“Holy, Holy, Holy”: Holiness, Divine and Human [Firebrand Big Read]

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In his Life of Moses, the early Christian bishop Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) sought to describe the nature of perfection to which Christians aspire. Ultimately, he drew an implicit distinction between God’s perfection and the perfection of human beings—a distinction that rested on what theologians call the “ontological” difference between God and creatures, the essential difference between their natures. Because God is uncreated, he is eternal being; therefore, his perfection lies in his unchanging nature. By contrast, because human beings are creatures who came into being in time and so are subject to change, our perfection is at best an eternal becoming. That is, a ceaseless growth into the likeness of God. 

When we reflect on the nature of holiness, we have to make a similar distinction—along ontological lines—between God’s holiness and the holiness which should characterize the lives of Jesus’ disciples. Christian holiness finds its origin in God’s holiness. As the Lord declared to Israel, “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy ” (Lev 20:26), which Jesus repeated in essence when in the Sermon on the Mount he declared to his followers what was expected of them: “Be perfect even as your Heavenly Father is perfect ” (Mt 5:48). Yet because God is God and we are mere creatures, our holiness takes a different—a distinctly creaturely—form. One instance in Scripture where one sees that difference is in Isaiah’s vision of God and the seraphim in Isaiah chapter six. Although there are many ways to approach this passage of Scripture, as a student of early Christian theology, I want to see how the Church, in that period when it was formulating the Creeds that set the grammar for thinking rightly about God and avoiding the errors of heretical groups, interpreted Isaiah’s vision and what it reveals to us about God’s holiness. 

In his vision of God “high and lifted up… and [whose] train filled the temple” (Isa 6:1), Isaiah heard the cry of the seraphim, these six-winged angels of the highest order of angelic beings, who worshiped God saying “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Hosts; Heaven and Earth are full of your glory ” (Isa 6:3). For early Christian interpreters this became the classic location where the Old Testament alluded to the Trinity. Ambrose of Milan (339-397) in his On the Faith (2.107), explained the threefold repetition of “holy” as an ascription of holiness to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while the following phrase, “Lord of Hosts” in the singular, denoted the oneness of God, that common nature shared by the three persons. Writing some twenty years later, Cyril of Alexandria added to Ambrose’s Trinitarian reading a Christological feature interpreting the declaration, “the whole earth is full of your glory” to be a prophetic gesture to the Incarnation when the Son would fill the world with his glory which would be manifest in his holiness (Commentary on Isaiah 176 A-B). 

There are in the various commentaries of the Church Fathers two repeated concerns about Isaiah’s vision. The first is exegetical; the second epistemological. The exegetical problem was how to reconcile Isaiah’s claim, “I saw the Lord” with other passages of Scripture, such as God’s words to Moses, “No one can see my face and live ” (Ex 33:20) or the climax of John’s prologue, “No one has ever seen God, except the Only Begotten who is in the bosom of the Father ” (Jn 1:18). The epistemological problem was how could anyone “see” God, not with their eyes—for God is spirit and therefore invisible—but with their minds? In other words, how could anyone claim to know or fathom the depths of God (Job 11:7)? When the early Christian bishops talked about the human mind, their reasoning rested on the axiom, “Like is known by like,” and its corollary, “Like is attracted to like.” We intuitively grasp this truth. A virtuoso musician is able to recognize and appreciate the brilliant artistry of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a way that someone untrained in music simply cannot. This logic seems to lie behind various claims in Scripture. When Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8), the implication appears to be that only those who themselves possess a likeness to God’s purity will be able to see the God who is purity itself. Even more explicit is the declaration in Hebrews 12:14 that holiness is that “without which no one shall see God.” Therefore, given the ontological difference between us and God—how unlike God we finite, sinful creatures are—how can we possibly comprehend God’s infinite and pure being? 

The Fathers addressed these questions in a variety of ways. The Egyptian teacher Origen (185-254) focused on the mediatorial role of the seraphim. He wrote, “In fact, when the seraphim who are around God, and know him intimately, shout, ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’, they affirm the mystery of the Trinity, for they themselves are holy. Among things that exist, nothing is more holy than the seraphim. And when they cry out, ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ they do not speak quietly one to the other, but shout their life-giving confession aloud for all to hear ” (Homilies on Isaiah 1.4-5). The seraphim are able to behold and declare God’s holiness because they themselves are holy. More controversially, Origen identifies the seraphim with the Son and Holy Spirit. Precisely because they are intrinsic to the Father’s eternal being—for God is never without his Word and Wisdom—they share in his holiness that they make known. Centuries later, Pseudo-Dionysius (late fifth-early sixth c.) built on Origen saying that the seraphim enjoy intimacy with God because as they surround the throne they are made holy by the light of God that shoots forth from the throne and fills them with his luminous holiness which they then reveal to human beings (Celestial Hierarchies 7.4). 

The Bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom (347-407), or “the Golden-mouth,” so-called because of the beauty and power of his preaching, focused on a different dimension of the narrative. He explained that Isaiah’s claim to having seen God did not contradict John’s prologue. For when John wrote, “No one has ever seen God except the Only Begotten,” he meant, “No one has ever seen God fully.” Following Gregory of Nyssa’s argument that God’s infinite being is incomprehensible to the intellect of finite creatures and therefore never known in its totality or essence, Chrysostom says that only the Son, who is consubstantial with the Father and therefore shares the Father’s eternal nature, “has seen the divine nature in all its splendor and beheld God’s essence ” (Homily on Matthew 13:10-11). He goes on to offer a symbolic interpretation of the seraphim’s wings. Since angelic beings are intelligible, spiritual beings they do not need physical wings to move, as do birds. Therefore, the “wings” should be taken as symbols signifying that when God condescends to us he reveals himself in a form that we are able to receive. And yet, even the seraphim cover their eyes with the wings because the glory of God is of a luminous character too great for them to comprehend. The seraphim, “were awestruck and trembled with fear, unable to bear the force of the lightning that shoots forth from the throne ” (Homily on Matthew 13:10-11). 

Writing a generation later, Jerome (342-420) offers a very different interpretation that nonetheless arrives at a similar conclusion. He argues that Isaiah did not see God in heaven; rather he saw only God’s “train that filled the temple.” Even as God revealed himself to Moses he showed him not his “face” representing his essence that none can know, but his “backside” representing the glory of God’s works. As for the seraphim, Jerome notes an ambiguity in the description of the seraphim’s wings “and with two he covered his face” (Isa 6:2). What is the antecedent of “his”? Whose face was covered? One possibility is that the seraph covered his own face. The other is that he covered God’s face shielding Isaiah from the sight of God’s glory, the brilliance of which a sinful man could not endure. Either way, the point is the same: the seraphim’s wings signify that God’s self-revelation always entails both disclosure and concealment. In such theophanies humanity receives but a glimpse of the Divine who is ever veiled in mystery. 

One of the interesting features common to all these commentators is that none of them come out and define the word “holy” as applied to God. Rather they allow the details of the narrative, particularly Isaiah’s own reaction to the vision, to illustrate the contrast between God’s holiness and humanity’s. Origen interpreted Isaiah’s description of “the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up,” to be a revelation of God’s transcendent otherness. In other Old Testament theophanies, such as Genesis 18:21 when God comes down to judge Sodom and Joel 3:12 where the throne of God is in the Valley of Jehoshaphat where he will judge the nations, God has condescended to humanity. But here God is “high and lifted up.” Therefore, Origen concludes that this is not a vision of the economic Trinity; that is, God’s activity on earth. Rather, Isaiah beholds God enthroned in his celestial majesty ruling the powers and principalities of heaven. “Holy,” therefore, denotes God’s heavenly glory that surpasses human understanding. 

In the seventh century, the teacher and martyr Maximus the Confessor (580-662) interpreted the passage as a model for the Church of what happens when we devote ourselves to the contemplation of God’s transcendent otherness. In his Chapters on Love (1.12), Maximus wrote “When through love the mind is ravished by the knowledge of God and stretches itself beyond things that have been created, it glimpses the transcendence and otherness of God. Then, according to the prophet Isaiah, it is astonished as it senses its own lowliness and utters with conviction the words of the prophet, ‘Woe is me, for I am stricken in heart. I am a man of unclean lips living among the people of unclean lips, and I saw the Lord God of Hosts with my own eyes ’” (Is 6:5). 

Behind Maximus’ words lie two key assumptions. First, whereas theologians often for heuristic purposes distinguish between God’s metaphysical attributes, i.e., the characteristics of his divine nature (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.) and God’s moral qualities (love, mercy, purity), in point of fact there is no such division in God. God is immaterial spirit; therefore his nature is “simple,” meaning that it is not composed of parts into which God can be broken down. Therefore, God’s holiness is God’s goodness, is God’s wisdom, is God’s power. It encompasses all of these. Indeed God’s so-called moral attributes are mere expressions of his metaphysical attributes. God is eternal and perfect being; therefore, God is immutable. That is, he does not change because there are no deficiencies in God that need to be corrected. Nor does he have any potentialities that need to be actualized. Unlike us, God is not growing into a bigger, better form of himself. Since God is immutable God’s purity remains the same and is not corrupted by forces external to himself. Therefore, he is not subject to the whims of passionate impulses (i.e., anger, lust, jealousy) as we are; his is an unalloyed, uncorrupted goodness. This is God’s holiness. Maximus’ second assumption is that such holiness is intrinsic to who God is. God is eternally holy. This is the way God is in himself before and independent of creation. But when we speak of God within his economy—that is, his creative and redemptive plan—the words “holy” and “holiness” are contrastive, distinguishing God from us. “Holy” denotes God’s radical otherness. It draws the absolute metaphysical distinction between God and creatures. God is God and creatures are not. God is God and there is no other. 

Thus, Maximus says that, when Isaiah encountered God’s radical otherness, he was instantly aware of God’s holiness which made him aware of his own unholiness: “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips.” Yet in that moment, the seraph took a burning coal—often interpreted as a figure of Christ—from the altar and touched Isaiah’s lips. Thus, his unclean mouth was purified so that he would be fit to be prophet of the holy God. For Maximus, when Isaiah says his lips are “unclean” he means that he is guilty of what Maximus calls “self-love.” “Self-love” is not that love that is the corollary of the love of neighbor; “You shall love your neighbor as [you love] yourself.” Rather self-love is like pride (Epistle 2 “On Love” 396D-397B). It is an exalted and exaggerated sense of one’s own worth. Consequently, one’s love is directed primarily to oneself rather than to God. But in the encounter with God’s holiness, we, like Isaiah, see ourselves as we are. When we consider God’s otherness, we realize the folly of our self-love and recognize that God and God alone is worthy to be the primary object of our love. This self-knowledge that is derived from our contemplation of God’s holy otherness both begins and sustains the Christian’s unending growth into the likeness of God’s holiness. 

Maximus was writing to his monks, for whom the contemplation of God in the study of Scripture was a major component of their daily life. In their contemplation, they, like Isaiah, encounter God’s holiness and experience a sense of their own unholiness. Yet this self-awareness that results from their reflection on God’s holiness is already motivated by love, not by self-love, but the love of God. Maximus is not here anticipating Luther’s simul iustus et peccator—the belief that we are simultaneously righteous and sinful. Rather he is articulating the paradox that the more we grow in the love of God and therefore grow in our likeness to God’s holiness the more profoundly we understand our unlikeness to God. And with it we also gain a deeper appreciation of the sheer gratuity of God’s mercy. Thus, unlike God whose holiness lies in the surpassing greatness of his transcendent being, the Christian’s holiness is grounded in humility, i.e., the awareness of our lowliness.

In a recent conversation, John Oswalt of Asbury Seminary posed the provocative question, when Isaiah beheld the Lord in his exalted majesty, why did he say “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips,” instead of “Woe is me for I am a finite creature”? In other words, why did Isaiah’s encounter with God’s transcendence (a metaphysical quality) cause him to name his unlikeness to God, not in metaphysical, but moral terms? One answer might be that, because of God’s simplicity where the moral and metaphysical are all one, to encounter God’s transcendent otherness is to encounter his purity and goodness (moral qualities). As the Fathers knew, evil is not a thing created by God but the privation or perversion of the goodness inherent in the things God made and declared to be good. Therefore, Isaiah’s vision of God’s transcendence was also a vision of God’s unalloyed goodness, a pure goodness that exposed the imperfect and distorted goodness of his sinful humanity. For Maximus, the effect of our experience of God’s goodness is an awareness of just how imperfect our reflection of God’s perfection is. 

Several centuries earlier, John Cassian (360-435) described a reaction similar to Isaiah’s among his monks in their life of contemplation. In his twenty-third Conference—a series of dialogues about the monastic life—he wrote, 

All those who are holy, or struck with compunction, because of the weakness of their constitution, and with daily sighs, they scrutinize their different thoughts, and the hidden and secret places of their conscience, humbly cry out… They consider the righteousness of human beings, so weak and imperfect, and constantly in need of God’s mercy, but one of them (i.e. Isaiah) whose iniquities and sins God cleansed with the fiery coal of his word that was sent from his altar, said, after having contemplated God in wondrous fashion, and after having seen the lofty Seraphim, and a revelation of the heavenly mysteries, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people with unclean lips.” In my estimation, he would, perhaps, not even have felt the uncleanness of his lips if he had not deserved to know the true integral purity of perfection, thanks to his having contemplated God. Upon seeing him, he immediately recognized an uncleanness that had heretofore been unknown to him (Conferences 23.17.1-3 “On sinlessness”).

Isaiah’s exclamation “Woe is me…” is not a cry exclusive to the sinner but is indicative of the self-understanding of the holy—in this case those who have given themselves to the pursuit of perfection through the monastic life of which a central discipline is prayer and contemplation. For, by the contemplation (theoria) of God, the monk recognizes how far inferior his holiness is to that of God’s. Cassian identifies God’s transcendent holiness, which stands in contrast with the monk’s inferior righteousness, as “the true integral purity of perfection.” Whereas the holy monk wrestles with “different thoughts” – perhaps the law of sin in his members at war with the law of God in his mind—in his simplicity there is no conflict or division in God. He is purity through and through. And yet, the character of the monk’s holiness by which he has merited this self-understanding is that he has submitted himself to the discipline of contemplating God. 

One of the questions that drives Cassian’s dialogue in Conferences 23 is how to interpret Romans 7:19, “The good that I want to do I do not do, but the evil that I hate, this I do.” Is Paul here speaking describing his own post-conversion condition under grace or is he assuming the voice of sinful humanity living under the law? Cassian’s answer is that it must be Paul’s enduring experience under grace because a sinner would never say that he hates sin or desires to do good that is beyond his power. For, sin is always voluntary. This answer, however, begs a second question: what is the good that the holy Paul and people like him want to do but cannot? Cassian’s answer is contemplation. Since God’s goodness far surpasses any earthly good, there is no greater source of joy for true lovers of God than the contemplation of God. It is the pearl of great price and the greater good that Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, chose. Cassian writes, 

What, then, is the one thing that is so incomparably superior to those great and innumerable goods...? Without a doubt it is the excellent part whose magnificence and enduring quality Mary chose when she relinquished the service of welcoming and hospitality, which is spoken of by the Lord…“Mary has chosen the good part which will not be taken away from her.” The one thing, then, is theoria, or the contemplation of God, whose dignity is greater than all the dignity of righteousness, and all the zeal for virtue. And all of that, which we said, existed in the apostle Paul, is not only good and beneficial, but even great and sublime (Conf. 23.3.1-2).

By “contemplation” Cassian here means something comparable to what Paul described when he exhorted the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing ” (I Th 5:16-18). It is a continuous consciousness of God’s presence; it anticipates the saints’ experience of God at the resurrection as “all and in all” (Eph 4:6; I Cor 15:28). For, the saints shall see God’s presence in all things of the new creation. In the present however, even those devoted to the life of holiness when they do contemplate God’s goodness are troubled by the self-recognition captured in Isaiah’s vivid hyperbole that, in comparison with God’s righteousness, “All our righteous deeds are the rags of a menstruous woman ” (Isa 64:6). For, Cassian says, most of our virtues— being thrifty, sober, and industrious— are often more worldly than they are spiritual. Therefore, we have no reason to take pride in our virtue. Even more troubling, however, is the thought that, although we recognize that there is no better object of our thought than God, yet we let our minds wander and be distracted by trivial, worldly matters that are infinitely inferior to the goodness of God. Sometimes that is the result of mundane necessity—the demands daily life imposes on us—and other times the result of being spiritually inattentive. Although Cassian’s language may seem extreme, the value of such monastic writings is that they challenge us to consider how much more intimately we might live in intimacy with God if we dispensed with so many of the trivialities of life that we allow to distract us. For our immediate purpose, the value of Cassian’s words is his insight that the humility of holiness is born of contemplation wherein we recognize that we have failed to make God fully the center of our thoughts. And yet, from that self-knowledge comes a deeper appreciation of God’s mercy that is our only hope. 

Although John Wesley disagreed with Cassian’s interpretation of Romans 7, he shared Cassian’s idea of the enduring humility of holiness, even among those who had attained perfection in love. In his Thoughts on Christian Perfection (q. 5), he responds to the objection posed by his critics that, if a Christian attained perfection, she would no longer need Christ to act as a priestly mediator. Wesley replied, 

Far from it. None feel their need of Christ like these [i.e. the entirely sanctified]; none so entirely depend upon him. For Christ does not give life to the soul separate from, but in and with himself. Hence his words are equally true of all men, in whatever state of grace they are: ‘As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me; . . . without’ or separate from ‘me, ye can do nothing.’… The best of men still needs Christ in his priestly office, to atone for their omissions, their shortcomings (as some, not improperly, speak), their mistakes in judgment and practice, and their defects of various kinds. For these are all deviations from the perfect law, and consequently need an atonement. Yet that they are not properly sins.

The holiness of Christian perfection retains humility and with it the recognition of the continual need for Christ’s High Priestly mediation because, in that holiness, one has a deeper sense of how dependent one is upon his grace for perfection in love. Christian perfection is possible and is sustained only by an unceasing participation in Christ. Ultimately, the disagreement between Wesley and Cassian about the meaning of Romans 7 is less the issue than the point of their agreement. Namely, abiding in the grace of Christ’s word in the communion of the Holy Spirit imparts the humility of holiness through the recognition of our absolute dependence on God. Therefore, no one who is truly holy succumbs to the hubris of self-righteousness but instead prays the more fervently for further bestowals of grace. 

The picture of holiness that emerges from these patristic interpretations of Isaiah’s vision is a clearer distinction between holiness as an attribute of God and as an attribute of the saints. For God, the seraphim’s cry, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” denotes his ontological otherness and with it his perfect goodness. By contrast, the Christian’s holiness is distinct from God’s holiness because creaturely holiness entails humility. As its etymological root humus (earth) suggests, to be humble means to recognize that one is a creature of the earth. In the words of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” “‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free, ‘tis a gift to come down where we ought to be.” Humility is living in the full knowledge that as creatures we are not the source of our own existence or our own righteousness; instead, it is the recognition of our dependence on the Creator. Therefore, since God in his holy otherness is not dependent upon anything outside of himself for his existence or blessedness, God’s holiness does not include humility. Nevertheless, God does humble himself in the Incarnation. Therein lies the marvelous paradox: God humbles himself by surpassing the bounds of his holy otherness that he might bless creatures with the gift of sanctifying grace, i.e., his power and presence, that we might be partakers in his purity and goodness. By that power and presence, the saints of God are set apart and given a distinctive way of being in the world as other—an otherness manifest of a different way of living that, as Paul says, is “not conformed to this world” but is “transformed by the renewal of [their] minds,” in order that by their otherness they may manifest to the world what is “the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). 

[Originally given as the opening keynote of the Next Methodism Summit II in Alexandria, VA, Jan. 19, 2024.]

J. Warren Smith is Professor of Historical Theology and Director of the ThD Program at Duke Divinity School.