Florensky on community

From Letter Eleven in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (scripture references in original):

Equal love for all and each in their unity, concentrated in a single focus of love for several, even for one in his separation from the general unity; disclosure before all, openness with everyone, together with esotericism, the mystery of the few; the greatest democratism together with the strictest aristocratism; "absolutely all are the elect" together with the elect of the elect; "preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15; Cf. Col. 1:23) together with "neither cast ye your pearls before swine" (Matt. 7:6); in brief, agape-philia--such are the antinomic dualities of the Good News. The power of the Gospel is accessible to all, does not need an interpreter. But this power is also thoroughly esoteric; not one word in the Gospel can be understood correctly without the "tradition of the elders," without the interpretation of spiritual guides, successively handing down the meaning of the Gospel from generation to generation. The Book clear as crystal is at the same time the Book with seven seals. All are equal in a Christian community and, at the same time, the whole structure of the community is hierarchical.

"Antinomic dualities" are at the heart of all of Florensky's theology, so it's important constantly to stress where this is coming from. Truth itself is not found apart from love, and love is found in self-denial leading to self-revelation, which is fully reflected in the Triune existence of God and more specifically in the incarnation and cross of Christ. Everything leading to the Truth, then, has an antinomical structure, consisting of two opposites which cannot be reconciled by the rational mind, but in fact reinforce one another to the spiritual mind. That is the starting point.

Here Florensky shows, as he always does, how essential this antinomical structure is to Christian life. Community itself consists thrives on a contradiction between the essential equality of all members and their essential inequality. Choose one or the other, and you'll get it wrong. Only by embracing both aspects of community, and allowing them to reinforce one another, can you fully understand--and, more importantly, experience--community.

Likewise, community has an antinomic structure in that it is both collectivist and individualist. Jesus came to call a people to himself; yet he also had disciples set apart, whom he called friends--one, in particular, called "the disciple whom Jesus loved." Jesus loves all of us, but this phrase refers to only one person in all of human history. The experience of community cannot be merely collective and abstract, but also must be concrete and personal. That is the tension. It cannot be resolved by reason, but only by love. Indeed, love finds genuine expression by embracing this tension.

The use of the mind in society

Friedrich Hayek is primarily known for his contributions to economics and political philosophy. Yet one of his best contributions to both of these fields is an underlying theory of social learning. As an economist, he was interested in how it is that civilizations make use of information which is distributed among many individual minds (see, for instance, Hayek's essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society"). As a political philosopher, he was interested in how institutions come to be, and how these institutions benefit individuals and allow society to progress. In both cases, Hayek finds that people engaged in free exchanges with one another unwittingly contribute to a process of social learning of which they themselves are mostly unaware.

Fasting of the heart

The days are growing longer. The sky is clear. The snow is almost melted. Into my room come gentle rays of evening light. The trees are still bare; but there's something in the light of the sun at 6:00 in the evening that says Spring is coming.

I sit and soak in the gentle light. My heart is open. Feed slowly, I tell it. Just as a hungry man must keep himself from eating too quickly, lest he regret it shortly thereafter, so also I must tell my heart to pace itself. Soak it all in, but not all at once. These are magical moments, but they are fragile.

We are a couple of weeks into the season of Lent, a time of prayer, fasting, and examining ourselves to see where we have fallen short and in what ways we must repent and turn ourselves toward God. I have learned in recent years the benefits of literally fasting. The body is good, but it must be made to serve a higher purpose than its impulses.

But we must eat. Why would we deny the body something it needs? The body needs food, yes, and that is exactly why fasting helps us gain control over the body. When the body gets comfortable having all of its needs met instantly, it is easy for the self to be guided by the body, rather than the other way around.

(And anyway a fast doesn't have to be total abstinence from food; it can be simply eating no meat, or eating half as much as usual, or leaving something out that usually seems essential. But abstaining from food for, say, 24 hours, is not an insurmountable feat. It can be done, and it is a useful exercise of the will.)

The Eastern Orthodox are very thoughtful about this topic. I've been reading a blog with daily thoughts on spiritual practices such as fasting (see also here and here). The practices they prescribe can be intense, as in this post, which makes the reason for such extreme measures clear:

Saint Theophan advises us that the flesh should be persecuted in all it parts and functions so that it can be transformed into a keen weapon of righteousness.

This is not the kind of theology of the body that is usually taught in Protestant circles. Judging by the teaching that comes out of evangelical sermons, one might be led to believe that Christian spirituality ought to involve no physical effort whatsoever.

For instance, in the sermon I heard last Sunday, the pastor explicitly said that it makes no difference what posture you take when you pray, and I'm sure the vast majority of Protestant Christians would be inclined to agree. God judges the heart, not the outward appearance. I suppose that's true.

But the heart, like the body, is prone to various lusts. The body may lust after food and sex, but the heart lusts after beauty, power, status, recognition--not that these are inherently evil, but neither are food and sex; yet lust after such things is spiritual darkness.

A frightening question occurred to me the other day. What else does the heart lust after? Just as the body needs food, what does the heart need, which it then learns to lust after? Friendship, perhaps. Love, romance, beautiful art, beautiful nature, hope, ecstasy, happiness--God?

Can the heart possibly lust after God? Isn't the greatest commandment to love God with all our heart? Yet love is not lust. Lust does not make a marriage. Seeking to make other people look at you is not true friendship. Lust turns inward; love turns outward. Is it not possible to do the same thing with God?

I fear it is. And there is practically no recognition of this in the culture in which we live, perhaps especially in the Christian subculture forged by evangelicals.

Lust after God begins innocently enough, with a deep and ecstatic desire to have a "personal relationship" with God. We pray to God earnest, heartfelt prayers, not mechanically, as the error-prone traditionalists are apt to do. Then "Our Father" becomes my Father, my Jesus, my personal Lord and Savior, mine, all mine.

There is this insatiable hunger for an experience of God, a prayer life that is ecstatic and intensely personal. There is an unquenchable thirst for real worship, the kind you feel when you are waving your hands in the air to music that really moves you. There is a desire to read the Bible and see what it really says, so that you know how to avoid all the errors of the dead, traditional church.

Or perhaps there is simply a desire for something different, something new, something that the masses can't handle because of their simple minds or their hardened hearts. Perhaps there really is something there...but you crave it so badly that you can never really have it.

But God wants our prayers and our worship to heartfelt! But sometimes the heart seeks God, and other times it seeks to devour God. The heart is not so different from the stomach. The stomach craves food, but if it is not disciplined, it will simply devour, rather than eat.

Is it really so hard to believe? Was it not in eating the very body and blood of Christ that the Corinthians displayed their selfishness and gluttony? (1 Cor. 21) Every Sunday before communion, our pastor tells us, "Feed on Christ in your heart, with thanksgiving." I wonder if the pastors at my church ever thought to add, "Eat slowly."

So it occurred to me this Lent that my heart, too, needs a certain amount of fasting, just like my stomach. It is always tempting for a Christian to go into prayer with the heart in a posture of grasping, rather than receiving. But what does the Lord's prayer say? Not "my will," but "Your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven." It is not for the heart to ascend into heaven to take the things of God, but rather to stay on earth, and to receive God's gifts from heaven.

What would that fast possibly look like? It is quite simple, really. Pray the Lord's prayer. Oh, but your pastor will tell you that the Lord's prayer should never be just a formula. Yes, it should. My heart needs a formula, or else it will always be greedy. It needs to be restrained by the words Jesus taught us to pray, so that it will not seek to devour God, but rather to love God.

The only pronouns in the Lord's prayer are our, us, you, and, your. There is no I, me, or my. Prayer is not about me. And prayer (and all of life) is first and foremost about loyalty to the Kingdom of God. Your Kingdom come; your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

So I will say the Lord's prayer, slowly, on my knees, not adding any of my own words--mechanically, even. This will protect the heart from reaching out to devour. It will be a fast. Just as for the stomach, I don't eat food, so for the heart, I don't feed it with its desires.

But the heart needs God! Yes, it does; that is the point. Just as the body needs food, yet we deny it food for the sake of making the body a "weapon of righteousness," so also the heart needs God, or rather to feel intimate with God, yet I will deny it for the sake of making the heart, too, a "weapon of righteousness," capable of feeding on Christ slowly, rather than simply devouring.

And then, perhaps, the heart will be liberated from its selfishness, so that it can truly pray those beautiful words, "Our Father," and actually feel that the Almighty God is indeed Father.

Contradiction

Well, having become interested in the theological views of certain famous mathematicians recently, I decided to read Father Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.

I realize this is not the kind of everyday pleasure reading that most people would engage in. But it appeals not only to my tendency towards abstraction (hello, I'm a mathematician), but also my deep personal desire to answer those scary questions, like what is truth?

This book has had a profound impact on me. Not that everything it says is thoroughly compelling to me, but its approach is unlike anything I've seen before. I love how Florensky starts from such an intensely personal point of view, and then delves into philosophical abstraction not only with intellect, but with passion.

The (Eastern) Orthodox way of thinking is fiercely Trinitarian. This is the Ground of the Truth. There simply is no Truth without Trinity.

Already in this we see Florensky powerfully seek to dismantle Western rationalism. For him any attempt to search for the Truth based on "givens," the axioms of the human mind, is deeply flawed. Thus he strongly condemns the Law of Self-Identity:

"A = A. That is the final answer. But this tautological formula, this lifeless, thought-less, and therefore meaningless equality A = A, is, in fact, only a generalization of the self-identity that is inherent in every given. But by no means is this formula an answer to our question 'Why?'

...

"'I = I' turns out to be nothing more than a cry of naked egotism: 'I!'"

The Truth, on the other hand, is absolute precisely because it transcends this egotistical self-assertion. It finds its self-identity through the denial of self, receiving itself back through love.

"Instead of an empty, dead, formal self-identity A = A, in virtue of which A should selfishly, self-assertively, egotistically exclude every not-A, we get a real self-identity of A, full of content and life, a self-identity that eternally rejects itself and that eternally receives itself in its self-rejection.

...

"Truth is the contemplation of Oneself through Another in a Third: Father, Son, and Spirit."

So in this view, Truth is found not (as dear old Schaeffer would have it) in the Principle of Non-Contradiction, but rather in the Principle of Self-Contradiction, the principle of denying oneself in order to find self-identity through love, rather than rationality.

This view of the Truth also leads to a similarly styled view of the truth (with a lower-case "t"). If the nature of Truth is the denial of this self-identity "I = I," then it's not surprising that Florensky comes to a view of "truth" (meaning knowledge about the Truth) that relishes antinomy, or contradiction:

"A rational formula can be above the attacks of life if and only if it gathers all of life into itself, with all of life's diversity and all of its present and possible future contradictions. ... It follows that truth is a judgment that also contains the limit of all its refutations, or (in other words) that truth is a self-contradictory judgment."

But if you really hate all this abstraction, you'll thank Florensky for pointing out how concretely this idea appears in scripture. He actually gives a little list of antinomies in scripture (one or two examples omitted):

Divinity: both One and Three
Christ: both human and divine
Relation of Man to God: both predistination (Rom 9) and free will (Rom 9:30 - 10:21)
Sin: both through the fall of Adam (Rom 5:12-21) and inherent in the flesh (1 Cor 15:50)
Retribution: both retribution according to works (Rom 2:6-10, 2 Cor 5:10) and free forgiveness (Rom 4:4, 9:11, 11:6)
Final Fate: both universal restoration (Rom 8:19-23, 11:30-36) and the "double end" (Rom 2:5-12)
Works: both the necessity of works (1 Cor 9:24) and the lack thereof (Rom 9:16). See also Phil 2:12 and then 2:13 for a related antinomy
Faith: both free and depending on free will (John 3:16-28) and God's gift not found in human will but in the will of God (John 6:44)
Judgment: "For judgment I come into the world" (John 9:39) "I came not to judge the world" (John 12:47)

Florensky isn't giving skeptics a cheat-sheet for how to argue against Christianity. He's stating powerfully what he feels to be the very strength of Orthodoxy.

"Contradiction! It is always a mystery of the soul, a mystery of prayer and love. The closer one is to God, the more distinct are the contradictions. In Heavenly Jerusalem, there are no contradictions. Here, on earth, there are contradictions in everything; and they can be removed neither by social reorganization nor by philosophical argument."

In this way he disparages all rationalistic worldviews. (No doubt the Soviets didn't approve of this, as their own Marxism depended on the strength of "social reorganization" to solve the contradictions of life.)

It is with these things in mind that I read a recent article by Al Mohler disparaging the postmodernism of "emergent church" types. He writes:

"The problem is this -- [the] argument that truth is plural means that the church should both embrace and celebrate different and even contradictory understandings of these doctrinal statements and core truths."

I wonder what Florensky would have to say about this classical Protestant attitude?

"A heresy, even a mystical one, is a rational one-sidedness that claims to be everything. ... Orthodoxy has a universal nature, but heresy essentially has a sectarian nature. The spirit of a sect is the egoism that emanates from it, spiritual separateness. A one-sided proposition takes the place of absolute Truth..."

Under this view, I suppose that Protestantism is, by its very nature, heretical. At its very core is the desire to get the Bible right, to boldly affirm one interpretation to the exclusion of other contradictory interpretations.

I wonder if Florensky has a point. The empirical evidence from the Bible is almost compelling enough. Can anyone actually resolve these passages together logically? Somehow I think those who do inevitably suck the life out of one passage or another.

But if that's not enough, can't you just take a look around at the sheer number of Protestant denominations and ask, didn't these all come from a desire to be "right"? Is there maybe a hint of egoism in our Protestant tendency to split, not only from the historic Church, but even from each other?

On the other hand, Protestantism is a reaction against idolatry. Thus it always seeks to remind humanity that its conceptions of God are always too small. If only Protestants would continually apply this principle to our own rationalistic interpretations of scripture!

There are many reasons to think about this conception of truth other than to critique Protestantism, for sure. This just happens to be on my mind at the moment, as it often is.

In any case, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth is shaping my thinking in lots of ways, and this won't be the last time I mention it.