As Worlds Collide: A Western Zen Buddhist Looks to Bishop Synesius

As Worlds Collide: A Western Zen Buddhist Looks to Bishop Synesius August 23, 2017

Synesius

I would hope that even school children know of the great mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, and sing her praises, and recall her terrible death at the hands of a Christian mob in 415.

But, me, at least in this moment, I find myself thinking mostly of her disciple Synesius.

Synesius was a student of philosophy, particularly Hypatia’s Neoplatonism. He had studied with her for several years and he would later continue to correspond with her for the rest of his life.

Eventually, Synesius married and settled in Cyrene. It is believed that perhaps he had professed Christianity. But if so there’s little evidence of it before his election as bishop of Ptolemais.

It seems he had not sought the office. And in fact Synesius laid out strong conditions for his accepting consecration to that office. He had no intention of separating from his wife. He refused to endorse the doctrines of the resurrection. And he challenged increasingly conventional Christian view of the idea of end times. He also had complicated feelings about the idea of the soul. This all had to be okay with those to whom he would answer as a bishop. What he did do was that if they knew this and accepted his conditions, he promised to be decorous about his departures from Christian orthodoxy in public venues, and faithful in service to the people.

The conditions were accepted and Synesius became bishop of Ptolemais. He served in that office until his death, probably not long before Hypatia’s horrid murder. Apparently with distinction.

I think about Synesius, this person who bridged two worlds, pagan antiquity and the dawning of the Christian ascendancy. His own thinking, well, it was a form of syncretism. But not something willy nilly, not “mere” syncretism. Rather it strikes me he had something that guided him, a thread if you will that he followed, and which allowed him to choose not out of appetite so much as out of insight. He could see the gold and the dross and he accepted the gold wherever it was found.

Although muddling my metaphors, this willingness to meet on the other side of dogmas, also allowed his insight to deepen. Doing this allowed him not to be tangled my the stories that we weave out of our experiences of the deep places, and which we sometimes confuse with those moments of awakening.

At least that’s how I’ve found it. What I do know is that he found much to love in both traditions, and he seemed unconcerned with surface contradictions. Synesius followed a thread of the wise heart. And the rest, well, it didn’t matter all that much. Me, I find it a model of the possibilities inherent in times such as he lived and in which we live, where worlds have collided, the old is dying, and new things are birthing.

And I think about that thread. There’s a koan. “Why does Guanyin follow the vermillion thread?” Which is usually understood as why does the archetype of compassion follow the cycles of life and death? It is, as are all koan, an invitation.

For me the great secret of all religions is two fold. On the one hand we are created out of a multiplicity of events, nothing is permanent, all is in motion. On the other hand each moment is the center of a universe that is infinite. Finding these things not as philosophy but as the discovery of our own hearts opens the way of the wise heart. Morality, love, justice, all tumble out of our attending to this treasure trove – once it has been opened.

Or, we can see it as a vermillion thread. Stretching from the unknown to the unknown. Each moment on that thread complete. And the great not knowing is revealed as our very heart.

I think of our times. And I think of that invitation. The wisdom of the Zen Buddhist way has given me a thread to follow through the storm of my own life and the world that is collapsing all around. But, there are so many things that come with my natal traditions, deep wisdoms buried within Christianity and humanism, and particularly the scientific paradigm. And I see gold. But, now tempered.

I look to Synesius, not as a hard model, but as someone pointing in a direction I can walk. And, as I pass him by, following that vermillion thread which guides me through the colliding worlds, I see they point in the same direction.

Many bows.

 


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