Conventional religiosity prefers contention without contrition, whereas Saint Silouan the Hesychast taught contrition without contention, preferring the immeasurable measures of love. Contention finds fault with those out there, whilst contrition knows the fault lies nearer home, but does not collapse into the narcissism of self-obsessed self-hatred, for here at home, love dwells where God dwells. Love leaps over the hyper-sensitivity of… Read more »
The Spirit proceeds from the Father to abide in the Son, drawing us into his ineffable abiding in the primordial union of the Son with the Father, restoring glory to the Father through the Son. Abiding in God’s ineffable openness, the uncreated oneness of God is spontaneously present as a womb of indescribable glory. Wisdom discerns the wondrous self-emptying of the… Read more »
The Hagioritic Tome (1340) of Saint Gregory Palamas bears witness to the experience of purification, illumination and glorification that inspires Hesychast saints, insisting that the light of purifying illumination and glorification is uncreated because God’s energies of light and glory are uncreated. The noetic awareness of the heart is transfigured with uncreated light and deifying glory, opening hearts to the… Read more »
Sudden presence is Christ’s timeless mystery, piercing through conditioned, temporal progression, uniting the uncreated and the created, time and the timeless, NOW, suddenly, timelessly, immediately. Christ is this timeless immediacy in the temple of the heart and in the eucharistic mystery of communion, as ecstatic suddenness, exaiphnes, which Saint Denys speaks of in his third epistle, describing it as unknowable and ineffable. Ecstatic suddenness… Read more »
The angel of the Name bears witness to the revelation of the Name in the heart, keeping safe the myatery of Name-hallowing until such time as the heart turns to see. Deification by grace includes this awakening to the witnessing heavenly twin, the angel of realisation, who is the prophet of our glorification. Orthodox Hesychasm fully acknowledges theosis to be… Read more »
In the primordial principle or LOGOS, there is ever-present awareness, primordial awareness of presence and primordial presence of awareness, which together turn out to be wisdom’s primordial unveiling of the timeless presence of glory. All phenomena arise from the uncreated presence of awareness, manifesting liminal presence unveiling glory at the heart of wisdom. Revelation of the origin uncovers the glory of the Father,… Read more »
The union of the mind and the heart in God empties the mind into God in the heart, a grace of union that unveils the ineffability of God’s self-emptying into us and our self-emptying into God. Wisdom and glory are ineffable both divinely and humanly, but ineffability is not nihilism, neither is self-emptying facile fusion, because ineffability is not confusion… Read more »
Christ’s Holy Cross overcomes death by dying; consequently, to live his resurrected life is to embrace death, conquering death. To cling to life is to die spiritually because the way spiritual death overcomes life is through infecting life with fear of death. Wisdom does not fear death, because wisdom is undying life, timeless life gloriously dying to life-clinging terror of death. Resurrection… Read more »
The timeless expansion of awareness in illumination arises together with the continuing temporal contraction of awareness in purification because whilst glory breaks in with illumination, temporal awareness reasserts itself, dividing future glory from past glory, reducing timeless presence to a fleeting present. Purification of the heart is already illumination in action, but temporal fluctuation subjects experience of uncreated light to unevenness, a coming… Read more »
The desert bears witness that wisdom is the fullness of sheer goodness, completeness poured out from grace to grace. The wisdom of Jerusalem is the glory of God’s Name whilst the wisdom of Athens is self-examination leading from self-forgetfulness through dialectical questioning to the fullness of self-knowledge. Culturally speaking, this is an integration of two wisdom traditions, the Abrahamic and the… Read more »