The Concept of Holiness
Feast of the Holy Innocents Slain by Herod in BethlehemAnno Domini 2019, December 29
Contemporary language frequently employs such expressions as “sacred” obligation, will, or commandment, a “holy” person. In semantic evolution the terms “sacred” and “holy” were detached from their roots and have taken on a moral
meaning quite different from their original ontological
significance.
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. The terms kadosh, agios, sacer, and sanctus
imply a relationship of totally belonging to God, and of being set apart. The divine act of sanctification or consecration takes a person or an object back from its empirical condition and places it in communion with the divine energies and grace which change its nature and immediately makes it experience, within its natural or original location the mysterium tremendum, the sacred trembling before the coming of the supernatural and its “awesome purity.” This has nothing at all to do with fear of the unknown, but is rather a mystical awe which accompanies every manifestation of the Transcendent One. “I will send my fear before you and will destroy all the people to whom you will come” (Ex. 23:27). Again: “Take off your shoes from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).
This is, in the world’s false realities, the overwhelming experience of a reality which is “innocent” because it is sanctified, purified, and returned to its original state, to its destiny of being the pure vessel of a presence. The holiness of God abides there and shines from it. Thus “this place is holy” because of the presence of God, as that part of the Temple was holy because of the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, as the Holy Scriptures witness to the presence of Christ in their words, as every church building is holy because God dwells there, speaks to us and feeds us with Himself. The “kiss of peace” is holy because it seals the communion of those who exchange it in Christ, who is present. The prophets, apostles, and the “saints” of Jerusalem are holy because of the charism of their ministry. Bishops have the title “holy brother,” a patriarch is addressed as “His Beatitude/Holiness,” not because of any personal virtue but because of their participation in the unique, holy priesthood of Christ. Each baptized person is confirmed or chrismated, anointed, sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order to “share in the nature of God” (2 Pet. 1:4), participate in the “holiness of God” (Heb. 12:10), and it is in this sense of participation in divine holiness that St Paul calls the members of the community “saints.”
The liturgy teaches this holiness most explicitly. Before offering the eucharistic gifts, the celebrant says: “Holy things are for the holy” and the assembly responds, moved by this awesome invitation, confessing their unworthiness, “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.” The One who is uniquely holy in his nature is Christ. Those who are His members are holy only through sharing in His unique holiness.
Isaiah (6:5-6) provides a most illuminating image of this. “Woe is me! … I am a man of unclean lips … Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand which he had taken with tongs from the altar, and he laid it on my mouth and said, Lo, this has touched your lips and your iniquity is taken away.” The energy of divine holiness is a fire which consumes every impurity. When it touches a person this fire cleanses and sanctifies, conforming him to the holiness of God. The priest, after receiving communion, recalls this vision of Isaiah, kissing the rim of the chalice, which is the image of the pierced side of Christ, saying, “Lo, this has touched my lips and taken away my iniquity and healed me of my sin.” The spoon with which the priest distributes Holy Communion in the Orthodox liturgy is called in Greek lavis, “tongs,” of which Isaiah spoke in his vision and of which the Fathers, with respect to the Eucharist say: “You have consumed fire…”
“Be holy, as I am holy.” Every degree of consecration and sanctification is through participation in the one, unique divine source. Thus is every being in the world “deprofaned” and “devulgarized.” This “permeating” of the world is the very action of the sacraments which teach that in every life there is a sacred power, that every Christian is destined for fulfillment liturgically by participation in the mystery of divine life. Thus as at the feat of the Transfiguration and at Pascha (Easter), the faithful bring to church fruit and other food to be blessed, for all our nourishment is like the Eucharist, an offering to be consecrated, a gift to be sanctified. The destiny of water is for sharing in the Epiphany mystery of the Jordan in which Christ was baptized. The destiny of wood is to be the tree of life and the Cross; of earth to receive the body of the Lord into the rest of Holy Saturday, the great Sabbath; of stone to seal the sepulcher and then be rolled back by the angel for the myrrh-bearing women. Oil and water are fulfilled in baptism, chrismation, and the other anointings. Wheat and the vine culminate in the eucharistic bread and cup. One sees very clearly here that everything refers to the Incarnation, everything is presented to the Lord as a splendid liturgy, the cosmic synthesis of all created being. The most basic actions of life, eating, drinking, washing, speaking, moving – all of these are integrated and directed to their ultimate end by the liturgy, namely participating in the holiness of God. “At last all things are the furnishing of our temple, instead of being our prison,” Paul Claudel says quite rightly. Thus holiness by participation is the restoration of our nature in Christ, His healing, “the return from what is contrary to nature to that which truly belongs to it.”
~Paul Evdokimov, “Holiness in the Tradition of the Orthodox Church”
*Register for the Eighth Day Symposium("For I Am Holy: The Command to Be Like God") before regular registration rates begin on January 7.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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