St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain — Spiritual and Proper Delights of the Mind

Cover art by William Bakos (detail)

ARECURRING topic here is the grandeur and divinity of the human soul.  St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749−1809) is best known as the compiler of the Philokalia.  However among his other works is one titled A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, which contains a section, ‘The Spiritual and Proper Delights of the Mind.’

There are two ways to reach a proper contempt of the world.  The first — the harder way — is from experience of the frustration, disappointment and ultimate futility of seeking happiness in worldly pleasures.  The second — much better — is to experience the delights of spiritual mindedness.  As St. Nicodemus puts it:

When the spiritual beauty is revealed to the soul and when it tastes the spiritual delights, then the formerly desirable pleasures of the body are hated and rejected. The whole reason why the physical pleasures are loved is the fact that the mind has not yet attained a vision and has not tasted a more sublime delight than the physical ones.”
Source: Chamberas, 228.

Below are a some excerpts from the Paulist Press edition in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

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The Six Areas of Spiritual Delight

Have you guarded your external senses so that they do not partake of the physical delights? I lave you guarded the external sense of imagination so that it does not receive impressions of evil passions? Have you also guarded your mind and your heart from passions and evil thoughts? Listen now to what are the spiritual and proper delights of the mind, about which we said a few things at the beginning. I suppose there are six main sources or areas from which the proper delights are born and derived. These may be ennumerated as follows:

1. Doing the divine commandments and fulfilling the will of God.

2. Acquiring the God-enacted virtues.

3. Reading and understanding the word of God in Sacred Scriptures.

4. Contemplating the reason and beauty of creation.

5. Knowing the reason for the incarnate economy of the Son of God.

6. Contemplating upon the attributes and perfections of God.

Each of these topics will be discussed briefly, for if one were to attempt a thorough discussion one would have to write many books.
Source: Chamberas, 173.

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How the Mind Glorifies God with All of the Creatures

The mind of man is not alone in glorifying and magnifying the Creator and loving father of the whole of creation, who, out of his abundant goodness, has produced so many thousands upon thousands, myriads upon myriads, millions upon millions of creatures — spiritual, physical, animate, inanimate, rational, irrational, adorned with such a variety of essences, powers, organs, energies, and perfections. The mind of man is filled by a sort of fulness, so to speak, of joy and gladness and is not pleased to glorify God alone, but as the appointed leader of all the visible creation, man is able to gather unto himself all the creatures that are subject to him and to formulate an all-harmonious choir. Thus, man glorifies God first and then moves the rest of the creatures through  a fine personification to glorify him also, and to praise their Creator. Now, man calls upon all of these creatures together with the three Children: “Let all the works of the Lord glorify the Lord; praise and magnify him throughout the ages.” And with David we say, “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Ps 150:6). Man is desirous to see these creatures acquire minds too and tongues and words to proclaim to all the almighty power and the transcendent goodness and wisdom of God, which he has poured out upon them. The divine Creator has not only created them out of nothing and given them existence, but also continuously provides for them everything needed for their preservation and well-being.

How the Mind Rejoices When It Considers Its Own Value

The mind especially rejoices — oh, how it rejoices! — when it glorifies its own architect, its omniscient Creator, God! When the mind returns to contemplate itself and paradoxically becomes its own — the seer and the one seen, the thinker and the one thought about — it realizes that among all the creatures of the whole world, only the mind has been lavished with so many gifts and has been glorified and honored above the angels and above all the creatures of the visible world. The mind has been honored more than the angels because the angels, not being united to a body, are consequently without a spirit that is life-giving to the body, according to St. Gregory Palamas. The mind, however, being united to a body, has consequently also a spirit that is life-giving to its own body. The mind, moreover, has been honored above all the visible and physical creatures because only the mind has been created in the image and likeness of its ow n Creator; the mind is the head and king of all this expansive sphere of earthly creations. It is also receptive of everlasting blessedness, since it has the natural attribute—if only it would observe the commandments of its Creator — to be united with its prototype and to become willingly by grace what its Creator is by nature. That is to say, the mind has the capacity to be deified and to become divine. As the meditative mind of the prophet David pondered upon these things, he had this to say about the magnificent value of man: “You have crowned him with glory and honor; you have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea” (Ps 8:5-8).
Source: Chamberas, 1989 200 f.

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Having read Holy Scripture very carefully, you should also read the holy Fathers who interpret the Scriptures. You will receive no less delight from reading the Fathers than you do from the Scriptures. The Fathers develop the hidden meanings in Scripture and with their own writings help us to understand what we did not before. Because of that philosophic axiom that all men by nature seek knowledge, we must say that great delight follows naturally when we learn about hidden and unknown matters. This is why there will be ineffable joy and gladness that will come to your soul from the interpretations and the words of the holy Fathers. You too will be shouting, as did David, those enthusiastic words in the Psalms.
Ibid., 190.

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When the mind rises through the creatures to the Creator and discerns that the reasons in the creatures have similitude with their Creator, the positive or cataphatic theology is used to name God positively — wise, good, creator, light, sun, air, fire and all of the beings as their Cause. But when the mind rises in the Spirit and supernaturally to the Creator and envisions the spiritual reality that God is unlike all the creatures and incomparably beyond them, then the mind uses the apophatic and transcendent theology to name God apophatically and transcendently as more-than-wise, more-than-good. Thus God is not a sun, nor light, nor fire, nor air, nor anything else from among the created beings.
Ibid., 197

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As St. John Chrysostom (Commentary on Psalm 9) explained: What does it mean to “be glad and exult in thee”? (Ps 9,2). It means that I have such a master that he is my delight and my joy. Whoever knows this delight as it should be known does not feel any other. For this is delight itself, while everything else is only names of delight. This joy causes man to be lifted up; it causes the soul to be free of the body; it flies toward heaven; it raises me beyond the worldly cares; it relieves us from evil.
Ibid., 215

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The (human) mind of course is by nature a lover of the good and seeks always to understand the best and the highest. It is drawn by the delight of having communication and participation in the divine perfections and so it seeks with all of its power to rise to the highest of these. Now since the mind is finite and therefore cannot contain the infinite, it realizes that that which it was unable to comprehend is much higher and much more delightful than that which it did understand. Thus, it marvels and ponders and does not know what will come of this amazement. In this state the mind is filled with divine love and kindles the soul with strong desires that are the result of a divine love and delight that is in turn provoked by the comprehensible aspect of the incomprehensible God and the ensuing questions that are raised. This divine love purifies the mind; purified, the mind becomes more godlike.
Ibid., 216 f.

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In other words, in all the virtues and good works which the mind uses, it must keep before itself as an example and an image the natural attributes and the perfections of God. These must be imitated as much as possible and through works one must prove that his mind is cultivated and refined by these perfections. St. Paul has urged all Christians to “be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Eph 5:1).
Ibid., 219

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What the Sun Is to Physical Things, God Is to Spiritual Things

St. Gregory the Theologian (Homily on St. Athanasius the Great) said succinctly and wisely something which he borrowed from Plato:

What the sun is to physical things, God is to spiritual things. For the one gives light to the visible world and the other to the invisible world. The one makes the bodily visions to be like the sun, and the other makes the spiritual natures to be like God. Moreover, the sun makes it possible for those who see to see and for those that are seen to be seen, and of the objects that are seen the sun is the best. So, also with God. To those who think and to those who are thought about, God makes it possible for the thinkers to think and for those thought about to be thought about. And of those realities thought about, God is the ultimate reality, where every appeal ends since there is nothing beyond God.
Ibid., 221

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Bibliography

Chamberas, Peter A. (tr., ed.).  Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain: A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel. Classics of Western Spirituality. Paulist Press, 1989; The Spiritual and Proper Delights of the Mind; pp. 173−227. [archive.org]

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Evelyn Underhill on the Profound Mystical Meaning of Christian Liturgy

IN the following excerpt from Evelyn Underhill’s book, The Mystic Way, she makes some insightful and important observations concerning the Christian Liturgy.  Three points in particular are: (1) the Christian Liturgy is a supreme work of art; (2) it has evolved and adapted itself over the centuries as a marvelous accumulation of contributions by countless individuals (and hence, by implication, expresses the great spiritual truths of human nature more than anything designed by a few human beings); and (3) in it one may find a profound symbol for the mystic’s quest for union with God.

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ALITURGY, says Dom Cabrol, is “the external and official manifestation of a religion”: and the Mass, the typical liturgic rite of the Catholic world, is “the synthesis of Christianity.”[1] If, then, our discovery of the mystic life at the heart of the Christian religion be a discovery indeed and not a fantasy, it is here that we may expect to find its corroboration. Here, in that most characteristic of the art-products of Christendom, the ceremonial with which the love and intuition of centuries have gradually adorned the primitive sacrament of the Eucharist, we may find the test which shall confirm or discredit our conclusions as to the character of that life which descends from Jesus of Nazareth. … [I]n the ceremony of the Mass, we have a work of art designed and adapted by the racial consciousness of Christendom for the keeping and revealing of somethings claiming descent from that same source, which lives: lives, not in the arid security of liturgical museums, but in the thick of diurnal existence — in the cathedral and the mission hut, in the city and the cloister, in the slums and lonely places of our little twisting earth. This “something is still the true focus of that Christian consciousness which has not broken away from tradition. The great dramatic poem of the liturgy is still for that consciousness the shrine in which the primal secret of transcendence is preserved. …

The Christian Church has often been likened, and not without reason, to a ship: a ship, launched nineteen hundred years ago upon that great stream of Becoming which sets towards the “Sea Pacific” of Reality. Though she goes upon inland waters, yet hints of the ocean magic, the romance of wide horizons, mysterious tides and undiscovered countries, hang about her. In the course of her long voyage, carried upon the current of the river, she has sometimes taken fresh and strange cargo on board; sometimes discharged that which she brought with her from the past. She has changed the trim of her sails to meet new conditions, as the river ran now between hard and narrow banks and now spread itself to flow through fields. But through all these changes and developments, she kept safe the one treasure which she was built to preserve: the mystical secret of deification, of the ever-renewed and ever-fruitful interweaving of two orders of reality, the emergence of the Eternal into the temporal, the perpetually repeated “wonder of wonders, the human made divine.” She kept this secret and handed it on, as all life’s secrets have ever been preserved and imparted, by giving it supreme artistic form. In the Christian liturgy, the deepest intuitions, the rich personal experiences, not only of the primitive but of the patristic and mediaeval epochs, have found their perfect expression. Herein has been distilled, age by age, drop by drop, the very essence of the mystical consciousness.

“The rites and symbols of the external Christian church,” says Eckartshausen [2], “were formed after the pattern of the great, unchangeable, and fundamental truths, announcing things of a strength and of an importance impossible to describe, and revealed only to those who knew the innermost sanctuary.” Each fresh addition made to this living work of art has but elaborated and enriched the one central idea that runs through the whole. Here it is that Life’s instinct for recapitulation is found at work: here she has dramatised her methods, told in little the story of her supreme ascent. The fact that the framework of the Mass is essentially a mystical drama, the Christian equivalent of those Mysteries which enacted before the Pagan neophyte the necessary adventures of his soul, was implicitly if not directly recognised in very early times. It was the “theatre of the pious,” said Tertullian (De Spectaculis 29, 30; see Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, p. 493) in the second century; and the steady set of its development from the Pauline sacrament of feeding on the Spiritual Order, the Fractio Panis of the catacombs, to the solemn drama of the Greek or Roman liturgy, was always in the direction of more and more symbolic action, of perpetual elaborations of the ritual and theatrical element. To the sacramental meal of apostolic times, understood as a foretaste and assurance of the “Messianic banquet” in the coming Parousia, there was soon prefixed a religious exercise — modelled perhaps on the common worship of the Synagogue — which implied just those preparatory acts of penance, purification and desirous stretching out towards the Infinite, which precede in the experience of the growing soul the establishment of communion with the Spiritual World. Further, the classic exhibition of such communion — the earthly life of Jesus — naturally suggested the form taken by this “initiation of initiations” when its ritual development once began; the allegory under which the facts of the Christian mystery should be exhibited before men. The Mass therefore became for devout imagination during the succeeding centuries, not only the supreme medium through which the Christian consciousness could stretch out to, and lay hold on, the Eternal Order, not only the story of the soul’s regeneration and growth, but also the story of the actual career of Jesus, told, as it were, in holy pantomime: indirect evidence that the intuitive mind of the Church saw these as two aspects of one truth.  Hence every development of the original rite was made by minds attuned to these ideas; with the result that psychological and historical meanings run in parallel strands through the developed ceremony, of which many a manual act and ritual gesture, meaningless for us, had for earlier minds a poignant appeal as being the direct commemoration of some detail in the Passion of Christ.

As Europe now has it, then, in the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox and the Mass of the Catholic Church, this ceremony is the great living witness to — the great artistic expression of — those organic facts which we call mystical Christianity: the “transplanting of man into a new world over against the nearest-at-hand world,” the “fundamental inner renewal,” the “union of the human and the divine.” All the thoughts that gather about this select series of acts — apparently so simple, sometimes almost fortuitous, yet charged with immense meanings for the brooding soul — all the elaborate, even fantastic symbolic interpretations placed upon these acts in mediaeval times, have arisen at one time or another within the collective consciousness of Christendom. Sometimes true organic developments, sometimes the result of abrupt intuitions, the reward of that receptivity which great rituals help to produce, they owe their place in or about the ceremony to the fact that they help it in the performance of its function, the stimulation of man’s spiritual sense; emphasising or enriching some aspect of its central and fundamentally mystical idea.

1. Les Origines Liturgiques, pp. 17, 140.
2. The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Letter II.

Readings

Cabrol, Fernand (Domr). Les Origines Liturgiques. Letouzey et Ané, 1905.

Eckartshausen, Karl. The Cloud upon the Sanctuary. London, 1909.

Hirn, Yrjö. The Sacred Shrine a Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church. Macmillan, 1912.

Underhill, Evelyn. The Witness of the Liturgy. In: The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins. London: Dent, 1913; ch. 6, pp. 331−371.

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The Oxford Movement’s Critique of Modern Rationalism

The Oxford Movement was a 19th century movement within the Church of England that eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement’s manifesto was set forth in explicit terms in the Tracts for the Times, published from 1833 to 1841.  However a parallel expression of principles took poetic form — in the Lyra Apostolica (1836), an anthology whose principal author was John Henry Newman, and with contributions by several others, including John Keble.

Newman, Keble and the others sought a return to a more authentic and full-blooded Christianity as found in the writings of Church Fathers.  Their critique of rationalism is relevant for our times.

The Introduction to the 1901 edition of the Lyra, written by Henry C. Beeching, excerpted below, explains with admirable clarity and eloquence the Oxford Movement’s critique of modern rationalism and Lockean Liberalism.

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WE must remember what the Liberalism of the Thirties was, if we would understand the indignation with which these men set themselves to repudiate it. It was the Liberalism of rational enlightenment. It believed that the evils and sorrows of humanity would fade away before the instructed intelligence. It was hard, confident, aggressive. It had the easy air of superiority which belongs to those who have never faced the deep underlying issues of life.

It omitted these from its calculation. Everything, for it, was on the surface; was plain; was uncomplicated. The cool reason, the average commonsense, the ordinary experience of the man in the street, were its sufficing standards. It abhorred mystery. It had no touch of reverence, awe, mysticism. It was frankly utilitarian. It was at the mercy of a bland and shallow {xxvii} optimism. Not that it was not doing an immense deal of practical good. It was opening doors of freedom. It was breaking down barriers. It was spreading knowledge. It was extending the range of social happiness. It was widening the old horizons of philanthropic effort. It was relieving men from the burdens and terrors of ignorant bigotry. It was insisting that institutions should do the work for which they were intended. It was bent on applying the test of real use for the public welfare to all the resources of Civilisation, which were locked up, too often, by the selfishness of prejudice, and the idleness of indifference.

But, in spite of all this beneficial activity, Liberalism was felt, by those ardent young men at Oxford, to be their enemy. And it was this, because it left out that which to them was the one fact of supreme importance—the soul.

Liberalism, as it was understood in the days of Lord Brougham, and of Benthamism, knew nothing of the soul’s enthralling drama—its tragic heights and depths, its absorbing wonder, its momentous agonies, its infinite pathos, its tempestuous struggle, its mysterious sin, its passion, its penitence, and its tears. All this Liberalism passed over, as of no account. It was for it a veiled world, into which it possessed no way of entry. It came not into its secret, and moreover, it was content to be excluded. It was inclined to sweep it all aside, as the rubbish of superstition. It was unaware of its own blind-{xxviii} ness. It was confident in its own adequacy to set human life straight, without regard to this disturbing matter.

It was this shallow self-sufficiency which stung the strong soul of Carlyle into fierce revolt. In him, the elements which rational enlightenment fancied it had disposed of, re-asserted their volcanic intensity. Through his voice, humanity defied the comfortable bribes of utilitarianism, and revealed itself once again as the passionate Pilgrim of Time, for ever seeking an unknown and eternal Goal. And this recoil of Carlyle, prophetic in its force, yet empty of any Gospel message, had its parallel at Oxford. . . .  Every fibre of Keble’s soul revolted against any temper that would smoothe over the dark realities of sin, or would cheapen the tremendous issues of human character and human choice, or would rob earth of its imaginative mystery, or would {xxix}trifle with the awful significance of word or deed in the light of Doom. Truth was, for him, no thin logical consistency, but a Vision of Eternal Reality, which smote in upon the conscience of man with the solemnity of a moral challenge.

Liberalism embodied, according to Newman’s analysis, the spirit of rationalism, and the claim of the human reason to sit in judgment upon dogmatic revelation. And, against this, Keble recalled to men the teaching of Bishop Butler on the moral nature of the evidence by which spiritual convictions were reached. To the mere reason, this evidence could not get beyond suggestive probabilities; but these probabilities were used, by the living spirit of man, as an indication of the personal Will of God, which could be read by the soul that was in tune with that Will. So probabilities became certitudes. “ I will guide thee with mine Eye,” was Keble’s favourite example of the mode in which Divine truth touched the soul. By deep glimpses, by rare flashes, by a momentary glance, the Eye of God could make us aware of Truths far beyond the understanding of reason. Such Truths possessed authority, which we could not dissect or critically examine. They were revelations of the mind of Him with Whom we had to deal. So Authority was the key-note of Keble’s thinking, in antithesis to the Reason of Liberal enlightenment. And Authority was shown, as Mr. Balfour has again shown us in our own day, to rest on profound instincts of human nature, which had their roots far down out of sight, and defied rational analysis. Emotion, Imagination, {xxx} Association, Tradition, Conscience, all played their part in the creation of that temper which found its joyful freedom in surrendering to Authority.

{xxxvi} . . . .Newman, who has denounced the attack of Liberalism so vigorously, finds the weak and worldly defence of the traditional Conservatism as repulsive and as dangerous.

Italics added. Source: John Henry Newman, John Keble, et al. Lyra Apostolica. (Introduction by Henry C. Beeching.) London, 1901.