The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) divides existence into two separate compartments. There is the phenomenal on the one hand, and on the other the noumenal. The phenomenal realm is the one we may know, and our ideas about it are representations (Vorstellungen). Effectively, what we can know, and what can appear to us, is always a representation; since, knowing is representing, therefore, by definition, the known world is a representation.
The mysteries laid out in Schopenhauer’s work are manifold, and compelling. But what always most allured me, was that the world which can be seen, thought, represented, he called a mere ‘appearance’. The question immediately arises to anyone with a taste for the secret and the difficult: if the world is always a representation and an appearance, then what is reality? Where is the actual world?
In later years, or perhaps for the more astute intellect, we find that such a search after the ‘real world’ is a false inquiry, or at least, we realise that Schopenhauer never himself believed or insinuated that it is possible to experience the world in itself. For, what is opposed to the phenomenal side of existence is the ‘noumenal’ side of it. And the word ‘noumenal’ derives from the Greek nous, or ‘nowse’, as they used to say in London. The nature of this hidden noumenal world is in the name: it is the realm of the pure thought, and only a thinking mind can see it, and even then, it can not see it, but only think it.
To clarify: all of existence is phenomenal and can be experienced by the senses one way or another; and that world is always a representation, an appearance, and something dependant on the thinking subject; it can be seen and lived, but it is always filtered by the mind, so it is a representation only. In Schopenhauerean metaphsysics, it is always and will forever be a representation. It cannot be the thing in itself; it will always be an appearance only. And if we were to ask Schopenhauer, then what is the thing in itself, and what is the real world, his philosophy would present us with just one alternative approach to existence: the noumenal one. The noumenon is pure thought: not representing any thing, not appearing in the world, and yet describing the whole and true nature of that world. That it gives the whole picture and meaning of the world, is why the noumenal is valuable.
It appears to have been the policy of the thinker who inspired this dual approach to existence, namely Emmanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), that whatever the thing in itself is, whatever the true nature of existence is, the whole meaning of it, whatever it is, our minds are not equipped to know about it. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer insisted that we can indeed think about the true and noumenal nature of existence. We can, that is to say, do metaphysics. For, while the thinking about the apparent world is usually called ‘physics’, thinking of the noumenal structure of that world is called ‘metaphysics’. Metaphysics is the type of thinking which describes and thinks about the noumenal side of beings, it is concerned with the Being of beings.
As everyone knows, Schopenhauer said that if we were to honestly talk about the nature of all Being and all existence, the permanent and structural conditions of existence, then it would be described as ‘will’ (der Wille). The word ‘will’ means desire, hunger, action, the force of internal movement which provokes action; it is what, despite anyone’s best effort, makes all life and every life into a theatre of pain and contest. Nothing which arises in the world in which we live is not provoked and dominated by will, or, speaking metaphysically, by The Will. If we were able to see, with a pure mind, across the entire universe, there would be nothing which is not moved by this same desire and impulsion which we feel in our hearts, and which we see in action, from our birth and our youth, and into old age, everywhere, and all our lives. The philosopher provides a vast number of examples of it at work, in human and animal life, and in unconscious matter. Nothing can escape from the commands, the metaphysical prison, of an impersonal and mindless or irrational will. There is no external safety, no possible transcendence.
To say that the will can be seen ‘in itself’ is an error. It can’t be seen or experienced in a pure form as you might see a landscape or a house; it can only be theorised; it is a theoretical event alone, when this ‘real nature of the world’, or this ‘noumenon’, is spoken of. Being able to experience it with our senses, is not only impossible, but looking for it is a sign that we have not understood what metaphysics is. Metaphysics or philosophy is a form of thinking.
I must confess, that as a youth, I believed in some alteration of consciousness, which would allow me to see the will in itself, as if it were some monstrous and infinite beast, like a dragon. Immature minds tend to allegorise things like that: we give a shape to an idea. What was more to the point might have been, that if you want to see ‘the will’ in action, you need only look at yourself at this moment, for it is almost impossible that anyone alive is not suffering from the effects of some passion, some ambition, some suffering, some goal, over which he has little or no control whatsoever; even his distraction and absent minded boredom is an instance of an impersonal will inhabiting him.
There are two possible escapes from this situation; and a thinking mind, such as mine was, even as a youth, wants to know where the escape route to the outer world is. It wasn’t the noumenal world that I was looking for; it was the noumenal in its purity and transcendence. There must be a way of rising out of the pointless nightmare of living, into a world of pure ideas, outside the will. Schopenhauer did offer some peace, if not escape. Firstly, he proposes that there is the calm and absence of will which is found in the contemplation of art, of true and classical art. And second, there is an actual escape into stillness of the will itself, on condition that one becomes a saint. Schopenhauer, who appreciated and learned something from Buddhism and some aspects of Hinduism, and who while execrating the Old Testament, did express admiration for ‘the historical Jesus’, or the man of the Gospels, proposed that it was possible for some rare people, to bring stillness to the will. I again revert to autobiography: for me, this mere stillness was not appealing, and I took no pleasure in being told that the best thing was to grow wise and quiet. It seemed to me, what in a sense is totally correct, that mere stillness of the will is not as good as letting the will dominate, letting passion run its course to the bitter end. But, as I have explained, nobody escapes the domination of the will, and if a person has chosen not to escape from it, then that is entirely because his choice was predetermined anyway. The decision to let passion and will rip, is simply the prompting of the will in itself.
I think this lays out the field in which metaphysics, self, and transcendence operate as concepts. Now, I propose to discuss a few things in this article, but there is one thing specifically toward which I am working or thinking, namely, the divine condition of a man. As I have said about my reading of Schopenhauer, who for many years determined how I saw the world, my will, or my intent, was to look for signs pointing toward the way out of existence so as to transcend it. I have said that Schopenhauer said that this was rare, but certainly possible, but only in a condition of absolute peace in the heart. My article is about the attempt to transcend existence, and I am going to show that this is done by means of a few things: the meditative practices described in The Philokalia of Ss Makarios and Nikodemos; and by the practice of thinking, philosophy and metaphysics. I write with the intention of showing that transcendence (a philosophical term) is not a mere academic enterprise, but something which the times call for.
Transcending existence, or standing outside it so as to, as it were, look down upon it, to look down on the will, on the world, and to go beyond appearances and representation, is my theme. I also give expression to the notion, that this desire and its fulfilment, is controversially, the proper way in which to understand Christ, and his Church. Further, I assert that as well as being a matter for pure thinking, transcendence is effectively the noumenon as something which can be experienced; I will try to explain why I think that this transcendence is also a practice, a method. And finally, but no less importantly for my purposes, the chief strand of German philosophy in what are still recent times, has taught this method, this metaphysics, and expressed the same desire. The work of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) seems to me to have laid the groundwork for anyone or any society, which wants to transcend the world and transcend the will. It is true, that our society is no longer essentially Christian, and our society has done nothing to take the philosophy of Martin Heidegger seriously. In fact, Heidegger’s philosophical transcendence of man is seen by most authorities as having been discredited by his alliance with the National Socialists, who lost the war, both philosophically and literally. And Heidegger himself denied that he was interested in Christianity or the Church; he was trained for the priesthood as a youth, but it would be only superficially acceptable to claim that he therefore consciously or unconsciously remained a Christian, after he had renounced his faith. Therefore, my bringing Heidegger and Christianity together could be seen as forced, on the surface. But the internal logic says otherwise.
I claim that I will achieve a lot of things in this little article; but it should at least be possible for me, if I fail in all else, to make some kind of description of The Philokalia. That collection was assembled from one thousand years of documents among the works of monks in the Orthodox Christian tradition; it was assembled and published in 1782 in Venice, with money provided by St Makarios, the work done by St Nikodemos. I have myself translated large parts of the collection of documents, particularly the later parts, including and after Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), Archbishop of Thessalonika. There is already a complete English translation, which was presented to the world in the translations overseen by Timothy Ware, himself an archbishop of the Orthodox Church. But if that is all I can do here, I yet have larger ambitions, which at least I can set out briefly, as traces of future work, in which I will describe the nature of existence, the noumenal meaning of Being, the meaning of life. If the work of Heidegger is our guide and our example, then it can be said that the era in which we are now alive, is ready and in need of this kind of thinking.
The thing in itself can’t be seen. It’s only allegorically that you could make it be seen, because it, the whole existing universe, is not an object except for the mind working with concepts and language. Now, while for Kant, the thing in itself is totally beyond our capacity to understand, yet, it is worthy of thought, even if only negatively so, as something ‘off limits’ to thought. Kant said that the designation ‘noumenal’ represents the external boundary of rational cognition. To give thought to the overall nature of existence, would be to give a meaning to Being. The meaning of Being would be the metaphysical description of the entire set of possible objects in the universe. In existential parlance, such a metaphysical description is the Being of beings.
I once wrote to Roger Scruton with my then newly published book on Martin Heidegger, and he replied to me that he was not interested in that German philosopher, since it appeared to him that Heidegger was merely reviving the old Thomist philosophy under a new guise. I can show that Scruton’s assessment is false as it relates to Heidegger. But that the Being of beings was something which preoccupied St Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274), and that for him it was the same thing as God, and that therefore Heidegger was interested in the same question as the scholastics, is true. In Thomism, the overall nature of the world is, that God made it. Similarly, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the overall nature of the world is only slightly different from that of Schopenhauer: for Nietzsche (1844-1901), the Being of beings is the Will to Power. And in Leibniz (1646-1716), the meaning of Being, the Being of beings, is the single substance or the Monad, governed by God and logic. In Plato, the meaning of Being, the Being of beings, is the idea of the Good and the Beautiful; and there is good reason to say as is frequently said, that all of philosophy and metaphysics and theology has been a set of footnotes on Plato (428-348 BC), a variation of Plato.
As already remarked, certain other thinkers deny that metaphysics is at all possible; they deny that the human mind is structured so as to certainly know anything beyond the senses. After Kant, Wittgenstein (1889-1951). But it did not stop Kant from proposing that we can nonetheless guess what the Being of beings is, by reference to the way we behave and feel; or rather, that it seems to be necessary to create a meaning of being, if we are to have a good life. Men live their lives as if they knew the metaphysical structural underpinning of existence, even if so to know it is impossible. He described a Christian metaphysics, or moral values and divine oversight. Wittgenstein, a follower of Schopenhauer, preferred to remain silent on what we cannot know.
By general consensus, in the English speaking world of professional or academic philosophers, the era of metaphysics is over. This is in part owing to the influence of Wittgenstein, who was a dominating personality; but the very shape of culture and civilised life has determined that men can no longer seriously do metaphysics. It is not important to me to characterise the type of philosophy they have been doing ever since, but the PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) degree taught at the highest English universities, so popular among the scoundrels who govern our country, is sufficient demonstration that truly, metaphysics is no longer practiced.
It is one thing to recognise that our culture is no longer equipped for the strenuous climb into the heights of the question about the nature of all things; it is another to say, as Heidegger does, that such an effort of organised thought is impossible anyway, because another type of thinking has replaced or usurped metaphysics. Heidegger held from the start of his career in teaching and academic work, that metaphysics is over; in later years he said that it has been transformed into ‘technological modes of thought’. For many years, while studying this German philosopher, I became obsessed, that the wartime defeat of Germany by the alliance of England, the US and Russia, was also a direct cause of the ‘defeat’ of his wishes to combat technological modes of thinking. When the Allies won the war, they also determined that Heidegger’s alternative to metaphysics should also be condemned as enemy territory. I shall come to Heidegger’s different type of thinking, a sort of anti-metaphysics, or to simplify things – the built in obverse of the historical descent and inheritance of metaphysics – later on.
First, I must turn to what I see as something which is, in the most essential way, very similar to Heidegger’s vision for thinking, namely the texts gathered together as The Philokalia. Metaphysics provides a meaning for all beings, it gives a name to the absolute defining character of all things. Now, it would be possible to look, for example, at the theories of Charles Darwin, as a sort of metaphysics. When Darwin describes living natural things as a whole, every one of them, as beings and things which struggle to survive in a battle against one another, he gives a general theory of all animals, including men. But this pseudo-metaphysical theory suffers from several defects which deny it the status of philosophy. Darwin’s work on the origin of the species does not account for inert matter, for example. And the main defect is, that it accounts for objects alone, but not for human consciousness, as metaphysicians are bound to do. There have been attempts to make his theory of natural selection suit consciousness, knowledge, and freedom, and other characteristics of the human mind; books by Richard Dawkins for instance, impute some kind of struggle to DNA, and to impersonal ideas (which he calls ‘memes’) but these thoughts cannot be taken seriously, and only serve for popular science, but not for serious inquiry. Darwin was a scientist, which means, he attended to certain discrete types of object, certain beings only. His theory does not account for matter itself, for instance; or the origins of existence in time and space, nor for space and time in themselves. His work deals only with living things, and even then only in the aspect of their reproduction, and makes no effort of any kind, to ask general questions about existence itself, as existence presents itself to anyone who is actually alive.
The Philokalia is not a formal metaphysics, either. The texts provided do claim to know and introduce the reader to the absolute truth of life. But that is by way of reference to the truth of revealed religion. They say: God did this, or God made it like this. Religion and religious texts do leave metaphysical questions open. This is why it was left to the Scholastics in the West, to solve many questions which remained open, where a religious attitude was dominant. A Christian, in a sense, does not need philosophy, and can be sure of answers which metaphysics demands, by relying on Scripture or tradition. The metaphysical quest, or the philosophical activity, asks what is the meaning of all the world and all existence? And the Christian, asking this, can be sure of the Platonic view, that God and the highest Good is at the heart and origin of all being. When a theologian or believer does any thinking, he necessarily moves toward answers which are already given him in Scripture. But the principle activity of a Christian thought is not philosophy but prayer and worship. The metaphysics such as it is, of Christianity, tends toward Platonism.
Similarly, the Philokalia does not set out to ask, what is the true nature of appearances? What is the meaning of Being? What it does do is, refine the intellect and the being of the individual person. And in this way, as I can show, the method of the texts in The Philokalia wander into the area which Heidegger inhabited. They leave Scholasticism, and technology, respectively, behind. It is an area not so much below philosophy (as Darwin’s work is), as it is higher up and in the future. The constant focus of both The Philokalia and the saint, and Heidegger, is, the centrality of the individual, who is examining his mind, changing his own existence, and revealing everything else: it is a theory of the Being of beings in which the individual consciousness stands in the position of the world’s absolute zero point centre. I would go so far as to say, that outside the conscious mind, there is nothing at all which can be or need be thought about. What Heidegger calls ‘Dasein’, and what the Philokalia calls ‘the mind in the heart’, are both transcendentally above beings, and they are the Being of beings. The condition of the individual when the mind is in the heart, is the foundation of all things.
Now, I think that I must make an important distinction. We have see, that the noumenal is a purely ideal thoughtful account of what the meaning of the world is; it is the description of the Being of beings. It is a purely mental, conceptual scheme, which provides the meaning of life. And, it is a type of thought whose job is to explain all beings. Conventionally, we call this the ‘Being of beings’. What makes this new thought, which I have ascribed to Heidegger and the Philokalia different is, that their type of refined transcendent thinking is not only a theory, a metaphysics. The thinking is tied to ‘consciousness’ and to ‘the heart’, it is thought as the ground from which everything else comes.
This thinking is not an impersonal contemplation of the given world. It reveals and makes the world, or denies it, and shapes it; it constitutes an entirely separate and transcendent realm of its own. Let me elaborate this suggestion, by means of some objections to it. I hope to clarify what I am trying to say. First, how can thinking or mind, which are simply epiphenomena of the body or matter, determine what exists and does not exist? I leave this to the reader to work out for himself. That the mind is merely a continuum of the physical body is a scientific sort of approach unworthy of serious consideration. With respect to how the mind can change the world, I remark that this is done all the time, at the every day level. A man doesn’t like the view from his window – so let him turn away. Or move house. Another man does not like the state of affairs in his country, and so he works to improve it. Or, at a higher level, another man is afraid of some fact, and overcomes his fear by gaining knowledge about it. The world is plastic, and can be changed. There is no predetermined fact about either the future or the past, nor the present.
But can the nature of Being and beings be changed by the mind alone? This invokes another question: we should rightly ask: if we were to say, that the mind precedes reality, and determines is appearance, isn’t this Platonism, and the ideal world? Such a position would be that of Socrates, when he explains in The Republic, that the true Being of beings is the Idea. Making this claim would be equivalent to saying, that there is nothing new being said in this article. But I should point out, that we are not talking about working with pre-existing ideas, or discovering the good, and measuring our thought by reference to the beautiful. At the moment, we only aspire to reach that silence and stillness of thought which are repeatedly advised by the authors of The Philokalia. And to work out how and whether the transcendentally positioned mind or consciousness has any power of thought. My current preoccupation is to discover whether, by working on the refinement of the mind, and putting the mind in the heart, and escaping the dominance of the will, or technology, something truly new can be thought. I also notice, by reference both to this notion of ‘the mind in the heart’, and the notion of ‘Dasein’ rather than ‘mind, we have not done something new or unforeseen, by redefining who and what it is that is thinking. I mean, in Heidegger, you don’t hear about man or mind, you hear about Dasein. And in The Philokalia, you don’t hear about man or soul, but about intellect in the heart.
We start out by recognising that there is such a thing as a pure thought, a thought about everything which exists, which is called metaphysics. The aim of metaphysics was to arrive at a coherent account of all things. The man who is thinking about all things, is in some respect in possession of the truth; he has a mind and language. We now say, that mind and language, in a certain way of controlled ascent and transcendence, can recognise itself as no longer thinking about the world, but much more than this, to become the site where the world is, to use an old term, where it is effectively created and governed. It is said, for instance, that God created the world; or, that physical law created the world. But by this standard, the individual reveals the world. And it might have been the case once, that the saint attained wisdom of detachment, the wisdom of considering pre-existing Platonic ideals of wisdom and the good. But here, pre-existing ideals of the mind give way to thought and consciousness as silent, and mystically informed by God and grace. He is in a position to refashion the world and determine how it shall be, while being linked to God.
It is the concealed power which is contained in metaphysics, that when it believed it was describing the world in itself, it was doing so because it had the latent power to shape and disclose or annihilate or reveal the world. Now, this is what the Philokalia also assumes, when it directly instructs the Christian to leave the world behind, attend to its thoughts only, perfect the mind, and then await wisdom from grace and energy from the Spirit. For, it is held, this aspiration of the purely mental event, is what the meaning of existence is, and it shapes and determines events. I would need to attend to the promises held out to the ascetic in order to elaborate on the precise way in which the saint confronts the world. But it is important to me, to notice, that the method of meditation of The Philokalia is this: to take a man, force him to discard his body, to focus on his mind, to struggle and transform the mind, and to produce or invoke a divine type of consciousness, close to God’s.
I think that this is both familiar and totally unexpected and unprecedented. It is what you could call, the concealed power inside conventional and historical metaphysics. It is implied in, but estranged from, Schopenhauer, for instance, that the mind voyaging in the noumenal realm has the power to transform existing things into something else, by transforming himself first, into an arm of God’s power. The man must be transformed (by God), and inherit some kind of new power of creation and destruction. Needless to say, such thinking is entirely foreign to technological types of thinking, where manipulation and control of man and the world is of a different type. In technological mastery (to use Heidegger’s term), man and his mind deploy resources, push objects, design the future of mankind. By contrast, with the mind in the heart, the nature of man is aligned with the nature of God, and the mind itself, under the guidance of God, stands outside as a sovereign lord over all beings.
The mind trained in meditation and prayer is not the creator of Being. That is silly. But he is the one who gives meaning to it, and opens it up into what people might call ‘life’. We could say, that outside of the mind, there is Being; or, also, outside the mind, there is God. That Being is outside the transcendental mind in the heart is self-evident. But I also claim, that God is self-evidently also there to me; but it should be accepted, that the word ‘God’ is also potentially simply another idea – and that it would be typical of metaphysicians to either chose to call on that name, or to refuse to do so. That it is intrinsic to the nature of God that faith is necessary, and that the Christian philosopher cannot really do without that faith, is another instance of the way in which, the mind itself shapes what is real, and how beings will appear and arise to consciousness. A world with and one without God, are different things – and depend on the outlook or attitude or the mind of the thinker who is doing the thinking.
It is possible to think, pray, and transcend into consideration of the Being of beings, without faith in God. But on the other hand, to deny God, when the possibility of him being there, would also be a mistake, if we take the question of existence seriously. God’s possible existence casts a long shadow over philosophy of any kind since, it makes a great difference whether He is to be mentioned or not, and if it were possible to show that God matters to philosophy, then thinking which avoids Him would be immediately a mere playing with thoughts and language. For my part, it has seemed inevitable and necessary to assume that God and the other persons of the Trinity are real – although I need go no further on matters of doctrine than this, and everything else can be thought through by any means at all.
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Where metaphysics lays out answers to the true reality of all things, and religion points at Scripture, The Philokalia describes a different sort of human being: he is the result of work, self-examination, silence, meditation. The saints made the individual human being into the very centre of all Being. How so, when God is the supposed centre, when God is the Being of beings? Like this: the individual shall become Godlike, and shall join God.
I would like to make the simple point, that when it comes to The Philokalia, and the philosophy which I consider to be important for the future, we are also dealing with something with which Heidegger’s ‘other metaphysics’ also deals. It turns the individual consciousness or man into the centre of all beings, it turns him into the Being of beings. Or even, it turns him into the place of Being itself, the place where meaning happens. But just as it was necessary to be firm about the matter, that the noumenon is purely a mental realm, and place of thinking, so it is necessary here too, to say that when the mind is at the centre of all Being and with God, this is also so only in the mental realm, the noumenal realm. We are not talking about man, or a man, but about a state of mind, when we say that the intellect shapes reality and lends meaning, and is the means by which the Being of beings is revealed.
It would be natural to say, that whereas the philosopher has an indifferent relationship to God, and that the philosopher absently-mindedly takes the place of God in the scheme of Being, that the Christian should always be aware of this usurpation, and should not do it. We would expect to be told, that the saints of The Philokalia never stepped on God’s toes, so to speak. But the saints do step on God’s toes; this in the nature of the energies of God, which the saint is said to feel; he devotes a life to practices which take him nearer and into the inheritance of becoming a friend of God, a son. And whereas it is very true to say, that the philosopher longs for an escape route out of philosophical difficulties, so that he resorts to poetry, and strange language, and waiting for an inspiration, the saint, by contrast, is sure of what he is looking for, and of the method to get there. It is in the silent work of observation of the self, refinement of the mind, of hesychia that what the philosopher is looking for, is found. This is also the escape from the will, from the passions and the heart, as the saints call it, the transcendence which Schopenhauer said was impossible.
The reason why Heidegger looked so hard over a lifetime, for an alternative to metaphysics was, that metaphysics in the old European style, was clearly at an end, and had ended in what I have shown, above, to be a sort of extended or deeper version of Darwinism, after theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Metaphysics had degenerated or collapsed into physics, and there seemed to be no chance of the community of thinkers, the nations of the West, anyone in the world, escaping from the domination of the science of Darwin, Newton, and Faraday. Metaphysics and physics have collapsed into one thing: whatever it is, it gives primary importance to science, and offers no way out: we could call it Technological thinking. It has replaced metaphysics. I have said, these types of thought are not themselves metaphysics; but their power is so sure, that they served as such. For instance, when in previous times, God had been the answer to all questions, in our time by contrast, the answer is certainly always some kind of scientific interpretation.
I have no difficulty in now asking, what’s wrong with that? Why should not science take priority and be allowed to answer any question of any kind, and put to rest the activity of refined speculation? What results, however, is a serious problem. The influence of science, according to the analysis of the philosopher, runs much deeper than in answering some questions of a discrete kind. For, the scientific view of the actual questioner himself, is also accounted for. People look at themselves from the beginning, and unavoidably, as a whole society, and as individuals, as if they were either objects of scientific study, or else as subjective observers looking for objective scientific explanations. It determines how they behave, and how they live. Just as in my speculations of a man who can assume the noumenal position and direct the nature of beings, giving them meaning or otherise, so does the technological position also do so, but in a purely instrumental way, and recogniseing no God and not even any Being.
Through and through, the contemporary man considers himself to be a mere being among other beings, both by confession, and when he elaborates his explaination for what the meaning of all things is. Technology is the actual meaning of things, the Being of beings. IN this way, man must be just another object of control and observation among others. The total dominance of an empty sort of philosophy, empty but world-controlling, is assured. This is how it seems to us, today. That is largely how people behave, and how history has dealt us the countries in which we live. A blind irrational will to technology, or perhaps a will to power, is at play, and it acts through a sort of pseudo-scientific flattening out and devaluation of everything it touches, including or especially of human consciousness.
As I have said, the texts of The Philokalia provide the way out of this. I have experienced it in my own life, and the Christian saints of the Orthodox tradition allow for this event; they have said that the prayer is transcendental and leads toward the position of God. That the Christian must make efforts to reject the world, and its activity, and focus on the self, is the burden of the collection. When they say ‘the self’, most of the writers, who have often read each other, from a distance of hundreds of years, have an idea of the self as something as it was described by Plato. In this descriptive scheme, the parts of the soul are several, but they are those Plato described or analysed. The heart, the passions, the mind, thought, knowledge, ideas, wisdom, and the fundamental drives of wrath, desire, and intellectual longing. Like a poetic tradition, or a tradition of philosophers who comment on one another, each one developing the work of his predecessor, they constitute almost, a single body of work.
The texts were gathered by St Makarios of Corinth, and St Nikodemos of Athos, after Makarios discovered the desperate or depressing condition of the monasteries at what turned out to be the end of the Turkokratia, the period of muslim military dominance of Greece. Makrarios commissioned Nikodemos to gather texts and books which would reinvigorate the Christian spiritual activity of the monks on Athos. Spiritual life has a long term habit of falling into decay. Turning away from life toward a consideration of the meaning of Being is hard; it is as hard as allaying the passions, or overturning the commands of the will. Men need to be pushed or enticed, or enabled gently to become monks. That is what a monastery is, of course. But a fire goes out if it is not fed properly.
The life of the monks is described, in most texts, as a form of isolated living, rather than the communal cenobitic life. Instructions from around thirty-five saints are given, as to how to lead the life of stillness, the life of hesychia. It could be considered to be a life of prayer, but this is prayer of a significant or specific type: rather than imprecatory and begging prayer, it is more like the mere watchfulness of a man observing his own mind, his own self. The presupposition of such prayer must be, that on the one hand there is a faulty mind, and on the other an eternal mind, and that the effort required is aimed at making the faulty mind become eternal. In this way, the meaning of Being, the absolute central structure of all beings, is the mind itself. That is the metaphysics, so to speak. That is the noumenal world conjoined directly to the activity of a man.
Where the meaning of Being is God, then God is assumed to be an intellect. And to raise the faulty intellect to the level of God is the aim. To achieve this, the passions have to be calmed. They are calmed by observation. The direct control of passions is not logically possible, for, in order to calm them, passion itself needs to be employed. Or, more charitably, one passion needs to control the others. But the best method of all, is to go into silence and inaction by not fighting them, but by watching them. This activity is not easy, as anyone who has tried to close his eyes and think of nothing can testify. It is actually impossible to let the mind be still. The heart, or the will, keeps on sending thoughts into the arena of the mind. It is possible to think of these, and the saints do think of them, as demons. The writers of the work tend to think of themselves as engaging in combat with demons, when they seek the stillness.
There is a magnificently coherent theory underlying this, which is derived from Christian theology, and is fully concordant with it. For instance, the saints are totally convinced, that Christ enjoins this kind of life, and raises man’s intellect. They also hold, that the Holy Spirit gives assistance, as grace; and that without grace, the effort might be pointless. It was said by St Paul, that effort or works alone are not sufficient. It is also held, that God instructs the man in prayer, and that wisdom is given to him, with practice.
The similarities with Buddhist meditation are innumerable, and I do not hesitate, on my part, to assert that the findings of Buddhist meditators can be useful. The Philokalia famously offers the assistance of a method to help the one who seeks transcendence from out of the world into the pure intellect. He must sit, and watch his breathing; he must not struggle or move either his body or mind. He must or can, at least in early stages, recite a ‘mantra’, or the beloved Jesus Prayer. The translator of The Philokalia into English and his team were careful to distance themselves from any advice to do these practices without guidance; people are different, and everyone has their own path; many stray – which is all that I have time to say on that topic. Otherwise, and to people who are ready and fit to hear, I commend the method and the entire volume of works.
What has become a useful guide for the man of prayer was set out by St Gregory Palamas. This saint was called from his solitude to discuss what was being done on Mt Athos by a pair of Western or westernised Christian theologians, who had taken to commenting on the practice of the silent prayer, and who denied that what it promised, and what it demanded, would be allowed by the Thomist tradition. Gregory and these other men had an exchange of texts and letters, an argument which Palamas is generally regarded as having won. It was in these texts, collected as The Triads, where he formalised the method, and the theory behind it, and where he showed that an individual can ascend to theosis or God head. In a simplified form, at the start, it is possible to summarise by saying that the man at prayer is putting his mind into the heart. That is, the unruly heart full of passion, and dominated by the will, assaulted by demons and interference and distraction, should be dominated by the intellect. Thereby the intellect dominates the heart, and the heart’s warmth and the whole being of the created man, infuses and guides his intellect toward God. Integral to this, is the possibility that God can enter into a man, in the form of the Holy Spirit, or as the ‘energy’ but not the essence, of God. God’s energy is his activity, as distinct from God himself; even Palamas held that it was impossible that God could or would touch a man with his essence. The essence of God is infinite and all knowing, and superlatively transcendent, and cannot take the form of the eternal fire visible to a mere man. Palamas was proving, that God can and does come to the man at silent prayer, despite being infinite and all powerful and unknowable.
As far as the monk is concerned, the world can be left to itself. The entire world for a man, can be compressed down to a single room, or even to a single meditating mind. This is proven by experience, by any individual. The created world, the world as we live it, rarely has any value, any beauty, any point. If we were to speak in public, to an audience, about the character of life, it would be an insult and it is never done, to tell the truth. In private, a man composes, let us say, a speech to give to a large audience; his speech to the public considers the benefits of being alive, the greatness of the community or the country, it praises this man or that; it is optimistic and objective. Let us imagine, what is usually the case, that while writing this eulogy for life, the man is depressed, disappointed, and obsessed by some shameful want to eat, or to humiliate some annoying person who keeps cropping up in his mind, or he is oppressed by the feeling of being tired or bored. And so it is in life in general. The truth is, despite what is said and seen in public, that escape from it is the best course, and God has blessed this desire in the Gospels, and in the saints, as in The Philokalia.
So while there is a massive internal and certainly an external demand to continue living ‘in the world’, it is rare for a man to begin meditation and prayer. Yet, what is waiting, in incremental stages, for the mind which attempts it, is the closeness and blessing of God, the absolute creator and ruler of existence. Not only that, but that the man in prayer shall become different from himself, perfect and humble; and among a long list of incentives, he will escape the will, and cease to be just one being among others, the subject of science and technology: he will know himself at the very centre of Being, and become the purpose and point of all creation. What the method is, what the process, what the underpinning theory, and some of the warnings which should be observed, I think can be found in a text of one hundred parts, which is found toward the end of the collection, by two hands, both of them known as Xanthopoulos. One of the writers was to be very nearly the last patriarch of the city of Constantinople. That is the most interesting and instructive of the collection, by my estimate.
There are some reservations about how a nation can be run, in which men practice this activity. Clearly, were a culture to recognise a class or elite of men of prayer, who could not possibly compete or find any useful place, such a society would probably first of all need to hold it widely as true, that God sent his Son as Christ, and so on. It would also be necessary for a large number of people to believe that prayer is necessary, and that monks should be looked after; this being unlikely in a democratic or a socialist state, it is my view that a hierarchical society of a paternal character, with a fixed respect for ‘religion’ built in, would be necessary. Democracies, where number, not individual talent, is prized, are not fit for Christianity, as has been proven by the last century or so of history. But enough of this; it would be possible to discuss the future and past of the Church, and under what conditions it flourishes, and how it dies, in another place.
I should also say something about the English translation, and what it lacks; but these are minor points, though worth remarking on here. Timothy Ware, or Archbishop Kallistos Ware, undertook a very large share of the work of writing and curating Orthodoxy in England in the twentieth century. He was also one of the editors or proof readers of the translation of The Philokalia (five volumes, Faber and Faber, 1979-2023). The editing criteria were idiosyncratic, but not so controversial as to make the translation unfit for purpose. Ware and two or three others removed the general introduction to the work written by Makarios and Nicodemos, and also removed the short individual prefaces which those saints wrote into the collection; he substituted them with his own. He also discarded the original texts themselves, where more up to date and scholarly versions were available. Ware and his staff removed at least one text, and put it as an appendix, specifically the part traditionally attributed to St Anthony the Great. This editorial policy is similar to that of the Palgrave anthology of English poetry: publishers no longer issue the original Palgrave, whatever its merits, but add in new poems, and remove others, only seeking to retain the spirit, rather than the letter of the original.
I myself began my translation of The Philokalia, working with an existing French translation, and the original Greek, which is available from a Greek publisher. I found the original 1782 edition in facsimile, online as a PDF. The Greek of the original authors is the classical language, which like Latin, continued to be used through the Middle Ages in roughly the same manner as it had been used by Plato or Sophocles. I was half way through translating the unpublished part, which is referred to as the ‘fifth volume’, when Kallistos Ware (1934-2022) died aged 87; this left my plan to contact him with the aim of assisting in the publication disappointed. It also revealed that my offer of help would not have been needed, since at his death it was announced that he had been overseeing that fifth volume’s publication at the end of his life, and it was released not long after. This rendered my efforts at translating the missing part needless. I have continued to work at it, but at present have only completed around one third of the whole collection, and other matters seem more important than the release of my version. If it were to be published, it would be a faithful rendering of the original, with original prefaces and texts, but in other details very similar to that of Ware. I have no quarrel with how Ware has translated his version, and have no hesitation in commending it.
Of my personal experience of what The Philokalia demonstrates and teaches, I will leave for another place. I had already begun to pray or meditate in the way the later parts of the collection advise. I had done so since at least 2011, and became only confirmed in doing so in 2017, when I began attending an Orthodox Church, and I decided to become an Orthodox Christian in part when I heard about the tradition of hesychasm. As I have explained elsewhere and at length, the questions which the activity of meditation brought to my mind, about why it worked, and why one had to do it, were answered directly by the notion of the Son of God, and theosis, as something designed for us by God. Like any eastern guidebook for meditation, I can only say that practiced regularly, the prayer and the meditation has immediately benefits for the mind, and a long term goal is given to any man, of getting closer to God over a lifetime, which to my mind has been demonstrated to be a real promise. But what goes on in a man’s spiritual life is best expressed carefully, if at all, for general attention.
I consider that this search after pure thought, and the centrality of the person, the fixation on Dasein as the centre of all Being, is the same result which Heidegger came to. Not that this coincidence makes any difference either to Heidegger, or students of theosis at the individual level. After all the injunction that the Christian should pray, has its own reward, and should be unencumbered by any ambition or ulterior motives, or any associations of any kind. Prayer is an end in itself. Rather, my point is, the time for this metaphysics, the time for this alternative to our Technological thinking, which serves as a disastrous and self-imposed prison of ruin, has come.
I have thought this, both that at the individual level, and at the European cultural level, in a more blurry or fuzzy way since 2003, when I began writing on Heidegger, and struggled to speak as I do now, due to my inexperience. But I also strained to find prayer and meditation, which are to my mind clearly what Heidegger was hinting at in his later works, and when he said in 1966, ‘Only a god can save us now’. Truly, to save human beings, to save our ancient country even, only a God can save us now. It has not escaped anyone’s notice, I am sure, that England is progressively becoming divested of its tradition, its value, its existence. And the question of who we are is answered like this: we are Christians who follow the life of stillness, and we should let that wisdom shape and preserve our way of life against the destructive forces of planetary liberalism and the devastation of the technological way of thinking, and foreign violent invasions.
I will conclude with some basic clarifications of Heidegger’s philosophy. His work is really not so much a philosophy, as the basis for a new start, a new sort of mental activity. And he knew what he was doing when he said that he was looking for ‘an other origin’ of philosophy. It was not even a new start which he wanted to initiate, but rather a start which is contained secretly in the Greek philosophy, in the work of Plato. The type of mind and thought that he wanted to give expression to, was something as strong and strange as Greece, which is at the start of our metaphysical world, and yet something hidden inside the Greek start of philosophy. As I have already said, where Plato and Socrates concerned themselves with questioning and thinking until the very source of knowledge was revealed to them, they simultaneously had no choice but to ignore the great resources of thinking and questioning to do something else; and that something else is what we are sorely in need of today. So, Heidegger’s is not a systematic description of the Being of beings: it’s the opposite, the secret otherside to systematic metaphysics. As I have shown, his ‘philosophy’ is a way of bringing about an individual who has been divinised, as if by theosis, so as to recognise himself as the very place where all things start from and end, and are understood. Perhaps I could put it like this: not divine knowledge, but divine knowing; not revealed divine ideas, but divine mind.
I shall conclude by returning to Heidegger, and what he was setting out to achieve. I do think that it aligns in not a distant way, with the practice of prayer, the central location of the individual in the scheme of all things, and the almost infinite value of the consciousness, the higher consciousness, which Heidegger from an early point in his career, gave the name of Dasein (being-there), which is usually left untranslated as a term. In his 1929 lecture on becoming professor of philosophy at Freiburg, Heidegger worked hard at a public lecture called ‘What is Metaphysics?’ It is a definitive statement of his method. He set out to do two things in the lecture: to describe metaphysics, and to outline his own philosophy, in the aftermath of the end of that type of thinking. He first turned to science, and speaking at a university, gave voice to the obvious truth, that science dominates the university, but in such a disorganised and disparate way, that the only common ground among the various sciences, was that they were each a department at the university. Each one of them, he announced, studied some thing, and nothing else, to the exclusion of other things. He wondered, how is it possible to exclude other things, unless it is possible for men to shut out and shut down large areas of beings? It is in the nature of Being that it can and does contain ‘nothing’, so that it is both present and absent, an excluding and destructive negativity.
Heidegger goes on to explain that Being is what it is, but it is always filtered through to men via Dasein, by the mind and the consciousness of an individual. All science originates in Dasein, who is already the centre of things, deciding and choosing, destroying and attending to things. He becomes aware of his place in the system of Being with the onset of anxiety. Stood in the mix of all beings, unaware or aware of the whole range of life, as may be, self-conscious Dasein is the means by which beings either exist or not. Dasein is transcendent above them; the very locus where beings emerge or disappear. Being itself is essentially finite, the meaning and overall structure of the world is finite, and comes to pass through an individual man. When a man asks the question: why are all these things and this world around me, he is asking the metaphysical question. Thinking, questioning, metaphysics, philosophy, is the standard position in which human beings find themselves, as the default position, prior to beginning to do science or anything else. And in this indication of the centrality of the mind and the consciousness, as something prior to ‘reality’ and appearances, we can move on to confront the dominant metaphysical collapse of physics and philosophy into one, which we call Technology. It is something which needs to be confronted.
To follow this position further, would be to further divinise man, and refine his awareness, into theosis. ‘Being itself is essentially finite’, what else does this mean, than that we should accept that God (Being) becomes man? That’s what it means, it seems to me.