"Holiness and intelligence of soul are to be recognized from a man's eye, walk, voice, laugh, the way he spends his time and the company he keeps. Everything is transformed and reflects an inner beauty."
Pseudo-Anthony, "On the Character of Men"
There are SPOILERS for this movie, if you haven't seen it. If you haven't seen the movie, go watch it. What I am saying assumes particular, experiential, knowledge of the movie. I am saying this in bold: I am not holding your hand any further. Watch the movie or don't read this post.
I am, by nature, an idealist. I have a strong natural bent to take whatever inner ideas I have and push them onto reality, with a will that cannot be properly understood in abstraction. On the one hand, this allows me to, once I've locked in on what can and should be done, to get it done. On the other hand, idealism is one of the greatest poisons to mental health to exist, short of being shot in the head. You cannot see the world as it is, only as it's filtered through your artificial abstractions. And this means you miss things. Obvious, obvious obvious things. Because you weren't looking to begin with! Many a situation have I botched due to thinking that the thoughts in my head were more powerful than bad finances or a mean left hook.
One of the things that I truly appreciate about Desert Father (and thus Byzantine) spirituality is the iron resolve to set aside idealism in lieu of measurable and obvious results. They don't mince around with stupid technicalities, they don't ask what you should do, they ask "Does this thing give peace and quiet to your interiority?" If the answer is yes, genuinely yes, then the rest can hang.
You know one of the first things Evagrius of Pontus, the primeval writer of the desert, advises? Don't leave people unless you absolutely must! Negative thoughts and other things have a habit of finding you when you're alone and making you far worse than you would be with people, even if they're not terribly good. The early Christians, for all their talk about the corruption and evil of the pagans, were a pretty cosmopolitan and upper-class group. They didn't mingle, but they certainly were a part of society! All this "Let's go across the ocean and find a new continent to get away with people we disagree with" is a Protestant thing and has absolutely no common ground with anything the early Church did, in any capacity. Even with the differing groups and all the bickering, nobody moved halfway across the world. The benefits of being in the general area of people outweighed the disadvantages of said people being unjust. People are worth loving, even if they can be bad.
So, what's the first thing we see in this movie? Oh, right, a father willingly allowing himself to be exiled, over "the purity of the Gospel". Upon finding an area clearly cursed and badly off, he doubles down. Lies. Steals. Anything other than go back to the town and apologize. This is the dude who would rather steal from his bereaved wife than go back to town. It's the joke about the guy waiting for God to save him from drowning, when three boats go by offering to pick him up, in film form.
What would a God Who is so focused on relationship and community that to call Him One is to call Him Three and the other way 'round have in common with someone who would gladly put his family into a cursed land to be rid of a town he finds offensive? What would that God, Who is Community, want to say to such a man, even if He could get that man to hear Him?
Oh, right, nothing.
This isn't a vending machine. You don't put in coins and have your vending machine god do whatever you want. You use the tools given to learn to relate, to be in harmony, not march out of the town and declare everyone else heretics. You love and cherish, and by so doing others correct themselves. So, I don't really have anything terribly nice to say to the father in this movie.
But it gets worse. Because the father's folly is then visited upon his children. The quote at the top of the post is about what a holy man is actually like and what's important about him. It's not the thoughts in his head that's important, but the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the way the world just... makes sense... to him. And if those things are not given to a child all they have are those most wretched of things: thought without context. It is the context of goodness that is necessary. Thought doesn't mean shit without the warmth that made it. And the father in this story doesn't have it. He passes on the chaff, without the fire that created it.
So, what happens if you fill a child's head with words that don't actually mean anything on their own, and then drop them in a cursed place? You think they're going to be able to take the words and just use them, like some sorcerer? Only the most wretched and vile of sorcerers believe in the pure efficacy of words, and many of those sorcerers walk with a cross around their neck these days!
Wait, isn't there something in the Bible about sorcery being evil? How it's a vile thing? And how God doesn't stand to be mocked by taking His Name in vain? Oh wait!
Exodus 22:18 is really clear about it:
Sorcerers must not be allowed to live.
The footnote in the Knox Version makes it clear the word is feminine. As in witch. As in using words just for their own merits is, inherently, a receptive act of invoking a spirit. Evagrius of Pontus would sure agree with that, his book about spiritual warfare, Antirhetikous, uses "thought" and demon interchangeably. To invoke a thought with a specific emotional state is to invoke the spirit who holds that combination, to the point to where thought/feeling and spirit are functionally indistinguishable. In fact, the whole Byzantine tradition rests on this central idea: thought with mood/emotion always invokes a spirit.
And we've already covered what it looks like, invoking God. Inner coherence, radiating out in peaceful and a gently healing aura.
The other way is sorcery, spiritual theft. It is a vile, repulsive thing, practiced by Satanists, Calvinists, Traddies and Orthobros, alike. The smell is so obvious, so repulsive, so noetically vile, that only the blindest of fools would miss it.
You shouldn't teach sorcery to your children using the Name of God and expect them to be Christians. You should count your lucky stars if they just become atheists, just to get the taste of sorcery out of their mouths. That's an act of morality from a child who was crippled right at the knees, trying to get away from what's clearly evil.
No, that's not the worse option.
The worst option is if they accept this horrifying idea and then spend the rest of their lives trying to use the Scriptures, commentary, and doctrines of your church as if they were calling on the Lord God. As if these things, taken on their own, with the artificial abyss you passed onto them, are enough to answer the natural abyss within. It's not. The abysses don't care about words or sentiment or (God help us) that disgusting thing called idealism. The abysses just swallow up whatever light and warmth they can find. If your child is unlucky, supremely unlucky, they will think that that double abyss of depression and cold, leading to occasional relapses into debauchery, are the best they're going to get. When that happens, you have damned your child, congratulations. If you're lucky they'll run into something that takes them out of this world before they do something really awful.
Like, I dunno, make a deal with the devil?
Like, I dunno, float above the corpses of their little siblings and join the ones who ripped their little bodies apart?
Horrifying, right? But, at the end of the day, humans will always come back to power and results over "morality" and loyalty, always, and if you blinded them to such an extent where they're floating up in the air like that, relieved to finally see results...
Where do you really think you are, right now, even if you're alive?
Heaven and Hell are states of mind, after all. Death is irrelevant to whether or not you're already there.
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