saidsimply

From Agnostic to Orthodox Christian

A fight against the lies inside myself.

Recognizing The Lie

It was a beautiful fall semester and the morning sun was just peeking through the window.

There I sat in a classroom, 16 years old, and surrounded by my friends. The topic of gun control had come up, and the teacher opened the classroom for discussion. None of the comments were out of the ordinary for a rural conservative community, but I felt a growing sense of unease as everyone spoke. When the teacher finally turned to me to hear my thoughts, that unease transformed into a dilemma.

On one hand, I could repeat what I’d heard from others around me, this would earn my friends’ approval. On the other hand, I could admit that I didn’t know much about gun control. Something in me held me from the former, so I chose the latter.

I left feeling unsatisfied with my uncertain answer to the question, but I knew I would have spoken falsely had I chosen otherwise. Many times later I faced small and big versions of this dilemma: Do I confess my ignorance? Or go against my conscience? Next we see why this exact dilemma is vital for preserving truth and justice beyond my personal struggle with reality.

The Stakes of The Lie

I later read the history of how human beings can turn to torture and genocide, and enjoy it. In short, how the human being turns to evil. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote most clearly on the subject, convinced me that permitting lies inside us, no matter how seemingly small, was the direct cause of this injustice.

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.” ―Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Solzhenitsyn learned through enduring years of torture and starvation that constraining deceit in himself was the best, if not the only good response to what seemed to be an unbearable circumstance.

He later wrote when analyzing the state of Russia, that it was each individual’s decision to let ‘the lie’ pass through them (or enter into them) that led to the hellish status of Russian society at that time.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ―Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

So, according to Solzhenitsyn, ignoring your conscience by letting ‘the lie’ pass through you isn’t just about any individual’s truth journey, it’s also the only way to steer history away from genocidal atrocity. With this horrifying realization, I swore to stop speaking and enacting anything that appeared untrue. That commitment is tested in me daily. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail. For instance, I try to remain sensitive to each word, phrase or paragraph I write in this essay. By practicing this, I’m learning how to write only those words that serve the truth. Because to act otherwise, however harmless it might appear, causes the annihilation of justice. Even though it may seem trivial, this is why I acted the way I did when I was asked about gun control.

Enacting The Lie

But I later realized that it isn’t just words that can be deceptive. I saw that my behavior itself could be a lie. As my words became sharper, so did my eyes, and what I saw in myself disturbed me. Yet, I faced a greater challenge from embodying the truth than speaking it.

Being practically oriented, I saw this as a fatal flaw in my world-view. And so I spent a couple years looking for a good solution. I saw through the short-comings of many modern ‘solutions’ and found the right answer in ancient tradition. But let us deal first with the approaches that did not work.

For the purpose of this essay, I termed the following ‘approaches’ as ‘Stoic’, ‘Expressive’, and ‘Traditional’ respectively. It’s important to differentiate them from the philosophies that bear their name, although they are related, and some of the following critiques may apply. I believe the following approaches characterize and summarize almost all non-christian world-views.

The ‘Stoic’ Approach

The stoic approach believes that excess emotions and the attempt to control circumstances outside oneself are what stop us from embodying truth. It holds that the world can’t be controlled, but with practice, the mind can.

“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ―Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

We must use our rationality to take the reins and lead our emotions into making good decisions. We do this in a multitude of ways, but it essentially comes down to a few practices:

1. Realize the finitude and scarcity of your life through meditation. This will make you value your short existence and motivate you to accomplish something.
2. Eliminate excuses, stories or fallacious thinking and judge yourself by your deeds. If you behave properly, you did well, if not, you failed. Hold yourself to this standard.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is actually based on the philosophy of stoicism. As I stopped thinking fallaciously and started thinking more rationally, I felt better about myself but I didn’t see much improvement in embodying the truth.

The danger of this approach is its over-valuation of rationality. We can be rational for a time, but our emotions start to rebel, because they can’t live with being tyrannized. All that causes an endless cycle of renewed strength with ‘rational’ behavior, followed by burnout and depression when the emotions take the helm. Ultimately the rational approach is plagued by repression, and repression always ends with the vengeance of the repressed.

The ‘Expressive’ Approach

The expressive approach is the exact inverse of the stoic approach. It believes that embodying truth comes from liberating our desires. It holds that while in the short-term, free expression may be dangerous, in the long-run, it grants you wisdom.

“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.” ―Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

Recognizing and acting on our authentic desires gives us lots of life experience to draw from, which leads us to wisdom.

The way to practice the expressive approach can be summed up by two points:

1. Be Authentic. Do what you feel, and not what you don’t.
2. Experiment, because you will either succeed or learn from failure.

Authenticity and sincerity help us act from our heart. As I tried this approach I did feel more liberated and experienced over time. However, I also began to fall into certain patterns of addiction. The danger with learning through mistakes is that not all mistakes help you learn, some mistakes just corrupt you.

Ultimately, I learned that pursuing your desire doesn’t give you satisfaction, but merely increases desire and decreases satisfaction.

The Lie Both Approaches Share

The expressive and stoic approaches both share the same assumptions, and often turn into one another. First, they start with the self. We are always relying on our own ability, whether we are trying to be ‘expressive’ or ‘stoic’. This assumption that we must embody truth by starting with the self appears earliest and most clearly in Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” Descartes limited his search for truth in what he could not doubt. This approach ultimately ends in self-contradiction and solipsism.

We are going to see an entirely different focus when we turn to the traditional solution to this problem. The traditional approach doesn’t start with the self but in an entity outside of us, who is the source of the self, and all truth.

“God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” ― Exodus 3:14

The ‘Traditional’ Approach

The traditional approach is integrally connected with the Church, and Her experience with Christ. (In my case, the Eastern Orthodox Church) This approach holds that you must recognize your need for help beyond relying on yourself. It holds that communing with God purifies you from the deception of your heart.

“For through the presence of God we are called gods, children of God, the body and members of God, even “portion of God.” In God’s purpose this is the end toward which our lives are directed. For this end man was brought into the world.” ―St. Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

God is present everywhere, but especially in our hearts, where He made us in His image. When we learn to worship Him he will expel the darkness and deceit in our heart, and take up residence there. This is what St. Maximus means by becoming ‘God’s body’, or a ‘portion of God’.

The way to practice this traditional approach can be summed up in 3 basic points:

1. Attend Liturgy (church).
2. Ask for guidance from the priest.
3. Commune with God through worship.

Confession, prayer, and the liturgy are the strongest medicine to heal our imperfections and help us embody truth. This is because the Church has direct communion with God through her unceasing worship of Him, and has zealously guarded that deep understanding of reality for thousands of years.

When I began to pray in the Orthodox tradition, prostrating myself in humility before God, and telling him about the lies and inconsistency of my behavior, that’s when He began to transform me, and my desires. My life completely changed, not because of a ‘philosophical truth’, or because I became more ‘authentic’, but because I began to cooperate, mind and body, with God’s infinite Grace and Truth.

The scriptures reveal God, and his historical providence over mankind. God’s revelation culminates in His taking on the garment of man as Jesus Christ. It’s a story about how Truth became a person. As such, you’ll see the best expressionism and stoicism in Christ, but also more. That Ineffable yet accessible Truth is best taught to us through our embodied participation and celebration at Church. Although because of our modernized mind we will face intellectual barriers to our faith in these accounts.

Recognizing The Truth

That day in the classroom I took on certain presuppositions about what it means to seek truth. There is a logical form of argumentation called a ‘transcendental argument’. The form of the argument is simple (X requires Y, If X, then Y) Yet the ramifications of this form of argumentation are massive. It means among other things, that my act of seeking entails or requires presuppositions beyond itself. For example, seeking truth requires the possibility of knowing truth, or there wouldn’t be any point in doing so. Knowledge also requires that certain immaterial presuppositions exist beyond itself:

1. Knower/self, a united place for knowledge to exist.
2. Universals, it’s impossible to have knowledge without universally true or false statements. Stating that ‘there are no universally true statements’ is itself an universal claim, meaning it assumes the very thing it’s attempting to deny.
3. Authoritative/binding ethics, without binding ethics we can’t justify holding other beliefs accountable to coherency or explanatory power, which are necessary for the possibility seeking truth via debate.
4. The laws of logic, without the laws of logic we cannot justify almost any form of knowledge, including the use of language, which depends on logic. (Sentences entail a logical system of grammar).

All of these categories (plus many more) entailed by normal knowledge actually require God as he’s revealed himself in the Bible and his historic church to exist. The other explanation, by starting with an ‘accidental’ universe, can never account for the existence of these immaterial objects which must come prior. For example, laws of logic cannot ‘emerge’ because they must exist fully in themselves all at once. There cannot be a ⅓ of a law of logic. This means a mind must have purposefully created it, and the only mind capable of doing such a thing is a God as expressed in scripture and by His historic church. God’s existence is a necessary prior which grounds, explains, and makes sense of the above preconditions to knowledge.

You’ll find that as you apply these arguments from one belief system to another, you will need your own necessary prior that looks like what christians have expressed as the triune God in order to maintain a logical position. The argument often forces opponents to presuppose some kind of structured universe, almost in the way Plato would have thought of it, where there is an ‘Absolute’ at the top which grounds these categories. The proof for Orthodoxy here then comes by the debate and comparison of this platonic universe with the christian one. The same proof is applied against other religions such as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and any other Christian church. Either way, you’ll begin to see that God’s existence (as he’s revealed himself) is prior or paradigmatic for holding beliefs at all. This is called the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), and it’s the strongest argument for my position.

How God Reveals Himself

“In Eastern theology, man is not just a body and a mind/soul, where the intellect is the highest faculty, but also a spirit, where there is a direct point of contact with God. This spirit is man’s “nous,” where he directly perceives the logoi, or the uncreated principles that are the archetype and pattern of all created things. Man encounters the logoi even if he is unaware of it, because he is created with a faculty for knowing God. Because man is fallen, this nous is buried under false beliefs and lies man has chosen to believe, but because God is ever-present and is ever-present in His infinity, it is impossible for man to escape this or utterly stamp it out.” — Jay Dyer, Numbers Prove God

When I set out on this journey to find the truth, I had no idea where it would lead me. But I had faith that if there was truth out there, it would make sense, and it would give me the insight I need to live a good life.

The quest to embody truth is not over. I’ve been blessed with God’s grace since my entrance as a catechumen into Orthodoxy, and this has given me the strength to overcome many of my flaws. However, with this increased insight, I have also noticed there are many more lies from within to confront. It will take consistent effort and cooperation on my part to continue seeing the results I want. Ignorance and willful blindness will probably plague me for the rest of my life, but every step I take into the light opens new layers of dimensions to explore and learn. I don’t ever want to stop.

Someday I hope to have enough joy in the truth that I may follow the example of my patron saint, St Maximus, who confessed the true faith with no rebellion in his heart, and had his tongue and right arm cut off for it. Or Socrates, who when falsely accused of unbelief in the state religion, didn’t run away, but stayed and refuted his accusers, encouraged them to live a virtuous life and was condemned to death. I want to offer my life to God on behalf of others as Christ Himself did. This is where the ultimate truth lies: the sacrificial love for others. And someday I hope to find it.

“Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a loving heart.” ―Fr Seraphim Rose, God’s Revelation to the Human Heart

Thank you for reading.