It was the Eastern Orthodox theology that most interested me as I continued to study the works of Nicolas Berdyaev. I explored Timothy “Callistos” Ware’s history of the Orthodox Church, and then went on to read other modern theologians like John Meyendorff and Vladimir Lossky before plunging into the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian’s writings on “Divine Light” and Gregory Palamas’s theology of the “Uncreated Energies of God,” and other mystical notions central to the Orthodox church, but strangely paralleling ideas also found among Quakers and other “unorthodox” western mystics.
The Eastern Orthodox faith has traditionally been characterized as “optimistic” by contrast with the Roman Catholic and Protestant West with its emphasis on Augustine’s notion of “original sin.” The story of Jesus is framed in the West by Roman legalism: God offered his Son to pay for the sins of humanity in a legal process by which one life is offered to redeem another. In Orthodoxy the point is not to be “saved” but rather to join God in the work of continuing creation. The stress is put on humanity’s divinity, the fact that we were “created in the image of God” and have within us a divine nature. Berdyaev summed up the Orthodox view by saying that humanity’s “chief end is not salvation, but rather to mount up on the wings of creativity.” Like other Orthodox theologians and philosophers, Berdyaev believed in theosis or “divinization,” based on the idea proposed by the early Church Father Irenaeus: “if the Word (Jesus) has been made man (sic) it is so that men may be made gods.” The Orthodox believes that through active co-creation, humanity finds what Aristotle would call its “entelechy” or end and meaning.
Meanwhile, I moved to Berkeley Way in Berkeley, thanks to Dave Smith, a UC philosophy student I knew from HCOB who invited me into a very affordable, but unstable and disastrously dirty and cluttered house. Upstairs and in the rear lived an ex-convict, we’ll call Aaron, who slept on a table in the center of his room which was otherwise almost bare. On the two entrance doors to the room he had padlocks installed on the inside. Aaron was already in the process of moving out as I came in. Dave lived in a room just off the kitchen, and in the front lived one of the owners, Calhoun Phifer, a very affable middle-aged ex-Cal student who had worked for the Union Pacific Railroad for the past few decades. And what a very dear, delightful, and generous soul Calhoun Phifer was. On a weekly basis he cooked a huge meal for everyone and left the kitchen a complete mess. But the whole house was really a mess. The dining room was full of stacks of dishes: they covered the central wooden table, the bookshelves, and they had even begun to grow beside the fireplace, where burnable trash was incinerated. There seemed to be a greasy layer over everything in the common area, on top of which were several layers of dust.
Eventually Dave moved in two other Christian philosophers, Kevin Rath and Steve Lohrey. When Calhoun moved out, the four of us occupied the house, although other housemates were always coming or going, including an outcast or two from the streets or the House Church, and usually a guest or two occupying the living room. Our house eventually became known around our community as “Calhoun House” in honor of our gracious landlord, and little by little it took on its own identity as a “party house” where the wilder members of the House Church would come to drink, listen to music, and hang out or spend an afternoon drinking coffee and talking philosophy or politics.
I went to work for Radix Magazine part time as circulation manager. This was simply a fancier title for the work I’d done at BCC as mail clerk, since my Radix job involved mailing out the bi-monthly magazine. I also took it on myself as part of my job to promote the magazine through poetry readings and an occasional art exhibit in the community.
In fact, since my divorce the only thing that kept me going was creative expression in poetry. We had a small poetry group that had initially been formed around the HCOB, and we met monthly to work on poetry. There were some very talented writers in the group, including Fr. William Ruddy, who eventually introduced me to his friend, the poet William Everson, when we took a trip to Everson’s home in Davenport, just outside of Santa Cruz.
William Everson (Brother Antoninus) by that time appeared to be far older than his sixty-seven years, with his white hair and beard and the tremor resulting from Parkinson’s Disease. Be he was also very friendly and down-to-earth and patient and we quickly became very comfortable with each other. As we left I invited the old poet up to read in Berkeley and he accepted the invitation. For the occasion I produced a small pamphlet of poems from poets who were on the bill for that night’s reading and called it Poems of the Third Epoch. Everson was curious about the title and I explained that it referred to the Trinitarian conception of history originating in Joachim di Fiores and developed in Nicolas Berdyaev as the epoch of the Father (the Old Testament period), the Son (the New Testament period) and the Holy Spirit (“the new epoch of creativity in a testament being written on the human heart”). As I wrote in a revised version of the pamphlet, I saw “these three epochs exemplified on a personal level in the career of William Everson.”15
Only later would I discover the essentially apocalyptic, utopian and millenarian nature of di Fiore’s idea and learn that Hegel, Marx, and Comte had all adapted this three-stage model of historical development to their purposes. Hitler, also, had based his idea of the Third Reich on di Fiore’s conception.16 In fact, this Joachimite conception pervades movements of the Left and Right all the way down to the present time, given the enormous foundational role millenarian thinking has in Western thought.17
Bill Everson and I became friends and engaged in a correspondence that lasted for a number of months as we both read through Berdyaev. I also spent many weekends at his cabin in Kingfisher Flat drinking wine and talking about poetry, theology, philosophy, Carl Jung and, of course, Nicolas Berdyaev.
I was brought out of this cosmic millenarian reverie one morning as I talked with Steve Scott, a Christian poet who had been part of both the Third Epoch poetry reading and the anthology I’d produced from it. As I babbled on about the theurgical and synergistic mysticism of creativity in Nicolas Berdyaev over a cup of coffee in a small café on University Avenue in Berkeley, Steve smiled indulgently. When I finished my spiel he said, “yes, good. And while you’re at recreating the world, you might want to come up with a few fields of wheat to feed the poor.” I felt my racing mind come to a complete stop as the words slowly entered my ears and dripped into my sinking heart. Yes. Of course. There are things poetry and art cannot resolve.
Scott’s down-to-earth counsel roughly coincided with Daniel Berrigan’s visit to Berkeley. He was to teach a course at the Graduate Theological Union and I decided I’d see if I could arrange to interview him for Radix Magazine. When I heard the class would deal with his exegesis of the Book of Revelation, I was determined to audit, no matter what. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult to audit, since there were no police or bouncers at the door: all one had to do was go into the class, sit down, and imbibe the clear teachings of a great man.
Diminutive and quiet, peaceful and gentle, Daniel Berrigan was a lion in the sheep’s clothing of priestly vestments. He spoke in a soft, matter-of-fact voice, and yet somehow projected to the back of the class where I sat. But most impressive was his understanding and insight into the book that had long fascinated and perplexed me. He started off talking about the need to take responsibility for the arms race. “If no one is responsible, no one is human,” he said. “How will Babylon (and by this, he clearly was referring to the USA) be saved if that which is most human, that is, freedom and responsibility, is not invoked?” Faith, he said, is an unfinished drama in the Book of Revelation, and that Book cannot be closed as long as we’re here.
“In the light of the Lord’s coming, the end is not in the hands of the nuclear bomb tinkers, but in the hands of Christ.” Babylon was an image of John’s time, but it must be translated into our own time. The Book is unsealed, Berrigan told us, and that indicated that there are no sealed facts. We must keep the “book” open and use it to unseal the present.
“Cold, rational means lead only to a cold, rational utopia. Technique,” Berrigan said, “is a spiritual invasion, a demonic, inhuman, a ‘disposal’ sense of time, a way of getting rid of problems, of ‘resolving’ problems, because you get rid of human activity. War is the dispose all (disposal), the way to get rid of problems