Toward Attention

"More Fundamental and Ultimately More Fateful Issues"

I was reading a review of A People Adrift, and the reviewer I was reading wrote this about the conservative--liberal divide in the Roman Catholic Church in the US after Vatican II:

each side feels beleaguered by the other which feeds an undue emphasis on contentious aspects of church life or teaching at the expense of more fundamental and ultimately more fateful issues.

Those lines should be engraved in gold on wooden  plaques and placed in prominent positions everywhere in every major institution in the world.

How to Make a Failed Attempt at Voting Saints Off the Island

So I was looking for St. Ambrose of Milan's commentary On the Song of Songs in English, but couldn't find it: I did find this, however.

I challenge the reader to tell me what's wrong with this sentence on this particular web-page:

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN COMMENTARY ON SCRIPTURE. Edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall. This will be a 27 volume series of Patristic Commentaries on the Old and New Testament. This series gives the commentaries of the Church Fathers, as well as ecclesiastical writers like Augustine, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, on the Holy Scriptures.

I get tired of seeing these little jabs. No one does this for St. Gregory of Nyssa. 

Charles Taylor

"What can Orthodoxy learn from the Catholic intellectual tradition, and what can Catholics learn from Orthodox, specifically in light of the Secular cultural condition we find ourselves in, and given the vast heritage that we share?" --this is the question I asked Charles Taylor after his recent appearance at BC, making a straight line to the podium as soon as the Q&A session was over. Unfortunately I was late to the talk, and so I only got the Q&A.

His answer was interesting: he said that modern Catholics were very good at the active life, going going going, but that they often forget that it's not all there is (the way he said this almost suggested to me that he may have been inclining, at least in that moment, toward suggesting that the active life was somehow properly subordinate to the contemplative life) to the Christian life. He seemed to be suggesting that Orthodox should learn the active life better. I replied that "when it comes to works of charity and social justice, you have us beat there hands down." He laughed, seemingly charmed, but also seemingly in agreement. Contemplation, he continued, especially as this is seen in Iconography, is something that Catholics need to recover. He pointed to Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov as two models for how this should be done. He said that Roman Catholic thought is perhaps too juridical, and that we Orthodox can enrich it by emphasizing this organic and contemplative dimension. I could not tell if he was suggesting the opposite was true, but I didn't get that sense.

He seemed to suggest, if I understood him correctly, that we must not react to the secular world we live in by seeing our faith as somehow separate from our secular life, or the vision of our faith as separate from our secular vision, but that the two should overlap, and by synchronous. He again mentioned Florensky and Bulgakov in this regard.

Unfortunately, some priests peeled us away from each other before I could continue to ask him questions. I then cornered him again at the end to get him to sign a copy of Sources of the Self that I bought at the book-display case.

Outposts of Memory

"We don't live in the Byzantine Empire anymore," some people I once associated with would occasionally say derisively about others. At face value, it is clearly true. We do not live in the Byzantine Empire.

Looking at various Greek parishes, the Church building would not always reflect this. Often it is drawn from a definite tradition of Church architecture that is distinctly Byzantine. The same could be said, perhaps, about some canons that (so I'm told) presuppose the Empire is in place, though I know less about that. Most likely we could extend this to other features of modern Orthodox Church life, both within the geographical area formerly belonging to Byzantium, or at least falling in or near its heart, and well beyond, in places such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Africa.

We should not be so strict with the Greeks on this, though. Byzantium may have fallen, but it is also true that Byzantium has fallen. People remember this. They remember. Cultures have memories and traditions -- it is how they persist as a singular culture through time, and part (only part) of how they enjoy communion with those who have gone before, and how they allow those who have gone before to enrich them even at the level of their secular life. This tradition, this chain, bears one into the present, and in many ways establishes one's identity. To break this chain is akin to mutilating one's own body. The Greeks should not forget -- particularly in Greece and those other ethnoi in traditionally Byzantine areas. They should, of course, remember intelligently, and not select only certain moments for poorly-remembered and drably-rehearsed tawdry festivals of memory to connect climactically with this heritage while kitsch overruns the bulk of their lives in so many other ways, leading to kitschy expressions of kitschified memory.

However, we American converts are only rarely Greek, and so are not in any way Byzantine, and we have our own cultural memory/memories. Often we connect to Orthodoxy because we see that it is closer to certain features of our cultural memory -- which is also not a dead thing. What I have an objection to is the forced assimilation to a foreign memory via structures that displace our own heritage and memory, which memory is often the basis of our appreciating Orthodoxy to begin with, whether it serves as a basis via negativity (i.e., because we see how this heritage fails) or via positivity (because we find that Orthodoxy is the best place to preserve this memory). Unfortunately, Orthodoxy will not be the best place to preserve this memory, this Western heritage, if it insists, either explicitly or simply de facto, on every jot and tittle of the Byzantine patrimony.

A more profound unity is needed than what we have, or else we are simply assimilating to the outposts of a foreign memory.

We must start and end with Jesus, of course.

A Barbarian Land

We are a barbarian land. This is not a historically Orthodox country, and the population is not a majority Orthodox.

We are a diaspora Church. Russian, Serbian, Arab, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Albanian, etc.: there are a few Western Rites. Even those parishes and jurisdictions that are mostly-English or all-English are transparently, if not self-consciously (*cough* OCA), inheritors of one of these traditions. That there has been no attempt, as with the Byzantine mission to the Slavs, to translate the Church's heritage into a cultural idiom appropriate to the various regions of the U.S. (with Alaska the sole exception), it is clear that Orthodoxy in the U.S. is not a mission phenomenon, but a diaspora phenomenon. We are a diaspora Church, no matter how many generations into the diaspora we go. There is no way to avoid this. Succeeding generations of American-borne ethnics will not change this. Neither will a steady influx of converts.

When Anglo-Celts stop naming their chilren after Russian and Greek saints to the neglect of their native traditions, and Churches in the U.K. and the U.S. are dedicated to Anglo-Celtic saints, then we'll have some initial movement to approach becoming a local Church.

The fact that converts willfully give up on this matter -- and that those spouses, who do not want to give up on naming their children according to saints that are part of the local cultural heritage, usually concede to their (sometimes ethnic, sometimes not) spouse who do -- this is not a mark of the Catholic Church, but of an ethnic sect, an exotic bird. And locals, even if they get their Divine Liturgies in English, are being assimilated. 

Unless the Orthodox Church can accomodate other cultural histories other than the ancestral lands that the Churches come from -- especially when these cultural histories are Christian -- it can never claim to be Catholic.

I do not want to be a distracting Celtic sideshow in an exotic bird zoo.

Only God can Be a Basis for Morality?

I've read/heard before that agitating and anxiety-induced chatter about how "without God we will have no moral ground" etc., and I've read/heard atheists and agnostics skewer it as though it rendered Christian commitment ethically vacuous (claiming that (A) if anyone does that, they're not thinking or acting morally, that (B) religious folks in fact borrow their morality from somewhere else and that (C) if (B), that this shows that the argument that "only a god (even God) can secure/provide our moral verities" is both false and insincere). It's not really difficult to refute it.

I guess it just strikes me as a bizarre (and Modern) argument, and at variance with both the Church's traditional approach to/understanding of the relation between common ethical precepts and intuitions and the Church's ascetical teachings on one hand, and the general sensibilities of the actually religious that I know on the other hand, whether Jews, Christians, Sikh, or Hindu of various sorts (I live in New England, so this may be a demographic peculiarity).

It seems to me that moral intuitions are common to all of us, and that we each and all have a conscience (or almost all of us, the overwhelming majority), not just the religious. It becomes more acute through training, consciously moral choices or through neuroses. It can get dull through the same (substituting "amoral" for "moral" in the choices). It strikes me that this common feature of our humanity will be interpreted by religious folks -- or let's keep it more specific, traditional Christians, Orthodox and Roman Catholic -- one way (who may then say that their ethical commitments are clarified and strengthened by religious experiences, and who thus perceive and interpret all ethical intuitions as having God, as the Good, as their proper end), and by agnostics and atheists another way (a pragmatic consideration, empathy, selfish interest, an evolutionary "program," mere convention, etc.).

I dunno, I'm just a guy with a keyboard, but it seems to me that this ambiguity is where our attention should go, and that we shouldn't waste it on those who make claims like "God (or Religion, or the Bible, or whatever) is what morality is based on." I was actually surprised to read that someone I respect, who is much more intelligent and cultured than I, was citing this claim seriously, even if it was only as a mirror to reveal other political postures as like unto it.

I am surprised by how often I've heard this claim refuted recently. I don't ever really hear it advanced, though I know some people do. It strikes me as a fundamentally eccentric claim.

Book

I saw this on Amazon.com, and I think it may repay a look-at for a better perspective amid the recent online debates regarding the issue of homosexuality, or rather, the canonical status of the sanctioning of same-gendered amorous relationships.

Gagarin and the Seven Heavens, Part 1

In the wake of Yuri Gagarin's historic ascent into "outer space" (a curious phrase), Nikita Khrushchev remarked "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there." That is the quote as the Wikipedia entry on Yuri Gagarin has it. I read here, however, that the actual quote by Khrushchev is "Why should you clutch at God? Here is Gagarin who flew into space, but, he saw no God there." It's a remarkable saying, not least of which is the presumption that traditional talk about God "in the heavens" is actually (and can only be) referring to space that is above the sky, conceived of as a dome.

Thus, one example (i.e., "Heaven" -- which in the Greek is literally "Sky", as in "Our Father, Who art in the sky") of what are properly intelligible locations (Gehenna, She'ol/Hades, Paradise, Heaven) are interpreted by Khrushchev and others to be spatial locations (my mother's garden, France, Alpha Centauri). Christian Theology is yoked to a strange and (if it ever existed as presented) outdated cosmology. Is this yoking simply truthful, stating the essence of Christian faith properly against mutilating post-advent-of-Modern-Science re-interpretations, or is it forced?

Granted, so much traditional language about heaven, as well as art depicting the same, speak and represent the "location" of heaven this way, as a geographical place beyond the dome of the sky. I can't even enumerate how often I've seen Jesus depicted in the sky. Sometimes some fathers who write about heaven qualify such spatial language (as in St. Isaac the Syrian or St. Augustine of Hippo), and make it clear that these are not principally physical-spatial places. Usually they don't explicitly do this (even if they can -- rightly or wrongly -- be read to be on board with such a thing by their use of the phrases "Heaven" and whatnot), and sometimes some of them seem to speak of it literally in a way that may indicate they actually thought of it spatially.

N.T. Wright once used the metaphor "off stage" to describe the fundamental intention for placing the sphere of the heavens outside all the other celestial spheres. I remember reading in one of the now-conventional Orthodox "convert" books (I think perhaps it was The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Bishop Kallistos Ware) that an Orthodox priest in Russia had responded to the Khrushchev quote, saying, "how will you see God in heaven if you do not see him on Earth?" I like the legend of this response, even if I have grave doubts about whether it's based in a historical event.

What is the truth of the matter? Is Khrushchev or this legendary priestly respondent offering the truth about Christian teaching?

Four Things (On Clerical Formation)

Four things will never mix well: the Academy, the Mechanic's Shop, the Administrative Office, and the Monastery. In any hybrid, one will be dominant. In examining our curriculum, should examine what kind of outcome we wish for our students. In forming clergy, we should ask ourselves what is primary before setting up a curriculum -- if a curriculum is the primary thing needed.

Secularization seems to make greater inroads when the bishop is separated from the charismatic office and implements canons as an aloof administrator with subsidiary mechanic-priests, likewise aloof. This is a perversion of Catholicism when it happens there (less so today with Catholic priests in America than it was 50 years ago), and when it happens to Orthodox bishops it is a perversion of Orthodoxy likewise. In all communities where this occurs (at least in the US), Nominalism seems to be more widespread.

Thinking about the situation last year in a Roman Catholic hospital, and the kind of response that the bishop gave, it seems clear that he was formed as an Administrator with secondary training in the Mechanic's Shop and tertiary training in the Academy (perhaps I have the 2nd and 3rd swapped). Traditionally, the Academy has had a very strong place in clerical formation amongst Roman Catholics. Unfortunately, it has for too long been separated from those, like the Carthusians, who are serious about their ascetical life. (According to Roman Catholic Canon Law, of course, such a bifurcation is abberrant, for all priests are expected to say a Mass daily, and to keep the hours -- clear indications of the mystical function that is at the heart of the priestly office.) Administrative concerns can always peripheralize the other three of the four things. Roman Catholics are not alone in being vulnerable to this.

Protestants have traditionally seen the Academy as the center of clerical training (if I am not mistaken, the original Reformers would not wear clerical vestments during the services, but only their academic robes), and only recently have some of the Revivalist schools of thought been sliding more towards a more Mechanic's Shop/Administrative Office hybrid (i.e., "Purpose Driven Life" and other marketed programs and megachurch setups) or else to Mechanic's Shop/Monastery setups (a rarer breed have been focusing on spiritual disciplines and retreats, etc.).

I wonder: what is the vision of clerical formation operative within Orthodoxy? Traditionally it has been all over the map, with strong emphasis on Monastery as the primary with Academy as secondary -- though this prioritizing seems artificial when applied to many historical figures, who were both/and as well as brilliant Administrators with a Mechanic's genius.

Still, I don't doubt the helpfulness of this heuristic, even with its failings.  What do we want?

Pascha and Secularism

There are always religious consequences to our political commitments, and political consequences to our religious commitments.

The Feast of the Lord's Passover shows the fault lines, within the US, of the political consequences of our mainstream religious landscape, and the forces that assist -- or even effect -- these commitments peek through from behind their ordinary veils a little bit. A Roman Catholic friend of mine is, I think, having a birthday this weekend, and is away, and presumably will not be attending an Easter Sunday service. I could be wrong. The whole thought that this person won't be attending, together with spouse and children, made me feel very alienated from this person and the culture as a whole, and has prompted me to consider things in this country.

I asked my wife tonight if she felt like she was becoming more sectarian as time went on. She said that in Russia, there were many Orthodox, but over here, there are not many, so that she is forced to be less sectarian. This shows the advantages of having a traditional religion, which informs the culture even if it isn't practiced. There is a central trunk from which one dissents.

I find myself at odds with this culture because it is inherently anti-religious. This may sound odd to most people. This culture does not oppose religion explicitly: there are many legal permissions and protections given to it, and religious affiliation is a free affair, and are officially sheltered from State interference. But all who would point to these things ignore a more fundamental truth: these privileges and sanctions are offered precisely because autonomy is assumed to be the essence of freedom and the only universal truth about the destiny of human life. Within such a model, to claim that human beings have a destiny they did not choose, but which is theirs by virtue of their humanity, is interpreted in political categories -- it is interpreted as a claim upon their freedom, as a form of coercion.

Of course, coercion is not how we are to respond to this situation. I fear that we must be more sectarian, not in order to retreat from the world, but in order to better bless it. It is in loving others with a messianic love that we set them free in God, insofar as they can receive this, and so we shepherd the secular city into the New Jerusalem. But to do this, we must be set apart: we must have our own culture: we must love one another: we must gather all our life around the community as it gathers to celebrate the Eucharist and keep the prayers: we must have a culture of piety and practice that sets us apart, and from which and within which we suffer divine things, and love others from this fulness received.