Month: May 2017

Editor’s note: I wrote this 8 years ago and while some ideas I hold today are more developed, I don’t think I’d change today what I wrote then.

By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

This essay is drawn from a talk given to the leadership of Orthodox Christian Laity on March 9, 2009, in Pinellas Park, Fl.

When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave his Nobel Lecture in 1970, he quoted this Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Let me say it again: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

We know Solzhenitsyn’s story. In WWII Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet Army officer who was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the Gulags under Stalin. In prison Christ captures him. The encounter changes him, so much so that he clandestinely wrote the three volume “Gulag Archipelago” that laid bare the moral bankruptcy of Marxism. His work caused the collapse of the Marxist intellectual establishment in Western Europe and tilled the cultural ground that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

“One word of truth outweighs the whole world” is a proverb that draws deep from the well of Christian anthropology and cosmology. Solzhenitsyn, like the simple peasants from whom he drew this wisdom, grasped that the most powerful agent of change in the world is a word spoken in truth.

We see it in Holy Scripture. In the opening pages of Genesis we read that God created the world by speaking it into existence. Unlike the polytheistic religions where the world is created out of the stuff and the substance of the gods (thus barring any ontological distinction between Creator and created), or the eastern religions where the material creation is merely differentiated and impersonal energy, the God of Abraham stands outside of space and time because he creates through speech, through the spoken word. Creation comes from God but is not of God. Language is key here.

God said “Let there be light” and out of nothing light appeared. He separated the land from the sea, created the sun and the stars, and all the other events of the creation by the same spoken word. Only man is created differently. Man becomes a living soul when God breathed into the dust of the ground that was already spoken into existence.

Later, after the world that God spoke into existence fell through the disobedience of Adam, God begins the work of restoring His creation anew. Again God speaks, first through the word of the prophet, then through the word of the apostle. The first spoke of the coming of the Christ, the second reveals Him through the preaching of the Gospel.

The Risen Christ Revealed

When the Gospel is preached, Christ is revealed. Christ is Savior, and our introduction to Christ — the means by which we awaken to His existence and become aware of His benevolent love towards us — occurs when we hear the Gospel. And the Gospel, in order to be heard, must first be preached. The Gospel is not a series of propositions, but the doorway into concrete, existential encounter with the Risen Christ.

We can say then that God first enters the world through a word. Further, when a word is spoken in truth, it draws from and references Him who is Truth — Jesus Christ. Christ said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The Apostle Paul wrote that, “All things were created through Him and for Him…He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” (Col. 1:17). Any word of truth references the Truth, even if the words make no direct mention of Christ.

A word spoken truth is never morally neutral. And a word spoken in truth contains its own verification because its final referent is Him who is the Truth. It commends itself to the conscience of those who have ears to hear, which is to say an inner orientation — the tilled soil of the heart that receives the word with gladness.

Further, the creative potency of a word spoken in truth elicits the warning to count the cost of speaking it. The man with a darkened heart will spit out the word of truth because of indifference, surfeit, preoccupation with mundane things and other reasons, and may persecute the speaker. Thus, sobriety and courage are necessary virtues in following Christ’s command that his followers bring truth into the world. Solzhenitsyn understood this. He wrote knowing that he would be killed if his writings were ever discovered.

When the word of truth is heard however, it redeems and restores the hearer. It can foster freedom and unleash deep creativity. The old can become new. Corruption can become wholesomeness. Sinners can become saints. It changes individuals. And as individuals change, their relationships change. As relationships change, culture changes. As cultures change, institutions change along with it. One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Source: Acton Institute

On Human Nature. Roger Scruton.
Princeton University Press. 2017. 151 pages.

By Rev. Ben Johnson

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On Earth Day, April 22, tens of thousands of activists held the first “March for Science” in cities around the world. “Science brings out the best in us,” Bill Nye, the star of two eponymous television programs about science, told the assembly in Washington. “Together we can – dare I say it – save the world!” he said, earning the enthusiastic approval of an estimated 40,000 people. Many of the participants – in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, even in the Eternal City of Rome – carried signs saying, “In Science We Trust.”

The marchers’ slogan is misguided from a philosophical, not to mention a theological, standpoint. Science is mechanistic and analytic, not ethical and prescriptive. That makes it, at best, an incomplete guide and at worst, corrosive to human dignity. Yet increasingly, Western society turns to science as a panacea for statecraft and soulcraft. Secularists maintain that their idealized version of “science” offers irrefutable solutions to everything from contentious policy disagreements to longstanding moral and ethical quandaries. Some researchers, such as Harvard’s Marc Hauser and former National Institutes of Health scholar Dean Hamer, contend that evolution hardwired human neurological circuitry with the very notions of morality and religious belief in the first place.

Edward O. Wilson, the apostle of sociobiology, popularized this school of thought. “The brain is a product of evolution,” he wrote in his 1978 book, On Human Nature. All “higher ethical values” are merely “the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.”

Can all human nature be reduced to assuring reproduction? Are we no more than the curvature of our grey matter and the neurological links between synapses?

Almost 40 years after Wilson, Roger Scruton explores the interplay of science and self in the first chapter of his new book, also titled On Human Nature. For Scruton, humanity is not to be found apart from our physical reality but arises from its fulness and complexity. “The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.” (Emphases in original.)

Humanity expresses itself above all in self-awareness, the ability to treat others as subjects and not objects, and our sense of responsibility – the moral culpability which we accept and ascribe to our actions and those of others. Persons are “free, self-conscious, rational agents, obedient to reason and bound by the moral law,” he writes. The human formula may be expressed in its simplest form as “first-person perspective, and responsibility,” a notion he explored in his 1986 book Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (chapters 3 and 4).

The essence of our common human nature buds forth as a “social product,” lived out in a myriad of I-You relationships (a phrase he borrows from Martin Buber), including that of citizen of a nation. Many of these are unchosen and not necessarily preferred. Yet fidelity to these obligations, which he designates “piety,” determines our moral character. It is in these contexts that our ability to treat others as co-equal persons is exercised.

The Nature of Liberty

Those tempted to say the abstract definition of human nature is too esoteric to be of value would do well to ponder its practical consequences. Scruton writes that I-You relationships, exercised within these contexts, have created “all that is most important in the human condition … responsibility, morality, law, institutions, religion, love, and art.” Not least among these considerations is the kind of society that subsists, germ-like, within each worldview.

Biological determinism has produced Nazi Germany, the society and ideology of Senator Theodore Bilbo, and the miasma of their modern-day disciples. Significantly, Martin Luther King Jr. cited Buber in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to say that segregation “substitutes an ‘I-it’ relationship for an ‘I-thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.”

Scruton dedicates another lengthy discussion to consequentialism, the notion that the ends justify any means. Moral good reduces to an arithmetic formula: The correct decision brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people, irrespective of any properties inherent in the act itself. But its proponents, such as Peter Singer, overlook “the actual record of consequentialist reasoning. Modern history presents case after case of inspired people led by visions of ‘the best’ and argues that all would work for it, the bourgeoisie included, if only they understood the impeccable arguments for its implementation.” Since privilege cloaks their benighted eyes, “violent revolution is both necessary and inevitable.”

As a result, Scruton writes, Vladmir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung brought about “the total destruction of two great societies and irreversible damage to the rest of us. Why suppose that we, applying our minds to the question of what might be best in the long run, would make a better job of it?” Instead of learning this lesson, he notes, generations of consequentialists have “regretted the ‘mistakes’ of Lenin and Mao.”

Juxtaposed to these two systems is human nature rooted in the moral interaction of equal persons. An accusation of wrongdoing yields an investigation, not an annihilation. Mutually agreed rights and responsibilities carve out a zone of autonomy inaccessible to anyone, even the State, and expedite social harmony.

This conception of human nature facilitates a free and virtuous society. “Cooperation rather than command is the first principle of collective action,” Scruton writes. “Morality exists in part because it enables us to live on negotiated terms with others,” both accountable to the tenets of right reason. He regards the “principles that underlie common-law justice in the English-speaking tradition” as “a natural adjunct to the moral order” and latent within natural law. He explicitly names six principles:

1. Considerations that justify or impugn one person will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another.
2. Rights are to be respected.
3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.
4. Agreements are to be honored.
5. Disputes are to be settled by negotiation, not by force.
6. Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own.

Although he does not elaborate on the kind of economic life that flows from this, it is noteworthy that he cites Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments explicitly in this context.

The Role of Religion

While he holds these truths to be self-evident apart from any supernatural origin, he finds believers their natural repository. “Religious people … have no difficulty in understanding that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their freedom, self-consciousness, and responsibility,” he writes:

Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down,’ which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. And abolishes our kind – and with it our kindness.

In four brief chapters Scruton, with characteristically elegant prose and clarity of thought, furnishes theists with an introductory grammar to defend their deeply held beliefs without relying upon special revelation. Believers, and society, are the better for it.

Rev. Ben Johnson is Senior Editor at the Acton Institute.

Macron and his ilk promote an ideology of “universal human values,” of a “common culture” for the whole world. In reality, however, he and other proponents of “diversity” are creating its exact opposite: a soul-numbing singularity, a dreary sameness of thought and inaction. For all the outward differences, Macrons on both sides of the ocean share with the mullahs and sheikhs and imams a desire for a monistic One World. They both long for the Great “Gleichschaltung” that will end in a Single Global Authority, postnational and seamlessly standardized, an “umma” under whatever name. The Christian vision of the Triune God Who allows choice, diversity, individuality, and free will is the enemy of this vision.

Source: Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

By Srdja Trifkovic

Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment.

Macron is a paradigmatic pastiche, almost a caricature, of Europe’s postmodern transnational elite. He is a former international banker and fanatical Euro-integralist who wants an ever-tighter union ruled from Brussels. He is an Islamophillic open-borders globalist, lovingly known among France’s urban progressives as the “French Obama.” Last January he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy were guilty of “disgraceful oversimplification.” In his opinion, by allowing over a million unassimilable and unvetted aliens into the country, “Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity by accepting, accommodating and educating distressed refugees.” Last February he lampooned Donald Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by promising never to build a wall of any kind.

More seriously, Macron’s “solution” to jihadist terrorism is more Euro-federalism: “We must quickly create a sovereign Europe that is capable of protecting us against external dangers in order to better ensure internal security,” he declared last March. “We also need to overcome national unwillingness and create a common European intelligence system that will allow the effective hunting of criminals and terrorists.” This is nonsense. Many terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Belgium, etc., were carried out by Muslims who had been arrested or registered and presumably supervised by their host-countries’ security services. The problem is not the absence of information sharing; the problem is that the number of Muslims exceeds the capacity of the security mechanism to manage the threat.

Most seriously, Macron is wilfully blind to the civilizational threat we all face. He has said he believes that French security policy has unfairly targeted Muslims and condemned those who would “make secularism a weapon of combat . . . against Islam.” Last fall he lambasted President Hollande’s meek statement that “France has a problem with Islam.” “No religion is a problem in France today,” Macron replied. “[I]f the state is neutral, which is at the heart of secularism, we have a duty to let everyone practice his religion with dignity.” Parroting Obama, he has said that the Islamic State is not at all “Islamic”: “What poses a problem is not Islam, but certain behaviors that are said to be religious and then imposed on persons who practice that religion.”

Macron is an evil idiot, so he will naturally occupy the Élysée Palace after a grotesque predecessor. Marine Le Pen’s predictable defeat shows that the political process in the Western world is a charade with preordained outcomes. The refusal of the Parisian elite class to protect France from Islam reflects a global problem that is a synthesis of all others, and goes beyond “Culture Wars.” It is the looming end of culture itself.

Macron and his ilk promote an ideology of “universal human values,” of a “common culture” for the whole world. In reality, however, he and other proponents of “diversity” are creating its exact opposite: a soul-numbing singularity, a dreary sameness of thought and inaction. For all the outward differences, Macrons on both sides of the ocean share with the mullahs and sheikhs and imams a desire for a monistic One World. They both long for the Great Gleichschaltung that will end in a Single Global Authority, postnational and seamlessly standardized, an umma under whatever name. The Christian vision of the Triune God Who allows choice, diversity, individuality, and free will is the enemy of this vision.

Macron belongs to the elite class: rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and irreversibly jihad-friendly. He will “fight” the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win. He embodies France’s loss of the will to define and defend one’s native culture, and the pan-European loss of the desire to procreate.

Communities bonded by memory, language, faith, and myth might still be revived, but a catastrophic, life-altering event is needed. And in adversity the eyes of men and women might be lifted, once again, to Heaven. Even before this happens—and it will happen—normal people should not succumb to passivity. The game is not up. The Dar al Islam is not the inevitable end of the road for France, Macron or no Macron. We are endowed with feelings and reason, with the awareness of who we are. The struggle of true Frenchmen and women to defend themselves against population replacement and cultural suicide is just, even if the outcome is uncertain. In the face of this uncertainty they will hold on to life, and beauty, and truth. And the political process be damned.

Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles, is the author of several books, including The Sword of the Prophet: Islam — History, Theology, Impact on the World.

St. Sergius and St. Bacchus (Click here to learn more)

Source: Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Reprinted with permission of the author.

Public Orthodoxy’s recent post by Giacomo Sanfilippo on “Conjugal Friendship” claimed to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity, but ended up falling into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies from an Orthodox standpoint.

The article raises outdated questions of modernist sexual identity in the name of postmodernity. It then answers them wrongly from the standpoint of Holy Tradition:

“To the question, ‘Can two persons of the same gender ‘have sex’ with each other?’ we hear from Holy Tradition a resounding no,’” it states. “Yet if we ask, “Can two persons of the same gender form a bond in which ‘the two become one?’” the scales begin to fall from our eyes.”

The scaly eyes seem part of a straw man view of the Body of Christ, however. For the Orthodox Church does not call it impossible for two persons of the same gender to engage in sex with each other. Recognizing that possibility in her teachings on love and anthropology, she does not equate secular Western definitions of gender and sex in her response to any forms of sexual activity in fallen human nature. Nor does Orthodoxy privilege Western individualism by identifying a certain definition of gender with personhood. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos notes that Holy Tradition sees Personhood (Hypostasis) in the mystery of the All Holy Trinity, not in individual will of a fallen human nature open to transfiguration by God’s grace. In the Personhood of Christ we are made, according to Genesis 1, not as persons making ourselves.

The piece casts itself as a postmodern query but leaves unasked the postmodern question that would deconstruct through queer theory its own bourgeois sexual identity politics. The better question to have started with from that standpoint would have been as follows:

Question: What does sexual orientation (of any kind as understood in 21st-century identity politics) have to do with marriage in the Orthodox Church?

Answer: Nothing.

Any view of essentialist identity is not part of Orthodox Christian teaching on the purpose of man as theosis. Theosis is achieved through unity with the uncreated energies of God, not in any essentialist view of human beings or Creation. That’s not through heterosexual, homosexual, intersexual, transgender, or other categories.

To the contrary, secular essentialist views of human beings have led to the categorizations of identity in modern totalitarianisms, in the “death wish” inherent in modernist materialisms, and their destruction of human beings and the environment on an unprecedented scale.

So any effort to find a sacramental Orthodox basis for conjugal same-sex relations, or any essentialized view of marriage based on an objectified view of identity, whether heterosexual or homosexual or any other category, runs counter to Orthodoxy as a living tradition.

Instead, the “Conjugal Friendship” piece reflects what the late Jaroslav Pelikan called traditionalism—an effort to find the self within a construct of Church based in ritual without theosis, in institutional organization without noetic transfiguration. It would try to force the noetic life of the Church’s living tradition into an individualistic model of the self in accord with American ethnophyletism, an emphasis on individual or tribal identities rather than ecclesial communion.

The mystery and beauty of Orthodox Christian marriage is a living and transfigurative symbolism–not an empty rite to be filled by individualistic desires in the style of neoliberal consumerism, an ethnophyletic heresy of the West.

Orthodox Tradition of marriage involves a profound encounter with the other iconographically in biological sex, a Christian fulfillment of the Daoist yin-yang. Its living symbolism links the story of Creation in Genesis to the marriage of the Lamb and the Bride in Revelation. The marriage of the Lamb and the Bride involves the community of the Church as the Body of Christ, her holy living Tradition, and not just an atomized will individuated from His Body.

In this sense, Holy Orthodox Tradition involves neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality, and approves neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality as an identity to be expressed in marriage. Rather, it is the two who are gathered in His name with whom He is in the midst, the complementarity of male and female from Genesis through Revelation in Scripture as realized by the Incarnation and the Church.

Kathryn Ringrose in her study of “the social construction of gender in Byzantium” found in Byzantine Orthodox society simultaneously a “single-sex” structure of complementarity (the “one flesh” of marriage) based on performativity of the two biological sexes, thus with a “two-sex” model as well, and in addition a “three-sex” model in which the third sex included both ascetics and eunuchs and the intersexed and asexual. St. Maximus the Confessor in his Ambigua put this in the context of spiritual anthropology as the “extreme” of Genesis 1:25 (made in one image, Christ) and St. Paul’s writings, and the “mean” of Genesis 1:26 (male and female).

The simultaneity in Orthodox anthropology of a one-, two-, and three-sex model is based both in the performative ascetic chastity of marriage and monasticism, and in a performative manliness and womanliness that in Christ are one but not erased even in the afterlife (signified by the Ascension of Christ and the Dormition of the Theotokos). This is an iconographic and not a gnostic anthropology, a performative iconography based in Orthodox terms on embodied physical forms and not in gnostic disembodied individual will and desire, except inasmuch as they participate ascetically, hesychastically, and liturgically in the divine energies through theosis.

The “conjugal friendship” article draws on notions of adelphopoiesis developed by the Blessed Martyr Pavel Florensky in his book The Pillar and the Ground of Truth. Yet the article’s interpretation of adelphopoiesis involves an appropriative Western neocolonial view of it based in the late twentieth-century scholarship of John Boswell. Boswell’s scholarship on that tradition has been shown to be seriously flawed by both secular scholars and the Church (see the article on “Adelphopoiesis” on the Orthodox Wiki, which offers a brief survey).

Fr. Florensky’s 20th-century view of this early form of spiritual brotherhood stressed the spiritual brotherhood aspect and not any non-canonical sense of sexual incest in opposition to Church Tradition of the chaste nature of spiritual kinship lines. For him this was chaste brotherhood, and his life story shows his performativity of sex within Orthodox Tradition, contrary to implications in the article. Fr. Florensky’s whole explication of identity in his book is relational and not essentialist, in keeping with Orthodox Tradition. He rejects the Fichtean Western philosophical basis of identity, I=I, for a sense of mystical identity, in which A=Not-A. This articulates a traditional understanding of Orthodox marriage as well.

Thus in some ways Orthodox anthropology is closer to today’s queer theory than to identity politics, though culturally and experientially it involves a very different experience from the ultimately atheistic grounds of both. Secular Western sexual theories today find their basis in anthropologies of atheistic socialist-communism, with their longstanding historical goal of subverting non-materialistic anthropologies of sex, evident in efforts of cultural genocide against Orthodox communities by both Nazism and Leninism, and in subtler but perhaps even more dangerous forms of neocolonial and neoliberal consumerism since.

Orthodoxy can draw a limited typology for marriage from Foucault’s idea that pre-modern sexual behavior did not involve essentialized sexual identity. In this Orthodox anthropology draws on a sense of natural law in Orthodox theology that the bioethicist Dr. Herman Engelhardt describes as a transformative sparkle rather than a static matrix of identity, an energeia entis rather than an analogia entis. The mix of apophatic and cataphatic approaches to God in Orthodox Tradition includes a dynamic sense of identity being transformed neptically in theosis, yet always also in an embodied way because of the Incarnation.

In the Orthodox Tradition of marriage’s own playful yet ascetic performativity, such “queer Christianity” (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis), identity is relational and not essential. Marriage is a holy living symbol of the relational synergy of theosis, involving both askesis and koinonia participating in the uncreated energies of God through the marriage of Christ and His Church. It is “queer” in the sense of sensual but ascetic monogamy, union of different biological sexes, reproductiveness in commitment to transgenerationality, living embodied iconography of Scriptural typology involving Christ and His Church, and in its shaping of a “little church” and “little kingdom” of the household in resistant to materialistic society. This is the Orthodox realization of queerness, which includes the Tradition’s expression of sustainability and social justice in the mystery of marriage and commitment to the transgenerationality of the Church and her incarnational otherworldliness in the world.

The “Bill Nye Saves the World” show recently sought to celebrate the “queerness” of human sexuality in its fallen state by a cartoon showing scoops of different-colored ice cream learning to blend together in a bowl. Bill Nye, trained in engineering and not biology, in celebrating secular sexual materialisms did not address biological aspects of male and female sex and reproduction. Even so, the silly melding of the ice creams could in a very limited sense be transformed in the Orthodox context of embodied chastity into a type of non-essential sexuality and transfiguration of identity in the Body of Christ. Yet how much more beautiful is the Church’s mystery of marriage as iconographic performance, an incarnational participation in the God Who is Love and the Church’s Bridegroom, than Western secular-bourgeois “conjugal friendship” of all kinds reduced to slurping up melting ice cream.

Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Bucknell University and co-editor of Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage (St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 2016), and author in it of “Mystagogical, Cosmological, and Counter-Cultural: Contemporary Orthodox Apologetics for Marriage” (university affiliation is given only for identification purposes; his views here are his own as an Orthodox Christian scholar).

Read the conversation on Orthodox Ethos.