Amidists, you say, are necessarily proponents of a “situation ethics” since the absolutist’s presumption of knowing exactly how to act or what to do in every circumstance betokens a lopsided reliance on himself and “his own purported knowledge” to the exclusion of “faith” in the Power of the Other.

But surely a “situationist”, basing himself as he must on a horizontal consideration of empirical circumstances and a best-guess approach as to the expected consequences of a given action, places at least as much emphasis on “self-power”. I agree, if I’ve understood you correctly, that a “formulaic” absolutism, which presumes to have all the answers in advance of all questions, is at odds with the humility and openness of true faith in Heaven. But there’s also what might be called an “operative” absolutism, where our moment-to-moment choices and actions are based, not on our own frail calculations, but on a vertical apprehension of metaphysical principles. In this case there is—or should be—no doubt as to what should be done in any given situation, not because one already knew what to do before the situation arose but because, in the very midst of its arising, a deliberate emptiness is filled with the Real.

It’s because they are operative absolutists that the actions of saints, let alone those of avataric personages, can easily run counter to the prescriptive morality of a given orthodox system. One thinks of Al-Khidr and Moses in the Koran (Sūrah 18:65-82) and of the teaching of the Tao Teh Ching: “When the Great Tao was abandoned, there appeared humanity and justice” (Chapter 18).

I generally don’t comment on the comments that appear on this weblog, but the opinion recently expressed in connection with “A Balancing Act” by someone calling himself “Faust”—I’ll resist speculating as to the implications, intended or not, of that name—calls for some response.

“Faust”, who says he is a perennialist, claims that “traditional condemnations of homosexuality may well fall into the category of the ‘human margin’”. But surely this is an abuse of perennialist, or at least Schuonian, terminology.  After all it is Schuon himself who gave us this phrase—in a chapter by that name in his book Form and Substance in the Religions (also printed in In the Face of the Absolute). A quick glance at this chapter should be enough to make clear my concern.

“The divine influence,” Schuon writes, “is total only for Scripture … and it allows for a ‘human margin’ where it exerts itself only in an indirect fashion” (Form and Substance [World Wisdom, 2002], p. 201). But of course it is Scripture precisely which forbids the practice of sodomy: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (Lev. 20:13); “Men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet” (Rom. 1:27). Other such Biblical texts could obviously be cited.

A critic might quibble, I suppose, that the second passage—coming as it does from one of Saint Paul’s Epistles—is a matter of smriti, not shruti, and that while “divinely inspired”, it is so only “to the second degree” (p. 224). Schuon, however, would be quick to counter such a move in this case, for as he rightly points out the Apostle is very careful to distinguish between the counsel he offers when “not under the influence of the Paraclete” (p. 225) and the commands he gives in the Name of the Lord. In the text from Romans, there is no indication whatsoever that Saint Paul is speaking in his own voice alone; and as for the passage from Leviticus, Schuon leaves no room for doubt: “The Mosaic Law has been given for all of time, right until the end of the world; nothing can be added to it, nothing taken away. This is the thesis of Judaism, and it is irrefutable” (p. 227).

“Faust” worries about “siding with the conservative Christian right”. But as far as I can tell there is nothing especially “right-wing” about Christians and Jews—or Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists for that matter—who insist upon remaining faithful to these and other such Scriptural precepts, unless one wishes to argue that all traditionalists are ipso facto “right-wing”, which “Faust” seems at some pains to insist is not the case.

Any number of posts on this weblog have been connected in one way or another with the dilemma you describe. As I’ve said before—though perhaps not quite in these terms—there’s simply no verbal formula that will provide a final resolution to the “problem” of faith vs. works. It’s rather a question of solvitur ambulando (the title in fact of a previous post).

About all I can do is repeat what I counseled in my last message to you: believe everything depends on God, like a good Calvinist, but act as though everything depends on you, like a good Pelagian; and rejoice in the meantime in the resulting paradox or koan as you anticipate its existential, or rather essential, resolution at that level of Reality where all questions are answered before being posed, a level fully accessible even now through our contemplative repose in the Name.

I really can’t say more, and probably shouldn’t even if I could!

After receiving your earlier message, my first thought was to recommend that you persist within the Islamic form, practicing it from the perspective of the religio perennis and exercising as much love as you wish for Christ and Christianity. Several of my closest Sufi friends, though fully Muslim in every respect, nonetheless have the highest regard for Christianity, and this includes a deep love for Christ and a respect for all the Christian saints. They are in this respect like Ibn Arabi, whose “heart had opened unto every form; it is … a cloister for Christian monks … and the Kaaba of the pilgrim”. Indeed every true esoterist would say the same, in principle if not in fact, given the metaphysical transparency of all orthodox forms.

But now I see from your most recent communication that in fact you’ve not been practicing Islam for some time—nor are you following any traditional Path. Though your family is Muslim, you “fell away”, you say, and “left the religion completely” some time ago. It’s not clear to me exactly how long this has been, but I take it that the rapid religious “oscillations” you describe have occurred within a period of just two or three years. This being so, my main concern is that you not compound the problem by acting once again in a precipitous or impetuous way.

“Haste is of the devil,” and the best advice I can give you is not to do anything right away—except of course to pray. Until you’ve weighed the alternatives and made a carefully considered decision, it would obviously be inappropriate to recite the canonical prayers of either Islam or Christianity, but you can—and clearly should—engage in personal prayer, opening your heart to God as fully and candidly as possible, requesting His guidance as you gather strength for renewed spiritual effort.

You need of course have no “fears” either way, either as a Muslim or as a Christian. The only thing you should fear is a further lack of spiritual seriousness. Perennialists say, of course, that there is more than one saving Path back to God, but they’re equally adamant that a man must follow only one of those Paths. Metaphysically, we’re universalists, but practically—or operatively—we must be “exclusivists”. Jumping back and forth between religions is not merely inefficacious; it is dangerous.

You’re very right to observe that the Jewish and Christian traditions proscribe homosexual acts, as do the other major religions, including Islam, Hinduism (at least for the “twice-born”), Buddhism, and Taoism. It’s important of course to specify “acts”—that is, sodomy in one form or another—since the orientation or tendency per se is morally neutral, though nonetheless one sign (among many) of the Fall. It’s also important to remember that from a traditional Christian point of view these acts as such are no worse in principle than fornication or adultery between heterosexuals.

And let’s not forget Christ’s words on the subject of sexual sin in general, namely, that a lustful thought is essentially—inwardly—the same thing as an adulterous act (Matt. 5:28). Given this precision, it’s surely worth asking how many people are truly guiltless in this domain. Who has not sought, and perhaps been consumed by, a few fleeting seconds of pleasurable sensation while forgetting the God-given beauty, sanctity, and sacramentality of the sexual act? How many otherwise virtuous spouses engage in intercourse in a true spirit of reverence—reverence for the God who made sex and reverence for the “image of God” who lies beside them—and without treating their husband or wife merely as a physical apparatus and occasional means?

It doesn’t follow, however—as you come close to suggesting—that the traditionalist, whether Christian or otherwise, is therefore best advised to “stop throwing stones” since his own house is “made of glass”. As long as we’re prepared to admit that we’re sinners ourselves, there’s nothing amiss in calling a sin a sin. “Do as I say, not as I do” is the refrain of everyone but the saint. No doubt it would be much easier, given the loud and often belligerent advocacy of homosexual conduct in our culture today, just to keep our mouths shut! Not to do so, especially in the academic environment that you and I share, is certainly an invitation to be labeled a “homophobe”. If and when you are, my suggestion is that you should calmly but forcefully explain (as I’ve had occasion to do) that you’re not afraid of but for all people who parade their vices—sexual or otherwise—as if they were virtues.

In any case we mustn’t end up “loving the sin” because of our rightful, indeed obligatory, efforts to “love the sinner”. I’m thinking, of course, of Saint Augustine, who tells us that we shouldn’t hate the sinner on account of his sin (as defenders of traditional precepts have too often done), nor should we love the sin on account of the sinner (as the political correctness of our times demands). On the contrary, we should love the sinner and hate the sin. As in so many areas of the spiritual life, the correct approach is a balancing act.

Thank you for your comment on the newly posted lecture “Disagreeing to Agree”, my contribution to the recent Common Word symposium at the University of South Carolina (currently first in the queue here).

With your usual nose for controversy, you’ve pointed—very rightly and not at all surprisingly—to what I expected, and fully intended, my (Christian) audience to find the most challenging claim of all: namely, that “the deified man attains a station that in some mysterious sense is beyond even that of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity”. (For readers of Anamnēsis who have not yet consulted this paper, I should add that this observation comes in a footnote (36) at the tail end of the paper (p. 27) and should be pondered in context before I’m thrown to the Inquisitors!) The whole point of my conclusion was to push through the dogmatic limits of exoteric theology, having given them their full due, in order to underscore the “dimensional” difference between theology and metaphysics.

I agree with you that an Orthodox theologian qua theologian would never have said this. But I disagree that no Christian sage or saint has ever done so. Eckhart, naturally, comes to mind. If you look back at the dialectic I flagged (on pp. 10-11) between Thomas’s words to Jesus (“My Lord and my God”) and Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene (“Do not cling to me … for I must ascend to my God and your God”), it should be clear that I’m proposing no more than did the Meister in praying God to be quit of “God” or in saying “God insofar as He is only ‘God’ is not the highest goal of creation” (see my Not of This World, p. 251).

But in this particular talk, I didn’t wish to rely on the teaching of someone who, rightly or wrongly, was (nearly) condemned by the Church, so I chose instead to challenge my fellow Christians with the words of a canonized saint—indeed one of the most important and honored saints in the East, Gregory Palamas. Granted, Gregory didn’t draw the conclusion I did, or not at least as far as we know, but he did supply the premise—and a perfectly extraordinary premise it was—by explicitly telling his readers that the deified man is “not merely uncreated”, nor even just “unoriginate”, but also “principial” (anarchos). However you slice it, this was an astounding claim, especially given the language of the Nicene Creed, wherein one is told, just as explicitly, that while Christ is not created, He does have an Origin or Principle (archē) inasmuch as He is “begotten by the Father”. A slip of the tongue by the saint? Rhetorical or poetic license? An unguarded moment? A deliberate clue for future seekers? It could be any of those things; but whatever the intentionality, or lack thereof, the text of The Triads definitely says what it says.

To put the point as baldly as I did may well have “blinded” my audience, but only for a moment I trust. When their eyes have adjusted, some will doubtless turn away, supposing this claim must have been prompted by the Evil One! Others, God willing, will be intrigued enough to look further, deeper; like you they will realize—given the rest of the lecture—that I intend no disrespect or dishonor toward Christ, quod absit. But they may also come away seeing that they’ve not yet given as much attention as they should to the fact that while Christ was certainly “Truth” and “Life”, He was also (by His own admission) “Way”. But Way to what End?

Thanks—to several inquirers and correspondents—for your patience. End of term academic responsibilities and numerous other commitments over the last few weeks resulted in a much longer delay than I had expected in revising and posting the lecture I delivered in March at the University of South Carolina Common Word conference.

The lecture, “Disagreeing to Agree”, can now be found on my website by clicking on “Scholarship” and then on “Articles and Papers”; it’s currently first in the list on this page. Or you can download it directly here. The lecture is to be published with the other conference proceedings, and streaming video and audio should be available by mid-summer on the USC Common Word website.

During the course of your daily sessions of prayer, you say, the Name of Allāh has occasionally “interposed” itself while you were repeating the Jesus Prayer, and you want to know what I think.

It goes without saying, of course, that there’s nothing “un-Christian” about invoking this Name. As you doubtless know, Allāh simply means “God”, and this is how Melkites and other Arabic-speaking Christians would normally address the Deity. On the other hand, as a matter of spiritual method, it’s obviously inadvisable to mix divine Names when engaging in Prayer of the Heart, the aim—or at least one aim—of which is a deepened concentration leading to hesychia or imperturbable stillness. There is also this methodical point to be noted: to say—as you did in your letter—that this interposition “just happens for no apparent reason” suggests a lapse of attention on your part; otherwise you wouldn’t find yourself doing something you hadn’t intended.

Do I think you’re “in danger”? No, but I do strongly advise you against giving place to this Name during your formal sessions of prayer. You speak of having sometimes deliberately stopped the Jesus Prayer in order to invoke Allāh “several times” before returning to the Name of Christ. This is unwise. My counsel, on the contrary, is that as soon as you’ve noticed this phenomenon, you should immediately turn your attention back to the words of the Jesus Prayer, gently but also firmly and insistently. Of course, as I’ve already noted, there’s clearly nothing wrong with a Christian calling upon the Name of God as such—or rather the Name “God” as such, be it Deus, Theos, or Allāh—rather than an avataric Name. If you feel a strong desire to invoke Allāh, you should certainly feel free to do so outside the formal invocatory sessions.

As for attending the Buddhist “gathering” you mention, it’s certainly possible—indeed highly desirable—to learn from the other traditions, but I would very strongly caution you not to join in any of the actual practices this retreat may entail; anything that might in any way compete for “psychic space” with your rule of prayer should be assiduously avoided. Listening to the lectures is fine, and so is “just sitting” or breathing, or even endeavoring to watch the inward movements of your mind. But if you’re invited to engage in a visualization of a Buddhist mandala or dakini, or to invoke a Buddhist mantram, you should obviously not do so. This should go without saying, but sometimes restating the self-evident is important.

A final word of warning. Each of the questions you’ve posed suggests you’re bored, or discontented in some way, with the very simplicity of the Christic invocation. It’s true, of course, that there’s something “monotonous” about the Hesychast path, but holy monotony is precisely one of its strengths! For its part the ego wants some novelty to escape to or some complexity to hide in, whether it’s making use of an alternative mantram or investigating the teachings of another religion. The efficacy of our method consists in the fact that we systematically avoid fulfilling this egoic desire, turning our attention repeatedly back to the “one thing needful”. Nothing else matters; in fact nothing else even exists.

A comment appeared a few days ago here on Anamnēsis. Written by someone operating under the alias “Thurbolt Smagg”—my first thought, I confess, was that one of the diabolical legion in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters had begun reading this weblog—it was tagged to a post of mine from last November entitled “Too Much Perennialism”.

Mr (or could it be Ms?) Smagg opines that perennialists should get over their “us vs. them” mentality and realize that the problems they face in academia are the same as those facing all religious studies professors, and in fact everyone in the humanities: namely, how to justify a discipline that fails to “offer scientific discoveries” or “innovations in health care” in an era when “the value of higher education” is increasingly linked to its “career possibilities”. He (or she) advises perennialists to take the temperature of the times and exploit the culture’s “passionate interest in matters of value and ethics”, the university’s “preoccupation with diversity”, and the “emergence of (or return to) the notion of interdisciplinary study”, the goal in each case being “to find a basis for cultural critique that does not simply fall on deaf ears”. In short “we must mine current trends in education for traces of the perennial wisdom, and build upon those traces”.

What this means, however, is that perennialists need to extract their heads from the sand and resist what Smagg perceives as their tendency to eschew other disciplines. “If we have quarantined ourselves from interdisciplinary discourse, it should come as no surprise that our viewpoint is considered irrelevant”. My correspondent concludes: “If perennialism can indeed claim for itself a future, it will not be because a professor—such as Dr Cutsinger—finally succeeds in explaining perennialism to his department chairman. It will be because a fully engaged scholar—such as Dr Cutsinger—sees the deep game and understands the territory in which the battle for the future is fought.”

Justifying the discipline. Exploiting public interest. Mining current trends. Battling for the future. It’s difficult to know quite what to say in response, especially since Thurbolt—if I may presume such familiarity—seems to have nothing but my best interests at heart, or at least the best interests of those academic perennialists among my readers who aspire to be deans or grants officers, or who perhaps are simply praying for tenure. Since I have tenure and don’t want to be a dean, I suppose I’m in a rather different category, and maybe it’s for that reason that the first thing to come into my mind was a passage from Gai Eaton’s wonderful book The King of the Castle:

To bring religion to the people is a fine and necessary undertaking, but this is not a situation in which the proposed end can be said to justify the means. The further people have drifted from the truth, the greater is the temptation to water down the truth, glossing over its less palatable aspects and, in short, allowing a policy of compromise to become one of adulteration. In this way it is hoped that the common man [here we might substitute: the typical funding agency or tenure and promotion committee] will be encouraged to find a small corner in his busy life for religion without having to change his ways or to grapple with disturbing thoughts.

It is a forlorn hope. Standing, as it were, at the pavement’s edge with his tray of goods, the priest [Smagg’s perennialist?] reduces the price until he is offering his wares for nothing…. And still the passers-by go their way, sorry over having to ignore such a nice man but with more important matters demanding their attention…. Had they been offered a real alternative, a rock firm-planted from the beginning of time, they might have been prepared to pay a high price. It is even possible, had the priest [or perennialist] turned his back upon them, attending only to the divine sun which seizes and holds his gaze, they might have come up quietly behind him, knelt down—looking where he looks—and forgotten all their care and all their troubles (London: The Bodley Head, 1977, pp. 17-18).

I’m under no illusions, or not at least on this count! I’m fairly sure that anyone likely to become my chairman will never really understand what I’m up to, and I’ve no doubt at all that carving out a space in academia for a fully funded Center of Perennialist Studies is—well, just the sort of absurd fantasy one of Screwtape’s minions might be expected to try and tempt me with! But that’s not why I’m in this job, never has been and never will be. I’m in it for the students, and I’m delighted to say that once again this semester I’ve been blessed with a few who seem drawn to the Sun.

I’m not surprised you had “some reservations” regarding my comments at the Common Word conference last week. You will understand, of course, that in the concluding section of the paper I was deliberately pushing past the dogmatic limits of the Christian tradition in order to underscore the difference between what I called a “planimetric” theology and a “three-dimensional” and “spherical” metaphysics. I think when you actually read the paper, rather than simply relying on a single hearing, my aims will be clearer, though perhaps no more acceptable to exoterists! I hope to have the talk, “Disagreeing to Agree”, posted with my other articles and papers on cutsinger.net within the next two or three weeks.

To answer your specific question, however, we needn’t turn to metaphysics per se, for in this case my remarks were quite within the mainstream of traditional Christian theology. The line you’ve singled out for criticism, far from being (as you mistakenly suppose) my own formulation, was a direct quotation from the “Athanasian Creed”, or Quicunque Vult. I realize, of course, that the eastern Church has never been as amenable as the West to this statement of faith, in part because it fails to honor the primacy of God the Father within the Trinity. Nevertheless, I don’t think any Orthodox Christian would, or should, dispute the way in which this Creed expresses the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ.

If you are unfamiliar with it, the Creed can be found here.

As you can see, I was quoting line 35, which explains that the unity of God and man in the Person of Christ came about “not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking [or assumption] of the manhood into God”. And of course, as I said in my talk, the reason for putting things this way is to safeguard the impassibility of the Divine. Keep in mind that the Bible speaks, for the most part, not sub specie aeternitatis, but within a temporal frame of reference, treating God as if He were an actor in a cosmic drama. For this reason the Incarnation is described, as in Philippians 2:5-12 and the other passages you cite, as if it involved an alteration in God. And yet, as your Catholic Saint Thomas Aquinas and a host of other theologians would insist, He who is actus purus, “pure act”, never begins and never stops doing whatever He does, for His Being is an Eternal Doing, if one may put it this way.

Occasionally, the Scriptures themselves include certain openings or pointers toward this trans-temporal dimension. With regard to the Incarnation, I’m thinking for example of John 3:13, where Christ informs the no doubt baffled Nicodemus that “no man has ascended into Heaven but He who descended from Heaven, even the Son of Man, who is in Heaven.” In other words, no one goes up except the One who came down, and even though this One seems to be speaking to you right now and right here on this earth, He’s actually still there! This is the Bible’s way of making one of the points I underscored in the lecture: God has always been man, and man God.

The “taking up” or “assumption” of humanity should not, however, be confused—as I fear you have—with the heresy of adoptionism, which was rejected by the Church, though not formally so, well before the eighth century synod and council you mention. The adoptionist—or “dynamic monarchianist”, to use the technical terminology—claims that Jesus was simply a man, who was empowered by God to work miracles and who, as a matter of honor, can be called God’s (adopted) son. By contrast, the passage quoted from the Athanasian Creed in no way disputes, but rather confirms, orthodox Christology, for in this case Christ’s hypostatic or consubstantial divinity is not in question. Indeed, it’s precisely because He does share fully in the Father’s divine nature that the “event” of the Incarnation must be understood as involving change, not in the eternal Son or Word Himself, but in the human nature that was “drawn” into participation in Him.

This is no more than Theology 101—remembering of course that there’s no such thing as a theology without at least some metaphysical basis. Having drawn a rather bold line between planimetry and sphericality, I’ll be the first to admit that, here as elsewhere, traditional Christian teaching depended for its formulation, and depends for its expression, upon the very metaphysics—largely Platonic and Plotinian—which the theologians have so often, and so carelessly, dismissed!