Revolution and the Restoration of Romanity, Comments on Aleksandr Dugin's “The necessity of the Metaphysics of Chaos”

[Note: To those waiting for the second installment of my discussion of identity, I promise you, it is forthcoming. Today's essay is a product of recent reading and I wanted to get it out quickly, so it got priority. My apologies. -J]

I begin this essay with the admission that, because I do not read Russian, I am forced to confront the ideas presented by Professor Dugin in translation, which may result in some inaccuracies of detail; however, given the rise in popularity of his “Fourth Political Theory” among my philosophic and intellectual circle, I feel that addressing some of the problems with his larger ideas that come across in the essay is warranted. I also must confess a certain longing for the geopolitical situation that Professor Dugin envisions as the end result of his “new way.” However, as I will attempt to demonstrate in this essay, Dugin's end-game is, ultimately, the restoration of a kind of political order that pre-existed the Roman world (and in that world, or cosmos, we must include Hellenic philosophy and culture) and is, frankly, inferior to it.

Dugin refers back to the essential dichotomy of order and chaos, striving back and forth toward the omipresent Logos as the birth of western philosophy with the pre-socratic Heraclides of Ephesus. Heraclides' philosophy identifies a common Logos in which all things participate, even unknowingly, as quoted by Sextus Empiricus “So we must follow the common, yet the many live as if they had a logos of their own. Though logos is common, yet the many live as if they had a logos of their own.” [1] Dugin asserts:

    The European philosophy was based on the logocentric principle corresponding to the principle of exclusion, the differentiating, Greek diairesis. All this corresponds strictly to the masculine attitude, reflects the authoritative, vertical, hierarchical order of being and knowledge. This masculine approach to the reality imposes order and principle of exclusivity everywhere. That is perfectly manifested in Aristotle’s logic where the principles of identity and exclusion are put in the central position in the normative manner of thinking. A is equal to A, not equal to not-A. The identity exclude non-identity (alterity) and vice versa.” [2]

Within this quote, we begin to see what Dugin is suggesting through what he identifies as criticisms of 'Western' philosophy; namely masculine 'domination,' vertical/hierarchical order, and exclusivity are—if not negatives—at least grave weaknesses of the philosophic system. By quoting the principle of identity defined by Aristotle in this regard, Dugin is actually asserting that the principle of identity might not hold true. A might not be equal to A and sometimes might actually be equal to not-A.

Such an assertion, no doubt, finds a great many supporters in our contemporary context. Exclusivity, masculinity, and hierarchy are the typical bogey-men of western academics, and much of their prejudice has filtered into the popular culture. In upholding the non-exclusivity of truth, people are willing to violate principles of identity; Dr. Peter Fosl noted this anecdotally from his dealings with undergraduates in philosophy classes a few years ago:

    I remember once posing the following question to a class I was teaching: if we take the religions of the world, isn't it true that at most one can be right and that perhaps none are right? Every single student in the class answered in the negative, holding that all can be right. When I pointed out that such an option would violate the principle of non-contradiction in the sense that it would mean that both X is true and X is not true (where X is a religious doctrine, for example that Jesus is God). To my amazement, every student was comfortable with tossing out the principle of non-contradiction.
    At the time I figured that the event showed that people are more interested in moral and political practices of tolerance and even simple manners than with logic. But I later thought to myself that my students might be onto something about the curious way "truth" plays out in religious discourses. There may be a sense in which it's wrong to use ideas of truth and falsehood as they appear in the sciences, philosophy, law, etc. But if one takes that option, one does have to accept, I think, a set of consequences that most religious believers would be loathe to tolerate (for example, that believing in Jesus may have little to do with salvation). [3]

The principle of non-contradiction (a corollary of Aristotelian identity) is here identified as an essential in exclusivity. Fosl is generous in his evaluation of the motives of his students; I suspect that most undergraduates at the liberal arts college at which he teaches would rather melt into the floor than be seen as possibly believing that someone, somewhere might be in possession of a exclusive truth. But, when faced with Fosl's justification of this principle of non-exclusivity, we come upon an interesting couple of ideas. The first, and most important for this analysis, that the nature of “truth” may not be the same in religious discourse as it is in other disciplines. {As a side note, I wrote a bit about Fosl's claim that believing in Jesus might not have much to do with salvation a few years ago. Interested readers can check that out here.}

Such an assertion begs the question, though, “What would a non-exclusive truth be?” Pressing the limits of language, we might be able to articulate such a concept as the 'furious green idea'--a grammatical possibility, but still functional nonsense. Non-exclusive truth has to be within this category as well. If exclusivity is ever not an essential component of truth, then we are faced with the possibility of many co-existing truths; which is another way of saying no truth at all. Fascinatingly, this is precisely what Dugin is asserting about post-modernity in his essay, saying:

    [...]postmodernity as a sum of non-co-possible fragments which can coexist. It wasn’t possible in the Leibnitz’s vision of reality based on the principle of co-possibility. But within the postmodernity we can see excluding elements coexisting. The non-ordered non-co-possible monades («nomades») swarming around could seem to be the chaotic, and in this sense we usually use the word chaos in the everyday talk. [4]

To be fair, Dugin asserts that this “chaos” is not the chaos which he advocates. His vision of chaos is actually “a kind of post-order and the Greek Сhaos as pre-order, as something that exists before the ordered reality has come into being.” [5] Here, however, we see Dugin betray that what he really seeks is a restoration of a earlier philosophic-cosmological system that was defined by the pre-socratic philosopher Anaximander. It was Anaximander who first articulated the limitless, boundless prexisitng unity out of which all things that have being arose. In his commentaries on Aristotle's Physics, the neoplatonic philosopher Simplicius of Cilea writes of Anaximander:

    Anaximander from Miletus, son of Praxiades student and descendant of Thales, said that the origin and the element of things (beings) is apeiron and he is the first who used this name for the origin (arche). He says that the origin is neither water, nor any other of the so-called elements, but something of different nature, unlimited. From it are generated the skies and the worlds which exist between them. Whence things (beings) have their origin, there their destruction happens as it is ordained. For they give justice and compensation to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time, as he said in poetic terms. Obviously noticing the mutual changes between the four elements, he didn't demand to make one of them a subject, but something else except these. He considers that genesis takes place without any decay of this element, but with the generation of the opposites by his own movement. [6]

Dugin speaks of chaos as “something that precedes being and order, something pre-ontological.” [7]

Maybe the case that Dugin wants to make—indeed, it is the case that he does seem to make in parts of the essay—is the identification with Chaos with the apeiron, and that a restoration of the ontology of pre-existing Chaos out of which Logos can arise is the only way to save the Logos from the perversion of post modernity. However, in another part of the essay, he gives us the intellectual history of Chaos “as something that preceded the Logos abolished by it and its exclusivity was manifested and dismissed by the same move. The masculine Logos ousted the feminine Chaos, the exclusivity and exclusion subdued the inclusivity and the inclusion.” Here, we see Chaos not as a the boundless, limitless first principle, but rather as the opposition to the Logos (made clear by the description of the Logos as essentially masculine and Chaos as essentially feminine). This begins to set red flags off for me, because I see cloaked in philosophic language a return to the Babylonian creation myth, where the pre-existing feminine Chaos dragon Tiamat is slain by the male warrior hero Marduk, who then builds and orders the world from her carcass. [8]

A return to this creation myth would not bother me, perhaps, if I were not an Orthodox Christian—and if I did not believe that Orthodox Christianity is an essential component in Romanitas or Romanity. Vladimir Moss provides us with a starting point to understand Romanity as “the principle that legitimate political power is either Roman power, or that power which shares in the faith of the Romans, [that is] Orthodoxy.” [9] This idea is, we shall see, entirely inconsistent and, ultimately, incompatible with Dugin's thesis.

Perhaps the greatest definition of Romanitas is the Eastern doctrine of synergia between Church and State, which was articulated most succinctly by the sainted emperor Justinian in the sixth century:

    The two greatest gifts which God in His infinite goodness has granted men are the Priesthood and the Empire. The priesthood takes care of divine interests and the empire of human interests of which is has supervision. Both powers emanate from the same principle and bring human life to its perfection. It is for this reason that emperors have nothing closer to their hearts than the honor of priests because they pray continually to God for the emperors. When the clergy shows a proper spirit and devotes itself entirely to God, and the emperor governs the state which is entrusted to him, then a harmony results which is most profitable to the human race. [10]

This is the Roman ideal: the Orthodox emperor presiding over the ecumene as the pater familias of the kings of the nations which make up the Roman world, supporting and supported by the divine priesthood of the Church. This creates a unity, a singularity, of Christian/Roman understanding. There can be only one emperor because there is only one God; there can be only one Church because there is only one God. Here we see that the principle of identity and the principle of the non-contradiction of truth are absolutely impossible to divorce from any kind of Christian understanding.

But, Christianity ups the ante. Again, with Romanity, we must confess the Orthodox Christian faith. To do that, we must confess the Symbol of Faith espoused by the Holy Fathers of the First Council of Nicea. In that Creed, which is held up by the Orthodox Church as the definition par excellence of our Faith, we are required to believe in the singular divine-human person of Jesus Christ, the same divine-human person defined in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John as “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made […] and the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”[11] Here we see that the Orthodox Christian understanding of the pre-ontological nature of reality is that the Logos transcends Being, it is the Logos out of which all things arise. And that Logos was made flesh, in the divine-human person of Jesus Christ—a male human being. The Roman Orthodox Christian can no more abandon the Logos than be can believe that the Logos can be perverted. And yet, this is precisely what Dugin asserts: The Logos that was the guarantee of strictness of the order serves here to grant the curvature and crookedness, being used to preserve the impassibility of the ontologically border with nothing from the eventual trespassers. [12]

Again, we see a dramatic example of the Heracleitan position; the Logos is common to all, and yet men act as if each of them possessed a private logos. Professor Dugin, for all his laudable goals, has underpinned them with theory which is very much possessed of a private logos. While he heaps praise upon the “eternal nascency” of Chaos, saying:

    To sum up, the chaotic philosophy is possible because chaos itself includes Logos as some inner possibility. It can freely identify it, cherish it and recognise its exclusivity included in its everlasting life. So we come to the figure of the very special chaotic Logos, that is completely and absolutely fresh Logos being eternally revived by the waters of Chaos. This chaotic Logos is at the same time exclusive (and it is why is properly Logos) and inclusive (being chaotic). It deals with the sameness and otherness differently. [13]

Dugin attempts here to create a logical space within Chaos for the continued existence of Logos, like a Venn diagram where Logos represents a subset of the all-embracing Chaos; this sounds very attractive, because it attempts to allow for a continuation of the Logos-centric tradition while acknowledging the existence of other traditions that exist de facto outside it, and by dealing differently with differences. But what he claims is as impossible as the furious green idea; because the Logos-centric tradition is crowned by the claims of Orthodox Christianity, the Logos itself is outside Being and the source of Being. For the Logos-centric tradition to exist within the eternal nascence of Chaos, as Dugin puts it, the Logos would have to in some way be defined as Chaos, which is antithetical to the truth-claim proposed by adherence to Nicene Orthodoxy. As a result, Dugin's idea of a multipolar world, with multiple truth-claims mutually co-existing within their own thought-space inside the eternally nascent Chaos is antithetical not only to Orthodox theology but also to Orthodox politics, while presenting the possibility of an existence for it within another context. This is why the idea is so dangerous. Like the post-modernity it reviles, it attempts to infinitely reproduce within itself a truth with is essentially outside itself—namely, the Logos that became flesh and dwelt among us.

If there is to be a revolution away from post-modernity (which is really modernism fulfilled), it has to be through learning to embrace the Logos the way that transformed the ancient multipolar chaotic world into the Roman Orthodox ecumene; the way that does not denigrate the upholding of Romanitas through the principles of the Orthodox emperor and the Orthodox priesthood, synergistically cooperating to bring all of the cosmos into the ecumene. From my perspective, Dugin is not offering us a way to return to the glory of Christian Rome (which is the essential political norm for Orthodox Christians) but a chance at living in the world inhabited by Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné.

And, as the old cliché goes, it might be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

[1] Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, VII 133
[2] A. Dugin, “The necessity of the Metaphysics of Chaos” 
[3] Peter Fosl, response of a questionon AskPhilosophers.org
[4] A. Dugin, “The necessity of the Metaphysics of Chaos”
[5] ibid.
[6] Simplicius, Phys. p. 24, 13sq.
[7] A. Dugin, “The necessity of the Metaphysics of Chaos”
[8] Thorkild Jacobsen, "The Battle Between Tiamat and Marduk" Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1968), pp. 104-108
[9] Vladimir Moss, The Restoration of Romanity, p. 15
[10] Justinian, Novella Six
[11] John 1:1-3, 14
[12] A. Dugin, “The necessity of the Metaphysics of Chaos”
[13] ibid.

Beginning at the Beginning

As mentioned in the previous post Democracy, Anyone?, I've been working on exploring some interesting connections between religion and government and, because I'm an Orthodox Christian (and happen to believe that in Orthodoxy all of the human experience is capable of being restored by the operative power of God's grace) I, quite naturally, wanted to try to understand it from that point of view. I am aware that there are other points of view; this on-going study is not really an attempt to convince anyone not starting at the same baseline. And, while I would like to convince people in my own tradition, I am aware that so many of us are unwilling to give up some fundamentally held beliefs that have been inculcated in us Westerners (and those cradle Orthodox who have grown up and been educated in the West)--specially Americans—that this whole project may be about as useful as fairy wings on a cement truck. Nevertheless, I think this is a worthwhile thing to look at, and, frankly, I am pretty shocked that the subject is so taboo among modern Orthodox.

Since I need a way to break all this down and organize it in some fashion, and because I'm terribly out of date and old-fashioned, I decided an Aristotelean approach would be best. So as I make these posts, I'll be breaking down the Orthodox political worldview accordingly by attempting to answer the following four questions: What does the Orthodox political vision contain, or, of what is it made? Second, how does it manifest itself in the world? Third, what principle(s) guide or move Orthodox politics? And, finally, what is its aim or purpose? I will, of course, be drawing parallels from the reality of the political world, particularly America, by way of contrast and explanation.

There are, of course, simple answers to each of these questions—and those simple answers, which I have encountered many times in my relatively short time in Orthodoxy, are true up to a point, but they often are subject to misinterpretation through omission and ambiguity (whether these are honest or intentional I am not sure, but, nevertheless, they lead to distortions and confusion about what the Orthodox Church has taught about the political life of human beings for centuries). There is also a shocking amount of political agnosticism among contemporary Orthodox in America (of course, there is also a shocking amount of American politicization, too; both are, I think, bad). Then there is the tendency among the descendants of those cradle Orthodox (and, it must be said, the ex-Uniates) who came to the U.S. in particular seeking escape from political oppression and the economic disasters of 19th and early 20th century Europe not to criticize the form of government which allows them the protection of “freedom of religion.” This is entirely understandable and even, on some level, a noble impulse—I'm sure that some view it as a corollary of Japeth and Shem walking backward and throwing a cloak over their father, so as not to see him in his nakedness and shame (Gen. 9:23). But the simple fact remains that many of the dearest-held beliefs about the origin and intent of the liberal government of the U.S. is nothing more than deception and delusion.

Consider what has been said by the much-beloved Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, on this very subject:

As long as the "American experiment" remained rooted in its Christian soil, it worked. It was truly the worst possible form of human society, except for all others. It deteriorated to its present condition not only by evil and sin, or as some say, by ceasing to be overtly Christian, and even Protestant. It decomposed when democracy became an idolized end-it-itself and every participant and group demanded its right not only to be respected and tolerated, but to be affirmed and approved without condition or question. It collapsed, and continues to collapse, not only through the loss of basic Christian doctrine and ethics, but through the loss of the conviction that there is truth and righteousness for all people in any form at all. Because of this, the transformation of modern American liberal democracy into a post-modern pluralistic plethora of hostile and warring interest groups, including some which bear the name "Christian", was inevitable. [1]

What Fr. Thomas says here is true to a point, but it misses the fact that the “American experiment” was never imagined to be a democracy, nor does he seem to understand the roots and origins of democratic government (perhaps even believing the liberal lie from the Enlightenment that selfish human interests are a good thing and will, when unfettered, lead to unlimited progress and social good—aka “enlightened self interest”) or its historically predictable outcomes, nor still yet that the grand experiment was never rooted in explicitly Christian soil. (Certainly not Orthodox or even “orthodox” Christianity.) It is probably better understood now than ever that the deistic/theistic impulses of many of the Founders of the U.S., while dressed, perhaps, in the trappings of Christian heritage, had at its root not Christianity, but a rival religion inspired by (and in many causes purporting to be the continuation of) the pagan mystery cults and “rational religion” of pre-Christian antiquity. Among these many groups (Freemasons, Rosicrucians, the 'Illuminati,' among others) was conceived and articulated a “new” conception of humanity: a brotherhood of all men, transcending nationality and creed, dedicated to the ideal of perfecting humanity through knowledge, learning, and freedom from the traditional confines of European culture and society (which must, no matter what one thinks of Western Christianity since 1054, be understood as deriving from the Church and upheld by the institution of monarchy).

The pervasive nature of these ideals, and their inculcation as tenets to be held against tide and time at all costs, shows just how influential these groups promulgating their doctrine of man's perfectibility through his own means have been; and yet, it does not take a saint or even a particularly good biblical scholar to detect as an enthymeme in that declaration the words of the serpent from Genesis: “For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The liberal promise has always been the exact same...to make people better through “freedom.” We contrast this to the words of the holy Orthodox elder of modern times, Elder Paisios the New of the Holy Mountain, who said “Freedom is good when the person can use it appropriately. Otherwise it is a disaster.”[2] And it is precisely through the promise of greater and greater “freedom” (or, in more modern terminology “justice”) that the “new” liberalism—that is, socialism—devoid of its sacred cow of private property as a basic human right, has ensnared generations of Westerners with the promise of freedom from want and necessity. [3] It makes for n interesting juxtaposition for anyone familiar with the wording of the Great Ektenia from Eastern Rite liturgies where the priest asks God “For our deliverance from all tribulation, wrath, danger, and necessity...” [4] Apparently, we don't need God; human progress can do that all on it's own.

That the roots of this political and spiritual plague are in the Schism between the Churches I hope to demonstrate more fully at a later time; and while it is in the East that the purity of Orthodoxy was preserved, there were many from the East that were responsible in large part for the rise of humanism which elevated the worth of pre-Christian antiquity (primarily Greek, but Latin as well) over and above the esse of Western civilization which is Orthodox Christianity (and which, like it or not, the Russo-Byzantine east is actually the major and only surviving part)...leading directly to the religious and political factiousness of the 15th century (not only the Protestant reformation, but the ultimate fall of the Eastern Roman empire in 1453). That this disease manifests itself first as a hostility to tradition, and to the traditional of the principle of monarchical power, and then moves on to the Church, then to the principle of “religion” in general, is not coincidental, and I hope to demonstrate those connections more thoroughly in subsequent posts. I also hope to point to a more specific cause (or causes) than has generally been the wont of historians or theologians or philosophers, or anyone else who has bothered to look into these things.

This, then, is the beginning of the beginning. I make the commitment to this to finish it as best I am able, by God's grace, and to be dedicated only to the truth—as best as it can be judged by a sinful and unworthy man. May the prayers of our fathers among the saints Justinian the right-believing emperor of the Romans, King Alfred the Great of England, King and Martyr Edmund of East Anglia, Prophet and King David, ancestor of the Lord, and all the holy Orthodox monarchs of all ages enlighten and bless this work which is dedicated to them and the memory of their wise and just rule and their dedication to the Holy Orthodox faith. In name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.


[1] Fr. Thomas Hopko, "Orthodoxy in Post-Modern Pluralistic Societies." (http://www.svots.edu/fr-thomas-hopko-orthodoxy-in-post-modern-pluralistic-societies/).

[2] Elder Paisios, Elder Paisios the New of Mount Athos. (http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english elder_paisios_mount_athos.htm#_Toc61750930)

[3] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. pg. 77.

[4] from The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom. (http://www.orthodoxyork.org/liturgy.html)

Democracy, Anyone?

"[...] a new demonic outpouring is being loosed upon mankind. In the Christian apocalyptic view...we can see the power which until now has restrained the final and most terrible manifestation of demonic activity on earth has been taken away (II Thess. 2:7), Orthodox Christian government and public order (whose chief representative on earth was the Orthodox emperor) and satan has been "loosed out of his prison," where he was kept by the grace of the Church of Christ, in order to "deceive the nations" (Apoc. 20:7-8) and prepare them to worship antichrist at the end of the age. Perhaps never since the beginning of the Christian era have demons appeared so openly and extensively as they do today."

Fr. Seraphim (Rose) of Platina, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, p. 109.

"Masonic and mystical symbolism has been used on American currency since the very beginning, and was employed as a means of of distinguishing our money from that of Old World Europe, which invariably featured the bust of the reigning monarch. In contrast, America's founding fathers agreed that American money should be decorated with symbols of the anti-monarchist, pro-democratic Enlightenment philosophy upon which the Republic was founded, and many of these ideals were Masonic in origin. [...] The Rosicruicians and proto-Masons believed that if a system of government could be set up somewhere that was not beholden to any church, or to any royal house, then its citizens would be free to learn these ancient [occult] truths and explore these new ideas. Then they could export their wisdom, and their enlightened form of government, to the rest of the world."

Tracy R. Twyman, Solomon's Treasure, pg. 3, 18-19.

"Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the "noise" of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. [...] Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so there is a hierarchical order within a community of families--of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings--tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly, physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God,"

Hans Herman Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed, pg 188.

"The Holy Fathers agreed with Eusebius. Thus St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: 'The three most ancient opinions about God are atheism (or anarchy),polytheism (or polyarchy), and monotheism (or monarchy). The children of Greece played with the first two; let us leave them to their games. For anarchy is disorder: and polyarchy implies factious division, and therefore anarchy and disorder. Both these lead in the same direction – to disorder; and disorder leads to disintegration; for disorder is the prelude to disintegration. What we honour is monarchy…' 'What we honour is monarchy…' That certainly appears to imply that monarchism is part of the Orthodox world-view, even if it does not figure in any of the Creeds. We find the same in the Fathers of the fifth century. Thus Archbishop Theophan of Poltava writes: 'St. Isidore of Pelusium, after pointing out that the God-established order of the submission of some to other is found everywhere in the life of rational and irrational creatures, concludes from this:‘Therefore we are right to say that the matter itself – I mean power, that is, authority and royal power – are established by God.'"

Vladimir Moss, The Restoration of Romanity, pg. 275.

"The two greatest gifts which God in His infinite goodness has granted men are the Priesthood and the Empire. The priesthood takes care of divine interests and the empire of human interests of which is has supervision. Both powers emanate from the same principle and bring human life to its perfection. It is for this reason that emperors have nothing closer to their hearts than the honor of priests because they pray continually to God for the emperors. When the clergy shows a proper spirit and devotes itself entirely to God, and the emperor governs the state which is entrusted to him, then a harmony results which is most profitable to the human race. So it is then that the true divine teachings and the honor of the clergy are the first among our preoccupations."

St. Justinian, Novella Six

Fear God. Honor the emperor.

1 Peter 2:17
_____________________

I realize that this post is going to end up being rather cryptic, but I wanted to give a sort of update on things I've been working on lately. As someone who has been critical of what passes for Western culture for a while, I've been interested in an on-again off-again way with the causes of Western decline. No doubt, this is the Aristotelian in me. However, as a result of last semester's final project for my class on the topic of Justice, Law, and Government, I began thinking about the relationship of chaos and order, of law to government (and justice to each), of democracy to monarchy, of secularism to the Orthodox Christian worldview...and certain things began to "click." As a result I've been working (when I've had time this summer, which has not been much, alas) on revising that project and expanding it to be less consumed by the abstraction of theory, and putting it to more concrete, practical use as a framework for understanding the interrelatedness of the Schism, humanism, the 'Renaissance,' the Protestant Reformation, the 'Enlightenment,' the occult, and the downward spiral of the West. More on this will follow, but for now, I ask you to read over the quotes I've pulled out here, and really think about them--not just react according to the dictates of modern western bias.

From The Professor: On the Topics of Faith, Scandals, and Communion

from letter # 250, To Michael Tolkien:

You speak of 'sagging faith', however. That is quite another matter. In the last resort faith is an act of will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with historical knowledge). 'Scandal' at most is an occasion of temptation--as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses. It is convenient because it tends to turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scape-goat. But the act of will of faith is not a single moment of final decision: it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act > state which must go on--so we pray for 'final perseverance'. The temptation to 'unbelief' (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there with us. The stronger the inner temptation the more readily and severely we shall be 'scandalized' by others. I think I am as sensitive as you (or any other Christian) to the 'scandals', both of clergy and laity. I have suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I should not leave the Church (which would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe, and should not believe any more, even if I had never met any one in orders who was not both wise and saintly. I should deny the Blessed Sacrament, that is: call Our Lord a fraud to His face.

[...]

The only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect, complete, and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely or once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children--from whose who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn--open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than) a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand -- after which Our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.)

-J. R. R. Tolkien, 1963.

Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christianity

I was recently invited on an internet radio show, The Black Fridays, to talk about Christianity as it existed in the Pre-Norman period of British history. The title links to the Fridays' webpage, where you can listen to yours truly expound on the topic for a bit. While the information I gave out was sound, I fear I was a little scatter-shot in the approach. It was much more conversational, and less informational, than I might have preferred. So, I thought that I'd give a little outline, more or less, to make things make more sense (if people bother to read this at all).

Despite all the craziness and weirdness that has been published about the Celts in the last few decades, the truth is we really do not know all that much about their indigenous religion. There is a good reason for this; they didn't write things down. It was only after the Christian era that Celtic myths, legends, and stories were compiled by Christian monks, for the reason of preserving them. The Celts are a curious people, though, because of their seeming uniqueness in Christian history. With few exceptions, the Celts converted to Christianity without suffering martyrdoms or conquests. They simply embraced the religion--and it flowered in the British Isles in beautiful ways for centuries.

The indigenous Celtic Church seems to have been, from its beginning, eastern in orientation. Legend has it that St. Joseph of Arimathea brought the Christian faith to Brittania near the time of the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. These early Christians, many of whom knew Christ and the Apostles, brought with them the Johannine traditions (liturgical and calendrical) that marked them as having continuity with the other communities founded by the beloved disciple. The Celtic Christians also kept to some of the same customs as the Jewish Christians, even into late period, such as the matrilineal descent of kings, and the vocation of priesthood passed down through families.

It is into this world that one of the most famous of the Celtic Christians was born--St. David, who became the Patron of Wales. His mother, St. Nona, was a nun who had been raped by sea-raiding pirates, probably from Ireland. She gave birth to him at the spot known now as St. Non's Well, in modern Pembrokeshire, and a stream of water sprang up from the earth. St. David is connected, also, to the legends of King Arthur; while the sources do not agree on their exact relationship, they all agree that he was a relative of the historical Arthur. Indeed, at least one of the legendary accounts say that he presided at the Mass at Arthur's coronation as King of the Britons. St. David was renown for the strictness of his asceticism, and for his love for his flock. He lived a life of astounding holiness, and was known to have been responsible for the rebuilding of the chapel at Glastonbury--where St. Joseph had first brought the Christian Faith to the Isle centuries before. So strong was the connection between St. David and these early Jewish Christians who came to Brittania seeking refuge from persecution at the fringes of the Roman Empire, that he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was consecrated as a bishop. Thus it is that, alone of episcopal sees in the West, the bishops of St. David's could trace their apostolic succession, not to Rome, but to the mother church in Jerusalem at St. James the Just, the brother of the Lord.

The next century and a half following the repose of St. David saw much trouble in the Isles. The Western Empire had fallen; the Legions, that for so long had protected the British Celts, had been recalled to the continent, never to return. Raiders, first from the pagan Irish, then from the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians began to pillage the Isle of the Mighty. Then, as the European continent became embroiled in warfare through the migrations of the Goths and the Vandals, these Germanic invaders came to Britain to stay. Eventually, over the next century or so, there were established the Heptarchy--the seven kingdoms of Old England: Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Sussex, and Essex.

After years of struggle with the indigenous Celtic Britons, the Anglo-Saxons kingdoms were, one by one, brought into the Christian fold...mostly through the missionary activities of their Celtic neighbors. Christianity flourished under the Christianized Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until the year 1066.

It was then that William the Bastard (whose good press would later label as "the Conqueror") landed in England, with the backing of the Roman Pope, launching a proto-crusade to bring the local church in Britain firmly under Roman domination, where it was to stay until the English Reformation, which established the English Church as its own entity apart from both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions. The systematic repression of the indigenous church in Britain was carried out with exceptional thoroughness; Celtic and Anglo-Saxon churches were demolished, and new, Norman-styled churches were constructed over their ruins. The local clergy were cast from office, and new bishops from Normandy were brought in to replace them. In fact, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop died in 1069, anathematizing the Pope of Rome.

Of the curious links to the Orthodox east, aside from the foundations of the Church in Britainnia with St. Joseph, and the introduction of monasticism from the Egyptian desert fathers, the links to Constantinople, curiously, come precisely through the Scandinavians who caused so much grief during the period of the Heptarchy. The viking trade routes through what is now Russia, with their major center of power being in Kiev, provided a vehicle for Eastern Roman trade and contact to Britain. This is proved by the fact that, in so many of the Anglo-Saxon archaeological finds, the golden byzant, the official coin of the Byzantine Empire, is found more than any other foreign coinage. Indeed, when the last Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson, was defeated at the Battle of Hastings, his wife and son fled to, of all places, Kiev Rus to live out their days in exile.

Hopefully, this will help you make some sense of the podcast. I hope you enjoy! If you do, please be sure to leave some comments on The Black Fridays' message board.

A Medieval Welsh Poem

"The Advice of Addaon"

I asked all the priests of the world,
The bishops and judges,
What most profits the soul.

The Lord's prayer, the Beati and holy creed,
All sung for the sake of the soul,
Are best practiced until Judgment Day.

If only you shape your own path
And build up peace,
You shall see no end of mercy.

Feed the hungry and clothe the naked,
Sing out in praise,
For you have escaped the Devil's number.

But the proud and idle, pain on their flesh
On account of excess,
Must be winnowed until they are pure.

Too much sleep, drunkenness and sipping of mead,
Too much pandering to the body,
That is their sweet bitterness before Judgment Day.

They who commit perjury for land and deceive their Lord,
Who pour scorn on the humble,
Shall know regret on Judgment Day.

By rising for matins and by midnight vigils,
By praying to the saints,
Every Christian shall receive forgiveness.

Aristotelian Metaphysics, Arianism, and the Roots of the Great Schism

The so-called “Great Schism” between the Church of the West and the Orthodox East is often conveniently dated to 1054, when, in an ecclesiastic scandal of epic proportions, the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicated each other. From this moment, two distinct branches of Christian thought, theological and philosophic, began to appear under the names of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The causes of this division have, over the past thousand years, been written about, discussed, and dissected; of the often-cited causes, three emerge as the most likely: differences in political development, divergent ecclesiological theories and practices, and the western introduction of new doctrines (such as the Filioque).

Dr. David Bradshaw argues, however, that the key to understanding the roots of the schism lies in the different understandings of the Aristotelean metaphysical concept of energia, and that the distinction between the two figures who come to dominate any discussion of Eastern and Western thought—Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas, respectively—comes down to how one defines the Divine Essence. Bradshaw believes that the root of the philosophic divergence drives the theological one, and this divergence begins in the West with Augustine and the development of the doctrine of the divine simplicity (Bradshaw, 3 April 2009).

Ultimately, the difference between the East and West does, I believe, lie within the problem of understanding the difference between the western doctrine of the absolute divine simplicity and the eastern doctrine of the distinction between the essence and the energies (energiai) of God. However, even understanding this conceptual difference brings us no closer to establishing a cause for the schism—it merely describes, accurately, the point of divergence. In this paper, I intend to provide a thorough examination of the divergence between the East and West, and then suggest a possible cause which seeks to unify the historical, philosophic, and theological roots of the schism.

Because of the complexity of its historical development, I will first give attention to defining the Eastern doctrine of the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. To do this, we must first establish a meaning for the word energia. Bradshaw provides an entry point for the discussion, stating that the word energia “appears nowhere in extant Greek literature prior to Aristotle, and even for some decades after his death it is restricted mainly to philosophical writers, particularly those of Aristotle's own school” (Bradshaw 1). The meaning of Aristotle's original use of the word, based on the scant etymological evidence, would seem to be “activity, operation, or effectiveness” (Bradshaw 1). However, it is also clear from the text of Metaphysics 12.7, where Aristotle discusses the Prime Mover, that the energia of the Prime Mover is both pure actuality as well as being fully active, per the statement that the Prime Mover “moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality” (Metaphysics 12.7.25-27). From this we see that, as least as regards divine being, energia has two meanings which exist simultaneously: that of actuality and of activity.

The dual meanings of energia continues throughout the Hellenistic period in the writings of the later Peripatetics and the Neo-Platonists, but the use of the word outside of the context of philosophy become important during the later Hellenistic period, during which time the Holy Scriptures are translated into Greek and during which Greek becomes the de facto language of Judaism. In particular, Bradshaw notes that Diodorus Siculus uses the word energia to describe actions of the gods, taken in judgment against human beings (Bradshaw 55). However, the most important linkage to this development of energia with regard to Judaism comes from two sources: the books of the Maccabees and from Philo of Alexandria. It is in these sources that we see the definition of energia as “activity” become expressly personal—that is, there is an agent behind the action. In II Maccabees, the following story is told of the attempted robbery of the Temple treasury in Jerusalem by Heliodorus:

But when he [Heliodorus] arrived at the treasury with his bodyguard, then and there the Sovereign of spirits and of all authority caused so great a manifestation that all who had been so bold as to accompany him were astounded by the power of God, and became faint with terror. For there appeared to them a magnificently caparisoned horse, with a rider of frightening mien, and it rushed furiously at Heliodorus and struck at him with its front hoofs. Its rider was seen to have armor and weapons of gold. Two young men also appeared to him, remarkably strong, gloriously beautiful and splendidly dressed, who stood on each side of him and scourged him continuously, inflicting many blows on him. When he suddenly fell to the ground and deep darkness came over him, his men took him up and put him on a stretcher and carried him away, this man who had just entered the aforesaid treasury with a great retinue and all his bodyguard but was now unable to help himself; and they recognized clearly the sovereign power of God. While he lay prostrate, speechless because of the divine intervention and deprived of any hope of recovery, they praised the Lord who had acted marvelously for his own place. (II Macc. 3:24-29).

It is obvious from the quotation that the activity of God in the passage is manifested by the “two young men” who are agents—or angels—of the Lord. From this, and from the miracles described in all three books of the Maccabees that are attributed to the divine energia, we can safely say that in the minds of the Jewish authors of these texts, energia did not describe the actions of an impersonal force, but the personal agency of God (III Macc. 4:21-5:28). This personal agency, however, is for God a kind of continuous activity; this is precisely the clarification Philo of Alexandria brings to Jewish theology. For Philo, this agency is manifested by God's self-revelation to Moses, giving His name as “I am He Who Is,” indicating that God's existence is one of eternal activity, and that this activity on the part of God is not work, but a kind of rest due to God's unique ability to make perfectly actual, through creating, the acts that He conceives (Bradshaw 60, 61)

Nor does the scriptural underpinning stop with the deuterocanon of the Old Testament. St. Paul makes explicit use of the concept of energia, and, most interestingly for our discussion, he uses the word to exclusively describe the activities of God (or, in a few instances, the work of the devil). The context, however, makes it clear that energia is exclusively the work of supernatural agents, acting according to their persons. Perhaps the most interesting example, for purposes of this discussion, of St. Paul's usage of energia comes in the Epistle to the Colossians, where he tells the local church there “[...] This mystery is Christ in you, the hope of glory […] This is what I also work for, struggling with his [Christ's/God's] energy which is powerfully at work in me” (Col. 1:27, 29). St. Paul is here teaching that the “hope of glory” of Christ is something that personally works in us, in precisely the miraculous way that we see the working acts of God, in a broader historical context, in the Maccabees. The Eastern Church Fathers take this teaching of energia as being something at work in us, but with which and for which we also work. This participatory understanding of the experience of salvation is clear in St. Gregory of Nyssa's homilies on the Lord's Prayer:

[…] for the words of the prayer outline what sort of man on should be if one would approach God. Such a man is almost no longer shown in terms of human nature, but, through virtue, he is likened to God Himself, so that he seems to be another god, in that he does things that God alone can do. For the forgiving of debts is the special prerogative of God, since it is said, No man can forgive sins but God alone. If therefore a man imitates in his own life the characteristics of the Divine Nature, he becomes somehow that which he visibly imitates” (Gregory of Nyssa, 71).

Having established the scriptural understanding of energia, however, we must turn again to developments in the realm of philosophy, and, in turn, the mystical interpretations of this doctrine in the East.

This preceding discussion of energia has so far made use, exclusively, of the fact that the energia are intelligible; that is to say, because the actuality precedes the potentiality, the actions brought about by the divine energia are observable operations. In thinking about the divine, both the tradition of the Holy Scriptures and the philosophic tradition insist, however, on the ultimate transcendence of God. Plotinus, considered the founder of the Neo-Platonic school of pagan philosophy, conceived of this apparent dichotomy between the knowable operations of the divine and absolute transcendence of the divine as explainable through his theory of two acts: the internal and the external. The internal acts of God are, ultimately, completely unknowable to his creatures, whereas the external acts are visible and observable to the creatures whose being derives from the ultimate being of God. This is stated directly in the Fifth of Plotinus' Enneads:

In two ways the Intellectual-Principle enhances the quality of the soul, as father as as immanent presence; nothing separates them but they fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession […] but this recipient, Matter to Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once formed by the divine intellect and uncompounded. […] there [the archetypal realm] we are to contemplate all things as members of the Intellectual-eternal in their own right, vested with self-springing consciousness and life—and presiding over all these, the unsoiled Intelligence and the unapproachable Wisdom (Enneads V.3-4).

Thus Plotinus makes it clear that there are two methods of describing the works of God—both the affirmative (in the case of the “unsoiled Intelligence”) and the negative (that is, “the unapproachable Wisdom”). The negative, or apophatic understanding, becomes the dominant one in the Christian East, while the affirmative, or cataphatic, becomes dominant—through St. Augustine—in the West (Bradshaw 3 April 2009). This distinction is essential to understanding the nature of the difference between the Eastern and Western doctrines.

The flowering of the Eastern tradition comes in the person of St. Gregory Palamas, who, drawing on the sources already mentioned, as well as the works of St. Maximus the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite, defends the practical application of the Eastern doctrine which comes in the hesychastic practices of certain monks. The Hesychasts practice a form of prayer that includes certain bodily actions which seeks to discipline the body so that the mind and heart may achieve the injunction of St. Paul to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Through this practice, the Hesychasts believe that one comes to participate, fully, in the life of God by direct experience of His energia, or energies, and that this experience often comes in the form of apprehending the “light of Tabor”–that is, the uncreated light of God. St. Gregory Palamas elucidates this wonderfully in a sermon on the subject of the Transfiguration of Christ:

The light of the Lord's trasfiguration does not come to be or cease to be, not is it circumscribed or perceptible to the senses, even though for a short time on the narrow mountain top it was seen by human eyes. Rather, at that moment the initiated disciples of the Lord “passed”, as we have been taught, “from flesh to spirit” by the transformation of their senses, which the Spirit wrought in them, and so they saw that ineffable light, when as much as the Holy Spirit's power granted them to do so. Those who are not aware of this light and who now blaspheme against it think that the chosen apostles saw the light of the Lord's transfiguration with their created faculty of sight, and in this way they endeavor to bring down to the level of a created object not just that light—God's power and kingdom—but even the power of the Holy Spirit, by which divine things are revealed to the worthy. (“On the Transfiguration I” 43).

So it is observed that from the Eastern point of view, to say that the light seen by Peter, James, and John on Mount Tabor—which is understood as the same spiritual experience had by the Hesychasts—is a created light, mediated by human sensation and intellect, is a monstrous abomination, because it would ultimately “materialize” the Holy Spirit, and thus, the Godhead of the Trinity itself.

Curiously, as we turn to the West, it is precisely the charge of “materializing” God which Barlaam of Calabria, a representative of the developing Western Scholasticism, would make against the Hesychasts. Barlaam, drawing from the elements of Western theology—and, if not directly quoting Aquinas, certainly engaging in Aquinian methodology—contended that “Every visible being […] is created; the light of Tabor became visible to bodily eyes, and therefore, it cannot be at all uncreated. It is a creature, 'describable,' and does not differ from the light we see with our senses; it is something which is lower than the mind” (Tatakis 158). This reasoning is explicitly Aquinian, and is reminiscent of his section in Quæstiones Disputatæ de Potentia Dei on the Divine Essence. There, Aquinas reasons that “As quantity is the cause of equality, and quality the cause of likeness, so is the essence the cause of identity” (Q. 7.v.10). In the same section, he also comments that “since […] creatures have not always existed, it follows that we could not say that God was wise or good before the existence of creatures. For it is evident that before creatures existed he did nothing as regards his effects, as neither good nor as wise” (Q. 7.v.14). Here we have two statements about God that are eminently western, and stand in ultimate contradistinction to the Eastern tradition: first, that God is identical to his essence, and second, that the attributes of God are the result of creaturely attribution.

Leaving the implications of these statements aside for the present, it seems beneficial to see where any antecedents to this kind of thinking can be found. The answer is that the struggle to understand the fundamental unity of God, who exist in three persons, goes far back into the historical past of Christian thought. In effect, the problem is how to understand the various anthropomorphisms of God that exist in the scriptures, even to the point where, in Genesis 6:6, “And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart,” while at the same time preserving the statement of St. James that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there can be no variation or shifting shadow” (Jas. 1:17). So, the question boils down to a simple one: how does one reconcile a personal God who has personal attributes and, for lack of a better word, personality, while simultaneously holding that this same God is not subject to variation, passions, or change? Aquinas states, when trying to understand the imputation of personal characteristics of God, that the descriptions of God being “angry” or “wise” or “good” or so on, would mean that “There would be no difference in saying God is wise, or God is angry, or God is a fire” if these characteristics were part of God's essence (Q. 7.v.14). St. Augustine has similar problems, when describing how the Father and the Son can be of the same essence, if they have different attributes—for example, that the Father is unbegotten and the Son is begotten (On the Trinity XV.iii.5). In resolving this difficulty, St. Augustine reaches the conclusion that Aquinas appropriates centuries later: “it is demonstrated that not everything predicated of God is predicated according to his substance […] He is called Father in respect to the Son, or the Lord in respect to the creature that serves Him” (On the Trinity XV.iii.5). Here again, it is obvious that to St. Augustine, and to the later theologians who followed him (particularly Aquinas), the only rational solution to this problem is to posit that God is not his attributes, but that created, human intellects are the source of the apparent dichotomy. Here lies the root of the formulation of the uniquely western doctrine of the absolute divine simplicity, which holds that God is identical to his essence, and his essence is identical to his will. In such a framework, it is obvious that no creature could apprehend God in any way that was not created and therefore mediated through the mind. For the westerner, to assert that created human eyes could behold anything that is uncreated, is to blaspheme—because such an assertion violates the principle of the absolute simplicity of the essence of God, which is alone uncreated and unoriginate.

Some years before Augustine's work, however, St. Basil the Great, one of the three Cappadocian Fathers of the Church, had addressed this same problem with respect to the heresies of Eunomius—a rather extreme Arian, who professed a doctrine similar to (although distinct from) the doctrine of the absolute divine simplicity. Eunomius asserted that God's essence is simple and undivided, and therefore, God's attributes are identical with his essence. Although Eunomius, apparently, took this in a different direction than Augustine or Aquinas, it should still give one pause to see that Aquinas' reasoning that “essence is the cause of identity” is being echoed among the extreme Arians. Indeed, if Aquinas is an accurate representative of the western theological tradition which, at least according to Bradshaw, had its boundaries set by Augustine, then it is not too difficult to conclude that Augustine would not have, necessarily, disagreed with Eunomius' statement, except to assert that some attributes are relatively predicated to God by creatures that are, in some sense, part of God, but at the same time not essential or substantially God (On the Trinity XV.iii.5). However, it is clear that St. Basil's solution to the problem of God's apparent changeability is not rooted in an understanding that explains away the changes or personal attributes of God by making them relative to human—that is, intellectual—perception, but by holding to the doctrine of the distinction between the essence and energies of God. Basil clearly and succinctly explains that “The energies [energiai] are various, and the essence [ousia] simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach” (Basil 249). Basil here makes use of the understanding developed by Plotinus, in the pagan philosophic tradition, and Dionysius the Areopagite, in the Christian mystical tradition, of the difference between God in His essence—which is unknowable and absolutely transcendent—and God's energies, His energiai—which are knowable and comprehensible, and, more importantly, capable of being experienced and participated in by human beings.

The disconcerting fact that the fundamental assumption of the extreme Arians lies within the argument of the West has some relevance to the discussion at hand, as I hope to demonstrate. Arianism, while initially an Eastern heresy, spread quickly all over the Roman world and the outlying areas. It finds its most ardent adherents, however, among the barbarian peoples who lived on the outskirts of the empire during the years of the Arian controversy, but who, by Augustine's time, in the Fourth Century, had established a presence within the empire's borders—mostly in the west. These barbarian adherents to Arianism—the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals—came to rule over most of the lands that had been the western empire. It is in this context that the Western fear of Arianism becomes part of the equation of understanding the schism. While it has been demonstrated, amply, that there is a significant metaphysical division that created the theological divergence; and while philosophers and theologians like to point to ideological constructs as the starting points for inquiry into a subject, in reality, there few historical events are decided purely on the choice of one abstract position over another—even if what is at stake is the true faith or heretical innovation.

It is my proposition that the influence and reaction to Arianism in the West is, more than anything, responsible for the development of the schism, by forming Augustine and Ambrose's theology in reaction to Arianism. One of the classical devices of rhetoric is to take the common position with one's opponent, and then, shift the argument to own's one position—thereby convincing the opponent of the veracity of one's own position. While Augustine is pointed at by some—among them, it seems, Dr. Bradshaw—as being the fountain from which all following flawed western theology flows, this is not necessarily the case. It seems at least possible that Augustine, in attempting to combat Arian tendencies and influences in the West, began his theological speculations on the nature of the Trinity with certain philosophic assumptions that could be demonstrated as common between an orthodox position and that of the heretics, then demonstrating that, even from the common position, that Nicene orthodoxy was the valid conclusion. In refuting that other notorious western doctrine, the Filioque, to which it appears, from On the Trinity, Augustine ascribed, St. Photios asserts the following:

Augustine and Jerome said these things. But perhaps they spoke out of the necessity of attacking the madness of the pagans or of refuting another heretical opinion or of condescending to the weakness of their hearers, or out of the necessity of any one of the many other reasons that human life daily presents. If such a statement escaped their lips because of one or more of the above reasons, why do you make a dogma and law of what was not spoken by them with dogmatic significance” (Photios 72).

Indeed, St. Photios goes on to mention that, in dealing with a powerful heretical sect that denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, even St. Basil assented to the gradual proclamation of the truth, rather than causing outright division by preaching the whole orthodoxy of trinitarianism all at once—suggesting that, at diverse times and places, it is best to bring those who oppose the truth (especially those who oppose it out of their own ignorance) to the truth by steps, gradually getting them to agree with the position of the true faith (Photios 77). But, if one were to impose upon the Church these teachings which were taught for the salvation of a particular people in a particular place in time (through economia) as if they were ontological, universal dogma, that would be a crime against the Church and the witness of these great Church fathers. It is by this same reasoning that I would suggest that the doctrine of divine simplicity, originating with Augustine, was never intended to be a universal doctrinal statement—which was not within his purview as bishop of the local church in Hippo to pronounce—but as a stop-gap measure to arrest the further spread of Arian heresy in the West. That this teaching became dogmatized as a fundamental tenet of the Church in the West is due, largely, to the rapid decline of Greek learning after the fall of Rome, and the random selection and generally poor translation of the writings of the Eastern Church Fathers into Latin. Having but one hugely prolific native son, in the person of St. Augustine, the West naturally looked to him as the pre-eminent Church Father, and forgot the truly conciliar aspect of theological dogmatization in the governance of the Church.

The root of the schism may, indeed, lie within the metaphysical differences, based on divergent understandings of the Aristotelean metaphysics of the energia as relates to the divine. I do not doubt that this is the case, and Bradshaw's scholarship is certainly a wonderful beginning attempt to show the fundamental errors in the assumption that generally underlie any discussion of the Great Schism between the East and the West. At the very least, it establishes that the often-repeated position that the philosophic differences between the East and West can be explained by the Greek fascination with Platonism and the Latin embrace of Aristotle is, on its face, an absurdity (Louth 318). And, while there is a great deal of truth in Philip Sherrard's claim that “Christians have no need of Greek philosophy […] Christianity itself is a manifestation of the eternal Logos. It is therefore, ipso facto, a complete tradition, and its doctrine embraces consequently a full metaphysical perspective,” it is also the case that the very vocabulary of metaphysics was established by the Greek philosophers (Sherrard 112). While it is tempting in the extreme to push the Eastern tradition in the direction of anti-intellectualism, especially when reading seemingly provocative statements from certain Eastern theologians, especially one such as St. Gregory Palamas who states with certainty that the experience of holy contemplation beings with the “cessation of all intellectual activity,” it is also manifestly certain that the tradition which formed St. Gregory was itself steeped in the philosophic tradition established through Aristotle's invention of the word energia, its use throughout pagan philosophy, its use in the Holy Scriptures, the understanding and interpretation of this use through the writings of the Church Fathers, and ultimately, culminating in an ability to describe the metaphysical reality of salvation as becoming a “partaker of the divine nature” (The Triads 35; 2 Peter 1:4). Therefore, while the salvation offered through the participation in the divine energia does not rely on philosophy for its existence, Christianity has made great use of the established philosophic vocabulary to describe the experience. However, the introduction of philosophic vocabulary seems to have been, from the very beginning, a temptation to the unwary or those who would set the philosophy above the reality. Knowing this, it would behoove all who strive to understand these great spiritual mysteries through the imperfect use of the intellect, to keep in mind the words of St. Gregory Palamas: “The mouths of evil, disreputable men, are full of deadly poison which, when mixed with the words of life, makes even them lethal for careless listeners” (“On the Transfiguration I” 39-40).

Works Cited and Consulted

Aquinas, Thomas. Quæestiones Disputatæ de Potentia Dei. Trans. English Dominican Fathers.Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004. 2nd Ed.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. W. D. Ross. From “The Complete Works of Aristole, Vol 2.” Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 6th Ed.

Augustine. “On the Trinity.” Trans. A. W. Haddan. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series, Vol. 3. Ed. Philip Schaff. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007.

Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Bradshaw, David. “Concept of the Divine Energies.” Lecture, Auburn Philosophical Society. Eagle's Nest, Auburn University, 3 April 2009.

Chryssavagis, John. In the Heart of the Desert. Bloomington: World Wisdom, Inc., 2008.

Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2007.

Nyssa, Gregory of. “The Lord's Prayer.” Trans. Hilda C. Graef. Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation. Ed. Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1954.

Palamas, Gregory. Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite. Trans. Rein Ferwerda. Binghamton: Global Publications/CEMERS.

Palamas, Gregory. “On the Transfiguration I.” The Saving Work of Christ. Trans. Anonyous. Ed. Christopher Veniamin. Waymart: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2008.

Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Trans. Nicholas Gendle. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1983.

Photios. On The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Brookline: Studion Publishers, Inc., 1983.

Plotinus. The Six Enneads. Trans. Anonumous. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2008.

Sherrard, Philip. The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition. Limni: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2002. 4th Ed.

Tatakis, B. N. Christian Philosophy in the Patristic and Byzantine Tradition. Rollinsford: Orthodox Research Institute, 2007.

Wisdom! Let Us Attend!

Throughout the history of the west, the great thinkers, philosophers, poets, and religious writers have spent a considerable amount of time writing on the topic of wisdom. Injunctions toward the acquisition of wisdom form the basis of the classical model of education which, far from being a mere acquisition of skills, was seen to be the necessary preparation of the mind, body, and soul for the gaining of wisdom throughout the course of life. That wisdom is not merely knowledge can be attested to by both Plato and Solomon—an agreement which demonstrates the dual-basis of western culture. However, in recent centuries, the quest for this foundational virtue seems to have disappeared from the cultural consciousness. In the past five centuries (that is, since the Enlightenment) the acquisition of wisdom seems to totally fall off the radar, not just for those writing about education, but also in terms of spiritual praxis. It seems curious that this intellectual and spiritual virtue of wisdom, which those who established Western culture valued so highly, should suddenly disappear, and its disappearance begs the question: why?

To understand the nature of the agreement of Plato and Solomon that wisdom is not just the possession of knowledge (as a thing in itself), a preliminary look at both Plato’s and Solomon’s understanding of what wisdom actually is seems to be in order. In Book V of Plato's Republic, Socrates makes a series of interesting statements of epistemology. The first is his rhetorical question, “...how can that which is not ever be known?” (Plato 6). With this statement, Socrates is definitively confining our ability to know only to things that are, a concept that has a long history in Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, a full explanation of which lies outside the scope of this discussion. Nevertheless, this definition that limits what we can know only to things that exist is the necessary foundation for the analogy which defines the relationship of knowledge to ignorance, and these to opinion:

And we are assured, after looking at the matter from many points of view, that absolute being is or may be absolutely known, but that the utterly non-existent is utterly unknown ... But if there be anything which if of such nature as to be and not to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and absolute negation of being ... And, as knowledge corresponded to being, and ignorance of necessity to non-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between knowledge and ignorance. (Plato 6)

In this analogy, knowledge is equivalent to being and ignorance to non-being. The intermediate between the two, which may be defined as the gradient between the two poles of knowledge and ignorance, is opinion (Plato 7). To be sure, Plato offers no definition of wisdom in Book V of the Republic, but with a slight reliance on inference, it might be said that the pursuit of true knowledge, and therefore of true being, is for Plato the act of becoming wise.

Wisdom, then, and the relationship of it to knowledge, is of vital importance. To Plato, wisdom does not seem to be a thing in itself, as knowledge or ignorance are (with their analogues in that which is and that which is not, respectively), but rather the action of acquiring knowledge/being. This agrees with Solomon—traditionally regarded as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes—who famously proclaims: “For in the abundance of wisdom/There is the abundance of knowledge,/And he who increases knowledge will increase suffering” (Eccles. 1:18). Such a statement presents a classic statement of logic, A is equal to B and B is equal to C, where A is wisdom, B is knowledge, and C is suffering. By implication then, an abundance of wisdom increases suffering. The question then arises, why would abundant wisdom, which seems to be the result of acquiring knowledge of the world (things that are), result in suffering? This is further complicated by the discourse in the second chapter of Ecclesiastes, which declares “Then I saw that wisdom excels foolishness/As light excels darkness./The wise man's eyes are in his head, but the senseless man walks in darkness” (Eccles. 2:13-14). Here, the author of Ecclesiastes makes an analogy of his own, that wisdom is like light, and foolishness is like darkness. This has an interesting relationship to Plato, in that, in the Republic (in Book VII) Plato creates the extensive, famous “Allegory of the Cave,” in which his liberated captive, upon beholding the brilliant light of the world beyond the cave, is able to see real things that are, rather than the mere shadows of imitations. The escaped prisoner is literally and metaphorically enlightened, which draws an inescapable parallel back to Ecclesiastes, which states “Who knows the wise?/And who knows the interpretation of a thing?/A man's wisdom will make his face shine” (Eccles. 8:1).

The crux of the problem lies in the inability to know who really has acquired true knowledge (and is therefore, according to the theory so far, wise), and who is speaking from ignorance. In a polis with democratic values, such as that of ancient Athens or even of the modern west, opinion, which is neither true knowledge, or complete ignorance, but a mixture of the two, is well nigh impossible to determine simply through the application of human reason. Reason may help to evaluate differing opinions, and logic can help winnow away the more useless and ignorant opinions, but to truly find a truly wise person who has absolute knowledge of things as they are seems impossibly difficult—and so, I conclude that it is from this fundamental inability to really know who is wise or who knows the interpretation of a thing (as noted from the first verse of the eighth chapter of Ecclesiastes) is the source of the suffering that comes from the increase of knowledge, and therefore wisdom.

It should be noted that Plato's discourse on the difference between knowledge/being and ignorance/non-being, and the “flux which is caught” between them—that is, opinion—offers no solution on how to determine who has wisdom and who does not. Indeed, the Preacher—who is the speaker for the large majority of the Book of Ecclesiastes—concludes his discourse with “Vanity of vanities ... All is vanity” (Eccles. 12:8). If we were to end there, indeed, the suffering would be great. A sort of agnostic skepticism would be the result: a belief that, even if there is true knowledge out there, and even if it is knowable, no one could ever truly believe anyone that claimed to have such knowledge, because it might just as easily be merely their opinion. Thankfully, the key to understanding Ecclesiastes, and, by extension, resolving the crises between who truly knows and therefore truly has wisdom, comes at the end of the text: “Hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God/And keep His commandments,/For this is the whole man.”

If the fear of God and the keeping of His commandments is the whole of man, and understanding this fundamental limit that is placed on human beings from outside our own sphere of control, is the source of wisdom, this also agrees with Socrates, who famously was said to be the wisest of men, because he claimed to know nothing. Wisdom, then, can be said not to be only knowing things (that would be mere knowledge), but knowing that we are limited—and that there are limits to what we, as human beings, can know. Affirmation of our own limitations is part of affirming not only our place in the world, but also that the world (and reality itself) has an existence outside of us and the utilitarian purposes to which we can put it.

In classical education, learning the virtue of 'knowing one’s place' in the order of creation was part of the spiritual and intellectual virtues of a liberal arts education. That this is true no longer, thanks in large part to the fact that liberal arts programs have succumbed to the culture of utility, means that the freedom to acquire wisdom is now lost on the majority of people in our society. In his book, The Life of the Mind, Schall reflects that, in Book Seven of the Republic Plato “suggests that it is possible to learn or to be exposed to things too soon, or that it is impossible to learn many things if we begin the project of learning them too early in life” (Schall 60-61). Considering this, when reflects on the basic theme of all the primary works so far—which I would define as “What does it mean to be liberally educated?”—the implications are fascinating. One could almost conclude that, as they say, timing is everything. To that end, Clement of Alexandria writes that “So, before the Lord’s coming, philosophy was an essential guide toward righteousness for the Greeks. At the present time, it is a useful guide toward reverence for God” (Clement 169). Just as in the larger picture of human history, the study of philosophy proves useful for the formation of the soul toward the Good so that one may know the revealed Truth of Christ, the God-man.

In the Stromateis, Clement of Alexandria says that our preliminary training makes us ready to see the Truth when it is presented. This implies that, even were we to shown the truth before hand, we would not necessarily be able to see it for ourselves, or understand it. Such a condition might be called “premature enlightenment.”

As one ages, one often finds new passages of interest, new or different lessons to learn even from works one read ages ago. In fact, it seems that, as the mind matures, so too the understanding of wise words. Perhaps it is the growth in wisdom in the individual soul that allows like to respond to like. Schall makes this point in his further reflection on the thought Plato in The Life of the Mind, where he mentions that Plato did not think that anyone was capable of being “fully wise or mature much before he was fifty” (Schall 62). There is an old adage says that ‘with age comes wisdom’—and, while Plato may have disputed that one becomes wiser just by travelling through time in one direction for set period or interval, the point seems well made that if one is in the pursuit of wisdom, the accumulation of knowledge and experiences will then enable one to grow in wisdom as one ages.

That is not to say that wisdom can be stockpiled like some great hoard, on which we sit growing fatter and richer off it, like the dragon, Smaug, in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Wisdom does not seem to be just a mere commodity. One of the purposes of liberal arts education, according to Seneca, is not to mere be acquainted with the ideas or plot of great works (such as the Odyssey), but to understand the point of the work—to be able to gain moral, ethical, or other instruction about how one ought to live from the work (Seneca 99). In such a schema, each time we “learn” more about the world, and hence ourselves, the more connections we are able to make with the things we already “know” and the things we have just learned. So, in the growth of wisdom, each new thing that one apprehends about the world, and about the self, casts new light on each things previously apprehended. In this way, everything one knows, everything one is, becomes a kind of prerequisite for each new encounter. Thereby, the liberally educated man, who values wisdom, is constantly reevaluating himself according to what he has learned.

This is precisely the lesson that Plutarch attempts to teach Nicander in “On the Student at Lectures.” Plutarch writes that the student should “immediately on leaving a lecture in the philosophic school, look at himself and examine his own mind, to see if it has got rid of any useless and uncomfortable growth and become lighter and more at ease” (Plutarch 147). Not only should we put to use what we learn through reexamining our own minds, as Plutarch recommends, but we must also be prepared to jettison any “useless” things that we already “knew.” We are called, it seems to a sort of intellectual holism; always integrating the new that is beneficial, and prepared to exorcise from ourselves those ideas which, upon later reflection, are but a cancer.

The danger of not understanding this process and expecting to gain all knowledge and all wisdom easily, without struggle, and without due attention to times and seasons of man’s life, is summed up especially well by Schall:

If they consider or experiment on something before they have either the maturity or judgment sufficient to examine it or recognize its evidence, young potential philosophers will easily become discouraged by the whole enterprise. They will think, because they did not easily see the point, that there is nothing there to be seen or learned, however highly it is praised by the dons, the sophisticated, the canon of great books, or the tradition. These disillusioned potential philosophers will suspect that the consideration of the things of the mind, of the things worthy to know for their own sakes, is a fraud and deceit because they cannot effortlessly grasp them. But the highest things are, for our kind, conditioned on a period of advent and waiting. That we are not given all things at once is not a defect in our creation. It may well be part of its glory (61-62).

There are prerequisites to the proper understanding of things, Schall reminds us. Mere exposure to the classics of liberal learning, to the great tradition itself, may be no more likely to lead us to a virtuous life, if we had no inclinations toward virtue in the first place. In fact, even some of Socrates' own students and associates became very un-virtuous men (Alcibiades and Critias come immediately to mind as examples of this). Without the proper formation of the mind and soul, even in the liberal arts tradition, freedom—much less true wisdom—is likely not to be the result. In the modern day, we cannot take for granted the assumption that the spiritual, ethical, and moral formation of people has taken place the way that the teachers of the great tradition have been able to in the past.

All the same, understanding somewhat about what wisdom is, and how one could go about acquiring it as was done in the past, why has modernity forsaken the pursuit of this lofty spiritual and intellectual virtue? Moreover, why does its disappearance coincide with the era known as “The Enlightenment”—arguably the birth of modernity? Perhaps it is because the emergence of modernity was spurred by the development of the market culture, where everything has been subjected to market forces. As such, there is no market for wisdom, and the market has simply winnowed it away like so much useless chaff. In the market culture, the value is placed on work qua work; all things are evaluated by their utility to facilitate greater and more productive work. There is no room left for the acquisition of wisdom, because leisure—that time which is necessary for the contemplative life that leads to wisdom—is gone from modern life. Work has, for Western society, become an all-embracing, all-consuming passion (Leisure 4). As such, it has taken over even the idea of education, where educated man is no longer the inheritor of the liberal, or freeing, arts, but is instead relegated to the status of the “intellectual worker” (Leisure 6). Such a change in status changes the nature of the educator from the one who passes on the traditional body of foundational knowledge, to the individual whose job it is to produce “intellectual” items (books, scholarly articles, research, etc). This change in status to intellectual workers places the thinking mind divorces the philosophic disciplines (which, Pieper claims are naturally furthest from the world of “work”) from the contemplative state of mind wherein human beings become capable of looking and seeing the world “as it is” (Leisure 8, 9).

Once decoupled from the contemplative, the idea of the world as a knowable place has, unsurprisingly, gone out of fashion in the circles of intellectual workers. In a worldview that sees no essential reason why human thought should have any meaningful relationship to reality, it should not comes as a surprise that “intellectual work” being done in the name of education has descended into mere critiques of language, where interpretation has become the slave of the particular “mode” of analysis being employed. Such an approach has nothing to do with leisurely contemplation. Where meaning is divorced from the means, there can be no getting at Truth.

Pieper says later in Leisure that leisure is that “which leads man to accept the reality of creation and thus to celebrate it” but that “[l]eisure is only possible...to a man at one with himself, but who is also at one with the world” (29). This concept of at-oneness with the world, and celebrating the reality of it, is connected very closely to Pieper’s thoughts on the necessity of the festive in the role of man’s inner life. This is stated quite explicitly at the end of Leisure, where Pieper says:

The Christian cultus, unlike any other, is at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. In so far as the Christian cultus is a sacrifice held in the midst of the creation which is affirmed by this sacrifice of the God-man—every day is a feast day […] Now, our hope is that the true sense of sacramental visibility in the celebration of the Christian cultus shold become manifest to the extent needed for drawing the man in us, who is ‘born to work’, out of himself, and should draw him out of the toil and moil of every day into the sphere of unending holiday, and should draw him out of the narrow and confined sphere of work and labour into the heart and centre of creation. (52-53).

Pieper suggests that the cure for the total work mentality is a return of the sacred and sacramental, as the festive is the key component of a leisurely culture. “Festivals are doomed,” Pieper says, “unless they are preceded by the pattern of religious praise” (In Tune with the World 37). The worshiping act is, essentially, an acceptance of one’s place within the world—leading to both the essential parts of leisure: an acceptance of reality, and the celebration of at-oneness with the world. It is only by affirming reality, and by celebrating our union with it, that true wisdom can be achieved. This leads us into the realm of worship—that which is revealed truth, and goes beyond the daily activities of work.

Nevertheless, it does matter what we worship. Mere humanistic ideological constructs (Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality leap to mind) are not enough to sustain the joy necessary for true festivity. Pieper defined joy as “an expression of love…Joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves” (In Tune with the World 23). This love must be directed away from us, not just individually, but also collectively; the glorification of the humanity, is not sufficient for the sustaining of festal joy. Worship of the transcendental God is an absolute necessity to the achieving of this right relationship to reality and to the self. This is where the Christian Eucharist becomes the essential sacrament and expression of this transcendental worship. Through the Eucharist, man takes the gifts of the good creation, provided by God, in the form of wheat and grapes, and through the application of his own meaningful work changes these things into bread and wine; these elements, produced by the cooperation of the human with the divine, are then offered back to God sacrificially. They are then received back again, by the people, as God’s own body and blood. These acts of taking, giving, and receiving are essentially celebratory of the goodness of creation (thereby affirming it) and in receiving them back through eating and drinking, express a unity in man with both the world and the transcendent. As such, the Lord’s Day, or Sunday, becomes essential to the contemplative life, because it is a day on which no work is done; not because work is prohibited, but because the voluntary sacrifice of the proceeds of a day’s labor, and the mental, spiritual and physical rest that are necessary to both the contemplative life and, therefore, the acquisition of wisdom, are exhibited on that day.

Because there is no way to sell this conception of the universe, and our place within it, there is no way for the market culture to absorb and market wisdom. In fact, the “culture industry” seeks to find ways to totally eliminate that which it cannot rebrand and sell. As Horkheimer and Adorno have put it,

Even in their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves to the unity of production. […] This dreamless art for the people fulfils the dreamy idealism which went too far for idealism in its critical form. Everything comes from consciousness—from that of God for Malebranche and Berkley, and from earthly production management for mass art. Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable. (98)

This becomes a serious problem as our culture becomes more and more reliant on technology for both information and entertainment, as it enables the “ease of acquisition” of mere knowledge that Schall talks about, and cheapens the whole of human learning. It should be no surprise, though, that the “culture industry” has come into existence and proceeds lock-step with the rise of mass media and mass entertainment. The illusory nature of the culture of “total work” is evident in the fact that it has to reassert itself on every level of human experience. Horkheimer and Adorno summarize this well, saying,

“The whole world is passed through the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production…the more easily it creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one that has been revealed in the cinema” (99).

As cinema and television grow closer together in terms of production quality, and as more and more people can watch these imitations of reality in the privacy of their own homes, on a wide array of mobile devices thanks to the internet, the access to facsimiles of reality is prevalent on a scale previously unimaginable.

But, it is not limited to the illusions of cinematography. The illusion that a person can know everything about the great works of western culture simply because they can all be downloaded on a single disk, or a single flash drive, to be searched and scanned at one’s convenience, is itself only a simulacrum of education and erudition. To really learn something from a great work, to really absorb its meaning and make it part of one’s self, one must do as Plutarch suggested to Nicander, and listen without questioning, reserving judgment until one has heard the whole of the argument. It is too easy to pilfer a work for pithy quotes, or passages that agree with one’s own opinions. Indeed, such a culture of easy information encourages an elevation of opinion, while simultaneously discounting the existence of objective truth or objective reality. By denying objective truth, the culture industry can recreate what it has destroyed outside itself as lies within itself (Horkheimer and Adorno, 107). In achieving a sort of artificial omnipresence, it has squeezed out any ability for the contemplative life, or wisdom, to flourish.

The market culture no longer only markets what culture produces, it now produces culture. Since it does not value wisdom—precisely because wisdom has no marketable value, being a virtue of the soul—it is seen as useless and worthless. The man who would devote himself to its acquisition would almost certainly be seen as a fool or a madman--it should come as no surprise that one of the jokes asked of those in pursuit of a liberal arts degree is "Would you like fries with that?" Nevertheless, this virtue of the soul is one that the Christian cannot deny, since the very revelation of Christian truth is that Wisdom has himself become a man for the purpose of the salvation of mankind. Nor should it surprise us that as western culture loses touch with its Christian moorings, wisdom and the contemplative life should begin to be looked upon as aberrant and mad. The Apostle Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of the age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (RSV, 1 Cor. 1:20-21). To be able to evaluate what is true knowledge from what is either merely opinion or true ignorance, we must look through the lens of the revealed truth of God to make sense of the great tradition of western knowledge, which is the unique gift of our personhood, made in the image and likeness of God himself. His gift is exactly this: that by His grace we are able to attain His wisdom through proper study combined with proper spiritual formation.

Works Cited or Consulted

Clement of Alexandria. “from the Stromateis” The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being. Ed. Richard Gamble. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007.169-175.

Horkheimer, Max & Theodore Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Cultural Memory in the Present. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Palo Alto: Standford University Press, 2002.

Pieper, Josef. In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity. Trans. Richard Winston & Clara Winston. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.

Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998.

Plato. “The Republic.” The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being. Ed. Richard Gamble. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007. 6-9.

Plutarch. “On the Student at Lectures” The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being. Ed. Richard Gamble. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007. 142-153.

Schall, James V. The Life of the Mind. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006.

Seneca. “On Liberal and Vocational Studies” The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being. Ed. Richard Gamble. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007. 98-105.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. Revised Standard Version. Ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The Orthodox Study Bible. Saint Athanasius Academy Septuagint (SAAS). Ed. Metropolitan Maximos+, Michael Najim, Eugene Pentiuc, Jack Norman Sparks. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2008.