Chapter 1: Introduction 1. As children learn the alphabet, they perceive letters merely as forms or idols in that they represent only a material reality. Chattering along, a child concentrates all his or her thoughts and attention only upon the letters themselves. When the child has finished reading a word, letter by letter, you may ask what he or she has read, and the child does not know what to reply, for only the form, size and color of the written letters had made an impression upon the mind; and that is all that the child momentarily knows about letters. Indeed, the child perceives letters as only a physical reality just as idols are to an idol worshipper. Hence, the beginning reader and the practiced idol worshipper both look upon their idols with veneration and fear. 2. Similar to children are many grown-ups; even many who call themselves philosophers and scientists. With great pains and labor they scarcely go beyond their childlike repetition of the letters that comprise nature. Very seldom, if ever, do they reach and comprehend the actual meaning and significance of those letters, written in nature in the form of things that comprise the visible universe, or in the scenes of happenings and events. A person well trained in reading, however, reads words without even thinking of the letters of which words themselves are composed, and consciously reads them quickly according to their meaning. A school teacher labors long and hard until students are able to read words according to their meaning. Worshippers of nature are but worshippers of the letters that comprise that nature. Though they have grown up, they are but immature children. When asked what the things in nature or happenings and events mean, they look at you wonderingly, like puzzled children, when asked about the meaning of that they had just read. 3. Therefore, it may be said that nature worshippers are analphabetic, and spirit worshippers only are alphabetic. To the mind of the former, things and creatures in the natural world represent an ultimate reality, expressed in their forms, colors, functions and relations. While to the mind of the latter things and creatures are only the symbols of a spiritual reality which is the actual meaning and life and justification of those symbols. 4. These are the clear words of St. Simeon the New Theologian on this subject: The man who is enlightened by the Holy Spirit, the Revealer of all things, acquires new eyes and new ears, and sees no more as a natural man, namely by his natural sight with natural sensation, but standing as it were beyond himself contemplates spiritually visible things and bodies as the symbols of the things invisible.1 Such is a spiritually learned man. He does not mumble the letters in nature as a child learning to read the letters on paper, but he seeks the meaning, weighs the meaning, and interprets the meaning of all those things that strike his senses. 5. St. Maximus the Confessor speaks in similar terms: To those who have eyes to see, all the invisible (spiritual) world is mysteriously presented in symbols of the visible world; and all the natural world depends on the supernatural world.2 This can be understood by those whose spiritual sight is opened to such a degree that they are able to see by the spirit the spiritual meaning of everything, but not by those who gaze with physical eyes and see only the physical nature of things. 6. The Apostle Paul very strongly speaks on this subject with the famous words: The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.3 He says also: Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.4 And still more expressively: We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.5 7. It is clear from this that whoever reads the natural without knowing the spiritual content and significance of what he has read, reads death, sees death, appropriates death. Also, whoever considers visible nature as the only reality and not as a riddle in the mirror of the spirit, does not know more than the child who may recognize letters but is far from understanding written words. And again, whoever looks at a visible thing as at something absolutely real and eternal by itself, as the ancient Hellenic naturalists did, and their modern followers do, is certainly an analphabetic idol worshipper. He sees the letters but cannot guess their meaning. Spiritual reality belongs to eternity while the symbols of that reality belong to time. 8. The Old Testaments tabernacle, which was made by Bezaleel, a divinely inspired artist, according to the pattern which God showed to Moses on Sinai, serves as an example and shadow of heavenly things.6 But with Christs coming the tabernacle—the ark—disappeared as letters disappear from our sight when their meaning becomes known. When Reality appears, the symbol of Reality disappears as unnecessary. The veil of the temple was rent from the top to the bottom because the reality of the mystery was revealed in its fullness. The Lord of the Holy of Holies came, and the symbol of Him was removed. 9. But, if the tabernacle with the temple and all its contents represented, as it were, a compressed text book of spiritual reality, the whole universe in all its extensions and wonders represents the shadow of heavenly things. Therefore, Christ with both hands, used to take and present to His hearers symbols from nature in order to explain spiritual realities which He would reveal to the world. He spoke to them of many things in parables. The Greek word parable, or the Slavonic word pritcha, signifies in dramatic form an action, an event, or even a physical object in relationship to man. And though the parable has an evident natural significance, its chief significance is to be sought and found in the realm of spiritual realities, in the spiritual kingdom. Therefore, when Jesus spoke to them in parables, He did so because seeing they did not see, hearing they did not hear, and neither did they understand. Why so? For this peoples heart had waxed gross.7 The engrossed heart means closed and blinded spiritual sight. This spiritual sight, which resides in the heart, encompasses all that which the psychologists ambiguously call the subconscious, intuition, and much, much more. 10. It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it is not given. Thus spoke Christ to His chosen disciples. By whom was it thus given unto them to know? By Christ Himself. He took off from their hearts the thick veils, and thereby restored their spiritual sight. Thus, they were themselves enabled to contemplate the spiritual significance of things without parables and in the absence of the symbols just as Adam did before the fall. For sinless Adam in Paradise was perfectly able to comprehend the sense and significance of all creation. He possessed the capacity to give every animal the very name which represented it symbolically. The Creator did not name the animals Himself but brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was its name. Adam did not make a mistake, but he gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.8 11. To give the right names to animals may seem a trifle to materialistic thinkers with a gross heart. Of course, it is only a trifle under the supposition that Adam gave the names to the living creatures just as a matter of course and in a senseless manner as the materialists now give names to their horses or dogs more for the sake of novelty than for anything else. But Adam did it with deep and precise vision of the spiritual reality which these creatures symbolically represented. This task, very difficult for a sinner with a gross heart, Adam accomplished quickly and easily. Without difficulty he read because it had been given unto him to know the reality itself without symbols. He had a pure heart, clear as crystal, by which he could see God and through God grasp the real meaning of all created things. The Savior renewed this power of vision in His nearest disciples. He renewed it not all at once but slowly and by degrees through His teaching and guiding, and finally through enlightening them by the Holy Spirit. 12. Such contemplation of realities without parables, which Adam had lost, which the Apostles having lost regained, is meant for all Christians. And all of us Christians would have had that wonderful capacity, that immediate awareness of the truth in its symbols, had we remained unspotted and unfettered by sin after our baptism. But every sin turns our eyes from heaven to earth and from the Creator to the creation. After every sin we hide ourselves from God just as Adam did after he had sinned. He did hide himself from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.9 And the more we sin the more we, ostrichlike, hide ourselves from the All-seeing, plunging and dropping among the visible creatures of nature, until we become as one of them, nay, but worse than that—until nature unwillingly becomes to us a god instead of God. In this way it happens that the truth disappears from our sight and the symbol is regarded as the only truth, the only reality. Finally the most fatal disaster occurs to us: our spiritual eyes are closed and blinded and we give ourselves to our physical eyes to lead us through the dark and incomprehensible jungle of nature. Physical nature becomes our only guide. Then justified is the saying, the blind lead the blind. 13. Christ said: It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.10 Not only human flesh but no flesh, no body in the universe, profits anything of itself. The body is useful in this life only as a tool or as the symbol of the spirit. For the spirit is reality, the body is the symbol of reality. The king is the king, and the coat-of-arms is only the symbol of the king. Unbalanced indeed would be the man who would deny the existence of the king and accept the coat-of-arms of the king as the king. Alas, there are such men in our Christian era, and in our day just as if we were living in King Nebuchadnezzars time thousands and thousands of days and nights before Christ, and not in the time of the Christian kings and rulers twenty-five centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, the worshipper of idols! St. Nikolai Velimirovich The Universe As Symbols And Signs: An Essay On Mysticism In The Eastern Church NOTES: 1 St. Simeon the New Theologian, Sermon 65. 2 St. Maximus the Confessor, The Path of Mysteries. Chapter II. 3 II Cor. 3:6 4 I Cor. 13:12 5 II Cor. 4:18 6 Heb. 8:5 7 Matt. 13:11-15 8 Gen. 2:19-20 9 Gen. 3:8 10 John 6:63
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:30:24 +0000
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