The fire of the Logos
Burning the wood of the Cross
First off, an apology.
I’m currently in Greece on holiday. My intention was to prepare, record, edit and upload episode 7 from here, but now I realise that plan was always unrealistic.
For starters, the Internet in this secluded corner of the Aegean is truly abysmal. But really, a long-expected holiday visiting old friends was never going to allow me the degree of focus that each episode requires.
Meaning I won’t be posting an audio episode this week. Sorry for that! You’re receiving this written piece instead. Regular service will resume once I’m back in England.
It’ll give you an opportunity to catch up on the episodes you haven’t yet had a chance to listen to.
In last week’s written post, drawing on what the Fathers have taught us so far, we arrived at an evocative but mysterious description of repentance in its higher mode, which can be formulated thus:
True repentance aims at purity of heart, creating calm for the Logos through silence.
In this post, I’m going to explore what that could mean, both in theory and in practice. Again, this will not be an exhaustive presentation. The mystery of true metanoia—which, recall, can be understood as focused noetic seeing that is somehow related to the coming of the Kingdom, whatever that may mean—is an infinite mystery defying definition.
First, the theory—and let us go beyond the merely abstract or conceptual and try instead to smuggle into the discussion something of the Greek original, theoria, ‘contemplation’.
Creating calm for the Logos through silence. To begin to make sense of that, we’re going to have to return to the meaning of the word logos, which first arose in episode 3. As I stated in that episode:
To understand Christianity, especially the Christian mystical tradition, one really has to get to grips with this Greek word logos and all of its many nuanced senses.
This is because, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John—the ‘mystical’ gospel—the evangelist uses the word logos to name Jesus Christ in his divine nature. ‘In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God’ [John 1:1]. According to this tradition, then, at the very summit of the contemplation of the Messiah stands the divine Logos. Wrestling with logos is therefore of paramount importance for understanding the Messiah’s Way.
And so, as we did for the verb noeō and its verbal noun nous in the last post, so did episode 3 provide some basic lexicological analysis of the verbal noun logos, as a first step toward understanding the Logos better.
Logos is a verbal noun of the verb lego, which means ‘to arrange, to put in order, or to gather together’. That’s its original meaning. So, logos is a verbal noun: ‘arranging, putting in order, gathering together’. And that log, the L-O-G in logos, is etymologically the same as the L-I-G in our word ‘religion’. That particle, lig or log, is ultimately traceable to an Indo-European root meaning ‘to tie or bind’. You can maybe see how a word that means ‘to arrange’ or ‘gather together’ or ‘put in order’ would be built on the deeper sense of ‘to tie’ or ‘bind’.
You can also, then, perhaps see how that verb, lego, and its verbal noun, logos, was used to mean ‘speech’, and by a further extension, how it was used to mean ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’: the mental process that precedes speech, the process which speech reveals. When we reason, we are attempting to make sense of things. To arrange them. To put them in order. To gather disparate facts and different impressions and to gather them together. To uncover how they’re related. To express their meaning.
Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is the Logos par excellence and that we human beings possess the power of logos only through participation in him, ‘the true light which lightens every human being’ [John 1:9]. He is himself the light of reason, the One who, in himself, is the unity, meaning, and ordering that initiates, sustains, and perfects everything that was, is, or will be. Tying ourselves to the Logos through the practice of faith in Jesus Christ is the Christian religion. It is what lies behind this cryptic saying of Christ, also in the Gospel of John, in which he refers to his imminent death by crucifixion: ‘When I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself’ [John 12:32]. Drawing all things meaningfully to himself through self-sacrifice and thereby binding all things in ultimate unity, tying them to God as well as to each other in noetic harmony: this is who the Logos is, the One for whom we are meant to ‘create calm through silence’.
How? Having contemplated the theory, how do we practise the contemplation?
Precisely through constant metanoia of the higher kind. Practising focused noetic seeing by remaining always attentive to ourselves, in faith we turn our attention toward the invisible God within by invoking the name of Christ: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’
It is by no means easy, but to the degree that we take up this mental struggle and cultivate the higher metanoia conscientiously, we inch ever closer to purity of heart, which is our goal. The inner turbulence of our passionate desires and attachments grows ever calmer, silencing the noisy, chaotic and uncontrolled anxiety of our thoughts.
By practising true repentance in spiritual silence, slowly but surely we create inner calm for the Logos.
Now, it goes without saying that, before attempting to practise the second repentance, we will already have experienced the first repentance. This entails committing ourselves to avoiding sin in action as best we can and, through the sacrament of illumination, being initiated into the spiritual life of the Church. Though purity of heart is our goal (and aiming at purity of heart is what drives the higher metanoia), the Church’s various spiritual practices are the indispensable means whereby our minds are trained to focus on that goal: prayer, fasting, sacraments, works of charity, psalmody, spiritual reading, and so on.
Remember what Abba Moses has stressed. The spiritual life requires us to discern between ends, goals, and means. As he said,
The kingdom of God [the ultimate end] is gained by the practice of virtue [the indispensable means] and possessed in purity of heart and knowledge of the Spirit [the proximate goal].
What Abba Moses has not said outright, but which is nonetheless true, is that all three dimensions of the spiritual life—the kingdom that is the ultimate end, the purity of heart that is the proximate goal, and the spiritual disciplines that are the indispensable means—are nothing other than the Logos himself, manifesting or revealing or uniting himself to the soul in three different modes.
Don’t forget, the kingdom of God is an exalted, inner, spiritual reality; it is the Logos enthroned in the heaven that is within; and so the ultimate end of all our spiritual efforts is the Logos himself, ‘the Son of Man who is coming in his kingdom’ [cf. Matt 16:28]. Quoting St Paul, Abba Moses stated unequivocally that we are in the kingdom only to the extent that we abide in ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ [Rom. 14:17]. And yet righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit are nothing other than Christ the Logos himself in the purified heart. ‘My peace I give you’ [John 14:26], Christ declares, who is himself the ‘righteousness from God’ [cf. 1 Cor. 1:30] and who prays to the Father that ‘my joy be perfected in them’ [John 17:13].
No less is the Logos himself the proximate goal on which we focus our attention. He is purity of heart, the One who was ‘revealed to take away our sins, and there is no sin in him’ [1 John 3:5]. He is the higher metanoia, the One who ‘faces toward the Father in heaven’ [cf. Matt. 10:32]. He is theoria or contemplation, the One who ‘has seen the Father’ [John 6:46]. He is agape or dispassionate love, the One who prayed that ‘the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them’ [John 17:26].
As for the indispensable means, the Church’s virtuous practices and disciplines, these too are the Logos in yet another mode. As Christ said, ‘I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me’ [John 6:38], thus revealing an integral part of the mystery of the incarnation. In his body of flesh he ‘humbled himself, having become obedient to the point of death’ [Phil. 2:8], thereby ‘leaving us an example, that you should follow in his footsteps’ [1 Peter 2:21]. Not to mention the degree to which Christ is identified with the material elements of the sacraments through which the Church distributes divine grace. He is the living water. He is the bread of life that is his body. He is the new wine that is his blood. He is the Anointed One whose anointing is by the holy oil of his own Spirit. He is the frankincense, and the myrrh, and the flour, and the candlelight, and the bell, and the inside of the cup.
So yes, Abba Moses’s three dimensions of the spiritual life are the one Logos in three modes.
Imagine a campfire. Why do we build a campfire? What end do we have in mind for it? Radiance: light and heat. This is the Logos in the inner kingdom, illuminating our minds, melting our hearts in love.
But how can we experience that radiance unless we keep the campfire burning? The fire itself is purity of heart, attentive inner noetic seeing, contemplative invocation; the Logos himself in the mode of turning toward God in true metanoia.
And yet, how will we keep the campfire burning unless we maintain a steady supply of wood for fuel? The fuel is our spiritual practices, the virtues, disciplines, and sacraments whereby, in our bodies, we resist the darkness of selfish fleshly desire and turn toward the light of sacrificial spiritual love, the Logos himself nailed to the wood of the Cross.
All three—the wood, the fire, the light—are the Logos. Just as light is in the fire, as kinetic energy, so is the vision of God in purity of heart; and just as light is in the wood, as potential energy, so is contemplative love in all our acts of prayer, fasting, and charity. All three modes are one light in us, body, soul, and spirit, because Christ the incarnate Logos is one with our threefold humanity, body, soul, and spirit.
Which raises a question. If the fire of true metanoia that discloses the inner light of eternal life requires the wood of the Cross, what does this mean for people who are ‘spiritual but not religious’? That they might contemplate this question is one of my ambitions for Life Sentences.