Spirit and Life

"Human bodies are circular."

When a friend of mine made this comment, I thought at first he was making an Origenist joke - as Fr. Peter explained in a Lumen Christi lecture, that we all will inhabit perfectly spherical bodies when we die (and I still remember Thomas following that with one of his best retorts, "Some of us are already becoming that way!")

But my friend went on to explain it in a more metaphysical way - almost everything about us seems to be built on cycles. Metabolism, blood circulation, nervous system, reproductive system (especially for women!), and even the birth and death of every individual cell. It's not only at the internal level, but the external level as well - the seasons change, the sun rises and sets, animal and plant life grows and dies - birth, life, dying, death, and a new birth to begin again. We have become so used to thinking in linear, scientific terms, to Hegelian philosophies of determined development of the consciousness, to narratives that have a beginning and an end (if we even think about the final end at all). And yet, while development is real, "The Circle of LIfe" is not just a song from the Lion King, and it is not just an outdated mythology of tribal civilizations - there is very real truth to the fact that human beings are circular creatures.

This is not only built into our environment or our bodies, but our spirits themselves - we get up, we work, we sleep. We go to school, we wait for summer. We get bored of summer, and wait for school. We wear down grooves in our consciousness that diverts the flow of energy directly to certain thought patterns and actions - the very philosophy of virtue depends on our circular nature! How do we become virtuous, or gain excellence at anything? By practice, by entering the circle and repeating over and over until this circle is absorbed into the fabric of our being, whether this practice is the virtue of patience, acquiring a foreign language, or developing the musical sensitivity and muscle memory to play guitar.

There is something so beautiful about this. We are not a monad, nor is life a collection of objects that happen to lie near each other. There is always a return to the start, a going out and coming back, exitus and reditus as we artfully craft each circle around us, weaving in the motion of the external world into the free desires of our internal world like the invisible dynamism of each atom, our own personal solar system. And yet at the same time, this circular nature seems to be the source also of mankind's biggest enemy, or one of them. Boredom.

Indeed, boredom can lead us to make more of ourselves, to challenge us to press beyond the easy, cowardly limits we might set for ourselves to dare something greater, the echo of our desire for transcendence and infinity despite the limits imposed on us by our corporeality. Yet all too often boredom comes almost immediatley - we want to pursue our circles as long as they are enjoyable. Once it becomes too difficult, we want to move on to something we feel will be a greater thrill to us. This restlessness makes us dissatisfied with our circles, unhapppy with familiar grooves, itching for something new and exciting. And yet it can't be radically new and unlike the past, or we are frightened - it must be at least familiar enough that we can understand it. Thus, there is a balance between which satisfaction lies - completely new is terrifying, completely old is mind-numbingly dull. Different people find different balances in acclimation and boredom, yet this cycle of novelty and boredom is a cycle shared by all. And almost invariably, unless the focus is survival itself, boredom is a deep enemy to our futures. Its damage is seen in hobbies and friendships, careers, marriages, families, and lies deep at the heart of the consumerist culture we live in, which pursues novelty and entertainment above all else.

The fact is, cycles die. Scientifically we know that no energy is ever truly lost, but have we ever found a truly closed system on this earth? There is a slow decline of energy loss in all things that move, breathe, or participate in the remotest scrap of being. Decay, rot, the gradual slow as all things naturally move towards the stagnant equilibrium of death. And so with our human cycles. We become sick of those same faces, the same sections of the city or neighborhood. We loathe the routine of our obnoxious jobs and our irritating professors. Enough of the same, it is time for something new! Abandon this circle, start a new one, or at least try to find a way to infuse life into this old, dead circle.

Yet how to rescue or revive it? We can try to run away, start new circles, but the more circles we start, the quicker we get bored with them. We try to distract ourselves by being workaholics, or devoting our lives to cheap entertainment, but this does not help. Nor can we run for ever - we are meant to have roots, and so we will either be unhappy without nourishment, or settle them down only to find ourselves trapped in the same old circles, bound by the dependence of others, our own lack of energy, our lack of health, or fear of new things in this familiar but dreary pattern.

"Vanity of vanities, says Qoholeth, vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

"What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun." (Eccl 1:1-11)

And yet, the plea for newness is at the very heart of man, and it does not go unanswered - "Behold I make all things new!" Hear again, wonder anew at the marvels the Lord has done for us, for he will refresh our weary hearts! Christ promises this - "Behold I make all things new... for the former things are passing away.!" (Rev 21:5) He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death, the death of our lives and the death of the cycles which ground them, will be no more. But that is then - and this is now. There is a long gap between here and eternity, where we may shed our tired circles like dead scales to enter the eternal circle of the beatific vision, where we may gaze ever deeper and deeper on God.

Yet this precisely is the message of today: even now the kingdom of God is at hand, even now the world may be renewed and these tired old circles inrupted with the infinity of the Divine to shatter our narrow conceptions of familiarity and routine - "Send forth your spirit and they shall be created, and you will renew the face of the earth." (Ps. 104:30) We are often mystified by the Holy Spirit - Fathers we know, the Son of course lived as one of us... but what is this third extra person who fits in no easy category? The Holy Spirit is precisely the one who dwells within us and loves through us, who renews us!

In light of the mysteries of the Spirit we see that life is not truly a circle, but a spiral - an ever deepening spiral upwards and inwards. We come around to the same point again and again, but if it appears the same it is only an illusion - we are never the same, we are alive and constantly growing - either acclimating ourselves flatly upon the earth or breathing the life of the Spirit who will take us deeper and deeper. The mysteries of faith we celebrate over and over, the three year liturgical cycle, the cycle of the week, the cycle of every Mass itself, birth, death, and rebirth, ending not with death or even a different birth from the same ashes, but Resurrection, the revival of the dead into a new and impossible life, followed by the commission to participate in the Spirit's mission to go and bear the news to the ends of the earth. As we live ever more in the Spirit, we come to the same truths again and again, and find in them an inexhaustible source of newness. This is because the true newness is not really cheap novelty - newness, the truth and refreshing newness we all seek is the life of the Spirit breathed into us, the breath of existence perfumed with that second breath by which we become one with divine nature, the new cycle, the exitus which proceeds from the Father through the Son in the Spirit, and the reditus catching us all up together in the Spirit to return through the Son to the Father.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus! Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love! Send out your spirit, and renew the face of the earth! Revive our dead bones with the consuming fire of divinity, let us live this mystery that is never changing and ever new!

Holy Spirit, Lord of life
From your pure celestial height
Your pure beaming radiance give

Come, O Father of the poor
Come with treasures that endure
You, O light of all that live.

You of all consolers best
Visiting the troubled breast
Most refreshing peace bestow

You in toil are comfort sweet
Pleasant coolness in the heat
Solace in the midst of woe

Light immortal, light divine
Visit now this heart of mine
And my inmost being fill

When you take your grace away
Nothing good in us will stay
All our good is turned toward ill

Heal our wounds our strength renew
On our dryness pour your dew
Wash the stains of guilt away

Bend the stubborn heart and will
Melt the frozen, warm the chill
Guide the steps that go astray

Grant to us who evermore
You confess and you adore
In your sevenfold gift descend

Give us comfort when we die
Give us life with you on high
Give us joys that never end

Amen. Alleluia.

Life of the Mind, Part III

Evagrius Ponticus was a late 4th century figure, trained in the theology and politics of big city ecclesial life under the Cappadocians, who ended up as a monk in the remote Egyptian desert. He was often criticized for being too intellectual, and indeed his theology did have very systematic theory behind it, unusual in the midst of often uneducated Coptic monks who focused more exclusively on the practical monastic experience, and often held anthropomorphic beliefs of God. Yet his theology also had a very practical side, for he gives a keen psychological analysis and develops battle tactics against the eight logismoi, or tempting thoughts, that attack a monk learning to pray.

From him come the very well known words, "the one who prays is a theologian, the theologian is one who prays."

And yet, this phrase is not so simple to unravel as it might appear. To understand them, you need to have a specific understanding of anthropology, epistemology, and the ascetic life, and how these all link together. Evagrius had a very particular idea about what a knowledge of God is, and the way it can be reached based on the kind of minds we have, and the way that body relates to that. Because of his Origenist creation account, he believed that we are all created originally to be minds contemplating God. But then we got distracted and fell away, cooling our fiery spirits into bodies. Those that fell the least were given angelic bodies, those that fell the most were given demonic bodies, and we are somewhere in between. Although bodies are not evil, exactly, they are not a full reflection of what we were meant to be - we were meant to contemplate God in undistracted unity. This is exactly the goal of monastic life, to return as far as possible to this contemplation.

This is prayer. But this itself is also theology.

How do we know something? Well, we can kind of get knowledge encountering things in this world of multiplicity, but we can't really know a thing until we grasp its nature. This is very much like Plotinus (who was a contemporary of Origen, Evagrius' biggest theological influence) - there is the knowledge you get through discursive reasoning, but a higher knowledge comes through immediate intuition of truth (like angelic knowledge). But this is still not the greatest kind of knowledge, because it is still in the world of multiplicity - this is not yet the unity of God himself. So there are three stages - discursive reasoning, intuitive knowledge of natures, and intuitive knowledge of God himself. But God does not come to just anyone, and it's not something we can do on our own. We have to first clear our minds of distractions (again, what caused us to fall away from our original bliss) by battling the logismoi until we reach the state of apatheia, a sort of unshakable peace. THEN we are in a place that God can show himself to us. This is theology.

The way Evagrius sees it, theology does not involve active thinking. Theology is conceptless prayer in which God reveals himself to us.

Again, note the connection this has to Plotinus. The highest form of philosophy was conceptless union with the One - to approach its utter simplicity required one to "close the eye of the intellect". Of course, Plotinus saw this mainly as a human activity, rather than a gift of God - his One remained unremoved from everything, as opposed to the Christian God who became incarnate. God is a goal rather than a means. However, interestingly enough, Plotinus himself was considered to be a fairly severe ascetic by his Greek peers (though nothing compared to Christian ascetics).

So there seems to be a relationship between different kinds of knowledge and access to truth, and how the body affects this.

For Greeks, knowledge WAS the access to truth - askesis was to prepare for this, and even the philosophers did this to some extent, although most of them fairly moderately.

For today's culture, if there is truth, it is an scientific, academic pursuit, with lots of computers and data, and no askesis is necessary to attain it. If there is truth, it doesn't really pertain to what we do. The skepticism about truth is combined with a strange dualism, in which we see no need to act in particular ways because our body is whatever our minds want it to be (since there's no objective truth) - asceticism is pointless. (Again, recall the lack of asceticism for those who theoretically need their minds most.)

What should we say as Christians? Well, there is certainly access to truth through scientific knowledge, but this is not everything. There is also through the infused wisdom of the Holy Spirit, able to be received only by those who have purified themselves from disordered attachments - ascesis is to prepare for the second kind of knowledge, unless these stages are not at all distinct. If they are not distinct, then you need to practice asceticism and virtue to be a good physicist, and I am very skeptical of such claims.

This leads into a further question: what kinds of truth really requires ascesis or holiness to understand? I think probably the deeper the knowledge penetrates to the natures of things, the closer to God it comes, the more purity of heart is necessary to understand it.

So is the theologian the one who prays? Supposing we don't espouse an Origenist anthropology, and supposing we think that knowledge comes both through science and infused wisdom, instead of the more singular divine illumination epistemology of Neo-Platonism... does Evagrius' statement about theology become meaningless? It seems you can do theology without prayer, at least to some extent. But if you take the scholastic route which allows for scientific knowledge, is there a place for contemplative prayer? If it is not to gain knowledge in the way Evagrius has it, then what is it for?

I think in order to really answer this question, we would need to first examine more carefully these two different kinds of epistemology - divinely infused knowledge, and then natural knowledge... but really, I think "natural knowing" is a broader concept than a single identical kind. It seems that way. An artist knows truth in a different way than a philosopher, even if they are knowing the same truth. There are different facets to be had with different approaches.

Second, we would need to find out how knowledge is related to union. Likeness is a principle for knowing - "like knows like," and so the more we are like God the more we know him. We become like God through union with him. We are in union with him the more we love. So Evagrius says to pray is to be a theologian... where does love enter this equation as well?

Nope, I'm not going to answer those questions. I don't know enough yet. They are familiar points in a trajectory that reaches many years into the future, at which point I may have answers more clearly laid out.