St. Isaac of Syria

David B Hart, "The Anti-Theology of the Body"

Divine Eros

I went on to mention that experiencing God may be as “simple” as seeing God in the beauty and complexity of nature. Father Maximos agreed but pointed out, however, that the experience of God is something much more profound than that, impossible to pin down with words or poetical constructions.

“If this is true,” I reasoned, "then the Creed within the Christian tradition does not mean what most people assume to be its message, that is, a blind faith in the idea of God.”

“That's a popular fallacy with all its disastrous consequences. True faith means that I live with God, I am one with God. I have come to know God and therefore I know that He truly Is. God lives inside me and is victorious over death and I move forward with God. The entire methodology of the authentic Christian mystical tradition as articulated by the saints is to reach that stage where we become conscious of the reality of God within ourselves. Until we reach that point we simply remain stranded within the domain of ideas and not within the essence of Christian spirituality which is the direct communion with God.”

....

“The spiritual methodology developed by the saints,” Father Maximos explained, “aims at offering us the possibility of the direct vision of God. When that happens, as I have said many times, it is no longer a matter of belief in the existence of God but a direct recognition of the eternal and unbroken relationship that exists between God and humanity.”

“And of course, the essence of that relationship,” he added, “is Love, which first emanates from God to humans and then from humans to God. It may sound scandalous to some people, but the full flowering of that relationship is the attainment of a deeply erotic relationship with God that lies far beyond the most intense and the most passionate erotic rapture between human beings. That state of ecstasy is what Saint Maximos the Confessor called the eros maniakos [maniacal erotic love]...”

--The Mountain of Silence, pp. 45-46

Wounded by Love - Elder Porphyrios

On Divine Eros

He who loves little, gives little. He who loves more, gives more. And he who loves beyond measure, what has he to give? He gives himself!

Christ is our love, our desire

Christ is joy, the true light, happiness. Christ is our hope. Our relation to Christ is love, eros, passion, enthusiasm, longing for the divine. Christ is everything. He is our love. He is the object of our desire. This passionate longing for Christ is a love that cannot be taken away. This is where joy flows from.

Christ himself is joy. He is a joy that transforms you into a different person. It is a spiritual madness, but in Christ. This spiritual wine inebriates you like pure unadulterated wine. As David says, You have anointed my head with oil and your cup intoxicates me most mightily [Ps.22:5]. Spiritual wine is unmixed, unadulterated, exceedingly strong, and when you drink it, it makes you drunk. This divine intoxication is a gift of God that is given to the pure in heart [Matt.5:8].

Fast as much as you can, make as many prostrations as you can, attend as many vigils as you like, but be joyful. Have Christ's joy. It is the joy that lasts forever, that brings eternal happiness. It is the joy of our Lord that gives assured serenity, serene delight and full happiness. All-joyful joy that surpasses every joy. Christ desires and delights in scattering joy, in enriching his faithful with joy. I pray that your joy may be full. [John16:24&1John1:4]

This is what our religion is. This is the direction we must take. Christ is Paradise, my children. What is Paradise? It is Christ. Paradise begins here and now. It is exactly the same: those who experience Christ here on earth, experience Paradise. That's the way it is, just as I tell you. This is right, it's true, believe me! Our task is to attempt to find a way to enter into the light of Christ. The point is not to observe all the outward forms. The essence of the matter is for us to be with Christ; for our soul to wake up and love Christ and become holy. To abandon herself to divine eros. Thus He too will love us. Then the joy will be inalienable. That is what Christ wants most of all, to fill us with joy, because He is the well-spring of joy. This joy is a gift of Christ. In this joy we will come to know Christ. We cannot come to know Him unless He first comes to know us. How does David put it? Unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain that build it; unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. [Ps.126:1]

These are the things our soul desires to acquire. If we prepare ourselves appropriately, grace will bestow them on us. It's not difficult. If we acquire grace, everything is easy, joyful and a blessing from God. Divine grace is constantly knocking at the door of our soul and waiting for us to open so that it can enter our thirsty heart and fill it. The fullness is Christ, our Holy Lady, the Holy Trinity. What marvelous things!

If you are in love, you can live amid the hustle and bustle of the city centre and not be aware that you are in the city centre. You see neither cars nor people nor anything else. Within yourself you are with the person you love. You experience her, you take delight in her, she inspires you. Are these things not true? Imagine that the person you love is Christ. Christ is in your mind. Christ is in your heart. Christ is in your whole being, Christ is everywhere.

Christ is life, the source of life, the source of joy, the source of true light, everything. Whoever loves Christ and other people truly lives life. Life without Christ is death; it is hell, not life. That is what hell is -- the absence of love. Life is Christ. Love is the life of Christ. Either you will be in life or in death. It's up to you to decide.

One thing is our aim -- love for Christ, for the Church, for our neighbor. Love, worship of, and craving for God, the union with Christ and with the Church is Paradise on earth. Love towards Christ and towards one's neighbor, towards everyone, including enemies. The Christian feels for everyone, he wants all to be saved, all to taste the Kingdom of God. That is Christianity: through love for our brother to arrive at love for God. To the extent that we desire it, to the extent that we wish it, to the extent that we are worthy, divine grace comes through our brother. When we love our brother we love the Church and therefore Christ. And we too are within the Church. Therefore when we love the Church we love ourselves.

There is one thing, O Christ, that I want, one thing I desire, one thing I ask for, and that is to be with You.

Let us love Christ and let our only hope and care be for Him. Let us love Christ for His own sake only. Never for our sake. Let Him put us wherever He likes. Let Him give us whatever He wishes. Don't let's love Him for His gifts. It's egotistical for us to say: 'Christ will place me in a fine mansion which He has prepared, just as the Gospel says: In my Father's house there are many mansions...so that where I am you may be also [John14:2-3]. What we should say rather is: 'My Christ, whatever Your love dictates; it is sufficient for me to live within Your love.'

As for myself, poor soul...what can I say...I'm very weak. I haven't managed to love Christ so very fervently and for my soul to long for Him. I feel that I have a very long way to go. I haven't arrived at where I want to be; I don't experience this love. But I'm not discouraged. I trust in the love o God. I say to Christ: 'I know I'm not worthy. Send me wherever Your love wishes. That's what I desire, that's what I want. During my life I always worshiped you.

When I was seriously ill and on the point of leaving this life, I didn't want to think about my sins. I wanted to think about the love of my Lord, my Christ, and about eternal life. I didn't want to feel fear. I wanted to go to the Lord and to think about His goodness, His love. And now that my life is nearing its end, I don't feel anxiety or apprehension, but I think that when I appear at the Second Coming and Christ says to me: Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? [Matt.22:12] I will bow my head and I will say to Him: 'Whatever you want, my Lord, whatever your love desires. I know I am not worthy. Send me wherever your love wishes. I am fit for hell. And place me in hell, as long as I am with you. There is one thing I want, one thing I desire, one thing I ask for, and that is to be with You, wherever and however You wish.'

I try to give myself over entirely to the love and worship of God. I have consciousness of my sinfulness, but I live with hope. It is bad to despair, because someone who despairs becomes embittered and loses his willingness and strength. Someone who has hope, on the contrary, advances forward. Because he feels that he is poor, he tries to enrich himself. What does a poor man do? If he is smart, he tries to find a way to become rich.

And so in spite of the fact that I feel weak and that I haven't achieved what I desire, I nevertheless do not fall into despair. It is a consolation to me, as I've told you, that I don't cease to try continually. Yet I don't do what I want to. Pray for me. The point is that I cannot love Christ absolutely without His grace. Christ does not allow His love to show itself if my soul has not done something to attract Him to me.

And perhaps that's what I'm lacking. And so I entreat God and say, 'I'm very weak, O Christ. Only You with Your grace will be able to allow me to say along with Saint Paul the Apostle, It is no longer I who live; Christ lives in me [Gal.2:20]

That is what preoccupies me. I try to find ways to love Christ. This love is never sated. However much you love Christ, you always think that you don't love Him and you long all the more to love him. And without being aware of it, you go higher and higher!

When Christ enters your heart, your life changes

When you find Christ, you are satisfied, you desire nothing else, you find peace. You become a different person. You live everywhere, wherever Christ is. You live in the stars, in infinity, in heaven with the angels, with the saints, on earth with people, with plants, with animals, with everyone and everything. When there is love for Christ, loneliness disappears. You are peaceable, joyous, full. Neither melancholy, nor illness, nor pressure, nor anxiety, nor depression, nor hell.

Christ is in all your thoughts, in all your actions. You have grace and you can endure everything for Christ. You can even suffer unjustly. You can endure injustices for Christ, and indeed with joy. Just as He suffered, so you too can suffer unjustly. Did you choose Christ in order to avoid suffering? What does Saint Paul say? I rejoice in my sufferings. [Col.1:24] This is our religion: for our soul to awake and love Christ and become holy, to give herself over to divine eros. And so He, too, will love her.

When Christ enters your heart, your life changes. Christ is everything. Whoever experiences Christ within himself, experiences ineffable things – holy and sacred things. He lives in exultation. These things are true. People have experienced them – hermits on the Holy Mountain. Continually and with longing they whisper the prayer: 'Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

When Grace is energized in the heart of the one who prays, then the love of God floods his entire being to such an extent that he may not be able to take more. Then this love is transferred to the love of the world and the human person. His love becomes so powerful that he asks to take upon himself all the suffering and unhappiness of the others so that they themselves may be relieved. He suffers with those who are suffering even for the suffering of animals, so much so that he sheds bitter tears when he becomes aware of their pain. These are the attributes of Love. But you must keep in mind that it is prayer that energizes them and causes them. That is why those who have advanced in the prayer never stop praying for the World.

--Monk Joseph, Geron Iosef Oh Hesychastes [Elder Joseph the Hesychast]

Thanksgiving and Sin

...the Church convicts sin though her thanksgiving. Through it she recognizes the "vital essence" of evil, the source of sin as unthankfulness, as man's falling away from the "hymning, blessing, praising, giving thanks and worshiping" through which he lives--for man, and in him all creation, knows God and has communion with him. Not giving thanks is the root and the driving force of that pride in which all teachers of the spiritual life, that "art of arts," without exception see the sin that tore man away from God. For the subtlest spiritual essence of pride, properly distinguishable only in the spiritual effort of "discernment of spirits," lies precisely in the fact that, as opposed to all other causes ascribed to the fall, it alone is not from below but from above: it is not from imperfection but from completion, not from deficiency but from an overabundance of gifts, and not from some unexplainable "evil" of an unknown origin, but from enticement and temptation of the divine "very good" of creation and man. Pride is opposed to thanksgiving precisely as unthanksgiving because it arose from the same causes as thanksgiving. It is another, opposite answer to the same gift; it is temptation by the same gift.

We know that, according to the testimony of all who follow the path of struggle with sin, temptation is not yet sin. Christ himself was tempted, and precisely by the gifts he possessed: power, authority, miracle-working. In fact, every gift of God to man, his divine image and perfection itself, is a temptation--and above all the gift to man of his I, the miracle of his absolutely unique, eternal, unrepeatable and indivisible personality, which renders each man "like a king of creation." Temptation is inherent to the personality because out of all creation only man is called by God to love himself, i.e., to be conscious of his divine gift and the miracle of his I. It is actually only through this love for himself that man comprehends God as the Life of his life, as the absolutely desired Thou, in which he finds himself, his fulness, his happiness, his human I, created in the image and likeness of God, who is love. The human personality is love for oneself and thus love for oneself as a bearer of the divine gift of knowledge and ascent into the fulness of life. And here it is innate to convert this love for himself that is implicit in man into love of oneself, into self-love, which constitutes the essence of pride.

No, man is not enticed by "evil" but by himself, by his own divine image, by the divine miracle of his I. He heard the serpent's whisper "you will be like gods" not from outside, but from within, in the blessed fulness of paradise, and wanted to have life in himself and for himself. He wanted all of God's gifts as his own and for himself: "I looked upon the beauty of the garden and my mind was deceived..." (Canon of St Andrew of Crete, ode 2,1)

The fall of man occurred here, at these heights and from these heights: "you will be like gods." But these words were in fact stolen from God. God created us and called us into "his wonderful light" so that we would become "like gods" and have abundant life. What then transformed these words into a lie, into the beginning of the fall, into the source of sin, decay and death? The answer to this question is given precisely by the eucharist, by the thanksgiving that returns us to the throne of the kingdom, grants us to see the face of God and his creation, heaven and earth, the fulfilment of his glory. The eucharist answers not with definitions, words about words, but with its own light and power. For thanksgiving is the power that transforms desire and satisfaction, love and possession, into life, that fulfils everything in the world, given to us by God, into knowledge of God and communion with him. And thus only thanksgiving convicts, i.e., exposes, sin as the falling away of love from thanksgiving, as unthankfulness. Created in the image and likeness of God, who is love, man cannot cease to be love, he "admires" all the same gifts. But it is a love that has ceased to be thanksgiving, i.e., the knowledge of the gift of life and everything in life as not only God's, from God, but as the revelation of God's love to man, as a call to man to transform all gifts and life itself into partaking of the divine life, into knowledge of God.

Life in oneself... But only the Father has "life in himself" (Jn 5:26), only God is Life and therefore the life of any life. The horror and finality of the fall lies in this: wanting life in himself and for himself, man fell away from life. Through sin death entered the world (Rm 5:12) and the world itself became "darkness and the shadow of death." Not transformed by thanksgiving into the "food of immortality," into communion unto life, it became communion unto death, and love for the world. Not transformed by thanksgiving into knowledge of God, it became a dim and self-devouring "lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes and pride of life" (1 Jn 2:16). "Man is a passion, but a useless passion." In saying this Jean-Paul Sartre did not of course know what happened in the falling away of man, in that "original sin," in which ceasing to be a sacrament of thanksgiving, the world died, and life became dying.

We know that all of this, the terrible lawlessness and untruth of sin, the bottomless sorrow and death-dealing power of our fall from God, the power of evil, had once reigned in the world each time that, from the heavenly heights to which Christ's thanksgiving had raised us, these two expressions come forth: "when we had fallen away Thou didst raise us up again..." But we know it because we have been restored, because we have access to the Father and have been made partakers of the kingdom which is to come: "and Thou didst not cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst endowed us with Thy Kingdom which is to come."

In Christ human nature is lifted up to heaven, sanctified, deified. "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him, God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God" (1 Cor 2:9).

Paradise was on earth, but we have ascended to heaven, and even now our life "is hid with Christ in God" (Col 3:3). The revelation of this last and highest gift, its endowment, is precisely the Church. And this endowment is accomplished in the sacrament of thanksgiving, in which the Church fulfils herself as heaven on earth.

Blessed Father Alexander Schmemann, "The Eucharist" pp 187-190

Orthodox Circle