Taxing Our Faults

When Elder Paisios was questioned about whether he struggled as a novice he answered, "Every time something happened in my struggle, or if others told me something, I never allowed things to just roll off 'untaxed." This leads to the question, what is the tax? Normally a tax is an additional cost that is added on to the goods we buy or service we use.  It is an extra burden that we are obligated to pay.

If we reverse this and say what is meant by being untaxed, it implies that there is no extra cost. This is how Elder Paisios explains the idea of a tax on his faults.  He says, "'Untaxed' means that you disregard your faults, aren't touched by them, you just let them roll off."  The tax is our effort to examine our own behavior. So, if we do not place a 'tax' on the faults we discover or are pointed out to us by others, we are in a sense ignoring them.  This ignorance leads to indifference. We begin to accept them as just part of our normal behavior. Our heart is hardened. Our conscience becomes blind.

Regarding this indifference the Elder says, "Indifference hardens the field of our heart and, no matter what we are told, what ever happens, we are not touched, we can't become aware of our guilt so as to repent." Once we become indifferent to our faults there is no way for us to improve. We know that God calls us to have a pure heart.  The only way to gain this is by being able to recognize our failings.  We must learn to fight indifference so we can become repentive and continually make progress in our way of life. We must learn to apply a tax on our failings.

What are some ways we avoid applying a tax to our faults? We change the subject when they are brought up. We find some rationale to explain our behavior, often blaming our environment or some other person.  We can get pretty creative in finding ways to avoid applying this tax. It's not a heavy tax. It only requires us to take the time to examine ourselves and seek ways to become more like Christ.

The Elder give us an example:

If someone says that I am a hypocrite, I would not say, "May whoever said that be cursed with a bad year!" Instead I would seek to find out what caused him to say such a thing. I would reason and say, "Something is going on; the other person is not at fault. There must be something in myself I have not noticed; I must have given cause in some way for others to misunderstand my behavior. He wouldn't have said such a thing without some reason. If I had been attentive and behaved with prudence, I would not have been misunderstood. I have brought harm to the other person and will be judged for it by God".

Notice what he did not do. He did not explore the other person possible negative motive for such an accusation. He did not assume the other person who is trying to discredit him because of envy or other malice. He assumed that there was a fault he had that he needed to better understand. This extra effort is the tax that is needed to keep us on a path of repentance.

Elder Paisios says:

If we don't examine everything in this manner, we won't be able to benefit from anything. This is why we often say about someone, "this person has lost all control." Do you know when control is lost? When we don't observe ourselves carefully. ... As the years pass, man matures spiritually, and if he makes good of past experiences, he progresses more steadily and more humbly. Often even the ups and downs in our struggle help us achieve a positive and steady spiritual march upwards.

This is what is key, to continue to make progress in the way we live and interact with other in this world. As we learn to perfect our own actions, our heart will be opened more and more to the needs of others and to the acceptance of God's love.  We will receive the blessing of His grace more and more abundantly if we learn to tax our faults. We must take advantage of every clue you get from our daily life and continually seek ways to understand our own behavior.

Reference: Elder pAisios of Mount Athos Spiritual Counsels III: Spiritual Struggle, pp 154-156

THE DIVINE ENERGIES

One of the most important aspects of Orthodox spirituality is participation in thedivine energies. Briefly stated, this is an Orthodox doctrine of fundamental importance and very often ignored. In Orthodox theology, a distinction is made between the "essence" and "energies" of God. Those who attain perfection do so by uniting with the divine uncreated energies, and not with the divineessence. The Greek Orthodox Fathers, whenever they speak of God, emphasize the unknowability of God's essence and stress the vision of thedivine energies, especially the divine uncreated Light. Orthodox spiritual tradition emphasizes the divine Logos indwelling in the world and our ability to attain a spiritual life and mystical union with the Holy Spirit in this world.

Christian contemplation is not "ecstatic," that is, outside ourselves, but it takes place within the Christian person who is the "temple of the Holy Spirit." Thedivine energies are "within everything and outside everything." All creation is the manifestation of God's energies. Vladimir Lossky says in the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: "These divine rays penetrate the whole created universe and are the cause of its existence." The uncreated Light and the knowledge of God in Orthodox tradition "illuminates every man that cometh into this world." It is the same light that the apostles saw on Mount Tabor that penetrates all of creation and transforms it, creating it anew. A modern ascetic says in the Undistorted Image: "Uncreated Light is divine energy. Contemplation of Uncreated Light begets, first and foremost, an all absorbing feeling of the living God - an immaterial feeling of the immaterial, an intuitive, not a rational perception - which transports man with irrestible force into another world, but so warily that he neither realizes when it happens nor knows whether he is in or out of the body." This is not a sentimental or emotional feeling or romantic fantasy. It is experience of the divine uncreated Light described by the neptic Fathers. Again, in the words of the same ascetic: "This supramental sensation of the Living God (which is experienced in contemplation) is accompanied by a vision of light, of light essentially different from physical light. Man himself abides in light because, assimilated to the Light which he contemplates, and spiritualized by it, he then neither sees nor feels his own material being or the materiality of the world."

ILLUMINATION
God's act is pure light, and when the Lord appears to us, he always appears asLight. In Holy Scripture we read: "In Your Light we shall see light." Only in the state of illumination does divine grace makes possible the contemplation of thedivine light. The hidden truths of Holy Scripture are not revealed to everyone, since illumination comes through the special divine gift of revelation. For this reason in the early Church, the holy Bible was read only in the Church and only by a charismatic person. In the Orthodox Church, we have never experienced "bibliolatry" or "worship of the Book," as in some sects. The Church holds fast to the unadulterated spirit of the Bible as it was delivered to the Saints, and through them, to us.

taken from AN INTRODUCTION TO ORTHODOX SPIRITUALITY by
George C. Papademetriou

Perfection: Deification

Can we really be deified?  What does this mean?  This is a central doctrine in the Orthodox faith and is called Theosis.

Fr. Dimitru Staniloae defines deification as "God's perfect and full penetration of man."  It is something that never stops but continues to the infinite.  It is an experience that only mankind is capable.  It is the result of a growth of our receptive powers to receive and use the divine energies.  It is through deification that we reach towards our potential to become like God, made in His image as we learn from the book of Genesis.


Fr. Dimitru says,

Man becomes more and more like God without identifying with Him.  Man will continue to become like God forever, in an ever fuller union with Him, but never will he reach full identification with Him; he will be able to reflect God more and more, but he will not become what God is.

The Holy Fathers emphasize that deification is by grace and not by man's own effort or nature.  When deified man's nature remains the same.  He does not become a source of divine energy, like God.  He receives God's energies though grace.  Man only reflects God's energies.  He never assumes the role of the source.


We never receive the totality of God's energies.  Through our efforts in preparation we make an ascent and as we grow spiritually God's energies descend on us granting us increased powers.


Fr. Dimitru concludes his book with the following thoughts:

The divine energies are nothing but the rays of the divine essence, shining from the three divine Persons.  And from the time that the Word of Good too flesh, these rays have been shining through His human face.

It can also be said that the things of the world are images of the logoi of the divine Logos, which are at the same time energies.  By creation God put a part of His infinite possibility of thought and of energy into existence, in the form specifically at the level of the understanding of human creatures.  He did this to permit a dialog with God and towards union with Him.

The incarnation of the Word confirmed the value of man and of these images of reason and of energy measured by him.  But it also gave man the possibility to see in the face of the man of the Logos, concentrated anew, all the logoi and divine energies.  Thus final deification will consist of a contemplation and a living of all the divine values and energies conceived in and radiated from the face of Christ according to the supreme measure of man.  But by this, in the face of each man, by the logoi and the energies gathered in him, the logoi and the energies of the Logos will be reflected luminously.  Eternal bliss will be the contemplation of the face of Christ.

So all will be in God and we will see all things in Him, or God will be in all things and we will see Him in all things; and the unitary presence of God in all things will be real to the extent that all creatures gathered in Him remain real and unmingled in God

This is the eternal perspective of deification.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 362 - 374 

Perfection: The Divine LIght

The one who has purified himself of the passions and has reached a burning love for God on the steps of the virtues can attain the vision of the divine light...

The attainment fo the divine light indicates that one's nature has been spiritualized, perfected, so that it is a clear receptacle of the warmth and a light of the love of God. There are no traces of ego-centeredness left.  The Holy Spirit shines from within, enlightening one's presence.

Father Dimitru tells us that St. Simeon the New Theologian... and Gregory Palamas have described these three elements;

a) The light is a manifestation of love

b) This love is the work of the Holy Spirit

c) He that raises himself to this state of light or of culminating love forgets bodily sensation, produced by the world through the body, and even himself.

He says,

The intesity of this love, the blinding level of light with which it overflows, makes the body of the one who expereinces it totally transparent for others...

The bodily sense are overwhelmed.  Fr. Dimitru writes,

The body and the world are not done away with but they become the medium by which the interior light is made known.  A paradoxical thing happens.  First, the exterior things are overwhelmed; secondly, a great love is poured out through them, to everybody.  Light radiates from everything.

Saint Gregory Palamas says,

This is union: that all these things be one, that the person who sees no longer be able to distinguish between himself and that through which he is seeing, but he only knows this much: That it is light and he sees a light, distinct from all creatures.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 358 - 361

Perfection: Divine Light - Knowledge Beyond Knowledge

The Divine Light is of a spiritual nature, fills the mind, and reveals the mystical realities of God.

The Light which is seen in pure prayer is beyond all that can be known through our senses and reason.  In effect it surpasses knowledge.  It is a higher knowledge (supra-knowledge) based on a relationship with God.


Saint Gregory Palamas says,

Because union surpasses the power of the mind it is higher than all mental functions and it isn't knowledge, and because it is a relationship of the mind and God, it is something incomparably higher than the power which ties the mind with things created, that is than knowledge.  Such union with God is thus beyond all knowledge.... This union is a unique reality.  For whatever name one gives to it––union, vision, a sense perception, knowledge, intellection, illumination––would not properly speaking apply to it, or else would properly apply to it alone.

The divine light is often referred to as a vision (not based on the imagination which include apparitions and so forth) reached by a leap through the descent of Spirit.


Fr Dimitru Staniloae says,

The vision of the divine light is a vision and a knowledge [caused by] a divine energy, and received by man by means of a divine energy.  It is a vision and a knowledge according to the divine way. Man sees and knows qualitatively as God, or "spiritually and divinely"...

Saint Gregory Palamas gives us an analogy.

The light of knowledge may be compared to a lamp that shines in an obscure place, whereas the light of mystical contemplation is compared to the morning star which shines in full daylight.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 341-343 

Perfection: The Divine Light is Spiritual

The light that is seen at the peak of pure prayer is not a physical light but a spiritual one.  It radiates from the presence of Jesus Christ and enlightens our souls with His truth.

This light is like the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai or the Apostles at the Transfiguration of Christ.


Saint Gregory Palamas writes describing the experience of Moses,

Because he was able to see, after he had surpassed himself and arrived in the darkness, he didn't see either by the senses or by the mind; so that light is self-visible and fills minds become blind in the sense of surpassing.... But when the mind is raised above all mental activity and is found without eyes in the sense of being surpassed, it is filled with a brilliance higher than all beauty; it is found in God by grace and has that self-visible light mystically and sees by the union above mind.

Saint Gregory Palamas says,

Those who see it are able to penetrate by the power of Spirit in them beyond the  pane of physical realities. They find themselves raised to an order of the Spirit.  Their eyes are open and they seek a target somewhere outside.  But this means only that the light from the order of spiritual realities has overwhelmed the surrounding realities; their senses have become full of the power of the Spirit. We might use a colorless comparison: For those who love each other, all nature is filled with the light which seems to radiate from the other.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 337 - 340 

Perfection: The Mind and the Divine Light

What is the Divine Light?

Fr. Dimitru Staniloae says,

It is, from one point of view, simply the happy radiation of divine love, experienced in a more intensive form in moments of ecstatic focus on God.

The experience which characterizes this state could be expressed by three terms: love, a knowledge by experience, higher than conceptual; and the light which is the expression of joy.

To attain this state is a journey.  The mind finds itself through prayer.  When the passions have been overcome and the mind is still, there is a descent of divine love which is often experienced as uncreated light.  There is an ascent through purification and illumination and then the divine descent for our purification.


Saint Gregory Palamas describes it as follows:

The one who desires union with God... frees his soul as much as possible from every impure tie, and dedicates his mind to unceasing prayer to God, and by this becomes wholly himself; he finds a new and secret ascent to the heavens, an unapproachable ascent to the silence of the initiate, as someone might say. With an unspeakable pleasure, he submerges his mind in this deep night full of pure, full, and sweet quietness, of a true tranquility and silence and he is lifted up above all creatures.  In this way, he completely goes out of himself and becomes wholly of God; he sees a divine light inaccessible to the senses as such, but precious and holy to pure souls and minds; without this vision the mind couldn't see by being united with things above it, only by its mental sense, just as the body's eye can't see without perceptible light.

In the divine light the mind is enabled to see God directly and to find itself in union with Him.  This is not a light which is beyond itself or higher,


Gregory Palamas again,

But seeing itself, it sees more than itself: it does not simply contemplate some other object, or simply its own image, but rather the glory impressed on its own image by the grace of God.  This radiance reinforces the mind's power to transcend itself, and to accomplish that union with those better things which is beyond  understanding.  By this union, the mind sees God in the Spirit in a manner transcending human powers.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 327 - 336 

Perfection: Divine Love Brings Union of All

How by our union with God or others is the union of the entire human nature and its union with God realized?


Fr Dimitru Staniloae wrties,

St. Maximus the Confessor says that first of all love unifies the individual man.  It replaces anger, falsenss, gluttony, and all the tings in which man has taken part by bodily love himself.  When these things no longer exist, no trace of wickedness can persist; in their place various kinds of virtues are introduced, which integrate the power of love.  However, by this unification of the individual man, the unification of individuals between themselvs is also realized.

 While we are here on earth we only can experience love in short ecstatic moments, in relationship with another person or with God.  Even when we are in an ecstatic relationship with God we forget all people.  So how do we experience a union with all people?


Fr. Dimitru says,

It follows that only in peaceful everyday love, manifested in fact and in thought, in Christian love in a broad sense, can we experience more or less love for all men. My interests, my passions, contradictory opinions, as voluntary manifestations, no longer break the unity of nature between me and my neighbor.  Every moment I judge things from the point of view of my neighbor with who I am connected; I replace my ego with his and give up mine.  By doing this right along with various neighbors with whom I come in contact, the sentiment of my union, actual or virtual with anyone, is strengthened.  On my part there is no longer a rift between me and them; I no longer see any such thing.  If they do, I don't.

This steady behavior strengthens the sentiment of my unity with them and with God... The energy of my love for another, also nurtured by the effort of my will, but especially by these moments of ecstatic contemplation, is easily directed later toward other people.  And everywhere I gain a steady disposition of love for anyone, a joy for all, a conviction that in each one I can discover the mystery of enchanting depths.  I feel united virtually with everyone and with every concrete opportunity...

Love for others grows from the habit of love for God and especially fro living it as ecstasy on the culminating step of prayer...

...

We have the feeling that in the love of God as ecstasy, God has opened His heart to us and received us in it, just as we have opened our heart so that He can enter it.  On the other hand, the coming back to God, to His heart, means to enter His home.  God's "home", however, wants to include all people, because in His heart there is room for everybody, and when I enter it I must feel that by being there I am united with eveyone there.  Coming back to God, we truly come back home where we belong to the supreme parental home, together with all the heavenly Father's children...

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 323 - 326

Perfection: Prayer Develops Love and Union with God

It is by prayer that we grow in love.


Fr. Dimitru Staniloae writes,

When we go forward by the Jesus Prayer, to mental prayer in the heart, we are sustained by love for Him.  It grows continually, and fashions us, in a spiritual imaging of His spiritual image, according to His image.  The we feel Him evermore united with our ego, in as "we" from which I can no longer leave without the danger of being lost.  And not only do I receive in me the ego, the "I" of Christ, which makes me according to His image, but also His "I" receives mine in Himself––He accepts even my body in Himself, so that He includes me in His pure senses, in His pure actions.  Thus all of us who believe become one "body" with Him and with each other, a fact which will become perfected in the future life.

This union is reached by pure prayer addressed to Jesus.  But until we are able to engage in this level of prayer we must strive to love our neighbors.  We work on this, recognizing that true love of neighbor, love that never fails, cannot be reached without prayer and asceticism. 


Love is an encounter with the infinite.  If we experience this ecstatic joy between two people it is usually only for a moment.  When we join in our love of God with prayer this state of joy can be prolonged.


Fr Dimitru writes,

We can spend a longer time in the intoxication of the love of God, as the height of pure prayer.... Prayer leads up to the "cessation" of the mind from every activity directed toward the limited.  But the intoxication of the love of God descends all at once from above. ...as overflowing joy, which expresses the total absorption of your person in the other and of the other's in you, there is also a peaceful love, directed by rational consideration, which grows little by little.  This is a preparatory condition for the other.

So our efforts to love one another is also an important preparation for our union with God.  As we learn humility, and learn to give ourselves selflessly for the good of others, we come closer and closer to God.  As we eliminate our passions and perfect our prayer to the state where is descends into the depths of the heart in pure prayer, we experience the unlimited love of God, our total surrender out of our love for Him and His love for us. It is through prayer that love is perfected in us.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 318 - 322

Perfection: Joined in Love

Love involves a union.  Between lovers there is a mutual  penetration of energies. This penetration is not imposed by force.  It is mutual and received with joy. The one loved is absorbed by the one who loves yet remains independent.  Love is experienced as a unity of free individuals.


Fr Dimitru Staniloae writes,

In love I don't only live myself or by myself, but also my neighbor or by my neighbor, without his ceasing to be a subject independent from me.  This means, nevertheless that I don't have him as an object of mine, as a part of my individuality, but in a free relationship.... he becomes more intimate to me than anything which I possess; I see him penetrating more deeply in me that anything, and I penetrate him more than anything which he has.

There is a substitution of egos that takes place between two lovers.  One ego takes the place of the other.  There is no absorption of the other but a going out of oneself.  The other becomes ones center of life.


This is the nature of our union with God.  It is what is meant when Saint Paul says, "I live, and yet not I but Christ lives in me."  When we love God we no longer possess our own life but now possess His life.


Christian love is the opposite of pride.  We no longer think only of ourselves and are only satisfied when the other is also satisfied.  Love is based on humility.


Fr. Dimitru wrties,

So love is realized when two subjects meet each other in a full, mutual experience, in their qualities as subjects, that is without the reciprocal reduction of each other to the state of objects, but revealing themselves to each other to the maximum, as subjects; nevertheless with all this they give themselves to each other with complete freedom.  Love penetrates two subjects reciprocally in their intimacy... By love you penetrate into the intimacy of your neighbor... without annihilating or belittling him...  The more I love him the more he reveals himself to me.

This is the nature of our desired relationship with God, our union with Him.  A mutual penetration of our love while not being assumed into him but free to act.  We live in Him and He lives in us.  Though this coupling in love we are able to voluntarily link our will with His.  Our energies co-penetrate.  His energy flows through us.


Next: Love demands asceticism and prayer.


Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 310 - 316

Perfection - The Steps of Love - The Path to Union

Fr Dimitru Stanloae begins his discussion about the final stage of Orthodox Spirituality, Perfection by Union with God or by Deification, with a discussion on Love and Dispassion. To understand union with God it is first necessary to understand love.  It is with love that we attain union with God.

What is love? What are its characteristics? Love involves an eradication of ego, the development of selflessness. Our self-centered actions come from the passions. These we first have to overcome. Love is about giving totally of oneself to another. We can't be preoccupied with our own needs and love others. Love only fully develops after we have freed ourselves of the control of passions and reached dispassion. 


Love is central to our finding union with God.

Fr. Dimitru Staniloae says,

We can't turn exclusively to God, as long as we are preoccupied in an egoistic way with ourselves.

Saint Diadochos writes,

He who loves himself, cannot love God.  But he who doesn't love himself because of he overwhelming richness of the love of God, loves God, for such a person never seeks his own glory, but that of God.  Because he who loves himself seeks his own glory, but he who loves God, loves the glory of Him who made him. since it is proper to the sensitive soul to always seek first the glory of God in all the commandments which he is carrying out, and secondly, to enjoy himself in his humility.

Saint John the Evangelist says,

"He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?" (1 John 4:20)

Fr. Dimitru outlines three steps in love:

a) The tendency of natural sympathy from the state of nature fallen from grace. [This we all have as a seed within ourselves from our birth.]

b) Christian love, which uses this tendency and grows by divine grace and by self-efforts; this grows and becomes firm. It brings nature to a kind of fulfillment. [This we develop as we follow the Orthodox Way of Life.]

c) Finally, there is love as ecstasy or as a gift exclusively from above.  This comes after a long preparation through the second and last for moments, that from the second it might gain new force and continue its growth. [This comes with pure prayer.]

Full love means a man's complete victory over himself.  

Divine love is a total victory of egotism.  It is gained through prayer after preparation through the activities of purification to rid ourselves of the passions. It is what we begin to experience as we are able to transcend reason and all concepts.  We discover God's love within our hearts and this helps us develop our capacity for love of God and for our neighbor. 

Saint Diadochos says,

When someone begins to richly feel the love of God, then he begins to love his neighbor too, with spiritual feeling.

Saint Diadochos adds an important adjective to our love of other, "with spiritual feeling." When we love another with "spiritual feeling" there is no separation between us.  All our thoughts are about the other person. And the one loved has all their thoughts directed toward us. We are joined in selfless union.  There is no separation. This is how we attain theosis.  It is based on our love of God and His love for us.  As we give up ourselves for Him, we find ourselves embraced in His divine love. We find the union we seek.

Fr Dimitru says of divine love,

Divine love is a drink, because it floods with its enthusiasm the worldly judgment of the mind and the feeling of the body.  It moves the one who participates in it to another plane of reality.  He sees another world, whose logic darkens the logic of everyday life; he receives the sense of other states, which overwhelm the feeling of bodily pains and pleasures.  

It is through this divine love that the Apostles received on that day of Pentecost. With the descent of the Hoy spirit filling them with divine love based on their total love of Jesus Christ, they were able to spread the Word throughout the world while suffering rejection, imprisonment and torture. All the troubles they endured never weakened their effort because of the union they had with God.  It was through divine love that they were able to bear all. This is the focus of the final stage of Orthodox Spirituality: Perfection.

More on love...

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 303 - 309


See Ten Points for an Orthodox Way of Life