Recommended podcast: The Mount Thabor Academy

Orthodox patristic lectures from Dr. Christopher Veniamin

Left to right: a young Dr. Christopher Veniamin, St. Sophrony of Essex, and Fr. Raphael Noica.

Since last August Dr. Christopher Veniamin has been producing an exquisite podcast drawing from his decades of theological study and teaching. It’s named The Mount Thabor Academy (on Buzzsprout, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice) after his press Mount Thabor Publishing. A native of London, born to Greek Cypriot parents, Dr. Veniamin has a degree in theology from the University of Thessaloniki, where he studied under Fr. John Romanides, and a doctorate from Oxford, where he studied under Bishop Kallistos Ware and wrote his dissertation on the Transfiguration of Christ in Greek patristic literature (since adapted for publication). His scholarly credentials and academic discipline are beyond reproach. But what makes him special as a theological thinker and teacher is his discipleship of the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, England, beginning with its founder, the disciple and biographer of St. Silouan the Athonite and one of the great teachers of hesychasm in the twentieth century, our father among the saints Archimandrite Sophrony.

The books by St. Sophrony were very formative to my catechesis in the Church as a young man. Saint Silouan the Athonite contains within it everything you need to know about the purpose of living. That Dr. Veniamin himself was formed in this tradition, deeply and personally, would be enough to make him special to me, but he also was my instructor in patristics at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary when I attended there from 2003 to 2006. His lectures were my favorites, and now he’s making them publicly available.

Dr. Christopher Veniamin.

The offerings of The Mount Thabor Academy begin with a seven-episode series “St. Gregory Palamas,” an introduction to that great Church Father’s theology told in historical context (recently updated with better sound quality; look for the episodes labeled “bis”). Dr. Veniamin’s landmark publication is his annotated translation of Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies, a thick, beautiful tome that is as accessible to the general reader as it theologically rich. He’s the professor you want teaching you about St. Gregory Palamas. And by starting with the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy, Dr. Veniamin outlines the proper approach to Orthodox theology, distinguishing it from the Scholastic method that we Westerners are still saddled with today. The basis of theology properly so-called is the personal experience of God. It is empirical and noetic, not speculative and rationalistic.

That’s Dr. Veniamin’s logical starting point for the podcast, but it doesn’t have to be yours if you’re more interested in the other offerings. After “St. Gregory Palamas,” the courses branch out into two ongoing series, the first of which is “Sts. Silouan and Sophrony the Athonites: Principles of the Christian Life,” a more practical, more inspirational set of lessons concerning how to engage in the personal, empirical basis of theology. And the second is “Mystical Theology,” a history of Greek patristics that traces the dogmatic patterns of linguistic expressions that either accord or don’t accord with Orthodox belief and practice. After an intro about Holy Scripture and Greek philosophy, chapters start with Philo of Alexandria and proceed to St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and now we’re several episodes deep into St. Athanasius the Great. An unnumbered special edition within the course discusses St. John Damascene’s Christology.

But again, all theology taught by Professor Veniamin is situated in the personal experience of God in His saints. In the “Sts. Silouan and Sophrony the Athonites” series, besides talking about those great Russian fathers, he also tells stories of visiting modern Greek elders. The first time he met St. Paisios of Mount Athos, Dr. Veniamin, then a young man, sat with him alone for a couple hours (ep. 10, 5:06). While enjoying the elder’s company, he wanted to ask him a question, but wasn’t sure what to say. In his family he had often heard the Greek word peirasmos (temptation), and now in Greece he was hearing the word logismos (intrusive thought); so he asked what the difference between them was. Elder Paisios didn’t respond at first, and young Christopher’s soul was filled with self-doubt, anxious that he had asked a stupid question. Finally the elder said, perhaps jokingly, “You’re going to be a theologian.” Dr. Veniamin to this day doesn’t know if he was being serious. He tells the story, though, in the course of teaching about intrusive thoughts. Such practical knowledge of how the spiritual life works is essential to the noetic purification that must occur before one can become a theologian.

St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (†1991) and St. Paisios of Mount Athos (†1994).

In the early eighties, while Dr. Veniamin was yet a student in Thessaloniki, his elder in the faith and fellow Cypriot Fr. Zacharias of Essex (disciple and eventual successor of St. Sophrony, four of whose books are available from Mount Thabor Publishing), with whom the young theology student was familiar from the monastery back in England, invited him on a journey to Athens to meet with Elder Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia. Dr. Veniamin tells a longer version of the encounter on his blog where he sometimes responds to questions from the podcast. But on the podcast, in the “Mystical Theology” series this time (ep. 5, 7:56), he cites the experience as one example of the kind of thing he’s talking about when he says the vision of God is the basis of theology. He introduces the story with a saying of St. Pachomius the Great (from his Life, ch. 48), spoken when his disciples approached him innocently asking that he show them a vision. St. Pachomius responded, “If you see a holy and humble person, that is a great vision.” As he reveals in his blog, Dr. Christopher witnessed first-hand St. Porphyrios’s miraculous and surprising clairvoyance, but that’s not what he’s moved to talk about in the podcast when he says,

I mentioned real moments, didn’t I, earlier, moments that make a very deep impression on one and stay with you the rest of your life. With St. Porphyrios at that moment, although it was difficult to describe — it still is difficult to describe — if I had to put one word as a description of it, I would say the experience was of him ... as a humble person, his humility. It was absolutely beyond words, and so difficult, as you can see, difficult to describe. But humility — “If you see a holy and humble person, that is a great vision.” We had a vision at that moment of a holy and humble person. And he didn’t have to do or say anything.

And when you... when you leave — of course, there’s a certain sorrow when you leave the presence of such a person because the saints have a way of drawing us into their spiritual world, and while you’re with them you have a little taste of that world, which is the grace of God.

And leaving... you are filled with the desire to pray... to repent, to weep.

When we hear mention of theoptia, the vision of God, it’s easy for us to imagine some exultant, sensational version of this, something that hasn’t first and foremost passed through the furnace of humility. But illumination only occurs in the midst of deep purification. There’s a sense in which the virtues are natural to human existence, in that the human being is created to be virtuous in power and activity, but there’s a greater sense that the virtues themselves are divine energies. God is humility. God is meekness. God is love. They are the activity of God. So when you see a truly virtuous person, you are having a vision of God in His activity, in His energeia.

And it’s a deeply personal encounter. But also let’s not get the persons confused. We encounter the person of God — the person of Christ, that is — through the person of the Holy Spirit, in the person of the saints. That’s the purpose of the apostolic mission set forth in the Bible. The saints acquire the mind of Christ and are deified with divine energy, passing on the experience to their disciples. But none of them, apart from being of the Body of Christ, is an hypostasis of God, and the difference is known. “I remember there’s a story about St. Porphyrios disagreeing with something that St. Paisios had said,” Dr. Veniamin says at one point (back in the “Sts. Silouan and Sophrony” series, ep. 9, 3:40).

And the person who was trying to figure out what was going on between them said, “Perhaps, Father, you really agree on a certain level.” “No!,” St. Porphyrios said, “We don’t agree!” “Father, how is it possible that the saints would disagree? How would we resolve a disagreement between the saints?” “The Church would resolve it,” said St. Porphyrios.

Conflict is resolved in the body of the Church because of the activity of the Holy Spirit who leavens it, and so God alone is worshiped. The person of the Holy Spirit — He who reveals to us the person of the Son, who reveals to us the person of the Father, who together are one being, not three gods but one being, with one activity — He is the life of the Church and the source of authority. The patterns of the virtues to which we are exposed in the saints of the Church, in those who follow the commandments, those are the patterns that, when adopted as one’s own through practice, show us who God is, and what can and cannot be said about Him. This process commonly results in apophatic theology, since through experience we learn that the uncreated God is wholly separate from all created things and no created language can possibly apply to Him. But when you encounter apophatic theology in the world, it is not always of the same quality. One can come to such expressions via rational deduction as well as from personal experience. It takes spiritual experience to discern the difference, as when reading the converted philosopher Clement of Alexandria’s questionable writings, which Dr. Veniamin addresses in the “Mystical Theology” course (ep. 6, 23:53).

Such issues tend to arise in this patristics track of the podcast. It is so very valuable to learn the dogmatic patterns of Orthodox theology, especially in historical context, which is how Dr. Veniamin presents it, because the distinctions the Holy Fathers learned to make were taught them through their experiences following the commandments and being illuminated by the God of love. Apophatic theology employed for this purpose results in the deifying revelation of the God of light. Apophaticism approached philosophically results in negative darkness, a completely relative state replete with potential for delusion. Encounter with God is also possible in this state, but if it is not met with recognition, and thence followed by dedication to purification, it is of no avail.

In his special edition of “Mystical Theology” dedicated to St. John Damascene, Dr. Christopher teaches (at 16:09),

I think the important thing to bear in mind is that in St. John Damascene’s theology, which is a recapitulation of his predecessors, you have apophatic theology meaning mystical theology, theology which is based on the life of prayer. Theology which is based on the vision of God, the vision of Christ in glory, the vision of the risen Lord, and not on thinking, not on figuring things out, not on speculation. This is very important because it will help you to discern what is Orthodox and what is not Orthodox. And this really goes back to the whole question of what is theology and who is a theologian. Or I could put it in slightly different terms: What is holiness? What is sanctity? What is deification? And who is a saint? What do we mean when we say “saint”?

And it’s my conviction that what happened in the West over time, because during the first millennium the traditions of the East and the West were the same with some minor differences, but what happened over time thanks to the increasing influence of the theological approach of St. Augustine, was that you have the introduction of speculative theology. Let me put it in a slightly different way. What you have is the abandonment of the biblical and patristic “method” — and I say “method” in inverted commas, because there is no method as such, but what I mean is there is the purification of the heart, the illumination of the mind, and the deification or the sanctification of the soul and body by means of living the commandments of Christ, and prayer, noetic prayer, that prayer which in its fullest form is represented by St. Paul when he says, “I know a man in Christ who was taken up to the third heaven and heard unspeakable words.”

Such unspeakable experience, then, is what causes the Fathers to take up apophatic theology, so as to translate the faith they have received into human language and thereby communicate truth to others, protecting them from the corruption of human-generated philosophy, and continuing the work of Christ who makes the Divinity incarnate in His person. Of course this is what the Church Fathers will do, continue the work of Christ’s Incarnation. They have acquired the mind of Christ, adopted His energy, by the grace of the Spirit, and so the process of theosis is extended through them by means of the cultural transformation that results when the Gospel of Christ is translated into the languages of the uninitiated. If I may resort to a different modern theological writer, I am reminded of how Panayiotis Nellas, in his book Deification in Christ, speaks about dogmas as though they are words deified:

By the application of this ascetico-eucharistic method, the Fathers of the Church saved the great cultural institutions of their day. With this method ancient Greek thought, for example, was baptized and Christianized and transformed without being changed externally. The words, such as logos, image, archetype and triad, remained the same, but they became the created clothing of uncreated truth. This means that they have become incorrupt to such a degree that our Church believes dogmas, like the bodies of the saints, to be immutable.¹

Of course, I’ve read this idea in a book. Orthodox theology must be based on experience, not book-learning, but it sure does involve reading a whole bunch of books. Books, and the words within them, may constitute the body of Christian theology — and so we revere the words of our instructors, the writings of the Fathers, and the words of Holy Scriptures, books we kiss in church like the Body of Christ — but the experience of God in praxis and theoria is the Spirit that gives life. Accordingly, Dr. Christopher teaches, in the conclusion to his “St. Gregory Palamas” course (ep. 7bis, 2:06),

If one attempts to theologize based solely on Scripture, then you cannot avoid becoming a heretic, because the correct interpretation of the Bible only takes place when it is accompanied by the experience of illumination and of theosis. Without illumination and theosis, we cannot interpret Holy Scripture correctly. And isn’t this why, on a deeper level, the Church has placed the memory of St. Gregory Palamas on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, immediately following the Sunday of Orthodoxy? It’s not enough to believe correctly intellectually. The Orthodox faith is a life lived, and it is experience of God. And we see as an example of this placed before us the person of St. Gregory Palamas himself.

Let’s say we have a book on surgery. Can anyone take a book on surgery and read it — without the practical experience of surgery — and interpret it correctly? I mean, this is what people think can be done! Is it possible for a person to declare that he is going to become a surgeon and instead of going to a medical college, to first become a doctor and to study anatomy and so forth, and, not only to study and to sit in examinations, but to go through the relevant exercises and study under an experienced surgeon and under the supervision of a surgeon, and then begin to practice the various forms of surgical intervention — can that person become a surgeon without doing that? It’s obvious that that’s not possible. And the same thing applies to all the sciences: biology, chemistry, astronomy, paleontology, anthropology, so on. In whatever discipline, Fr. John Romanides used to say to us, it is necessary for one to practice so that he or she can proceed to the verification of a certain theory. In other words, theory is verified by empirical, or experiential, practice — by empirical knowledge.

And in the same way, one who does not approach the Holy Bible through those who know by experience, through those who have the same experience with the prophets and the apostles, for whom baptism is illumination and theosis, or glorification.... When one arrives at illumination and has the Holy Spirit praying within him, and then when that person has arrived at theoptia and sees Christ in glory — the very vision of Christ in glory, that is theosis. And this is also to be found in the ancient Latin writers, although they call it glorificatio, which is a more biblical term. Theosis is a theological description of glorification. Look, for example, at the passage in St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, where he says, “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured” — the translation that I prefer is the King James, but here King James needs to be corrected. It’s not “when one member be honoured”; it’s “when one member be glorified, εἴτε δοξάζεται ἕν μέλος, all the members rejoice” [1 Cor. 12:26].

This chapter in 1 Corinthians is worth considering here, because when we hear of what it takes to interpret Scripture properly, when we hear of the lives of the saints and despair of being like them — of sharing “the same experience with the prophets and the apostles” — we risk separating ourselves from the Body of Christ, which has many members. We should not think this way, but be humble. “And if the ear shall say, ‘Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body’; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing?” (1 Cor. 12:16–17). As St. Paul says earlier, “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all” (1 Cor. 12:4–6). Some are called to be the eye, and some are called to be the ear. Some are called to be prophets, and some are called to be teachers. “But covet earnestly the best gifts,” St. Paul says (1 Cor. 12:31), saying ζηλοῦτε for “covet earnestly”, as in “be zealous for”. And the best gift, the Apostle goes on famously to say in the thirteenth chapter, is love. If one member of the body be glorified, let all members rejoice in that glorification as though it were their own, and thereby abide in the one love that pervades the whole body.

Two good friends: Vladimir Lossky as a theology professor in Paris (†1958) and St. Sophrony as a monk on Mt. Athos.

Vladimir Lossky was called to be a teacher. The Church loves Lossky. His books are excellent, and the debt owed to him by teachers like Dr. Christopher Veniamin is visible in Lossky’s titles alone, like The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) and The Vision of God (lectures given in 1945–6, published posthumously in 1961). His The Meaning of Icons (1947), co-authored with Leonid Ouspensky, is the consensus best book on the topic. A tremendous deal of positive instruction is to be had from reading his works.

But an illuminating story comes down to us about his friendship with St. Sophrony, whom he knew first as Sergei Symeonovich Sakharov; Dr. Veniamin tells it in his “Sts. Silouan and Sophrony the Athonites” series (ep. 4, 00:14). Before going to Mt. Athos and meeting St. Silouan, Sergei Sakharov as a successful artist was close friends with Lossky, son of the famous philosopher Nikolai Lossky, in the Russian émigré community in 1920s Paris. When in that city the St. Serge Orthodox Theological Institute was created, which would be the center of a revival of patristic studies that fed into the subsequent Ressourcement movement renovating the Roman Catholic Church, both Vladimir and Sergei were among the first students. But Sergei did not last long before growing disenchanted with the academic approach and fled to Mt. Athos where he became the Monk Sophrony. Returning to Paris more than two decades later, on account of health problems and to seek publication of the writings of his late spiritual father Starets Silouan, Fr. Sophrony first shared these prized writings with his friend Vladimir Lossky to get his opinion; this was the late forties, and Lossky was in his creative prime. “To Fr. Sophrony’s surprise,” Dr. Veniamin relates, “Lossky, God rest his soul, gave the manuscript back to Fr. Sophrony saying that this was very nice; they were the writings of a deeply pious man who speaks of the Holy Spirit, repentance, humility, love for enemies — but it’s not theology.” This startling response was in fact what inspired St. Sophrony to write the first half of Saint Silouan the Athonite. St. Sophrony, drawing on his worldly knowledge of art and philosophy, had to develop a further layer of translation in order for a modern audience to have a chance of recognizing what true theology — and hence a true theologian — really is.

My young self benefited massively from that condescension, as my twentieth-century mind understood St. Sophrony’s explication much more readily than St. Silouan himself. But the less-educated St. Silouan’s more simply expressed wisdom contains the seeds of everything St. Sophrony writes about. I’ve found now that with experience I gravitate more towards St. Silouan’s half of the book for nourishment, though for the understanding of it, I remain as dependent as ever on St. Sophrony’s half. Vladimir Lossky, as learned as he was in Orthodox patristics from an academic standpoint, lacked the vision of God necessary to recognize the power within St. Silouan’s words for what they were.

This wasn’t the case, it should be said, with other holy men of the era who encountered this holy monk, in person or in writing. Though the larger community of Russian monks on Mt. Athos didn’t understand it, St. Nikolai Velimirovich of Zhicha, the great Serbian bishop and theologian, was a frequent visitor of St. Silouan during his lifetime, as Dr. Christopher says in the “Sts. Silouan and Sophrony” course (ep. 3, 12:56). It was on a visit there, actually, in 1930, that St. Nikolai ordained St. Silouan’s disciple Sophrony to the diaconate. Well, many momentous years later, St. Nikolai was sick at a hospital in London, and St. Sophrony, having since left Mt. Athos as I mentioned, came to visit him. It was then that St. Sophrony shared with St. Nikolai a letter he had received from one of St. Nikolai’s own spiritual sons, St. Justin Popovich, archimandrite of Chelije Monastery and prominent theologian. He “had read the newly published, but as yet little known, Starets Silouan, as the book used to be called,” Dr. Veniamin says,

and complimented Fr. Sophrony on the publication of such a marvellous book. Among other things, St. Justin said that such a book appears perhaps every one hundred years. And the other thing that he said which struck Fr. Sophrony in particular was that the writings of St. Silouan are like those of St. Symeon the New Theologian. To Fr. Sophrony’s surprise, upon hearing this — Bishop Nikolai was in his bed, sick — he paused for a moment, thought about what St. Justin had said and then shook his head in disagreement... and said, “No, his word is healing.” The word of St. Silouan, Bishop Nikolai insisted, was healing.

Top: St. Silouan the Athonite (†1938) and St. Nikolai of Zhicha (†1956). Bottom: St. Justin of Chelije (†1979) and St. Sophrony of Essex (†1993).

Through such healing words the Church is kept alive, and the Orthodox theological tradition with it, though not in the way that academicians might expect. That’s how the Church survived the catastrophe of the twentieth century, anyhow. In the hyperconnected, discombobulated twentieth-first century, which fragments and conflates in equal measure, who knows how the Holy Spirit will move and be made manifest? Though I’ve known Dr. Christopher Veniamin and studied under him in person, which is optimal, I at least see his podcast The Mount Thabor Academy as a welcome addition to the electronic mediasphere, and a potential lifeline between the two worlds, that the life of the Holy Spirit among us may be transmitted from past to present and beyond, leavening the Body of Christ in all its members.

1. Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, td. by Norman Russell (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), p. 102.