The Utter Importance of Unimportance by Archbishop Chrysostomos

The Utter Importance
of Unimportance

From a Sermon by Archbishop Chrysostomos

“LET NOTHING be done through self-interest or vainglory, but in
humility of mind, each considering others superior to himself;mind not
each one his own interests, but rather the interests of others” (Philippians
2:3-4) [translation mine].

I have known a number of important or well-known people—mostly,
but not solely, scholars and academics—and have unworthily enjoyed
opportunities in my life that astound me.However, I have never myself
held any position of high esteem or enjoyed the acclaim of others.Yet,
like every individual, I have nonetheless many times had to resist the
sinful lure of wishing to be important or the fantasy of thinking myself
somehow important on account of those whom I have met and the mysterious,
inexplicable richness and diversity of my life experiences.

When I study my own psychology with ruthless objectivity and honesty,
I see—through the prism of my own weaknesses—the clear wisdom
of the foregoing statement of theApostle Paul. If we focus on the
importance of others, foregoing our own temptations at self-enhancement,
we are able to act outside vainglory and without selfishness, beyond
pride and outside the sin of self-centered rivalry, and to accomplish
what is otherwise impossible in this life.

Indeed, in everyday life and, of course, in spiritual life, nothing is
more important to success and happiness or to spiritual transformation
and human restoration than realizing how unimportant we are,made nothing
by our sins and imperfections, which we should regret for rendering
us of no account. Indeed, it is a realization of the utter importance
of unimportance that ultimately introduces us to joy and genuine life on
earth, in service to others, and that prepares us for the future life.
Salvation, as Scripture and the Patristic tradition teach us, comes to
those who, seeing their own unimportance, are able to impute importance
to others and thus, humbly serving their perceived superiors, exalt
themselves in humility, save themselves through love for their brothers
and sisters, and free themselves from the egotism and inner pride that
are the true enemies of the restitution of fallen man to sonship in God.

Orthodox Tradition
Aside from these greater attainments, an awareness of, and growth
in, our own unimportance changes the world in which we live in very
simple but significant ways. This is especially true in Church life. Instead
of teachers,we become learners.And in being learners,we obtain
genuine knowledge and pass on to others the fruits of that knowledge.
In that passing on,we become servants, attributing to, and deriving from,
Christ Himself all that we teach.We teach not as teachers, but as servants
to the Teacher.

Today, sadly,we see an almost universal trend among those who have
yet to learn the basics of the Faith and who are decades away from spiritual
maturity.Cultivating in themselves a sense of importance, they foolishly
strive to become important: teachers without knowledge and experts
without experience.Before they have lived the Faith, such “important
people” begin reading (and, if they can, writing) books, seeking recognition,
advertising their knowledge, and setting themselves up as critics
of the Faith.Admittedly, some of them (though remarkably few, to
be candid) are educated and clever; however, they are not theodidacts
(taught by God) and their ideas, concocted in the world of theology and
amateurish, superficial reading in the Fathers and Holy Tradition, are
not drawn from the Teacher Himself and from the Divine curriculum
of humility, obedience, repentance and love, but from their egos.

With the advent of the Internet, in particular, we have produced a
generation of asinine dabblers and scholarly dilettantes, formed, in the
worldly sphere, by such things as the “Wikipedia” and, in the realm of
Orthodox knowledge, “OrthodoxWiki.” These sources, purveying
knowledge mixed with rumor and gossip and, in some cases, utter nonsense
passing as scholarly commentary, are rooted in and drawn from
the notion that anyone’s opinion or thinking has meaning and that expertise
is the domain of the loudest voice. They reckon as authoritative
those who neither study nor work, and thus have time to feature their
personal views on the world’s latest platform for the advocacy of everything
from insight to idiocy. In this age of the electronic “Hyde Park Corner,”
an Internet soapbox and self-appointed professorial skills have put
a final end to peer review, excellence, the wisdom of experience, and,
vis-à-vis Orthodoxy, the authority of teaching from within theMind of
the Teacher and in an enlightened state.

Before the kooks and lunatics of Hyde Park mounted the worldwide
soapbox of the Internet, self-appointed self-importance was by and large
considered sociopathic in origin and manifestation, if not at times a feature
of full-blown psychopathy. In the academic world, themost renowned
thinkers and polymaths did not hold forth as self-professed experts, but
were often embarrassed when expertise was attributed to them.The very
finest minds that I have encountered in my life all chanted, to a number,
the universal mantra of the true scholar: “The more I learn, the more
aware I am of how little I know.”

Volume XXVII, Number 3 7

In the spiritual realm, in this age of ecumenical boldness in assuming
that humans, and not truth and God, will unite believers; when theologians
challenge and criticize the Fathers and Saints; and when a doctoral
dissertation (if one can apply such an appellation to the pitiable
work that nowadays often earns the title “doctor,”which was once distinguished
and honored) is likely to fail if it does not engage in the hermeneutics
of doubt and the rubrics of snide cynicism, the Internet has
found its proper adepts. Gone is pious scholarship, which is dismissed
as the ruminations of half-wits. The arrogance of mediocrity, having set
the standard of scholarship, has paved the way for impious “theology.”
In each of these instances, it being politically incorrect to question
the IQs and actual abilities of our experts today, we have allowed selfimportance
and self-advocacy to make much of what one sees in the media,
in the academic world, and in theology and popular religious writing
not just prurient and meaningless, but, paradoxically, “important.”

I read books on Orthodoxy, for example, that are hailed as “the definitive”
new text, when in fact they are usually compromised statements
by individuals striving to be important and desperately seeking worldly
fame and attention.As such, these works have no importance whatsoever.
They convey nothing of substance and they lack the one thing
needful: an awareness of the importance of unimportance in those who
write in the spirit and name of the Teacher for the sake of others.
Hence, we see, in the name of Orthodoxy, which claims to continue
the Church that Christ established, talk of “officialdom,” unity at all
costs and according to human will, relevancy to the world, and, to put
it bluntly, a bow and a smart salute to importance.And this is not just
among compromised ecumenists,who seek to work around the embarrassment
of Orthodoxy primacy (in some cases done with honest love
for the heterodox, I must admit, but more often than not done to use the
Orthodox witness to gain recognition and notoriety); it is also a phenomenon
among extremist Orthodox,who seek to be important in their
vicious condemnation of errant Orthodox,mimicking the “importance”
of the left by assuming from the right a different sense of false importance.

In service to Christ and Orthodoxy, we must seek unimportance in
all that we do; find relevance in our irrelevancy in the world of religious
influence and authority; find self-importance in our self-abasement and
in spiritual kenosis through humility, obedience, repentance, and love
for our fellow man; and seek in all ways to teach without overshadowing
the Teacher, to instruct without ever impugning the primacy of the
Fathers, and to study as ones who know nothing, not like those whose
doubting ignorance resonates with the braying of a blind ass (a fool can
doubt, but only a wise man knows how to believe). And in coming to
belief, as I have argued, we must have before us a constant, ceaseless
awareness of the utter importance of our unimportance.