The Place Where Paradox Speaks, Part I. The Coincidence of Opposites: An entrance into greater fullness or a passage into the borderlands of deception?

The Canaanite woman cries out, and she is heard the woman with the issue of blood is silent, and she is called blessed; the Pharisee speaks, and he is condemned; the publican does not open his mouth, and he is heard.

-Abba Epiphanius

And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but . . . in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development . . . holds out hope.

Here is E.K., who was born around 1940, one of those boys who, under Khrushchev, gathered to read poems on Mayakovsky Square, but was hauled off instead in Black Marias. From camp, from a Potnia camp, he writes to his girl:

‘Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased . . . . I have experienced a turning point . . . Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside.’

-Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part IV: The Soul and Barbed Wire, Ch. 1: The Ascent

The Question(s)

Is it truly the case that an experience on one side of the spectrum can reveal to us the reality of its opposite on the other?

That silence can express the expanse of language?

That blindness can sharpen our vision?

That the path of darkness can open us to new dimensions of light?

That weakness can work depths of strength?

That giving, even to the point of poverty, can unveil greater riches?

That foolishness can bring wisdom?

That hardship can produce gentleness?

Suffering, healing?

Chaos, peace?

Sorrow, new dimensions of joy?

Self-denial, self-fulfillment?

Humiliation, exaltation?

The passage into the “valley of the shadow of death,” the coming of light and life?

Which realities have been spoken of as the “paradoxy of orthodoxy.”

An entrance into more expansive reality or deeper delusion?

Yet, the question for us here is whether this is actually the case?

Whether these realities are so?

Or are they just a series of beautifully-constructed illusions to help us cope with the actual realities of suffering, pain and loss? (Which, I may add, has been a continual critique of the post-traumatic growth literature: “Despite the strong appeal of this narrative, empirical research provides limited evidence that adversity reliably leads to improved psychological functioning…” with prospective studies finding “very small (or non-significant) correlations between perceived change and actual change)1, 2, 3, 4.

That is to say, in our experience of the “slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune” with its “sea of troubles,” our minds, plunged into darkness and chaos, seek an escape by reconstructing some sort of misperceived, “redemptive” narrative of growth (a “post-hoc self-perception” of positive change) that, in truth, has no foundation in the real world.

All just an illusion.

That’s one position. And maybe there is a partial truth to this in certain cases.

The truth of eternity spoken in paradox

Yet in other cases could it also be true that our experience of the “opposites” of life—what has been termed the conincidentia oppositorum (the “coincidence of opposites”1—is indeed not a mere illusion but an actual pathway into a more expansive reality—into Eternity itself? As we, however, are locked in the structures of our finite, and we might add fallen, realm, it may indeed be the case that such expansive, eternal truths can only be expressed to us in the here and now only in terms of paradox.

And even that imperfectly.

Always, as Eliot wrote,

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
…a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating (Four Quartets, East Coker, V )

Be that the case, there is still the witness of experience (which, we should say, is derived from the Greek word, “ex-peirasmos”: Literally, “that which comes out of testing”). For if the lives of the saints (or of our patients, or of own biographies, for that matter), hold any weight, we find that it is often in the fires of testing that our soul is drawn out of the passing vanity (the hevel) of This Age into a more comprehensive reality brimming over with Eternity itself. And the view offered to us in the present opens our finite minds to a metanoiaic understanding, that changes the “totality of consciousness at the deepest level of being.” A change which we never would have experienced, we must finally admit, if the fires of trial had not been lit beneath us.

And even if the glimpse of light from this refining fire may be granted to us only for a moment, in that moment we are given to see the present through the lens of eternity and view eternity through the lens of the present.1

The truth of eternity heard in silence

That’s the first side—the positive dimension—when we, as the opening quote testifies, are brought through the overwhelming intensity of trials into a place of silence, where the voice of truth is no longer stifled out by the roar of the “surfeit and vanity” from outside. Pressed beyond the limits of ourselves, beyond the limits even of finite reality, we are taken into the eternal silence of the Word of the Cross. And here, the perplexing nature of what initially appears to us to be contradictions is shown to us simply to be reality—the way things actually are in this finite, fallen realm.

Here the experience of sickness can work in us eternal healing, suffering true dimensions flourishing, poverty enduring wealth, sorrow depths of joy.

For these hardships, trials, testings, even horrors, can brings us to view a deeper level of paradox operating underneath it all. A paradox which centers on the paradox of our own existence—We are finite persons with an eternal soul. Or in the language of Solomon,

“God has set eternity in our hearts” (Eccl 3:11).

Finite and mortal yet eternal.

And so, when events in our lives push us beyond the limits of earthly, material, mortal existence, these may be precisely what are necessary to open our eternal soul to the illuminating light of eternity that redeems and heals.

Therefore we do not lose heart.

Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,

While we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.

For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal (II Cor 4:16-18).

Two pathways opened to us in the “first of testing”

This, again, is a positive dimension of the fires of testing where we pass through the “narrow and hard pathway” (or more literally, the “narrow and suffering [thlîpsis] path”) into life itself.

Yet, there may be a negative dimension also.

For the same fires may also plunge us into a still greater, deafening and blinding darkness. With our eyes focused only on the “things which are seen,” we experience only “our outward man perishing.” Overwhelmed by the blackness of suffering, we are blinded from the inner experience of renewal and flourishing that the thlîpsis is meant to offer us.

We see only the suffering and are blinded to the glory.

The path into the “Borderlands”

As such, our entrance into this silence of Eternity comes to us with a grave warning.

When we move out of the noise of This Fallen Age (“Hell has been occupied by noise…And we will make the whole universe a noise in the end”2)— beyond the confines of our finite, material existence, we enter into what has been called the “Borderlands” of eternity. And in this realm, we come into contact with spirits, not only of the eternal Kingdom of light, but also of the kingdoms of this dark, passing age.

The working of one redeems; the other deceive.

The one illuminates; the other darkens.

The one produces peace; the other disorder.

The one brings healing and life; the other plagues the soul, working death.

The pathway through the “Borderlands”

So the Apostle John tells us,

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit,

But test (δοκιμάζετε [dokimázō]) the spirits to see whether they are from God,

For many false prophets have gone out into the world (I Jn 4:1).

This is the warning given to us with the pathway through offered—test the spirits.

Test that which is offered from the sphere of human wisdom (Part IA, below), which may on the surface appear brilliant and full of seductive insight, yet which can draw us into still greater delusion (Part i).

Here in the “Borderlands” of eternity, we begin moving beyond an easily constructed view of reality, built upon technique—the idea that any set of actions can offers us a predetermined result:

“If I get into this school, then…”;

“If I get this job, then…”;

If I get married, then…have children, then…move into this neighborhood, then…”

Or “If I am healed from this, then…”

Or to even Christianize it, “If I do this ministry, then…Go onto the mission field, then…read more, pray more, fast more, then…”

Here we are opened up beyond any artificial constructions we place onto reality, be it pagan or Christian. We are brought beyond the material and transient vanities of life into the spiritual realm of eternity.

And thus, here we must struggle to grasp for the words, the tools, to express what we encounter. And if we use our earthly eyes, we will be blinded; if we seek to perceive through the tools of This Age, our understanding will be deluded.
Thinking ourselves wise, we will become a fool.

And with that we begin.

The Outline

We will break our discussion into three sections (with this initial writing working through Part I). Our thesis will be:

I. That this is so:

A. Witness to the coincidence of opposites from the sphere of human wisdom

i) The entrance into and a warning from the “Borderlands”

Isaiah 6 & John 6

Appendix: Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis

B. Witness to the coincidence of opposites from the sphere of divine foolishness

i) Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia)

I Cor 1-2

Appendix: Scriptural Witness to Paradox

II. Why all of this may then be so?

III. And finally, how. in our Fallen World, this can be so?

Part I. That this is so?

A. Witness to the coincidence of opposites from the sphere of human wisdom:

Insights from a modern, Oxford polymath neuroscientist

Ian McGilchrist, an" “Oxford psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, literary scholar”1 and proclaimed polymath presents to us a very prescient insight into the nature of understanding, offered through the lens of neuroscience. His initial work, “The Master and His Emissary," received widespread acclaim for its brilliant analysis of the asymmetry in the division of the brain’s right and left hemispheres which convincingly demonstrates how that specialization influences our unconscious experience of the world. To use McGilchrist’s own summation, the left hemisphere (“The emissary”) processes information in ways that are “certain, fixed, isolated, explicit, abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable, known by their parts, and inanimate,”; whereas the right hemisphere (“The Master”), constructs “a world of Gestalten, forms and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts, but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing, interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied and animate.”

Two different (on the surface) oppositional constructs, that together—and this is a key emphasis in his literary research and output—enable us to perceive the whole of reality. If there is an imbalance—if one is ascendant and the other suppressed—then predictable dysfunction in perception ensues, the results of which extend far beyond the personal realm of the neuroscientific.

From the “Master and His Emissary” to “The Matter with Things”

This seemingly impossible-to-stop tendency within the human personality and the society at large, it seems, formed the background to his next, two-volume work, The Matter With Things (a 1500 page magnum opus of sorts), which develops his arguments from the realm of neuroscience further into that, not only of science, but philosophy and religion, which together form “the deepest traditions of human wisdom.”

After a comprehensive analysis in Parts I of the “Science of Life” detailing, as he understands it, “The Ways to Truth” that are open to us through Attention, Perception, Judgment, Apprehension, Cognition and Creativity, he moves in the second part into the “What of Truth.” There he deals with the respective claims that Science, Reason, Intuition and Imagination have on Truth.

The coincidentia oppositorum

Then in Part III (from which the quotation below is based), he opens with a chapter entitled, The coincidentia oppositorum (“The coincidence of opposites”). We will return to the history of this term in the next section, but for now we will only note that in McGilchrist’s own wording, he comes to understand this phrase not through a kind of “religious dogmatism” that engenders “false certainties that impede [our] access to truth.” He understands only through, we might say, raw perception. Unhindered (as is supposed), he enters into the territory of true, pure, philosophical wisdom.

Now the quotation, introducing the essential reality of paradox which continually “besets” humanity:

We pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time.

We privilege autonomy and end up bound by rules to which we never assented and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time

We pursue leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever and that we have less time than we had before.

The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends are or whether there is purpose in anything at all.

Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash—They promptly crash.

We're so eager that all scientific research results in positive findings that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking.

We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian in order to get value for money and thus render it pointless and in this form certainly a waste of resources. We improve education by dictating curricula and focusing on exam results to the point where free thinking—arguably an overarching goal of true education—is discouraged in our universities. Many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically. And their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude.

We over sanitize and cause vulnerability to infection. We overuse antibiotics leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill. We make drugs illegal to protect society and while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs, we create a fertile field for crime.

We protect children in such a way that they cannot cope, let alone relish in uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable.

The paradox of reductionism

In a response to the question of both How and Why all of this occurs, he pinpoints hemispheric specialization:

The left hemisphere's motivation is control and its means of achieving it is alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of recursive interactions at any one time—which is all it can.

One cannot deny that there is incredible levels of insight here. And one cannot deny the reality of the “coincidentia oppositorum” through which McGilchrist seems to surgically dismantle the foundations of scientific determinism and materialistic reductionism.

What is fascinating, however, is that he concludes his argument by returning to none other than neuroscientific reductionism to summarize his case: “The left hemisphere’s motivation is control and its means of achieving it is alarmingly linear…” As if to say, “All of this happens in ways that we cannot explain by logical rationalism, because, logically-speaking, it’s clearly a left hemisphere phenomenon.”

That’s one level—Brilliant but ironically self-contradictory.

Neuroscientific techniques vs spiritual tools of perception

Another level is that in his supposed dismissal of material reductionism as an explanatory model, he pushes his audience into the Borderlands of “philosophy and spirituality”; yet—and here is the central problem—in such a way that he offers us, not spiritual tools, but only limited, human, neuroscientific techniques (that is to say, decisively non-spiritual tools) to help guide us in our passage through This Age.

And though such techniques, such knowledge (gnósis), such learning, will seem quite “wise” in the eyes of the world (see below); yet, in the end, they will utterly fail us. In the words of the Apostle,

These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the psychic man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (I Cor 2:13-14).

And so, in applying the wisdom of man to understand the eternal workings of the spiritual realm, we will invariably be led to, at the best, only a partial understanding, which if we then apply on a broader level, will result in distortion, spiritual delusion, to prelest.

Yet how was this received by the academy?

Insight from the book’s reception

Here are a selection of reviews from Oxford, Cambridge and Parisian academics and authors on The Matter with Things:

“Brilliant insight—an analysis with a “clarity, lucidity, and almost hypnotically compelling style…”1

“Genius…one of the most important books EVER published.”2

“It’s very simple: this is one of the most important books ever published…a thrilling exposition…’

“This is the most extraordinary book…astonishing…”3

“A work of remarkable inspiration and erudition…”4

“This is a book of surpassing, even world-historical ambition, and—still more rare—one that delivers on its promise.”5

“McGilchrist turns to the resources at our disposal for correcting this imbalance. These resources, primarily philosophical and spiritual, are deployed to encourage us to ‘reconceive our world, our reality’, to ‘learn again to see’…a hugely ambitious vision without parallel in contemporary thought.”

Where these rave reviews take us? A blessing; a warning

With such absolutely stunning reviews, McGlichrist has officially welcomed us to the “Borderlands.”

On an initial level, as noted above, his work has powerfully demonstrated the reality of paradox which daily confronts us in our finite existence, and to which reductive science or what he terms, “material reductionism” has little answer.

And for this, he is to be applauded.

Yet on a deeper level, his work takes us somewhere else, opening us beyond the calculations of the supposed objective workings of the scientific method; into new territory, where “science” and “research” give place to tools of (in the words of one the above reviewers) the “philosophical and spiritual.” We are brought out of the arena of our conscious-level methods of control and manipulation, into something more unconscious; into the “imaginal space” that operates by different laws, as it were. We are brought into the borders between the certain and the uncertain, the linear and the integrative.

And his introduction to this is, in certain ways, also blessable.

But is there possibly more to the almost zealous and far-reaching endorsements of the reviewers (“a book of surpassing, even world-historical ambition…”) which literally call on us and theoretically offer us the tools to “‘reconceive our world, our reality’” so that we can “‘learn again to see’’”?

Could it be that the “thrilling” experience of reading this work with its “almost hypnotically compelling style” has brought us to the border? Opened the door into the spiritual realm (The pneumatika)? Yet—and this may be an explanation for the excessively positive reviews—in such a way that we need not be weighted down by the encumbrances of history, tradition, the Scriptures, the sacraments, the ascetic life ( à la I Cor 9:27 - 10:17)?

There is no (as is oft-repeated in the book) burden of “truth-as-correctness,” which is a “path of the left hemisphere.” There is simply a ”spiritual openness.”

Blessable again, right?

With that we introduce you to the work of a different polymath, who has a different response and offers us a different path—one who was not praised by the wisdom of this age; but rather rejected, exiled and finally martyred in the Gulags.

i) The entrance into and a warning from the “Borderlands”

Words from the martyr, polymath priest known as the Russian da Vinci

One of the first distinctives that Pavel Florensky makes clear in his work, Iconostasis, is that the passage into the Borderlands is at the outset seductive. This is very important and something we should not look past. And be it in writing such as McGilchrist’s, or as Florensky notes, in popular art or our own dreams or even mystical experiences, “the soul is raised up from the visible realm to where visibility itself vanishes and the field of the invisible opens.” And here,

How tempting it is to call 'spiritual' those images—those soul-confusing, soul-absorbing, soul-consuming dreamings—that first appear to us when our soul finds its way into the other world.

For from where do these images, these dreamings come to us?

From which realm?

Such images are, in fact, the spirits of the present age [In the NT, literally the “Now Age” (ὁ νῦν αἰών, I Tim 6:17, Tit 2:12) that seek to trap our consciousness in their realm.

These spirits inhabit the boundary between the worlds; and though they are earthly in nature (Gal 3:15), they take on the appearances of the spiritual realm (II Cor 11:14).

When we approach the limits of the ordinary world, we enter into conditions that (like the ordinary) are continuously new but that have patterns which differ entirely from those of ordinary existence.

He will specify later in this chapter that here—”in between, at the boundary of this world—are concentrated all the temptations and seductions.” That is to say, this is not merely a place of “spiritual openness” (a term frequently encountered in “centers of spirituality”1,2,3). The question is a place of spiritual openness to what?

For the reality is that our openness to “the spiritual” involves not merely an openness to “the good” but to the world of spiritual darkness and deception. And for this very reason, in Florensky’s words, the entrance into the borderlands is “the area of our greatest spiritual danger.”

Why exactly it is an “area of our greatest spiritual danger”?

Because it will deceive us if we “approach this boundary while still willing earthly attachments.”

If we “approach it without a spiritual mind.”

If we “approach it before we are, in the spiritual sense, truly grown-up” [Heb 5:12]

To expand for a moment on what he speaks of as the “spiritual mind,” we may extend his words to the Pauline understanding offered us in I Corinthians 2, where spiritual discernment is granted not through the “wisdom of man” (be it in spirituality centers or by proclaimed, contemporary spiritual gurus). Rather, it comes through the gracious inner-working of the Holy Spirit, Who is the only One actually able to interpenetrate the deepest depths of our person.

The Spirit, in short, enters into our spirit opening our person to the “mind/heart/soul of Christ” (nous Christou):

These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man (literally, “the psychic man” [psychikos anthrópos]) does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” (Is 40:13-> Rom 11:34)

But we have the mind of Christ (nous Christou, I Cor 2:13-16).

And just how is this possible?

How do we, finite, fallen, limited persons, actually have the “mind of Christ”?

Insights from another 20th c. theologian of the Gulags

We turn again to one who, like Florensky and Solzhenitsyn before him, also himself suffered (tsarasph) in the Gulags: Dimitru Staniloe.

In the fourth volume of his Dogmatic Theology, he writes with a clarity of synthesis regarding the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit that is exceedingly rare in academic theology (and may be best spoken of as the wisdom derived from ex-perience).

To attempt a very brief synthesis, he writes that the Spirit so “overwhelmed and utterly penetrated” the human person of Jesus during His life on earth that His Body, and by extension, ours, “was made spiritual in an incomparable way.”1,2,3

Truly Spirit-filled, Spirit-led1,2,3; and, yet at the same time, truly human—the spirit and flesh, the soul and body, were in perfect union.

Glorification and pneumatization

Then, in His passion and death, Jesus “offered Himself through the Eternal Spirit” (Heb 9:6-15), purifying humanity and bringing it “through His own blood” (9:12) into the “Holy of Holies,” into “Heaven itself to appear in the presence of God for us” (9:24).

Our humanity, crucified and risen with Christ (Rom 6:1-11) was, in His ascension, brought up to the very throne of the King of eternal glory. And here, in the words of John’s Gospel, Christ Himself was “glorified” (Jn 7:37-39). And in his glorification1, 2 His Body, and ours with Him, would become fully “spiritualized,” fully “pneumatized” by the Spirit of God (Pneuma tou Theou).

This is precisely why Jesus, even after His resurrection, commanded His disciples to still wait for the Promise of the Father which He, once ascended to the Father, would send to them, enduing them with “power from on High” (Lk 24:46-49). Then, to continue Luke’s narrative into Acts, when the Spirit of God manifests Himself at Pentecost, the Spirit (Pneuma, an extension of the original Hebrew, ruakh [רוּחַ]) of the risen and ascended Christ can now extend Himself into the “pneumatized” body of Christ.

Now, humanity can be Spirit-filled, Spirit-led 1, 2, 3. Now humanity can become truly human.

From Christ’s spiritualized body into ours

In Staniloe’s own words,

In this way the power for our salvation and deification shines forth within us from Christ's spiritualized body.

The descent of the Holy Spirit is what gives the Church a real existence; it initiates the indwelling of Christ's deified body in human beings and thereby initiates the Church as well. The descent of the Holy Spirit is thus the act of transition from Christ's saving work in His personal humanity to the extension of this work within other human beings. Through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Christ lays the foundation of the Church in His body, and through these events, the Church's being exists in its potential form.

However, the Son of God became man not for Himself but so that He could extend salvation from His body, as divine life within us. This divine life, extended from His body into those who believe, is the Church. This life shines forth from His body, which was raised up to the full state of pneumatization (spiritualization) through His Ascension and sitting at the right hand of the Father, within the deepest intimacy of infinite life and love that God directs toward human beings.

The spirit of finite man is enabled by the Spirit of God to receive and fully participate in eternal realities.

As such, His life, as it is “offered through the Eternal Spirit,” will bear witness (mártyres, Acts 1:8) to the eternal realties of this eternal paradox which will be made visible, become incarnate, in their very person:

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;

Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body (II Cor 4:7-10).

From Staniloe back to Florensky

The reason for the grave warning: Life vs seduction, intoxication, enslavement and death

To draw this section to a close, we return to the warning of Florensky of what may happen to us if we enter into the spiritual battlegrounds of the Borderlands unprepared. We, very simple, can have two responses:

The first will lead us to into delusion, believing that our entrance into these spiritual lands is an entrance into greater fullness of satisfaction and personal peace; the other will lead us into truth, as we we perceive that this entrance marks nothing short of warfare—invisible, though it be, yet even more real than the most concrete, visible realities of this age. As such, this entrance will require a different arsenal.

Evangelical phraseology and word-smithing will not work here.

Words disembodied from life will suffice nothing.

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after to the flesh.

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down strongholds, casting down imaginations (logismoi—A very, very important term that encompasses all the demonic attacks that seek to deceive and delude our minds]) and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God,

And bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (II Cor 10:3-5).

The way forward

And so the way forward, through the landscape of deceiving spirits (I Ki 22:14-23) that fill up the Borderlands, requires—not human wisdom, but simple obedience with humility.

In the words of Anthony,

I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, "What can get through from such snares?"

Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility.'"

A path of humility.

Decidedly not seductive.

Not painless.

Not a “broad and easy” way.

Yet, in the words of Christ Himself, Who stands for all eternity as the ultimate paradox of the God-man incarnate, this is the only pathway that “leads unto life.”

A closing quote

And so here close with one final quotation of Florensky, which contrasts the seductions of spirituality offered to us in the Borderlands with the yoke of spiritual sobriety (sóphroneó ) given to us in the Gospel:

A day of spiritual sobriety, when it holds our soul in its power, is so sharply different from the spiritual realm that it cannot even pretend to be seductive, and its materiality is experienced not only as a burden but also as a yoke good for us in the way gravity is good for earth, a yoke restricting our movements but giving us a fulcrum, a yoke reining in the swiftness with which our will acts in self-determination (for both good and bad) and in general extending in the will its instant of the eternal, i.e., the will’s angelic self-determination toward this side or that, an instant lasting our whole life and making our earthy life not an empty existence passively manifesting every possibility but, rather, the ascetic exercise of authentic self-organization, the art of sculpting and ‘chasing our' essence. This lot, or fate, or destiny, i.e., that which was decided from above, fatum from fari—this destiny of our simultaneous weakness and strength, this gift of our divine creativity, is time-space.