Blog - Symposium Reflections on Holiness
Symposium Reflections
The Old Testament is a strange library. Sometimes we do some unhelpful things to the stranger portions of it in an attempt to domesticate it and make it fit into our paradigm of spiritual reading. The Levitical dietary code is a perfect example. Every few years or so Christian booksellers promote a new book or program promising better health by way of observing the instructions of Leviticus 11.
Let's start with the name. The name “seven deadly sins” actually has a much shorter history than “capital vices” or “capital sins,” both of which bear a more ancient and longstanding pedigree. And in a fun twist, the name seven deadly sins is typically used by Protestants, who by and large reject the distinction between venial and mortal sins, to which the word “deadly” in the name refers.
The Church was born in Holiness. In and through the holy lives and witness of the early apostles, martyrs and confessors was Christianity indelibly impressed on history. Holiness is true war, reason, and morality. And the early Christians “fought” by prayer, service, and martyrdom.
I suggest that the values which we most ignore, the recognition of which we most seldom find in writings on education, are those of Wisdom and Holiness, the values of the sage and of the saint.
The sacred is something in which the Divine is present or which is charged with divine energies. The very idea of the sacred presupposes to start with the presence of the Divine or the existence of God. Without the Divine – without God – there can be no holiness, nothing sacred. We cannot talk about the sacred without presupposing God, just as we cannot talk about sunlight without presupposing the sun, however many mirrors it may be reflected in.
The Church is the gathering of the laos, the whole people of God. A lay person is not, as in the popular usage of the word “layman,” an amateur or an ignoramus. Instead, a lay person has the highest status, which all the baptized share: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” as St Peter says in his first epistle.
The saint has triumphed over time while living intensely within time. He has thus come to bear the closest resemblance to Christ, who is at once in the heavenly places, and always with us, bringing mighty things to pass. He bears Christ within himself with the invincible power of his love, for the salvation of men.
The way of Christian holiness is, in any case, hard and austere. We must fast and pray. We must embrace hardship and sacrifice, for the love of Christ, and in order to improve the condition of man on earth. We may not merely enjoy the good things of life ourselves, occasionally “purifying our intention” to make sure that we are doing it all “for God.” Such purely abstract and mental operations are only a pitiful excuse for mediocrity.
Above all, holiness is the opposite of the reality of this world and presents itself as the eruption of what is absolutely different, that which Rudolf Otto termed das ganz Andere (the wholly Other). The Bible supplies the fundamental definition. Only God is holy, and a creature is such only in a derived sense. The sacred and the holy can never be of the creature’s own nature but only and always by participation in the nature of God.
Each Father, in his own personal way, reveals the same Truth. Thus we have a St Basil the Great who speaks in a kingly tone, with grandeur and sobriety, transmitting the message of the Kingdom.