‘Progressing in piety’ – life after joining the church

Ladder of Divine Ascent: 12th-c. icon, St Catherine’s, Sinai

In The Apostolic Tradition, the author (Hippolytus? of Rome?) writes at the end of the baptismal rite:

And when these things are done, let each hurry to do good works, to please God and to live properly, being devoted to the church, putting into action what he has learnt and progressing in piety. (21.38, trans. Stewart-Sykes)

The phrase that struck me as I read this was ‘progressing in piety’. One of the features of ancient, medieval, Byzantine Christianity is its belief that the ongoing life of faith involves progress. We are not simply ‘saved’ and baptised, but, now that we are made right with God and adopted as His children, we have the opportunity to ‘progress in piety’.

The standard of perfection, for example, is God. And God is eternal and infinite. Therefore, argues St Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) in the passage excerpted by Richard Foster in Devotional Classics, the human pursuit of perfection is endless and infinite as well. We will never arrive; even in eternity we will have room for limitless growth in glory.

In some Protestant circles (usually the Reformed), a fear of ‘works righteousness’ and the legalism or false sense of personal achievement that attend it have led to a rejection of the idea of progress in holiness — although they acknowledge that something like it occurs, as Spurgeon did when he rejected the phrase ‘progressive sanctification’ as unscriptural, speaking of growth in grace instead.

St John Climacus’ Ladder is all about this progress, after all. Indeed, the ascetic literature, while it can at times tend towards legalism of the harshest kind, is piercingly aware of growth in holiness, portraying it as a ladder or an ascent or steps towards God. Simultaneously, there is an acknowledgement of the necessity of grace for this growth in holiness. (St Theophan the Recluse, the nineteenth-century Russian always comes to my mind when I think about this.)

We are commanded to progress in piety, but we need the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit will empower our spiritual disciplines so that we can strive for the heights of John Wesley’s Christian perfection. (A concept, when rightly understood, I am not opposed to — but I do wonder if anyone ever received so much grace.) This is synergeia, synergy, and it is not a rejection of grace but a way of viewing how it operates.

Ascending to Perfection (Wesley & Ancient Syriac Asceticism)

A lot of mystical literature, from the Neo-Platonists to today, includes imagery of ascent. The fourth-century Syriac Liber Graduum is no exception. In 19 we read:

1. Give me now your full attention, O one who wishes to become a solitary and is anxious to travel quickly to the city of our Lord Jesus. I will show you how you may go directly to the city of our King, if you have the strength to journey as I will show you. Because the steps are difficult to climb, I will guide you [how] to climb. Since, however, there are also numerous paths that deviate from the straight road — on which many mountains loom about you, and day after day you are blocked until the day of your death comes — it will find you on [one of] the paths that turn off from one side or the [other], seeing that you do not know how to go directly on the road to that city. If during your life you do not investigate about that road, traveling diligently in order to reach that city, you will not be able to go to it when you have departed from this world, for the end of your road is Perfect and its beginning is when you begin to uproot from yourself all faults. (Trans. Kitchen & Parmentier, pp. 183-184)

Memra 19 goes on to discuss the ascent to the city of Jesus, discussing various commandments that one must follow in order to make the climb. There are two paths — the path of the Perfect that takes you straight up, and that of those less-so, that will not get you there ultimately, but will perfect you and mature you and make you strong enough to climb the narrow, treacherous path of the Perfect.

Alongside the ascetic labours (Memra 20: … there is no other ascent to this step … except by this ascent … much watching and fasting, lowliness, and powerful crying out with many tears, much supplication and with the sweat of afflictions [p. 217]), there is always prayer. It is very useful in the ascent of the Perfect and the fight against sin.

Fourth-century Syriac authors were not the only Christians in history to believe in Perfection. While his conception differs on some key points — the Liber Graduum‘s Perfect are celibate ascetics who have renounced all attachment to the world — John Wesley is very famous for his teaching on Christian Perfection.

This Lent, in fact, I read Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

We may disagree with what Wesley calls “Perfection”, but I believe that by the grace of God (as Wesley says), it is attainable. Christian Perfection is having your heart filled with naught but love — love of God and love of neighbour. These are the two commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets, after all. The Perfect in Wesley’s view may still commit sin involuntarily or through ignorance, but will not willfully sin.

Now, the question of sinlessness aside, can we fault Wesley’s answer to how we are to wait for this change?

Not in careless indifference, or indolent inactivity; but in vigorous, universal obedience, in a zealous keeping of all the commandments, in watchfulness and painfulness, in denying ourselves, and taking up our cross daily; as well as in earnest prayer and fasting, and a close attendance on all the ordinances of God. (Ch. 19)

Like the Liber Graduum, Wesley also calls us to prayer:

All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God, without either adding to or diminishing from it by his own choice.

Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding be employed in outward things.

In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer. (Ch. 25, Q. 38, §5)

Wesley was a reader of the Fathers, with a special love of Chrysostom’s homilies and Ephraim the Syrian’s poetry. It is clear to me from reading A Plain Account that the Greek Fathers have influenced Wesley’s thinking about humanity. He believes that God is actually powerful enough to take the peccator that I am and make me really and truly justus.

Indeed, Wesley’s call to piety, like that of the other famous Anglican Patrist of that age, William Law, is an application of the ascetic, mystical writings of the Fathers to a modern layperson’s situation. The wisdom of texts such as the Liber Graduum is adapted for a new audience — much like how Cassian adapted the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a Gallic audience.

Besides having a more optimistic anthropology than the Lutherans or the Reformed, Wesley and the ancient ascetics call us forth to a holiness that is beyond virtue. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. We tend to think that we are “good” by being nice to people, even rude people and jerks, and by giving to the poor. Maybe we are “good” because we evangelise. Maybe it’s because we go to protests and write letters to MP’s. Maybe it’s because we don’t look at porn.

Wesley and the Fathers would applaud these things. And then they would tell us to go further.

They would tell us to live lives saturated with prayer, to do everything out of love, to fast, to study the Scriptures assiduously, and to seek out opportunities to do good whenever we can. By doing so, we will put to death “the flesh” and rise nearer to the likeness of God, healing the wounded image within.

I think we can do it. And I think most of us western Christians don’t even try out of sheer laziness.

Shame on me for being lazy rather than righteous.

“Kill the flesh, in order to acquire a body.” -Sergei Bulgakov

St. Gregory of Nyssa and Endless Perfection

This past Tuesday we looked at a selection from St. Gregory of Nyssa‘s Life Of Moses (that found in Devotional Classics, Richard Foster & James Bryan Smith, eds.).  The passage dealt with the pursuit of virtue, the entire theme of the Life of Moses.

Perfection in St. Gregory is endless.  Following in the Platonic tradition, Gregory argues that evil is essentially non-being.  Evil is a lack, the absence of the good.  The good, on the other hand, when there is no evil, is boundless.  Goodness is never-ending; so also must be the pursuit of it, and that pursuit is virtue.

This line of reasoning also takes Gregory to the doctrine of divine infinity during this passage.  God himself is the ultimate good, the highest good, the most perfect being there is.  Therefore, he must be infinite, boundless.  He has no boundaries upon himself, his being, his action.  According to Anthony Meredith in The Cappadocians, this doctrine of divine infinity is a new direction in theology and philosophy.  St. Gregory has innovated in both the Patristic Greek tradition as well as in his Origenist/Platonic context.  If so, like most of the innovations within Meredith’s book, this has a great impact upon the subsequent tradition as well as being dictated by Scripture and tradition.

Back to our own pursuit of perfection.  I agree with St. Gregory.  If God is perfect, and God is infinite, then the road to perfection must also be infinite.  Thus, St. Gregory says, “For the perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”  I believe that this would accord with John Wesley’s idea of Christian Perfection as seen in his Plain Account thereof (for more on Wesley’s teachings on the topic, see the blog A Heart That Burns).

We are not to lose hope, however.  Gregory draws our attention to the heroes of the faith, to the people who populate the Bible, especially Abraham and Sarah.  Of course, the main thrust of his work is the life of Moses and how Moses’ life is a model for our faith, especially when seen “spiritually”, ie. allegorically.

In our discussion afterward, Liam suggested that perhaps the best thing to do in our journey towards perfection, towards “friendship” with God (St. Gregory of Nyssa’s word, not mine), is to start with regular prayer and Bible-reading.  I know, I know.  It’s grade three at Sunday School again.  It’s every Evangelical preacher you’ve ever met.  Well, guess what.

They’re right.

And St. Gregory would recommend it, too.  The Bible is where we find the lives of the Old and New Testament saints, where we find the teachings of who God is.  And prayer is where we approach the Uncreated Light and enter into the darkness that surrounds His radiance.  Would that we all prayed and read our Bibles!

Where do you think we should go from there as we seek perfection and cultivate friendship with God?

Saint of the Week: John Wesley (Pt 2)

Yesterday, we left off with John Wesley’s true and powerful conversion of his entire self to Christ and the cause of Christ in 1738.  This led to his evangelistic mission that lasted from 1739 until his death in 1791.

This was the year that Wesley the student became Wesley the teacher — although he would never cease to learn as his life continued.*  He became a preacher.  As I recall, one of his first (if not the first) major evangelistic events was outdoor-air preaching in Bristol.  In that city were many people of the working-class who had not heard the Gospel in plain language, people whose lives were lived out in abject poverty both of body and of spirit, alcoholics, wife-beaters, people who, if they did darken the door of the local parish church, had learned to tune out the parish priest.

So Wesley did something different.  He brought the Gospel to them.  He stood out of doors in their midst and preached to them Christ crucified.**  He called them to live lives of holiness, infused by the grace of Almighty God.  And John Wesley, the failed missionary of Georgia, aflame with the limitless power of the Holy Ghost, became John Wesley the evangelist of England.  He travelled on horseback almost ceaselessly, preaching 15 times a week, bringing the light of Jesus into the darkness of Britain.

And the Holy Spirit did His work in these people.  People came to hear Wesley, and they were convicted by his words.  These new converts were organised into a system that would enable them to be catechised in what the faith taught and instructed in how to live, being held accountable one to another.  On one occasion, when Wesley visited one of the smaller gatherings, a former alcoholic appeared drunk at this believers-only gathering.  Wesley expelled him for drunkenness.  The Spirit worked on this man’s soul, and by Wesley’s next visit he was living sober, counted among the faithful.

Wesley had a high standard of holiness; yet we see in his sermon “On Working Out Our Own Salvation” that he was aware that we are not saved by holy living, only by Christ.  Yet in that sermon he exhorts his listeners to holy living, for Christ who calls us to work out our own salvation also “worketh in us” to bring it about.  By grace we are called to obedience; by grace we are enabled to live the obedient life.  By faith we respond.  This call to holy living was one of the central points of Wesley’s theology, as seen in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

More important for Wesley’s theology than Arminius was Perfection.  Indeed, whether we are predestined to salvation or can choose it freely, we are called by Christ to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.  God is love — He loves you, ungrateful, decadent you.  Respond in faith.  Live by faith.  Thus, live faithfully.  Live out holiness.  This is, of course, nothing new.  Wesley is not out to start something new, though!  He is calling the Church, in the 18th century, in the 21st, back to her origins, to her one true Love, the Father Almighty; his is the faith of the Primitive Church, of the Fathers, from the Didache to the Cappadocians to Ephraim the Syrian.  His faith is one informed by the Prayer Book and William Law, by the mystics Pascal, Brother Lawrence, Fenelon, Mme. Guyon, Mme. Bourignon, John of Avila, Lopez, Molinos.***

And the faith of this Great Tradition inevitably leads us to live our theology and to proclaim our theology.  The Virgin Birth matters, the Ascension is real.  These miracles are events of history, and their impact permeates us now, contrary to certain Anglican bishops then (and now) who denied these doctrines.  Christ is God; God is Christ.  He is ascended on high and He lives in us and through us.  By His power, we live holy lives.  Thus, Wesley’s theology always grappled with the practical realities around him, including faithless bishops and faithless flocks.  These were called back to Jesus, back to the Gospel, back to lives of holiness.

Ah, that we could live holy lives ourselves!  The path of holiness is calling us to seek it.  Our Guide is reliable.  And the End of the path is the most worthy End of all — for He welcomes us with open us, us squandering, prodigal, wastrel children of His.

*See John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns and Sermons, “Introduction,” by Frank Whaling.  HarperCollins, 2004, p. xxiv.

**This technique had been seen in England before, as with George Fox the founding Quaker.

***See Whaling’s “Introduction”, p. xxi.