Christ the Eternal Tao

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That’s actually what Fr. Seraphim Rose ended up doing in college. He learned the ancient Chinese language to study Chinese philosophy, taught be the leading scholar in Traditional Chinese Philosophy at Berkeley. Gi-Ming Shien and Fr. Seraphim actually made a translation of the Tao Teh Ching and what they found was many of the words had been misinterpreted by modern scholars and even modern Daoist. For instances the term Emptiness is always interpreted as a nihilistic void by atheistic scholars and Buddhist. When Lao Tzu intended it to be an axis that’s a positive. Non-being as a part of the whole that causes perpetual motion of the wheel or universe. It’s key to understanding his philosophy and I firmly believe it was revealed to Lao Tzu by God. The Tao/Logos is a study on Christ.

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There's a reason why Lao Tzu wrote about the "Dao," i.e. the "Way." It is not a coincidence that Christ called himself the "Way," the Truth and the Life. Both because he knows all things including the meaning that this term has in other cultures around the world, and also because of the obvious and universal metaphor.

Fr. Seraphim is absolutely correct to equate this term with the term "Logos" which the theologian borrowed as the closest Greek equivalent. It is also interesting that the Egyptians had their concept of "Ma'at," or Truth, another word Christ used in that phrasing. It goes to show how universal is the seed of knowledge of the Word embedded in man's heart.

Lao Tzu, Confucius, Plato, etc. were virtuous men who thought deeply and searched for the truth. I do believe that such men were saved in the Harrowing of Hell.

We should appreciate them pointing towards something of Christ according to their ability like the sibyls also prophesied of Christ, without embracing the pagan ideas in which they still were. If we go too far we will become modern Origens.

One of the things I appreciate most about Confucius is his lack of interest in the demonic oracles which pagans worship. He did not go around insulting them--he had no knowledge of the truth about them, after all--but he simply ignored them. His disciples specifically wrote how notable it was that he never spoke of them at all. That speaks to me of a man who understood intuitively that there was something off even if he did not know what.

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道

No matter how much we may study, it is not possible to come to know God unless we live according to his commandments, for God is not known by science, but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and learned men came to the belief that God exists, but they did not know God. It is one thing to believe that God exists and another to know Him. If someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with love for God day and night, and his soul cannot be bound to any earthly thing.— St. Silouan the Athonite

That Which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist.”— St. Augustine

In Christ the Eternal Tao, Hieromonk Damascene states:

“If we concede that the pre-Christian philosophers did seek the truth, and that they did catch glimpses of it, it only stands to reason that their teachings should bear some similarities, like a broken reflection of the moon in water, to the fullness of Truth in Jesus Christ. Therefore, these similarities need not appear as a threat to Christianity; instead, they offer one more proof of Christ as universal Truth.”

Before the Word came into the world
The sages sought Him out in every place.
They saw Him not, but sensed His presence everywhere.
They found Him in living beings, mountain crags, and flowing streams,
in seas and winds.
He was not these things, but He spoke in these things, guiding them.
All things followed His course.
Therefore the sages called Him by His other name:
The Way

Gi-ming Shien "Order is natural and necessarily requires a directing principal, for it is unimaginable that order is produced by the ordered individuals themselves. If there were no directing principle, how could there be proportion, symmetry, and the adaptation of one thing to another?
There must, therefore, be an organizing power which orders-as, for example, in the seasons. The principal of seasons, from which the seasons proceed in an orderly and never failing fashion, must exist before the seasons themselves. The ultimate principal is, therefore, of prime importance, and it is this that Lao Tzu calls the Tao"

There exists a Being undifferentiated and complete, Born before heaven and earth.
Tranquil, boundless,
Abiding alone and changing not, Encircling everything without exhaustion.
Fathomless, it seems to be the Source of all things. I do not know its name,
But characterize it as the Tao.
Arbitrarily forcing a name upon it, I call it Great....
TAO TEH CHING, CHAPTERS 25 AND 4 (Translated by Gi-ming Shien and Eugene Rose).

In the beginning was the Tao, And the Tao was with God, And the Tao was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by Him;
And without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shines in darkness,
And the darkness comprehended it not.
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, And the world knew Him not.
And the Tao became flesh,
And dwelt among us,
And we beheld His glory ...
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, CHAPTER I
(Translated from a Canton edition of the New Testament, published in China in 1911 by the American Bible Society.).

The trees, the birds, the rivers and winds:
These had no choice but to follow the Way.
Man alone is given a choice;
Man alone can follow or go his own way.
If he follows the Way, he will suffer with the pain of the world,
But He will find the Original Harmony.
If he follows his own way, he will suffer only with himself,
And within him will be chaos.

—Christ the Eternal Tao. By Hieromonk Damascene.

道

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. - John 14:6

And they, therefore, are the wise who walk in His way; for He Himself has said, "I am the way."

• St. Dionysius the Areopagite

Ad 550

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“While studying under Boodberg, Eugene made a more thorough study of the language of the Tao Teh Ching. For his master’s degree thesis he wrote an essay entitled “‘Emptiness’ and ‘Fullness’ in the Lao-Tzu.” One of the Berkeley professors who reviewed this paper, Cyril Birch, noted how closely Eugene had followed Boodberg’s approach to linguistic analysis. For the philosophical aspect of the essay, Eugene received help from the wisdom of Gi-ming Shien, as is clear from a comparison of the thesis with notes he had taken during Gi- ming’s lectures at the Academy.
In the introduction to his thesis, Eugene indicated that his approach had been “‘philologico-philosophical,’ an alternative examination of words and ideas.” Lao-Tzu, he stated, “is not concerned with abstract concepts, but rather with what one might call poetic ideas: ideas highly charged with dynamic associations.” Although Eugene’s paper was necessarily limited in scope, it did help to bring these poetic ideas out of what Eugene regarded as the needless obscurity characteristic of many translations and interpretations of the Tao Teh Ching. He wrote: “Our examination of the language of the book — always in conjunction with the ideas bound up in it — will serve, it is hoped, as a partial antidote to the too-often careless, even cavalier, approach to Lao-Tzu the ‘mystic’ and fount of ‘esoteric wisdom’ that has marked many of the popular works on him. Lao-Tzu’s thought is often elusive and paradoxical, but it is rarely if ever as fantastic and contradictory as it has sometimes been made to seem.”6 The interpretations of the Tao Teh Ching that Eugene offered not only made the book’s meaning more clear and understandable, but they also brought out deeper and subtler aspects of it”— Fr. Seraphim Rose: (Life and Works) Page 161-162

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Rose argued that for Lao Tzu emptiness is a golden mean between unbalanced affirmation and apathetic negligence. "Emptiness" and "fullness" are not nouns in Lao Tzu's Chinese idiom, but rather verbs (which may be better translated as "waning" and "waxing"); however, the concept he elucidates corresponds remarkably to the Aristotelian concept of the "golden mean", also appropriated by Christian theology.

As Rose explained, the nihilistic concept of "emptiness" is referred to by Lao Tzu by a word best translated "exhaustion". "Exhaustion" or "finality" means death, "reaching the end of the breath, total expiration" (Rose, Emptiness and Fullness, 33). This is not the word Lao Tzu uses many many times to explain the "good" sort of emptiness, however: "In the usual understanding of the word, both in English and Chinese, "emptiness" has a contrary, "fullness"; but if this kind of emptiness, and extreme, is what Lao-Tzu has in mind when he speaks of it, all that we have said on the "mid-point" as the ultimate goal of his thought is set at nought. But in fact this is not what he had in mind. To be "emptied" is not the same as to be "exhausted". " (Emptiness and Fullness, 29)

Lest we mistake "emptiness" and "fullness" for metaphysical concepts, Rose reminds us that Lao Tzu's language is oriented around verbs, not reified nouns, and that "emptiness" and "fullness" are translations of words literally meaning the "waning" and "waxing" of the moon. The comfortable Western concepts of “substance” and “person” are simply absent from Lao Tzu's vocabulary. By contrast to Aristotelian essentialism, for the East a static or permanent plenitude of being or "nature" or "essence" is not what constitutes form, but rather emptiness, becoming, or sunyata. The Hindu language of maya and illusion is avoided by the Taoists, but a somewhat more Heraclitean ontology of becoming and doing still eclipses any possibility of ontotheology.

This lack of substantive ontology has ramifications for Lao Tzu's quietism. Since he did not reject appearances or phenomena or things as illusions, Lao Tzu did not embrace the violent rejection of being seen in certain strands of ascetic Hinduism, and since he did not regard "things" as real (lacking the vocabulary to place "things" as ontological categories at all), he did not embrace the worldly attachment to them. Instead, he preaches the quietistic and apparently (though misleadingly so) complacent acceptance of the Tao, by exhorting us to be supple and fluent with the Tao - it is through suppleness that is found power (the famous "wu wei" paradigm). "Wu wei" should not be viewed as cynical, nihilistic, or pessimistic resignation - it is through suppleness that is found power; it is through the Tao that we flower into who we are, that we find our "true potential", as humanistic psychology might see it. As Lao Tzu said, “If one uses it [the Tao], it is inexhaustible” – for while the Tao is emptiness, all form is emptiness, so there is no contradiction in saying that this emptiness is inexhaustible.

The challenge for cross-cultural philosophy remains reconciling the Western categories of personhood and substance, so essential to Christian theology, with the common Oriental tradition of emptiness and fullness; Lao Tzu's placement of the "golden mean" within the context of sunyata provides a possible clue to its solution.

The Way is like an empty vessel That yet may be drawn from
Without ever needing to be filled.
It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.
In it all sharpness is blunted,
All tangles untied,
All glare tempered,
All dust' smoothed.
It is like a deep pool that never dries.
Was it too the child of something else? We cannot tell.
" But as a substanceless image? it existed before the Ancestor."