Stromata Blog

Lenten Weblog, Day 41: Lazarus Saturday

Today is the Feast of the Raising of Lazarus, which along with Palm Sunday tomorrow, forms a joyous interlude before the somber tragedy of Holy Week, as well as a prelude to the triumph of Christ’s Resurrection.

Bringing Lazarus back to life after four days in the tomb stands out among Our Lord’s miracles. Cures and exorcisms are unspectacular fare by comparison. The question naturally arises: If Jesus performed this miracle, if all of Lazarus’ family and friends could testify to it, how could there have been any doubt about His divinity? Wouldn’t all unbelief be instantly silenced?

Extending that thought, why, if God is real, doesn’t He show Himself to us with wonders that no atheist could deny? Instead His power skulks in the shadows, revealed, so it seems, only to those who are predisposed to believe in Him without tangible proof.

The answer is that belief in supernatural forces is not good in and of itself. Magicians and Satanists believe in them, too. Those who saw the raising of Lazarus knew only that a man who claimed to be a prophet had performed a miracle. How they reacted to that news depended less on what Jesus did than on their own characters. If they already loved God, they were drawn nearer to Him by this sign of His love for a stricken friend. If they loved only the things of this world, they saw a possible benefactor, a bestower of health, wealth and pleasures, to be approached in the same manner as any earthly despot. The Gospels forbear to record it, but we may be sure that Our Lord was surrounded by flatterers and schemers, by men who desired to use Him for their own purposes. Some of those purposes may have been idealistic: to free Israel from its Roman masters or relieve poverty through perpetual manna from Heaven. Others were less creditable. All were distortions, for they treated God as a means rather that as the supreme end.

Cheap miracles, dispensed to all and sundry, would alter most people’s conception of how the world operates, but not of what its purpose is. The supernatural would be just another tool, which wicked men would seek to use wickedly. It is only a man who is already moving toward union with God who can profit when God touches his life in a manner outside the ordinary course of nature. The rest are better left in the shadows until they are ready to receive the true light.

Troparion - Tone 1

By raising Lazarus from the dead before Your passion,
You did confirm the universal Resurrection, O Christ God!
Like the children with the palms of victory,
We cry out to You, O Vanquisher of death;
Hosanna in the Highest!
Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord!

Kontakion - Tone 2

Christ the Joy, the Truth and the Light of all,
The Life of the World and the Resurrection
Has appeared in His goodness, to those on earth.
He has become the Image of our Resurrection,
Granting divine forgiveness to all!

And now, after 41 consecutive days, I’m going to bring the Lenten Weblog to a close. Lent isn’t over, but there are plenty of church services to occupy my time between Palm Sunday and Easter. Attending to them will be more profitable to my soul than writing these foolish and inadequate words. May Holy Week be blessed to all, as we await the glory of Pascha.

Lenten Weblog, Day 40: Readings

Being a bit weary this evening, I think that I’ll forgo trying to write creatively. Here instead are a trio of excerpts from essays worth reading:

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), “Biblical Aspects of the Question of Faith and Politics” (homily delivered in 1981):

The state is not the whole of human existence and does not embrace the whole of human hope. Men and women and their hopes extend beyond the thing that is the state and beyond the sphere of political activity. This does not only apply to a state that is Babylon but to any and every state. . . .

But when Christian faith, faith in man’s greater hope, decays and falls away, then the myth of the divine state rises up once again, because men and women cannot renounce the totality of hope. Even when such promises . . . proclaim as their goal the complete liberation of mankind and the elimination of all domination, they stand in contradiction to the truth of man and in contradiction to his or her freedom, because they force people into what they can achieve themselves. This kind of politics that declares the kingdom of God to be the result politics and distorts faith into universal primacy of the political is by its nature the politics of enslavement; it is mythological politics. . . .

It is of course always difficult to adopt the sober approach that does what is possible and does not cry enthusiastically after the impossible; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry for the large-scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passion of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted. But in truth political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away. It is not the adventurous moralism that wants itself to do God’s work that is moral, but the honesty that accepts the standards of man and in them does the work of man. It is not refusal to compromise but compromise that in political things is the true morality. . . .

Christian faith has destroyed the myth of the divine state, the myth of the state as paradise and a society without domination. In its place it has put the objectivity of reason. But this does not mean that it has produced a value-free objectivity, the objectivity of statistics and a certain kind of sociology. To the true objectivity of men and women belongs humanity, and to humanity belongs God. To genuine human reason belongs the morality that is fed by God’s commandments. This morality is not some private affair; it has public significance. Without the good of being and doing good there can be no good politics. What the persecuted Church laid down for the Christian as the core of its political ethos must also be the core of any active Christian politics; it is only when good is done and recognized as good that a good human social existence can thrive. To bring to public acceptance as valid the standing of morality, the standing of God’s commandments, must be the core of responsible political activity.

Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria, “Habemus Papam!”:

What do I, as an Orthodox bishop living and serving in Europe, expect from the new pontificate?

First of all, that the Catholic Church continues to preserve its traditional doctrinal and moral teaching without surrendering to pressures from the ‘progressive’ groups that demand the ordination of women, the approval of the so-called ‘same-sex marriages’, abortion, contraception, euthanasia etc. There is no doubt that Benedict XVI, who has already made his positions on these issues clear, will continue to oppose such groups, which exist both within the Catholic Church and outside it. . . .

I hope, next, that there will be a general amelioration in the relations between the Catholic Church and the world Orthodoxy. . . . My fear, however, is that by concentrating exclusively on the dividing issues we are likely to lose precious time that could be used for a common witness to the secularized world. Europe, in particular, has so rapidly dechristianized that urgent action is needed in order to save it from losing its centuries-old Christian identity. I strongly believe that the time has come for Catholics and Orthodox to unite their efforts and to defend traditional Christianity, which is being attacked from all sides. In twenty, thirty of forty years it may simply be too late.

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, “Biblical Repentance”:

Repentance is the arche, the foundational principle, of the life in Christ; it functions in the life of grace as the number “one” functions in arithmetic. It is not simply the “first” step of the Christian life. Repentance, rather, provides the abiding and formative structure of the whole life in Christ. Repentance is not a first step that we take with a view to getting past it. We are called to remain forever repentant. Although there is certainly progress to be made in the life of grace, all genuine progress is indicated by a renewal of repentance. A Christian does not “grow” in Christ by diminishing in repentance. True growth and authentic progress in Christ always imply growth and progress in repentance. . . .

[T]he Bible indicates that the conversion of repentance is not just an act of God; it is also an act of man’s free will under the accepted influence of God’s grace. Man’s heart, his interior, is altered by repentance. . . .

[B]ecause repentance is the free decision of man as well as the free gift of God, the grace of repentance, if not properly safeguarded, can also be lost. . . . [T]he blessed assurance given us in Christ (cf. Romans 8:31-39) is no substitute for humility and vigilance. At no point in our Christian lives can we afford to forget that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), with discipline lest we fall away (1 Corinthians 9:27). “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (10:12). . . .

Repentance is the non-negotiable, foundational constant of the life in Christ. However much God’s saints differ from one another in style, tone, and emphasis, repentance is a grace and discipline – a principle – shared by them all.

Lenten Weblog, Day 39: Too Many Years?

Rand Simberg, one of my favorite writers on space policy, uses the papal election as a hook for an essay, “Habemus Papam...Ad Perpetuitatem?”, wondering what the Church thinks about the prospect of “extreme life extension and indefinitely-long healthy human life spans”. From his tone I suspect that he believes traditional Christianity to be basically hostile to the idea, even if “there wouldn’t seem to be any existing ecclesiastically doctrinal reason” for that attitude. He foresees that the current Pope or a successor might “draw a line, and declare certain life-extending, life-enhancing therapies to be un-Catholic”, even if they didn’t “require killing embryos, or some other means that is morally problematic”.

To be fair and balanced, that suspicion only lurks in the background. The essay’s principal theme is that Christians haven’t thought a great deal about the moral implications of increasing longevity.

In a world of conventional life spans, we can always console ourselves with the thought that, if we’re stuck with a dud pope, or a particularly nasty and competent dictator, or an overactivist judge, no one lasts forever.

But what if they do? What are the implications of this for the future of the Church? Or of dictators (who are usually the first in their own nations to take advantage of new medical techniques)? Or the Supreme Court? Or indeed, any position which, in our current finite-lived reality, is defined as a term for life? And what will be the response of the Church in particular, which like most churches, partly grew in response to the innate human fear of death, in a world in which death was commonplace, to a world in which it becomes a rarity, only resulting from severe injuries occurring too far from medical facilities?

Questions like that aren’t really answerable, because, despite the great medical advances of the past century, a world in which death is rare is still a long way off. One needs a more precise scenario – How long do men live? What medical technology is needed to sustain them? How healthy are they? – to speculate about its practical consequences. On the other hand, there are a few broad principles that, it seems to, must be taken into account in any Christian view of the issue.

Christianity has always affirmed that life on Earth is a blessing and death a curse. In the Orthodox Church, “God grant you many years!” is a frequent acclamation, not “God take you to Heaven swiftly”. Earthly life is not the whole of life; neither is it a trivial prologue to be rushed through on the way to the real performance. Although each of us will live forever, these years of mortality are, to the best of our knowledge, the decisive period of our existence, during which we will either gain eternal glory or cut ourselves off forever from God. From a purely utilitarian point of view, we ought not to be in a hurry.

Still, the blessing of life is not the foremost blessing. No one, including non-Christians, thinks that it is. Were youthful, healthy life always preferable to death, we would praise soldiers who run away from battle. It is possible to make oneself miserable through excessive love of life, just as through excessive love of wealth or food or sex or any other natural good. At the same time, the expectation of many, many years can be an inducement to sloth and ennui. There may be other bitterness in the blessing, too, as I wrote a few years ago:

That the nearness of death repels laziness is no surprise. There are other, subtler psychological effects. Those who have the most potential life to lose are likely to be the least willing to risk it, and aversion to risk, once it gains a foothold in men’s habits, can little by little come to dominate their doings.

In the Age of Exploration, a majority of those who boarded ships for the New World died on the voyage. In our faltering Age of Space Exploration, a handful of deaths traumatize opinion. When the Mir got into trouble, commentators averred that, if the single American on board died, it would be politically impossible to go forward with the International Space Station – and they were probably right.

It was not just that people did not want to risk their own lives. They did not want to see even willing volunteers in jeopardy. Risk aversion, it seems, has become deeply ingrained in the national psyche. The most straightforward explanation is that, just as rich men dread robbers and tremble when others than themselves are robbed, those who feel that they have a natural right to fourscore-and-ten years easily pass from a normal fear of death to a morbid phobia. Eventually, the joy of life is stultified by precautions against losing it.

For our ancestors, so far as one can now discern, the relative shortness of life did surprisingly little to diminish human happiness. Probing the psychology of the past is treacherous, but it is surely noteworthy that depression, suicide and despair did not become visible literary themes until the 18th century nor obsessive ones until the 20th. The melancholy that accompanies the demise of a young Dickensian heroine is tinged with sweetness and hope. Nowadays, except in overtly camp performances like Love Story, the typical novelistic or dramatic response to dying, at almost any age, is rage against man and the universe. Angels in America has displaced David Copperfield and Marion Fay.

That longer life is not a prescription for unalloyed happiness is one of the reasons why we should be cautious about taking morally questionable steps obtain it. In no moral calculus does a mediocre end justify extreme means. Almost everyone, Peter Singer excepted, I suppose, would shrink from killing a healthy newborn infant in order to gain several centuries of personal happiness. Isn’t it then prudent to refrain from killing unborn children when the prospective reward is nothing more than a few decades of life that may not be particularly pleasant or happy?

A quick summary of what I believe to be the Christian answer to Mr. Simberg’s question amounts to this: Prolonging the span of healthy human life would be a great good, but it is not a good to be pursued at all costs, and it will not add as much as many imagine to the sum of human happiness. Ultimately, life in this world, however long it lasts, is of no length at all compared to eternity. Whether we survive for a hundred years or ten thousand, it behooves us to direct our thoughts to the life of the age to come, for that is where our future lies.

Lenten Weblog, Day 38: Zacchaeus the Tax Collector

Today is the feast day of St. Zakkai, the undersized architelones (a unique word but transparently synonymous with telonarches, “chief collector of customs”) of the city of Jericho, who climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus and was summoned to be His host at dinner. Delighted rather than offended by such presumptuousness, Zakkai announced his intention to give half his wealth to the poor and to repay fourfold any taxes that he had taken unjustly. In return, Jesus says, “Today has salvation come to this house.”

This anecdote, related only by Luke (19:1-10), includes no miracles or prophecies. It does make the point that Our Lord, as part of his mission to save sinners, was willing to consort with them, but that lesson sounds as if it has been tacked on. One wonders to what extent it really fits. Zakkai seems like an eminently respectable figure. The crowd grumbles that he is a sinner, but he does not confess to sinful conduct, nor does Jesus accuse him. The almsgiving and proffered restitution proceed prima facie from Zakkai’s joy at being recognized and honored by One whom he admires intensely.

Commentators twist their pens into knots searching out reasons why this sin-and-repentance or proclamation-to-the-outcast story should be so different from others in Luke. The simple answer is the most obvious: Zakkai’s encounter with the great rabbi was one of his treasured memories, and he recounted it to Luke or Luke’s source. Luke put it into his history because it was amusing and edifying. If, as modernist critics tend to assume of the entire Gospel narrative, it was a heavily redacted “tradition” or an invention with a theological purpose, it somehow never lost its concreteness or absorbed extraneous moralization. Why not follow Ockham’s advice and posit that it really happened and that we have a record not far from the literal facts?

In those mere facts a moral does reside, one that, so far as I know, is rarely brought out in sermons. Zakkai was a wealthy and important man, presumably a dignified figure and perhaps, if he was like many short-statured people, a bit touchy about his dignity. Nonetheless, when Jesus came to Jericho and a crowd gathered to see Him, this architelones did not have his servants clear a way to the front rank. He did not exert his power to seize a place near the Lord. Instead, he humbly climbed a tree, an act that cannot be done with much dignity. He would have been sitting there, clinging to the boughs like a schoolboy at play, when suddenly Jesus turned toward him, making him conspicuous to the throng, and said, “Zacchaeus, come down. Hurry, because I must stay at your house today.” (Luke 19:5 [Jerusalem Bible]) And the rich tax collector, heedless of appearances, unembarrassed by being made to look comical in front of his fellow citizens, clambered down from his perch, his heart overflowing with joy.

According to tradition, Zakkai followed Christ after His Resurrection and was appointed by St. Peter to lead the Christian community in Caesarea. That is not certain, however, and we know nothing about what else he did or when or how he died. He has one moment in history, when he subordinated fear of ridicule to love of the Lord and found salvation in that moment of humility.

Apolytikion – Tone 3

Having justly hated unjust riches, thou didst lay up treasures of salvation; for, receiving the Saviour within thy house, thou, O Zacchaeus, wast truly made marvelous with all the fruits of repentance thou broughtest forth: deeds of mercy, the correction of wrongs, and godly life, because of which we honour thee and call thee blest.

Kontakion – Tone 4

When He that bowed the Heavens came to save sinners, Zacchaeus, great in zeal, but little of stature, beheld the Tree of Life from in the sycamore; lifted above the earth, he saw Jesus, Who called him: coming down in lowliness, he repenting, received Him; and so salvation came into his house, and he was shown forth a true son of Abraham.

Lenten Weblog, Day 37: Quid Timent?

For the enemies that he has already made, Pope Benedict XVI merits the admiration of Christians everywhere. Rarely has bile been so refreshing. My only regret is that our Orthodox Patriarchs are not hated so shrilly and with so much reason.

Quid timent? What are they afraid of? Andrew Sullivan comically pretends to tremble for freedom itself:

It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It’s not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It’s a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning.

Sullivan’s insinuation that the new Pope is hostile to political freedom is easy to debunk. Amusing is his notion of the ogre’s modus operandi:

He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments. He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebatable. His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd. But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him. He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West.

So “a man of books and treatises and arguments” refuses to debate “his version of the truth”? The man whom Sullivan slanders as a “Grand Inquisitor” has been as vigorous a debater as any prelate of the past century. How many bishops or theologians give book-length interviews to mainstream journalists or have huge bibliographies?

What the instantaneous anti-Benedictines fear is not that the Vatican will suddenly devise tools to suppress freedom of thought – how many policemen has the Pope? – but that a vigorous, intellectual Pope will argue effectively for a Faith that is far more reasonable than its contemporary challengers.

In his pre-election homily, the then-Cardinal highlighted the central weakness of modernist concepts of religion and morality: their abandonment of natural reason in favor of “truths” founded on private feelings. That sort of self-created doctrine can give no account of itself. At its roots, it is irrational and unsustainable.

We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith – only faith – which creates unity and takes form in love. On this theme, Saint Paul offers us some beautiful words - in contrast to the continual ups and downs of those were are like infants, tossed about by the waves: (he says) make truth in love, as the basic formula of Christian existence. In Christ, truth and love coincide. To the extent that we draw near to Christ, in our own life, truth and love merge. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13,1).

There can be no attitude more egotistical and unloving than the insistence that our personal convenience and desire be validated by the Church, regardless of whether it conforms to what Scripture, Tradition and Natural Law teach. If a man believes that the Church is the Body of Christ, his reaction to disagreeable-seeming teachings ought to not to be, “Jettison them!” but “What can I learn from them? Am I so certain that my impulses are right and the voice of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church wrong?”

A Pontiff who hammers home the theme that moral relativism is a form of tyranny, in which we make ourselves slaves to desire and refuse liberation by reason, is a threat to the ascendancy of comfortable irrationality. The call to become adult children of the Father is disturbing to those who, as C. S. Lewis put it in The Problem of Pain, “want in fact not so much a father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven – a senile benevolence who as they say ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves.’” The post-Enlightenment Left has quickly grasped that Benedict XVI is a more dangerous enemy than even John Paul the Great. May their fears prove justified.

Lenten Weblog, Day 36: Varieties of the Secular

Bishop Hilarion, the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative to “the European Institutions” (a paraphrasical way to refer to a European Union of which the Russian Church is not a huge admirer), has written a new essay on “Traditional and Liberal Values in the Debate Between Christianity and Secularism”, in which he attempts to identify the nub of the conflict between religious and secular world views. His analysis has much in it that is worthwhile. Unfortunately, with all due respect to His Grace, it goes seriously astray, because its image of secularism is drawn almost wholly from the Enlightenment. To the bishop, “secular liberalism” is still the philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. That kind of liberalism still exists, in a semi-pure “libertarian” form, in elements of modern, dirigiste liberalism and in present day conservatism, but the most powerful and conspicuous form of contemporary secular liberalism is proudly post-Enlightenment. It does not worship Robespierre’s goddess of Reason or deduce the right form of polity from the “state of nature”. Reason has been dethroned along with the other archaic deities, while reasoning is scorned as a tool of patriarchy and oppression. Today’s secular liberals lack even the old bigotry against the numinous. “New age” mysticism tempts them, and exotic religions without the taint of Western tradition (Buddhism, for example) or with the virtue of intense anti-Western animus (such as Wahhabi Islam) are deemed worthy of a condescending tolerance. To place these secularists in the same camp as the Enlightenment is an error that can breed only confusion, as Bishop Hilarion demonstrates.

His crucial mistake is to see secular liberalism as the driving force behind “globalization” and traditional religion as the heart of resistance to it.

Today only religion is systematically resisting the desperate attack of globalization, entering into an unequal battle for the defence of those values which it considers fundamental and which are being challenged by globalization. Only religion is able to counter the ideology of globalization with its own system of spiritual and moral orientation based on the centuries-long experience of generations acquired during the pre-globalization age.

In the modern battle for values people find themselves more often than not on opposite sides of the barricades, with those inspired by religious ideals on the one side and those whose world-view is formed by secular humanism on the other. At the core of the modern globalization ideology is the humanistic idea of the absolute dignity of man and of the existence of universal, “common human” values, which should serve as the foundation of a single world civilization. By “common human” values, however, are understood not only those spiritual and moral tenets which are common to all religions or which are equally obligatory for both religious and non-religious people (“thou shall not kill”, “thou shall not steal”, “thou shall not bear false witness” etc.), but also many ideas that are questionable from the religious point of view and which are rooted in liberal-humanistic morality.

That account is almost diametrically opposed to the true state of affairs. How does it square with the fierce anti-globalization rhetoric of the secular Left or with the leading role of the United States, the world’s most pious major nation, in promoting closer economic relations among the various regions of the world? A more accurate description of the forces on “opposite sides of the barricades” would be conservatives and libertarians facing post-Enlightenment secularists and modernist Christians. The inspiration for globalization is not zeal for “a single world civilization” but ordinary economic self-interest. Nor is there much in the resistance that can reasonably be characterized as a “spiritual and moral orientation based on the centuries-long experience of generations acquired during the pre-globalization age”. The most active anti-globalists hold traditional values in contempt. Their multiculturalism stems from its usefulness as a weapon against the hated West, not from genuine respect for ancestral mores.

From faulty premises, the essay reaches the seriously faulty conclusion that Islamic extremism is a religious reaction, deplorable to be sure, to the likewise deplorable phenomenon of globalization:

There exist several variations of the religious answer to the challenge of totalitarian liberalism and militant secularism. The most radical answer is given by Islamic extremists, who have declared jihad against the “post-Christian” Western civilization with all its so-called common human values. The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism cannot be understood without comprehending the reaction brought forth in the contemporary Islamic world by the attempts of the West to impose its world-view and behavioural standards on it. We are used to hearing statements on how terrorism has neither nationality nor denomination, and nobody doubts that unsolved problems of an ethnic or political nature are the main causes of terrorist acts. But it is impossible to deny the fact that the most aggressive perpetrators of modern Islamic terrorism are inspired by a religious paradigm, viewing their acts as an answer to the total hegemony of Western secular thinking. And as long as the West continues to lay claim to a world-wide monopoly on world-views, propagating its standards as being without alternative and obligatory for all nations, the sword of Damocles of terrorism will continue to hang above the entire Western civilization.

But the “religious paradigm” of Islamofascism, the Wahhabi sect, originated in opposition to traditional Islam. Mohammed ibn ‛Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), who spent his entire life in Arabia, Iraq and Iran, probably never heard a whisper about “Western secular thinking”. According to their own propaganda, Wahhabi-influenced terrorists still see non-Wahhabi Moslems as enemies, along with the “crusaders” from the West. While it may be obvious to an Orthodox bishop that terrorism directed toward the modern Western world must be conceived as “an answer to the total hegemony of Western secular thinking”, the terrorists themselves believe that they are attacking Christianity. Among Western secularists, they find many who join with them in decrying American policies (as when Osama bin-Laden quoted Michael Moore). Meanwhile, as we have seen in Iraq, the one element of America’s behavior and world view that we have any interest in “imposing” on anyone, namely, democratic and constitutional government, appears to be quite popular with ordinary Moslems.

If Christians are to address secularism intelligently and effectively, we must avoid seeing it only as it was a century ago. There exists an Enlightenment secularism, with which we can discuss issues of common interest, because we have reason in common with it, though not revelation. There is also a post-Enlightenment secularism that denies the authority of reason. It “argues” by expressing feelings and is outraged when those feelings don’t move others to act as it wants them to.

Bishop Hilarion closes with hopes that the Church will be able to “to enter into a peaceful, non-aggressive, though obviously unequal, dialogue with [secularism], with the aim of achieving a balance between the liberal-democratic model of Western societal structure and the religious way of life”. With the old kind of secularism, that was a possibility. With the new, the dialogue will be extremely “unequal”. Its own presuppositions prevent it from engaging in rational dialogue. Since its advocates remain in possession of their reasoning faculties, little though they may wish to exercise them, Christians can try to reason with them. In return, however, we can anticipate nothing but a succession of whines and tantrums. It will be an unsatisfying exercise, and I find it difficult to share His Grace’s optimism about the prospects for any degree of success.

Lenten Weblog, Day 35: The Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt

The fifth Sunday of Lent is a unique commemoration in the calendar of the Orthodox Church. We have many celebrations of saints and some of holy icons; today we honor an “icon in words”, the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. This work, attributed to St. Sophronius of Jerusalem (c. 550-c. 639), is a narrative gem. Whether the events that it recounts literally took place (though there is no strong reason to doubt the basic facts) is no more important than whether an icon offers a literal portrait of the saint whom it represents.

Commentary on this tale can only flatten it and drain away a portion of its meaning. That most Orthodox know it only second hand, through the sermons that we have heard year after year, is our misfortune. We should read and reflect on it today, learning from Father Zosimus, a man who studied holiness all his life, how far short of the divine our striving falls, and from Mary the sinner how great is the power of repentance and prayer.

It is profitable, too, to reflect on the background against which St. Sophronius wrote: the Persian invasions that Emperor Heraclius repelled with desperate fighting, the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies within the Church, and the Moslem assault that placed the birthplace of Christianity under alien rule. Sophronius himself held the office of Patriarch of Jerusalem when the city was besieged by Caliph Omar, negotiated the terms of its surrender and died shortly afterwards. (His year of death is uncertain: between 638 and 644; his feast day is March 11th.) Yet his masterpiece brushes aside kings and conquests. Empires are mortal and transient. It is human souls that live forever, Zosimus and Mary who, from the perspective of eternity, matter more than Heraclius and Omar.

Troparion – Tone 8

The image of God was truly preserved in you, mother,
for you took up the Cross and followed Christ.
By so doing, you taught us to disregard the flesh, for it passes away,
but to care instead for the soul, since it is immortal.
Therefore your spirit, holy mother Mary, Rejoices with the angels!

Kontakion – Tone 3

Having been a sinful woman,
you became through repentance a Bride of Christ.
Having attained angelic life,
you defeated demons with the weapon of the Cross.
Therefore, most glorious Mary, you are a Bride of the Kingdom!

Lenten Weblog, Day 34: The Religious Left at Work

While the “Religious Right” is routinely reviled for extremism and lack of Christian charity, the media take less notice of those qualities on the other end of the politico-religious spectrum. Worthy of attention is statement on the Terri Schiavo case bearing the irenic headline, “Have They No Decency? Religious Leaders Call for an End to Selective Morality in Washington”. The 100-plus “leaders” are described by Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy thus:

Signers of the statement included Roman Catholic lesbian activist Mary Hunt of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, Alliance for Baptists pastor Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, United Methodist pastor James Lawson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Disciples of Christ pastor Ken Brooker Langston of the Disciples Justice Action Network, Unitarian Universalist Association President William Sinkford, Quaker Joe Volk of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Chicago Theological Seminary President Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Disciples of Christ feminist theologian Rita Nakashima Brock of the Faith Voices for the Common Good, and American Baptist pastor James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City.

This group was assembled by the left-wing Center for American Progress, Angry Clintonite John Podesta’s think tank. The most remarkable feature of its declaration is refusal to grant that politicians who attempted to save Terri Schiavo’s life could have been acting in good faith.

How does it come to pass that elected leaders who are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution now refuse to accept any court’s decision until they find a court that agrees with their position? How does it come to pass that expert medical opinion, along with expert legal opinion, is being cast aside and trodden underfoot in a crass use of piety to usurp judicial prerogatives? . . .

Sadly, we understand all too well how this can come to pass. We see clearly how an excruciating family drama—involving the understandable grief of the parents as well—is being manipulated for narrow political advantage.

In other words, the President and the majority of Congress didn’t really care about what happened to Mrs. Schiavo and didn’t believe their own words about the sanctity of life; they were just making “a crass use of piety . . . narrow political advantage”.

As proof of their hypocrisy, the statement then presents a laundry list of liberal spending and policy initiatives. Any failure to support these nostrums will, we are informed, demonstrate a lack of “true respect and concern for human dignity and the right of every child, woman, and man to the fullness of life”.

If one wished to play turnabout in this “Question Your Bona Fides” game, it would be easy to ask whether indifference to a concrete case of killing by dehydration doesn’t cast a cloud over the signers’ advocacy of measures to help disabled people in the abstract. Aren’t they a bit like the man who urges his neighbors to write checks to charitable causes but won’t help the cripple who shows up on his own doorstep?

Ultimately, though, casting aspersions on motives back and forth is a profitless contest. The clergypersons and modernist theologians assembled by Mr. Podesta have every right to make religious arguments in favor of denying food and water to helpless women. I’m willing to believe that they write in defense of that view with sincerity, not simply in hopes of gaining narrow political advantage by tarring their political enemies. I would believe it more firmly if “Have They No Decency?” breathed any spirit beyond hatred of those enemies and unreflective scorn for their point of view.

But let me end on a more pleasant note. Mr. Tooley also summarizes a praiseworthy statement, by a minister of one of the most liberal and modernist Protestant denominations, that goes beyond the rights and wrongs of a particular case:

Florida United Methodist Bishop Timothy Whitaker spoke more forthrightly in defense of traditional Christian teachings regarding human life. “A fundamental moral principle consistent with faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ is to always care rather than to kill.”

Whitaker observed that “there are many disabled persons who live by means of a feeding tube,” and that she was more accurately described as “severely disabled” rather than terminally ill.

Placing too much value on mental consciousness to define life’s value would imply a “spiritualistic view” of humans and would threaten the lives of the mentally incompetent, Whitaker warned, and would go against Christian and Jewish beliefs about the importance of the body.

Likewise, Whitaker urged not viewing life as making moral claims by itself, when it is rather God’s “purposes for human beings that make the ultimate moral claims upon us.” He said opposition to abortion should not be based upon a “right to life” but upon God’s call to “care for the most vulnerable.”

A person who is in a “persistent vegetative state” is not a vegetable to her loves ones, Whitaker observed. The love that Mrs. Schiavo’s parents and siblings showed her was of “immense value” and no expert could judge the effect of that love upon even the severely disabled woman, he said. For Christians, this kind of love is a witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ.

“Moral reflection should include consideration of the value of the love of caregivers as well as the condition of the one receiving care,” Whitaker wrote. “I believe it would be better to let her live because she is the beneficiary of abundant love.” He questioned the wisdom of a law that would allow a spouse, especially one “compromised by conflict of interest” like Mr. Schiavo, to be the sole witness to her intentions, without considering the moral claims of other family members.

Whitaker criticized the “individualistic perspective” that believes a person may decide for himself whether or not to live or die, without considering the ability of others to love and care. Such “absolute individual autonomy” could lead to physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia,” he worried. Christians should introduce “communitarian values” into society that guard against extreme self-determination.

“The church’s mission is not to be the chaplain to a culture of death,” Whitaker concluded, “But to be a witness to the love of God in the world.”

Lenten Weblog, Day 33: Rendering to Caesar and God

Today being the deadline that it is, there springs to mind Our Lord’s famous saying, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17 and parallels [KJV]) This verse dramatically contradicts certain naive inferences that seem to follow naturally from God’s sovereignty over all of His creation, yet we are so accustomed to it that we do not recognize how strange an injunction it is.

God created Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. Caesar created nothing; whatever the state has, God made. The logical consequence is that only God has a claim on men’s labors and lives. That is the response that the inquirers expected from Jesus and the one given by his contemporaries, the Zealots who not long after rose in revolt against Rome. That Jesus gave the unexpected answer, teaching that some things do belong to Caesar, had profound implications for moral philosophy and the shape of Christian society.

Within the Christian world, there is no divine monopoly. States legitimately exist without regard to religion, and religious law does not preempt the entirety of life. Hence, secular states are not only conceivable but the norm. Their rulers, even if sincere Christians obedient to Christ’s teachings in every respect, are not, in their role as rulers, agents of the Church. There are, in the classic formulation, “two swords”, each supreme in its own realm.

But how can we allow the temporal sword to be wielded without reference to Christianity? Doesn’t that mean that Caesar will be free to act without moral restraint, that, except by happy whim or accident, he will be a tyrant?

That would certainly be the case if “good” and “evil” were categories dependent solely on God’s arbitrary decree; that is, if “good” were no more than a synonym for “what God approves”. The only way to ascertain the moral quality of an action would then be to find out what God thought of it, and that could not be known except through revelation.

The Christian view, inherited from Judaism (which perhaps expresses it more forcefully; “arguing with God” seems to be a peculiarly Jewish penchant), is the opposite: that good and evil are knowable to all rational beings, whether or not they have ever heard of Christ. Moral reasoning is very difficult, and men frequently make mistakes (if there were great short-term pleasure to be gained by believing that 2+2=7, we would make plenty of mistakes in arithmetic, too), but it is within the reach of Caesar. What cannot be accomplished by natural reason, the Church teaches, is release from the bondage of sin and death. That gift, which is not the business of Caesar, proceeds from God alone. In matters pertaining to our salvation, we dare render nothing to any being or power except God.

Natural law is the foundation of the secular state and therefore is a necessary implication of Our Lord’s endorsement of rendering unto Caesar. On this point, Christians and atheists used to concur. Their disagreement was over whether anything beyond natural law had reality. The most remarkable alteration in secularist thinking over the past century has been its abandonment of natural law in favor of dismissing “reason” as a human construct. It is ironic that the Gospels furnish stronger reasons to reject theocracy and greater reassurance about the potential virtues of a non-religious polity than does most of what passes nowadays for secularist discourse.

Lenten Weblog, Day 32: Dialogue With Mecca?

Not long after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, George Amiroutzes, an eminent theologian and last Grand Logothete of the Empire of Trebizond, offered proposals for merging Christianity and Islam.

He presented to the Sultan a study which showed that they had much in common. It might be possible to devise a synthesis; or at least each faith could recognize the other as a sister. The difference between the Bible and the Koran has always been exaggerated by bad translations, he maintained; and the Jews were to blamed for having deliberately encouraged misunderstandings. [Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p. 183]

In many respects hopeful views of relations between the Church and Mecca have not advanced much since Amiroutzes’ day. John Paul the Great was a strong proponent of Christian-Moslem dialogue, and the New York Times reports that it is a controversial topic within the College of Cardinals as it meets to elect a new Pope. Many of the prelates are not too enthusiastic about the project, while others see Islam as a useful special purpose ally.

Like John Paul, [Francis Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria] has often spoken of one specific rationale for reaching out to other faiths, Islam included: that believers, of whatever faith, have a duty to fight against a secularism that he says has sapped Christians of their spiritual strength.

“God can speak to us through other believers,” he told an interviewer several years ago. “From sincere Muslims, Christians can learn, for example, the courage of sincere prayer. They pray five times a day, and no matter where they are – be it the railway station or the airport – they will do it.

“Whereas many Christians are ashamed of making the sign of the cross in a restaurant or pulling out a rosary on a train,” he said.

Very much in the opposite camp is Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. Today’s Daily Telegraph quotes from her just published official biography:

We are being challenged by Islam these years – globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy.

We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.

And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.

Somewhere in the middle is Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who, according to the Times “has spoken of the need for the Muslim world to undergo the same political and religious changes that reshaped Europe, in particular the separation of church and state, and therefore become more secular”.

In contrast to his colleagues who would like to ally with Islam against secularism, Cardinal Danneels sees secularism as an ally against Islam. He and Queen Margrethe have, I think, more sensible approach. We should never be impolite the followers of other religions, but it is not rude to recognize that there is an immense gulf between our Faith and that of the Moslems. The seeming points of agreement are coincidences, not corollaries of concord on deeper matters.

Moslems are monotheists, but their religion is in all other significant ways a form of paganism. Like the gods of the polytheists, their One God is essentially indifferent to mankind. He demands obedience instead of offering love. John Ashcroft made an astute though much berated comparison: “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” Moslems universally deny that God could or would give a son as a sacrifice to save sinners. They almost as universally (a handful of modernizers excepted) honor those who die making war on the infidel. In the words of a leading expert,

The notion of martyrdom is common to Christianity and Islam. Indeed, the same word is used – “martyr” is from a Greek word meaning “witness”, and the Arabic shahid has the same meaning. But in Sunni Islam, the shahid is one who is killed in battle; he achieves martyrdom by dying in the holy war. This is very different from the Jewish and later also Christian notion of martyrs as those who voluntarily endure torture and death rather than renounce their beliefs. [Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, p. 163]

Despite the fact that Moslems recognize the Old Testament as a sacred text and invoke blessings on a figure whom they call “Jesus” (but who is utterly unlike the Christ of the New Testament), there is no genuine common ground for religious dialogue. There might be if Islam underwent a reformation. Some of its suppressed mystical strains may have a concept of God that is nearer to the Judaeo-Christian “Father in Heaven”, which could be the starting point for useful dialogue. As Islam is now, however, the honest course of action is Her Majesty of Denmark’s: “to show our opposition” – with rational argument, of course, not with distortion or persecution – to doctrines that we believe to be radically false.

Update (4/15/05): In the comments KK takes me to task for “ compar[ing] Christianity with the media-image of Islam” rather than with its actual theology. He is disappointed that I wrote a “polemic” when it would have been better to “discuss the real theological differences of two religions both purporting to be a sort of advancement upon the original religion of Abraham”.

In fact, discussion of “the real theological differences” was my intention. I wished to say to my fellow Christians that Islam and Christianity are more alien to one another than is usually recognized and that dialogue that adopts George Amiroutzes’ vision of two fundamentally compatible faiths is founded on a false premise. That does not mean that relations cannot or should not be more cordial than they are, only that cordiality won’t be achieved by pretending to agree on irreconcilable doctrines.

KK unwittingly illustrates my point when he writes,

Islam does indeed revere Jesus, as the author notes, but not in a disingenuous way as is suggested. Although not considered the son of God, he was considered by the Prophet Muhammad to be the most perfect human being to have lived – an example for all mankind.

The most important Christian belief about Jesus is that He is the Son of God, “begotten of the Father before all ages”, not “an example for all mankind”. I do not think it polemical, but simply accurate, to write that the Moslem image of Him, as summarized by KK, is “is utterly unlike the Christ of the New Testament”. Similarly, the Christian and Moslem conceptions of God’s relationship with mankind and of man’s salvation differ toto caelo. Though I don’t fancy myself a peritus in Islamic theology, I have never seen so much as a hint in any Moslem writer that man has been redeemed from enslavement to sin and death through a sacrifice on the part of God. My strong impression is that Moslem theologians regard the Christian doctrine of atonement, in any of its forms, as impossible and absurd.

I agree with KK that the Moslem use of the term “martyr” for soldiers who die while fighting for Islam (a usage with no parallel in Christian terminology) does not entail sympathy for terrorism. I also agree that Islam places heavy stress on the duty of charity. Nothing that I wrote suggested otherwise.

Lenten Weblog, Day 31: Too Much Religion?

Glenn Reynolds’ father was a vocal member of the Religious Left during the Vietnam War era, which may have led the son to think that the right attitude is “Religioso, Ma Non Troppo”.

Are we in the midst of a religious revival that will change the face of America, and the world? Some people on the Right hope so, while many people on the Left fear so. I suspect, however, that the trend will be less dramatic than either the hopeful or the fearful believe.

There certainly are signs of a revival in religious interest. Not only is there some evidence in the polls (depending on which polls you read), but I’ve noticed an increase in religious talk in recent weeks, even from such normally secular rightists as Rush Limbaugh. It may well be that there’s something of a preference cascade going on, with events like the Terri Schiavo affair and the death of Pope John Paul II making religious people more willing to display their faith openly.

Neither in these paragraphs nor in the rest of his column does Professor Reynolds try very hard to separate Christian faith from conservative politics (though he has made it clear elsewhere that he knows that left-of-center Christians exist). The “religious revival” that he speaks of is best defined as an upsurge of Christian activism in the interests of conservatism, or perhaps of conservative activists’ invocation of Christianity, rather than a “Great Awakening” in the historical sense. As the Rev. Donald Sensing observes, this is not an era of enthusiastic mass conversions.

I think that most clergy like me had some high hopes that America would be religiously revived and for awhile after Jan. 1, 2000, we were encouraged because worship attendance did rise. Alas, it was temporary, just as the rise after 9/11 turned out to be.

So what would “a religious revival that will change the face of American and the world look like” if it didn’t involve a major increase in the number of believers? The idea is, I suppose, that the existing cadre of believers will stop holding a variety of opinions and coalesce behind a faith-inspired political agenda. This hope (or fear) extrapolates from the increased political activity of anti-modernist Protestants, a group that has historically tended to ignore “the world”. In the past several elections, more and more of them have come to the polls. Even the Amish, the ultimate world-contemners, voted in record numbers in 2004. Moreover, the church-going Protestant vote, which used to split about the same way as everybody else’s, has grown more solidly conservative Republican.

Hence, the essence of this sort of “religious revival” is that political conservatism is outcompeting liberalism for Christian votes. Does that reflect changes in Christianity – or in conservatism and liberalism? It’s conceivable that some development within the Church could affect the average Christian’s outlook on politics, but nothing of that sort has been visible for the past couple of centuries. Christianity is about the same as ever; the reshaping of its political preferences is a reaction to what is on offer from political parties and ideological movements.

There is also a second tendency at work: Just as Christians are drawn toward conservatism (at least when liberalism foams with suspicion of Christians’ beliefs and motives), conservatives are drawn toward Christianity. Ideally, no one should become a Christian for any reason other than faith in the truth of the Gospels and the Creeds. In practice, the emotional affinity between Christianity and contemporary conservatism is undeniable. Much of what the press sees as Christians flocking to conservatism is actually conservatives turning to Christ.

For some on the Left (and on the libertarian Right), these complementary movements add up to a dreadful prospect. Economic historian Robert William Fogel (a liberal, despite having been pilloried by his ideological soul mates for Time on the Cross) says, “We’re headed for another titanic battle between a religious populace and a secular elite, between the peoples’ elected representatives and the courts. What is past isn’t necessarily prologue, but it is comforting to note who won in the earlier confrontations.”

Note the hidden premise: that a democracy with “a religious populace” is dangerous and must be restrained by “a secular elite”. The candor is welcome. Perhaps it could be extended to renaming the “Democratic” Party to, say, the “Secular Party” or “Judiciary First”. They could take “Know-Everythings” as their sobriquet.

Which brings us back to Professor Reynolds’ “ma non troppo”. There is a point at which no one – certainly not any Christian conservative – can disagree if we are talking about religion in the political realm. A party platform derived from Scripture is ridiculous, both “too much” religion and a pseudo-religious distortion. Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and He did not proclaim eternal verities about tax policy, welfare, education, foreign aid, etc. Indeed, it is the Left, not the Right, that most often pretends that there are “Biblical positions” on such issues.

Conservatives are are similarly unlikely to endorse ecclesiastical dominance over the state, if only because it would push the state sharply to the Left. If Christians who attend church regularly are a solidly Republican bloc, the clergy who minister to them are just as reliably Democratic. Everyone knows of congregations whose priest or pastor is decidedly more liberal than his flock. How often does one see the opposite?

Still, moderation is not to be practiced in all things. If there can be “too much” religion in politics, there cannot be too strong and abiding a faith in Christ. Were such a faith to touch tens of millions of hearts, it would be a good thing both for the individuals who turned to the Lord and to society as a whole. It would not, however, change the face of worldly politics to any remarkable extent.

Lenten Weblog, Day 30: Recruiting for ECUSA

Pontifications, a traditionalist Anglican blog, has an irenic suggestion to ease the woes of both modernist Roman Catholic clergymen and the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. The former need a more welcoming home, the latter a corps of committed clerical supporters. Talk about a match made in, if you’ll pardon the expression, Heaven.

If you are a Catholic priest who really does not believe what the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches … I’ve got just the right sect for you. There will be lots of clergy openings in the next few years. Good salaries, good benefits, earlier retirement than in the RCC, and a pretty good pension plan—and as long as you are not married, you can sleep with just about anyone or anything you like (parishioners of all ages, though, are always off-bounds—sorry). No more apologizing about contraception. No more conscience-wrestling about divorce and remarriage. Women priests? No problema. And don’t tell me that deep in your heart you haven’t wanted to bless the union of a gay couple! Our churches are much more attractive and our liturgies are so much superior to what you are used to. Trust me. It may be initially difficult for you to get used to beautiful ritual … but you will adapt! And think how much better you will feel about yourself. After all, you will be hanging out with a more up-scale, better educated class of folk. And contemplate how liberating it will be not wasting all that energy constantly fighting the Man in Rome. Here in the Episcopal Church you will be free to believe and teach the religion of your enlightened choice. You will enjoy a freedom of faith beyond your imagining.

You will find that life under the authority of our inclusive bishops is a painless affair, unless of course you happen to be one of those dinosaurs who still believe in a divine revelation once given to the saints. As the infamous Connecticut Six are now discovering, underneath the carefully pressed purple shirt of every inclusive bishop is a true Spirit-led prelate who is eager to crush underfoot all hard-hearted, Spirit-quenching reactionaries who refuse to follow the infallible magisterium of the General Convention. . . .

So stop waiting for God to reform the Catholic Church. She long ago abandoned the Pope and has lighted upon the Episcopal Church in glory and grace.

The writer means that as satire, but I think that the point is a good one. I can understand why a priest would remain attached to the Church of Rome if he believed that it descends in the right line from St. Peter and holds the keys to the Kingdom, even though the current hierarchy might seem to him unsatisfactory. But why does a modernist, for whom Tradition is nothing and St. Peter a long-dead, semi-legendary Jew, stick with a Church in which Cardinal Ratzinger is a serious contender for supreme leadership? Leftover sentiment from one’s childhood is all very well, but there ought to be limits.

Lenten Weblog, Day 29: Archbishop Iakovos, R.I.P.

Iakovos Coucouzis, the longest serving Greek Orthodox Archbishop of North and South America (1959-1996), died yesterday at age 93. He had already held his position for a decade when I was received into the Church, and, as the years went by, it was hard not to fall into the habit of thinking that he would be Archbishop forever. His beard was as white when I first glimpsed him as when he retired; his voice could have been central casting’s idea of the voice of Yahweh on Mount Sinai; he seemed like an unaging icon of equanimity.

He was born in the Ottoman Empire, on the Aegean island of Imvros, and educated in Turkey but came to America as a relatively young man, to serve as a deacon under Archbishop Athenagoras (later Ecumenical Patriarch). In 1942 he became Dean of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Boston, where he served until his elevation in 1954 to a titular bishopric, coupled with appointment as Patriarch Athenagoras’ personal representative to the World Council of Churches. On February 14, 1959, he was elected Archbishop of North and South America in succession to the deceased Archbishop Michael.

The secular world took notice of him only twice: when he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King in 1965 and when he stepped down in 1996, reportedly “forced out” by the Ecumenical Patriarch for having supported a proposal to unify the Orthodox jurisdictions in America. The former event was well deserving of attention. It reflected Iakovos’ lofty moral principles, in which the media were less interested when he spoke out against abortion, euthanasia and declining standards of conduct.

Regarding his retirement, I have no inside information but know better than to trust the media version of ecclesiastical news. It may be that Patriarch Bartholomew was offended by the prospect of weakened ties between Constantinople and its largest archdiocese. It is equally possible that he saw the proposed structure, a compromise that would have preserved each existing jurisdiction’s ties to its mother Church while setting up a centralized administration, as too Rube Goldberg-ish to lead to any outcome but confusion. And, of course, Iakovos may have retired simply because he was 85 years old, not because he and his superior didn’t see eye to eye on organizational issues.

In his influence of the spiritual life of his flock, the Archbishop was, so far as I can judge, wholly a force for good. He preached the doctrines of the Church, promoted education and ministries to youth, fostered cooperation among Orthodox Christians of all jurisdictions, and cooperated in the ecumenical movement without letting the Church be coopted by left-wing Protestantism. There can be little doubt that he will be remembered within the Archdiocese of America as one of its seminal leaders.

May his memory be eternal.

Further reading: Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, “Death of a Patriarch”
Farewell Remarks of Archbishop Iakovos Upon His Retirement in 1996
Fr. Alexander Veronis, “Archbishop Iakovos and the Establishment of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center”

Lenten Weblog, Day 28: A Murdered Patriarch

Today is not only the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder (which I recognized by anticipation yesterday) but the feast day of St. Gregory of Constantinople (1745-1821), Patriarch of Constantinople (1797-1798, 1806-1808, 1818-1821), whose murder on Easter Sunday 1821 was the first Ottoman atrocity in reaction to the Orthodox uprisings in Moldavia and Greece. Two metropolitans, twelve bishops and scores of prominent laymen followed him into martyrdom. “By the summer of 1821 the great houses in the Phanar [the Greek district of Constantinople] were empty. . . . With the holocaust at the Patriarchate the old dispensation was ended. The Orthodox Church had to reorganize itself to face up to a nationalistic world.” [Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (1985), p. 406]

Ironically, the martyred Patriarch, Gregory V Angelopoulos, was not a nationalist. In the Byzantine tradition of political quietism, he opposed rebellion and adhered to the concordat between Patriarch Gennadios and Sultan Mehmet II, made after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453. By its terms, the Patriarchs swore political fealty to the Sublime Porte in return for freedom of worship (accompanied, it is true, by prohibition of proselytization, restrictions on church building, and disruptive intrusions into Church affairs).

In 1798, during the first of his three terms as Patriarch, Gregory was involved in a semi-scandal, when he saw to the publication of (and perhaps personally wrote) a book entitled The Paternal Exhortation, which urged Orthodox Christians to remain loyal to Ottoman rule. It denounced Greek and other nationalisms in terms similar to those that contemporary conservatives elsewhere were using against revolutionary movements. The ostensible author was Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a prelate of saintly reputation who then lay gravely ill. He recovered, however, living for another ten years and staunchly denying any connection with the Exhortation. [Runciman, op. cit., pp. 394-6] The incident, a great embarrassment to the Church hierarchy, was a milestone in the Greek community’s internal debate between those who were content to await the Sultanate’s collapse when God willed and those who, often under the influence of secular Western ideas, demanded that the process be hastened along.

A decade later, while in retirement on Mount Athos after being deposed from his second Patriarchal tenure (the Ottomans liked to rotate Patriarchs in office, because they could extort “gifts” at each accession), Gregory was approached by, but declined to swear allegiance to, the Hetaireia ton Philikon (“Society of Friends”), an underground organization established to promote the independence of the Sultanate’s Christian peoples. Aside from scruples about his oath to the Sultan and the lack of information about the composition of the group’s leadership, he probably suspected, with much justification, that the Hetaireia was fundamentally non-Christian in its principles.

In 1818 he was recalled to Constantinople and enthroned as Patriarch for a third time. By now revolutionary trends were running strong in the increasingly decrepit regime. In early 1821 Alexander Ypsilanti, scion of a leading Phanariot dynasty, raised a revolt in Moldavia. Then, on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation, a clergy-led popular uprising broke out in the Peloponnesus. The Patriarch summoned a synod to condemn rebellion, but the Sultan’s ministers were certain that he was the secret force behind the threats to their power. He was arrested and ordered to convert to Islam. When he refused, he was hanged from the middle gate of the Patriarchal Palace on Easter morning. The gate has never since been reopened.

Saint Gregory was a martyr not just for the Faith but for a particular understanding of the duty of Christians who must live under a hostile government. His belief in submission to the political authorities, so long as the price was not the destruction of the Church, and his distaste for revolutionary movements founded on nationalist aspirations are easy to dismiss today. They were almost certainly doomed to obsolescence, but is it so obvious that they were wrong?

Because the nationalist impulse prevailed, all of the Christians of Asia Minor, save for a few dwelling in Constantinople and on two nearby islands, were deported in the “exchange of populations” agreed to in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Their number included tens of thousands of Turkish-speaking Orthodox, since nationality and religion had come to be regarded as synonymous. Thus all of the leaven was removed from one of the ancient Christian heartlands, and it should be no surprise that the permitted vestiges have faded to almost nothing.

At present, Orthodox Christianity in Turkey is being smothered, because the Church may neither train new priests within the country (the famous theological academy at Halki has been forcibly shuttered since 1971) nor import priests from abroad. The degree of persecution is mild compared to much of the rest of the world, but it is steady and effective. (Vide Otmar Oehring, “On Religious Freedom in Turkey” and United States Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe, “The Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey: A Victim of Systematic Exploitation”.) We cannot be sure that the situation would be better if Christians had heeded the Paternal Exhortation. We can strongly doubt that it would be worse.

Lenten Weblog, Day 27: St. John Climacus on Slander

Tomorrow being the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder, it seems fitting to post a passage from his Ladder of Divine Ascent that has lessons not just for monks but also for bloggers. It comes from Chapter 10, “On Slander” (translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell):

Slander is the offspring of hatred, a subtle and yet crass disease, a leech in hiding and escaping notice, wasting and draining away the lifeblood of love. It puts on the appearance of love and is the ambassador of an unholy and unclean heart. . . .

I have rebuked people who were engaged in slander, and, in self-defense, these evildoers claimed to be acting out of love and concern for the victim of their slander. My answer to that was to say: “Then stop that kind of love. . . . If, as you insist, you love that man, then do not be making a mockery of him, but pray for him in secret, for this is the kind of love that is acceptable to the Lord. And remember . . . Judas was one of the company of Christ’s disciples and the robber was in the company of killers [Luke 23:39-43]. Yet what a turnabout there was when the decisive moment arrived!”

If you want to overcome the spirit of slander, blame not the person who falls but the prompting demon. No one wants to sin against God, even though all of us sin without being compelled to it.

I knew a man who sinned openly but repented in secret. I denounced him for being lecherous, but he was chaste in the eyes of God, having propitiated Him by a genuine conversion. . . .

Fire and water do not mix; neither can you mix judgment of others with the desire to repent. If a man commits a sin before you at the very moment of his death, pass no judgment, because the judgment of God is hidden from men. It has happened that men have sinned greatly in the open but have done greater good deeds in secret, so that those who would disparage them have been fooled, with smoke instead of sunlight in their eyes. So listen to me, all you accountants of other people’s faults, listen well; for if, as is certain, it is true that “you shall be judged with the judgment you have used yourselves” (Matt. 7:2), then whatever sin of body or spirit we ascribe to our neighbor we will surely fall into ourselves. . . .

You can always recognize people who are malicious and slanderous. They are filled with the spirit of hatred. Gladly and without a qualm they slander the teaching, the doings and the virtues of their neighbor. . . .

Self-esteem, even when there are no other attendant vices, can bring a man down. Similarly, if we have got into the habit of passing judgments, we can be destroyed completely by this alone, for the Pharisee was condemned for this very thing [Luke 18:9-14].

A good grape picker chooses to eat ripe grapes and does not pluck what is unripe. A charitable and sensible mind takes careful note of the virtues it observes in another, while the fool goes looking for faults and defects. It is of such a one that it was said, “They have searched out iniquity and died in the search.” (Ps. 63:7)

Do not condemn. Not even if your very eyes are seeing something, for they may be deceived.

St. John did not shrink from making critical comments; at one point (ch. 14) he sharply rebukes Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), a famous ascetic whose counsel about fasting he regarded as “like telling a child to climb the entire ladder in a single stride”. To expose erroneous ideas is healthy and proper debate. To premise every argument on the presumption that those on the other side are acting in bad faith in order to further diabolical agendas is the sin against which the saint warns us.

Lenten Weblog, Day 26: Market Share and Mustard Seeds

In what sense was the Papacy of John Paul II a success? Leaving aside his personal qualities, did he have the kind of impact that justifies calling him “John Paul the Great”?

Those who wish to answer “no” have one prima facie powerful argument. John Derbyshire, who is no Hitchens-like contemner of the Pontiff (“John Paul II shone like a lighthouse through the fog of fear, doubt, and defeatism that had shrouded the West and its values through the 1970s”), nonetheless avers,

It is therefore sad to reflect that the quarter century of his papacy was a terrible disaster for the Roman Catholic Church. Regular attendance at Mass all over the traditionally Catholic world dropped like a stone all through John Paul II’s papacy. Everywhere in the great Catholic bastions of southern Europe — Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal — the story is the same. In France, “eldest daughter of the Church,” the only argument is whether regular Mass attendance today is just above, or just below, ten percent. In Ireland — Ireland! — the numbers declined steadily from the 90 percent of 1973 to 60 percent in 1996, since when they have fallen off a cliff, to 48 percent in 2001 and heading south. A hundred years ago the U.S. Church imported priests from Ireland; now Ireland imports them from Nigeria.

This loss of ecclesiastical market share, at least in Europe and America, is undeniable. Mr. Derbyshire thinks, not unreasonably, that it is explained by –

the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations. We live, as never before in human history, in a garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day. None of that is enough to turn the heads of those who are truly, constitutionally devout; but not many human beings are, nor ever have been, that committed to their faith. And so the flock wanders away to the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows.

As a description of the present psychological state of First World denizens, that scenario is rather rose-tinged, but it does reflect the hopes that the 20th Century intelligentsia placed in mankind’s ability to fashion a happy destiny without God. The intelligentsia’s new faith trickled down to the man in the street, who readily took up the pleasing notion that “Let your conscience be your guide” means “If it feels good, do it”.

John Paul did not create intellectual tides that started flowing before his birth and rose toward their crest while he was still a little known cleric in Poland. He did have to bear their onrush when he became the head of an institution traditionally devoted to the opposite principles: to eternity rather than the moment, to moral absolutes rather than relativism, to the culture of life rather than the quest for pleasure. He could have responded in the way that many modernist Christians urged him to: by “updating” the ideas of the Church to conform to those of the anti-Church. Had he chosen that course, more than ten percent of Frenchmen might go to Mass regularly today. The question is, what would the Mass mean to them?

Our Lord told us what he thinks of those who profess His name but disregard his commandments. A congregation of Laodicaeans, however numerous, is, in Christian terms, a failure, and that is the best that ecclesiastical progressives hope for. By contrast, a Church greatly reduced in numbers can be a success, provided that it does not allow itself to contract to an obscurantist, isolationist remnant. The present age is not the first ebb in the history of the Faith, and let us recall that the whole enterprise began with a dozen commonplace Galileans, one of whom was a traitor.

In the past quarter century, Christianity has lost numbers, but it has, if my perceptions are accurate, grown stronger in faith and intellect, to a large extent on account of the efforts and inspiration of John Paul II. Traditional Christians are no longer afraid of historical and scientific inquiry; as knowledge has grown, it has become, as we should have known all along it would be, the ally of faith. As the Orthodox Bishop of Vienna said last week, John Paul was “able to develop a universal humanism based on spiritual values as opposed to the atheist version of humanism”. Thus he “contributed enormously to the rediscovery of faith by many of those who lost it because of liberalism and relativism prevailing in democratic Western societies”.

Humanity is learning that there is nothing permanently satisfying in “the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows”. The secular “garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day” is filled with confused, frightened, discontented wanderers. If John Paul succeeded in planting a mustard seed therein, “the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches”, then he will indeed be “the Great”.

Lenten Weblog, Day 25: St. Tikhon, Enlightener and Confessor

Today is the feast day of St. Tikhon (1865-1925), Bishop of the Aleutians and North America (1898-1907) and Patriarch of Moscow (1917-1925). Distinguished for both his labors in building up the Orthodox Church in the New World and his sufferings under the communist regime in Russia, he was recognized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in October 1989, as communism was giving way to a more hopeful future.

Born Vasily Ivanovich Belavin, the son of a country priest, the future saint graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1888 and became a seminary instructor. Three years later, he took monastic vows and assumed the name “Tikhon”, after St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-1783). In 1898 he was chosen as Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska, which made him the only Orthodox prelate in the Western Hemisphere. As the name of the diocese suggests, its attention had hitherto been focused on the Orthodox community in Alaska, a legacy of Russian rule. Bishop Tikhon looked to the rest of the continent. He changed the name of the see to “the Aleutians and North America”, moved its headquarters to New York and, after being raised to the rank of Archbishop, appointed two auxiliary bishops, one of them an Arab, St. Raphael Hawaweeny, the first Bishop of Brooklyn. He also obtained the approval of the Holy Synod in Moscow for an Orthodox Western Rite with a liturgy is based on the Book of Common Prayer (now known as the “Rite of St. Tikhon” and used by the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese).

In 1907 he was recalled to Russia, serving as Bishop of Yaroslavl (1907-1913) and Vilna (1913-1917). After the February Revolution in 1917, which briefly gave Russia a democratic government, the Holy Synod was reorganized, with Tikhon as one of its members. In August of the same year, the first general council of the Russian Church since 1666 met in Moscow. It elected Tikhon both Metropolitan of Moscow and chairman of its deliberations. The first great issue facing the Council was a proposal to restore the office of Patriarch, which Peter the Great had suppressed after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Even as the Bolsheviks were taking power in the streets, the assembled bishops voted in favor of restoration and conducted the election of the new Patriarch. Under the time-hallowed procedure, the names of the three top vote getters were placed in an urn. After a night of prayer, the oldest monk present drew one of the names. Providentially, Tikhon, the third place finisher in the balloting, was selected. He was enthroned on November 21, 1917.

A believer in strict noninterference by the Church in secular politics, the new Patriarch tried to remain neutral in the Russian Civil War, going so far as to refuse on one occasion to bestow a blessing on a White commander. Naturally neutrality did not please the Bolsheviks, who wanted only subordination. Assaults on churches and priests, including the murder of the Metropolitan of Kiev in January 1918, led Tikhon to issue an encyclical denouncing “the open and concealed enemies of the Truth of Christ who have begun to persecute the [Church] and are striving to destroy Christ’s Cause by sowing everywhere, in place of Christian love, the seeds of malice, hatred and fratricidal wrath”. [Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p.343]

The next day, the communist government issued a decree implementing its notions of “freedom of conscience” and “separation of church and state”: All Church property was confiscated, clergymen were forbidden to receive salaries or gifts from their parishioners, and the teaching of religion to minors was banned. On October 26, 1918, the Patriarch urged the authorities to –

celebrate the anniversary of taking power by releasing the imprisoned, by ceasing bloodshed, violence, ruin, constraints on the faith. Turn not to destruction, but establish order and legality. Give the people the respite from fratricidal strife that they long for and deserve. Otherwise, all the righteous blood you shed will cry out against you and with the sword will perish you that have taken up the sword.

As Richard Pipes says,

It was the most daring challenge to the new regime that any public figure had had the courage to issue: it recalled the admonition three hundred fifty years earlier by another Metropolitan of Moscow, Philip, to Ivan the Terrible, condemning the tsar’s barbarities, for which he paid with his life. It is not quite clear what was on the Patriarch’s mind when he spoke out: whether he wanted to arouse the population against the regime or merely [sic] to fulfill a moral purpose. Some historians, assuming the former and observing the population’s failure to act, conclude that it failed in its purpose. Such judgment ignores not only the atmosphere of unbridled Cheka terror prevailing at the time, but the fact that Tikhon in a subsequent epistle (July 21, 1919) urged Christians under no condition to wreak revenge for the sufferings they had endured. . . . [op. cit., p. 345]

In 1922 the regime, after killing or imprisoning thousands of bishops, priests and pious laity, attempted to place control of the Church in the hands of a GPU-run “Living Church” movement. Tikhon, by now in confinement, at first attempted to resist. Eventually decrees appeared in his name purportedly acquiescing in all of the government’s measures. It is unlikely that he actually consented to them, and some were palpable forgeries. Death from heart failure released him from his ordeal 80 years ago, on April 7, 1925. The ordeal of his motherland lasted more than 60 years longer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the seeds of Orthodoxy that he planted have grown into a flourishing vine.

Troparion - Tone 1

Let us praise Tikhon, the patriarch of all Russia,
And enlightener of North America
An ardent follower of the Apostolic traditions,
And good pastor of the Church of Christ.
Who was elected by divine providence,
And laid down his life for his sheep.
Let us sing to him with faith and hope,
And ask for his hierarchical intercessions:
Keep the church in Russia in tranquility,
And the church in North America in peace.
Gather her scattered children into one flock,
Bring to repentance those who have renounced the True Faith,
Preserve our lands from civil strife,
And entreat God's peace for all people!

Troparion - Tone 8

From your youth you have loved Christ, O blessed one.
You have been an example for all by word, life, love, spirit, faith, purity and humility.
Therefore, you now abide in the heavenly mansions,
Where you stand before the Throne of the all-holy Trinity.
Holy hierarch Tikhon, pray for the salvation of our souls.

Kontakion - Tone 2

A gentle manner adorned you,
Kindness and compassion you showed to those who repented,
You were firm and unbending in confessing the Orthodox Faith,
And zealous in loving the Lord.
O holy hierarch of Christ and confessor Tikhon,
Pray for us that we may not be separated from the love of God,
Which is in Christ Jesus our Lord!

Kontakion - Tone 8

Successor of the Apostles, adornment of the hierarchy, teacher of the Orthodox Church.
Pray to the Master of all that peace be granted to all the world,
And great mercy to our souls!

Lenten Weblog, Day 24: The First Gospel

Every careful reader of the Gospels notices that there are passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke that correspond very closely in thought and wording, which is why those three works are called the “Synoptic Gospels”. Also noticeable are places where Matthew and Luke agree without any Markan parallel. For about a century, since Sir John Hawkins and Adolf Harnack formulated the theory, most, though certainly not all, New Testament scholars have inferred that Matthew and Luke drew on a lost book, conventionally called “Q” (from the German Quelle, “source”), that contained sayings of Jesus and at least a sketchy narrative of his ministry.

The “Q” hypothesis can’t be called an established fact. While it accounts for a great many phenomena, other explanations are possible. Short of discovering an actual copy of “Q”, definitive proof will always elude us. Nonetheless, it is a decent working theory, the one that appears in virtually all mainstream commentaries on the Gospels.

If we assume arguendo that “Q” was a real document, an incomplete reconstruction of its content is possible. Harnack undertook the first rigorous compilation of the text (Sprüche und Reden Jesu, die zweite Quelle des Matthaeus und des Lukas (1907)). As he observed, the original work was undoubtedly fuller. Whatever the two later authors did not use is now unidentifiable as “Q” material or is forever lost. Despite that limitation, one can discern certain surprising characteristics in the remnant.

Most striking, as Sir William Ramsay emphasized in his review of Harnack (“The Oldest Written Gospel”, reprinted in Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion (1908)), is the lack of any visible awareness of Jesus’ death. The absence of a passion narrative might be an accident of preservation, but –

. . . the teaching of Q is inconsistent with the idea that the writer of the lost Source regarded the death of Jesus as the fundamental fact in the Gospel. One acquires the impression throughout that Jesus was to him the great Teacher, not that He was the Redeemer by His death: Jesus was to him a Son of God, the King who reveals the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of God stood out prominently, and its nature, with the conditions of entering it, were emphatically stated. . . . The way of salvation, i. e., the Kingdom of God, does not lie outside of, or apart from, the common life, but in the ordinary life of man (i. e., it is the spirit in which that life is lived); and every man has the opportunity of being justified by the spirit of wisdom. The revelation by the Son is the only and necessary way by which man can obtain knowledge of God; this way of salvation is a difficult path with a single narrow entrance; it was unknown to many prophets, though now shown publicly to those who know Him; it is hidden from the wise and educated, but revealed to infants; the Kingdom of God has come near those cities whither the true teachers and Apostles go; there is need for many workers in this harvesting of the world. [Citations to Harnack’s reconstruction have been omitted throughout.]

In this Teaching there lies implicit the Gospel of Christ, but the foundation on which alone (according to the universal Christian Gospel from Peter and Stephen onwards) the Kingdom of Heaven can be built up, is wanting, for there is no allusion to the death of Christ, which gives the needed driving force and the power.

Later researchers have called attention to other ways in which “Q” is distinct from the Gospels in general: observance of the Jewish law is taken for granted; the themes of repentance and the imminence of the end times are strongly emphasized; Jesus is portrayed as the culmination of the line of Old Testament prophets; those who reject His teaching are likened to the persecutors of the prophets, though there is no sign that they are as yet engaged in actual persecution; the gentiles are scarcely noticed, except when the Jews are warned that their rightful inheritance could be forfeited through failure to heed Jesus.

From the data, Ramsay believed that one could draw a highly probable, though at first glance startling, conclusion about the date and sitz im leben of this lost document:

There is only one possibility. The lost Common Source of Luke and Matthew . . . was written while Christ was still living. It gives us the view which one of His disciples entertained of Him and His teaching during His lifetime, and may be regarded as authoritative for the view of the disciples generally. This extremely early date was what gave the lost Source the high value that it had in the estimation of Matthew and Luke, and yet justified the freedom with which they handled it and modified it by addition and explanation. . . . On the one hand, it was a document practically contemporary with the facts, and it registered the impression made on eye-witnesses by the words and acts of Christ. On the other hand, it was written before those words and acts had begun to be properly understood by even the most intelligent eye-witnesses.

If one imagines the disciples acting like human beings rather than the peculiar mannequins of higher critical tradition, nothing could be more plausible than Ramsay’s proposition. Writing down the words of a teacher who has made an immense impression is natural to his pupils. Modern historians of early Christianity presume that Our Lord’s sayings were either recollected years after the fact or forgotten and reinvented. Isn’t it more rational to think that they were contemporaneously recorded? That record was superseded in great measure when the Resurrection fundamentally altered the disciples’ understanding of their Lord, which explains why “Q” did not survive independently. Instead, it was drawn on by the authors of the Gospels that we have today. (N.B. There are a few indications that Mark also made use of “Q” to a limited extent, but he evidently found most of his material elsewhere; it’s easily conceivable that “Q” was not Our Lord’s only Boswell.)

Sensible as Ramsay’s theory may sound, you will look in vain for mention of it in standard reference works. So far as I can tell, it has never been refuted, just ignored. And the reason why it made no impression is not hard to figure out: The assumption that underlies virtually all scholarly work on the New Testament is that we have scanty or no eye-witness evidence concerning Jesus’ ministry. What we learn from the Gospels has to be the product of one or more “communities” transmitting (or concocting) oral tradition.

It would be bold to assert dogmatically that Sir William Ramsay was right and the consensus of the learned wrong, but the hypothesis that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were in large part taken down as he uttered them seems too plausible to be dismissed without examination.

Lenten Weblog, Day 23: The Veil of Ignorance

After resisting temptation for a while, I decided to look at Christopher Hitchens’ de mortuo nil nisi malum on John Paul II. Everyone knew that Mr. Hitchens would write something vicious. If he had unexpectedly found favorable, or even neutral, words for the late Pontiff, his public would have been deeply disappointed.

The denunciation was rather feeble, I thought, beginning with reasonable, though vastly overstated, criticism of John Paul’s failure to crack down vigorously enough on pederastic priests, then drifting into absurd irrelevancies, such as the claim that a “Catholic cabal” “imposed” President Ngo Dihn Diem on South Vietnam. All quite nonsensical and deserving of Tom Smith’s sneer that it –

reads like the rantings of an Oxford old boy well into his third bottle at the local wine bar. Reading his piece, one wonders, justly, what exactly does the no doubt unexemplary Catholicism of the long dead Vietnamese politician Diem have to do with anything? You can almost see Hitchens bent over his glass, muttering “Catholics . . . Pope . . . damn . . . . them” like some old Nazi muttering “the Jews.”

What most struck me, though, was Mr. Hitchens’ opening trope:

The papacy is not, in theory, a man-made office at all. Its holder is chosen for life, by God himself, to hold the keys of Peter and to be the vicar of Christ on earth. This is yet another of the self-imposed tortures that faith inflicts upon itself. It means that you have to believe that the pope before last, who held on to the job for a matter of weeks before dying (or, according to some, before being murdered) was either unchosen by God in some fit of celestial pique, or left unprotected by heaven against his assassins.

Maybe there is a Papist somewhere who believes that the Pope is “chosen by God” in some nontrivial sense, but I’ve never met any who weren’t aware that he is elected by the College of Cardinals, human beings quite capable of picking a mere mortal or even a less than satisfactory Christian. No one thinks that Pope Alexander VI was the Holy Ghost’s favorite son. Mr. Hitchens appears to be under the impression that Popes are god-kings rather than simply men endowed with high office and great responsibilities, which some carry out more adequately than others.

The flood of commentary on the late Pope’s tenure, much of it exhibiting amazing misunderstanding of Christian history and doctrine, highlights a more general problem. Our society’s secular elite knows less about Christianity than about astrophysics and is nonetheless ready and willing to pass judgement on what it doesn’t know.

This ignorance would be bad enough if it were limited to journalists. More disturbing is to find elementary lapses in scholarly works. To take one instance, The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch has received lavish, and in many respects deserved, praise. The author is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, so, despite the fact that he is by his own account not a Christian, one expects him to be thoroughly acquainted with Christianity.

Yet Professor MacCulloch confuses the Virgin Birth of Christ with Mary’s perpetual virginity (p. 97, where he asserts that Isaiah 7:14, the classic proof text for the former, was used to support the latter) and writes that Arius taught that “Jesus was not God at all, but a human prophet of God” (p. 182), a highly misleading description of the Arian doctrine that the Second Person of the Trinity was created before Time began. Later (pp. 589ff.) he asserts that Christian teachings about men, women and sexuality “borrowed heavily from the pronouncements of pre-Christian Greek and Latin science”, as if all of the opinions that he dislikes (and he dislikes pretty much all that the historical Church has to say on those subjects) were not found, clearly and forcefully stated, in the text of the Bible.

All of these are areas in which an Oxford Professor of the History of the Church ought to be as unlikely to err as a law professor is to confuse habeas corpus with corpus dilecti. It takes little imagination to extrapolate how much nonsense the public is fed about the Faith by what appear to be authoritative sources.

The upshot is that public discourse has no filter for distinguishing wildly speculative theories, such as those of the Jesus Seminar, from solid though unconventional scholarship, such as John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew. In such an intellectual atmosphere, a preposterous novel like The DaVinci Code isn’t laughed into oblivion.

Does it matter to Christians how much or little secularists know about us? I think that it does. On the simplest level, misinformation is a barrier to evangelization. If non-Christians hold a farcical picture of Christian doctrine, they won’t give it serious consideration. Those who become dissatisfied with the secular world view will instead drift to other religions, of which New Age pseudo-mysticism and radical Islam are the most active proselytizers at present.

There is also a danger to Christianity itself. Hearing ourselves constantly misrepresented and abused, we are tempted to retreat into isolation and obscurantism. Until recently, that was the dominant survival strategy of Protestant fundamentalists. Of course, refusal to engage the world only convinces the world that it is right to regard Christians as mentally impaired fanatics, leading to a downward cycle of reprehension.

Having identified the problem, I confess that I have no useful ideas for remedying it. Anticipating that a large proportion of his readers will lack familiarity with Christians’ “basic doctrinal toolkit”, Professor MacCulloch finds it necessary to furnish an appendix consisting of the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Hail Mary. If those can rightly be considered unfamiliar texts, the task of acquainting this age with the Faith of our Fathers is a daunting one indeed. To make a start, I suppose, most of us need to devote more time and effort to making sure that we are thoroughly acquainted with it ourselves.

Addendum: The recently resurrected Man Without Qualities shreds the Hitchens screed into more tiny pieces than Sandy Burglar tearing into a top secret memorandum. I have formed a working hypothesis that Mr. Hitchens did not really want to say anything negative about Pope John Paul but, knowing that he owed his public a tirade, sat down with a couple of fifths of single malt scotch and let whatever came into his head slop onto his keyboard.

Lenten Weblog, Day 22: Eucharistic Potluck

Today in the NRO Corner, there was a passing reference to an incident from Bill Clinton’s Presidency. While visiting South Africa, he and his wife received communion at a Roman Catholic church. His action stirred up a controversy, somewhat lost among the many Clinton controversies, particularly after Cardinal John O’Connor denounced it in a Palm Sunday sermon as “legally and doctrinally wrong”, adding “Some undoubtedly believe that if one has enough prestige or money, anything goes.”

Most of the ensuing press commentary was unfavorable to His Eminence. His stance was lambasted as lacking in Christian love for one’s neighbor. The priest who administered the sacrament defended himself by saying, “I had no time to go and ask permission when he stood up. And that you wanted me to embarrass the president, but a president who is here to pray with us? . . . Everyone in my situation would have done the same, unless maybe something wrong upstairs.” [CNN transcript; no link available]

Like the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Church limits the reception of the Eucharist to baptized and chrismated members of the Church. Save in a few extreme circumstances, e. g., to dying prisoners in the Soviet gulag, Orthodox priests are not permitted to give communion to non-Orthodox. Under no circumstances are Orthodox believers allowed to take communion in non-Orthodox churches.

These rules are frequently a sore point with members of other Christian denominations, who attribute them to intolerance. The truth, however, is the contrary: Their motive is charity toward those who are not of our Faith.

To understand why, one must consider what the Orthodox (and the Romans, too) believe about the Eucharist. The sacrament is central to the drama of salvation; in it we are united with the Body of Christ, which is present in the Bread and Wine that we consume, and with our fellow believers. As Bishop Kallistos Ware puts it in his classic text, The Orthodox Church,

The Eucharist, by uniting the members of the Church to Christ, at the same time unites them to one another: “We, who are many, are one bread, one body; for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). The Eucharist creates the unity of the Church. The Church (as Ignatius saw) is a Eucharistic society, a sacramental organism which exists — and exists in its fullness — wherever the Eucharist is celebrated. It is no coincidence that the term “Body of Christ” should mean both the Church and the sacrament; and that the phrase communio sanctorum in the Apostles’ Creed should mean both “the communion of the holy people” (communion of saints) and “the communion of the holy things” (communion in the sacraments).

These effects do not result from anything that the communicants feel or do; they are acts performed by God. Moreover, they are not necessarily safe or comfortable acts. In the prayer before communion, the worshiper supplicates, “May the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.” The implication is that the Eucharist wrongly received, without proper preparation, a proper state of mind and full union of intention with the Church, can lead to condemnation rather than salvation. The sacrament is a mystical supper, not a come-and-get-it potluck.

Those who are outside the Church are in no position to receive this mystery. It cannot unite them to the Eucharistic Society of the Church; because they do not accept the Orthodox Faith, they do not even desire that unity. A fortiori, it cannot unite them with Christ, for that union takes place only in the context of the “sacramental organism”. Therefore, receiving the Bread and Wine in an Orthodox liturgy can do non-Orthodox no good and may do them harm.

On a lower, but still important plane, “open communion” is false in another way: It implies that the theological differences among Christian denominations are of no real consequence. Many people would like for that to be the case, but different groups hold divergent doctrines, not all of which can be true. Do we wish to say that we don’t care what statements about God are true or false? That is what we imply when we misuse the sacraments to create a pretense of union without unity in faith.

What about the other side of the nave? If the Church has reasons not to offer the sacrament to non-Orthodox, do they have reasons to acquiesce in that prohibition?

A non-Orthodox Christian who seeks to receive Orthodox communion proclaims by his action that he disbelieves the Orthodox doctrines concerning the Eucharist. He does not understand the Church to be a “sacramental organism”, does not see any connection between union with Christ and union of the faithful, and does not fear judgment or condemnation if he eats and drinks the Body and Blood of Christ without being duly prepared. He evidently views the sacrament as either mere symbolism, to which human emotion rather than divine grace gives meaning, or a magical rite that extorts Grace from God.

While everyone is free to disagree with the Orthodox Church, it is impolite, to put it mildly, to display one’s disagreement by going up to the celebrant at the most solemn moment of the liturgy and shouting your disagreement in his face. And that is exactly what a non-Orthodox does when he deceives a priest into giving him communion.

I hope that non-Orthodox who are tempted to go forward for communion at Orthodox liturgies (or non-Roman Catholics at Catholic masses) will ponder in their hearts why they wish to engage in such rudeness to their hosts (pun intended).

Note: For the benefit of non-Orthodox readers who may find themselves at an Orthodox liturgy, let me mention that, at the end of the service, the priest distributes bread, called antidoron, to those present. Non-Orthodox may partake of antidoron and are encouraged to do so. It is not a sacrament but a gesture of fellowship. In fact, it plays the irenic, ecumenical role that some people seem to wish to assign to the Eucharist.

Lenten Weblog, Day 21: Sunday of the Holy Cross

The theme of this Sunday is the Holy Cross, which is carried in procession through the congregation and venerated at the conclusion of the liturgy. Lent is now half over, and the reason for emphasizing the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion is, as the special reading for the day tells us, to strengthen our resolve to fast, pray and purify our lives during the last weeks before Pascha.

With the help of God, we have almost reached the middle of the course of the Fast, where our strength has been worn down through abstinence, and the full difficulty of the labor set before us becomes apparent. Therefore our holy Mother, the Church of Christ, now brings to our help the all-holy Cross, the joy of the world, the strength of the faithful, the staff of the just, and the hope of sinners, so that by venerating it reverently, we might receive strength and grace to complete the divine struggle of the Fast.

The Cross was not always a “joy of the world”, however. In the day’s Gospel reading (Mark 8:34-9:1), Our Lord says, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Jerusalem Bible) Can we imagine how those words fell on the first ears that heard them? “Taking up one’s cross” is a cliché to us. To the Jews of 1st Century Palestine, it was what condemned criminals did as they went to the torture-death of crucifixion. There could be no greater contrast to the worldly success that is promised so lavishly by false prophets (and occasionally, alas, by evangelists purporting to call men to the service of Jesus).

That the bearer of such a message induced anyone to follow Him ranks as a miracle in itself. We, who live in safe, comfortable times, to whom refraining from meat for a few weeks a year is the acme of suffering, need to reflect more often on what the first Christians, moved by the incarnate presence of the Lord, were willing and able to risk and do. If we fall so far short, is it because we cannot do as much, or because we do not care to try?

And if you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it. . . . Now, who that wants this general sincere intention, can be reckoned a Christian? And yet if it was among Christians, it would change the whole face of the world: true piety, and exemplary holiness, would be as common and visible, as buying and selling, or any trade in life. [William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ch. 2]

Lenten Weblog, Day 20: Death, the Old Enemy

The close juxtaposition of the dehydration of Terri Schiavo and the natural passing of Pope John Paul II makes Death a natural topic for reflection. Our secular culture has two attitudes toward human mortality, mutually contradictory but fervently held.

The first is that death is so great an evil that no end can justify it. Thus, statistics about how many people were killed in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime in Iraq are cited as proof that the effort wasn’t worth the price, while cost-benefit analyses that argue that some environmental protections or safety measures are too expensive for the number of lives that they would save are denounced as inhumane.

The second is that “death is a natural part of life”, that we ought to welcome it for the aged and the infirm, that for many, e. g., infants born with severe defects, it is a better fate than life. This view is summed up in Walt Whitman’s haunting, though perverse lines,

Come, lovely and soothing Death.
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Both of these feelings – they scarcely possess the thoughtfulness and coherence to be called “opinions” – are distortions of the Christian tradition, which likewise has two teachings about death.

First, death is mankind’s great enemy and curse. In Genesis, God is represented as telling our first parents that, should they defy the divine command and eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (that is, claim for themselves the autonomy to declare what is right or wrong), the punishment will be death. That punishment attached to human nature and has been inherited ever since. It is not the same as the natural termination of organic existence; that animals and plants are mortal is not a punishment for their sins. Organisms decay, but blotting out a creature with rational intelligence and free will, with what we label a “soul”, is a horrible event. Our moral instinct revolts against it, even as it does not revolt against the peaceable deaths of dogs, sparrows or oak trees. Indeed, men have instinctively realized, from as far back as we have information about their beliefs, that death for a rational being is not simple extinction: The soul continues, because rationality is not a purely material phenomenon and cannot be cut off by material obliteration. The instinctive view is that this persistence is by nature a miserable fate. In Homer, the ghost of Achilles says that the meanest slave is happier than the most glorious of the dead.

Death is not, then, good in and of itself, not “lovely and soothing”. It is the negation of good – not just an evil but the summation of all evils. A Christian rightly prays that it will be averted. On joyous occasions at Orthodox churches, we sing, “God grant you many years!”

If that were all that there is to be said about death, life would be hopeless, for each of us will die, and after a relatively brief period. If we scale down the time span of the universe, from its creation till today, into a single year, the longest lived human dies less than a third of a second. If we thereafter survive as immaterial souls, what could be more dreary? The most vivid picture of the pains of Hell is cheerful next to the prospect of billions of years of ghostly prolongation.

This hopelessness pervades classical Greek and Roman thought. Either the extinction of the rational soul or its bodiless survival was an unbearable concept. The ancients found palliatives: the mystery cults, reincarnation, Epicurean denial of reason and free will; none of them healed despair. The best remedy was a jocular agnosticism, as in Emperor Hadrian’s deathbed poem:

Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec ut soles, dabis iocos?

[Sweet, wandering little soul,
My body’s guest and companion,
Where will you go now,
Pale, stiff and naked?
No longer, as you used to, will you play jokes on me.]

In Christian belief, Christ is the medicine for despair. By His death and resurrection, He conquered death and gave those who believe in him the promise (but not the certainty: we have the free will to reject Him) of our own resurrection unto life eternal, not a simple replication of the life that we now lead under the dominion of sin and death but everlasting life in the presence of God.

To say that Christians have no reason to hate death is mistaken. Christ trampled down death; He did not make it “lovely and soothing”. Death is not beautiful; it is ugly. “Embracing” it or praising it as a relief and a boon is a denigration of the gift of life that God has bestowed upon us.

Therefore, the Christian view of death is the opposite of the contemporary secular one. We do not hasten death, for either ourselves or others. At the same time, we do not tremble at the prospect. To use an earthly analogy, secularists are like soldiers who flee from the enemy, hide wherever they can and, when caught, tamely surrender. Christians are soldiers who face the enemy resolutely, staying at their posts under the heaviest bombardment, fighting with confidence of victory.

The world recedes; it disappears;
Heav’n opens on my eyes; my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy Victory?
O Death! where is thy Sting?

– Alexander Pope, “A Dying Christian to His Soul”

Lenten Weblog, Day 19: St. John Paul II

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Karol Wojtyla are three names that historians of the 20th Century will inevitably link. Among them they accomplished the amazing feat of turning the trajectory of Western civilization. It is not certain that the next century will be one of free men, free markets and spiritual rebirth; it is certain that all of those were dim prospects before the Great Triumvirate began their work.

Of the three, Fr. Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, Patriarch of Rome, undertook the greatest task. Though President Reagan and Lady Thatcher promoted causes congruent with Christianity, their activity was primarily secular. John Paul struggled in the realm of faith, against the tides of modernism that seemed destined, just a quarter century ago, to sweep away the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and leave behind bare, ruined choirs, among which a minimalist religiosity would play the tune for a this-worldly socialist libretto.

It isn’t for a non-Roman to pass judgement on the internal state of the See of Rome and its dependencies, but no great discernment is required to recognize that the Second Vatican Council, in the course of making vital pastoral reforms, moved so swiftly that it gave the impression that essential doctrines were as malleable as external customs. The upshot was a time of troubles, during which it certainly appeared that the Roman Church would soon be as modernist, save for vestigial cassocks, statues and incense, as the most “advanced” branches of Protestantism. My traditionalist Roman Catholic friends in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s had the air of soldiers in a beaten army, who hoped to endure as prisoners of war. They nicknamed the Pope “Paul the Sad”, a fitting sobriquet for the shepherd of a bewildered flock.

John Paul II stood steadfastly against that zeitgeist. If he did not succeed in dispelling it from every crevice of the ecclesia, he did reverse the balance of forces. Today it is the modernists who are demoralized and defensive; the stridency of their denunciations of the Pontiff’s “reactionary” tendencies is sign enough of that. The progressive periti and their the dreary secular mentalité look quainter by the year.

In the eyes of Orthodox Christians, John Paul is a particularly significant figure. Had the Roman Church remained on its previous course, Orthodoxy would have been left as the last major traditionalist bastion in a sea of semi-Christianity. We have been promised that the gates of Hell shall never prevail; still, it is a relief not to be alone and abandoned. While the current state of affairs in Christendom is not as good as the unblemished communion for which we all pray, it is far more satisfactory than what might have been. It is one thing to debate with Roman theologians about the filioque, another to confront periti who harbor doubts about the Trinity.

Throughout his reign, John Paul labored for improved relations, and eventual unity, between his jurisdiction and the Orthodox Church. He did not, needless to say, throw over a thousand years of Latin theology in an instant, but he identified what is essential to reunion between East and West. As he said in his Easter address to the Archbishop of Athens four years ago:

I wish first of all to express to you the affection and regard of the Church of Rome. Together we share the apostolic faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior; we have in common the apostolic heritage and the sacramental bond of Baptism; and therefore we are all members of God’s family, called to serve the one Lord and to proclaim his Gospel to the world. The Second Vatican Council called on Catholics to regard the members of the other Churches “as brothers and sisters in the Lord” (Unitatis Redintegratio, 3), and this supernatural bond of brotherhood between the Church of Rome and the Church of Greece is strong and abiding. . . .

At this meeting, I also wish to assure Your Beatitude that the Church of Rome looks with unaffected admiration to the Orthodox Church of Greece for the way in which she has preserved her heritage of faith and Christian life. The name of Greece resounds wherever the Gospel is preached. The names of her cities are known to Christians everywhere from the reading of the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Saint Paul. From the Apostolic era until now, the Orthodox Church of Greece has been a rich source from which the Church of the West too has drawn for her liturgy, spirituality and jurisprudence (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 14). A patrimony of the whole Church are the Fathers, privileged interpreters of the apostolic tradition, and the Councils, whose teachings are a binding element of all Christian faith. The universal Church can never forget what Greek Christianity has given her, nor cease to give thanks for the enduring influence of the Greek tradition.

The Second Vatican Council stressed to Catholics the Orthodox love of the liturgy, through which the faithful “enter into communion with the Most Holy Trinity and become sharers in the divine nature” (Unitatis Redintegratio,15). In offering liturgical worship pleasing to God through the centuries, in preaching the Gospel even in dark and difficult times, in presenting an unfailing didaskalia, inspired by the Scriptures and the great Tradition of the Church, the Orthodox Church of Greece has brought forth a host of saints who intercede for all God’s People before the Throne of Grace. In the saints we see the ecumenism of holiness which, with God’s help, will eventually draw us into full communion, which is neither absorption nor fusion but a meeting in truth and love (cf. Slavorum Apostoli, 27).

I have little doubt that, within the lifetime of most men now living, Karol Wojtyla will be officially recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. In the eyes of God, I am confident, he is one already. May his memory be eternal!

Update (4/5/05): The Daily Telegraph reports that L’Osservatore Romano writers and other Roman Catholic spokesmen have begun referring to the late Pope as “John Paul the Great”, putting him in a category with only two of his predecessors, Leo the Great (440-461) and Gregory the Great (590-604).

There hasn’t been a generally recognized “Great”, religious or secular, since Frederick II of Prussia. It isn’t an appellation that seems suitable to extraordinary democratic leaders like George Washington, William Pitt fils, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The Papacy, though, is a less modern institution, and we really shouldn’t give future historians the impression that “Great”-ness ended with a bellicose German.

Lenten Weblog, Day 18: Lighter Fare and a Warning

As a refrigerium from the discipline of Great Lent, let us turn to last Sunday’s Easter sermon of an eminent Canadian prelate, Michael Ingham, Anglican Bishop of New Westminster (via Midwest Conservative Journal, which keeps track of the comedy of modernist theology for the benefit of the rest of us).

Bishop Michael is much impressed by “new science”, that is, by science that was new several decades ago, though he doesn’t actually seem to know a lot about science old or new. He thinks, for instance, that traveling for 2,000 years at the speed of light would not take one out of the Solar System and that the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that our universe may someday “meet up with an anti-matter universe . . . [and] go up in a cloud of smoke”. He is distressed that “These ideas somehow never make it into the church.”

Not that His Grace is more at home in theology. At least, he seems to be under the impression that Christians have historically conceived of Heaven as a place that one can reach by traveling a very long distance from Earth. Happily, “A few brave Christians have taken up the challenge of these new ideas” and arrived at what sounds exactly like the old idea of pantheism.

Diarmuid O’Murchu in Quantum Theology: the Spiritual Implications of the New Physics says we should stop thinking of God as a supernatural Being located outside the universe. Instead, he says, we should think of the universe itself as a pulsating, vibrant dance of energy alive with benign and creative potential in which God calls to us from within, not without.

He says we should stop thinking of ourselves as created beings, and see ourselves instead as woven into the fabric of a dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe in which we must play our part or become extinct. The damage we are doing to the planet and to other life forms may leave the universe no choice but to spit us out, as it has done to countless species before us.

Well, well, a new theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs: They didn’t play their part in the “dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe”, so it spat them out. Is that a recent finding of evolutionary biology that I somehow missed?

The central theme of the homily is a cloudy connection between Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which “brings a new understanding of the non-predictability of events” (that’s why scientists conduct experiments, to marvel at how the results are different every time), and whatever it was that happened on the first Easter.

Easter is a kind of uncertainty principle thrust into the heart of our tidy, ordered universe, undermining all our theories about how things ought to be. It’s an event that makes everything unstable.

As Scripture says, “The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great something that leaves them totally confused.” Certainly that is the case with the Bishop of New Westminster.

The unsettling side of this excursion into post-Christian nonsense is that Bishop Ingham imagines himself to be a serious, enlightened thinker, whereas he is in fact as ignorant and obscurantist as the most retrograde, Bob Jones-style fundamentalist. His abandonment of the good of intellect is a warning to us all.

Lenten Weblog, Day 17: St. John of the Ladder

Today is the feast day of St. John “of the Ladder” (“Climacus” in Latinized Greek), whose surname comes from the title of his principal work, Klimax tou Paradeisou (Englished in a recent edition as The Ladder of Divine Ascent). In 30 chapters the book traces the ascent from attachment to the world to union with God, beginning with the defeat of commonplace vices and continuing through the acquisition of the virtues of stillness, prayer, dispassion and love. It has long been central to Orthodox spirituality and is appointed for reading aloud in monasteries during Lent. The Fourth Sunday of Lent is dedicated to the author.

About St. John’s life, our knowledge is scanty. He is now believed to have been born before 579 and to have died about 649. At age 16, after excelling as a student, he abandoned the world to live as an anchorite near Mount Sinai. At age 60, he was chosen as abbot of the mountain’s great religious house (now known as St. Catherine’s Monastery). He passed into life eternal at about age 75.

The Ladder quickly became one of the most popular spiritual tracts ever written. In ascetic circles, it is one of the fundamental expositions of hesychasm, the approach to God through continual prayer of the heart. Among laymen it is read for its striking aphorisms and insight into the spiritual struggles that afflict all Christians. Indeed, St. John has wise counsel today. For instance, in view of the emotions aroused by the court-sanctioned starvation of Terri Schiavo, we should ponder what he had to say about the remembrance of wrongs:

Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sin, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind, shame of prayer, cessation of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasure-less feeling cherished in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice. . . . You will know that you have completely freed yourself of this rot, not when you pray for the person who has offended you, not when you exchange presents with him, not when you invite him to your table, but only when, on hearing that he has fallen into bodily or spiritual misfortune, you suffer and weep for him as for yourself. . . .

The forgetting of wrongs is a sign of true repentance. But he who dwells on them and thinks that he is repenting is like a man who thinks he is running while he is really asleep.

Troparion - Tone 8

By a flood of tears you made the desert fertile
And by your longing for God you brought forth fruits in abundance.
By the radiance of miracles you illuminated the whole universe.
O our holy Father John Climacus, pray to Christ our God to save our souls.

Kontakion - Tone 1

You offered us your teachings as fruits of everlasting freshness,
To sweeten the hearts of those who receive them with attention.
O blessed and wise John, they are the rungs of a ladder,
Leading the souls of those who honor you from earth to Eternal glory in Heaven!

Lenten Weblog, Day 16: A Citizen of Christendom

Today is the fifth anniversary of the canonization of St. Raphael Hawaweeny (1860-1915), the first Orthodox Bishop of Brooklyn (consecrated 101 years ago, on the Third Sunday of Lent, 1904) and a pioneer of Orthodoxy in this country. He was born in Beirut, to which his parents had fled from Damascus during an outbreak of violence that took the lives of their parish priest, St. Joseph of Damascus (martyred on July 10, 1860), and many other Christians. The family later returned to Damascus, where Raphael excelled in school and won a scholarship to study for the priesthood. In 1886 he graduated from the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s School of Theology at Halki in Constantinople. After serving for a time on the staff of Patriarch Gerasimos of Antioch, he enrolled in the Kiev Theological Academy, then was ordained to the priesthood in 1889 and became the Patriarch’s representative in Moscow. Unfortunately, he fell out of favor with Gerasimos’ successor and by 1895 had been relegated to teaching Arabic at a seminary in Kazan.

Showing that God rarely closes one door except to open another, this underutilized priest came to the notice of the Syrian Orthodox Benevolent Society of New York, which was searching for a clergyman to attend to the needs of America’s small, scattered Christian Arab population. Fr. Raphael was invited to take the post and arrived in this country on November 2, 1895. Within two weeks he had established a chapel. The following year he traveled across the continent from New York to San Francisco in the first of his several transcontinental pastoral journeys, visiting Orthodox communities – Greek and Russian as well as Arab – in 30 cities.

After declining offers of ecclesiastical preferment in the old country, Fr. Raphael was chosen as Bishop of Brooklyn under the Moscow Patriarchate (then the only active Orthodox jurisdiction in the United States). He was the first Orthodox bishop whose consecration took place in the New World and the first to serve there throughout his entire episcopal career. In addition to continuing his extensive travels, Bishop Raphael founded a periodical for his Arab-speaking flock, al-Kalimat (The Word, still published (in English) by the Antiochian Archdiocese), translated liturgical texts into Arabic, while at the same time encouraging the use of English in church services, wrote extensively, and took part in ecumenical endeavors, particularly the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union, of which he was vice president from 1910 through 1912.

In 1911 he began to suffer heart problems, though ill health reduced his activity only slightly. He passed into life eternal on February 27, 1915.

Orthodox Photos has a short biography, with photographs illustrating St. Raphael’s career.

Troparion - Tone 1

Your proclamation has gone forth throughout North America,
calling the scattered sheep into the unity of the church.
hearing your voice, they responded to your teaching,
and through your writings you instructed them in piety.
now guided by your example, O Father Raphael,
we sing hymns of praise unto Christ our God.
Glory to Him Who gave you strength!
Glory to Him Who granted you a crown!
Glory to Him Who, through you, grants healing to all!

Kontakion - Tone 8

You were a guardian and a defender of the Church¹s teaching;
you protected your flock from false doctrines and confirmed them in the true faith.
O holy father Raphael, son of Syria and glory of North America,
always intercede before the Lord that our souls may be saved.

Lenten Weblog, Day 15: Strange Spirits

A standard media line is that those who object to starving Terri Schiavo to death are motivated by fanatical Christianity. That surprises me a bit, for I had charitably thought that hardened secularists also disliked the idea of depriving people of food and water. At issue in Mrs. Schiavo’s case is whether she is aware of what is happening to her, a question of fact that cannot be decided on religious grounds. I assume that morally sane nonbelievers do not advocate cruelty and have sincerely convinced themselves that there is no rational possibility that Terri Schiavo feels anything as her body dies. Were that my conviction, too, her circumstances would not distress me. (This morning I happened to see a snippet of CNN Headline News reporting that her doctors were administering morphine, which suggests a certain lack of confidence in the diagnosis of total unconsciousness.)

If the role of Christian zeal in this dispute is overstated, a different religious impulse has been overlooked. Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, Gregory Felos, also adheres to a supernatural creed, the tenets of which he has espoused in a book entitled Litigation as Spiritual Practice. He believes, to summarize baldly, that death is a stage in a divine procession. Hastening it for the disabled is to help them on their journey and doesn’t actually deprive them of life, as they are drops in the ocean of God and will be reincarnated in due course. A few quotations (from sources ([1] and [2]) that, while hostile to Mr. Felos, do not appear to be plucking his words out of context; cf. his publisher’s Web page):

[Mr. Felos’ reaction to reading a book on “conscious dying”:] Scripture says neither hands, nor feet, nor emotion, nor mind, nor body are we. Our death—the permanent separation of our spirit, our consciousness, from the body—if experienced with awareness, can provide the opportunity to dispel the greatest of illusions: that we are this body. The author [of the book] goes on to describe how meditation and spiritual practice is the process of dying—the means by which we extinguish our ego and body identification and realize we are the expression and manifestation of the Divine. Pretty heady stuff, especially for one who had just died and been reborn, so to speak. I deeply connected with the message of this book, and as I gazed out the window upon the clouds and surface below, I felt death move a bit closer.

[On a different occasion, by his own account, his thought “I wonder what it would be like to die right now” caused an airplane to go into a sudden dive.] At that instant a clear, distinctly independent and slightly stern voice said to me, “Be careful what you think. You are more powerful than you realize.” In quick succession I was startled, humbled and blessed by God’s admonishment.

This autonomy from mental control is characteristic of how events and emotions are encountered during Grace. . . . Nothing holds permanent and immutable except the ocean of God’s consciousness from which and upon which the forms of Divine consciousness play. Life in Grace is a succession of these unfolding moments. Whether the next moment brings death or a fortune is irrelevant because nothing that can happen can ever harm or hurt you, or improve or make you better. In reality you have never been born and never can die. You are the expression of the Divine.

If we are infinitely large, if the Divine within us, which is us, contains all of creation, what can be taken from us and who is there to take it? [emphasis in original]

[An experience that he claims to have had while he and his wife were debating whether to have children:] I heard the soul of my yet-to-be-conceived child emphatically shout: “I’m ready to be born . . . will you stop this fooling around!” . . . The voice I heard was distinctly male, and I beamed with the idea I had a son—or was going to have a son—or sorta had a son out there—or something like that. [James Taranto: “Of course, if Felos (or a talking gleam in his eye) thinks the way to conceive a child is to stop fooling around, some medical expert ought to sit him down and explain the facts of life.”]

Gregory Felos, then, embraces the “right to die” (or, to be more precise, the right to have others liberate your God-spirit by ending your life), because he has received what he regards as spiritual enlightenment. I take it for granted that he is sincere and regards his mystical experiences as authoritative. But how does he know that they derive from God rather than from his imagination or a malign spirit?

Christian mystics not infrequently report diabolic visions that are every bit as vivid as those sent by God. They can distinguish the one from the other by drawing on the teachings of the Church. If a saint is urged by an angel of light to kill an innocent woman, he knows that the “angel” is a demon in disguise, because it calls him to do what the law of Christ forbids.

Mr. Felos, by contrast, has no theology but that inferred from his visions. No independent authority can test the validity of the visions, and he has never thought to raise skeptical questions. Thus he has been led to a self-righteous zeal for what can only be characterized, by those who do not share his faith, as a cult of death. In our era of “New Age” spiritual experimentation, he is far from alone in following unexamined impulses into terrain that is dangerous to soul and body.

Lenten Weblog, Day 14: Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

On the second Sunday in Lent, the Orthodox Church honors St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359). To Orthodox theologians St. Gregory is a tremendously exciting and seminal thinker, whose ideas swept through the 14th Century Church like a divine fire. Before Gregory, it is not unfair to say, Orthodox thought, as exemplified by such figures as Barlaam of Calabria, was drifting toward Renaissance Roman Catholicism, just as the Byzantine Empire was drifting toward political subordination to the Western powers. Gregory decisively rejected the intrusion of humanism and rationalism into theology. His great contribution was to arrest the tendency to push the implications of God’s transcendence to their logical end point. His great opponents Barlaam, Gregory Akindynos and Demetrios Kydones, placed God so far beyond human comprehension that He became an impersonal, unknowable, Neoplatonic deity, almost the sort of God that Antony Flew, the recent defector from atheism, hypothesizes.

St. Gregory’s God, by contrast, is personal and knowable, not in His divine essence but in the “energies” with which He touches the world. To a non-specialist like me, the details of the reasoning of Gregory and his later interpreters are obscure, but the conclusion, vindicating the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, against the God of the philosophers, is clear.

To the saint’s contemporaries, God’s accessibility was not a matter of abstract speculation but immediate practical import. Palamatism became a key issue in secular politics, in which Gregory himself strove to play the role of peacemaker. Contrary to what one might cynically suspect, the Palamite cause did not triumph through being on the winning political side. While it was certainly helpful that the emperor who presided over the first council to consider the controversy (the Council of St. Sophia, June 10, 1341) was Gregory’s boyhood friend Andronicus III, that prop vanished when Andronicus died less than a week later. Within a few years, the Emperor John V Palaeologos had accepted union with Rome in return for promises (never fulfilled) of a great anti-Turkish crusade. Had Palamatism not already been decisively established within the Church, it is likely that this political development would have led to its condemnation. Instead, Gregory was canonized in 1368, only nine years after his death. His role as a Father of the Church was further emphasized when he began to be commemorated during Lent, on the Sunday formerly reserved for the highly esteemed St. Polycarp of Smyrna (d. 166).

Further reading: Monachos, “Gregory Palamas – An Historical Study”, “St. Gregory Palamas – Knowledge, Prayer and Vision”, “Gregory Palamas – Historical Appendices”
Fr. George Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers”
Panayiotis Christou, “The Teaching of Gregory Palamas on Man”

Lenten Weblog, Day 13: First Commandment and First Amendment

It’s remarkable how frequently non-Christians or Christian modernists undertake to expound what traditional Christians “really” believe, generally along the lines of, Those guys may pretend to be reasonable and harmless, but if you dig deeper. . . .

Today’s exhibit is a column distributed by the University of Wyoming Religious Studies Program under the title, “The First Commandment vs. the First Amendment”. Its news hook is the forthcoming Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings, but its central argument is less transient: that the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion is directly opposed to the First Commandment’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

The Puritans were perhaps the pivotal religious group in America’s founding. They championed religious freedom, by which they meant that they themselves should be a community that was free to worship according to their beliefs. They believed that they were a new “Israel” and that therefore Scripture and the Ten Commandments applied to them. As a community, they enforced its legal requirements.

The First Commandment took on special meaning. “You shall have no other gods before me” meant: You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community. Freedom of worship was thus freedom to do as the community of believers determined, with scriptural and divine guidance, but not as individuals believed, whatever scriptural or divine guidance they received. The Puritans thus created a restrictive society, like the one they had fled.

People who went against the dictates of the Puritan community were expelled, as were fervent Christians such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Both fled to Rhode Island, where Williams founded America’s first Baptist congregation. Rhode Island became a center for religious difference. Not only did several different types of Christianity flourish there, but so did the Touro Synagogue, one of America’s first Jewish congregations.

Williams’ ideas later became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment, which provides the foundation for the exclusion of government from involvement in religious matters. . . . This religious freedom comes from the First Amendment's denial of the First Commandment.

The message is clear: Belief in the First Commandment leads to religious persecution. The United States would have evolved into an oppressive Puritan theocracy, with only “freedom to do as the community of believers determined,” had not the founders of Rhode Island boldly denied the validity of the First Commandment, a denial that “became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment”. To readers unacquainted with Christian history and doctrine, the exegesis of the commandment as “You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community” may sound plausible enough, but it has been invented by the columnist out of thin air.

That princes could and should establish a particular faith as the official religion, supported by the state and granted privileges of varying degree, was taken for granted well before any large part of the world was influenced by the words of Yahweh. The Athenian Assembly that condemned Socrates and the Roman Emperors who persecuted the early Church did not need a Mosaic injunction to inspire them. When Christian-ruled states emerged, they, too, regarded religion as a proper object of legal regulation. If any Church Father invoked the First Commandment in support of that practice, he merely added a superfluous buttress to an uncontroversial practice; all of the debate was over which creed should be established.

While Puritan Massachusetts was no exemplar of what we would today call religious freedom, attributing its intolerance of heterodoxy to intense devotion to the First Commandment is far-fetched. The colony’s founders had gone to a great deal of trouble to find an out-of-the-way location for what was intended to be a homogenous community of the Elect. The limitation of full citizenship to members of the official church was intended to prevent that goal from being thwarted. It did not rest on a doctrine that God commanded state-enforced uniformity.

And what of Roger Williams, who supposedly pioneered the anti-First Commandment views? The folk of Massachusetts Bay with whom he quarreled did not accuse him of repudiating the Ten Commandments. Indeed, at the time of his expulsion he was pastor of one of the settlement’s leading churches, and his adherence to Puritan theology was unblemished. His troubles with the authorities stemmed from political rather than religious disagreement, particularly over relations with the Indians and the validity of royal land grants.

That Christian governments have engaged in persecution is not a source of pride, nor is it a corollary of the fundamentals of the faith. Rather, it is a consequence of the adaptation of the faith to the world, a process in which worldliness too often infects faith. Those who constantly urge the Church to “keep up with the times” and “get rid of outmoded dogmas” may wish to reflect on whether being in step with the zeitgeist and downplaying dogmas that the age finds unattractive have served Christianity well in the past.

Lenten Weblog, Day 12: A Reason for the Orthodox Calendar

Today is Good Friday, the most severe and solemn of fast days, for Christians who follow the Western calendar. It is also the Feast of the Annunciation, a day of celebration and joy. Doesn’t that coincidence suggest that the Orthodox calendar, which everyone agrees is less “scientific”, has its virtues for marking the life of the Church?

For the Orthodox, Holy Friday and the Annunciation cannot fall on the same day, and Easter always falls after the Jewish Passover (though that was not invariably the case during the 1st Millennium). Those are excellent results if the purpose of the calendar is to produce a meaningful Christian year. They are less excellent, I concede, if the highest priority is applying exact astronomical methods to the decisions of the First Council of Nicaea. Readers may decide for themselves which is more important.

It should be noted that, even using the Orthodox calendar, Holy Friday could fall on March 25th so long as we observed the Julian civil calendar. It is the surface inconsistency of adopting the Gregorian calendar for most purposes but keeping the old method of determining the date of Easter that eliminates the risk of a spiritual anomaly. That is, I think, an example of how Tradition can outperform Reason in arriving at rational and satisfactory outcomes.

Further reading: Lewis Patsavos, “The Calendar of the Orthodox Church” is a good overview of the calendrical controversies.

Discussions of the dating of Easter seem invariably to center on astronomy rather than faith. Very thorough and useful for the former is Marcos J. Montes, “Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar”, which includes “Notes on the Orthodox Easter”. William H. Jeffreys, “Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Passover” provides an algorithm for calculating the Jewish holy days.

There was a strong effort a few years ago in ecumenical circles to persuade all Christian denominations to adopt a new, astronomically more precise Easter calculation. Proponents saw an opportunity for “unification” in the coincidence of Orthodox and Western Easters in 2001 and 2004, after which everyone could march along under the new New Calendar. For an account, vide “Efforts to Find a Common Date for Easter”. The campaign went nowhere and didn’t deserve to. Not only would it spread the spiritual defects of the Western calculation to the Orthodox world, but any attempt by Orthodox jurisdictions to revise the church calendar at this moment in history would generate schisms whose detriment would outweigh the benefits of celebrating the Resurrection of Christ on the same day as our Western brethren.

Lenten Weblog, Day 11: Civil Obedience

You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’s decision, and such an act is bound to be punished. Good behavior is not afraid of magistrates; only criminals have anything to fear. If you want to live without being afraid of authority, you must live honestly and authority may even honor you. The state is there to serve God for your benefit. If you break the law, however, you may well have fear: The bearing of the sword has its significance. The authorities are there to serve God: They carry out God’s revenge by punishing wrongdoers. You must obey, therefore, not only because you are afraid of being punished, but also for conscience’s sake. [Romans 13:1-5 (Jerusalem Bible)]

As Terri Schiavo wastes away, many Christians will be righteously indignant (or, as the media will label them, angry), and in some hearts indignation at a cruel decision will metastasize into fury at the United States and Florida governments. One commentator has already called for “storming the Bastille”, that is, rescuing the victim by executive fiat despite the absence of legal authorization. Others, less vocal or excitable, will merely harbor dark thoughts about the virtues of civil disobedience.

Before giving way to such sentiments, we should reflect on the words of St. Paul. Is it an evil that the governing authorities have approved the death by starvation of a middle-aged woman and frustrated all attempts to save her? Suppose that they allowed parents to kill any infant who was judged “sickly”, or that fathers had unfettered power of life and death over most of those in their households, or that judges routinely ordered torture, flogging and cruel executions? Is it dismaying that Christianity is widely denounced as an improper basis for public policy? Suppose that merely naming oneself as a servant of Christ were a punishable offense?

Those suppositions were, of course, facts in the 1st Century Roman Empire. According to St. Paul, the officials who routinely perpetrated horrors greater than those inflicted on Terri Schiavo, “were appointed by God”, and resistance to their decrees was tantamount to “rebelling against God’s decision”. They were to be obeyed, not merely because defiance would lead to penalties but because conscience demanded it.

If the Apostle could write that about Caesar’s minions, a fortiori, it is true of duly elected or appointed officials of the United States and Florida. If conscience demanded acquiescence in the decisions promulgated by an absolute monarchy that excluded Christian opinion entirely, the force of that demand is magnified when the state is subject to popular control and allows Christians full freedom of speech. It is hard to accept an outcome that one believes to be drastically wrong, but conscience (as we too often forget these days, when “follow your conscience” and “do what feels good” are generally treated as synonymous) is the faculty that instructs us to do what we do not like.

Bowing to the wisdom of St. Paul does not mean spinelessly accepting tyranny. The duty to obey the constituted authorities is not man’s only duty. A “just rebellion” is no more unthinkable than a “just war”, but neither is the norm. Indeed, one need only contrast America, Florida judges and all, with Lebanon or Kyrgyzstan to see how frivolous it is to grumble that our government is undeserving of patriotic allegiance.

So let us respond to the Schiavo tragedy not with railing but with prayer, not with anger but with fasting, not with disobedience but with repentance. The evil done already is enough.

Lenten Weblog, Day 10: Opportunity in Unraveling

The news that one of our most invaluable quarterlies, The Public Interest, will cease publication has spurred me to browse through back issues. Last night I reread “The Unraveling of Christianity in America” by Clifford Orwin, which appeared in the Spring 2004 issue. As his title suggests, the author has little optimism about either of the two great camps, “mainline” and “evangelical” into which he divides American Christians. On the Christian Left,

Since the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the Social Gospel, the typical response of the mainline churches to the challenge of secularism has been to capitulate to it. Every one of these churches has been advancing (or retreating) from Christian orthodoxy down the road of secular progressivism. They have not done so without hesitation and confusion, which have sometimes brought them to the brink of schism. Nonetheless, within each of these churches, certainly at the national level, progressivism has eventually prevailed across the board. . . .

Similarly, within the pastoral realm, the discourse of psychotherapy and personal fulfillment appears to have established itself as thoroughly in the mainline churches as in the lay world. Those who are looking for something different in church than is on offer outside it are increasingly less likely to find it there.

The evangelicals have avoided surrender to the dominant secular culture, forming a sort of counterculture. Unfortunately, they lack many of the qualities needed to prevail in the “culture wars”:

Perhaps most confusingly, neither are evangelicals themselves immune to the inroads of the mainline from which they seek to distinguish themselves. James Davison Hunter’s studies of evangelical divinity students show a marked tendency toward regression to the mean of Protestant religious opinion in America. And then there is the vogue for “Christian counseling,” a growth industry if ever there was one. Himmelfarb reports that “evangelicals are divided between those practicing a ‘classical’ spirituality derived from earlier Protestant and Puritan traditions, and those partial to a ‘postmodern’ or ‘existential’ spirituality, which is therapeutic and individualist.” . . .

No counterculture fully realizes its aspiration to separate itself from the broader culture. I will note, however, one respect in which the evangelicals have failed not just themselves but the rest of us. This is the barrenness of their intellectual life. In many months spent over many years visiting in a pious household, I‘ve not come upon a single evangelical book that rose above mediocrity. On a recent lecturing trip to the South, I met a young evangelical intellectual who had just defected to Catholicism. First among his reasons was the intellectual wealth of his new, much older faith in contrast with the poverty of his former, much younger one. He disclosed that others of his circle were contemplating the same move for the same reason. It would be unfair to demand of evangelicalism that it produce a St. Thomas Aquinas or Pascal any time soon. Still, it had better develop some avenue of intellectual response to its own most thoughtful young people.

There is a great deal of truth to these indictments, though generalizing from the library of a single “pious household” and the dissatisfaction of one intellectual may be rash. Christianity is not, however, the only faith that is unraveling. Secular liberalism has, in Dr. Orwin’s view, lost its intellectual bearings in a more fundamental way:

In posing the question between humanism and theism as one of reason versus revelation, one risks being branded as passé in the most advanced secularist circles. This is not because the reigning theorists there will crow that reason has triumphed, but because they take it for granted that its pretensions have been decisively refuted. The earlier John Rawls, he of the Theory of Justice (1972), might have seemed to argue that secularist liberalism was the dictate of universal reason. This invested his enterprise with weight, as if he really was participating in the grand style of political philosophy. Later, however, he crumbled on this point, conceding that such liberalism was merely “our” perspective, no more grounded in the truth about things than any previous moral horizon. He thus made his peace with postmodernism.

Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist, candidly admits that at the end of the day liberalism is a matter of faith, not reason. Indeed, he goes further than this: He concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” he describes secularist liberals like himself as “freeloading atheists.” They continue to rely on the Judaeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern.

Rationalism that rejects reason is nothing but a refined superstition, as its adherents more or less acknowledge:

This twofold admission—that liberalism is merely a faith that remains dependent on an earlier faith, the authority of which it has rejected—should not, claims Rorty, dismay liberals in the least. No rational or coherent alternative to liberalism exists; all “foundational narratives,” upon inspection, will prove equally arbitrary and groundless. Thus our allegiance to liberalism progresses from the naive to the “ironic,” but the allegiance itself survives this transition unscathed. Through his supposed practice of unprecedented candor, Rorty achieves unheard of feats of having his cake and eating it too. Liberalism of this postmodernist sort pillages the Biblical tradition for everything up to and including its own moral core, while still priding itself on remaining a faith of the atheistic variety.

The other element in the American spiritual mix that Dr. Orwin describes is the “bourgeois bohemians” (David Brooks’ famous Bobos), who –

yearn for Something Higher, Shared, and Meaningful. Unfortunately, this vague impulse is attended by neither commitment nor belief. A Bobo never limits his options, so while he may dabble in a range of sacred practices (taking “helpings from the spiritual buffet table,” as Brooks puts it), he can never dedicate himself to any. Brooks cites the real life example of a “26-year-old disabilities counselor, the daughter of a Methodist minister, who describes herself as a ‘Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.’”

The conclusion that I draw from this taxonomy of American spiritual culture is that Christian pessimism is unwarranted. The enemies of the Faith have effectively yielded the intellectual background and fallen back on the fortress of emotion and impulse, where “moral laxity is a way of life, having mysteriously emerged as the fundamental principle of morality itself. Not only do they treat the sinner with charity, but they’ve become curiously indifferent to the sin.”

Bringing a message of repentance to those who say they have no sin can be frustrating, and developing ways to pierce the armor of indifference is a daunting challenge. Nonetheless, though anti-Christian sentiment may sometimes grow fierce, Christianity has, for the first time since the Middle Ages, an overwhelming advantage in the struggle for men’s minds.

Addendum: The last part of the essay has the air of having been tacked on in order to incorporate recent events. It takes a peculiar turn, arguing that President Bush’s support of democracy to the Islamic world puts him on the secular side of the cultural divide, because it accepts the premise that Christianity is not essential to democracy.

The American project . . . . both implies and demands the abandonment of the link on which [Abraham Lincoln] so relied between liberal Christianity and liberal democracy. For it is crucial to our victory in the forum of world opinion (including, crucially, Muslim opinion) that we not couch our global project as akin to Christianity in any way. . . .

By its deeds, not merely its words, this administration has exceeded all previous ones in rejecting the dependence of democracy on Christianity. It has adopted the premise that just as Confucianism, historically anything but liberal or democratic, has posed no insuperable obstacle to the democratization of East Asia, so Islam will pose none to that of the Middle East.

Dr. Orwin’s reasoning puzzles me. Is he saying that the proper Christian position is that non-Christian peoples ought to be left under the sway of tyrants until and unless they come to Jesus? Christians are aware the democratic idea got its start in ancient Greece, five centuries before Our Lord’s Incarnation. We may contend that belief in Christ has consequences that make democracy and liberty more likely to flourish, but political felicity is not a parochial blessing that we refuse to share with infidels.

Lenten Weblog, Day 9: Will Christians Miss Atheism?

A recent UPI article-essay by Uwe Siemon-Netto appears under the headline “God Not So Dead: Atheism in Decline Worldwide” and opens with what sounds like excellent news for Christendom:

There seems to be a growing consensus around the globe that godlessness is in trouble.

“Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide,” Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg told United Press International Tuesday.

His Oxford colleague Alister McGrath agrees. Atheism’s “future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat,” he wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today.

Professor McGrath’s essay, “The Twilight of Atheism”, a precis of his book of the same name, looks back at the factors that made atheism attractive and those that caused that attraction to wane:

Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively. . . .

With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.

One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms—Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.

Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe.

This sociological analysis has its place, but it is, to my mind, less interesting and important than atheism’s intellectual retreat, dramatically signaled by the defection to theism – albeit the theism of an unlovable, impersonal God – of Antony Flew, formerly a thoroughgoing skeptic. Professor Flew’s convictions were overthrown by the absurdity at the root of all atheist systems: the idea of a self-created universe. At a fundamental level, disbelief in a Creator requires a larger “leap of faith” than belief.

Developments like these are heartening to contemplate. Nonetheless, before we rejoice too unreservedly at atheism’s loss, we need to ponder to what extent it represents Christianity’s gain. On that point, Uwe Siemon-Netto offers sobering words:

The Rev. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, told UPI Tuesday: “True atheists in Europe have become an infinitesimally small group. There are not enough of them to be used for sociological research.” . . .

Zulehner cautions, however, that in the rest of Europe re-Christianization is by no means occurring. “What we are observing instead is a re-paganization,” he went on, and this worries Christian theologians such as Munich’s Pannenberg and the Rev. Gerald McDermott, an Episcopal priest and professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Va.

For although in every major European city except Paris spirituality is booming, according to Zulehner, this only proves the emergence of a diffuse belief system, Pannenberg said, but not the revitalization of traditional Christian religious faith.

Observing a similar phenomenon in the United States, McDermott stated that the “rise of all sorts of paganism is creating a false spirituality that proves to be a more dangerous rival to the Christian faith than atheism.”

Atheism has the virtue of its vice: It aspires (leaving aside charlatans like the late Mrs. O’Hair) to be purely rational. Christianity, the most rationalistic of faiths, can debate it on common ground. The neo-pagan “spiritualities”, by contrast, have no use for reason. They begin with the same self-contradiction as atheism, the uncreated universe, but are not interested in thinking through the implications of that position. “Feelings” reign supreme, meaning that the followers of these invented faiths ultimately abase themselves before their own irrational impulses. The quality of their actions depends on the soundness of their constitutions and amiability of their characters. If they start to go wrong, reason is not there to arrest the decline.

For this reason, we Christians may eventually pine for a recrudescence of atheism. It is a worthier opponent than many of those that we must now confront.

Lenten Weblog, Day 8: Another St. Thomas

Recognized saints named Thomas aren’t all that common, and many of them, being post-1054 Latins (e. g., Thomas Becket), are unsuitable for Orthodox devotion. I was pleased, then, to see that March 21st is the feast day of a Byzantine St. Thomas, viz., Thomas I, Patriarch of Constantinople, and I decided that I would make him the subject of today’s entry. Gathering facts about his life would, I supposed, be a simple matter. Not only do I have plenty of books on Byzantium, but there is always the infinitely knowledgeable World Wide Web.

Alas! This saint is lost in obscurity. On his own feast day, he is overshadowed by James the Confessor, who suffered under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (741-775). The most extensive biography that I can find shows no sign that the compiler knew much about Thomas’ own deeds:

Saint Thomas, Patriarch of Constantinople, was at first a deacon, and later under the holy Patriarch John IV the Faster (582-595) he was made “sakellarios” (sacristan [“chief financial officer” would be a more apt translation]) in the Great Church (Hagia Sophia). After the death of holy Patriarch Cyriacus (595-606), St. Thomas was elevated to the Patriarchal throne in 607. The saint concerned himself in every possible way about the spiritual needs of his flock.

During the patriarchate of St. Thomas, an ominous portent appeared in the land of Galatia (Asia Minor). The heavy crosses which were carried during church processions began to shake and to strike against each other. The clairvoyant Elder, St. Theodore Sykeotes (April 22), explained the meaning of this portent. He said that discords and disasters awaited the Church, and the state was in danger of barbarian invasion. Hearing this, the saint became terrified and asked St. Theodore to pray that God would take his soul before these predictions were fulfilled.

After the death of the holy Patriarch Thomas in 610, disorders started in the Church. St. Thomas’ successor, Patriarch Sergius (610-638), fell into the Monothelite heresy. Through God’s dispensation, war broke out with Persia, which proved grievous for Byzantium. The Greek regions of Asia Minor were completely devastated, Jerusalem fell, and the Life-Creating Cross of the Lord was captured and taken to Persia. Thus, all the misfortunes portended by the miracle during the church procession came to pass.

If one may add historical detail, gleaned from the Chronicle of Theophanes and various reference books, St. Thomas became Patriarch on October 11, 607, under the Emperor Phocas (602-610). Phocas, a mere centurion who was elevated to the throne by mutineers against his capable predecessor Maurice (582-602), has left a reputation for tyranny, which revisionist historians have lately argued was due to a policy of agrarian reform that outraged the aristocracy (though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the putative reforms actually took place). Be that as it may, no contemporary needed clairvoyance to sense disorder ahead. In 608 the Exarch of Carthage, one of the most powerful imperial officials, launched a revolt. Most of St. Thomas’ tenure in the Patriarchate had civil war as its backdrop.

In religious policy, Phocas was strictly orthodox, making no effort to mollify the Empire’s large Monophysite and Nestorian communities. A revolt by the former led to the murder of the Patriarch of Antioch (which, in a foreshadowing of the contemporary Middle East, was blamed on the Jews), while the Persian Great King invaded as protector of the latter. On the other hand, the Emperor made strenuous efforts to mend relations with the See of Rome, which resented the assumption of the title “Ecumenical Patriarch” by John the Faster. The Romans later claimed that Phocas had declared Rome to be caput omnium ecclesiarum, which, given his posthumous ill fame, made no impression in the East.

St. Thomas doubtless supported, and may have guided, his Emperor in these controversies, but, save for the tale of his meeting with St. Theodore, he seems to have done nothing that later generations recalled. He died on March 21, 610. Six months later, the rebels seized Constantinople and crowned Heraclius, son of the rebel exarch and one of the most spectacular figures in the entire history of Byzantium, Emperor.

Hence, I cannot relate the miracles or pious sayings of my namesake. Still, there is a lesson in the veil that lies over his life: To be a saint is not a matter of conspicuous deeds but of thoughts and actions known only to God. There are many in the heavenly company whose very names are forgotten, yet they are greater than the earthly emperors.

Addendum: The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s Web site reproduces a splendid icon of St. Thomas, showing him teaching from the Gospel, surrounded by a multitude of blessed figures.

Lenten Weblog, Day 7: The Sunday of Orthodoxy

The first Sunday of Lent is known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It commemorates the end of the iconoclastic controversy, the bitterest period of internal dissension in the history of the Orthodox Church, comparable in some ways to the Reformation in the West, though the outcome was not, happily, a permanent schism.

An proto-iconoclastic undertone, contending that the custom of venerating images of Christ, the Theotokos and the saints contravened the Second Commandment, had long existed in fastidious religious circles. It may have been reinforced by the rise of Islam, with its severe prohibition of any kind of representation of the human form. In 726, Emperor Leo III initiated the strife by ordering the removal of a much revered icon of Christ from one of the gates of his palace in Constantinople. Four years later he officially condemned icon veneration and installed a Patriarch who shared his views. For more than a century thereafter, the clash between iconoclasts (“image breakers”) and iconophiles (“image lovers”) was the major ideological breach within the Byzantine Empire.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council, convened at Nicaea in 787, settled the controversy theologically with a dogmatic decision that is accepted by the Universal Church:

We define that the holy icons, whether in color, mosaic, or some other material, should be exhibited in the holy churches of God, on the sacred vessels and liturgical vestments, on the walls, furnishings, and in houses and along the roads, namely the icons of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, that of our Lady the Theotokos, those of the venerable angels and those of all saintly people. Whenever these representations are contemplated, they will cause those who look at them to commemorate and love their prototype. We define also that they should be kissed and that they are an object of veneration and honor (timitiki proskynisis), but not of real worship (latreia), which is reserved for Him Who is the subject of our faith and is proper for the divine nature. . . . For the honor rendered to the icon is in effect transmitted to the prototype; he who venerates the icon, venerates in it the reality for which it stands.

The Council’s decree did not settle the issue in the secular world. Emperor Leo V (813-820) revived official iconoclasm, which remained ascendant for thirty years. Then, following the death of Emperor Theophilos, who had been one of the fiercest persecutors of iconophiles, his widow Theodora, acting as regent for their son Michael III, renounced iconoclasm and returned a magnificent array of icons to the Church of St. Sophia in a great procession held on March 11, 843. That event, called the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”, is recalled in today’s divine liturgy.

The classic exposition of the theology of icons is On the Holy Images, written by St. John of Damascus in response to Emperor Leo’s actions. Ironically, this great Father of the Church lived in a region under Moslem control and came from a family that provided government officials to the Caliphate. He would probably have been martyred had he written within the reach of Imperial justice.

St. John’s central argument is that the Incarnation of Christ demonstrates that the divine can properly be represented materially. If not, how could the eternal Second Person of the Trinity have been embodied in a human being?

Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God. How could God be born out of lifeless things? And if God's body is God by union, it is immutable. The nature of God remains the same as before, the flesh created in time is quickened by, a logical and reasoning soul.

I honor all matter besides, and venerate it. Through it, filled, as it were, me. Was not the with a divine power and grace, my salvation has come to thrice happy and thrice blessed wood of the Cross matter? Was not the sacred and holy mountain of Calvary matter? What of the life-giving rock, the Holy Sepulcher, the source of our resurrection: was it not matter? Is not the most holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the blessed table matter which gives us the Bread of Life' Are not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and altar-plate and chalices are made? And before all these things, is not the body and blood of our Lord matter? Either do away with the veneration and worship due to all these things, or submit to the tradition of the Church in the worship of images, honoring God and His friends, and following in this the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Icons and iconography are more conspicuous in the Orthodox Church than anywhere else in Christendom and play a leading role in every Orthodox Christian’s devotion. Hence, it is meet and right that they should be singled out for special attention at the beginning of Lent.

Sidelight: The debate over icons forms the central theme of what is perhaps the only science fiction story ever based on a genuine, accurately portrayed theological question, “Images” by Harry Turtledove (Asimov’s, March 1987; Agent of Byzantium (1988)). The hero, Basil Argyros, is a Byzantine official living in the early 14th Century. In his alternative timeline, Mohammed converted to Christianity and was ultimately canonized, Islam never existed, and the Late Roman Empire flourishes throughout the Mediterranean world. In “Images” Argyros confronts a nascent iconoclastic movement and devises against it the same arguments as St. John of Damascus, with more immediate success.

Lenten Weblog, Day 6: Terri Schiavo’s Golgotha

Early yesterday afternoon, Terri Schiavo started on her road to Golgotha. If nature now runs its course, she will die, at some time during the next week or two, of hunger and thirst, like a traveler stranded unprepared in the desert.

In the Orwellian language to which we have become so accustomed, the process that is killing her is called “euthanasia”, “good death”, though it is not, I think, the way of dying that anyone chooses as a swift, painless dispatch. It is less agonizing than crucifixion, less merciful than the quick-acting poisons that terminate the lives of men judged guilty of murder.

To feel comfortable with such an act, those who approve it and carry it out must hold two contrary thoughts without ever noticing their contradiction. On the one hand, starvation and dehydration are not torture, because Mrs. Schiavo is “vegetative”, unaware of stimuli, unconscious of afflictions to her body and therefore not suffering.

At the same time, we are told that death will be a mercy to her, that it will end the misery of her bedridden existence. But if she will be unaware of her aching belly and dry throat, how can she despair over not being able to walk and talk? The administrators of her good death want us to view her simultaneously as a vegetable and as a sensitive, fastidious human being. If she is not both, their consciences are not so blunt that they can justify treating her in a manner that would be cruel to a dog or cat.

In many cases like these, there is a third consideration: The incapacitated person’s family undergoes financial hardship and emotional trauma. One can debate whether their desire to put a tragic incident behind them justifies physician-assisted homicide, and there are rational arguments (not, in my opinion, strong, but rational) in favor of that action. In Terri Schiavo’s case, though, part of her family – her husband – has already “moved on”. He has a new female companion, with whom he has children, whom he could marry were he willing to obtain a divorce. The other part of the family – Terri’s parents – desperately wants to keep her alive and has offered to bear the cost of caring for her. Michael Schiavo can walk away without responsibility or expense but chooses not to do so.

This is not, then, a genuine “right to life” case, where keeping one person alive will arguably harm another, where we must decide between the competing claims of life and other goods. It turns, rather, on personal autonomy. Mr. Schiavo holds, by decree of the Florida judiciary, the right to speak on behalf of his wife. Does he have the right to say whatever he wills in her voice, without interference from “outsiders”? Is he mutatis mutandis the sovereign of the Schiavo domain with the final authority over what goes on within its borders? Is Terri Schiavo on the same level with his other property, to be disposed of when no longer wanted?

That question is, odd as it may seem, a microcosm of one of the great issues in foreign policy today: Are rulers absolutely sovereign within their realms, licensed to do good or ill as they please? Are their subjects their property?

The answers to the two questions don’t have to be the same; there is a great deal of difference between a family and a country, between a husband and a supremo-for-life. Yet many people tend these days to answer both the same way. Conservatives, through a strange reversal of historical roles, are those who speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. Liberals invoke legality (of a limited and blinkered sort) on behalf of power.

So far, legality and power have triumphed, just as they triumphed for a time at that other Golgotha, nearly 2,000 years ago. It is quite possible that Terri Schiavo will breathe her last while Western Christians are mourning on Good Friday. That prospective coincidence should remind us of the truth: The powerful of this world have no true power. One Who suffered is the Lord and Savior. In Him Terri Schiavo will live.

Related posts: You Don’t Have to be Pro-Life to Love Terri Schiavo
“Vegetables” Who Think

Further reading: Blogs for Terri
Wesley J. Smith, “A ‘Painless’ Death?”
Fr. Robert Johansen, “Killing Terri Schiavo”
Fr. Robert Johanson, “Terri’s ‘Exit Protocol’ Begins”
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Court-Ordered Death of Terri Schiavo”
Megan Dillon, “Terri Schindler-Schiavo: Myths vs. Reality”

Lenten Weblog, Day 5: Toward Christian Africa

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Patrick. When he began in mission in the wild realm of Ireland, his enterprise probably seemed futile. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography observes,

From the tone of much of the Confession, it can be inferred that one important reason for its composition was that Patrick felt that his mission was misrepresented in Britain. Christians in the late Roman empire did not think in terms of having a missionary duty to take Christianity beyond its frontiers to the ‘barbarians’. Some in Britain (perhaps the educated and aristocratic ecclesiastical hierarchy) were therefore highly dubious about Patrick’s conviction that God had called him to go and preach to their Irish enemies.

Certainly no one anticipated that, within a few generations, pagan Ireland would be a solidly Christian land that would send famous missionaries and teachers to the European continent!

That history sheds light on one of the most remarkable and overlooked religious developments of our time: the tremendous expansion of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. As reported in the Daily Telegraph.

If a clergyman’s success is measured by the size of his flock, then Africa’s priests stand to inherit the earth. Their congregations are growing faster than any since the earliest years of Christianity.

The pews of Africa’s churches now hold 390 million worshippers – more than three times the total of 35 years ago. Over the next two decades, Africa’s congregation is likely to grow by another 200 million, causing a huge shift in the character of the Christian faith.

The direction of the shift is indicated by the fact that the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, the leader of what is now the largest member of the Anglican communion, is a staunch traditionalist. That stance makes him persona non grata to modernist clerics. To me it calls to mind how St. Columbanus brought a purified faith from Ireland to Merovingian Gaul.

Though we tend to think of Africa as predominantly Moslem and pagan, Christians in fact are about 53 percent of the Sub-Saharan population (currently estimated at about 730 million). This growth certainly seems providential. The past half century has been a period of catastrophe for the continent, culminating in the AIDS pandemic. On a merely secular level, the propagation of Christian ideals of monogamy and sexual restraint is the best hope for the next generation of Africans. Christian ideals are also potentially, if not always and everywhere actually, a powerful engine for political freedom and economic development. Those secular benefits are not, to be sure, the reasons why Africans turn to Christ, but they will be welcome side effects.

And who knows? Perhaps one day a Columbanus from Africa will spark a spiritual revival in the desiccated, “enlightened” parts of the white Western world.

Lenten Weblog, Day 4: Patrick, Orthodox Saint

Patrick, the evangelist of Ireland, is an Orthodox saint, whose feast day troparion is, “O holy hierarch, Patrick, wonderworker, equal to the Apostles and illuminator of the Irish people, pray to the merciful God that He will pardon our transgressions.” Another version of the troparion and kontakion is –

Troparion
Holy Bishop Patrick,
Faithful shepherd of Christ's royal flock,
You filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel:
The mighty strength of the Trinity!
Now that you stand before the Savior,
Pray that He may preserve us in faith and love!

Kontakion
From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ's service:
He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil's bondage.
You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts.
In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul!
Having received the reward for your labors in heaven,
Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth,
Holy bishop Patrick!

St. Patrick’s icon, painted by Nicholas Papas, adorns St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Oakland, Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, St. Patrick is one of those figures to whom nonsense attaches by the bushel. The best way that I know to winnow fact from legend is to read E. A. Thompson’s Who Was St. Patrick? (Boydell Press, 1985), a sober account based primarily on Patrick’s own surviving writings, the Confession and the Epistle to the Soldiers of Coroticus.

Lenten Weblog, Day 3: A Mustard Seed in China

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.” [Matthew 13:31-32 (Jerusalem Bible)]

Few mustard seeds are as tiny as the Orthodox Church in mainland China. Except in Hong Kong, Orthodoxy has no legal existence in the communist domain. The faithful have been reduced by half a century of persecution to a few thousand. The last Chinese Orthodox priest known to be living inside the country died last year at age 80 without having ever obtained permission to minister to a church.

In a recent interview with Religioscope, Mitrophan Chin, whose Orthodoxy in China Web site contains extensive information about the past and present of Chinese Orthodoxy, discussed the Church’s history and plight:

Lenten Weblog, Day 2: Hope in Impossible Straits

Great Lent is a season not only of fasting and repentance but, also and more vitally, of hope. Viewed from a purely secular perspective, the world is a doomed arena of meaningless activity by organisms doomed to strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then be heard no more: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Yet with God all things are possible. He brings hope to us mortals, however hopeless our situations may seem. For example,

Kate Adamson is the mother of two who suffered a double brain stem stroke and was in a coma for 70 days. She was completely unresponsive to stimuli and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors finally pulled her feeding tube and, for eight days, she lay dying. Instead of being unconscious as the doctors believed she was aware of everything. . . .

When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, “Don’t you know I need to eat?” And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had. . . .

Doctors had given up hope that Kate would ever recover, but she is now fully functional except for some paralysis on the left side of her body.

Mrs. Adamson has been speaking out about her experience for the sake of another seemingly hopeless patient, Terri Schiavo. Unless Congress, a court or a miracle intervenes, the process of starving Mrs. Schiavo to death will begin this Friday. When we pray, we should think of her.

Lenten Weblog, Day 1: Clean Monday

Orthodox and Western Easters are at their maximum separation this year: five weeks. Therefore, while the Westerners approach Holy Week, today is the beginning of Great Lent in the Eastern calendar. Orthodox Easter will fall on May 1st.

For Orthodox Christians Lent is associated with a rigorous regimen of fasting. According to the canons, we are to abstain from meat, fish, dairy products, wine and olive oil, as well as reducing our overall consumption of food. Fasting is not, however, the whole of our Lenten duties.

Thus, the Mother Church, exercising wise care, established the period of the Fast so that we may all remember our duties emanating from our holy Baptism, and may understand that we are by definition contenders and athletes taking part with the grace of honor in the various sacred exercises: forgiveness of one another, fasting, prayer, charity, patience in sorrow and hardships of life, perseverance in pain, and the offering of brotherly love to one another.

Fasting relieves the body from unneeded weight; it empowers prayer, humbles the sense of one’s worth, and opens up the gates of repentance. Physical “repentance” strains and exercises the body, but it also constitutes a clear demonstration of our self-knowledge that we are sinners and fallen people, and that in repentance we ask God humbly to bring us back to life. It is a confession and prayer in which the body partakes as well.

Charity sanctifies fasting and makes our prayer more agreeable to our Merciful God. Our patience in illness, pain and sorrow leads us to the footprints of the holy Martyrs and secures for us tremendous gifts and wreaths from our Lord. Our act of forgiving all who have harmed and hurt us in any way, and our love for all, seal our genuineness as Christians and render us emulators of Christ. The frequent study of the Holy Scriptures, the teaching of the Fathers and the lives of Saints give our spirit necessary food, which we need so that we fight well and until the end. [Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, “Catechetical Homily on the Occasion of Great and Holy Lent, 2005”]

Further reading: Demetrios, Archbishop of America, “Encyclical for Great and Holy Lent, 2005”
Fr. Patrick Reardon, “Orthodox Christian Lent, Prayer, Fasting, and Baptism”
blogs4God, “Clean Monday Ortho-Blog Cache”