The Light of the Saints

Several events within my memory stand out. As with most the big and happy highlights are all there: my wedding, my daughter’s baptism, my reception into the Orthodox Church. Some there also are bitter: sitting with my father as he died, visiting the matushka of the priest who had catechized me and chrismated me on the day after he had died. Some of the memories are of a different kind, and involve more professional and academic matters. I remember a wonderful evening in Oslo, Norway, at the home of the Rev. Dr. Roald Flemestad, now Vicar General of the Nordic Catholic Church. The evening began about 6 and ran till 3 AM. There I had the best cognac ever I have tasted- – Otard – – but as well the humane and lively company of my hosts (Fr. Roald’s wife, a PhD in Medieval French literature, had made the meal that afternoon, all the while on a conference call with her employers, IBM) and their other wonderful guests, various professors and clerics.

Another day, similar but more subdued, was a brief afternoon spent within one of the libraries of Black Friars, Cambridge (a Dominican house) where I had coffee and conversation with Fr. Aidan Nichols. After the happy pleasantries, we eventually got around to all sorts of topics theological, and I put to him a question prompted by none other than our own Acolyte, about the will of the saints in Heaven, and is it singular, with only a singular object, i.e., is the summum bonum One? While he did not deny the Maximian and Palamite teaching about the plurality πραγματα περι Θεου – – things around God (granted, I wasn’t pressing him hard on this point yet, but he’s no one’s fool), he also noted that we shall see each other face to face as well, so that we are not only turned to God, but to all the Saints as well. I have thought about that since then on several occasions, and now given it more thought in light of a recent conversation elsewhere in the blogosphere, but in light also of that memorable evening in Oslo.

Our good friend and boon companion, The Ochlophobist, on 1 November put up a post that touched on a number of items. One of them was the Russian film Ostrov (The Island). Och wrote

>>I recently watched Larisa Shepitko’s pristine The Ascent (1977), which … evokes that cathartic impulse via which, I believe, the medium of cinema takes the role that some want to find in a church service, correspondent to Trotsky’s logic. I have sometimes wondered if the film Ostrov (The Island) is not the most satanic of films, as it forces the favorable viewer (and seeks to coerce all viewers) into intuiting (or outright thinking) that there is a mimesis outside of an actual encounter with such holiness that meaningfully conveys via manipulative and image-in-place-of rather than -image-in-fullness-of re-presentation the reality of which the film makes a caricature. Following this logic, it may well be better for the soul to watch American Pie than Ostrov. I reserve judgment on that question. <<

Och’s point had been made to me at other times, and most memorably by Fr. Adrian Pollard of blessed memory, that there is a reason we keep monks in monasteries, and that the faithful should take great care in reading such things as the Philokalia. In Fr. Adrian’s experience, most of those who do, do so to mimic the Pilgrim in The Way of the Pilgrim, and in this regard were nothing but spiritual voyeurs indulging in spiritual pornography. It is a point akin to that Neil Postman made in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, that TV trivializes all it touches. This is why televising the Divine Liturgy is such a bad idea, and consonant with Och’s sentiments above: The Divine Liturgy entails sacred acts and sacred words done within a sacred space. Outside of this space, those looking in are just voyeurs. What is the Divine Liturgy if I can fold laundry or pop a cold one while watching it, and do so in my pajamas, or pause it to answer the phone?

Having said all that, while I think Och has a point about Ostrov, I think it is so only to a point, for I didn’t take the movie as letting people into the life of the holy fool, or getting the viewer in touch with their inner holy fool.

{Spoiler Alert! For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, you are getting ready to find out what it is about.}

Instead I thought the whole movie about the inscrutable ways of God. Clearly the monk is a holy fool, graced with the gift of prophecy and discernment, and that he is gifted as well with farsighted visions of things no one else could know. Lastly, he is a man of great repentance. It is his repentance that drives his monastic vocation, for he took up this life after he shoots the captain of the coal barge he on which he served during World War II. The Nazis blow up the ship – – they are the ones who forced him to shoot his captain, and he is fished out of the water by the monks of the monastery. Overcome by the horror of what he had done he spends his life in prayer as a lay monk, feeding coal into the monastery’s heating system, and praying for the soul of his departed Captain. But beside him we also have the other monks: the vain scholar- – I could identify – – and the soft and far-from austere abbot.

Yet the key to the whole movie was what the monk, the holy fool, despite his gift of vision and clairvoyance did not see, and could not know, for God had never revealed it to him: the raison d’etre of his life was not true, for his captain had survived. The real reason he was a monk and had lived the life of repentance was not so he could be absolved of his sin of murder, for he had murdered no one. This, the foundational and fundamental fact of his life, God never revealed to him. Instead, the purpose of his life was so that he could exorcize the demon of the daughter of his ship’s captain, who not only had not died, but had thrived and was now an admiral in the Soviet navy. Yet despite his status and all the benefits that came to him with it (party membership has its privileges), these were of no help to his daughter. And so he came seeking salvation from the miracle-working fool he had heard about, this pariah in the Soviet system.

I show this film to my Orthodoxy class on the last day of class. Most of them, of course, are sucked in by the very things that Och warns about (and I have already warned them as well, as they had all read- – or were supposed to have read – – The Way of the Pilgrim). It is getting them to see what only struck me the second time I watched the film that proves the benefit of the movie, something that Tolstoy noted in his short story “Truths We Live By” (sometimes called “Michael the Visitor”), that “it is not given to man to know his own needs.” What we need we only come to realize over time, for we are ignorant of the ways of God, and thus absolutely ignorant of all our needs. In Tolstoy’s words, we do not know whether we need boots for the next year’s work, or slippers that evening for our corpse.

This has application in how we view others, whose needs we often see better than our own. It is left to us to help others in their needs, realize that because we are blind to our own failings and needs, that we need them to help us as well, and lastly we need others so that our own personal existence, the logos of our existence, can move towards its proper τελος and end, which is rest in God, to enjoy “all good things”.