The glorified are hallowed by the Holy Name of God because in wisdom they glorify God’s Holy Name. The glorification that angels offer sustains creation by participating in the uncreated creative energies of wisdom and glory in the Name. The angelic music of glorification partakes in the ‘Amen’ that says ‘yes’ to the uncreated creativity of God, ‘yes’ to the one Name, the one wisdom, the one glory, the one awareness, one presence, one sound and one voice of ‘I AM.’ Glorification is subverted by vain glory, which is a refusal to glorify God. Satan and his demons invert the glorification of angels because they refuse to glorify God, silencing the glorification of heaven. Saints and angels invert this inversion when they embrace the wisdom of the Cross, which undoes satanic separation and demonic division. When the heavens partake anew in angel song, the morning star sings Hallelujah Yah, grounding the earth’s foundation on God’s uncreated awareness and creative presence, timelessly enshrined in the hallowing wisdom and glory of the Name. Children of God Most High are raised up by the renewing Name, hallowed by the grace of recognition and unceasing remembrance of God. Desert wisdom centres on this hallowing recognition which turns blind hearts into sanctuaries of unceasing prayer, blessed shrines of the remembrance of God.
Desert wisdom has been an unbroken witness to Christ’s Name which unites awareness and presence, wisdom and glory, in angels and saints. St Maximus used to say that saints had become angels when they bear witness together to the age to come, for when Christ unites heaven and earth in the hallowing Name, the Kingdom comes, its glory is revealed to wisdom in heaven and heard on earth. In his Mystagogy, Maximus reminds the desert that hallowing glorification deifies earth as well as heaven when the wisdom of the Cross restores glory to God, filling heaven and earth. Maximus revered St Denys and saw his Mystagogy as a confirmation of St Denys’ Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies. The desert agreed with Maximus that his un-named elder, whose wisdom inspired his Mystagogy, was in the desert tradition of Evagrius and Macarius, like Denys, for whom the heart was the sanctuary of the deifying Name. Christ unites the earthly heaven of angels with the heavenly earth of saints in the Holy of Holies of the illumined heart, a union that when lived and loved, glorifies both angels and saints. Wisdom’s angelic function is to mother the illumination of angels and saints, wedding glory in their midst, holding together what without her flies apart. There was always a remnant of seers in the desert who did not abandon wisdom, who retained wisdom’s vision of glorification.
Wisdom’s vision is angelic vision which desert seers never totally forgot, although they were always under enormous pressure to dumb down wisdom in the interests of the blind, including the blind who were determined to rule the blind. Glorification was for prophets and apostles, inspiring saints, they said, but not for the laity of Christendom, who were not seers but blind. But icons of Holy Wisdom were revered in Hesychast circles where Ezekiel’s vision of wisdom was still remembered, inspiring wisdom’s embrace of glory in Novgorod and elsewhere. Wisdom was remembered as an angelic High Priest anointing prophets, priests and kings among angels and saints, holding all things together, keeping glorification in tune. The angel of wisdom did not abandon her seers although they were obliged to lie low in caves and desert cells when ruling religious powers were imposing blind control. Wisdom clothed with the sun, crowned with twelve stars, was driven into the wilderness again and again by the great, red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. Christ, her child, was enthroned safely in heaven but she was concealed in the desert, awaiting awakened hearts (Rev 12). Desert seers bear witness to her hidden mysteries when her purification of hearts opens to mysteries of illumination and glorification in union with Christ resurrected, ascended and glorified, hallowing wisdom in seers and and glory in saints. Angels of glory rejoice in heaven when seers embrace wisdom in the Holy of Holies, bearing witness to the union of Cherubic wisdom and Seraphic glory in the Holiest of all Holies.