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Herbert Schwartz used to say: The only thing the average Catholic knows about love is how fast it can become a mortal sin! Time reported re Obama in Berlin: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama declared. "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know they have fallen before." These walls are walls of hatred. Hatred cannot be displaced except by its opposite: love. A whole new world just opened up to me last week. Somehow I happened on the word “adelphopoiesis” – I was doing a search on Pavel Florensky, a Russian priest, scientist, outstanding member of the Russian intelligentsia in the last century - who is also a canonized saint. Prior to my current researches on him, what I found most moving was his death. He was just so valuable as a scientist to the Soviets (I think he patented the way to galvanize rubber or some such – that’s the kind of thing he did as a scientist), they didn’t expel him as so many other intellectuals, he even went daily to work in his cassock, his cross, the whole bit – but after a while their patience began to wear, they put him in a concentration camp, and then the day arrived when they came to fetch him for execution. You know, those Soviet camps were huge metropolises, some remain important cities still. So the guards led him through the whole entire prison city out to the helicopter or whatever – and all along the route, the other inmates braved the wrath of the Soviet guards, in effect risking death themselves, to kneel, heads bowed in prayer, along the road as Father Pavel Florensky was led away. So he is a very important saint, and we can be sure we will have his powerful prayers for this work. As you can glean from what follows, this adelphopoiesis, in Russian, “bratstvo”, which gets translated “brotherhood”, is in Russian, however, not a universal abstraction, a pie-in-the-sky slogan, but a one-on-one relationship – the painting of Florensky and Bulgakov by Nesterov, http://www.picture.art-catalog.ru/picture.php?id_picture=1062, is truly a study in bratsvo and you can’t help but feel inside your own self their intimacy. I would note here that in the Russian Church, theology is communicated much more through ikons and the theological hymnology of the Church’s services than through theological tomes of whatever sort. Even St. Thomas Aquinas is most emphatic that our knowledge of God is exactly this, KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, and not a bunch of theological propositions, which, as he explains, are the complex formulations in which our minds, being discursive, are constrained to express our knowledge of God Who is, however, perfectly simple. So simple, in fact, that He can be three-in-one – now, THAT’S SIMPLICITY! So this ikonic painting of Fathers Florensky and Bulgakov will serve here as the best possible introduction to adelphopoiesis. There was, and most probably still is, a liturgical service for blessing this relationship, which is thus sealed in Christ and sanctioned by the Church. In our culture, by contrast, love and marriage both are absurdly equated with, and too often reduced to, sexual penetration. What I am finding, however, with the yoga I am practicing, is that the more you do these things to get the “nadis” or energy channels opened up, the more the way you feel on the INSIDE is just beyond anything that would even be possible from mere external penetration – and it goes right up all the way inside of you. It is what is known to yogis as the awakening of kundalini. One time a good many years ago, in our community, I worked on our computerized translation system with the person whose brain storm it was to build such a system, and for quite a few years we were just together all the time, so that we became very close, although not physically intimate. Sometimes, because we worked around the clock a good bit of the time, we would go to sleep together on the floor. We were fully clothed, didn’t intertwine our limbs, etc., my friend compared it to how puppies lie on each other in a litter. And one time, as I was just waking up, I had this “something”, I didn’t have a word for it then, as my acquaintance with yoga was only very superficial, but it started in what in yoga is known as the root chakra, and it just went right up all through every bit of me, it was like nothing else I had experienced, and I could still feel it for three whole days afterward! At the time, I did nothing to build on this experience, but, at present, this is what I am getting with the yoga I’m doing. So my point is that – if we get the kids to do yoga the right way (very few currently licensed yoga practitioners do it the right way, needless to say), they will experience this, well, it’s really NATURAL ECSTASY without getting pregnant all over the place. Think how happy that would make those Catholics who are so fixated on abortion! And on a larger scale – think of all those walls of hatred that would just melt down like silly putty! I read that Bulgakov was declared to be in heresy by no less a holy and revered saint than St. John Maximovitch! What St. John condemned was, however, the perception of Mary the Mother of God as divine – and the Princeton writer I was relying on for Florensky’s teaching (see below) also expresses this common misreading of the teaching which was no doubt in currency then (and probably still is, I am not like St. John a hierarch, so such things are not within my ken) because to say that Mary is “in the hypostatic order” does NOT elevate her to a 4th person of the Trinity – which would be a contradiction in terms, anyhow. Since such a heretical absurdity cannot but have absolutely disastrous practical consequences, it remains essential for us today to rightly understand Mary’s being “in the hypostatic order”. Herbert understood this rightly, and taught us that the infinity proper to Mary is “relative” infinity, such as is recognized in the differential calculus. The first time I heard him explain this, there were just a few of us out for a drive, and the example he used was the tangent and the secant: no matter how close the tangent comes to the secant, and this can go on to infinity in the mathematical calculations, it never becomes equal to it. (I think Bulgakov and Florensky must have been intellectuals akin to Herbert; I was tremendously impressed that Herbert put even the differential calculus at the service of the Mother of God! Herbert, incidentally, taught in St. John’s Great Book College at Annapolis, and on four different faculties, being considered an exceptional master in all four! My academic accreditation is very good; I had a superb mentor!) I guess not enough people in our community knew what a tangent and secant are so the next time, and thereafter, Herbert used the example of the polygon: its sides can be multiplied to infinity, but it can never become a circle – we being as the polygons, in relation to Mary, the perfect circle. Mary is the model and paragon of all we are created to be, so we rightly look to her to help us fulfill this promise. Thus Mary’s virginity has nothing whatsoever to do with a-sexuality – with which it is however equated and identified in our entire western culture, just look how she is depicted, more like an anorexic debutante than the generous Mother we see in our Orthodox ikons, where she is always shown pointing us to her Son, rather than, as in western art, preening herself before us, and holding out her hands to draw us to herself, rather than to God. This radical misconception of God’s whole plan for our salvation, and of Mary’s role in it, is in fact programmed into the English translation of the prayer in which, in the OCA variant, there occurs the phrase, “without defilement you gave birth to God the Word”!!! The Greek variant I have heard is “corruption”, the Antiochian, “stain” – all are egregiously misleading, and incorporate into our beautiful prayer (the first thing Abp. Paul taught me as he was receiving me into Orthodoxy) the worst possible reading of the Catholic dogma entitled the Immaculate Conception. The mistranslated word in both Greek and Slavonic refers to planting the seed in the female via genital penetration – the most representative transfer I discovered, in my Greek dictionary, was the term from animal husbandry, “to mount”. And the original Greek and Slavonic are perfect cognates: exactly the same root term, employed as a noun. Thus the correct meaning is “without SEED you gave birth to God the Word”. The Pentecostarian is full of references to the seal of the Mother of God not being broken at the birth of her divine Son, comparing this to how the seal of the tomb was not broken when Christ rose from it in the Resurrection – and in ikons, as also in the hymnology, Mary is the “sealed gate” in the book of in the book of Ezekiel: “The Prophet Ezekiel speaks of the Temple whose East gate remains sealed, through which only the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered. This clearly prophesies the Virgin Birth of the Theotokos (Ez. 44:1-2).” (St. George Antiochian Cathedral website http://www.stgeorgeworcester.org/ ) The virgin birth thus is the guarantor that Christ, God incarnate in our flesh, has been conceived, not from any human seed whatsoever, but from the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Spirit. She therefore is the spouse of the Holy Spirit (in Orthodoxy St. Joseph is known as the Guardian of the Holy Family), and therefore OUR Mother, the Mother of God incarnated in US – as our Orthodox services say: God the Word has “clothed” Himself in me!!! Jesus was the first born of many brethren, who are ourselves, so Mary conceives us in that participation in God’s own divine nature (cf 2Pet 1:4) whereby God the Word became man, became me, became you, became all of us!!! Here are some excerpts from what looks like a very timely translation of a major work of Fr. Florensky, in he which explores our “experience of ‘ecclesiality,’ which is understood as the new life in the Spirit, experienced within Orthodoxy…. In modern Russia this tradition was renewed in the late eighteenth century through the revival of hesychast mysticism, a yoga-like form of meditative practice based on the silent recitation of the Jesus Prayer. The nineteenth century, which experienced an incredible growth in the monastic population, witnessed a creative encounter between the monasteries and the artists and intellectuals, reflected, for example, in the works of … Dostoevsky. “…[Florensky] focuses on mutual relationships between human beings and between humanity and God, understood subjectively and metaphysically. The Goodness of these relationships rests on what is called love. This love is modeled after the Incarnation and is imagined as a process of kenosis, of self-emptying. "The metaphysical nature of love lies in the supralogical overcoming of the naked self-identity 'I = I' and in the going out of oneself" (PGT, 67).” This “going out of oneself” is ECSTASY, Greek ek-stasis, stand outside. All this erudite word play should not obscure the vital fact that this is the antithesis of the SELFISH HATRED which currently still has the world in its thrall. “Florensky's … notion of love as friendship [is the] culminating idea of the book. The basic idea … is that ‘to live among brothers, it is necessary to have a Friend, if only a distant one’ and that ‘to have a Friend, it is necessary to live among brothers, at least to be with them in spirit’ (PGT, 297). … And in the "gracious office" of the "half-ecclesiastical, half popular" rite of adelphopoiesis (Russ. bratotvorenie and pobratimstvo), for which he gives a detailed bibliographical note, he finds the appropriate liturgical expression of philic love, just as in the general communal liturgy he sees the appropriate expression of agapic love (PGT, 328-30). Sanctified thus in the liturgy, friendship becomes an essential element of ecclesiality. …The whole work in one way or another is about this need for a friend in a world of brothers, of Christian philic life in the Christian agapic community.” Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters Pavel Florensky Translated by Boris Jakim With an introduction by Richard F. GustafsonCOPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 1997, by Princeton University Press.
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