Crucify Your Mind

The Orthodox Church has often been accused of being “anti-intellectual.” More often than not, this “anti-intellectualism” is blamed on St. Gregory Palamas. Nothing could be further from the truth, as anyone who has read the Triads will tell you. In fact, St. Gregory devotes much of the first book to this very question. “Is there then anything of use to us in this philosophy?” he asks. “Certainly”:

For just as there is much therapeutic value even in substances obtained from the flesh of serpents..., so there is something of benefit to be had even from the profane philosophers—but somewhat as in a mixture of honey and hemlock. So it is most needful that those who wish to separate out the honey from the mixture should beware that they do not take the deadly residue by mistake.

According to St. Gregory, the Western Church departed from Orthodoxy precisely because it failed to separate the “honey” of truth from the “hemlock” of error. Yet his advice to the would-be philosopher is no more “anti-intellectual” than St. Paul’s admonition: “Test all things; hold fast what is good” (1 Thes. 5:21).

But how do we “test all things”? How can we tell the honey from the hemlock? To answer that question, we may look to the greatest Orthodox philosopher of modern times: Fr. Seraphim Rose.

Before converting to Orthodoxy, Fr. Seraphim completed advanced studies in Chinese philosophy. He also pursued religious studies with Alan Watts, one of the most revered “religious thinkers” of his time.

Fr. Seraphim—or, as he was known then, Eugene Rose—realized that his formidable intellect could become an obstacle in his path to Christianity. Again, it has less to do with Orthodoxy or even academia. It has to do, rather, with our own shortcomings. It’s not that we’re too clever: it’s that we’re not nearly clever enough. We’re not nearly as objective, not as logical as we think we are.

According to Rose, there’s only one thing to be done. We must crucify our minds. “When I became a Christian,” he wrote to an old friend, “I voluntarily crucified my mind, and all the crosses that I bear have been only a source of joy for me. I have lost nothing and gained everything.”

What Eugene meant is that he realized that true knowledge doesn’t come through the head (dianoia), but through the heart (nous). And the nous doesn’t speak the language of graduate seminars or academic journals. Those things are good, so far as they go. But the nous—the heart—speaks directly to the Master. “My sheep hear my voice,” He said; “I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

The trouble is, it’s often difficult for us to hear our heart. We’re not “tuned to the right frequency,” as St. Paisios put it. We can only find the right “frequency” through ascetic labor: fasting and prayer. And, all too often, it’s our head—our ideas and theories and notions—that make all the noise. We mistake our own vain musings for the voice of God. That’s the way to spiritual death.

Eugene laid all of this out in a letter to Fr. Thomas Merton, the world-famous Roman Catholic monk. Merton began his career as a “conservative”; his first book, a spiritual autobiography called The Seven Storey Mountain, is a treasure. Yet his fame quickly went to his head. Merton began to chase popularity by conforming himself to popular ideas. This was the warning that Eugene offered to Fr. Thomas. This section, which comes near the end of the letter, is worth quoting at length:

I think Christians have of late become entirely too “sophisticated,” too anxious to feel at home in the world by accommodating their faith to passing fashions of thought; so contemporary Christians become “existential,” speak of the “here and now” of faith and spiritual things. Well, that is fine, as far as it goes—but it doesn’t go far enough.

Our hope as Christianity cannot be reduced to the abstract, but neither can it be reduced to the concrete; we believe and hope in a Kingdom no one living has ever seen, our faith and hope are totally impossible in the eyes of the world. Well then, let us tell the world that we believe the “impossible.” It has been my experience that contemporary men want to believe, not little, but much; having abandoned Christian faith, nothing can seem too fantastic to them, nothing can seem too much to hope for—hence the “idealism” of today’s youth.

For myself, my own faith grew rather gradually, as a more or less “existential” thing, until the stunning experience of meeting a Christian (a young Russian monk) for whom nothing mattered but the Kingdom of the world to come. Let the contemporary sophisticate prattle of the childishness of seeking “future rewards” and all the rest—life after death is all that matters. And hope in it so fires the true believer—he who knows that the way to it is through the hard discipline of the Church, not through mere “enthusiasm”—that he is all the more in the present (both in himself and as an example) than the “existentialist” who renounces the future to live in the present.

Eugene assured Merton that what Western man wanted more than anything was not a watered-down, “social justice”-oriented Christianity. It was authentic Christianity:

Above all, the Christian in the contemporary world must show his brothers that all the “problems of the age” are of no consequence beside the single central “problem of man”: death, and its answer, Christ. Despite what you have said about the “staleness” of Christianity to contemporary men, I think that Christians who speak of this problem, and in their lives show that they actually believe all that “superstition” about the “other world”—I think they have something “new” to say to contemporary man.

In short, Christianity was declining in the West, but not because it was too demanding. Rather, it wasn’t demanding enough. It had already been watered-down and diluted over the course of centuries. The Western mind grew restless because it couldn’t hear the nous; it couldn’t hear the nous because it had grown estranged from the living tradition of fasting and prayer.

Merton was vaguely interested in Orthodoxy. He once referred to St. Silouan the Athonite as “the most authentic monk of the twentieth century.” And yet, instead of learning how to fast and pray from the Eastern Church, he looked to the pagans of the Far East—just as Eugene Rose had. Before long, these paganisms became the center of his worldview. Shortly before his death, he told one friend that he hoped “to become as good a Buddhist as I can.” He said to another, “I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism.”

Merton thought he was smart enough to dabble in other religions without losing his Christian faith, but he was wrong. Rose saw him losing his grip on Faith in real time. His mind was leading his heart astray. He was too clever by half.

The same can easily happen to us. We can become enchanted by all sorts of heresies and ideologies: ecumenism, universalism, feminism, Marxism, etc. At first, we may try to “syncretize” these errors with Christianity. But as soon as we decide to look for truth outside the Church, our fate is sealed.

This is why we must crucify the mind. Only then are we able to tell the honey from the hemlock.

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