Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox spirituality1

John Chryssavgis
Rev. Dr John Chryssavgis is the author of numerous works on Orthodox theology and spirituality. He currently serves as theological advisor to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on environmental issues. Abstract The technical language and specic images that we adopt when we speak about preservation of the natural environment depend on values and images that we promote and even presume in our daily behaviour and lifestyle. In Orthodox Christian spirituality, such language and images certainly play a crucial role. This presentation considers the central importance of: 1) the world of icons as the way we view and perceive creation; 2) the beauty of liturgy as the way we celebrate and respond to creation; and 3) asceticism in the lives of the saints as the way we respect and treat creation. It draws on classic Orthodox Christian texts as well as contemporary literature to provide fundamental spiritual insights into the way we comprehend Gods creation and the way we should confront its exploitation in modern times. Introduction Whenever we think of the Genesis account of creation, we tend to forget our connection to the earth and to our environment. Perhaps it is a natural reaction; or perhaps it is a sign of our arrogance that we tend to overemphasize our creation in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26) and overlook our creation from the dirt and the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7). Our heavenliness should not overshadow our earthliness. Most people may be unaware that we human beings did not get a day to ourselves in Genesis. In fact, we shared the sixth day with the creeping and crawling things of the world (Gen. 1:2426). There is a binding unity and continuity that we share with all of Gods creation. Indeed, the depth of Adam (haadam) is originally created from and deeply correlated to the topsoil of the earth (adamah). It is helpful to recall this truth.
1

Presentation during the 3rd Meeting of the World Council of Churches Working Group on Mission and Spirituality held in Athens from 2227 March 2010. This paper draws substantially on my introduction to Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: ecological initiatives of the Green Patriarch, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003; rev.ed., 2009 and on chapter 7 of Light through Darkness: Orthodox spirituality, Maryknoll, Orbis, 2004.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-6631.2010.00042.x Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

181

International Review of Mission

Volume 99  Number 2  November 2010

In recent years, we have been reminded of this truth indeed, in a painful way with the cruel extinction of ora and fauna, with the irresponsible clearance of soil and forest, and with unacceptable noise, air and water pollution. Yet our concern for the environment is not a form of supercial or sentimental love. It is a way of honouring and dignifying our very creation by the hand and word of God. It is a way of listening to the mourning of the land (Hos. 41:3) and the groaning of creation (Rom. 8:22). This paper is dedicated to the wholeness of truth experienced on that sixth day of creation. Anything less than the full story, any deviation from the fullness of that truth, is a dangerous heresy.2 Speaking about heresy when it comes to assessing the environmental crisis is not too farfetched. Whenever we speak (whether about things in heaven or on earth), we are always drawing upon established values of ourselves and of our world. The technical language that we adopt, and even the particular species that we wish to preserve, depend on the values and the images that we promote, or rather presume. In Orthodox Christian spirituality, symbols and images certainly play a signicant role. When I consider images, I think of the central importance of    icons (i.e., the way we view and perceive creation); liturgy (i.e., the way we celebrate and respond to creation); and asceticism (i.e., the way we respect and treat creation).

A sense of the holy in nature implies that everything that lives is holy. Everything that breathes praises God (Ps. 150:6); the entire world is a burning bush of Gods energies, as Gregory Palamas stated in the 14th century. If we are still, if we grow sensitive, then our eyes are opened to see the beauty of created things.3 Seeing clearly is precisely what icons teach us to do. The iconic vision of nature As already observed, icons, or sacred images, bear a central importance in Christian Orthodox thought and spirituality. The world of the icon offers new insights, new perceptions into reality. It reveals the eternal dimension in everything that we see and experience in our environment. Our generation, it may be said, is characterized by a
2

The Greek term heresy (airesis) implies a partial or incomplete truth. See also P. Sherrard, Human Image, World Image, Ipswich, Golgonooza Press, 1990; K. Ware, Through the Creation to the Creator, London, Friends of the Center Papers, 1997; and John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, Preserving Gods Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology, Kings Theological Review 12, 1989. Abba Isaac the Syrian, Ascetic Treatises 65. Martin Buber spoke of divine sparks scattered everywhere, while William Blake wrote that every living thing is holy. Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

182

John Chryssavgis

Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox spirituality

sense of self-centredness toward the natural cosmos, by a lack of awareness of, or communication with, the beyond. We appear to be inexorably locked within the connes of our individual concerns even in our desire to escape from this impasse with no access to the world outside or around us. We have broken the sacred covenant, the symbolical connection between our selves and our world. The icon restores; it reconciles. The icon reminds us of another way and reects another world. It offers a corrective to the culture that we have created, which gives value only to the here and now. The icon aspires to reveal the inner vision of all, the world as created and as intended by God. Very often, it is said, the rst image attempted by an iconographer is that of the Transguration of Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor in the midst of the prophets of old. This is precisely because the iconographer struggles to hold together this world and the next, to transgure this world in light of the next. By disconnecting this world from heaven, we have in fact desacralized both. The icon articulates with theological conviction our faith in the heavenly kingdom. The icon does away with any objective distance between this world and the next, between material and spiritual, between body and soul, time and eternity, creation and divinity. The icon reminds us that there is no double vision, no double order in creation. It speaks in this world the language of the age to come. This is why the doctrine of the divine incarnation, the divine economy, the plan of reconciliation, is at the very heart of iconography. In the icon of Jesus Christ, the uncreated God assumes a creaturely face, a beauty that is exceeding (Ps. 44:2), a beauty that can save the world.4 Our view of faces in Orthodox icons is always frontal; they are depicted with two eyes gazing back at the beholder. The conviction is that God is in our midst, here, Emmanuel (Matt. 1:23). Prole signies sin; it implies a rupture in communication or communion. Faces are frontal, all eyes, eternally receptive and susceptive of divine grace. I see means that I am seen, which in turn means that I am in communion. This is the powerful experience of the invisible and the immortal, a passing over to another way of seeing. This is Passover, Pascha. It is resurrection. The icon converts the beholder from a restricted, limited point of view to a fuller, spiritual vision, where one sees everything as reconciled and as united in a single reality in Him through whom all things live, move, and have their being (Acts 17:28). For the light of the icon is the light of reconciliation, the light of restoration, the light of the resurrection. It is not the waning light of this world; it knows no evening, to quote an
4

F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, quoted in N. Arseniev, Mysticism and the Eastern Church, Marburg, Student Christian Movement, 1926 [Reprint St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, New York, 1979, p. 118119].

Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

183

International Review of Mission

Volume 99  Number 2  November 2010

Orthodox hymn. This is why icons depicting events that occurred in the daytime are no brighter than icons depicting events that occurred at night. The icon of Gethsemane, for example, is no darker than the icon of Pentecost. The icon of the resurrection is no brighter than the icon of the crucixion. The icon presupposes, indeed proposes, another light in which to see things, a different way of life, as the Orthodox Easter liturgy proclaims. This is a vision that liberates us from every alien vision. It provides for us another means of communication, beyond the conceptual, beyond the written, beyond the spoken word. This is the language of silence and of mystery, the language of the kingdom to come. The entire world is an icon, a door, a window, a point of entry opening up to a new reality.5 Everything in this world is a sign, a seed. Nothing is a vacuum in the face of God, wrote Irenaeus of Lyons in the 2nd century; everything is a sign of God. Everything and everyone contains this dimension, and bears this transparency. And so in icons, rivers assume human form; so, too, do the sun and the moon and the stars and the waters. All of these assume human faces; all of them acquire a personal dimension just like people; just like God. And if the earth is an icon, if this world is an image that reects the presence of God, then nothing whatsoever can be neutral, nothing at all lacks sacredness. No land is terra incognita. For if God were not visible in creation, then neither could God be worshipped as invisible in heaven. Or, as Paul Tillich would put it, If God is not seen in the present, then God cannot be seen at all.6 The liturgy of nature What the Orthodox icon does in space and matter, the Christian Orthodox liturgy effects in praise and time, namely, the same ministry of reconciliation, the anticipation and participation of heaven on earth. If we are guilty of relentless waste, it is perhaps because we have lost the spirit of worship. We are no longer respectful pilgrims on this earth; we have been reduced to mere tourists. The Eastern Orthodox Church retains a liturgical view of the created world, proclaiming a world imbued by God and a God involved in this world. Our original sin, so it seems, lies in our prideful refusal to receive the world as a gift of reconciliation and humbly to
5

On icons, see L. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, New York, St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1992; and P. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, Redondo Beach CA, Oakwood Publications, 1990. See, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 50. Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

184

John Chryssavgis

Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox spirituality

regard the world as a sacrament of communion. At a time when we have polluted the air that we breathe and the water that we drink, we are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as to a mystery of ever-increasing connections. By liturgical, however, I do not simply imply ritual. I mean movement, dynamism and creativity. The world is not static, as Plato might have believed; nor again is it eternally reproduced, as the classical worldview might have proposed. It is a movement toward an end, toward a nal purpose and toward a sacred goal. It is neither endless nor purposeless. It is essentially relational. To adopt the concept of icons, we are to think of the world also as a picture, as an image: one requires every part of a picture for it to be complete, from the alpha to the omega. If one were to move (or to remove, or still more so, to destroy) one part of the picture whether a tree, or an animal, or a human being then the entire picture would be affected (or distorted, perhaps even destroyed). The truth is that we respond to nature with the same delicacy, the very same sensitivity, and exactly the same tenderness with which we respond to any human person in a relationship. We have learned not to treat people like things; we must now learn not to treat the rest of creation like mere things. All of our ecological activities are measured ultimately by their effect on people, especially upon the poor. And all of our spiritual activities are judged by their impact on our world, especially upon the environment. Therefore, liturgy becomes a commemoration of the innate connection between God and people and things. It is a celebration of the sense of communion, this dance of life. When we enter this inter-dependence of all persons and all things this cosmic liturgy, as St Maximus the Confessor described it then we can begin to understand the environmental crisis and to resolve issues of ecology or of economy. In the 7th century, St Isaac the Syrian described this as acquiring a merciful heart, which burns with love for the whole of creation for humans, for birds, for the beasts, for demons for all of Gods creatures.7 And in the early part of the 20th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky embraced the same truth in The Brothers Karamazov, relating indeed, reconciling compassion to forgiveness in the words of Staretz Zosima:
Love all Gods creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of Gods light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the
7

Mystic Treatises, Homily 48, Brookline, Holy Transguration Monastery, 1986, p. 30.

Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

185

International Review of Mission

Volume 99  Number 2  November 2010

divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. Do not, therefore, trouble it, do not torture them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against Gods intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you with your majesty dele the earth by your appearance on it and you leave the traces of your delement behind youFalas, this is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they, too, like the angels, are without sin, and live to arouse tender feelings in us and to purify our hearts, and are as a sort of guidance to us. Woe to him who offends a child!8

Father Zosima goes on to instruct young monks about the need to struggle for forgiveness:
My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it may seem absurd, but it is right nonetheless, for everything, like an ocean, ows and comes into contact with everything else: touch it in one place and it reverberates at the other end of the world. It may be madness to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are nowFjust a little easier, anyhow. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in a sort of ecstasy, and pray that they, too, should forgive your sin. Set great store by this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.9

Then, as a consequence to such embracing compassion, Zosima concludes by relating compassionate love to cosmic liturgy:
When you are left in solitude, pray. Love to fall upon the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth ceaselessly and love it insatiably. Love all men, love everything, seek that rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Be not ashamed of that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, but only to the chosen ones.10

The world in its entirety forms an integral part of the liturgy. God is praised by the trees and by the birds, gloried by the stars and the moon (cf. Ps. 18:2), worshipped by the sea and the sand. There is a dimension of art, of music and of beauty in the world. This world is the most inconspicuous and silent sermon declaring the word of God. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, since most of us may not fully contemplate the spiritual depth of things, it is also the clearest, most visible and most tangible sermon declaring Gods presence.

8 9 10

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982, vol. 1, p. 375376. Ibid., p. 376. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, vol. 1, p. 379. Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

186

John Chryssavgis

Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox spirituality

This means, however, that whenever we narrow life to ourselves to our concerns and our desires we neglect our vocation to reconcile and transform creation. And whenever we reduce our religious life to ourselves to our concerns and our desires we forget the function of the liturgy to implore God for the renewal of the whole polluted cosmos. Our relationship with this world determines our relationship with heaven. The way we treat the earth is reected in the way that we pray to God. The body of the world Of course, this world does not always feel or even look like some sort of completion of heaven. This is why Dostoevsky wrote of watering the earth with our tears. Reference here to tears is a clear indication, at least for Orthodox spirituality, of the cost involved. It reminds us of the reality of human failure and of the need for a cosmic repentance. In order to alter our self-image, what is required is nothing less than a radical reversal of our perspectives and attitudes, especially of our practices and lifestyles. There is a price to pay for our wasting. It costs in self-discipline. The balance of the world has been ruptured; it is an outstanding balance that can only be countered by the corrective of sacrice. The environmental crisis will not be solved simply by sentimental expressions of regret or aesthetic formulations of imagination. It is the spirit of asceticism or sacrice that reveals to us the way out of our ecological impasse by proposing the solution of self-denial in theological terminology, this is called salvation through the denial of selshness or self-centredness. A spirit of asceticism can lead to a spirit of gratitude and love, and to the rediscovery of wonder and beauty in our relationship with the world. Yet the ascetic way is a way of liberation. And the ascetic is the person who is free, uncontrolled by attitudes that abuse the world; uncompelled by ways that use the world; characterized by self-control, by self-restraint, and by the ability to say no or enough. Asceticism, then, aims at renement, not detachment or destruction. Its goal is moderation, not repression. Its content is positive, not negative: it looks to service, not selshness; to reconciliation, not renunciation or escape. Without asceticism, none of us is authentically human.11 Let us examine one particular aspect of asceticism in the Christian Orthodox spiritual practice, namely, fasting. We Orthodox fast from all dairy and meat products for half of

11

Cf. K. Ware, The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Afrmative, in V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis eds., Asceticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 13.

Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

187

International Review of Mission

Volume 99  Number 2  November 2010

the entire year, almost as if in an effort to reconcile one half of the year with the other, secular time with the time of the kingdom. To fast is       not to deny the world, but to afrm the world, together with the body, as well as the material creation; to remember the hunger of others, identifying ourselves with and not isolating ourselves from the rest of the world; to feel the hunger of creation itself for restoration and transguration; to hunger for God, transforming the act of eating into nothing less than a sacrament; to remember that we live not by bread alone (Matt. 4:4), that there is a spiritual dimension to our life; and to feast along with the entire world; for we Orthodox fast together, never alone or at whim.

To fast is to acknowledge that all of this world, the earth, is the Lords, and all the fullness thereof (Ps. 23:1). To fast is to afrm that the material creation is not under our control; it is not to be exploited selshly, but is to be returned in thanks to God, restored in communion with God. Therefore, to fast is to learn to give, and not simply to give up. It is not to deny, but in fact to offer, to learn to share and to connect with the natural world. Fasting begins to break down barriers with my neighbour and my world, so that I recognize in others faces icons and in the earth, the very face of God. Anyone who does not love trees does not love people; anyone who does not love trees does not love God. To fast, then, is to love; it is to see more clearly and to restore the primal vision of creation, the original beauty of the world. To fast is to move away from what I want to what the world needs. It is to be liberated from greed, control and compulsion. It is to free creation itself from fear and destruction. Fasting is to value everything for itself, and not simply for ourselves. It is to regain a sense of wonder, to be lled with a sense of goodness, of God-liness. It is to see all things in God, and God in all things. The discipline of fasting is the necessary corrective for our culture of wasting. Letting go is the critical balance for our controlling; communion is the alternative for our consumption; and sharing is the only appropriate healing of the scarring that we have left on the body of our world, as well as on humanity as the body of God. Conclusion A story in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers relates how the devil once asked a monk who was sitting, doing nothing, What are you doing here? To which the monk replied, I am 188
Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

John Chryssavgis

Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox spirituality

doing nothing; I am simply keeping this place. Our role and, indeed, our responsibility is to protect our planet. This reminds me of the divine commandment in the garden of paradise, according to which we are to till and keep the earth (Gen. 2.15); I like to translate this as serve and preserve the earth which is, quite literally, what it means. During every Orthodox Divine Liturgy, the deacon stands in the middle of the church and exclaims, Let us stand in goodness; let us stand in awe. Before we can begin to act responsibly, we are called to stand still. The message of asceticism is, Dont just do something; stand there! Finally, this exhortation to abide in goodness takes me back to the beginning of it all in Genesis, when God looked upon creation and said, Indeed, it is good, very good (Gen. 1.31).

Copyright & (2010) World Council of Churches

189

Copyright of International Review of Mission is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.