This is a FREE Post.
Author’s note: Much of this post is inspired by a lecture given by Charles Stang, Ph.D. You can read the transcript here. I use a lot of his terminology in this article so I wanted to make sure to cite him. Please check him out if you can.
Burning
“Attend above all else to the reading of the scriptures.” — Attributed to Origen.
There is a story that circulates around the Mediterranean, who knows if it’s true. It is said that, many years ago, in a small monastery hidden away in the hills of Greece and overlooking the sea, a junior monk, frustrated with his lack of spiritual progress, went to see an elder, Father Joseph. The night was cool and cloudless, and from the little courtyard of the monastery where the monk found Father Joseph praying, one could see in the skies every star. Beneath them, in the blackness, the sound of the sea rolled on and on, one after another, wave upon wave. Behind, tucked into the hillside, came the gentle sounds of the other monks chanting their nightly prayers. The bell tolled. The monk stood patiently behind the elder, who had not yet seen him, waiting for an appropriate time when the older man would pause in his prayers, for the younger did not want to interrupt him. After several minutes, old Father Joseph at last lowered his hands and sat down, apparently finished.
“Abba?” The younger man said, approaching cautiously. “If I would not be a bother to you, would you allow me a question?”
The old man turned, his long grey beard hanging down almost to his waist. Seated as he was against the darkness of the horizon in his black robes, apart from his pale face he was scarcely visible. He looked ancient. Far older than any living man had a right to.
“Ah, Lot, my son. Yes, of course, here,” the old man patted the stone he was sitting on. “Sit beside me. What is it that troubles you?”
“I do not know how to continue,” the young monk began as he settled down upon the stone. “I do all that is required. I rise early in the morning and attend to my prayers. I read the scriptures daily. I say my office and do my work and chant with the brothers. Yet, I find within myself no peace. I do not feel that I am growing closer to God.”
Listening, the old man smiled and, after a few moments, patted the younger man’s knee in a fatherly way as he groaned with stiffness, rising to his feet. Turning to face the younger man, without a word, the old monk raised both hands to the heavens and, as Lot sat watching, each and every one of the other’s ten fingers began to burn like brightest candles.
“My son,” the old man said, staring down at him from behind ten luminous rods, “if you are willing, you can become all flame.”
Husks and Shells
“For our God is a consuming fire.” — Bible, Hebrews 12:29
“For the Lord your God is a consuming fire…” — Bible, Deuteronomy 4:24
Halos are a bit strange.
Seldom does anyone bother to explain them.
For thousands of years, in both pre and post Christian religion, saints, angels, gods, and holy people have been depicted in art with a ring of light around their heads… and most people don’t know why. Moses, famously, after he had been up the mountain communicating with God, shone so brightly that for a time after he had to wear a veil over his face, lest the light coming off his skin blind and disturb those who came to speak with him. Jesus likewise, on Mount Tabor, was said to have been in an instant transfigured, made all aglow with light such that even his clothes became whiter than the whitest snow.
Why would this happen?
What could this mean?
Well, there is a tradition in religious thought that has been deemphasized in modern times. Deemphasized, really, almost to the point of being forgotten. The ancients you see believed that God… was Fire. That’s not a metaphor. Ancient people believed, apparently literally, that God’s body, in as much as God can be said to have one, was made of Flame. “God is light,” says the apostle, “and in him there is no darkness at all.” Further, The Holy Spirit, when it descends from Heaven upon the disciples at Pentecost, comes down and alights upon their heads as visible Flame. Even today, whether or not you believe them, Eastern Orthodox Christians claim that God descends, every Easter, as Holy Fire within the church built around Jesus’s empty tomb.
God is Fire. God is Light.
In him there is no darkness at all.
We creatures on the other hand, we men and women and plants and animals and angels… we are made of lesser stuff, and a great many theological disputes have erupted over the years about just what, exactly, that lesser stuff is. Because you know, the soul of a man, and his spirit… how are these connected to his body? I mean, is it random? Are souls just plopped into bodies? Could the soul of a man have been put in the body of a woman, or vice versa? Could the soul of a plant be placed in the body of a dog? Is my physical face, right now, in any way connected to, or a reflection of, the invisible parts of me? Is my body, with its shape and size and morphology, a necessary consequence of the “shape” and “size” of my soul?
Many do not think so.
Many have not thought so for thousands of years.
We might say that such people, perhaps in the majority, have believed that bodies and souls are akin to husks and kernels. We might say that they believed that the flesh, the body, was nothing but a shell, a containment vessel for what was actually important, the soul within. In such a model, the husk does not much matter and it might look like anything, as it bears little relation to the qualities of the kernel it contains. It is easy to think then, under this vision, that the body we now have might’ve been a very different one, and that the things that happen to it do not impact the soul inside. After all, if our outward selves truly are just husks, then it is hard to see how harming the body, or using it improperly, could negatively impact the inward self which it contains. Sins of the body, of the flesh, do not therefore make much sense to such people, since they see the soul inside as totally separate from the body, and incapable of being changed by it. Religious systems operating under the Husk and Kernel Model cannot help therefore but to deemphasize the body, and inevitably they will come to see the body as random, a thing even “assigned” to them at birth. Husk and Kernal bodies you see, are nothing but a hinderance. A heavy, joyless corpse soon enough to be discarded so the soul can at last be free and happy, unhindered by the weight of physicality.
But…
There is another model.
One favored by many of the fathers of the early Church.
I ask you, what if, instead of thinking of our bodies and souls as husks and kernels… we instead thought of them like states of matter? Like Ice and Steam?
States of Soul
Origen is not looked upon favorably by modern Christianity nor, honestly, by most of the Church for most of its history. He was a universalist, meaning that he believed that everyone, even The Devil himself, would eventually be saved and brought back to God, and he worked this out theologically using some rather interesting ideas.
…
For these ideas he has routinely been called a heretic.
That isn’t really fair.
The man after all lived from 185 to 253 A.D. and so much of what we now consider “settled doctrine” had not even been thought of yet much less “settled” during his lifetime. Origen was one of the early voices trying to work out what this whole “Christianity” thing means and how it’s all supposed to work. He is therefore, undeniably, a Church Father, albeit one of questionable standing. This is a problem for those who like their dogmas cut and dry with no grey areas because The Church Fathers are supposed to represent a unanimous voice. They’re supposed to articulate the clear, unadulterated will of God.
Origen sort of throws a wrench into that.
He said things which are, at first glance, hard to square with what has become Christian orthodoxy.
So controversial has he been, in fact, that for almost two thousand years his detractors have been spreading the rumor that he castrated himself. You know, to say, kinda, “Don’t listen to this guy! He’s a lunatic who cut his own balls off! You don’t want to be driven mad like he was, do you?”
“Well… do you!?”
To be clear, there’s no evidence that Origen castrated himself. It’s probably a rumor. I mean, early Christian ascetics could get pretty extreme in their devotion, that’s true, and it was not unheard of for men who felt they were struggling too much with lust to cut their testicles off to remove that temptation. It’s therefore not unimaginable I guess to think that Origen would’ve done similar but, regardless of the truth of the accusation, the idea of his castration has been used solely as a means to humiliate and discredit him, instead of engaging honestly with his ideas.
And you know… maybe some of that is his fault.
He could’ve been clearer.
Engaging with Origen’s ideas isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do because, even after you read everything he wrote, it’s still not 100% obvious exactly what it is that he believed. People have argued over the specifics of his doctrine for centuries, resulting in little consensus, but… one thing that does seem pretty clear?
Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls.
Origen believed, in other words, that before you were born you existed, as a pure soul, or rather, as a pure mind or pure intellect, in Heaven.
Everybody did, thought Origen. Even the angels.
You see, according to Origen we were all, in the beginning, the same relative class of being. We were all Nous… Greek for Mind or Intellect. You, me, the angels, the demons, all of us, according to Origen, were, in the beginning, pure Mind, and the goal of our existence and our whole joy consisted only in the contemplation, in the beholding, of God. We were with God, and fully focused on him.
But…
Then we got distracted.
Somehow, someway, our minds turned from him to other things and, in the process, began to cool.
Origen you see believed that our present bodies were, in fact, no different than our eternal souls… our eternal minds. What we see now before us when we look in the mirror is that same Mind, that same Nous, which beheld God in the beginning, only, having been distracted from the contemplation of God, The Holy Fire, we are a Nous which has condensed. Solidified. Just as metal, or rock, when it is cold, is solid and unbendable, but when heated becomes liquified and eventually becomes gas, so too Origen believed that our present bodies were nothing but the cold forms of our souls. To Origen, when a soul is in the presence of God, that is, when a soul is fully devoted to the contemplation of God, then that soul takes on God’s heat. Just as an iron placed in a forge glows with the light of its fire… becomes its fire, so too do souls which are united fully to God glow and become a part of his all-consuming flame. We are not, according to Origen, kernels trapped in husks. Rather our whole being, all the time, never truly changes. Instead, we just change states, like water becoming ice, liquid, or steam, depending on our nearness to The Source. Angels then were beings who were not overly distracted from God and remained in their numinous, gaseous state. Men and women were more distracted, so much so that we changed states and became solid although, in both scientific and spiritual terms, still mostly water. Demons, most distracted of all, became hard as stone, and took up a residence commensurate with their state of being, down beneath the Earth.
Intriguing idea.
Unorthodox. But intriguing.
Note that that does not mean, really, that our present bodies are the only ones we could have had. That question is still unanswered. Just as an iron rod, once heated, may be molded into any shape before it is tossed in the water to cool, under Origen’s metaphysics it is still an open question whether or not we might have had different bodies. At the same time though, under this model, whatever body we do have, whatever shape it takes, is us, and not merely a shell or a husk which we can demean and dispose of without consequence. What happens to the body inevitably shapes and forms our souls because, again, our bodies are our souls.
…
And do we just get one?
Unclear.
Origen leaves that an open question and whether or not he believed in reincarnation has been hotly debated for years. Under his scheme, it might be that, upon Death, we are returned to the fire from which we came to see if we are ready for it and, if not, pulled back out again and hammered into a new shape, a new body, and placed back into the world. I suspect that for Origen (as well as for all of the Church fathers of less controversial character) Hell is something like that, for what could ever burn Eternally except God himself? A man, living long in a cave and emerging into the light of day, might be pained to the point of torture by the rays of the sun which another man finds quite pleasant. So too, perhaps, in the end, everybody goes to the same place, back to God, only some become the fire… whilst many others just feel burned.
I don’t know. As I’ve tried to make it clear through the title of this blog, Holy is He Who Wrestles is place where we wrestle with complicated ideas and, while Origen’s worldview doesn’t sit quite right with me, there is nonetheless something about it which resonates and which, perhaps, goes a long way towards explaining the supernatural. For the worldview which most of us are inculcated with from birth is exactly the opposite, one which views matter as the primary element of reality. Mind, if it exists at all (and some philosophers try very hard to pretend it doesn’t) is thought to be nothing but an “emergent property” of matter, and therefore anything which does not conform to the known laws of physics is deemed, ipso facto, impossible.
But if we are Minds…
If Mind is not an emergent property of Matter but Matter, instead, a cooled and condensed form of Mind…
Well.
That’s a horse of a different color.
If that’s the case then the dream-like quality that Reality can sometimes have suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Miraculous healings, telepathy, clairvoyance, mysticism and magic… if we and the world are minds before we are matter then perhaps Reality really can be altered simply by our beliefs. Perhaps faith is the key. Could it be that the placebo effect is nothing but that, the magic of a mind dreaming itself into a different state? Maybe, even, I do not put it out of possibility, the fantastical stories of the past, tales of Merlin and Imhotep and Prospero and cult priestesses transmuting themselves into snakes might have a glimmer of possibility, and perhaps it is only we, who have forgotten what we actually are, who now lack such powers.
Out there?
Yes.
I know. But I have first-hand witnessed a handful of what I would call “miraculous” healings, and such thoughts go as far towards an explanation of them as any other. Maybe we can’t change ourselves simply because we aren’t hot enough to bend. Maybe, like ice cold iron, we have become immovable, capable only of rust and decay. Perhaps the Resurrected Christ, precisely because he was once again so heated, was also so unrecognizable. His form, while completely real and solid, also more malleable and fluid than we cold hearted creatures can now conceive.
Contemplation
Regardless, the religious impulse over and over again seems to be directed towards the same end. Towards becoming, as it were, “Filled with Light.” We can’t get away from that idea, not even at our most “scientific” and most secular. After all, do the atheists of our day not console themselves with the notion that they are “star stuff” and that to such star stuff they will one day return? Does not even something as superficial and kitsch as the Marvel movies feature their gods illuminated with lightning or named, rather on the nose, something like “Star Lord?”
It’s what we want.
It’s our subconscious desire.
Deep down, probably in all of us, if we were to search our feelings and ask ourselves honestly, “What do I want?” …I think it’s probably the same.
We want to be on Fire.
We want to Glow.
We want to be radiant with Light.
That’s the religious impulse in a nutshell. The belief that we are not currently Hot enough. We are not bright enough. We do not burn enough with Love.
For that’s what it is you know. The Light. The Scriptures do everything but tell you this directly. God is Fire, God is Light, and, also, God is Love. How can that be unless the Light, the Fire, and the Love are actually all different words for the same thing? My friend I tell you that the nearer you draw to God in contemplation, the more you think on Him, dwell on Him, the more like him you will become. The fire will burn hotter in you, and hotter, perhaps, than you could ever imagine. You will become consumed with Love for all things and all people and your reality will become more bendable and malleable as it heats. Miracles will not seem so impossible in that place. You will feel more alive than you have in years.
How to get there?
Origen said that the easiest way was to read the scriptures.
Over and over again.
It will bother you, yes, and there will be many parts in them that you don’t understand or which seem to you morally repugnant. No matter. Keep going. Origen believed that as you read you would come to understand not because the text was perfect but because the One you were trying to understand through the text was. Your intention to draw near to God is what makes the text infallible, indeed, what makes the text worth anything at all. Apart from your desire for The Divine it is just ink on paper, a book sitting somewhere lifeless on a desk. Origen you see saw The Bible as a vehicle for contemplation, for thrusting yourself back into the refiner’s fire. For him, as I understand him, parts of the scriptures were in fact meant to be incomprehensible on purpose, much like Zen koans. They are there to force you to ruminate upon them, to force you to meditate. You see, the magic happens not because you read a specific word or a specific phrase from On High. The magic happens because you’re thinking about God.
That’s what matters.
The Nous is drawing near again unto its Source.
That’s what has the potential to make you, like Abba Joseph, all flame.
Amor Vincit Omnia.
Truly inspiring piece. This is one of the best you've written. God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:5 has a qualitative and not merely quantitative aspect. God is promising Abraham that his offspring will be *like* the stars, not merely as numerous as the stars. That's pretty close to becoming fire. Daniel 12:3 picks up on this when it says,
"And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever."
And we (foolishly?) consider fire dangerous: too close contact definitely harms flesh and bone. But perhaps the fire that is God has different effects. Perhaps it only consumes dross. Another analogy? found in the Bible speaks to the refining fire. What if we fear and avoid closeness to God because we do not want to be refined. How are we to distinguish between the fire of hell and the fire of God's love? There is much to ponder.