Nihilism as the end of atheism is a historical necessity

Comments

33 responses to “Nihilism as the end of atheism is a historical necessity”

1. Scott Pennington

   November 21, 2010

   . . . and not just for our subjective, earthly lives . . .

   1 Corinthians 15:12-20
   Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

   Reply
2. Eliot Ryan

   November 21, 2010

   We are in a fight for our lives.

   We are fighting for our souls …
   Elder Cleopa:

   Brothers, never forget that our soul is immortal. Let me tell you one thing: we are mere strangers and passers-by here on earth. Listen to what the Psalm book says: Unworthy is man on earth and a stranger, just like all his ancestors. Nobody stays in this world. We are not here to stay. Down here is a ceaseless passing-by; we come by birth and leave by death.
   God tells Isaiah: Listen, prophet, call out to the people and tell them: All man’s body is grass and all man’s glory is like the flower of the grass. The grass has wilted and the flower has fallen, yet God’s word remains for ever. So let us not rely on this life, brothers, because it?s nothing but shadow and dream.

   But do you know what remains for eternity? Our soul. It is clear that our bodies turn to dust. As we bury and unbury our dead one can see how little time it takes for them to turn into dust. Especially after a while, not even the bones remain; it all turns into nothingness.

   This is also the first of God’s commandments, that one is dust and into dust one shall return. Yet the soul never dies. The soul remains unto the ages of ages, because it is spirit and cannot die. That is how God has made it.

   Those who, alienated from God, do not believe in the existence of the immortal soul, will try to attain biological immortality by slowing down the aging process as much as possible. For them, all of life is what we see here on earth.
   I believe this is why we see such a mad race towards the prolongation of life: moving from embryo farms to fetus farms to replace organs, stem cell research to cure neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, etc.

   Now, many people are concerned about the rapid increase in population over the past two centuries. They claim that humans are beginning to overpopulate the Earth, and that the planet may not be able to sustain the present or any larger number of inhabitants. And yet they wish to live longer? Who will have the right live longer? Certainly not everybody.

   Perhaps in this light we better understand the prophecies of Orthodox Church Fathers: a WWIII meant to destroy and annihilate as many human lives as possible will break out. The war will be followed by a great famine.

   The Third World War will not be for repentance, but for annihilation; but the Lord will leave the strongest alive, that they might confront him [antichrist].

   Those who will fast and endure fasting, those are the ones who will survive, because the Holy Spirit will preserve them; those will also be the ones closer to God in the time of great famine and perdition.

   This is a possible path for a world led by people afflicted with self-assurance, “reason” and “logic thinking”.

   Elder Paisios counseled:

   We ought always to be careful and be in constant hesitation about whether things are really as we think. For when someone is constantly occupied with his thoughts and trusts in them, the devil will manage things in such a way that he will make the man evil, even if by nature he was good.

   The ancient fathers did not trust their thoughts at all, but even in the smallest things, when they had to give an answer, they addressed the matter in their prayer, joining to it fasting, in order in some way to ‘force’ Divine Grace to inform them what was the right answer according to God. And when they received the ‘information,’ they gave the answer.

   Today I observe that even with great matters, when someone asks, before he has even had the time to complete his question, we interrupt him and answer him. This shows that not only do we not seek enlightenment from the Grace of God, but we do not even judge with the reason God gave us. On the contrary, whatever our thoughts suggest to us, immediately, without hesitation, we trust it and consent to it, often with disastrous results.

   Reply
3. Harry Coin

   November 21, 2010

   Fr. Hans, the atheist rejection of God doesn’t entail anything on the atheist’s part dependent upon beliefs held by non-atheists. As the nature of their belief is to affirm a negative there is no logical problem with arriving at the same attitude toward any particular issue as a non-atheist might arrive. An atheist could affirm ‘life is good’ or ‘Christian values are correct but for reasons other than those Christians hold’, etc.

   Reply
   1. Isa Almisry

      November 21, 2010

      No, they can’t.

      I used to have this argument with a good atheist friend of mine, who affirmed that atheists could be moral. She was stumped, however, when I pointed out that the question wasn’t whether atheists could be moral but the argument of why they should.

      She might choose morality, but what of the atheist who rejected it? Why the humanism of Albert Einstein over that of Kim Jong Il? How is Sartre less indepted to the Gospel than Kierkegard? When the humanists point to the Spanish Inquisition, how do they exonerate themselves of the Reign of Terror and the Purges of Stalin?

      I’ve yet to see a humanist come up with a convincing moral imperative.

      Reply
      1. Harry Coin

         November 22, 2010

         Isa, you see the thing is: they feel no need for your category of ‘moral imperative’, or the more mild of your characterization of ‘why they should’. That position feels completely ‘okay’ with ‘seemed like the right thing to do at the time’. Very much in the same mode we Orthodox feel no need to swing at the Vatican Catholic’s position for “the need” we Orthodox ought to, but don’t, have for ‘a theory of primacy’. Fish don’t need bicycles, Christians don’t need ‘a theory of primacy’ and its presupposed conclusions.

         My attitude is to encourage, support and cooperate as is proper with all right choices and hope that such hints at why the ‘right ones’ seem right start to add up over time.

         To answer your question regarding why should or ought the atheist choose less rather than more horrific theories– I think we need to content ourselves with leaving reason to the side and working with the hope in everyone for survival and betterment.

         We Christians ought to take comfort in the things we uphold as proper generally resonate with better health, longer life, greater human warmth, dignity and peace. Atheists will generally will find themselves greatly outnumbered by their own peers not to mention the rest of us to the extent they attempt to oppose these things.

         Reply
4. George Michalopulos

   November 21, 2010

   Very well put Fr. If I may be so bold as to think aloud here, I have been perplexed by the kerygma of Christ’s resurrection and why it was so life- and civilizational transforming. I believe that not only was the Resurrection a historical event, but that we are living with the cosmological consequences –the background radiation if you will–of that occurrence. It was as physicists like to call certain catastrophic events, an “event horizon.” The Resurrecton altered space and time as we know it. I believe that this is summed up beautifully in the liturgical poetry of the Orthodox Church.

   Stick with me here. This is why even atheists (as you pointed out) are arguing from a Christian viewpoint, why atheism itself (as opposed to paganism) could only arise from a culture that has a Christian mindset. This is why the scientific method could only arise in a Christian milieu; likewise the rule of law (tempered by mercy), the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery.

   Nature, if it had its way, mandates as a historical necessity the subjugation of classes and/or races of men, war, infanticide, genocide, etc. If Darwinism is all there is, that is no God, no transendence, just the mere agglomeration of molecules, then good and evil by necessity cannot exist. As Dostoevsky said, then “all is permitted.” As Nietzsche said, the Superman would be “beyond good and evil.”

   Of course Christianity never eradicated those things, but the kerygma fundamentally altered man’s fallen state so that he could at least see that evil exists and that he can’t always be a slave to it. What pricked these thoughts was your debate in which you mentioned Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I was a very young lad, I can tell you that even the most die-hard segregationist had to go outside of the Gospel to go on believing that blacks were inferior and needed to be segregated from whites. That’s why King ultimately succeeded, because try as we might, we could not maintain a pagan worldview. The Gospel and all its background radiation would not simply allow it.

   What do you think? Am I on to something? (My apologies to all the physicists out there.)

   Reply
   1. Eliot Ryan

      November 22, 2010

      George: There is not just background radiation. Christ is the primary source of radiation or light. Light gives us the ability to choose between truth and falsehood.
      The one who obeys Christ’s instruction “DENY YOURSELF, PICK UP YOUR CROSS, AND FOLLOW ME” becomes a new source o radiation, a veritable beacon of light and salvation to the world. This is the light of the Saints. The light of the Saints is often rejected by their fellowmen because they love sin and dark deeds.

      Reply
      1. George Michalopulos

         November 22, 2010

         Eliot, I appreciate the sharpenning of the dialogue. As I said, I was “thinking aloud” and trying to formulate the “why” of post-Resurrection history. (And not all that well, I might add.)

         Reply
5. Michael Bauman

   November 21, 2010

   I posit that before the Incarnation, the world, indeed the cosmos was in disorder tending to non-exisitence. When God became man the whole cosmos was reordered, tending toward life with all men being drawn toward the Life. Even though our addiction to sin is still representative of the disorder, the direction has been reversed.

   As St. Athanasius pointed out, the pagan gods were no more as they were revealed either as human concepts or demons.

   Since Jesus Christ is life, the wholesale rejection of Him entails embracing death.

   Ontologically, it means the rejection of who we are as human beings while we embrace only the physical and immediate emotional parts of ourselves,i.e. the most transient parts subject to corruption. So we have an emphasis on our feelings and on our sexual satisfaction.

   Reply
6. Nick Katich

   November 22, 2010

   Fr. Hans:

   It would appear that you have hit the proverbial nail on the head; however with a caveat that is actually inherent in your statement contained at the end:

   Nothing exists beyond Him. Atheism, then, is not a return to paganism since this path is a historical impossibility. It is, rather, a descent into the cold regions where life cannot exist and the end result, again, by historical necessity, must be a place where the suffering will become greater than the slavery to fate and despair known by the pre-Christian ancients. Historical necessity allows no other conclusion.

   Man, in my view, by necessity fills voids because he cannot by nature tolerate the thought of “nothingness”. Man also, by his fallen nature, thinks that he is the center of the universe, one who knows all and is all. Man will therefore seek to find a solution.

   We see the solution happening in the here and now. Without sounding Hegelian, the tension between Christianity and Nihilism which exists in those minds who reject Christianity but who fear Nihilism will be to replace Him with the State. What Lenin failed in the long run to achieve by force is slowly now being achieved by moral imperative.

   The objective basis of morality is slowly being ground in “Man” himself. Man must be allowed to live in a healty environment which the State must preserve; hence the environmentalism of the post-modern politics. Man must be allowed to live in good health; hence the post-modern politician’s penchant against soft drinks, toys in Happy Meals, etc. Man’s dignity must be preserved; hence the post-modern politican’s penchant for “levelling” on a social level and “dumbing down” on an educational level. The list can go on and on.

   Having made “Man” the objective basis of morality, only the State can insure, through the “New Class” (for, as Djilas discovered, there is no such thing as a classless society), that “Man” is preserved and protected against his own individuality. Hence “Man”, as an abstraction, must be exhalted and placed on the cosmic pedestal, and no “man” (i.e. individual) can stand in the way.

   Statism, therefore will become the “place where the suffering will become greater than the slavery to fate and despair known by the pre-Christian ancients”.

   To further develop your thought (which is in the right direction), I would suggests a reconsideration, in light of your developing concept, of St. Justin of Celije’s “The Supreme Value and Infallible Criterion” and C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”.

   P.S. Your debate was outstanding!

   Reply
   1. Isa Almisry

      November 22, 2010

      Fr. Schmemann of blessed memory notes how Christianity is a way was too successful, removing the power of death. Being thus freed, modern man doesn’t know what to do with himself.

      Reply
      1. Fr. Johannes Jacobse

         November 22, 2010

         Sociologist Peter Berger (“The Heretical Imperative” 1979) says the end result of this success (which is really a function of culture, the myth of progress probably works into this) is boredom. David Bentley Hart touches on this too. Boredom is one factor in modern culture that drives man to self-destructive beliefs and behaviors.

         Reply
         1. Harry Coin

            November 22, 2010

            There is something to this ‘boredom’ consequence leading to decay. The French royalty were really bored in their decaying days, how many stories involving sorry consequences of ‘ennui’.

            We’ve heard of the extensively really true and pure actual Russian Orthodox royalty, royally bored and having a good old time shooting buffalo for hope of being less bored.

            Fr. Hans briefly touched on something of a ‘classification of atheisms various species’. Those that, by whatever process, recognize a virtue such as ‘better knowledge of nature’ or ‘better artistic performance’ and work to attain it seem somehow less ‘atheist’ than those that deem it wise to kill as many as necessary to improve one’s own quality of life.

            Reply
         2. Harry Coin

            November 22, 2010

            Thinking more about it I really think this ‘boredom’ or ‘ennui’ idea is on the right track. An athiest living in relative comfort might really be in a pickle finding any source of motivation. That John Malkovitch character comes to mind. Comparable to a marble sitting a bowl– hard to find a reason to put out enough effort to climb anywhere, do anything.

            Reply
         3. Eliot Ryan

            November 24, 2010

            The loneliness and boredom pandemic is caused by selfishness and ignorance. “We are products of a corrupt culture that teaches selfishness”. Many live selfishly, striving to acquire worldly power and material possessions, and to fill the emptiness inside them with passing pleasure. “Grab every single morsel of happiness which comes your way” becomes their motto. Often, their effort to attain happiness implies to willingly hurt others. They cannot adjust to the demands of married or religious life.

            The history of the Church teaches us that the saints were neither lonely nor bored. They lived for Christ!

            About Prayer – by Fr. Cleopa

            St. John of the Ladder says: Whoever has found sweetness of prayer, will always want solitude. And St. Isaac the Syrian says: Whoever has found sweetness of prayer, will flee from crowds as a wild donkey! He will want to stay in that sweetness and in his dialogue with God, always. And vain chatter and business and other things will draw him away from prayer, but he will always be sorry and long for it whenever that happens.

            God doesn’t ask us to only take our body out of the world and run into the woods; but it is with our minds that we should leave the world. I could sit in the midst of the noisy world, as St. Theodosius would do – the initiator of monastic communities – yet they would see him pray as a pillar of fire, in the middle of the world. He would receive three thousand poor in his dining hall every day and would tend to them at table. And you would see him in the middle of the world just as he would have been in the farthest desert, because he had acquired perfection in that. He would no longer hear or watch anything of this world, but only the things Above. But such a life belongs only to the ones who have perfected that [practice].

            Reply
   2. Eliot Ryan

      November 22, 2010

      Indeed, outstanding debate!

      During a lecture at the University of California in 1981, Fr. Seraphim Rose attempted to reach out to students.
      Today, with the advent of modern technology, our reach and impact, has increased exponentially. In less than a week, thousands watched online “The Source of Human Morality” debate. This is a very good time to educate and attempt to awake people (especially the young) of the world by every possible means before they become enslaved and imprisoned by sin.

      Reply
7. T. Nathaniel

   November 22, 2010

   Fr. Hans,

   I appreciate this line of thought. But isn’t a nod to Fr. Seraphim in order here.

   This sort of thinking would have been a welcome addition to your debate – especially in order to pry reason out of Matt Dilahunty’s hands as any sort of criterion for moral rightness. This would have at least exposed him for the utilitarian or Hobbesian that he must inevitably be as an atheist.

   If there is no God, and thus no rational order inherent in the universe, then reason itself can be nothing but a complex behavior which is oriented toward survival and nothing more. Thus it cannot really issue commands that are absolute and universal. It must exist as a slave to the passions and nothing more. The only things capable of issuing commands then for the atheist are self-preservation or pleasure, the latter of which, if we accept an evolutionary perspective is ultimately reduced to self-preservation, since selection for survivability is what has determined even what we find pleasant.

   Atheists today are keen to claim a robust role for reason in their philosophy (even calling it a philosophy seems absurd since they rely so much on a scientistic positivism and are so ignorant of the history of philosophy). But rationalism has always been more amenable to theistic belief than empiricism. Most of the major rationalists in the history of philosophy have thought that God’s existence could be proved in one way or another. I am not saying that you should have tried to prove that God exists in your debate, since this is incredibly difficult to do, and the God that is proved is not clearly the God of Abraham anyway. But I do think that you could have taken away any claims that Matt made to rationality.

   If you had pushed him on this point he would have had to move to some sort of utilitarianism (he even said in the debate a few times, following Sam Harris, that health could function as a standard of goodness). Once a commitment to utilitarianism is exposed, he loses any claim to the inherent dignity and worth of human beings and then your comments about the gulag and the concentration camp receive the context that makes them more palatable.

   Reply
   1. Wesley J. Smith

      November 22, 2010

      Just because one is an atheist, doesn’t mean that he or she will not “believe” or have faith. In fact, I don’t think human beings are capable of believing in nothing. (What was Chesterton’s great quote about when one stops believing in God, they won’t believe in nothing, but anything?)

      While I don’t get into religion at all in my work, I see these tendencies all the time in those with whom I contend. Transhumanists, for example, almost all tend to be atheist, or at least materialist. But it is a quasi religion in that it has a dogma–ending all suffering (human and animal) via technological redesign and radical individualism, an eschatology that proclaims the coming of a quasi second coming known as “the singularity” in which technology will hit a tipping point after which technology will be unstoppable and result in a superior post human species, the end result of which will be material immortality and a quasi New Jerusalem. (I remember one telling me he was a “Buddhist transhumanist. I pointed out that is an oxymoron. Buddhists say that the material reality is an illusion. Transhumanists think that the material world is all there is.)

      And, of course, transhumanism is just a new eugenics, which specifically denies human intrinsic dignity as it says we are not good enough and have to “seize control of our own evolution,” which of course, would not be evolution.

      Another materialistic approach is “scientism” that pretends science can determine morality. We saw some of that in your Baltimore debate.

      We will also see a new paganism, with a vague spiritualism that will not be atheistic, but will be New Agey, or worship nature, etc. I think that most non theists will end up here because it allows a belief in the afterlife, which brings hope, without any constraint on individual morality, which seems to drive a lot of this in my view.

      But what would a true atheistic morality be? The more famous New Atheists, as you also noted in Baltimore, borrow from what they like about Judeo/Christianity, while decrying what they think of as moralism. But I recall a French atheist taking these advocates to task, writing that was not true atheistic morality, but a morality that lacks the courage of its convictions. He said–I wish I could remember his name–that a true atheistic creed would be utilitarian–to eliminate suffering, even if that eliminates the sufferer–and hedonism–get all the pleasure you can for tomorrow you die. That is what Huxley saw coming in Brave New World.

      Reply
8. Nick Katich

   November 22, 2010

   Isa: I’m going to out on a limb and disagree with the Blessed Father with whomn I am in complete agreement with just about everything else. To do so, I must digress, more for the reason of clarifying my own thought than for preaching.

   The problem I think is inherent in our Fallen nature. By this, I do not mean that we were created that way or that that was our nature pre-Fall. We became that way by Adam’s choice in the first instance and, by act of will, we continue to emulate Adam. (and, no; inherency of nature and act of will are not necessary contradictions).

   St. Justin’s point is that the Fall was not caused by an act of disobedience against God. That is too superficial, although disobedience was involved. To St. Justin, the real cause of the Fall was the belief (made by choice) of placing “Man” on the cosmic pedestal; to believe that Man is the point of reference within the rest of Creation; to believe that Man, gifted with reason, can do all things, which thread runs through Western culture with ever increasing frequency, at least since the Renaissance and finding a huge boost during the Enlightment. In placing Man on the cosmic pedestal, Adam could easily commit the act of disobedience since Man knows best what is best for Man.

   To St. Justin, a remarkable change occured during the early part of the Second Millenium in the West. By placing reason on the same pedestal as faith, man once again took a bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. By attempting to harmonize the two, al la Aquinas, the Great Conversation was opened in Western culture as to whether it is possible to harmonize the two. And, as soon as reason replaces revelation, guess what. Man again becomes the referrence point; he once again mounts the cosmic pedestal.

   One result of this is a not so subtle an attempt to restore revelation and re-reconcile it with reason. And in whom better can this fusion take place than in the one man has a special channel through which he uniquely receives revelation. Of course I speak of the one who claims to sit in the only Chair given to and left behind by Peter. And, if one man can be said to be infallabile, why not all men, asked Luther, Calvin, etc. Now the Great Conversation began to have sub-conversations, faith vs. reason, faith vs. works, faith as a rejection of reason, and so forth.

   Brief digression over.

   To say that the Church was too successful is tantamount to saying that it is inherent in Christianity in its ultimate successes to evolve into a secular (atheistic?) culture. I don’t think that Father Alexander would ever posit something like that.

   In order to measure its success, one needs to determine (define) its actual mission and to measure its success against the scale of fullfilment of that mission. I’m now really going to go out on a limb. Based on my grading scale with mission as the subject, it can be said that it has been a failure, though not an abysmal one (C- would be the grade). Why do I say this.

   The Church, in the narrow sense of the earthly institution(s) under the stewardship of men, has mainly viewed its mission as the saving of souls. Under that guise, it has tortured and killed heretics so as to prevent their poisoning and jepordizing the souls of the faithful. It has burned books to keep the mind of the faithful from pollution. In its Western manifestation, it has fought war after war in the name of religion (like the Thirty Years War). In its Roman manifestation, it has declared the point of reference in salvation not to be God but to be he who sits in the Chair of Peter. It stole from the poor by the creation of indulgences. It normalized sin by the creation of Purgatory, so on and so forth.

   It not surprising that in the West it gradually lost its moral authority. It is not surprising that Protestants against Rome first appeared and that, after the Thirty Years War, secular Protestants against Christendom next appeared during the Enlightenment. All of this is not an illogical result of focusing its mission on the salvation of souls or, as Dostoyevski points out in the Grand Inquisitor, making people believe that they are saving souls. As they say, perception is everything. Therefore, make rules and make people believe that if they follow the rules, they will be guaranteed salvation.

   What the Church in the Patristic era was about in terms of mission was the healing of souls rather than saving them, although saving them is the ultimate hope of their being healed. God saves them, or not. The Church is supposed to help heal them. That is the mission and message that Romanides extracted from the Fathers. Healing souls means loving heretics, not killing them; teaching noetic prayer and not burning books; communing people, not making them pay indulgence taxes; teaching people to love God, not making them to fear Purgatory; making Christ the reference point, not an old worn out Chair that actually belonged to Linus and not to Peter.

   That is what the Church’s purpose is, ought and should have been. I submit that Western civilization would have been a lot different today if it maintained the Patristic context. Inventing the Isodorian Decretals is no different the the post-modernist disinventing God. The goose led the way; the gander merely followed.

   Fr. Hans, the fight is afoot, not just for our lives, but also for our souls. The outcome will truly be a revelation.

   Reply
9. Isa Almisry

   November 22, 2010

   To St. Justin, a remarkable change occured during the early part of the Second Millenium in the West. By placing reason on the same pedestal as faith, man once again took a bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. By attempting to harmonize the two, al la Aquinas, the Great Conversation was opened in Western culture as to whether it is possible to harmonize the two. And, as soon as reason replaces revelation, guess what. Man again becomes the referrence point; he once again mounts the cosmic pedestal

   I have to disagree, ever so slightly, with the great saint. It was not the Tree of Knowledge, but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve didn not act like Newton and Pascal (both, much to the embarrassment of the militant secularists, committed Christians and giants of science, Newton stating his physics (around a tenth of his output) was only for the service of his theological work (the other 9/10s)), but rather like Leopold and Loeb committing the perfect crime just to prove something, that they were beyond good and evil.

   The Vatican epitomizes this mistake in Humanae Vitae “This kind of question requires from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection on the principles of the moral teaching on marriage—a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation.” The Church’s moral teaching is based on the divine Revelation (“thou shalt not eat…”), and the natural law only enriches and illuminates our understanding of it. To base ourselves on natural law (“when [we] saw that the Tree was good for food…”)is what has contaminated Western moral theology since at least Thomas Aquinas (ironically called the “Angelic Doctor,” not the “Physics Doctor”). The problem is not harmonizing-nature is only in order when it is in accord with the will of the Creator which He has revealed-but the attempt to arrive at Revelation by natural law.

   To say that the Church was too successful is tantamount to saying that it is inherent in Christianity in its ultimate successes to evolve into a secular (atheistic?) culture. I don’t think that Father Alexander would ever posit something like that.

   I am grossly simplying the eloquent argument he put forth (btw, he said that the highest honor he ever received was learning that his “For the Life of the World” was being published by samizdat). It is akin to Kierkegards “Attack on Christianity,” which was not an attack on the Gospel but its cheapening, when the king receives baptism and taking up the Cross is reduced to social conformity to the established morality. Kierkegaard rightly points out that the present success of the social standing of the Church does not validate the claims of the Son of Man crucified as a criminal to being the Son of God. Only Faith does that.

   And this Faith is what Kierkegard (and I think Fr. Schmemann etc.) means by “subjectivity is truth” and “truth is subjectivity.” Truth does not derive its importance by discorvering objective facts: how one relates oneself to those matters of fact and acts on them demonstrates the importance of Truth. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity. As St. James warns “you believe God is One? The demons so believe and tremble.” Unless that knowledge informs our person and our place and action in the world, we are no better than the demon, or the atheits.

   Christ said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” not the method, the fact, and the value. We must know Him as He is (I AM), a Person, not an object or abstraction. The West erred by thinking that knowing about Him suffices, whereas one must know Him. What the West has done is decided that once the symptomns subsided, they decided to stop taking the medication. Do that with antiobotics, and you make your body a petrie dish to raise super stains of germs. Do that with Faith, and you make your soul a perfect place for seven spirits worse than the one expelled (luke 11:26).

   Reply
   1. Fr. Johannes Jacobse

      November 23, 2010

      Regarding the “subjectivity of truth.” Christos Yannaras has a great chapter in “The Freedom of Morality” titled “Pietism as an Ecclesiological Heresy” that lays out the theological rationale for the necessity of moral action you outline above but from a different direction.

      The conceptual overlap between the pietistic impulse in American culture and the necessity of subjective moral action (I agree with your thesis of “truth-subjectivity” above) portends some confusion for American Orthodox I think. The Roman solution is the notion of an operative natural law as you point out. The Orthodox solution is to elevate the Church as the locus of (ontological) communion between people and thus the antidote for a ‘subjectivity without boundaries’ — a kind of corral around subjectivity that prevents it from devolving into pietism.

      I’m not sure if the Yannaras and Schememann definition of the Church works either, though. The sociology strikes me as too idealistic. On the Greek side it too often morphs into a hermeneutic of Byzantine supremacy, on the other/American side it leads to the the notion that the proper observance of rubrics is the pathway to Christ. I am not denying that the Church is the “pillar and ground of the truth” of course. I’m merely questioning whether some popular understandings of what this means is adequate to the cultural task at hand.

      Reply
      1. Michael Bauman

         November 23, 2010

         In one sense the task of consciously building a cultrual Christianity is going to fail because the essence of Christianity and the cultural pneumbra of it is the personal encounter with the risen Lord in the community of believers.

         Any artificial construction simply doesn’t have the life it needs to really work.

         Reply
10. Nick Katich

    November 22, 2010

    Isa: The Tree of Knowledge is my shorthand. I’m sure both Fr. Justin and I the full name. I’ll ponder your other comments.

    Reply
11. Nick Katich

    November 23, 2010

    Isa: There is nothing you said that I cannot agree with. We are just approaching the matter from different directions. “What the West has done is decided that once the symptomns subsided, they decided to stop taking the medication”. Hence, my basis for the saving v. healing of souls distinction. Sapienti sat

    Reply
    1. Isa Almisry

       November 23, 2010

       Yes, I think we are simpatios.

       Reply
12. Winston Smith

    November 23, 2010

    A couple of thoughts:

    I will not dignify any concept by calling it an ‘historical necessity’ because I reject Marx, and all his intellectual tripe, utterly.

    There are fashions in thought both fleeting and long term, and nihilism, as a fashionable thought, has almost run its course. Nihilism is a bleak, pessimistic and depressing pall, under which nothing can grow. The only authentic response to life for a true nihilist is, ultimately, self-annihilation. We’ve been self-destructing for the last 100 years and are rapidly approaching the point of total dehumanization. The tide will turn–sooner, rather than later. Having manifested an idea to its uttermost extreme, people will ultimately seek more fertile avenues of activity. (That may be the inherent value of boredom.) As a small example, you can see this now, with the resurgence of interest in classical art training and formal values in art. Abstraction is dead.

    The Christianity rejected by the West is Western Christianity, not Eastern. If my only choice were Western Christianty in all of its perverse manifestations, I would not now be a Christian. There is–to my mind, at least–boundless opportunity for the Eastern Orthodox church to lead the spiritual recovery of western civilization. One major reason is that its authenticity is not circumscribed by logic. Rather, its validity is enhanced by mystery. Counterintuitive though it may seem, people accept mystery more readily than they accept tortured logic. And they are not looking for judgement, they are looking for healing. In our fallen-ness, it’s a need that will always be with us. The Christ of the Eastern church is a healer.

    Come what may, we must keep the flame alive.

    Reply
    1. Fr. Johannes Jacobse

       November 23, 2010

       How about “historical inevitability”?

       More on the rest of your post later.

       Reply
       1. Chris

          November 23, 2010

          Father, what does historical inevitability do to our free will?

          Reply
          1. Fr. Johannes Jacobse

             November 23, 2010

             It doesn’t affect it all. My term “historical inevitability” deals more with the trajectory of culture.

             One other point though, I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of “free will.” I prefer “radical freedom”, that is, our freedom is so free that we can turn our back on our Creator. Our freedom of course consists of the freedom to obey or disobey, but the fact that disobedience is, well, allowed, or to put it another way that our Lord is not coercive — he does not compel us to believe — is a remarkable testament to the sovereignty granted to mankind. (Calvinists don’t like that, but then Calvinists have great trouble with human freedom.) The freedom of course is necessary for love to be love. Love cannot exist without freedom; ultimately love also circumscribes and directs that freedom.

             Reply
    2. Eliot Ryan

       November 23, 2010

       If my only choice were Western Christianty in all of its perverse manifestations, I would not now be a Christian.

       Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury not become Fr Roman?

       Nevertheless, the article does reveal that the Anglican Archbishop’s first encounter with God was at a liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, when he was aged 14. Here he met the ‘living God’ and when he left he felt that he ‘had seen glory and praise for the first time’. ‘I felt I had seen and heard people who were behaving as if God were real. I came away with the sense of absolute objectivity and majesty and beauty of God which I have never forgotten. If people worshipped like this, I felt God must be a great deal more real (than) I have ever learnt him so far’.

       Reply
    3. Chris

       November 23, 2010

       Interesting thoughts. I tend to agree. I also find it interesting that in the Wests’ movement towards Eastern Christianity is the protestant facination with Messianic Judiasm. I’ve even heard that one Messianic Christian in California is attempting to “recreate” the ancient Liturgies. Hopefully, he’ll come to see that Orthodoxy has already done this and preserved it. But I also fear that we may have a return of “Judaizers” and their attempt to push “authencity closer to Jewish” (please note. I’m not trying to be anti-semetic here.)

       Reply
       1. Fr. Johannes Jacobse

          November 23, 2010

          Quite by accident almost ten years back, I met the leader of the Messianic Jewish movement on a street in New York. We just basically bumped into each other, had a quick conversation and I told him: “If you want to follow your Judaism to its final completion you would become Orthodox Christian.”

          Reply
       2. Isa Almisry

          November 23, 2010

          They might be coming at the right time: it seems the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in Palestine has a majority of Hebrew members now.

          Reply