Orthodox attitude to the Bible

[Isaac David]

I was recently informed that scholarly investigation of Scripture is not considered a problem by Orthodox christians, as we are not fundamentalists. I was told that we 'know' that not all the law was revealed to Moses on Sinai, for example. This came as something of a surprise to me.

I was never a fundamentalist before I converted to Orthodoxy, but I feel uncomfortable with this kind of claim, especially as it doesn't seem to me to deliver anything useful for the Orthodox believer. I can understand that the Fathers were less concerned with historical accuracy in the Old Testament than with its meaning for the Church, but this seems to to go beyond such unconcern. What do more knowledgeable heads have to say about this? I think it would help.

[John Curtis Dunn]

but I feel uncomfortable with this kind of claim, especially as it doesn't seem to me to deliver anything useful for the Orthodox believer

Your uncomfortablness is justified, many modern Bible scholars write as if they posssess a kind of superior source of knowledge when they introduce their \i[theories}. One of the most readily prominent examples is the commonly held theory of the priority of the Gospel of Mark. These moderns, wrap their own theories in a cloak of scientific research and reach conclusions which meet their own criteria to justify their speculative opinions. A common bit of arrogance is that our Fathers were not concerned about historical accuracy.

Under the guise of scientific scholary objectivity, every thing is opened to reconstruction for writing some modern pseudo-biblical science fiction, i.e., the Jesus Seminar, as if it were fact.

john

[Justin]

I would tend to agree that modern critical scholarship is not a problem for Orthodoxy--the only catch being that we say that it's normally wrong (if not in conclusion, at least in spirit and/or methodology). And even when it's right, the Church normally already knew or had stated what modern theologians claim to be "discovering" (e.g., the whole issue of whether Dionysius the Areopagite actually wrote what is attributed to him, which is something that has been debated for fourteen hundred years or more now, though to hear some people talk you'd think it's just modern scholarship which is "revealing the truth"). Hans Kung can claim to clear away the dust and debris of centuries (so HE can show us the truth? Egads), and we might even read Hans Kung and get something out of it. Or we might not. Either way, we have nothing to fear from him, unless we let him impress upon our hearts somthing misleading or corrupt.

[Richard Leigh]

Dear John,

I think you are being unfair to the field of scientific scholarship. One of the key things that makes it scientific is that it is open to peer review.

Any method used is intended to achieve a condition of as little bias as possible.

There will always be some error in what comes out of such scholarship since nothing in this life is perfect, nonetheless what error can there be in striving to improve one's understanding?

The ultimate question of course is how does what has been learned affect one's daily life in Christ?

Richard (the unOrthodox)

[Richard McBride]

Monochos: Orthodox attitudes re: the Bible:

Blessed of the Lord Isaac David

Your concern for the conversion of your whole self to Orthodoxy so well illustrates the first mental problem that which so many of us, who are converts, face. To that end I submit the first paragraphs to a piece I am working on at the moment; and I only hesitate because it may seem excessibely 'speculative'. For me, however, it is Truth as I understand it, and it is thus far, loaded with no 'inventiveness' on my part -- so far as I am aware. [If you or anyone detect traces of my vain imaginations in it, please inform me.]

"The Two Covenants

As Orthodox, we are well prepared to accept the Law of the First Covenant, but according to its direction we also know that there could be no fulfillment -- which is to say that Salvation would never be its promise. The Orthodox belief rather is that the First Covenant (the Law of Moses being incomplete) required the further and final promise of the Law Giver Himself. This final act was the demonstration by the Law Giver, in human form, actually becoming the living example by which a Second Covenant will complete and finalize the First. Therefore, the Old Covenant of the Law, being completed by the New Covenant of the Faith, became (the pair of them) a combination capable of revealing the mystery by which the children, the beloved of the Lord, sinners though they be -- by which they were enabled to partake of certain mysteries and to gain the Promise -- to spend eternity basking in the Light of His Love, and in return, praising God unceasingly.

And it is worth repeating, over and over, that the adumbration of the Old Law was itself the Law Giver's ultimate legal decree for His children: To love and adore the Lord thy God, with all the energies one may possess; and likewise, love one's neighbor (even be they enemies) as one hopes to be loved, ones self. [Mat.22:37-40] It is this divinely reemphasized pair of commandments which finalize all the others and thereby makes salvation possible."

My point in saying this, Isaac David, is to set a platform for discussing the work of the Fathers. I go at it this way because of the fundamentalist objectcion to our belief in the holy work of the Fathers, and to illustrate how we believe that going back to the presumption of sufficiency in the Jewish portion of the faith alone (and by thus avoiding the work of the Fathers), lays the groundwork for Syncritism.

rdichard mcb

[Richard McBride]

monochos: Orthodox attitude toward the Bible

The Richard who is not yet Orthodox, in speaking of the purpose of all scholarship, said:


"The ultimate question of course is how does what has been learned affect one's daily life in Christ? "

That is my feeling as well. For, not everything of Modernism is 'bad'. If it were, then we should not have been bothered with it these past three centuries. It is often said that in every heresy there is a grain of truth. All smoke and NO fire, is an impossibility.

One of the small scintillations of Modernism has been to clean up our sloppy processes of common sense thinking. Parmenides made the great leap in this respect by denying to his fellow philosophers their belief in some great biological cosmos. It was in error. From what I can tell of his poem, he replaced it with Space and Truth -- which amount to two version of the same Absolute (I think).

Seraphim's hero, Plato, added immeasurably to that earlier and weakly structured platform by bringing rationality to discussions on the problems of the cosmos. This increased structure is what you have discussed as a method, "intended to achieve a condition of as little bias as possible."

But just because the primary method of Modernism has been to take this same notion and run with it, is not of itself a bad thing. What has been the problem (as with everything in the modernist bag of tricks) is they turned the amazing Greek desire for clarity of thinking into modernist Objectification. Objectification (total lack of bias) has been overblown and like all these notions, when they lapse into existentialist prose, they seek to destroy the absurd by their own absurd and unavoidable urge toward revolution. (I've bitten off too much with this absurd generalization, so I will ignore it. Perhaps, you should too.)

The great advantage of philosophy, still (even after modernist notions have mauled it with all the Positivisms they can invent), is clarify our discussions amongst ourselves, even though they be based upon, and hopefully fed by, the Will of God and the Power of the Holy Spirit. For, when the Holy Spirit speaks to us, He either uses sublime suffusions of immediacy, or quite nudges and urgings, or a 2x4 laid smartly up side the head. The point being, that to my poor experience, the Holy Spirit communicates to us NOT in the manner of our speaking to each other.

If this be Truth, then there is much reason to utilize the great gift of Reason for our own earthly conversations. It has many benefits. And just because these mutterings are of this world, does not mean that they are wrong and that philosophy is necessarily evil. It all depends upon the purpose to which it is put. Philosophy is but a tool. And denying its reality is to deny one of the Gifts given to us to make the best use of this fallen world.

Richard, I hope you don't mind my tacking on post scripts to your own much more pithy remarks.

richard mcb

[Richard Leigh]

"Richard, I hope you don't mind my tacking on post scripts to your own much more pithy remarks."

Dear Richard,

Not at all! I appreciate the compliment.

Richard

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Richard,

regarding your comment:


Parmenides made the great leap in this respect by denying to his fellow philosophers their belief in some great biological cosmos. It was in error. From what I can tell of his poem, he replaced it with Space and Truth -- which amount to two version of the same Absolute (I think).

I think you're right about what Parmenides replaces the "organismicity" (if I may coin a term) of the cosmos with space and Truth, and I agree that that earlier conception was in error, but I think it had some hint of the Logos in it. I mean, Parmenides took out the metaphysical, which Plato and And Aristotle I think returned. Heraclitus' pneumatic firey logos (complete with logoi spermaticoi) was a thought that needed a little development from Philo and finally brought to fruition by the Holy Spirit Himself in St. John the Theologian. Wouldn't you agree?

Richard the Other

[John Curtis Dunn]

I think you are being unfair to the field of scientific scholarship. One of the key things that makes it scientific is that it is open to peer review.

Yes, that peer review is powerful enough ostrasize or embrace a theory and to restrict or admit into its own membership and thus capable of defining to those outside of that scholarly community what is and is not true scholarship. But, can and has this modern scholarship been a means for politicalizing the Church? Is there really any such thing as value-less-biblical scholarship (positive objectivism)?

Twentieth century biblical scholarship was marked (marred?) by its own attempt and belief that it can and has achieve(d) scholarship which is free of ecclessiastical restrictions. Effort was expended to create a scientific history which could be free from philosophical constructions; that is to identify a set of objectively established facts, such as the democratic scholarly consensus on the sayings of Jesus.

Biblical Scholarship has been following a course to explain away the transcendental, supernatural, and miraculous elements found in the Scriptures, and this has usually on the a priori grounds that none of these things could be true.

Of course, there have been exceptions, the primary question which Christ asked of His disciples remains imperative, "Who do men say that I am?" Who do you say that I am?"

john dunn

[Daniel Jeandet]

Dont be afraid, just believe. Dealing with modernistic scholars is simple.

Compare all modern biblical scholarship with the intepretation and application of scripture given to us by the Fathers and always reject the moderns when they disagree with the Fathers.

Only trust the testimony and interpretation of those who lead an evangelical life.

[Richard Leigh]

Dear John,

I wouldn't say the course of scholarship is without its perils. There certainly is a battle going on, and we do better to bleive scripture than to disbelieve.

I agree that in a putative effort to achieve an actually unacheivable biasless point of view scholars do what we all do and dip from their own place in the boat -- i.e., the current going general philosophy of the day.

The peer base expands though when we begin to cross disciplines and we get exacting anthropologists who point out that the western positivistic philosophical base is not the end all and be all in reality.

Parmenides set us off on a track for a lifeless (=spiritless) world to live in, and I'll warrant it's taken The Enemy a few millennia to bear fruit from Epicurus' atheistic materialism, so, we've been at this for some time now.

But we all know better. The other side of the equation shows a good bit of time in the dark ages when the church (or rather, officials under western bishops) set themselves up as thought police and made the same errors of ignorance.

So, I opt for scholarship with faith: eat the fish and throw out the bones.

Richard

[Daniel Jeandet]

I just read your post again and I noticed this


"we are not fundamentalists"

I have also heard this from people who want to dismiss those who are determined to preserve thier Orthodoxy in the face of so many modern temptations. Sometimes people are scared they will not be keeping up with the current trends in intellectual thought if they dont agree with the modern scholarship. Some of them want Orthodoxy to appear to others as some kind of super religion that can accomadate every kind of persons tastes or every personal appraoch to matters of Faith. Some people (often without realising it) want to reduce the Commandments of Christ or question the truth of scripture so that it is easier to be a Christian in this world. Sometimes people invent an "us and them" situation, setting you up so that if you dont agree with them, they can say you are a fundamentalist. Be careful of these people. Pray for them, but dont trust them or take thier advice on spiritual matters.

If the Fathers didnt dare to interpret Scripture and teach others about it without much ascetic labour and tears, then what hope have the modern scholars got? And why do they sometimes put forward strange ideas that go against the Fathers or that throw into doubt the truths of Creation and God's revalation? (I refer to evolution theory and stupid opinions on the Gospels). Some of these people need to produce something to justify thier positions or they have a desire to be good scholars so even if they have nothing useful or good to add to the inexhaustible treasure that is the Patristic writings, they go ahead and analyse things on the basis of "science" (as if some things are not known) or Historical research.

The Fathers were men who would not lie and could not be decieved. There is enough Patristic food to last the entire human race for the rest of time, and let the Scripture stand as it does, especialy dont listen to anyone who doubts the Truths in Scripture, they are in trouble already.

Sorry for the rant, but there is too much of this junk and it is so easy to be fooled.

[Isaac David]

Thank you all for your answers and further discussion; it has certainly helped to clarify matters somewhat. Being a convert from non-Orthodoxy can be difficult: is this bit of my belief and practice Orthodox, or is it some baggage from my former existence? Faced with people who have been Orthodox longer can create uncertainty.

Yet, I have always believed that Truth is 'supernatural', revealed by the Holy Spirit. Scientific truth may be useful for many things and may even be helpful in matters of faith (my first introduction to Orthodoxy was through Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Church which couldn't have been written without some academic research), but it is not life giving. Here, I take my stand on what I understand by St. Isaac of Syria's three degrees of knowledge. Ultimately, the only knowledge worth possessing is that revealed in Scripture and the Holy Fathers.

[John Curtis Dunn]

Ultimately, the only knowledge worth possessing is that revealed in Scripture and the Holy Fathers.

Yet, and I believe this to have been Owen's Jones consistent argument "Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." [2 Cor. 10:5]

In the above passage we read of our ongoing warfare with the world, in which reasoning (from first imagination to argumentive conclusions) perverts all its sensory information/facts into a knowledge which opposess the knowledge of God in Christ.
Therefore, we must not be lazy in our own thinking, but actively reconciling (subjugating) even every (individually and/or collectively) high thing (the walls of opposition).

Our Orthodox mission to the world is to raze the walls of those cities of knowledge which resist the Gospel, and hunt out that reasoning of other cities of knowledge which oppose the knowledge of God and bring it into captivity to Christ.

Make no mistake, our warfare against the world is for the world, for whom Christ died.

john

[Richard McBride]

monochos: [Forgbive me! I can't find the proper category]

Dear Richard, in referring to your:

Heraclitus' "pneumatic firey logos (complete with logoi spermaticoi) "

I may say that from my poor knowledge of that very interesting ancient (among the ancients), Heraclitus, I take your "pneumatic firey logos" description to refer to his unusual apotheosis of war -- which, I think I recall, was his explanation of the source for everything -- all generation?

But unless you tell me otherwise, I am inclined to accept his version of 'logos' as being simply the Old Greek reference to a gathering, a collection, or perhaps more philosophically, to a methodical recounting of the constitution of the cosmos? Would his metaphysic not support that more general assumption? You will have to tell me.

What seems totally inline with my sense of these things was your comment, "...a thought that needed a little development from Philo and finally brought to fruition by the Holy Spirit Himself in St. John the Theologian."

Even before Philo's time, 'logos' had become as much an icon of Greek culture (especially of their unusual way of thinking) as, in the hands of Saint John, it took on the work of characterizing Christ. In saying that, however, I should NOT want to imply that Saint John's inspiration was a small step, and that he merely converted some existing notion to the representation of God -- a sort of hand-me-down icon, as it were. No, my sense of the long and complex history of 'logos' is that by the time of the Incarnation, it was a huge word in Greek culture, and by Saint John's hand, and through the grace of the Holy Spirit, it was deemed worthy of becoming filled with grace by becoming the very characterization of God, thereby taking on an entirely new significance.

But it is difficult to treat such complexity in a small message -- especially when one is hardly prepared to deal with it, as am I.

richard mcb

[Fr Averky]

Dear in Christ Isaac,

Having been quite ill for a few weeks, I am only now looking at Monachos again. Reading the answers to your question, I perceive that you are asking if the Orthodox Church has problems with contemporary Biblical scholarship.

As with all matters concerning Holy Orthodoxy, the Church looks to the Fathers, and does not rely upon non-Orthodox "scholars," who for the last seventy years have done everything possible to debunk the Holy Scriptures. One small example is the articles to be found in "Biblical Review," and "Biblical Archeological Review." Both of these periodicals consistenly question the veracity of Holy Scripture, and oftentimes the very existence of Biblical personalities. While it is true that they do indeed verify Biblical information, this is increasingly rare.

Last year I decided to subscribe to "Theology Today," but after having received but one issue, I wrote a polite letter to the editor stating that simply could not bear to read such outlandish and un-Christian posturing on the part of men and women claiming to be "theologians."

I do not know who gave you your information about Orthodoxy having no problem with modern Biblical studies because we are not "fundamentalists." A pilgrim visiting here a few weeks ago- a man new to the Faith, told me that someone had "informed" him about something in regards to monasticism, and I simply had to tell him that we can not listen to every "opinion" given us, especially by other convert laymen. I also know of laymen who have been "informed" that at times they can grant themselves an "economia" to eat meat on a Wednesday, a Friday, or during a Fast, not realizing that only bishops and in some cases, Spiritual Fathers can grant an economy.

Having served in a number parishes, I have run into many converts who have read five or six books, and then consider themselves to be "theologians," and Church "experts," teaching others and questioning the teaching and authority of the priest.

Dear Isaac, you are fairly new to the Faith-rely upon the interpretations of the Holy Fathers, and do not concern yourself with those non-Orthodox men and women who feel that they have so much knowledge. The Holy Scriptures as we know them were assembled and approved by Orthodox bishops in Council, and they have been interpreted by men who were themselves filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the folly of the Protestant (apologies to you, Richard Leigh) mind that there is "free" interpretation" of the Bible. How can we men, sullied by the passions and our sinfulness, and so far from God, gaze upon the words of God and the letters of the Holy Apostles, and dare to think that we "know" what we are reading. All you have to do is tune in on any televangelist on a Sunday afternoon, and you will behold how dangerous it is for people to interpret as they wish. There are of course, theologians from Orthodox countries who have written excellent and spiritual commentaries on Holy Scripture.

Isaac, do not trouble yourself with this question at all, but repent sincerely, fast to the best of your ability, pray fervently, go to confession and communion frequently and try to change your life to the good. Just doing these few things, and doing them well, is enough for the average Orthodox Christian to do. Live your life simply and humbly, and you will live a life pleasing to God.

In Christ,

Fr. A.

[Isaac David]

Dear Father Averky

Thank you for your answer. I would not have troubled myself with this question had it not been raised in a conversation at my church - in fact, it arose when I asked if the frequent references to the King's mother in the Books of the Kings in the Old Testament were had ever been picked up by the Fathers as a reference to the Mother of the Lord.

I'm not sure if the opinion expressed was as extreme as those espoused in the journals you mention, but it is worrying when such an opinion seems to have some support among the priests and bishops (this seemed to be the import of the conversation). Then it becomes an issue of trust.

Well, clearly, your last piece of advice is the most sensible. I know I can trust that. Once again, thank you.

Isaac David

[Charalambos Andrew Geo]

Maybe i have missed the point but, remember the orthodox hold the bible in very high regard, in the liturgy they take it around the church and have it in the alter, the lay people and ordained kiss it in matins, an icon of God, we should take care of it, in the orthodox study bible there is a good description how orthodox believe in the bible, and Sister Magdalene in conversations with Children mentions some useful information regarding the traditions which may also be in the Bishop Kallistos Ware book the Orthodox church. I remember reading in the Orthodox Study Bible in the essays e.t.c something of the like- when you read a letter from the king you rejoice and take good care, (please remember i am not quoting accurately or properly,) and a letter from a heavenly king you almost despise and reject such a thing. if anyone has it it's nice to read it.

In the liturgy the priest says may we be made worthy to hear the holy gospel, and the chanters reply or at the end we glorify God, during the epistle we sit and listen, and as the priest comes out we stand to hear the Holy gospel, the priest for the epistle an Gosple sais wisdom let us attend, during the liturgy at different times with the Gospel and epistle being read, during matins, we have alter boys standing next to the priest with the Gospel and everyone chooses to listen or not depending on who they are but every one partakes, almost every word of the liturgy is derived in some way from the Gospel and Edler Prophirios, may he pray for us, said that everything he said was in the Bible. At the end of reading the bible we glorify God, as the priest comes the sacred Body and Blood of Christ, it's i think symbolic of how God comes to man and we approach in fear of God and faith and love draw near.

I think there is more we could say and i could elaborate but i felt this was missing. I asked a sister about evolution and all them things and her answer said to me in the end i.e things like that at to how that happened is on the periphery not demeeming scientists work as they look at Gods work and marvel at God for his creation, the bible is about mans' relationship with God how we fell and God redeeming us, this is very basic description of what is trying to be conveyed, if i lack clarity or if i make mistake in what i have learnt from others i still find it difficult to express it clearly, i would appreciate the critisicm in love.

In Christ
Harry

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Harry,

Yes, I think the point is that the Orthodox are saying that they are not biblicists, using the bible as the last word in everything from science and technology to astronomy and cosmology.

But also I think the Orthodox do not want to limit God's speaking or ability to speak to His church to the written pages of the Scripture, but that the Holy Spirit continually works with and through the church delivering the same word which Scripture is in whatever idiom is required for any given social situation or age. This, I'm told, is the Orthodox definition of "Tradition."

Richard

[Charalambos Andrew Geo]

I would also agree with that, like the tradition of the church fathers, and canons is all based in scripture, and the teaching of the church.

we apply it without changing the theology to our circumstances? without changing the dogmas restate the faith, under the guidance of a spiritual father, there is also another form of tradition as Saint Paul i think speaks about, but here we go as you said the last word in scripture, if you know what i mean,

In Christ
brothers and Sisters, pray for all
Harry

[Richard McBride]

monochos: The Gospel

Dear Harry

Your sensitivity toward the Gospel Book is well founded, and well understood by Orthodox. Thank you for the 'elaboration'. We may not be pointed too often toward that precious ikon. Non-Orthodox are not familiar with the extremely high regard we place upon the Gospel.

What you are speaking of is, of course, the Gospel itself. It is not the Bible. And this underscores the very special emphasis we place upon the Second Covenant, as opposed to the First, without in any way degrading the importance of the Law.

richard

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Richard


Non-Orthodox are not familiar with the extremely high regard we place upon the Gospel.

OTOH, some of us are (though more of us ought be, I do what I can to bring that about).

Regarding covenants, it is interesting to note that the second was called "new" in the first [Jer.31:31], called "old" in the second [Heb.8:8].

Richard the Other

[Jonathan Tallon]

Dear John,

I am confused by your antipathy to those who believe that Mark may have been written before Matthew and Luke. We have four gospels (one Gospel!) - how does the order in which they were written affect their value for us?

Jonathan

[Fr John Wehling]

Glory to Jesus Christ!

No doubt many of you are familiar with this quotation from St John Chrysostom, but for those who are not, I post it here. I think it is a terrific example of the Orthodox approach to Scripture.

"It would indeed be appropriate for us not to require at all the aid of the written word [the Scriptures], but to exhibit a life so pure, that our souls should have the grace of the Spirit instead of books, and that just as these are inscribed with ink, even so should our hearts be with the Spirit. But since we have utterly put away from us this grace, come, let us at any rate embrace the second best course! … Reflect then how great an evil it is for us, who ought to live so purely as not even to need written words, but to yield up our hearts, as books, to the Spirit; now that we have lost that honour, and have come to have need of these, to fail yet again in duly employing even this second remedy. For if it be blameworthy to need written words, and not to have brought down on ourselves the grace of the Spirit, consider how heavy the charge of not choosing to profit even after this assistance, but rather treating what is written with neglect, as if it were cast forth without purpose and at random, and so bringing down upon ourselves our punishment with increase. But that no such effect may ensue, let us give strict heed to the things that are written…." (St John Chrysostom, Homily I on The Gospel of St Matthew)

[Richard McBride]

Blessed of the Lord John (Dunn)

I finally found the message to which Jonathan Tallon was referring ("I am confused by your antipathy to those who believe that Mark may have..."). It was your message #143 Monday, 15 September, within this string.

In re-reading I again noticed your comment on "the Jesus Siminar". What is that, John? It sounds like one of those Discovery Channel 'revealments' on everything you ever wanted to know about Jesus?

richard mcb

[Richard Leigh]

Dear John Curtis,

I would like to second Jonathan's question regarding the importance of any presumed order in which the gospels may have been written, to a life of faith, I mean.

It seems questions of temporal priority of written documents is important to modern people, apparently it was not one that concerned the ancients who when ordering writings did so an the basis of scale from easy to difficult.

All anyone has (or has ever had since the question was considered) is a theory of when any particular Gospel rendition was written in relation to the other three (inlcuding the oder in which they appear in our bibles today.

Yours,

Richard L.

[Herman Blaydoe]

Information on the Jesus Seminar can be found here (http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/pearson/seminar/js1.html).

A so-called "search for the historical Jesus", their agenda seems to be to demythologize, scholasticize and generally secularize the Gospel. They basically deny the Resurrection and Diety of Christ.

From the conclusions of the website above:

"Seek--you'll find." This is one of the "authentic" sayings of Jesus (Matthew 7:7 // Luke ll:9 // Thomas 92:1, colored pink) in The Five Gospels. A group of secularized theologians and secular academics went seeking a secular Jesus, and they found him! They think they found him, but, in fact, they created him. Jesus the "party animal," whose zany wit and caustic humor would enliven an otherwise dull cocktail party --this is the product of the Jesus Seminar's six years' research. In a sense the Jesus Seminar, with its ideology of secularization, represents a "shadow image" of the old "New Quest," with its neo-orthodox theology -- and its ultimate bankruptcy.

[Daniel Jeandet]

I have read in several books that the order the Gospels are arranged in, had more to do with the fact that the first three gospels were used to catechise the early Christians, starting with Mathew, then Mark, then Luke. The last Gospel to be read by the Faithful, it may have been after baptism, im not totaly sure, was the Gospel of St John. St Johns Gospel is the Gospel of illumination and is on a another order than the other three, so it was not read or taught until the catachumen had been illumined.

That is a very vauge and probably flawed explanation of an important subject, my memory is a bit overburdened, so I will try to find the place I read it and post a more detailed version of this Theological viewpoint.

[M.C. Steenberg]

We have four gospels (one Gospel!) - how does the order in which they were written affect their value for us?

Dear Jonathan, Richard, Daniel and others,

The order in which the Gospel accounts were written has value to Orthodox largely through the revelation than can come through this knowledge vis-a-vis the narrative process of Scriptural formation. The Scriptures did not 'fall out of heaven', but were and are the product of the Church's appropriation of the divine Mystery revealed to her. That mystery is encountered through the text whether or not one knows the history of their formation, composition, etc; but a knowledge of these attributes can be additionally revealing -- of the process of the Church's formation of Scripture, in the very least. Knowing the background of the authors of the Gospel accounts, and the circumstances/times of their writing these texts, reveals to us something of the 'goings-on' of the moment in which they committed to writing the divine truths of their experience. Certainly there is value in this. The 'human side' of Scriptural revelation has always been deeply valued and important in the Orthodox Church.

What we must shy away from is the kind of deconstruction that some engage in when bringing up the question of dates: e.g., trying to determine the 'most authentic' of the Gospels, or locating the 'true sayings of Christ' by dissecting the accounts on evidence of date, influence, adoption, and so on. The so-called 'Jesus Seminar' is by far the worst offender in this category. They represent what is, by Orthodox standards, a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of everything that Scripture is.

INXC, Matthew

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Matthew,

Does Orthodoxy then know the order in which the Gospels were written?

Richard

[John Curtis Dunn]

Does it matter whether we believe in the priority of Matthew, Mark or Q as Orthodox Christians?

Many, if not all modern arguments designed to establish the primacy of Mark and/or Q are depend upon a prioria that the testimony of the Church Father's concerning the priority of Matthew are only unenlightened guesses. Not everybody who subscribes to the primacy of Mark-Q does so because they have intended to reject Orthodoxy, but the hypothesis for Mark-Q's priority begins by doing just that. The growth and acceptance of the Mark-Q hypothesis develops along with the search and rejection of the Gospels as reliable testimonies to the Historical Jesus.

The earliest testimony for the priority of Matthew Gospel stems from a brief passage attributed to a disciple of the Apostle/Evangelist named Papias. Papias was the Bishop of Hierapolis at least between 95 and 110 A.D.; St Irenaeus described him as "one of the ancients." He also identifies Papias as "the hearer of John," which places Papias in the same time and category as Polycarp.

The relevant passage comes to us through Eusebius: "Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he was able." Until the appearance of "Higher Criticism" it was universally understood that Papias was refering to Matthew. Papias is important precisely because he is the earliest source upon which the priority of Matthew is established or rejected.

Contrary to much contemporary opinon, there is no evidence that Matthew based his collection upo Mark or the speculative Q. Indeed, there is no known historical evidence for the existence of Q. If this is true, why is it so important for some to assert the existence of Q and the priortiy of Mark's Gospel over Matthew"s?

For some these questions are irrelevant,. but they lie at the foundation of much of modern man's apologetical reason for rejecting the Gospel.

john dunn

[Fr Averky]

Dear friends,

Not wanting in any way to offend our beloved non-Orthodox friends and vistiors, please forgive me for saying, but I am a little surprized to see how pious Orthodox Christians would involve themselves in worrying about what modern so-called "Biblical scholars" posture one way or the other about Holy Scripture. Alas, at times they sound barely interested in Christianity and the salvation of those who read their articles, as they pompously question the veracity of Biblical characters and events.

Of course, anyone has the right to discuss this matter, but being the old grouch that I am, I just want to say that the "Orthodox approach to the Bible" is what the Church teaches by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Ecumenical Councils and what the Holy Fathers have taught us. The Church has always held as her own the authority to order,interpret and define the truths to be found in the Holy Scriptures. People like St. Theophylact the Bulgarian and other scholar-saints have the key to the canonical order and what the Holy Scriptures mean. The Holy Spirit cannot inspire the minds of scholars whose seem to be only intent on "debunking" the Scriptures. While I intentionally did not see it, a few years ago there was a television concerning the persona of Jesus Christ, and Orthodox Christians were shocked that the most time was give to a rather crass and cynical "Biblical expert" who spent everfy minute of his time pooh-poohing the life of our Saviour.

We Orthodox have the fullness of the Truth, so please, do not touble yourselves with such questions. As usual, Richard Leigh thank you for your considerate approach to these questions-you know, slowly but surely, you are becoming Orthodx in your heart. I continue to pray for you in that regard.

Respectfully to all and with offense meant to no one,

Fr. A.

[John Curtis Dunn]

but I am a little surprized to see how pious Orthodox Christians would involve themselves in worrying about what modern so-called "Biblical scholars" posture one way or the other about Holy Scripture.

"What Me Worry?"

john dunn

[Richard Leigh]

Dear John Dunn (in particular, but to others as well, notably Fr. A.),

It is useful to be critical in the face of the devil, as Jesus was in the wilderness but as Eve was not in the Garden. The use of questioning in the testing of Spirits is well attested by the contrast between that of Zechariah vs. that of Mary to Gabriel concerning God's announcement to them through him.

When we talk about reliance on our Revered Father's and Mother's experience and training in the faith we mean to portray ourselves (to ourselves, and I mean sincerely [and I speak with sincerity]) as calm and penitent children sitting at their feet beholding the Lord Himself through the light of their faces and and the glory of their words ultimately placing our trust on Him (through them, at first).

One use of critique in trying to understand a statement delivered in an age and culture so different from our own as the one in which Bp. Papias lived is to improve our ability to hear exactly what he said, so that we not mistake his words about the Lord for something else, or something else for words about the Lord. Many of our predicessors had great and marvelous things to say about Him and how we and the world are related, such as Origen, some of who's words have been found hollow.

Papias himself says that what he learned was not from hearing any of the apostles themselves but "elders" who had heard from them. IOW his information was second hand, and the "John" Papias heard from was not the Theologian; but, not to be disparaged on that account, who of us wouldn't die to have as our teacher someone who had heard directly from one of the apostles? In the third fragment we have from him he reports a death of Judas (presumably the disciple) which does not accord with the scripture [he has him run over by a chariot with the result that "his bowels gushed out" (but then again, perhaps this isn't fatal? Or better, perhaps this is only spuriously attributed to Papias.)

The fourth fragment attributed to him as recorded by Irenaeus shows Papias to have understood certain sayings of the Lord in a millenialist way. I believe it was Augustine who first debunked that theory (though I am quizicle, I believe the theory was rejected by Eastern Fathers as well, and I know they did not have accesss to Augustine).

Papias' statement about what Matthew wrote says that it was a compendium of sayings, and that it was in Hebrew (or what he called Hebrew, this could as well mean Aramaic). The Gospel we have which is attributed to Matthew is not a Sayings Gospel, i.e., is not simply a list of Logia, or pithy proverbial sayings, but a well organized presentation of material much (but not all) of which is presented in Mark in a different order, and most (but again not all) is most certainly originally written in Greek. Thus, it is not what Papias' informant was talking about. The only sayings gospel available to us in this 21st century is the one attributed to Thomas, which I believe is considered a gnostic document (but I don't think we've heard the last word on that -- again, it seems, as I recall, also to have been originally written in Greek).

It is a natural question to ask, "Why is the order of events different in Matthew and Mark?" The answer will be something along the lines of what you teach us, Father Averky, that The church has the right to decide upon, order and arrange what is given Her." And why would that be? After all, we know that Luke (the only evangelist willing to name himself) wrote The Apostles' Acts as a second volume to his rendition of the Gospel, yet it is separated from the first by John's rendition. Why does the Church have such authority? Because Spirit is given to Spirit in the spiritual; grace to faith, light to the sighted (and sight was given the blind, and for this may all rejoice --- but not to all of the blind, why not? Only God can tell, but last I heard, He's not telling that).

I know that Augustine believed and/or taught the priority of Matthew, I believe as a theory, and I know that his contemporary Jerome was the first to have had all of the books we call collectively "The Bible" into one volume, thus in a particular order. I believe that the Gospels had been bound together, but sometimes in a different order than the way they are now, and the epistles of Paul. I have a Westcott and Hort which places the Catholic epistles between Acts and the Pauline ones, I cannot find the source of that ordering, but I could explain it without very much imagination (a telling word, I know).

Irenaeus explained the need for four versions of the Gospel story, the point being the need of each for the witness of the others, and I believe it was him who said that discrepencies are needed to increase veracity in that if all the people who come to the witness stand repeat each other verbatim, it gives the impression they all "got together on their story" for presentation, thus casting doubt on them all.

Father Averdy rightly warns against spending too much time and energy on the problem of priority (and I remind of what I'd said in an earlier post, that such a question is a modern one, not an ancient one). Let those of us for whom it is true to say that we have the inveterate curiosity of Papias become aware that ultimately the answer will be of little help to us since all the presentations of the Gospel bring to us (and us to) the Lord himself, and repent, receive an absolution from Father A., if he will be so kind.

I will end with a delightful story pertinent to this issue. My pastor and I both agree that when speaking of the Lord to nonbelievers (partricularly but not necessarily Jews), it is not a good idea to introduce them to the Gospel of John, because it is so "rarified" better, especially for the Jews, to give them something more specifically addressed to their situation, i.e., Mattew.

It happens that my wife and I had invited our pastor to our daugher's wedding, and we had also invited a believing (= Christian) Jewish man. I was eager that they be introduced, and did so after the ceremony. In testifying to how he came to faith my friend told my pastor (and me), "I went to this Bible Study a Jew. They were studying the Gospel of John. On hearing it, I said, 'Who couldn't believe this!'." And so he came to faith.

So much for strategizing, eh?

Yours in Love,

Richard

P.s., rare is the seeker after Truth to end upon falshood. Why? Because Jesus said, "Seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be answered..." While it is true that we cannot know a person's heart, we can get a good clue by what one says because according to Jesus it is out of one's heart that one's words come. Thus, we can get a pretty good idea of the motive of a "scholar" who's critical examination of the Gospel texts results in faithlessness. One usually finds what one is looking for (though some have been converted in the endeavor!) Praise be to God! ---RL

[Vincent Lehr]

Many moons ago, Fr. A. wrote these words:


"We Orthodox have the fullness of the Truth, so please, do not trouble yourselves with such questions."

As a newbie to this forum, I am enjoying reading the various posts. One of reasons that one joins such forums as these is to investigate the various claims of truth, ask questions, and to learn more about the Christian Faith.

It was for this reason that I was quite dismayed at the above comment. Along with giving us the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers (and Mothers), God has also given us an intellect to use. By doing so, I'm assuming He does not wish us to follow blindly every single thing that is taught to us, without us using our God-given abilities to investigate the evidence for various claims.

If we tell Orthodox Christians to accept everything the Church teaches you, without checking to see if it is actually true, then we are taking upon ourselves very cultish tendencies. Even St. Paul tells us that the Jews in Berea were more noble than those in Thessolonica because they examined the Scriptures daily to see for themselves whether or not the teachings that Paul was giving them were really true (Acts 17:11). Did St. Paul chastise them, and say "We Christians have the fullness of the Truth, so please, do not trouble yourselves with such questions. Just take our word for it." On the contrary, he commended them for their questioning and searching for truth. To do otherwise is to stifle people from using their brains.

Along with that, we must remember that not all the Fathers were correct all of the time. I've been told by several Priests that the Fathers were probably correct about 80% of the time. That means these God-illumined men were wrong 20% of the time!

Let's take an example -- the doctrine of the soul after death. Do we listen to the teachings of Fr. Seraphim Rose (ie. Tollhouses), with his many quotes of the Fathers, or do we listen to the opposite teachings of His Eminence, Archbishop Lazar, with his many quotes from the Fathers? It is not enough to say "do not trouble yourselves with such questions." If we are to be honest to ourselves, to God, and to His Church, then we must ask questions, seek answers, search for truth, and have enough courage to deal with that truth when we are confronted with it, whatever it may be, and from whatever source it might come from.

Dcn. Vincent

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Father Deacon Vincent,

Meaning no offense at all, I feel it necessary to call you on a point of order. While I too remember that quotation of Fr. A's, I cannot for the life of me remember its context, but I do remember a period in which the forum was subject to what the e-community calls "trolling" i.e., false brethren who'd snuck in pelting participants with loaded questions with an apparent intent of unraveling the Orthodox faith.

My complaint to you is that you have quoted our dear Father Averky "out of context" which is not fair.

Not only must Fr. A be read (and quoted) in context, i.e., of the post one is quoting from, but anything he writes in a negative tone must be read in the context of the whole thread, for you will find that when he finds he has misspoken, he comes to repentance quite easily.

Yours,

Richard

[Vincent Lehr]

Richard,

If I am mistaken about the intent of Fr. A's comment, then I truly apologize. It just took me quite off guard to see that comment in the context of people asking questions about the historicity and dating of the Scriptures.

In many Orthodox circles, the assumption seems to be "If the Church teaches it, that settles it, and don't question it!" Very similar to my Evangelical days of "If the Bible says it, that settles it!" If Evangelicals really believed that today, they'd all be members in the Flat Earth Society. But science, history, anthropology, etc. does occasionally give us new insights into these subjects. If we really have the truth, then we must never be afraid to ask questions, and to meet the challenge head on, no matter where it comes from (ie. The Jesus Seminar).

As a former Charismatic, we were always accused of being "anti-intellectual". I fear that many in the Orthodox Church also come under that banner, afraid to question and challenge things.

BTW, I did read the whole thread (even the archives) prior to writing that rant, and I've also read some of the other things that Fr. A wrote on other topics, so I know he's not afraid of facing the hard questions head on. It was in that context that I wrote what I did, perhaps more out of surprise at seeing the comment than anything else.

Dcn. Vincent

[Fr Averky]

My Dear Fr. Vincent,

Since the post of mine from which you take your quote is in this thread, I had opportunity to read it again,and I can see where it would easily be misunderstood and for that I ask for forgiveness from all.

What I was trying to say, and still, others perhaps will disagree with me, that as Ortrhodox Christians, we should not be too concerned with the articles written by moderrn scholars whose aim seems to be to take the Truth and Mystery out of Holy Scripture, proving by archeologgy, anthropology and academic studies, that much of what is to be found, especially in the Old Tesatment is either myth or not accurate. I for a few yeasrs subscribed to Archeology, Biblical Archeological Review, and Biblical Review, and with rare exception, the articles seemed to question what I have been taught all of my life, and while they caused me no temptation, they also were not worth my time.

So you see, Fr. Vincent, I was trying to defend the authority of the Orthodox Church, which in my eyes, alone is able to define the meaning of Holy Writ, and I am sorry if my words caused you consternation.

I do not think that the examples which you give are in line with what I was trying to say. As a priest and having been a pastor, I would not wish that any Orthodox Christian , especially one not strong in his faith or sufficiently knowledgeable about the teachings of the Church come to spiritual harm. I would not "forbid" people to read such things, but going back to my original remark, I simply do not think we should trouble ourselves with the opinions of those who do not look at Scripture with Orthodox eyes.

While I agree we should be rational sheep of Christ, and not follow blindly, at the same time, I am not going to seek the opinions of people unknown to me. In regards to the statistics in regards as to how often the Fathers were wrong-I am personally more interested in when they were right. And who has come up with these statistics? Like Rebecca remarked on another thread - what in the end to statistics really mean? I do not think that we are guilty of "cultish tendencies" if we are in faith willing to accept what the Church teaches us. As mentioned before on Monachos, the Church is not a salad bar, in which we can pick and choose those teachings or traditions we can accept, and reject or question those which we do not. Unfortunately, we have been effected directly or indirectly by New Age thinking, which expresses the idea that if a person has an opinion, then it must be "true," and this in not in keeping with Orthodox ethos or praxis.

In my poor opinion, this comes down to the issue of people having "rights." The right to question, to doubt, to search. In many areas this is fine, but speaking only for myself, in matters of the faith, I have no doubts. I have enough temptations without adding any new ones. I am quite content with accepting what I have learned from my Orthodox teachers and the Fathers ( the 80%) and I do not wish to accept the authority of contemporary non-Christian and cynical scholars. You may call me reactionary, but I do not wish to have such rights.

By the way, being in the Russian Church, I would rather listen to a theologian like Fr. Michael Pomozansky who gives ample proof of the Tool Houses quoting many Fathers of the Church, but as a metaphor, rather than Bishop Lazarus's idea of Soul Sleep, which is a heresy. I cannot believe that people fall asleep at death, and will remain asleep until the Parousia.

All the best to you Fr. Vincent, and have a blessed Christmas Lent and please forgive me for having vexed you.

Fr. A.

[Fr Averky]

My Dear Friend Richard,

Thank you for your good-hearted words. The words of mine which have been quoted are in this thread, but you have to go to the archive to see the reason they are said. Being a conservative as I have always been even from my youth, I have never appreciated questioning and speculation in matters of the Faith. When I accepted Orthodoxy, I accepted it. I have never turned back, I have never taken my hands off the plow, and I have never questioned what I have been taught by those whose words I respect. Since the day of my Baptism, I have led my life trying to live my Orthodoxy, not questioning it.

For instance in regards to the conflict over the Toll Hoses, I had known Fr. Lev Puhalo, whose name is not Lev Puhalo, for many years, and as a layman questioned his stability, and I know that he has told several people that he denies the existence of Hell, but his opinion did not cause me to question what I had been taught to be true. I knew Fr. Seraphim when he was also a layman, and while I hold to the teaching, not Doctrine or Dogma of the Toll Houses, I was not happy that he chose to add a chapter to his book "Orthodoxy And The Religion of the Future defending his positon in refutation of attacks by Lev Puhalo, because it was neither appropriate nor monastic, and I told him so myself in a letter.

On other message boards, such discussions are all too familiar, and with the rare exception of rough moments, especially those brought on by those aptly described by you, the Orthodox members on this forum try to be harmonious and of one mind in their acceptance and defence of Orthodox teaching, and that is the sound basis and intention of Monachos. I would further venture to say that some of those who were "trolling" were quite surprized by the oneness of mind and the firm wall of defense they ran into, seeing that the Orthodox as one person acting in defense of the Church. And as I have said to you many times before, dear Richard, you are the best Orthodox non-Orthodox Christian I know!

My love in Christ. to you!

Unworthily yours,

Hieromonk Averky

[Matthew Panchisin]

Dear Father Deacon Vincent,

Welcome to Monachos community. Those of us who are not ordained nor anywhere near the point of being able to determine the alleged and perceived 20% of the God-illumined Orthodox fathers alleged probable incorrectness find many people here dear and helpful. One of the most important things I learned from the venerable fathers the hard way, was not to trust my thoughts all of the time.

I disagree with your quote.

If we tell Orthodox Christians to accept everything the Church teaches you, without checking to see if it is actually true, then we are taking upon ourselves very cultish tendencies.

I find it spiritually beneficial to trust what the Orthodox Church teaches, trying to embrace her just as a child trusts a most wise loving mother.

The issues of what to accept as Orthodox have been addressed and resolved. Should new matters require the attention of the Orthodox Church, I trust they will be addressed accordingly.

I have read and tried to put into practice the advice that Father Averky had mentioned regarding the matter you commented on and others as well. As such

I agree with Father Averky's quote.

We Orthodox have the fullness of the Truth, so please, do not trouble yourselves with such questions.

His apparent firm words, which convey traditional Orthodox Christian tendencies, have brought me some peace on several occasions. I recall a private email I sent to Father Averky recently regarding our Church and the Moscow Patriarch, regarding several things. Father Averky's advice and spelling at the time seemed very wrong, harsh and stern. In short Don't involve yourself or trouble our Archbishop with such concerns, his cross is heavy enough. Trust in those that God has placed to take care of such matters. Well he was right. It wasn't my responsibility. I'm no longer disturbing our older Archbishop and have dismissed the matters in my mind and have found peace from his words. And for that I am grateful to God. His spelling, Oh well it's legible.

There is an old saying among journalist ("If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.")

There is an older saying among the fathers, God willing and our willing. "Love."

In Christ,

Matthew P.


Dear Richard,

You can now use the search button in the upper right hand corner to search various post by keyword and other criteria. If you read from the top of this thread you will find the context that Father Deacon Vincent was referring to it seems.

[Waldemar]

Dcn. Vincent wrote:As a former Charismatic, we were always accused of being "anti-intellectual".

Dear Father Deacon Vincent,

Have these accusers followed you even into the Orthodox Church?

[Owen Jones]

God demands that we give a good accounting of our faith. I do not believe that Orthodoxy requires a "blind faith" as is required with certain "fundamentalisms" but rather an illumined faith and an informed faith and, with apologies, to what Aquinas called a "formed" faith. A faith that does not dig and struggle with the meaning of things, and makes no effort to understand, can be, for some people, not all people, but some people, can be a dead faith. I have great respect for a simple, peasant faith that simply relies on the rituals of the Church as the path to righteousness, but the Church must always have people who struggle, dig, and, yes, argue to some extent over what things mean, and therefore, not always take at face value what they are told. It really depends on the spirit and the tone of the inquiry. Even then, an inquiry that is initially critical and skeptical, can end up leading to something good. There is the story of an Oxford Don who was a classics scholar who was asked to do a New Testament translation for, I think, the Penguin Classics. He started out as a non-believer and ended up a believer, because, as he said, "it rings true." So whatever leads us to faith, regardless of how we start out, God blesses.

What if a priest is confronted with a man in his parish who says, Father, I just can't believe in God. Is the priest to say, "you are wrong?" Or is he to respond with love, and say, "yes, many people say this. On the other hand, others have said....." as a means of creating a dialogue, between himself and his flock, between man and God. If we shut down any dialogue at all, then, indeed, I think we have sunk to the level of cultishness.

I personally think, because Patristic theology is so foreign to our present cultural background, that one of the best ways to prepare onself to understand theology is to study Euclid first. By just jumping into Patristic theology, we impose our objectivist certitudes on the text, and we violate the spirit of the text. No amount of prayer alone is likely to illumine or minds to the Patristic perspective on things, especially if I am prayer from a modernist perspective with is frought with all of the theological and philosophical heresies rampant in modernism, such as voluntarism and nominalism. There is, in a sense, only one prayer and that is the prayer of God's creation, that is struggling and groaning...Not just "my prayer." But in modernity, it is always just "my prayer" or "me, me, me..." In Orthodoxy it is always "our prayer."

It depends on the person and "where he is" so to speak, existentially, and it takes spiritual insight to lead and assist. So for one person, the spiritual instruction might be, "put down all of the theology books because you have become so obssessed with theology that you are not aware that God's creatures are all around you. They are God's theology -- pay attention to them for a change. For another man, the advice should be, do not rely on my instruction only but check out what St. Athanasius really says for yourself.

[Daniel Jeandet]

If I may be so bold, I suggest we should question everything the Church and the Fathers teach by trying them and seeing if they work.

The only way to know if the modern scholars are incorrect is by ignoring them, because if they deny the power of the Churches teachings they predict the same results for both paths, that is, no results except a head full of conjecture.

I hope that makes sense.

[Vincent Lehr]

Dear Everyone (that should cover all the bases)
:-)

It seems I am causing offense and disruption in the minds of some people on this list, and for that I am truly sorry. Here I am, a newbie in your midst, and already being contankerous! What fools we can sometimes be.

Alright, I will sit back, read a little more, and listen to those who have been here much longer than I.

I've also noticed that there is also a time delay in the postings. When I gave my first response to Richard, it took about 12 hours before it was posted. By then there were three other postings before my response.

Dcn. Vincent

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Fr. Dcn. Vincent,

Welcome to the Forum, belatedly, and of course no need to apologize to me.

I run into the same attitude you do, in all the venues you mention, plus my own conservative Missour Synod Lutheranism (LC-MS) (dont start!
:-), yes, you're in the right place, this is an Orthodox forum!)

I had a good ex-LC-MS professor who taught the duty of modernity is to be critical. Of course there's a great fear of being critical (or criticized) among the shepherds of the church, the fear of loosing the rebellious. For those of us pressing "further in, further up" however, the critique is going the opposite way.

Far be it from us to defend a flat, much less stationary earth. If Orthodoxy is truly as it says it (she?) is, right religion based on spiritually factual and testable experience of the One True God (in Christ, etc.), then of course it is testable, and to be tested. It will stand the test or it isn't Orthodox (IMO).

Yours,

Richard

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Fr. Dcn,

Not offended, Father, just straightened a bit (at least, speaking for myself). We do try to be careful for one another.

And yes, that time delay we owe to Matthew who is our "keeper of the flame," i.e., to keep any flaming out -- its our temporary penance for an earlier, more "robust" time. Those trolls and all, you see.

But stay, now that you're in, the water's fine and we love you.

Richard

[Matthew Panchisin]

Dear Daniel,


What you have suggested makes no sense to me. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your words and you could explain it better.

Your quote

If I may be so bold, I suggest we should question everything the Church and the Fathers teach by trying them and seeing if they work.

Your suggestion that we intentionally embrace the spirit of disobedience by questioning everything that the Church and the Fathers teach by trying them and seeing if they work would automatically preclude us from acquiring the virtue of obedience and other virtues as well. You cannot learn from the Church and the fathers through false premise of disobedience. You cannot love by hating and you cannot put out living water with fire. I fear that if anyone habitually pursued that sort of a notion that they may find themselves in a place much worse than no results except a head full of conjecture. I can assure you there would be many much worse results. What the Orthodox Church and the Fathers teach will take a lifetime of patience and struggle. Since these issues are matters of salvation I think it very important that we listen to our spiritual fathers and don’t try or suggest such things ourselves. And I can further assure you this conclusion is not a matter of blind obedience or conjecture.



Dear Father Deacon Vincent & Owen,

Irrespective of it’s stage and degree of application, the spirit of science is in of it’s self finite by means of it’s adjustable foundation of scientific proof. Like many philosophers it does not confess Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to be the Son of God. Albert Einstein’s ultimate limited conclusion regarding the created universe was that “Not only is the universe greater than we know it is great than we can know.” As such it cannot even to begin to approach the uncreated. Utilizing modern science as a contributing factor in matters of faith leaves that faith subject to reinterpretation and innovation. I would tend to think in the realm of the transcendence of space and time science is reconfigured since it like all things is subject to Gods will. Perhaps even Sir Isaac Newton may have found himself at escatological odds.

I hope that my words have not caused anyone any offense.

In Christ,

Matthew P.

[Matthew Panchisin]

Should read:


"Not only is the universe greater than we know, it is greater than we can know.”

Matthew P.

[Herman Blaydoe]

I suspect, in all this, that the spirit of inquiry makes the difference. Faith is a matter of trust, and has to be established to some degree. Some require less evidence than others. "Once bitten, twice shy" comes to mind here. When I first approached Orthodoxy, I questioned and challenged at every opportunity. But at some point, I began to trust what Holy Orthodoxy taught, and if I did not quite understand or know EVERYTHING, I have come to the point where I firmly believe and TRUST that the answer is attainable through the Church, whether or not I, personally, have gotten there quite yet.

We have all had our disillusionments, disappointments, where what we thought was TRUE turned out not to be. The Holy Apostle Paul teaches us to TEST ALL THINGS to see if they are from the Lord. But at some point, we can stop testing, because we trust and further testing is unnecessary. That point is different for each of us, but we can go overboard. One beautiful prayer to the Holy Theotokos asks her to deliver us from our own vain reasonings.

WHY are we testing something? To see if it is really true? Just because it is fun to pick it apart and examine the parts? To gain a deeper understanding? Or perhaps simply because we don't want to have to deal with it, hoping it to be false?

Sometimes WHY we do something is more important than WHAT we do. If challenging God and wrestling with angels leads to a greater personal Faith, then perhaps it can be a good thing. But if it causes our brothers and sisters to stumble, perhaps we should reexamine what we are doing AND why.

Just some simple thoughts.

Herman

[Owen Jones]

I don't think we should ever stop testing, since what we believe is right and true might be nothing more than our own ego.

[Daniel Jeandet]

Matthew, your right, I didnt really say that very well. Trying to sound clever again.

I just meant that there is a middle way between outright rebelion and disobedience, and an unquestioned acceptence of Orthodox doctrine that goes no further than mental assent and becomes an end in istelf. The second can easily lead to the first I have found. Disobedience does not mean you do not agree with what the Church teaches or what you Father has instructed you, it just means you dont act on it.

In other words, without putting into practise the words of our teachers, they resemble the fundamentalist deadness of some types of protestant letter worship. The question we might ask could be "if I only follow this authentic teaching, I will uncover the image of God within myself"? Followed by the living experiment of a new life in Christ.

I was stupidly trying to say something clever and ended up obscuring the message because my intention was more to impress than to edify.

[Daniel Jeandet]

Good one Owen. I might also add that I dont think He will ever stop testing us, so we can let that ego go.

[Arsenios]

Hey, Daniel -

I, for one, understood you to mean to test everything by obedience, and not to be testy! We prove the faith in our obedience to Christ and the Church Fathers...

And you are right, you were a tad on the over-clever side of things, by saying that we question everything by doing what we are instructed... I am shoulder to shoulder with you on THAT kind of miscreance!

Plain and simple are challenges for us over-wordy types...

Arsenios

[Matthew Panchisin]

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for your post and I'm sorry if I stupidly misunderstood your words and over reacted. I could have simply just asked - What do you mean? I need to learn to be much more loving and patient. I don't know if you obscured the message as much as I misunderstood it apparently.

Dear Arsenios,

Thank you for conveying your understanding of what Daniel had written. I just learned quite a bit.

I have a hard time just trying to keep the fast, that alone should preclude me from biting off more than I can chew by commenting at all on obedience.

I'm reminded of Saint Basil telling us that because we didn't fast we fell from paradise.

Be at peace Daniel & Father Deacon Vincent and a blessed Nativity Fast to all.

In Christ,

Matthew P.

[Fr Averky]

Dear Friends,

Deacon Victor, I am not offended, but I went back to the archive, and feel that in the context of my post with which you started this part of the current thread, my words do make some sense, and the person who started the thread, Isaac David, tells me that to him it does.

My post speaks of particular instances of modern scholars, and John Curtis Dunn also expresses very well what I wanted to say, if you will go back to the archive.

While I appreciate Daniel's suggestion of testing the veracity of the writings of the Fathers by living what they write, for me, if only I was spiritually able to do so! I certainly agree with Owen when he says that to increase our knowledge we should study, and this can and does include Biblical History, Church history, and Biblical archeology, if done in the right spirit. This is true of any subject. Yet, for instance, one wishing to learn about Catholicism would not read an aricle about this subject written by a Baptist or Seventh day Adventist, by virtue of the fact that the view would be in light of the beliefs of those two groups. Thus, a person would seek a Roman Catholic source.

What I meant back in my original post was, as I have said, that I was speaking in particular of those secular and often non-Christian scholars who would try to disprove what we as Christians believe, thus we need not botther ourselves with their opinions. Only last night I was reading a book which is a translation of the writings of a man who lived during the terror of the early years of the Communist Sate in Russia. The son of a priest, he came to know many people like Paul Florovsky, Komiekov, and many holy Elders. He mentions that it is one thing to come upon an error in the writings of the Fathers or other spiritual writers, but it is quite another matter to actively search for them, and I would say that this is what troubles me-when people are trying to see as false what we have been taught is the Truth. This to me is not "questioning," but a form of spiritual sabotage.

As we Orthodox Christians know, one of the great bishop saints who lived in the 20th Century is St. Nektarios of Pentapolis, or more commonly, of Aegina. About twenty yers ago, a nun in Greece came upon something he had written which contains an error. Sounding the alarm, she wrote a much distributed article in which she claimed to have found the wonder-working bishop guilty of Heresy! People like the followers of Panteleimon in Boston began to have less regard for him, as they did of St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain because of some of his writings that they consider to be in error. We know that St. Cyril of alexandria fell into error in some of his ideas, but he is still regarded as a Father of the Church. St.Osios of Cordoba weakened and fell into heresy, but he returned and is honored as a saint of the Church, and there are others we could cite.

Again, while I am not talking about "Blind" belief, I find that I must aver to what Waldemar has so well said, I TRUST what the Church teaches. This is a matter which has been discussed before; that true spiritual knowledge and the true spiritual ife cannot be gained by just the reading of books or by consideratons of the intellect as is done in the West-the true spiritual life is attained in the heart by humility, prayer, tears, and Fasting. As we know when Christ's disciples attempted to cast out demons, but could not, He said, "O you of little faith, this can only be done by prayer and fasting." He never did say anything about reading or studying or questioning, in fact He rebuked the Pharisees for their "knowledge," but He did talk about repenting, humility, fasting and praying.

As long as we continue to search for God in the mind, we will never find Him, and that is a very difficult lesson to learn, especially for converts -it does not entail study or questioning, but struggle and without fear opening our hearts.

In Christ,

Fr. A.

[Owen Jones]

One must, of course, at some crucial point, put one's trust in the Church's teachings, or else one has no business being there. That trust in this day and age is not always very easy to build, since we live in an age of betrayal of just about anything of value. So why trust Orthodoxy instead of what Roman Catholics say (close, but no cigar) or Episcopalians, or Baptists or Mormons? I remember a conversation I had with an Arab cab driver many years ago in Washington D.C. He was raised a Muslim and quit because he did some reading on his own and discovered that Muhammed was a really bad man. So how can you build a religion around a really bad man? I think, if I am not mistaken, that Orthodoxy rests on this fundamental principle. That the only reason that we are expected to believe in the Church is because there is evidence of that goodness in its Apostolic Witness. There is proof of the pudding, as the English would say. But then, you might say that Billy Graham is a good man. That is when you have to have some intellectual discernment, and realize that he is teaching a fraud that many good men over a long period of time warned us against. So we should not put all of our faith in one man's opinion. It is the overwhelming body of the faith as represented by a succession of good men who embody the Gospel (Heb 11)

It's difficult to find such people today and so in some sense we must trust the written record. It's hard to imagine that over a thousand years a succession of people were able to perpetrate a fraud.

[Waldemar]

I don't think it does much good to test the seaworthiness of the Ark of Salvation by prying up its planks while at sea.

[Vincent Lehr]

Owen wrote:


"It's hard to imagine that over a thousand years a succession of people were able to perpetrate a fraud."

Thanks for the good post, Owen (and Fr. A). Regarding the above quote, however, it's not difficult to imagine such a thing happening at all when one considers Islam, Hinduism, and many of the other "ancient" religions.

Josh McDowell, in his book, "Evidence That Demands a Verdict," cites the martydoms of Christians as evidence that Christianity is true. He says that people would not be willing to die for falsehood. The first time I read that, I thought, "What about the Muslims?" They are certainly giving their lives for what they percieve as truth, but it doesn't necessarily make Islam true.

Dcn. Vincent

[Owen Jones]

It's not the martyrdom per se but the manner in which people approached their martyrdom. Their spirit. It's a completely different spirit. What God does in Christianity it seems to me is unique in that he willingly becomes powerless. That is the basic foundation of the Christian life. Willingly becoming powerless. And the transformation that takes place, which others can observe and evaluate. So, yes, any apologetic statement requires further digging.

[Waldemar]

Dcn. Vincent,

Father Averky wrote:

As long as we continue to search for God in the mind, we will never find Him

I must agree with this statement as well as to express my fears for you, especially if in your mindful search, you are relying on the mindless apologetics of one non-Orthodox Christian Josh McDowell to defend the integrity of the Orthodox Faith.

From what you have posted, it appears that the chink in your armor is that part of you that still clings to your former confession: &#34;As a former Charismatic, <u>we</u>...Josh McDowell...he says.&#34; Forgive my rudeness, but who cares what &#34;Josh&#34; says? &#40; Boy does that bring back memories. I remember my old Campus Crusade friends with their, &#34;Josh says&#34; this and &#34;Josh says&#34; that. Even back then, the Josh cult inspired uncharitable thoughts on my part!&#41;

It looks to me like the accuser has parasitically latched onto that part. Why not make a clean break? If thine charismatic evangelical Protestantism offend thee, cut it off!

&#34;Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.&#34;

&#40;Dear Matthew Steenberg, I will now cease and desist from e-P bashing. E-Pism as well as my reflexive counters have snuck up on me again. Forgive me.&#41;

[Owen Jones]

"As long as we continue to search for God in the mind, we will never find Him."

Sorry, but this smacks of heresy. God is all in all. If He is not present in my mind, then I am in big trouble. We all are. Precisely where are we to search for Him, if not in the mind? In Heaven?

[Waldemar]

Jeremiah 29
13 And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

[M.C. Steenberg]

I peice together here a chain of quotations from the above:


"As long as we continue to search for God in the mind, we will never find Him." [...] Sorry, but this smacks of heresy. God is all in all. If He is not present in my mind, then I am in big trouble. We all are. Precisely where are we to search for Him, if not in the mind? In Heaven?

Perhaps both comments offer a bit of play on extremes. Certainly Fr Averky did not mean to suggest that the search for God in the mind is of itself wholly wrong, but rather that a search for God solely by and in the mind will never be wholly successful, since God is not merely an intellectual concept or principle. And surely Owen, you do not mean to suggest to limit God to the mind, as is well clear from your many other posts. You are both pointing out the extremes and limits of a defition of faith that lies in the middle.

INXC, Matthew

[Rebecca]

Perhaps randomly, but in thinking about the role reason plays in our salvation, I&#39;m reminded of the hymn from Holy Week..The Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night..in particular the phrase that says &#34;be watchful&#34;..the Greek word is something like &#34;grigora&#34; &#40;pardon poor phonetics&#41;.

[Matthew Panchisin]

Dear Owen and Father Deacon Vincent,

In the Orthodox &#34;Study&#34; Bible in the footnotes of page 100 referencing Mark 6:52 you will find The knowledge of Christ is a matter of the heart When our hearts are illumined by God, they become the seat of divine presence, grace and knowledge. In all the ascetic writings of the Orthodox Church, the heart is known as the &#34;seat of knowledge.&#34;

Heiromonk Averky&#39;s words in context:
As long as we continue to search for God in the mind, we will never find Him, and that is a very difficult lesson to learn, especially for converts -it does not entail study or questioning, but struggle and without fear opening our hearts.


In Christ,

Matthew P.

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Owen adn Matthew,

The problem is in the definition one uses of &#34;mind.&#34; If by mind, one speaks of the enlightened &#40;as opposed to darkened&#41; nous, then of course that is where God is found, the Fathers teach, but if by mind one &#40;such as our extremely practical Father Averky&#41; means, scholasitic interegation and gnostification, then of course, God cannot be found in the human understanding, as this would be tantamount to the darkened nous.

And might I add that it is through such practical application that monks such as Fr. A espouse is precisely the action of purifying or participating in the clarification or enlightenment of this nous? At least, that&#39;s how I read Vlachos.

Richard

[Owen Jones]

Allow me to beat the horse, kill it, and then I promise I&#39;ll dismount.

Anything, of course, can lead us astray. Too much emphasis on feeling, or on intellect, or will. Vlachos, in the Patristic tradition, would say that all of the parts, including the physical body, have to work in concert and obedience. Ultimately to God, of course, and His commandments, but the highest order of Being is intellect, in the classical sense, or mind, if you will, which is not simply a brain function, and which the Fathers located with the physical organ of the heart, not the brain. And none of the Fathers, to my knowledge, reduced God to love, as is so common among Christians today, but rather understood God in some sense as pure intellect.

Whether the seat of the intellect in the heart is is a metaphor or a conceit, or biologically true is up for grabs. But the larger point is that Mind has to govern our passion and will, and intellect is governed by God&#39;s mind. So a proper understanding of Mind and its relations would seem to be pretty important. So by saying that we find God in our minds, I would qualify by saying that God is found in Mind, of which my individual mind is a contingent reality. I have all of the knowledge of God in my mind, because of the way God created me, to know everything to know about God, Man and the proper relations, and what I must do is to purify my mind of evil or distracting thoughts in order for the purity of intellect to shine and I will know what I need to know about what and who I am, which is really the point afterall -- to have a proper understanding of who we are. The Fathers argue that we do not begin with God to get to God but with the things that He has made.

[Daniel Jeandet]

The mind is sanctified by the grace given to the humble, broken heart. Ultimately, so is the body, that is why there are relics. But you might say we dont look for God with your body do we? Then why pray with the lips and do prostrations? Why fast? Because everything goes together, but the body and reason might steer you wrong until they are subject to the heart, whose grace filled state burns up the protests of the limited reason or the lazy flesh. Then those servants &#40;body and reason&#41; of the illumined intellect have only Godly acts and thoughts.

We love to divide and categorise, but our quest is for wholeness, union, away from fragmentation. Unraveling complexity is a less and and less complex task as long as it proceeds according to Gods will.

Space and time.

[Waldemar]

Behold the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching...

Thanks Rebecca!


Faith And Science In Orthodox Gnosiology and Methodology
by George Metallinos

http://www.romanity.org/mir/me01en.htm

The two types of knowledge

It is the Orthodox Tradition that puts and end to this theoretical collision within the field of gnosiology. It does so by differentiating the two types of knowledge and of wisdom:

1&#41; divine or that which &#34;from above&#34; and
2&#41; secular &#40;thyrathen&#41; or lower.

The first knowledge is supernatural and the second is natural. This corresponds to the clear distinction between the Uncreated and the created, between God and creation. These two types of learning require two methods of learning.

The method of divine wisdom-knowledge is the communion of man with the Uncreated through the heart. It is accomplished through the presence of the Uncreated energy of God in man&#39;s heart.

The method of secular wisdom-knowledge is science, it is accomplished by exercising the intellectual/ logical power of man. Orthodoxy establishes a clear hierarchy in the two types of knowledge and their methods.

The method of supernatural gnosiology, in the Orthodox Tradition, is called hesychasm and is identified with watchfulness and purification &#40;nepsis and katharsis&#41; of the heart. Hesychasm is identified with Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, patristically speaking, is inconceivable outside its hesychastic practice. Hesychasm in its essence, is the ascetic-curative practice of cleansing the heart of passions to rekindle the noetic faculty within the heart.

It must be noted at this point, that the method of hesychasm as a curative practice is also scientific and practical. Therefore, theology, under proper conditions, belongs to the practical sciences.

Theology&#39;s academic classification among the theoretical sciences or arts began in the 12th century in the west and is due to the shift of theology into metaphysics. Therefore, those in the East who condemn our own theology, demonstrate their Westernization, since they, essentially, condemn and reject a disfigured caricature of what they regard as theology.

But what is the noetic function? In the Holy Scriptures there is, already, the distinction between the spirit of man &#40;his nous&#41; and the intellect &#40;the logos or mind&#41;. The spirit of man in patristics is called nous to distinguish it from the Holy Spirit. The spirit, the nous, is the eye of the soul &#40;see Matt. 6:22&#41;.

The noetic faculty is called the function of the nous within the heart and is the spiritual function of the heart, its parallel function is the heart as the organ that pumps the blood throughout our bodies.

[Matthew Panchisin]

Is anybody mindful of or know the Aramaic, English, Greek or Russian translation of the word ouch!

I hear you Priestmonk Averky, your coming in loud and clear over here. Keep praying for us.

In Christ,

Matthew P.

[Rebecca]

And none of the Fathers, to my knowledge, reduced God to love, as is so common among Christians today

I don&#39;t think it&#39;s inappropriate &#40;at least I hope not&#41; to strive against such a reduction &#40;and by &#34;reduction&#34; I assume you use the word in the context of limitation, circumscription, saying &#34;something is this and no more&#34;&#41; which I also have seen &#34;out there&#34; in televangelist land and other places that are less of a caricature.

but rather understood God in some sense as pure intellect.

But God does demonstrate His love, the depth and breadth of which so far exceeds the human capacity to want or need. The earth quakes the sun darkens at the expression of His love. I&#39;m pretty sure, from your posts, that you agree with this so I&#39;m not trying to kick the poor lifeless horse &#60;grin&#62;, just perhaps adding a little texture to discussion &#40;adding another dimension if you will..realizing that dimension may already be there but tacitly&#41; http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/happy.gif

[Fr Averky]

Owen,

With all respect. there is a saying among the Russians: &#34;Anglicans rarely truly truly convert, but see Orthodoxy as a change of venue.&#34; This is an area in which we shall never agree, for about six weeks ago you stated that Christianity is best sought and found through philosophy. When I asked you why then does it say in the Akathist to the Mother of God, &#34;Rejoice thous who shows the philosophers to be fools?&#39; As usual, you would not deign to answer me, but now you say that my words &#34;smack of heresy.&#34; How so, Owen?

I would be convinced if you could show me any place, either in the Holy Gospels, the Epistles, or the writings of the Fathers that indicate that God is to be found in the mind.

St. Theophan the Recluse says, &#34;How can you find God in the mind, that rag market? To find Him, you must descend to the heart, and there you will find Him.&#34;

Owen, we Orthodox do not have the &#34;Prayer of the Mind, we have the &#34;Prayer of the Heart.&#34; You know, I have always tried to be supportive of you acknowledging when your words or thoughts have been correct or wise, but if you think that my words are not in keeping with what the Orthodox Church teaches, then you and I do not belong to the same Church. I cannot be so proud as to claim that &#34;I and my family are the only sound Orthodox Christians I know.&#34; I make bold to say that if you think God is in the mind, then have you truly found Him? How does a person whose heart is closed, especially to his brother, find God? Please tell me.

You may make any statement you wish, but I cannot accept your words; I need to have something from Scripture or the Fathers to prove your opinion to me. I try to be loving to you, yet you continue to insult me-but God bless you, Owen, God bless you.

In his book, &#39;The Mind of the Orthodox Church,&#34; Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos says,

&#34;The philosopher Barlaam maintained that the truth is a single and was given to mankind by God through both the philosophers and the prophets. And he even went so far as to maintain that the experience of the philosophers was superior to that of the Prophets and Apostles.St. Gregory Palamas made clear the distinction between the two wisdoms and the two knowledges. There is human wisdom and the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God is revealed to the saints, irrespective of their cognitive power. Even the most illiterate can achieve participation in the deifying energy of God. Thus, the truth is a revelation of God to man, a manifistation.&#34;

In his book&#34;Orthodox Psychotherapy,&#34; Metropolitamn Hierotheos says:

&#34;The salvation of the soul is not the stripping off of something, but the putting on of Christ. It is not a negative state, but positive, chiefly communion and union with Christ. This communion takes place primarly in the heart. Therefore, to attain salvation is mainly to find the heart. When God grants us to find our heart, we are walking the path of salvation. Abba Pambo&#39;s words are characteristic: &#34;To have a heart means to find one&#39;s heart, within which one will be guided by God.&#34;

St. Mark the Ascetic, interpreting the Lord&#39;s words: &#34;The kingdom of God is within you&#40; Luke 17, 21&#41; says,: &#34;It is necessary in the first place to have the grace of the Holy Spirit energising the heart and so, in proportion to this energising, to enter into the kingdom of heaven.&#34; Therefore, many Fathers regard it as essential to find the place of the heart, which is energised by the uncreated grace of God, because then the Christian has God as his teacher and is safely directed by the Holy Spirit.&#34;

And Met. Philotheos states further: &#34;When Holy Scripture and the Fathers speak of the heart they mean the mataphysical &#40;spiritual&#41; heart, but also the bodily heart. The heart is both the bodily organ and the center of our being, in which we have communion and union with God. These two meanings of the heart meet at a point but at the same time they are differentiated.

St. Ambrose of Milan says; &#34;Faith s the mother of a good will.&#34; On this, St. Tikhon of Zadonsk comments: &#34; Therefore, where there is no well-intentioned heart, there is also no faith.&#34;

St. Tikhon also says:
&#34;All outwardness without inwardness is nothing. Whatever is not inside the heart does not exist in actual fact. Virtue is not virtue when it is not within the heart. Therefore, correct your heart, and you shall be good and and your outward deeds will be good, for the inward is the beginning of the outward.&#34;

&#34;And thus pure streams flow from a spring when the source itself is pure. Likewise, good works come forth from the heart when the heart is good, but there cannot be good works without a good heart, just as from a putrid and noisome spring nothing else can flow but putrid and noisome water.

Therefore correct your heart and will and you shall be good, you shall be a true Christian, you shall be a new ceature. For all good or evil is from the will and from the heart. When the will and heart are good, then the whole man is good.&#34;

In the book &#34;Risen Indeed,&#34; Father Michael Bordeux quotes words from Anatoli Levitin who so beautifilly descfribes the soul finding God:

&#34;In my soul, the process of inner maturing for my new life was completed in a way which is beyond understanding. I felt the invisible hand of the Great Artist drawing heavenly images in my heart, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, images which drew me towards a new life. My heart was filled with the hidden action of God&#39;s grace. And from here I heard the wonderful sounds of heavenly harmony. From here the stern voice of denunciation sounded, pointing to my unworthines and sinfulness. Here in my heart a fiece struggle began between the new and old man. Mysterious states, which I had never experienced, took hold of my being. My reason was puzzled. &#39;What is happening to me?&#39; Often under the influence of passions my reason rebelled against these new things my heart was experiencing, inflicting blow after blow at my heart with lightening speed. But my poor heart, fighting and suffering, believed. In moments of exhaustion, it felt the mysterious power of grace flowing into it, transforming the bitterness of suffering into a source of unearthly joy. The Holy spirit, the Comforter Himself, revealed His power in weakness. Then my proud mind was humbled, recognizing the greatness of the spiritual world revealed to it.&#34;


What more can I add after such beautiful words? I understand that we have been given a mind, and of course, it should be used for study, for consideration, for the attaining of knowledge, but I could give another hundred quotes by many people who with consistency state God is found in the heart, and I do not believe them to be heretics. Please, Owen, do not wound me so, for we must help each other along the Path, not hinder. If you have not yet experienced that of which Levitin so beautfilly speaks, then I will pray most fervently that you will, and I do pray for you.

With love in Christ,

Fr. Averky

[Waldemar]

Dear Owen Jones,

You wrote: &#34;And none of the Fathers, to my knowledge, reduced God to love, as is so common among Christians today, but rather understood God in some sense as pure intellect.&#34;

When I read this, a few hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Here, St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote about the followers of Valentinius:

&#34;These hold that the knowledge of the unspeakable Greatness is itself perfect redemption. For since both defect and passion flowed from ignorance, the whole substance of what was thus formed is destroyed by knowledge; and therefore knowledge is the redemption of the inner man. This, however, is not of a corporeal nature, for the body is corruptible; nor is it animal, since the animal soul is the fruit of a defect, and is, as it were, the abode of the spirit. The redemption must therefore be of a spiritual nature; for they affirm that the inner and spiritual man is redeemed by means of knowledge, and that they, having acquired the knowledge of all things, stand thenceforth in need of nothing else. This, then, is the true redemption.&#34;

Against Heresies
Book 1
Chapter 21.4
http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-58.htm#P6172_1387452

Gnosticism comes to my mind when I hear &#34;pure intellect&#34; in reference to Christianity.

Which Fathers understood God in any sense &#34;as pure intellect?&#34;

[Fr Averky]

Dear Friends,

In my most recent post, if it makes it through, I left out some important words, which change the meaning: In regards to the &#34;conversion&#34; of Anglicans, it should say, &#34;There are some Anglicans...&#34; Please do not consider this an &#34;attack&#34; on former Anglicans, but at least in the Russian Church, we have had former Episcopalian clergy and many laity who clearly displayed those problems, and some even went so far as to say that they would &#34;teach these ethnics what Orthodoxy is really all about.&#34; It cannot be denied that Anglicanism covers an entire gamut, from High Church candles and incense to Charismatic to Clavinism, and everything in between. Thus, there is much more latitude as to what one must believe to be an Anglican. It was in this context that I made my remark. Of course, there are so many of us who have come from all Churches and who have become true sons and daughters of the Church. Forgive me if my words sounded intolerant, for they were no intended to be so. In my pride I was reacting to having been told that my words &#34;smack of heresy.&#34;

I can see where it is hard to express something and not be misunderstood; Matthew, I am sorry that you see my words as an &#34;extreme,&#34; for I said what I did, and then later clarified that while understanding the place of the &#34;mind&#34; in our existence, I maintain, as I have amply shown, that the Fathers say that God speaks to man through the heart. If that is &#34;extreme,&#34; I do not know what to say.

Fr. A.

[Owen Jones]

This is a generic post about Christian doctrine, but could be applied to how Orthodoxy &#34;looks&#34; at the Bible. I am posting, not in response to any specific post, but rather in support of the general position of every Orthodox person I know that the truth of experience and the truth of dogma must be related and not split in the way it appears to have been done in the &#34;West&#34; between an abstract, or over-intellectualized doctrinal position on the one hand, and what the Latin Catholic Church calls &#34;mysticism&#34; or what Protestants might refer to as feeling, or passion, or a variety of terms of personalized psychological states.

While we Orthodox make the claim that theology is experiential, we do often tend to want theological truth to take on a kind of separate existence in the form of &#34;eternal verities&#34; rather than engaging in the much more difficult task of connecting them to experience in a disciplined and ordered matter. Hence, we fall into the individualistic trap of adducing to our own &#34;personal&#34; experience the aura of dogmatic authority.

And then there is also the problem of the intellectual and experiential milieu, which, no matter how much we might reject intellectually, or dogmatically, we are still a part of. As the quote below argues, the contemporary cultural/intellectual milieu is characterized by mass alienation. So we should not &#34;project&#34; psychologically our own alienation onto the field of Christian dogma. Since the dogma is not derived from alienation but the experience of participation in God and His Creation.

So, at any rate, here&#39;s the quote: Comments&#34;

&#34;Professor Altizer, [Altizer was a British atheist who was quite popular in his day] if I understand him correctly, identifies `Christianity&#39; with the Christian dogma and is therefore inclined to attribute to my pursuit of `the mystery&#39; an originality which I must modestly decline. There were always Christian thinkers who recognized the difference between experiences of divine reality and the transformation of the insights engendered by the experience into doctrinal propositions. The tension between theologia mystica and theologia dogmatica goes as far back as the Patres...
&#34;As far as my own vocabulary is concerned, I am very conscious of not relying on the language of doctrine, but I am equally conscious of not going beyond the orbit of Christianity when I prefer the experiential symbol `divine reality&#39; to the God of the Creed...

&#34;Having brought the larger range of Christian thought to attention, I can now heartily agree with Professor Altizer in his attribution of a guilt to `Christianity.&#39; It is the guilt of Christian thinkers and Church leaders of having allowed the dogma to separate in the public consciousness of Western civilization from the experience of `the mystery&#39; on which its truth depends. The dogma develops as a socially and culturally necessary protection of insights experientially gained against false propositions; its development is secondary to the truth of experience. If its truth is pretended to be autonomous, its validity will come under attack in any situation of social crisis, when alienation becomes a mass phenomenon; the dogma will then be misunderstood as an `opinion&#39; which one can believe or not, and it will be opposed by counter-opinions which dogmatize the experience of alienated existence. The development of a nominalist and fideist conception of Christianity is the cultural disaster, with its origins in the late Middle Ages, that provokes the reaction of alienated existence in the dogmatic form of the ideologies, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The result is the state of deculturation with which we are all too familiar from our daily talks with students who are caught in the intellectual confusion of a debate that proceeds, not by recourse to experience, but by position and counter-position of opinion. Once truth has degenerated to the level of true doctrine, the return from orthodoxy to `the mystery&#39; is a process that appears to require as many centuries of effort as have gone into the destruction of intellectual and spiritual culture.&#34; [Voegelin, CW 12:293-295]

[Owen Jones]

There is a context to everything. In today&#39;s culture, there needs to be a recovery of reason wihtout which, just becoming a more loving person typically leads to all kinds of disorders. My understanding of Orthodoxy is that love is kind of the glue that binds the Trinity, and binds God to His Creation, and moves us to seek God, but that love has to be properly ordered and governed &#40;even within, or especially within the Trinity&#41; so that it does not seek the wrong object, and this governing capacity is pure intellect, which we are to approximate. If God is to be reduced to pure love, without any ordering principles attaached to that, then, I think it is fair to say that you end up with the kinds of problems that Paul was preaching against at Corinth. There is a principle of balance here, of course. Intellect without love is a problem. Love that is disordered is a problem.

But I think I am right in saying that Mind or Intellect in its pure form exists prior to anything else and that Creation is ordered according to the Divine Mind. God did not just will Creation arbitrarily, or whimsically, or out of what today we might call love as a kind of emotional feeling or sentiment of belonging. Surely love involves deep feeling in God&#39;s Creatures &#40;including the animal kingdom&#41; but it is also a scientific principle for the Fathers that is harmonious with the intellectual structure of things.

But today you have this lack of understanding of the meaning of Mind or Intellect. It is seen as a human function, a function of the brain, or some sociological phenomenon. That is why I believe that without a recovery of what the Fathers meant by reason, it is very difficult for true Orthodoxy to blossom. What you have is an Orthodoxy that is either striving to enter the modern world and adapt and be like the Episcopalians, or an Orthodoxy that is simply ritualistic and cultish with nothing to say about the nature of reality, of which we are all a part.

[Matthew Panchisin]

Owen&#39;s Quote

Sorry, but this smacks of heresy. God is all in all. If He is not present in
my mind, then I am in big trouble. We all are. Precisely where are we to
search for Him, if not in the mind? In Heaven?

Saint Silouan the Athonites Quote

&#34;Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.&#34;

http://www.philthompson.net/pages/about/silouan/

In Christ,

Matthew P.

[Rebecca]

some random comments/reflections/reactions...

While we Orthodox make the claim that theology is experiential,

&#34;the Lord is God and has revealed Himself to us&#34;...hymn sung during the morning prayers on Sunday before the Divine Liturgy.

we do often tend to want theological truth to take on a kind of separate existence in the form of &#34;eternal verities&#34;

&#34;I am the Way and the Truth and the Life&#34;

rather than engaging in the much more difficult task of connecting them to experience in a disciplined and ordered matter.

In the context of what the Saints have said, the above appears to be nonsensical; as I understand it the Saints talk about the experience being that of communion with the Lord...we are partaking of Him. He is Truth. It&#39;s already related by definition.

Now, if you were speaking of some other type of &#34;experience&#34; &#40;and imo, it&#39;s ok to talk about various other experiences&#41; then I could understand the suggestion for the above task, but for the sake of clarity of discussion I think it&#39;s worth pointing out that such other type of experience wouldn&#39;t be what the Orthodox Saints speak of.

Hence, we fall into the individualistic trap of adducing to our own &#34;personal&#34; experience the aura of dogmatic authority.

This is actually kind of interesting, if I can go off on a bit of a tangent...unless my memory is muddled &#40;which is always likely&#41; one of the differences between the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox Church is that the Orthodox church says that God does directly communicate with people, without requiring the intervention/mediation of a priest. Whereas the RC church says that the God only communicates with people through a clergy. It&#39;s interesting though that Orthodoxy places liturgical worship at the center of our lives. I remember getting into a discussion with my dad about truth and he very emphatically told me that if you want to find truth go to the Liturgy, that&#39;s where Truth is. I&#39;m pretty sure he was referring to Holy Communion with God being our way of finding Truth.

Again, I&#39;m not to condemning the gift that God gave us in the ability to think, just responding to above specific comments...

Best Regards and hoping you&#39;re having a peaceful and pleasant week...

[Fr Averky]

Dear Friends,

I find that somehow this thread has evolved into a discussion as to whether or not God is &#34;pure intellect,&#34; or &#34;pure love.&#34; For myself, I have not in any way desired to posture that God is pure love, but have, in response to the posts of some, said that finding God does not take place in the intellect through philisophical considerations or intellectual reasoning, but through the soul&#39;s reaction to God&#39;s love in the heart; that the heart is the place that the Fathers, both ancient and more recent, consistenly indicate that God is to be found.

It goes wiothout saying that God invested us with an intellect, and that intellect is at its very best when it is used and developed in the seeking of God. However, there comes that time when that intellectual reasoning and the knowledge that a man has gained, then must begin to descend into the heart, where the knowledge of the mind will enjoy its greatest reward, the seeking and finding of God. From this point on, it then is not a matter of &#34;pure&#34; love at all, but a gradual warming of the heart as the flame of divine love is ignioted in the soul. As for me, I cannot but accept &#34;the God of the Creed.&#34;

This conversation on the present level can but reach a dead end if there are thoughts and opinions which are being offered which are not Orthodox in either content or in attitude. As I have mentioned before, I am not an intellectual, and I cannot quote any number of atheistic philosophers or educators, being limited, I can only rely upon those Fathers whom I have already quoted, and others. Again, I have not myself that God is &#34;prelove,&#34; and I for one do not believe in the &#34;Universal Love&#34; of which ecumenists speak. To me, all Truth is the Orthodox Chuirch. I have spent more than half of my life struggling to have but a taste of that Love which grows in the heart, and while I have had but brief experiences, it is my inspiration. We living in the 21st Century have as one of our greatests challenges the inability to reach our own heart, and so we spend our lives experiencing that emptiness which no excercise of the mind or intellect can ever or will ever fill.

We need to read and reread the Holy Gospels and the Epistles, for in them will we see the deceptively simple lesson to be found there. Let us all pray that one day that having ears, we will finally truly hear, and having eyes, we will finally truly see, for now we stumble and grope our way through lives frought with trials and sorrows which could handily be avoided if only we could humble ourserlves and cry out, &#34;O Lord I believe, heal thou my unbelief.&#34;

In my unlearned simplicity, I cannot seek or find Truth in philosophy or in my poor limited intelledct; I can only beg God to melt my cold heart so that I can open the door and invite Him in.

Fr. A.

[Isaac David]

Dear Fr. Averky

Father, Bless!

Thank you for those timely quotations. I am too often enthralled by philosophical discussions - but I am never moved by them as by such sweet words reminding us of heavenly truth.

Glory to Jesus Christ our God!

Isaac David

[Owen Jones]

But the classical Christian &#40;Orthodox&#41; understanding of intellect is far more than just reasoning and thinking about things. It is more primal than that. It is God&#39;s presence in the things He has made, at the level of intellible structures of reality, that are iconic of God&#39;s Mind or Intellect. So the world is not constructed by some different order. It follows the same &#34;rules&#34; if you will that God Himself abides by. God cannot be divided against Himself. He is One &#34;nature,&#34; not several natures at war with themselves. And His Creation is a reflection of that One &#34;nature,&#34; albeit in an obscured and sometimes corrupted presentation. So when Orthodoxy speaks of intellect, it is not speaking of some self-contained human reasoning or thinking process, but rather the locus of Divine Presence in the created world that operates and functions according to an intelligible structure. This is opposed, by the Fathers, not in a dualistic way, what they called sensible reality, which is the way in which things impinge on our consciousness to produce passionate states. What most people today mean by intellect, or intelligence, the Fathers would say is not intellect at work at all, but rather sensate functions. There is only one intellect and that is divine intellect. There is no personal intellect as such, only our participation in the Divine Intellect to the extent that is possible while still in a physical body. So the telos for an Orthodox Christian is to participate fully in the divine intellect &#40;which is what illumination is really all about&#41; and that participation is both caused by, motivated by, and achieved by various forms of Love. And these forms of love is distinct from what the Fathers refer to as the passions, while our definition of love today would most likely be described by the Fathers as a confused, disordered, passionate state that is profoundly self-oriented. What the Fathers meant by love is a rational detachment from sensate things, the movement of our attention from such things to transcendent reality, and the force that moves us in that direction. It is combined with deep feeling, but the deep feeling itself is not Love.

[Owen Jones]

Well, I&#39;m not talking about &#34;some other type of experience&#34; Rebecca. So I&#39;m not sure what specifically is nonsensical about what I said.

As Peter says, we are to be partakers of the divine nature. Through communion, yes, and in all that we say and do. So when Our Master says, &#34;I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light,&#34; truth is not some abstraction, some eternal verity, but something very concrete that is embodied and lived. In another words, Truth means living the way Christ lived. Now, one can argue that God is truth, and that that is what this statement really means. And of course, that would be true. However, it might surprise people to learn that the Greek Patristic position is that God is not an existing thing. That we cannot posit &#34;existence&#34; to God. God is Beyond. God is &#34;I am.&#34; All things exist in God. Existence is a contingent reality for the Fathers, by definition. Which is why it is possible for a saint to say that it is possible to &#34;relapse into a state of non-existence.&#34; And since God is not a contingent reality we cannot impute existence to God, otherwise we would also have to admit that he could non-exist. The same with all other categories, such as Being, which have no value apart from their polar opposite. So the Fathers speak of God, not as Being, or pure Being, certainly not as &#34;a&#34; Being &#40;whether with caps or not&#41; but &#34;Beyond Being.&#34;
. And so Truth for the Fathers is something that has no separate existence of its own, but exists in that intermediate state or realm in between man and God as we &#34;move&#34; toward Him. That is the realm in which the liturgy takes place. A realm that is in between the world and heaven, in between time and timelessness. It is a &#34;space&#34; in which time becomes relative. It is a time in which &#34;space&#34; becomes expanded to include the cosmos and that which transcends space. In our desire to objectivize God and truth and things like communion, all of this may sound a little too fuzzy and muddle-headed. But reality is not something that is so easily objectified. And clearly, the Fathers did not treat God as an objectifiable object. Nor are we a &#34;knowing subject.&#34; That comes in much later with Aquinas. Who then has to resort to elaborate &#34;proofs&#34; of the existence of God and what is knowable and unknowable.

Regarding experience, I have a right to have one, and God has a right to reveal Himself however he chooses. The problem comes in with the interpretation of the experience. There was a big battle over the Uncreated LIght. The debate was not over whether or not someone had had the experience, but over what it meant. So the Church, at its best, stands as a kind of interpretor of our experience, so that we do not fall into the egotistic stance of making the experience mean anything we want it to mean. So too is the Church a &#34;mediator&#34; of our experience. But the Church is not the only mediator. Language is a mediator. Culture is a mediator. There is no theology or theological truth that exists apart from culture. It is not predetermined by culture. It is not caused by culture. But it is mediated by culture.

The cosmos is a mediator. There is no such thing as a pure, direct un-mediated experience of God. We have physical bodies. So everything we know and experience about anything is mediated through our sense organs. And our soul &#40;psyche&#41; is the sense organ par excellence which is also connected to a physical body. That is why purification of the body and transformation of sense perception is something that has to occur for there to be &#34;Truth.&#34; Truth is not some object in the sky to be grasped but a quality that is embodied in the very fabric of who we are from the beginning of time and seeks and yearns to be set free.

[Fr Averky]

Dear Owen,

What is it that you find so frightening about committing yourself to God and your neigbor through love? It seems that in every post you are wanting to prove yourself &#34;right&#34; concerning your thoughts and opinions. Several times you have said that the Fathers say this or that, but to date you have not quoted any of them, just philosophers. That does not make for a strong arguement, either from the standpoint of non-Christian thinkers, or your own views. You could convince all of us better if you could come up with something genuinely from the Fathers, and not from your own intellectual perceptions. I do not think it unreasonable to ask for Christian and spiritual sources, since we are talking about godly matters.

I personally would be grateful if we could strike a cord of commonality, but non-Orthodox sources and personal opinions are not sufficient. Please, give us some examples wherein one of the Fathers refers to God as &#34;pure intellect.&#34; Thank you. In myposts, I have relied on what many Fathers have said, and I do not desire to convince anyone by giving my own reasonings.

Owen, I am more than willing to be convinced, but I need proof, and not opinion. As we well know, Truth is not a &#34;what,&#34; but a &#34;who,&#34; so until we get to know Christ, we will never know the truth.

Seraphim, please be more like St. Seraphim; he was not a learned intellectual or phjilospher, yet he was given to see our Saviour and the Theotokos, and he was grace-filled, possessed of Uncreated Light. His life literally touched thousands-not such a bad example to follow, I would think.

[Rebecca]

What the Fathers meant by love is a rational detachment from sensate things, the movement of our attention from such things to transcendent reality, and the force that moves us in that direction

ok then...

I'm tempted to respond by with either a paragraph of predicate calculus or a page of prologue code...(just kidding..ha ha)...I guess we all have our "professional nomenclature" for things? http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/happy.gif

Seriously though, I'm over here by the bottom rung of the Ladder (hanging on by the tips of my fingers when I can, but mostly just falling on the ground), just going along knowing in my heart that God loves me even if I fall and even if I forget (or deny) that He does and find myself sad, and even though I have a little tiny pea brain....Wonder and awe that He who created all the complexity of the world, the majesty of the mountains and the tranquility of the forests (where graceful deer quietly walk through the morning mists), is so Loving that He would care for the insignificant spec that I am, that He would watch over even me. How merciful He is that he would continue to care for me in my disregard for Him, me being so prideful of my own abilities, but He forbears judgement and gives me another day to have a change of heart, to turn my attention to Him to begin the effort to clean the "weeds that have overgrown all the deep chambers of my heart" that He would grant me to see and be able receive Him in my heart, He who truly knows me and all my thoughts and all I've ever done and all that's ever happened to me. And if He would love me, who am the worst, how much more beloved are you and everyone else to our Lord, Who wiped His face on a cloth to give an image of His face to someone wanted to see Him but couldn't travel, He Who is hymned by angels yet willingly allowed that He be struck and spat upon that He might grant life to those in the tombs.

And these forms of love is distinct from what the Fathers refer to as the passions, while our definition of love today would most likely be described by the Fathers as a confused, disordered, passionate state that is profoundly self-oriented.

Interestingly, the Greek language has many words for what we would translate to "love."

[Rebecca]

Owen,

being concerned that my attempt at humor might not have carried properly, allow me to say that I recognize the attention and care with which you composed your post 739. I also recognize that you&#39;re speaking from a different language of terms than I&#39;m fluent in is all. http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/happy.gif

[Owen Jones]

Dear Fr. A.,

I&#39;m surprised that you haven&#39;t asked me when I stopped beating my wife!

[Fr Averky]

Owen,

Would you please give us at least one quote from the Fathers upon whom you rely? For whatever reason, you dance around the subject with many impressive words, philosophical concepts, and so on, but still you give no information where we can read from those &#34;Fathers&#34; of whom you speak.

When Frank Schaefer became Orthodox, and started right away to publish books about his experiences, while his works were very sincere, those of us who read &#34;Dancing Alone,&#34; I think it is, noted that he quoted only Maximos the Confessor. One of the Fathers here mused,&#34;I wonder if Mr. Schaefer knows of any saint other than St. Maximos.&#34;

I accept your learnedness and your intelligence, but as you do not wish to accept my or Effie&#39;s word that there is good church attendance in Greece, I am afraid that I cannot accept any of your personal opinions insofar as they seem to be very Western in their approach, although I am willing to be corrected.

Metropolitan Hierotheos says:

&#34;All ascetism in the Church aims at man&#39;s theosis &#40;divinization&#41;, at his communion with God the Trinity. This is accomplished when the energy of the soul &#40;nous&#41; returns to its essence &#40;heart&#41; and ascends to God.&#34;

&#34;The heart is the centre of man&#39;s psychosomatic constitution, since, as we noted previously, there is an &#34;unconfused&#34; union between soul and body. The centre of this union is called the heart.

The heart is a place which is discovered through ascetic practise in a stae of grace; it is the place wherein God is revealed and made manifest. This definition may seem abstract, yet it is a matter of spiritual experience. No one can show the place of the heart by rational and speculative definitions.&#34;

And again:

&#34;Reason is a functiion in the brain whereas the nous [the energy of the soul] operates out of and is united with the heart in its natural state. In the saintly person, who is the manifistation and and bearer of Orthodox spirituality, reason works and is conscious of the outer world while the nous is within the heart, praying unceasingly. The seperation of the nous from reason constitutes the state of a spiritually healthy person, and this is the goal of Orthodox spirituality&#34;

And lastly:

&#34;St.Gregory Palamas calls Barlaam a theologian, but he clearly emphasizes that intellectual theology differs greatly from the experience of the vision of God. According to St. Gregory Palamas, theologians are the God-seers; those who have attained to perfect faith, to the illumination of the nous and to divinization &#40;theosis&#41;. Theology is the result of man&#39;s cure and the path which leads to the cure and the acquisition of the knowledge of God.
Western theology however, has differentiated itself from Eastern Orthodox theology. Instead of being therapeutic, it is more intellectual and emotional in character. In the West, Scholastic theology evolved, which is antithetical to Orthodox tradition. Western theology is based on rational thought whereas Orthodoxy is hesychastic. Scholastic theology tried to understand logically the Revelation of God and conform to philosophical methodology. Characteristic of such an approach is the saying of Anselm of Canterbury; &#34;I believe so far as I understand.&#34; The Scholastics acknowleged God at the outset and then endeavored to prove His existence by logical arguements and rational categories. In the Orthodox Church, as epressed by the holy Fathers, faith is God revealing Himself to man.&#34;

&#40;Orthodox Spirituality a brief introduction by Metropolitan Hierotheos &#41;

Forgive me Owen, but this last paragraph describes perfectly how I react to your posts; they are Scholastic and rational in foundation, and thus they do not breath the fragrance of the Fathers. This is why your arguements, even though you consider yourself to be &#34;right&#34; so far fail to convince me. Again, I am more than willing to be convinced by you, as I do respect your knowledge, but in this matter, proof is still required. You may say &#34;according to the Fathers&#34; all you wish, but which ones, and what excatly do they say to back up your own ideas?

Sincerely,

Fr. A.

[Daniel Jeandet]

Owen, I am really appreciating your posts.

When you say,

&#34;And these forms of love is distinct from what the Fathers refer to as the passions, while our definition of love today would most likely be described by the Fathers as a confused, disordered, passionate state that is profoundly self-oriented.&#34;

I read,

&#34;And these forms of love is distinct from what the Fathers refer to as the passions, while my definition of love today would most likely be described by the Fathers as a confused, disordered, passionate state that is profoundly self-oriented.&#34;

Is it possible that you are projecting your notion of love as you understand it onto everybody else, assuming they have experienced nothing greater than this? Any bodies definition of love is going to be tied to thier experience of love.

You said at one point that dogma must be tied to experience, sometime later you remarked, &#34;Whether the seat of the intellect in the heart is a metaphor or a conceit, or biologically true is up for grabs.&#34;

This seems to cast doubt on one of the Churches &#34;experiential dogmas&#34;. As well as the testimony of several people on this board and many, many Fathers. That the seat of the spiritual intellect is in the heart, in both a biological and immaterial sense is not up for grabs, it is true. We fulfill the greatest commandment by loving God with all our heart. The Fathers also say that heart is not just the deepest inner man, but also the whole man, encompassing all our faculties as well as our physical reality. Like a hologram. A lifetime of faith and struggle on the battlefield of the heart will result in the sanctification of the whole man over time, until he fulfills the commandment perfectly, but it has to start somewhere, at some point in space and time, and that place is the heart, and a time of the sincerest repentance and humility.

I know that when you say intellect, you are not talking about thinking and stuff, but the intellect as the Fathers understood it. Trouble is, the Fathers didnt understand it until they had discovered it, unified its energies, and turned them away from the unatural bond with creation and towards the creator. Perhaps you went a bit too far against what you see as an emotional type of faith, since you clearly long to transcend passionate and earthly notions of love and the heart. But we have to begin with what we are, holding the promise before us. When we try to truly love, while being aware of our ego, and the poverty of our love, our love is transformed. Obviously the heart and its love, in the fallen state, are not real. The are darkened by ego, ignorence, sin. That does not mean we throw away the words, it means we cling to the faith that these things can be healed and purified and made new. Its still the heart, and its still Love.

Forgive me Owen. I really like what you are saying, I understand your points and I think I understand what the others are getting at too, we just need to give a little, no?. Why not concede that the way to the knowledge of God is through the heart, simply because that is the testimony of the saints? Then some others here can see that you are not trying to change thier minds or confess a different faith to them, you just want to understand it more deeply in the way you are inclined.

Forgive me, I hope Im clear in this post and havent offended anyone.

[Effie Ganatsios]

"Seriously though, I'm over here by the bottom rung of the Ladder (hanging on by the tips of my fingers when I can, but mostly just falling on the ground), "

Rebecca, what a terrific description!

And exactly how I feel most of the time as well.

effie

[Daniel Jeandet]

Hey Owen, Ive posted this link before but no-one commented on it, so I assumed nobody read it.

http://free.hostdepartment.com/a/away/

Its called &#34;For everything that lives is holy&#34;.

Its a talk by Philip Sherrard and its along the lines of alot of things you say. I like your posts because I like to think along those lines too.

Have you read much of Sherrard&#39;s work? His is a very edifying philosophical Orthodoxy. If you read this link then I could discuss it with someone, and we might both benefit. I hope I havent ever hurt you or anyone else, forgive me if I have.

[Owen Jones]

Dear Daniel,

Accusing someone of psychological projection is a power play. Be careful. It can be turned back on you. Although I wouldn&#39;t stoop that low myself.

Regarding Sherrard, the speach from the above link is interesting. But it&#39;s an example of what I call &#34;guruspeak.&#34; Sherrard is speaking here in the tone and format of a guru. It&#39;s interesting that his one reference is to Blake, who was an 18th Century Romantic gnostic, who was reacting to the then dominant liberal/rational orthodoxy. But true Orthodoxy is not a reaction to anything and does not need to be, although it&#39;s helpful to understand the problems with the intellectual milieu and respond accordingly, and Orthodox thinkers have done that, but always on guard not to over-react to the world into a gnostic direction. That, I think, is what Sherrard has a tendency to do. I think Sherrard is over reacting and overreaching a bit. He wants everything to be spiritual and holy and it isn&#39;t. Potentially perhaps.

I never said the way to God is not through the heart. What our vollies on this thread back and forth prove is that even some of us who are Orthodox have bought into the modern intellectualized world view and are reacting to that, instead of really trying to understand what the Fathers mean.

Take the word &#34;simple,&#34; for example. The classic meaning of simple is indivisible. It means something that cannot be further reduced to discreet component parts. It is what it is. That definition has changed to mean either a simpleton or fool, or a romanticized version of a person who does not bother with complex things, and is therefore superior to another class of person that is too &#34;sophisticated&#34; or &#34;intellectual&#34;.

By this new, romantic connotation of simple, Tarzan was simple, because he was not encumbered by civilization. He could live the pure life. That&#39;s what we tend to mean today by simple. It&#39;s not what the Fathers meant. They meant something that was pure, yes, but because it was indivisible. It is what it is. It is an intellectual principle. As Paul points out, a person has component parts, limbs and whatnot, that all serve a distinct function, but cannot be separated without obviously destroying what it is. At the same time, he is at pains to point out that we are complex. We are a composite being. Yet simple because you cannot parse the human into independent parts. So simplicity is an intellectual principle, and an aesthetic principle. Unity in diversity one might say. Now how does one arrive at a recognition of this principle? Well, you begin by simplifying life at the pragmatic level. You limit your desires and your possessions in order to limit the distractions and anxieties so that you can develop your intellect in such a way that you are better able to see the meaning and purpose of things, and not just look at things &#40;not just physical things, but the things of life&#41; as disjointed, disconnected, meaningless, or meaning something less than or other than their true meaning and purpose. But this simplicity of life serves an intelligible principle, and, this is very important, is not an end in itself.

But today, in the generally romanticised environment, someone is likely to say, &#34;I just want a simple faith. I don&#39;t need all of that intellectual stuff.&#34; Fine as far as it goes, if you mean by intellectual stuff, reading Kant. But the Fathers would cringe at this sort of romanticized version of Christianity. And, indeed, the most &#34;simple&#34; of people would stand for two hours in Church and listen to a very, very intellectually complex oration by a St. Gregory the Theologian, for example, and be captivated. But today, we would likely say, just give me the simple truth, not all that intellectual stuff. That&#39;s the catastrophic cultural situation we are in, in which we see ourselves as individual romantic heroes struggling against a complex world, and superior to it.

[Daniel Jeandet]

Thanks Owen, Im sorry about that projection thing, I should not have said that.

Thankyou for replying.

[Melissa]

Owen,
As a therapist in the human realm, I&#39;d just like to say that psychological projection is not necessarily a bad thing, or even a negative - it&#39;s a normal thing that we all do all the time, every day of our lives. Also, I didn&#39;t notice that Daniel J. accused you of projection in his post #57, although it clearly felt that way to you. Many of us responding to this thread are reacting to things that you say for different reasons, I&#39;m sure. I know I&#39;m working on the issue of the intersection of faith and logic. So you and I may have some collisions at that intersection, not because of what you&#39;re saying but because of what I&#39;m working on in my own heart and soul.
As I currently understand one aspect of faith, anyway, it&#39;s what I have when logic and reason fail me, the church stands firm, and I decide to accept, believe, what the church says.

A couple of comments -- From your post 739 -&#34;It follows the same &#34;rules&#34; if you will that God Himself abides by.&#34; - I thought God was the Creator of all &#34;rules&#34; to use your word, and Himself above all &#34;rules&#34;? &#34;Rules&#34; seems to me to be a concept that takes me away from faith and into a humanistic attempt to figure God out. I get a bit scared when I find myself trying to figure God out, I feel cold and back away into prayer.

#740- &#34;Regarding experience, I have a right to have one, and God has a right to reveal Himself however he chooses.&#34; - Yes, of course. I apologize in advance for my prickliness, I pray to be relieved of it but am still afflicted, but I really would like to get a better sense of you, and if you&#39;re going to mention the right to have an exeprience, I want to ask you, what experience? Did I miss your mention of it in a past posting, or did you choose not to go ahead and speak of it in a personal way? I believe, from the postings I&#39;ve read, that there is room for personal experiences to be mentioned, and it would help me get a sense of how you integrate your intellect and your faith - not that you have any obligation to provide that, it&#39;s just another thing I&#39;m working on myself, so it interests me.
In Christ - Melissa

[Rebecca]

Now, one can argue that God is truth, and that that is what this statement really means. And of course, that would be true.

And Truth is God. That is the starting point, imo. One thing I find consistent in the Orthodox Saints that I&#39;ve read is that God is not some amorphous entity, a generic &#34;higher power&#34; but a specific Person &#40;actually specific Persons&#41;.

instead of really trying to understand what the Fathers mean.

I could, hypothetically, contend that you don&#39;t &#42;really&#42; understand what the Fathers mean. However, if I did that I would be setting myself up as not only the authoritative interpreter of thier meanings, but also setting myself up as judge of you and your understanding. I don&#39;t think that I am supposed to be doing that, even if refraining means I am subject to ridicule and insult &#40;not that I think anyone has done that to me&#41;.

I think people are at all different places in their spiritual development, but are all still beloved of the Lord.

[Rebecca]

Dear Effie,

thank you for your kind words...and especially for your recent post in the Faith thread.

Actually, I wonder if you or someone on the board who knows Greek more than I might happen to know a particular Christmas hymn that I&#39;ve only heard in Greek, but have been wondering the English for...I can try to give the Greek phonetics..please pardon if they&#39;re hard to follow..it&#39;s something like

thefte ithomen pistin pou eh yenisios Xhriston

the a capella mixed voice byzantine chior at my church sang it so beautifully during Christmas Liturgy a few years ago, but I didn&#39;t know what they were saying in the hymn...http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/sad.gif

[John Curtis Dunn]

Take the word "simple," for example. The classic meaning of simple is indivisible. It means something that cannot be further reduced to discreet component parts. It is what it is. That definition has changed to mean either a simpleton or fool, or a romanticized version of a person who does not bother with complex things, and is therefore superior to another class of person that is too "sophisticated" or "intellectual".

The word simple meant without hypocrisy, without guile, or naive; it is these characteristics [when present in reference to sin] which exalts a person.

The Apostle Paul, however, did not perceive being simple with being unlearned or uneducated. [see Rom. 16:19]

john dunn

[Owen Jones]

No, Melissa, it&#39;s just that there seems to be one opinion that the philosophical experience is something foreign to Christianity, or irrelevant to Orthodoxy, or that, once your have become Orthodox, one must reject the philosophical experience. But I found that I could no longer deny God as a result of Plato &#40;in my teenage atheist days&#41;, and many of the Fathers &#34;philosophize about God.&#34; This criticism stems largely, I think, from a misunderstanding about what the classic philosophical experience is all about. So I tend to jump in pretty agressively some times in defense of philosophy when it is categorically rejected in other comments.

Regarding projection, I don&#39;t deny its reality, it&#39;s just not a good debating tactic. And if one wants to be truly Patristic, then I don&#39;t think there&#39;s much room for it. But in our current cultural milieu, much is made of psychological motivation. Sometimes too much.

Is there such a thing as a therapist in the non-human realm?

[Effie Ganatsios]

Melissa, at this moment I am listening to a wonderful CD my son bought yesterday with Greek Christmas carols.

The carols are interspersed with quotations from the bible concerning the nativity.

Each year I love the sing Christmas carols &#40;English&#41; while preparing the house for Christmas.
It&#39;s at these times of the year &#40;Christmas but especially Easter&#41; that I miss my family most of all.



The line in your message means &#40;if I understood the phonetic meaning correctly &#41; &#34;we see &#40;acknowledge&#41; the faith &#40;inherent&#41; in the birth of Christ.&#34;

I&#39;m ashamed to say that my Greek is not 100% - I wasted so many years not really caring or knowing much about my heritage. One of the saddest things about life is that the older we get the more we regret opportunities that we didn&#39;t take advantage of.

Effie

[Effie Ganatsios]

&#34;The Apostle Paul, however, did not perceive being simple with being unlearned or uneducated. [see Rom. 16:19]

john dunn&#34;

I agree, John.

One of the things I noticed soon after I started to read the Philokalia was how simple the thoughts of the Fathers were set down. Their words were as simple as the theory behind them was sometimes complicated.

A truly intellectually brilliant person has no need to convince others of his brilliance. If the person whom you’re addressing can’t understand you, does it really matter how smart you are &#40;or think you are&#41;? I have spent many happy hours watching various documentaries on TV and listening to truly brilliant people explaining complicated matters in terms which I was able to understand and have thus benefited from their knowledge.

I don&#39;t think Orthodox simplicity means giving up our brains and not thinking at all. If I accept whatever I am told without thinking about it, then can I really be described as being created in the image and likeness of God.


One more thing : Protestants are very fond of claiming that the Orthodox believe that the intellect has little ultimate bearing upon our knowledge and experience of God. What we actually believe is that the intellect is not the direct path to God - this, of course does not mean that it is in any way demeaned. As Father Averky mentioned on another thread, many, many Orthodox fathers and theologians have affirmed the goodness of the intellect.

[Fr Averky]

Rebecca and Mellisa,

What can be done or said when almost all of the responses of a person are his &#34;projections,&#34; and furthermore, isn&#39;t it a bit odd when such a person would even take another to task over what he perceives to be a &#34;projection&#34;, for it seems to be the basic modus operandi of some of our members. Further, I do not believe that because we see something in a person and comment on it that we are either attempting a power play or a projection Few of our members openly consider themselves to be &#34;right,&#34; and most of us to do not say &#34;something like, &#34;I really write well,&#34; as another person said. Most of us say what we think on a matter and are willing to concede a point here or there, admit when we are wrong, apologize if we have offended, and are willing to be taught, and do not always have to be didactical. But if a person cannot bring himself to do any of these Christian things, then even that person&#39;s knowledge and wisdom only serves to build barriers, not open hearts. There is certainly nothing wrong in simply being huiman, for at least we should have that in common.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that there are individuals who never really answer a question posed, to them or backs statements made concerning the spiritual life with the words the Fathers., but only refers to them? Very rarely is a convert layman on his own an acceptable authority on the Orthodoxy Church.

It is evident that the majority of us did not spend a lot of our youth studying Plato or Aristotle, and in coming to Orthodoxy, these two great philosphers were not our usual point of reference, for we were directed to HolyScriptures and mthr wfitings of ancient and modern Fathers, and to people like Metropolitan Hierotheos of of Nafpatkos.

Last night I was reading the introduction to the book &#34;Fr. Seraphim&#39;s Letters to Fr. Alexey Young,&#34; and author of the preface, a nun who knew the Platina Fathers very well, and who herself is quite leaned, mentions that Father Seraphim often said that the Orthodox Church faces a very bif challenge in that too many converts are &#34;too much in the head,&#34; and not enough &#34;In the heart.&#34; While it is true that Fr. Seraphim did not abandon what he had gained through his stidies in philosphy, it is never a point of rereference concerning him, nor is it indicated in his writings, nor did he ever bring it up in his spiritual direction. As it says further in the preface-he was an obedient servant of the Orthodx Church.

In the wonderful little book &#34;Light in the Darkness,&#34; the translated writings of Sergei Fudel, his description of Fr. Paul Florensky perfectly states what I knew Fr. Seraphim to be:

&#34;There is a theology we might call &#34;school theology,&#34; we can even speak of a &#34;drawing room theology,&#34; but there also exists the true wonder and amazement of &#34;thoughts about God,&#34; which is joyous theology.. This was the theology of Father Paul Florensky who was also a very learned theologian. A friend of his once said that &#34;&#34;FLORENSKY&#39;S GREATNESS WAS NOT IN HIS LEARNEDNESS, BUT THE FACT THAT HE KNEW HOW TO OVERCOME HIS LEARNEDNESS.&#34; You could sense this every time you came in touch with him, for in his serenity there was always a breathe of truly spiritual logical thinking. Why do I mention &#39;reasoning&#39; only? the because the spiritualizatiion of man as a whole being, of his soul and body, BEGINS with the reasoning of the mind.&#34;

When you spoke to Fr. Seraphim, you did not get the sense of being in the presence of a &#34;great Mind,&#34; a &#34;learned intellectual,&#34; but knew that you were in the presence of a quiet , peaceful, and truly humble monk. Like Father Paul, he had an amzing serenity, and that serenity was infectious. Of course, one who had read any of his writings or had heard of of his talks knew that they were in the presence of a truly educated and intelligent, capable of true &#34;spiritual logic.&#34; One Summer when I was in Platina fir a visit, Fr. Seraphim was beginning work on his translation of Via Patrum, a book about the lives of Western saints. As it was his turn to read, he read the lives of some of those saints to us. Although he read in unhesitant English, he was actually ight translating from Latin. When he explained certain theological or spiritual concepts, he was never haughty or had the need to let you know that he was &#34;right&#34; about this or that.
It was that wonderful combination of keen intelligence combined with humility and very apparrent love for God and neighbor that drew so many people to him, and why he is remembered with so much respect today. I remember walking a path on the hill where Fr. Serapohim lived, and I was really struggling as a new novice. I met Fr. Seraphim as he was coming down the hill, and he blessed me and said just a few encouraging words, but they comforted me and gave me strength.

I have to say at this point that in this discussion it has not been my intention to be antii-intellectual,&#34; but to point out that the Fathers consistently tell us that the workings and intuition of the mind are that first point of contact from which springs the first interst in God, but that intellect reaches it highest point when the mind descends to the heart, and the heart opens itself to be transformed by God in that God reveals Himself to a person&#39;s soul.

St. Barsanuphius the Ascetic tells us how general human knowledge, or &#34;worldly wisdom,&#34; can be harmonized with with divine wisdom: &#34;You must not pay attention to worldly wisdom only, for if you are not granted spiritual wisdom from above, all wisdom is in vain. Blessed is the one who has both worldly and spiritual wisdom.&#34;

St. Theophan the Recluse says,&#34; The crux of the matter is that we must train our mind to live in the heart. Our mind must be transferred from our intellect into our feeling heart, the two must be made one...&#34; Fudel goes on to say , &#34; In other words, our thinking mind must become our loving mind. This is the depth and the warmth which the Church Fathers invite us to reach. Yet in our vry poor efforts to pray, OUR MINDS ARE IMMEDIATELY AND FIRMLY ROOTED IN OUR OWN PERSONAL CONCEIT AND PRIDE.

St. Macarius said that our minds must be nailed to the cross of JesusChrist.

I do not think that the love for which Orthodox Christians struggle is in any way &#34;romantic,&#34; for any of us who have even made even he smallest effort to attain spiritual love, will quickly realize that attaining the love of which the Fathers speak involves suffering. Suffering because this love entails carrying our cross and sufering as our Saviour suffered.

&#34;Suffering is accepted in Christianity as a means of ascending to God. The one who wants to be a Christian must discover in his heart a warm pain, a life-giving wound by which he he partakes in the suffering of Christ and of all people.&#34;

&#34;We have to speak of love and non-love, of holiness and non-holiness. This is the knot that holds together our spiritual existence.
Yet to speak of love means primarily to speak of humility, or more precisely, of humble love, because love does not seek its own, bcause love forgets &#34;its own&#34; and gives it up in humility. Only humility can forget about itself. Humility is the very essence of love, which gives up its own and sacrifices itself.&#34;

Any of you who are parents are aware of the sacrifice of self that is needed in the proper raising of children.

&#34;Love is a quality of will, &#34; a virtue of will. All God wants from us is this effort of will towards Him -our love for Him. God reveals Himself to people not for their accomplisments and deeds, as a kind of compensatiion, but only in response to the love-will, to desire to be with Him, to the will to live.

Dear Freinds these quotes from Fudel very well sum up what I have been attempting to in this thred: Of course, we should use our intellect, for we have been give our mental gifts from God, but in the end, it is that &#34;love-will&#34; that is spoken of that brings us to thel ove of God and neighbor, and by its very definition, this love cannot be romanticized or idealized, for it can be born in truth, in suffering, and the desire to be with God. In the Holy Scripture it is never said &#34;God is intellect,&#34; but it does say &#34;God is love.&#34;

Forgive me for going on so long.

Fr. A.

[Melissa]

Got me (chuckle), Owen! Of course not... a weak attempt to delineate secular therapy from "Orthodox Psychotherapy" - the spirit in and behind the book, I guess. I am passionate about the transformative power of faith, and am blessed to work in the private sector where therapists can still talk about God and faith as the most meaningful lens for viewing life events.

I, too love philosophy, though I'm not as well read as many of the discussion participants. I probably joined this group just as you were "jump[ing] in pretty aggressively" as you said, and got a bit reactive myself. I grew up in the Lutheran church, raised my kids in the Presbyterian church, and years later married an Episcopal priest who led me to Orthodoxy...had a lot of "head religion" in those years, and was bowled over by the holistic multi-sensory experience of Orthodoxy. My heart, head, nose, eyes, body were feasting in a Pascha liturgy (my first Orthodox liturgy), and I knew I was "home". The months of theological and philosophical debating that followed between my husband and I helped me, especially, integrate the liturgy experience (and others, we had continued to attend services), and get ready to become catechumens.
My conversion wouldn't have had the same depth, in other words, if I hadn't allowed both the heart and the head (although I really don't think of them as that distinct) experiences. I believe philosophy and theology can be deeply heartfelt - my own husband is an example - and not detract from a simple (simple: in this case, that which illuminates a complex experience) faith.

About psychological motivation - if I believe there is such a thing as psychology, then I have to also believe in psychological motivation. And I do. However, in part I agree with you - I think our culture (I'm assuming you're here in the US, but maybe you aren't...) makes too much of pathology-based psych. motivation. Even Frued said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

Hey, I just re-read my post #9 to you - perhaps the intersection of faith and logic could be understood as the meeting place of the head and heart?

Do you read Kirkegaard?
Melissa

[Owen Jones]

I tried K., but found him to be impenetrable. But I respect him for a&#41; refuting Hegel and b&#41; being rigorously honest. One might argue that he&#39;s Orthodox without the joy. But, hey, he was from Scandinavia.

I think the therapeutic aspects of Orthodoxy are far from being appreciated. In a therapuetic culture ruh amuck, it&#39;s a way we have of speaking to people in this culture.

A sad commentary is that the dean of an Orthodox seminary some time ago instituted an 800 number for priests to be able to consult with a therapist, anonymously. What this says is that our therapeutic knowledge is not being practiced among ourselves. It&#39;s there, but at the level of theory. Our priests get little or no benefit from this knowledge, and are pretty much on their own.

The Church could learn something from the military on the psychology of small unit cohesion. A huge army fights effectively because of small unit cohesion. You are willing to fight for the guy next to you on either side, because you know that he&#39;s going to fight for you. As soon as that small unit cohesion is lost, and each person sees himself as in his own individual foxhole, then the entire army dissolves as a fighting unit. THis is one problem with the institutional Church today. The priest is totally on his own and this leads to all kinds of psychological disturbance. Of course, it&#39;s a general problem, not just priests.

[Melissa]

Effie - While I will always love hearing from you, I think the carol reference was from someone else -I can&#39;t seem to find that post right now, but hope she sees your note, too!
Your CD sounds lovely.
Melissa

[Melissa]

Dear Father Averky:
Fudel: &#34;In other words, our thinking mind must become our loving mind.&#34; What a wonderful way to put it! It&#39;s so hard to describe the way the love of thought &#40;philosophy, economics, theology, whatever&#41;, and the love of simple faith &#40;as I said somewhere else, a definition of simple is also &#34;that which intelligibly illuminates the complex&#34;&#41; can go together without conflict. Intellect unwarmed by the reflection - even emotional reflection - of the heart, is only finding part of the truth. So Fudel puts it simply, and beautifully.

Yes, there is no need to fret about projection, and if one thinks in those terms at all, much to be learned by looking for it - in my own writing, and in others, and making good use of it! Enough from me about that, though!

I do love reading about someone&#39;s personal experiences, as examples of what they&#39;re saying in a post, or in asking for help or feedback, etc. You do that, Father, and Effie, and some others in some of the threads, and that&#39;s one way I get a sense of a person&#39;s heart-felt faith. So thank all of you who include something personal.
Melissa

[Melissa]

Hi Owen,
Hmm, I like Kierkegarrd, and do also find him difficult. I try to digest what I&#39;ve read literally one line at a time - so I can&#39;t claim to have read much!! I&#39;ve just moved, so after sending that last post I&#39;ve been trying to find/remember the title of, one of his books that was quite helpful to me in my understanding the intellect/heart connection in my faith. I couldn&#39;t find the book, though, and memory has failed me for the time being.
I could so easily find myself swinging one way or the other, heart or head, without ever bringing them together. Kierkegaard&#39;s life and work helped me see it wasn&#39;t necessary either to &#34;swing&#34; or to choose one mode over the other. From your recent posts, I&#39;m guessing you don&#39;t think it necessary to choose, either.

I agree with you that Orthodoxy as a therapeutic &#40;healing, saving&#41; grace has not gotten enough attention, apparently in the clergy as well as the laity. The counseling center where I work has frequently run a clergy group, because clergy of all denominations &#40;we never had an Orhtodox participant&#41; seem to suffer from burn-out at a pretty good clip. I wonder why, and if Orhtodox priests suffer from it, too? It seems to me that perhaps we congregants don&#39;t allow enough time for our clergy to pray, reflect, meditate, read, write, etc. -- and not always be running a program, class, meeting, making a visit... Maybe if any of our priest members read this they would be willing to offer an idea.
Thanks, Owen, for your thoughtful responses to my sometimes perhaps too pointed comments!
Melissa

[Fr Averky]

Dear Owen,

Thank you very much for your post No. 744. Ah, if only we had &#34;small unit cohesion.&#34; More often, it is small unit anarchy!

And it all comes down to what Owen is talking about; the lack of the willingness and ability to give and accept therapeutic love. It is there, but both priest and layman have to be willing to seek it. As, you very well put it Owen, &#34;The priest is on his own and this leads to all kinds of psychological disturbances.&#34; One of the saving graces of having a married clergy is that the inherent loneliness of the priesthood is somewhat buffered by having a wife and children. As we have seen in the widely publicized unfortunate events in another Church, expecting a man who needs to love and has the desire for loving to be basically forced into a situation of tremendous loneliness and isolation, then indeed, &#34;all kinds of psychological disturbances&#34; arise. While understanding the benefits of a celibate clergy, I find it so much more balanced to have the option of either being celibate or married.

Also, the priest is on his own, as I think Owen implies, when it comes to functioning as pastor, spiritual father, dealing with the Sisterhood, and all the various committees, basket ball teams, and finds himself a sitting duck for minor incidents which, by the inspiration of the devil, quickly escalates into a major problem-for him.

Fortunately, in our small part of the Orthodox Church we have kept the tradition of priests having a spiritual father to whom they can turn for advice and solace. We even have priests from other jurisdictions who come here for confession and spiritual advice.

As to laity, often it is not possible to use any method of spiritual therapy, for if a priest even dares to make an observation about an area in a person&#39;s life that could use some improvement, they just might take it the wrong way and will then start to complain loudly to others, and even the bishop as to how &#34;cruel&#34; the priest was to them.

Years ago, a very good friend of mine who is a priest in another Orthodox Church was serving Divine Litrugy on the Feast of the Annunciation. A very prominent parishioner arrived just as the Gospel was being read, but did not come into the church, but stayed out in the narthex talking loudly to the man selling candles. He remained there for the rest of the liturgy, talking and smoking until it was time for communion. Putting out his cigarette in the sand in front of the &#34;kissing icon,&#34; he came right up and received the Divine Mysteries. As my friend leaned forward to give the man communion, he said to him in so soft a voice as to be heard by the man, &#34;_____, if you were planning to go to communion, don&#39;t you think you should have been in church and praying for the entire Liturgy?&#34; Later that day, my friend received a call from his very irate bishop demanding to know why he had &#34;Loudly and publicly humiliated one of the most pious and generous members of his parish!&#34;

By God&#39;s mercy, that same bishop has come to appreciate my friend, and has of late been exceedingly kind to him. How different our lives would be if we all could humble ourselves, for in doing so, we would indeed receive healing.

We should call to mind the words of the man in the Gospel narrative whose son was healed by Christ after having been possessed of a demon which first threw him into the fire, and then into the water:, &#34;O Lord I believe, heal thou my disbelief.&#34;

Fr. A.

[Moses Anthony]

Dear Fr. Averky,
Fr. Bless!

I know that you asked the question of Owen, for some example(s) of the Church Fathers who perceived of God as pure intellect.

There were several forces in the development of the doctrines of the Church, in it's early centuries. Among them were the Hellinization of Jewish thought, Neo-Platonism,and Gosticism. The two great schools of theological training during those early years, Alexandria and Antioch, were at odds with one another, over the expression of reigning concepts about God, concepts which we today easily accept, without much question.
One of the early doctrines about God, was that God was Pure Intellect. As I said the schools of Alexandria and Antioch at times opposed each other, and sometimes their leading exponents were anathamatized at public debate or in Holy(?) Synod.

As you might guess what we often bandy about in theological philosophizing today, the nous, was something of hot debate then. The theological doctrines were coloured by the language of philosophies and lawyers.

I've been reading quite a lot lately, and my mind is slightly full of stuff not allowing any specifics, i.e, names. If you however have the time to research the early centuries (2nd through say the 4th) of the Church, you may pinpoint those luminaries ot thought, who held to the theory in question.

While I , with limited understanding at my command, can understand how extrapolating, a person might arrive at such an exegesis, I see it as fallible. For, how is one to prove concretely the theory; if God is, as we say, sing and teach beyond the furtherest limits of human understanding?

Something else was also at work in the life of the Church, the apparent readiness of anyone in debate to drop the phrase "the Church Fathers" to prove their point, sometimes overlooking that some of those Fathers were excommunicated, never to be received back into communion. This means their teachings were classified as heresy!
I do not believe that Intellect is all that Almighty God is, although I believe that intellect is surely one of the attributes/energies emanating from His being.

Alas I fear I'm in way over my head. Honest to goodness Fr. I didn't plan that, but it seems to fit so I'll leave it.

a sinful and unworthy servant

[Owen Jones]

Certainly the Syriac Fathers were critical of Greek &#34;abstractions.&#34; One of the blessings of Greek Orthodoxy however is that no one attempts to &#34;prove&#34; anything about God, a la Aquinas. Nor did I pose that God as Pure Intellect in any sense &#34;defined&#34; what God is. In Greek Patristic thought, God is Beyond. However, as an ordering principle, intellect rather than will seems to me to be central to Greek patristic thought. This notion is a corrective, in my view, to the nominalistic bent in theology that comes into the Latin West in the late Middle Ages and dominates today, in which the most important or overarching principle is Divine Will. As with any corrective, one can go too far with it in an opposite direction. So there should always be balance. But just as a general conclusion from my own readings, however spotty, it would seem to me that Intellect as an ordering principle governs Will. The Greeks also posited that God was completely detached and dispassionate, which is hard to square sometimes with the Judaic understanding, which the Syriacs probably more closely follow, where God is certainly passionate.

I would not agree that the Greek Fathers are influenced by &#34;neo-Platonism&#34; as such. This comes in after Plotinus and tends to influence the Latins more, such as Boetheus. It is one of the myths created by Protestants that the Church was Hellenized in the early centuries, which they believe constituted a distortion of Biblical Christianity. That, in fact, Biblical Christianity went underground until the 15th Century, and that Greek Patristic Christianity is not Christian at all.

But the problem that the FAthers had was how do you turn Christianity from a Jewish sect into a universal commentary on human destiny. The Greeks really discovered universals and with it the idea of a universal humanity, which provided Christians with the insights necessary to universalize Christ. Now, I do not wish to imply that this was some kind of slick propaganda effort on the part of the Greek Fathers. I simply believe that the &#34;fusion&#34; of Jewish Biblical and Greek thought is Providential.

Later, Christianity is universalized through the symbol of Christian Empire, which is somewhat of a deformation of Christian thought, since it does not account for what one is to make of the decline and fall of Christian Empire. The Protestant alternative, is to simply personalize and individualize Christian belief. The Augustinian approach is to divide the sacred and secular into overlapping but somewhat discreet realms, in which the sacred is progressing toward an otherworldly fulfilment, and the secular is in a state of decay. That argument has been superceded by the &#34;modern&#34; view of history as only secular, and progressive.

The problem today is even more accute, since, in the current philosophical disorder, there are no universals. One man&#39;s opinion is just as good as another&#39;s and human beings are distinct individual entitities, united only in a kind of new tribalism symbolized by ideology or ethnicity.

Unfortunately, many if not most Christians buy into this state of philosophical disorder. Christ is overly personalized, as is faith and salvation. So one &#34;joins&#34; a Church, rather than being part of a mystical body of believers that are also intimately connected with all of Creation and serve as part of the iconic structure of the cosmos.

Today, there are no universals, and so faith is reduced to passionate fervor, and self-interest.

So a recovery of the classical Greek understanding of universals is a key element to understanding early Christian thought.

[Owen Jones]

This thread is getting a bit off topic, and yet I suppose everything is related in some sense to how we interpret Scripture. But I think it was Fr. Arseny who was quoted as saying that the problem with the clergy is that it had become proffessionalized. A career. This does not mean that priests are believers, or devout, but as soon as it becomes a professional career, which is how the seminaries function, then it becomes destructive. The demons I think take great pleasure in the notion that the priestly vocation is a career. So you get a lot of alcoholics and people from alcoholic families or other family problems who are looking for some kind of escape, and when they are placed in a pressure cooker environment, in which the people expect them to essentially be managers of parishes, they implode in large numbers. This is probably just as big a problem in Orthodoxy as anywhere else, at least in America.

The priest learns very early on in the parish that he is on his own and that the primary order of the day is to make sure things run smoothly. And even under the best of circumstances with the best of intentions, priests are assaulted daily by the demons, and, frankly, resistance to demonic influence is not part of their priestly training.

[Daniel Jeandet]

"And even under the best of circumstances with the best of intentions, priests are assaulted daily by the demons, and, frankly, resistance to demonic influence is not part of their priestly training."

Consequently, they are unable or unwilling to train the flock in the unseen warfare and so the demons end up using the people against the priest and vice versa, until divisions fragment everybody into smaller and smaller groups. The people have no faith in the priest because he is clearly no better at fighting than they are, and the priest is increasingly frustrated by what he see as problems with people or events because he is unable to discern the activity of demons around himself because he has not learned to discern it within himself.

[Effie Ganatsios]

sorry, melissa. That message was meant for Rebecca. I usually write and post my messages very early in the morning before I have my morning coffee.......

One very good book about about psychology and Orthodoxy is THE ILLNESS AND CURE OF THE SOUL
by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos.

Some chapters can be found online.

It is well worth reading and I am including just a small sample :

&#34;We have been taught from our early age that knowledge of God is studying and learning about God: the more books we study, the more knowledge of God we obtain. What do you say about this?


Natural and spiritual knowledge


-We have already said in the beginning of the conversation that there are two kinds of faith. Faith based on hearing and faith based on theoria. This entails two kinds of knowledge also: natural knowledge which begins by studying, by contemplating nature, the various miracles and signs, by the acceptance of the Revelation of the Saints. There is, also, spiritual knowledge which is begotten by the communion with God. The first knowledge begets faith, the second one is begotten of faith, -of faith based on theoria. When we say that prayer grants us the knowledge of God, we mean, of course, spiritual knowledge which is the fruit of theoria. When one reaches the illumination of nous and unceasing noetic prayer wells up in his heart, one acquires the knowledge of God, which is communion and union with Him. St. Isaac the Syrian teaches that the knowledge which precedes faith is one thing and the knowledge which is begotten of faith is another. The former is called natural knowledge, whereas the latter is called spiritual.&#34;


Effie

[Fr Averky]

Dear Owen,

Right and right again.

Dear James, I will address my answer to you and Owen. When I was asking Owen about sources, it was not out of desiring to be combative, but in order to gain some of his knowledge, and to understand where he was coming from other than just his statements. I always cringe personally when I hear someone say &#34;According to the Fathers,&#34;
because when I was in the seminary, one or the other of our*teachers would themselves say &#34;The Fathers say,&#34; but would never think or remember to tell us which ones.

This was to make me very look foolish in my early days as a priest in a parish, because one of my parishoners was tellinbg me that a much loved famil pet &#40;Animal Companion?&#41; had recently gotten ill and died. The man said that his young daughtm wanted to know if the pet would go to heaven, and he did not know what to tell her.

I remembered a converation that I had had with a very well-know fellow convert priest who had told me that the &#34;Fathers say that if a person has lived a righteous life and goes to heaven, God can grant that his favorite pet will be with him for eterniy.&#34; But Father A.. did not tell me who had said that. To comfort my parishioner, I told him what I had been told. He replied,&#34;That is very comforting to hear Father, could you please tel me which Father said that?&#34; Well, I could not, and ever since then, I have made it a point to make sure that when I quote the Fathers, I have their words before me. And I think that we owe it to each other in courtesy to direct others to our sources for as many good reasons as one can think of. I see that since I became ill, many things that I have studied and should know, I have forgotten. Recently on another thread, I said that I had never heard of the teaching that the Incarnation would have taken place even if Adam had not fallen. Of course, it was very quickly pointed out to me where I was wrong, and even after I sent out my post, I was telling myself that I was wrong, and should have thought it through before I answered. I have no problem admitting that I have been wrong and will happily stand corrected, but I do not feel so good when I feel that I have been dismissed out of hand. If I were more virtuous I would not be bothered, but I am proud and sinful.

One of the great values of Monachos is that there are many well-educated and knowedgeable people who if they are willing, can teach all of us something. As to my complaining, as it were about a person giving what primarily his opinion, again, when I was in the seminary, we would be given a paper to write, and it always was given with the words, &#34;Give as the sources of your paper the Holy Fathers of the Church; we are not interested in your opinion.&#34; By researching the Fathes, you will see how they can be separated by several centuries, yet one will find a continuous chain of thought and oneness of mind in their writings. Thus, to me at least, I am always have an opportunity to learn something new, or to rekindle old ideas and interests, but for me, the inspired Fathers of the Church are the primary source. So whether it is the writings of St. Ephraim the Syrian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great or Ignatii Briachaninov, or one of the Optina Elders, you will find that golden thread of thought, which is in itself a proof of the veracity of Orthodox teaching and thought.

Thank you again James; not receiving an answer, I did a little delving and found some of that information you so kindly gave me, but still, it would have made me feel better just as a person had I been given a direct answer.

Fr. A.

[Melissa]

Dear Effie,

Your comments give me food for thought. I've read the book you refer to, and found it difficult and very good - I've wanted to get it out again but haven't; now you're the second person to mention it to me recently, so I guess this is the time!

I have only a brief response to your post, partly because we've recently moved and my reference books are still packed or, if unpacked, are not immediately at hand. A task for next week, but you'll be "off" by then! So tonight I can only offer my experience and some ideas.

I do agree that the more we study God the more we know - if we approach that study prayerfully. I'll use myself as an example: When I sit to learn about our Lord, which I do shamefully little of and do it poorly, I try to pray first, then absorb, and assimilate with my whole being. When I'm able to approach it that way, I believe I have a chance to know more of God because I've tried to open my heart as well as my mind to the Holy Spirit, to guide my learning. In contrast, when I in just "sit down and read" to study - that's a head experience, there's nothing wrong with it, and some days it's all I can do. My knowledge has increased, perhaps, but the experience is different, and the difference is marked.

It seems like a prayerful approach to learning about God (to learning about anything) changes the experience, perhaps joins natural and spiritual knowledge in some way, but I don't know enough to speak to that, because I'm still learning about it. In truth, I'm still just trying to love God first, and put everything in line after that! Maybe that's the only difference that matters in how we approach everything...

Thank you Lord for coming to us, for living and suffering and sacrificing for us, that we could be here, in the midst of your creation, helping each other to love You in all that we do. Amen.

Melissa

[Effie Ganatsios]

Melissa, isn’t it strange the way our souls seem to know just what to do with very little guidance on our part? You write that “I try to pray first, then absorb, and assimilate with my whole being.” And “In truth, I’m still just trying to love God first……….” What else is needed? Nothing!

I found this in my “Prayer journal” – unfortunately there was no heading so I don’t know which Father wrote it…

“ Prayer is a technique or art of loving, a method of Being in Love, God, who is love…….. Pray as you can, don’t try to pray as you can’t. For although the essence of prayer is the same - contact with God - not all forms of prayer suit all people. The attitude is the same…… Withdraw your soul from the perception of sense objects, and the nous will find itself in God. It is said that the highest state of prayer is reached when the nous goes beyond the flesh and the world, and while praying is utterly free of matter and form. He who maintains this state has truly attained unceasing prayer.
…..Words are the tools of this world, silence is the mystery of the world to come. We pray with words until the words are cut off by wonder and we are left in silence, the Silence which is God – God, who is silence….
When a man’s nous is constantly with God, his desire is transformed into divine love…

In stillness of prayer we very gently listen to what God speaks within us…”

I know that very few people attain such an exalted state of prayer – a “prayer of the heart” but surely it’s a goal well worth striving for.

Effie

[Owen Jones]

Dear Fr. A.,

I feel like you are arguing with a person who does not exist and to statements that haven&#39;t been made. I don&#39;t have a direct quote from one of the Fathers to provide you yet that says, &#34;God is Pure Intellect.&#34; They may be there, I just don&#39;t have one at my fingertips. It&#39;s only a sense that I have gleaned from the Greek Fathers. I don&#39;t intend it to mean that God is nothing else. I never said God is Pure Reason or Pure Intellect and nothing else. Nor am I claiming any particular rightness or authority on the subject. I&#39;m not a priest or a theologian or a holy person. So please do not judge me as such.

It&#39;s just food for thought, an imagery if you will. If you don&#39;t like it, find. If you disagree with it, fine. I could be wrong. If so, I doubt I have condemned someone else to eternal hell by expressing my view on the subject.

As for the definition of the term Intellect, I have repeatedly stated that I do not define Intellect in a Latin, Scholastic way, and yet that is how you claim that I define it. And in so doing you virtually accuse me of being heartless, without any love or feeling, which is puzzling to me to say the least. It seems you have an argument against some thing or someone, but I don&#39;t think it is me.

Also, I have repeatedly said that I do not view philosophy as a set of dogmatic concepts but an experience. If that is how you define philosophy, fine, but please do not impose your definition on me. Philosophy is not exactly the same as the Orthodox Christian experience, but it is not opposed to it either. And I think an excellent case can be made that philosophy was just as Providential as the Law and the Prophets. Otherwise why would the Timeaus be the most quoted book by the Greek Fathers other than Scripture? And why would St. Paul have such a powerful response to his sermon at the Aereopogus, by claiming that His God is the Unknown God of the Greeks?



As for Reason, people mean different things by it. If you define it just as a brain function, fine. But do not insist that everyone must. St. Athanasius did not define Reason as a brain function. In ON THE INCARNATION, he defined Man in his prelapserian state as Reason. As opposed to being driven by passion, which becomes our predominant state subsequent to the Fall. In that sense, it is virtually equivalent, if not the same, as what others mean by Intellect. Classically, Reason is understood as both Ratio, which is the more instrumental form of REason &#40;or brain function one might argue&#41; and noetic reason, as that function that is closest to God, or, more accurately, that which more closely approximates the Divine nature in man.

Unfortunately, there is this narrow minded bias among many today who think that anything having to do with Reason or Intellect exists in opposition to Orthodoxy which is based on deep feeling, and an experiential aesthetic. Why is this not making the exact same mistake that you are critical of the Latin West of making? In the Latin West, they have split dogma and experience. There is dogmatic theology and there is mystical theology which is limited to a small class of people that the Church defines as &#34;mystics.&#34; As far as I know, Orthodoxy has never made such a distinction. We are all defined as mystics. And we are all defined as noetic beings. Which is why in the early Church, illiterate people would stand for two or more hours to listen to a highly intellectual sermon and be captivated. Today, most of us would not tolerate such things. We would hang the priest for doing that, and accuse him of simply lording his education over us.

If you read Patristic sermons and treatises, they are, for the most part, conducted in a very intellectual style, and yet contain deep feeling at the same time, and we would not split the two if only we would reject our modern anti-intellectual biases.

I guess if I have one cause, it is the problem I see quite often, almost a ubiquitous problem, of objectifying Orthodoxy into a system that is then used as a club to beat someone else over the head with. We turn off just as many as we save with that approach. There should be an element of open, scientific inquiry as part of Orthodoxy. In Orthodoxy, no one has found the Truth. We are all still striving for it, searching for it. We never arrive at some end point where we can claim that we know it. That is why we all claim to be chief among sinners before receiving communion.

I have a friend who is a mathematician. He got very involved in Buddhism. He was forced to become a Christian because his mind told him that that was the only course of action to follow. He is now a Christian but very disenchanted with his Church situation. So I have offered to show him some Patristic writings that actually reflect what he now believes, but was not aware even existed. So that is just one of many examples of people who need an intellectual approach to God, understanding that by intellectual we mean a sincere search for the truth, rather than a system, in order to overcome their confusion caused by any number of intellectual fallacies that dominate public opinion today. And Orthodoxy offers that to people. What&#39;s wrong with that? Love can deepen and grow in little baby steps, but if one has an intellectual stumbling block to belief, they can be incredibly loving people in many ways and still not get it. So I stand by my statement that in Orthodoxy, Intellect is the governing principle that orders love and directs it toward its natural object. Intellect is not some discreet subject matter apart from love, any more than the persons of the Trinity are discreet from one another. But if we just try to be loving without developing our intellectual awareness, we are prone to serious error and even all kinds of destructive impulses. Like moralizing to the rest of the world about how they are mistreating the planet.

Finally, most of the Philokalia &#40;I know, I know, one is not supposed to read it unless one is a monk or well advanced on the spiritual path&#41; contains teachings on detachment and noesis and stillness that are perfectly consistent with virtually any Platonic Dialogue but which is evident in Scripture in only a very indirect sense, through a personal story. Which is why Protestants &#40;sorry, I&#39;m not trying to bash Protestants, only to use this as illustrative&#41; absolutely despise any talk of meditation, or contemplation, or inner prayer, or stillness, or detachment or the idea of making noetic progress. They reject all of that stuff as too philosophic or mystical. For them, everything is personal, and personal only. God is not Intellect. God is pure Will. THat, I think, is a decisive error. They say there is only a personal relationship and that&#39;s all that matters. But that is an intellectually disordered position to take and leads to much personal grief.

The desire of the intellect to search beyond ourselves for the basis of our existence is placed in us by God as an Erotic force that compels us to never be satisfied. That intellectual search is not to be found in a set of objectifiable dogmatic premises, as important as they may be to resisting error, but take us far beyond that. It is an insatiable desire to always go beyond self in every aspect of our being.

The Fathers understood this in a deep way. So learing mathematics, geometry and astronomy was almost as important as learning the Nicene Creed. It is not the whole story, but it trains the mind &#40;not just the brain&#41; to appreciate the order of creation along intelligible lines. And the Fathers consistently say that one does not get to God by starting with God. One approaches God by looking at the things He has made, and understanding their true nature and purpose. That cannot be done apart from Intellect. One begins to love creation once one begins to appreciate and understand the intelligible principles that govern creation. That is what I mean by Intellect, that&#39;s what the Fathers mean by it. Not some late Roman Catholic scholastic definition of it.

There is a very fascinating article I recently read on the web. It states that China has almost 100 million Christians. And one of the leading attractions to Christianity is the whole idea of progress that is pregnant throughout Christian teaching, that gets us out of a fatalistic, predetermined, cyclical prison of thought. They look at the West, i.e. the Christian West, and they see a more hopeful society and they want to live in hope. So it begins for them with an intelligible, yet observable principle put into action. And it becomes very, very attractive to them. They are breaking out of a dead intellectual system, through a process of intellectual openness.

[Qashisha Chas Kluetz]

Beloved Owen Jones: Indeed! When did you stop beating your wife? And, together with the rest of us, who are among the unlearned, too?

Your most pitiful soul who only pleads ignorance; beseeching the mercies and graces of our worshipful LORD.

Qasha

[Fr Averky]

Dear Daniel,

On what do you base your statement? Does it come from your own experience? You have failed to factor in that the priest has the Grace of his office, and despite the many problems and set backs which I myself have only just cited, I would say that the majority of priests struggle mightily to protect and guide the portion of Christ&#39;s flock which has been given into his hands, The priest is the minister of the local bishop to his parish, and as such has been given the spiritual authority to serve the Divine Services, and to administer the Holy Mysteries of the Church. He is the &#34;Little Father&#34; to his people, who shares their moments of joy, who holds their hands as they lay dying,and brings new souls into the Church and crowns with glory the happy couple. He knows his childrens deepest sorrows and darkest secrets, not judging them, but aware of his own sinfuless and in his own frailty and weakness does what he can to assuage their sorrows and heaviness of heart.

No one but another priest can undesrtand the profound loneliness which part. of the cross of the priesthood. and yet, Daniel, there are those moments when our saviour allows his humble priest to see Uncreated Light, to participate in a miracle, to reach down and lovingly pick up someone who has fallen, to witness the very real power of prayer No Daniel, it is not true that the priest is not willing or unable to &#34;train&#34; his people in unseen warfare. More often than not, it is the stubborn and proud well-read and clever layman who will not be taught, but imagines himself to be knowledgeable, and as such does not receive healing because he will not admit that he is ill, even though his life reflects that illness. And even when the priest tries to give him soul-saving advice, he continues to live the lie upon which his reality exists, and he shuns that conversion of heart which would save him. You could not begin to imagine how much grief that the average priest must bear as he observes so many people with so much spiritual potential tossing their blessings and their salvation to the wind. Week after week, the saving words of the Holy Gospel are given as food to the souls of the faithful, and they go home empty in heart and soul because they simply were not inclined to listen.

I have no idea what your past or present parish experience might be, but most parishoners despite the fact that they have to struggle on many levels by themselves, at the same time are happy to pitch in and help, and do what they can to ensure the growth and vitality olf their parish community. I was loaned to a parish in anotheir diocese that for various reasons had not had a priest in ten years, but in all that time they had faithfully gathered every Sunday and Feast, had Reader&#39;s Service, a little coffee hour, always paid their utilities, and kept their little church in immaculate shape. Like so many parishes, there is to this day a family whose members are the Devil&#39;s servants, but despite their best efforts to cause divison and disruption, the parish now has a young priest who has caused it to grow almost weekly. When I left, the parish was four times larger than when I arrived now, the new priest has tripled that

I was concerned to read your cynical view of parish life, and I pray that you will find a place wherein you will be able to struggle and receive the help that you need.

Fr. A.

[Fr Averky]

Dear Owen,

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your explanation, because I never have considered you to be heartless and lacking in love; in fact, if you go backthrough the archives, you will clearly see that even when you made statements which seemingly were made for their &#34;shock&#34; value, I always tried to speak to you kindly.

In regards to the prolongued discussion we have been having, this is the very first time that you have actually taken time and in a loving way made clear your thoughts, which in the end tells me much more about your worth as a person than it does &#40;even though beautifuly put&#41; about your use of the word &#34;philosophy.&#34;

Unfortunately, Owen, as my Spiritual Father puts it, &#34;It is not the truth that always counts, but the perception.&#34; I recall all too wel that a few month ago you made a statement along thre lines of you believe the best way to approach or come to Christianity is through philosphy. Owen, I do not agrderd with you, but as you just stated, the understanding of the word &#34;philosphy&#34; has been distorted, and people no longer love wisdom or cherish eduction or delve into life&#39;s mystreries, but live on a purely secular and worldy level. I would be willing to bet that almost all high school students and the majority of college students have no notion what philosophy is or could tell you the name of a single Greek philosopher.

I agree with you that the Church is possesed of a higher philosphy as revealed by God&#39;s truth, and incdeed that philosophy in that meaning of the words is salvific.

But again, not clearly understanding you, for which I do apologize, I took your words that the &#34;Fathers say that God is pure intellect&#34; as being your understsnding of God and His role in our salvation. Please understand Owen that your delivery at times precludes being able to really converse with you, because your opinions, some very good indeed, are delivered from behind a wall. Your post today is the most personal I have ever seen from you, and it reveals much about you that is so very good, and I am grateful that you have spoken to me in this manner at last.

In the end it can be seen that we were not i so much oin disagreement, as we were approaching the same Truth by different paths. Over the last year that I have been on Monachos, it has been statements that you have made, almost in passing, which were a moments of wisdom and understanding that really helped me.

In regards to the Philokalia, to me, it is not so much a matter that a person is &#34;not supposed &#34; to read it, but I do believe that to understand it for its worth, one needs to have life experience and spiritual experience in order to understand the high philosophy to be found there. New Christians have but begun the arduous journey which is the Spiritual Life, and they, have to experience God&#39;s pulling away in order that they might appreciate His grace more; to be buffeted by the winds of the passioins, and storms of doubt and persecution, and to learn at last to be attentive in the heart and wait on Him.

It was not my intention to say that God is pure Will, nor to say that a sincere Christian needs to cease thinking, or that he may not have intellectual consideration. One of the aspects of the attractiveness and authority of the Fathers, is that it is eminently clear that they were possed of intelligence and that while having God in their hearts, they still knew Him in their minds. Yet by their words we are reminded timje and time again that trhough the workings of the heart, God reveals Himself to a soul.

I am agreeing with you when you say we are all striving to find the truth, for it indeed is a long process. This is what has caused me to so admantly warn new converts not to find God through the compilation of information, but to live the Christian life itself and to achieve what it means to be an Orthodox Christian through God&#39;s Providence and that which He provides for us through experiences, good and bad, allowing us to be met with many uncertainties and very real crisis in order that we might all the more turn to Him.

Owen, I have also emphasized that the place for God is int the heart and not in the head, with what I have just said in mind. It must be a given, that I am not speaking of a syrupey sentimental and romantic approach to God, with the heart as a valentine, but the very real struggle to put Christ in the center of our existence rather than ourselves.. Achieving that trust, leading to faitffulness is, as you know, hard won. So to me, the heart is not just a place of tranquil repose, but a battleground, where every one of us has so much in his own life to overcome before he can even get to the door of his heart to open it to God.

I was taken aback when you wondered why I had not asked you when you had stopped beating your wife. While sometimes I have felt you to be rather clinical in your approach, I have never thought of you as being cruel or heartless. I will admit that in times past i thought you were being dismissive to me and to others, that is because you never let down your guard as I see in your post to me today, and I tell you, it makes me feel so much more comfortable.

Coming to Orthodxy represents the rebuilding my lost faith and my life again, for having been a young person during al the turmoil of the 60&#39;s and having suffered the trauma of Vatican II, for a while a part of me gave up. When I walked into the Cathedral in San Francisco for the first time , I felt like a prisoner granted freedom. Freedom from no longer trusting God or wanting Him in my life. In my many years in the monastery, I have seen so many who were filled with fervour, and hads all kinds of knowledge,and who went around here teaching and correcting others, and now they long ago gave up their Orthodoxy, and have slipped through the cracks.

Knowing that wisdom cannot really be givden but that it come only in time, still I desire to try to help others from not fallking into the traps and to make the mistakes I made. So if at times I sound fierce, it is because of my love for Holy Orthodoxy. Owen, I am not bragging, but I know that more people have come to Orthdoxy through my poor efforts than were ever driven away. Those close to me know that I am very strict and straight forward, having no provblemsletting people know what I think, but in time. sometimes after many years, have come to me and told me how at one times they were so angry at me for getting after them, but now they realize how much I love them, but more importantly, we have to love God.

[John Curtis Dunn]

And why would
St. Paul have such a powerful response to his sermon at the
Aereopogus, by claiming that His God is the Unknown God of the Greeks?


St. Paul did not engage the Philosophers with philosophy. One group &#40;the Epicureans?&#41; described the Apostles words as a babbler:<u>spermologos</u>, while the second &#40;the Stoicks?&#41; perceived him to be proclaiming &#34;foreign divinities:<u>xeno daimonion</u>. What was it that motivated their attention to St. Paul? It seems there were two things, 1&#41; the city wholly given to idolatry and 2&#41; Therefore disputed he. Thus it seems these philosophers were drawn by their inclination towards a perespective new idolatry and the opportunity to debate about such things.

Owen&#39;s reference to the Areopagus encounter as some proof for a synthesis between philosophy and Christianity seems to idealize the scene. It is to imagine that Paul has found an ideal audience who are waiting to understand and engage St. Paul in an intellectual debate so as to be convinced of the philosophical superiority of the Gospel.

However, St. Luke&#39;s presentation is full of negative evaluations.
1&#41; For example, the use of the verb sumball does not convey a debate to expound and understand each other, but rather it has a stronger connotation of being a quarrel, a dispute, a heated argument &#40;17:18&#41;
2&#41; The city was given to idolatry and these philosophers were attracted to St. Pauls arguments not because they heard a logical discourse which drew them away from idolatry, but because they thought he was bringing to them a new idolatry.
3&#41; In verse 19, it reads And they took him, this does not mean he went voluntarily. Rather, it means &#34;They took hold of him and escorted by coercion,&#34; it is more like an arrest.
4&#41; St. Luke notes in verse 21, that this was the typical behaviour of Atheanians, they spent their time looking to hear some new thing.

It seems that St. Paul was being evaluated to determine whether he should be allowed to continue preaching and proclaiming his doctrine within the streets of Athens.

john dunn

[Owen Jones]

I don&#39;t believe, nor do I think I have argued, John, that Christianity is a synthesis with Philosophy. Rather, that philosophy provides a providential foundation for the spread of Christianity beyond being a Jewish Cult. There is a big difference. And it&#39;s not my fault that most of Paul&#39;s hearers at the Aereopogus were not receptive. They were hardly philosophers, if I get your meaning from your post. They were philodoxers.

But Paul had to be knowledgeable of the Greek philosophical tradition to even make the sermon, and, then, what about St. Dionysius?

And, with kind regards to Fr. A., one does not have to wear one&#39;s heart on one&#39;s sleave in order to discuss ideas. I would not call that a &#34;wall.&#34; My only successful sermon as an Episcople priest was when I made my confession to the congregation in order to encourage them to make their confession. But not every post, or every sermon, every day, please!

I don&#39;t think I ever said that philosophy is the best path to Orthodoxy, but I do think that today, a recovery of reason, properly understood, is essential to a blossoming of Christianity. The primary problem today leading people away from the One True God is not lack of belief. It is that people will believe anything, no matter how philosophically inconsistent or absurd.

There is a fundamental failure in Christian &#34;apologetics&#34; today because it is based on either vain attempts to prove it to be true in some supposedly objectifiable way that does not exist, or it is so personalized that it simply reinforces the opinion that one is free to believe anything he wants, or it is offered as a threat, i.e., if you don&#39;t believe this you are surely going to hell forever! Those are all philosophically inept approaches.

I would argue that you need some type of foundation, some groundwork, to make Orthodoxy intelligible and attractive to most people today. Of course, the most compelling &#34;argument&#34; is by the example of self-sacrifice and purity of heart of Orthodox Christians, but that still can&#39;t be everything. If that was all there was to it, we would all be Arians today.

Best of health.

[Richard Leigh]

Dear John,

I agree with your evaluation of St. Paul and the Athenians in general and the philosophers on Mars Hill in particular. I do not agree with your evaluation of Owen though. At least, I did not read him as attempting a synthesis of pagan philosophy and Christianity.

Paul was an apostle and philosophized as such, not as the philosophers, and this is all I think Owen is referring to.

Richard

[Owen Jones]

One problem is that most conservative or traditionalist Christians are taught reflexively to think of philosophy as a pagan ideology, and nothing more. Indeed, there have always been pagan ideologues. The Sophists were pagan ideologues in fact, and condemned Socrates to death for not being pious enough toward the pagan gods. Plato referred to them as philodoxers, lovers of their own opinion. Celsus was a pagan ideologue who attacked Christianity as a threat to Rome, and produced a kind of caricature of Christianity, to which Origen responded decisively, using philosophical arguments as well as Biblical and common sense arguments.

But this caricature of philosophy is really quite wrong-headed. And it is a fact that Christians from the very earliest of times not only used philsophical method in the strict sense, but indeed saw in philosophy a movement in the soul by God to seek him out on the level of intelligibility. Many saw the great insight of philosophy, that man is Reason, as not only not in conflict with defining man as Faith, but really as two sides of the same coin. And it&#39;s not that this is at odds with anything in Old Testament PRophecy or wisdom writings. While the Prophetic type in the Old Testament is the exemplar of Wisdom, the philosopher is portrayed in Plato as also a prophetic type. He has not reasoned to where he is, in the vulgar, or mundane sense, but has acquired what wisdom he has got through the intervention of God through some oracle or prophet -- i.e. revelation. If Plato says that philosophy is revelation, what right do we have to tell him that he has no right to say that?

And let&#39;s remember that prophets were something highly prized in the ancient world as purveyors of divine wisdom. They were all over the place. So how does one evaluate a prophet? How does one make the vital distinctions between a true prophet and a false prophet? That&#39;s really, really tough which is why there is so much in Scripture written on the subject, and why Christ was the object of so much scorn among the powers that be as a false prophet. It wasn&#39;t just that he was a threat to the powers that be, but that there was a real difference of opinion as to his status as a prophet. And you might argue that the religious powers of the day had lost their spiritual powers of discernment because of the way in which they had institutionalized spiritual things into a set of rules and rituals. &#40;not unlike the Sophists -- only a dolt would fail to see some commonality in the saving tale of Socrates persecuted by the sophists and the saving tale of Christ persecuted by the Pharisees&#41;

So it was only natural that early Christian thinkers would see in philosophers a type of wisdom that was authentic and that they could incorporate. I get back to the same analogies. With the discovery of Calculus, the scientific community did not dispense with algebra. Likewise, most Christian thinkers did not dispense with philosophy. And they could differentiate between philosophers who were simply propagandists for the Empire, and philosophers who genuinely reflected divine wisdom. They took what they could use and they left the rest.

Today we live in a decidedly anti-philosophic culture. Every idea is dissected according to self-serving motives, and ideas are not taken at face value and examined on their own terms. In other words, people are incapable of discussing ideas dispassionately. They only know to attack or critique the person behind the ideas.

Or the opposite takes place: ideas are accepted or rejected as having some kind of objective existence of their own, rather than symbolizing an experience or range of experiences which we fail to appreciate. So a good idea is rejected because the defender of the idea acts as if the idea was showered on him from above directly, and therefore he claims absolute &#34;objectivity,&#34; when any idiot with an ounce of common sense knows that it is more complicated than that.

Many early Christians could see that philosophers had had an experience of the One True God without the benefit of the fullness of the revelation in Christ. That lack of fullness or completeness was not sufficient to reject everything in philosophy, and, in fact, the early Church needed a universal language to explain to itself what it all meant, beyond just a revelation to Jews.

If I were to wave a majic wand and have control over American primary and secondary curriculum, I would argue that it&#39;s insufficient to just require that people become Biblically illiterate, since so much of it is obscured by the Ancient Middle East mindset. I would also require Euclid and Plato and Aristotle, because classical reason has just as much validity today as then. It has a way of transcending everything cultural in a way that the Bible alone is difficult to do. Indeed, it almost sounds like St. Maximos is arguing that you cannot understand the hidden meaning of Scripture without a grounding in numbers and Euclidean Geometry.

[Rebecca]

Dear Owen,

I hope you&#39;ll forgive me taking one quote out of context and asking about it again, but the particular quote below stood out to my pea brain. Please consider that I am not in any way trying to attack or provoke the person who wrote the quote, but am trying to work through the confusion that happened when I read the quote. Please also keep in mind the pea brain of the author of &#42;this&#42; post...

Christ is overly personalized, as is faith and salvation. So one &#34;joins&#34; a Church, rather than being part of a mystical body of believers that are also intimately connected with all of Creation and serve as part of the iconic structure of the cosmos.

So in reading this, although my first reaction is to think of the many Orthodox Saints who speak richly and at length of Christ&#39;s Person, and who speak of &#39;relationship with God&#39; as St. John Chrysostom did in his &#34;Marriage and Family Life,&#34; I stop for a moment and consider the overall context of the ongoing discussions on this message board. And so I want to ask a different question first...

&#34;Christ is over personalized&#34; leaves the reader to wonder who does this? Passive voice leaves the actor ambiguous...In the context of this forum, where the focus is to discuss Orthodox Christian Patristics, liturgics, etc, one might conclude that you are speaking of the Orthodox Saints who have left a legacy of their words that speak of the true relationship and the fullness of the Person of Christ. However, again, taking into account the context of your posts on this forum that I&#39;ve read, I think that might be the wrong conclusion? And again, I think it is ok to discuss other things, and am not trying to stifle discussion, but seeking clarity of discussion.

Your other post above said &#34;I feel like you are arguing with a person that does not exist&#34;....

I would say something similar with regard to the quote &#34;Christ is over personalized&#34; if the actor, the whoever it is who is &#34;over personalizing&#34; is presumed to be the Orthodox Church...But I wonder if your intent is to assign the role of actor in that comment to the Orthodox Church?

Or is the intent to make commentary of other actors outside the Church? If so then I can suggest that, as with so many things, the fullness of the faith is in the Orthodox Church...as with so many things, be it &#39;relationship with God&#39;, Christ&#39;s Person, what is Love, faith, etc, the fullness of these things are found in the Orthodox Church, not in a denial of the existence of these things, but in putting them the context of the fullness of the faith. Such things as Love, relationship with God, and Christ&#39;s Person are given their proper perspective during the Divine Liturgy, the center of our Faith. And clearly that true perspective is richer and not the same as what is &#39;out there,&#39; outside the fullness of the faith.

As the icon transforms the worldly things it portrays &#40;animal and vegetable life&#41; and points us to God, to paraphrase Mr. Ouspensky, so the Orthodox Church takes those parts of ourselves which the world turns into the mundane and puts them into their proper place in the proper glory of God. I would suggest that the Orthodox Church has always done that, does that today, and will continue to do that forever.

So, I conclude that you must not be speaking of the Orthodox Church as being the actor that &#34;over personalizes Christ&#34; etc?

I also conclude that your comment is not intended to promote worship of a non-personal generic &#34;higher power&#34;...and I figure that your lack of specificity in elaborating on the actor who you are referring to as &#34;over personalizing Christ&#34; is for the purpose of courtesy and avoiding direct conflict/contention with the specific actors you&#39;re referring to, them not being the Orthodox Chruch?

[Owen Jones]

No, I was referring to the current intellectual/theological environment in which matters of faith and belief are overly personalized and psychologized to the detriment of reason and the transcendent mystery. In a phrase, theology is no longer a science, let alone the queen of the sciences, but simply a personal position that one takes. This is a cultural catastrophe. And we as Orthodox Christians are not immune to this. We absorb the intellectual environment and apply it to our faith. And we see the effects of this, even on this site, so when someone makes a theological statement that is questioned, it is not the statement or the idea that is questioned but rather the person.

So, when a person says, for example, they are believers in the One True Faith, it may well be a sincere personal statement, but in the current cultural environment, it is easily dismissed as a matter of personal taste, such as what kind of chocolate one prefers. Without a good scientific foundation, it may be great personal spirituality, but that was not the intent of the Fathers, to simply offer a good personal spirituality. They made a rational defense of Christian theology as the fullest, best, most complete explanation of reality as it is experienced. And they arrived at that knowledge through reason, illumined by faith. And they would be the first to argue that Truth is something that one only approach with fear and awe, and never actually acquire. It&#39;s something one lives. That is an intellectual precept of the first order. And yet we think we can become Christian just by believing in all the right opinions, while we might be far from being Christian in our lives. We should have little assurance that just believing the right things, as if they are self-evident truths, is sufficient for salvation. But in the current intellectual environment, you have this problem of objectivization of ideas colliding like Newtonian Atoms and all that creates is more ideas of equal and opposing value. So what is left over to validate the idea is personal feeling. That is not the Patristic intellectual vision.

Now, with that said, I realize that most people do not come to faith in Christ by examining theological controversies, or intellectual debates. It usually has to do with familial or cultural influences. A kind word of someone asking them to join them in Church. Little things like that. And I know a prominent convert who based his new found Orthodox faith on the fact that the Orthodox Church was in the possession of relics of the Apostles. Fine. But the Church as a whole cannot afford to ignore the intellectual environment or treat its own intellectual tradition as a kind of ship in a bottle. It&#39;s there to be used to engage the unreality of commonly held intellectual misconceptions. The Church cannot afford to allow personal feelings to trump Reason and the great intellectual vision of its tradition.

[Melissa]

Owen -I don&#39;t think theology was ever a science in the way that our culture thinks of science now, and that gets us into linguistic trouble. Since the Enlightenment at least, science seems to mean/be the best approximation we can make connecting or explaining observable phenomenon. The general public appears to take &#34;scientific thought&#34; as &#39;gospel&#39;; as if it &#39;proved&#39; something, or could do so if given enough time/money.
Anyway, I think too often we try to prove theology in the way 21st century Western thinkers talk of proving something; we call it a science without realizing that our companions don&#39;t understand that use of the word science.

From what I&#39;ve read &#40;not enough, I&#39;m quite sure&#41;, it seems that theology can can hang a number of ideas together on the tree of
philosophical reasoning &#40;or on a choice of trees!&#41;, and then eventually jumps to faith for the rest. Personally, I don&#39;t think this is bad -it&#39;s a way of avoiding addressing spiritual experiences from the emotional perspective only&#40;as you were talking about in your post #753&#41;. My spiritual father would never let me get away with saying, &#34;Well, my eyes teared up when I was praying, so I knew the message was from God&#34;, for example. Not that God can&#39;t/doesn&#39;t speak that directly as He Wills, but that in general we have to have more to talk about than that, or we fall into dangerous territory. The unseen war is waged by the devil in believer&#39;s hearts as well as their minds.

&#34;And yet we think we can become Christian just by believing in all the right opinions, while we might be far from being Christian in our lives.&#34; I may have a different take on this than you, at least by extension - I believe this is a core statement about theology and how individuals use it - because believing in the right opinions can indeed lead us to a Christian life - if we recognize that believing is only the first step -that believing is really a personal challenge to live as I believe.
So when I read the Bible, I have to gain as much knowledge as I can, perspective, context, etc., about what I&#39;ve read. I have to consider other sources, like the church Fathers, the saints, philosophical understandings, etc. I have to register my feelings, talk with my spiritual advisor, my husband, my friends, my priest...then I can begin to form a belief that grows into a concrete lesson for my life. I &#34;take it to heart&#34;. After doing that for awhile, I begin to struggle with the faith in a familiar way - I learn my own failings, of which there are many, and I learn which precepts of Orthodoxy feel sort of settled in me &#40;I don&#39;t struggle with those anymore&#41; and which are more challenging, where I notice I still want to fight the Will of God. Where I want it my way. At that point, only one thing more is needed - not more philosophy, thinking, arguing, discussing - only for me to humble myself and accept the tradition as my best window into what God wants for me. This is where philosophy and personal experience and tradition and theology all intersect, I believe. The point at which I&#39;ve done all I can do, and it&#39;s always more than I &#34;should&#34; do, and have to give it all up, quit the intellectual and emotional struggle I so relish, and live in the light of my faith as it has been revealed to me in the church. This is the moment where I become responsible for what God has given for me to understand. This is what I feel in my heart, after the process I described above, and it tells me &#34;give it up, you&#39;re working too hard.&#34; Sometimes I actually do. Then I find a revelation for my life awaits.

Most of the time I&#39;m a miserable failure at all that. I&#39;m just becoming aware of the process, and in talking with others, it&#39;s a familiar process to some of them, too, although we may use different language to describe it.

I&#39;m posting this on this thread because I began thinking of it in response to your post #753, and because it does impact my Orthodox attitude to the Bible...but perhaps it really belongs in the &#34;Personal and Casual Conversation&#34; thread, because it&#39;s not a learned piece, just a gathering of my philosophy, I guess, as it impacts my understanding of Orthodoxy. May it land - or not- where it will!

[Matthew Panchisin]

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I thought this might be helpful.

Archimandrite Justin Popovich

The Mystery of Knowledge
from The Theory of Knowledge of Saint Isaac the Syrian in
Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ



According to the teaching of St. Isaac the Syrian, there are two sorts of knowledge: that which precedes faith and that which is born of faith. The former is natural knowledge and involves the discernment of good and evil. The latter is spiritual knowledge and is the perception of the mysteries, the perception of what is hidden, the contemplation of the invisible.

There are also two sorts of faith: the first comes through hearing and is confirmed and proven by the second, the faith of contemplation, the faith that is based on what has been seen. In order to acquire spiritual knowledge, a man must first be freed from natural knowledge. This is the work of faith. It is by the ascesis of faith that there comes to man that unknown power that makes him capable of spiritual knowledge. If a man allows himself to be caught in the web of natural knowledge, it is more difficult for him to free himself from it than to cast off iron bonds, and his life is lived against the edge of a sword.

When a man begins to follow the path of faith, he must lay aside once and for all his old methods of knowing, for faith has its own methods. Then natural knowledge ceases and spiritual knowledge takes its place. Natural knowledge is contrary to faith, for faith, and all that comes from faith, is the destruction of the laws of knowledge — though not of spiritual, but of natural knowledge.

The chief characteristic of natural knowledge is its approach by examination and experimentation. This is in itself a sign of uncertainty about the truth. Faith, on the contrary, follows a pure and simple way of thought that is far removed from all guile and methodical examination. These two paths lead in opposite directions. The house of faith is childlike thoughts and simplicity of heart, for it is said, Glorify God in simplicity of heart &#40;cf . Col. 3:22&#41;, and: Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven &#40;Matt. 18:3&#41;. Natural knowledge stands opposed both to simplicity of heart and simplicity of thought. This knowledge only works within the limits of nature, but faith has its own path beyond nature.

The more a man devotes himself to the ways of natural knowledge, the more he is seized on by fear and the less can he free himself from it. But if he follows faith, he is immediately freed and as a son of God, has the power to make free use of all things. &#34;The man who loves this faith acts like God in the use of all created things, for to faith is given the power to be like God in making a new creation. Thus it is written: Thou desiredst, and all things are presented before thee &#40;cf. Job 23:13&#41;. Faith can often bring forth all things out of nothing, while knowledge can do nothing without the help of matter. Knowledge has no power over nature, but faith has such power. Armed with faith, men have entered into the fire and quenched the flames, being untouched by them. Others have walked on the waters as on dry land. All these things are beyond nature; they go against the modes of natural knowledge and reveal the vanity of such modes. Faith moves about above nature. The ways of natural knowledge ruled the world for more than 5,000 years, and man was unable to lift his gaze from the earth and understand the might of his Creator until our faith arose and delivered us from the shadows of the works of this world and from a fragmented mind. He who has faith will lack nothing, and, when he has nothing, he possesses all things by faith, as it is written: All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive &#40;Matt. 21:22&#41;; and also The Lord is near; be anxious for nothing &#40;Phil. 4:6&#41;.

Natural laws do not exist for faith. St. Isaac emphasizes this very strongly: All things are possible to him that believeth &#40;Mark 9:23&#41;, for with God nothing is impossible . . . To step beyond the limits of nature and to enter into the realm of the supernatural is considered to be against nature, as something irrational and impossible . . . Nevertheless, this natural knowledge, according to St. Isaac, is not at fault. It is not to be rejected. It is just that faith is higher than it is. This knowledge is only to be condemned in so far as, by the different means it uses, it turns against faith. But when this knowledge is joined with faith, becoming one with her, clothing itself in her burning thoughts, when it acquires wings of passionlessness, then, using other means than natural ones, it rises up from the earth into the realm of its Creator, into the supernatural. This knowledge is then fulfilled by faith and receives the power to rise to the heights, to perceive him who is beyond all perception and to see the brightness that is incomprehensible to the mind and knowledge of created beings. Knowledge is the level from which a man rises up to the heights of faith. When he reaches these heights, he has no more need of it — for it is written: We know in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away &#40;I Cor. 13:9-10&#41;. Faith reveals to us now the truth of perfection, as if it were before our eyes. It is by faith that we learn that which is beyond our grasp — by faith and not by enquiry and the power of knowledge. . . .

There are three spiritual modes in which knowledge rises and falls, and by which it moves and changes. These are the body, the soul, and the spirit. . . At its lowest level, knowledge follows the desires of the flesh, concerning itself with riches, vainglory, dress, repose of body, and the search for rational wisdom. This knowledge invents the arts and sciences and all that adorns the body in this visible world. But in all this, such knowledge is contrary to faith. It is known as mere knowledge, for it is deprived of all thought of the divine and, by its fleshly character, brings to the mind an irrational weakness, because in it the mind is overcome by the body and its entire concern is for the things of this world. It is puffed up and filled with pride, for it refers every good work to itself and not to God. That which the Apostle said, knowledge puffeth up &#40;I Cor. 8:1&#41; was

Faith presents a new way of thinking, through which is effected all the work of knowing in the believing man. This new way of thinking is humility. . . It is by humility that the intellect is healed and made whole. . . The humble man is the fount of the mysteries of the new age.

obviously said of this knowledge, which is not linked with faith and hope in God, and not of true knowledge. True, spiritual knowledge, linked with humility, brings to perfection the soul of those who have acquired it, as is seen in Moses, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, and all those who, within the limits of human nature, were counted worthy of this perfect knowledge. With them, knowledge is always immersed in pondering things strange to this world, in divine revelations and lofty contemplation of spiritual things and ineffable mysteries. In their eyes, their own souls are but dust and ashes. Knowledge that comes of the flesh is criticized by Christians, who see it as opposed not only to faith but to every act of virtue.

It is not difficult to see that in this first and lowest degree of knowledge of which St. Isaac speaks is included virtually the whole of European philosophy, from naive realism to idealism — and all science from the atomism of Democritus to Einstein&#39;s relativity.

From the first and lowest degree of knowledge, man moves on to the second, when he begins both in body and soul to practice the virtues: fasting, prayer, almsgiving, the reading of Holy Scripture, the struggle with the passions, and so forth. Every good work, every goodly disposition of the soul in this second degree of knowledge, is begun and performed by the Holy Spirit through the working of this particular knowledge. The heart is shown the paths that lead to faith, even though this knowledge remains bodily and composite.

The third degree of knowledge is that of perfection. When knowledge rises up above the earth and the care for earthly things and begins to examine its own interior and hidden thoughts, scorning that from which the evil of the passions springs and rising up to follow the way of faith in concern for the life to come . . .

It is very difficult, and often impossible, to express in words the mystery and nature of knowledge. In the realm of human thought, there is no ready definition that can explain it completely. St. Isaac therefore gives many different definitions of knowledge. He is continually exercised in this matter, and the problem stands like a burning question mark before the eyes of this holy ascetic. The saint presents answers from his rich and blessed experience, achieved through long and hard ascesis. But the most profound, and to my mind the most exhaustive answer that man can give to this question is that given by St. Isaac in the form of a dialogue:

Question: What is knowledge?
Answer: The perception of eternal life.

Question: And what is eternal life?
Answer: To perceive all things in God. For love comes through understanding, and the knowledge of God is ruler over all desires. To the heart that receives this knowledge every delight that exists on earth is superfluous, for there is nothing that can compare with the delight of the knowledge of God.

Knowledge is therefore victory over death, the linking of this life with immortal life and the uniting of man with God. The very act of knowledge touches on the immortal, for it is by knowledge that man passes beyond the limits of the subjective and enters the realm of the trans-subjective. And when the trans-subjective object is God, then the mystery of knowledge becomes the mystery of mysteries and the enigma of enigmas. Such knowledge is a mystical fabric woven on the loom of the soul by the man who is united with God.

For human knowledge the most vital problem is that of truth. Knowledge bears within itself an irresistible pull towards the infinite mystery, and this hunger for truth that is instinctive to human knowledge is never satisfied until eternal and absolute Truth itself becomes the substance of human knowledge until knowledge, in its own self-perception, acquires the perception of God, and in its own self knowledge comes to the knowledge of God. But this is given to man only by Christ, the God-Man, he who is the only incarnation and personification of eternal truth in the world of human realities. When a man has received the God-Man into himself, as the soul of his soul and the life of his life, then that man is constantly filled with the knowledge of eternal truth. . . .

It is the man who restores and transforms his organs of knowledge by the practice of the virtues that comes to the perception and knowledge of the truth. For him faith and knowledge, and all that goes with them, are one indivisible and organic whole. They fulfill and are fulfilled by one another, and each confirms and supports the other. The light of the mind gives birth to faith, says St. Isaac, and faith gives birth to the consolation of hope, while hope fortifies the heart. Faith is the enlightenment of the understanding. Faith, which bathes the understanding in light, frees man from pride and doubt, and is known as the knowledge and manifestation of the truth.

Holy knowledge comes from a holy life, but pride darkens that holy knowledge. The light of truth increases and decreases according to a man&#39;s way of life. Terrible temptations fall upon those who seek to live a spiritual life. The ascetic of faith must therefore pass through great sufferings and misfortunes in order to come to knowledge of the truth.

A troubled mind and chaotic thoughts are the fruit of a disordered life, and these darken the soul. When the passions are driven from the soul with the help of the virtues, when the curtain of the passions is drawn back from the eyes of the mind, then the intellect can perceive the glory of the other world. The soul grows by means of the virtues, the mind is confirmed in the truth and becomes unshakable, girded for encountering and slaying every passion. Freedom from the passions is brought about by crucifying of both the intellect and the flesh. This makes a man capable of contemplating God. The intellect is crucified when unclean thoughts are driven out of it, and the body when the passions are up-rooted. A body given over to pleasure cannot be the abode of the knowledge of God.

True knowledge the revelation of the mysteries — is attained by means of the virtues, and this is the knowledge that saves.

[Melissa]

Dear Matthew P. -

Thank you for your post - some of it I'd seen before, but it's a good explication of the need and rationale for head/heart integraton in Orthodoxy, and a good reminder for me, always.

Melissa

[Daniel Jeandet]

St Isaac to the rescue again!

How I love this saint.

[Rebecca]

Dear Owen,

And we see the effects of this, even on this site, so when someone makes a theological statement that is questioned, it is not the statement or the idea that is questioned but rather the person.

I hope my post 42 didn&#39;t seem to do that...was not intended so. apologies if efforts failed http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/sad.gif

I may be beginning to understand a teeny bit what you&#39;re saying. It&#39;s interesting to me how my past experience in parish I grew up in, that I&#39;ve posted about elsewhere, was what I&#39;d say was an extreme of the intellectual side of things and left me inclined to focus on what the Saints speak of regarding the &#39;heart&#39;&#42;&#42;. However, I will resist a projection of that extreme &#40;focus on intellect to the seeming &#42;exclusion&#42; of Orthodox sense of &#39;heart&#39;&#41; onto your statements.

&#42;&#42;to ramble a bit...it seems somewhat interesting to my pea brain, in light of the &#39;cultural phenomenon&#39; described in post above &#40;personalization, love, etc&#41; to note that said phenomenon appears to me to maybe be another situation where what the world makes mundane, the Church transfigures into proper glory of God...perhaps echoes of how St. Paul took the Greek &#34;unknown god&#34; as starting point to transfigure and lead folks to the True God? please forgive ramblings from pea brain...not intended to devalue exploring the treasure of what the Saints have said throughout the ages! just a &#42;small&#42; thought...

[John Curtis Dunn]

Owen wrote: &#34;I don&#39;t believe, nor do I think I have argued, John, that Christianity is a synthesis with Philosophy.&#34;

I believe it was Owen, who under another thread has argued that without Plato there would be no Christianity?

John Dunn

[Owen Jones]

I said that philosophy prepared a fertile field in which Christianity could be planted. That&#39;s much different than saying that Christianity is a synthesis with philosophy.

[Fr Averky]

Dear Owen,

While I can accept the validity of your sense of things, the majority of people and the Church itself does not look at Christianity from that particular slant, or at least, not most of the time. Most of us are pretty mundane. Sorry.

If you feel that you afe being attacked personally, please know that if you explained yourself at a much simpler level for we poor ill-educated ones, you would see that people would react more positively and with better understanding.While it is true that most of us are nhot at your intellectual level, it does not make us feel any better being reminded ot it.

After you and I had gone around and around for a few days discussing the difference between the intellect as the place in which one finds God, or my premise that it is in the heart, in one post, which was more relaxed and personal, you left the world of the intellect for a few minutes and were not so oblique. This made me feel that our conversation had become less adversarial and I found that I finally understood what you had been saying.

I think what upsets people at time is that we are made to feel that we are being talked down to, although*now I do not think that is the case.. You have many good things to say, and I have learned much from you, but I often find myself wishing you would treat others with a little more kindness and respect. No matter how &#34;correct&#34; we might be, how we treat others as we express what we know will be received or rejected according to that treatment. It is just one of the weaknesses that we humans have.

One aspect of Orthodoxy which is lacking-the cultivating of the mind, another is lack of charity. As you have pointed out so succinctly on many occasions, we cannot limit ourselves to just pious acts ignoring our minds and intellects. In every monastery that I know of, monastics may have icons and book. Books by which they can continue to learn, to grow, to consider, and yes, even now and again, question.

At the beginjning of my second year in seminary, I went to the bishop&#39;s office and asked if I could be blessed to no longer attend school, because I thoughtI had come here to struggle, pray, and live in silence. The bishop took off his glasses and said to me &#34;Brother Nicholas, the day of the unlearned peasant monk is over. In these days, monks need to be educated and aware of the world around them. It will do no good if pilgrims come to this monastery seeking comfort, guidance and understanding, only to be spoken to by monks who have no awareness of life outside the confines of this place, and what people are up against. We should strive to read, to think, to translate, and so on, lest our minds begin to stagnate&#34;

So I believe that we need to keep ourselves not only in a state of piety, but in knowledge as well. For me and many otrhers, philosophy is not an area by which we would view the Faith, yet, if if I have come to understand Owen even a little, not only has he been speaking of classic philosophy like that of Plato and Aristotle, but actually of that &#34;higher&#34; philosophy which gives deep consideration of the wonders and Mysteries of God, and in so doing, begins its journey to the heart, creating a truly rational Christian. From this, a person does not follow or obey or even worship like a robot, but the marriage of mind and soul in turn marries itself to the belief that God Is.

Please correct me if I am wrong, Owen.

In Christ,

Fr. A.

[Moses Anthony]

Dear Owen, John Curtis Dunn,

At this moment where I live (CST) the hour is almost 10 p.m., and I must be at work by 6 a.m. As with the interpretation of art and literary works without the input of the author, well...

Owen that what you have said- and intimated- on more than one occassion, and what you John may be thinking of is, without the divine providence of philosoiphy as a foundation for it's spread, Christianity would have remained no more than a Jewish sect.

Your knowledge Owen I have absolutely no problem with, nor the concept that as Orthodox Christians we should not forsake the intellectual side of our heritage. Your thought about the value of philosophy to me negates what Almighty God himself has said about His Word/word. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and do not return there but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be thatgoes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it." To me this says that the God whom we say is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, whose word/Word is not devoid from His person, does not need- at it's best- any incomplete system, to prop up what sends forth!

I cannot speak for such a humble man as Fr. A., but it seems to me that this is also at the base of what he has issue with in your posts Owen.

subdeacon Moses

[Daniel Jeandet]

i think you should write a book Owen. Have you ever considered doing that? Sometimes I feel like I am getting what you are saying, and its not that difficult to get, but you just dont have enough room here to really elaborate enough for us to fully understand. I dont even know alot of the words you use or people you quote. I like reading books.

[John Curtis Dunn]

[Owen]They were hardly philosophers, if I get your meaning from your post. They were philodoxers.

Owen it was you who referenced the account of the Philosophers reaction to St. Paul: &#34;And why would St. Paul have such a powerful response to his sermon at the Aereopogus, by claiming that His God is the Unknown God of the Greeks?&#34;

This summary appears [to me] to suggest that St. Paul was attempting to reach these philosophers on their own ground, or being a philosophers to the philosophers.

Also, I would suggest that St. Luke, being an educated man, knew who could and could not be classified as a Philosopher. When St. Luke and St. Paul rehearsed the events later, I am doubtful towards the idea that St. Paul said, &#34;You know Luke, those men were only &#34;philodoxers,&#34; unlike Plato, the true Philosopher.&#34; And when St. Paul exhorted the Christians to avoid the deception of Philosophers, I doubt he was excluding Plato. However, this being said, I am not thereby meaning to trash Philosophy, certainly there have been Saints who studied Philosophy and applied it to the application of understanding the world around them. One such was St. Basil the Great, but let us not forget also that he lamented &#34; &#34;I have consumed almost all my youth in the vain attempt to acquire the teaching of a wisdom which is folly in God&#39;s eyes.&#34;

Having quoted the above, I believe it is also fair to suggest that whenever the Fathers praised any Philosopher [and I acknowledge that they did this a little], it was precisely because they [the philosophers] in some place encouraged the pursuit of virtue, which for the Fathers was a higher pursuit than wisdom [?]. Therefore, in that vein of using the works of the Philosophers to engage the culture around them, it was to direct them to that higher wisdom, which is to embrace and practice the virtues.

Virtue is the fulfillment of wisdom, or the evidence thereof, which is known not made manifest through intellectual discourse on the theories of epistomolgy, but in the struggle to quell the passions which wage war in the soul against the virtues?

In our cultural warfare [which begins within our own souls], the gaining of knowledge or worldly wisdom [remembering that St. Basil could describe all the wisdom of the philosophers as folly in the eyes of God] must also be compared to laying up treasures on earth versus laying up treasures in heaven. This is even so when we consider the fine arts of culture, such as music. The one thing necessary remains always and primarily the bending of every energy to that one task, &#39;the winning of the heavenly crown.&#39;

&#34; If there is any affinity between the two literatures [i.e., sacred and profane], a knowledge of them should be useful to us in our search for truth; if not, the comparison, by emphasizing the contrast, will be of no small service in strengthening our regard for the better. With what now may we compare these two kinds of education to obtain a simile? Just as it is the chief mission of the tree to hear its fruit in its season, though at the same time it puts forth for ornament the leaves which quiver on its boughs, even so the real fruit of the soul is truth, yet it is not without advantage for it to embrace the pagan wisdom, as also leaves offer shelter to the fruit, and an appearance not untimely. That Moses, whose name is a synonym for wisdom, severely trained his mind in the learning of the Egyptians, and thus became able to appreciate their deity. Similarly, in later days, the wise Daniel is said to have studied the lore of the Chaldeans while in Babylon, and after that to have taken up the sacred teachings.

Altogether after the manner of bees must we use these writings, for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination, nor indeed do they seek to carry away entire those upon which they light, but rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go. So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest. And just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious. So, from the very beginning, we must examine each of their teachings, to harmonize it with our ultimate purpose, according to the Doric proverb, &#39;testing each stone by the measuring-line&#39;.

To be sure, we shall become more intimately acquainted with these precepts in the sacred writings, but it is incumbent upon us, for the present, to trace, as it were, the silhouette of virtue in the pagan authors. For those who carefully gather the useful from each book are wont, like mighty rivers, to gain accessions on every hand.....For the journey of this life eternal I would advise you to husband resources, leaving no stone unturned, as the proverb has it, whence you might derive any aid.&#34;

Quotations from Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry by Plutarch and Basil the Great, F. M. Padelford, trans.,Yale Studies in English, Vol. XV; New York, Holt and Co. 1902.

[Melissa]

In The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition Archimandrite Vlachos says, "Philosophy is an offspring of man's intellect - that is, intellect and reasoning define the expression and formulation of concepts; conversely, theology is a fruit of God's Revelation to man's pure heart." And, "Although they studied the philosophy of their age, the Fathers of the Church followed a different method to acquire the knowledge of God. And this method has been the hesychastic one.

A characteristic distinction between the heretics and the Orthodox was, and still is, that the heretics used philosophy to expound on matters of faith, whereas the Holy Fathers used the Revelation, which is a result of hesychia, with all of its importance."

"The Holy Fathers-it must again be emphasized- did not work philosophically, thinking of themselves as philosophers, but had experience and subsequently expressed it in terms of their time, which they loaded with a new life. And they did this, not because it was needed for faith, but because the heretics had appeared, who were trying to alter the faith." (quotes are from pages 39-43)

The author isn't specific in this section about which Holy Fathers he's referring to - has mentioned at least St. Gregory the Theologian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Basil the Great, and St. Paul in this general section as he traces his argument that theology is not a philosophy; within which is the sub-argument that to use one's own thinking to expound upon God is inappropriate, since God cannot be "expressed or conceived" by man.

What do you think about this? Are these statements good representations of how the Holy Fathers taught, or am I getting a skewed viewpoint?

I think in part he's saying that the Fathers used the language of philosophy to express their knowledge of God because it was understood by the audience they were trying to reach, but that they hadn't acquired the knowledge itself through philosophizing, but through hesychastic practice.

That sheds more light for me on why I left a denomination that is basically philosophizing its way out of Christianity, in my opinion, and joined the Church where tradition speaks loud and clear, and is based on revealed Truth. It's like I'm now able to refine my focus, I don't need to search endlessly for meanings, but just focus on living the faith. The Church tells me how, and supports and corrects me as I keep trying. Leading me on into Eternity, God willing.

Prayerfully, Melissa

[Owen Jones]

Vlachos oversimplifies an issue that is far more complex than that, to the point of perhaps being misleading. Vlachos employs the fallacy of the straw man argument here. He defines philosophy in a very reductionist matter in order to knock it down. Classical philosophy was not conceived by philosophizers, such as Socrates and Plato, as a system of anything, or as simply a process of human intellection, without God&#39;s revelation. In fact, it is a search beyond human processes of intellection or observation. So Vlachos is really criticising what is the opposite of philosophy. Also, there is an implicit argument here against an argument that no one has made. I know of no Christian who argues that somehow philosophy provides an alternative or substitute revelation to the Bible. Yet he seems to be implying that there is that argument lurking around somewhere. Also, it is disengenuous at best to suggest that only heretics studied philosophy or philosophized about God. Many of the Greek Fathers advocated the study of &#34;pagan literature,&#34; i.e. classical philosophy, and there is at least one treatise that I am aware of by one of the Cappadocian Fathers &#40;I think it was Basil&#41; to that effect.

One problem I see with this line of argument is that it could be, and was argued, against the Old Testament. This is the argument that the Jews cannot get to Christ through their vanity, limitations of their doctrine, etc., and therefore, the New Testament is the only way to get to Christ to the complete rejection of the Old Testament. Don&#39;t even bother with the Old Testament. This was called the Marcionite heresy, and was rightly condemned by the Church. The Church, so far as I know, never officially condemned the reading of literature outside of Christian literature, which seems to be the elephant in the drawing room in Vlachos argument. While many of the Greek Fathers encouraged the study of classical philosophy and classical literature. One should no more reject the reading of philosophy than one should reject the reading of mathematics, geomotry or astronomy.

Which leads me to ask, what is the fear? If our faith rests on such shaky grounds that we have to condemn the reading of classical philosophy, how good is it? Or more precisely, what are we worried about? That some philosophical inquiry might undermine our faith? If that is the case, then our faith is not worth much, if it cannot stand up to scientific or philosophical scrutiny. In our own day, it would suggest that no Christian can be an engineer, biologist, astronomer or cosmologist, or logician, or lawyer, etc.etc.etc.

It is clear that the Fathers did not view theology as a separate discipline, distinct from all others, but rather science, par excellence. It is the pinnacle of science, building on all of the lower levels. Just as you don&#39;t reject algebra when you advance to calculus, you don&#39;t simply reject all revelation before Christ when you discover Christ. And classical philosophy is revelatory. It reveals the nature of the soul, if nothing else, which is incorporated into Christian teaching.

Christianity today is in a culdisac. Christians are so fearful of Reason &#40;despite the fact that that is how Athanasius and most of the Greek and Latin Fathers defined what it is to be human&#41;, because of modern skepticism, that they say all one has to do is have blind faith. That is a disaster. It leads to the opposite of Christianity. It leads to a kind of self-assertive, self-centered, fearful, insecure, anxiety ridden faith that rests on slogans. Nothing deep.

[Rebecca]

Which leads me to ask, what is the fear? If our faith rests on such shaky grounds that we have to condemn the reading of classical philosophy, how good is it?

good questions imo. where I went to school, formal logic &#40;and I know you&#39;ve made distinction between that and &#34;reason&#34;; I&#39;m not debating deep things here just rambling on value of education&#41; was taught by the philosophy department. my very favorite class of all time was my logical metatheory class &#40;Cantor&#39;s theorem, Godel&#39;s theorem and working through the formal systems that prove them&#41;. I only took one philosophy course that might &#40;?&#41; be considered &#34;classical philosophy&#34; and it was called &#34;philosophy of the mind&#34;..and it started with Aristotle and went through Spinoza and some later thinkers that I&#39;ve since forgotten the names of &#40;as well as the details of their writings&#41;...

The thing was, for me, &#40;and not to be arrogant about the opportunity I had for this education, but just to comment on the joy of learning&#41; that I took the philosophy of the mind course same time I was taking cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and first semester of logical metatheory, and I took formal computer languages quickly on the heels of all that. They all interrelated to a degree that I hadn&#39;t anticipated when signing up for the electives.

I&#39;ll never regret that semester and what I learned because it helped me recapture the joy of learning, which I&#39;d somewhat forgotten by my senior year in college after the grind of exams etc. &#40;it was so easy to fall into just focusing on performing on the exam&#41; and though much of this was not directly applicable to my major, the approach to thinking I learned really helped organize my pea brain &#40;as much as it is organized&#41;

[Owen Jones]

Thanks, Rebecca. You have anchored the discussion in practical experiences, which is what is needed. &#34;Modern&#34; education, instead of awakening in the student a desire to know, numbs the mind and forces people to regurgitate popular opinion about things. This has produced generations of lost young people whose intellects are spiritually destroyed. This natural desire to know, which God places in all of us, is called Eros, both by Plato, and by the Christian ascetics. It is also the force in-between God and Man that causes us to desire God, in and through a seeking intellect, and moral desire to please God and to do his one. Once cannot separate out these functions. By the same token, the Church cannot create a closed system where there is no desire to seek, to know more, to transcend. The key is to have the right grounding, not just morally, but in a higher sense. What are the ordering principles so that our desire does not seek a false object? Reason is the category discovered by classical philosophers that is incorporated into Patristic Christianity that defines that ordering principle, without which, our spiritual desires -- our loves -- become unruly and disordered and we will fall for any and all quack promises of salvation that we come across -- or we become fixated on one thing at the expense of everyone else. The way the Orthodox Fathers distinguished between heretical teachings and Orthodox teachings was through Reason. I&#39;m not aware of any Father who argued that God dictated the Chalcedonian Definition to them. On the other hand, it is equally false to say that Reason is not a direct gift from God, born of ascetic efforts and deep prayer. It is all of a piece.

Now let&#39;s look at where Christians have erred in modern times. Many Christians supported Hitler. A part of that problem was a loss of Reason at the societal level that led to the same problem I described above about modern education.

This is why I argue that the best thing that could happen for Orthodox Christianity is to return to classical education in the schools. I would argue that Orthodox theology is the fruition or culmination, not just of the Old Testament, but of the fruit of philosophy, or classical Reason.

In fact, I think many of the criticisms made of classical philosophy are more appropriately made toward Judaism. Jewish thought imploys a kind of hard, rigid logic based on human reasoning regarding the consequences of sin that is false and self-defeating and causes Jews to be slaves to their own self-sufficient thoughts. This inevitably leads to idolatry of the mind.

Jewish thought simply cannot comprehend or allow for the paradox of existence that says that we are no longer slaves to the law or sin. This quandry for the Jews results in Judaism naturally resorting to syncretistic philosophy in order to escape from their logical rigidity and inability to accept a more theologically nuanced, or paradoxic situation. This is why modern Jewish thinkers have adopted all kinds of perverse ideologies promising innerworldly salvation, from Marxism to Freudian psychoanalysis.

It was classical philosophy that provided an intellectual framework consistent with the Revelation of Christ Resurrected. Jewish thought could not then, and cannot now.

[Melissa]

Dear Owen, Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post re: Vlachos. Gives me a better perspective. I don't always know how to understand the language some Orthodox authors use - like that all philosophers/philosophical thinkers are heretics...I don't believe that, but wasn't sure how seriously it was meant...

Yay, let's return to classical education, as you and Rebecca were discussing...better for our kids all around.

Thanks again. Melissa

[Trudy Ellmore]

Dear Melissa:

One thing that we must keep in mind regarding the word &#34;heretics&#34; is its definition. The dictionary says: &#34;somebody who holds unorthodox religious belief: somebody who holds or adheres to an opinion or belief that contradicts established religious teaching, especially one that is officially condemned by religious authorities.&#34; &#40;Encarta Dictionary&#41; &#40;Side note: unorthodox with a little &#39;o&#39;.&#41; As it has been explained to me, &#34;heretic&#34; means &#34;other thinking.&#34; Orthodox &#40;little &#39;o&#39;&#41; means &#34;adhering to what is commonly accepted&#34; or &#34;right thinking&#34; as someone put it to me. Thus when I see the word heretic used associated with some philosophers/philosophical thinkers, it fits especially when used by Orthodox writers and believers.

Hope this doesn&#39;t muddy the waters more than they were. YMMV.

In Christ, Trudy

[Richard Leigh]

Dear Owen,

I&#39;d be interested in some of your resources regarding Jewish thought. It is not devoid of Hellenistic influence, at least historically speaking, as I&#39;m sure you know, though I expect you&#39;re right regarding any lack of such influence currently &#40;though I don&#39;t know&#41;. I am needing to look further into modern Jewish thought. Also, if you would elucidate on &#34;incapable&#34; &#40;i.e., &#34;...simply cannot comprehend...&#34;&#41; for me, I would appreciate it.

I am agreed with all three of you regarding theneed for classical education.

Richard

[Owen Jones]

I&#39;m not trying to be hard on Vlachos, mind you. He knows a lot more about the faith than I. But sometimes it&#39;s very easy to write things in order to sound authoritative by being overly simplistic. I would just hate for him to be interpreted by the faithful in such as way as to suggest that one should eschew any learning outside the faith, or assume that somehow the study of classical philosophy is going to turn one into a heretic.

[Owen Jones]

I don&#39;t have any specific resources other than the obvious nature of the NT conflict over who Christ was, and from studying a little Hebrew, and general common sense awareness, Richard, but let&#39;s face it, the Jews could not accept Christ as the Incarnate Son of God. That was blasphemy for them, and in part that is due to the fact that a God differentiated into two persons was intellectually incomprehensible. Hebrew is a very compact, concrete language, and Judaism, apart from some of its modern offshoots, is not very mystical -- it is historical, concrete, compact. The Hebrew language does does not have the symbols necessary to convey participation in a Triune God, all this tripartite soul business and so on. It only has 40,000 words and as such is, as my Hebrew professor once put it, a very &#34;poor&#34; language. Whereas Greek has five different words for love, and a variety of words to connote or symbolize the experience of divine human participation at various levels of being. That is true to this day to a great extent, if one wants to look, for example, at all the raging controversies over what it means to be a Jew. One can always become a Jew through conversion, but even this is normally done through marriage. But conventionally one is either a Jew by virtue of one&#39;s mother, or a Jew by virtue of living in Israel. Many Isrealis, for example, do not believe a Jew living outside of Isreal is really a Jew. That&#39;s not simply a narrow prejudice, although there is certainly some of that, but it is also part of the fact that God has a special physical location -- the Promised Land. Christianity can take &#34;the Promised Land&#34; as a symbol for the experience of Exodus as a spiritual release from sin and worldliness into a new realm. Jews for the most part reject such symbolization. The Promise Land is what it is and only that -- the nation of Israel. And what I have found, which is certainly just a personal anecdotal observation and nothing more, is that when Jewish scholars devote themselves to philosophy, they become great Aristotelians and lousy Platonists. They love the formal logic of Aristotelianism and hate the mysticism of Plato. Except for the Hassidic Jewish scholars like Abraham Heschel. But there is a great story in Heschel&#39;s A Passion For Truth about a great Hassidic scholar who was worrying over a logical conundrum over the dinner table with friends. He was so traumatized by not being able to resolve this logical conundrum -- I forget the specifics -- that he went into a catatonic state that lasted several days.

[Melissa]

That&#39;s how I understood your post. Vlachos talks about psychology, too, in ways that I may have some questions about, but find helpful and challenging personally and professionally.
Melissa

[Fr John Wehling]

&#40;Warning: parenthetic statement to follow having nothing to do with anything previously under discussion here!&#41;

My favorite Heschel story &#40;at least when I heard it it was attributed to Heschel; this is my paraphrase&#41;...

Some young people came to Rabbi Heschel and said, &#34;Rabbi, the liturgy needs to be contemporized; it does not express what we feel.&#34;

&#34;My children,&#34; the Rabbi responded, &#34;it is not the liturgies job to express what you feel. It is your job to learn to feel what the liturgy expresses.&#34;

[Richard Leigh]

Owen, Mellisa, and???

Regarding Vlachos. Remember everybody that the book you&#39;re all refering to is at least an attempted if not total transcription of a series of talks to lay folk on the subject at a somewhat social gathering after Divine liturgy. Everyone is speaking from the top of their heads, Vlachos included. Also, remember that it is a translation into English from its original modern Greek. Thus, I would think, we need to be careful to read whatever else the Metropolitan has written on this topic.


Richard

[Warren Bensinger]

Owen & Richard L.

Excuse me for jumping in but My Daughter who is a Jewish Rabbi in RI, Said that "Intering Jewish Prayer" by Hammer, Is a good book to look at the turn of time at the way Jews did things and the way Christians copied (because they were Jews). I haven't bought the book but it is avalible at Amazon.

w
t.s.

[Owen Jones]

I was interested to note that it is the official position of the Greek Archdiocese of NA that without Greek Language, philosophy and drama, theer would have been no Gospels, no liturgy, no Christian theology, that all of these things were Providentially ordered by God to prepare the world for Christ, and the time for His Glorification comes when the Greeks arrive on the scene.

[Fr Averky]

Owen,

And I have been interested to note that Greek Americans love to speak of the glories of ancient pagan Greece, and little about the glories of the Byzantijne Empire; this not meant to be offensive, but I have read over the years speeches given by Archbisop Iakovos, extolling the the glories of Hellenism and its great value to the world.

Of course,this is very true, and that which ancient Greek culture gave to the world is astounding, but such comments, as are any nationalistic expression, are not to be seen as some criterion of the value of the people of Greece.

The Russians state that Cyrillic alphabet, devised by two Greek brothers for a small Slavic kingdom who used Slavonic, is the only language ever inspired by the Holy Spirit specifically for Orthodox worship, for it has no secular uses. Greek and Latin are also considered the old &#34;sacred&#34; language, but we do not even want to consider the terrible things written in those languages.

That is the wonder of Orthodoxy-each Church has its own treasures, which contribute to its spiritual splendor/ When the average person thinks of an image of Orthodoxy, he can recall one image, that which is seen in photographs more than any other structure n the world-St. Basil&#39;s in Red Square.

Fr. A

[John Curtis Dunn]

12 January, 2004 Owen Jones wrote: &#34;the Jews could not accept Christ as the Incarnate Son of God.&#34;

----

I apologize for the lapse of time from the above posting to my reply, but now that I have a little time to catch up on my reading, the above is in need of some little response.

While Jews are described in the NT as not believing upon Christ, to imply that there was something with in the OT faith passed on from Abraham unto John the Baptist which made the Incarnation &#34;intellectually incomprehensible,&#34; is erronous. Unbelief is far more serious a matter than the lack of intellectual comprehension of how God could become man, or a how a Virgin could give birth.

The rationalization of unbelief follows after the hearing of the Gospel, not before. Granted, the deceits of unbelief may have been sown prior to hearing the Gospel, but nobody can disbelieve what they have never heard. The NT does not describe those Jews which rejected the Gospel as doing so from want of intellectual comprehension of the mystery of the Incarnation. Rather they willfully refused to recognize the works of Christ as evidence or proof of His Divinity.

This failure was a result of pride and jealousy, not the lack of symbolic abstract categories. The Old Testament is full of symbols and their explanations, granted some are more readily apparhent than others, but none can be categorized as &#34;intellectually incomprehensible.&#34;
In fact, more often than not, unbelief is steeped in creating symbolic abstracts to explain away the most obvious of meanings.


Every Orthodox Christian is familiar with Psalm 50, a Psalm in which the symbolic meaning of the OT sacrifical system is clearly enunciated. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.&#34;

And we must also include the Prayer of Solomon:I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in for ever. &#40;1 Kngs 8:13} But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house that I have builded?&#40;v. 27&#41;

This prayer shows that the OT mind when it was filled with faith, was capable of recognizing and living with apparhent contradictions. He of whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, could still be found dwelling in a building made by men&#39;s hands. This prayer was offered to God by Solomon after the Glory of the Lord had filled the temple, such that the Priest could not even remain in the Temple to minister.

Neither can the unbelief of the Jews be excused by pointing to the lack of words. The OT makes a clear and definite demand which categorizes love in a manner equally and perhaps superior to that of the Greek language. &#34;And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.&#34; &#40;Deut. 6:5&#41; The lack of words for love does not mean the OT mind lacked the abiltiy to differentiate between types of love, and this passage also shows that there is an ability to express this differentiation.

Besides the above we also read: &#34;The Lord did not set his love on you, or choose you because you were more in number than other people; for you were the fewest of all people.&#34; &#40;Deut. 7:7&#41; Here the Lord&#39;s love is defined as a free-will choice not a passionate response to something within Israel. Is there any Greek word which captures the essense of God&#39;s love for mankind as expressed in this passage?

We read in St. John&#39;s Gospel: &#34;For God so loved the world, that He gave His Only-Begotten Son...,&#34;&#40;3:16&#41; and here we find the Greek word agapao or agapeo. St. John also used this same word to describe the Pharisees: &#34;For they &#40;the Pharisees&#41; loved the praise of men, more than the praise of God.&#34; &#40;12:43&#41;

If we attribute to agapao a distinct characteristic of free-will as found expressed in Deut. 7:7, how are we to explain: &#34;The she &#40;Mary Magdalene&#41; runneth and cometh to Simon Peter and the other disciple , whom Jesus loved &#40;phileo, 20:2&#41; Followed later by &#40;21:20&#41; we read, &#34;Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved &#40;agapao&#41;.&#34; These two passages show that St. John could use agapao and phileo interchangably.

What is different about these two loves?

john dunn

[Owen Jones]

One of the problems in discussing matters of intellect today is that intellect is usually characterized as a discreet activity of the brain. The classical understanding of intellect encompasses the moral will. So bad intellectual ideas stem from a deformed moral will and actions, and vice versa. To state the obvious, that most Jews at the time of Christ did not have an intellectual concept of Incarnation and thereby deemed it a &#34;scandalous&#34; notion, does not implicity or explictly dismiss the element of disobedience in the moral will behind the formulation of the Jewish intellectual tradition. I believe it is a consistent teaching in Catholic Christian, East and West, that intellect and moral will are inextricable. Most heresies stem from excesses or extremes in the moral will, either due to licentiousness or extreme puritanical perfectionism.

And as our ascetic tradition teaches, the moral will first leads to a transformation of the senses, both physical and spiritual, so reality becomes luminous to the soul. Without that transformation &#40;Pentacost&#41; one cannot expect the Jew to see fully that which is. Even the Apostles themselves did not, en toto, see Jesus as the Christ until after Pentacost. They were still thinking and perceiving as Jews.

It&#39;s striking to me that Protestantism, which has always seemed to me to be a kind of re-Judaizing of Christianity, the more sublime aspects of the Incarnation are either refuted outright or are simply avoided.

[John Curtis Dunn]

09 April Owen Jones wrote: &#34;The classical understanding of intellect encompasses the moral will. So bad intellectual ideas stem from a deformed moral will and actions, and vice versa.&#34;
----

The above also defines a heretic. There is a moral deformaty in the man or woman who cannot and will not believe the Orthdox Faith. When stated this way, the path to Orthodoxy is made clearer, but not necessarily easier. It is extremely difficult to distance oneself from the web of intellectual rationaliztions which each of us individually weaves to justify our moral deformities.

Owen wrote:
&#34;To state the obvious, that most Jews at the time of Christ did not have an intellectual concept of Incarnation and thereby deemed it a &#34;scandalous&#34; notion, does not implicity or explictly dismiss the element of disobedience in the moral will behind the formulation of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

I can assent to the above, but it seems that your original posting to which I replied was more narrow than the classical definition you now offer? You wrote: &#34;...but let&#39;s face it, the Jews could not accept Christ as the Incarnate Son of God. That was blasphemy for them, and in part that is due to the fact that a God differentiated into two persons was intellectually incomprehensible.&#34;

If, as you have written: ...most Jews at the time of Christ did not have an intellectual concept of Incarnation, how could they refuse to accept Christ as the Incarnate Son of God&#34;?
How does one reject Christ as the Incarnate Son of God if one does not possess some intellectual concepts which will not accept Him as the Incarnate Son of God?

All and every rejection of Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Son of God &#40;as confessed by Orthodoxy&#41;is due to moral deformity, even with such men of the calibre of Abraham Heschel.

But I was replying to the idea that the OT lacks the concepts of symbolism through which the Incarnation could be grasped and understood. This was the point I comprehended from your words: Hebrew is a very compact, concrete language, and Judaism, apart from some of its modern offshoots, is not very mystical -- it is historical, concrete, compact. The Hebrew language does does not have the symbols necessary to convey participation in a Triune God.

I would concede that the symbolism of the OT is not abstact, but this defeciency is overcome by the use of symbolic imagery. For example: In Genesis 7:11 we read, &#34;... and the windows of heaven were opened.&#34; Later in Malachi 3:10 we read:&#34;...and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing...&#34;

In both of the above a window is used to describe how God, of whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain is able to enter into the world. The first entrance being a judgment and the latter being a blessing. This window is used as means to express how God enters into the world. In a similiar manner, Jacob&#39;s dream images a ladder and a gate through which God enters into the world. Both window and Gate image a point of seperation between God and man. The ladder upon which the Angels ascend and descend unites the incomprehensible with the comprehensible. It is as you have explained, grounded in compact, concrete language, but it sufficiently conveys the Incarnation in a manner which the Church continues to use.

Hellenism introduced many difficulties into Church, but by much prayer and some refined arguments gifted men were able to resolve these in a manner which the Orthodox Church could accept. Hellenism was steeped in dualism and the Church Fathers had to continually steer the Church through it.

Perhaps I have simply misunderstood your point, if so, forgive me.

Peace and good will.

john dunn