What the hell is a Judeo-Christian?

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I don’t know if my dog likes watching news commentary and reporting but, when I come home, that’s what’s on TV sometimes, so he must. From that, I pick up snatches of what your “average joe” is thinking about today.  Today it’s discussion about governments posting religious monuments and stem cell research. It’s a bit like listening to aliens, without the lasers and space ships. One thing that doesn’t seemed to get questioned, I noticed, as I relieved myself in the other room, is the phrase “Judeo-Christian”. Supposedly, the US is predicated on “Judeo-Christian” values and beliefs, and these monuments are “Judeo-Christian”. What the hell is a Judeo-Christian? That, to me, is like saying Islamo-Hindu.

I know, I know, they’re not talking at all about Christianity as I would use the word. They’re linking together components in a historiographical theory that claims there’s some fundamental shared worldview between Jews and Christians. People of the book, they used to call them – tho they don’t include muslims anymore – that went out of vogue in the 1990s – so now that phrase is largely forgotten. I remember the lovely little men who used such terms, with their pony tales and their liberality, who a few years ago wouldn’t think of including muslims in the same breath and, once again, now that the invasion of Iraq and its atrocities are evil, and there’s some color in the white house, they’re back to cautiously regarding the “good muslims” as somehow sharing a history.

One of the exercises we did in college in the History of Mediaeval Philosophy was to compare Avicenna, Averoes, Aquinas, and others, and see whether or not Jews, Muslims, and Roman Catholics (proto-Protestants) sounded more like each other than any of them resembled Holy Orthodoxy. Even the critics, atheists, and committed religionists of other stripes admitted they did. People of the book, indeed. But the religious psychology has just as much in common w. Brahmanism. I know someone who was in a schismatic Roman Catholic group before converting to Holy Orthodoxy. He was always an agitator and never really was happy with his conversion, and now he’s off being a quasi-Buddhist. He doesn’t realize that he just really went back to his original species. The trappings have changed, but not the fundamental premises.

Anyway, I listen to words like this thrown around, with no one batting an eye, and not one voice asking what precisely is the theory behind this compound “Judeo-Christian” and I realize that if an Orthodox person were to stand up and say that the Jews are the enemies of Christ, that there is no separate “dispensation” of salvation for them apart from the Church (standard evangelical speculation), and that we have nothing to do with these false Jews but are ourselves the New Israel, the Israel of God, the ancient religion of Adam, of Noah, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Solomon and David, we would undoubtedly be labelled anti-semitic. And there can be no greater crime in the current political empire than being anti-semitic – our support for zionist Israel is “unwavering”, and is continually being “renewed”. We wouldn’t have to go that far, though, to incur the wrath of “anti-racists”. Just saying, “Judeo-Christian? Don’t know what you mean. We have nothing to do with the Jews, unless you mean the Christian ones. Yes, we have a Patriarchate in Jerusalem – are you talking about them?” – that would do it. That would incur the ire, the wrath, the hatred and vitriol of those who insist that there’s a standing dogma about Jews that we all must share – support for the nation of Israel, and hence for Zionism, their supposed shared content and historical continuity with Christians (yes, I deny that, too), and the notion that the religion of these folk is just as salvific, not to mention the unwillingness to even say the word “Jew” unless it’s in delightfully upbeat or solemnly positive context.

Judeo-Christian? No such thing. Not if we, the Orthodox, are Christian. If we’re not, then yes, certainly, Judaism, Islam, and Protestant Roman Catholicism have a lot of substance and history in common. As religious philosophies, most certainly. Historically, though, Judaism is a concoction of the enemies of Christ, that section of Hebrews who wished to remain anti-Christian, when Christ rose again and filled the world with his body, the Church. Reformed Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, Judaism in general – this is not the faith of the ancients. These are religions of recent invention. True, they draw upon a gnostic and occult that existed alongside the ancient faith, and certainly they draw upon early anti-Christian gnosticism and hermetics, and mediaeval scholastic inventions, just as Protestantism and Roman Catholicism do. But they are not the faith held by the Patriarchs, our Saints. And no Orthodox mind can declare them to be such. All such dispensationalism is abjectly heretical.

It will be deemed anti-semitic to say there is no separate salvation for the Jews. Why not be honest – there’s no separate salvation for anyone? Why make the Jews an issue. We feel the same way about the Greeks. Nationalism doesn’t save. Ethnicity doesn’t save. Christ saves. And apart from Christ, there is no salvation. That is the Christian Faith; it is the very statement of that Faith for which Christ himself was crucified – it is indisputable. Calling something else administratively “Christian” or to declare it “Christian” by sheer exercise of ecclesiastical judgment, is simply dishonest. Words become nonsense when they don’t have even the remotest resemblance to their historical significance.

Same with the word Jew? What is a Jew, anyway? Those who bandy about terms like anti-semitic at the drop of a hat can’t answer that authoritatively. An old adage goes, “Want to start an argument in an elevator full of Jews? Ask what is a Jew – is it a practitioner of some form of Judaism, a citizen of the nation of Israel, or an ethnic designation?” The “Jews” themselves can’t agree. What is it, then, that an anti-semite or an anti-anti-semite is really against? Besides, terms like anti-semite are really inappropriate when we repudiate salvation by any other religion, by any national affiliation, and by any ethnic background with equally disregard. If you were a South African Jain Buddhist of Polish descent, and we said it doesn’t convey any special treatment or presumed theosis, what would you call us then? Even “racist” becomes nonsensical, since Buddhism, for example, is not a race. How about “intolerant”? That gets tossed out there a lot – not to mean what it really means – failing to tolerate something – but to label anyone who fails to say what you want to say about others – that it’s all “just as good”, “six of one”, that there are “many roads, all leading to the same place”.  I think it’s you who is intolerant, if you can’t even speak accurately about those with whom you disagree.

My old bishop used to say, when referring to the temple, to the implements of the altar, to the books kept in the altar, to the psalms sung by the choir, the smoke filling the air, the candles, the vestments, indeed all the physical implements of the ancient faith, “Really, we’re just Jews.” Not these cooked up “Messianic Jews” who get together and play at temple the way evangelicals play at church, wearing yamikas, slaughtering lambs, and reading the King James Bible (the scaled-down 66-book version). I’m talking about being able to refer to Saint Moses, the Patriarch, as easily as to St. Paul. I won’t go into a long set of proofs and illustrations. If you’re Orthodox, these things abound. They’re all around you on a consistent basis. If you need text, you might read Georges Barrois, if you’re interested. I’ve heard his “Jesus Christ and the Temple” delves into this. One can just as easily read the scriptures, in the context of the liturgy of the people who wrote them.

The point is that when I listen to people tossing out this “Judeo-Christianity” and it goes unchallenged and without disclaimer, I think, “They’re not talking about anything that has to do with me. This is an alien religion that I don’t have anything in common with. Not even the words on their monuments which my people wrote, since we do not mean the sames things by those words.” In their attempts to be inclusive, they’ve been exclusive. And I imagine, were I a Buddhist, I could feel marginalized. Here, though, I don’t want these US governments creating monuments to my faith. Historically, that’s been a disaster. Look at all the religious crap that’s been commissioned by rulers throughout the ages. Screw the rulers; give me the monks. You don’t get bizarre arias, and weirdly occult tapestries out of decent monks. These stone billboards they’re dropping onto capitol lawns just muddy the waters and spark arguments over things that aren’t even real, like “founded on Judeo-Christian traditions”. Which practicing Jews signed the Declaration or wrote the Constitution? And come now. You mean Protestant traditions. The US is a Protestant nation. Its tolerance for everything else extends just as far as its ability to coopt it and shape it into something seemingly compatible. It’s a syncretic tradition, all right. That’s what the hyphen means. And all this presumed ‘inclusion’ and ‘tolerance’ is just intolerance of anything but that syncretism. If we don’t want to be what you are, don’t want you speaking for us, deciding for us, whatever, you’ll brand us with labels, bomb our villages, and villify us in your pseudo-histories. Tolerance indeed.

Our Christian Names

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In our quasi-revolutionary, neo-gnostic culture, including most especially academia, and especially still religious academia and its amateur counterpart among those of us who read books, it is popular to refer to every scholar (and eventually everyone who has said anything at all) by surname. “Ecco’s thesis is…” “Jaki is daring when…” “Cantor actually challenges the notion…” The depersonalization of the individual, the treatment of the person as genus – as nature or essence – is in fact heretical to Holy Orthodoxy, which is why we do not refer to Saints in such a manner. Applied to the Holy Trinity, this reversal is in fact the reason for the Great Schism by which Holy Orthodoxy has repudiated all heresy, and the heresy of heresies. Person is not interchangeable with genus. So to speak that way, it truly to speak as a heterodox. It is barbarian speak, it is the speech of the unlearned, of the irreverent, of the thoughtless and impious.

Still, you hear dapper religio-academics referring to “Fr. Schmemman” or just “Schmemman” when they’re being particularly “down to earth”. The sing-songy tone is one of perhaps unintended disdain – the kind of disdain that is inherent in a trivialization of personality, intended or not. One hears it in hip-hop speech, hippie slang, and the “bro” and “dude”-ness of insipid “guy-speak”. And why shouldn’t we expect it among Orthodox, when in some Orthodox Churches you hear of people being called, in the Roman Catholic vein, “Father Anderson” (at least they don’t toss out just “Anderson”), not to mention “Fr. Bill” (who would ever dare to refer to a Saint Bill), or even just “Bill” (“Bill’s not coming to the men’s breakfast today.”) – I think I just threw up. It’s either the heretical anti-personal anthropology of the heterodox or the vain ultra-personalism of their social descendents, thoroughly Protestantized, as if we were joining hands together, singing campfire gospel songs, and listening to the mystical insights of the Fr. Larry or Brother Lenny or even Linda. (well, we have yet to see Father Lisa, but the attitude is the same). The imposition of cultural flippancy on one hand, or cultural utilitarianism on the other, is a great show of religiosity but really a mediocrity of Faith.

I won’t argue this endlessly with naysayers. You are of your tradition, and I am of mine. Be what you are; let’s not argue. I don’t have to eat with you, and you certainly won’t be sitting at my table, if you’re claiming we share the same Faith. And yes, I do eat with out and out Protestants, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Witches, Warlocks, Atheists, and Spiritualists. I don’t eat with people who, pretending to honor Christ, dishonor his Church, claiming it’s all one big religion and I’m (quite unwillingly) a part of it. Rank me among the unbelievers, if that’s the case. Give me Samaritans any day. Those I can pat on the back and make friends. So before you say, “Christ ate with sinners,” think also about who was *not* at his table. Did he break bread with all the false Christs?

The truth is that speaking in this manner ultimately belies the Holy Incarnation of Christ. Christ shared our nature. Christ became man. And his name is Jesus. When you say in your heart that name, you teach your mind how to say all names, and how to think of all your brethren. Why then, this disdain which masquerades as disregard, mere casualness, and laziness? Piety, as my old Bishop used to say, is taking little pains. What pain it was for God to be born with a man’s name.

But there are those who do not wish to dishonor all that is dishonored by using these inappropriate designations. And sometimes they ask how to cultivate a habit of proper attribution. I’m no wise person to consult, but I think it’s helpful, when you think in your mind of “Fr. Alexander” (Schmemann) or “Fr. John” (Romanides) to think of them in the light of “Saint Alexannder” or “Saint John” for whom they are named. Who among us would have the spite to refer to a Saint Maximovitch or a Saint Hotovitzky? If we can’t bring ourselves to what we know and should sense is irreverence toward the Saints, how dare we do it of anyone among us, especially not those icons of the saints who are our teachers and clergy, those who bear Saint’s names? When you say the name of your brother in Christ, think “he will be glorified” if he is living or, if he is reposed, add “pray for me” to your thoughts when you say his name. Fr. John (“pray for me”) Romanides. Fr. Alexander (“save me by your prayers”) Schmemman. Then, over time, you will find it hard to speak shamefully of such people and, perhaps, with mercy, of anyone (“grant me such mercy, Lord”). In fact, what we’ve been doing is speaking of people in a naturalistic way, as though they are dead, or as though they will not live forever. This is, perhaps, part of the cure for our blindness. And of each other, perhaps especially if we find it hard to honor one another in our thoughts, it is good to remember, to be mindful, of such gentle sayings: “he will be saved, and I will be condemned” Matthew, “by his prayers save me” Michael, “remember me, St. Barbara” Barbara, “pray for me her Angel” Micah.

Keep in mind that we call it your “Christian name” for a reason. The name you received at Baptism is the new name, written on a white stone, the name by which you will be called in paradise, the name that in the Kingdom, this economy of Christ’s Incarnation,  you are known by and are referred to. Doesn’t the priest say this name when you receive Holy Communion? Isn’t it written into the prayers said at the altar, behind the iconostasis? The pride it takes to disregard the name, and shake it off, preferring “Homer” and “Kelly” to the names of your patron Saints who watch over you and pray for you, should you make it pride upon pride by applying it likewise to others?

We sometimes hear the xenophobes among us complain that this is an “ethnic” tradition – that it’s Russian or Greek. Such statements beg the question, besides which they are inaccurate. This is the ancient tradition, the living tradition, the one tradition. This is not “your” tradition or “mine”. It’s “ours”. How can we claim such things? It is the tradition of paradise, active in Heaven, and indeed throughout the whole of the One Church, undivided and indivisible by Death, which we repudiate, speaking life everywhere. If the Saints speak to each other this way, gathered around us, when we pray, what arrogance says that the bonds of our Death, the cultural of our natural birth, or the affected culture of pseudo-academia is the basis for what comes out of our mouths? The whole man is made new, speech and all. All must be deified – you must not cling to anything and say, “Not this. Except this.”

And do remember your mother in the Faith, the Church whose missionaries founded your Church. It’s impossible to listen to “Americans” (which are not a people, nor a race, nor even a nationality), refer to traditions as Russian when they received the *entire* Orthodox Faith from the Russians in the first place.  Shame. Sadness. Blindness. Again, I won’t argue this here – not today. One thing at a time. Blindness and foolish talk are everywhere – they are cheap and abundant – trying to cover every argument at once makes truth into a commodity also, and I won’t do it. I will say that I think you know, in your heart, when you’re espousing ideology (be it communist, deconstructionst, neo-fascism, or some glib amateur cultural anthropology), and when you are in fact striving to walk in the footsteps of the Saints down through the ages. It is so much easier to be a succesful rhetorician of ideology than a failed but determined adherent of better men who lived wiser lives.  Easier to be the fathers’ widely heard critic than their poor and obscure imitator. Bleh.

Anyway, I write here for a few reasons. To give people answers who bother me with questions, so they’ll go away, and also so I can think through and give answers clearly, be transparent in what I’ve said, submit it to others to correct, and not let the impulses of the moment govern my response, and so I don’t often have to repeat it. I write also to record thoughts for my own memory, because it’s poor (I am neither mindful nor therefore righteous – I’m forgetful of everything I hope to remember). I am writing also to confess my sins – not the specific circumstances of them, but the sins (Whenever someone accuses you falsely, say “I am guilty”, even if you did not do what they say – say “I am guilty of sins like these” and “Yes, I am prideful. I am an angry man. I am impatient and thoughtless. I have committed all the sins you say except, perhaps, renouncing the Orthodox Faith.”) Here is one place I say such things because, saying them, I hope to believe in them fully and be saved. I write here also to think, because, for me, the two things (writing and thinking) are so tightly interwoven and bound. I need to think, and I need a place to think, a place conducive to the kind of thinking I’m doing. I create such places wherever I want to do a new kind of thinking.

Have you ever picked up a bottle of something and it said not to use it for what it was designed for? Like a children’s toy, clearly designed for a certain age group, that says not to let that age group use it? Or batteries that say not to leave them in the device after use? I wish I could offer a disclaimer like that – “This may poison you. What I say may be not only completely useless but actually harmful. And yet, if you want to use it, it’s here. I won’t stop you.”

Comments

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I get a lot of comments I don’t post. I think it’s only fair to say why I post some and not others.

* I don’t post comments that offer an agenda that I find despicable, tedious, or needlessly controversial, especially when it’s not relevant to the content. Things that come through advocating white supremacy, neoconservative imperialism, hatred of particular ethnic groups (recently got one referring to the “Satanic Serbs”) – I don’t post. For one thing, you might read enough to at least realize who you’re talking to and what the blog is about, before vomiting this stuff all over us. But even so, it just would be material I’d have rebut, so someone else doesn’t have to, sparking a flame war. I only have so much energy and inclination to fight (yes, I have a little), and I see no point in letting other people determine when I’ll do so.

* I don’t post comments that disregard the very underlying premise of the conversation. The comments coming in that begin with the assumption that nothing matters but what you and I come to through some process of discussion or argument. These are the inherently Protestant commentaries that try to persuade through appeals solely to feelings, rhetoric, religious philosophy, or some activity of “coming to agreement” we presumably engage in with each other. I look upon these things as abject Roman Catholicism with the papal mitre simply democratized. Each of us is presumably our own pope, and we pronounce de facto what is and isn’t so, confusing our perceptions with the thing perceived – subject and object. It’s a waste of time for me to post those comments, because I find I’m endlessly making the same point in response: “Go away. We’re not really talking to each other at all. You’re trying to converse by saying, “Well, dismissing all you believe, all your sources of understanding, your religion, your fathers,  your creed, all of it – your entire epistemology, and starting with just you and me here in a blog, let’s come up with our own religion, which will work just like a religious philosophy…” What kind of numb nuts goes in for something like that? It’s the Nigerian E-mail scam of the religious world. Might as well ask to borrow my wallet and my car, setting aside any commitments I might have to protect my family. Not being a dunce, nor inclined to needless repetition, and finding these attempts tedious in the extreme, I have responded to a handful of them, and chase the others off wherever possible. Truly, you can’t argue with a committed Protestant; he can’t hear you, so he just keeps ignoring what you’re saying are your premises and offering speculation or alien premises as substitutes. Drain your brain, he’s saying, and then we can talk.

* I don’t post comments that ignore the fact that previous comments made the same point, and are just being offered as a way to flood the comment box with extra “votes”. In fact, I click “spam” on those, and they stop arriving.

* I don’t post comments that offer to argue it out, without a useful end being proposed. See above – if the goal being proposed is that, by argumentation and discussion, we will arrive together at “the truth”, and have now a religious philosophy we can hold to, I have to remind you this is not a Protestant’s blog. I don’t count invitations to apostasy as useful ends. If the idea is argue so that you’ll understand it better, get better at arguing, etc. – what’s in it for me? That’s right – is your desire to be a better debater of one of these topics a claim on my attention and peace of mind? You’ve heard of spiritual warfare – what do you think I’m off doing, in this mind of mine? I really don’t need to fight a war on two fronts, if I can avoid it. This is called a blog of personal confession – I’m in it because it saves me, not because I want to argue, let alone argue for the sake of arguing. If you can propose a useful, and honest goal, that an Orthodox person can legitimately accept, then maybe arguing something out will be beneficial. So far, no one has done that. And “because I really want to know” is not useful or sincere, if that’s really just something you say to get the argument going – a feint, to invite your rhetorical opponent to reveal their hand. What, do you think you’re dealing with hobbyists? I’m not “just curious” – I’m in this for my life – I’ve been around that block – I’m no dummy.

* I don’t post comments that are out and out pretense. When some one writes, “So basically, you’re right, everyone else is wrong, and unless I believe what you believe, I’m going to Hell.” I don’t bother posting it. This person is not asking a sincere question, they’re summarizing via a mischaracterization, and trying to sell it as an innocent question. Again – no dummy here – a rhetorical question is just a statement with a question mark after it. What, do I seem to be of middling intelligence, with the emotional sophistication of a third grader? Besides being insulting to your host, it’s wasting the time of the audience. It’s more appropriate to yell out, “I know you are, but what am I?” than something that tedious and lame.  Your desire to flop about and whine, “but I’m confused – I’m confused – enlighten me” is not a claim on anyone else’s attention. What, do you think I’m trying to get you “saved”? I’ve no such interest. I’m trying to save myself. I’m not responsible for your feigned desperation to “better understand”, when it’s a cliche for agitation. And no, I’m not “judging” you, I’m avoiding you, because you’re patently obvious in gimmicks that we’ve all come to know and recognize if we have any sense. Have you read Proverbs? Do you not see all the warnings against being taken in by scams? Next time you think I’m judging you, be consistent – send your money to that Nigerian scam artist who just wants a few hundred to withdraw and split thousands with you. Don’t judge him – take him at his word.

There are probably one or two other reasons. But these will do. This post is offered in the interest of fair play, transparency, and  yes, you can detect it, a bit of weariness with reading the same diatribes, illicit offers, and offers to participate in peeing matches. I don’t pretend to be democratic – this is not an open forum. I don’t pretend to give voice to all ideas – what the hell would I want to do that for? And I don’t mind seeming to be inconsistent, if you’re not paying close enough attention. Just because you don’t see the pattern, doesn’t mean there’s not a formula in play. Not that there’s anything wrong with being idiosyncratic – I’m a person – it’s a personal blog – a site of personal confession – I’m working things out, and I expect inconsistency. It’s a home-made cake, not store-bought off the shelf with anti-caking agents in a cake, of all things!  I’m willing to have it appear that I only let through posts I like or think I can refute. In truth, I’ve not seen any new arguments – it’s not like my people haven’t been doing this sort of thing for a very long time. You’d think most of the likely arguments, we’d have heard centuries ago and already responded to, wouldn’t you? It’s not like we’re an invented religion cooked up out of the Enlightenment and presuming, like an institution, to start from scratch, issuing all kinds of “original” pronouncements.

In a way, wouldn’t you expect a blog operated by an Orthodox person to simply toss away most of the same old arguments we’ve heard a thousand times and answered quite effectively and finally once, a long, long time ago?  Why should I repeat all that – read our fathers, if you want to know. Ibid. I don’t need to “hash through” the same old things. I’ve got  a goal here, and if you’re visiting, and reading, and wanting to comment, comment, but keep in mind that goal. I’m not doing this primarily for you, or to broadcast yet another personal religious philosophy from my own pet pulpit. I’m here trying to work out my salvation. If you want to talk with me about it, talk with me about it, but the heterodox agenda stuff, or the personal cultural agenda of some Orthodox people (conservative imperialism, ethnic cleansing, or whatever it may be) is not really an attractive addition to that discussion.

You know, even the post that attracts the most vitriol – the one on Freemasonry – really is just because someone asked me for documentation, and I happily provided it. That’s a good discussion. But then people came along wanting to say, “Yes, but let’s ignore all that, and let’s ignore in fact everything else you’re saying, and let’s make some new religion together, based on our personal whims.” That’s like some prostitute walking up and saying, “Yeah, I see the ring, but wouldn’t a roll in the hay be a great idea today?” I’m married to my Faith. I’m sorry, but building a tinker-toy religion out of parts that we find lying around is really not going to be a temptation for me; in fact, the very idea is repulsive.

If you’ve got nothing else to say but, “Well, but I don’t want you to be that religion, I want you to just walk away from it and come prancing into mine,” then you’re asking us both to commit apostasy – you by cheapening your Faith, and me by departing from the Rock for something as momentarily bewitching as an e-mail scam. What the hell? Don’t you have any self-respect, or respect for what you’re throwing out there and calling “the truth”? If not, why should I respect it, either? My best friend is of another religion. And the turning point, for me, the moment of detente – easing of tensions, came when we both acknowledged that we’re of different peoples. I can break bread with my friend, because I don’t commune with my friend. We don’t confuse things that are distinct, so respect, love, compassion, these are possible. What you offer, when you say that it’s all the same silt, is none of those things – you offer the very death of respect, the meaninglessness of love, and the irrelevance of compassion.

“I am not what you are, and you are not what I am.”  is just as much an appropriate stake at which to be burned as “I will not renounce the Gospel of Christ.” The goal of this blog is not to continually make that confession, but it comes out in nearly every encounter with encroachment, because,  by god, it’s true. And if it were not true, I would make it true, like Abraham, by coming out of Ur, and taking my family with me. The line between us, makes us human, and allows the possibility of real Faith. The absence of the line, the notion that one thing is as good as another, means that no Faith is real – truly, I weary of posting comments by atheists in religious robes. So, sometimes I don’t. I just don’t. In the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Lastly, I plead technology. Comments are letters to the editor, not to the world. This isn’t a forum, it’s a blog. I publish what I think fits, whether it praises, is antagonistic, or just asks a question. I don’t publish things I think miss the point, especially not if it seems intentional. I don’t publish things, usually, that I think are inflammatory. I don’t publish things it takes too much time, attention, or emotional involvement to respond to. And I don’t publish things I think will cause needless bickering. But I will, at least, tell you, up front, that I’m not publishing them. I don’t send out rejection letters. Your comment either appears or it doesn’t. We’re not the New York Times. But I don’t pretend it’s an open forum, and then treat it as though it isn’t. Can you really ask anything else of me but honesty? If I’m not what you want, go elsewhere. There are other blogs. If you have a comment, I welcome it, if it takes into account where you are. This is my chapel. It’s not a church, it’s a chapel. It’s not the private chamber of my heart, nor my icon corner. It’s my chapel, a little out of the way, but still the door is unlocked most of the time. But if you want to have your Vegas-style wedding here, I might lock the door. I’m trying to be saved here. Leave me in peace, if you don’t want to be around that, or honor it.

To those I’ve offended, I apologize. I have no doubt that I sometimes ignore the worthy, flame the innocent, and promote the obnoxious. If you can’t think of times I’ve done so, I can. I am guilty, and beg your forgiveness, and your prayers, so that I can be saved by them, unworthy as I am.

Christ and the Feeding Tube

My wife and I have an understanding. Resuscitate, revive, and sustain life as often and as much as possible. Neither of us will accept any prodding to pull the plug, sign DNR orders, or any such thing.

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We do this, not only because we love one another, and want to live together forever, as we shall in paradise, but also for religious reasons. And we know full well there are those who claim it is Orthodox thinking to “let people go”, to refuse to use “artificial” machines and techniques to save or sustain life. And we think many of these people have imbibed deeply of the spirit of the world, and are not espousing Orthodox thought at all. Some, we allow, have simply misunderstood technology and medicine, or have not thought it through. The prevalence of thinking doesn’t indicate good thinking.

Now to sustaining life: What we’re talking about, quite often, in real terms, is food, water, oxygen, etc. So much of removing “life support” is quite literally what it sounds like – it is removing the things needed to support life. In fact, the most common causes of death in this way, are starvation, thirst, and suffocation. Not only are they painful forms of death, but grotesque and violent, however ironically the very technologies being removed are replaced with technologies to make these less painful or less grotesque – more presentable.

But these are the very things that we are bound by Christ to provide for our families, our brethren, indeed those who have need of them. Feed them. Give them Drink. Etc.  “If anyone doesn’t provide for his own, he is worse than an infidel.” and “If one has the world’s goods, and seeing his brother in need shuts his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” “If anyone’s son asks for bread, does he give him a stone?” “I was hungry, and you fed me. I did thirst, and you gave me drink. Therefore…”

You will hear the religious pundits and armchair religious philosophers tell you that technology has extended life beyond what God intended (as though they know what God intended), and that therefore we have to ask “new questions” about when to stop sustaining life. This is gnostic thinking. I won’t expand on that here, but it is, and this is our response:

The questions aren’t new. The ancients dealt with very real issues of the responsibility to sustain life, or to let it expire. Indeed, the early Orthodox established the first convalescent homes for the elderly, not to mention all of their hospices for the homeless, abandoned, and those dying of leprosy and disease. And they fed them, clothed them, and cared for them with whatever means they had. Once you say that we will give this much care, and no more – this much we will sustain your life, but no longer – under these conditions, but not those, you are engaged in a kind of philosophical relativism that has nothing to do with the love demonstrated by the Church. The testimony of the lives of the Saints stands in stark contrast to and repudiation of the decadent, murderous lives of these contemporary religionists. Denying the Saints, they are neither Catholic nor Christian, nor Orthodox and partakers of our holy tradition.

Raising the dead and healing the sick, those who were not of the Faith prompted the apostles to protest to Christ, and Christ told the apostles to let them be – these were doing their good work in Christ’s name. Even greater things would eventually be done in his name. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a similar  example.

And so now to the question of saving life. Left for dead, without care, the Jew would have died, but the Samaritan, the one with love, says Christ, provided care and feeding, sustained and revived him.

Image via Wikipedia

What technology has done is made it possible to do that better, for longer, perhaps more expensively and with more finesse and precision, but it hasn’t changed the questions. Who dares say that Christ needs to come and preach a new gospel, and address the questions that he forgot or couldn’t forsee. Who dares to say they will do this for Christ, with their religious philosophy? Gnostics. Gnostics every one. Denyers of the gospel. Repudiaters of the Incarnation. Blasphemers of the Holy Spirit.

What is “artificial” is their philosophies, their contrived gospels. Medicine, using the tools and techniques at hand, has been around forever. And Christ himself, sanctified the concept of medicine, by himself accepting the attribution “Great Physician.”

Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him: for the Lord hath created him. For of the most High cometh healing, and he shall receive honour of the king. The skill of the physician shall lift up his head: and in the sight of great men he shall be in admiration. The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them. Was not the water made sweet with wood, that the virtue thereof might be known? And he hath given men skill, that he might be honoured in his marvellous works. With such doth he heal men, and taketh away their pains. Of such doth the apothecary make a confection; and of his works there is no end; and from him is peace over all the earth, My son, in thy sickness be not negligent: but pray unto the Lord, and he will make thee whole. Leave off from sin, and order thine hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all wickedness. Give a sweet savour, and a memorial of fine flour; and make a fat offering, as not being. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him: let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success. For they shall also pray unto the Lord, that he would prosper that, which they give for ease and remedy to prolong life. He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician. - Sirach 38

We hear so often, “for all practical purposes they are dead.” Practical purposes? What does life have to do with practical purposes? And you rail against machines? You’ve just declared that a human life is nothing but a machine.

Did not even the Lord raise one who had died? Was already dead. Was long since dead. He raised him, “Lazarus, come forth!” Indeed, Christ raised all the dead, and when Christ died, the dead rose and walked around and were seen by those who knew them. Christ is the antithesis of these theories of life which are hostile to our history, Faith, and tradition. Christ is the one who goes far beyond the stench of the grave, descending even into Hell to retrieve those who have long since reposed.

Speak against the Lord, Gnostics, if you dare. You repudiate the very one who can save your life, now and forever. But you Orthodox, who are you to decide with the philosophies of the Protestants, the metaphysics of the heretics, who should live and who should die – who is kept alive and cared for too long, and who should be abandoned and their care removed? When you mouth their vanities, you are not my brothers, when I or my wife are sick. Don’t come near our bedside. Stay out of our hospital room. Keep the bony fingers of your heresy from our lives. You are not our brothers; the Samaritan is. Give us the Samaritan. The pagan that saves our lives is the Christian, and the Christian that says, “let them expire” is the pagan, and we will not pray with you.

I have even seen one blasphemer’s “Orthodox” web site that is offering up these “withhold treatment” orders for his congregation and others, as he preaches his vain personal philosophy as though it were the truth. Schemer. Ideologue. There’s one frock in which I cannot find life, one stole under which I cannot find shelter.

Now, I’m not interested in debating this with anyone. Above all else, I see our religion as a religion of life. Did not Christ say as much? God is God of the living. All the enemies of life can offer is religious philosophy – they have no appeal to the one that created life, not recourse to our Holy Tradition that is not polluted with the whispering of others. It is true that some holy men held varieties of opinions on varieties of things. No doubt someone can easily find such an opinion. In the end, I will forgive an opinion, as you must forgive mine.

But if you come near us with your gleaming knife of sacrifice, I will call you “pagan”, which is what you are. Keep away. May God curse the knife that is raised over our living bodies, the testament of his greatness and power. As much as you do not sustain us, you do not sustain Christ. As much as you do not save our lives, you do not save the life of Christ. As much as you withhold treatment from us, you withhold treatment from Christ. And what will the Physician say to you in the Judgment? That you were philosophically right? “Physician, heal thyself!” He has already spoken.

And may God preserve the physician that shows forth the glory of God, with machines, with mixtures, with tubes and tools, with wires and computers, with whatever means he may have. As the Samaritan gave from what means he had, so in the case of my family, give, and you will be rewarded by the Most High God who created us both, who made Heaven and Earth and put it into your hands for this purpose. You are the instrument of the Almighty. Save us, by the prayers of all the Saints.

And even if we babble insanities, “Kill me. Let me go. Starve me. Suffocate me. Abandon me. Go away. It’s my time. I want to die.” What friend hides from his own friend in time of need? What suffering person calls out, “leave me be” that you shrug and leave them be? Who are you? What kind of friends are you? What friend sees his friend on a ledge saying “I don’t want to live,” and thinks, “all right then. To each his own.” If you’re my friend, you will ignore me if I plead for death. You will give me life, because in life is the Spirit of God. Because I get old, you want to abandon me? How is my life less valuable than an infant’s? Who are you to decide which lives have more or less value? Or if I’m unconscious? Is the infant able to tell you his preference for life or death? If you are knocked out, shall I wait until you wake up to ask if you’d like treatment? Try to get around it all you want. Good people, like the Good Samaritan, care for those who are sick and dying. Bad people offer up philosophies over their sick beds.

And to hell with your religious arguments. Christ healed even on the Sabbath. Your argument is with him; you won’t find it here.

Grasping at Nothing

I’ve never felt so profoundly and helplessly Orthodox as when I’ve thrown religion over my shoulder. For the pain of it, for the weakness in it, for the inexorable totality of it. When I’ve neglected the liturgy, and failed at prayer, and broken inside, and hid, and sentenced myself to despair, and tried to live without moving at all – in those moments of life, there’s something that happens. In letting go, I’ve felt myself adrift in something larger than myself, and so my Faith sustains me where I have failed it.

Perhaps it’s hanging onto the Fast, that tangible connection to the rhythm of Faith that holds me when all other forms of confession fail. I will not eat when my Lord is in betrayed, is crucified, when I have done this thing, and brought this upon the world. If there is nothing else, I will starve if need be, before I let go of the sense that meaning exists in the world. I will welcome the desert and the sand into my mouth. That’s what fasting is. And we begin a new fast tomorrow.

Drown me in it, Lord. Take from me this knowledge of fat and richness. Make me lean. Make me know suffering. Thank Thee for not condemning me to constant joy, where there is no meaning, where I am condemned to the silent prison of my mind, to solipsism, to narcissism.

If nothing else, I can hunger. I can know Thy reflection in loss and emptiness. Fill me with loss, and come to me in the void. Grant me the oblivion that, emptied of all else, is full of Thy love and Thee. Crush me with it. Amen. Take from my mind all false images, all pretense of holiness. Let me live in the dark of my tomb.

Apart from this, none of it makes any sense. It’s all a noise-filled room, a crowd of emotions, a maze for the mind. Absence is the chapel of the soul.

A friend shared with me “Super Correctness” (Chapter 63 from Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works). Happily, this piece is also available [online]. Now if I could just find chapter 61 “The Desert in the Backyard”.

I am Not Alone

Have you ever realized that you have received miraculous wealth? An amazingly complex chain of seemingly impossible events has begun to give you your heart’s desire, has saved you, had continually protected, guided, and enlightened you, the way you would do for your own family? And that this is incontrovertably due to Christ’s mercy, to the prayers of his most pure Mother, and the prayers of the Saints on your behalf – and that they have heard you, witnessed you, watched you, and answered you? There is no other possible reaction than to bow low, to kneel, to press down your head in aching gratitude. It is to finally realize that you are loved, that you are not alone, that you have a family, and that, while the world really is out to destroy you, you have a strong defender and protector, just as your own family has in you. And the rest, the rest that can be said, is in private, for the ears of Christ and the Saints. So I have nothing more to say about this right now.

Anonymity & Christian Tradition

I love the anonymity the web provides. And sometimes I confess a perverse sort of pleasure in how some of the most abusive and presumptuous critics are discomfitted by it and scream for more controls, more exposure, less privacy, etc. All in the name of an honesty and accountability they don’t actually model except in quickly offering up their ‘papers’ to anyone who asks – which is more a lazyness and surrender of soul than anything truly decent and honest.

In the religious realm, especially: One has to dismiss the rantings of people who never met an ad hominem they didn’t like – people who’ve never heard of an ad hominem in the first place. People who care not about truth but credentials. People who don’t like dissent, don’t like questions or speculation they can’t attribute to an authority figure, people who want to carry books with the rules spelled out and the authors’ names next to the rules. It’s part of the fundamentalist impulse.

Truly, there are only two reasons that the identity of the author matters:

One reason is so you can accept or dismiss the ideas based on the identity. It’s dishonest, it’s a logical fallacy, and it’s a form of worshipping heroes on the one hand (idolatry) and dismissing those we don’t like or strangers on the other (pride and inhospitality). It is to follow persons, not the truth. The assumption is that the ‘right’ people are usually correct, and the ‘wrong’ people usually aren’t. But it has always been the case that good people with good credentials have offered up swill in place of truth – and our very tradition depends upon the words and deeds of the ‘wrong’ people. Uneducated people, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and Gentiles. Speaking of the “right” people:

“If I, Paul, or an Angel, or anyone comes to you claiming to be Christ, and preaches any other gospel than the one you have received…”

The other reason is so that those who express ideas we don’t like can be punished for them. I’ve been called a “coward” by people who were angry with my ideas. Such claims imply that there’s actually something to be afraid of, and that the person making the claim actually has it in mind. In other words, he’s validating the reason he wants the information – to punish the offender. Why not just come out and say, “If I find out who you are, I’ll do x to you.” The critic relies on dishonesty, chiding the anonymous writer for being afraid, but withholding acknowledgement on what presumably fearful thing he has in mind.

“The owner of the vineyard sent servants to the keepers of the vineyard, to speak to them, but they did not listen and killed them instead.”

I’ve seen priests act like this. I’ve seen people talk of virtue and honesty and dignity and then act like this. Truly it is said, “there will come a time when your own brethren will deliver you up, and think they do a service to God.”

On the one hand, the zealots will persecute others in the name of Christ, always seeking justification in the fact that it’s “those people” – it’s not the correct people – it’s not us. To any such “correct” people reading this, I am with all the incorrect people. I am with the wrong people who are dangerous and a threat to the world you want to create. I am with the people who are making it worse. Do to me what you would do to them. But don’t expect me to hand my head to you on a platter.

On the other hand, the effeminate weaklings who follow names and approved leaders are just as bad. Those who cannot listen to anything without checking the speaker’s credentials – “he’s part of the such and such school” – “he’s one of so and so’s disciples” – “he used to be one of those people”. For these wishy washy relativists, an idea is not actually true in itself – truth is a subjective thing that depends on who says it. They have committed the fundamental theological and anthropological heresy and fallacy of conflating subject and object, person with operation, who I am with what I do. In the tortured confusion of their own minds, they cannot but be led about by whoever is holding up the golden calf as easily as whoever is wearing the mitre.

Personally, I like to point out to those who lecture the anonymous about responsibility and integrity (usually the mouthiest are US citizens – always lecturing the world on how they should live), that their own political, social, and cultural traditions are rife with elegant anonymity – indeed depend on it entirely. From Publius to Samuel Clemens. Of course it’s not necessary to cite religious examples, as these are more interested in asserting their own culture than in following Christ. Christ for them is the Christ of culture. He is not the Christ who could have said:

“Tell no one who I am.”

To those who talk about where they stand religiously, and cite nebulous principles that they interpret against the moral status of the anonymous, I like to mention the many anonymous saints who left anonymous works, did anonymous deeds, and wrote ikons anonymously, and toiled and gave and lived anonymously. If they look closely, they will find some of them in their scriptures. Indeed, the books of scripture are quite often written anonymously. In fact, the entire monastic tradition is like this – the monks give up their family names when they receive orders. It is so obvious that, failing to take stock of the fundamental liberty within their own tradition, the advocates of exposure want dossiers and ID checks and tracking systems and all the apparatus of the worship of the modern state. They have sold their birthright for the pottage of contemporary personalism and tacit depersonalization. For them, persons and ideas have become inseparable. They would make good officers of the state.

“Welcome strangers, for some have entertained angels unawares.”

In any case, originally this site was anonymous by default, because I never saw a reason to add my name. When I found people making such a big deal about it, and listened to them, and looked at my suffering brethren and how others are wrongfully persecuted or simply dismissed, I decided out of solidarity to refuse to add my name. And when I took stock of how the clamour for putting not ideas in the dock but personalities is a clamour for crucifixion, a clamour for illicit trial, I found that I would not add my voice to those who cried out:

“Tell us plainly who you are. Who do you say that you are?”

Instead, I decided to let them squirm, and do with their ignorance what they like, since they do so very little good with what they know.

“Then neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”

If you don’t like my ideas, don’t read them. But you don’t own them, visitor. Nor do you own me. Nor anyone else. Nor is your inconvenience at doing something fundamentally illogical at best (ad hominem) if not illicit, a claim on my activity. And if you are merely curious, then the answer to your question is that I have decided not to comment upon it. I don’t answer the merely curious.

For those of you out there who are considering writing anonymously, I encourage you to be accountable to your Confessor. Tell him about the place you write. Go to confession. Live in such a way that your life can change and is subject to ideas other than your own. And then be free. Perhaps your pride will want to put your name on everything, and anonymity will help you overcome it. Whatever you decide, some of the others of us are holding the line, and hope that makes it easier for you.

Orthodox Fast at Thanksgiving

At Thanksgiving, we’re always greeted with rationalizations, prevarication, and even abuses of Scripture to justify breaking the Fast, and right in the middle of the Fast, too, which makes about as much sense as having a dance contest in the middle of a funeral.

Last year, I spoke to this – it’s just not an Orthodox thing to do. Get permission from some lax Bishop all you want – it’s not right, and we all know it, or should.

This year, I’d like to address the question underlying it all - a question that rarely but occasionally gets articulated in any actual way: “Can I be deified without fasting?” It’s rare that we’re as candid as that, especially when our intent is to violate the fast with a feast, and dress it up in cultural capitulation, blood and soil, patriotism and imperialism, or slavery to Protestant ‘bible’ hermeneutics. It is a Protestant and American holiday after all. In other countries, the Orthodox diaspora have their own national festivals to ignore. But it does get asked, on occasion, much to the chagrin of those who now have to dredge up references to “it’s better to love…” or “fasting without compassion is…”. Yeah, we know all that. And the implication of all of those statements is that it’s not one or the other, but both. The moment you claim it’s one or the other, you’re reading and talking like a Protestant, not an Orthodox. We dont’ do “either/or” – we do “both/and”. Let’s answer the question:

question: “Can I be deified without fasting?”
answer: Why would you be?

I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re being burned at the stake right now, and there’s no time to fast. It’s not like you’re starving to death and the great question is whether to eat a fish or not. You live in a Willy Wonka land of ubiquitous food. The lion’s share of all commercial entities surrounding you have some connection with processing, selling, delivering, or preparing food. A certain percentage of your neighbors are actually off giving food away. Nothing gets so much attention to the local panhandlers as a cardboard sign, “will work for food”. The nation is a temple to food. Gorging is the national pasttime. Even at other passtimes, they’re just not the same without food – sports and hotdogs, movies and popcorn, cubicles and office candy. For the religious, the Sunday buffet. For the non-religious, the Sunday brunch. If the population of the US were livestock, it would all make sense – the engine of the economy is largely driven by cramming as much feed into each individual as humanly possible. Yuppy fashion revolves around tasting the latest – steel cut, hand-rolled, fire-roasted, whatever – bad food dressed in the language of delicate exclusivity. More food is consumed in the US than in the rest of the world combined. There are whole groups of people who live off the food that’s thrown away, the piles of extra crackers, baskets of bread, garnishes and day-old donuts. And you ask, “Can I be saved without fasting?” Why would you be. You’d be just like everyone else. You’d be just going along on the great cultural mud-slide of consumption. Your concern is less salvation than salivation. Deification would be an afterthought – something to play at, philosophically, after your belly were full.

So, I think the clear answer is “No. You can’t be deified without fasting.” And even if someone could, that someone would not be you. In fact, in the context of cultural, there’s nothing so characteristically Orthodox as keeping Fast. We’ve (in many quarters) shaved our men’s faces, bared our women’s luxuriant hair, coated ourselves with makeup and colognes, installed benches from the Protestant meeting halls, hooked up amplifiers to our mediaeval organs, and whitewashed the walls where once the saints surrounded us. We’ve added security guards, parking attendants, paid choirs and singles groups. The number of our committees exceeds the number of attendees at vigils, most of which we’ve transformed into morning Easter and Christmas services, replete with the fashion parades and “come to our church” flyers that we’ve seen the local religionists doing all these years. And for all of that ridiculous capitulation, all of that religious prostitution, all of that whoring after the gods of of the dominant culture, there is one thing left that’s a dividing line between those who believe and those who don’t. Keeping the Fast.

It’s not for nothing that St. Seraphim said, “He who does not fast does not really believe in God, whatever else he may pretend.”

Can I be deified without fasting? There is no deification without the transformation of the body that fasting obtains.

For those with Protestant and Roman Catholic backgrounds, or who were educated in the religious environment in the US culture in general, it seems obvious that salvation is an internal thing, is salvation of the mind, or of the soul. At best, the body, in this attittude, is unimportant.

But this is heresy to the Orthodox. We *are* our bodies. Our bodies *are* us. And there is no salvation apart from deification of the body. And no deification, therefore, apart from the ascetic undertaking of the body. All of the fathers speak of all ordinary Orthodox people transforming the body through ascetic feats. To deny this, or sweep it under the rug, is to deny Orthodoxy itself and, if you’re doing that, why are you concerned about deification in the first place. Have your idols, and ask no further questions. But to even speak of deification, which is what all Orthodox tongues mean by “salvation”, we are talking of what our fathers have experienced, what the Saints have experienced, what Christ himself underwent for our sake, and what the Church has continually said we must undergo with him – the very crucifixion of our bodies, of which fasting is a preparation, a type, and a means.

And lest we wrap our idols with the purple of “thanksgiving”, there is no thanksgiving without mourning, no feasting without fasting, and no proper execution of either apart from the life of Christ, the life of the Church, her calendar, her history, and her movement. All such thanksgiving is a false thanksgiving, and is not honored by God. Sure, the heterodox may in ignorance of the truth achieve salvation before I do, and their many prayers offered incorrectly may be heard while mine are ignored, but we who are Orthodox have no excuse for throwing off what we have received as if to return to ignorance, when we have been enlightened. It is like the man who, as Kahlil Gibran describes, cultivates a limp, so that others may excuse him from work. If we cultivate pretense in order to excuse us from the Fast, how we can claim that thansgiving draws us to the feast?

The feast belongs to those who have fasted. Those who have not, don’t know what a feast is. There is no distinction in their minds. As St. Paul said of those who all speak and make sounds at once, or who babble prayers of gibberish, there is no way to experience prayer for them, because they can’t distinguish one thing from another. So it is with those who “feast” only and do not fast – they don’t really ever feast, either. They can’t know the significance of one activity from another, and therefore all activity is inaccessible to them. Lethargy of body results in lethargy of soul, and the dimming of both.

Our thanksgiving is not of one kind. Now is the time of preparation for the glorious Incarnation of God. Now we are in darkness. Now we are at the end of the history of man. Now we are on the verge of destruction. Now we are lean and the spirit which was given to us has gone out of us, and we are on our last leg in the world. But at such a moment, at such a dry time, at such a lean and hungry time, the God is about to be born and our hope not only renewed but the salvation of God, the deification from on high, to be among us.

At such a time, while we take stock of where our sins have brought us, what Death has done to us, and how without God we are, how we have run after so many idols, have ignored God’s commands, have broken his laws, have disdained his saints and prophets, is now the time that we become gluttons again and proclaim it a holiday? Those who are sensitive at all to what we are doing, as Orthodox, cannot do so. Now is the lean time, the Nativity Fast, the Little Lent, and we shun celebrations and cover ourselves with the ashes of sorrow, until the bright day when God comes to save us.

How will we know that day, if it is like any other day, even if it comes among us? If we’ve already been celebrating and feasting, how will we know any distinction when God is born? You see, we blather on about how Christmas starts earlier and earlier, and yet we have broken the Fast and started too early. We mumble about how Christmas has lost its meaning, and yet we have taken its meaning away in our own awareness, because we were acting as if any given day is a celebration. When Christmas arrives, therefore, are you and I really having Christmas at all? Is the Incarnation really real for us, when we haven’t felt the need for it? When we haven’t known any sorrow, is there any significance in joy? When we haven’t felt our lack, is there any meaning to fullness?

The Orthodox are fasting. We don’t expect the heterodox to do it. We don’t expect the nationalists to do it. We don’t expect the atheists to do it. And they will all be saved before I might – that’s the Orthodox attitude. But precisely because that’s our attitude, we do not stand distant from our own means of salvation – the Fast, the Church, the calendar, the life of Christ we live through every year. We don’t fill our bellies with the attitude that such things don’t matter. At that point, we cease to be asking Orthodox questions at all, and nothing we think or say about the Faith matters. We have ceased to affirm our own existence as bodily creatures and, in the court of logic, we’ve therefore removed the ground of our own assertions. To deny we exist is to deny that we have any thoughts at all, or anything to say. Therefore, listen: be Orthodox. Keep the Fast. Hold the line. Stand strong. It is not so great a thing to not be a weakling. It is only our normal lives, our confession of Faith. It is the love of Christ’s body. It is to say the same thing we say when we stand and say the Creed. For the one who doesn’t fast, all Creeds are gibberish, and Christ’s body and our salvation is inaccessible.

On Friends Parting Ways

I’ve noticed that most of the people around me don’t have friendships that end. In fact, they seem to think it strange that someone might. Sometimes they say, “that doesn’t happen to me.” But I listen to them, and I observe that in fact relationships do sort of stop happening for them – they just seem to dwindle to an occasional phone call, a carbon copied joke in e-mail, and then silence.

In fact, what I see is in some sense they’re both correct and incorrect. They’re correct, because of the meaning of those two words – friendship and end.

It’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because they simply resort to inactivity, and ending is an action. Somehow, this is thought to be better. If they see the person, they exchange the “what are you doing now?” which is very similar to the small talk they made when they first met and the “let’s get together some time”, which they don’t actually mean to do. But, somehow, they’ve escaped the scandal, the shame, or the reality of it ending. They’ve substituted for that an unreality of simple inaction and a preserved fiction that I’m still “cool with” that person.

Likewise, it’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because the meaning of ‘friend’ is so fluid for them, that at any given moment of thought, someone might be or might not be considered a friend. I notice, too, this goes with a level of patronization that keeps either party from really telling the other what he’s thinking. There are rules about how honest you can be. In other words, the ‘friendship’ or ‘non-friendship’ seems to depend on distance rather than closeness. I notice they don’t have non-friends, though – they have people they “know” but don’t usually ever say “he and I aren’t friends” – it’s considered impolite and absolute and drastic. In other words, friendship seems to be a moving target, a social fiction, and a matter of epistemological boundaries. In fact, if you reach across the boundary, and suggest that it’s about all the opposites of those things, you’re seen as seeking a “lover”, a “gay relationship”, or some bizarre form of family or religious bond.

Friendship doesn’t end with the people I see, because they don’t really end relationships, and they aren’t sure what we mean when say friendship in any categorical or definitive way.

My friendships do end. Either I end them, or the other person does. As drastic and extreme, as socially ill-adapted as that will make me seem to the people around me, I actually like that it happens. Not the pain involved, of course. But I’m not all about avoiding pain. People die, people go away, people become someone else. It’s part of living in history. I like it because it comes from being involved in friendship so much, from being involved with the persons involved. It comes from all the things the people around me say “don’t happen to” them. It comes from a mutual search for truth, a mutual attempt at progress, a mutual affinity for penetrating social barriers and finding the scalding naked person underneath and from remaining staunchly loyal to what we each love in the other person. Hell, it comes from loving the other person.

That’s the other thing: people seem just as appalled by the reasons that friendships end. It may be becaused of irreconcilable ideologies, or incompatible assumptions about the world or about relationships, or conflicting goals. People around me seem to assume these are always a bad thing. Or at least a shameful thing to admit in polite company. I don’t think that way. I may be trying to disarm the world, and my friend to arm it, and we realize we just can’t be together. I may be trying to uplift the poor, and my friend to protect the rich. I may be trying to find the meaning in life, and my friend actively working for a nihilist worldview – a world where meaning is out of fashion. Not that my friend is always the bad guy, if we differ. It may be that I have a violent temper, and he’s a peacemaker. Or it may be less clearly moral – it may be that I like to challenge people, and he likes to comfort them, and we can’t seem to each be active at the same time, and we each need to be.

Sometimes, it’s just lethargy vs. action. Perhaps I’m insisting on changing the world, making war on the world, searching for (and actually finding) the truth, and perhaps my friend just wants to “hang out” and finds all that activity to be a distraction, a burden by proxy, or actually “wrong”. We may not judge one another, but we may find that, except for a few laughs over a few things, we’re actually incompatible.

Either way, for reasons like this, and for other reasons, I find, in my experience, that friendships end. Deep, meaningful friendships the moreso. In fact, the kind that cross from a mere acquaintance into what I would call friendship seem almost guaranteed to have a lifespan, and so I now have begun preparing for them to end, the same way I prepare for the people I love to die one day. It’s much like a death. Seven swans and they all, one by one, fly away.

Sometimes it is more drastic, like a betrayal. This can happen, really, only when deep trust has developed. You see the conundrum. People who don’t develop deep, trusting relationships – what I’d call friendships – don’t have friendships that end. People who prefer social fictions to true endings, let even those relationships wither rather than end. I prefer a clean cut.

I know people who, to avoid this, remain entirely within themselves. They don’t trust. They don’t connect in any substantive way. And of course it goes back to the old adage… “to have loved and lost”. I think it’s worth it. Not worth “the risk” – I’ve given up thinking of it as a risk, and committed to thinking of it as a certainty – again, like death.

Invariably, when you say things like these, someone asks, “Yeah, but is it Christian?” So often, in our culture, religion is thought to be about some hypothetical “ought” rather than an ongoing and involved “is”. I don’t know about that. I tend to be suspicious of religious philosophy – it hasn’t done much but lop off heads and burn people at the stake. When I look at our monastics, they do neither – they deal with the smelly feet of the reality of the world, so to speak. They deal with the leprosy of life. They acknowledge Death.

That’s it, you know. To not allow for friendships that end is to try to deny the reality of Death, and to live in a hypothetical ought that is too pure even for the Son of God. But to live with Death, to acknowledge it and live anyway – not to ‘give in’ to it, but to work to overcome it from within – that’s Christian, in my view. That means loving enough that you always lose something. It’s not only always worth it; it’s necessary for our salvation, I think.

To my friend, who you and I have parted ways, pray for me so that I can be saved by your prayers. And forgive me my frailties and failings. They are more than you ever knew. I’m happy that we each cared enough about something that we didn’t just “hang around”. Go with God.

Why meat, wine, and oil?

This weekend I was asked why we fast from meat, fish, eggs, dairy, alcohol, and oil. The person wanted a neat explanation. There isn’t one.

My own understanding will differ from some and we Orthodox are OK with that. We’re not OK with not keeping the rule, but we’re OK with different understandings of why the rule might be in place, especially since there is more than one reason we fast [I already talked about that in another post].

As I see it, we fast from those things which are traditionally or ceremonially regarded as feast foods. By definition and practice, a fast is not a feast, and vice versa. After all, we don’t only fast from foods, but from parties, from spectacles and shows, etc. Whatever event it may be, the death of Our Lord, the darkness of the world and preparation for His Incarnation, his temptation in the wilderness, and ours, the answer can be simple: Our Lord is in such a condition; shall we be celebrating, or covering our heads with sackcloth and ashes, and keeping vigil? For us, there is no union with God, apart from sorrow, grief, dryness. The notion of only happy times, of continual gratification, is foreign to Orthodoxy. We don’t consider it Christian at all, but fundamentally pagan and anti-Christian. God is a burning fire. We have always known it, and said it, and meant it, and we have always fasted, since the first man in the Garden.

Fasting and feasting alternate along a timeline – they are inherently time based, historical activities. And we are a people of holy history, and that is another key point. In becoming Orthodox, one steps into the line of that history, with continuity, not with opposition or resistance. We are always either fasting or feasting, because we are the people of God, created by Him and redeemed by Him, and always following His life, and our calendar, through the Incarnation. We are a people of the calendar, a people of time, a people of history, because we are people of the Incarnation, of the Timeless entering Time, of God becoming man, and living a historical life among us, eating with us, fasting with us, and teaching us to live accordingly.

First, meat. Meat is traditionally a feast food. You’ve heard the phrase “to kill the fatted calf”. Meat, milk, cheese, eggs, among the Orthodox are a way of celebration.  Keep in mind that we are always feasting and fasting, have always been, since time immemorial – since the beginning. People forget, when they ask these questions, that we are not a Protestant religion, that began at a certain time among men, which is based on some particular philosophical stance. We are the religion of the first man, since God made him according to that religion, and we are in accord with our history. Ours is not a belief system, but an asceticism. Ours is not a religious philosophy, but an orthopraxis. The supremacy of doctrine over activity is a late, Western mediaeval, heterodox notion that has nothing to do with us. We reject it – it is heresy. In fact, we have always feasted and fasted since before there were any written doctrines, before there were any scriptures, before there were books, before anyone tried to explain anything. If anything, our way, our tradition, our history is the important thing, and any discussion afterward must be in accordance with it, since it came after. History dictates that, as an inviolable law – that there is a before and an after – an order built into our very condition and context and Orthodox people, as indeed all people are rightly designed to be Orthodox, and were from the beginning, from Adam.

So meat… – we did not try to transform that into a philosophical explanation. When it was necessary to clarify, we clarified, but we are not religionists constructing a positive religious philosophy. As Vladimir Lossky points out, we make statements when they are necessary to protect the faithful, to preserve for them the possibility of salvation. The statements are not “here is how we have built this philosophical construct” but “this is what we say, and this is what we do” – “this is our orthopraxy”. We have always treated meat as something especially regarded for feasting. So when we fast, it is quite normal for us to regard it as inappropriate. As evidence that we were not building a philosophy of meat, we did not regard shellfish the same way. Crabs and mussels and clams were ubiquitous – you picked them up off the ground like leaves. You don’t see this today, because of overfishing, ecological alteration, and climate change. But shellfish was never regarded as a special food, a feast food, because it was as common as grass, and so inappropriate to a feast. It would be a Protestant in the US having ramen noodles at Thanksgiving. The Orthodox always knew how to use food to celebrate. And because we always did, we always knew, almost automatically, what was inappropriate for a feast. Remember, we are either fasting or feasting at all times.

What about oil and wine? (by which we mean alcohol, though in some places, where beer is a ubiquitous part of daily life, served at ever meal, that has been accepted, within normal moderation – though going out drinking is still ridiculously inappropriate as the activity of a fast, just as a party is). Oil has always been a special food. We have always spoken of it among ourselves (listen to the Scriptures being read in our Churches) as special, as significant, as rich, as reserved, as often holy. We annoint with it, ceremonially was our faces with it or cover our heads in it. It is understood, like meat, to be the fat of the land, a richness, a feast food. The same is true of wine. The examples are everywhere, and the reasons obvious. Christ, after all, fasted from wine. If being Christian means anything at all, according to the minimum definition thrown about in the wide open culture, it at least contains the idea of imitating Christ. Again, as an illustration that we did not make a philosophy of wine or of oil: some Orthodox fast from all oil, because they piously see it as the same thing, and some fast only from olive oil (that at least is forbidden during fasts), but find corn oil acceptable, because corn oil where they live is as common as dung, and included in every meal, since they can remember. In South Korea, where Orthodoxy has existed for 100 years, the Metropolitan has given a general economia for sesame oil (it is to Koreans what corn oil is to people in the US). Again, in some Germanic Orthodox churches, beer (as a daily dinner food) is acceptable.

Neither those who would point fingers and say, “you’re in violation – you’re using canola oil!” nor those who would say, “ah, who cares about oil anymore when chocolate and coffee are the happy foods of our time – we should ban those!” are allowed to rule us in this. The Church has been gentle, though in gluttony it is easy to see the fast as extreme. But that is to have already stepped outside the Faith to occupy some presumably automonous plateau of evaluation, and is heretical in principle. We have always fasted with gravity, with somberness, with seriousness, with sorrow, with work, with effort – there is absolutely nothing there that was decided by philosophical principle and simply ‘implemented’. This is how Orthodox people behave.

We have not become like the heterodox, who make personal inclination or attitude the beginning place – and choose what to “give up” for a fast – that is to miss the point – the fast changes your personal inclinations and attitudes, not the other way around. One might as well decide to drape oneself with robes, if one is so inclined, and proclaim onself a bishop. Indeed, some heterodox do. This is all of one piece.

Certainly, if pious people wish to fast from chocolate and coffee, along with what the Church requires, there is nothing wrong with that. There is something deeply heterodox about substituting that decision for what the Church requires. And even the decision to add to it may only be made, in Orthodox praxis, with the Church, in consultation with one’s father confessor. The moment it becomes disconnected from the life and mysteries of the Church, the good thing is now a heterodox thing, and becomes bad. It was not for Adam to decide, on his own, from which fruit to abstain in the Garden. As it was with our father, so it is with us, his children.

Certainly, if pious people understand the prohibition on oil to mean all oil, a dry fast (there is great tradition behind that), let them keep it, if that is how their bishop and their father confessor roll. If they eat corn oil, and that does not conflict in their understanding, with the prohibition on oil, or with the advice of their father confessor and bishop, then who can judge otherwise for them? To do so, is to oppose the Church. God forbid.

As [looking up priest's name] has said, I feel it’s all right to have non-dairy creamer in my coffee, and to have coffee, but I’m not comfortable with vegan bacon. Still, personally, I’ll eat a Boca Burger during the fast. It’s basically our falafel. There are areas here where one cannot make absolute statements on an item by item basis, and one cannot create a general philosophy that explains external reasons for what we fast from – reasons external to our history and tradition.

We have fixed the basic requirement, when clarification became necessary, at meat, fish, dairy, eggs, oil, and wine – just as the Apostle St. Peter had fixed the minimum for avoiding “pagan food” at rejecting at least the drinking of blood and eating strangled things. Our way in this is not a philosophy, nor because it is tradition is it optional in the way the heterodox speak of tradition (“well, it’s tradition, but we don’t keep it”). Phooey on that; it’s just a lie. An Orthodox person who says this has told you a lie, whether he realizes it, or has simply believed the lie himself and is repeating it like a monkey repeats an action it sees. We are not monkeys. In essence, I can just as easily say that there is no “why” for this food vs. that food. We fast – this is what fasting is and has always been – we kept the tradition w/o words until the words were needed, and then we kept the tradition with words, and because the words changed little, the tradition changed less after the words. When you ask for “why”,  you are hypothesizing a different kind of “religion” than that. You are asking that we give it a Western mediaeval philosophical pedigree. This we cannot, need not, should not do.

Personally, I think that there are more than one reason for the same thing. It’s not the Orthodox way to say that one word has only one meaning, nor that there is one law to all truths, one premise to all realities. Reality is not based on premises – reality is reality – reality yields premises, and many of them. The West has it backwards. They try to divide 2 by 6 to get 3.

Among the effects then, if not reasons, I think it’s a true statement, as the monks have discussed, that the rich foods tend to inspire the passions, most especially blood-filled meats do. This isn’t hard to fathom on a practical level when you consider that the US consumes the bulk of the world’s meat, and is also the most violent and warlike civilization in history. Sorry if you don’t like that, but it is the only people to have utilized a nuclear weapon on another civilization. On civilians populations. Intentionally. Twice. The cultural obsession with meat in the United States, in my view, is no coincidence.

I also think that fasting from meat is an abstinence from death, a sign of paradise that was and paradise that is to come. The lion will lie down with the lamb and a little boy will lead them. There will be no more suffering, no more tears, no more death. Yes, you’ll all be non-meat-eaters in Heaven. Even Protestants would have to cook up some new ad campaign to keep their books from adding up to that truth. In fact, the monks, who eat only fish on special feasts, and no meat the rest of the time, are themselves as sign of the coming world, of paradise, and I think that’s one reason. But again, this cannot be, is not, and never has been a philosophical principle, with any absolute weight, or any precise 1:1 correlation with our practice. After all, we fast from milk, which does not require the death of the animal. Though, we fast from eggs also, and I think it’s telling that we fast from reproductive products. This has significance as well, in my view, for paradise and for our history. I simply refuse to make a philosophy of food out of it, nor does the Church teach it as a doctrine. I think it’s true, but I would only comment on the significance I see, and not offer it as an absolute rule, or the “why” of it all. Again, remember, we are not forbidden, most of us, mussels and crabs during the fast, though most of us would understand it to miss the point entirely if we went out for Alaskan King Crab and Maine Lobster during Lent. It’s not really appropriate, and we know better. Some Orthodox, quite piously see all fish, including shellfish, as included in the prohibition on fish, and that’s pious – nothing wrong with that at all.

The Church is gentle. The Church does not pronounce absolutes – cannot do so – because we are not a religious philosophy. Philosophers are the ones who make categorical statements, inviolable ones. We are alive in time and history, the Spirit with and in us, and always have been, since our first breath, and will be always now and ever unto Ages of Ages. Amen.

Praying with Hypoglycemia

First, I don’t make excuses. I’m Orthodox. I believe that my own sin is responsible for the death at work in my body, and therefore for any illness I have and its results. I am responsible. It is my fault. That is the Orthodox mind. I brought death into this world. I am Adam. I did this. All the suffering, all the pain – it’s me – I caused it. I crucified Christ.

Second, it’s a significant challenge to keep it from creating more sin and more death.

The effects are most pronounced before and especially after liturgy. I’m referring to hypoglycemia – low blood sugar. My hypoglycemia is fairly pronounced. The technical part is that I have trouble metabolizing sugar in food. I need protein to help me do so. Lacking that, I need complex carbs (they don’t break down into sugars as quickly as junk carbs) to sustain me until I can get protein. Lacking those, I burn and burn on foods and beverages containing simple sugars. The effects are that, if I don’t have sufficient protein, often enough, I become either lethargic, isolated, and depressed, or I become cranky, perhaps even explosive, impatient and offensive.

Often enough, I get my choice. From midnight Sunday morning until after liturgy is a fast. And this means that after liturgy, before I’ve had protein, or if I’m only having carbs, especially simple ones laden with sugar, I get to choose between avoiding contact with people, keeping to myself, trying to sit alone, being fairly unresponsive, seemingly antisocial, or else to engage, but with that engagement causing me enough pain that I can tend to lash out in a hostile or antisocial way. It’s a lovely choice. I’m not complaining. It’s my fault. But I do recognize the challenge.

Platitudes don’t work. It’s a chemical thing. It’s bonded to my person. It’s death. The easy answers might as well ask me not to die, and not have sinned. The easy answers are themselves signs of death, for their lack of truthfully taking stock of what death is and does and where it comes from. Yes, I know about economia. I have an economia, for dairy during fasts. Not for violating abstinence. And this is sufficient, in my opinion. Economia is not mean to free us from challenges, but to remove barriers to our salvation. Sometimes the lack of challenge is the barrier. So I’m not seeking further economia of that kind.

Living with this means being misunderstood almost all the time. And trying to explain it to someone is just as much a cross, because then the moment you say something unconventional, challenge authority, disagree with what people consider obvious, engage in dissidence, or display unusual behavior, people think (and say, often enough) “ah, well know he has problems.” People refer to the illness to explain anything they can’t otherwise explain. And now you might as well not have engaged them – you have no credibility anyway. Further engagement remains superficial, disappointing, if not demoralizing. It’s usually not worth it, to engage or to explain.

The point is that once you discuss being ill, you no longer even have the credibility to discuss being ill. So you accept alienation, as the normal course of your life. You breathe in the deep Christian tradition of alienation, the great precedents, and you buckle down and endure. You live a life enduring, letting the waves of human reaction wash over you, and strip away flesh and soul, but you go on living anyway. That’s the way you live.

You sit alone a lot, and try to keep from doing harm. You engage on occasion, but cautiously, and sometimes when you can’t disengage and need to, you invent excuses, unless someone’s standing in your face going on and on, oblivious, and then you usually just burst at some point and let the chips fall where they may.

You wait for the moment to try to get some protein in you – some soymilk, some hummus, something to calm you, soothe you, rescue you from the inferno in your soul, and from the acid bath of human contact while you endure. You hold out, hold on, pray if you have the heart, and you hope you don’t ruin yet another potential relationship. But you’re ok if you do; there was barely a chance anyway.

And most of all, you do what it takes to be Orthodox. You keep the Faith. You hold on. The end is coming. Life is a speeding car. You wait to be redeemed, and you accept suffering. You pray that God will let you live, even on the coattails of all those going before. You don’t seek advice – no one understands. You don’t seek help – there is no fixing it. You only get from one day to the next. And for God’s sake, you don’t listen to lectures from people who tell you how it’s supposed to be, how it’s all supposed to work, and what it all means. We live in a culture of little moralisms, of platitudes, of religious fortune cookie catchphrases. You withdraw – you don’t let people explain to you your place in the world. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” Listening only makes it worse.

And if you tell anyone any of this, you do it with no intention of seeking or getting their approval, with no interest in their pity or their assessment of you, and with no hand held out for answers or for some ‘message’. If you say anything, you say it into the void. But you say it, because maybe they’ll understand more for the next person, for the one near them that they don’t understand, and they’ll make the only viable choice other than simply remaining aloof – they’ll choose to live with him, live with who he is, how he is, what he is, and how he lives.

That’s all any of us can do, really. I’m sick and I live with you. I don’t apologize, and I don’t ask you to apologize for not getting it. And likewise, if you want to help, live with me, live with the next guy, live with each other. Live with those you don’t understand, with the stranger, the outcast, the isolated, the unusual, the different, the deviant,the dissident. That’s the meaning of peace. That’s the Christian way to live on the earth. And for some of us, it’s living with the normal people, differently, but as truly as we can.

I’ve not much more to say on this. It’s a bitter choice – not whether to offend, but how to offend, by withdrawing or through engaging. It’s a ludicrous illustration of the absurdity of death and of sin. I have thanked God for my illness. I’ve thank him that he’s allowed me to see the meaning of death in this way. It has saved me. All things truly are for our salvation. God be praised. God have mercy. God heal me, through sickness if need be. Save me by any means. Only do not let me fall away into nothing, into oblivion, save my dust, and reconstitute me a man, and I will serve Thee.

The Faith of Saintly Augustine

I read a recent comment on a blog discussion about St. Augustine. We all know that St. Augustine published things that, in hindsight, have proved unfortunate in how they have been received and used by the heterodox. That, of course, says nothing about how they have been understood by the Orthodox, or were, at least until the last hundred years or so (specifically since Orthodoxy’s supposed renewed contact with the West, by which we must mean, to be factual, it’s widespread Westernization – as illustrated by the very question at hand).

The comment tells us that we have mistakenly asked the question of whether St. Augustine is a saint. The commenter certainly has that much right. How dare anyone presume against mother Church in such a way. But if that punch is pulled, what comes next is a slap as the commenter tells us that the correct question is whether St. Augustine should have been sainted in the first place. Actually, I’ve put words in the writer’s mouth – he said it’s whether St. Augustine should have been considered a saint in the first place. But since that actually makes no sense, as if there is some hypothetical place from which the Church’s activity can be evaluated externally to herself, so we are left with the implicit question which actually then must contain a heterodox approach to ’saintness’ – namely that a saint is someone the Church ‘makes’ as saint by proxy, by mere act of authority, and that’s a heterodox view. We’ll come back to this.

The problem with the whole question of should this person be a saint or not, is first that it presumes that individuals are up to these questions, that there’s a question at all – an implied hypothetical choice (hypotheticals don’t exist), and that such questions are ultimate ahistorical – that they’re philosophical in character and can be philosophically resolved. I’m saying that they’re inherently impious questions, since they presume against the Faith we have received, they contain presuppositions, in other words, that are anti-Orthodox and heretical. The Fathers have always spoken of questions that can have no answers, since the questions themselves are improper – and have (in St. Irenaeus, for example) considered them gnostic in that, instead of having the result the answerer intends – that of resolving a supposed issue, they result in a ‘raised consiciousness’ – change of consciousness – a movement away from a mind that is Orthodox to one that is dialectical, indeed pagan by default, protestant by proxy.

The appropriate question, in direct contradistinction to the cited statement, is not whether St. Augustine should have been considered a saint, but whether in fact he is a saint and, more to the point, how it is Orthodox people determine who to venerate. If the answer is not that we consult our church’s calendar (e.g. June 15th), our ikons, our venerations, and our fathers among the Saints, then we are not Orthodox. We are not being Orthodox. The one who led me into the Faith once counseled me that there are many counterfeit communities out there, masquerading as Orthodoxy, some perhaps even within the widely accepted affiliations. He advised that mutual recognition is not adequate to determine or recognize Orthodoxy. In fact Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy – it either is or isn’t, and if you take away anything from it though it has everything else, it isn’t Orthodoxy. We don’t get to decide whether we’ll venerate the Theotokos or whether we’ll fast, or whether we’ll use these scriptures but not others. There is an Orthodox way, and there’s everything else.

And among the things to watch out for, he counseled, is communities that add their own ’saints’ to be venerated, or most especially take away saints that are venerated. If they remove names, my mentor said, run away – they aren’t being Orthodox. And I hold to this, despite all the wise guys on the web. There’s another problem with asking these impious questions. It is Orthodox, by default, to consider all other men saints. Do we not cross ourselves whenever we pass a cemetary? And why? Because we do not know but that a Saint’s body may repose there. Do we not cross ourselves in remembrance of any of our dead? And why? Because they may be saints.

But moreso, the fathers tell us to consider all men righteous compared to ourselves. There is something so very inappropriate about asking whether it’s really right to consider so and so a saint, or pious, or righteous. It is not for us to judge saints, but rather the saints will judge us. It is the great cloud of witnesses, deified, translated, transfigured, who properly witnesses our behavior, not for us, kicking around on the internet, or expressing our personal opinions at coffee hour or conferences, to question theirs.

Likewise, by default, we Orthodox do not presume to judge the piety of another at all. So if someone says, this man is pious, or that man is pious, who on earth is so arrogant that they will dare to become a doubt-caster. What kind of self-righteous pawn of Satan would accuse the saints. That’s what Satan does, you know. Do we really want to join in?

The point is all of this speculation is the very example of the worst of which St. Augustine has been accused. He always said he was offering speculation. Now those who would detract from him do likewise, justifying it because they are ‘fixing’ Orthodoxy. They are the epitome of what they condemn. Those who have dug a pit have fallen into it. It has become popular, with good reason, to attack Augustinism, and the gnostic heterodoxy or heterodoxization or gnosticization of Augustinists – more correctly to defend against their attack on the Church.

But in terms of our own thinking, it is an error to impute an analysis of Augustinists and Augustinism to St. Augustine, or demand that the Church somehow respond for how the words of one of its own have been used. After all, we might as well ask whether Christ should have been considered Lord, since he likewise, if not prototypically said things that Christians have used to attack Orthodoxy and undermine the continuity of the Church’s message. Indeed, such an analysis is already popular among those who rail against religion, against what they understand to be Christianity, and against who they understand to be Christians.

It is not saying too much to say that as you speak of St. Augustine, so you are speaking of Christ. Indeed, as much as you have done it to the least of his Saints, as much as you have persecuted the lesser of his holy ones, so you have persecuted Christ, and so you have railed against principalities and powers in ignorance. You judge those who will judge angels, and in the name of one who is their King. What folly.

We are not bound to take an erroneous use of one our own’s words and turn them about as a criticism of the Church, for that is what asking such a question does. In fact, that critical method is inherently gnostic and would be right at home on any third century gnostic’s sermon roster. Indeed, the anti-Augustines are practicing Augstinism in their anti-Augustinism. They have conflated person and operation. They have turned the Faith on its head, and committed treason against it. Lord have mercy.

The Orthodox way is to insist on understanding, indeed to persist in understanding, anything written or said by one of the Saints in an Orthodox manner, wherever even remotely possible. After all. St. Gregory Palamas draws heavily on De Trinitate, a book that makes me more than cringe in my futile understanding of it, for his own 150 Chapters and some of his sermons; St. Gregory sees what I don’t. To complain that one’s mind cannot handle this is not a claim on the truth of the Orthodox way, but is rather to confess one’s own sin, one’s own frailty, one’s own weakness – and when it’s a denial of that very principle, one’s own heterodoxy. That some faint and lose heart should not mean that the rest of us put a microphone in their hands and agree to collaborate on their failed persistence. The fathers, including St. Photius the great, champion of Orthodoxy against Augustinism, always treated St. Augustine’s word with reverence. Who, says St. Photius, dares to impute any impious teaching to this man, for in doing so you would impute it to the Church.

Some have said it is because the fathers were ignorant – they didn’t have all of St. Augustine’s writings, and if they did surely they would have railed against them. That is a heresy folded into a heresy. First, we know those from of old who claim to be wiser and better informed than the fathers, to have the knowledge, the insight, and the analysis they didn’t have. They are our enemies of old, the gnostics. Out with you, counterfeiters – show your colors! You have shown them. We know these words, and the fathers also have condemned them already, before you ever grew your first beard hair. St. Irenaeus catalogs this in his encylopedia of gnosticism, against heresies, as a sure sign of gnosticism. We also know this hypothetical chatter – “surely if…” – the fathers have condemned this also – St. Maximus tells us that hypotheticals don’t exist. These are vain imaginings of those who try to step outside of history and play God. The impiety. If the fathers had what you have, you say, they would think and speak as you do, you say.

The worst of these crimes is pride. Immense, boundless pride. It is not for the fathers to learn how to think and speak from you, in some hypothetical world of philosophy; it is for you to learn how to think and speak from them. More correctly, to think and speak as they did. And they have proclaimed Augustine saint, and pious, and righteous, and a champion of the Faith. Who are you? Truly St. Photius is right – you speak against the Church, against the Faith, against the possibility of Faith. You substitute for the Faith your own speculations, your own puffed up self image, and your own philosophy. It is the ultimate act of Protestantism – we need to carry you around with us now, as a new kind of pope, a new bible, to keep us correct. You have assaulted the Church to divide it with the very cleaver of dialectic you condemn, pitting saint against saint, father against father, apostle against apostle. You are Marcion. Repent. Your correctness exceeds that of God himself.

To hell with that kind of correctness. I’m with St. Augustine, and St. Photius, and St. Maximus, and St. Irenaeus, and all the desert fathers who call us to account for our pride, before I am with any religion or Church constructed on paper or in a blog, picking piecemeal through the Faith like litter, building a homonculus religion out of personally preferred parts. But that’s just it – I’m not important – Christ is with St. Augustine – that’s important. But you do take serious risks in trying to divide any of us as you do: if you persist in this way, then whatever Faith you are asking me to subscribe to, I reject on my life. I’m am of the Faith of St. Augustine, and must be, if I wish to be of the Faith of Christ. I’ll tell you where Augustinism thrives – it is never so pronounced among the heterodox as it is among the Orthodox who strive to outdo them in their intellects. Better right now to embrace them all as brothers than to speak againt one of our heroes in this way. Better to call everyone pious, and every impiety piety, than to attack Christ in this way. In a world of absurdity, let Christ be true, though every man of us be made a liar.

That’s where I come down on it. Some of you will not appreciate it. That’s fine. The beatings will continue. And the persecuted Saints will endure it. And Christ will wreak his retribution at the right hour. Add me to your list, if you want. I am not more worthy than my Master, or than any of these. I tell you, if St. Augustine is persecuted, put me down as one of his. Let the cock crow, I will not deny him. The Holy Spirit has come. Burn my eyes out, if you wish. Better me, this one, stupid blogger, than so worthy a hero among the Saints. But I will call to your mind the desert, and those who speak from it, warning us of this pride. Be very careful. Touch not the annointed of God. Do not despise his messengers, among whom is St. Augustine. Read the parable of the vineyard. Do you not see what you are doing? Repent. The Kingdom of God is near. Seek the prayers of St. Augustine, and ask his forgiveness, as I ask yours for offending you. I don’t know what else to do. And if I have a son, I will name him Augustine, just as Bishop Augustinos of Florina (Church of Greece) bears his name, because we need to defend our own, not join the heretics in twisting his words, which is only our own twisted understanding.

Lord unbend our minds. St. Augustine save us. I know that you are a saint, and that i am not, and that is more troubling to me than how someone has trifled with words you have written.

Friend, declare with us all and the infallible 5th Ecumenical Council that you “hold fast to the decrees of the four Councils, and in every way follow the holy Fathers, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Theophilus, John (Chrysostom) of Constantinople, Cyril, Augustine…” Declare yourself among them, rather than seeking to drive a wedge among their names where none exists except in the vanity of your mind. Seek to understand them as they rightly understand each other. Do not speak against the whole church. Don’t you realize it? When you speak against any of the Ecumenical Councils, you speak against the whole church, or separate yourself from it, for we are the Church of the Seven Councils, and none of us can hold the True Faith or be saved who deny them, as St. Athanasius has said. To stand on Sunday and say the Ecumenical Creed means nothing unless you mean all that they mean in the Ecumenical Councils – it is from the Councils that the Creed is our Credo.

Do you not see what you have said and what you have done? Do you not see what you are doing?

To various among your other points:

For a photo of the beautiful St. Augustine Greek Orthodox Church in Vienna, go [here]. Our commenter implies that he cannot find any ancient churches dedicated to the saint, but this is to confuse Orthodoxy with antiquarianism. We Orthodox do not impute some greater degree of spirit to the ancient Church than to the recent. We are not antiquarians but the preservers of the living Faith.

The 6th Ecumenical Counsel, which is infallible, speaks of “most excellent and blessed Augustine”. The Council of Constantinople 1166: refers to “Saint Augustine”. In challenging the sainthood of St. Augustine, one is challenging very specific things, and not some vague inclinations, and most specifically not the knowledge level of these ancients (ironic, since presumably we are venerating the ancient). What is challenged is more significant and serious than the wisdom of the ancients or of the moderns, but perhaps the very Spirit of God.

See also St. Augustine’s “Retractions” which, at the end of his life, lay out things he wished he’d said differently and which show the development of his thought and, most specifically, not only that the format of his writing was speculative, but that humility won out in him, and piety, overall.

For a traditional Greek Icon of St. Augustine, labelled “Saint Augustine”, see the cover of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s book, “The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church”. Our commenter has also written scandalous things about Fr. Seraphim, a saintly man, after Fr. Seraphim refused to collaborate with him in attacking St. Augustine, but this is beside the point. There’s no need to go past the cover, by the standards the critic claims are so telling. And none anyway, if the icon is insufficient for you. An excellent discussion, including a letter by Fr. Seraphim is [here].

Some key points: The Orthodox do not regard the term “blessed” as truly distinct from “saint” or to show a rank or order among saints, but merely as distinguishing a different type of saint or perhaps a different reason for veneration. Also, the Orthodox do not regard someone a saint or not a saint solely on the basis of his thought, otherwise there are many saints that we would reject as such, but often on the basis of his piety, or his pious Christlike actions. So the basis of argument is, as ever, superfluouss. Lastly, there is a distinction between a saint and a father, but this is not a dialectical or categorical distinction, but in a positive way it is a distinction of how we respond to a saint, not a distinction in the saint himself and, in a negative way, it is merely an academic distinction (that is to say: a convention for academic communication). The tendency to confuse academic communication with religious attitude is itself a sign of “Augustinism”.

The charge often laid against the Orthodox, by which I mean those of us who, with the Church, as the Orthodox, without making war on the Church, venerate St. Augustine in peace, is that we are not anti-ecumenistic enough. This is a silly assumption, and an ad hominem.

It is not only quite possible to be deeply Orthodox and venerate St. Augustine, it is required. What the purveyors of ad hominem and guilt by association and begging the question have done, is redefine what it means to be ‘anti-ecumenistic’ by equating it with being anti-St. Augustine. Therefore, if you defend the saint, you may be Orthodox, but not really – you’re a member of the party that doesn’t get it and is destroying Orthodoxy – you occupy the unofficial category of being insufficiently severe. They don’t dare claim you’re not Orthodox (they do in some places, where they don’t “recognize” the rest of the Orthodox) – not too loudly, because removing the authority of the Church, which keeps St. Augustine on the calendar and the walls of our churches, and in the names of churches and bishops, and so on, would remove their own claim to be authoritative. They need us, like parasites. It’s kind of icky. But now of course, they can beg the question, saying that the Orthodox don’t venerate St. Augustine, because you and I are insufficiently Orthodox. Our commitment is suspect. We’re of an unofficially wrong attitude, though we have rejected none of the Church’s doctrines and only presumed to love her champions. And all pious men are champions of the Faith, because all piety is Orthodoxy, just as  all those who attack the Church are impious, and so heretical, though every doctrine they allow is correct.

This division of piety from correctness, this opposition of the two, is so fundamentalist – evangelical – protestant that it boggles the imagination how any Orthodox person could go down such a mental trail. Not really, since they are displaying the very Augustinism they presume to critique, while St. Augustine himself is so catholic that he could never sit with such a mind, nor could any of the saints. Again, it’s kind of icky.

If their were a Byzantine or Russian form of quasi catholic protestantism, they’d fit right in. Fundamentally, they don’t believe in the Church. As one writer points out, they live in a time in which their trust has often been betrayed, and this is the extreme reaction. But brethren, it is necessary, first of all, that we hold the catholic Faith. Let us, though there are a great many other reasons, if for no other reason, hold fast to St. Augustine in order to hold fast to that. To do otherwise separates us from the piety and mind and authority and wisdom and Faith of the Church. If you reject her saints, you are not her child. Who is it who does not love the friends of God, who can be a friend of Christ? Repent. Convert. Leave off your heresy. And those who persuade you to be antagonists against Christ, depart from them.

Personally, and I’ve no wish to proselytize, I prefer the OCA, where you will find both ecumenists and traditionalists and everyone else living in relative harmony, but no faction is allowed to take over and build a private army of co-religionists. I would rather pray with ecumenists, and St. Augustine, and you my militant saint-hating brethren, than join anyone in moral and emotional schism. God defend the Church, at the gates of Hell, and all of us, and St. Augustine.

Some other nice material: [here] and [here]. The entry in the Prologue is on [June 15th].

Sightings

A church sign at a mega-church on the way to work reads “The World is Yours”. Instantly I remembered where I’d heard that before. On the mount, when Christ was being tempted. “I will give you the cities of the world…” What was the response again? “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” Someone should put that on the sign across the street.

Flipping channels last night ran across one of those CSI programs. Common scenario – they were shaking down a religious person with a shady past. Not an Orthodox Jew or a Fundamentalist Mormon in this case, but a Buddhist. The writers’ version of a shady past? He had vandalized a nuclear power plant in his youth. The detectives were pulling out every slur in the books, “I need to check your aura” said the ‘tough lady’ as she scanned him for traces of something. The acceptable slurs are always people of anti-statist religious movements (monks have been causing the world some embarrassment in Myanmar) and anti-statist political movements (e.g. anti-nuclear activists, anti-WTO activists, etc.). If he’d been a black man and they’d said, “Dance, boy!” as they shot at the ground, there’d be blood in the streets. Whenever anyone is unjustly treated, or persecuted for faith, we are all unjustly treated and all persecuted for our Faith. May the Judgment come swiftly, and vindication.