“…Many Orthodox Christians live on the horizontal plane. And what do we mean by that? Well, we are encouraged because we grow up in this society which trains us, teaches us, to think and to develop our rational intellect to the zenith, to really work and become people of the διάνοια, the mind and we’re not at all trained, in fact we don’t even admit that it exists, this thing we call the nous in the Orthodox Church.

Which, let me say right off that another way to understand the nous, because it’s a term that many of us do not know are not familiar with it, or it’s very hard to wrap our minds around it, what exactly do we mean by the nous? In scripture, St. Paul uses the term ‘spirit of man’ but the Fathers use the term nous in order to distinguish it from the spirit of God.

But you can also understand the spirit or the eye of the heart also is another term to understand the nous. In contemporary philosophy something that is close to it but not really the same is the intuition, the perception. So the eye of the heart is that which sees and communes with God. It’s not on the level of the rational intellect.

So, what we want to do, and what we must do in the spiritual life is to… yes, many of us became Orthodox, we’re converts… by using, in America especially there’s many converts, by using very well, the rational intellect to learn about Orthodoxy and we continue in many of our catechism… many of our catechetical tools, and the way we do catechism in the Church is essentially learning about Christ, learning about the faith, learning about the Church history. And that’s all very good. That’s only preparatory, however, for the spiritual life. It’s only preparatory.

You can amass great knowledge. You can become a great academic theologian and have no essential initiation into the spiritual life and you can remain spiritless, without purification and illumination. So it is certainly NOT the spiritual life. And just like in the Old Testament we had the law which prepared us for the grace of God, we had the 10 Commandments which prepared us morally and it was a presupposition, prerequisite so to speak for the coming of the incarnate Logos.

It was not the aim, to be a good person in other words, is not the aim or the point of the Church or the incarnation. Moral perfection or moral development is actually like the rational intellect in development. Rationally knowing about God is actually just preparatory. It’s NOT the spiritual life. So we can become really good people. Do a lot of good things and know all about the Church and still be uninitiated into the spiritual life. Or at least the spiritual life remains inactive within us.

So, we have to get beyond that. We have to become people who experience God directly.  So the Lord begins his mission in this earth by saying to us ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.’ And these words we need to unpack because many of us in the English language and within the Protestant… the English language has been, I would say, in many ways poisoned by an experience of God which is not the authentic experience and so we think of terms, without wanting to, within a context which is not the context of the Gospel, is not the context of the faith.

So the term repentance. Let’s look at that. The term repentance, the term Kingdom. We’re also going to look at the term knowledge, πίγνωσης in Greek, which is used by St. Paul to explain what it means to know God. We’ll look at these key terms because they reveal to us more and more about what the true meaning of the spiritual life is.

So the Lord says in the beginning of the spiritual life, of the initiation of the Kingdom of God on earth, the spiritual life, He says ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.’

What does repentance mean? Repentance in Greek is μετάνοια, μετάνοιες is the verb used by St. John in the baptism of our Lord and that means change of nous. Not change of διάνοια, not change of ways of thinking about God only, but much deeper. Change in your spirit, in your whole stance before God. So repentance is a change of orientation, a change of stance that reorients us and… puts us in a position to be able to receive the Kingdom of God, receive Christ within us. It is a change of the nous, not, again, not of the mind.

So it’s not [that] we change our way of thinking about God. So many people associate becoming Orthodox with accepting a certain set of doctrines and opinions or positions about the things of the Church. Actually, that’s not yet the spiritual life, [it] is not yet the Orthodox faith. It’s much deeper. You have to go deeper. And the change has to be in the whole spirit and stance of man. This is what the Lord is… so that we may become able to receive the spirit of God within us and the Kingdom.

Let’s look at the word ‘Kingdom.’ βασιλεία, in Greek, and it really should have been translated as ‘the reign of God’ not the Kingdom. Of course, the Kingdom would have been a perfectly good word if it was not filled with meaning which is foreign to the spirit of the Church. It is not an external thing, a thing of this earth, it’s not a part of the created world but it is the Kingdom of God within us says the Lord says which is the reign of God, the spirit of God that reigns in the nous over the man, over his senses, his imagination, and his rational intellect.

So these things are subjected to the nous which has been reoriented and accepts the spirit of God, and the spirit of man and the spirit of God commune. God reigns within us. Only, however when we have been purified. When we have been made a temple, a vessel which can receive the spirit of God. The spirit of God does not dwell there where there is passions and delusions. The spirit of truth does not dwell and, well, it doesn’t activate and work together with a mind and a stance which is contrary to it. So we have to prepare ourselves to receive it….”

So the theanthropic [both divine and human] nature of the Church, the theanthropic nature of the life in Christ is salvific. When we cooperate with the spirit of God and our virtues are a fruit of this cooperation, then we have salvation. And this is apparent in the lives of the saints. Obviously anyone who has met a holy man or woman who has been purified and illumined understands what I’m going to tell you right now. Their virtues are not a fruit of their activity alone but of the Holy Spirit. And so, therefore you don’t find one thing in them that is compelling. But you find their whole stance, their whole way, the way they look, the way they sit, the way they communicate, as filled with the grace of God. And convicting and transformative. So you see that it is not them alone which is communicating this to you but the Divine grace, the grace of God within them. It is a synergy of spirit and the spirit of God, the divine with the human nature. And so virtues in of themselves are not salvific but virtues which are a fruit of the Holy Spirit are salvific for the person and for others. That’s when the others say, this presence of this person alone, the presence of God alone is convicting and changes me. Not the words they say or the things they do.

“…We understand there’s two kinds of faith. There’s the Orthodox faith which we… confess, which is a presupposition to the spiritual life. We all have to confess this. Why? This is also in doubt today. Many people doubt this is a necessary prerequisite for the spiritual life. Do you really need to confess the Orthodox faith? Because they see the Orthodox faith as an ideology, as an idea. Well, it’s… and they see salvation as being a good person. They think it’s about being a good person. So I can be a good person without saying the ‘I believe in one God,’ the Creed. Why is that a presupposition of the spiritual life? Why is that a presupposition into the initiation of the mysteries?

Because this is reality. This is reality. Reality is that we have one God and three persons. We have the God Who is both God and Man. We have the Church which is one, holy, catholic and apostolic and all the rest of the doctrines and much more. What are they telling us and what are we confessing with the Creed that we read every day in the morning and the evening prayers? REALITY. NOTHING LESS. He revealed to us the reality of the universe, the reality of Himself, the reality of the Truth. And so how can we talk about salvation in the spiritual life if we don’t even accept reality. We do not accept reality. How can you draw near to the person of Christ, the Trinity, if you deny that He is the Trinity and that He IS God and Man? So there is a presupposition about that.

 

If I said to you that I know Fr. Thaddeus and he’s 6′ 5″, has a short beard and doesn’t wear his cassock anywhere. Right? Which is very the opposite. You would say ‘you’re not in reality, Father.’ I’ve met him he’s not like that at all. No, no, no, this is Father Thaddeus. I’ve seen him, I know him you’re not in reality! Then of course we have a problem here. Let’s bring Father Thaddeus in here. Let’s see what he looks like and then we’ll establish reality.

Well, this is exactly the same thing with God. He’s revealed himself. If I stand up and you say ‘the reality is that He is NOT the Trinity but he is what Mohammed says,’ you have to choose. Either Mohammed has it right or the Apostles. Not both of them. And we can’t talk about the same God if we do not describe him as the same God because we know Him by experience. He’s not a philosophical idea we’ve accepted. The minute that we start to say ‘well, maybe they also worship the same God…’ we reveal what? That we don’t know God!! We reveal that we are without grace, that we have not met Him, just as I said, if I said to you He is not anything like what you know, you would have said you haven’t met him yet.

So this is a prerequisite, of course it’s a prerequisite and God forbid we ever get to the point where Orthodox Christians say it’s not a prerequisite. In fact, where are you at that point? Where are you as Christians? Help them who say ‘well, there are many paths up the mountain. There are essentially one mountain and many paths. We are on this side of the mountain and, that’s the perennialist theory that some Orthodox Christians teach, even some great theologians.

 

You know, all the heretics were great theologians. They were all usually bishops too and priests. I don’t know of any layperson that was a great heretic. If you know anybody, tell me and I’ll correct what I usually say about this. So they’re all…

So they teach that ‘this mountain exists and Christians go up one side and Muslims up the other and we don’t see that they’re actually going up the mountain because we’re on this side and they’re on that side but actually at the end of the day we’re all going to be surprised because they’re all paths up the mountain and they’re all reaching God and if you really know the internal workings of every religion as I do, the great teacher and theologian of the universe, you would see that this is all the same. Yes, it appears differently, we don’t talk about Christ in Islam, but it’s really Christ that’s in Islam bringing them to Mohammed’s God.‘

This is the kind of theory that is passing within Christianity today as a legitimate interpretation of reality.

 

So, reality is a prerequisite for communion and salvation. And to approach the mysteries without reality… is to walk away without the grace of God. There are two types of faith as we said, there’s the Orthodox faith that we confess, which is reality. If we confess that, we are doing well but we are not yet living the spiritual life. Because we need another kind of faith… and that is trust. And the Greek word for faith, for trust, we have the word faith, εμπιστοσύνη. It has, it’s the word for trust. It has the word faith in it. This is the kind of thing, trust in the Master, that we have to increase and kindle….”