Premoderns Understood Doubt & Skepticism

One of the unfair stereotypes that people have about our forebears is that they were hopelessly ignorant folks to whom religion came easily.

They sucked down the information without question, and gullibly believed everything that was told to them. They were the sort of people that saw lightning and heard thunder, and totally believed that God is angry! or some other oversimplification.

But St. Gregory of Sinai, who spent much of his life in a monastery, tells us that this is simply not the case. 

Mature believers everywhere, and in every circumstance, struggle with doubt:

As the great teacher St John Chrysostom states, we should be in a position to say that we need no help from the Scriptures, no assistance from other people, but are instructed by God; for 'all will be taught by God' (Isa. 54:13; John 6:45), in such a way that we learn from Him and through Him what we ought to know. And this applies not only to those of us who are monks but to each and every one of the faithful: we are all of us called to carry the law of the Spirit written on the tablets of our hearts (cf. 2 Cor. 3:3), and to attain like the Cherubim the supreme privilege of conversing through pure prayer in the heart directly with Jesus. But because we are infants at the time of our renewal through baptism we do not understand the grace and the new life conferred upon us. Unaware of the surpassing grandeur of the honor and glory in which we share, we fail to realize that we ought to grow in soul and spirit through the keeping of the commandments and so perceive noetically what we have received. On account of this most of us fall through indifference and servitude to the passions into a state of benighted obduracy. We do not know whether God exists, or who we are, or what we have become, although through baptism we have been made sons of God, sons of light, and children and members of Christ. If we are baptized when grown up, we feel that we have been baptized only in water and not by the Spirit. And even though we have been renewed in the Spirit, we believe only in a formal, lifeless and ineffectual sense, and we say we are full of doubts. 

Hence because we are in fact non-spiritual we live and behave in a non-spiritual manner. Should we repent, we understand and practice the commandments only in a bodily way and not spiritually. And if after many labors a revelation of grace is in God's compassion granted to us, we take it for a delusion. Or if we hear from others how grace acts, we are persuaded by our envy to regard that also as a delusion. Thus we remain corpses until death, failing to live in Christ and to be inspired by Him. According to Scripture, even that which we possess will be taken away from us at the time of our death or our judgment because of our lack of faith and our despair (cf. Matt. 25:29). We do not understand that the children must be like the father, that is to say, we are to be made gods by God and spiritual by the Holy Spirit; for 'that which is born of the Spirit is spirit' (John 3:6). But we are unregenerate, even though we have become members of the faith and heavenly, and so the Spirit of God does not dwell within us (cf Gen. 6:3). Because of this the Lord has handed us over to strange afflictions and captivity, and slaughter flourishes, perhaps because He wishes to correct evil, or cut it off, or heal it by more powerful remedies.

St. Gregory of Sinai, in the Philokalia, Vol. IV 

Has Christianity Become Less Literal?

There is a line of thought that Christian thought has become incredibly less literal as time goes on because literal interpretations are no longer tenable. We are forced to look at the Old Testament and other portions as being purely parable, not because we have always believed as such, but because it is now standing on untenable ground. 

But this really is not the case at all...

The Old Testament has been interpreted very liberally, with almost a sort of mysterious meaning, and the literal meaning has been treated as surface level. 

St. Maximus the Confessor is famous for looking at many Old Testament passages as parables, and you see this in other very early Christians. 

Here is St. Maximus the Confessor writing in the early 7th century:

"Intelligence and reason are to be treated like the bondservants of Hebrew stock who are set free at the end of six years (cf Deut. 15:12). They labor like a servant and a handmaid for everyone who practices the virtues, since they conceive and realize the qualities of active virtue, and their whole strength is as it were drawn up against the demons that oppose the practice of the virtues. When they have completed the stage of practical philosophy - and this completion is represented by the sixth year, for the number six signifies practical philosophy - intelligence and reason are set free to devote themselves to spiritual contemplation, that is to say, they contemplate the inner essences of created beings."

(In the Philokalia)

This quotation comes from the 5th century saint, St. Neilos the Ascetic: 

"Similarly, when a slave has come to love his master and his own wife and children, he may reject true freedom because of his bonds of physical kinship: and so he becomes a slave for ever, allowing his ear to be pierced through with an awl (cf Exod. 21:6). He will never hear the word that can set him free, but will remain perpetually a slave in his love for present things. This is why the Law commanded that a woman's hand should be cut off if she seized hold of the genitals of a man who was fighting with another (cf. Deut. 25:11); in other words, when there was a battle between her thoughts, whether to choose worldly or heavenly blessings, she failed to choose the heavenly and grasped those which are subject to generation and corruption - for by the genitals the Law signifies the things which belong to the realm of change."

(in The Philokalia)

St. Neilos the Ascetic

One of the more grave issues that we face is that this sort of misinformation about the Church fathers and what they thought, coupled with assumptions about historical thought in general, begins to create and foster atheism. It puts all of Christianity on a much weaker footing than it really is by trying to box it into bad theology. 

Because of a lack of familiarity with actual, true Christianity, due to poor, secular public education, the faith has suffered immensely, and we are failing in our duties to put God in His rightful place.