St. Diadochos of Photiki on Blogging

Well, more or less.  In the Philokalia, St. Diadochos reflects thus on the danger of talking too much:

When the door of the steam baths is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates itsremembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good.  Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a welter of confused thoughts to anyone it meets, as it no longer has the Holy Spirit to keep its understanding free from fantasy.  Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. (“On Spiritual Knowledge,” in the Philokalia Volume 1, 276)

If indeed “ideas of value shun verbosity,” then is it possible to gain much through blogging?  I think the 5th century Bishop has a point.  Granted, it can be taken too far – scholarship of every kind is built on a kind of “verbosity.”  We wouldn’t have PHDs without forests of trees being destroyed to put ink on pages.

I suppose these matters are on my mind because I’m preaching tomorrow on humility, based on the Christ hymn in Philippians 2.  It strikes me that blogging doesn’t seem like a very humble activity – a way for those unsuccessful in traditional media to put their thoughts out there for the world to see.  Most social media is built on this desire.  Is there such a thing as “humble blogging”?  Is it possible, in the verbosity that is the blogosphere, to find ideas of value?

My own thought, at least today:  I’m not sure that anything I’ve written is worth the time, either in my writing of it or your reading of it, when compared to the Scriptures or to the writings of the Church Fathers or the greats like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth.  For that matter, I don’t know if I’ve read any blogs good enough to justify spending the time there versus any of the above.  What say you?

(And don’t be too verbose.)

Who Gets You Out of Bed On a Sunday Morning?

I’m reading N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian with a small group at church.  It’s proving to be a little heady, but most are liking it.  (While many on the theo-blogosphere might not find it so, it’s worth remembering that even Wright’s popular writings are far denser than the drivel that is typically mass-marketed to literate believers.)  He does a great job of mapping out three different ways of relating heaven and earth, or, if you like, the physical and the metaphysical.  The Bishop says they are either the same (pantheism), overlapping and mysteriously interlocking at various and sundry places (the Jewish/Christian view), or they are utterly distinct (gnosticism and its cousins).  The last of these views is held by many in the West who believe in a vague, uninterested and uninteresting god – the one Pacino/Satan in The Devil’s Advocate calls “an absentee landlord.”  Wright correctly notes that such a God would motivate few if any people to do anything worthwhile; even something as simple as getting out of bed for such a deity would seem rather pointless.

In fact, many people in the Western world assume that when they talk about “God” and “heaven” they’re talking about a being and a place which – if they exist at all – are a long way away and have little or nothing directly to do with us.  That’s why, when many people say they believe in God, they will often add in the same breath that they don’t go to church, they don’t pray, and in fact they don’t think much about God from one year’s end to the next.  I don’t blame them.  If I believed in a distant, remote God like that, I wouldn’t get out of bed on a Sunday morning either. (Simply Christian, 62-63)

 

For a great introduction by Bishop Wright, check out his lecture from a few years back at the National Cathedral over at their site.