Of categories

When intellectual and conventional categories replace ontological truth and revelation in Christian theology, then in the historical life of the Church, too, the problem of salvation is obscured by a shadow that torments mankind, that of a “law” which leads nowhere.
Christos Yannaras

On "Ecumenical dialogue"

...the cosmological dimension of the event of salvation and its ontological content is an area of little concern for the 'ecumenical dialogues' of our times.
Christos Yannaras

In preparation for Great Lent

Today is celebrated the memory of St. Theodora who after the death of her iconoclast husband restored the veneration of icons in 842. Of course this is where the feast we celebrate in two weeks, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, originates. Today's commemorations also "happen" to coincide with the Sunday of the last judgment reminding us that those who do not recognize Christ in "the least of these" will be sent into "the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels". It seems to me reasonable to recognize that seeing Christ in "the least of these" includes many of the saints we venerate on icons. Having recently read the life of St. Symeon of Emesa, fool for Christ, I could not help but see in his life such an example as fools for Christ take on a much more humble position than your run of the mill monk. Recently I posted a great explanation of the fool for Christ phenomenon which well sums up this thought.

And don't forget that today is also the commemoration of St. Blaise of Sebaste the patron of my bosom buddy Bleys, otherwise known as Colonel K.

The fools for Christ

...seem to reject the Apostle Paul's admonition to accept any personal deprivation and sacrifice in order to avoid scandalizing the faithful (1 Cor. 8:13). But what kind of scandal is St. Paul talking about? It is something that causes confusion in the realm of truth, and may thus deprive others of the possibility of participating in truth--the possibility of salvation. If by eating food offered to idols you give your brother's 'weak conscience' grounds for supposing that there is some connection between idol worship and the truth and life of the Church, then the responsibility for the confusion you cause is great indeed.

The challenge of the fools, however, does not create confusion in people's faith, nor does it obscure the Church. It simply surprises those who have identified faith and truth with the secularized concept of moral uprightness and conventional decorum. Fools for Christ have the gift, and the audacity, to manifest openly the human fall and sin which is common to us all: this is the reality of our nature, and it is not cancelled out by individual cases of 'improvement,' nor by concealment behind social externals.

In this sense, every monk in the Orthodox East is a kind of 'fool for Christ.' He wears a garment of mourning, openly declaring that he accepts our common fall and sin; and he withdraws into the ascetic life, waging war on this fall and this sin on behalf of us all. This same acceptance is the calling of every member of the Church. If we persist in ignoring the Gospel of salvation and continue to identify the regeneration of man with the social recognition of individual virtues, with worldly success in gaining individual moral respectability, then the fault is ours alone--and it is an error which bars us from truth and life.

The prototype to which the Church has always looked is not individual moral self-sufficiency, but the monks' lament of repentance. This lament is ultimately joyful--a 'joyful sorrow'--and turns sin into a measure of the acceptance of Christ's love. Man is able to mourn and lament only when he knows exactly what he has lost, and experiences this loss as a personal deprivation, a personal thirst. This is why repentance, the personal sense of the loss of God, is also a first revelation, our first acquaintance with His person, our first discovery of the extent of His love.

In the case of the fools for Christ, certainly their shocking freedom from every law, rule, restriction or code of obligations is not simply didactic in its purpose, reminding us of the danger of identifying virtue and holiness with conventional social decorum and egocentric moral rectitude. No one can ever really teach simply by calling into question mistaken concepts and ways of life: one has to make the fulness of the saving truth incarnate in oneself. The shocking freedom of the fools is first and foremost a total death, a complete mortification of every individual element in their lives. This death is the freedom which can break and destroy every conventional form; it is resurrection into a life of personal distinctiveness, the life of love which knows neither bounds nor barriers.

The example of the 'fools for Christ,' then, is neither extreme nor inexplicable, as it may perhaps seem to many people. It is the incarnation of the Gospel's fundamental message: that it is possible for someone to keep the whole of the Law without managing to free himself from his biological and psychological ego, from corruption and death. And that on the other hand, it is enough is someone humbly accepts his own sin and his fall, without differentiating it from the sin and fall of the rest of mankind, trusting in the love of Christ which transfigures this acceptance into personal nearness and communion, into a life of incorruption and immortality.
Christos Yannaras

Delivered unto us

Holy Scripture, then, is not an objectified 'source' of Christian truth and revelation, like the 'theoretical' texts which outline the impersonal and objective principles of an ideology. Nor are their two sources of objective authority, Scripture and Tradition, as Roman Catholic rationalism would have it. Prior to any written formulation, Christian faith and truth is a fact, the fact of God's incarnation and man's deification. It is the unceasing realization and manifestation of this fact, its tangible embodiment in history--in other words, it is the Church

This order of precedence is a fundamental precondition for approaching the ethics of the Gospel--and, for that matter, the whole teaching of Scripture. The Gospel finds its manifestation in the fact of the Church; and if we overlook this fact, we are left with nothing but a disembodied teaching whose significance may be exceptional, but is bound to be relative. (As we know, Scripture formed the basis for all the heretical distortions of the event of salvation, and many who reject Christianity have devoted serious study to the text of Scripture without abnegating their rejection.)

Prior to any written formulation, the historical reality of the Church is the 'gospel,' the 'good news'--the news of incarnate truth and salvation. For this reason, we cannot think of the Bible as the 'founding charter' of the Church, containing theoretical 'statutes' for the Christian faith and a code of 'commandments' for Christian ethics. Christianity is not made up of 'metaphysical' convictions and moral directives which always require a priori intellectual acceptance. The Gospel of the Church is the manifestation of her life and her experience: and this experience was set down by the eyewitnesses of the resurrection, of the beginning of man's salvation: '...even as they delivered unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word' (Lk 1:2).
Christos Yannaras

So...you call that an 'icon' do you?

Even from the thirteenth century—a key point for our understanding of all subsequent religious and cultural developments in the West—we can no longer speak of ecclesial iconography in Europe, but only of religious painting. And this means that is the western Church artistic expression ceases to be a study and a manifestation of the Church’s theology—at least on the preconditions for theology in visual art formulated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

Christos Yannaras