Anathema

I don't agree much with Stephen (his blog is here), but despite our differences (and they are significant) there is that which we may agree upon ...

• That there is absolute Truth, and that that Truth is the Lord Jesus Christ. We may disagree as to how that Truth has been revealed: through Scripture as interpreted by the Puritans, or through Tradition as written by the Bride and Body of Christ, the Church. [Fr. Stephen Freeman addresses the concept of the Church as epistle, as Scripture itself.]
• That we need to be transformed by that Truth - we need to become like Christ. Again a disagreement as to how: my friend believes that that transformation is effected without his will; Orthodox teach that we participate in that transformation.
• That those people who teach otherwise are false shepherds and ear ticklers; that they are heretics preaching a false gospel ... they are leading people away from Truth (the Person of Christ) into error and damnation. And so I am therefore of like mind with Stephen in his criticizing (here and here) of the Emergent Church.

I must confess that I have not paid much attention to the Emergent Church (hereafter EC), regarding it as a Protestant phenomenon and problem. And it does stem from Protestantism, and it is primarily Protestants who are seduced by it. When I have encountered the EC, I have quietly noted that it was far from Orthodoxy, but inevitably disagreed with Protestant reasons (besides the very elementary ones listed above) for dismissing it. But in a more in-depth reading on this movement, I grew very disturbed to find that it touches upon Orthodoxy.

It needs rebuke from an Orthodox standpoint.

A Brief Sketch of the Emergent Church

The EC self-defines as a post-modern church. It does not believe in separations (exclusivity) but in bringing all into one fold (inclusivity). It does not like to condemn sin, unless it be those [orthopractic] sins of omission: failing to care for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden. It speaks of the Love of Christ. It cares about the environment. It likes to borrow spiritual practices to create a pan-spirituality. And it calls itself a "generous orthodoxy", claiming the heritages of disparate and incompatible beliefs.

It likes the mystics: the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the musings of Thomas Merton; it appropriates Hildegard von Bingen, St. Seraphim Sarovsky, St. Francis of Asissi, Thomas à Kempis, Brother Lawrence, the Desert Fathers. It builds a mosaic image of the Church by bringing together all traditions in a strange amalgam that is everything and yet nothing.

And it is not afraid of image, icon, prayer rope or rosary, the Jesus Prayer, chant, incense, candles, crossing oneself, participating in sacraments ... nor for that matter is it afraid of Buddhist asceticism and prayer, or other pagan innovations.

A Vox Clamanti Response

I know that I am a postmodern. I respond to anecdotes and the experiential ... I am not content with word or text alone. My tastes are wide-ranging and may touch on persons of other beliefs whom I admire (eg. George MacDonald, St. Francis of Asissi, Mother Theresa, C.S. Lewis). And yet there is one frequently-recurring tenet of postmodernism that I reject emphatically: relative truth. My sampling of the world's smorgasbord of thought and experience can only be acceptable insofar as these things pertain to absolute Truth - I may read contemporaries George MacDonald and J.M. Barrie but Barrie's doctrines of childhood, while amusing, have less to do with Truth than MacDonald's expositions of simple godliness.

I am disturbed by the EC's appropriation of things Orthodox. This is not reverence or respect for Orthodoxy, but a fundamental rejection of it. The external trappings of Orthodoxy - the so-called "smells and bells" - are part of a complete package that offers a theological reasoning for all it does. Its traditions do not float independent of its teaching, and very frequently its traditions require discipline, mentoring, and a firm grounding in prayer before they are taught.

The acquisition of these traditions by those who don't believe in or care to learn their undergirding theology is an insult at best and a negation of Orthodoxy at worst. But then, what else can we expect of those who reject Christ (who is Truth) but that they also will reject His Bride?

Roger Oakland, one part of whose 6-part discourse Stephen offers on his blog, makes a serious error in his critique of the EC. It is not a return to Roman Catholicism that he should fear, no matter how much the Emergent Church may use her (or Orthodoxy's) externals. No matter what one may claim about her errors, Rome still believes in an absolute Truth and as such points to Christ. The central problem with the EC is a nihilistic denial of Truth which is a denial of Christ. The Enemy unmasked.

There is another word for this denial of an absolute Truth. It is called syncretism and it is a major heresy. Unlike the syncretism of the WCC-type ecumenists which avoids theology and positive assertions of Truth as the (admitted) source of division, this EC is a new syncretism with a newly-manufactured theology to defend its old - abyss-old - nihilism.

Postscript

Pilate asked rhetorically, "What is truth?" His was the wrong question. He should have asked, "Who is Truth?"

Christ is Truth. The only Truth and the only reality. And He is the Way, the only Way to salvation, and the Church is His body. And He is the Life ... the Life of the baptised Christian, the Life that conquered death and the grave, the Life that creates and recreates the Church every minute of every day, the Life of the eighth day.

...

Analogy 1 It is one thing for men to argue over the shape of the sun. There is, of course, a right answer. Someone will be right, and someone will be wrong. But it is something else entirely for a man to claim that there is no sun (or square and round and ringlike, which amount to the same thing).

Analogy 2 Or, alternatively, this could be compared to a classroom where the question is asked, "What is 2 + 2?" There is one answer, and many wrong ones. But everyone who answers with a number believes that there is a correct answer, and therefore has the opportunity and the reasoning capability, no matter how wrong he might initially be, to correct himself. For the person who answers "blue" or "butterfly", on the other hand, before he can engage the question he must first repent of his decision to treat mathematics like poetry.

...

I had a friend in whom I see the fruition of the EC. In her room she would quietly play Gregorian or Tibetan chant while burning incense or smudging sweetgrass at an altar that combined an icon of the Pantocrator of Sinai, an icon of the Horned God, a statue of Buddha, and an earth goddess idol. She was happy with it, because it reflected her spirituality, but I could never decide whether she was worshipping herself or the Great Deceiver.

- V.

Evolution, Historicity, and Ghost Writing the Bible

From Orrologion. I have left his post intact.

- V.

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The Editor's Prophecy

I've got no problem accepting that all of the events in the Old and New Testaments literally, historically happened, 'really'. If one is going to believe that the ever-existing Creator of the Universe decided to not only take on human form, but become a human being consubstantial to us, well then, it isn't hard to believe in all sorts of other things. Same with belief in miracles.

That being said, I think the consensus of the Church over the past 150 years has been that there is no necessity to believe in young earth evolution. This is likely due to the fact that the Genesis and other 'violent' accounts in the OT have been viewed primarily as types and allegories in the East for centuries and centuries prior to Darwin, even if a literal, historical reality to the events was assumed, as well - the 'higher' and 'more spiritual' meaning of these texts was always beyond that of the literal and historical.

The Church has also seemed to accept in a pretty nonplussed way modern critical methodologies and at least some of the results arrived at along this spectrum.

How does one 'square the circle', so to speak, given the fact that so many of our liturgical and patristic texts explicitly or implicitly accept the historicity of the events and persons mentioned and the traditional, single authors (e.g., Moses wrote the Pentateuch, only one Isaiah, Paul wrote Hebrews, etc.)?

I think there is a difference between the historicity of the events described and the reality of the person of the prophet/author describing.

There is also in Orthodoxy - and therefore also in the Church's precursor, Israel - a long history of 'secrecy'. Humility is honored. Saints will feign madness, they will not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Joseph will seem not to know his brothers. There are many examples.

It is my contention that many of the authors of the biblical texts may in fact be compilers and editors. They may also feign their identity leaving themselves either anonymous or pointing to a greater light than themselves, out of humility. St. Xenia of Petersburg wore her husband's clothes and would only respond to her husband's name - she was taking on the ascetic endeavor (podvig) of foolishness-for-Christ's-sake quite literally in her husband's name and on his behalf.

Similarly, sometimes humble, anonymous prophets may have pulled together writings and tales written or told by others (explaining the different 'tones' or 'vocabulary' within a work) to their own prophetic end. What is historical is the editor's prophecy, though the building blocks of that editorial creation may or may not be historically 'true'. What is most important, and this is agreed on by the Fathers, is that the typological and allegorical meanings of the Scriptures are the most important.

Our only question is whether the historical is also 'true' - and, it should be noted, historical is different than literal.

Christ literally spoke of birds of the air and flowers of the field, as to whether he was referring of specific, historical birds and flowers is a different question; Christ literally spoke of a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, whether these were real historical men that experienced the things Christ mentioned is a different question.

(Many of the arguments against 'fundamentalist' and 'literal' readings of Scripture are in fact arguments for the use of typology and allegory and against assuming the literal reading is historical. Much of the confusion is (purposefully?) due to a conflation of these distinct arguments.)

It seems to me that historicity can be left to science, archaeology, etc. and a case can be made either way. It doesn't really matter in the same way it doesn't matter whether Shakespeare's Macbeth acted, thought and spoke like the historical Macbeth. An editor/prophet is making a different point - just like many of the posts here do not reflect my own thoughts and words though my editorial intent would push one toward a certain way of viewing the world - by using the building blocks available to him. When Macbeth speaks, we do not say Macbeth-S when referring to the character in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Macbeth-H when referring to surviving documents written by the historical man. We simply say 'Macbeth'.

It's not good to constantly be winking at the audience and reminding them that you're really just an actor and not 'really' _______. Neither does a metaphor remain a metaphor if it is explained - that's called a simile.

- Christopher Orr

Hell & Subhumanity in Art

Two experiences stand out in my mind. I was once asked to accompany a friend to an exhibition on Picasso (I went). And once I ingested (over the course of a morning) a massive tome on Salvadore Dali.

Both were slow descents into Hell.

Kinds of Art

I find that there are four types of art for me.

1. There is the art that is so beautiful that it is a physical pain. I have only felt this with something I have seen in person, never yet in a book or on a screen. In these cases the only thing to do is to walk away, sit down, and then come back. ... I sometimes imagine that the holiness of God is akin to this painful beauty that can only be appropriated in small doses.

2. There is the art that is good and wholesome, that grows on me and becomes increasingly dear, valuable. Like a friend, a fine wine, a well-brewed beer, a Cuban cigar, or a much-read book, I need to adjust to the flavour - roll it on my tongue - before it is revealed. The flavour gives it the depth and richness that makes it worth coming back to.

3. There is the art that is the equivalent of musack - it is a background noise that becomes annoying when it is the focus of attention. When I saw Renoir in person, I was surprised to find that his paintings were to me bland, without sustenance. I moved on.

4. And then there is the art that is wrong. It can be sensed immediately as wrong or even evil (as in the case of Bacon's Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X). In others there may be an initial piquance or cachet (like college dorm Dali prints) that masks the perversion beneath. In my journeys through the massive output of both Dali and Picasso, the flavour soured and the spell quickly lost its charm as their art spoke their hells for them.

Fr. Seraphim

Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke of art like this last category, art that came out of Nihilism, art that came out of the lower depths, art that taught a subhumanity.

And in fact such an image has quite recently been portrayed; it is the image of contemporary painting and sculpture, that which has arisen, for the most part, since the end of the Second World War, as if to give form to the reality produced by the most concentrated era of Nihilism in human history.

The human form, it would seem, has been rediscovered in this art; out of the chaos of total abstraction, identifiable shapes emerge. The result, supposedly, is a new humanism, a return to man that is all the more significant in that - unlike so many of the artistic schools of the 20th century - it is not an artificial contrivance whose substance is hidden behind a cloud of irrationalist jargon, but a spontaneous growth that would seem to have deep roots in the soul of contemporary man. In the work, for example, of Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jose Luis Cuevas - to take an international sampling - there seems to be a genuinely contemporary art that, without abandoning the disorder and freedom of abstraction, turns its attention away from mere escape toward a serious human commitment.

But what kind of man is it to which this art has returned? It is certainly not Christian man, man in the image of God, for no modern man can believe in him; nor is it the somewhat diluted man of the old humanism, whom all advanced thinkers regard as discredited and outmoded. It is not even the man disfigured and denatured in the earlier Cubist and Expressionist art of this century; rather, it begins where that art leaves off, and attempts to enter a new realm, to depict a new man.

To the Orthodox Christian observer, concerned not with what the avant-garde finds fashionable or sophisticated, but with truth, little reflection should be required to penetrate to the secret of this art: there is no question of man in it at all; it is an art at once subhuman and demonic. It is not man who is the subject of this art, but some lower creature who has emerged (arrived is Giacometti's word for it) from unknown depths.

The bodies this creature assumes (and in all its metamorphoses it is always the same creature) are not necessarily distorted violently; twisted and dismembered as they are, they are often more realistic than the figures of man in earlier modern art. This creature, it is clear, is not the victim of some violent attack; rather, he was born deformed, he is a genuine mutation. One cannot but notice the likeness between some of these figures and photographs of the deformed children born recently to thousands of women who had taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy; and we have doubtless not seen the last of such monstrous coincidences.

Even more revealing than the bodies of these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say that these faces express hopelessness; that would be to ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures more or less adjusted to the world they know, a world not hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but a-human. The anguish and rage and despair of earlier Expressionists is here frozen, as it were, and cut off from a world to which they had at least the relation of denial, so as to make a world of their own.

Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose.

From here, recently shared in the blogosphere by Daniel Matsui here.

The "Artists" in Question

Alberto Giacometti













Jean Dubuffet













Francis Bacon













Leon Golub













Jose Luis Cuevas













- V.

And the New Patriarch is ...

His Eminence Metropolitan KIRILL of Smolensk and Kaliningrad.

Image from LA Times.

He will be enthroned on Sunday.

Many God grant him many years and much wisdom.

- V.

Your Creepy Thought of the Day

... brought to you by the letter Y.

As in why, oh why did I have to read this gem?

We face a choice. We could allow this crisis to start a retreat from globalisation.

As some want, we could close our markets - for capital, financial services, trade and for labour - and reduce the risks of globalisation, but that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade, and confine millions to global poverty.

Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth pangs of a new global order, and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global economy, not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting new rules for this new global order. (Found in various places - here is one source.)
- British PM Gordon Brown.

I like the phrases "a new global order" and "a new internationalism" best.

Somewhere out there, there is a man, a woman, a family packing up the house to move permanently to the cottage, the mountains, the bomb shelter. I almost wish I were moving with them.

- V.

A New Patriarch

The Russian Orthodox Church (or the Moscow Patriarchate) is electing its new patriarch this week.

Patriarch Alexiy II, a hierarch who was widely respected in the Orthodox world, died last month. We pray that the Lord would remember him eternally, and we pray also that his successor would be God-annointed and -appointed. The MP has the largest number of Orthodox of any jurisdiction (165 of 220 million total), and its leadership is not based in a hostile territory, nor it is sweating under scandal - it is uniquely placed to speak the voice of authentic Orthodoxy to the world, without constraint or moral taint. And many Orthodox have come to expect that voice from the MP.

We would like to see that continue. We would like to see a godly man upon the patriarchal throne, a man of humility, but not an innovator or a "modernizer".

The council of bishops has narrowed the options to three men. We do not know the characters of any of the three, only what Reuters and others see fit to print, but God knows, and we pray that His will be done. From Reuters:

[In order, left to right:]

• Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, a 59-year-old head of the church's economic affairs widely regarded as the traditionalists' favoured candidate, polled 32 votes.
• [Metropolitan] Kirill [of Smolensk and Kaliningrad], the church's 62-year-old top diplomat who raised hopes of a rapprochement by meeting Pope Benedict in the Vatican in December 2007, won 97 of the 197 valid votes cast.
• Belarussian-based Metropolitan Filaret [of Minsk and Slutsk] had 16 ballots. The 73-year-old cleric has good relations with the large Catholic community in Belarus and is also close to President Alexander Lukashenko, accused in the West of crushing democracy.

Voting in the final round could differ dramatically from the first ballot because it will be held in the church's Local Council -- which unlike the Bishop's Council includes laypeople and monks.

[Bulleting, editing, reordering mine.]

- V.

Disaster Strikes Ottawa

I have friends in Ottawa, the (currently) frigid capital of Canada, and I thought I would take a moment to share their pain with you.

It doesn't appear that their situation is getting much play outside of Ottawa itself - at least, my search for news articles found nothing from outside the city - but the people of Ottawa are experiencing an unnatural disaster. Namely, a bus strike, now in its 46th day.

This is a grim kind of ascesis, an ascesis made abuse because it isn't voluntary.

It seems that bus drivers want more money, or to keep their current scheduling. It seems that the city wants to save money, or to bully the drivers into worse hours. It depends on who is doing the talking. But I don't think many people in Ottawa care anymore what either the bus drivers' union or the city says - they just want their city back.

Let me put this into perspective. Ottawa has frequently been called the coldest capital of the world. I don't know enough to dispute it, but we'll take it as assumed that it is cold. I do know that there was a nasty cold snap a couple weeks ago where the mercury dipped below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And then there were a couple snowstorms where a foot of snow fell.

Meanwhile, the poor and the destitute have to walk, or stay at home.

Meet Anna Kraisingerova. She is 59, and she walks 6 hours to and from work, 18 km (11 miles). Happily, her story is now known, and there has been an outpouring of kindness.

But there are those whose stories do not yet have a happy ending.

Meet businessmen who are losing a third of their business.
Meet store owners who have no business.
Meet Burmese Christians who have no Church.

This bus strike is inhumane.

- V.