AD MAJOREM GLORIAM DEI. SOLI DEO GLORIA.
January 1st 2020
The Spirit’s witness to the union of the Father and the Son is nothing like an observation of something known by a separate knower, because when God knows God in God, divine tri-une knowing is utterly ineffable. When God sees God through God, there is recognition which opens into the remembrance of God, but no trace of division between knower and known and no confusion of persons in God’s knowledge of God. When division intrudes, however, confusion reigns, tearing Holy Trinity apart into sterile warring heresies. Division determines not only heresies but also every divisive fundamentalist parody of Orthodoxy, which means that separation excludes wholesome Orthodoxy, which it confuses with heresy. Orthodox ecumenism is heresy for some Orthodox fundamentalists because the uncreated light of the Holy Name is in practice, though perhaps not in theory, demonised. Exclusion is the narrow conclusion of every fundamentalism because exclusion was always the unconscious premise. Holy Trinity was never permitted to communicate how God knows God through God or to reveal how ineffable union is deifying communion in the mysteries of glory and the Name.
Wisdom knows otherwise because boundless awareness is always opening to dimensionless presence, as uncreated ‘I AM’ unveils ‘I AM’ in glory in the midst. But only metanoia turns minds right round at centre, releasing delusive division into unconfused communion. Only theoria sees God as God sees God, unveiling the deep roots of uncreated awareness and deifying presence in the Name. Fundamentalist literalism cannot help spawning reifications that reduce the Name to shallow nominalism. The mysteries are read down to narrow beliefs that treat shallow exteriors as if they were all that there is. Subjectivism declares war on presence because objectivism has reified awareness, leaving hosts of heresies that parody wisdom by misconstruing glory. If Holy Trinity had been permitted to turn the mind and allow wisdom to see with the eye of the heart, none of these fundamentalist confusions would arise. But worldly reification rides roughshod over wisdom, objectifying what in God is always present but gloriously ineffable. Reification reduces glory to proliferating parodies that replicate their cancerous spread without restraint. But the Name saves because it has never ceased to be God’s saving presence and healing awareness, releasing reification by dissolving confusion, conserving union by curing division. The Name is Holy Trinity unveiling ‘I AM’ through ‘I AM,’ in the wisdom and glory of ‘I AM.’ There is no separation between ‘I’ and ‘AM’ in the Name or between ‘I AM’ and ‘I AM’ in Holy Trinity. So there is nothing in God for separation to separate nor for reification to reduce to shallow parody.
Holy Orthodoxy has never been shallow confusion or narrow separation between the uncreated and the created, because confusion and separation are always being healed by Christ in the Spirit wherever wisdom ascribes glory to the Father. When self-obsessed confusion imposes self-interested division, heresy swings between warring extremes as extremism spawning extremism. But the Name unveils Holy Trinity as union of wisdom and glory, curing all confusions and divisions. This wisdom is the way of ‘I AM,’ releasing the truth of the Name as life of glory wherever we turn. There is nothing that can stand in God’s way because God liberates all that God knows and all that is known. Outside God, delusion appears to run riot but in God there is no outside, no hostile otherness, only difference between God the Father and God the Son, with the radiant image of this which the Spirit unveils in us. We do not know this if we live from reifying opinions not wisdom. We live as if God were not God, because confusion and separation define us. We live as if awareness were cut off from presence, although in God, ‘I’ and ‘AM’ are forever one. We suffer delusions of isolation and exclusion even though ‘I AM’ is one in God and God is one in us. There would be no end to these delusions if it were not that they were never actually real. Wisdom sees things as they are. Wisdom knows as God knows, knowing even as we are known by God, in the fulness of grace and truth.
God’s knowing of God is inaccessible to worldly opinion but has always been the living heart of Orthodox Christian Wisdom. If this were not so, shallow institutionalism would have stifled God-centred glorification of God long ago. Sometimes, the wisdom that restores glory to God appears powerless beside the reigning powers of money and public celebrity. Sometimes, the glory of the Cross looks like a humiliating defeat and glory appears to fall short of glory wherever we turn. But in God, God never falls short of God or glory from glory, verifying the revelation of glory through God’s Holy Name. Each new year dawns as communion clarifying confusion, union healing division in the hallowed Name. Delusion repeats delusion as before but wisdom inspires wisdom just as glory increases glory hour by hour, day by day, moment by moment. Awareness conjoins with presence in the Name as wisdom weds glory, a dance of mutual co-inherence that reveals Holy Trinity everywhere. A secular age overlooks these mysteries of glory but it does not follow that their radiance is not renewing us wherever we turn. A few do turn and see, knowing God as God knows us, re-connecting the short circuits of the fall. The Name then completes what God has always known, God’s knowing of God in God, which wisdom and glory know.