On the Absence and Unknowability of God

One of the weird things about Western theology is how completely it ignores the existence of Orthodox Church. People often talk about the difference between Catholics and Protestants as though they're the only sort of Christians. The Orthodox have various responses to this oversight on our part: sometimes they ignore us right back, sometimes they take revenge by arguing that everything that is wrong with the world is the fault of the West.

Christos Yannaras is one of the people we perhaps shouldn't ignore. In the Orthodox Church he's like Rowan Williams crossed with Stanley Hauerwas crossed with John Milbank. Maybe. Andrew Louth says that he is 'without doubt the most important living Greek Orthodox theologian'. Bet you feel about about not having heard about him now, huh?

Yannars' On the Absence and Unknowability of God takes a classic contemporary Orthodox-theological approach: he highlights a problem in Western thought, explaining why it's the Catholics' fault, and argues that if we'd just stayed Orthodox everything would have been fine. In this case, the problem is the death of God. Nietzsche announced that God was dead, and he's sometimes blamed for the subsequent growth of atheism in the West. But Heidegger argues that it's not Nietzsche's fault: all he was doing was prophetically announcing the imminent failure of European metaphysics. He says that European thought has basically turned God into nothing more than an anchor for everything else: God is there so we can explain why the universe made sense, so we can say that there's some original source from which everything else comes. God is the answer which puts a stop to the endless question: but why? Eventually, the answer is 'Because God'. Why do we exist? Because God created us. How can we trust our reason? Because God is rational and God came first. As soon as we start to use God like that, there's always the possibility that someone will come along and prove that there isn't any guarantee that we're rational, and so the whole idea of God will collapse, which is roughly what Yannaras thinks has happened in the West.

Apophatic theology, in this God-logic, ends up being part of the problem. If we can never fully understand the rational principle (God) on which everything else depends, we can start asking questions. We get skeptical, we get agnostic and then, bang! All of a sudden, we've become Richard Dawkins. But for Yannaras, God was never meant to be an axiom, a first principle, a logical necessity. We have a relationship with God, who loves us, and apophatic theology isn't meant to be about a logical incomprehensibility at the foundation of all being, it's meant to be about the fact that we can never fully articulate our experience of loving and being loved by God.

So for Yannaras, Heidegger and Nietzsche aren't atheists exactly, but point us towards a better, more plausible idea of God. Instead of thinking they understand what God is and how he caused everything, they leave God's place empty. God isn't dead, God is absent or unknowable. To think about how we come to know God, Yannaras uses the Eastern distinction between God's energies and God's essence. God's essence is, er, the essence of God, God in Godself. God's energies are God's activities in the world, creating, redeeming, and all that shebang. We can know God's energies but not God's essence, so knowing God through the world is a bit like knowing Banksy only through his artwork, or knowing Salinger only through Catcher in the Rye. An artists' work can tell us a lot about the artist, but they can't tell us what the artist is like in themselves.

So apophatic theology for Yannaras is important for two reasons: firstly, because of the unbridgeable divide between God's essence and God's energies, which means we can never speak about God's essence; and secondly because language always falls short of the richness of relationships: with God, we can experience more than we can speak of.

The body in Greek worship

In addition to his overview of attitudes to the body in Greek Orthodoxy, Kallistos Ware also lists the following as ways in which the body is involved in worship:

1. The Orthodox liturgy involves the body in worship through various symbolic actions. Worshippers face towards the East, mark themselves with the sign of the cross, make deep bows and sometimes prostrate themselves.

2. The practices of fasting and abstinence involve the body in spiritual life.

3. The two chief sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, directly involve the body. The Orthodox Churches prefer full immersion baptism rather than sprinkling and use ordinary bread instead of communion wafers.

4. Anointing of the body with oil is common practice, and in the Christian East oil is both a normal ingredient in cooking and a regular part of worship. In the Euchelaion, 'the oil of prayer,' the sick are anointed with oil which is seen to confer both physical healing and the forgiveness of sins.

5. The laying on of hands is a regular part of confession and ordinations.

6. At funerals the coffin is left open, and all give a last kiss to the departed. The dead body is seen as an object of love, not abhorrence. Cremation is normally forbidden because of reverence for the physical body and belief in its ultimate resurrection.

7. In marriage, the sacramental 'matter' that receives God's blessing is the actual body of the man and woman entering matrimony (as opposed to, say, the Eucharist, where it's the bread and wine that are blessed and then consumed by worshippers). While the Greek Fathers have an ambiguous relationship to marriage, which is often seen as inferior to celibacy, and see sex as primarily about child-bearning rather than an expression of love, the negetive elements of their attitude to marriage aren't present at all in the service for a first marriage (although in the service for a second marriage following a divorce, marriage is portrayed as a remedy against sin and a way of controlling our unruly impulses). Instead, the reasons given for mariage are the love of husband and wife, and the bearing and bringing-up of children.

8. The body has a part in private prayer, especially in the (sometimes controversial) practice of 'hesychast prayer', which uses the Jesus prayer (the repetition of this prayer: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner') and links it with the rhythm of breathing. There are three elements of this 'physical method' of prayer:

   1. Bodily posture: sit on a low stool with head bowed and chin resting on chest.

   2. Breathing is regulated – slowed and coordinated with the words of the Jesus Prayer.

   3. Hesychasts practice inner exploration, or searching for the place of the heart. The hesychast pictures ther breath coming in the nostrils, passing down within the lungs and into the heart, and at the same time seeks to make their intellect descend with their breath so that intellect and heart are united. Interestingly, it's seen as dangerous to explore the body below the heart in this way.

Ware concludes that, whatever the ambiguity in the Orthodox tradition as a whole, this shows that the 'Hebraic' attitude which sees the body as a unity wins out. I think this is where is argument is most precarious - leaving aside for now the question of how fair his Hebraic/Hellenic distinction is (and I know that some people would question it), I'm not totally sold on his idea that a positive view of the body wins out. Still, he's an Orthodox bishop and I'm neither of those things, so maybe he knows better.

The body in Greek Christianity

Kallistos Ware is a titular metropolitan bishop of the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate. I don't know what that means, but if your innuendo-dar is as sensitive as mine, you'll notice that that's a pleasingly appropriate title.

Ware takes a saying of John Climacus – that the body is 'my helper and my enemy' - as typical of an ambivalence towards the body in Greek Christianity. He suggests two reasons for this – one is the doctrine of the Fall which suggests that however good the body was to start with, it's now broken by sin and a cause of temptation. The other is a tension between the 'Hebraic-biblical' tradition which tends to see the human person very holistically, and the 'Hellenic-Platonist' tradition, which, while resisting full-on body/soul dualisms, tends to distinguish between body and soul in its discussions of human nature.

Ware also suggests that attitudes to the body were shaped by changes in society. Between 284 and 565 (I assume that's some significant historical period, though I couldn't tell you why), society became increasingly hierarchical and rigid, with social roles more clearly defined, and more hereditary serfdom meaning that peasants in the fields were pretty much stuck with the same bit of land as their fathers, and sons in the city had little choice but to take on the family business. He suggests that this increasing rigidity of society corresponds to increasing rigidity in terms of the rules by which the body and sexual behaviour were controlled. This might be partly to do with the influence of Christianity, but was a shift that begun before Christianity was really influential in the Roman Empire.

He outlines the views of various important Greek theologians. Origen thought that souls were created before bodies and were put in bodies as a punishment for earlier sin (let's talk more about Origen some time – he's bonkers), which didn't mean that bodies were bad, necessarily, but did mean that souls didn't need bodies and so the body wasn't seen as intrinsic to human nature. Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, thinks we can only be saved through the body, and argues that the image of God in humankind is in the fact that by reproducing we get to take part in creation. He says that 'among those who are sanctified, even the seed is holy.' Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, though, think that we only get married and have sex because of the Fall, though Irenaeus and Augustine disagree – Irenaeus thinks that as they grew older, Adam and Eve would've got round to getting it on even without sin, but there just wasn't time between the old making-woman-out-of-a-rib lark and that bad thing they did with the apple (oo er).

So, a lot of ambivalent attitudes. Also, from the 3^rd century the church started to reinstate Old Testament rules about women being unclean during their period, and it's still common practice in the Orthodox Church to ban women from communion while they're riding the crimson tide. There are also records of men being banned from communion if they had a wet dream the night before (Hi Tom, noticed you didn't go up for communion today, what gives? Well, er...) Also frowned upon is doing the nasty the night before communion, and while you could argue that this is about reverence for the mystery of sex, it contrasts interestingly with rabbinic traditions which see the Sabbath night as the most appropriate time for a bit of how's-your-father.

There's also a suspicion of bodies - especially women's - in the monastic tradition from the 4^th century, but there's also a lot of reverence for the bodies of the sick and the poor. The ascetic tradition (that's the monks with the fasting, chastity, general self-discipline, and occasionally maggots) is often seen as being pretty negative about the body, and while there's definitely a bit of that, ascetic practice is perhaps better understood as a struggle to discipline the body so that it can be saved rather than because it's bad. Symeon, one of the Desert Fathers, once said, 'my hand is Christ, my foot is Christ, my penis is Christ.' So there.

There's also a long tradition of seeing the heart as the centre of the human person. Macarius uses the heart as a symbol for the whole person, and its seen as the place where the intellect is located and where grace enters us. Greek tradition often sees as the heart as the seat of thought, and tend to say that the true fullness of our hearts is hidden even from us. The prayer of the heart is, in the Byzantine tradition, prayer of the whole person, including the body and God's spirit praying within us, so to 'enter' or 'discover' the heart comes to represent the reintegration of our personhood in God.

Photo credit: treviño on Flickr