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Theophany/Epiphany

Subject: Thanks to my Mama, who has guided and nurtured my path to Orthodoxy as also within it, above all on the Feast of her falling asleep each year

As you begat me into life, you also begat me into Orthodoxy, Mama, for I was born in Buchareste, Romania, it was the evening of Easter Saturday, and so every year on my birthday, as you would tell me how I was laid in a tiny white cotton hammock right in your bed so you could constantly rock and caress me, you would also tell me how I was rung into the world by all the bells in Buchareste. Anyone who has ever been in an Orthodox capital city on Pascha knows what an awesome experience that is!

Fast forwarding to now, I first journeyed to Jerusalem and met Vladika Pavel, my spiritual father who has nurtured me with the very same devoted love and attention as you, Mama – born of and fed by the most total faith and trust in God’s loving providence which inspired you, was breathed into you, as also Vladika, by the Holy Comforter, the Spirit of Love. This is the meaning of Theophany: not just “manifestation”, the meaning of “epiphany”, but God’s self-manifestation. It was the manifestation of the Triune Godhead, as we read in the Gospel for this feast:

When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Mt 3: 18f

In these times we live in, my relationship with Vladika has been marked by physical separation, but in God’s providence, this very separation has proven to be almost miraculously fruitful.

And so it was that about the time of Pascha last spring, I began to puzzle over the statement in Vladika’s official biography, that he took the name Pavel/Paul, for the teaching of St. Paul. I had wondered what he meant by that, in just what way the teaching of St. Paul was special within Christian teaching, but I never had the opportunity to ask him. For my readers who are tempted to ask me why I didn’t just read Galatians et passim – the answer is that in the western Church there are those who actually oppose the message of St. Paul to that of Christ Himself, and no way am I going to consult our western biblical translations and risk falling into that trap!

I had a clue, in that St. Gregory Palamas calls Paul “Christ’s mouthpiece”. However, even in our Orthodox seminary here in the U.S., St. Tikhon’s, the former professor of dogmatic theology (at least I HOPE he is former! I am no insider when it comes to OCA news) routinely referred to “Palamite theology” as if it were some esoteric teaching other than “routine” Orthodoxy – and I never heard anyone at all try to call his hand. Tears come to my eyes when I recall such things, so I don’t want to dwell on them.

So I confess that I effectively have my own little world within the Church, peopled basically by those who have not asked to be unsubscribed from my e-mails. This is fine, it’s how I am very glad to live my life – but let’s just say it tends to be on the futuristic side: I know these are the ones who will prevail, and I know this with a kind of infallibly bed-rock certainty which comes only with faith. Herbert used to say that faith is infinitely more certain than reason, because the guarantor of faith is God Himself, while – well, the guarantor of our fallible reason is our fallible reason!!! So in our camp – Vladika Pavel’s and mine - this whole thing Pope Benedict is so big on, whether or not faith and science even have the possibility of contradicting each other, well, it’s all just a chimera of Benedict’s and his buddies’ personal invention, with no authentic ties to actual reality whatsoever.

So, readers, you understand my situation, as, within this muddle, I was trying to understand what Vladika Pavel meant by Paul’s “teaching.

So I began with Palamas’ clue, and this actually accorded with my own perception of St. Paul, that I arrived at before I knew anything about St. Gregory, in that I regarded Paul as Christ’s “psychologist” – since Paul never knew the “historical” Christ personally, but knew him only from his own experience of Christ as living WITHIN him: “Now not I live, but Christ lives in me.” Gal 2:20f Paul goes on to say, “The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God.” Peter could lay claim to the credibility of his teaching, being among those who “were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” 2Pet 1:16 So also John: “We declare to you … what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands…” 1Jn 1:1 This was a powerful witness to their veracity and that of their teaching – but Paul’s role within the Church was other than theirs. Paul knew Jesus the way we must know Him: by experiencing His very divinity in ourselves, and divinizing us!!!

And so it is not to be wondered at that, when Pope Benedict himself says of Paul that he learned about Jesus from the other apostles ……… at this point I paused in my writing to check out what Paul says in the beginning of Galatians about NOT consulting with the other apostles, and even spending 14 years abroad before he approached them, and this only by way of ascertaining that their respective efforts were coordinated.

I mean, however did Pope Benedict get so turned around hind side before?

I used my Jerusalem Bible because the extensive notes, etc., as unedifying as they are spiritually, and theologically distorted, prove nevertheless very helpful for cross referencing and locating texts and – thank you, thank you, Mama, for on your feast day providing the full answer to very issue I was puzzling over!!!

************ T*H*A*N*K Y*O*U ************

Here is Paul’s account of his teaching, from the first 2 chapters of Galatians:

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— and all the brothers with me, to the churches in Galatia:

Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. When God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." And they praised God because of me.

Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain. As for those who seemed to be important—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance—those men added nothing to my message. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been to the Jews. For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. James, Peter and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong.

* * * * * * * *

In the course of my researches using the Bible – especially in checking out erroneous and totally misleading translations, something I am much engaged in – what I am discovering is that the biblical translations are radically faulty, incorporating the whole miasma of flawed theological disputation which we see operative just about every single time Pope Benedict opens his mouth, so that, to be perfectly honest and accurate in this crazed situation, what I have concluded is this: The people are not led astray by theological controversies, which are so boring it is only professional “intellectuals” who make their living by their disputations with one another, securing tenure by regularly publishing their stuff, however nutty it may be – no, this scholarly community, which dominates our universities, has managed to so screw up the biblical translations that – well, the footnotes such as I will quote from in the Jerusalem Bible are really no longer necessary for obfuscation of the text, so altered is the text to begin with, by the translation.

What I am now seeing as definitive of Herbert’s approach to the Bible was the fact that Herbert, a Jew, and from a thoroughly Jewish background, was probably totally unadulterated by Christianity inasmuch as the New York intelligentsia of which he was such an integral part (his brother married the sister of Lionel Trilling, the famous literary critic, whose wife’s account of their “love affair” during the speakeasy days was serialized in the New Yorker) was not exactly known for including fervently practicing Christians. The only Christians he ever mentioned knowing as he grew up were the Irish “micks” in the neighborhood who would pull down the Jewish boys’ pants to see if they were circumcised. Herbert actually first knew of Thomas Aquinas from his mentor at Columbia University, Richard McKeon (well known to scholars of Aristotle), who was a lapsed Catholic. Herbert, who lost no love on his mentor, used to say that it was McKeon’s rabid hatred of Aquinas which initially aroused his interest in the great Catholic theologian, because anything McKeon hated with such ardent venom must be eminently worthwhile!

And so, little by little, over the years, as I worked with Herbert’s writings and sought to myself grow in the truths he taught us – I found that all the teachings Herbert was criticized, attacked, and persecuted for within the Catholic Church, are to be found in St. Paul! Most notably Herbert’s teaching that we have 2 natures, the human nature proper to us, and God’s own Trinitarian divine nature by participation (cf. 2Pet 1:4 – I give the reference, because Orthodox in the US have on several occasions criticized me on the internet, on the basis that Gregory Palamas says we experience, not God’s “essence” but his “energies”. Such critics, however, simply do not understand this terminology, which St. Gregory, moreover, did not invent, but which is documented as being in the tradition from at least the 1st and 2nd centuries, “essence” being what would be proper to God, or any other subject, precisely as such, while “energies” would be what can be communicated to others – “nature” being obviously in the latter category. And God does in fact communicate his divine nature to us, by participation, adoption, while He communicates it to God the Word as properly His, as the Father’s begotten Son, indeed this RELATIONSHIP alone distinguishes the Persons of the Trinity, Who in the divine nature are One.)

It is taking me a little time to grasp exactly why within the Catholic Church Herbert should have been so despised for teaching what St. Paul reiterates so frequently, urging us constantly to put off the old man, put on the new man – until we can say with Paul: “Now not I live, but Christ lives in me.” Especially since Christ’s communicating His nature to us in baptism wherein the Holy Spirit indwells within us, elevating us to participation in the Triune Divine Life of the Godhead Itself – was in fact the BASIS upon which, in the Church Councils dealing with Christology, Christ Himself was defined as being one divine Person, having 2 natures, divine, as proper to Him as God, and human, as assumed by Him in time. So to deny St. Paul’s – and our own - actual EXPERIENCE of these two natures --- would really be to destroy the underpinnings of Christianity in its entirety!

And, in fact, that is what actually happens! I had occasion a couple of weeks or so ago to use the quotation from Col 3: “You died have, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”

That phrase “renewed in knowledge” gave me pause. When I checked, the word translated “knowledge” is in the Greek a strengthened form of “gnosis”; in Russian – because I find the Russian translation, besides being from the “Leningrad Codex” which is known to be the most faithful in existence, is always a clone of the Greek, and since Russian is not just an academic language for me, I know something of its nuances in actual communication, I find that by working between the Russian and Greek I can come up with the faithful meaning. So in the Russian translation of this passage, the term for “knowledge” is one that is used, for instance, when you say to someone, “I am pleased to have come to know you, gotten acquainted with you.” So it is this PERSONAL intimacy that is intended here. Which is faithful to the sense of the passage, for this is how we are renewed in the image of our Creator, until not I live, but Christ lives in me.

Thus it is not just an academic quest for accuracy, because this is the kind of “knowledge” Indian yogis are dealing with in what concerns the higher chakras! I see a lot of complaints these days about Christians being ill-treated in India – but the Indians do have a point, in that the Christian message being put out at present from the western Church is a direct and very forceful slap in the face to a spiritual quest which is perfectly in line with the genuine Christian teaching communicated by St. Paul – and as against the error of St. Peter, who wanted Christians to accept the Gospel as a kind of add-on to Jewish observance, notably circumcision! The matter was resolved in the first Church Council, the Council of Jerusalem (see Ac 15), but it was Paul who carried the day!

I’m not going to labor the point regarding our dealings world wide with other religious communions (not to mention the Quakers right here at home, see my post on Margaret Askew Fell Fox, the Mother of the Quakers, and my ancestor), so absolutely indispensable to the attainment to – well, that respect for God Himself as manifested through His creation, which, in truth, constitutes a perpetual theophany - instead of creating a world-wide social order ruled by unregulated selfish greed. Anyone who fails to see this as the crux of the problem hasn’t been reading the news for the past half-century.

I feel constrained to conclude this missive by keying in the absolutely incredible notes I found in my Jerusalem Bible, I could literally have dropped dead of the shock were it not that I am so accustomed to encountering the anti-Christ on all sides these days that all I experienced was a minor jolt at seeing EVERY SINGLE THING St. Paul says in the passage from Galatians contradicted and turned on its head in the Jerusalem Bible notes!!!

Well, actually, on second thought, the wrongheaded understanding encoded into so many parts of this particular text is so inane, it would be nigh impossible for me to make enough sense of it to indicate, as regards the notes, the absurdity of their objections to this initially distorted understanding of what is at issue to begin with! So I will rest satisfied with just one glaring example.

The note on Verse 16, which I quote below, states: “This should not be taken as meaning that Paul received all his doctrine without human intervention.”

When God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." And they praised God because of me.

Thus Paul’s faith is the same as that of Peter and the apostles who knew Jesus during His sojourn earth, for Paul is said to be “now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” But I, myself, cannot imagine a more forceful affirmation that this faith was not taught him from Peter et al, but was communicated to him directly from “God Who … was pleased to reveal His Son in me” without any other “human intervention” whatsoever! The only person who helped Saul/Paul in any way was Ananias, who had to be reassured by God even to take him in, and we read that “after a few days” (Ac 9:20f), Paul immediately “began preaching in the synagogues, ‘Jesus is the Son of God.’” Only Barnabas helped him around that time in Jerusalem, and this merely to reassure the other disciples who were afraid of him.

It’s just, among Catholics, the mentality prevalent – and as a foregone, even axiomatic, presupposition, unquestioned and unquestionable – that Paul or anyone else can receive truth only from the Petrine Catholic Church, and specifically the papacy. I have already written of the obviously painful difficulty even Pope John Paul II, as a doctoral student in the Angelicum, had accepting, in his thesis entitled “The Object of Faith in St. John of the Cross”, that John of the Cross never even CONSIDERS THE POSSIBILITY that Vatican dogmata might be the object of faith, which – it is the burden of his doctoral thesis to demonstrate - is God alone. The future Pope added a lengthy addenda of texts from St. Thomas Aquinas stating unequivocally that such dogmata are merely the complex formulae in which our reasoning processes are constrained to express the truth of God which is simple – literally, simplicity itself. But whether Pope John Paul II ever actually understood this himself remains an unknown – and certainly if he did, he failed to communicate the truth of the matter to his successor.

Mama, is there some way you can get this point across to Pope Benedict, so that he will call upon Vladika Pavel and myself to rectify this mess?

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