‘No confusion: no division,’ does not define the indefinable but indicates a healthy openness between unity and difference which Christ the Logos communicates in the desert. Wisdom neither asserts nor denies but leaves these two signs or indications, pointing the way to avoid the degeneration of union into confusion or the disintegration of communion into division. The ethos which the divine-human Logos inspires in Holy Orthodoxy is the sound basis of all ecclesial economy, neither an oppressive uniformity nor a disintegrative deformity. Because divine-human Logos thinks cosmically and acts personally, Patristic wisdom logic envisions indivisibly and discerns individually. (Individuality is not individualistic for desert wisdom). Elders in the desert, aware of the Logos of indivisibility, live by individuated economy, because they listen to the Logos, who thinks universally but acts personally.
The divine-human Logos is universal but is also personal and it is wisdom that communicates sound difference between indivisible sameness and individuated difference. Narcissists live as if there was no Logos, individualists as if Logos was merely their own opinion. Elders see with the eye of Logos, beholding the beauty of holiness, upholding the good and the just. In contrast, sinners separate good from evil, dividing the just from the unjust. Fear drives their primitive instincts for self-preservation, self-interested safety and self-centred control, whereas love inspires the hallowed heart and mature mind of elders and saints. The ethos of desert Hesychasm is sustained by the fulness of the stature of love, which frees fear to transcend fear so that fear rises as love into God-centred love of God and one another, where our brother or our sister is one spirit with oneself, one divine life, one awareness of hidden wisdom and one presence of unveiled glory.
The ethos of divine-human Logos is divine-human love, curing fear of self-love, purifying love of self-obsession, awakening wisdom to wed love’s glory in the midst. ‘No confusion: no division’ together indicate the direction toward love’s wholesome union, which does not degenerate into confusion or disintegrate into division. Wisdom does not define the ethos of love but infuses the desert community with wholesome difference and undivided communion. Prophetic aphorisms in the desert shatter the fixated dualisms of good and evil, sacred and profane, piety and impiety, dualisms which separate them from us, me from them. Wise elders adhere to the Logos, seeing as God sees, imparting words of uncreated grace that glorify saints, sustaining an ethos of love which liberates false fusion into indivisible communion. Neither shallow conformism nor narrow individualism do justice to the wisdom of love, gently flowering between paradise lost and a promised land. Logos as teleological end is the same yet subtly different from the Logos as archeological beginning, indicating a completeness in the end which embraces incompleteness in between. Discerning the end in the beginning, wisdom ends with completeness, making all things new, restoring incompleteness to completeness, as an ever renewing beginning again in every moment.