Trading enlightenment for illumination

“And Jesus, having seen their faith, saith to the paralytic, ‘Child, thy sins have been forgiven thee” (The Gospel According to St. Mark 2:5).

Epistle — Heb. 1:10-14;2:1-3

Gospel — Mk. 2:1-12

St. Gregory Palamas lived in the 14th century and was one of the last witnesses of Christ before the West fell under the spell of the Enlightenment. In the East, the Orthodox Church embraced hesychasm—a prayerful, ascetic practice that St. Gregory defended—while the West drifted towards humanism. The tension between these two directions shaped much of the intellectual climate of the time. St. Gregory’s theological opponent, Barlaam, influenced the early rise of humanism, which, after hesychasm’s victory, set the stage for the Italian Renaissance.

I explored St. Gregory and the Hesychast Controversy in depth last year, so if you’re interested in learning more I would defer to that.

The point being, St. Gregory is not just a figure in history; he is one of the last witnesses to the fullness of Christ before modernity’s pull. While the West leaned toward rationalism, the Orthodox Church held on to a deeper, mystical way of understanding God’s presence—the energies-essence distinction—which remains central to our theology today.

Lately, I’ve become interested in shifting away from these top-heavy, humanistic perspectives, being drawn to the patterns and symbolism woven throughout Scripture. Inspired by modern thinkers, artists, and historians like Seraphim Hamilton, Jonathan Pageau, and the Anglican-priest-turned-Orthodox-priest Andrew Louth, I have been endeavoring to read the Gospel and Epistles in a way that pulls me back into a pre-modern, theocentric paradigm.

What shifted my perspective was reading a passage from Dr. Timothy Patitsas’s The Ethics of Beauty. He quotes St. Maximos the Confessor, who says:

“God was so good that his goodness could not be contained within himself. It poured forth ‘outside’ himself in a cosmic Theophany over against the face of darkness… Creation is a movement of repentance out of chaos and into the light of existence… Creation results from God’s self-emptying over the face of non-being. God appears, He shines out, as Beauty. This Beauty is so compelling that not even non-being can resist falling in love with it. Overcome with eros, non-being renounces itself, repents of its chaos and self-absorption, and arises into being. As it does so, it ‘learns’ to behave as the One it loves behaves–full of self-emptying Goodness for everything around it.”[1]

This has radically changed how I see things. St. Maximos and Dr. Patitsas lay out an eternal, recurring pattern we see across all of Scripture—from the Old Testament, through the Gospels and Epistles, and even into the Book of Revelation. It’s an embedded liturgical pattern, one that provides the very foundation for why the Lenten season is so profound.

The Lenten Spring isn’t just about repentance; it’s about entering this eternal pattern of Creation. It’s about moving from chaos into the light of existence. This cosmic pattern is the key for interpreting the Bible, and it underlies the writings of the Church Fathers—from St. Maximos and St. Dionysius the Areopagite to the Cappadocian Fathers and St. Gregory Palamas.

It shows itself in our iconography, something I began contemplating after the first Sunday of Lent—the Victory of Orthodoxy, when the Church triumphed over the iconoclasts. The Word of God shines in the darkness, illuminating and clarifying reality, like the very words we speak that shape and define our world. But the Word of God isn’t an abstract idea—it’s personal. It is Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos, revealed to us in the flesh.

Who “hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail” (Heb. 1:1-12).

Christ’s descent into matter is a symbol in itself. “In the biblical cosmology, a symbol is the coming together of the two primary sources of the cosmos: the unseen and the tangible, or to use the terms from Genesis 1, heaven and earth. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”[2] The Word made flesh in the very principle of reality, now expressed in the form of Jesus Christ—the God-man. The unfathomable reality of God is now accessible through Jesus Christ, who enters the world, teaching not for material gain, but to offer life.

“In him was life; and the Life was the light of men” (Jn. 1:4).

Christ’s teachings are not just abstract truths—they are life-giving. The crowd that gathers around Him in Capernaum is not seeking comfort or wealth. They are seeking light, seeking reality, coming out of their chaos and moving toward being—toward the light of men.

God appears, He shines out, as Beauty—compelling the crowd to enter into His Word, providing order, texture, and rendering reality unto them.

In this context, we turn to the story of the paralytic. St. Luke, the physician and Evangelist, records that the man is suffering from palsy—meaning unstrung and loosed on one side—an inability to move or act. The Evangelists who records this event report that four friends carried the man to the Lord. These four friends represent the Church—the bishops, the priests, the deacons, and the laity—intercessors and the Four Gospels. They are the Church helping us move toward Christ, helping us overcome our spiritual paralysis.

Capernaum, where Christ performs this miracle, is symbolic of the Church and the heavenly Liturgy—a space not for the perfect, but for the broken and contrite in heart (cf. Ps 50:17 LXX). The Church is a hospital. As Jonathan Pageau puts it, “The Church asks you to come to church broken. Come broken and if you come broken, then you get this glory. You get to participate in this beauty”[3] and in this Beauty you become healed—whole.

In our repentance, we move toward healing, toward restoration. The ontological transformation in the paralytic’s healing mirrors the pattern of Creation itself—moving from non-being to being, from chaos to light. It’s an ontological participation in divine reality, not merely a set of beliefs or doctrines. This active process restores our nous (the eye of the heart), reorienting it toward God.

The paralytic’s healing reflects sin’s structural problem. It is sickness that touches not only what we do, but who we are becoming.

The Greek theologian, Panayiotis Nellas, illuminates this pervasive problem, pointing—again—at the beginning:

“The phrase ‘in the image’ implies a gift within man but at the same time a goal set before him, a possession but also a destiny, since it really does constitute man’s being, but only in potentiality …Having been made in the image of God, man has a theological structure. And to be a true man he must at every moment exist and live theocentrically. When he denies God he denies himself and destroys himself.”[4]

We see a broken paralytic whose weak, unsupported limbs drift toward non-being. His movement toward Christ, aided by his friends’ faith, is the path of salvation. It’s the process of being lowered into the heart, of allowing the Church, the sacraments, and tradition to purify and reorient us.

St. Gregory Palamas writes of the ascetic process of purification, finding this rest in God, “When through self-control we have purified our body, and when through divine love we have made our incensive power and our desire incentives for virtue, and when we offer to God an intellect cleansed by prayer, then we will possess and see within ourselves the grace promised to the pure in heart (cf. Matt. 5:8). Then, too, we will be able to affirm with St. Paul: ‘The God who said, “Out of darkness let light shine”, has made this light shine our hearts, to give us the illumination of the knowledge of God’s glory in the Person of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6).”[5]

This purification is an ongoing ascent toward God in the Upper Room, a moving from chaos to being—into Life that is the light of men: Christ. Just as the paralytic needed help from his friends to reach Christ, we too are helped by the Church in our journey toward Christ.

And here we see the key to salvation: It is communal. Love is communal. The world teaches Salvation is not a solitary experience, but a journey made alongside others. The distractions of this world—the noise, the chaos—keep us from seeing the Beauty of God. In a world that exalts individualism, our hearts become fractured, isolated, and enslaved to the pursuit of human praise (cf. Jn. 12:43). As St. Maximos the Confessor writes, “The self-love and cleverness of men, alienating them from each other… have cut our single human nature into many fragments.”[6]

The modern world distorts what it means to be truly human, severing us from one another and from God. But when we turn our hearts toward Him, when we follow the path of the paralytic, we are living theocentrically, as Panayiotis Nellas writes, when a man lives this way “he realizes himself by reaching out into infinity; he attains true fulfillment by extending into eternity” living in union with God and all creation.

“Therefore,” the Apostle thus warns, “we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip… How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him” (Heb. 2:1,3).

Let us take up this great salvation, spoken by the Lord from the very beginning, confirm it in our hearts, and through the Church, re-liken the image of God within us. Our destiny is to live theocentrically, to reach out into infinity and become true, attaining the fulfillment of our original purpose: to be united with God in Beauty, Truth, and Rest.

Selah.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ

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[1] Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (Maysville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2019), 75, 78.

[2] Derek J. Fiedler, “‘Arrival’ & the Universal Language,” The Symbolic World, September 19, 2024, https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/content/arrival-the-universal-language.

[3] Jonathan Pageau, in “Inescapable Beauty: Orthodox Aesthetics and Iconography with Jonathan Pageau and Fr. Turbo Qualls,” hosted by David Patrick Harry, The Church of Eternal Logos, YouTube video, November 9, 2023, 32:00.

[4] Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ, 37, 42, quoted in Johanna Manley, ed., The Bible and the Holy Fathers: For Orthodox (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 742.

[5] St. Gregory Palamas, The Philokalia, Vol. 4, 333, St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, eds., trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (New York: Faber and Faber, 1995).

[6] St. Maximos the Confessor, The Philokalia, Vol. 2, 173, St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, eds., trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (New York: Faber and Faber, 1981).