I’ve been reading The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation by Saint Theophan the Recluse. If one is able to ignore the fact that the St Herman of Alaska edition is very poorly translated, there are a number of gems to be found.

Just this morning I was reading a “Rule for Struggling with the Passions”, in which Theophan notes the following: “[One’s] main passion draws all passions to itself, just as it binds them near itself, or gives them a point of support. Other passions may be revealed in no other way than by weakening and overcoming this main one.” Now that your susceptibility to the demon of lust has been weakened, it stands to reason—or unreason!—that other sins would begin standing out in starker relief.

Of these newly revealed problems, it seems to me that the “sloth” and “inertia” you mention are going to among those most difficult to deal with, at least at that level of generality. Better that you should focus your energies on specific manifestations of acedia, tackling them one at a time. And a good place to begin, I suggest, is with oversleeping. Staying in bed past the time you had resolved to get up sets a very bad tone for the whole day, strengthening rather than weakening your other negligent tendencies.

I’m unsure what strategies to recommend. I suppose enlisting your wife’s help, asking her to throw a glass of water on your face at the appointed hour, is out of the question! But seriously, are there not other similar goads that could be of service—say, positioning a rather loud and obnoxious alarm clock at some distance from your bed, so that you’re obliged to get clear up and shuffle across the room to shut it off? As with every spiritual problem, the solution often begins with something quite mundane.  It’s no exaggeration to say that logistics are half of the Path.

How, you ask, are we to go about seeing God in all things? My answer would be by “looking along” them. As you know, this is my recurrent formula—borrowed, of course, from C. S. Lewis (“Meditation in a Toolshed” in God in the Dock)—for what the Christian mystical tradition, beginning with Dionysios the Areopagite, refers to as photisis or illuminatio, the second of the classic stages of our movement toward God.

First comes catharsis or purgatio, then photisis or illuminatio, and finally theosis or unio. In the second stage of the Way—that of enlightenment or illumination—one is able to discern God within things and things within God, for the “things” in question have become as it were transparent or diaphanous; they no longer monopolize our attention, blocking our perception of God, but rather transmit or prolong that attention, inviting us to pass through them and into their Maker.

As far as Orthodoxy is concerned, the second stage (and a fortiori the third) more or less takes care of itself—if, though only if, we have taken stage one seriously and submitted ourselves to a disciplined ascesis. In other words, “looking along” is not so much something a person works at as it is the fruit of a prior work on himself, a work in which he endeavors—through prayer, fasting, vigils, prostrations, etc.—to overcome his passions and attachments. For as long as we’re attached to a thing, seeing it merely as an occasion for (or obstruction to) our own personal satisfaction, we’ll never be able to see through it or “look along” it.

The “symbolical meditations” you speak of can certainly be useful auxiliaries. I’ve been reading a book called Beauty for Truth’s Sake. The author, Stratford Caldecott, does a good job of showing how a rigorous and systematic study of the liberal arts—especially the quadrivium—assisted medieval Christians in expanding or opening their vision to the presence of God in the world around them. But such study is insufficient in itself. Pondering the cosmogonical implications of the Pythagorean Tetractys or the Golden Rectangle and the theological resonances of the Music of the Spheres will do a man little good if he is not also making a daily, indeed hourly, effort to do battle with “thoughts”, subdue his appetites, and mortify his ego.

In attempting to answer your question about dogmas, I would begin by pointing out the obvious: namely, that every religious system, whether of the East or the West, is—as Schuon said—“an error compared to the Truth”. The religions are finally no more than upāyas, that is, “skillful means” or “saving mirages”, the soteriological point of which is to serve as pointers or portals leading us in the direction of the ineffable Principle. We are therefore best advised to look “along” these systems rather than “at” them. In a Christian context, one thinks of the resurrected Christ’s words to Thomas and Mary Magdalene in John 20: Thomas is invited to touch Him, a touch that leads to the most exalted profession of faith in the New Testament, “My Lord and my God”, while Mary is admonished, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to my God and your God.”

The two Christian dogmas you mention (Incarnation and Trinity) point toward the paradoxical fact, embedded in these back-to-back exchanges, that Jesus both-is-and-isn’t God and, indeed, that God both-is-and-isn’t God. As I emphasize when teaching my university theology class, in rejecting various Christological heresies, the early Church was following a largely apophatic trajectory, insisting less on what ought to be believed and more on what ought not to be believed: one must not believe that Christ was only human (“adoptionism”), or only divine (“monophysitism”), or neither human nor divine (“Arianism”), or a composite of the human and divine (“Nestorianism”). Needless to say, the dogma of the Trinity comprises a similar koan, one which helpfully frustrates our tendency to think of God as Some Thing.

You ask, “What kind of belief is necessary for the spiritual Way?” Given the foregoing observations, I would answer by saying: a belief that allows one to “ride the crest” of these paradoxes. We aren’t really Christians if we don’t take what the Church teaches seriously; like Thomas, we’re obliged to confess, “My Lord and my God”. But at the same time we need not, and ought not, to become fixated on the formulations as such; like Mary, we must avoid all “clinging” so as to keep our minds and hearts open to That which transcends every form. “God is supra-non-knowable,” said St Maximos the Confessor—who, let us immediately add, was tortured and maimed for his uncompromising insistence on the Christological dogma of dyotheletism—“and He can therefore be known only by an act of supra-non-knowing.”

Perhaps I should append one other note. When you speak of an “assent of the will”, it sounds as though you have in mind a sort of “willing suspension of disbelief”—in other words, a purely volitional capitulation to a claim one would otherwise have every reason for doubting! I think of Tertullian’s fideist slogan: Certum est quia impossibile est. It seems to me, however, that both of the dogmas in question make eminent metaphysical sense, notwithstanding their koanic character. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine verbal formulations that could come any closer than these to expressing The Inexpressible. I’m tempted to go even further: it seems to me that what you call the “exoteric side of Christianity” actually does a better job of “mapping” the multi-dimensionality of the advaitic Self onto the plane of words than either of the other two religions you cite, Islam and Buddhism. This of course is why Schuon could speak of Christianity as an “eso-exoterism”, and why he said that “Christianity is not a priori a religion but a mystical brotherhood become a religion”.

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.