Hidden Holiness

3 God's Humanity and Humanity's Becoming Godly

41 chapter three God’s Humanity and Humanity’s Becoming Godly Eternal life consists in being continuously present before the face of God and continuously seeing oneself in God’s light, from which one cannot hide. Does the dogma of the veneration of the saints and their canonization not exclude the notion of the relativity and compatibility of heaven and hell, even if in different forms and compoundings ? This question can be answered by another question: Does human saintliness signify perfect sinlessness, and does canonization presuppose precisely such a conception of saintliness? We think that the testimony that canonization gives concerning saintliness has a somewhat different meaning, that of a sum total, in which sinful infirmities are submerged in a general saintliness.And this sum total is different in each individual case. It is not by chance that the Church distinguishes between major and minor saints . . . [T]his is what the prayer of the Church says about all human saintliness: “there is no one living who does not sin. You alone are without sin,” . . . every human being has need of forgiveness and redemption by the Blood of the Lamb.In other words, the saintliness glorified by the Church signifies not sinlessness but righteousness as the sum total of pluses and minuses, experienced as a synthesis of bliss and suffering.1 This is the great Russian theologian of the twentieth century Sergius Bulgakov’s (1871–1944) perceptive reflection on human holiness in the last book of his great trilogy, one of the last he completed in his remarkable life. Not surprisingly, it is called The Bride of the Lamb, from the vision of the seer John in the book of Revelation, and deals with the church as the communion of saints and the last things—life with God beyond this world and time. Despite questions about the orthodoxy or the conventionality of his theological writing, Bulgakov brings together tradition and modernity , Christianity and humanism, the divine and the human, as perhaps no other theologian of the modern era. Hans Urs von Balthasar is closest, and some of his thinking too has provoked controversy, and for the same reasons as Bulgakov’s. Typically, Bulgakov packs almost an entire book of ideas into a couple paragraphs, cited judiciously above.We will examine most of these themes as we move forward, such as the reality that holiness starts with God, is a gift of his life, is God’s constant presence in a human life. Closely connected with this interpretation and emphasized by his student Paul Evdokimov , is the corollary, namely that holiness is not heroic feats of asceticism or virtue—exactly what the celebrity version of sanctity seems to insist. Rather, holiness has to do, is a relationship, with the Holy One and thus is connected to wholeness. Holiness, further, does not require the absence of sin and human qualities, eccentricities, phobias, sufferings—the substance of ordinary human life. Holiness is a struggle with the baggage of human existence, all the elements that make us who we are. Despite the claims of hagiography,the written lives of saints,and the characteristics deemed necessary for official church recognition or canonization, the personalities and lives of the saints remain truly human and particular, even imperfect. One can see in them the process of sanctification in progress. Every saint says, in the Eastern Church’s prayer before communion,quoting St.Paul,“of sinners , I am the first.” Likewise the funeral service notes “there is no one living who has not sinned,” only God is without sin. Holiness is diverse in shape because of the diversity of the saints. Bulgakov notes this in mentioning traditional categories, even “minor” and “major”saints.Icons of the assembly of saints often indicates this by grouping together, just as the preparatory rite of the Eastern liturgy (proskomeHIDDEN HOLINESS 42 dia), the prophets, apostles, martyrs, bishops, fathers and teachers, healers , holy women, and locally venerated saints of a country or region or monastery.Bulgakov observes too that there will always be saints never officially recognized by the churches. So, not only is sanctity diverse, never restricted to one set of categories, it is also universal. There are holy people of every century, every social class and country, every state in life, gender, age bracket. Bulgakov featured the figure of Divine Wisdom or Sophia in much of his last twenty years of theological writing...