Person and Personality in Orthodox Teaching
Concerning the Concept of a "Personal Lord and Savior"
I was a little surprised when Archbishop Chrysostomos recently wrote me with
some critical words about my experience of Jesus Christ as my personal Savior
within the context of the Orthodox witness....It seems to me that accepting
Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior is what Christianity is really about....I
find Jesus in Orthodoxy and I can find no reason to look at His saving Grace any
differently now that I am Orthodox than when I was a Protestant. I am saved in
Orthodoxy and rejoice in my Savior (Luke 1:47)....Could you explain why my
language was described as missing the mark or off the mark—whichever?
(P.L., IL)
We have asked His Eminence to respond to your comments and question:
In corresponding with you some time ago, I had occasion to chastise you for
approaching the Orthodox Faith with a certain superficiality and without
addressing the wholeness of the salvific experience that one finds in Orthodox
theology. I will reiterate and expand on what I told you, hoping that you will
reflect on these matters carefully. Firstly, as I pointed out to you earlier,
the concepts of personhood and salvation in the Orthodox Church have absolutely
nothing to do with these notions as Protestant Evangelicals understand them; and
secondly, the separation of human salvation and the witness of the Church into
two elements, if not the separation of salvation and personhood themselves, is
wholly foreign to Orthodoxy. Salvation is the realization of personhood in
Christ, through theosis (divinization by Grace), and Christ is not only
the Church itself, as Father Florovsky has so clearly demonstrated from a
Patristic standpoint (see, for example, his brilliant essay, Le Corps du
Christ vivant: Une Interprtation orthodoxe de l Église Universelle [The
Body of the Living Christ: An Orthodox Understanding of the Catholic Church]
in the collection, La Saint Église Universelle [The Holy Catholic Church]
[Neuchatel-Paris: Delachaux et Niestl, 1948]),1 but
the very source, as Perfect God and Perfect man (Teleios Theos kai
Teleios Anthropos), of our restoration to the image of God, or salvation.
I have often emphasized this point about the existential and wider dimensions
of religious terminology in the Fathers of the Church, by recounting an
astonishing incident in one of Father Florovsky's seminars, in 1976, at the
Princeton Theological Seminary. In the course of a certain lecture, a seminary
student—frustrated, I suspect, at the philosophical depth of Father Florovskys
discussion of a certain Patristic point (in fact, he was, as I recall,
discussing Origen)—raised his hand and rather boldly asked, What does all
of this have to do with accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?
There was a long pause, after which Father Georges, with a piercing glance,
looked up at the student and said, with the frail voice that in those days
betrayed his advanced age: Young man, I was converted to Jesus Christ, not to
Protestant Evangelical piety. He then continued his lecture, without another
comment. He no doubt thought that the matter was closed; his clumsy student, no
doubt, understood nothing of what Father Georges had said.
That one confrontation has always encapsulated, for me, the vast distance
which separates the experiential theology of the Fathers and the doctrinaire
theology of Christian apologetics (what Father John Romanides, as we shall see
below, calls polemical or dogmatic theology, without implying
anything pejorative by the former word), if indeed one can dignify pietistic
clichés such as the one in question—however sincerely proffered—with the
word theology.
Let me elaborate on what I have said, by touching on the Orthodox meaning of
the person and the relationship of personhood to salvation within the context of
the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas. In this way, you will see vividly what I
mean when I refer to your pietistic notion of personal salvation as superficial.
It is, in fact, only by carefully defining our terminology in the language used
by the Fathers—language rising out of their experience of God and the
restoration of human personhood in Christ—that we can fully understand the
profound dimensions of Scriptural references to Christ as our personal Savior
and the experiential nexus between the person and salvation in Christ. When we
turn to the living witness of the Fathers, we capture a fullness of Christian
teaching that is neither related to the Evangelical understanding of personal
salvation in Christ, nor in any manner captured by that understanding, save in
the undoubtedly well-intentioned strivings of those who seek the ineffable
within the tragically limited boundaries of an existential mystery reduced to a
verbal affirmation.
I will begin my comments by translating and quoting two sections from a
number of very insightful passages written by Metropolitan Ierotheos of
Nafpaktos about St. Gregory Palamas theology and the theology of the Orthodox
Fathers in general, which give us a grounding in understanding the experiential
dimensions of true theology. These passages are found in His Eminence's
excellent essay, He peri prosopou didaskalia kata ton Hagio Gregorio Palama
(St. Gregory Palamas Teaching on the Person),2 in
which he approaches the question of personhood somewhat differently—and with a
different and more expansive aim—than I, but whose observations are wholly
consistent with what I have to say.
Speaking of the theological methodology of St. Gregory Palamas, Metropolitan
Ierotheos writes: St. Gregory Palamas was a synthetic theologian, in the
sense that he knew all of the theology of the Orthodox Church and unceasingly
directed its application to the needs of his age. The Holy Fathers of the Church
always theologized in a synthetic and productive manner.3 This
means that, having personal experience of God, they confronted the theological
currents of their age from within their experience, which was, in actuality, the
experience of the Church, employing even the nomenclature of heretics, but
endowing it with a different content and a different meaning.4
Addressing directly a theology of experience derived from the vision of God,
His Eminence notes that: Theology as a vision of God is one thing, as St.
Gregory Palamas indicates in a number of places, and a theology which aims to
express this experience in contemporary terms is quite another. Father John
Romanides, in order to underscore the difference between these two different
theologies, refers to empirical theology [a theology of experience] and dogmatic—polemical—theology.
The first entails the vision of the Uncreated Light of God in the human Nature
of the Logos, while the second entails the effort to convey this
experience in the confrontation of heretics who [merely] philosophized about
these serious matters of the Faith.5
Keeping in mind these general principles with regard to the source of genuine
theology (empirical theology), let us examine what St. Gregory
Palamas says about the person. To begin with, we must say something about the
Orthodox understanding of man. Man exists both in essence and in hypostasis (and
the word hypostasis is one which Palamas seems to prefer over the
word person, having drawn much of his language in this regard from both
St. Basil the Great and St. John of Damascus). The essence of man (bear
in mind that this word derives ultimately from the verb to be, as
Metropolitan Ierotheos reminds us) describes his state of being, which he shares
with all others. His hypostasis (person), however, is that which
distinguishes him from others. (Needless to say, one should not naïvely confuse
the terms used here in describing the human being with the Hypostasis and
Essence of God, which have wholly different meanings and which apply to God
alone. The Essence of God is ineffable; and the Hypostasis of God is
uncreated, while that of man is created.)
The human person is the hypostatic manifestation of the human essence,
the realization of who a human being is as an individual: being, again,
common in his essence but individual in his hypostasis or person, as St.
Gregory Palamas affirms. It is primarily the human person to which the
therapeutic and salvific methods of Hesychasm, as the spiritual teachings of
Palamas are called, are directed. The cleaning and enlightenment of the
individual human mind, the purification of the human heart, and the restoration
of the passions (which have been misdirected and perverted, as a result of the
Fall) constitute the Hesychastic way of life. And the way of life that effects
these things leads to the restoration of the individual, the human person, who
freely turns from a life of sin to one of synergy with God. In short, one can
say, though risking theological difficulties in overstating this point, that the
restoration of the human being in Christ centers on the person, on the
restoration of the person, and on the cure of the process of disease which
separates the individual from the full realization of his potential in Christ.
In the purest anthropology of the Fathers, expressed perfectly in the
Hesychastic teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, we come to understand that the
essence of man, his being, has been restored through the divinization of human
nature by the Incarnation of Christ, Who, in His Resurrection, lifted human
existence above what it was even before the Fall. The personal salvation of the
human being lies in his free acceptance of the potential for restoration in
Christ, his ascetic struggle to free himself from the taint and illness of sin,
and his restoration of the human person, his hypostasis, through the
vision of God. And this vision of God, according to St. Gregory Palamas, is
communion with God, the divinization of the human person (theosis), and
his union in energy with Christ. In this divinization by Grace, man comes to an
intimate knowledge of God. His mind cleansed and enlightened, his heart
purified, and his passions cleansed and directed towards the love and attainment
of holiness, man finds salvation.
And once more, this salvation is personal, centered on the distinct
human being who draws on his essence—renewed in Christ—and who, in his
person, becomes a small Jesus Christ within Jesus Christ, to quote one
Church Father. So it is that Jesus Christ is our personal Lord and our Savior.
In this profound sense of the personal, and in an apocalyptic encounter with
redemption (for salvation is closely united to spiritual vision and to the
noetic revelation and knowledge of God), we find, through experience, what
the more fundamentalistic Protestant Evangelicals understand only in empty form.
We know through the attainment of true personhood in Christ, which is the
enlightenment or salvation of man, what these seekers know only intellectually
and in terms of a theology of affirmation and commitment crippled by the
unrestored senses and passions.
It behooves me to note, here, that God transcends all human categories of
thought, all human conceptualization, and even our understanding of His
existence. The personal experience of the redemption of Christ, therefore,
occurs beyond the dimensions of the human intellect, as I said above, since the
true encounter with Christ is an encounter with God Himself. This encounter is
the result of our union with God's Energies, and thus occurs noetically and
spiritually, through the mind made new in Christ, the heart transformed by
Grace, and the person restored to the image of God in union, by Grace, with the
God-Man. Divine vision is, in effect, vision beyond vision, just as personhood
in Christ is beyond the personal as we understand it, since the fallen
personality is not a true person, but the product of passions and fallen
proclivities.
In conclusion, I should emphasize that the therapeutic path towards the
restoration of personhood in Christ is, and must be, focused, of course,
on the life of the Mysteries, which are the very life of the Church and which
cannot be separated from the Church in any manner whatsoever: among other
things, the emptying-out (kenosis) of sin through confession and the
infusion into our hearts, joints, and reins of the Body and Blood of Christ in
the Holy Eucharist. The spiritual faculty of man, the noetic faculty, having
been displaced from its natural place in the heart, as St. Gregory Palamas
teaches us, must be brought back into the heart, back to its natural place, so
that the human person can be restored and, cleansed by the Mysteries, rise above
his own nature, attaining what is above nature, transcending human nature
through union with Christ. As a result of this, the human being transcends even
his own person, his restoration in Christ touching on all mankind. Gaining the
gifts of the Spirit, he sees all things clearly, not only for himself, as St.
Gregory writes, but revealing what he sees to others, and thus helping them to
gain their salvation through the vision of God.6 In
this sense, Christ is not only our personal Lord and Savior, but He is also the
Universal Person, Who renews us each individually and, so made manifest in us,
reveals to us a far greater dimension of personal salvation than we can imagine.
Endnotes
1. I have rendered the French words properly here, and not with their English
cognates, as translators far too often do, much to the detriment of their
translated texts. This is an especially important issue with the works of Father
Florovsky, who developed a very specific vocabulary, and especially in English
(the language, incidentally, in which he preferred to write theology, on account
of its richness), where he was able to use Greek and Latin freely and to define
and employ words in a specifically Orthodox manner.
2. See his book, Metaxy dyo aionon (Between Two Centuries) (Lebadeia,
Greece: Hiera Mone Genethliou tes Theotokou, 2000). This book contains, in
addition to some superb essays on the theology of St. Gregory Palamas, a number
of excellent essays on pastoral issues (some of which have appeared in other
publications), as well as a series of essays on the contrasting political,
social, and religious ideas and values that have formed the contemporary West
and the Orthodox East. Drawing largely on the historiographical
presuppositions of Father John Romanides and the idea that Roman Hellenism
(Romiosyne) sharply separates the cultural and spiritual experience of
the Orthodox East from that of the West, these latter essays entail, in some
way, a deviation from the clear thought and precision that mark so many of
Metropolitan Ierotheos works.
Romiosyne, the image of the Mediterranean hegemony which underlies the
creation of modern European civilization and its scions in the New World (which
are, however politically incorrect it may be to say so, European
societies), is for me a concept that calls the East and West to commonality, not
one which serves to alienate them, spawning unwise talk about two ways of life
that somehow impinge on the very access of the human soul to the restorative
qualities of Christian catholicism. A renewed view of the common heritage of the
Christian East and West should not lead us to emphasize, as Metropolitan
Ierotheos does in the essays in question, the separateness of the Eastern and
Western experience, but to seek those ways in which Western Christianity,
especially, may restore to the sometimes superficial shell of its Christian
confessions the essence of Christianity which has been preserved within
Orthodoxy. And in all humility, the Orthodox themselves, who are fiddling much
of their time away in the pursuit of ecumenical contacts that do more, in the
context of simplistic religious syncretism, to denigrate Orthodoxy than to
rehabilitate Western Christianity, have much to do to restore their own
understanding of the treasure of the Apostolic Church that they hold in their
hands. Romiosyne provides us with an opportunity to discover, East and
West together, a diamond that adorns the common crown of Christian civilization
and which the Orthodox East has simply held in trust.
In support of my view, Father Florovsky has called the idea of a separated
East and West an historical myth. Though political ecumenists have
misinterpreted, misused, and exploited his statement in this respect, he
emphasizes that the broken unity of Christianity cannot justify a notion of
self-sufficiency on the part of the Orthodox East. (See Father Georges essay
on this subject in his Collected Works [Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishers,
1985-], Vol. XIV, p. 210.) While the Church is not divided, Christendom has
certainly been divided by the falling-away of the West. This is undeniable. It
is incumbent upon us Orthodox, then, to call the lost sheep of the heterodox
confessions to Orthodoxy, a task at which political ecumenism, by compromising
the very self-identity of the Orthodox Church, has failed miserably and
lamentably and a task little served by overstatements of that which divides the
East and the West.
Certainly, Metropolitan Ierotheos agrees with, and has encouraged, the more
enlightened and informed kind of vision that I have described, here. But it is
this which makes all the more tragic some of the heavy wording in his essays on
the Western Enlightenment and the Orthodox East, which seem to reflect something
other than the universal, catholic experience of Romiosyne (which, after
all, brought about the very cultures that we now separate into East and West
with such unfounded facility).
3. The word synthetic is used here, of course, in its strict
theological sense. His Eminence makes a very important point, since a number of
contemporary theologians, and especially Russian theologians still under the
influence of the Western Scholastic tradition, have suggested that St. Gregory
Palamas theology represents a sudden deviation from traditional Orthodox
theology. This accusation is, of course, without substance, both on the basis of
an historical and theological analysis; but it is important, in response
to this contention, that we emphasize that the Hesychastic tradition is nothing
more than a synthesis (a collective integration), by Palamas, of what
were the extant spiritual teachings of his age. Moreover, he expresses the
timeless and ageless experience of the Eternal, as it is contained in the
theological corpus of the Orthodox Church.
By productive theology, His Eminence is referring, as he indicates, to
a theology which addresses the needs of any particular age. This creative
process does not involve a new set of theological principles, but the
expression of theological truths by the creative use of contemporary language,
expressing what is ancient in new and contemporary words.
4. See Metaxy dyo Aionon, op. cit., pp. 217-218. By the nomenclature
of heretics, His Eminence means the categories and terminology of
classical Greek philosophies, which the Fathers baptized and adopted in
their attempts to express the mysteries of the Christian Faith in the categories
of human thought (e.g., the philosophical principles and language of
Aristotelianism, Platonism, and so on).
5. Ibid., p. 219.
From Orthodox Tradition,
Vol. XVII, Nos. 2 & 3 (2000), pp. 28-34.
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