The Wheel Issue 11

WHEEL THE

ISSUE 11 | FALL 2017

CREATION AND DISCOVERY Models of Reality in Faith and Science Andrei Rublev and Russian Art Reading The Benedict Option

WHEEL THE

ISSUE 11 | FALL 2017

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Faith and Science: Models of Reality as Sources of Conflict Archbishop Lazar (Puhalo)

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In Vitro Fertilization and the Beginning of Human Life

POETRY DESK

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Pre-Post-Liturgical Nap David O’Neal

DISCOVERIES

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Attributing the Zvenigorodsky Chin Levon Nersesyan talks with Oxana Golovko

FAITH AND REASON

Gayle Woloschak

FAITH AND REASON 30 Creation, Faith, and Science Theodore Feldman 35 Taxonomy and Anthropology Sergius Halvorsen 42 Science’s Deepest Belief Alexei Tsvelik READING ROOM

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Reading The Benedict Option with MacIntyre and Schmemann Adam A. J. DeVille

Š 2017 The Wheel. All rights reserved.

ISSN 2379 - 8262 (print) ISSN 2379 - 8270 (online) May be reproduced and distributed for noncommercial use.

Editorial Board Inga Leonova Timothy Scott Clark Joseph Clarke Katherine Kelaidis Gregory Tucker Managing Editor Samuel Bauer Graphic Designer Anastasia Semash Advisory Board Archpriest Robert M. Arida Sergei Chapnin Archdeacon John Chryssavgis Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun Pantelis Kalaitzidis Archpriest Andrew Louth Gayle E. Woloschak

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FAITH AND REASON

Faith and Science: Models of Reality as Sources of Conflict Archbishop Lazar (Puhalo) It is my proposal to demonstrate that almost all of the apparent conflicts between science and faith arise from models of reality and not from reality itself. Such conflicts may be resolved by reexamining the models of reality we hold that are based on obsolete information.

The Church Fathers should perhaps be given credit for possessing such integrity and intelligence that, had they had access to the technology and information at hand in our century, they would have been able to restructure their understanding of the history, geography, and nature of the earth and the universe. The holy Fathers were open to the learning and experience of the world around them and utilized that learning themselves. There is every reason to surmise that they would utilize our own contemporary exploration and ability to reshape many of their own models of reality.

The reshaping of our models of reality does not contravene our basic dogmatic understandings about God as creator and redeemer. In fact, the discoveries of the past century only open us up to greater wonder at the beauty of the universe and at its fragility. This wonder can also open to us a greater appreciation for the presence of God and his role in sustaining our universe. We need not limit the role and plan of God by the boundThe Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

aries of our own finite understanding and wisdom, but can open up our minds to the beauty, the vastness, the fragility, and the dimensionality of the universe, as a way of expanding our relationship with God in faith and love. When we cling to rigid and frozen models of reality, particularly those based in literalist understandings of Scripture and in non-dogmatic statements of the holy Fathers about science and history, we deprive ourselves of reality itself. We close ourselves off from a more full discovery of God’s presence, even though he is “everywhere present and fills all things.”

Note: This essay was published in 2005 in the journal of the Academy of Romanian Scientists.

Modern physics and cosmology have become “superstar” subjects. There is, however, an admirable and dignified modesty among physicists who acknowledge that they offer us only models of reality, rather than reality itself. When Niels Bohr said that “the purpose of science is not to know the essence of nature, but to discover what can be known about nature,” he reminded us that science is a method of exploration, not the final arbiter of facts and understanding. Science is not an alternative to revelation.

This same dignified modesty is expressed in the Orthodox Christian concept of apophatic theology. Apophatic theology acknowledges that doctrinal and poetic formulations are secondary worlds, models. They are more or 5

1

See Gregory of Nyssa, That There Are Not Three Gods.

less adequate in giving words and concepts to our encounter with ultimate reality. Since no one can know or comprehend the essence of God, even the dogma of the Trinity must be understood as a secondary world: a conceptual framework of enormous importance and clarity that is the best we can do in the framing of language for the experience of the ineffable—but, nevertheless, a model of reality.1 When we assume that we have a concrete definition of the Divine, we step onto the path of those who built the Tower of Babel. We will examine later the problems created in Western Scholastic theology when philosophical theologians attempted to present such models as facts which were legally definable, adequate, and comprehensible by reason.

The modesty of science was expressed by physicist Werner Heisenberg when he said that we have no framework for correlating the mathematical symbols of quantum physics with concepts in everyday language, nor can we satisfactorily discuss atoms in normal language.

The evidence upon which scientific exploration builds models of reality can only be expressed symbolically by a mathematical formalism, which might be the closest one can come to expressing a metaphor for the great mysteries it encounters but does not resolve.

In order to understand the essence of this discussion better, let us first explain the meaning of models of reality.

Perhaps the best way to do this is to look at history’s most famous clash between models of reality. In the year 1500, the prevailing model of the universe in the West was neat, tidy, dogmatic—and completely wrong. It was generally believed that the earth was located at the center of a harmonious system of concentric circles.

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These diaphanous crystal rings were delineated by the heavenly bodies that revolved in perfectly circular orbits around the earth. The sun rotated around the earth, as did everything else in the universe. There could be no essential change within the region of the harmonious spheres. The greatest of the philosophers and the teachings of the Church agreed: Earth did not move. The sun rose and set as it orbited the earth. This system was not thought to be a model of reality. It was held to be reality itself—a reality so concrete that it could be a dogma of faith.

Then, however, an insignificant science-oriented monk somewhere in north central Europe had the temerity to offer a radical revision to this venerable model. Not only is the earth not stationary, he asserted—not only does it, like the other planets, rotate around the sun—but their orbits are not perfect circles. Father Nicholas Copernicus had the good fortune to live beyond the reach of the Inquisition, but his writings were received with outrage and suppressed. When Galileo pointed his crude telescope toward the heavens, however, the old model of cosmic reality was doomed. Not only was Copernicus generally correct, but even his challenge to the accepted understanding was just the beginning. His model was more accurate but by no means complete. The conflict that arose from the clash of the two models of reality was enormous. It had already cost the life of Giordano Bruno, and came close to claiming the life of Galileo.

Let us carry our example a step further. Copernicus and Galileo, too, gave us only models of reality. In fact, the sun is not stationary either, nor is it at the center of the universe. It races through space at an enormous speed, in one of the tentacles of a massive spiral galaxy, which itself is hurtling outward from some unknown point

to an unknown destination. This also is a model of reality, which may eventually be augmented by yet more discoveries.

This historical example demonstrates my thesis that models of reality, and not reality per se, are the sources of the apparent conflicts between Christianity and modern science. Lest scientists judge too harshly, let us recall that the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was driven to suicide, in 1906, at least in part by the ridicule he endured from other scientists for espousing atomic theory. Atomic theory strongly contradicted the model of reality held by most physicists of his day.

How does the massive amount of new information we have today square with models of reality shaped by an antique understanding of relevant sections of Scripture? How we might resolve the conflicts—sometimes bitter conflicts—between scientific models of reality based on this new information, and those drawn from a simplistic reading of the Bible? (Here we are speaking of those subjects where science and religion may overlap. There is a range of subjects on which there is no such overlapping. For example, science can say nothing about the Holy Trinity or about Christ’s resurrection or his ascension.)

Metaphor and Simple Stories Simple stories told for simple people are often unconcerned with scientific facts or chronological accuracy. Sophisticated psychology is often contained in narratives that appear naive on the surface. Even in stories that appear simple, the meaning conveyed may be complex and surprising in its depth. Metaphor, which is very rich in older languages, conveys meaning through interlocking imagery. It has a fluidity that can convey textures of The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

meaning that a more concrete language cannot. Metaphor also contains an internal dissonance that warns one not to take it literally. At the very least, literalizing a simple narrative story or a metaphor creates a false model of reality. In relation to Scripture and theology, when we literalize a metaphor, we engage in idolatry.

Let us look at the creation narrative in the book of Genesis, for example. The details and processes of the creation of the universe, our solar system, and our earth are extremely complex. Indeed, these matters are so complex and difficult to comprehend that the best scientific minds in history with the finest technology are only now unfolding the details, though with difficulty. Why would Scripture attempt to explain all this vast complexity—so complex in many details that it exceeds human language and requires mathematical formulae to express—to a wandering tribe of Hebrews who were not yet literate? Instead the narrative presents a simple story, but one filled with meaning and revelation. Moses had to come down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments; it would have been of no value for him to have returned with the periodic table of the elements.

It is not surprising that ancient peoples formed a model of reality based on a more or less literal interpretation of the Genesis narrative. What is astonishing is that anyone in the twentieth or twenty-first century would hold a model of reality that is so clearly incorrect. The first tragedy is that such a disproven model of reality causes the actual meaning of the story to be lost.

The second is that it sets up an unnecessary conflict between religion and science, which undermines the faith of many who desire to believe.

The creation narrative, from the beginning up to the time of the holy proph7

ets Sarah and Abraham, condenses an enormous time and a vast prehistoric oral tradition into a simple narrative.

This entire narrative is about meaning, not historical or scientific detail.

We must remember that we derive our theology from meaning, not from supposed facts. Facts do not constitute truth even when they are accurate.

Only meaning can provide a basis of truth, and both the meaning in Scripture and the truth of that meaning are revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

The same might be said of science.

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a careful, encyclopedic recorder of observed facts, but still held an erroneous model of cosmology. His facts were of little value until his assistant, Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630), interpreted them after Brahe’s death. Only when the facts were given meaning did they become valuable for knowledge and understanding.

Truth is founded on meaning, while models of reality are based on supposed facts. Or rather, models of reality are derived from a presupposition of the accuracy of a given set of what appear, at least on the surface, to be facts—but are really the suppositions of a given era.

For Orthodox Christians, spiritual and theological truth is derived from meaning illumined by grace. Revelation, in the Christian sense, is also about meaning: it is a way of integrating meaning into the events of life. It too must be illumined by divine grace. If there is, therefore, any claim to immutable truth, it is to be found in spiritual experience rather than in rationalistic reflection on a given set of surmised facts. Models of reality, based on supposition about a given era’s “facts,” are malleable and subject to revision when the information that informed them is disproven or displaced by subsequent discoveries.

This is where the crisis arises for fundamentalism and for scholastic-based 8

western theology in general. Fundamentalist interpretations of Scripture consist in models of reality based on supposed facts, with little comprehension of meaning and a cavalier disregard for the nature of narrative and metaphor. It is these models of reality which many religious thinkers bring into conflict with the models of reality generated by physics and other fields of science and medicine.

Axial II The German psychiatrist and existential philosopher Karl Jaspers adopted the expression “Axial Age” to describe some of the greatest philosophical developments in the ancient world.

Between about 800 and 400 B.C., an enormous paradigm shift in human thought took place. The transformation moved slowly at first, and then accelerated in a great flowering of philosophy and systematic ethics. This era began at about the time the Prophet Isaiah was illuminating the revelation of God in Israel. Religion in Persia had just been revolutionized by the Avestan prophet Zoroaster. In the ensuing centuries, Confucianism developed a new system of ethics in China and the Milesian Greeks began to speculate about the nature of being. During this period, too, the Buddha began to explore the problem of human suffering.

The great thinkers of this age began to consider the actual meaning of myths and taboos, and to transpose them into systems of ethical and moral meaning.

This process had, in fact, begun with the great lawgivers of history who attempted to systematise human experience into the structure of civil society, binding it together with legislation that took account of the purpose of myths and taboos. It was during this era that the quest for an understanding of the roots of good and evil advanced a general moral philosophy. It was evident

that people could keep any set of laws to the letter and still do evil things to others. Law was not the solution; it remained only a mechanism for controlling and mitigating behavior within a civil society. Neither the moral concepts nor the legal concepts developed were by any means universal.

During this great axial period, theology began its long journey of development. Philosophy was focused on cause and effect, permanence and change, the place of man in the cosmos. Later it devoted great energy to the question of how we learn and know. The paradigm shift of this first axial period consisted in a movement away from unexplained myth and into the realm of philosophy, which speculated about the nature of things and, in particular, the nature of being.

Philosophy and theology developed as part of the same stream. Within it, myth was converted into a systematic concept of ethics and social morality.

Philosophers, both secular and religious, became the dominant practitioners leading structural changes in government and in concepts of humanity, the world, and the universe.

I believe that we are in the midst of a second great axial period. It appears to me that a major paradigm shift is underway, one that began in the 1600s but gathered its real force at the beginning of the twentieth century. This shift has been motivated, in some small way, by the fact that the question of what we know is overpowering the question of how we learn and know. This dynamic axial shift has picked up enormous speed, especially with relation to the brain, since the advent of the computer age. The abstraction of the intellect and the old preoccupation with a metaphysical dualism of mind and brain hardly seem tenable or significant in our present era. Reality at all levels and in every dimension is a mystery. I do The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

not suggest that the world of our sensual experience is not reality, but that it is only the surface of reality. This surface can be penetrated only with great effort, either spiritual or scientific, over time. The more deeply we penetrate through the surface of perceived reality, however, the greater the mystery becomes.

This mystery is reflected in quantum physics and also in Orthodox Christian theological experience. They are complementary. Orthodox theology can be informed by modern science, and science can be illumined by Christian spiritual experience. Such an exchange can be accomplished only when we clearly maintain the understanding that science is a method of exploration, not a dogmatic system, and is not pursued in the manner of a religion or “spirituality.” Likewise, Orthodox theology is not a system for interpreting the physical history and properties of the cosmos but a means of the transformation of the human person, an avenue of the revelation of redemption, and a framework for life and experience.

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Philosopher Robert Solomon spoke of a second axial period beginning in the 1700s. I would date its beginnings to the 1600s. However, in my view, we see the paradigm shift mostly clearly in the early 20th century, with the acceptance of atomic theory, the birth of quantum physics, and the emergence of evolutionary biology.

What shapes my idea that we are in a second axial period is the major shift in the paradigms of philosophical and religious thought in the present era, beginning with the last decade of the nineteenth century.2 Scientists, and physicists in particular, have gradually replaced philosophers as the architects of the grid through which we view humanity in relation to the world, the universe, and each other. This shift has clearly touched all areas of human thought and reasoning. Just as the lofty theories of philosophers slowly “trickled down” to the most common levels of society, reshaping human thought, so the abstractions of scientists have been trickling down to every human level, reshaping, over the past four or five centuries, every aspect of thought, 9

including theological and religious concerns. In the twentieth century and in the present, technology, which is something of a parasite on science, has had an even greater impact on the shaping of the human mind. Still, at the root of the making of the postmodern mind, both quantum physics and evolutionary biology have been seminal. This great paradigm shift constitutes what I see as the second great axial period.

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

From an Orthodox Christian point of view, if we are to continue to witness the faith of Jesus Christ effectively, we must respond to this axial shift. At a time when the scholastic system in religious thought has been exposed for its emptiness as a spiritual and theological cul-de-sac, a deep spiritual void and hunger has been created in man by the age of technology, with both its benefits and its tendencies to dehumanize. The equally blind alley of “spirituality without religion” offers no answers; it cannot separate itself from the spirit of the age and its bondage to ultimate hopelessness.

Orthodox Christianity stands in a position to have a vital, existential encounter with the paradigm shift of the present axial period, to give form to the void and fullness in place of emptiness. It has the content and the spiritual power to carry man beyond mere spirituality and into a profound spiritual life, in the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is not in conflict with this new grid of understanding but complementary to it. I believe Orthodoxy alone can sail easily upon the sea of our unfolding understanding of the

universe, of the origins of humankind, and of the mysteries of the quantum world. In order to do this effectively, however, we must wean ourselves away from the bondage of scholasticism into which so many have fallen.

We must return to the great existential revelation of the faith clearly enunciated by the holy Fathers, and in particular by the great hesychastic theologians who synthesized our understanding of our true relationship with God and the universe.

If we, as theologians and teachers of the faith, cannot address the new paradigms of the axial period in which we live in a meaningful and open way, we will be frozen in obsolete and meaningless models of reality, which we must forever set in militant opposition to every scientific discovery and every potential opening to deeper understanding. If we fall prey to such arrogance, we will be unable to respond at all to the spiritual needs and aspirations of mankind, we will be unable to sustain the Gospel, and we will be able to speak only to the most superstitious and religiously credulous elements in our societies. The younger generation will have been betrayed by us as we betray the Gospel and the faith with a blind, reactionary religiosity rather than an openness to new understanding and a grasp of the infinitude of the Orthodox Christian revelation.

Orthodox Christianity is not the arbiter of “facts,” but the healer of humanity, the source of meaning, the path to authenticity of life, and the doorway to eternity—to immortality.

The Most Reverend Lazar (Puhalo), retired Archbishop of Ottawa, is the founder and abbot of the Canadian Orthodox monastery of All Saints of North America in British Columbia.

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FAITH AND REASON

In Vitro Fertilization and the Beginning of Human Life Gayle E. Woloschak IVF and Fertility Disorders In recent years, scientific approaches have been developed to treat some “fertility disorders” through in vitro fertilization or IVF, an alternative to the natural route of sperm fertilization of the egg in the womb of the mother.

IVF has been used in many situations around the world to help couples who are unable to conceive children by natural means. The egg and sperm are joined together in vitro (that is, in a test tube), given appropriate proteins and “feeder cells” to enable growth to the multi-cell stage, and then implanted into the womb of a woman who has been treated with hormones to make her body behave as if she were pregnant, so that she can appropriately nurture the implanted embryo.

IVF has become a large industry in the United States and western Europe. In 2014, IVF babies made up 1.5 percent of all births for a total of 3.9 million children.1 The cost of each procedure is around seven thousand dollars, and much of it is usually covered by medical insurance for treatment of infertility. In a typical IVF procedure, many eggs are fertilized in vitro, several are placed into a woman’s womb, and the rest are frozen in preparation for the next opportunity, since the first attempt is often unsuccessful. This act of freezing the extra embryos has pro-

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

vided ample room for ethical discussions over the years.

What is the Orthodox perspective on IVF? Certainly many Orthodox families have conceived and given birth to children using fertility assistance through IVF. Many Orthodox bishops in the U.S. have given a blessing for the use of IVF by particular families, with the caveats that the egg and sperm come from the actual parents of the child, that a surrogate mother not be used, and, in some cases, that the procedure be carried out with only one or two eggs, so that extra embryos are not generated in the procedure. Other Orthodox bishops have refused to give a blessing for IVF. Finally, some families have pursued IVF without bringing the issue up with their priest or bishop.

The range of Orthodox responses has been broad and inconsistent.

1

www.npr.org/sections/ health-shots/ 2014/02/18/279035110/ ivf-baby-boom-birthsfrom-fertility-procedurehit-new-high.

Most faith traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have struggled with issues of technology and medical care. Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and some Lutheran communities have all—after much deliberation—provided written documents defining their faith communities’ official position on the issues of stem cells, IVF, and similar technologies. In the Orthodox Church such official pronouncements are rare, but there are several reasons why is par-

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2

The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, Chapter XII (Moscow: Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, 2000).

3

John Breck, The Sacred Gift of Life: Orthodox Christianity and Bioethics (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2010); John and Lyn Breck, Stages on Life’s Way: Orthodox Thinking on Bioethics (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2006); H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2000).

4 Stanley S. Harakas, Health and Medicine in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition: Faith, Liturgy, and Wholeness (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Stanley S. Harakas, Living the Faith: The Praxis of Eastern Orthodox Ethics (Minneapolis: Light and Life, 1993).

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ticularly necessary to ponder these issues.

the moral assessment of abortion by the Church is based.2

It is not the object of this paper to examine the entire range of factors behind the Orthodox Church’s slow response to contemporary social and moral issues. Among the many explanations for this phenomenon are the lack of unified voice among Orthodox bishops and a diversity of perspectives on whether such pronouncements are even necessary or useful for the faithful. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that one overriding problem is bishops’ and priests’ limited knowledge about these complex medical techniques and the absence of a formal means of providing advice on them within the Church as a whole. Another issue is the reluctance of the Church to provide strong dogmatic pronouncements on any issue; this can be a strength in many cases, but when families need guidance on issues of concern, it can lead to difficulties in decision-making.

This passage suggests that IVF is prohibited because of the destruction of those embryos that are not implanted into the woman (who is made to be hormonally pregnant), and that those embryos are considered fully human beings. Killing the in vitro–generated embryos would result in abortion, which is considered sinful for Orthodox. Orthodox bioethicists John Breck and H. Tristram Englehardt have essentially accepted a Roman Catholic view on the issue, writing that human life begins at conception regardless of whether that conception occurs in vitro or in vivo.3 Stanley Harakas has expressed a more measured perspective, commenting in some texts that because “wastage” of embryos occurs in natural conception, wastage of IVF embryos may also be acceptable.4 This view—that eggs fertilized in vitro are embryos—is shared by some Orthodox bishops in the U.S. who provide a blessing for IVF, insofar as the couple has only one or two eggs fertilized in vitro at any given time. While this practice is more costly than the usual approach, it avoids the generation of “spare” embryos that might be discarded or mishandled.

One of the rare written perspectives on IVF has been provided by the Russian Orthodox Church in its millennial document The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church.

This document is significantly flawed, not only in its tone and perspective— it takes a legalistic and formulaic approach to ethical issues that is foreign to Orthodoxy—but also in its reference to scientific facts that have been inappropriately understood and referenced. It states: Morally inadmissible from the Orthodox point of view are also all kinds of extracorporeal fertilisation involving the production, conservation and purposeful destruction of ‘spare’ embryos. It is on the recognition of the human dignity even in an embryo that

It should be noted that Orthodox attitudes toward non-IVF issues of reproduction differ significantly from those of the Roman Catholic Church in several regards, most notably in the perspective on birth control. The Roman Church does not give a blessing for the use of birth control as a means of preventing pregnancy, because it considers non-natural actions that make procreation impossible unacceptable.

The Orthodox Church does not impose such limitations provided that the method of birth control does not cause destruction of the embryo. For

Embryonic ​pluripotent​cells​are able to differentiate​into various cell types. In this case, NTERA-2 cells will develop into neuroectodermal cell lineages.

This model system was used to study neuronal diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Courtesy of Gayle Woloschak and Tatjana Paunesku.

example, the “morning-after pill,” also called “Plan B,” despite its name does not cause the destruction of an embryo but rather delays ovulation by up to seveny-two hours, and thus would be acceptable for Orthodox but not for Roman Catholic Christians. Directly transferring concepts about reproduction from the Roman Catholic Church to the Orthodox Church seems, therefore, to present some conflicts.

Lessons from Science Obviously, no biblical commentaries or Church Fathers’ writings can provide precise information on the issue of IVF. While there are texts that relate to sanctity of life, they do not consider technological issues such as the challenges of applying beginning-of-life IVF technologies. The Russian Orthodox Social Concept document reThe Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

lies upon statements by the Church Fathers and in the Canons indicating that human life begins at conception, but these statements were written at a time when eggs and sperm were unknown, and a man was considered somehow to insert a “life force” into a woman. Not to argue semantics, but it needs to be noted that scientists do not consider IVF to be conception. Conception is something that occurs in a womb, not in a test tube: it is a mother, not a scientist working with cells, who conceives a child. For a scientist, it is hard to imagine that a cluster of cells of as yet undetermined types and functions is a human being. Are the cells human? Of course, but so are the skin cells we lose each day in the shower.

What is important is not whether the cells are human-derived but whether, in fact, they constitute a human being.

These cells cannot grow into a human 13

being unless they are implanted into a woman who has been made to be hormonally pregnant. This question of the treatment of in vitro fertilized eggs as human beings is a point of inconsistency between science and Orthodoxy.

5 www.babymed.com/ twins/twinsmonozygotic-vsdizygotic-andmonochorionic-vsdichorionic.

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Alessia Deglincerti, Gist F. Croft, Lauren N. Pietila, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Eric D. Siggia, and Ali H. Brivanlou, “Self-Organization of the In Vitro Attached Human Embryo,” Nature 533 (2016): 251–254.

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Science can contribute to this discussion by offering a better understanding of the twinning process. While identical twins share the same womb and the same genetic material, they are considered by the Church to be separate persons with their own paths to salvation, their own separate souls, their own individualities. This would no doubt be the case even for conjoined twins. From a scientific or medical perspective, there are four processes that can lead to twinning, but the upshot is that if the embryo splits within the first thirteen days, twins can result.5 In the United Kingdom, it is illegal to grow in vitro–generated embryonic cells in culture beyond fourteen days because this time is viewed by scientists and ethicists as the demarcation point for twinning; since twins cannot develop at fourteen days or later, one can claim that the embryo at this point may now be an individual. In general, however, there have been no techniques available to keep in vitro–fertilized embryos alive in a test tube beyond the sevenday limit. Recently, investigators have managed to keep embryos alive following IVF for up to thirteen days in a culture plate, although they did not have the same structure as one would find in the womb.6 These studies were done to try to understand the process of embryogenesis and not to create life in a test tube. The major findings of this work were the identification of the different gene regulatory programs turned on and off in each cell of the embryo. There is of course, no evidence that the process observed in the test tube is identical to what occurs in the human being, and in fact it is very

likely that the culturing of the cells alone modifies events, as is known to occur in most other cells grown in culture. What is the point of all of this? If twinning can occur as late as thirteen or fourteen days into embryogenesis, then it is very difficult to claim that an embryo in the womb prior to thirteen or fourteen days is a human being, and even more difficult to claim that an embryo in the test tube prior to thirteen or fourteen days is a human being. If twinning can occur as late as thirteen days after conception, then it is not clear how the cells prior to this point can represent a full person with a soul and individual determination, when in fact the embryo could become two—or in rare cases even three or four—persons.

Many use the production of pregnancy hormones as a point of demarcation for the beginning of human life. This production does not occur in the test tube and requires the relationship of the mother and embryo. Close to the time of twinning, a structure formed within the embryo called the blastocyst starts to produce unique hormones that lead to positive pregnancy tests. Many physicians consider this point to be the start of pregnancy because it marks the first point of a unique response from the embryo to the mother’s body. At this point, the embryo is producing hormones in response to interaction with the mother, and thus a relationship is being established.

Some scholars taking a view similar to that of Harakas have suggested that implantation is a good demarcation point for defining the human being.

Again, this is a process that cannot occur in a test tube and requires the mother’s womb. From a biological perspective, this point of demarcation also makes sense because implantation occurs between seven and twelwe days

after fertilization, and thus falls easily into the timeframe when individuation occurs (that is, when the possibility of forming twins has ended). In addition, personhood from an Orthodox perspective requires the development of relationship, and one could argue— particularly for IVF-generated embryos, which have only the hands of scientists to manipulate them—that the relationship of mother and child is established at the point of implantation, although one could make this same case for the hormone production noted above. After that point, wastage—loss of unimplanted embryos, which makes up about 90% of all fertilizations in utero—generally no longer occurs.

Thus, this approach for demarcation would place the beginning of human life well before twinning and yet still in the multi-cell stage rather than the single in vitro fertilized egg.

Let me summarize the different views: 1. Human life begins at the moment when the egg is fertilized, whether in vitro or in vivo.

2. Human life begins at the time when twinning is no longer possible in vivo (day twelwe or thirteen). This is not a point that can be considered in vitro, because twinning cannot occur in the absence of a womb.

3. Human life begins at the time when the embryonic cells begin to release hormones in response to interaction (day twelwe or thirteen). This is a practical demarcation point because pregnancy can be easily detected clinically. It also marks a point of relationship between the embryo and the mother. Again, this cannot be mimicked in vitro.

4. Human life begins at the point of implantation (day nine–twelwe). This The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

too is a point of relationship between the mother and the embryo. It occurs after “wastage” has been eliminated (that is, after embryos that will not survive have been sloughed off from the body) and again cannot occur outside of the womb.

The first view is that expressed by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church (although the Roman Catholic Church does not support IVF, because it prohibits any process that can interfere with procreation), and many Orthodox bishops. I believe that the latter three arguments provide a basis for reconsidering the timeframe for the question of the beginning of human life.

Decisions about IVF Finally, there is one issue related to IVF that has not been addressed in the arguments expressed above or in the Russian Orthodox Social Concept document, and that is the question of why should IVF be undertaken at all.

When trying to discern whether a behavior is appropriate or even ethical, motivation is a major factor in the consideration. Why would a couple want to have IVF rather than adopt a child?

There may be many reasons, but discernment here is essential. Motivations that involve “making sure my genes are passed on to the next generation” or egotistical ideas that “I must leave my own children in the world when I die” may not be appropriate reasons for making the IVF choice. Discernment of reasons requires interacting with a spiritual mentor who can help in the decision-making process. Too often, couples make these decisions outside the realm of the Church and do not consider it necessary or even useful to approach a spiritual mentor to aid them. Involvement of priests, bishops, and other spiritual advisors 15

in the process is important and useful for the family.

In today’s world medical technologies are increasing the number of decision points in people’s lives. In the past, questions about whether a couple should have a child when fertility was compromised were limited to the consideration of adoption. With new technology, the choices have in-

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

creased—whether to have a child by in vitro fertilization, whether to have the “donor” sperm or eggs be derived from the parents or from another individual, whether to use a “surrogate mother,” and more. These decisions are difficult and require insight and careful consideration. They are not merely economic or practical discussions but call for spiritual reflection, insight, and guidance.

Dr. Gayle E. Woloschak is professor of radiation oncology, radiology, and cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University. She is also associate director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science as well as an adjunct professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.

POETRY DESK

Pre-Post-Liturgical Nap David O’Neal

After having spent time at the heart of all things, I feared I might miss it, but as it turned out, The center of the cosmos kindly followed me, Remaining just under my feet wherever I went, Until it was at last revealed to be located Just under yours as well. Then I saw a muskrat in Irkutsk on The TV, and it turned out to be Under his too.

David O’Neal is a book editor who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His essays and poetry are archived on his blog, Nonidiomatic (http://davensati54.blogspot.com/).

16

DISCOVERIES

Attributing the Zvenigorodsky Chin Levon Nersesyan talks with Oxana Golovko Translated by Vera Winn

Artistic Technique Levon, tell us how you discovered that the Zvenigorodsky Chin was not painted by Andrei Rublev.

A difference in painting technique between the Zvenigorodsky Chin and the Holy Trinity is clearly visible without the use of any scientific devices, but before we drew any conclusions, it was necessary to analyze the techniques used as accurately and objectively as possible, and only then to compare the objects visually. We followed a universal, internationally recognized method of extensive analysis. Radiography enabled us to examine the structure of the wooden panels, the nature of the cloth and the method by which it was attached, and the state of the coating. Infrared photographs were extremely informative, exposing underlying layers such as the preparatory outline, which provided an idea of the technique.

The contour lines on the icons of the Zvenigorodsky Chin are thin, straight, neat, and quite long, and the final image follows their outline almost perfectly, especially on the icon of Christ the Savior. By contrast, the painter of the famous Holy Trinity searched for the final form. His contour lines are short, wide, vibrating strokes, with splotches on the ends, as if his brush The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

were moving backward and forward.

In the latter case, the final image rarely corresponds with the preparatory drawings, and there are quite a few corrections even in the preparatory drawing itself. It is obvious that the first master was accustomed to working out all the details clearly and neatly from the very beginning, while the second created a rough sketch and then modified the form of the image in the process of painting.

Careful microscopic examination and microphotography of the paintings enabled us to clarify the number and sequence of paint layers. These techniques can also be used to identify the pigment composition of the various color mixtures, which can be verified by chemical or X-ray fluorescent analysis. Pigment composition is one of the least reliable sources of accurate information for attribution, however, because the kind of materials available to the icon painter may have varied. But the number, and most importantly the sequence, of paint layers and the layering technique are the most decisive indicators of a master’s skills and his individual manner.

The icons of the Zvenigorod Chin have more layers than the Holy Trinity, and they are thinner and more homogenous—perhaps because the upper layers were laid on the lower ones

Note: On June 26, 2017, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow held a press conference on the authorship of the Zvenigorodskiy Chin, a famous depiction of the Deisis (supplication) featuring the Archangel Michael, Christ, and St. Paul.

This triptych was long attributed to the 14th–15th century iconographer Andrei Rublev, but scientists and restorers now believe the icons were painted by a different hand, or possibly by multiple painters.

The announcement caused a major uproar, as Rublev is a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church and some consider his icons, such as the renowned Holy Trinity, to be supporting evidence of his sanctity. Oxana Golovko’s interview with art historian Levon Nersesyan, who led the research team at the Tretyakov Gallery, first appeared on Pravmir.ru.

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before they had completely dried.

The red is hidden between layers of ocher, and under the glare of white paint, there is another preparatory layer, which is lighter than the rest of the ocher, reducing the contrast of the highlighting. In the Holy Trinity there are only two layers of ocher, transparent red is applied on top of other layers, the white brush strokes are denser and brighter, and the whole painting looks much more dense.

These differences cannot not be due to the evolution of the technique of one master, even if we assume that he was trying to simplify his methods by abandoning a detailed drawing, reducing the number of paint layers, and making them more dense. It is hard to imagine how the hand that formerly drew lines in a certain way and at a certain length, that removed the brush at a certain moment, that painted in short or long strokes—along with all the other characteristics of his individual style—would change so dramatically. We seem to be dealing with two masters, who achieved spectacular and absolutely flawless results, regardless of the simplicity or complexity of their techniques.

Icons are often the work of many hands, not of a single artist—one master creates the design with certain personal elements, other artists paint clothes, apprentices paint the background, and so on. How does this affect attribution?

Of course, we must also take this issue into account, especially for later icons. So, before the opening of the exhibition of about fifty signed icons by Simon Ushakov, we conducted technological analyses and even restored some of Ushakov’s 18

works. We discovered that his individual style is less apparent in his large icons. This observation led us to the logical conclusion that, in such cases, the master was only directly responsible for a preparatory drawing and some final corrections. Sometimes he just signed a collective work.

In his day, the signature did not indicate the artist’s intention to glorify himself, but it was rather a certification of quality.

It is difficult to imagine that the Greek artist who painted most of the iconostasis at the Annunciation Cathedral at the Moscow Kremlin did it all alone.

Even if apprentices painted the lux-

Three icons of Zvenigorodsky Chin.

urious clothes, the background, and other details, I still think that there might have been two or even three masters. They employed a very similar style, but each still used individual techniques. Some day we will find out what these techniques are, just as we discovered the individual differences between the icon of Christ the Savior and the two other icons of the Zvenigorodsky Chin.

The Question of Nationality The author of the Zvenigorodsky Chin may have been Greek or Russian—or both. Is that important?

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

I don’t think this has anything to do with national pride. We are not talking about something specifically Greek or specifically Russian. We are talking about a more or less unified spiritual and artistic culture of the medieval Orthodox world, which is sometimes called the “Byzantine Commonwealth.” After all, Christianity came to Russia from Byzantium in 988, bringing the Byzantine tradition of icon painting. This tradition included not only a collection of models, iconographic schemes, and extremely sophisticated artistic techniques, but also the whole complex system of symbolic language, aimed 19

Zvenigorod angel (left) and Trinity angel (right).

at translating supernatural spiritual content into comprehensible images.

It is clear that this system could not have been “mechanically” implanted [in Russia]. It could only have been assimilated through long-term dialogue and close cooperation. And if we are talking about the pre-Mongolian era [before 1223], the question of the nationality of the masters does not make sense at all. We simply do not have any criteria to determine it—and of course skill level cannot be such a criterion, can it? It is quite possible that provincial Greek painters, whose art lacked the brilliance of the Constantinople school, came to Rus’ [Ruthenia]. It is also possible that talented Russian icon painters could have surpassed their Greek teachers. Both the monumental paintings and the few preserved panel icons of the pre-Mongolian period are completely Byzantine, both in content and in their purely formal artistic technique. For this period, it is impossible to determine whether they were painted by Greek or Russian masters.

In the thirteenth century, communication between the Rus’ and the Byzantines declined. Rus’ was cut off from the rest of the [Orthodox] world by the Tartar-Mongol invasions, and 20

the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Crusaders. It is interesting that the Russian iconography of that era is marked by some influence from medieval [Western] European art— especially in the western outskirts of Rus’, including Novgorod and Pskov.

This period was the beginning of the independent development of Russian art and the formation of its regional schools.

Sometimes art historians refer to the middle and especially the last quarter of the fourteenth century as “the second meeting with Byzantium.”

By then the Russian artistic tradition had become more distinctive than in pre-Mongolian period, so Byzantine influences—or their absence—can be identified more easily. Some icons cannot be attributed to Greek authorship even hypothetically. Others have mixed features, and in such cases we can assume that the author was either a Greek who had partly adapted to the local culture or a Russian who went through Greek training.

Judging by the few surviving works of art executed in the Byzantine tradition, this period was the peak of late Byzantine iconography [in Rus’].

It was the context for the emergence of such an exceptional phenomenon as Andrei Rublev. Our knowledge of Rublev’s work is based only on fragments of frescoes and one icon—but they fully demonstrate the extent of his gift and his skill, which corresponded to his outstanding teachers and predecessors.

and the distribution of work on the iconostasis. The only thing that is certain is that the central icons were painted with the participation of some outstanding Byzantine master—but even those researchers who still believe this master was Theophanes the Greek can no longer date the iconostasis to 1405.

So, should the history of Russian art be rewritten? In serious books on this subject, the icons of the Zvenigorodsky Chin are usually referred to as the peak of excellence of a mature Andrei Rublev.

By the way, the first publications that contained detailed analysis of historical sources and archaeological materials concerning the iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral appeared when I was still a student, and over the thirty years since then, the history has been successfully “rewritten.” I think that, sooner or later, the same will happen with the Zvenigorodsky Chin. Our immediate task is not to change the labels or to rewrite art history, but to present all the details of our discovery patiently, until our colleagues finally get used to the new theory and accept it.

Probably. But I do not see anything terrible about it. The main thing is not to rush. Sometimes researchers must abandon very important and well-established attributions. This happened with the aforementioned iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral at the Moscow Kremlin, which, according to the chronicles, was created in 1405 through the collaboration of Theophanes the Greek, Prokhor of Gorodets, and Andrei Rublev. There were even very detailed studies describing each painter’s individual contributions. But archaeologists discovered that the original Annunciation Church—the one mentioned in the chronicles—was the small temple of a princely family, and this iconostasis could not have fit in it. It seems more than likely that it was moved from some other place to the [present] church, which was built later. Furthermore, even if the ancient icons were moved from one church to another (the Annunciation Cathedral was rebuilt twice after Theophanes and Rublev worked there), these works could hardly have survived the Great Fire of Moscow of 1547. So, in the end, we had to give up everything—the exact dates, the attributions to Rublev and Prokhor, The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

Who Was Andrei Rublev?

Surprisingly, some people became upset at the news that the artists of the Zvenigorodsky Chin and the Holy Trinity are different people.

You know, a year ago, in a small village near Bergamo, I made a presentation about the Zvenigorodsky Chin to my Italian friends who admire medieval Russian culture. Italians have very emotional reactions and I saw how their eyes literally filled with tears when they heard that the master of the Zvenigorodsky Chin was not Andrei Rublev. After all, the Zvenigorodsky icon of Christ the Savior belongs to world culture, and is considered by Christians of all confessional identities to be not only a masterpiece but even the quintessential representation of spiritual experience—the uni21

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versal prayer image, if you like. And here my listeners were being told that the Pantocratore di Rublev was not at all di Rublev, but was painted by some other, unknown master. An utter catastrophe!

But I think I was able to console them.

I said: Let’s imagine two historical pictures. In the first, there was a wild and gloomy desert, populated by hostile barbarians, who continuously killed and raped each other with bestial cruelty—something like we see in [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev. This desert had only two “bright angels,” who suffered from the omnipresent viciousness and cruelty. One of them had fled from the perishing Byzantium, bringing all its spiritual and artistic heritage. The other, the only one equal in spirit and talent, had miraculously grown on the local, graceless soil. And here they were, working together, not understood by anyone. I definitely do not like this picture, and, more importantly, it is not accurate.

The real situation was different.

Imagine Moscow in the last decade of the fourteenth century. There were a lot of Greek newcomers, not only the scribes who arrived with Metropolitan Cyprian but also remarkable artists. And there were also many wonderful Russian masters. They communicated, they worked together, they shared their experiences.

It was not the Dark Ages, in which people killed each other and wept in the mud. It was normal life, with many talented people who created one masterpiece after another. The young Andrei Rublev was among them, helping the senior masters, observing the ways they worked, learning from them. Then he created his own style, no less virtuosic than in the icons of the Zvenigorodsky Chin, The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

but a little different. He did not paint the Zvenigorodsky Chin—so what? His Holy Trinity is still an absolutely perfect masterpiece from an artistic and a spiritual perspective.

Previous page: Theotokos from the Blagoveshchensky Chin.

You must agree that such a picture inspires more optimism and faith in humanity—in its spiritual, cultural and artistic potential.

The historical references to Andrei Rublev are scarce.

There are only four of them. Two chronicles (circa 1405 and 1408) mention Rublev’s work on the Annunciation Church in the Moscow Kremlin and on the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir. The Life of Sts. Sergius and Nikon of Radonezh describes the decoration of the Trinity Cathedral at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra, and briefly mentions Andrei Rublev and Daniel, who were monks of the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow and worked on the Spassky Cathedral shortly before Rublev’s death.

Based on the surviving works of Andrei Rublev, we can state that the iconostasis of the Trinity Cathedral was almost certainly part of its original structure and was created

by Rublev and Daniel. As for the icon of the Holy Trinity, we can only guess that it was painted at the same time the Cathedral was built, around 1425–27. We are not sure who created the iconostasis of the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir or when, and the frescoes are only partially preserved.

It is not clear whether these frescoes were created at the time the cathedral was built, by the same group of painters, or later by other artists. By the way, the next phase of our project will be a technical study of the Vladimir icons, which may help us to solve this puzzle.

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Next page: Christ from the Blagoveshchensky Chin.

Oh, I almost forgot—in the Spassky Cathedral of the Andronikov Monastery, ornaments were preserved on the slopes of the windows, and under the floor archaeologists found pieces of bituminous plaster with traces of frescoes.

[Other attributions are] just assumptions and hypotheses, and easily veer into speculation. Of course, these are wonderful works in which one wants to see the hand of a great master. And attributing these works to Rublev inevitably raises their value. Even a single mention of his name is enough for this. Hence the desire to see the “Rublev School” or the “Rublev Circle” everywhere. The person who started this trend was [modern Russian painter and art historian] Igor Grabar. In his opinion, these icons were so perfect and beautiful that only Rublev, the greatest Russian artist of the early fifteenth century, could have been their creator.

Speaking about historical data, one cannot help recalling the remarkable characteristics of Daniel and Rublev as reported by Saint Joseph, a monk of Volotsk. In his Answer to the Curious and Brief Tale about the Holy Fathers who Lived in the Monasteries of the Russian Land, he wrote: The marvelous icon painter Daniel and his disciple Andrei . . . had so much virtue and were only striving in fasting in the monastic life to achieve God’s love and blossom forth in it. They never cared about the material world, but focused their minds upon immaterial and divine light while . . . they painted images of Lord Christ and his Most Pure Mother and the Saints.

This testimony to their spiritual state and holiness adds nothing to our

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information about their real biographies and their artistic works. The same goes for other documents of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their numerous references to Rublev. Undoubtedly, his works were highly appreciated and collected. But it is possible that, at that time, Rublev’s name was used as a mark of quality, to indicate the highest level of artistic skill, and that this approach was inherited by Russian and Soviet historians of art.

So, there is very little information about Rublev, and there are even fewer icons whose authorship we can confirm by this information. All his biographies can be compared to the lives of the saints, written according to ecclesiastical tradition, in which enthusiasm and reverence for the saint compensated for the lack of facts. In Rublev’s case, this tradition was adopted not just by the church, but also by art historians.

Rewriting History Why have Russian art historians supported this legend?

In the nineteenth century, Russian art historians—and the entire educated public—became concerned about the absence in Russian culture of great artists of the level of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and other famous European masters. Comparisons of Russian and European art traditions sometimes led to contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, in the eyes of the pro-Western [Russian] public, ancient Russian icon painters were simple and not very skilled artisans, who had never achieved the heights of creative expression of the European masters during or after the Renaissance. But the opposite point of view was affirmed in an equally cat-

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

25

egorical—and sometimes almost grotesque—manner. For example, the famous Slavophile writer Aleksandr Ivanchin-Pisarev, standing in front of the Holy Trinity—which, by the way, was hidden behind later painting and a riza [silver cover]—“marveled at the painting of the Byzantines” and “was absolutely convinced that their students, the Italians, even Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, could not even be compared to them. Not only Cimabue, Giotto, Castagna, and Ghirlandaio, but even Bellini and Perugino created nothing as great as this icon.”

The nineteenth century was all about “discoveries” that would show to the world the extraordinary achievements of the great Russian icon painters. Now we know that Orthodox art, which was strictly canonical and for the most part impersonal, was based on completely different principles. Its creators were not first of all “artists,” but couriers of spiritual experience through the Church.

However, nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century art historians ignored this perspective. Igor Grabar sought to name specific painters he could claim were an equal match to the great European artists. His Commission on the Restoration of Works of Art and Antiquities concentrated its research on the oldest pre-Mongolian artworks and on anything that was somehow connected to well-known names. So they went to Vladimir, because Daniel and Rublev worked there, and they worked on the iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, because the old chronicle mentioned that this iconostasis could have been created

by Theophanes, Prokhor, and Rublev.

They were trying to find landmarks— cultural milestones—around which 26

they would later built a multitude of different schools, circles, and workshops. Until recently, the whole history of Russian art was based on these same speculations.

Recent publications on the Holy Trinity are not so categorical about its authorship. They say, “more than likely it was painted by Rublev.”

Yes, there are alternative theories.

We know that Daniel and Andrei Rublev worked on the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra in the1420s and that they frescoed the new Trinity Cathedral, erected at the behest of St. Nikon.

Theoretically, even the simultaneity of these now lost paintings and the existing iconostasis could be disputed— after the frescoes were painted, it would have taken some time for them to dry, and only then could the iconostasis have been installed. What if other masters were invited to work on the iconostasis? We might also guess that the icon of the cathedral’s dedication [the Holy Trinity] was created along with the rest of the iconostasis and not brought from an earlier temple, as some researchers believe.

Finally, let’s not forget that Rublev’s authorship of the Holy Trinity is based on a rather late source, The Tale of the Holy Icon Painters, which was written at the end of seventeenth century.

But on the other hand, the Stoglavy Church Council of 1551 proclaimed that all icons of the Holy Trinity should be painted “after Andrei Rublev.”

Yes, but it says “after Andrei Rublev,” not “as Andrei Rublev painted the Holy Trinity for the Trinity Cathedral of the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra.” Literally, this is not about a particular icon, but about the canon of iconography developed by Andrei Rublev.

How can we be sure about the authenticity of the Holy Trinity, then? Is it really a painting created in the early fifteenth century, or is it the result of later renovations and restorations?

Many people have expressed doubts about the authenticity of the Holy Trinity. Many of them have criticized Vasily Guryanov, who undertook a full restoration of the icon in 1904.

He cleaned it as much as possible and then filled in the lost spots, giving the icon its “splendid” look. For this reason, in 1915, the art historian Nikolai Sychev commented rather harshly on the restoration, saying that it did not disclose, but in fact completely concealed the Trinity for us—because the restorer painted his own version in place of deleted areas of painting.

The question is, to what extent is the Holy Trinity Rublev’s, considering that it was modified by Guryanov’s infillings as well as infillings made in earlier times?

There was even an incredible theory that the icon was practically re-written in 1834 by Salautin, an icon painter from Palekh, who at that time was supervising the renovation of the Trinity Cathedral iconostasis. This theory does not hold water. First, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the methods of the work of the restorers; and second, it ignores the fact that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Palekh artists could not have known the techniques of medieval icon painters. The mass cleaning of ancient icons began only half a century later, so none of those Palekh painters could have created a convincing imitation of a fifteenthcentury painting.

Questions remained, however. When we started analyzing the Trinity, we were very much afraid that we would The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

find on it only restorational infillings and tints. However, it turned out that the icon was only lightly damaged and had been restored very little. The original painting gave us a complete idea of how the master had worked, which allowed us to restore almost everything that was lost.

You and other art historians are now working on a book in which the results of your analyses of the icon Our Lady of the Don will be published.

Did you discover something new about this icon?

Among other things, we tried to verify the hypothesis put forward by Igor Grabar and supported by many researchers that the Annunciation Deisis and Our Lady of the Don were created by the same master. Grabar believed that it was Theophanes the Greek. The Moscow Kremlin Museum allowed one of our researchers, Dmitry Nikolaevich Sukhoverkov—a restorer of the highest competency— to conduct the technical part of this research. He was given the opportunity to view the Deisis icons up close and to take photographs. We could not identify any individual manner.

As I already mentioned, in my opinion there was not just one, but several masters who worked on these icons.

However, it is quite obvious that the Annunciation Deisis and Our Lady of the Don were created in the same workshop, by a team of masters who had worked together more than once.

Perhaps they were learning from each other. In any case, they used the same set of techniques.

According to a widely disseminated contemporary account, the Annunciation Cathedral Deisis was moved from the Dormition Cathedral in Kolomna, and therefore dates back to 1392, 27

when, as is mentioned in the chronicle, the “signing” of the temple took place. Since the most important artworks in Moscow beginning in 1395 were produced under the direction of Theophanes the Greek, art historians have speculated that he could also have been the head of the team that, three years earlier, had worked in Kolomna. But this is just an assumption, because neither his name nor that of another leading master was mentioned in the chronicles. In addition, it was believed that Our Lady of the Don originated from the same Dormition Cathedral, and could have been painted simultaneously with that cathedral’s iconostasis.

Theotokos “Donskaya”.

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We did not find decisive technological evidence of simultaneity, and therefore it seems more likely that one of the masters of this team received an order for this icon upon his return to Moscow. The customer could have been Princess Evdokia, who probably wished to add this icon to the preexisting structure in remembrance of her husband, Prince Dmitry Ivanovich, and his victory in Kulikovo Field.

Perhaps this story was later transformed into the legend about Prince Dmitry Donskoy carrying the icon into the battle at Kulikov.

It is interesting that the reverse side of Our Lady of the Don was painted

by a different master, apparently a Novgorodian by birth. In our book, we compare the techniques of the front and reverse sides of the icon and show that they were painted by different masters.

A New Discovery—Not a Sensation Why, when art historians tell the general public that the Zvenigorod Chin and the Holy Trinity were painted by different artists, do they do it with reservation? Are there any doubts?

No, there is no doubt among specialists, including the head of the Department for the Conservation of Tempera Painting of the State Research Institute for Conservation, Viktor V. Baranov, who worked with us for the two years. But the problem is that, in today’s ideological climate, our scientific discoveries may be not received as we would like them to be.

But isn’t it a sensation?

This, of course, is a new and extremely interesting discovery. But not a sensation. A sensation is something that undermines the foundations and leaves a person standing on ruins, so his world must be built anew. There are no ruins here. Things have been shifting for a long time, brick by brick, and at some point these bricks, like a mosaic, made up a new structure. Is this sensational? I don’t think so.

You know why I do not like this word?

It doesn’t belong to my—to our—vocabulary. Researchers who engage in lengthy, monotonous, and laborious work, and then scrupulously analyze its results, avoid this word so diligently because we are trying, perhaps in vain, to direct consumers of mass media to a completely different cultural discourse, which unfortunately seems hopelessly outdated today. This is the only discourse that ultimately leads to an understanding of certain cultural phenomena, including scientific discoveries. But in sensational statements and in the ensuing turbulent discussions, with mutual insults, no understanding occurs.

We cannot achieve truth through fights, but only in calm conversations, in which the parties hear each other— as you and I are having now, for example.

But what if such cautiousness left your work unknown to many people?

That would be better than unhealthy excitement. Basically, this information requires effort to review and understand. People interested in this subject should read our interview from beginning to end and then decide whether to believe it or not. As for those who run through the headlines in search of sensational news, I would prefer for them not to notice this, because who knows what would come to their minds?

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

Levon Nersesyan is a specialist in ancient Russian art. He works at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and teaches at Moscow State University. He is an author of several books on Russian iconography and an encyclopedic dictionary of ancient Russian art. He lives and works in Moscow and Venice.

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

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FAITH AND REASON

Creation, Faith, and Science Theodore Feldman To take an aspirin for a headache, and then to repudiate Darwinian evolution, is hypocrisy. For aspirin’s work in our bodies, and the biochemistry of the willow tree from which it is derived, are inextricably bound to evolution. To drive a car and repudiate evolution is hypocrisy. For the car consumes fossil fuel, the knowledge, extraction, and use of which are, again, bound to evolution, which explains the formation of petroleum from ancient sea creatures. If we live in the modern world, enjoying the fruits of science, then we cannot reject its theories.

The psalmist proclaims that the Lord “set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved” (Ps. 104:5, ESV). It was against this assertion that Galileo stumbled, when his church persecuted him for arguing that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. If we interpret Scripture literally, then we must 30

reject the earth’s rotation and with it all of astronomy, which traces the formation of stars over billions of years and cannot abide a six-day creation.

We are compelled as well to discard all the historical sciences, which reach back into time much further than the authors of Genesis ever imagined.

What, for example, are we to do with the science of linguistics? Genesis tells us that prior to Babel all nations spoke the same language. Linguistics cannot countenance this, any more than geology the six-day creation. If we insist on a literal interpretation of Scripture, we will end up rejecting all of modern knowledge.

But what is meant by “a literal interpretation of Scripture”? The letters (literae) of Scripture tell us nothing; they are marks on a page. They have no spirit in them. We Christians must read them in the Spirit in whom we abide. What spirit, then, do we bring to Scripture in a so-called “literal”

interpretation? We are told that a literal interpretation insists on the “plain meaning,” “simple meaning” or “common understanding” of the words of Genesis.1 This “plain meaning” is certainly not the meaning of the authors of Genesis; those who bring to Genesis a “literal” interpretation make no attempt to discern the intent of Genesis’ authors or the understanding of their audience. Rather, the “plain meaning” is of course our “plain meaning,” the meaning of our common speech and conversation.

But this speech, this conversation, is thoroughly informed by our modern, positivist, scientific worldview, which declares that only what science can show us is real. From our youth, this metaphysic has been so ingrained in us that to see beyond it is as difficult as to jump out of our own skin.

So for example, some creationists in the Orthodox Church argue that the six days of creation recorded in Genesis could not have been enough time for evolution to proceed. How much time is necessary for the evolution of species is, however, a scientific question. Others dispute whether the days recounted in Genesis were twenty-four-hour days or longer periods of millions of years, a question regarding measurement that takes no account of the world view of ancient Israel, which did not divide the day into hours and had no conception of periods of time millions of years long.2 Orthodox creationists ask whether God created the heavens and earth “all at once” on the first day or over a longer period. They argue that the sequence of events reported in Genesis contradicts the order of the evolution of species.3 They deny that the many ancient skulls found outside of modern Iraq are human and questions the dating of these discoveries. Since Eden was located in what is now Iraq, The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

they believe, there can have been no primitive humans outside that area.4 They grant variation among species but disallow “that one kind or species changes into another,” an argument dating back to Darwin himself, which, despite the abundant evidence in the fossil record, was not conclusively disproven until quite recently.5 These arguments—involving concepts of the succession of time, descent and inheritance, length of the solar day, ice ages, and skull finds— abide in a universe of discourse that is governed not by the spirit in which Genesis was written but by modern science. Orthodox who accept evolution and attempt a reconciliation with Genesis fall into the same trap, questioning “whether the scientific evidence of humankind, or Homo sapiens, being around 200,000 years old [can] be reconciled with the Biblical record that Adam and Eve lived at a much later date, probably after the end of the last Ice Age.”6 The logic of creationism stands Genesis side by side with science as if the two were of one kind, and debates their compatibility. But since Genesis was written some thousands of years before the emergence of modern scientific habits of thought, this endeavor will only do violence to the one or the other.

Its narrow focus on the first six days leads creationism to ignore God’s continuing activity, and to imply—if only by its silence—that his creative work afterwards stopped. In this, it adheres to a constitutive aspect of our modern scientific outlook: that nature runs as an autonomous realm by its own laws.

The notion that after the first six days God abandoned his creation, allowing it to run according to the laws of nature, is often expressed as the “watchmaker” analogy. Favored by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deists

1

For example, Jesse Dominick, “A Patristic Perspective on a Crucified Mind: Fr. Seraphim Rose and the Doctrine of Creation” (M.Div. thesis, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 2013); Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000).

A search online for “Genesis plain meaning” returns many references to non-Orthodox discussions.

2

Rose, 111; Andrei Kuraev, “Can an Orthodox Christian Accept Evolution?”

Silouan (blog), February 11, 2016, silouanthompson. net/2011/02/can-anorthodox-christianaccept-evolution/; S.V. Bufeev, “Why an Orthodox Christian Cannot Be an Evolutionist,” n.d., www.creatio. orthodoxy.ru/ sbornik/sbufeev_ whynot_english. html; “Interview with Fr. Damascene (Christensen),” Pravoslavnie.ru (blog), February 22, 2006, www. pravoslavie.ru/ english/7197.htm.

3

Rose, 135–136.

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4

Andrew Phillips, “Towards an Orthodox View of Creation and Evolution,” OrthodoxEngland.org (blog), August 2006, orthodoxengland. org.uk/towardso. htm.

5

Rose, 424–425.

Patrick Nosil et al., “Host-plant Adaptation Drives the Parallel Evolution of Reproductive Isolation,” Nature 417 (2002): 440–443.

6

Vladimir De Beer, “Genesis, Creation and Evolution,” OrthodoxyToday. org (blog), May 25, 2010, www. orthodoxytoday. org/view/de-beergenesis-creationand-evolution.

7

Rose, 135–6.

8

See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox, 1982), 13, 17.

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and by scientists such as Isaac Newton, the watchmaker analogy grew up with the young science as part and parcel of its methods. According to it, God does not eternally fill his creation with his energies and his love; he is, rather, like a watchmaker who builds a watch and then leaves it to run on its own. Seraphim Rose, whom we can regard as the father of contemporary Orthodox creationism, was most likely unaware of his adherence to this view when he insisted that the first six days occurred “before all the world’s natural processes began to work. . . . If we can know what happened in those Six Days at all, it is not by scientific projections . . . but by God’s revelation.”7 Implied is a radical divide between our Lord’s creative work during the first six days and the rest of the history of creation.8 All of us inherit from our culture this outlook: that God, absent from his creation, simply allows it to run according to its own laws.

Scripture contradicts this view. “My Father is working still, and I am working,” Jesus assures us (John 5:17).

Psalm 104 confesses that God is always creating: “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground” (Ps. 104:30). We thank God at every Divine Liturgy, who “by your measureless power have made all things, and in the greatness of your mercy have brought all things from nonexistence into being”—all things, that is, including those present and to come, not just those supposedly created in six days.

Since creation continues without end, we need not trouble ourselves to count the days of creation or calculate the age of the earth according to Scripture. The entire dispute over the six-day creation evaporates when we take scripture as a whole instead of tearing a single chapter out of context, and when we include the practice of our worship.

Moreover, God does not reserve creative activity to himself. In his boundless generosity he grants to creation itself power to create. He commands creation: “Be fruitful and multiply,” and in obedience his creatures bring forth new life through procreation.

Even lifeless creatures enjoy a certain creativity. God commands: “let the earth put forth” plants, “let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Gen. 1:11, 20). Earth and water, lifeless beings, bring forth life.

Nor does Genesis draw any clear distinction between the creative power of the earth and God’s creative act: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures. . . . And God made the beasts of the earth” (Gen. 1:24–25). The acts of God in nature cannot be separated from nature’s own activity according to its laws. By this I do not mean to imply that God is somehow bound to the laws of nature or dependent upon them. Rather, the laws of nature are a manifestation of God’s creative work.

Our Lord is “upholding the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3)— all things, including the laws of nature themselves. The acts of God in nature are a mystery, the same order of mystery as his acts in history. And indeed, why should they be of a different kind?

It is we who draw the distinction between nature and ourselves, a distinction not to be found in scripture.

Even brute force, as we like to call it, exercises creative power. Gravity forms rock from sediment carried by air and water, acting in cooperation with these other elements of nature. Out of gases it brings forth stars. Finally, nature herself, through evolution, creates new forms of life. The authors of Genesis certainly did not envision this. But we can say that the creative work of nature, commanded by God in Genesis, is manifest in the process of evolution.

God is not jealous of nature’s fertility through evolution; should we be, then?

Do we prefer a miserly God, who keeps to himself all power to create? Indeed, God is jealous of our worship, but not of our creative work.

Nonetheless there is validity in creationism’s charge against evolution.

The theory of evolution, and modern science as a whole, allow God no role in his creation. There is certainly place for a questioning of science from the point of view of Christian faith that stands on firmer ground than a literal reading of Genesis. I want now to offer such a questioning.

Scripture reveals to us that we are a part of the creation. We do not stand outside it. The same language and rhythm that Genesis uses for the first five days of creation it also applies to the sixth day, to the creation of men and women: “Then God said . . . So God created . . . And God blessed . . .”

Yet we differ from our fellow creatures, first in that God has created us alone in his image and likeness; and second in that he has tasked us with leading our fellow creatures to deification. The icon of our right relationship to creation is revealed in the Divine Liturgy, as we offer to God its fruits, not in their original form as grapes and wheat but transformed into bread and wine by the work of our hands and in cooperation with creation herself, in the form of yeast, heat, and other natural powers. It is through this work and this cooperation that nature is deified as the body and blood of our Lord, that God becomes “all in all.”9 In many other places scripture reveals to us our community with creation.

Psalm 104 recounts God’s creative work from the earth’s very foundation, through the formation of oceans and mountains, the loving provision The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

of food for animals and, without breaking rhythm, the labor of men and women on the earth. The lions roar for their prey; with the dawn they retire to their dens and we men and women go forth to our daily work.

The creatures that fill the sea include both Leviathan and our own ships.

The psalmist regards our work and the work of the other creatures as a united whole. He portrays a perfect harmony among all creatures.

Scripture also makes known our community with creation in the many places in which creation with us praises God: “Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars!” (Ps. 148:3) “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge” (Ps. 19:1–2). Here the psalmist testifies to the knowledge and understanding possessed by what we today regard as inanimate objects. In sum, the separation of man and nature into two autonomous realms is not biblical. The vision of Scripture is that of a single realm united in harmony.

9

Dumitru Staniloae, The Sanctifying Mysteries (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012), 105.

This is the vision of faith. What is the vision of science? Science treats nature as an autonomous realm distinct from us. We call this realm “nature” rather than “creation,” removing it by our language from the divine economy, and we see ourselves as living outside it. Science stands over and against this realm and aims to work its will upon it. It inherited this posture from the Scientific Revolution itself. The preeminent exponent of this separation was René Descartes, who divided the cosmos into exclusive categories of mind and matter. Matter, the object of scientific investigation, has no properties according to Descartes besides being extended in space; it is inanimate, 33

10 See Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (London: K. Paul, 1925).

11 Sunday Matins, Antiphon on Hymns of Ascent, Tone 3.

dead. Even the processes of living beings Descartes and his contemporaries treated as the mechanical workings of dead matter. They laid the foundation of modern science upon the utter separation between us persons, or thinking beings, and nature.10 They and their successors understood that this was the path toward a mathematical treatment of the cosmos, toward scientific dominion over nature. I am painting with a broad brush—there were some who attempted a different path, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the nineteenth-century Romantic Naturphilosophie movement—but in the end, the roads they indicated were not taken by mainstream science. If creation is just dead matter, then we can do with it as we please. Early proponents of the new science spoke of forcing nature’s secrets from her by torture—by which they meant the experimental method.

Our faith calls us, ourselves part of creation, to lead creation to salvation and deification. By contrast, the scientific method places us outside of creation, making it an object to exploit rather than a subject to lead back to God. Laboring along their chosen path over the course of four centuries, scientists have met with great success. They have delineated a realm of activity, the autonomous realm of nature, where their results cannot be questioned. To challenge them on their own ground—on issues such as the age of the earth or the evolution of stars and of species— is a fool’s errand. Yet against the fundamental approach of science, as I have described it, we can offer a challenge.

Science indeed can prove that the earth is about four and a half billion years old. But that its matter is dead science can never prove. This is not a scientific finding but a metaphysical assumption, one that makes possible the very activity of science. It is an axiom for science that its objects are only matter,

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and axioms can never be proven. But our culture takes it as proven. It is far from an inconsequential assumption, a simple compartmentalization that allows science to proceed. It separates us from creation and tempts us to abuse it by separating it from God. We Orthodox Christians affirm that matter is not dead. We pray many times daily to the Holy Spirit, confessing that he fills all things. If the Holy Spirit fills all things, then he fills all matter. And if matter is full of the Holy Spirit, then Descartes was wrong: matter is more than mere extension. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life; therefore matter, filled with the Spirit, is not dead but alive. “In him all things live and move,” we proclaim.11 In the Mother of God “all Creation rejoices,” we sing. We exhort “sun and moon . . . and all you shining stars” to praise the Lord. How can dead matter rejoice in the Mother of God? If we believe in the correctness of our worship—that is, in its orthodoxy—then we can confidently affirm that matter, far from being inert, is filled with the presence of God. Nor is it any use proposing, as many do, that science and faith both search out truth: science the truths of nature and faith the truths of God. For this again is to separate God from nature.

There is one truth, our Lord, as he himself said. He created both nature and ourselves. Any truth about nature must be seen in the light that proceeds from him. That light we find in Scripture, in our tradition, and in our worship.

As Orthodox Christians we must take our faith seriously, so that what we proclaim in our worship is not cast aside when we look around ourselves at—and act in—creation. We must free ourselves from science’s unproven assumptions, with which we have been

catechized from our youth up. But we must also understand science and its methods, and not venture to contradict science on its own grounds.

Only then can we properly engage in a search for the right relationship with creation. Only then will we possess both the wisdom and the credibility to begin a dialogue with science and

its practitioners. Only then will we be able to offer to science the wealth of our theological understanding, built up across many millennia, since the ancestors of ancient Israel first began thinking about their God. We can keep in mind that, in contrast, the scientific world view is only a few centuries old. There is much work to be done.

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

Protodeacon Theodore Feldman (Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, Boston) holds a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching history and history of science for many years, he left academia and currently works as a database administrator for an insurance company near Providence, Rhode Island.

FAITH AND REASON

Taxonomy and Anthropology Sergius Halvorsen Taxonomy, the science of classification, is a basic means of understanding the world around us. In biology, organisms are classified according to the well-known system of kingdom, phylum, class, and subsequent levels of increasing specificity, all the way down to species and subspecies. Taxonomy is not inherent in the organisms themselves, however. People are not born with the label Homo sapiens.

Rather, taxonomy is a hermeneutic, a method for systematically defining and understanding creation. While every classification system is based on quantifiable, objective data (such as morphology, genetics, and reproduction of fertile offspring), the act The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

of classifying organisms or objects into particular taxa is a hermeneutic exercise. Moreover, taxonomy is not static; over time, systems for classification change to reflect deeper understandings emerging from new observations. Even though the objects that are classified have not changed, modifications in taxonomy can result in striking reorganizations. The implications of taxonomical classification and reclassification are manifold, for both science and faith.

An example of taxonomy’s importance—and of how quickly it can change—was revealed in a recent episode of the radio show Radiolab, 35

“Stranger in Paradise,” Radiolab, January 27, 2017. www. radiolab.org/story/ stanger-paradise

1

Photo Credit: Guillaume Aricique.

“Stranger in Paradise,” in which producer Simon Adler investigated the strange scientific journey of the Guadeloupe raccoon.1 In 1911, Gerrit S. Miller, a zoologist and curator at the United States National Museum, received a specimen from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Miller’s analysis concluded that this small raccoon, which he named Procyon lotor minor, was a unique species. It became known more commonly as the Guadeloupe raccoon, and in 1996 it was placed on the list of endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Much beloved by the islanders, the raccoon is an iconic symbol of Guadeloupe. Even though the raccoons cause substantial damage to crops and livestock, the residents of Guadeloupe love their eponymous raccoons.

When a new species is discovered, specimens are collected and stored in biological archives to serve as reference specimens against which future discoveries can be compared. The animal that Miller received in 1911 became the reference specimen for the Guadeloupe raccoon and it remained in relative peace until 2000, when it came under new scrutiny. Biologists noticed characteristics of a juvenile raccoon in its skull. This explained the specimen’s small size, which had been considered one of the unique features

of the species. After performing additional morphological and genetic analyses, zoologists concluded that the raccoons living on Guadeloupe are no different than standard, garden-variety North American raccoons. The Guadeloupe raccoon, far from being unique to the island, is actually an invasive species that arrived there a few hundred years ago.

Armed with the results of this research, zoologists went to Guadeloupe and spoke with authorities on the island, informing them that the raccoon was not indigenous. Additionally, conservationists explained that Guadeloupe raccoons threaten populations of native endangered species, by raiding sea turtle nesting sites and the eggs of certain species of birds. The islanders’ response to this news was anything but enthusiastic.

Most local authorities simply rejected the biologists’ reclassification, in many cases covering up reports that identified the raccoon as an invasive species and leaving laws protecting it in place. Several of the Guadeloupe residents interviewed at the end of the Radiolab broadcast greeted the news of taxonomical reassignment with skepticism, saying that they would continue to regard the raccoons as a national treasure. Yet in July of 2016 the European Union placed the Guadeloupe raccoon on a blacklist of invasive species, and it is possible that within the coming year the legal status of the Guadeloupe raccoon will change from a protected, endangered species to an invasive one that should be managed as a pest. While the biology of the Guadeloupe raccoons has not changed, their zoological classification has gone from endangered to invasive, from friend to foe.

Taxonomic reclassification is not limited to the field of biology. Consider

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the case of Pluto, that tiny celestial body, 18 percent the mass of the moon, whose orbit is so far from the sun that sunlight takes more than five hours to reach it. Discovered in 1930, Pluto was for sixty years numbered ninth among the planets of the solar system. Questions about Pluto’s planethood arose in the early 1990s when other, slightly larger objects were discovered in the Kuiper Belt, one of the most distant realms of the solar system. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union changed the definition of a planet and Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. While few people are as personally invested in the classification of Pluto as the residents of Guadeloupe are in their raccoons, “Pluto is a planet!” was nevertheless a popular response to the change.

These two stories strikingly illustrate an important fact: for most people, taxonomic classifications are regarded as absolutes, since they function as the hermeneutical landmarks that allow us to understand and navigate our world. As we learn about science—about plants, animals, fossils, and planets—we must decide how particular things and groups of things should be organized into a taxonomic system that provides order to the world around us. We are told that the Guadeloupe raccoon is a unique species; that Pluto is a planet; that Neanderthals were a distinct species of hominid. These taxonomic assignments are almost always popularly received as new dogma, not as provisional classifications subject to later revision. Changes in classification can seem like the hermeneutic equivalent of moving the goalposts or altering the rules in the middle of the game.

To be told that Pluto is not a planet or that a beloved local animal is an invasive species, whether because of new information or the application of The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

a new hermeneutic paradigm, evokes a strong response because it violates our firm sense of how things in our universe should be properly ordered.

Reclassification is never easy, and consternation over taxonomic fluidity is clearly a universal human condition.

The question of taxonomy hits even closer to home when we consider human origins and paleoanthropology.

When the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeletons were discovered and analyzed in the early twentieth century, scientific consensus defined Neanderthals as a unique hominid species. However, there is mounting genetic evidence to indicate that ancient humans (Homo sapiens) interbred with Neanderthals, and that the resultant offspring were not only capable of reproducing, but were, in fact, our ancestors. Since the reproduction of fertile progeny is one of the basic definitional requirements of a species, our current classification system regards Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as subspecies. In other words, the two are more closely related than earlier classifications indicated. When considering skeletal remains, anthropological artifacts (such as tools, cave paintings, and burial sites), and the fossils of hominids, the line between human beings and nonhuman beings becomes rather fuzzy. This raises fascinating theological questions about anthropology. What exactly is meant when one speaks of human nature?

In exploring evolutionary theory, one faces the somewhat disquieting question of where to draw the border between human and nonhuman.

Whether Pluto is numbered among the planets is important to astronomers studying and classifying objects in the solar system, and it may be an emotional question for people who, as children, memorized the names of the 37

www.mos.org/ exhibits/colby-room

2

nine planets with a mnemonic such as “My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.” Similarly, the question about Neanderthals may have greater or lesser importance in relation to scientific and theological questions about human origins. But the most important—and often the most difficult—kinds of reclassification are those that directly affect ethical decisions. The case of the Guadeloupe raccoon is exactly this sort. A friend now appears to be a foe.

Taxonomic re-sortings with ethical implications can be seen in a variety of contexts. In the twentieth century, a number of substances such as the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, DDT, thalidomide, tobacco, and chlorofluorocarbons were initially labeled as harmless only to be reclassified as toxic, carcinogenic, or destructive to the environment. Reclassifications like this are never easy: those who will be adversely affected by them argue against those who seek to protect themselves and others from the newly discovered deleterious effects. One sees similar conflicts today regarding the classification of greenhouse gasses and genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food. People are passionate about these questions because the classification directly affects ethical and legal decisions, often in the form of government regulation.

An excellent example of the ethical dimention of reclassification can be seen in the Colby Trophy Room at the Museum of Science in Boston. The museum refers to the exhibit as a re-creation of Colonel Francis T. Colby’s den in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Like a snapshot in time, the room contains original artifacts and animals representing both the life travels of Colonel

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Colby and the mindset of a generation. . . . Although unusual from a modern perspective, this room represents the roots of current attitudes toward ecology and conservation.2 For someone who has lived through the birth and development of the ecological movement, this exhibit represents an earlier era when wild animals, and their wild habitats, were powerful and dangerous forces that threatened the existence of humanity.

When the natural world is classified in this way, a trophy room—filled with animal skin rugs on the floor, taxidermic heads on the wall, and impressive racks of hunting rifles—is a positive statement about the ability of men such as Colonel Colby to dominate nature. A person of a particular age might recall a time when such an exhibit would have evoked feelings of awe and admiration (this is certainly what Colonel Colby intended).

When young children look at the same exhibit today, the response is likely to be one of puzzlement. “Daddy, why are all these skins and heads and guns in here? This is kind of creepy.” Over the course of the last fifty years, the natural world and the animals that inhabit it have been formally and informally reclassified. Animals that once constituted threatening forces to be subdued and dominated are now regarded as precious resources that can be easily destroyed and which must be conserved. Many previously threatening species are now endangered. Today, a video showing healthy populations of endangered animals, thriving in well-managed game preserves—the same kinds of animals whose heads and skins are on display in the Colby Trophy room—demonstrates human power (in this case, the power to curb our own capacity to extirpate natural

environments). Not only are rare animals and their habitats reclassified as valuable and worth cultivating and preserving, but human beings are placed in a different category as well: those who once struggled to dominate nature are now responsible for preserving nature from destruction and extinction.

Another example of informal taxonomy and classification is seen in the heated debates between vegans and omnivores. A vegan might look at a pig and see an intelligent, sentient being: a pet, a companion. An omnivore might look at the very same pig and primarily see pork chops, sausage, and bacon. Substantially different classifications often result in incompatible ethical decisions, revealing the subjective nature of taxonomy as a hermeneutic. The pig, Pluto, and the The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

pesticide do not change; it is our perspective on how they fit together that makes the difference in our treatment of them. In a profound way, taxonomy is intimately connected to ethics, because it speaks to us at the deepest levels about relationship and value.

The value constructs inherent in taxonomies become particularly apparent in questions of anthropology.

Many contemporary moral and ethical debates boil down to the question of who or what is human. Questions relating to the sanctity of life—the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, the terminally ill—are fundamentally questions of what it means to be human.

More broadly, questions regarding immigrants, refugees, race, and religion are closely tied to the question of who a human being is. If some are dehumanized, it is much easier for one

The recreation of Colonel Francis Thompson Colby’s “gun room” at Boston’s Museum of Science. Photo: www.wbur.org/ artery/2016/03/25/ taxidermy-incontemporary-art.

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group to marginalize another systematically. The question becomes even more critical in issues of war, justice, and capital punishment. The language used to refer to an enemy or a criminal reflects this. “He is a monster.”

“They are inhuman.” Or consider the language that describes the death or injury of innocent men women and children in warfare: collateral damage. In order that the killing and suffering of war might be more easily justified, the people who are injured or killed—whether civilians or enemy combatants—are not thought of as people like you and me. Instead, they are just part of the scenery that has to be destroyed in order to accomplish the mission.

The question of taxonomy as hermeneutic has an interesting analog in Christian faith. When Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter answers, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29, Matt. 16:15), we see the relationship between faith and taxonomy. Jesus’s opponents looked upon the same man as Peter, yet classified Jesus differently. They classified Jesus as a blasphemer and an enemy of the state, which led them to condemn him to death. The contrast between the two confessions comes into dramatic focus in the juxtaposition of Mary, who stood weeping at the foot of the cross, and the crowd, who jeered and taunted, “Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him” (Matt. 27:42). The man on the cross does not change, but the two taxonomic judgments, expressed in two incompatible confessions of faith, are radically different. Whether one regards Jesus as an imposter or as the Christ is a confession of faith. Both perspectives can be argued based on the evidence, based on relevant data, yet they lead to substantially different conclusions.

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Paul’s mission to the Gentiles was another example of reclassification and taxonomy as hermeneutic. The circumcision party (Acts 11, 15) believed that a Christian must follow the halakhic laws of ritual purity. However, to Paul, and later to the somewhat reluctant Peter, the Gospel of Jesus Christ required a reclassification of Jews and Gentiles. As Paul famously wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:28– 29). The mission to the Gentiles was an example of taxonomic reclassification: those once rejected—the unclean, the nations, the outsiders—were now the ones whom the apostles were called to serve. Another example was Paul’s definition of the spiritual warfare: we do not fight against flesh and blood— against other people—but against the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). In the same way that followers of Christ confess belief through the symbol of faith (the Creed), “I believe in one God,” the taxonomic classification of who or what is an enemy, or who or what is human, is also a confession of faith.

In an age of “fake news” and aggressive critiques of “postmodern relativism,” this perspective on taxonomy as a confession of faith may seem a bit unsettling, like an embrace of subjectivism in which there are no absolutes, but merely a chaotic sea of “truthiness” where “my facts are just as good as your facts.” However, such a pessimistic conclusion is itself a confession of faith (or at least faithlessness). It is far more constructive to focus on the process by which we come to make our confessions, particularly as we engage in discussions with those who hold different confessions.

Every confession, like a mathematical proof, is based on a set of givens, ideas that are accepted to be true.

This is true of scientific theories. Acknowledging the confessional nature of ideas that are accepted as true is an act of profound honesty and humility. Thomas Hopko often remarked, “We must always admit that we may be wrong.” Acknowledging the limits of understanding and taxonomic certainty is not an abandonment of truth, but rather a deeper perception of it.

Yet to make a confession of faith in God is much more than promoting a claim of objective fact; it is instead the beginning of a relationship, with God and one’s neighbor, and requires the recognition that in every relationship there is always uncertainty. To acknowledge uncertainty—to embrace mystery—is not to abandon a search for objective truth or to say that everything is entirely relative. Categorical reality is not defined by my confession: my neighbor is still my neighbor whether I classify him as an enemy or a brother. However, the nature of my confession matters far more than the nature of my neighbor.

This confessional faith is central to our relationship with God and with

our neighbor, a reality perfectly illustrated through the common biblical metaphor of the marital relationship between God and his people. In any marriage, “faithfulness” is central to the ongoing health of the relationship, even though the fact of a spouse’s ongoing faithfulness can almost never be definitively proven; indeed, any marriage in which one spouse is constantly looking to prove the faithfulness of the other is doomed to either failure or crippling dysfunction. Ultimately, marital faithfulness is a classification leading to a hermeneutical act of faith: you are my spouse, ergo I shall be faithful to you, and also presume that this faithfulness will be reciprocal. The cruciality of faithfulness in a healthy relationship, expressed through the marital language of Christianity, also sets the standard for our love of neighbor. Deciding to be faithful, while fully aware of the underlying uncertainties, may be the most difficult and important act of Christian faith. The residents of Guadeloupe, no matter how their beloved raccoons are classified, continue to confess their love for these animals, even though they are objectively, at times, very difficult to love.

For all of us, this is perhaps the most meaningful confession of all.

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

The Rev. J. Sergius Halvorsen is Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Rhetoric at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, where he also teaches a course on Faith and Science. He received his B.A. in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz before pursuing theological studies at St Vladimir’s and then at Drew University. He is a priest in the Orthodox Church in America and lives in Connecticut.

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

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FAITH AND REASON

Science’s Deepest Belief Alexei M. Tsvelik

“Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of today a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of eternity.” — James Clerk Maxwell To understand the deep connection between science and religion, we need to study the assumptions lying at the roots of scientific thought. No discourse ever starts from nothing; we always make assumptions. When a discourse is young, these assumptions are debated and open to the light of day, but with the passage of time they start to be taken for granted and gradually slip into subconsciousness. When people say that science and faith are opposed to each other, they do not reflect on the creed which natural science professes. This creed is not always clearly and openly presented when scientists talk about their discoveries or give interpretations of what goes on in the world. Nevertheless, science assumes that events occur according to rules, which scientists call laws of nature. These rules are thought to be independent of our will.

The principal occupation of science is obtaining knowledge about these laws. Knowledge of the laws of nature enables us to predict future events and also to reconstruct the events of the past—although one has to remember that, according to the modern view, 42

these laws are not deterministic but statistical, admitting a certain degree of flexibility. There is a very intricate play between chance and necessity in nature which together make our world so rich. The laws’ predictive power is of the utmost importance.

Science does not just systematize facts about the world, bringing them into some tidy order. The system and the order are considered to be good only insofar as they enable us to make accurate predictions. Knowledge, in order to be reliable, must be predictive and verifiable. By insisting on reliability, this approach narrows the field of science.

There is some question as to whether natural science can put claims on everything, including human behavior, or whether there is a line or even lines separating the world of inanimate matter from creatures with intentions and emotions—and eventually from those, like us, with intelligence and the capacity for reflective thinking.

Some think that there is no essential difference between the human sphere and the rest of the world, and hence that natural science can (at least in principle) explain it all. Others think that science is just a human invention making obviously wrong pronouncements about human nature, and on this basis do not take it seriously even when it speaks about inanimate objects. I think that the latter point of

view is too extreme. For the purpose of the present narrative, it is enough to assume that natural science has complete authority as far as inanimate objects are concerned.

A widespread belief holds that the principal adversary of science is religion, with its belief in the “supernatural.” In fact, the concept of the supernatural is not a necessary attribute of religion, as is evident from the fact that the foundations of science were established by deeply religious people. The very idea of the natural laws—without which science does not exist—was conceived in the religious society centered on the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras. These ideas were later developed by Plato and Aristotle, both very religious people, even though their religion was not that of the masses.

The founder of the modern European science, Isaac Newton, was deeply religious, as were such other great scientists as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Kurt Gödel, and Werner Heisenberg. And although Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and Paul Dirac were not religious in the conventional sense, it would be preposterous to call them atheists.

A quotation from Albert Einstein illustrates this thesis: The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked.

While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza’s Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.1 One reason for the conflict between science and religion is a misunderstanding of the ontological status of natural laws. Experience acquired in scientific research tends to suggest that these laws constitute a logical structure for always-changing world events. In other words, scientists believe that the world changes, but the laws do not—otherwise science would have no predictive power. To maintain that the universe is supplied with a logical structure is tantamount to maintaining that it is ruled by reason or logos. The following quotations from Albert Einstein and the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead illustrate this point:

1

Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?” The Christian Register 127 (June 1948): 19–20.

2

Albert Einstein to P. Wright, January 24, 1936, quoted in Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 93.

. . . ultimately the belief in the existence of fundamental allembracing laws also rests on a sort of faith. All the same, this faith has been largely justified by the success of science. On the other hand, however, everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.2 In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive convic43

3 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1925), 3–4, 12–13.

tion in the existence of an Order Of Things. And, in particular, of an Order Of Nature . . . .The inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner . . . must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God . . .

My explanation is that faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.3 In other words, the governing logical structure of natural science is literally not of this world. It has an ontological status different from that of events.

We infer its structure from the observation of phenomena—not seeing it with our eyes or hearing it with our ears, but deducing it through our intelligence by means of hypothesis and analysis. The laws of nature are not of this world because they are not located at any particular point in time or space. They are not things or events; they direct events, and one may therefore speak with confidence about their preexistence and independence of the material content of the universe. The relationship of natural laws to matter can be likened to that of blueprint to product, or software to hardware.

The reader may be surprised by such an idealistic view of science, but it is implicitly contained in every physics textbook. According to this view, space and time—together with their material content—do not govern themselves. Their behavior and fate is determined by the law, which itself is atemporal and all-encompassing. This idea lies at the foundation of modern physics and has far-reaching consequences. The laws are “out there” in the sense that they are not our invention. Neither are they

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social constructs, although our knowledge of them is necessarily limited and changes with time. No self-respecting scientist would say that he or she has invented some natural law. Laws are not invented but discovered, just as Christopher Columbus discovered America for Europeans, although it had been there all along. Just as Columbus mistook America for India because his theory was wrong, we may also be confused about the real meaning of our discoveries, but our understanding is improved through a continuing process of criticism, verification, and argument.

One might well ask whether we can ever be truly confident in any knowledge. Not only members of the general public but even some philosophers believe that this is impossible, that every new scientific epoch cancels the achievements of the previous one, since “paradigm shifts” in scientific thinking allegedly create impenetrable barriers in our intellectual development. If this were true, science would have no real say concerning the status of humans in this world.

I think, however, that this point of view is based on a misunderstanding.

New developments in science do not cancel the achievements of the past, but rather put limits on their validity and accuracy. The theory of relativity, for instance, disproved the Newtonian postulate of absolute time, but in doing so it did not invalidate all of Newton’s achievements and results.

Likewise, quantum mechanics disproved the absolute determinism of classical mechanics. Notwithstanding this, anybody interested in the motion of macroscopic bodies whose speed is slower than that of light can still rely on the laws of mechanics formulated

by Newton more than 300 years ago.

They are essential for car, airplane, and rocket engineers, and for those

who analyze weather and climatic events. The same holds for chemistry: even though we do not yet understand how to unite quantum mechanics with gravity, this is of little concern for any practicing chemist and, I dare to say, will remain so even after this unification is achieved. I believe it is safe to assume that there are areas of our experience where our knowledge is reliable. And I will try to show that even this restricted knowledge will allow us to draw far reaching metaphysical conclusions.

Let us now come back to the idea of universality. We have ample evidence that the laws of nature as we know them have remained the same throughout the history of the universe, and that they are the same in all the regions we can observe. This idea has not been accepted without challenge and doubt. Evidence in its favor comes from spectroscopic analysis of remote cosmic objects. Atoms of different chemical elements emit or absorb electromagnetic radiation (including radio waves, infrared radiation, visible light, and X-rays) at different frequencies. Each element manifests a unique pattern of emitted radiation, constituting a kind of “fingerprint.” When astronomers analyze light from remote stellar objects they find the same spectral patterns as here on Earth. No matter how far these objects are—light years, thousands of light years, or even billions of light years away—we see the same patterns. This analysis gives us information about the chemical content of these remote objects, and also suggests that the laws responsible for the composition of chemical elements are the same throughout the observable universe. Moreover, since light travels at a finite speed, by looking further away we look deeper into the past. This means that by observing the The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

same spectral patterns in objects located billions of light years away, we can ascertain that the laws of physics have remained unchanged for many years.

The concept of natural laws that is at the center of this discussion may be illustrated with a thought experiment.

Imagine a very young universe, at a time shortly after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies have not yet been formed. There are not even any complex atoms, only elementary particles.

Imagine that some higher power has placed in this young universe an incorporeal spirit, and has given him our physics textbooks. Obviously the knowledge of physical laws contained in these books is rather incomplete.

Even so, by reading them, our angel will be able to extract enough information to conceive a broad outline of future developments. He will be able to predict that the expanding universe will cool down, and that matter will organize itself into ever more complex forms. Elementary particles will form atoms of hydrogen and helium, which in turn will form dense clouds and eventually stars. Matter that remains outside the stars will continue to cool down, but the temperature in the stars will increase, giving rise to thermonuclear fusion. The fusion of hydrogen nuclei will create heavier elements.

The clever spirit will be able to make these predictions by reading the physics books given to him well before the events take place.

This thought experiment demonstrates the thesis that physical laws are not contained in material objects, as materialists suggest, since they predict the formation of these very objects. And I hope it is clear now why I believe that the laws governing the events and the events they govern are fundamentally different entities. This 45

brings us to the main thesis of my narrative: idea precedes its material incarnation, and since in its unity it contains all the stages of the entire process of incarnation, from the simplest to the more complex, the complex may be said to come before the simple, not vice versa.

The material world—the world of things we can see, hear, taste, and touch—is not the only reality. There is also an aspect of it which opens itself only to our intelligence. This idea speaks against materialism, but does not necessarily speak for God. One can argue—and this argument has been put forth before—that the laws of nature constitute an impersonal force, lacking any awareness or concern for our existence. If one can call this God, it would be the indifferent god of Baruch Spinoza, not the personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For a religious person, the crucial question is whether the Platonic world of ideas supplants God or belongs to God.

© 2017 The Wheel.

May be distributed for noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com

To answer this question, it would be necessary to establish the relationship between natural laws and humans. We would have to find out whether our arrival in this world was just an accident or the result of a purposeful pro-

cess. We would have to study our relationship to this world carefully, and especially our ability to extract reliable knowledge of it. I believe that modern science points toward the reality of a purposeful process. This, however, lies outside the scope of this paper.

Further Reading Barr, Stephen M., Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

Burov, Lev and Alexey, “Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe,” in Trick or Truth? The Mysterious Connection between Physics and Mathematics, ed. Anthony Aguirre, Brendan Foster, and Zeeya Merali. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016, 157–170.

Ferguson, Kitty, The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God. West Conshohocken, Penn.: Templeton Foundation Press, 1994.

Penrose, Roger, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. London: Random House, 2004.

Plantinga, Alvin, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Alexei Tsvelik works as a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford Universities before joining the Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department at Brookhaven in 2001. He is an author of over 170 scientific publications, including two books on quantum field theory.

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READING ROOM

Reading The Benedict Option with MacIntyre and Schmemann Adam A. J. DeVille Rod Dreher’s idea of a “Benedict option” is ostensibly drawn from the closing paragraph of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s monumental book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Writing in 1981, MacIntyre pointed to the efforts of Christians during the decline of the Roman Empire to salvage their moral tradition by constructing “local forms of community.”1 Dreher cites this passage of MacIntyre in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, which is an extended plea for contemporary Christians to withdraw from mainstream society and to turn inward, forming intentional communities where the faith may be kept alive through the oncoming dark ages.

MacIntyre’s remark is, however, a strange foundation on which to build this argument. For in extracting one phrase from After Virtue, Dreher ignores the strong caution that preceded it. Moreover, except in that book’s conclusion, which Dreher invests with so much meaning, MacIntyre never mentions St. Benedict again in his subsequent work. Meanwhile, Dreher neglects some of MacIntyre’s most important books and essays, such as Secularization and Moral Change. We know this from the potted history he gives us as when, for example, he insouciantly claims that “the loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragThe Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

menting for some time now, a process that is accelerating.”2 MacIntyre (who is as much an intellectual historian as he is a moral philosopher) lays out abundant historical evidence for his thesis and argues forcefully that the view that moral and social change is consequent upon the decline of religion is false, and the view therefore that such change could be arrested or could have been arrested by halting the decline of religion is also false.

I have argued instead that the causes of moral and social change have lain in the same urbanization and industrialization that produce secularization.3 While Dreher nods his head toward the Industrial Revolution, he never really takes MacIntyre seriously and investigates the role of urbanization and industrialization. Nor, worse, does he do the only sensible thing and pursue a critical analysis of the role of economics beyond the dominant neoliberal paradigm. We shall return to this problem presently.

Though I have every sympathy with Dreher’s evidently sincere desire to see Christianity flourish everywhere possible, I regret to say that Dreher’s book offers little that is new and fresh to assist with such a task. It is, rather, wreathed about with the stale air of

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. New York: Sentinel, 2017.

1

Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 263.

2

Dreher, 22.

3

Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 58. My emphasis.

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apocalypticism on the cheap. In reading Dreher, I was ineluctably drawn back to a passage from the great Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann’s Journals: “In the Bible, there is space and air. In Byzantium the air is always stuffy, always heavy, static, petrified.”4

4

Alexander Schmemann, journal entry for February 27, 1979. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans.

Juliana Schmemann (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2000), 213.

5

Schmemann, 113.

6

Dreher, 12.

7

Dreher, 18.

In fact, several passages from Schmemann came to mind while reading The Benedict Option, which fixates on same-sex marriage and gender issues to an unhealthy and unhelpful degree.

None seems more acute or appropriate than a remark from March 1976, during Lent: “Students’ confessions.

Always sex. I am beginning to think that this sin is useful; otherwise they would consider themselves saintly and plunge into guruism.”5 Dreher’s entire project reeks of guruism.

It is, of course, the nature of gurus that they must convince you of their epistemological superiority. They know things that you cannot possibly know—at least not as they are known by the guru. One thing the guru certainly knows is how bad things are and how badly you need his wisdom, his program and, especially, his merchandise to get you out of the deplorable state of affairs you are otherwise condemned to inhabit.

That is the most objectionable feature of Dreher’s book: its profiteering on the back of despondency and determinism as manifested in such claims as “the wave cannot be stopped, only ridden.” Or when he counsels Christians to build an “ark” instead of fighting “unwinnable political battles.”6 Or when he flatly insists that “the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with.”7 These claims are theologically objectionable insofar as he presumes to know that nothing

48

can be changed and, consequently, that there is no room for the virtue of hope.

Such claims are also objectionable on historical grounds. While Christianity has dwindled and even died off in some parts of the world at different points in history (the history of the Assyrian Church of the East offers the clearest example), such a process is by no means inevitable or, as Dreher suggests, entirely out of our control. He also ignores the surprising ways the Church can rebound precisely when, in the eyes of the world, she seems to be at her weakest.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, similar predictions of decline and demise were made by many as the Church in the West felt under attack in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the face of the increasingly prominence, including the formation of the Italian state which deprived the Church of the Papal States. The Papal States were thought to be essential to the mission of the Church—wrongly, as we now see, and as Pope Leo XIII himself quickly grasped. In fact, it was under Leo that the Church—and especially the papacy—found a new focus and dynamism, and emerged into the twentieth century on an upward trajectory, aided in no small part by money earned as compensation from Italy for loss of the Papal States and as part of the Lateran Treaty process.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, in the heat of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the plight of the Church also looked dire to many, and even what finally became the great reforming Council of Trent was, for some time, a very close-run thing that nearly fell apart. But ultimately Trent proved to be a success. Again the Church was

on the move, with new orders, such as the Jesuits, and a new dynamism that recovered much of what she had lost.

The Church opened up new avenues, took on new nations, and continued to grow globally.

Going back further still, to the rise of the mendicant orders, the Church in the age of Dominic and Francis was thought by those giants and many others to be in a massive state of disrepair and dissolution, perhaps fatally so. But Francis of Assisi—responding, so he believed, to the Lord’s call to “repair my Church,” launched a reformation that continues more than 800 years after his death, as the sisters who sponsor and run my own University of Saint Francis daily, cheerfully attest.

Dreher’s lack of familiarity not just with Catholic and broader philosophical history, but also with Catholic life in any serious detail—apart, that is, from his boutique examples in Italy, Oklahoma, and Maryland—is really telling. For there are plenty of Catholics I know who have been doing the things he has packaged together, and been doing them without fanfare for decades. There are, moreover, many Catholics emerging today—especially among the much-feared and much -derided “millennials”—who have a deep grasp of the faith and a deeper desire to live it. I see them every semester in my classes, and they give me a modest degree of hope.

Knowing even just a little of this history must surely give one reason to question Dreher’s firm determination that Christianity in North America and Western Europe is finished. Examining Christian history all the way back to the beginning helps one to see that the Church has always been in a cycle of decline and rebirth, rising in some places at some times while sinking in others.

I have now taught for almost 20 years in three countries at a number of Catholic institutions at both the high school and university level. With each passing year my students seem, quietly and imperfectly, but firmly and hopefully, to be growing in the strength and depth of their faith. I find, therefore, Dreher’s narrative of unrelenting decline to be extremely selective in its evidence, and plainly to ignore plenty of evidence I have myself seen firsthand.

There are other serious problems with Dreher’s recounting of history, not least his retailing of the discredited notion of “wars of religion” and his indifference around the founding of the modern nation-state. But arguably the most egregious flaw with Dreher’s historical section (chapter 2) is its attempt to describe the history of the Enlightenment without even mentioning MacIntyre’s Whose Justice?

Which Rationality?8 The convenient neglect of such a crucial if dense book reveals once and for all that Dreher’s read of MacIntyre is selective and tendentious.

Dreher goes on and on about “moralistic therapeutic deism” (never taking seriously some of the criticism of that claim and its research, which I have myself heard from other Catholic sociologists), but the Catholics I see in my classes are, with each passing year, farther and farther removed from that. He also makes much of Pope Benedict XVI’s comments about the “dictatorship of relativism,” but my classroom experience has made it clear to me that nobody is ever really a relativist.9 When I have taught ethics and moral theology to students, I have easily managed to disabuse students

The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

8

Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?

Which Rationality?

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

9

Also see Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues, and Goods,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992): 3–19.

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10 Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “Theology, Ethics, and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4.4: 435–443.

11 James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1997), 50.

of a lazy relativism by asking them to tell me how they live their lives when faced with significant moral choices.

So are my examples correct, and Dreher’s wrong? Do my anecdotes trump his? I would not for a instant claim that. In fact, let us suppose Dreher is more right than wrong about our particular moment in North American and Western European Christian history. Let us suppose Christianity is largely on life support, and may soon die out almost entirely. What is to be done? The answer he proposes to this is, of course, the “Benedict option.”

dict option, which can be dismissed as both harmless and irrelevant precisely because it has failed to offer us—as MacIntyre continues later in the same essay—“a theological critique of secular morality and culture,” including, of course, the economics of late capitalism.

But what kind of solution is this? Here remedy and disease seem almost indistinguishable, and here a deeper appreciation of MacIntyre could, perhaps, have rescued Dreher’s project at the moment of its conception. For Dreher’s project seems to have fallen into the very pit MacIntyre predicted in a 1979 essay. There MacIntyre recognized the dangers of “the peculiarly deep secularization of our pluralist culture,” which

Laid out before one are whole lives that one can, if one has the necessary credit line, freely choose to inhabit: devout Christian; high-tech yuppie; Down East guide; great white hunter.

This striking transformation of life into lifestyle, the way in which the tools, garments, and attitudes specific to particular times and places become commodities to be marketed to anonymous and rootless consumers: these are the natural (if also banal) expressions of our normal nihilism.11

offers traps to the theologians into which they continually fall. A culture of systematic unbelief would provide a relatively unambiguous context for theological utterance, while a pluralist culture offers an atmosphere of tolerant absorption through which the theologian is diminished and patronized and in which the theologian too often responds either by an anxious accommodation to the culture or by an equally adaptive reaction against it.10 Dreher is clearly in the latter category, offering a reactionary take on this moment in our history. Like many reactionaries he is a member of the bourgeoisie, proof of which can be seen in the very notion of a Bene-

50

The “Benedict option,” then, seems to participate too much in the fatalistic neoliberal economics of the culture it claims to resist. Dreher’s whole project seems an example of what James C. Edwards describes thus:

The whole “Benedict option” smacks of just such a transformation of life into lifestyle, and its uses and abuses of Benedict have turned that great saint into a commodity to be marketed to “anonymous and rootless [Christian] consumers.”

In this regard, all those commentators worried about the political implications and applications of Dreher’s proposal have nothing to worry about: he is simply not radical enough, for his proposal—to borrow Catherine Pickstock’s language about the dreamy reforms of Vatican II—manifests “an entirely more sinister conservatism” that fails “to challenge those struc-

tures of the modern secular world that are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose.”12 Far from challenging, let alone overthrowing, those structures, Dreher beats an unseemly and hasty retreat from them and says the idea of anybody challenging them is pointless. Worse, Dreher sneers that those who still want to challenge the structures of the modern secular world are deluded. Those who do not read the signs as he does are dismissed as “the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right” or as out of touch as White Russians after the Revolution.13 But assertions do not arguments make, and such derisive dismissals as these merely underscore Dreher’s very flimsy and intellectually fragile plaidoyer for a particular program that will appeal to people most like Dreher: middle-class American Christians.

But gurus have no greater insight into the future than anyone else. Indeed, gurus should be questioned precisely insofar as they try to see and say how things are, and how they are going to turn out. Let us invent a law here— call it Merited Commensurability: the more adamant someone is in saying that such and such is bound to happen, the more we ought to greet such claims with the strongest skepticism.

I wish Dreher had a deeper recognition of the contingencies of culture and unpredictability of human events. At one point he edges up to such a recognition, saying that “History is a poem, not a syllogism,” but he has no sooner delivered himself of that single line then he races back to what the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has called a narrative of “chosen trauma,” in which the West is in inexorable decline and persecution of Christians is coming in fast and thick as far as the eye can see.14 The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

(Dreher’s treatment of Sigmund Freud, on pages 42–43, turns the latter into the usual sort of grotesque one would expect from those who have never read primary sources. Dreher reads Freud through the mediation of Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.)

Dreher’s overheated narrative of trauma and decline could have benefited from a hefty dose of modesty and restraint at the urge to predict the future. Here I rather wish he had some of the modesty manifested in Winston Churchill’s eloquent eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, delivered in Parliament in late 1940: At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion.

There is another scale of values.

12 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

13

Dreher, 12

14

Dreher, 23.

Dreher’s “scale of values” inclines toward recommending such things (“options” indeed!) as deeper prayer and more frequent fasting, these being unobjectionable—indeed noble—in themselves. But when they are packaged together with still further options enjoined upon others, and when especially they are read, as they only can be read, in light of his regular gastronomic ejaculations on his blog about oysters and mustards, or, now, the bourbon cocktail invented by a friend and called the “Benedict option,” I could not help 51

15 Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London: Duckworth, 1969), 108.

16

Dreher, 137.

17 Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 142–145. My emphasis.

18 Dreher, 65–67, 129–134, 165–166, 131.

but think of another work of MacIntyre’s that Dreher seems never to have read, Marxism and Christianity. There MacIntyre says of the Tractarians and the “ascetic disciplines” they commended to everyone (weekly communion, intense local community life, regular fasting, auricular confession, and other devotions practiced in ritually resplendent churches) that these disciplines “were of a kind possible only to a leisured class.”15 Like most members of the leisure class, Dreher evidences little interest in seeing the social environment flourish on a wide scale, preferring only that it do so for the small communities he advocates, and of course for himself.

Though Dreher commendably says at one point, “love the community but don’t idolize it,” the rest of his book is precisely such near-idolatry.16 Here again one can only note that a deeper, more sophisticated engagement with MacIntyre would have saved Dreher from such fatuities.

MacIntyre has offered repeated demonstrations of, and arguments against, what he calls the “communitarian mistake,” which is premised upon “a further mistake...that there is anything good about local community as such.” Those “communities are always open to corruption by narrowness, by complacency, by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole range of other deformities, including those that arise from a cult of local community.” To avoid such problems and deformities, local communities must engage in many things, including “a rejection of the economic goals of advanced capitalism.”17 Dreher seems totally uninterested in any such rejection.

Dreher seems to lack self-awareness of how such advanced capitalism makes

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his peripatetic blogging life possible, but makes many of his proposals impossible for too many other people, who must pick up and move far from family and community merely to survive economically. Here we must include his praise of “stability,” his advocacy that one must “live close to other members of your community,” his insistence that public schools be abandoned and people should homeschool their kids, and his impertinent demand that “church can’t just be the place you go on Sundays—it must become the center of your life.”18 Try suggesting any one of these things, never mind all of them (and still others he recommends) to the people working three jobs just to pay rent and forced to relocate every few years when jobs disappear.

Incidentally, those Tractarians recommending such ascetic disciplines as Dreher does, and those practicing them, did not always have an easy time of it in the Church of England of the late nineteenth century. There was considerable opposition to many of these proposals, as John Shelton Reed’s fascinating Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian AngloCatholicism showed. In the end, the “ritualists” and Tractarians, when they did not decamp for Rome, were reduced to a Dreher style of pleading merely for the right to be left alone pursuing their “option” for what Cardinal Henry Edward Manning came caustically to call “private judgment in gorgeous raiment, wrought about with divers colours.”

Cardinal John Henry Newman, of course, came to loathe private judgment. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and then especially in his famous “Biglietto Speech,” he denounced private judgment as just another species of liberalism. Newman, acutely aware of the

contingencies of history, especially Christian history, and loathe to make the sorts of facile prognostications that Dreher does, ended that speech in Rome after being given a red hat by Leo XIII with this apt reminder: Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. . . . Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God. Dreher is not content to stand still and see the salvation of God. His busybody guruism, seeking to safeguard “Orthodox Christianity” is, as MacIntyre suggested, a typical reaction of the leisure class that often has the greatest tendency to fixate on simplicity, intentional community, and various forms of voluntary self-denial—whether in monasteries or pseudo-monastic communities. It is the leisure class especially among converts to Orthodoxy (in what Amy Slagle has aptly called the The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity) who most often seem to fetishize monasteries, who have the time and money to obsess over “monasticism” and “tradition” in psychologically suspect ways, running after their “spiritual fathers” for permission to pee or clip their toenails on Fridays in Lent.

Dreher, of course, is not made of such stern fanaticism. Curiously but revealingly, his gaze falls primarily upon Catholic and Protestant communities in preference to, for example, Mount Athos. Nevertheless, one must challenge this desire to play at being a monk or a quasi-monastic, and one must regard any and all calls for “new forms of community” with The Wheel 11 | Fall 2017

a great deal of skepticism until and unless they engage in—as MacIntyre says—“rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say.”19 Absent such serious rational thought, and attendant safeguards, one can only be cautious and reluctant to pursue such a life, much as wouldbe monks rightly were before their tonsure. I am told by a liturgist of impeccable scholarship that some recensions of the Byzantine rite of monastic tonsure saw the hegumen or abbot toss the scissors away three times when presented with them by the wouldbe monk, who would then have to scramble across the floor to retrieve them repeatedly, each time being reminded of the seriousness of the state of life he was about to enter and the real risks he would run thereby.

19 Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 223.

Because of those risks, it is imperative that one repeatedly and ruthlessly interrogate any romanticism about monastic or community life in any form, for they are fraught with conflicts and problems, not least a tendency toward escapism and subtle forms of self-promotion—and not-so-subtle forms of control, manipulation, and outright sexual abuse. Returning once again to Alexander Schmemann, we see that Schmemann has already offered us severe warnings about these temptations in a bracing and acid passage from January 1981: More and more often it seems to me that reviving the monasticism that everybody so ecstatically talks about—or at least trying to revive it—can be done only by liquidating first of all the monas53

tic institution itself, i.e., the whole vaudeville of klobuks, cowls, stylization, etc. If I were a starets—an elder—I would tell a candidate for monasticism roughly the following: —get a job, if possible the simplest one, without creativity (for example as a cashier in a bank); 20

Schmemann, 284–285.

—while working, pray and seek inner peace; do not get angry; do not think of yourself (rights, fairness, etc.). Accept everyone (coworkers, clients) as someone sent to you; pray for them; –after paying for a modest apartment and groceries, give your money to the poor; to individuals rather than foundations; –always go to the same church and there try to be a real helper, not by lecturing about spiritual life or icons, not by teaching but with a “dust rag” (cf. St Seraphim of Sarov). . . .

–do not thrust yourself and your service on anyone; do not be sad that your talents are not being used; be helpful; serve where needed and not where you think you are needed;

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–read and learn as much as you can; do not read only monastic literature, but broadly. . . .

–be always simple, light, joyous.

Do not teach. Avoid like the plague

any “spiritual” conversations and any religious or churchly idle talk.20 Real monastics, whether Benedictine or otherwise, know that the course of wisdom is to be found not in talking “church talk” or promoting “options,” but in listening and serving everyone, without drawing attention to oneself.

Real monastics who have done that include another of Dreher’s fellow Orthodox, nowhere in evidence in his book: Mother Maria Skobtsova, who made wartime Paris her “monastery” without walls, serving the suffering she encountered there, including the Jews, service to whom and protection of whom cost Maria her life in the gas chamber of Ravensbrück. She would later be canonized by the Orthodox Church, not just for this sacrifice of her life but also for her monastic service in and for the city of Paris, not atop some mountain somewhere or in an inaccessible cloister.

What Skobtsova was living was something later described by another Franco-Russian Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, as “interiorized monasticism,” which may be lived anywhere and everywhere for the life of the world.

Precisely insofar as it is interiorized, such a monastic spirit it is silent, reflecting, as Thomas Merton once said succinctly, the entire wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers: “Shut up, and go to your cell!”

May we all do so.

Adam A. J. DeVille is chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology, program director of the master’s degree program, and associate professor of theology at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Among his publications are several books on the relations between Eastern and Western Churches as well as writings on Christian marriage and priesthood.

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“The majority of fish eat one another, and the smaller among them are food for the larger. If it ever happens that the victor over a smaller become the prey of another, they are both carried into the one stomach of the last. Now, what else do we men do in the oppression of our inferiors? How does he differ from that last fish, who with greedy love of riches swallows up the weak in the folds of his insatiable avarice? That man held the possessions of the poor man; you, seizing him, made him a part of your abundance. You have clearly shown yourself more unjust than the unjust man and more grasping than the greedy man. Beware, lest the same end as that of the fish awaits you—somewhere a fishhook, or a snare, or a net. Surely, if we have committed many unjust deeds, we shall not escape the final retribution.”

— St. Basil the Great, On the Hexaemeron

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