Is God responsible for all the suffering and evil in the world?
Is the world completely evil?
What is evil?
Does free will have anything or everything to do with evil?
Age old questions indeed, used as arguments both for an against the existence of a God. These questions were recently raised during an interesting discussion with some friends, so I decided to give a short summary here of the way in which Martines de Pasqually approached the matter in his Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings. Read More...

Tags: Martines de Pasqually, Treatise, Commandments, Universe, Exile, Desire, Reintegration, Reconciliation, Creation, Beauty

Although the planets only occupy a very small proportion of Martines’ highly complex body of teachings, they are of central importance. Indeed, the celestial immensity, in Martines’ table, is shown as the intermediary between our universe—represented by the terrestrial immensity—and the Creator’s closest agents in the supercelestial immensity.
Read More...

Tags: Martines de Pasqually, Contemplation, Emanation, Universe, Reintegration, Treatise, Exile, Reconciliation, Creation

“Honour your father and your mother” (Ex. 20,12), “for it is through them that God has brought you into this life, and they, after God, are the causes of your existence.” However, Gregory introduces a twist: “thus after God you should honour them and trust them, provided that your love for them strengthens your love for God. If it does not, flee from them, yet without feelings of hatred”. This reminds me of Matt 19,29 And everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children or land for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times as much, and also inherit eternal life. Read More...

Tags: Gregory Palamas, Hesychasm, Orthodox Church, Virtues, Exile, Commandments, Reconciliation

The scholarly approach I usually take on this website and blog would be meaningless if it didn’t translate into our day-to-day lives. It should go without saying that intellectual endeavour, spirituality, and everyday life should balance each other out so that they produce the most harmonious experience of the world possible. So now that I have set a workable theoretical background through other posts on this blog, I will start addressing the more down-to-earth concerns we may have, whether we are already advanced in the spiritual career or not.
As I have spent some time describing the importance of desire and contemplation, I thought I would start with a short how-to approach to meditation and prayer that will help us engage in the “art of contemplation”, which is at the root of an infinite progression towards our ideal. Read More...

Tags: Prayer, Meditation, Contemplation, Reconciliation, Hesychasm, Virtues, Commandments, Desire

For the first and second parts of this series on Gregory Palamas please go here and here, respectively.

3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” (Exod 20:7), swearing an oath falsely because of some worldly thing, or out of human fear, or shame, or for personal gain. For a false oath is denial of God.
[...]
4. One day of the week you shall ‘keep holy’ (Exod. 20:8). Read More...

Tags: Gregory Palamas, Reconciliation, Reintegration, Contemplation, Commandments, Orthodox Church, Hesychasm

People of faith claim that they can feel God’s presence, metaphorically in their lives, and even physically in their hearts. But if God is transcendent, non-physical or supra-physical as it were, how can such a perception be possible at all? Let alone be proven? Also, how can one receive what is sometimes described as a calling from a God that is supposed to be so unfathomable? These questions have acquired some momentum with writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Read More...

Tags: Soul, Contemplation, Exile, Reconciliation, Beauty

Part 3: Contemplation and Desire

As we have seen previously, Gregory of Nyssa taught that man must leave his current predicament and make his way towards God. However, this requires him to abandon complacency and self indulgence, to leave behind his old ways and to remain constantly vigilant -

“But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.” (Mt 24:43)

But how can one summon enough strength to practice the virtues and reach the purity that are required for walking the narrow path of reconciliation?

“There is a wide interval between those who have been purified, and those who still need purification. For those in whose life time here the purification by the laver has preceded, there is a restoration to a kindred state. Now, to the pure, freedom from passion is that kindred state, and that in this freedom from passion blessedness consists, admits of no dispute.” (In The Great Cathechism)

Therefore,

“if we must describe the masonry, then let incorruptibility and impassability mould the house which justice and freedom will adorn. Let humility and patience shine in another part of the house along with piety befitting God. Let love, the noble craftsman, fashion all these virtues in a marvellous way.” (Commentary on Ecclesiastes, J.325.)

In other words, the object of man’s desire, and love, is God’s Wisdom rather than his own:

“And so it is equally reasonable that he who is enamoured of wisdom should hold the Object of his passionate desire, Who is the True Wisdom; and that the soul which cleaves to the undying Bridegroom should have the fruition of her love for the true Wisdom, which is God.”

And what better way would there be, if one desires to become a temple for God’s Wisdom, than to follow Christ’s example of ‘detachment’ from sin and ‘immutability’ in virtue?

“Because Christ received the first fruits of our common nature through his soul and body, he made it holy and kept it in himself as unmixed and uncontaminated with any evil; by offering [the first fruits of our common nature] through incorruptibility to the Father of incorruptibility, he might draw all those of the same kin and race (Eph 1.5) and adopt the disinherited and God's enemies to share his divinity. Just as purity and detachment united the dough's first fruit with the true Father and God, we, the mass of dough, should cling to the Father of incorruptibility by imitating the mediator's detachment and immutability as far as possible.” (On Perfection, J.206)

The bishop of Nyssa considered that our desire to resemble Christ is born from the contemplation and the perception (theoria) of infinite Good. And God being infinite, that desire itself must be infinite:

“Since, then, those who know that is good by nature, desire participation in it [God as absolute virtue], and since this good has no limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless. […]

“Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always visible as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype. […]

“This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more. Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied.” (Life of Moses, pp. 31, 114, 116; translation by Malherbe and Ferguson).

“We need an unceasing desire for higher things, which is not content to acquiesce in past achievements; we ought to count it a loss if we fail to progress further.” (On the Beatitudes, p.130)

In addition to sight, St Gregory uses another worldly metaphor to convey his thought of ‘theoria’, the perception of God: the scent of the divine – an imagery that was to become popular amongst kabbalists of the middle ages with regards to the immolation of the sacrificial lamb (holocaust). Whereas the fumes of the holocaust attract the divine to earth, it is the opposite movement that St Gregory has in mind, although both lead to the same goal:

“I will take up again what I said at the start of this homily: let no one who is passionate, fleshly and still smelling of the foul odour of the old man [2 Cor 2:16] drag down the significance of the divine thoughts and words to beastly, irrational thoughts. Rather, let each person go out of himself and out of the material world. Let him ascend into paradise through detachment, having become like God through purity. Then let him enter into the inner sanctuary of the mysteries revealed in this book [the Song of Songs]. […] The souls, therefore, draw to themselves a desire for their immortal bridegroom and follow the Lord God, as it is written [Hos 11.10]. The cause of their love is the scent of the perfume to which they eternally run; they stretch out to what is in front, forgetting what is behind. “We shall run after you toward the scent of your perfumes.” (Commentary of the Song of Songs, J.25, J.39).

Again, one sees that infinite desire can lead to eternally migrating away from the “foul odour of the old man” and towards the ‘scent of the perfumes’ of the ‘bridegroom’.

Tags: Orthodox Church, Contemplation, Gregory of Nyssa, Exile, Reconciliation, Virtues, Desire

I suppose that it is appropriate to start a blog named ‘Apokatastasis’ with a piece on one of the greatest figures of the early Christian Church, and at least its first systematic theologian and philosopher, Origen of Alexandria (185-254 AD).
Read More...

Tags: Origen, Reintegration, Creation, Reconciliation