Mystagogy 1 part 1/13

Volume. MYSTAGOGY. Concerning what symbols the rites celebrated in the holy Church at the synaxis [eucharistic assembly] are appointed to be.

PROLOGUE. "The wise man, taking an occasion, becomes wiser, and the righteous, gaining understanding, will increase his capacity to receive"—according to the divine proverb. You yourself, most honored of all to me, have clearly demonstrated this very thing by experience, teaching by deed what the divine word wisely intimates.

For once, when you heard me—cursorily and as briefly as was possible—recounting what had been beautifully and mystically contemplated by another great elder, one truly wise in divine things, concerning the holy Church and the holy synaxis celebrated in it, and recounted as instructively as I could, you urgently demanded that I make for you a written narration of these things, wishing to have the writing as a remedy against forgetfulness and an aid to memory; for, you said, time by nature subdues memory,

and, through the forgetfulness of what has been stored up, is able imperceptibly to plunder and utterly obliterate the impressions and images. For this reason it altogether needs a renewing means, by which the power of the word, perpetually in its prime, naturally preserves the memory unimpaired and undiminished.

(Note: There is also an indication of the page of the Patrology (==) when the text derives from there.)

...to hear, and to seek the unshaken permanence of what has been heard, is wiser—this everyone surely knows who cares even a little for rational nobility, and who is not altogether a stranger to intimacy with the word.

And I, for my part, at the outset hesitated, declining the undertaking of the discourse—for the truth will be told;

not because I was unwilling, beloved, to give you by every means and according to my ability what your heart desires, but because I had neither partaken of the grace that leads the worthy to this, nor had any experience of the power and practice of speaking, having been reared in unlettered simplicity and being wholly uninitiated in the arts of rhetoric—those discourses that have their charm in mere delivery, in which most people especially delight, confining their pleasure to the hearing, even if often they contain nothing of true value in depth;

and—to speak more properly and more truly—because I feared lest by the meanness of our discourse I should do violence to that blessed man's lofty eloquence and insight concerning divine things.

Nevertheless, at length I yielded to the constraint of love, which is stronger than all, and willingly accepted the command, choosing rather to be laughed at by the fault-finders for presumption and lack of learning on account of my compliance, than to be thought, by my delay, unwilling to share with you my eagerness in every good thing. I cast upon God my anxiety about how to speak—upon Him who alone works wonders, who teaches man knowledge, who makes clear the tongue of the stammerers, who devises a way for those in straits, who raises the poor from the earth and lifts the needy from the dunghill;

I mean from the carnal mind and from the foul-smelling mire of the passions;

that is, the one poor in spirit, or the one who is impoverished of evil and destitute of the disposition toward it; or, on the contrary, the one still held fast by the law of the flesh and by the passions, and on this account poor and destitute of the grace that is according to virtue and knowledge.

For it is presumptuous and arrogant, and close to madness, for one who can neither contain nor comprehend that man's teaching to attempt his works, and to put forward as his own the mysteries divinely revealed to that man alone through the Spirit. Rather, [I shall set forth] only such things as were left by him, in his love of mankind and by God's will, as graspable for others also, for the exposition and exercise of their own disposition toward divine things according to their longing; through which the all-radiant ray of the things being celebrated, being contemplated proportionately by them, becomes familiar and holds to itself those who are seized with desire—so that those who come after him may not be wholly idle through all the day of the present life's time, lacking the word that hires them for that divine vine-dressing, the word that pays back, for the spiritual labor of the spiritual vineyard, the spiritual denarius of the divine and most royal image, which was plundered at the beginning by the evil one through deceit at the transgression of the commandment.

I do not undertake to relate in order all the things mystically contemplated by the blessed elder;

nor even the very things spoken, as they were conceived and uttered by him.

For he—besides being a philosopher and a teacher of all learning—through the abundance of his virtue and through his more long-standing and more scientific practice and diligent toil concerning divine things, had set himself free from the bonds of matter and from the fancies arising from it; and so he fittingly had his intellect illumined round about by the divine rays, and on this account able straightway to behold what is not seen by the many, and to have the word as a most exact interpreter of what he had conceived;

and being strong in speech, so that the hearers could see the whole intellect borne aloft upon the word,

and could receive all the things conceived made manifest purely in the whole intellect and conveyed across to them through the mediation of the word.

But [I shall relate] only such things as I carry in memory, and as I am able to conceive dimly and to express still more dimly—yet reverently, by the grace of God who illumines what is darkened.

For I do not suppose that you—who know how to judge justly—ought to think that I am able to conceive or to speak otherwise than as I am able to conceive and speak and as the grace from above grants, the power proportioned to me being fittingly provided, even though he who handed it down and taught it is most exalted.

Since to demand equal things from those who are not equal in virtue and knowledge seems to me to be not far from those who attempt to prove that the moon gives light equally with the sun;

and from those who try to force things that do not at all correspond to one another in every respect to be capable of corresponding—which is impracticable and impossible.

But let God preside over the things said and conceived—He who alone is the Intellect of those who understand and of the things understood, the Word of those who speak and of the things spoken, the Life of those who live and of the things made alive, and who is and becomes all things to all, for the sake of the very things that are and that come to be;

but for His own sake in no way whatsoever either being or becoming any one of the things that are and that come to be, inasmuch as He is by nature ranked together with no existing thing at all; and on this account, rather than "being," He admits the "not-being"—because of His being-beyond-being—as more properly said of Him.

I mean both "being" and "not-being."

Both, indeed, in the proper sense: for the affirmation of God's "being," as cause of beings, posits it; while the affirmation of His cause-by-transcendence removes "being" from Him as belonging to all beings;

and, again, neither in the proper sense, since neither presents the positing of the very essence and nature—of the "what-it-is"—of the one being sought.

For to Him with whom nothing whatsoever is by nature conjoined as cause—whether being or non-being—to Him nothing of the things that are and are spoken of, nor of the things that are not and are not spoken of, is fittingly near.

For He has His existence simple and unknowable and inaccessible to all and utterly inexplicable, being beyond all affirmation and negation.

And so much concerning these matters;

but let us come to the proposed subject of the discourse.

How and in what manner the holy Church is an image and type of God. The blessed elder used to say that the holy Church, according to a first application of contemplation, bears the type and image of God, as having the same operation as His by imitation and figure;

[the Church] which annuls and overshadows all the particular relations contemplated according to the nature of each of the beings—not by destroying them and abolishing them and making them not to be, but by overcoming and outshining them, as a whole does its parts, or rather as the very cause of the whole shows forth, according to which both the whole itself and the parts of the whole naturally appear and exist, since they have their entire cause outshining them; and just as the sun, outshining the stars in both nature and power, so [the Church] conceals their existence as that of effects, since it is their cause.

For just as the parts naturally derive from the whole, so too the effects derive from the cause both their being in the proper sense and their being known, and have their own particularity in abeyance, whenever, encompassed by their reference to the cause, they are wholly qualified [by it];

according to the one power, as has been said, of their relation toward it.

For being all in all, God who is beyond all by infinite measures, will be seen as utterly alone by those pure in mind;

when the intellect, gathering up contemplatively the inner principles (logoi) of beings, comes to rest in God Himself, as the cause and origin and end of the production and genesis of all things, and the unextended foundation of the embracing of all.

In the same manner the holy Church of God too will be shown, as an image after the archetype, to be doing the same things about us as God does.

For though there are many and almost numberless men and women and children, distinguished and greatly differing from one another in race and form, in nations and tongues, in modes of life and ages, in opinions and crafts, in manners and characters and pursuits, in sciences and dignities, in fortunes and characteristics and habits—of all those who come into her and are reborn and re-created by her through the Spirit, she bestows and graciously gives to all equally one divine form and appellation: to be from Christ and to be named after Him;

and one relation—according to faith—simple and indivisible and undivided, which does not even allow the many and countless differences belonging to each person to be recognized as existing at all, because of the universal reference and convergence of all into her; according to which no one at all is in any way separated from the common body, since all are grown together with one another and joined according to the one simple and indivisible grace and power of faith.

"For," it says, "the heart and soul of all was one";

so that, as out of different members, they are and are seen to be one body, truly worthy even of Christ Himself, our true Head.

"In whom," says the divine Apostle [Paul], "there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave nor free;

but Christ is all and in all"—He who encloses all things within Himself by the one simple and infinitely wise power of His goodness, like a center from which certain straight lines radiating from it depend; who, by the one simple and unitary cause and power, does not allow the beginnings of beings to be sundered from their ends, but circumscribes their extensions in a circle and draws to Himself the bounds of beings and of the things that have come to be by Him;

so that the creatures and works of the one God may not be utterly alien and hostile to one another, having nothing in relation to which and toward which they may show forth what is friendly and peaceful and identical toward each other, and lest their very being too should be endangered, falling away into non-being by being separated from God.

God, as has been shown, soothing and rendering identical the difference about them by their reference and union toward Himself as cause and origin and end.

How and in what manner the holy Church of God is an image of the cosmos that subsists out of visible and invisible substances. According to a second application of contemplation, he used to say that the holy Church of God is a type and image of the whole cosmos, which subsists out of visible and invisible substances, as admitting the same union and distinction as it.

For just as she, being according to her construction one house, receives a differentiation according to a certain particularity in the position of her structure, being divided into the place set apart for priests and ministers alone, which we call the sanctuary, and the place left free for all the faithful people to enter, which we call the nave; yet again she is one according to her hypostasis [subsistence], not divided along with her own parts on account of the difference of the parts from one another, but rather, by their reference toward her own oneness, she releases even these parts from the difference belonging to their designation, and shows both to be identical to one another, and declares each to be by interchange what the other is constituted as being in itself: the nave being the sanctuary in potency, consecrated by its reference toward the goal of the mystagogy, and conversely the sanctuary being the nave in actuality, having in it the beginning of its own mystagogy; and through both she remains one and the same.

Thus also the whole cosmos of beings, brought forth from God by genesis, being divided into the intelligible cosmos, filled up out of intellectual and incorporeal substances, and into this sensible and bodily one, magnificently woven together out of many forms and natures, is, as it were, another Church not made with hands, wisely intimated through this one made with hands; having as its sanctuary, as it were, the world above, allotted to the powers on high, and as its nave the world below, assigned to those whose lot is to live by sense-perception.

Again, there is one cosmos, not divided along with its own parts;

On the contrary, He circumscribes even the natural difference of the parts themselves that arises from their particularity, by relating them to His own oneness and indivisibility; He shows them to be identical both with themselves and with one another, alternating without confusion, the one wholly embedded in the other as a whole, and both filling up the whole of Him as parts fill out one thing, while they themselves are filled out, in respect to Him as a whole, uniformly and totally as parts.

For the whole intelligible world appears, mystically imprinted through symbolic forms, upon the whole sensible world, to those who have eyes to see;

and the whole sensible world subsists within the whole intelligible world, made simple in a knowing manner according to the intellect by means of the inner principles.

For the former exists in the latter through its inner principles, and the latter exists in the former through its impressed types;

and their work is one, as it were 'a wheel within a wheel,' as Ezekiel, the wondrous beholder of great things, says — speaking, I think, about these two worlds.

For 'the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,' says the divine Apostle.

And if the things not seen are beheld through the things that appear, as it is written, then much more, for those who devote themselves to spiritual contemplation, will the things that appear be understood through the things that are not seen.

For the symbolic contemplation of intelligible realities by means of visible things is, in turn, the spiritual knowledge and understanding of visible things by means of the invisible.

That the holy Church of God is also an image of the sensible world taken by itself. And again he used to say that the holy Church of God is, by itself, a symbol of the sensible world alone, having the divine sanctuary as its heaven and possessing the beauty of the nave as its earth.

And in like manner he said the world too is a Church:

having heaven, which is like a sanctuary, and having for its nave the ordered arrangement of things upon the earth.

How and in what manner the holy Church of God symbolically images man, and is itself imaged by him as by a man. And again, according to another mode of contemplation, he said that the holy Church of God is a man, having the sanctuary as its soul,

the divine altar as its intellect, and the nave as its body, since it exists as an image and likeness of man, who was made according to the image and likeness of God. Through the nave, as through a body, it sets forth moral philosophy; through the sanctuary, as through a soul, it expounds natural contemplation spiritually; and through the divine altar, as through the intellect, it enters into mystical theology.

And conversely, man is a mystical Church, in that through the body, as through a nave, he makes the soul's active power radiant with virtue by the workings of the commandments according to moral philosophy;

and through the soul, as through a sanctuary, he carries up to God by means of reason the inner principles of sense-perception, purely cleansed of matter in the Spirit according to natural contemplation; and through the intellect, as through an altar, he summons forth — by another speaking and many-voiced silence — the much-hymned silence of the Godhead, the silence of that unseen and unknown great-voicedness in the innermost sanctuary; and as far as is possible for man, according to mystical theology, he communes with that silence and becomes such as one ought to be who has been deemed worthy of God's coming-to-dwell and has been sealed with His all-radiant splendors.

How and in what manner, again, when the soul is considered by itself, the holy Church of God is an image and type of it. And he taught that the holy Church can be an image not only of the whole man, composed, I mean, of soul and body by composition, but also of the soul itself considered by itself in reason.

For since he affirmed that the soul is, in general, constituted of an intellective power and a vital power,

and that the intellective power moves authoritatively according to the will, while the vital power abides naturally as it is, without deliberate choice;

and again, that to the intellective power belong both the contemplative and the practical;

and he said that the contemplative is called the intellect (nous),

and that of the intellective power the intellect is the moving element, while of the vital power the reason (logos) is the providential element;

so that it may preserve the soul's movements toward God;

and that the reason (logos), likewise, both is and is called prudence (phronesis), when, having joined to the intellect by its activities the vital power which it governs providentially, it shows it, in temperate wisdom, to be undifferentiated from the intellect;

for it then bears, identical with the intellect and like it, the reflection of the divine through virtue, which reflection he said is naturally apportioned to both the intellect and the reason;

so that the soul is rather seen to be constituted primarily out of the intellect and the reason, as both intellective and rational,

the vital power, that is to say, being contemplated equally in both — I mean in both the intellect and the reason;

for it is not permissible to think that either of these is devoid of life, since the vital power is shared by both. Through it, the intellect — which we also said is called wisdom (sophia) — being unfolded in the contemplative habit by an ineffable silence and knowledge, is led toward truth by an unforgetting and unending knowledge; while the reason — which we called prudence (phronesis) — terminates, in the practical habit, bodily, according to virtue, in the good, through faith.

From both of these is constituted the true knowledge of things divine and human — that knowledge which is truly without stumbling, and the consummation of all the most divine philosophy of Christians.

And, to speak about these matters more clearly: he said that one part of the soul is contemplative, as has been stated, and the other practical;

and the contemplative he called intellect (nous), the practical reason (logos), as being the soul's primary powers;

and again, the intellect he called wisdom (sophia), and the reason prudence (phronesis), as being its primary activities.

And in the rational part there are: reason, prudence, praxis (action), virtue, faith; and the end of these is the good.

And he said that the truth and the good signify God — but the truth when the divine seems to be denoted from the side of its essence;

for the truth is a thing simple, unique, one, identical with itself, partless, unchanging, impassible, never deceiving, and wholly without interval.

but the good, when the divine is denoted from the side of its activity.

For the good is beneficent and provident of all things that come from it, and protective — being called 'good' (agathon) from 'being exceedingly' (agan), or from 'having been set' (tetheisthai), or from 'running' (theein), according to the opinion of those who etymologize — bestowing upon all beings their being, their continuance, and their movement.

He therefore said that the five conjugate pairs (syzygies) understood concerning the soul converge upon the one conjugate pair that signifies God.

By a 'conjugate pair' I now mean: the intellect and the reason; wisdom and prudence; contemplation and praxis; knowledge and virtue; unforgetting knowledge and faith.

And the pair signifying the divine: truth and the good;

by which, as the soul moves forward in progression, it is united to the God of all things, imitating the unchangeableness and beneficence of His essence and activity, through a habit fixed and immovable in the good according to its deliberate choice.

And — to mix in a little fitting contemplation of these things — perhaps this is the divine decad of the strings of the intelligible psaltery of the soul, which has reason re-echoing to the Spirit through the other blessed decad of the commandments, and which intelligibly produces those perfect, harmonious, and tuneful notes by which God is hymned;

so that I may learn what is the inner principle (logos) of the singing decad and of the decad that is sung, and how a decad, mystically united and joined to a decad, leads back to Himself Jesus, my God and Savior, who is filled up through me who am being saved — Him who is ever most full and can never go out from Himself — and restores me, the man, wondrously to myself, or rather to God, from whom I have received my being and toward whom I press, longing to receive in addition, from afar, my well-being.

Whoever has been able to know this will assuredly come to know it from experiencing the things spoken of, having already clearly recognized through experience his own dignity: how the 'according to the image' is rendered back to the image, how the archetype is honored, what is the power of the mystery of our salvation, and for whose sake Christ died;

and how again we can abide in Him, and He in us, as He said; and how 'the word of the Lord is upright, and all His works are done in faithfulness.'

But let us bring the discourse back to the sequence of the argument, being content with these things concerning these matters.

For he affirmed that the intellect, moved by wisdom, proceeds to contemplation;

and through contemplation, to knowledge;

and through knowledge, to unforgetting knowledge;

and through unforgetting knowledge, to the truth;

concerning which the intellect receives the limit of its movement, since its essence, power, habit, and activity are all circumscribed for it therein.

For he said that wisdom is the power of the intellect, and that the intellect itself is wisdom in potency;

and that knowledge is its activity;

and that unforgetting knowledge is the perpetual, habitual motion concerning the knowable that surpasses all knowledge — a motion of wisdom, contemplation, and knowledge, that is, of power, habit, and activity — a motion that never ceases, whose end, as the unforgettable knowable, is truth.

And this is worthy of wonder: how that which is unforgetting comes to rest, being circumscribed — or rather, manifestly being bounded as by God who is truth;

for God is the truth, around whom the intellect, moving unceasingly and without forgetting, can never come to rest from its motion, finding no limit where there is no interval.

For the wondrous magnitude of the divine infinity is without quantity, indivisible, and wholly without extension, and admits no comprehension whatsoever that could reach to knowing what it is according to its essence.

And that which has no interval or comprehension is in no way bounded by anything.

Likewise the reason (logos), moved through prudence, proceeds to action; through action to virtue; and through virtue to faith — that truly firm and unfailing assurance of divine things;

which faith reason possesses first in potency according to prudence, and afterwards displays in actuality according to virtue, through its manifestation in works.

For faith without works is something dead, as it is written;

and no one of sound mind would ever dare to call anything dead and inactive worthy to be numbered among good things.

For he affirmed that prudence is the power of reason;

and that reason itself is prudence in potency;

and virtue is its activity;

and that faith is the inward, unchanging fixity of prudence, action, and virtue — that is, of power, habit, and activity;

whose utmost end is the good, in which reason, ceasing from its motion, comes to rest.

For God is the good, in whom every power of every reason naturally finds its bound.

But how and in what manner each of these is achieved and brought into activity, and which of them is opposed to or akin to each, and to what degree — to distinguish and discuss this does not belong to the present subject.

[When the soul has so done], then it too will be united to God who is true and good, the one and only One, becoming beautiful and magnificent, and as far as possible conformed to Him by the perfection of the four generic virtues, which manifest the divine decade according to the soul, and which contain the other blessed decade of the commandments.

And again, the same soul becomes a monad, containing the good in unitary fashion by way of convergence, and displaying within itself the simple and indivisible character of the divine activity as undividedly distributed;

by these the soul has vigorously preserved what is its own inviolate, and has manfully thrust away what is alien as evil — possessing intellect well-reasoned, wisdom prudent, contemplation put into practice, virtuous knowledge, and upon these the unforgetting knowledge most faithful and unfailing alike; and having presented to God the effects joined wisely to their causes, and the activities joined to their powers, it has in return received the deifying power of simplicity.

For reason is the activity and manifestation of the intellect, as the effect is of its cause;

and prudence is that of wisdom, action that of contemplation, virtue that of knowledge, and faith that of unforgetting knowledge;

from these is fashioned the inward disposition toward truth and the good — I mean toward God — which he said to be divine understanding, unerring knowledge, love, and peace, in which and through which deification comes about;

understanding as the completion of all the knowledge of God and divine things attainable by men, and as the unerring possession of the virtues; knowledge as that which has genuinely set foot upon truth and affords an enduring experience of the divine; love as that which according to its disposition wholly partakes of the whole delight of God; and peace as that which experiences the same things as God and prepares those deemed worthy according to it to experience them too.

For if the divine is wholly unmoved, as having nothing whatsoever to disturb it — for what could there be to reach to its height? — and if peace is a stability unshaken and unmoved;

and moreover an untroubled joy;

does not then every soul also experience divine things, the soul that has been deemed worthy to receive the divine peace? — having surpassed not only vice and ignorance, falsehood and wickedness, and the evils opposed to virtue and knowledge, to truth and the good, which subsist alongside the soul's unnatural motions, but already even the very boundaries of virtue and knowledge, of truth and goodness as we have come to know them — if it be lawful to say so — and having, according to His most unfailing promise, ineffably and unknowably laid itself to rest in the most-true and supremely-good bed of God, so that it now has nothing left of the things that naturally disturb it reaching to its hiddenness in God;

according to which blessed and all-holy bed, that awe-inspiring mystery of the union surpassing intellect and reason is accomplished, through which God becomes one flesh and one spirit with the soul [the Church], and the soul with God;

O Christ, how shall I wonder at Your goodness — for I dare not say repay it — I who do not even have power sufficient to wonder worthily?

"For the two shall become one flesh;

and this mystery is great;