On the scandalous precision of mystery: Orthodoxy in a big world

Let’s begin on a peninsula off the coast of Greece. There, overlooking the rich blue Aegean Sea at sunset, a monastery novice arrived at his elder’s cell to discover him on his patio, gazing upon the magnificence. “What are you doing, Father?” The elder, before turning into his cell to begin evening prayers, replied, “Mazevo yli; I am gathering fuel.”

What is the difference between metaphysics and theology? Metaphysics may be understood as investigation into being, into the relationship of mind and matter, into hidden qualities of created reality. The word comes from Aristotle—who apparently never used it. The 14 books of his Ta Meta ta Physika were given that title by the editor 100 years after the books appeared. Instead, to describe his interest in the causes and principles of all things, he used words like first philosophy, first science, wisdom, and even theology. But these terms shared a common meaning. Metaphysics studies the physical and what is after or beyond the physical, yet still within the bounds of the created.

Theology is different. Theology is experience of God, encounter with God, transfiguration in God, immediate vision of the uncreated personal Divine. We call to mind the observation of the fourth-century Evagrius Ponticus, “A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.” Where the concerns of metaphysics lie with the created, the concerns of theology lie with the uncreated. Theology cares about prayer, love, work, rest, purity of heart, asceticism, moral choices, and, with our monk, certainly the symphony of nature—but all within a pursuit of the uncreated.

To turn a familiar phrase, metaphysics studies this and that, while theology is encounter with the other. Metaphysics or theology—which was our good father on his patio practicing? Maybe both, for he took into himself all that he encountered in the created world before him—the Aegean blue, the buttery glow and warmth of the setting sun, the breeze—and carried within him, as he turned inside to light the candle before his icons, to resume his search, his fellowship, his worship of the uncreated. This water and that shoreline inspired his reach for the holy Other, who is beyond all waters and all shorelines.

An Orthodox Christian seeker of God will have no abiding interest in metaphysics, only theology. From theology to culture: When culture does its thinking—presuming it does any thinking at all—it tends to dis-integrate complicated issues down into false binaries. Technology: good or bad? Immigration: yes or no? America: getting better or getting worse? Internet: making us smarter or dumber? Education: public school or homeschool? Medicine: pharmaceutical drugs or natural treatments? Patriarchy: good or bad? Feminism: useful or useless? Issues thick and rich with lots of perspectives are instead stripped of subtlety and in a fit of impatience, reduced to unsatisfying alternatives. When only two choices are available, we must either keep the baby with the bathwater, or we must throw out both.

Those occupied with religion are not immune to such entropy. Do you lean right or do you lean left? Religiously conservative or religiously progressive? Looking backward toward the past or forward toward the future? Exclusive or inclusive? Tradition or innovation? Dogma or tolerance? ISIS or Episcopalian? Either you are with us or are you are with them? Absurd simplifications, these.

Now, into this regrettable sifting falls the perfectly useful word, “mystery.” Augustine said everyone knows what time is, as long as we are not asked to define it. The same may be said for mystery. Everyone knows what mystery is as long as we are not asked to define it. There is sense in this. Mystery, by definition, is something the faculty of reason can neither understand nor explain, with a cause the faculty of reason cannot fully know. Because mystery transcends easy contour and creed, however, one may be tempted to place mystery as a balance to, say, doctrine, on the see-saw of life; or mystery as the balance to reason. Yet, once again, we fall into a false binary. Either one can fall on the side of certainty, of assurance, of air-tight systematic theology, or one can fall on the side of emotion, of poetic unknowing, of open and subjective experience: all that is commonly associated with mystery.

We are all familiar with the fundamentalism of the one side: “This and only this religious doctrine itself must be political doctrine, cultural doctrine, institutional doctrine, with consequences for non-conformity.” And we are all familiar with the ecumenism of the other side: “None, and absolutely none of the world’s religions in itself possesses, preserves, nor expresses the fullness of divine revelation.”

Human beings are like water. We naturally flow toward the lowest places of known resistance, so we seem prone to organize into those simpler either/or conceptual frameworks. Either the maniacal—all parts are fraudulent compared to my truth—or the mysterious—all truth is greater than the sum of its parts.

It is here where traditional Christianity rarely gets invited to either dinner party. We spoil the fun by suggesting a middle path, bringing to the breezy aether of mystery a precision so singular and unbending as to be scandalous. For this tradition, mystery is not a feeling nor an abstraction nor an ephemeral rhapsody of a purely spiritualized experience. We shy away, for example, from the sentiment expressed by the 19th century Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, while lying sleepless on his bed, turned for comfort not to ascetic or bodily prayer but to a vague sense of some cosmic benevolence.

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close…

While lovely and loaded with good vibrations, such psychological exercise, for the Orthodox, falls short of the precision of mystery.

Neither is mystery a corrective to dogma, nor some cure for reason. We step away from the teenager who defended his complete avoidance of homework and house chores with an appeal to mystery. “My head is in the heavens, Dad, and my heart is in mystery.” “Ain’t no mystery you can’t get a job,” Father replies. Mystery is not kryptonite to dogma, nor to reason, nor to hard work. Instead, mystery, for the Orthodox Christian, is a Person, and therein lies the scandal.

Mystery describes the wildly incomprehensible union of the divine and the human. Mystery describes the sacrificial condescension of the spiritual into the material. Because mystery is a Person, mystery transcends the faculty of reason but moves toward a precision and a pulse greater than reason could ever produce.

In Buddhism, what matters is not the Buddha but his teachings. In the philosophical system of Platonism, what matters is not its namesake, Plato, but his teachings. In Taoism, not the figure of Lao Tsu, but his teachings. Christianity’s entire structure, however, rests upon and derives its very life from the mystery of Christ. The Man is the message, and the message is the Man. In our lexicon, suffocatingly narrow for some, “mystery” simply means the mystery of Christ. This is why mystery is the property not of metaphysics but of theology. Like theology, mystery is experience of God, encounter with God, transfiguration in God. Mystery is encounter with the transcendent who has become immanent; with the unknowable, who has condescended to become known; with one more spacious than the heavens, who lies curled in the womb of a Virgin.

From theology to mystery, from mystery to personhood. According to the Genesis story, God creates the non-human world. Then, in a sweeping crescendo, makes man, “male and female, according to our image and likeness.” Here the desire for us that is part of God’s own life is imparted to the man made in his image so that, as a permanent part of his own self, man will desire God in return. This is the dance of salvation, a dance that God initiates. That initiation comes to us as the Son and Word of God, uttered forth from the Father in a love both concentrated in the historic figure of Jesus of Nazareth while also encompassing all reality as the personal ground of being.

What is distinct about Orthodox Christianity? Well, other than our failure, more staggering than most, to actually live what we believe, it is this paradox. The love that can be found everywhere can only be found here. Early non-Christian figures, such as Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote about the crucifixion; or Tacitus, a Roman historian who wrote about Nero’s hatred for Christians and their “Christus”; or Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator who wrote about persecuting Christians who refused to renounce Christ—all these testify to the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. While early Christian figures, such as Paul, the apostle who wrote about the cosmic Christ; or Irenaeus, who wrote about the Son of God redeeming all the stages of human existence by entering into them with sinless perfection; or Athanasius, who wrote about the divine becoming human so the human may become divine—all these testify to the cosmic existence and universal redemption of the Logos of God. The horizontal historic and the vertical cosmic, like the two lines that form a cross, meet in the tiny cry of a Bethlehem babe, which somehow rings no farther than the cave, yet echoes throughout the universe.

The Gospel according to St. John, the fourth of the four New Testament gospels, opens with a sentence that has occupied serious minds through centuries. “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made.” The term “logos” first appears six centuries before Christ, but the early Christian movement discerned in the term a deeply personal sense. “Venerate this crib,” wrote Gregory the Theologian, in his fourth-century homilies on Christmas, “because from it you who were deprived of meaning are fed by the divine meaning, the divine Logos himself.”

Originally, “logos” meant word, reason, inherent structure, creative pattern, ordering principle, but the early Christian vision connected the term with God’s own love for the world, a love of which the Person of the Son and Word of God is the embodiment. They believe, then, that this historic Christ was the Logos, the Word and reason and inherent structure of creation. This Word created and sustains the universe; this Word goes looking for his lost children when they succumb to the serpent in the garden; this Word is enshrined in the Law of Moses; this Word visits the prophets; this Word inspires the psalms; this Word takes up residence in the manger of a cave; this Word hides everywhere as the logoi spermatikoi, the seeds of truth, inherent in all human beings and in all genuine striving towards supernal light. And this Word stands as the telos, the ultimate end or goal, of every desire of man.

As the 20th century Catholic, G.K. Chesterton, wrote, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.” This understanding of mystery, at once cosmic in scope and concentrated in Christ, enables an Orthodox Christian to be both narrowly dogmatic and widely benevolent. Yes, there is only one mystery because there is only one Man. There is only one path, because there is only one Person. Yet that mystery and that path art everywhere present and filling all things, as the fulfillment of every genuine striving, of every good heart, in every age, even if that striving and that heart emerge in a form the Orthodox Christian does not recognize.

So he is not a practitioner of fundamentalism, for he accepts that the Spirit blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. Not all beyond his familiar boundary is undifferentiated darkness, but neither is he an advocate for ecumenism, for he believes that revelation is indeed discoverable only in the mystery of Christ and in a certain reading of him. So not all beyond his familiar boundary is undifferentiated light.

He has his Scriptures and his saints, but he also rests in the powerful calculus of desire. Any heart, anywhere, at any age, who genuinely desires God, the mystery, the path, the Logos will not abandon. Human desire for the design is like a magnet which attracts the complementary magnet of God’s spirit. As the epistle of James reads, “Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.” How did the poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, put it? “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and “the Holy Spirit over the bent / World broods with warm breast and […] bright wings.” If seen through these eyes, eyes that look for the beautiful and the good and the true, that look for the grandeur of God, the world becomes a cathedral. Mystery is everywhere, the pulse of everything that has being. Like ribbons rippling from a desk fan, every breath, every moment of time, every material thing, from the Milky Way to the molecule, quivers with the energy of God.

The scandalous proposition here is that, for the Orthodox Christian, that energy has a name, a body, a mother, an incarnation—and a cross. This antinomy of the immanence and the transcendence of the one, living, divine reality lingers at the silent center of the most pure experiences in human life. It is central, yet always beyond our reach: the bubbling of a mountain stream: simple, yet nourishing; the clean whisper of falling snow in the night forest; the sleeping infant, defenseless, yet overpowering; the deep energy shared between two persons with walls lowered enough to love—these are the kind of experiences that, when received at a perfect and unscripted moment, have stirred poets to rhapsodize and lovers to sing. And yet, poets and lovers, painfully aware of the impermanence of experience, yearn for whatever these experiences point toward: something no longer fleeting, but stable and unchanging, and simply good. Something—or, for the Orthodox, some One—who has a name, a body, a mother, an incarnation, and a cross.

Mystics of various religious traditions speak of the translucence of here and now, as if the eternal God uses temporal life to tug at our inner attention. It was written of the 19th century Russian ascetic, Anastasia Logacheva, very much a product of her time and place, that, like many mystics, she lived in two time zones: the present, and the eternal. In the present and the temporal, she was very much a humble peasant woman, subject to the usual constraints of her gender and class. In the eternal, however, she experienced mystical union with the divine, and radiated a charismatic authority that drew followers, rich and poor, male and female, to her.

Anastasia’s dual citizenship of eternity and time, heaven and earth, helps us to understand how God, while entirely other and beyond and inaccessible, is also everywhere present and filling all things. Only God can be absent from all that exists while alive in everything that is. Present, even in those who deny his existence, is the God who has given them being. And while human beings can degenerate into a flurry of sinfulness, even becoming monstrous or mad, they cannot eradicate the goodness at their core. And, once again, that goodness has a name, a body, a mother, an incarnation, and a cross.

Over a thousand years before that Russian ascetic, a Greek monastic, Maximus the Confessor, lived and suffered for not just the theocentric but the scandalously christocentric precision of mystery. Tongue cut out so he could not speak, right hand cut off so he could not write, Maximus yet describes both the transcendence and immanence of God. All immortal things and immortality itself, all living things and life itself, all holy things and holiness itself, all good things and goodness itself, all blessings and blessedness itself, all beings and being itself are manifestly works of God. Some began to be in time, for they have not always existed; others did not begin to be in time, for goodness, blessedness, holiness, and immortality have always existed. These eternal attributes await those who desire to rise above the material, the mechanical, the mundane to seek a life of richer mystery. And those attributes bear a name, a body, a mother, an incarnation, and a cross.

For Orthodox Christianity, Christ is God’s part; desire is our part. This holy desire, a desire that, because of its refusal to substitute mere emotionalism as mystery, accepts suffering, and organizes priorities, is key. It is the worthy offering of worthy souls in lots of places and in lots of circumstances.

The story is told of the fourth-century Egyptian monk and Desert Father, Macarius, who, while praying in his cell, heard a voice that said, “Macarius, you have not yet reached the standard of two women in the city.” On his arrival in the city, he found the house and knocked at the door. A woman opened it and welcomed him to her house. He sat down and called them to sit down with him. Then he said to them, “It is for you that I have taken this long journey. Tell me how you live a religious life.” They said, “Indeed, how can we lead a religious life? We were with our husbands last night.” But the old man persuaded them to tell him their way of life.

Then they said, “We are both foreigners in the world’s eyes, but we accepted in marriage two brothers. Today we have been sharing this house for 15 years. We do not know whether we have quarreled or said rude words to each other, but the whole of this time we have lived peaceably together. We thought we would enter a convent, but since that did not come to pass, we have made a covenant between ourselves and God that a worldly word shall not pass our lips during the rest of our lives.” When Macarius heard this, he said, “Truly, it is not whether you are a virgin or a married woman, a monk or a man in the world. God gives his Holy Spirit to everyone according to their earnestness of purpose.”

In the Hebrew narrative, the original day of creation is not called the first day; it is called, rather, Yom Echad, one day. So the text actually reads, “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Does it matter? Is the distinction between “first day” and “one day” important? Yes. By using “one day” instead of “first day,” the author of Genesis means to elevate that day of creation above the rest, as more than merely first in a sequence. The number one is not simply the numeral that comes before two and three and seven; instead, it is the root, the basic principle out of which all subsequent numbers come. The “one day” of Genesis is the touch of God upon creation, and every touch since then has its root in that first principle moment.

For Orthodoxy, the mystery of Christ is like that. It is our “one day”: the root, the principle out of which all subsequent life flows. It is theology. It is mystery. It is at once concentrated here, yet cosmic everywhere. It is the singular grain that leavens the whole universe. It is the personal pulse and expression of God’s love for the whole world.