Year: 2015

Patriarch Kirill and Russian Orthodoxy Deserve Respect Not Insults: An Open Letter to George Weigel*

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by Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, James George Jatras, and Fr. Victor Potapov

I. Introduction

As longtime friendly colleagues in the pursuit of a faithful Christian public moral witness in America, we are profoundly saddened and shocked at your unfounded, insulting accusations against the moral integrity of the senior leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church since the Ukrainian crisis erupted in February 2014.

The initial broadside appeared in your column in the Denver Catholic Register on March 18, 2014, when you dismissed Patriarch Kirill of Moscow as “duplicitous” and Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfayev), chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, as “mendacious.” We take increased umbrage at the steady escalation of your Szechuan ad hominem prose since then:

“These [Ukrainian Greek Catholic] bishops, like other western Christians, have not been duped by the extraordinary campaign of lies that has issued from the Kremlin these past seven months, but…all of us who cherish the spiritual patrimony of Russian Orthodoxy…are deeply saddened when you and Metropolitan Hilarion, your chief ecumenical officer, amplify the falsehoods of President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov.” [June 17, 2014]
“Russian Orthodoxy’s leadership today functions as a Kremlin mouthpiece in matters Ukrainian, even as it lies about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s role in the current crisis and betrays its ecumenical commitments in doing so…[February 17, 2015]
“Serious ecumenical theological dialogue is impossible with men who are acting in the world as agents of Russian state power. Pretending otherwise emboldens the Russian Orthodox leadership.” [August 4, 2015]

The condescending, hubristic tone of those comments is surpassed in offensiveness only by your resort to uncharitable epithets—liars, mouthpieces, and dupes—which hardly constitute a reasoned argument. It is well-nigh impossible in this “open letter” to defend Patriarch Kirill and Metropolitan Hilarion from your omniscient pretense to know their hearts and minds. However, we shall attempt here to set the record straight by accurately citing and explaining their public positions on the Ukrainian crisis.

II. Symphonia—Not “Separation”—of Church & State

Far from a throwback to Soviet-era practices—as you have suggested, both in your own words and though uncritical quotation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s (UGCC) Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk (“Ukraine Rising,” National Review, Nov. 10, 2014), the close cooperation between Church and state in Russia today is more reminiscent of the pre-1917 symphonia, the Orthodox standard throughout our history since the time of Byzantine Emperor Theodosios I in the late fourth century. That organic instead of adversarial understanding of the sacerdotium and the imperium united, harmoniously albeit with some tension, in a single Christian commonwealth is obviously antithetical to the neo-Jeffersonian principle of strict “separation” of church and state, now political dogma in virtually all Western countries imbued with the notion of secular liberal democracy.

In the restored symbiosis in post-Soviet Russia it is hardly clear that the Church is the junior partner dutifully “amplifying” state policy. To the contrary, as Professor Nicolai N. Petro of the University of Rhode Island pointed out (“Russia’s Orthodox Soft Power,” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, March 23, 2015), Kremlin policies “are popular precisely because they have the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Grounded in a religio-cultural vision of Russky mir—the “Russian World” descended from ancient Kievan Rus’ and embracing the people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and perhaps Kazakhstan—the balance in the contemporary Russian neo-symphonia, as it were, depends on the respective priorities of Patriarch Kirill and the Putin government. As Petro astutely observed, Russky mir is, for the state, “a political or a cultural concept” by which the Russian Orthodox Church “can be a useful tool” for Russia’s domestic and international advancement. But Russky mir is, for the Church, “a religious concept” by which the national governments can be “tools” for the “second Christianization” of the historic lands of Kievan Rus.’

We would argue that, since AD 2000, the Russian neo-symphonia has begun to tip in favor of the Church, not the state, and praise God the Holy Trinity for that! The comprehensive document titled, Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, produced by the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate under the leadership of Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfayev)—whose moral character you have besmirched—is the gold standard of contemporary, yet very traditional, Orthodox social ethics. Other ecclesial initiatives have provided the main impetus for recent Russian laws—decried, alas, by Western liberals—to curb propagandizing and proselytizing of young Russians by “gay rights” advocates, reduce the enormity of abortions in post-Soviet Russia, and protect the sanctity of religious temples from unwanted intrusions by miscreant groups like “Pussy Riot.” In addition, the Russian Church has established a profound inter-confessional collaboration with U.S. evangelicals to promote strong families and traditional marriage between one man and one woman alone.

None of those accomplishments was possible throughout most of the twentieth century. As each of the co-authors of this open letter have acknowledged often in print, Russian Orthodoxy had to endure the godless Soviets for 74 years, including the shameless betrayal of faithful confessors and martyrs by Orthodox hierarchical collaborators with that regime. For you to compare that horrific era to the miraculous re-emergence and moral integrity of the Church since 1991 is shameless.

Whatever criticisms one might have of the symphonia model, blanket condemnation is hardly appropriate as we witness the trend in our own country, where Christianity is increasingly marginalized, moral vices are officially promoted as virtues, and abortion “rights” and homosexual “rights,” in particular, are now key components of U.S. foreign policy—a trend we are sure you deplore no less than we.

III. The Russian Church—a Rival, Not an “Enemy”

Patriarch Kirill, Metropolitan Hilarion, and other prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church have been consistent on two points with respect to Ukraine. First, they voice support for Russia’s policies. Second, they call for restraint in what they see as a deplorable, fratricidal conflict, which pits the Russky Mir against itself.

You need not accept their point of view. Perhaps based on your own religious heritage, you may prefer to believe that the UGCC is “a safe-deposit box of Ukrainian national culture and identity,” despite the mere 15%, at most, of Ukraine’s population who identify as Catholics (Latin or Eastern rite). Underlying the current conflict are some sharp as yet unanswered questions: What exactly is Ukraine (“Borderland”) and who are Ukrainians? Are they an aspiring part of (an increasingly godless and libertine) “Europe” defined in Brussels or an integral part of the Russky Mir? Who was on the “right” or “wrong” side of World War II? Ukrainians themselves are at odds on these questions, largely along regional and confessional lines.

When Ukraine became an independent republic in 1991, those questions lay dormant under a deceptively calm surface. But they remained a fatal weakness in the very fiber of the new state, along with an unbelievable level of oligarchic corruption. The unconstitutional unseating of the flawed but democratically elected government in February 2014 shattered what was already a fragile unity. That, not some mythical Russian aggression, has torn Ukraine apart.

Worse, the overturn of the legal government would not have succeeded without violence or the participation of extreme nationalist elements. You write that Ukraine “rose up against post-Communist corruption and stagnation,” and that Archbishop Shevchuk’s “Church played a central role in the Maidan Revolution of Dignity,’ its bishops and priests dodging Russian bullets to tend to those demonstrating nonviolently for freedom and justice.” However:

Surely you are aware of the leaked phone call between the EU’s Catherine Ashton and Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, indicating the true source of sniping on the Maidan.
Surely you know that “those demonstrating nonviolently” included members of violent radical groups like Right Sector, using spiked clubs, Molotov cocktails, and even guns against riot police to seize government buildings—behavior that, in Washington, would be put down immediately with deadly force.
Surely you know of the May 2014 massacre in Odessa of dozens of anti-Euromaidan demonstrators—or maybe that was just more nonviolent struggle for “freedom and justice”?
Surely you know of the new law criminalizing criticism of the wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), sinister fascists guilty of participation in massacres of Jews and of slaughtering tens of thousands of Roman Catholic Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Perhaps that’s an example of the “Revolution of Dignity”?
Surely you know that only two days after the President Viktor Yanukovich fled from Kiev in February 2014 the Ukraine parliament repealed by an 86% majority a 2012 law ensuring, among other things, the official use of Russian as a second language in the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, where the civil war has since proved most violent. Was that punitive, provocative measure indicative of Ukrainian “freedom and justice”?
Surely you know that the Ukrainian military’s Azov Brigade engaged in combat in the Donbass region includes self-proclaimed neo-Nazis, perhaps as much as 20% of the unit (according to USA Today, March 10, 2015), complete with swastikas, as well as the infamous “SS” runes and an inverted version of the Wolfsangel symbol used widely during World War II by Nazi German Waffen-SS divisions. Are German broadcaster ZDF and Norwegian broadcaster TV2, which filmed the latter, and NBC News (who reported the incidents online on September 9, 2014), also “dupes” and “mouthpieces” of the Kremlin?

Your trumpeting of a single Ukrainian national will may fit in well with a “good vs. evil” Manichaean narrative to depict the Ukraine conflict as one of West vs. East, democracy vs. tyranny, Ukraine vs. Russia, and, by implication, Catholic vs. Orthodox. It may be great fare for readers of the Denver Catholic Register, National Review, and other publications who may be unaware of past and present complexities. But it is not conducive to a peaceful and just resolution of the Ukraine crisis or averting an even broader conflict that would imperil Europe and the world, including the U.S. Nor is it an excuse to hurl verbal Molotov cocktails at honorable Christian pastors who happen to disagree with you.

*George Weigel is a distinguished lay Roman Catholic theologian and author of the magisterial Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II (Harper Perennial: 2004 [updated edition].

Archpriest Alexander F. C. Webster, PhD, is a retired U.S. Army Chaplain (Colonel), author of four books on Orthodox social ethics, and rector of St. Herman of Alaska Russian Orthodox Church in Stafford, Virginia. James George Jatras, Esq., is Deputy Director of the American Institute in Ukraine, former foreign policy adviser to the U.S. Senate Republican leadership, and a Greek Orthodox layman. Mitred Archpriest Victor Potapov is the dean of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, DC, and a retired Russian language broadcaster for the Voice of America.

Ancient Faith Today: David Daleiden – The Man Behind the Planned Parenthood Exposé [AUDIO]

Transcript

Mr. Kevin Allen: Thank you for joining me on this special edition of Ancient Faith Today. You know, there are few stories with greater current significance and more “legs,” as we say in media, in the U.S. right now than the seven recent exposé videos that the pro-life activist organization, the Center for Medical Progress, released beginning in July, showing Planned Parenthood officials, the nation’s single largest provider of abortion and women’s health issues, and some of their affiliate organizations discussing, sometimes quite brazenly, reimbursement for donations of fetal tissue—organs, body parts—as well as “intact fetal cadavers,” with a non-existent biomedical research company called “BioMax Procurement Services.”

Secret recordings, as many of you know, of seven meetings using professional actors were produced and released with Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood officials, and these videos, especially the seventh, which features testimony from a Holly O’Donnell, a former procurement technician at StemExpress, a California company that until recently acquired aborted baby parts from Planned Parenthood, in which she alleges witnessing that Planned Parenthood committed infanticide of a baby with a heartbeat outside the womb so as to extract that baby’s brain. Well, that and all of the others have powerfully reopened the national discussion about the legal and moral implications of abortion.

Subsequent to the release of this series of videos, five states have now defunded Planned Parenthood—Louisiana, New Hampshire, Alabama, Utah, and Arkansas—and I’m only assuming that others are considering it. Six additional states are investigating Planned Parenthood, and even in the progressive state of California, Melissa A. Melendez, a Republican in Lake Elsinore, has officially requested to the joint legislative audit committee a state audit of Planned Parenthood, and the house commerce committee just announced it’s expanding its investigation of Planned Parenthood and several other Planned Parenthood affiliates about their practices relating to fully intact aborted babies, which, if guilty, these organizations could be violating federal law, known as the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.

However, and as we know with our political process, Democrats on the House of Representatives oversight committee are just launching an investigation, not on the abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but on the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind the series of exposé videos.

Well, I’m privileged to have the director of the Center for Medical Progress as my guest in studio today. David Daleiden is the director of the CMP, the Center for Medical Progress, and has long been a pro-life activist. He’s only 26 years old, and considered a hero by many in the Christian and pro-life community. I’m pleased and honored to have David Daleiden as my guest on the program today. David, welcome to Ancient Faith Today.

Mr. David Daleiden: Thank you so much for having me on, Kevin.

Mr. Allen: Our privilege and pleasure. First, before we get into specifics and background and all of the issues that we’ll cover in this extensive interview, did you ever think or imagine that this video exposés that you were planning would have the significant impact that they are having on the national and perhaps international discussion, both legal and moral, on abortion?

Mr. Daleiden: Well, we certainly thought that the project itself, that the information that we were documenting and illustrating about how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of the babies that they abort, that that was information that was going to be shocking to the public, and that that was going to be big news. I don’t think anybody realized that it was going to be “ten presidential candidates commenting on the first day” big. That’s a sort of volume of discussion that I don’t think that you can necessarily plan for or completely expect. So we knew it was going to be big, I hoped that it was going to be big and have a big impact and that a lot of people would enter that discussion, but I really had no expectation that it would be as large as it’s become.

Mr. Allen: And as we were briefly discussing, there’s been a lot of political as well as legal push-back. Were you surprised by that and prepared for that?

Mr. Daleiden: You know, actually I kind of take a different perspective on that than I think a lot of people do, from the outside looking in; more from the eye of the hurricane looking out actually feels a lot calmer in there than some people might think. So I was surprised it took for there to be any kind of significant push-back from the abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood. I think that that’s an indication and a symptom of how off-guard this project took them. The baby-parts trafficking was the last thing that Planned Parenthood and their allies were expecting to have to talk about, the last thing that they were prepared to talk about, and the last thing that they were prepared to talk about in public, and that’s why they are kind of desperately trying to change the conversation to anything else that they possibly can.

Mr. Allen: Well, let’s begin, because I know my listeners are going to be interested in this, with a bit of personal background. I understand you’re a traditional Latin Mass Tridentine Catholic. Is that correct?

Mr. Daleiden: That’s correct, yeah. I like to just call it Catholic.

Mr. Allen: Okay, and I’ve heard you have some Orthodox connections in your ancestral background?

Mr. Daleiden: I do, yeah. My maternal grandfather was Greek, and I believe that he was baptized and chrismated Greek Catholic, but definitely, ethnically, historically, that connection is there.

Mr. Allen: Interesting. And you wrote to me in an email as we were kind of ramping up for this wonderful conversation we’re having and going to have this. You wrote: “The ancient prayer and rituals of the Orthodox Church, including the Divine Liturgy, are some of the biggest spiritual influences on my work.” So how has Orthodoxy in this context influenced your work?

Mr. Daleiden: Definitely. So I think, first of all, we know that the Church is—the Catholic and Orthodox churches were united for the first thousand years, so the ancient Roman Mass that I usually attend on Sundays was the Mass of the Orthodox Western world for a thousand years while the churches were united, and the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern churches is still said in many Catholic churches around the world, and was the prayer of the Eastern Catholic Church for the first thousand years. So that connection is very strong and has always been there.

But also Orthodoxy, specifically as it is today, back when I first started doing pro-life work, when I was in late high school, college, I would frequently go to Orthodox vespers on Saturdays at the Greek Orthodox Church in Sacramento, which was where I grew up. And the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is still one of the cornerstones of my prayer life. It’s something that we said many times undercover at different abortion meetings with different abortion doctors.

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah. So, Orthodoxy is… I’m really someone who really just sees things like that as two sides of the same coin. And the Orthodox Church, to me, is just as much of a spiritual fountain of grace as what I find from my Catholic Church.

Mr. Allen: David, can you summarize, as we start to get into the issues of these exposés, can you summarize for our listeners the major new news points about Planned Parenthood that you feel that your videos have uncovered, that the public media and even the government—although they don’t appear to be willing to admit it right now—might not have been aware of?

Mr. Daleiden: You know, I think the biggest thing that almost everybody seems to say after starting to watch the videos is: “I had no idea that this was going on.” And it’s sad, because the harvesting and sale of aborted baby parts has actually been going on for decades, and Planned Parenthood has been involved in it in a major way for decades, and government money has been involved in it for decades. And even many politicians, many government people, officials, have been shocked to find out that this is taking place. And the public has been absolutely shocked and outraged, because this really… Fetal trafficking is really the capstone of the abortion industry. It’s what comes beyond abortion, and it’s what comes when you have abortion clinics led by Planned Parenthood that are well-established, that are successful, that are high-volume, and that aren’t being challenged. And this is sort of the logical next step for them to start to take, so it really is the capstone of the industry, but it’s also the dirty little secret that they’ve kept buried down so far that nobody else would find out about it.

Mr. Allen: I want to come back in a little bit to funding, because you mentioned that, but I want to ask you this first. Some of our listeners have asked me this question: Were the actors that you used in the exposé videos, were they pro-lifers committed to this work, or were they simply professional actors you hired?

Mr. Daleiden: It was kind of a mix. I wouldn’t call anyone a professional actor, so to speak, but we used and trained investigators who were, all of them, committed pro-life people, some to varying degrees to others. Not everybody had an activist background, but everyone was very creative and intelligent and a good fit for the sort of investigative acting they were going to do.

Mr. Allen: Gotcha. So they could think on their feet and respond.

Mr. Daleiden: Exactly.

Mr. Allen: Yeah, gotcha. Because that seems to be what drew a lot of the information out, the fluidity of the conversations. David, some observers have argued that the filming of the video might have violated California’s strict recording laws. What do your lawyers tell you?

Mr. Daleiden: So the California recording law actually has two really important exceptions to it. Number one, it only applies to what are called “confidential” conversations, so if there’s a conversation that’s happening in public, something that people are walking by, they can overhear it, it’s not considered a confidential communication, so the California recording law simply doesn’t apply.

Mr. Allen: Interesting.

Mr. Daleiden: So all of the restaurant business lunch meetings that you’ve seen, those are fully in compliance with the California law, and there’s plenty of case law where actual news organizations have done investigative journalism stings in exactly the same format—public conversation at a business lunch meeting—and the courts have upheld that.

So there’s that, and the second big exception to the California recording law is if you are gathering evidence of violent felonies, of crimes against people, the recording law also doesn’t apply in those situations. So when you have situations of born-alive infants, which is technically infanticide and homicide under even California state law, those are also situations where the recording law doesn’t apply. And we’ve surprisingly gotten some admissions from Planned Parenthood and the leadership of some of their proxies as well of policies that indicate there’s born-alive infants in the whole fetal tissue world.

Mr. Allen: Especially in the seventh exposé. That just…

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah.

Mr. Allen: It was so shocking, I didn’t really know quite how to respond to that. By the way, I’m speaking with David Daleiden. He’s the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the man behind the exposé videos that have rocked the abortion industry.

So, David, did you have prior knowledge before you did the videos about what would likely come out that you were trying to draw out? And why did you suspect that Planned Parenthood allegedly was violating tissue donation and possibly other laws?

Mr. Daleiden: Sure. So, like I said, a lot of people have been shocked to find out that this is going on, and almost nobody realized that Planned Parenthood was harvesting and selling aborted baby parts, because unfortunately it’s been at this point 15 years since this whole issue was ever a part of the national discourse. It was 15 years ago that my friend, Mark Crutcher, and his organization, Life Dynamics, out in Texas, actually did the first big exposé of how Planned Parenthood harvests and sells aborted baby parts. And nobody had really talked about it much before then for many years. Mark did a big exposé in 2000-2001.

It was in the public discourse for a certain amount of time at that time, and then it just kind of got buried by the mainstream media by Planned Parenthood’s political allies and cronies, and nobody revisited it literally for 15 years. I found out about it about five years ago and was really disturbed by it, really troubled, and I thought that this is something that everybody needs to know about because I don’t think that you can fully appreciate what the abortion industry is in America without understanding that baby parts sales are the capstone of it. So that was sort of the tip of the iceberg, was what I knew about, but it was almost like the more you could find out about what information was available just two years ago or five years ago, the more you wanted to know. It was stuff that raised many more questions than it answered, so I wanted not only just to revisit that topic of baby part sales, but I wanted to do something that would be more in-depth and go right to the heart of it, to the source, to the suppliers, which are the Planned Parenthood clinics, and try to answer a lot of the questions that were left unanswered last time.

Mr. Allen: Did you find in your doing these exposé videos, which have been called “sting” videos, but I like “exposé” better, did you find new information that you weren’t necessarily even expecting, given the history that you had accumulated in your pre-investigation work?

Mr. Daleiden: Oh, yeah. Definitely. What we discovered this time around that was not discovered 15 years ago was that the knowledge and approval and support of and even the participation in harvesting and selling aborted baby parts is something that happens at the top levels of Planned Parenthood. It goes literally to the very highest levels of their national organization and percolates on down from there. 15 years ago, all we knew about were certain local Planned Parenthood affiliates that were involved and maybe on the level of certain doctors, certain physicians. Today what we know is that the senior director of medical services of Planned Parenthood, their top abortion doctor who writes their training manuals, who trains their abortion doctors…

Mr. Allen: This is Deborah Nucatola?

Mr. Daleiden: Deborah Nucatola, who oversees all of their clinical practice all over the country, she herself has been implementing and orchestrating and developing their policies, their national policies, on aborted baby organ harvesting for many, many years. She practices it herself at the big Planned Parenthood surgical facility in Los Angeles. So it goes to the very top of their organization, and that’s definitely new information.

Mr. Allen: Interesting. Now to be fair and balanced, as such, I have to give you some approaches from a critical perspective, and as you know critics have pushed back by arguing that the editing of the videos might have skewed the true content of the conversations in which, and especially the first, as we’ve been talking about her, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the PP executive, says things that they claim you edited out that might have contradicted earlier statements that she made that would have minimized the drama or the impact of these later statements. How would you respond to that?

Mr. Daleiden: The Center for Medical Progress always includes with me undercover the video release that we do, we always include the full footage of the conversation along with what’s basically a summarized version of it that’s just the highlights, so people can watch the summarized highlight version, because most people aren’t going to have the patience to sit through three hours of abortion business meeting conversation. And people can also watch the full footage of the conversation, and they can make their own conclusions about what the highlights are and how they feel about our presentation of that.

As far as the stuff with Dr. Nucatola, specifically in that business lunch meeting with her, we actually… Some of the… Many of the statements that we didn’t include simply because we didn’t have time to include them, many of them I think back up our case and help to tell a fuller picture of it, including one of her most honest statements [which] is that some Planned Parenthood affiliates may want to “do a little better than break even” on their so-called fetal tissue donations, i.e., turn a profit, and if they can make it seem reasonable the way that they do that, they’re happy to do so.

Almost all of Dr. Nucatola’s statements about the actual remuneration, the actual money that Planned Parenthood gets from the so-called donations of aborted fetal tissue, almost all of her statements are phrased in a way talking about the appearance of the fetal tissue donation or what it looks like, what the perception is, but the one time that she actually talks about the actuality, what’s really going on, she says the clinics would be happy to do a little better than break even.

Mr. Allen: You know, David, I’ve heard commentators and politicians allege that a great percentage, even as high as 95% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion services. However, according to the 2013-2014 Planned Parenthood annual report, which I have reviewed, they claim that only 3% of their total services were for abortions. This still amounts to approximately and reportedly 327,653 abortions, or 30%ish of the 1.05 million abortions in the U.S. That accounts to close to 900 abortions per day. So my questions are: do you dispute that 3% number, and, if so, on what grounds?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, the 3% number that Planned Parenthood puts out is entirely fabricated. It was really sophistry about the talk about the percentage of services, because for Planned Parenthood, passing out a condom or filling a new birth control prescription, that counts as an individual service. Even given an abortion visit, you have an ultrasound, you have pre-op bloodwork, you have a counseling session. All of these could be counted as different services, so you can artificially inflate the number of other services that Planned Parenthood does while artificially deflating the number of abortions in services, and that’s how they arrive at the so-called 3% number.

A much more organic and accurate way to look at it is to say Planned Parenthood has 2.7 million patients that they see every year, and they do 327,000 abortions every year. So you divide the number of abortions by the number of patients, and you would arrive at an approximate number of about 13% of Planned Parenthood clients are abortion clients in any given year. So that gives you a better sense of the foundational aspect of abortion to their overall business.

Then you look at the actual revenue that the clinics bring in. In their annual report, they divide up their revenue into basically three different streams. One is private donations, one is government money, and the third is the actual fees for services that their clinics bring in, operating as a business, and for that third category of clinic income, 50% of it comes from their abortion procedures.

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah.

Mr. Allen: And Abby Johnson, as you probably know, the former clinic director of a Planned Parenthood office in Texas, has said publicly that her branch, for whom she worked, made about $120,000 a month selling aborted fetus tissues and organs. That’s well over a million to a year in one clinic. And I wonder: Has Planned Parenthood ever been officially audited, so that people would understand, if they could really investigate whether this 3% number is true or not?

Mr. Daleiden: There has never been a comprehensive, official government audit of Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, ever.

Mr. Allen: I didn’t think so.

Speaking of federal and state taxpayer funds, because you mentioned that before, the Hyde Amendment, which was put into law in 1976, made the use of federal funds for abortions illegal. And according to a report by The New York Times—and I want you to comment on all of this—they claim that only Medicaid patients, in cases of rape, incest, and the mother’s life being threatened, can use federal Medicaid funds for obtaining abortions. So my question is: Are federal and state taxpayer funds being used for abortions?

Mr. Daleiden: Absolutely, and here’s the problem: it’s that money is fungible, so the only thing that Hyde Amendment really prevents is it prevents taxpayer funding from being used to fund, to reimburse the procedure cost of an abortion, the same way that you would reimburse the cost of any other medical services.

Mr. Allen: With the paper trail.

Mr. Daleiden: Right, but what the government money still pays for, is it pays for the rent that the Planned Parenthood clinic is paying, it pays for the salary of the medical director who’s doing most of the abortions anyway, it pays for the electricity that turns the lights on in the abortion room, it pays for the electricity that powers the vacuum suction machine that suctions the baby apart, it pays for the water and the soap that they use to sterilize the instruments—when they do sterilize them—it pays for all of the operational aspects of the clinic that allow it to continue to run and get 50% of its clinic funding from abortions.

Mr. Allen: David, as you’re well aware, a portion of Title 42 of the U.S. Code reads thus:

It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce.

And the law includes fetal tissue in its definitions, but it says that the term “valuable consideration” does not include reasonable payments for removal, transportation, preservation, and other associated costs. So this particular question is obviously more of a legal than a moral issue, but I do want to ask it: What side of the line, that is, covering costs is legal or profiting is illegal, do you think Planned Parenthood is on this legal point?

Mr. Daleiden: Planned Parenthood’s absolutely on the wrong side of the law on this point, and they know it, and that’s why they’re working overtime to try to cover that up and to distract from the whole issue. There’s also… So the law that you just quoted is the federal law on human organ transfers in general.

There’s also a federal law on human fetal tissue specifically, and that’s Title 42, §289g-2, and that explicitly prohibits any payments for fetal tissue, and the definition of “valuable consideration” that establishes that certain reimbursement payments for certain costs of facilitating a tissue or organ donation, that section is actually narrower in the specific fetal tissue law than it is in the organ donation law. Yeah, the qualifier about “removal” has been taken out of the fetal tissue one because of specific legislative intent there that Congress wanted to make sure they closed off any possible loophole that an organization like Planned Parenthood might use to justify payments on a per-specimen basis for aborted fetal tissue.

But ultimately the interpretation of citizen-journalists like myself, interpretation of the public and of lawmakers, and also the interpretation of Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood’s own attorneys are actually all in agreement here. The federal fetal tissue law that if you’re making a profit or receiving a financial benefit for supplying aborted fetal tissue, everybody, Planned Parenthood included, agrees that that’s what’s against the law and that’s wrong, and that’s the point that Planned Parenthood is most strongly trying to say, “We don’t receive any financial benefit. We don’t receive any profit.”

But when you actually look at the way that the business operates, Planned Parenthood doesn’t transport fetal tissue, Planned Parenthood doesn’t ship it, Planned Parenthood doesn’t do any of that, because they partner with middleman companies like StemExpress or Advanced BioScience [Laboratories] or Novogenix Laboratories, and those middleman companies send in harvesting technicians or procurement technicians like my friend Holly O’Donnell, who used to be one, who used to work for StemExpress doing that, and those techs go into the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics first thing in the morning. They have a list of all of the body parts orders that have come in, and they let the clinical staff know what they’re looking for, like Dr. Nucatola, the senior director of medical services, says, they have a huddle at the beginning of the day to map out what they need to harvest at that day.

The procurement technicians are the ones typically who consent the abortion patients; they identify the abortion patients who can provide the baby parts that they need, and they consent them. They then wait for the procedures to be done. They wait in the back path lab of the clinic. The clinic brings the aborted baby from the operating room to the path lab, which is what they do every day for every abortion procedure anyway. They leave it with the technician. The technician does all of the dissection. They package it up; they ship it off. So the only thing that Planned Parenthood has to do is open the doors for the technicians in the morning and carry the fetus from the OR to the path lab. And just for doing that, for supplying the baby and the baby parts, Planned Parenthood gets a per-specimen payment, per specimen that’s harvested from the aborted baby, of sometimes $50 a specimen, $75 a specimen, even $100 per specimen, and all of that is straight-up profit that goes to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.

Mr. Allen: As you know, better than I, some of the pro-choice media have contacted experts who have said that the price ranges mentioned in the first two videos, anywhere from $30 to $100, do not come close to making Planned Parenthood a profit, but just recovering some of their costs. How would you respond to that?

Mr. Daleiden: Those so-called experts just don’t understand how Planned Parenthood operates. They’re clearly not experts in the way that abortion happens clinically, because the only thing… Again, Planned Parenthood literally has no costs when they’re allowing an outside biotech company’s procurement tech to come into their clinic, harvest the body parts, and sell them.

Mr. Allen: And even Dr. Nucatola, in the first video, makes a statement that suggests that some clinics would be comfortable with a payment that was slightly more than their expenses. She [says]:

I think for affiliates at the end of the day they’re a non-profit. They just don’t want to. They want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.

So she seems to be admitting this.

Mr. Daleiden: Absolutely, absolutely. Everyone admitted at the end of the day that it constituted as some kind of financial benefit to Planned Parenthood. Nobody denied that when the media spotlight wasn’t on them. And Dr. Mary Gatter, who is the president of Planned Parenthood’s medical directors council, she described the arrangement that Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles has had with Novogenix Laboratories and said, “It was very easy. We didn’t have to do anything,” yet they still received so-called “compensation” for it.

Mr. Allen: David, also at issue in this video is patient consent. For researchers to use the fetal tissue or body parts, the specimens need to remain intact, which could mean that the providers would have to use a different method to abort first-trimester fetuses. But, per Planned Parenthood’s own protocols, women who decide to donate their fetal tissues are told that their care will not be changed in any way based on their decision. Do your videos, past or future, provide evidence that Planned Parenthood is or has violated this protocol by using different methods to maintain intact fetuses so they can be sold or harvested?

Mr. Daleiden: Planned Parenthood is lying to their patients and lying to pregnant women who come into their clinics, because Planned Parenthood… Every single Planned Parenthood doctor that we talked to was happy to modify their abortion technique in order to get higher quality baby parts for sale. And they’re not just willing to make slight alterations; they’re willing to use flat-out illegal abortion procedures in order to get those body parts…

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: …like the partial-birth abortion technique, which is where you use ultrasound guidance to convert the fetus to a breech position, you pull the baby out of the mother feet-first, keeping it all in one piece, because, as the baby’s body gets bigger from the legs to the torso to the shoulders, it helps to increasingly dilate the birth canal so you can get a fully intact fetus out of the mother. And that’s exactly the procedure that Dr. Nucatola, the senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, described to our investigators that she and other Planned Parenthood doctors could use in order to get higher quality fetal hearts and brains and livers in order to sell. And that procedure is completely illegal according to federal law, and that’s an issue that Planned Parenthood—that’s an argument that they’ve completely dropped for the past five or six weeks. They won’t even address that issue because they have no defense for it.

Mr. Allen: And in one video, a Planned Parenthood visual—you’ll [have to remind] me which one it was—discussed facilitating organs harvest by crushing fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner so as to procure them, and that seems to me to be a pretty admissive statement.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, that was Dr. Mary Gatter, the president of Planned Parenthood’s medical director council.

Mr. Allen: Number two, wasn’t it?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah. [She was] saying that when it came to a suction abortion, they could use a “less crunchy” method for the suction, basically a much less powerful suction instrument, and use that to try to keep the entire baby intact.

Mr. Allen: For the purpose of?

Mr. Daleiden: For the purpose of harvesting the bodies.

Mr. Allen: Obviously. Why would they do it that way if not?

Mr. Daleiden: Yup. In a case like that, when you’re making decisions about your patient based on what’s going to get you a more intact specimen so that you can sell it so that you have a financial benefit, in that case you’re no longer treating that patient as a woman, you’re no longer treating her as a human being who has patient autonomy and has her own dignity. You’re treating her like a harvesting pod, which is horrific.

Mr. Allen: And as you know, many women have post-abortive psychological issues: grieving and all of these things. I wonder, if Planned Parenthood were upfront about what they’re doing, if this would change the minds of many of these women, especially young women, that come in.

Mr. Daleiden: Oh, yeah. There were… And what Planned Parenthood likes in part about the fetal tissue sales as well is that it can be a way to lock in certain abortions and make certain that they happen. There were Planned Parenthood doctors who suggested to our investigators that getting patients to sign the donation form for fetal tissue collection might actually decrease their no-show rate, because typically you have a certain percentage of patients that come in for pre-op work on day one, and then don’t actually show up on day two because they changed their mind, and some of them hope that if we got them to sign the form on day one, they would definitely come back on day two.

Mr. Allen: Or maybe feel better because they think they’re contributing this abortive process to medical benefit.

Mr. Daleiden: Right, but at the same time, the form that they’re being consented for and the process of so-called donation that they’re being consented to is actually not the process that is actually happening, because it’s not a donation, it’s a sale; the financial interest the clinic has in the patient’s so-called donation is not being disclosed to them; and the fact that they’re going to change the abortion procedure is not being disclosed to them.

Mr. Allen: My, my. You know, in a robust attempt by Planned Parenthood to “tar and feather” you personally and your organization, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said to George Stephanopoulos, who, by the way, as you probably know, is a Greek Orthodox priest’s son, on Good Morning, America!, she said you are “part of the most militant wing of the anti-abortion movement that is behind the bombing of clinics, the murder of doctors in their homes and in their churches.” What’s your response to that?

Mr. Daleiden: It’s outrageous. Planned Parenthood is resorting to name-calling, because they don’t have any argument to make, and they don’t want to address the actual issue of their baby parts sales. I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been connected to any kind of bombing or violence or anything like that. It’s just ridiculous. It’s a little outrageous that they’re resorting to name-calling because they don’t have anything else to say.

Mr. Allen: One thing I did pick up, though, that I wanted to challenge you with, I guess, is this: Do you think that this statement was said because one of your board members [is] a man named Troy Newman, who is the president of Operation Rescue, and two people affiliated with Operation Rescue were actually convicted of an attempted bombing of an abortion clinic in 1998, and she’s just kind of washing everything over?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, that’s it exactly. They’re trying to play “eight degrees of separation” with my organizations and the board of directors. Troy Newman is one of my board members. Troy Newman was never involved with a bombing of a clinic or a killing of a doctor. Troy Newman’s organization has never been part of that. Nobody who’s worked for Troy Newman has ever been part of violence against an abortion doctor. It’s a really cheap, ad hominem, name-calling way of trying to play “eight degrees of separation” to attack the messenger because they don’t want to talk about the message at all.

Mr. Allen: David, I would like to ask you this. An Obama-appointed Superior Court judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order against your organization, the Center for Medical Progress, from releasing video footage of StemExpress officers, one of Planned Parenthood’s affiliates. First, has that restraining order been rescinded, and why do you think StemExpress is so concerned about the video being out there?

Mr. Daleiden: So that temporary restraining order actually came from a judge in Los Angeles county. That’s not from the federal court in San Francisco.

Mr. Allen: Okay.

Mr. Daleiden: But StemExpress and Planned Parenthood are both really concerned about the video from a business dinner meeting that our investigators did with StemExpress’s CEO, Cate Dyer, and with their other top leadership back in May, because during that meeting Cate Dyer very candidly admitted to our investigators frequently receives fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from their abortion clinics, and whenever we’re talking about fetal tissue harvesting, we’re talking about abortions where no chemical or poison could be used to kill the baby before the abortion, because that would poison the body parts and render them unusable for fetal tissue work.

So if you’re talking about no feticidal chemical being used, but you’re also trying to get an intact fetus, a fully intact fetus, then you’ve got a perfect storm there for a born-alive infant, because all you’re doing is you’re delivering a premature baby. If you’re doing that at the abortion clinic and shipping that baby to StemExpress’s laboratory, are you killing the baby after it’s delivered? Are you letting it die in transit? Are they killing it through vivisection at the StemExpress laboratory? Either way you slice it, no pun intended, you’re talking about homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide, and that’s what Planned Parenthood and their ally, StemExpress, are terrified about coming to the public right now.

Mr. Allen: Has that temporary restraining order been rescinded, or is it still in place?

Mr. Daleiden: There is a hearing going on as we speak right now about that temporary restraining order. All signs point towards its being dissolved today, so we’re hopeful about that.

Mr. Allen: Now, StemExpress, as you obviously know, has now officially cut ties with Planned Parenthood. Why do you think that is?

Mr. Daleiden: Allegedly, StemExpress has cut all of their ties with Planned Parenthood. I think there’s a good reason to be skeptical about that, because the indicators that we have from the statements of their own CEO is that they’ve been working with a large number of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, not just the two big affiliates in northern California that they explicitly said they cut ties with. I think ultimately those questions need to be answered fully and explored by the different Congressional committees that are investigating them right now, but as far as the PR move, I think this is a PR move simply from StemExpress themselves because they’re really afraid about what their connection to Planned Parenthood is going to continue to mean for their business and for their bottom line, and they’d have to be really afraid to do that, because, as they’ve told our investigators, they’re frankly desperate for as many fetal livers as they can get right now.

And for them to sacrifice their three big, high-volume Planned Parenthood collection sites in northern California, that’s a lot of fetal liver that they’re giving up that they need for their bottom line. So they’d have to be very concerned about the revelations that are going to continue to come forward about themselves and their relationship with Planned Parenthood in order to cut those ties, and it’s interesting that it seems to not have been a coordinated PR move with Planned Parenthood, because the Planned Parenthood CEOs came out with their own joint statement a few days later, saying: Hey, wait a sec. We can’t control StemExpress but for our part, we’re going to continue to offer fetal tissue collection services, and we’re going to find another way to do so. Which is kind of an awkward thing for them to do if this was a coordinated move to try to bury the whole issue. So I think you also see from that all of the different players in the abortion industry—Planned Parenthood national, Planned Parenthood local, StemExpress—they’re all kind of pulling away from each other right now, and they’re all kind of out for themselves.

Mr. Allen: Despite having a bi-partisan majority in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood, on Monday, August 3, the Senate couldn’t overcome the 60-vote procedural hurdle enjoyed by Planned Parenthood supporters in Congress. Do you think the Congressional battle over defunding Planned Parenthood is over, or will it continue?

Mr. Daleiden: All indications are that it’s definitely going to continue; this issue is not going away. Even after the various budgetary and fundings that are going to happen in the next month, in September, there’s still… there’s now four different Congressional committees that have open and robust investigations of Planned Parenthood and their baby parts sales. So regardless of what happens legislatively in September, just with the different budgeting and appropriations, this whole issue is going to continue to be investigated and to continue to be brought up in Congress for a very long time.

Mr. Allen: And I’m speaking with David Daleiden. He is the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the producer and the man behind the exposé videos of Planned Parenthood which have shaken up the abortion industry internationally.

David, there was a news article, I believe, in The L.A. Times, written where the author said the people who support animal rights tend to do so because they feel that animals are innocent and vulnerable and need human protection, so why do you think this same empathy and compassion for animals, for their innocence and vulnerability and their need for human protection, doesn’t just inherently or patently apply to innocent and vulnerable babies in the womb, whom many pro-choicers refuse to even call human?

Mr. Daleiden: I think it does apply, and I think the difference is just…. why they’re not people [is that people do not] actually take the time to actually look at the baby, to look at the human fetus in the womb, because what most people do [is] they do automatically apply those same feelings of compassion and respect and a desire to protect that innocent little human life, and I think that’s why in part why our videos are having such an impact, because they’re forcing everybody to take the time to look at the baby that’s being violently ripped apart and pulverized or exploited because of the abortion industry.

Actually, even some abortion doctors that we spoke with, even Dr. Nucatola herself—this doesn’t come up so clearly on the video, but in person—when our investigators would speak with her, and she would describe in detail her abortion procedure and she would describe saving the baby’s head for last or doing a certain maneuver on the fetus, she would… her voice would get hoarser, almost like she would start to choke up, almost like she had a voice in her throat, and she would wipe her eyes once or twice, talking about it. She wasn’t the only abortion doctor like that. Some of them are so far gone that it does seem like there’s something really almost inhumanly evil or twisted going on there, but Dr. Nucatola’s not one of them, and many of the abortion doctors that we met I did not think were like that, were very, very conflicted about what they do.

Some abortion doctors cry when they see the baby parts. Some of them are really upset by it and really cut up about it. So I think that the hard-core pro-abortion people are definitely in the minority, the sort of people who are willfully ignorant or willfully in denial about the humanity about the unborn baby. Abortion doctors generally don’t have that luxury; they have to deal with it every day. So I think the explanation for the really few people out there who are full-throatedly comfortable with abortion, having taken the time to consider all aspects of it and even confront the baby in the womb, those are people who are frankly okay with killing certain types of people, and that’s what it comes down to. So we shouldn’t be scared of that or shocked by that; we shouldn’t be discouraged by that, because all that means is that when normal people and the vast majority of people do take the time to consider the unborn baby, they overwhelmingly come down on the side of life.

Mr. Allen: Thank you for that, because sometimes we can tend to demonize people, and it’s good to know that you have noted their inherent humanity and the conflict that even some abortion doctors experience, so I appreciate that.

I want to switch gears a bit here. I don’t know if you saw this report or not, but there was the 2008 Pew Research poll, called the US Landscape of Religion, and this direct question was asked of all of the various Christians of varying faith traditions, and the question was very direct. It was: “Should abortion be illegal in all or almost all cases?” With the Roman Catholics polled, according to the Pew Research Poll, only 55% of Catholics agreed with the statement that abortion should be illegal in all or almost all cases, and of the Orthodox polled—and the sampling may be a bit skewed, because in our case the sample number was very low, reflecting our minority status in the United States, but nevertheless, the Orthodox results were the lowest: only 30% agreed with the statement. Evangelicals, on the other hand, agreed with the statement by 61%, so they’re more orthodox—small-o—on this than even Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox. So my question to you, David Daleiden, is: Why do you think this is, that in the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, with the clearest canons and teachings against abortion and infanticide and the sanctity of life, the polling numbers showed up the way they did?

Mr. Daleiden: That’s a really big question and topic, and we could almost do a whole ‘nother interview on that, I think, with pastors from both traditions and all kinds of stuff. I have a couple of ideas, though. I think the first is that, in general, I think it’s well-known that the Evangelical communities in America tend to be a little more uniformly devout than both the Catholic and the Orthodox communities, and that’s just kind of a function of Evangelicalism: you’ve got a lot more converts and sort of reverts, people who are born again, whereas in the Catholic and Orthodox communities we have a lot of people who are cradle, and our faith has become such a part of our culture, just sort of the air that we breathe, that sometimes sin is even like the air that we breathe, too. There’s both good things and bad things to that. I’m a cradle Catholic, and I’m not ashamed of that. I think there’s a lot of benefits to that that come to you that you don’t always get as a convert. There’s something to be said with growing up in an environment that in some way has been immersed in the faith for centuries, but there’s also a downside, in that sometimes you can take it for granted.

I think maybe also, like you said with regard to the Orthodox specifically in America, Orthodox are much more of a minority in the United States, and I think there’s a lot more of an immigrant context where even just the political context of abortion in America is maybe a little more foreign to Orthodox, and so for that reason the polling questions and the answers may not even translate the same way, so what Orthodox understand abortion in America to be and the way they’re answering the question, it may not… we might not even be talking about the same things.

And then the third thing that I would say is that, in contrast to the Protestant and Evangelical traditions, Catholics and Orthodox, I think we’ve always been… I think our theology is a little more nuanced in general. There’s always been a more robust, nuanced theological tradition. I wonder if, culturally, we might both have a tendency to answer questions, especially if you’re not a dogmatic theologian, you might have a tendency to answer questions in a more nuanced way.

So I guess what I’m kind of saying is I wouldn’t say necessarily that Catholics or Orthodox are more pro-abortion or are more hateful of unborn children or something like that than other traditions. I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily that we’re lazy or uncanonized or anything like that. I think that there’s just a lot of cultural static that might be getting in the way there.

Mr. Allen: David, as we’re coming to a close, how many more videos, now that we have seven, are you planning to release?

Mr. Daleiden: I’ve been predicting in various media outlets that when all is said and done, we’ll have about a dozen very high-quality, shocking, significant videos that will have been released, so that leaves about five left to go. We are on track to have that total of twelve, but truly, at the end of the day, the Center for Medical Progress has collected probably close to 300 hours total of undercover footage of the abortion industry on the baby parts issue and other related issues, so we could potentially go beyond that twelve in the coming weeks and months.

Mr. Allen: Wow. And the CMP does its own editing and its own production work?

Mr. Daleiden: We do our own production. We have a very qualified and skilled, talented video editor that we work with.

Mr. Allen: Gotcha. Yeah, because they’re very professional.

So, David Daleiden, as we’re coming to an end of our very fascinating and informative interview, which we appreciate very much, what can our listeners—Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Catholics—do to be of help to you, your organization, and your defense should they choose to?

Mr. Daleiden: They can do a couple of things. Number one, you can visit our website, centerformedicalprogress.org, and on our website you can find the petition to sign to call for an immediate moratorium on all of Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and also a full investigation of the full extent of their lawbreaking on fetal tissue sales and illegal abortion procedures. Number two, you can contact your Congresspeople, your representatives in Congress and your other elected representatives, and you can ask them to see to it that there’s a full investigation of Planned Parenthood and that they’re fully held accountable for the crimes that they’re committing against humanity and against unborn children. And the third thing, you can share our videos and our materials, our resources, with your friends on social media and in person. You can also find a link to donate on our website, at centerformedicalprogress.org, to support our work.

Mr. Allen: Great. Thank you so much. My guest on this program has been David Daleiden. He is the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the young man behind the exposé videos of Planned Parenthood and their affiliates which we all know has made international impact. David, thank you very, very much for being my guest on Ancient Faith Today.

Mr. Daleiden: Thank you so much, Kevin.

Nature and City in the Greek East

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The poet seems to suggest that we can now find the natural city only in the imagination. The bridge for the modernist poet is now an interior, and even a psychological function. It was not always so.

Source: Πεμτουσια (Pemtousia)

By Bruce Seraphim Foltz

The beauty of the city is not as heretofore scattered over it in patches, but covers the whole area like a robe woven to the fringe. The city gleams with gold and porphyry. Were Constantine to see the city he founded, he would find it fair, not with apparent but with real beauty. Themistius, 4th Century Byzantine Orator

Constantinople

CConstantinopolis Nova Roma: “the polis founded by Constantine as the New Rome.” First known as the Greek colony of Byzantium, it had been settled by residents of ancient Megara, faraway city on the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow land-bridge between Attica and the Peloponnese. Spanning both Europe and Asia, Byzantium Constantinople modern-day Istanbul has always served as a bridge between these two great continents of the ancient world, a double-headed eagle looking simultaneously east and west. And this was indeed the principal reason for its selection as the New Rome, the imperial capital for what by the fourth century had become as much an Asian as a European Empire. That, and to be a bridge between heaven and earth, a city to do what Old Rome never could: to embody and set to work the ontological bridge between the visible and the invisible at which both occidental philosophy and oriental religion had, in their own ways, and to varying degrees, already arrived.

By nature, it has always been a land of waters that would separate. Waters of the Bosporos. Waters of the Sea of Marmara the Sea of Marble. Waters of the Golden Horn. Three waters, everywhere visible, and often audible, ready to isolate its sectors and perhaps to swamp, and overwhelm, the putative city itself in waters and seas. These are not just nearby. They surround and embrace the city, as if to immerse it, inundate it. The city is built down into the very waters themselves, and it everywhere rises up from them.

Civically, it is on the contrary a land of bridges. Its bridging and conjoining character is its primary civic feature. Its unity and coherence as a city is a function of human techne: both the human art that joins the terrestrial element to the circuit of the city, and the human art that joins the terrestrial with the celestial, the visible with the invisible, the secular with the sacred.

“Therefore I have sailed the seas and come,” sings the poet, “to the holy city of Byzantium.” Crossing the waters to the holy city, he hopes to find “sages standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall” and William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” unfolds with images of golden artifacts and golden artisans, and even golden nature! Goldsmiths and hammered gold. Golden boughs and golden birds. In his prose work, A Vision, Yeats envisions golden Byzantium as the bridge city, the unifying city, the integral city, reflecting that:

…in early Byzantium, [as] maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers… spoke to the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter and…the vision of a whole people.

He goes on to imagine that had he really sailed to the Byzantium of Justinian the Great, he would have found “in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even.” Unity of the religious, the aesthetic, and the practical. Unity of the human, the natural, and the supernatural. The ever-attracting luster of gold, and the mosaic composite of golden fragments that have been drawn together into one.

Finally, in his “Preface” to the 1893 edition of the “Works” of William Blake, Yeats reflects that:

In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may lose the power to delude.

It is thus no longer in Byzantium itself undone in 1453, as the last act of the genuine “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” that we can find the “natural city” the city that would bridge the organic world, the world of the artisan, and the spiritual world, unifying spirit and nature, nature and super-nature. The poet seems to suggest that we can now find the natural city only in the imagination. The bridge for the modernist poet is now an interior, and even a psychological function.

Was Constantinople, “the holy city,” in fact “the natural city” as well? Let us listen closely to the report of an envoy that actually did sail to Byzantium in the tenth century. Traveling the earth in search of the religion best suited to unify the Russian people, the emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kiev finally reached Constantinople. Their report back to him became decisive, and it is quoted in every history of Russia:

Then we went to [Byzantium], and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterwards unwilling to accept that which is bitter.

As in the poetic narratives of Yeats, in this historic account too we find earth and heaven, the visible and the invisible, joined together by means of beauty. But this is not the beauty of nature left in a raw or wild or pristine state. It is that of nature rendered beautiful through techne, through human art and artifice: through the art of the architect and poet and iconographer, of ritual and liturgy, and indeed, through the art of the goldsmith. The beauty that bridges, joins together, and unifies the beauty that renders possible the seeming paradox of the natural city this beauty itself comes about not through nature, but through production, through what the Greek language spoken in Byzantium called poeisis.

These portrayals of Byzantium find deep resonance in the aesthetic thought of Martin Heidegger, which can help articulate their coherence. In Heidegger’s thought, the dark self-closure of earth is thought in contrast both to the openness of what he calls “world” as well as with the manifest measure of the heavens. The work of art, then, is understood as “setting-forth” the earth, allowing it to be seen in its earthliness, even as it brings the earthly into the dynamic unity of a world. (And what work of art, we may ask, sets forth the earth more dynamically and dramatically and sets to work a world more effectively than the Hagia Sophia, the “Great Church” of Constantinople?) Beauty, in turn, can be seen as the revealing or un-concealing of physis, nature regarded as what comes forth of its own accord. Moreover, because physis or “nature” is not just one region of beings, but rather is everywhere emergent in all that is, to reveal this all-present self-emergence through beauty is at the same time to reveal the unity through which beings as a whole join together and cohere. “Beauty,” Heidegger maintains, “is the original unifying One.” Nor is this a simple or abstract unity. Because it is “all-presence,” beauty is that captivating, enrapturing unity that “lets one opposite come to presence in its opposite.” (A unity, we may add, that allows the captivating conjoining of visible and invisible, the human and divine, the celestial and terrestrial, sacred and secular, nature and the city.) Finally, Heidegger sees this integral and healing unity disclosed by the arts in their “poetic” character as itself being a revealing of what he calls “the holy.” He characterizes the latter, in turn, as the necessary element for humans to encounter the divine, and thus for the authentic poetic task the task of art itself to be possible. Perhaps, then, rather than being incidental to its character as “natural city,” the fact that Constantinople was singularly founded as a sacred city, as a city that would link heaven and earth this establishment of the city as the great bridge between earth and heaven, and vice versa would serve as the very precondition for its singular power to unify nature and humanity as well. The natural city, then, would at the same time be, in the words of Yeats, “the holy city.” Byzantium is not only the New Rome: it is also the New Jerusalem as its residents, in fact, understood it to be.

But we must ask once again, was Byzantium not just the City of Constantinople, but the inhabited empire itself was Byzantium in some distinctive and even definitive sense, really “the natural city”? What we have considered so far, from the poetic vision of Yeats to the captivated, enraptured report of the Russian emissaries, is surely suggestive, but it is hardly conclusive. And indeed, there is a body of opinion and scholarship that would argue just the contrary: that rather than being “the natural city,” Byzantium represented instead the historical-cultural beginning of the unnatural city.

The field of Byzantine Studies is in its early stages, still far from overcoming twelve hundred years of Western prejudice and provincialism in understanding not just Eastern Christendom, but European history as a whole. The entire period of Late Antiquity the years from 250 to 800, during which Byzantium took shape and first flourished has been seen almost exclusively through the prism of the “Dark Ages” undergone by the Franks and Gauls in Western Europe. Eastern Christendom, too, has been viewed from the perspective of the Latin Church that was born out of those dark times. Seen in this way, Byzantine Christianity becomes merely a mystical aberration from the Latin norm, and Byzantium as a whole a curious, rococo remnant, somehow persisting out on the margins. It is hardly surprising, then, that few of those who have thought historically about nature and city have been free from this parochialism. The architectural historian Vincent Scully who is in other respects without peer for his lifelong study of the relation between nature and the city does only slightly better than most. Examining his otherwise excellent narrative will sharpen our understanding of Byzantium as the natural city.

In his recent book, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, Scully presents the fruit of a life’s work: a magisterial history of architecture tracing the alienation of the city and nature, from the ancient Egyptians, Minoans, and Mesoamericans to its sad end with the inhumanity of modernist architecture and the frivolity of the postmodern school. Scully sees two tendencies at play in the relation between our buildings and the natural environment around them. One sees the city as part of the landscape, and seeks in its architecture to imitate and intensify surrounding nature, to invoke its deities and indeed to aid and assist them. His favored example is the great pyramid (the “Temple of the Moon”) at Teotihuacàn, which Scully sees as mimetically presenting the spirit of the mountain that serves as its background. And in doing so, it evokes and invokes the water goddess to bring down the needed water from the earthly heights. (He passes lightly over the fact that all too often, as was certainly the case with the Aztecs, this kind of primal identification with nature has simultaneously entailed human sacrifice to hungry deities as well.) In the second tendency, literally invented by the ancient Greeks, the city stands up against nature, confronts it, raises up human and eventually, abstract and geometrical forms to master and control it. At a certain point, this mastery reaches a point of totalization, in which the world is brought indoors that is, the interior environment of the buildings becomes the primary element, a world unto itself to replace the natural environment. This latter step, Scully argues, is taken first of all in the Pantheon of Rome, whose dome is conceived as a planetarium, but even more decisively in the great temple, the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, whose circular dome over a square floor plan he sees as the triumph of Pythagorean abstraction and human control over the very cosmos itself, and whose vastness impresses the visitor with a sense that the building is a world unto itself, subduing and interiorizing the natural world outside.

In part, Scully’s analysis simply repeats the time-honored cliché: a world that is old and tired, and that has lost its nerve, now retreats inward into stoicism and neoplatonism and ultimately into the interior, psychological recesses of Christianity. The Western world begins to waken during the Renaissance and look “outside” to the world of nature, while the Christian East never does, remaining dreamily entranced in mysticism. Yet this doesn’t quite work for Scully, since the very tendencies he thinks begin in Byzantium in fact proceed more definitively in the West: from the Gothic cathedrals and its interior spaces oriented so decisively heavenward, away from the earth, to the abstract interiorized buildings of the International Style in the twentieth century. But in another sense, Scully occupies solid ground here. His polarity of imitation and identification versus confrontation and abstraction is parallel to Nietzsche’s contrast of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Wilhelm Wörringer’s contrast of abstraction and empathy, and indeed Heidegger’s notion of a conflict between earth and world. Such a tension, it seems, is an irreducible element of the human condition. It is the thesis of the present article, then, that rather than initiating a decisive fissure between these two tendencies, Byzantium as the consummation of ancient thought and spirituality instead presents in an exemplary manner nothing less than the successful resolution of the conflict between them. To see how and why this is the case, however, will require a brief consideration of Byzantine philosophy and theology.

All of the great world religions address themselves to some (perhaps one) great, intractable Problem. For Hinduism, it is the veil of Maya or illusion endemic to, and generative of, the very universe itself. For Buddhism, it is Suffering not just human suffering, but suffering of cosmic proportions brought about by clinging and grasping. And for Christianity, it is the Fall. But for Byzantine Christianity, and for the Christianity of Late Antiquity generally prior to Charlemagne, the Fall is a disorder of the whole cosmos, of nature as well as humanity. Redemption, then, must in all these traditions have the same cosmic dimensions: a restoration of humanity and nature alike to their prelapsarian condition, transfiguring both nature and humanity, and returning them to their paradisiacal state. In that blessed state, according to the Byzantine vision, human beings would as before exercise a cosmic priesthood, apprehending and consecrating the divine presence not only in one another, but in the world as a whole: in every ray of light and each fallen leaf. The eternal Logos, through which the cosmos was created, can once again be apprehended within the inherent logoi of all creation, because that same Logos entered creation, became material and earthly, precisely to restore this lost unity of heaven and earth. And this allows human beings to once again realize their inherent divinity as images of God. (Byzantine theology calls this process theosis, and it is summarized in the celebrated formula of Athanasios: “God became man in order than man might become God.”) Humanity can thus resume the cosmic priesthood for which purpose it was created: to be that being through which the divine image within all creation becomes fully realized, the nodal point through which creation apprehends and consecrates its own inner divinity.

Humanity and nature are retrieved from opposition and confrontation, because both are restored to unity with the Logos from whom they commonly derive their own being. Because heaven has come down to earth, earth and heaven are now essentially re-united a theology that underlies all Byzantine art, but which is most characteristically embodied in the art-form of the icon. Here, in the icon, the terrestrial is infused with the celestial. The icon, properly understood, is not a representation, but a presentation not a Vorstellung, but a Darstellung of the invisible by means of the visible, a temporal epiphany of the eternal, a visible window upon the invisible. (Latin theology, in contrast, properly begins with the Libri Carolini, in which Charlemagne’s court theologians responding to the Second Nicene Council that had vindicated the icon from the accusations of the iconoclasts rejected this theophanous character of the icon, insisting on the jurisdictional separation of earth from heaven, and substituting the discursivity of allegory and instruction for the noetic immediacy of iconic experience.) The background, the very element, of every icon is gold: the inner radiance of the divine energies. That Byzantium is the golden city, that its icons and murals and mosaics radiate with gold, that its ceremonial vessels and reliquaries and garments and gateways are golden, that the pages of its illuminated books shimmer with gold, that its very flag features its double-headed eagle against a golden background, simply articulates the Byzantine vision: a restoration of all creation to its divine roots, which can be seen to radiate and well up from deep within the earthly itself. It is the golden glow of the pristine dawn of creation shining within the city. But glimpsing the Byzantine flag which still flies over Mt. Athos on the Halchidiki Peninsula of Macedonia let us return to the ancient city itself.

Hagia Sophia — The Great Church of the Divine Wisdom

The Divine Wisdom is the eternal Logos, seen as shaping the cosmos and holding it together. It is thus also the inner logos of each being that when fully realized joins it to the whole in a love that must be understood ontologically. St. Maximos the Confessor, Byzantium’s greatest philosopher and theologian, states this powerfully: “the unspeakable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things, as in the bush, is the fire of divine love and the dazzling brilliance of his beauty inside every thing.” The Great Church of the Divine Wisdom, then, itself serves to bring together all the elements of the cosmos in a transfigured form, making manifest the inner glow of their divine beauty.

Contrary to Scully’s Westernized view, the Great Church like all Byzantine temples serves not to transport the worshipper to heaven as the Gothic temple would do or to replace the natural and earthly with an abstract, Platonized heaven, or even less with a psychologized, “inner” space but to really join together heaven and earth, to serve as the ontological bridge between them. The great dome, originally lined with solid gold, still seems to float weightlessly above, as if suspended from heaven or borne by seraphic orders. It is heaven itself, but brought down to earth and joined with it. The Divine Liturgy, for whose sake the church is built, dramatically enacts the joining of heaven and earth: the drama is a progressive interaction and eventual communion of the heavenly (the sacred space and the celebrants in the sanctuary, behind the chancel or iconostasis) and the earthly sphere of the nave, toward whom the icons face, offering the vision of heaven. The rounded apse, deep within the sanctuary, is the cave of Bethlehem, the hollow of earth in which God first assented to become visible. The supporting arches “mark the cardinal directions of space, [and] its piers and pavements the mountains and plains of earth.” According to Justinian’s contemporary Procopius, the cathedral’s “marvelous” and “indescribable beauty” was enhanced by the rich hues of the precious stones in the galleries and arcades, due to which “one might imagine that one has chanced upon a meadow in full bloom. For one would surely marvel at the purple hue of some, the green of others, at those on which the crimson blooms, at those that flash with white, at those, too, which Nature [Physis], like a painter, has varied with the most contrasting colors.” This observation was echoed by a contemporary poet know as Paul the Silentiary, who saw the use of coloring marble on the floors and walls as a painting in stone, that presented a gathering of twelve kinds of “marble meadows” from the far corners of the earth. And all of this is oriented, as is every Byzantine church that is, it faces the golden glow of the rising sun in the orient or east.

This could not be farther removed from Scully’s claim of an abstract, Pythagorean space. Rather, it is much more evidentially mimetic than the Meso-American pyramids or the Green Corn Dance of the Taos Pueblo, which Scully valorizes. Yet this mimesis evokes not dark gods, hungry for human blood, but a deity inhering deeply within nature indeed, a transcendent god become earthly who nourishes the faithful with his own blood, at the consummation of the Liturgy, under the golden dome of heaven. The Apollonian moment of form and structure, in turn, is not imposed from outside as a human or mathematized mastery of nature nor realized as confrontation, but as a restoration of the paradisiacal elements of nature’s innermost logoi. Aesthetically, it is in the classical terms revived by Hölderlin and Nietzsche, and in a most unexpected way a marriage of Dionysios and Apollo.

Much has been made of the desacralization of the earth that some claim to have taken place during the early Christian era, and this notion forms the basis of Max Weber’s influential concept of the disenchantment of nature. Yet this view, as well, sees matters only through Latinized lenses. Long before the rise of Carolingian theology in the West, nature is seen and experienced as iconic, as the visible window upon the invisible. The Byzantine temples and liturgies and holy things set this iconic and noetic relation to nature into play. But it is not just that nature as a whole acquires a new kind of sacred character. It does so locally as well, with regard to specific places. Writing in the Harvard University Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Beátrice Caseau describes a much more complex understanding than the usual view of “sacred landscapes.” Rather than a generalized, pagan sense that nature was somehow sacred, she describes a rich ebb and flow of sacralization, desacralization, and resacralization of specific places in relation to specific deities as peoples and religions migrated and changed. The Christian desacralization was thus a normal part of this process, although accompanied by a new kind of sacralization of place.

Princeton historian Peter Brown has richly documented this, describing how through holy relics and much more importantly, in the East, through the life and being of holy men and women monastics and saints and holy fools “paradise itself came to ooze into the world.”

Nature itself was redeemed. . . . The countryside found its voice again. . . in an ancient and spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. Water became holy again. The hoof-print of his donkey could be seen beside a healing spring, which St. Martin had caused to gush forth from the earth. . . They brought down from heaven to earth a touch of the unshackled, vegetable energy of God’s own paradise.”

But not only does the ascetic, the holy person of God, sanctify the natural environment through serving as a vehicle of the divine energies: he sanctifies the inhabited places as well. In the Byzantine world of the Christian East, Brown continues, the most important conceptual polarity was not that between city and countryside, but rather between the “world” and the “desert” and of course “desert” in the Orthodox East soon came to refer not literally to the arid expanses of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, but just as much to the Caves of Kiev and the wild forests of the Russian taiga or the aerial heights above the North Syrian Highlands. The life of the ascetic who can inhabit the wild places of the earth that are usually seen as uninhabitable is angelic, in contrast to those more timid and conventional Christians, the kosmikoi, who remain “of the world. ” Such ascetic figures, spiritual athletes themselves, become the most important apertures of all, through which holiness and grace become tangible “in” the world as such, and thus in both the city and the country. Two of the great and exemplary ascetics of early Byzantium were St. Symeon the Stylite, and his precocious successor Symeon the Younger (521 592) who as a boy set out for the mountains above Antioch. This younger Symeon, “was believed to have played with mountain lions, calling them ‘kitty.’ Settled on a high mountain-top, yet still accessible to pilgrims from Antioch and elsewhere, Symeon was believed to have brought back to earth, in his own lifetime, the sweet smell of Paradise, and a hint of Adam’s innocent mastery of the animal kingdom.”

Those same wonderful sorts of stories that have been told surrounding St. Francis of Assisi and his empathetic relation to animals and nature virtually unique in the Latin West, and extolled by Scully as noble exceptions to the usual relation to nature in Western Christianity have been observed and recounted innumerable times over in the Byzantine East, from the Desert Fathers and Mothers of fourth century Egypt, to the holy hermits of the Russian taiga in the nineteenth and indeed they are experienced and retold today about not a few of those thousands of monks still living on Mt. Athos, the Holy Mountain: the last, and greatest, Byzantine holy city the remote, and nearly forgotten, monastic republic jutting out some twenty miles into the Aegean, while preserving intact the religion and culture and sensibilities of Byzantium. Nature on Athos, as visitors invariably report, is indeed holy, and its dozens of cities monastic communities hanging on cliff-sides and clinging to shorelines, merging imperceptibly into the landscape are strikingly integrated with nature: holy people living close to the land, gathering their sustenance gently and humbly from a landscape that has been sanctified for a millennium. The natural city resolutely resisting the European Union’s insistence that divest itself of its own “nature” to be “opened up” for mass tourism. But for those fortunate enough to have visited and lingered here, it is the strongest evidence of all that ancient Byzantium was, and may remain for us today, in an exemplary way, the profoundly Natural City.

Bruce Seraphim Foltz teaches philosophy at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Orthodox Lectures at Acton University, June 2015 [AUDIO]

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Ancient Faith Radio is pleased to present the Orthodox lectures from the 2015 Acton University, a week long event that draws people from around the world which took place this past June.

The lectures were delivered by Frs. Johannes Jacobse, Gregory Jensen and Michael Butler. Two more lectures were delivered by Dylan Pahlman, research fellow at the Acton Institute.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Prophet and Critic – Fr. Johannes Jacobse

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Russian writer, contributed indispensably to bringing down the Soviet Union. Conventional Western opinion sees his story, too, as ending then. But the conflict of good against evil and truth against lies runs throughout the moral universe, not just the Soviet scene. Moreover, half of his writings are not yet in English. This course explores the unknown Solzhenitsyn.

East Meets West: Consumerism and Asceticism – Fr. Gregory Jensen

Asceticism is concerned with the “inner transformation of the human person, in his being progressively conformed to Christ.” Understood in this way, asceticism has a foundational role to play in any Christian response to the practical and anthropological challenges of consumerism.

Orthodoxy and Natural Law – Fr. Michael Butler

Eastern Orthodoxy has been ambivalent about natural law. This lecture considers how natural law thinking might work in distinctly Orthodox ways of considering the relationship between faith and reason and examines some implications that might be useful today.

Introduction to Orthodox Social Thought – Dylan Pahman

This course offers an introduction to fundamental principles for Orthodox Christian social thought.

Markets and Monasticism – Dylan Pahman

This course offers a brief survey and analysis of the historical interaction between Christian monasticism and markets, both East and West. The overwhelmingly positive practice of monastic enterprise since the beginning of the movement offers an important context for monastic teachings on wealth, possessions, and poverty, and challenges common caricatures of monasticism as being of no “earthly” good.