Fr. Rafail Noica: on discerning subtle heresies

"Sentimentality is the subtle scent of heresy"

Heresy is a choice of the heart.

[…]

A group asked me to speak to them about the Mother of God. And I do not remember anything that I talked about, but I talked to them for about an hour and a half, and they were very attentive—all of them, both the Protestants, Catholics, and the elderly whom I was afraid of, and the young people who were more sympathetic, all were attentive. In the end, one of the old, Catholic men came to me and said, “Father, you energetically spoke about the Mother of God for an hour and a half, and without any bit of sentimentality.”

And I was struck by this. Sentimentality is the subtle scent of heresy, which even if it is not a crude error in mind or expression, the error is somewhere in the spirit, and this spirit allows you to be free and gives you crudeness at some point. But if it is not free, because it is all the censorship of the rest of humanity, then it remains subtle and wins over many Orthodox, like The Imitation of Christ.

When I returned to Orthodoxy, the first book a Romanian Orthodox man gave me was The Imitation of Christ. When I showed it to Elder Sophrony, he said “well…it’s like a text on moralism alongside the Ladder by Saint John,” that is, he immediately compared it to the Ladder by Saint John.

When I read it later, I thought you can find many passages that are edifying, but you must know that there is still a subtle error. I’ll tell you which one—an error that is good, that depicts good things—not that error is good. You edify yourself as an Orthodox Christian because you experience the words that come from a foreign spirit as an Orthodox; you receive it as an Orthodox Christian. And to the degree that Orthodoxy lives in us, we become—as Saint Dorotheus of Gaza says—like a pig whose stomach digests all kinds of junk, let’s call them. But he has such a good stomach that he digests them correctly. And I saw this in many Orthodox people; that swallowing all kinds of poison, the Orthodox Christian receives them as an Orthodox and digests them correctly, edifies himself, and then what happens? Pay attention to this: many Orthodox love The Imitation of Christ, why? Because they experienced it correctly. But there are two dangers: in the first place, preaching something like The Imitation of Christ, you destroy the Church. Secondly, and maybe it should be the first, if you are sensitive, the spirit that you breathe in that book risks ruining your correct vision and understanding.

Understanding is not a work of reason, but it is a state of the spirit. And if the spirit begins to sweeten itself with the subtle smell of heresy, then one’s thought and experience begin to go astray—at first unnoticeably. So, pay attention: although we Orthodox, to the degree that we are Orthodox, if we are–grant this, O God, to be more or less Orthodox–then God gave us a stomach in which we can also digest things from Shamanism and digest them in an Orthodox way; but this does not mean that Shamanism is correct, or that what we read is good or what not, but we need to go further in subtlety so that we can become like our great Patriarch Saint Photios of Constantinople who when he heard the Filioque said, “where did this monster come from?”

Which of us is in the state of discerning an ugly monster in the Filioque, which says that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son? And I am not saying that we are bad or anything like this, but that we at least still do not have much spiritual experience if we do not understand that it is a monster. Thus we come to this subtlety–when we encounter something without even determining, “a plus b equals c,” because we do not yet know, or maybe we know but it is not necessary to say, “ah, there is a dogma that says this, thus the Filioque is a monster.” No, you must feel it immediately. If we don’t feel it immediately, then it means that we still have to make some progress. We are not heretics, because our heart does not find rest in heresies, and to the degree that we do not find rest in heresy, we are not heretics, but we are still in the error of our ignorance and sinfulness and nonbeing–not sinful nonbeing, but nonetheless nonbeing. 

—Fr. Rafail Noica, Conversations on Mount Athos