s “incomprehensibility” beginning in the Old Testament is the mystifying issue over the “names” of God or how mankind tries to name God. Dionysius the Areopagite developed that idea. He wrote a body of work called On the Divine Names. The Apostle Paul’s preaching on the Areopagus at Athens helped convert Dionysius to Christianity. A person’s name bears a key a feature or likeness, but names are not the same as a person’s nature, as the iconographer Aidan Hart explains how icons relate to the prototypes. St. Gregory the Theologian writes that “our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named.” To help understand the meaning of names, St. Gregory ordered them hierarchically in the tradition of Dionysius. The first type bears closely to His essence: I AM, Lord. The second type bears the power of God shown outwardly: All-Powerful and King of Kings, Lord of Sabaoth. The last type bears the ekonomia of God: God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God’s actions with His people. How we bear the image of the Holy Trinity in ourselves matters, but we are not able to lower God into our minds by a simple identification or by one word that settles it all. We cannot make God man by our names or philosophies or signs, but God can become man to save His named ones on earth. Many of the so-called human forms of God, like walking, vengeful, regretful, asleep, are to be taken allegorically. St. Gregory of Nyssa presents the namelessness and the ungraspable nature of God as the basic tenet of Christianity in Against Eunomius. Some of the main struggles against Christianity include Arius and Eunomius on the one hand, and Gnosticism and the Manicheans on the other hand, who misunderstood the divine names of the personal, Living God. He explains further that the names that we find in Holy Scriptures are worthy of reverence, but that we must take heed so that we do not think that God needs those names, but rather that we need them to understand God. Dionysius the Areopagite teaches that the divine names come from “the beauty of the processions” of the Holy Trinity, and this essence of “emanations” are beyond our understanding. We can experience them as energies working in the world around us.