The practical steps you have taken in an effort to master yourself make good sense. It is inevitable, however, that the new resolve and determination with which you are attempting to deal with your sins—and which, let me emphasize, I unreservedly applaud and encourage—will create their own tensions. Hence the anxiety, self-absorption, and “negative emotions” you speak of.

Something of a spiritual balancing act is going to be necessary: you must continue to exert your will and to work very hard to counter tempting thoughts with the Name, never letting down your guard, but at the same time you need to remember that the ego cannot finally defeat the ego. A prideful desire for perfection and a passionate desire for pleasure are two sides of one coin, and the first is considerably more dangerous than the second, as we can see of course in Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees.

I am reminded of the following from Schuon:

“The great Gospel virtues—charity, humility, poverty, childlikeness—have their final end in the ‘Self’: they represent so many negations of that ontological tumescence which is the ego, negations that are not individualistic and thereby contradictory, but intellective, that is, taking their point of departure within the Self as such in conformity with the profound nature of things” (Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, p. 62).

Schuon inserts a footnote—and it is this I remembered—after the word “contradictory”:

“A guilt complex and a compulsion of humility are the commonest expressions of this contradiction. An attitude is false to the extent that it runs counter to truth; true humility, the kind that is most efficacious, is an impersonal ‘non-pride’, which remains independent of the alternative ‘humiliation-flattery’ and avoids all unhealthy preoccupation with the ‘I’. The fundamental virtues are centered in God, not in man.”

You mention the distinction in the writings of St Gregory Palamas—and other Fathers—between God’s essence, His person (hypostasis), and His energies, and you propose that the essence should be treated apophatically since it is imparticipable while the energies are cataphatic inasmuch as the deified man is enabled to share in them. I think I would sort things out somewhat differently.

In the technical terminology of the Christian East, essence is an answer to the question “what?” or “what kind?” Hypostasis is an answer to the question “who?” or, in the case of inanimate objects, “which one?” And energy is an answer to the question “how?” or “in what way?”—that is, in what way does the person or thing in question act? It seems to me that God should be regarded a priori as radically different from us in all three of these respects—essentially, hypostatically, and energetically—which is tantamount to saying that the apophatic perspective must be applied in response to each of these questions and thus on each of these levels.

God’s essence, unlike ours, is distinguished by what the late Latin scholastics called aseitas, which means that He is “from Himself” alone, though even this is misleading, for in fact His essence is supra-essential and thus “beyond-even-being” (hyperousia), hence subject to no category or condition, even that of aseity. As for His tri-hypostatic “who-ness” or personhood, it too is utterly unlike our own: not only is it three-fold, though without being numerically multiple; it also serves as its own predicate: “I am that I am.” When asked, “Who is there?”, we can also say “I am”, of course, but in our case the “I” is the subjective modality of a particular nature, namely the nature of man: “I am … a rational animal, etc.” Finally, God’s energies are uncreated, whereas ours are created; we can (and must) act by continuously replenishing ourselves from a source outside us, whereas He contains in Himself an infinite and inexhaustible fountain.

On the other hand—and here we come to the central Mystery of the Gospel—what God is by nature we are meant to become by grace. “God became man that man might become God” (Saint Athanasius); “man is a creature under orders to be God” (Saint Basil the Great). It is worth noting that the Biblical locus classicus for the Orthodox doctrine of deification—2 Peter 1:4—does not say that we are to become “partakers” of the divine “energies” only, but of the divine “nature” as such. Needless to say, the Apostle had no pressing philosophical or theological need to spit as many hairs as the Hierarchical Hagiorite, and it would therefore be a mistake to make too much of a single word. Even so, you will surely agree that the “nature” (physis) of this passage is a good bit closer to “essence” (ousia) than to “energy” (energeia).

This being so, we are justified a posteriori (that is, “after” the non-temporal fact of Christ’s salvific work) in thinking that we are like God in all three respects—essentially, hypostatically, and energetically—which is tantamount to saying that the cataphatic perspective can be applied in response to each of the questions above and thus on each of the corresponding levels. In the final analysis, the only thing that truly is is the divine essence; whatever is not it is not, and this means that inasmuch as we are, we must share in that essence. Similarly, on the relatively absolute level of person, the only one who can truly say “I am …” is the One who can rightly add “… that I am”; insofar as I can legitimately claim to be a “who”, I therefore have no choice but to speak and act as God’s I. As for the energies, obviously anything worthy of being given this label must finally be uncreated, which is why Saint Gregory can say that the deified man, though made from “what is not”, “becomes uncreated” (The Triads).

This analysis—freely admitting that not all the i’s have been dotted nor all the t’s crossed—amounts to an Orthodox Christian application of the following metaphysical observation of Schuon’s:

“There are only two relationships to consider, that of transcendence and that of immanence: according to the first, the reality of Substance annihilates that of the accident; according to the second, the qualities of the accident—starting with their reality—cannot but be those of Substance. Exoterically speaking, the first point of view is absurd since things exist; and the second is impious—it is pantheism—since things cannot be God; esoterism fully accounts for the fact that things exist and that they are not God, but it adds a dimension of depth to these two initial observations, which contradicts their superficial and as it were planimetric exclusivism. Whereas exoterism is enclosed in the world of accidence and readily derives glory from this when it seeks to demonstrate its sense of reality in opposition to what appear to it shadows, esoterism is aware of the transparency of things and of the underlying Substance, whose manifestations are Revelation, the Logos-Man, the doctrinal and sacramental Symbol, and—in the human microcosm—Intellection, the Heart-Intellect, the lived Symbol. Now to ‘manifest’ is to ‘be’; the Name and the Named are mysteriously identical. The saint is a manifestation of Substance in accidence and on the other hand a reintegration of the accident in Substance” (Esoterism as Principle and as Way).

I can see you’re getting in the swing of your upcoming studies already! Your diagnosis—and perhaps prognosis—concerning the “bright agnostics” I encounter in my honors seminars is for the most part right on target, and you’re right in thinking that “The Noble Lie” was designed in part to provoke and encourage this particular audience.

If I were to follow your lead and do some “over-generalizing” myself, I would estimate that only about 25 percent of the honors students I teach fully understanding what I’m telling them and what they’re reading in the books I assign. Of these only about 25 percent make the existential connection and realize that the ideas they’ve encountered could “irrevocably alter” (your phrase) the direction of their personal lives. And of these, finally, only about 25 percent actually decide to begin moving toward that alteration in a deliberate or systematic way. Not the best odds, I agree, but quantity isn’t the issue.

Part of the explanation, again as you correctly surmise, is the fact of youth and the prospect of “bright futures”. Most people your age, regardless of how bright they may be, have a difficult time putting time in perspective since they haven’t yet experienced enough of it. I imagine this observation sounds a bit patronizing—wait till you’re as old as I am, etc.—but I don’t mean it that way at all. I’m speaking simply from the point of view of what might be called “applied metaphysics”. With a few rare exceptions, people need to move along the line of time somewhat further than you have before they become seriously interested—practically, and not just theoretically—in transcending it.

I’m afraid I don’t know you well enough to be able to predict what you’ll do with what you learned from our “Yogis, Mystics, Monks, and Zen Masters” or how exceptional you may prove in the long run. As already noted, the odds are that you’ll seldom look back. And even if you do, the next few years are going to be tremendously difficult for you, with any number of obstacles thrown in the way of serious spiritual work. Given what other, former students have told me, medical school is essentially one, long, stressful night! This being so, trying to preserve even the smallest residue from what you learned this past semester is going to be a full time job.

So what do I recommend? One strategy might be to look for “vertical openings” within the context of the health profession itself, places where an “alchemical” approach to the body is possible (I have in mind the chapter by Titus Burckhardt). More importantly, however, you can make a daily, if not hourly, effort to watch yourself—to push back the continually encroaching illusions so as to keep an objective grip on what is really going on.

“Make an effort”, I say, and not necessarily succeed in so doing! As you’ll recall, there was a consistent emphasis in each of the traditions we studied—in Yoga, Hesychasm, Zen, and Sufism—on the importance of detachment, on not identifying with the passing thoughts and emotions, the ups and downs, of our days. But there was also in each a compassionate acknowledgment of the fact that victory in this domain is finally more gift than achievement, a gift for which we prepare ourselves best by remaining courageous and hopeful even in the midst of our repeated failures.

Do you remember our brief discussion of the Zen master Soko Morinaga? Remember the subtitle of his autobiography? An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity. Your next years will almost certainly provide you with repeated opportunites for learning this lesson. Make the most of them!

Yes indeed, reading and listening to lectures can take a person only so far. Do you know the Tibetan parable? A lame man and a blind man are both attempting to make their way to the holy city of Lhasa, which stands in this case for the Western Paradise of Chenrezig—that is, for “Heaven”. But of course the lame man can’t walk, and the blind man can’t see. Their solution consists in the lame man’s climbing atop the blind man’s shoulders and telling him where to go. The point of the parable is that doctrine (which is lame) and method (which is blind) must be combined. Only together do they permit one to make genuine progress in the spiritual life.

As to your second question—why with all my obvious interest in non-Christian religions, I nonetheless follow a Christian path—you have rightly intuited, or perhaps deduced from your reading of Schuon and other perennialist authors, that remaining within the tradition in which one was raised is far preferable to conversion to another religion. Changing religions, Schuon insisted, is more than a change of country; it is more like a change of planets, and barring necessity or an unimpeachable sign from God, having to learn to breathe so different an atmosphere is inadvisable.

Changing churches, on the other hand, is a very different matter. I myself am Eastern Orthodox, though I was raised as a Protestant. There are any number of reasons for this choice—ranging from the doctrinal to the liturgical—but by far the most important is the fact that Orthodoxy is alone among the Christian possibilities in offering its adherent the ancient treasures of a contemplative method, in the form of Hesychasm. Not that there aren’t Catholic and even Protestant mystics and sages, to say nothing of saints. That’s not in question. But which of them is able to tell the rest of us how to attain to his vision, let alone transformation? Where is there a step-by-step, practical guide to theosis outside the Christian East?

So yes again, I strongly recommend you investigate the Orthodox Church. I do not know where you live, nor what the possibilities are in your area. Needless to say, man being man, Orthodoxy is no more immune than any other religion to local variations, and indeed deformations, along what Schuon would have called “the human margin”. Perhaps I should add this as well, though it should go without saying: the Orthodox are by and large no more open to perennialism than are other traditional Christians. Nor should, or need, they be so long as they are seriously seeking to follow their own Way to God. The majority of men are so made that they cannot make concerted spiritual efforts unless they are first convinced that their Way is, if not alone true, then at least the best.

Do not waste your time being surprised by this, or trying to turn conversations with the priests you may meet into interfaith dialogues. As I have pointed out before in this forum, one goes to Church after all, not as an exercise in comparative religion, but in order to be nourished and in time transformed by the God-given sacramental Mysteries. Moreover—and note well, for this is extremely important—having recourse to those Mysteries, by virtue of an initiatic affiliation with the Church, is the sine qua non if you wish to engage in the methodical use of an Invocation like the Jesus Prayer. You can certainly say this Prayer from time to time for brief periods and in a more or less devotional way. But if you wish it to be the centerpiece of a full-fledged method, you need to have the guidance of a wise elder (the Greek geron and Russian starets), and such guidance presupposes membership in the Church.

Having taken note of your posts from the “Faith, Doubt, and God” course discussion board, I thought I might jot you two a joint reply, for your comments are related as two sides of one coin.

B. has teasingly, but at the same seriously, accused me of mounting an argumentum ad hominem. But in fact my remark in class was by no means intended to replace other, less rhetorical observations, which is precisely what ad hominems attempt to do. I certainly do believe (this was the cause of his allegation) that anyone who is well informed regarding the teachings and methods of the world’s orthodox religions and who is sufficiently supple—“sophisticated” may not have been the best term—can’t help but be a perennialist. But stating the belief and defending it are, I freely admit, not the same.

As for whether B. himself is therefore “ill-informed” or “unsupple”, the latter diagnosis seems to me the more apt in his case. Lest he suppose, however, that I’m accusing him of being unable to sit in full lotus (!), I should perhaps clarify that what I have in mind is a metaphysical, not physical, plasticity. Explaining this further would require much more than a brief comment in a forum like this, so allow me to cut to the chase by saying—and please understand: this too is just an observation and not (yet) an argument—that Meister Eckhart is almost certainly the most “supple” Christian I’ve ever read.

Which leads me to respond to T.’s post. Not surprisingly, she has expressed her concern that Eckhart’s teaching is “exaggerated”. I couldn’t disagree more. As I see it, what he said in our course reader about the difference between “God” and God (see Chapter 70 of my Not of This World) couldn’t be clearer or truer or more just. His teaching may indeed be a “shock” to some people, but that’s not his “agenda”. He’s simply stating What Is in as direct a way as is humanly possible. But he realizes—and this, of course, is what pulls many of his Christian readers up short—that in order to say What Is one must know What Is, and that in order to know What Is one must be What Knows.

I’m fully aware that this last formulation, of Schuonian origin, may itself produce its own sort of shock. B. is right in thinking that it would almost certainly be censured by authorities such as the Elder Sophrony or Bishop K.—though I can tell you in all honesty that the latter is himself rather more “supple” in private than he is in his ex officio discourse. Be that as it may, even taking the public words of His Grace at face value, all they show is that there is an important difference between being a mystic and being an esoterist, just as there is a difference between being an esoteric Christian and being a Christian esoterist.

I myself am an esoterist first and foremost. And this means that for me Christianity, like every religion, is a salvific upaya and not a one-for-one mapping of celestial facts. I don’t think I’m letting any cats out of the bag when I tell you this: from a certain point of view, my Advice to the Serious Seeker, which I believe you’ve both read, is about nothing else. In any case, esoterism thus understood is the standard by which I measure what counts as “suppleness” or “sophistication” (from sophia = “wisdom”). This being so, I trust it is clear that my above assessment of B. is in no way a “put-down”. Clearly the saints themselves are on a spectrum of varying degrees of esoterism, hence of “metaphysical plasticity”; someone like Maximos is significantly “suppler” in this respect than a Cyprian, which is no doubt why B. finds some of what the Confessor said about the modalities of Incarnation “too abstract” and insufficiently rooted in the particulars of the flesh and blood Jesus.

A final point. Though I am by my very nature an esoterist or metaphysician, I’ve never supposed that everybody else should be one too. Indeed I’ve always been diffident about pressing “my” position too firmly or insistently lest I end up confusing or distracting an interlocutor whose spirituality is more bhaktic in character. Better by far to keep one’s eyes on the finger and not look at the moon than to ignore both finger and moon while gazing off into empty space. Behind my alleged ad hominem there are indeed arguments, but advancing those arguments, to say nothing of winning one of them, is of very little importance. It’s loving God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength that counts. And as far as I can tell, you two do, for which of course: Deo gratias.

Do I have an opinion, you ask, as to whether the professoriate is truly skewed to the left, as David Horowitz and other conservative activists have charged?

I’m minded to quote William Kirkpatrick, “the Great Knock”, who—as you may recall—was the young C. S. Lewis’s tutor. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis records this master in elenchos as saying that he had no opinions on any subject whatsoever, but simply stated the facts and exhibited their implications.

I can’t say that I’ve never opined, but on this subject I’m prepared to emulate “Kirk” and just state the facts—the facts, at least, as I have come to know them within my own discipline of religious studies and, more broadly, among humanities professors and social scientists. With only the very rarest exception, I can tell you unequivocally that they’re liberals to a man, or (as they would doubtless prefer) to a “person”.

It may be an illusion of perspective—after all the tree we’re standing next to always looks bigger than the tree on the horizon—but I’m prepared to speculate, if not asseverate, that religionists are even further to the left than their fellow humanists. Take a look at this bit of satire. It would be even funnier if it didn’t ring so true!

As you seem to have discovered for yourself, the key to maintaining balance in the midst of our physical struggles is objectivity with respect to our emotional states. You speak of “managing my anger and sadness by willfully ignoring them until they pass”, and this suggests you’ve been able to “place” yourself as it were “above” yourself, at least for short periods of time. This is no mean accomplishment, and I cannot but admire your fortitude.

If I might suggest just a slight adjustment, however: Rather than ignoring your emotions, see whether you can simply watch them. Pushing, pushing them away, which is what “ignoring” seems to imply, might paradoxically make the anger, sadness, and other related psychological states seem stronger and more intractable than they really are; whereas by taking a kind of objective “interest” in the times of their arising, their relative degrees of strength, their connection to the course of your illness, and so forth, you may by God’s grace begin to overcome them. Of course, the feelings as such may well remain in you for some time—and we have no way of predicting how long a time this might be—but soon enough it will become apparent that they are not you, and this perception will in turn give rise to a freedom and growing sense of peace.

As for using petitionary prayers when we’re ill, we’re told on the one hand that whatever we ask “in Christ’s Name” will be granted us but on the other hand that every prayer should include the coda “Thy will be done”. In the final analysis, of course, these are two ways of saying the same thing, for someone who is truly “in” the Name cannot but will what God wills. Obviously you’re saying something very similar when you tell me: “I am confident God will take care of me no matter what, even if not in the way I prefer or would have chosen.”

Health is ambiguous. Sooner or later, everyone dies of something, and the deduction seems obvious: Our bodily states should never be regarded as more than means to a spiritual end. Prayers for physical well-being—be they for ourselves or for others—need to be offered, therefore, with the understanding that health is but a relative good. You may, and should, certainly pray that the sometimes “crippling pain” you’re experiencing not impede you in your efforts to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”. But to pray only that there be no pain at all may be asking too much.

I realize this is a “hard saying”, but it’s nonetheless true. We simply do not know what “schedule” God may have us on, nor to what extent our salvation could not be effected were it not for our present ordeals.

You ask whether the following, admittedly mysterious, passage “implies a doctrine of reincarnation”:

“And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John…. This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he…. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come” (Matt. 11:7-14).

It’s certainly common enough for theosophists and other “new age” interpreters to see some sort of equation here—John = Elias—and to account for it in terms of palingenesis. I would be most cautious, however, in adopting this all-too-horizontal interpretation, not least because the Baptist himself rejects it (John 1:21). And for good reason: if he and Elias are one and the same, how are we supposed to explain the appearance of Elias—qua Elias, not John—on Mount Tabor (Matt. 17:1-9) after John’s own gruesome death (Matt. 14:1-12)? Would we then be obliged to posit a case not of re- but of retro- incarnation?!

A much wiser approach to the subject is outlined by the perennialist author Leo Schaya, in an article whose title is itself the key: “The Eliatic Function”. I recommend the whole piece but would call your attention here to the following decisive passage:

“One aspect peculiar to the universal function of Elias resides in the fact that this function can be exercised by others than Elias…. Elias … means not only a prophet sent to Israel, but also a universal function which may be exercised by several people, both within Judaism and within other traditions, and whatever be the names given by these traditions to the unique celestial source of this descent of the “Spirit which bloweth where it listeth”. The possibility of his multiple personification is made evident in the Gospel, which identifies John the Baptist with him who “crieth in the wilderness and prepareth the way of the Lord” (Matt. 3:3; Luke 3: 4-6; John 1:23). He who is thus denoted first by Isaiah (40:3) is—according to Jewish tradition—the precursor of the Messiah, the immortal prophet Elias. John the Baptist refused to be confused with him; however, he affirmed that he was the one of whom Isaiah spoke, and by this apparent contradiction he made it quite evident that, without being Elias in person, he exercised in his own time and orbit the Eliatic function.”

Something tells me you’re not going to be satisfied with this explanation, however. It’s hard to hear the “tone” in an email, but I have the impression this is for you a more than academic question. On the contrary, you seem to be on something of a mission to find a Biblical basis, however tenuous, for a doctrine that you, as a Christian, are already predisposed to believe in. I won’t try to argue you out of this stance—predispositions seldom yield to argument anyway—though I would like to warn you against invoking perennialism as a justification for your mission. One can’t say it often enough, it seems: The unity of the great traditions is transcendent and “stratospheric”, not immanent or “atmospheric”, which means in this case that we must steer clear of all mixing and matching of eschatologies. Is there any truth to the doctrine of reincarnation? Of course. But it’s not a truth, or form of the Truth, that a Christian qua Christian needs, and attempts to graft it onto a Christian branch will not produce the fruit you suppose.

And even supposing they could, so what? Eschatology—like cosmology—is a derivative, second-order science. Its particulars are indications and pointers, not one-for-one mappings, and what they point us toward is a State in which considerations of post-mortem states are no longer of consequence. The following from Wolfgang Smith’s Christian Gnosis: From Saint Paul to Meister Eckhart may help you to grasp what I’m saying. I recommend meditating with particular care on what Smith calls “the standpoint Eckhart has made his own”:

“The question now obtrudes whether indeed every Christian is called to gnosis, or better said: whether salvation and supreme gnosis are, after all, one and the same. Might there not be ‘lesser’ stations in the Kingdom of God, in accordance with the words ‘in my Father’s house there are many mansions’? Or are we to think, perhaps, that the ‘way’ normally continues after death: that to attain its true end, the soul is generally obliged to pass through a series of post-mortem states culminating at last in the realization of gnosis (in keeping with the Vedantic notion of krama mukti or ‘gradual liberation’)? Is this, perhaps, the explicated sense of what the Church terms Purgatory?

It appears that these are matters Eckhart does not discuss, does not consider at all. They are questions, moreover, posed from a ‘creaturely’ point of view, which disappear from the standpoint Eckhart has made his own: where ‘all creatures are one pure nothing’, what is there to be said concerning ‘heavens’ and ‘hells’? One is reminded of a Vedantic text which speaks to this issue in what might be characterized as ‘initiatic’ terms, evidently designed to arouse the disciple from his ‘theological slumbers’: ‘There is neither dissolution nor genesis, none in bondage and none practicing [yogic] disciplines. There is no one seeking liberation and no one liberated. This is the final truth.’”

You’re right of course that there’s no Byzantine Empire. But as to whether it should, or shouldn’t, serve as a model for “a truly Christian society”—a pointer to the pattern “laid up in the heavens” (Republic, 592b)—that’s a larger issue. Surely Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire were in many important (I don’t say “all”) ways a much closer approximation to the Kingdom of God than the modern secular state. It wasn’t for nothing that Plato found democracy to be the second worst polis.

You’re also right when you say that “it’s impossible to find anything even close to the same justification for violence in the New Testament that one finds in the Koran”, though let’s be sure to add at once that “Muslims” who endeavor to rationalize terrorism on the basis of Koranic texts are able to do so only by taking those texts out of historical context and only by disregarding the all but unanimous consensus of the ‘ulamā’ concerning the principles of jihad and just war.

Be that as it may, I want to caution you to be very careful that you don’t end up comparing apples and oranges. Two points in particular come to mind:

1. If one is looking for scriptural justifications for violence, the Old Testament is surely at least as good a choice as the Holy Koran. To suppose that Allah is a “different” God, or a “false picture” of God—I’m referring here to your letter—is therefore to agree implicitly with the early heretic Marcion. It’s to say in effect that the God of the Old Testament is not really the Father of Jesus and hence that all New Testament allusions to the Old need expurgation. If I recall correctly, Marcion’s canon was limited to a highly edited Gospel of Luke and a few of Paul’s Epistles, likewise redacted with a view to eliminating even the most passing of references to the Bad God. This of course is not the Orthodox Christian position. On the contrary we see the Hebrew Bible as a preparatio evangelii, and we read it—when necessary—allegorically and anagogically, turning those Babylonian babies (Psalm 137:9) into demons, etc.

2. Here’s a more important point, though. You say that the New Testament is “significantly more pacific” than the Koran and that it thus lends itself far less readily to a  “culture of violence”. Fair enough. But here again it’s apples and oranges. The worm in the Christian apple isn’t a tendency toward excessive rigor or force; it’s a tendency toward excessive tolerance—a tolerance no longer understood as simply patient forbearance in the face of undoubted error or sin, but now misidentified with mere mushy-mindedness and a perverse refusal to admit that sin even exists. There are many factors at work here, of course, but clearly one important cause of this refusal is the fact that an increasing number of Christians are content to focus on the command to “judge not” (Matthew 7:1) while forgetting that “I came not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).

Sitting in my university office surrounded by many of the mushy-minded persuasion, I must confess there are days when I rather long for a return of the Byzantine army! And when the occasional brawl breaks out on the Holy Mountain and the monks at Esphigmenou start taking their semantra to the heads of the modernists, I can’t help but think that on some level they’re more “authentically Christian” than all the smiling ecumenists.

Needless to say, I’m not recommending violence, and I’m certainly not applauding the Muslim terrorists; they’ve clearly turned their scriptures to their own egos’ ends. My point is simply to remind you that it’s possible to misuse the Christian scriptures, too. What one gets as a consequence is that much-vaunted modern virtue called “being nice”, which practically speaking has become indistinguishable from the most cancerous forms of relativism. Corruptio optimi pessima. The Christian “equivalent” of the Wahhabist madrasahs or terrorist cells isn’t to be found in the basement of the isolated anti-abortionist bomber. It’s in the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and other liberal Protestant bodies. In Islam you get terrorists; in Christianity, Laodiceans, whom we are told God will “spew out of his mouth” (Revelation 3:16).

A closing question to ponder: Which would you say is the more lamentable? The thousands of bodies that have been killed by the terrorists, or the thousands—more likely millions—of souls that are being killed by the relativists?

Thanks for your interest in my upcoming USC Maymester course: “Mysteries of the Christian East”.

Yes, the majority of the seats are already filled, but there’s still room for a few additional registrants. As you will have noted on the Master Schedule, “special permission is required”, and there will be a small additional fee for the travel component of the course, so do get in touch with me soon (cutsinger@sc.edu) if you’d like to be included.

While our focus is the mystical spirituality of the Hesychast tradition, the class will also include a brief introduction to Eastern Christian theology, iconography, music, and liturgy, as well as a “crash course” in abecedarian Greek! We’ll be traveling during the second week (May 17-21) to St Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in the Sonora desert of southern Arizona, one of several monastic communities established by the Athonite elder Ephraim, a former abbot of Philotheou Monastery on the Holy Mountain.

I’ve thought for some time it would be good to create a teaching context that would allow me to draw upon the experiences gained during my pilgrimage to Athos in 2007. Given the Athonite avaton (ban) regarding women, and given the fact that university administrators would no doubt look askance on a course only men could take, a pilgrimage to Arizona seemed a good second best!

Do let me know if you need any further information, including a copy of the tentative syllabus.