Class scheduled for 4pm Nov 9, 2019:
From Michael Ruse:
A 12th century German mystic, woman saint, and doctor of the Western Church wrote:
The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it "the reflection of the living Light." And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.
This Western mystic from the Rhineland was the nun, Hildegard von Bingen. She called her experience an umbra viventis lucis (a shade of living light in Latin). Her vision not only sounds very much like the teaching on glorification and illumination spoken of by the Eastern Church Fathers and experienced by modern Orthodox saints, but it also gives us a way of looking at what sacraments are and how they work within us in the Orthodox Church.
From the understanding of the Orthodox Church, we receive the sacraments as a “living light” that direct us toward becoming more like the Holy Trinity, as Metropolitan Hilarion explains at the end of this chapter. The difference between scholasticism and hesychasm or “the path of deification” is directional. Who is infusing who with what?
This truth of becoming united with God is not easy to calculate or to analyze like weather patterns, personality tests, data charts or even advanced metaphysical inquiry. It is not only the truth of it, but also the beauty of Light that surpasses rational thought, although our minds too are integrated with Jesus Christ. Just as light passes through a small window of a church on a Sunday morning and children try to grab the single ray beaming down and keep it, so too is our own reasoning limited when we try to capture the sacraments into our own hands in this way. Often times the result of humanistic reasoning is to make pictures appear differently than what they are by manipulating and connecting points that are not meant to be connected. Our humanistic categories rearrange icons with different pigments, lines, and shadings with a goal toward unity. But what kind of icon would we create? All forms of sacraments, especially those outlined in the Great Book of Needs, connect us to the Holy Trinity and all the saints.
The Eucharist gives birth to and connects to most of the sacraments. Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us of keeping the mindset that sacraments are interconnected, not isolated events. It’s preferable, overall, to be thankful and marvel at the mysteries rather than to dissect them with rigorous methods. The implication is that the long-term effects of such a scholastic or abstract mindset even in some Orthodox circles could have detrimental fallouts in the faith of Christians. In the development of the Western Church, there were scholarly men who tried to approach theology, including “sacramentals,” the cross, grace, salvation and Jesus Christ, the Godman from this kind of primarily metaphysical and rational explanation with sincere faith. The major scholastic characters in Europe were Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas. The long-lasting scholastic approach of Latin theology, Metropolitan seems to suggest, is one of the reasons why the Byzantines did not make such distinctions between “sacramentals” and sacraments.
But to draw some boundaries around what is and isn’t a sacrament is necessary and helpful for those in the Orthodox Church to discuss. The Orthodox Church understands that the mysteries are wide and many, like an umbrella of light that gives us strength in all points and needs of our daily life. Join us this Saturday at 4:00 p.m. to learn about the sacramental understanding of Orthodoxy.