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.

Here are some answers (or attempted answers) to the four questions you pose. God knows best.

1. You ask how to “fit” your daily prayers into an already tightly packed schedule. One of the Catholic saints—Francis de Sales, perhaps—said that everybody should pray at least a half hour a day, except for people who are really busy, and they should pray an hour a day! This will seem to you unrealistic, I’m sure—until you begin to see more clearly where Reality lies. In the meantime, you can work toward this ideal incrementally. I would start by trying to set aside ten minutes of quiet, concentrated time for the Jesus Prayer the first thing in the morning, and then again in the evening between supper and bed.

2. The specific posture, or postures, you adopt are less important than physical stability. You want to do whatever allows your body to be at once relaxed and alert and thus whatever facilitates your being able to think about something other than aches and itches. The Yogis teach that one or another of the “cross-legged” sitting positions—such as padmasana and siddhasana—are the most conducive to unbroken concentration, whereas the Hesychasts make a practice of sitting on a short stool or bench, with their knees drawn up toward their chests. Simply standing is of course an option as well. Whatever the posture, you will need to make periodic adjustments—especially at first, as your body grows accustomed to the practice.

3. Calling it the Pax Profunda is a reasonably good way, and of course a thoroughly traditional way, of describing the operative or alchemical goal of any spiritual discipline—at least insofar as there is a “goal”. I add this perhaps surprising qualification because there’s a very important sense in which Prayer of the Heart has no “goal” other than itself. In Hesychast teaching, for example—and this is true mutatis mutandis for other forms of mantrayana—the Name of Jesus is sacramental in character, embodying (like the Eucharist) Christ Himself. In other words the Name is the Named, and for this reason the Prayer is an end in itself, or the End Itself. To invoke JESUS is already to be in His presence, hence in the Kingdom, whether you “feel” it to be so or not.

4. Discursive prayers, including words of praise and thanksgiving, are fundamentally cataphatic in character, whereas contemplative prayer is apophatic; the first corresponds to what we can say and think about God and is addressed to Him insofar as He is an interlocutor and agent, whereas the second corresponds to what we can’t say or think about God and is directed toward Him insofar as He simply is What is, at once higher than the Heavens and deeper than our own heart. These are by no means conflicting approaches, however. The Divine Essence and the Divine Person are not two Gods but one and the same Reality as seen from two different, but complementary, perspectives. In the words of Hermes Trismegistus, “It is not that the One became two but that these two are One.”

So you’re going to be leading a discussion of the great Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church for an adult Sunday school group at your church, and you write to ask whether I have any suggestions? NO! What else could the answer be to a question about apophatic theology?!

But in all seriousness, there’s no way to make the rarified truths of this classic book “user friendly” (your phrase), especially when the users are pious faithful whose relationship with their Lord is almost certainly founded upon images and comforting thoughts. Your audience will—or at least should—be suspicious from the get-go, given where I assume they’re coming from: a solid basis in Scripture.

What you might do, I suppose—speaking of Scripture—is to preface your discussion of Lossky by pointing out that the Name God gives Himself in the Bible—“I am what I am”—proves He is incomparable to anything else; as His own predicate, He conforms to no category: “If He is, we aren’t,” as certain Fathers were wont to insist; “and if we are, He isn’t.” Or again you might try opening your students’ hearts to the operative implications of Philippians 2:5-7. We’re to have the “mind” of Christ, says St Paul, who, “because”—not in spite of the fact that—He was in “the form of God” emptied Himself. One could spend a few decades pondering that single admonition.

In any case, there’s no way to make this dense and demanding text unconfusing without depriving it of its intended effect. The whole point is to be amazed—using that too-often-used word with its full etymological force—by what the Areopagite calls “the unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth”, which, he koanically declaims, “lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty”.

The “problem”, of course—I speak now with a serious playfulness!—is that once a person has drunk deeply at this apophatic well and started adopting Christ’s mushin no shin, it’s a slippery slope to becoming … a Christian perennialist! It’s surely no accident that Lossky’s dissertation was on Eckhart, however unfairly critical he may have been of the Master, and there’s a reason Metropolitan Anthony Bloom was able to stump him with a few pearls from the Hindu tradition. Do you know that story? It’s recounted in the 2005 biography, This Holy Man: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony.

It seems that as a young man the Metropolitan (then Andre) wrote out a list of eight quotations from the Upanishads and took them to Lossky with an apparently innocent inquiry: “Could you help me? I have some sayings from the Fathers here, and I can’t remember who said what. Can you identity them for me, please?” The biographer continues: “Lossky went through the list and without hesitation wrote beside each quotation the relevant name: St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, and so on. When the theologian had attributed them all, Andre dropped his bombshell, ‘It’s the Upanishads.’ From then on, he said, Lossky began to look much more sympathetically at other faiths and came to find in them truths he had never before been able to acknowledge” (p. 85).

The moral of this story is that you (and your priest!) mustn’t go blaming me if your Sunday school class decides the next book on their list should be The Transcendent Unity of Religions. 2 + 2 = 4.

In his book on the Shaykh Al-Alawi, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Martin Lings comments on one of the Shaykh’s aphorisms: “To demand increase showeth ignorance in a disciple.” According to Lings, this saying refers among other things to

the ignorance of supposing that things of the Spirit can be gauged like the things of this world, and that [a faqir] himself can judge whether or not he is receiving increase. A disciple of one of the Shaykh’s disciples [Lings is referring to himself in his own relation to Schuon] once complained to his Master: “I have regularly invoked the Supreme Name for more than ten years, but without any result.’ His Master replied: ‘If you could make in one moment all the spiritual progress you have gradually made in these ten years, it would cause a mortal rupture in your soul” (p. 209).

It is always a mistake to become distracted by the image in the rear-view mirror of our spiritual lives. Keep your eyes on the road.

You asked about current and upcoming courses.

Classes just started this week for me, and I’m offering two. First is an old standby I call “Faith, Doubt, and God”. Close to seventy brave souls have shown up to test my in-your-face promise to prove the existence of God. Or rather, since sheer cussedness has been known to take logic hostage, to show beyond all shadow of a doubt—quoting from the syllabus—that “the truly intelligent person, who is prepared to use his entire apparatus of knowing in the fullest possible way, will inevitably come to see that God exists”. Here’s a “flow chart” for how the course will proceed, and here’s a list of the readings from A Question of God, the course “Reader”.

The other course is a small honors seminar on “Yogis, Mystics, Monks, and Zen Masters”. As I explained to the students the first day, my aims are chiefly two: first, to provide some “data” for testing the perennialist thesis that there is a transcendent unanimity among the world’s religions, realized by the sages of those traditions in the “divine stratosphere” (Schuon) as distinct from the “human atmosphere”; and second, to challenge the prevailing academic consensus that religions are nothing more than beliefs, to be accepted by faith alone, whereas the empirical sciences are the exclusive purveyors of knowledge and certainty—an assumption widely shared, I noted, not only by skeptics but by religious people themselves. Here I quoted Coomaraswamy:

“It is mainly because religion has been offered to modern men in nauseatingly sentimental terms, and no longer as an intellectual challenge, that so many have been revolted, thinking that that “is all there is to” religion…. The severe discipline which any serious study of … religion and philosophy demands can serve as a useful corrective.”

I guaranteed my young charges that the readings I’d compiled for the course—on Yoga, Hesychasm, Zen, and Sufism—would, if nothing else, provide them with a large, demanding, and continuing dose of “intellectual challenge”.

As for up and coming attractions, I’m planning to teach a short course during my university’s “Maymester” later this spring. I’m calling it “Mysteries of the Christian East”, and it will include an off-campus trip to St Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in southern Arizona, one of several monastic communities established by the Athonite elder Ephraim, a former abbot of Philotheou Monastery on the Holy Mountain. As you know, my regular university offering on “Christian Theology” is taught from a decidedly Orthodox standpoint; nonetheless I’ve thought for some time it would be good to create a teaching context that would allow me to draw even more fully and directly on my pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain 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 the Sonoran Desert seemed a good second best!

You’re “astonished”, you say, that Saint Thomas Aquinas should be so highly praised in Professor Oldmeadow’s book concerning the perennialist school: Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of Perennial Philosophy (soon to be republished by World Wisdom, in a revised and expanded edition, as Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy). Was the Angelic Doctor not the very epitome of “mere rationalism”?

Your surprise is certainly not surprising, but I’m obliged to tell you that Oldmeadow has very fairly represented the position, if not of all perennialists, then certainly of Frithjof Schuon. Needless to say Schuon was well aware of the limits of ratio or dianoia, and he wrote about these limits extensively. At the same time, however, he greatly valued the logical rigor of the Scholastic method and was the very first to prefer it to those flights of mere subjectivist fantasy which often masquerade as “mystical intuition”.

Indeed there is a recurrent theme in his writings to the effect that that there is nothing illogical about the spiritual life. We should never suppose that our grasp of the Truth is against reason, only beyond its exhaustive formulation. To speak of the effacement of thought in direct intellection is not to deny its pedagogical value. On the contrary, a rigorously logical attitude toward concepts and philosophical positions is the sine qua non of intellective adequation. Hence what we might call the “initiatic” importance of Schuon’s criticisms of false points of view, as in his (significantly titled) Logic and Transcendence, where he writes as follows:

“The Divine Essence eludes logic to the extent that it is indefinable; but as we are conscious of it, seeing that we can speak of it, it constitutes a premise which allows us to draw at least indirect and extrinsic conclusions. Everything that presents itself to our mind is therefore a premise in some respect, and as soon as there is a premise, whether direct or indirect, precise or approximate, there is the possibility of a conclusion and thus of logic. To speak of concepts which impose themselves on us while concealing themselves from our logic is pure and simple contradiction, and in fact no doctrine has ever rejected the logical explanations of any notion…. No religion has ever imposed on the human mind, or ever could have imposed, an idea which logic was incapable of approaching in any way; religion addresses itself to man, and man is thought.”

Schuon readily admits, of course—still quoting from Logic and Transcendence—that “there are in God aspects that are independent of all limitative logic, and it is from them that the cosmic play and the musical aspect of things arise; but there is nothing in God that opposes the principles of non-contradiction and of sufficient reason, which are rooted in the Divine Intellect.”

I once asked him for a list of recommended reading materials for the Christian esoterist, and I mentioned what I assumed might be some good possibilities: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and a few others in the East, and of course Jakob Boehme and Meister Eckhart in the West. Schuon responded by saying that there was “too much theology and moral sentimentality” in almost all of these authors. The Christian esoterist, he said, need read only “the purely metaphysical portions of Eckhart … and Saint Thomas Aquinas”! Like you I was at first somewhat surprised by this answer, but considering his advice in light of passages like those I have quoted above, it is easy to understand Schuon’s rationale, for there is certainly nothing “sentimental” about the author of the Summa! It is true of course that at the end of his life this saint’s thinking was transcended in vision, but this is hardly an excuse for the rest of us not to think!

For further discussion of these points, you might wish to have a look at my article “A Knowledge That Wounds Our Nature: The Message of Frithjof Schuon”, which can be found here.

You asked about the role—or perhaps better the “position”—of Christ in Christian prayer.

It is common among the Fathers of the Christian East, and thus among many Orthodox authorities, to say that one should pray “in” the Holy Spirit, “through” Jesus Christ, and “to” God the Father, though it is important to admit at once that, like Catholics and Protestants, the Orthodox do not always practice what they preach in this regard and often formulate prayers which are directed to the Son. One thinks above all of the “Jesus Prayer”. You will recall in this regard the point I made in my paper, “Disagreeing to Agree”, about the formulations “our God”/”God” in relation to Christ (see p. 11 of that article here).

As for traditional sources, the key Biblical text would almost certainly be Ephesians 2:18: “Through Him [Jesus] we have access in one Spirit to the Father”, though one could also mention Romans 1:8: “I thank my God through Jesus Christ”. Among the Church Fathers, Origen is quite insistent in drawing out the implications: “If we understand what prayer is, we ought not to pray to anyone born [of woman], not even to Christ Himself, but only to the God and Father of all, to whom also our Savior prayed…. For when he heard, ‘Teach us to pray’, he did not ‘teach’ them ‘to pray’ to Himself, but to the Father, saying, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’, and so forth” (On Prayer, 15.1). I might add that when Origen uses the word “all” in the phrase “the God and Father of all”, he doubtless has in mind the expression “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”, which recurs in Romans 15:6, 2 Corinthians 11:31, and Ephesians 1:3.

Again, though, it is important to underscore the fact that there is nothing systematic about such a practice in Christianity; indeed Origen himself ignores his own rule on a few occasions. There is nothing surprising about this, of course, given the “spiritual economy” of Christianity and its stress upon the Divine “presence”, and you will certainly wish to word the relevant section of your paper in such a way as to acknowledge the many Christian exceptions to the rule of “through” Christ “to” the Father.

No, I’d not in fact heard of the formulation you quote from Father John Romanides: “If the Church were a factory, its product would be relics.” And no, I wasn’t thinking of things in quite so osteopathic a way when I spoke in my last post about the “production of saints”.

It’s a clever line, of course, and it’s very attractive to think that there might be some empirical criterion for sanctity. I’m certainly in favor of finding (what you called) a “measure beyond religious and denominational politics”—assuming that “measure” is an appropriate term in this context. Nonetheless I would hesitate to draw the conclusions you have.

Incorruption may well be a proof of sanctity. Having venerated the relics of numerous fathers on the Holy Mountain, I’m among the very first to respect this possibility. But it doesn’t follow that corruption—or rather non-incorruption—is therefore a proof of non-sanctity. Let’s not be Father Feraponts, turning up our noses—or pinching them, as the case may be!—at all but the most obviously physiological manifestations of holiness.

Bodhidharma’s cautionary advice is apropos in this connection: “If someone strikes you as so holy that you are inclined to call him a saint, this is a sign that the person is not a true saint. For the true saint cannot be described in such terms: He breaks through the limits of all such conceptual categories.”