I grew up
in a house of contradictions. We loved each other and we fought. I had a
brother who was five years my senior, and we somehow developed a style of
contradiction. If he said white, I said black. If I said red, he said blue. Or
after either of us made a perfectly reasonable statement, whatever exceptions
might exist, the other was sure to note them. It came to be that in any
discussion, the last one talking won. Our conversations still have something of
this flavor. (I can hear him saying, “No they don’t”).
Our
exchanges point to an inescapable aspect of reality: it is filled with
contradictions or at least something that we perceive as contradictions.
Reason, as it is commonly used, is quite abstract. Syllogisms step back from
reality and speak in terms that are actually quite removed. If two people are
discussing a tree, there are many agreeable, scientific observations that can
be made. However, none of the observations is the tree itself, and a
contradiction rests in that very fact.
Orthodox
worship not only notes various contradictions, it raises them to the level of
wonder. The teaching of the Fathers frequently hovers over various
juxtapositions of opposites. Christ is the God/Man. Mary is the Mother of God.
The Trinity is three, yet one. God dies. The Uncontainable is contained. There
is an instinct within Orthodox thought that the truth is most profoundly known
precisely in the form of contradiction.
One
Russian theologian who gave voice to this was Pavel Florensky. Born in 1882, he
combined a brilliant scientific/mathematical mind with a profound theological
soul. His greatest work, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, was written as his
master’s thesis in 1908, and published in 1914. It is particularly remarkable
as a theological work by one so young. Florensky was executed by the NKVD in
1937.
He gives
an entire section of his thesis to the theme of contradiction. In it, he says,
“Love is the renunciation of reason.” This is not a disparaging of reason as a
useful tool, but the recognition that the nature of reality always contains
contradictions:
We can,
however, only express the Truth if we foresee the extreme expression of all the
contradictions inherent in it, from which it follows that Truth itself
encompasses the ultimate projection of all its invalidations, is antonymic and
cannot be otherwise.
The
contradictions are resolved in the ascetic life, according to Florensky, a life
which he followed with great energy, throughout his time as a student, married
man, scientist, engineer, and martyr. And in this, he was fully Orthodox. It is
also difficult to describe.
Christ
points to this when He tells us that the “pure in heart shall see God.” There
is always the great risk in reason in that it becomes the primary tool in the
hands of those who care nothing for the purity of heart. The modern world has
harnessed reason to great effect, but has, as often as not, used it to create
weapons of mass destruction and to monitor and control its own citizens (and in
this I think as much about the tools of consumerism as anything). We have
become possessors of a “reasonable” truth but do not have the purity of heart
to live with its contradictions.
Florensky
grasped the true heart of asceticism. He said, “Love is the renunciation of
reason.” By this, he does not mean that we embrace the chaos and anarchy of
irrationality. Rather, we recognize and accept the limits of reason, and offer
ourselves to the contradiction of the reality around us. Every human being
stands as a contradiction. They are always more than we think they are, and
whatever we think or imagine them to be, they are also something else as well.
The refusal to acknowledge the “something else” (the contradiction), is the
refusal to renounce reason and, instead, to place reason where love alone
belongs.
St. Paul
notes that “faith works through love” (Gal. 5:6). This describes the very heart
of the ascetic life. Only love extends itself in the self-emptying struggle
against the passions without becoming lost in the solipsism of asceticism for
its own sake. It is love that endures the contradictions of reality without
turning away or reducing them. And it is love that finally comprehends the
reality hidden within the contradictions that confront us.
An
article by Fr.
Stephen Freeman
Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2016/06/14/the-renunciation-of-reason/
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