 |
| Saint Sophrony the Athonite. |
From this passage we see that knowledge is both a result of and
equivalent to living communion. This communion is realized through love : love
is thus the uniting principle. This “gnoseology” derives from trinitarian
theology—absolute love between the divine hypostases ensures their absolute
unity. This absolute unity/communion of the triune being results in the
absolute mutual knowledge of each hypostasis. Great significance is attributed
to the perichoresis (coinherence) between the divine persons—their absolute
mutual coinherence. Fr Sophrony builds up a model of divine love within the
trinitarian being: “The absolute perfection of love in the bosom of the Trinity
reveals to us the perfect reciprocity of the ‘interpenetration’ of the three
persons.”
This trinitarian model allows Fr Sophrony to make the connection
between love and knowledge more explicit: “God is love (1 Jn 4:8) and He knows
Himself and us absolutely; and everything in Him is one.” Fr Sophrony transfers the
principle love=knowledge onto the human plane. The objects of knowledge here
are both God and other humans. Fr Sophrony mentions knowledge of God in this
context in his Ascetic Discourses : “The highest aim, according to Silouan is
‘the more a person loves God, the more he knows Him’ . . . love
unites the very being. When we have repulsion toward others, barriers and so
on—this deprives us of life. When we have prayer, love and tears, this brings
us closer to the highest ‘science’—knowledge of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit.”
On the basis of his maximalist anthropology Fr Sophrony transfers
the intratrinitarian principle of being to the level of multihypostatic human
existence. As in the Trinity, in which the hypostases know each other through
perichoretic love, so also humans come to know each other through love. This
connection between knowledge and love on the human level is clearly expressed
in Letters to Russia : “If I will love my brother and my neighbor as my own
life,and will not egoistically separate myself from him, then, clearly, I will
come to know him more, and know him more deeply, in all his suffering,
thoughts, and quests.”
Fr Sophrony inherits the idea of the living dimension of the
knowledge of God from his elder Silouan. The golden thread of Silouan’s ascetic
theology is the idea that living knowledge of God is actualized in the
communion of the Holy Spirit.
Fr Sophrony himself points out his dependence on Silouan in this respect. In Silouan, the knowledge of
God is always based on revelatory experience of some kind and therefore comes
“from above.” The faculty of the knowledge of God is placed not in man’s
rational faculty alone but in “the whole man”: “The soul suddenly sees the Lord
and knows that it is He . . . The Lord is made known in the Holy
Spirit and the Holy Spirit pervades the entire man—soul, mind and body
.”
Empirical/scientific
knowledge can be enclosed in the form of thoughts, objective ideas, and
concepts, but these are insufficient for the perception of divine reality. Here
we come to a crucial question: How and in what form then can nonconceptual and
subjective knowledge of God be communicated to the human being?
To answer this
question Fr Sophrony introduces a new concept: theology as a state of being. He
writes that in the moment of divine revelation (as in contemplation of the
divine light, for example) “profound knowledge descends on us, not as a
thought, but as sostoianie [state] of our spirit.” These states usually occur
during prayer. Fr Sophrony describes how in the moment of such prayer “our
mind-spirit is included in the mind of God and receives an understanding of
things which escapes any adequate expression in our daily language.” He
explains this communion in knowledge through the state of our spirit in the
following example: “All things are created by His will, His thought. He
conceives the world, and His creative thinking becomes created being. Not
matter but the thinking of God the Creator is the initial factor. Thus we live
this world not only through the prism of experiential knowledge, but in the
Spirit also behold it in another fashion (cf Heb 11:1-3).”
The problem with the term “state” is that it can be easily confused
with the common use of the word, which has a very strong association with
psychological conditions, or even with “feelings.” The temptation to fall for
this conclusion is strong indeed, especially when Fr Sophrony describes these
states in terms of their psychological effect, as joy, or pain. However, Fr Sophrony
anticipates such misunderstanding and gives a clear definition of his technical
term state in contrast to the usual use of the word in the context of
psychology or human emotions:
“ State ” is the fact of being, which prompts our thought,
operating after its own fashion, to understand truth. Such understanding is not
achieved by demonstrative reasoning but through an intuitive penetration or an
establishment of fact as knowledge of Divine Being, descending on us from God.
Reference:
I love Therefore I am. The Theological legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Nicholas Sakharov. 2012.