John Chryssavgis. Beauty and Sacredness in the Work of Philip Sherrard. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 16.

1 (1998) 91-109.

Beauty and Sacredness in the Work of Philip Sherrard

John Chryssavgis
Abstract: Beauty and sacredness are interrelated concepts, embodied as they are in a sacred anthropology and cosmology. In his writings, Philip Sherrard (d. 1995) articulates these profound values with unique eloquence. He writes of the beauty of the body, as well as of the need for ascetic discipline. He emphasizes the innate sacredness of life, art, and culture, but also criticizes the dehumanization of humanity and the desacralization of nature in recent times. He describes the spiritual worldview of traditional Christianity and the eclipse of this worldview in contemporary science. In a word, he discerns the beauty of Christ's countenance even in the shattered image of the world. Sherrard's prophetic voice is worth listening to.
"Exceedingly beautiful" --Psalm 44:3 (45:3)

Introduction
Beauty and sacredness are neither abstract nor subjective realities. Beauty is the response of creation to the sacredness of God; it is the material expression of a spiritual reality. The beauty of the world is the tangible indication that this world is made by a loving, divine God who manifests his transcendent holiness in the immanent attractiveness of creation. Beauty and sacredness are therefore embodied in a sacred anthropology and cosmology. They are articulated

in the inspired utterances of prophets, sages, seers, poets: . . . utterances, affirmed and reaffirmed in the lives of generation after generation of holy men and women . . .; and it is initially from such doctrine that . . . we can learn who we are-what we have the potential to be--and what constitutes the true nature of the cosmos. (Sherrard 1990:131-132)
This is how Philip Sherrard describes the transmission of the sacred principles that define our appreciation of the values of the "beautiful" and the "sacred" in the world. Notice how theology, cosmology, [End Page 91] and anthropology share the same language in his thought. What Sherrard ultimately envisages is a tradition of beauty and sacredness--a kind of spiritual "succession" through the centuries, or a metaphysical "pedigree" across cultures--that insures the continuity of the central values of life and the world. This outline of Sherrard's thought is based upon some of his major works. 1 I endeavor to show (a) how the erotic dimension of life and the environmental crisis that we confront are in fact two sides of the same coin, (b) how the ascetic and the aesthetic (or iconic) aspects of a Christian world-view are interrelated.

The world of the body

The beauty of Eros. A philosophy of disembodiment is a philosophy of death; a theology of incarnation is a philosophy of life. The human person transcends all forms of dualism--both inner (between body and soul) and outer (between man and woman, as well as between humanity and the environment). Extreme asceticism and extreme spiritualism alike represent a partial truth, but to assert a partial truth is to espouse a heresy. This is why the monastics of third- and fourth-century Egypt were able to embrace with such veracity and ferocity the struggle within themselves between body and soul: precisely because they were convinced that this reflected the doctrinal formulation articulated during the same centuries concerning the two natures united "unconfusedly and undividedly" 2 in the one person of Christ. Far from being a cause for "shame," the body reflects divine beauty and therefore is a reason for God's glorification and the world's sanctification. Christians may be to blame for many of the scars left on the concept of the body, yet

whatever differences there may be in emphasis, it is quite clear that the notion that man is really a bodiless spirit or soul who has been embodied

temporarily as a result of the fall, and even as a punishment for falling, so that salvation consists in freeing the soul from the body and in disincarnating, is no part of Christian doctrine. (Sherrard 1976:41)
If the incarnate self is the reality of human existence, then we must recognize its close involvement with sexuality. Human sexuality is not a mere accident of our reality. Although sexuality and spirituality are not identical, they are intimately related. Furthermore, since sexuality and the sense of beauty are also intimately related, we are called upon to understand sexuality as a living, flowing energy whose ultimate source lies in God, and whose physical expression is but one aspect of its fullness. Conversely, if we fail to experience or appreciate sexuality, we [End Page 92] gradually blur our sense of beauty. The sexual indulgence in contemporary society is evidence of the absence, not of the excess, of true eros. Sherrard (1976:43) wonders whether even our negative attitude toward the natural world "cannot be traced back ultimately to a fear of sexuality, and whether this fear has not led to a hostility towards and a wish to escape from the body." It is difficult for a person to become aware of his or her own body without becoming aware of the bodies of other people. In sexual love, a man and a woman "offer each other" to the sacredness and beauty of the other, to the God in the other. Sherrard (1990:118) parallels this encounter with the event of the icon. There is an art that is involved in sexual love, and the purpose of this "art . . . is to transfigure each other . . . to see each other as the manifestation of the divine Beloved":

It is the same as it is with an icon: each becomes for the other an icon, so that their love and their mutual embracing are in recognition of the spiritual reality that each incarnates. . . . If there is a place for icons within the Christian framework then there is a place for sexual love. (1976:47-48)
The body, physical beauty, and our sexuality are like a ladder that permits us to be raised to divine beauty. They do not distract us, but actually attract us in our ascent toward God. This is why St. John Climacus, the author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent (late sixth century), can daringly propose: "Blessed is the one who has obtained such love and yearning for God as a mad lover has for his beloved . . . generating fire by fire, eros by eros, desire by desire" (1982: steps 26.31 and 30.5). Yet there has been a separation, even an opposition, between sensible beauty and spiritual beauty. The continuity between sense and spirit has been distorted, even lost; the ladder is broken. It takes much time and ascetic discipline to restore the ladder, binding the heavenly and the earthly together once again. Even in its

religious, moral, and spiritual depth, life can never be authentic without love, without laughter, without eros, without sensuality, without sexuality, without intensity of experience. The purity of passion. This truth has always been understood by mystics and ascetics, who teach us that love is never satisfied, only fulfilled. Sherrard was aware that "the sense of beauty that goes with [sexual love] cannot be achieved without the highest degree of chastity" (1976:49). This was why he dedicated so many years of his life to the English translation of the Philokalia, the collection of Patristic texts on prayer and the ascetic life that provides spiritual direction to enable readers to "love the beautiful" (the literal meaning of the term ). This is also why Sherrard visited the Holy Mountain so frequently, and fought-- [End Page 93] even to the point of misunderstanding 3 --to preserve the beauty of its silence. He planned the translation of the Philokalia from as early as 1971. His collaborators in this genuinely cooperative venture were Gerald Palmer, who initiated the project but died in 1984, and Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia. Sherrard had already completed the first draft of the fifth and final volume a month before his death on 30 May 1995. In April of that year, he wrote to me:

In an effort to finish two, for me, fairly major undertakings--the first being the translation of the Philokalia and the second being a new book which I entitle (provisionally perhaps) Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition 4 --I had to put virtually everything else to one side. Happily, both tasks are now concluded, except for the dotting of several 'i's and the crossing of several 't's; but they have left me exhausted, far more so than I was aware of--in fact, the day after I finished the last chapter of the book I found I could hardly move! I'm still much in the doldrums, and wait for the energies to come seeping back, if they will.
In the introduction to the first volume of the Philokalia, Sherrard describes the book as

an itinerary through the labyrinth of time, a silent way of love and gnosis through the deserts and emptinesses of life, especially of modern life, a vivifying and fadeless presence. . . . It must be

stressed, however, that this spiritual path . . . cannot be followed in a vacuum. (Nikodimos and Makarios 1979:l.13-15) 5
He felt that the texts of the Philokalia presuppose not a vacuum but a specific doctrine that entails a specific ecclesiology. The doctrinal dimension will be examined briefly later, but I might here add that, in accordance with Sherrard's world view, this ecclesiology needed to be situated in a particular space. Accordingly, the Philokalia was more than simply "a way" for Sherrard; it was "a place." That place was the Holy Mountain, which was especially dear to Sherrard's heart because it is there that the spiritual values of Orthodoxy and the cultural values of Greece unite in a very dynamic focus. In its natural beauty and its monastic representatives, the Holy Mountain outwardly materializes the inner treasures of the Philokalia. He was a frequent visitor, a loving critic, and a literary artist of Mount Athos. His book Athos: The Mountain of Silence (1960) provides an inner picture of the Holy Mountain in a way that no other book in any language has been able to achieve. This is because he knew well that monasticism, at least in its genuine expression, is neither an abstention from sexual love nor an extinction of the most vital response to life. Passions in the monastic context are dealt with differently--they are [End Page 94] transcended by greater passions. Perhaps a world reduced to "fleshly love" is too small and narrow when compared to a world of such "passion" (see Sherrard 1976:42), a world in which freedom from passion ("apathy") itself becomes a passion. In Greek philosophy, just as in Greek Patristic theology, passionate love is conceived in two different ways, either as an infectious disease, in which case it is considered intrinsically evil, or as a neutral impulse, in which case it depends on our free will. In the first instance, passionate or sexual love is perceived as essentially irrational if not animal, and must be eliminated; in the second and more positive instance, however, passion is perceived not as equivalent to vice but rather as an intrinsic part of human nature created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen. 1:26). Therefore, passions must be illuminated, not eliminated. Instead of eradication, they require redirection, transformation, and proper education. One might even say that passions are more than a purely neutral impulse in life--that they constitute a necessary force. St. Gregory Palamas (1973:II, ii, chs. 19-22) describes such passions as "divine and blessed." A single vivid expression of eros, just like a single vivid experience of beauty, will advance a person further in the spiritual life--will be more effective--than the most arduous struggle against passion and the most severely ascetic methods. A single spark of love is sufficient to ignite a cosmic fire, revealing the whole world's beauty. And a single person alive and alight with this "exceeding beauty" can bring about the world's reconciliation with God. Such, in Philip Sherrard's mind, is the Philokalia's spiritual depth and the prophetic dimension of the Garden of the Panagia, as the Holy Mountain is traditionally called.

The body of the world

The sacred in life and art. The process of discerning the qualities of beauty and sacredness in the world of poetry, just as in the body of the world, begins in the mind and heart. Again: "the primary battle is not cultural, but spiritual; and the artist has to fight it not in the thick of our fragmented and alienated society but in the depths of his own being, where alone its outcome will be decided" (Sherrard 1990:41). It is there that the light "can reveal in created things the beauty that manifests in visible form the divine beauty of the Creator" (1990:159). For Sherrard, this means communicating "a picture of the divine world order--that is, a picture of how things are in their true state, or in 'the eyes of God', and not as they appear to us from our limited point of view" (1990:75). It means connecting to the world of the icon. Just as the monk sees with the eyes of the heart, the icon reveals the world through the eyes of God. This iconic world, however, is not an unreal world. The icon reverses [End Page 95] perspective as we know it, abolishing the "objective" distance between this world and the heavenly Kingdom. There is no double order in creation, no sharp line of demarcation between "material" and "spiritual." The icon constitutes the epiphany of God in the wood, and the existence of the wood in the presence of God. In this world, it speaks the "mother" language of the age to come--or indeed, the native ("natural") language of this world. Sherrard literally fought to hold this essence of reality together:

The reality of each thing is the manifestation of the spiritual and sacred reality that constitutes its true and eternal identity and being, and it is immanent in this reality, as it were ensheathed by it. . . . There is no split, no dualism of Spirit and matter in reality. (1990:138)
Nothing renders the mystery of life more sensible than the face of God painted on the wooden surface of the icon, announcing an infinite transcendence and a profound presence alike. Beauty and holiness have a bearing on personal salvation, beyond having any cosmic significance. It is no wonder, then, that the two central theological events depicted in Orthodox iconography are the Incarnation and the Transfiguration. In a very real sense, every icon portrays these two events:

For the art of the icon is ultimately so to transform the person who moves towards it that he no longer opposes the worlds of eternity and time, of spirit and matter, of the Divine and the human, but sees them united in one Reality, in that ageless imagebearing light in which all things live, move and

have their being. (Sherrard 1990:84)

The icon presupposes and proposes another means of communication, beyond the conceptual, the written or spoken word. It is the "writing out" (literally: iconography) of that which cannot be written down in theology. Thus the icon not only reflects another world, it even communicates that world by transforming this one. The earth as icon contains within itself the seeds of heaven. All things are sacraments when viewed in God's perspective and light. We are called not to look at icons, but through them; and, by the same token, we are invited not simply to look at the world, but to penetrate the surface in order to see the divine beauty that is the sacred depth of all things. In this respect, the icon resembles a ladder that connects the visible world to the invisible dimension, the created earth to the uncreated God. Material creation itself constitutes a ladder that restores the bond between this world and the "next," offering a "footstool" for the ascent to God (cf. Acts 7:49; Is. 66:1). Indeed, if God were not tangibly present in the very earthiness of this world, then He would not be present in heaven either. If we could not worship Him visibly, then we [End Page 96] could not properly worship Him as invisible. If we are unable to see God in the beauty of the world, there is no value in merely inferring His presence or holiness from the world. Sherrard (1990:37) alludes to this image of the ladder when he writes that the artist "must have one foot firmly in the world of time and place, in the world of change and transitoriness," implying that the other foot should be raised toward the eternal, spiritual world. Where the monk on Mount Athos struggles to preserve the "human image" restored by Christ, the art of the icon claims to proclaim the "world image" revealed by the same Christ. And this conviction becomes a way of life: "A spiritual or sacred art-the art, say, of Byzantium and of mediaeval Europe--presupposes a way of life centered in the knowledge and experience--or, rather, in a knowledge that is experience . . . of the universe . . . as issuing from God in successive levels" (Sherrard 1990:33). Art is one such level; culture is another. Sherrard's love for the people and poetry of Greece betrayed the same conviction about the need for an ascetic effort to acquire the spiritual vision and experience of reality. He always regarded the Orthodox Church of Greece and modern Greek literature as "two aspects of [one and the same] culture." 6 When Sherrard describes a poet's "visionary experience," it is as if he were talking about the same mystical contemplation of the heart that is described in the Philokalia, the same vision that is narrated in the world of the icon: "It seems that at the moment of vision, the soul, or man's inner being, expands in an embrace which infolds all Nature. Only Nature is no longer merely that Nature of which our senses tell us" (1956:228). Analyzing the poetry of Dionysios Solomos, Sherrard echoes the same process that

we have seen as being the basis of the monastic life and the iconic world:

The artistic process begins with the artist's intuition of this world, his immediate experience of it, something which is not possible until he has gone through an inner development . . . , in other words a kind of dying . . . and participation in the world of spiritual realities. . . . Thus in this traditional view of art, the artistic operation begins and ends not with the individual but with the supra-individual world of the Great Realities. (1956:19-20, 233)
Sherrard felt that, as a result of its traditional roots, Greece did not suffer--at least not in the same way and to the same degree as did Western Europe and the Western world--the rupture of the spiritual world view caused by emphasis on individual consciousness and the intellectual life. The mythological language of the Orphic and the [End Page 97] Pythagorean classics, together with the theological vision of the Christian and Byzantine sources, insured the survival--fragmentary perhaps, but nevertheless genuine--of a tradition that preserves the memory of spiritual reality. Sherrard (1979:4) outlines the historical and symbolic stages of the gradual loss of this traditional connection between art and life, "when literature ceased to be an expression of life, of an experienced reality, and became something else." Nevertheless, the "Great Realities" of Solomos are the "Great Visions" of Kostis Palamas, who believed that moments of passion, which at first may give birth to feelings of shame and self-disgust, may become moments in which life fulfills itself, in which ugliness is transformed into beauty (see Sherrard 1956:60, 237). When the seemingly repulsive aspects of life are accepted and embraced, they will, "through miraculous metamorphosis, reveal the beauty which, rejected and denied, remains for ever frustrate in them." Sherrard (1956:53) quotes from Palamas's "Altars":

"Whatever you have within you, good, suffering, sin, some affliction of the soul, some sickness of the flesh, confess it. Into the light! All the beautiful things of earth, to be more beautiful, and the world's ugly things, to be stirred by the breath of loveliness, seek a priest to confess them, seek a love to kiss them. If you have tears, shed them; they are likely to be pearls. And don't be ashamed of relics; they too feel pain and weep." 7
The same image is found in the poetry of Angelos Sikelianos, whose first important

poem was "The Visionary." Sikelianos derived his mythological attitude to life from the beliefs and customs of the illiterate peasant folk of Greece who preserved it, however unconsciously and imperfectly, during the long years of Turkish occupation (see Sherrard 1956:128). In his "Hymn of the Great Home-Coming" Sikelianos knows the power of eros (Sherrard 1956:134, 161); in the "Word of Greece" he understands the power of silence (1956:156), and in "The Visionary" he makes use of Christian iconography (1956:149). His doctrine may differ from that of much "official" Christianity, but his mysticism--which Sherrard likens to that of Meister Eckhart--perceives the inner identity where

all has become one, the One has become all, in an all-embracing singleness; and man, in achieving his own unity, has become everything. . . . Earth and sky were once one. They can be one again. Earth can mix with the stars. The sky can harvest the wheat of earth. In these symbolical terms Sikelianos represents later the falling into disunity of things, the division of time from eternity, flesh from spirit, and the possibility of and need for their reconciliation if life is to be fulfilled. Man's task is to bring this reconciliation about. Through the attainment of spiritual vision, which is the realization of his nature, he also brings together the worlds which [End Page 98] have fallen apart, he restores their original unity. But the impulsion for this act of creative understanding comes from participation in the life of the senses, in the life of the physical world. We are far from the cell and the scourge. (1956:182-183, 127)
With George Seferis, we are again in a world where all the attention is turned toward the inner center. The opening line of Seferis's early poem "The Cistern" reads "Here, in the earth, is a cistern rooted." Sherrard recognizes in the poetry of Seferis the reality of another world "rooted" in this world, or

as this present world experienced not from the point of view of our normal consciousness, but from the point of view of a level of consciousness obscured for us by the purely rational categories by

which for the most part we allow ourselves to be dominated. (1956:244-245)

Indeed, this world of beauty is known also through the power of silence (1956:188), as well as through the force of passionate love:

For there is a possibility--and in this, Seferis would seem to imply, lies the significance of such physical love--that the experience physical love gives will remind man of something he was in danger of forgetting: that life can be other than his normal consciousness allows him to realize; that there are realms of experience which everyday life obscures; and that these realms exist nowhere else but in himself, in the unexplored depths of his own being. (1956:254)
The entire spiritual world view of the Greeks is personified in General Makriyannis, whose life and mindset are evidence of the fact that the Greek people

had not gone through that debauchery of rationalism of which the modern western world is the product. [They] had not known that split between mind and instinct, head and heart, and the consequent paralysis of man's emotional life. On the contrary . . . the Greek people had remained for centuries very close to the earth on which they lived. . . . Their character was much more a direct expression of the forces of nature than the product of any self-conscious training or control. Hence their extreme ego-centerdness; hence, from an external point of view, the disorder and inconsequence of their life; hence, too, their spontaneity, naturalness and sincerity: what they did was not the result of premeditation or reflection, but simply the breaking forth of the original life-stream itself. (Sherrard 1979:61)

Makriyannis was a symbol of all this, "a symbol for Greece. And such symbols do not remain national. They become universal, for they have the power to stimulate and enrich the heart and mind of man" (1979:71). [End Page 99] The rape of man and nature. People with such a sacred memory and mythology recognize that the center of the heart and of the world lies elsewhere, and draw significance and life from connecting with this center. On the other hand, people with a secular mentality consider themselves to be the center of the universe. "It is the independence and autonomy we ascribe to our selfhood that is the crux of our aberration," declares Sherrard (1995:26-29). He calls this autonomy "deceit," "lie," "ignorance," "fall," "demonization," and "hell." Furthermore, he is convinced that this attitude led to the mechanistic world view that from the seventeenth century onward resulted in the constantly accelerating dehumanization of man and desacralization of nature. The "original" cause of this error was a disconnection between earth and heaven, man and nature, body and soul:

. . . there is in man a difference between his inmost self and the self with which he usually and mistakenly identifies himself, his everyday empirical self; and it may be this split in his selfawareness . . . that is the most evident symptom of that internal dislocation of man's being which in the Christian tradition is indicated by the term 'Fall'. (Sherrard 1987:30)
Although the icon reveals this connection, and although the poet imagines the same connection and the monk struggles to preserve it, Sherrard is nevertheless realistically aware that we live in a world where this appreciation of sacredness and attractiveness has been lost. The interdependence (Sherrard [1987:25] favored the Patristic term ) between heaven and earth has been ruptured, the contract broken. Sherrard may have been a visionary, but he was not an idealist. He believed that the process of dehumanization and desacralization is not accidental, that modern science presupposes a radical reshaping of our whole mental outlook. And so he outlined the intellectual developments that led to the "eclipse" of the sacred world view and to the emergence of scientific philosophy. In his opinion, what was prepared by St. Thomas Aquinas was consolidated by Descartes--namely, "a radical dualism between soul and body, mind and matter, in which the body, along with the rest of the physical world, is regarded as totally deprived of all spiritual or non-material qualities and powers" (1987:60, 69). Sherrard was sometimes accused of overstating his case. Admittedly, some representatives of contemporary Orthodox theology have tended to be sweepingly

critical of Western thought and society. There is an inherent temptation here to which Sherrard did not succumb. It is nave to suppose that Orthodoxy automatically has the key to the answers in areas where others have failed. The shattered image of [End Page 100] humanity and the world is a problem not only of Western Christianity or Western civilization. While much fine literature has described this crisis as a process that began in the late Middle Ages, grew in the Reformation, and culminated in the modern technological revolution, there is no single era or culture that may be held responsible for today's disastrous developments. In the language and culture of the Philokalia, this would undoubtedly be termed "the sin of pride." Sherrard himself (1995:12) admits that these "developments . . . had been incubating in the Christian consciousness for some centuries prior . . . , in both the Greek East and the Latin West." Sherrard ought to be read in light of another key concept of the Philokalia. I am referring to "metanoia": repentance understood as a radical reversal of the destructive path that leads to death. This, I believe, is the context within which Sherrard must be appreciated, and the guiding principle behind his thought. "Nothing can stop this process," he says (1987:88-89), "except a complete reversal of direction. And nothing can initiate a reversal of direction except a recovery by man of an awareness of who he is: the cure must go back to where the sickness started." Certainly Sherrard felt that the matter of ecological annihilation is the major crisis of this century and probably of the next century--"if indeed there is one," as he characteristically wrote to me (12 January 1991). It seems to me, however, that Sherrard's entire outlook is colored not so much by a sense of hopelessness before the ugliness and sinfulness of the world as by a profound sense of hope regarding the world's beauty and sacredness--an optimism that he draws from the Orthodox Church's ascetic tradition. Repentance is clearly at the center of his thought:

If we are to overcome this ignorance, and to rediscover and reaffirm the true dignity of both man and nature in a way capable perhaps of stemming, if not turning, the tide of progressive materialization and disintegration on which we are all now carried, it can only be by rediscovering and reaffirming the spiritual principles on which the masters [of the early Christian tradition] have based their life and their thought. (1987:118)
However, there is yet another detail that underlies the thought of Philip Sherrard. I am referring to his basic intuition that the very difficulties that beset our world, the very distortion of our world view, present God-given opportunities for us to discern

the beauty and holiness of God in the world: ". . . it is only by what one might call providential intervention that we even begin to recognize and accept that our cosmos is, or may be, a sacred cosmos" (1990:147). There is a kind of "providence," he believes, in the very disastrous disintegration of [End Page 101] the world that we face. We are, today, in a much better--perhaps privileged--position to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly and retrospectively, the impasse of our life style and its impact on our world. No matter how carefully modern man has tried to foster a secular mentality divorced from a sacred one, it is today clear that certain "cracks" have appeared on the earth's face and body. In spite of our actions to control or contain the world, we now confront a global problem that concerns everyone, irrespective of race, color, or creed. Ecological retribution, we now know, will sooner or later follow suit, indeed with mathematical precision. And herein, at the very root of our despair, lies the source of our hope. According to Isaac of Nineveh (1923: XIX, p. 73), "there is nothing more powerful than despair. For despair cannot be conquered by anything. . . . When, with our thought, we cut off our hope for life, then there remains nothing more courageous . . . because then God gives us salvation, strength, and rest." The most mystical of all experiences is the profound realization of who we are, of what we have done, and of where we are headed. Our destruction is a lasting reminder of our destructiveness and as such may become the starting point of our transfiguration. Our death can prove the seed of resurrection; the hell that we have created may inspire the source of healing in our heart and in our world. Repentance, consequently, is the painful recognition and continual repetition, with God, that the world was created "beautiful," "very good" (cf. Gen.1). It remains beautiful in spite of the brokenness and ugliness that we have caused. This is the pervasive and persuasive argument that underlies Sherrard's passion, almost mission:

Man is called upon to mediate between heaven and earth, between God and His creation. . . . It is only through man fulfilling his role as mediator between God and the world that the world itself can fulfill its destiny and can be transfigured in the light and presence of God. It is in this sense that man--when he is truly human--is also and above all a priest-the priest of God: he who offers the world to God in his praise and worship and who simultaneously bestows divine love and beauty upon the world. (1987:40-41)
This passage brings us back to the image of the ladder. For the world is not embraced as an end in itself; rather, it is to be looked through, and read as a book with a message. Sherrard speaks of the "book of nature," the liber mundi through which and

within which we must discern "the expression of a hidden, interior world, a spiritual world," just as Holy Scripture reveals an ulterior meaning. Indeed for Sherrard "there is no separation or division . . . between the truth revealed in the Holy Book and the truth revealed in the book of nature" (1995:10, 17). [End Page 102]

The face of beauty and "lineaments" of the sacred

It is this sacramental dimension of the world that enables Sherrard to proclaim an alternative cosmology, one that can discern God's beauty and sacredness in every part of the created world:

Nature is a revelation not merely of the truth about God but of God Himself. . . . Were there no creation, then God would be other than He is; and if creation were not sacramental, then God would not be its creator and there would be no question of a sacrament anywhere. If God is not present in a grain of sand then He is not present in heaven either. . . . Ultimately it is because we see ourselves as existing apart from God that we also see nature as existing apart from God. (1987:94)
There is no authentic beauty in the world outside the unique beauty of Christ; or, better still, all authentic beauty in the world is a reflection of the beauty of Christ who, "revealed through the Incarnation the possibility inherent in human nature" (1990:89). When Genesis 1:31 tells us that "God saw everything that He had made, and, indeed, it was very good" (the Greek term indicates "beautiful"), it is in fact alerting us to the fact that God's beauty and sacredness are what determine the world's harmony and holiness. Sherrard never ceased to proclaim this unified truth about beauty--about the unified source of all beauty and holiness: "When God 'saw that it was beautiful', this seeing was an act of self-recognition by means of which He verified that what He saw was a true and faithful image of His own inner and nonmanifest life" (1990:111). Beauty is attractive and substantive inasmuch as it beckons us to participate in the divine order of things (cf. II Peter 1:14). This is the definition of beauty given by Dionysius the Areopagite in his treatise On the Divine Names (1980:IV, 7; Migne PG 3:701): "as it calls all to itself, hence it is also named kallos." The ancient Greeks loved to play on these words. Sherrard, however, goes still further: "Not only this, but since Christ exemplifies the norm for human life, it also means that there is something radically wrong with us when our whole physical being is not so irradiated" with the light of His beauty and holiness (1990:86). This inevitably influences the way in which we perceive the material world around us, for

if the vision we have of our own inner being . . . does not embrace the spiritual qualities--of beauty, of love--that fill our being when we attune ourselves to God, we cannot perceive these qualities in the forms of the things about us; we cannot perceive their intrinsic sacredness. The link between transcendence and immanence is broken. The intimate interpenetration, the secret coincidence of uncreated and created, divine archetype and visible image, is frustrated, and the marriage between them remains in a state of suspension. (1990:14) [End Page 103]
This last passage serves as a wonderful synthesis of Sherrard's thought on heaven and earth, sexuality and marriage, icons and art, as well as on the sacredness of creation. In his last public appearance, a lecture entitled "For Every Thing that Lives Is Holy," delivered in London on 27 June 1994 to the "Friends of the Center"--a lecture that Sherrard described (in a letter to me dated 25 November 1993) as "the most powerful statement" he had ever made on this theme--, he spoke forcefully against any disconnection of the beauty in this world from the beauty of Christ: "It is this concept of the double truth--this duplicity in the true sense of the word, or what we might call 'double-think'--that constitutes the major premise that has to be reversed if ever we are to escape from the clutches of our materialist world" (1995:19). Sherrard not only perceived everything sub specie aeternitatis, but also in lumine Christi. He discerned the unique and unifying face of Christ in all things. Unless Christ may be discovered "in the least of His brethren" (Matt. 25:40) and also in the least particle of worldly matter (Sherrard 1995:22), then He may be far too distant to matter in any real sense. It is when we are attentive to the iconic presence of the word and wisdom of Christ that "we begin to see the beauty at the heart of things. And this is the road to the recovery of paradise. This is itself the overture to paradise" (1995:32). This, again, is an indication that Sherrard is not guilty of overstating or oversimplifying his case. 8 His purpose is not so much to "attack" science as to "appease" heaven. One would be missing the mark if one explained or dismissed Sherrard's critical remarks as unduly negative toward science, for the extreme nature of some of his statements derives from his sensitivity to the tension between heaven and earth, the tension between the way things are and the way things could or should be. It would be more correct to place Sherrard, too, among the "prophets, sages, seers, and poets" (1990:131) with which we opened this paper-- those who feel the liminal vibrations of our estrangement from God and cry out for the reconciliation

between this world and the next. Our century has seen other such prophetic figures-for example, Jacques Ellul 9 --criticizing modern technology and its devastating effect on the environment. One ought to read Sherrard's daring remarks about the Theotokos in the same way. Comfortably breathing the air of the Orthodox tradition, Sherrard moves from the Christological to the Mariological plane in order to reveal the cosmological role of the Theotokos as a parallel, and even a premise, for the cosmic event of Christ. As the "joy of all creation," Mary embraces the uncreated in a manner that corresponds to that in which Christ assumes humanity. She is the "Mater" of all matter. Sherrard (1992:181) refers to her as the "universal [End Page 104] nature," the natura naturans, the matrix in whom everything flowers. Through Mary, we appreciate how Mariology unveils the femininity of creation, something that lies hidden in the heart of Orthodox iconography and liturgy. In Orthodox churches built from the late fourth century onward, the Virgin Mary is depicted in the apse immediately above the altar, somewhere between heaven and earth. She constitutes the bridge and link between the world and the One who creates and "contains all things" (Christ the Pantokrator). In comparison to the inaccessible, transcendent God, the Virgin Mary is arguably the person more immediately and frequently resorted to in daily prayer and devotion. Thus, in the popular Orthodox Service of the "Akathist Hymn" (early seventh century), the Theotokos is hailed as "the throne of the King, as bearing the One who bears the universe . . . as the womb of the divine Incarnation and as the one through whom creation is refashioned [Stasis I]. . . . She is the shelter of the world, broader than the clouds [Stasis II], the promised land, the land of the infinite God, the key to Christ's kingdom and the hope of eternal blessings" (Stasis III). In Orthodox Church decoration it is not by accident that the icon of Mary the "Platytera" (the one who is broader than the whole of creation) is placed beneath the icon of the "Pantokrator" (the one who upholds all of creation). As an Orthodox hymn states, "Standing before the temple of her glory, we think that we are in heaven." Therefore, beside God the Father we find the Mother of God; beside the King of All we see the Queen of All; beside the "sophia" of the divine Word stands "the vessel of divine wisdom," that treasury and repository of divine "sophia." The unceasing response to God's eternal initiative is the continual "let it be" of the Virgin. Mary's word constantly and completely corresponds to God's Word, lovingly bearing that Word in her womb and selflessly confirming Him in her life. Mary is able to realize these "mysteries" precisely because, again in the words of the Akathist hymn, "she has yoked together maidenhood and motherhood," "remaining a virgin, yet giving birth" (Stasis III). As virgin, she heals the brokenness of the world; as mother, she fulfills the barrenness of creation. As virgin, she signifies the integrity of life, and not just of celibacy; as mother, she personifies the affirmation of life, and not just of marriage. The same hymn states that "she brings opposites to unity." Little wonder that the Virgin Mother is held in high esteem by monastics and married

persons alike. She rightly constitutes the "queen"

of heaven, as well as the

"breath" of creation. To adopt an image that we have already used in relation to the body, to sexuality, to the icon, and to the created world, Mary is hailed as a ladder. The Akathist Hymn refers to her "as the heavenly ladder by which God descended, the bridge that leads the earthly to the heavenly [End Page 105] . . . [Stasis I]. In her, the heavens rejoice with earth and the earth concelebrates with heaven. . . ." (Stasis II). The same understanding of Mary as the "mother" of all that is created is the subject of Sikelianos's long poem "The Mother of God." In considering this poem's feminine element or principle, Sherrard writes the following about the Theotokos:

She is the passive root or ground of creation, a state of pure potentiality and receptivity, into which the spirit pours its fertilizing seed. She is the human soul in its state of original purity . . . the eternal Wisdom itself, the divine Mother, or Mother Earth, from whose ever-virginal womb issues, after the penetration of the spirit, earth and everything that lives. (1956:162) 10
This was the way that Sherrard essentially learned from the writings of the Philokalia. Whether it was in the "eye of the heart," with his emphasis on the or "intellect" as the seat of insight and intuition beyond the narrow level of the reasoning brain; or whether it was on the wood of an icon, which for Sherrard conveyed to us a picture of the divine world order "in the eyes of God" (1990:75); whether in the mystery of the flesh of man and woman; or whether in the bodily flesh assumed by Christ through the mystery of the Incarnation; or, again, whether on the very flesh of the material world--Sherrard saw one and the same thing, namely the face of Christ, which for him was the face itself of beauty and holiness. Everything on this earth tells of the love of the Creator Christ, and speaks aloud of the at-one-ment between heaven and earth. Every single thing, if allowed to, not only reveals the world's beauty but even fulfills the kingdom's holiness. The concluding words of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy refer to the fulfillment of all; in a very vital sense, the earthly liturgy is more than a mere concelebration in the worship of the heavenly realm. This world, in spite of its shattered image, remains an icon of the completion and fulfillment of the heavenly kingdom. These are the closing words of Philip Sherrard's life:

All the phenomena of the world of nature represent

or symbolize with things celestial and divine. . . . In the whole visible, natural world there is nothing that does not express or represent something of a higher invisible world, the spiritual world. Without this rootedness in the spiritual world nothing could exist for a second, for apart from the spiritual world nothing can have any existence at all. No visible thing--nothing. . . . (1995:10-11)

Conclusion
One of Sherrard's most moving pieces is the brief epilogue to The Wound of Greece, a commentary on the figure of Aretousa in the seventeenth-century [End Page 106] Cretan epic Erotokritos. I offer it here as an epilogue to my paper, and as a "prologue to [his] life" 11 :

Now it is over. . . . Gradually, when the book is closed, the epic loses its dramatic quality, its quality of action. The dialogue becomes a monologue, the monologue itself condenses into something much finer, something more pure and uncontaminated . . . [a continuous lyric utterance]: condenses into the portrait of a person free from the accident of time and place. . . . He is dead . . . A love of this kind, if it is to be perfect itself, must pass through a moment of final despair, of furthest separation, of complete abandonment: for it is this death which precedes the deliverance, it is this that makes possible the beginning of new life. (1979:118-119, 124)
"The book is closed." Yet Sherrard's books will remain an open testimony to his quest for beauty and holiness in the world. Although something of the "dramatic quality" is lost from the epic known as "Philip Sherrard," his passion to preserve the quality of the world as beautiful and holy cannot be lost. The dialogue, too, has stopped: the dialogue with God on the level of theological discourse; the dialogue with Greece on the more cultural level; the dialogue that he loved to entertain with friends, at Katounia on the island of Evia, on the personal level; the dialogue with the heart on the spiritual level; and even the dialogue with the universe on the ecological level. Yet the dialogue has been "refined"--"condensed" into a monologue--now that

Philip Sherrard has been transferred, or perhaps he would prefer to say transformed, into the new life and the new world of the heavenly Kingdom (cf. Rev. 21:1-5). There he can at last rest, "caught up in the clouds . . . to meet the Lord" (I Thess. 4:17), to see more clearly and more fully that which he always imagined, as prophet and poet, about the beauty and the sacredness of the world. For now he is at one with his soul and body, with the earth that he venerated, as well as with the heaven that he worshipped. Holy Cross School of Theology

Notes
1. Specifically, "The world of the body" is based on Christianity and Eros, complemented by the Philokalia. "The body of the world" concentrates on The Sacred in Life and Art and The Marble Threshing Floor, together with The Rape of Man and Nature. Finally, "The face of beauty and 'lineaments' of the sacred" treats the culminating synthesis of his thought found in his last publication, the booklet Every Thing that Lives Is Holy. The word "lineaments" is taken from the title of Sherrard's last manuscript, which will appear posthumously (see note 4, below). 2. From the doctrinal definition of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, A.D. 451. 3. For his article "The Paths of Athos," which was criticized by monks of the Holy Mountain, see Eastern Churches Review 9/1-2 (1977):100-107. The final words of this article are: ". . . the state of the paths of the Holy Mountain can be seen as a direct reflection of the inner spiritual health of the monastic community." 4. Philip Sherrard's wife, Denise Harvey, generously entrusted this manuscript to me for publication. It is to be issued in 1998 by Holy Cross Press. Bishop Kallistos Ware graciously accepted my invitation to contribute the foreword. 5. Bishop Kallistos, in the obituary he wrote for Sherrard (Ware 1995), attributes to Sherrard the initial draft of the general introduction. 6. Campbell and Sherrard (1968). See the subtitle of part three (chapters 6 and 7), pp. 189-244. 7. From "seek a priest" to the end is in my translation. Sherrard (1956:42-43) observes that Palamas himself draws a parallel between his own experience, even anguish, and that of an Athonite monk. 8. See Ware (1950:50). Also cf. Freeland (1988).

9. See, for example, his The Technological Society and The Betrayal of the West. 10. On the Virgin Mother in Sikelianos, cf. Sherrard 1956:149; on the "eternal feminine," cf. Sherrard 1956:24. 11. Title of a poem by Sikelianos. Cf. Sherrard (1956:135).

References Cited
Campbell, John and Philip Sherrard 1968 Modern Greece. New York: Praeger. Climacus, John 1982 The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Introduction by Kallistos Ware. London: SPCK Press. Dionysius Areopagita 1980 The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Translated by John D. Jones. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette. Ellul, Jacques 1964 The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf. 1978 The Betrayal of the West. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. New York: Seabury. Freeland, G. 1988 "Essay Review: The Dehumanization of Humanity and the Desanctification of the Natural World--The Search for the Villain." Phronema 3:71-80. Isaac, Bishop of Nineveh 1923 Mystic Treatises. Translated by Arent Jan Wensinck. Amsterdam: Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen to Amsterdam. Migne, Jacques Paul 1857-1912 Patrologiae cursus completus . . . , Series Graeca (= PG). 162 volumes. Paris: J. P. Migne. Nikodimos, Saint and Saint Makarios 1979 The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth. Translated by Philip Sherrard, G. E. H. Palmer, and Kallistos Ware. 4 volumes to date. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Palamas, Saint Gregory 1973 Defense des saints hesychastes. Edited and translated by Jean Meyendorff. 2nd

edition. Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense. Sherrard, Philip 1956 The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry. London: Valentine, Mitchell. 1960 Athos, the Mountain of Silence. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Reprinted as Athos, the Holy Mountain in Woodstock, New York, by Overlook Press, 1982. 1976 Christianity and Eros: Essays on the Theme of Sexual Love. London: S.P.C.K. Reprinted in 1996. Limni, Greece: Denise Harvey. 1979 The Wound of Greece: Studies in Neo-Hellenism. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1987 The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science. Ipswich, United Kingdom: Golgonooza Press. 1990 The Sacred in Life and Art., Ipswich, United Kingdom: Golgonooza Press. 1992 Human Image, World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Ipswich, United Kingdom: Golgonooza Press. 1995 For Every Thing That Lives Is Holy. London: Temenos Academy. n.d. Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition (forthcoming). Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Press. Ware, Bishop Kallistos 1995 "Philip Sherrard (1922-95)." Sobornost 17 (2):45-52.