Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 1 (From sessions of June 7 and 20, 2007)

Every phenomenon in the world -- leaf, cloud, rock, stream -- has many different sides. If, for example, we consider water, we can concentrate on the shape it takes, or on its power, or its depth or freshness or clarity or life-sustaining ability. . . . Words expressing any particular aspect of a phenomenon are always limited. If we forget this, we become trapped in the determining force of language, and our terms become dead. Moreover, the higher our thought is carried, the more difficult it is to find the right words. The big danger is that the words will become abstract.

I would like to share some of what I have found helpful for experiencing the ideas in the opening verses of John's Gospel.

The Prologue of St. John's Gospel describes the entire cosmic and earthly evolution of mankind, focusing on a central event marking the transition from an old fallen world to a new world of hope and redemption. In the Prologue we already have the whole story, as in a seed.

Here are the first five verses of the Prologue:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. (John 1:1-5, New American Standard Version)

What was there in the beginning? Not a flame. Not a collection of particles bumping into each other. Not nothingness. It was a Word. This awakens in us a specific feeling connected both to soul and spirit. We do not find ourselves confronting an object when we picture this beginning, but a speaking presence, a Thou. The entire world that came into being can be understood as a spoken Word. If we ask, "Where is this primordial language?" the answer is "Everywhere around us." Mountains, rivers, the sun, everything in nature, everything in history -- the whole story of creation -- can all be understood in the language of this Word.

The Word is connected with meaning. When we pronounce words of our own language -- and especially nouns, such as "cloud" or "tree" or "grass" or "rock" -- images light up in us and these images are bearers of meaning. Some part of the world becomes present to us, can be "seen" through the word. In all words there is meaning, and this meaning is the image- and light-aspect of speech. We are illumined by meanings; we gain orientation, a sense of where things are and what they are. We hear "tree" and we know the matter concerns one sort of thing -- a tree, and not a different sort of thing such as a cloud. The image of a tree comes to mind. If we pay attention to meaning, we find that meaning is everywhere in the world, which is to say that everything shows us something, enlightens us, speaks to us in its own distinctive way. Even if we perceive the world without using words, we find that everything we perceive nevertheless speaks its meaning to us. Every time we experience a particular, meaningful element of the world, we receive a bit of light.

"In the beginning was the Word" -- in the beginning was meaningfulness. In the beginning was the light (not yet the manifest light of later verses) that is the inner being, the illuminating power, of meaning. Through this light the world speaks to us and brings us meaning. We can usefully meditate upon all the ways that the world is not a mere aggregation of things but is filled with meaning and light.

But we have something else in the Word. We can approach it by recalling those moments when our impulse to speak is not prompted primarily by a desire to describe or understand the world, but rather by a need to express an inner content of the soul. We may have a feeling that is too strong to withhold; something must be said, or perhaps poetry must be composed. Enter into your state at this moment, and you will recognize a strong soul element of the Word, an element that is not simply a matter of meaning. For example, we may feel compelled to speak a word of comfort to someone, or we might be overwhelmed with the beauty of a sunrise, so that the soul is moved to speech. Or we might pray. All our feelings want to be expressed through the Word, whether a purely inner Word or the spoken Word.

Music is one of the best examples for this. When we listen to wordless music, it's clear that in some way we can understand it, and that our understanding comes at least in part through feeling. This exemplifies what happens with all the arts, which depend not so much upon words as upon our ability to feel an object within our soul. While the content of our feeling is not a language in the more usual sense, it is nevertheless language. If meaning is language received as light, then we can say of artistic feeling that it is language received as beauty.

Or again: how do we know directly how well or badly someone else is doing, without actually asking them? It depends upon how open we are, how deeply we can be aware of another person. This is a matter of sensitivity, sympathy, and compassion. Much the same applies to our knowledge of all living creatures. We might well say of the person who is particularly adept at this sensitive receptiveness that he or she has a beautiful soul. So on the one side beauty connects to artistic endeavors, and on another side it relates to soul beauty as manifested in how openly and deeply we can feel the being of the Other. That is, we can both speak and understand with the soul.

So now try to imagine the world, not as light- and meaning-filled, but as a soul speaking. How different our attitude toward the world becomes when we are open to it like a soul, a cosmic soul!

And now take one further step. We can imagine a situation where expressing ourselves in poetry or words of comfort is not enough. We have to do something for someone. Feeling becomes so deep that it drives us beyond itself, beyond the need to express it artistically. It drives us toward some sort of deed. This could be a deed issuing from joy or grief or the desire to help . . . but the point is that the feeling is so powerful that it plays into our will more strongly than when we simply want to capture the feeling in a work of art. Perhaps we have to make a sacrifice. The necessity is for a moral act. Our whole life is in fact full of moral deeds.

What we do in this way is always a kind of language, but it is a language we speak with our whole being. It doesn't matter whether we actually say words when we act; we are saying something nevertheless. This is a third, deepest, and "silent" level of language, the language of our lives and deeds. And if we must act, it is because every life situation speaks to us in one way or another. It summons, or could summon, moral deeds from us. Without this, our lives have no sense.

For example, a person born with a lot of fear might come to accept it as a task to overcome this fear. Or a person suffering loneliness might struggle to find through solitude a connection to the divine world or to his own I Am. Many Russian emigrants who left their country earlier than Natasha and I were driven almost to madness by the question, "Why?" "What is the meaning of this exile from our native land?" They did not merely want the strength to survive; they needed to know the moral and spiritual significance of their difficult circumstances. Only a few of them could come to a sense of mission, struggling to rise above blood and country and culture so that they could communicate soul to soul, spirit to spirit. Likewise, those who managed to find meaning in the camps of Hitler and Stalin could do so only by penetrating to a depth of understanding where all events, all circumstances, spoke a moral and spiritual language. This, incidentally, is always a language of sacrifice, more or less. The moral sphere is a sphere where we give of ourselves. The death of a divine being on the cross is a central image for all moral striving.

When we look back on our lives, say, to some moment when we felt alone, we can always ask what our destiny wanted from us -- what movement of will, what action -- when it put us in this situation. Or we can consider a moment of fear, or pain. In all such cases we can ask how the world is speaking to us. The language in which our destiny speaks to us is not the same language as that of trees and clouds, sun and stars, when we consider these as meaningful objects of understanding. But it is still language. It's a language of moral tasks -- tasks we can accept or not accept.

We have, then, three aspects of the Word. The path toward the center of the world leads from light to beauty to sacrificial moral deeds. There is the light that lends a certain meaningful clarity to things. There is the soulful, aesthetic realm in which we unite ourselves with another person or the world. And there is the language of will, declared in matters of our destiny. This latter language is always moral and spiritual, and it always requires us to do something, even if this doing is the action of restraining ourselves. This aspect of the Word penetrates to the deepest level of all. It's the level referred to when Christ was invited to command the stones to become bread, and replied to the tempter: "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:3-4). The Word, with its moral qualities, is the ground of our existence. It's our most profound sustenance -- even of our physical being.

When we consider the Word on these three levels, we can imagine the entirety of our lives to be, in this exalted sense, one word. There is something we want to say with our lives, and no life is comparable to any other. No one else can pronounce your or my word. We each have our own name, and we try to understand this name as a statement of our task. We try to realize the task and thereby to speak our name.

Now imagine further all sorts of different people, each with a different destiny, that is, with different moral tasks and deeds and challenges. Millions of people, all the beings in the universe, each with its own name. If we can embrace all of them in the thought of one being, as if all possible moral deeds were combined in this being, as if all names were hidden in the one Name that encompasses them all -- then we come to the Word that "was in the beginning," from whom (as we shall soon read) all things, all possibilities of particular speech arose.

We've thought of the Word on three different levels: luminous meaning; expression of soul; and willful, moral deed. But we can also look at the matter a little differently, "on the horizontal." There are words we have spoken, and they have their own objective life in the world. Once the poet or artist has produced his work, it remains thereafter as a fact of the world. It's an objective reality. But before this outward realization there was a process of creation. And before the process we have the artist himself, the person who is speaking. So we have first the speaker, then the process of speaking, then that which is spoken, by which we refer to everything that can be created -- music, painting, philosophy, science, moral deeds . . . everything. After we have considered the light-filled meaning of things, and the soul of things, and the all-embracing moral speech of the world, it remains to ask, Who speaks?

We can speak or be silent. We have a potential for moral deeds, but we are not our moral deeds. We are ourselves, the ones who act. This question, Who speaks? is addressed in the next line of our text:

and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Here it will help us to imagine a person presenting Himself in and through the world, someone we can address not just as meaning, not just as a feeling content of soul, not even as a bearer of moral destiny, but as "you." The world is spoken out of inner depths; somebody has spoken it, revealing Himself in it. Someone stands behind all possible meanings and feelings and doings, and is the speaker of all possible contents of the Word. We can think the analogous thought by reflecting on all the different expressions of our individual being and, through those expressions, approaching their source in ourselves. In the case of the divine Word, we must think of all possible expressions by all possible beings.

In the deep, deep silence before the world has begun, before anything has been spoken outwardly, all was in God. The Word is the revelatory countenance of God. In terms of the Trinity, we can think here of the Father and Son, where they are the "same," but the Son, who is younger, is presenting, declaring the Father. The Father has the world, so to speak, "inside," while the Son enacts and reveals the intent of the Father. We can see a reflection of that in our own lives: before we have spoken a word, it resides in us as a kind of imprint of our moral-spiritual being; when we actually speak it, we are revealed. The Father holds all things within; the Son reveals those things through creative activity in the world. All reality is hidden in the Father; through the Son it becomes the origin of a new creation -- He is the One who begins.

"And the Word was with God, and the Word was God." At this point in the text God has not yet breathed out His Word. With the next line, which does not yet make reference to particular things, we hear the basic truth of all existing things, a truth that precedes life and light:

All things came into being through Him

Meaning and beauty and morality had to exist as possibilities of the Word before any specific words of meaning or beauty or morality could be spoken. All possibilities were given a language in the primal Word. In the beginning there was not just darkness or emptiness or even light. Rather, there was the potential for all possible good that could be developed in the world. The highest morality underlies our existence, if only as a seed. This is the beginning of the world. This potential, this moral-spiritual intent, is the deepest content of the world, lying at the foundation of all existence. It's what we know as substance -- spiritual-physical substance. At the level of its most fundamental existence, all being has this character. This is only emphasized when our text is repeated in negative form:

and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.

Nothing in the world has any other origin than a moral-spiritual origin. Realizing this can bring us great hope! We can also arrive at this quality of hope by meditating on the words, "In the beginning," because hope attaches to every beginning. We can say that hope is the moral will of beginning. It is beginning seen from the inside. In every birth of a child we have a new hope for the future.

But it's also true that every new year, every day, one hour before our death -- each moment can be for us a beginning, the initiation of a new act of speaking, with all its incredible potential for yet unrealized meaning, for powerfully expressive feeling, for profound moral accomplishment. This has been true ever since Christ came to earth and brought the original Beginning into the flesh. The potential is now always there to change everything.

In Him was life

Life is something more than mere mineral existence. In the stillness of a rock's existence we can sense absolute trust in the Father and faithfulness to His will. It's a quality Christ saw in Peter when He said, "This is the rock upon which I will found My church." It's a matter of being faithful to the ground of our being in the face of everything that will come.

But life brings something different. We observe movement, rhythm, breathing, change, evolution. Everything is rising up and passing away, then rising again, like waves in the ocean. It's not a union with the Father through faith and stillness, but union with the world through activity and development. In the world of plants we can observe this dynamic communion of organism and world, separate life and unified environment. Every flower and leaf is different, yet they are all bound together in a way -- united, we might say, in the sun as their heart and center. They all breathe with the sun. Seen from a spiritual point of view, this kind of relationship is a relationship of love. The plant, through love of the Sun, follows it and listens to the world harmony.

This reality of the plant world bears on the living social organism, where relations are (or ought to be) governed by love. This is how society becomes an organism. Such unity is referred to in the gospels as the Kingdom of Heaven. "Kingdom" points us to a kind of society, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a place where society is woven into an organic unity through love.

From another vantage point the life of a plant is a continual creating and destroying. Or, we could say, metamorphosis. There is continual change. One form dies away into another. Nothing stays the same. The leaf must die -- must quit "leafing" -- before the petal will come. The petal must die before the fruit will come, and the fruit must die before the seed will come. The seed must die before the next plant will come. In this sense the entire organic world lies under the sign of the cross. The old must die in order for the new to live. This principle governs all possible change -- including the inner and historical development of humanity -- so far as this change is alive: nothing new can be born until something old that has fulfilled its mission is willing to die and free a space for the new.

and the life was the light of men.

Life apprehended in consciousness becomes light. This light is the conscious wholeness of life. In life we become united with the world like plants with the sun; in light we recognize this unity, we recognize the world harmony that embraces both ourselves and others, and we can name ourselves and others. The recognition of creatures in their unity with the world -- this is the giving of names, as Adam gave names. Light is more strongly forming than life. It tells us, "Here am I, and there is the world," giving us the possibility for a consciously directed connection between self and world.

This light we are speaking of, by the way, is an inner light, not yet the external, darkened, and reflected light of our normal experience today. It is light still not separated from life. Such was the state of Adam in Paradise. He ate from the Tree of Life and he gave names. It means he was in union with the world and was aware of this union -- a union achieved through immediate perception and not through the intellectual knowledge gained through separation and alienation.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

So far we have had only positive evolution, but now we come into the darkness. The word translated "comprehend" has been given many different renderings. It combines both a cognitional meaning -- the darkness could not understand the light -- and also the meaning that the darkness could not grasp or overcome light.

Darkness is an external state, a state of disconnection from everything interior. It is light that has become merely physical. Darkness appears, and then the world ceases to be a Word. The world is deprived of meaning, life is deprived of soul, and existence is deprived of morality. In this state we perceive separateness. Soul darkness or darkening of the mind occurs whenever we know only how to abstract and analyze and when we feel only ourselves. To feel ourselves separate from the world is to be deprived of meaning and love and to live in darkness.

We can say, then, that darkness is awareness of our discrete, separate existence, of our egotism, and, finally, of our belonging to death. Darkness is the lack of light, beauty, and goodness. At the same time it is a place of freedom and choice. God stepped back, giving place to our freedom -- or, which is the same thing, giving place to temptation, egotism, and death. Freedom is not thinkable without our passing through darkness, temptation, and evil, through matter and death. This is reflected in the Hasidic and other esoteric traditions that declare how God withdrew Himself or died -- but the light still shines in the darkness, in our consciousness and soul, in the voice of our conscience, never forcing us but leaving us free to choose.

The creation of darkness is a function belonging to the evil powers, and without it we could not be separate from God and could not become individuals. The other step belongs to us, and depends on whether, with the Son's help, we can distinguish light from darkness, and choose the light in order to overcome the darkness. . . .

Further Note on the Trinity

If we want to understand the principle of the Spirit, we can think of all the created beings, imagining them as having reached the place where they are self-conscious and aware of their existence within the love of the Father, their unity in God. This consciousness of love is the principle of the Spirit. The Father holds all things within Himself; the Son reveals and creates; the Spirit is expressed through awareness and the unity of love.

Of course, we have only one God, and "God is love." But love has different aspects. For example, it can bear us up and withstand everything. There is a mystical saying that, as the sun above endures everything, bad and good, so also the Father above endures everything, bad and good. Thinking of the Book of Job, you might say that the Adversary has a certain contract with the Father, who allows him access to people in order to prove them. The Father will carry everything until the Last Judgment, when His judgment will be pronounced on all things. Until then, everything both bad and good exists within the realm of the Father. His is a love that can bear all things.

The Son's love is a sacrificial power of creation, of bringing something new, of making things better, of healing. The Son does not have the same relation to evil as the Father. Whereas you could never say of the Father that He is tempted by evil, the Adversary does appear to Christ as tempter. And where the Father has an "understanding" with the Adversary, the Son says "Get thee behind me, Satan." He does not endure evil, but rather helps people to overcome it. On earth He works toward the transformation of evil into good. His task is to create all things anew, for which purpose the Father has given everything into His hands.

Christ is spoken of in different ways, calling attention to different aspects of His being. He is, for example (as the second person of the Trinity), the revelation or face of the Father. He is also the Logos through whom all things came into being. Because love creates and heals, He is the healer and redeemer of all creation. He is Jesus Christ. We can think of them as all the same, but we also should not lose the various distinctions associated with the different terms. And we must realize that the Incarnation of Jesus Christ hadn't yet become a historical fact "in the beginning."

A third aspect of love -- that of the Spirit -- is shown clearly in the event of Pentecost. Individuals were blessed with the ability to speak and understand different languages. This allowed the discovery of unity amid difference. Without learning different languages, we cannot overcome the separateness of peoples. Here we see at work what we might call the wisdom of love. It's a wisdom that enables us to find harmony and peace, however different our worlds of interest and accomplishment.

So everything divine is love, but love can have these three aspects: bearing all things; creating and healing; or being wise. Vladimir Solovyov had an argument with Tolstoy because the latter said that conscience, as the voice of morality, was enough; we don't need to think. Solovyov responded that the voice of conscience only told us what not to do -- don't kill, don't steal, and so on. Or, if it says, "Give something to a person in need," it doesn't tell us what to give. Every physician and teacher knows the difference between compassion and wisdom -- between compassion for someone's sufferings and the wisdom to know how the person could be helped. We need wisdom as well as compassion.