Orthodoxy
I came across a lot of things recently that illuminate the Orthodox Christian faith.
Collected thoughts on Orthodoxy
The knowledge about God results in definitions and distinctions. The knowledge of God leads to this one, incomprehensible, yet obvious and inescapable word: holy. And in this word we express both that God is the Absolutely Other, the One about whom we know nothing, and that He is the end of all our hunger, all our desires, the inaccessible One who mobilizes our wills, the mysterious treasure that attracts us, and there is really nothing to know but Him.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
Tradition will always feel nebulous, indefinable, and inscrutable, and yet we differentiate between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, Orthodox and not Orthodox based on whether the idea comports with Tradition.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Orthodoxy is not so much a series of doctrines and practices to be grasped once and for all, but a way of life that one takes up, growing in perfection with each passing year.
Rod Dreher, Reconciling With the Really Real
From the rising of the sun even to the place where it goes down, my name shall be great among the nations; and in every place incense shall be offered to my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of Hosts.
Malachi 1:11 (emphasis pointedly added)
Grokking Orthodoxy
What changed my mind is my own writing. The older I got, the more I felt the need to share my belief with others. I felt it in a good and peaceful way in the Catholic Mass. I prefer the Orthodox Mass, but for a Westerner, it’s very hard to get into the Orthodox mindset — the references are quite different. I knew so much of the Catholic Church that I didn’t manage to jump over to the Orthodox Church.
Jon Fosse, Nobel Laureate in literature, 2023.
This comment surprised me yet, considering what I’d learned about Fosse’s prose style, didn’t entirely surprise me.
He is correct that “for a Westerner, it’s very hard to get into the Orthodox mindset.” I’ve been at it for more than 26 years now, and it’s still a challenge. But it seems to me that the “problem” is the Western mindset — drilled into me pervasively for almost 50 years, including in church to a shameful extent — not the Orthodox mindset.
For most of the world
Wise government, and knowledge in general, were deemed more likely to come from ancient learning than experimental progress. Similar things were true in the Islamic world. Europeans were the anomaly here. Historically speaking, virtually all cultures put a higher value on tried and tested ancestral wisdom than on newfangled, unproven contemporary innovation. That is easy to forget in the contemporary West, where we are so shaped by the notion of progress and the expectation that we will know more tomorrow than we do today. But from an eighteenth-century perspective, what needs explaining is not why Chinese education centered on two-thousand-year-old Confucian texts, or Islamic learning on the Koran, or why traditional societies prized certainty over possibility. These represent the norm in almost all times and places, including medieval Europe. What needs explaining is why early modern Westerners started doing the opposite. Why did their cafes, museums, and stately homes fill with “curiosities”? Why did the pursuit of novelty, discovery, and possibility begin to win out over antiquity, familiarity, and fidelity?
Three factors were particularly significant. The first was [Western] Christianity, whose influence on the psychology, sociology, eschatology, and theology of Western Europeans over the course of a millennium or more can scarcely be exaggerated. Psychologically, as we saw from Joseph Henrich’s work in chapter 2, we can thank the Roman Catholic Church and its theology of marriage for the “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical” way our brains work. Sociologically, the Western Church also created the European bourgeoisie—the urbanized middle class of “burghers” or “townsfolk” with their charters, guilds, and universities—as an unintentional by-product of the papal revolution in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Eschatologically, the hope of the coming kingdom generated an expectation that the future would be better than the present, and that progress was therefore possible (in contrast to religious systems in which history is a series of cycles, or even a steady decline from a Golden Age in the distant past).
Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World, pp. 231-32
There’s more to it than this, but this is important: Orthodoxy is more like the rest of the world than like the progress-seeking Westerners. Yet living here, I’m still subject to all the blandishments of our WEIRDER culture:
- Western
- Educated
- Industrialized
- Rich
- Democratic
- Ex-Christian
- Romantic
Martin Shaw’s Christian journey
Of his Christian journey, fairly recently begun:
I’ve grown a little in a sense of theology and church history, but not, I hope, at the exclusion of the thing itself; a stumbling encounter with divine ground. And the more I experience that, the quieter I feel. I remember St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘he who possesses the word of Jesus can even hear his silence’. I would make no claims to have that mastery, but I do have experience – however briefly – of to what he’s referring.
And for us Christian worker-bees, some of us have to be careful of gargling with too much overt mysticism. It can distract us from the voluminous-ordinary. Me at least. We start proclaiming about hesychasm when we’ve spent roughly five minutes being vaguely quiet and twiddling our prayer rope.
(I think the silence of God is for me partially a sense of an abiding presence as well as active instruction. By their nature, these things require sitting with.)
I’ll be “sitting with” on Mt. Athos for a while, during which imminent trip I won’t be blogging.
Dogma
Dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the Divine Mysteries, but rather a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before which we stand in awe…
Andrew Louth via Martin Shaw
Christian voices from other traditions
The American religious scene
The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.
Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion
Re-enchantment as a luxury belief
Now that we are comfortably on the other side of scarcity, tyranny, ignorance, and the likelihood of dying young, it’s easy to overlook the material, moral, and political accomplishments of modernity and note only its fragmentation, irrationalities, alienation, and malaise. For some religious people, malaise provides a motivation to re-enchant the world, and, indeed, the theme and hope of re-enchantment is prevalent among young Christians. While I have genuine sympathy for their frustrations at the state of the world, too often they express a craving for meaning more than truth, and not always in entirely reasonable ways, including ways that exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of the moment.
R.J. Snell, Life in the Ruins: Keeping Faith within the Immanent Frame
That paragraph encapsulates a lot. I’m one of those who tends “to overlook the material, moral, and political accomplishments of modernity and note only its fragmentation, irrationalities, alienation, and malaise”.
As noted, I’m heading for Mount Athos, and when this posts, I’ll already be in Thessaloniki, preparing for a Monday boat trip to the Mount. I’ll not be posting this week and will be largely incommunicado.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 