I have already explained, that I consider myself to be alone in this nation, and in this existence. And that, my closest associate, is another who I consider and believe to be, God. By far and away, in my active life and meditative life, the most important other person is God; and, I consider myself to be in a dependent relation to him. That’s how I live, and I imagine that many or all other people live in this way, whether they see that God is a person, or whether they hide his person under a number of surrogates and illusions. For instance, I think that many people, when they look around them in their solitude, think of the government as the mighty agent on whom everything else depends. For me, as I have explained, this is not so.
The God I imagine, and depend on, is one with a personality; he is the God with three parts in one, as he is described in the accepted Orthodox theology, described in the Apostle’s Creed. I can appreciate that there are many reasons why my view could seem outdated, or quite rare in our time. One of those reasons is, that people overestimate the power of the socialist and international state; by sheer power, size, and omnipresence, the government can seem to people, to have the appearance of a divine power; and in Britain, this is more certain to be the case, since the Establishment and the class system it still roughly engenders, gives to the state, an prevalence and acceptance, which it has in few other countries; and this could lead unreflective people, to no longer seek after the source of their intimation of, a truly divine scaffolding holding up their life.
But people who have no fear of God, can be so settled in their ignorance, for other reasons, beside their love of the government and its apparent beneficent power. One of them is, that they do not consider themselves to be alone and at the centre of life. And so, they never ask the question usually framed in these terms: “Why am I here?” If anyone has no sense of the importance and unique individual quality of his life, and does not perceive the centrality of his existence, to the existence of everything and everyone else, and how the entire world only exists as it does, as he knows it, in his conception of it, then that man will not follow me, in looking for the source of his existence. And, I think, from my observations, that a large percentage of people, are unreflective and negatively selfless in this way. They lead a life of rivalry with other people, and consider themselves one of a set of people with whom they bear comparison, rather than a life where they value themselves for their own sake, irrespective of other people. And, a person without a self, cannot be a Christian, since the Christian religion is about finding your eternal soul, being a complete unit, looking after your eternal self and individual fate, as a conscious and responsible person.
But I am also aware of thoughtful people, who know that they are alive, and who value their consciousness and individuality, who nevertheless think that certain discoveries about human prehistory, contradict the notion of God as a creator, and so they refuse to commune with God for that reason. To my mind, to my way of looking at it, and from what I have learned and seen, the Earth came into existence around four billion years ago, and it seems possible but not conclusively proven, that the universe as a whole is expanding, at a rate which shows that it was brought into existence perhaps fifteen billion years ago.
For some people, who see the creation of the world as I have just described, this history of the universe, contradicts the story told in the bible, and without much more reflection on the matter, they consider the bible to be closed. They can, with justice, say that the bible was written by human beings, and is not accurate. And that therefore, they don’t know or care about God. Since the sources of our information about God are from own deductions, and Scripture, and the Church, and since they do not think of these three things as sufficient, they turn from the notion of God entirely.
I have also found that Orthodox Christians, by contrast, accept the story of Genesis, and deny that the world is fifteen billions years old, who say that it is not possible to be both a Christian, and to deny the literal truth of the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But I would think it wrong, to take the Genesis story as the literal truth of creation, for, there is convincing evidence, that human beings such as I am, are very distant descendants of creatures which came to life on earth perhaps two billion years ago, rather than the six or seven thousand years ago, which Genesis tells us about.
I now propose to describe the reconciliation of the provable fact, that life first emerged on earth around two billions years ago, and that the earth itself started to form around four billion years ago, with the idea, that God created the world and man. There is no reason to try to exhaust the proofs, or the grounds for believing, that the earth has developed and changed over several billion years; or that animal life, of which we are part, has also changed and developed, over an only moderately smaller period of time. To attempt to explain, in this day, why I believe that the sun is far older than six thousand years old, as an object, would indicate that I were dealing with people, who have a fixed and immovable denial of what observation of nature, can teach us.
After that, I want to explain how I think it is, when one is Christian; and how to become a better Christian. I think that it is a perfectly rational belief, that God created the world for man, and that God became man in the form of Jesus. I can also show, how to become a better Christian or more Christian, according to how it is described in the New Testament; and finally, I can show why the Church is the proper way of organising your life, so that you interact with other people through the Church, so as in part, to avoid and diminish the State.
It is my idea, that politics should be delimited to the discussion and approval, of the collection of taxes for war and defence, and for the functions of law and order, and for little more than that. And, that the other functions of men when they come together, should be left to the individual under basic laws, and to men as a members of the Church. This, I think, is a classical liberal political position, and an Orthodox Christian attitude toward the Church.
There is no reason why, anyone who knows about geology, and biology, and chemistry, in such a way that they know about evolution or creation of animal types and species, the ancient existence of the earth and stars, and the interaction of animals and man with his environment which encourage the development or evolution of our species over time, should not also believe in the Christian God, or the God of the Old Testament. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. If we read Genesis in the spirit in which it was written, as a short and direct statement that God made the world, then there is no reason to get hung up about why the Bible didn’t state, the scientific objective truth. It did nto state the objective truth, since the people who wrote it, had not been informed about the truth, by either God or experience and observation. Simply, the writers of Genesis did not know about science, and so they did not write Genesis with the benefit of it. God did not think that the precise way of his creation needed to be known by men at that time; it is hardly as if men know it properly at this time.
Scripture can only with a great deal of dishonesty be said to be, the actual word of God. I know that Milton and other puritans, believed that God wrote the Scriptures; but they were motivated to believe this, because they had no other source of authority and tradition, on which to depend. Because they had discarded the Church, they had to cling more fiercely to the Scripture. But, unless God spoke precisely to particular men to inform them, scrupulously what to write, then the Scriptures cannot be the exact word of God. And, as we know, the Bible is freely translated, and was freely translated, into different languages, even at the time when it was composed. Since we know that the New Testament was composed and put together in Church councils and by some particular saints, who discarded other texts and gospels, while cherishing the ones we know about, then we can see, that Origen and Irenaeus were not receiving the direct word of God; rather, they were editing the large number of gospels and letters and documents, which were at hand, as men would do. I do not deny, indeed it is essential to my view, that the editing process was assisted by the Holy Spirit; but that they were as it were, entirely possessed by God while selecting texts, or that the writers Matthew, John and the others, where possessed to write, seems implausible to me. Matthew and the others, have not even set down such words as these: “God gave me these words to write down”. And, I think it is improper to claim, that any saint, heard the Gospel as words whispered directly into his ear. On the contrary, we generally read St John or St Mark, not as men who had the Gospel given to them by God, but as men who either remembered Christ, or learned about him from Peter, or Paul, or other witnesses.
Likewise, the history of the Jews is a fact we can trust in; that there are Jews, and that they existed at the time of the Captivity, and that they wrote what they thought of as their history, is beyond question. But that the Jews, when they wrote that history, were inspired by the actual hand of God, directly, and unerringly, is to my mind, an idolatry; it is to make of the Scripture some kind of divine object in its own self. The Old Testament has clearly been edited, particularly in the case of Isaiah and Jeremiah, as examples; and the Pentateuch was composed not by Moses, but mostly during the Captivity, and on the basis of other creation stories heard around the fertile crescent, at a time when the Jews needed urgently to set down their national identity and memory, so as to survive as a people. I do not deny, that God may have inspired them to do so, but when they wrote, they did so as mere men.
The authority of the Church, and the truth about what God wants from us, does not come even for the most part from the Scriptures. It also comes from tradition, and the inherited behaviour of the early Church; it also comes from councils, where theological matters, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, were decided. So it is, that the importance of the Virgin, not mentioned to any great extent in the Scriptures, has rightly increased, due to tradition, and the life after Christ’s time on earth, rather than for any other cause in the written Scriptures.
The most significant thing about being a Christian is not obedience to the Scriptures, nor even the tradition. It is the relationship of a self to himself, and to God. This is something which cannot really be taught with words, but only by practice, and praying. Which is why the Church is equal in importance to Scripture. Christ, in my way of understanding what he means, did not or could not tell us, in merely human language, what the meaning of being a follower of Christ means, except by actions. He was born, he worked miracles, he died on the Cross, and was resurrected; he gave a message about the kingdom, he showed how by a certain practice of withdrawal and humility, men could move toward perfection, out of sin, and toward eternal life. And, additionally, he influences men in later times, and our own time, in the individual life.
And so, what matters most about existence, takes place in the individual, in a way which is hard to describe, but easy to experience, but only experienced on an individual and solitary basis. Hence, it is not something which is easy or possible, to communicate or set down in a book. Certainly, by its nature, this experience cannot be objectively tested, proven, or measured. Subjective experience is forever cut off from outside investigation by other people. Being a Christian and being alive, involves the preconditions for the world, rather than anything in the world. It is about consciousness, and aiming the mind at God. I would say, that the Old Testament shows people how to behave as a nation, and the New Testament shows how to behave as an individual. Through individuality, you will be saved.
Now, if we consider what the story of creation via natural selection means, in this framework; I can happily say, that it is not impossible for me, to accept that God created the world via a long circuitous and creative means.
I have spoken with other Christians about this, and even while they do accept the Genesis story, we can agree, that the whole of creation, either way, is an objective miracle and clouded by mystery. Whether we think of the world created in six days, a few thousand years ago; or whether we prefer that it was created around fifteen billion years ago, in a cosmic explosion, the same incomprehensible mystery surrounds this problem, that there is anything in existence at all. And, seen from the perspective of a living person, with only limited powers of experience and communication and thought, the problem will only ever be answered theoretically. Belief and trust and deduction, always play their respective parts, no matter what the answer is.
It would be characteristically proud of an antagonistic scientific type of person, to say we are sure of how the world was created; that certainty in the large picture and the small details, is not as certain as they claim. What distinguishes their attitude, is that they are proud, not that they are right. The certainty, which is entirely unwarranted, is more important to such people, than the knowledge and the position of wanting to know the truth. And the arrogant claims of atheists, are misplaced and harmful. Not least because, this arrogance is a block to becoming humble and prayerful in the soul, which is what is more important, that the objective story of creation, as far as Christians are concerned. Indeed, scientific objectivity also demands, a questioning and humble approach to reality, which is lacking in the assertions usually spoken by people antagonistic to God.
Christians must not claim to know the truth about the creation story, with firmness and conviction; that’s the same kind of disastrous pride which the atheists have. And, besides, the important thing about being alive, is that one is an individual, and that one is oneself, the origin of the world to the extent, that only through consciousness, can anything even be perceived to have happened, or be known about. This remains demonstrably the case: that any particular man, is or can become, the friend of God, and the sole creator of the world, by his openness to experience and consciousness. Hence, the central claim of Christianity, is that it can show the truth of consciousness. While, because it is not a physical object, this area of study is forever, and on principle, not something that material sciences can ever even reveal for study, let alone investigate objectively.
We are consciousness, because God is conscious. That is all we can say with certainty. Science must, with trouble and some humility, accept the first half of the statement; and Christianity must in addition, provide the second half, as the only sufficient explanation. The precise details of the creation of the world, are kind of second order importance, beside this inexplicable and uncircumventable and utterly true fact.
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I would now try, to describe the method of meditation, by which one becomes more Christian, and closer to God. And this is work, which I find hard. I have done so elsewhere, but the effort is so personal, in writing it down, that it drains me; and besides, the method is simple, so simple, that I feel a sense of weariness in trying express once again, what is so close and obvious to me, but yet so secret and obscure. I set this alongside the method of becoming a better Christian, which consists in going to an Orthodox liturgy on a regular basis. Both are valid, and although it is not my method of spreading the word, to speak of the Orthodox Church at length, that is only because I am not sufficiently educated in it, or not an authority on it. It is not because I disregard its importance to a Christian life, of taking part in the sacraments of the Church.
One should sit, alone, in your closet at it were; and prepare for around twenty or thirty minutes of undisturbed sitting. Then, with closed eyes, wish well one by one, in a litany, all people near and far, beginning with oneself, and ending with one’s enemies. And then, begin to recite silently, a short prayer, namely this one: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”, but this prayer is not so important as this: to simply breath softly, from the stomach, and through the nose, and to let the mind watch the breathing, constantly, without great effort, but without distraction, in order to let the body and mind fall silent, and yet attentive.
The distraction tends to be quite hard on people who first attempt to do this. They are assaulted by thoughts, which attempt to make them give up the exercise. Typical questions and voices arise, in the first few attempts at praying, which directly instruct the one doing it, to stop it. Or, the mind suggests reasons to the one praying, why he should stop. These are what you might call demons, or, at any rate, they are the common everyday personality, complaining while the greater consciousness pushes it out.
The new consciousness, which observes the breathing, cannot be the mind. If anyone thinks that the mind can watch itself, then I would ask him to explain, how any single object, can simultaneously be something else, because if the mind is watching itself, then that is what must be happening. No, rather, when we start to observe the mind, simultaneously to the activity of the mind, then there must be two intellectual operations at work. Firstly, the autonomous and thinking speaking mind; and then, the other mind, which is able to watch it, while it is watching the prayer and the breathing. This second mind, is what I would call, pure consciousness; it is also what I would call, the real self, the integral and complete, soul. And it is thus, that in basic terms, a man at prayer, is developing and training to be a more conscious soul. We can elaborate, by saying such things as this: that the consciousness is eternal and outside time; that it is free and unmoved by the mind, the heart, the intellect, and so on; it is almost as if it were already dead, since it is detached from the body’s demands, while, admittedly, and strangely, it is linked mysteriously to the body. This consciousness is the spirit, and once it has become a true self, delinked from the everyday motivated, passionate personality of fallen man, then it becomes an eternal self, the centre of all existence. Only God is truly outside this person and self, and when some kind of serenity has been established, I think that God does find welcome in the soul.
The person praying must also simply observe the thoughts, and those thoughts will eventually grow silent. In this way, we see that the praying consciousness, is not the intellect or the mind. For, it is the mind which we aim to put to rest. Thoughts must not be taken seriously, nor be resisted. There must be no violence or effort in the mind. So, we can understand what it means, when it is said: Do not resist evil. Indeed, all the sayings of Jesus, reflect the same imperative, to turn inwards, to withdraw from the outside, to find the kingdom of heaven within you. To be gentle and not resistant.
In the first weeks and months of this practice, sometimes there are truly horrific, previously unknown resistant forces, inside the soul, which rise up. For, one is by this act of praying, building up the soul, becoming a self. And, whatever there is in side the person, which is broken, or malign, or possessive, or competitive, dominant and interested in the world and other people, will eventually show up and force itself into view. And, it is only the work of the one praying, to observe these demonic ideas and visions, to allow them to come, and to watch them undisturbed. Then, they disappear, and one is free of them. One is cured of these disturbances. I think that this is almost miraculous, and a power of the soul which cannot be described, or understood other than in religious way: by becoming observant and at peace, one is also cured of psychological illness and distress. I also find, that when the prayer is over, these worldly and distracting dominating ideas remain absent, and cured; so long as there is no pride in the achievement of the one praying, he can take with him, the new work of soul and self, which he has accomplished.
Over the years, progress has been hard for me. And, in recent years, maybe after a year of practice, my aim, has been simply to be close to the Holy Spirit, since, this prayer is precisely that: to be in such a condition of peace, that God finds us favourable. One might see the Holy fire. One might see the future and the past as if one had been there, but these are not magic tricks. When I pray and want help from God, and he gives me foresight or insight, I don’t want these things so that I can get a lottery number, or the power to predict things where other people will fail. On the contrary, whatever gifts there might possibly be, are for me alone. And that self to which they are given, is more and more remote from any concern with what in the world is thought of as useful. Rather, God has all things in mind, and if we are ready, and we share his mind, then we may be allowed to share in that mind. But again, whether that happens or not, is not something one aims at. The achievement is not to have seen with God’s eyes, but rather, this humble and unspeakable gift, to have become God in a human life, and therefore to be almost entirely without any personal selfishness or assertion. To become one with God.
And I say, that the spoken instructions or what is taken to be moral commands of Christ, where they differ from the Scriptural rules and commands of the Old Testament, relate entirely to this new innovation: that Christ was teaching a man how to pray and commune with God the Father, through the Spirit. There are no other moral commands in the New Testament. Christ’s teaching is the fulfilment of the law, it is not by any modification to it, so, where the Law had said that one must respect property, and honour Father and Mother; the New Testament, when it denies property and denies that anyone should respect Father and Mother, is not contradicting the Law; rather, it is setting out the means by which one enters the spiritual world of praying. Somebody who can pray, is able to approach to the perfection of the humanity; and that is the capstone of the building of the Law, and what God wanted the Law to aim at. It fulfils the law, by bringing human beings into the same being, as God. And, at the same time, as regards who men shall act in the world, they will refer to the commands of the Old Testament.
I say no more here. In some other place, I should devote a long study about method, meaning and purpose of prayer as I understand it, but here, it is enough to give indications.
I am fascinated, by how what I believe, is the same as what Kierkegaard believes. We both locate the supreme unit of value, the location of the struggle to be a Christian in the New Testament prayerful sense, in the single lonely individual. But his approach and method were not the same as mine. And, I believe that he did not approach God in the same way in practice, as me. But he did so in theory. Kierkegaard insists on the passionate intensity of faith; on the urgency of following the New Testament in its unworldliness; as if faith will reveal the soul and spiritual perfection of a man. And yet, he does not show how to do this. He says that one must be intense in faith, and he explains why, but he never shows how. I have struggled, until I learned to pray in a methodical way, to see how to put into practice what Kierkegaard has said so well and truthfully, about how it is to be a Christian; and, perhaps he himself struggled to put into practice, what he put into words so perfectly and so passionately.
And, that is the point of the Love, which is useful to us, and which St Paul explains. God loves us, and God requires us to love one another. Yet, love does not seem to me to be the absolute meaning of human life. Love is the means by which we recognise in other people, the divine value.
And it is thus, that St Paul, in his letter to the Corinthains, praises and tells them to love; so as to get along with each other, in their differences and with their various skills. Some can pray, some can speak, some are strong in body; some are wealthy; some capable of prophecy or intellectual work; there is no hierarchy, no demand that they be all the same, able to pray with the same skill. They should accept their differences and love one another. But it does not seem to me, that this is the central core of Christ’s message. The central message cannot be, that people should join together, and love one another. I cannot deny, that rules such as this, are found in the Old Testament. But I have denied that Christ gave any rules for practical things; his rules were for spiritual perfection.
So, what is the rule of love, which St Paul teaches, other than this: when you set up a Church, it will be founded on love between the members. But as for the perfection of the soul, there, love has a different function, and relates more to how a man will experience God, and how God will treat him. And this is different from the rules aboutr how Christians will behave toward each other.
The love of other people seems to me to have been best expressed, in its deepest form and purpose, in the Christian perspective, by those high intellects of the culture of the Christian Middle Ages, the origins of the individualistic self-development of the culture of Renaissance in Italy, Dante and Cavalcanti. They were individuals and solitaries. They gave voice to the dominant intellectual religion of the high Middle Ages, which was prevalent and Christian, across all Europe. Chivalrous love, romantic love was something they aspired to, as what you might think of as individual knights and men of Florence; and what they valued in love, was this: that when they saw in another person, they sometimes, but rarely, and perhaps only once, saw the same infinite value that they felt in their own soul; when they saw in another person the light of God, which they could not see in themselves, because the eye cannot see itself, then that divine value of another person, was seen as beauty; and the reason they were drawn to that person who was shining with the ideal beauty of God in the soul, was that it allowed them to see the divine influence and presence; and this relationship to another person, usually a young woman, they called Amor, or romantic love; it is because it was a spiritual vision of another person, that it was forbidden or illogical, to make the love physical. And as we know, that romantic love, was never consummated, and was never meant to be consummated. They saw in a human being, the divine presence; and, properly, the same divine presence is in every person who has been created and lives, by God.
In effect, love is this: seeing the eternal soul of a person, and recognising God there; usually in the form of beauty. It is of course, also the simple acceptance of other people, Christians, in the church.
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