Scripture Interpretation: Conclusion—Who can do it?

Who is most trustworthy to interpret the Holy Scriptures?  In the last article we saw how beneficial was the scholarly research on the background of the problem facing the Church in Colossae.  But to understand the whole of the New Testament, what does it take?  The Apostle Peter wrote: “Account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you.  As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” (IIPet. 3:15-6)  This is fearful!  So who can we trust?  Father Theoclutus, a respected ascetic and scholar of Dionysiou Monastery on Athos, once said, “It is Protestantism to read the Bible and interpret it.  In the Orthodox Church we go according to the teachings of the Holy Fathers.  They lived the Gospel, they reached a state of illumination and wrote out of the illumination they had received.”  Now this process is what must be explained. 

In the letters of Saint Joseph the Hesychast he writes to a correspondent of stages of grace as follows:

“The spiritual life is divided into three stages, and grace acts in a person accordingly.  The first stage is called purification, during which a person is cleansed.  What you have now is called the grace of purification.  This form leads one to repentance.  All eagerness that you have for spiritual things is due to grace alone.  Nothing is your own.  It secretly acts upon everything.  So when you exert yourself, this grace remains with you for a certain period of time.  If a person progresses with noetic prayer, he receives another form of grace which is entirely different.

“As we mentioned earlier this first form of grace is called, ‘perception of the action of grace’ and is the grace of purification.  That is, one who prays feels the presence of divine energy within him.

“The second form of grace is called the grace of illumination.  During this stage one receives the light of knowledge and is raised to the vision of God.  This does not mean seeing lights, fantasies, and images, but it means clarity of the nous, clearness of thoughts, and depth of cognition.  For this to occur, the person praying must have much stillness and an undeceived guide.

The third stage—when grace overshadows—is the grace of perfection, truly a great gift.  I shall not write about this now, since it is unnecessary.”¹

This development could be explained in another way as follows:

“Central to Christian life is ongoing repentance, and the saints are those who repent thoroughly and completely.  Repentance in the Orthodox Church has various shades of meanings.  The Greek word, ‘metania’ literally means a change of mind, implying what the Holy Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans: ‘be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind’ (Rom. 12:2).  The equivalent word in Slavonic—‘pokaianie’—implies to be wretched, to mourn and lament—to be filled with tears.  In conjunction with the disposition of one’s heart, and effort of free will, this ‘spirit of repentance’ acts in varying degrees.  In some people it acts temporarily according to the sins they have committed.  There is confession, the resolve to change, remorse, and maybe some act of penance.  However, in others this ‘spirit of repentance’ acts systematically, remaining upon one, leading him from one degree of purification to another.  Then continuing on, this ‘spirit’—which is an action of the grace of God—leads one from one degree of enlightenment to another.  Perhaps we could presume to say that the latter is what the Apostle Paul wrote of to the Corinthians: ‘But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord’” (II Cor. 3:18).²  Thus one reaches the state of grace of illumination.

Now let us go on to a living example of this.  The Elder Joseph of Vatopedi Monastery on Athos gives us an explanation as he refers to the struggle of a saint of his monastery, Joachim Papoulakis.  He writes of a particular period of the saint’s life when he had much solitude and practiced strict ascetic labors.

“During this time Saint Joachim’s chief occupation was prayer; and he went about it using all of the rules and principles of spiritual inwardness³ and sobriety that he had practiced so intently during his stay on Athos.  His five years of extreme asceticism in his carefree surroundings, coupled with his earlier training, raised him to the level of godly illumination; and Divine grace elevated him to deific theorias⁴—now a normal state for him—at which point his blessed soul was adorned with clairvoyance and foreknowledge.  What is more blessed than the mind that has been illumined and the heart that has been purified?  The person who is found worthy of these things sees, by means of them, God and the things of God. How very little we know about the life of holy men—and only in a faint way do they become known to us—and this from glimpses of their life that they themselves have allowed us to see.

“Everyone drew attention to the saint’s spiritual gifts of prophecy and healing, which were usually revealed when he associated with people for their benefit,  But what struggle did this spiritual giant undergo in order to ‘put off the old man’ (Eph. 4:22) of corruption and lies, to ‘put to death the members which are on the earth’ (Col. 3:5), and to crush the beast of egocentricity—which is truly the ‘abomination of desolation’ (Matt. 24:15)—so that ‘mortality might be swallowed up by life’ (2Cor. 5:4)?  Only fellow spiritual athletes who are one in heart, way of life, and belief know these things; those who take up the Cross of Christ; those who have hurled themselves with zeal into the sea of painstaking diligence and have fully embraced ‘spiritual poverty’ (see Matt. 5:3) by means of voluntary obedience and submission.  ‘As many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them’ (Gal. 6:16), and this is precisely what the blessed Elder Joachim Papoulakis did.”⁵

I do not know if my readers agree but I believe that a person who has reached such a spiritual state is the most trustworthy interpreter of the Holy Scriptures, as the above mentioned Monk Theoclutus said, “In the Orthodox Church we go according to the teachings of the Holy Fathers.  They lived the Gospel, they reached a state of illumination⁶ and wrote out of the illumination they had received.”  Amen!

1.    Monastic Wisdom The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St, Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery 1998, pp. 44-5    

2.    In the Footsteps of a Saint, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2006, p. 3

3.    Spiritual inwardness is defined in Glossary of the book quoted as, “The turning of the mind to the place of the heart where Christ resides.

4.    In the Glossary of this book Theoria is defined as, “The state of prayer where the heart and mind, after being cleansed and purified by spiritual activity, are drawn up into God by His grace.”  So the idea of “deific theorias” is that one ascends into the likeness of God through such experiences,   provided he continues in his ascetic struggles.

5.    Saint Joachim Papoulakis of Vatopedi, Holy Great Monastery of Vatopedi, Mount Athos 2024, pp. 33-4

6. I thought it might be of interest to relate the following: Once the late Abbess Makrina (reposed in 1995) of the convent of “Panagia the Directress” at Portaria in Greece in speaking a state of prayer one can reach said, “It is as though the heart is bleeding and then everything becomes as gold and diamonds, the trees, the houses, everything becomes as gold and diamonds.”  She also comented, “The mind receives illumination through prayer of the heart.”