What about Paradise? - Orthodox Canada

REPLY:

What has caused this fall into that old enemy of Christianity Gnosticism? Fear, as always; fear and a proclivity to ignorance. The "gnosis" of Gnosticism always depends on ignorance and usually thrives on fear, and presents a dualistic "spirituality." Gnostic dualism attempts to create a sharp dichotomy between the human soul and body, between the visible and invisible dimensions of the universe and between the material and created spiritual elements of the world. Indeed, this latter "dualism" helped to create the iconoclast heresy.

The fear is for the loss of a certainty that for some was an illusion, for others a delusion. Models of reality are challenged as they must be and now are more and more frequently. When this happens, the reaction retreats, not into cautious reflection and examination (which sincere conservatives practise) but into the murky harbour of ignorance. Galileo and others of his era demolished the antique model of reality which believed in a geocentric universe. Little by little, the perfectly ordered concentric circle model of the universe came unwoven. In the 1600's, new knowledge and understanding began to spring forth like a rapidly unrolling scroll which shattered so many obsolete and inaccurate models of reality with surer and more demonstrable models. Revealed were the realities of the great age of the universe and the fact that the universe is not harmonious, well ordered place the old models needed for it to be. Laws turned out to be, not expressions of nature, but human efforts to prescribe order for nature and give an illusion that man has some sort of control. When it became evident that the more tidy and insular models of reality were evaporating, that the earth and the universe were not as they desired them to be, many people developed neuroses about it. They retreated into Gnostic/Platonistic phantasies of an "invisible world" which was ordered as they desired. They desire to abandon reality and retreat into an orphic-manichaen phantasy.

It is not a new phantasy; it is an ancient heresy revisited. Since it sounds "spiritual", it is quite seductive, as Gnostic dualism often is.

What is shocking is the scope of the carelessness and inattentiveness among educators and leaders in the Orthodox Church in our era. So many of them are far more apt to defend the heretical world view C the heresies of Origen, Platonism, the Gnostics and Scholastics C and rail against the Orthodox Christian worldview which denies their dualism. They do so thoughtlessly, uncaringly, without reference to truth or demonstrable understanding C and indeed they do so in reaction against reality, and even in opposition to the holy fathers. The delusion of spirituality can be seductive and destructive at all levels. This Neo-Gnosticism, in reality, replaces faith with illusion and a deluded "spirit-reality." For those who fall into the delusion, this Gnostic spirituality provides an illusion of certainty that is the very antithesis of faith. The flight from reality into the hallucination of an "invisible world" (which in more primitive times was haunted by elves, fairies and leprechauns) can never lead to the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, can never equal a saving faith, can never bring one into an Orthodox Christian life, which must be lived in the real world, not some invisible wonderland or Platonistic "kosmos noetos".

Let us look at some specific aspects of this New Age Gnostic delusion:

1. The notion of an "invisible world" in which actual (or true spiritual) reality is to be found is simply the Gnostic rendition of Plato's kosmos noetos, the realm of ideas or prototypes. It is most certainly not a Christian (or Jewish) teaching. It reflects the Gnostic disparagements of the material universe and their phantasies about an invisible spiritual universe. In pure Gnosticism, the notion is that the visible, material universe was created by a demiurge or evil deity, while the pure, spiritual realm is the dwelling place of the good deity who created the spirit realm.

2. The idea that science and religion cannot be reconciled is common to both the Gnostic and the fundamentalist mind. Gnostics presume this because science deals with the actual material universe. Fundamentalists seek this delusion because science has devastated their narrow, radical literalism in interpreting Scripture. Interestingly, some fundamentalists also believe that the material universe is evil and/or in the possession of Satan C a serious heresy to be sure.

3. The description of paradise that you mention may have been gleaned in part from someone's hallucination and in part from some of the more fabulous and unsober renditions of a few lives of saints. This is an important cautionary note. The lives of saints are inspirational reading. They can never be sources of doctrine. While a core of most of the hagiographies remain constant, the details, as especially dreams, visions and spiritual experiences develop and are added to the "lives", embellished by various unknown sources and often edited. Indeed, when St Symeon Metaphrastes produced his own versions of the lives, he comments that the editing was necessary because so much fable and mythological detail had crept into the collections.

An example would be the version of the life of St Barbara in which shepherds are turned into toads and their sheep into grasshoppers by an irritated God. One also finds supposed word for word "discussions" supposedly had in secret, between a saint and demons or angels. Also, there is the problem of literalising some moral fables found in Patericons or in interpreting spiritual metaphor in a literal way. Unsober and careless persons will even pit a doctrine derived from such sources against the teaching of the holy fathers.

4. The kind of fabulous material presented in such unsober tales will, in the long run, undermine faith in Christianity. Thoughtless and careless editors might even think that, while such tales are not really true, they will reinforce people's faith. They will not. They are destructive products of unstable, Gnostic minds and they can only drive greater wedges between young people and the Church. Ultimately those too careless to examine these spiritual delusions and those whose neuroses have a need for them, do not care about the destructive consequences of them. They simply want to satisfy their own self-centred needs for a "spirituality" or perhaps "spiritualism".