#uncreated light

“Set aside half an hour out of the twenty-four to say the Prayer. Whenever you are able; but the evening is best. Say it without using the prayer rope - in supplication, pleading, and with tears. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ Cultivate this, and you’ll see what fruit it brings. From half an hour, it will become an hour. And guard this hour. Whether the phone is ringing, or you have this task you need to do now, or you’re sleepy, or some blasphemy is confronting you. Nothing. Turn off the phone. Finish your tasks. Do this half hour and you’ll see. You’ve planted a little tree, and tomorrow or the day after it will bear fruit. St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil both began like this and became luminaries for the whole world. St. Symeon the New Theologian had experiences of the Uncreated Light while still a layman. He was a layman. How many laymen appear as such exteriorly, but deep down are monastics!”

~Elder Ephraim of Katounakia

“The theological controversies about the nature of the light of the Transfiguration of Christ—controversies which, about the middle of the fourteenth century, divided the upholders of the doctrinal traditions of the Eastern Church from certain rationalizing theologians, related basically to a religious problem of the first importance. It concerned the reality of mystical experience, the possibility of conscious communion with God, and the nature of grace—whether it is created or uncreated. The questions of man’s ultimate destiny, his beatitude and deification, were at stake. It was a conflict between mystical theology and a religious philosophy, or, rather, a theology of concepts which refused to admit what seemed to it to be an absurdity, foolishness. The God of revelation and of religious experience was confronted with the God of the philosophers, on the battlefield of mysticism, and, once again, the foolishness of God put to nought the wisdom of men. Finding themselves obliged to define their position, to formulate concepts of realities utterly transcending philosophical speculation, the philosophers had finally to give a judgement which in its turn appeared ‘foolishness’ to Eastern tradition: they asserted the created nature of deifying grace. ... At the end of our study we must think of another aspect of the divine energies: that of the uncreated light in which God reveals and communicates Himself to those who enter into union with Him.

This light (φῶς) or effulgence (ε῎κλαμψις) can be defined as the visible quality of the divinity, of the energies or grace in which God makes Himself known. It is not a reality of the intellectual order, as the illumination of the intellect, taken in its allegorical and abstract sense, sometimes is. Nor is it a reality of the sensible order. This light is a light which fills at the same time both intellect and senses, revealing itself to the whole man, and not only to one of his faculties. The divine light, being given in mystical experience, surpasses at the same time both sense and intellect.”

Elder Paisios, Bathed in Uncreated Light, First Kneeling Prayer, Saint Anthony Monastery, Arizona

25. The one who through the virtues and by disposition genuinely follows Christ transcends the natural and written law.

{10.56} There is nothing, it seems to me, to hinder a person who has received preparation in these, I mean to say the natural and written laws, from living in a manner pleasing and appropriate to God, indeed beyond these and even without these, through pure faith, from genuinely following reason alone as it leads him to the highest Good, in such a way that his mind touches absolutely no object, thought, or concept—to which every nature and [1152D] all knowledge (in things either real or conceptual) are subject and manifested. And this is wholly fitting for the one who has proposed genuinely to follow Jesus, who passed through the heavens, so that he might be able to receive comprehensively,146 to the extent that this is humanly possible, the true knowledge of beings through the manifestation of the divine light.