The Wheel Issue #4

WHEEL THE

FAITH AND REASON

Sacramental Action in a Secular World Pluralism and Its Discontents A Conversation with Peter L. Berger

ISSUE 4 | WINTER 2016

WHEEL THE

ISSUE 4 | WINTER 2016

EDITORIAL 5 CONVERSATIONS 11

Have We Traded the Holy Spirit for Ideology?

Gayle E. Woloschak

“Christians Should Be Happy about Pluralism”

A Conversation with Peter L. Berger

FAITH AND REASON 26 A Phony War Gregory Hallam

32 What Has Paris to Do with Byzantium?

Crina Gschwandtner

38 On Dominion and Progress: Sacramental Action in a Secular World Anthony Artuso

EARS TO HEAR, 44 Miniature Worlds Margaret Artuso EYES TO SEE STATE OF AFFAIRS 48 The Problem of Fear: A Reflection on the Words of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Inga Leonova

54 Orthodox Fundamentalism: From Religion to Politics Cyril Hovorun

POETRY DESK 61 Hypatia

Norman Hugh Redington

FROM THE ARCHIVES 64 Talks on the Beatitudes: Blessed Are the Peacemakers; Blessed Are Those Who Are Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake Alexander Schmemann

Š 2016 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 Michael Berrigan Clark Timothy Scott Clark Joseph Clarke Gregory Tucker

Advisory Board Archpriest Robert M. Arida Sergei Chapnin Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun Pantelis Kalaitzidis Archpriest Andrew Louth Gayle E. Woloschak

Graphic Designer Anastasia Semash

Visit us at www.wheeljournal.com or contact us at editors@wheeljournal.com.

Cover: Smiling Angel, Notre-Dame de Reims

EDITORIAL

Have We Traded the Holy Spirit for Ideology?

Gayle E. Woloschak The Orthodoxy of my youth no longer exists in the United States (or perhaps in the world) today. The young, immigrant-heavy American Church had grown up into an openness to change, liturgical reform, improved conciliar approaches to Church governance, and a dynamic parish interaction. Influenced by a call from theologians (most notably Fr. Alexander Schmemann) for a rediscovery of the centrality of the Eucharist in the Church, the request for frequent communion originated not from the bishops, but as a groundswell from the people. This Eucharistic renaissance in North America became only a first step in cultivating a Church characterized by open discussion, the free exchange of ideas, and increased participation of all members in its life.

The environment was stimulating, dynamic, and charismatic. It was not perfect, but there were few forbidden topics. The goal of discussion was often simply to have a dialogue, rather than to achieve new, binding formulations.

Differences of opinion were cherished as paths to the expression of a deeper truth about the reality of the Church’s life in the world. Genuine reflection on the question at hand, in which participants strove to express the validity and reasoning of various theological perspectives, was an appropriate and desirable goal of these open discussions.

As a long-standing practicing member of the Church, I have witnessed the The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

ebb of these positive attitudes and the growth of a fear of discourse and communal introspection. Counting Church members in numbers rather than the spirit they bring has gradually transformed the Orthodox Church into an institution similar to all other member-seeking organizations, one that caters its agenda to those who can be attracted to come rather than one that continues to seek the truth through the communal discernment of its people.

Today, Orthodox dialogue on difficult issues is perceived as threatening to the Church rather than enriching it and is strongly discouraged at almost all levels. Thus, “minor improprieties” such as church attendance by unwed families may be fully accepted in one parish or fully rejected in another, depending on the situation and on what can be expected to bring new members or preserve old membership. Concomitantly, wider issues at the intersection of science and religion are not discussed, but are exposed instead to a make-believe scrutiny imported from Western Evangelical Christianity. This leaves the strong impression that the only purpose of these issues is to serve as rallying points for new or potential congregants who are theologically dedicated to the piecemeal rejection of contemporary scientific theory and research. The need to express “the” Orthodox position on all matters has become the new ecclesial imperative, curbing the debate and discussion that allows the Holy Spirit 5

to work within the Church (both in its “daily operations” and its overarching functions). We have replaced theological dialogue with ideological rigidity, and it is strangling the Church.

The Importance of Dialogue

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Sergius Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 147.

The Church was created for its people through the descent of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit’s expression in the Church depends on the people who comprise it, and its operation is evident through human interaction and dialogue. Fr. Dumitru Staniloae noted that the Holy Spirit and personhood are intertwined, so that a person comes alive only within the context of a relationship and possesses the Holy Spirit only in relationship with others. This gives a sacred dimension to human interaction that is especially dependent upon speech and communication. In some cases, this sacred communication has been related to the conciliar nature of the Church.

For example, for Fr. Schmemann, the core of the theological description of sobornost was the unity of persons engaged in a conciliar discourse.

Speech is inherently important for humans, the richness of its form setting us apart from all other animals. Many believe that language evolved when early hominids gradually changed their primate communication systems, slowly acquiring the ability to form a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. Because deep concepts depend on complex verbalization, it appears self-evident that a spiritual dimension to human life (as evidenced in our burial of the dead, for example) evolved after the development of speech. Speech allowed for intimate personal experiences to be shared and therefore allowed humans to be aware of the inner life of entities other than themselves, providing the possibility of relationship and communion.

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Throughout the works of the Church fathers and the saints, we see the importance of speech and dialogue for humanity and for our interactions with each other and with God. The Genesis story provides an example when it relates Adam’s task of providing a name for each of the animals.

What is the importance of giving a name to something, and what are the things that we name? In general, we name those things for which we are responsible and with which we have intimate relations: our children, our pets, occasionally our homes, ranches, or farms. (In some Orthodox families, the godparent names the godchild in order to reflect the responsibility the godparent has in the child’s upbringing.) The story of Adam naming the animals reflects human responsibility for animals and for the earth as a whole.

But is that all? Fr. Sergius Bulgakov attributed more than responsibility to this naming, noting that as Adam spoke the names of the animals, he learned something about himself: that he was not like them, and that he was alone. The mere speaking of the names of the animals was a teaching experience for Adam.

Bulgakov believed that there was a logical significance to this naming. In his book Icons and the Name of God, he wrote: The name itself and naming could be considered a human invention existing only for man and in man. The Archangel’s Annunciation of the Name of God, which is also a human name, revealed to the world and to humanity that the name of God is and therefore is also a human naming. . . . This imparts to naming a mysterious, profound, and realistic character. This affirmation, namely that the name enters into the image of God in man . . . constitutes the most profound ontological basis of naming: thought collides here with the power of fact.1

Earlier in Genesis there is yet another example of the importance of speech and communication: the Church fathers remind us that God created by speaking.

This implies a relationship between speaking and creativity. If one also accepts a relationship between creativity and the Holy Spirit, then the action of speaking is tied to the Holy Spirit.

People develop new ideas as they talk or even as they are interacting with or listening in groups of others. Think tanks and universities gather groups of people together to talk about problems and develop solutions; the act of talking, of speaking, is more productive for developing creative ideas than is the process of putting individuals in a series of separate locations and asking them to think alone to find a solution to a problem. The Church has often expressed this link between speaking, creativity, and the action of the Holy Spirit, all tied together mystically and charismatically.

Finally, in the Church, there is a connection between speaking and confession, as has been noted by Aristotle Papanikolaou.2 Many therapists working with prisoners have noted that prisoners who admit their crimes are on a better road to recovery than those who never admit what they have done. In Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Dmitry, while in prison for a crime he did not commit, admits his guilt of being an uncaring human being and becomes sanctified by the action of confession, which enables him to accept the help and love of his brothers. Speech about our own deficiencies unburdens us from our problems and helps us to work through our concerns. Confession of one’s sins is an essential component of repentance; one of the first steps in healing is naming the sin (a Christian concept that has been adopted by many, including twelve-step programs for recovery from different addictions).

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The Church is grounded in conciliarity, a principle that has as its model the Holy Trinity. Each person lives not for himself but for the other, as pointed out by Costa Carras.3 The Trinity offers a model of unity in diversity within the Church, where differences of perspective, culture, liturgical practice, and more are not only tolerated but integrated, becoming not hindrances but in fact essential. The fact that four Gospels are accepted by the Church, despite their divergence in perspectives and their disagreement in regard to many facts, suggests that the Church survives—and thrives—in diversity.

Slight differences that we are expected to notice and appreciate give more depth to our understanding and belief in the Gospels. If we chose to commit ourselves to a single literal text, we would be impoverished; we would be denying ourselves the possibility of spiritual introspection. Instead of communication, we would embrace repetition, and our belief would simply become a panacea against fear of God, dulled and impersonal.

2 Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Honest to God: Confession and Desire,” in Thinking Through Faith, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elizabeth Prodromou (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 219–246.

3 Costa Carras, “The Problems of Conciliarity,” Sourozh 35 (1989): 38.

Ideology Undermines Dialogue This value in speaking, that of producing creative ideas, of putting words into actions and allowing them to function, has a special relevance to the situation of Orthodoxy in North America today, where genuine dialogue and reflection on many issues have been replaced with the expression of ideologies. What is the difference? Ideology usually refers to a set of ideas that are highly politicized, proposed, and upheld by a group within society, often in the absence of explicit experience or discussion. Manfred B. Steger and Paul James have defined ideologies as “patterned clusters of normatively-imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations, carrying claims to social truth—as, for 7

example, expressed in liberalism, conservatism, and socialism.”4 In Church situations, claims to social truth easily become replaced with claims to religious truth at the expense of conciliarity. Dialogue, on the other hand, is an open exchange of ideas or opinions with a view to reaching an amicable agreement on an issue (or in some cases, an agreement to disagree).

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Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, “Introduction,” in Globalization and Culture, vol. 4: Ideologies of Globalism, ed. Paul James and Manfred B. Steger (London: Sage Publications, 2010), xii.

An ideology is based on an established intellectual framework that resists challenges or the advance of new ideas. In my daily work in biomedical science, I have seen many cases where deficient classical paradigms remain unchallenged for years because new data do not fit in with current thinking in the field. Culturally, acceptance of particular ideologies in past centuries has had dangerous consequences: the devastating religious wars of seventeenthcentury Europe and the global martial chaos of the century just past are painful witnesses to the consequences of inflexible ideological dictates. But while adoption of such ideological rigidity is detrimental in science and politics, it is especially so in the Church.

Too often in contemporary North America, overzealous application of political ideologies adversely shapes public debate on issues ranging from economics and science to social concerns such as homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia. The extension of intellectual frameworks derived mainly from the political arena to life within the Church impoverishes the latter and reduces it from the Body of Christ that seeks the salvation of souls to a tool for the advancement of political aims. The Church has a rich history and tradition of dialogue and discussion of complex issues that resist reduction to a single slogan or catchy phrase. When wrestling with issues that are complicated and idiosyncratic in nature, the Church often employs the

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principle of oikonomia (managing the household). This oikonomia can be used to permit a behavior that “goes against the rules” in an effort to facilitate the salvation of the person’s soul, or to acknowledge human limitations in understanding matters that only God can judge adequately.

When we ignore the principle of oikonomia and concentrate on ideological fixations, what happens to the Church?

Dialogue is hampered, discussion of difficult issues is muted, and too many make unfounded a priori assumptions to know the Church’s teaching on any issue in any circumstance. This leads to a judgmental and confrontational environment that is hurtful to openness and Spirit-filled discussion.

Worse, stances motivated primarily by political ideology may contravene the actual teachings of the Orthodox Church.

Let us take, for example, the topic of evolution. I am a scientist who sees no incompatibility between Orthodox teachings and the theory of evolution.

In most Orthodox academic circles, very few scholars oppose evolution or view it as conflicting with Orthodox teachings. Nevertheless, despite the actual noncontroversial status of evolution within Orthodox theology, I have been severely attacked by individuals and groups who think that evolution is contrary to the teachings of the Church and who refuse to discuss the issue other than to say that “evolution is not biblical,” a proposition based in a biblical literalism that is foreign to Orthodoxy and should be discarded as discordant with the Church fathers and their understanding of Scripture. True growth in the Church is hindered by preconceived notions that speak more to the contemporary political environment than to the Orthodox Church.

What Can Be Done?

Dialogue within the Church on the numerous topics that face our world needs to be fostered at all levels—in academic centers, in regional discussions, and in local parishes. Especially pertinent today are questions at the intersection of science and religion, relating to genetics and genetic counseling, therapeutic use of stem cells, and more.

As social justice and equality are often measured in terms of technological opportunities, should the Orthodox faithful embrace or reject these possibilities?

Unfortunately, the Orthodox churches’ response to such questions has often been to release position statements without thorough and deliberate internal investigation and discernment.

For example, positions on in vitro fertilization mostly just replicate the nonOrthodox texts on this topic released by other Christian denominations. Yet most such concerns require case-bycase decisions (after all, these technologies are themselves more and more often “personalized”), similar to an approach employing oikonomia rather than a legalistic or doctrinal formulation. One cannot, for example, make a decision that a particular chemotherapeutic regimen should always be accepted because it tends to lengthen life. Instead, the more proper approach (and that used clinically in most medical centers in the United States today) is to tailor the therapy to the patient. A decision for treatment of an early stage cancer or for that of a young person with no other disease may be very different from a decision made for a latestage cancer or for an elderly patient already debilitated with other problems. Categorical approaches are typically unhelpful because of the numerous circumstances in which they will not be applicable. Therefore, Orthodox discussion of these topics should not be motivated by the need to generate The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

a consensus statement at the end; the goal of the discussion should be the discussion itself.

Resistance to discussion is often expressed by members of the Church who protest particular issues “on principle,” ranging from evolution to homosexuality, from global warming to the ordination of deaconesses. Conversations about many of these topics are rejected on arbitrary grounds. For instance, many refuse to countenance the development of adult stem cell technologies because they wrongly assume that all stem cells that exist are derived from aborted fetuses. It would be better to allow the discernment offered by the Holy Spirit to act while monitoring complex, new situations; such a considered discernment would permit the engagement of dialogue, ideas, and a much deeper and more sustainable well of reflection on the issues at hand. Unfortunately, the contrary impulse can often be witnessed in statements made by hierarchs and national Orthodox Church organizations, which are frequently salted with faulty factual knowledge of the issues in question.

For instance, in the case of in vitro fertilization, there remains a tendency to equate non-implanted embryos with post-natal babies. Yet, as in the case of the different treatment decisions that might be made for different cancer patients, there are vast and obvious ethical and theological differences between fertilized embryos in a laboratory and children who have been gestated and born into the world. The inattention to these critical details suggests that positions have been taken based on a rigid adherence to over-determined theological extrapolations without consideration of such pastoral concerns as care for the individual and love for others.

Such apparent zeal in marking an ab9

solutist position may swell Church membership with persons who yearn for a black-and-white moral universe.

Yet, while attracting members based on a robustly expressed ideology may make for a good political party, it does not create a climate of mutual support and spiritual growth within the Church.

Instead of statements prepared as final pronouncements, the Church should be able to voice nuanced views with the help of a broad range of Orthodox Christians who are scholars from appropriate disciplines, theologians, or both.

The Church need not take positions on any and all issues that confront us in the modern world, but often these matters affect parishioners, who are faced with making decisions about new technologies in light of conflicting information from Church leaders. Parishioners considering in vitro fertilization are confused by multiple hierarchs who provide divergent guidance about the moral and theological implications of various forms of the procedure. Such situations are likely to become even more complicated with the rapid growth and application of new technologies and new discoveries in all disciplines. © 2016 The Wheel.

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

In light of the profundity and complexity of technological and social change, the Orthodox Church in North America should return to the roots of its tra-

dition of openness in dialogue, conciliarity, and freedom of opinion. In his book The Freedom of Morality, Christos Yannaras describes the early Church of the Apostolic Council as the church that vindicated the inclusion of nontraditional members by honoring St. Paul’s theology and rejecting legal substitutes for salvation. In his estimation, the Church thereby repelled the danger of becoming an “ethic” rooted in a specific era. In contemporary North America, there is a vogue for polarized political opinions and the rejection of discussion that could lead to changing one’s mind. Orthodox Christianity, however, relies on an innate flexibility for its continued existence. It is worrisome that today’s Orthodox Christians increasingly seem to embrace legalism as salvation, thus putting us in danger of reducing our Orthodox Church to a religion, an ethic, a series of ideologies that suit a particular political climate and not the universal Church. How can we recapture the spirit of openness, reflection, and sincerity that is expected of us as Orthodox Christians? We must agree to discard easy solutions to complex issues and instead develop a willingness to “work” (leitourgia being the common work of the people) to find ways to express an Orthodox perspective, realizing that it may require time, patience, and discernment.

Dr. Gayle E. Woloschak is currently Professor of Radiation Oncology at Northwestern University in Chicago and Adjunct Professor of Religion and Science at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, and at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Toledo (Medical College of Ohio) and a DMin in Eastern Christian Studies from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her laboratory interests include molecular biology, radiation biology, and nano-biotechnology, and her science-religion fields include biological evolution, stem cell research, and ecology.

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Photos by Timothy Clark.

CONVERSATIONS

“Christians Should Be Happy About Pluralism” A Conversation with Peter L. Berger Austrian-American sociologist Peter L. Berger is the author of numerous books on sociological theory, the sociology of religion, and global development, which have been translated into dozens of foreign languages. His latest book is The Many Altars of Modernity: Towards a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Berger sat down with The Wheel’s Inga Leonova to discuss the contemporary intersection of secular and religious discourse, problems of religious intolerance and conflict, and his thoughts on Orthodox Christianity.

Cyril Hovorun and Robert Arida prepared interview questions.

Secularization and Religiosity A recent study by the Pew Research Center, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, indicates a decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves with major organized churches. Does this decline make you uncomfortable?

Were you correct when you advocated the theory of secularization, or when you renounced it?

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Was I right when I advocated the theory of secularization? No. I decided it was empirically untenable. The question is, who are the “nones?” We know a little bit about this, and the idea that it is a wave of atheism is absurd. Pew has found that something like 75 percent of Americans pray every day, believe in God, believe in life after death.

This is not an atheist group.

I think there are two meanings to this.

One thing that comes out in some of the questionnaire responses is that there is a kind of “Asian” spirituality involved: people who want to discover their inner child (heaven help them), be at one with nature, things of that sort. That’s probably a minority of the “nones.” Most of them are simply people who don’t feel comfortable in the church or religious community to which they used to belong. And so, when asked, “What is your religious affiliation?” they are “nones.” If you asked me, I would have to answer that my affiliation is “none” at the moment. We went to this Lutheran church which turned out to be 11

impossible for a number of reasons, so right now I am a “none.” But if you conclude from that that I am a flaming atheist, that would be a big mistake.

So I was right in saying the basic idea of secularization theory—that the modern world means the decline of religion—has been massively falsified. With two important exceptions: Europe, especially Western Europe (Russia is a special case), and an international intelligentsia which tends towards godlessness or secularity. But that’s it! There’s no evidence for this theory in the United States, which is furiously religious.

I taught for six years in Texas, at a Baptist university. Secularization theory after you spend three days there would strike you as utterly absurd. But in the rest of the world, too—Latin America, Africa, Asia—all the major religious traditions of the world are experiencing revival movements. The revival of Islam is not just about terrorism; there is a wave of resurgence of Muslim piety among ordinary people. The same goes for Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism. So, to generalize from these American survey data about what is happening in the world is absurd. And even in terms of America, they are not what they seem.

Non-identification with an organized faith does not necessarily mean faithlessness. Perhaps it means that religi-

Americans’ religious identification, 2007–2014. Source: America’s Changing Religious Landscape (Pew Research Center, 2014). http:// www.pewforum. org/2015/05/12/ americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

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osity has become more fluid. And it’s probably influenced by a degree of social mobility.

Well, people are socially mobile and geographically mobile. If you put together two factors, one social/cultural and the other legal—if you put together pluralism, which simply means different religions and value systems coexisting in the same society more or less at peace, with legally guaranteed religious freedom—what you get is something like American denominationalism, which has become global.

Take Judaism. Two hundred years ago, if you said, “Could Judaism have denominations?” that would sound crazy.

Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. In America, depending on how you count it, there are at least five Jewish denominations: Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. But if you count every Hasidic community as a denomination—which actually makes sense, since the Satmar and the Lubavitch movements are like denominations— then Judaism is as denominationalized as American Protestantism. Every one in America becomes a denomination. A student of mine found sixty Buddhist centers in the greater Boston area.

When I was last in the hospital, with my fractured hip, I met the Buddhist chaplain at Beth Israel. Very nice guy, vaguely Asian in appearance. “Why are you coming to me?” I asked. He said, “In the intake information you didn’t put down a religion.” (I didn’t want to put Protestant and be visited by some crazy Baptist preacher.) So I got him.

And I had a very nice conversation with him. I asked, “Do you have many Buddhist patients?” “No,” he said, “hardly any.” “Well, do you teach Buddhism?”

“I couldn’t do that.” I guess his salary is paid for by Beth Israel. “So what do you do?” Very interesting answer: “I

put Buddhist concepts in a sort of secular frame, like giving up the self, like attentiveness, like patience.” I said, “That one I could use.”

That gets us to the other question, which I find the most important: Is secularism a danger? It depends on what you mean by secularism. As an ideology it can range from extreme hostility to religion—like scientific atheism in the old Soviet Union—to ACLU lawyers in America who go to court because somebody put a Christmas tree in a public park, which is insane. All of that is secularism. Is it a danger? Not in America. It’s a nuisance. There are issues of religious freedom involved.

Today in the newspaper, they put this poor woman [Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis] in jail in Kentucky.

For contempt of court.

Yes, because she continues to refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses. I don’t share this woman’s theology or view of homosexuality, but a country which can afford to free conscientious objectors from military service in times of war can certainly afford having a county clerk claiming First Amendment rights in not issuing same-sex marriage licenses. But even in America, I would say, secularism is an annoyance rather than a danger.

Secular Space The interesting issue is what I call a secular space. You cannot have a modern society without an area of that society which is totally godless, if you wish, which operates with a purely secular discourse. When I was working on a book recently, I stumbled on Hugo Grotius. He was a Dutch jurist in the seventeenth century and one of the founders of modern international law. He used a Latin phrase to say that international law has to be formulated etsi deus non The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

daretur, “as if God did not exist”— purely secular discourse. He had no choice. Europe at that time was divided between Catholic and Protestant states: Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian in the Netherlands; the Ottoman Empire; Russia as part of Europe. It had to be “as if God did not exist” if all these people were going to sign onto it.

This spread to other areas of life. It began, I would argue, with modern science and technology. You cannot study modern astronomy using Hindu mythology.

You cannot fly an airplane looking into a Talmudic handbook. These are secular disciplines. Modern society couldn’t exist without them. Our death rate would go up incredibly as soon as we stopped.

“As if God did not exist”: this can coexist with very supernaturalist religion. I recently hit on an example of this. The Pope is driven around in his Popemobile. He goes from one supernatural event to another. So imagine Pope Francis riding around, going to a sanctification ceremony, about to declare some Bolivian nun to be a saint, which actually extends papal jurisdiction into the other world. The car breaks down. I suppose the Vatican has a garage with automotive technicians, and probably also has an office for exorcism, because exorcism is a recognized Roman Catholic practice. Well, which do the aides of the Pope call? The garage, of course; not the exorcist. So the supernatural mission of the Pope on that particular occasion is supported by a purely secular technique.

“You cannot have a modern society without an area of that society which is totally godless, which operates with a purely secular discourse.”

That is tremendously important for a number of reasons. First of all, the secular space not only allows you to have surgery, which I hope will save your health for many years to come. It also allows a number of other things, without interfering with someone’s being a believing Orthodox Christian or Buddhist or whatever. On the personal level, both 13

religious believers and observers of the modern world, or secularists, have seen the secular and the religious as being in opposition—modernity is secular, religion is not modern, they collide. Well, they do sometimes: the people in Moscow (I forget their name) who think that the world is 6,000 years old, a belief they share with millions of my Texan friends—there is a collision there [of science] with faith. But there are relatively few of these areas of direct collision.

Medical ethics and bioethics is an area of enormous collision.

Yes, but—this is a good example: What are the issues right now? Assisted suicide, use of genetic material from embryos, let alone abortion or contraception if you have a hangup on that.

Yes, there are some cases of collision, but most people who are religious perfectly combine their religious beliefs and practices with being very modern people. Come with me to central Texas and you’ll meet them on every street corner. How is that possible? Here my training as a sociologist is helpful. My teacher, Alfred Schütz (who was totally uninterested in religion) coined a very useful concept: relevance structure.

What is a relevance structure? Different areas of our lives have different relevances. It has always been the case since—excuse my non-Biblical view— since our ancestors climbed down from the trees, but it’s much more so in a modern society because it’s so complicated, so we have to move from one relevance to another. You’re in an architecture bureau, then you go to an Orthodox group, God knows what else you do.

Relevances shift. We do that all the time.

An example I like to give is one that involves Orthodoxy, a story I heard from a friend of mine, Christopher Marsh, a Russia expert. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg has, I believe, the greatest 14

collection of Orthodox icons in the world. It was founded by Catherine the Great, it became a museum; all through the Soviet period they had these icons, people visited them and had, one hopes, some kind of aesthetic experience. Apparently, fairly recently, a group of people came to the museum, went to the icons, and had a worship service, with candles. They kissed the icons, maybe they brought incense. The tourists thought it was curious, but the administration didn’t like this at all. It was an inappropriate relevance structure. For a short period they transformed a purely secular space into a space for Orthodox worship—very interesting.

Another example I think I give in my book: I know a very successful eye surgeon in Boston, who operated on cataracts for both my wife and me. He’s an Orthodox Jew, I guess Modern Orthodox. He wears a skull cap in his office, not in the operating room (if he does, no one sees it—he’s got a uniform on). I haven’t discussed religion with him, but I know he’s very Orthodox and his patients love him. I talked to one who said he’s a real mensch, he’s warm. And I noticed that he dealt with me as a person, not as a symptom on two legs. Why? I imagine the way he sees it—do you know the concept tikkun olam? it’s a rabbinical concept, “the repair of the universe.” The universe is defective and I, as Jew, am supposed to help repair it, thereby hastening the coming of Messiah. He probably thinks of his profession in that way. Fine: it’s perfectly genuine and it translates into his behavior. But not in what he does in the surgery. If it did, the surgery would fail, and even his most Orthodox clients would sue him if he leafed through the Talmud to find the next step in surgery.

Out of the question. Purely secular space.

There’s a personal level and there’s a political level. In a democracy, if you

want to convince your fellow citizens of some particular moral purpose that you have—say you want to change the prison system, one of the biggest scandals in American society today, the horrendous prison system, based on insane laws. Increasingly a bipartisan majority agrees this is untenable: millions of people in jail including kids who stole, I don’t know, chewing gum three times and then become felons for life. If you want to advocate for reform, you have to use arguments within the secular space. You cannot say, “God does not like this.” “This is not Christian.” “A good Buddhist does not put people in jail for life.” You have to put it in secular terms: “It’s against basic American notions of human dignity.” And there are utilitarian grounds: “It’s too expensive.”

OK, I’m not involved in prison reform, though I think we all should be. But I’m a fanatical opponent of capital punishment. I think it’s a barbaric thing that a civilized society should not employ.

Barring no exceptions. I would even have put Eichmann in jail for life, rather than hang him. But public opinion in America is changing. It’s increasingly pro-abolition. Why? I would say for all the wrong reasons. It’s too expensive—it takes ten million dollars to get somebody executed with all the appeals—and there are more and more cases in which DNA shows that people were wrongly convicted (even ardent pro-capital punishment people don’t want to see an innocent person killed).

And then on top of that, some of these things don’t work very well, injections and so forth. All of these are good reasons, but they are not why I think I am opposed to it. But certainly you can’t say it’s against the teachings of Jesus.

You can’t. You have to put it in secular terms. That’s extremely interesting.

But that’s where your Dutch friend was right. You can get consensus in a pluralist society.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

Well, he believed natural law was the answer, which I doubt. But what’s interesting is that it spread beyond international law. In the Netherlands this was very much the case. I don’t know legal history in the Netherlands, but I know enough about Dutch history.

What were the two major problems of the Dutch newly independent Netherlands? One was to prevent Spain from reconquering their territory. The other was to build a system of dams to prevent half the country from being flooded. The independent Netherlands was almost all Protestant in the north and mainly Catholic in the south. It was Catholic and Protestant provinces joined in a united state. They had to collaborate on the question of how to prevent the country from being flooded: they had to act as if God did not exist, not as Protestants or Catholics.

Let me give you a political example I find very revealing: the constitution or Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which went into effect as a bill of rights when it was voted in by the constitutional assembly in 1949. Unlike the American case, in which the bill of rights came some years later in the form of amendments, there is upfront in the German constitution—in the first article—an assertion of rights. A very lapidary sentence: “The dignity of man is inviolate.” A fundamental value of the new democratic state. The historical context is not difficult to see: It was only four years after the fall of the Nazi regime, with its horrendous violations of human dignity, still fresh in the memory of most of the people—well, all of the people—who were in the assembly.

Some of them were in concentration camps. And a pretty awful regime was a few miles to the east: the Soviet Empire.

Throughout the German constitution, which is still the law of the land, there is no reference to religion at all. Germany had begun rapidly secularizing at that point. Most Germans today are not re-

“There is up front in the German constitution an assertion of rights: ‘The dignity of man is inviolate.’”

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ligious; they don’t belong to Christian churches. But they can all agree on this, on the basis of moral insights they share on the human condition.

“Every chapter of the Qur’an begins with bismillah, ‘In the name of God, who is merciful, who is compassionate.’

This is where the people who want to oppose radicalism theologically within the Muslim context should begin.”

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That’s tremendously important. It means that people can agree on certain moral propositions for different reasons. The Christian can say, “This is the will of God. Man created in the image of God—that’s the basis of human dignity.” Other religions have other ways of dealing with this. But agnostics and atheists can ascend to that first sentence, too, about what it means to be human. That’s an enormously significant political benefit. The secular discourse of the German constitution interacts with the religious beliefs of citizens which are quite different. Now if someone were an ISIS type—“kill the infidel”—they could not agree to that sentence. But a non-extremist Muslim can agree to it. God is justice and mercy. Every chapter of the Qur’an— every surah—begins with bismillah, “In the name of God, who is merciful, who is compassionate.” (Every chapter except one, for whatever reason.) This is where, I think, the people who want to oppose radicalism theologically within the Muslim context should begin.

While I still directed the research center at Boston University, we had a conference on the hospital as an interaction platform for religion and secularity. Every hospital is a temple to secularity. The high priests run around in long white coats. Hierarchy all the way down: you have patients with their johnnies, exposing their behinds to the manipulations of the clergy. And everything there is modern technology and modern science. But it’s constantly permeated with religion, both formally and informally. Chapels; chaplains, including my Buddhist friend; prayer circles. Eight years ago, I was in hospital for three weeks. At one point a young intern came by, an MD. After

we had a five minute talk, he said, “By the way, you should know that some of us are praying for you.” Then one of the cleaning woman, who was Latina, embraced me. We spoke Spanish together, and she said “Todos estamos en las manos del Señor”: “we are all in the hands of God.” So it’s not hermetically sealed against religion.

So I think my new paradigm, if I have enough chutzpah to call it a new paradigm—it’s a new way of looking at religion and modernity, and it has both personal implications and socialpolitical implications. The political ones come out in favor of religious freedom: even if you didn’t believe in it, it’s the most practical way to handle a pluralist society. I said that in a lecture in Beijing, at Renmin University, where the higher cadre of the Communist party get degrees. I said to them, “I’m not telling you what to do, but if you have a society which is religiously pluralistic, it’s not a good idea to hit people because of their religion, unless they’re a very small minority and you can afford that. If there are millions of them, you’d better have some kind of accommodation with them.” And all the apparatchiks nodded. So I think that was the most provocative part of the lecture.

Culture Wars and Religious Freedom Culture wars often seem to move from the public sphere to churches and, infused with sacred power, go back to society and fight even more fiercely. Are these wars inevitable in churches?

Some culture wars come from the public sphere to the churches, some originate in the churches. Take the obvious example: the Catholic hangup on birth control. It did not come from the public sphere. They hit the public sphere with their view of it. There have been many

cases of Catholic hospitals where the nuns didn’t want to be forced by Mr. Obama to hand out condoms.

It is a somewhat hypocritical cause, because it is not consistent with the actual practice of those medical centers, which, in cases of rape, give the morning after pill at the very least.

Yes, but if I were Cardinal O’Brien, Archbishop of Providence, Rhode Island, I would say, “We don’t want the government to tell us what do in these matters.

If we decide in certain occasions we’re going to have an abortion, it’s regrettable, but it’s not the government who should tell us that. It’s an issue of religious freedom.” I agree with that.

I have a contract now with Gordon College, an Evangelical college in the North Shore. I get along with Evangelicals. They know I’m not one of theirs, but we get along. They have a big thing going on now. Their president—a sociologist, Michael Lindsay—was one of I-don’t-know-how-many presidents of evangelical institutions who wrote a letter to President Obama. It’s an issue of religious freedom. They have a code of behavior for faculty and students which includes a provision on homosexual behavior.

There was a storm of outrage in the communities around there. I talked to the woman who’s my manager there, and I said, “Look, I don’t agree with Michael on homosexuality, but I do agree it’s an issue of religious freedom.” If a Baptist college decides that their understanding of Christianity means that you can’t have homosexual activity on campus, that must be respected. And if you let the government interfere with that, you are making a big hole in the First Amendment.

I think religious freedom is so important. There are always rights in colliThe Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

sion. Unless there is enormous damage done by a religious group, it trumps other rights. And I would rather see some idiotic doctrine like creationism be taught than have the government tell people they can’t teach that in a school that gets public funds. Well, that’s another story.

Might it be the churches’ place to resist culture wars instead of fueling them?

The British Parliament, one year ago, passed the Same-Sex Marriage Act. The Catholics had been fighting it until the bitter end, and they’re still fighting it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who’s fairly new—an interesting man who has a business background—issued a statement right after the parliamentary decision: We’re not going to do what the Catholics are doing. Parliament has voted, this is now the law of the land, we will obey it. We disagree with it, but we’re not going to fight it. But if you want to be married— two men or two women—we will not conduct the wedding for you. There are lots of churches in England that will happily marry you, so go somewhere else. The only thing we’re concerned about is maintaining our traditional doctrine—marriage is between one man and one woman—and we don’t want Anglican clergy to be sued or in any way legally penalized for not performing these weddings.

That was before the parliamentary decision prohibiting the Church of England from conducting same-sex marriages— which is a quirk of British law, because unlike in America, the Church of England is not separate from the state. It has legal authority in marriage.

But in America, too—in every state, as far as I know—if a clergyman performs the wedding, at the end he says something like “According to the laws of the State of Massachusetts, I now declare 17

you man and wife.” So he acts as an agent of the state. And that creates the problem. If it’s clear that he’s not the agent of the state, the state exercises its authority by issuing a marriage license. It doesn’t need the ceremony.

In fact, if you get the license you can do whatever you like, have your uncle spill champagne all over you.

1

Anton C. Zijderveld and Peter L. Berger, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 86.

It’s different in England, and the Anglican church generally is a more complicated issue. Because, having created this provision in the law, now—a year later—the Church of England has moved toward recognition of homosexual unions but can’t conduct them because they created a law that basically prohibits them from doing it. So it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

But what they can do? That’s happening in other countries, including the United States: they will bless the union. The church does not affect the marriage—which, by the way, was also the case in the Lutheran Reformation.

But it will create a legal problem in England because, unlike in America— where you need a marriage license and you don’t need a religious ceremony— you can have a religious ceremony and the clergyman acts as an agent of the state. It’s a one-step process.

The English constitution is part of the genius of the English state, at least for the last couple hundred years. Not like France, where everything has to be logical. In England there’s a wonderful practicality. One of the nicest examples I know is a lecture I heard by the then–chief rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks. He was talking about how practical the English are compared to the French. When the Queen opens Parliament, there is a parade with her at the end. Before her go the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the other religious functionaries, including Buddhist

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monks. In front of the whole parade is a guy with a big cross. Well, Sacks said, “This is difficult for me. I’m an Orthodox Rabbi. I don’t want to march behind the cross.” So the religious leaders had a rather short meeting, and said, “What we’ll do is put the rabbi first, then we’ll have the guy with the cross, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.” The French would never do that! They’d have to have a philosophical treatise.

Fundamentalism Fundamentalism seems to be at stake in the culture wars. What would be your definition of it? In your book In Praise of Doubt, you make the case that fundamentalism, both religious and secular, “is always an enemy of freedom.”1 Can you elaborate?

Of course fundamentalism is an enemy of freedom. I would define fundamentalism as a project which tries to restore the taking-for-grantedness of religion, where supposedly there is no doubt.

An example I like to give: In ancient Greece, when two strangers met, one would ask the other, “Who are your Gods? What Gods do you worship?”

That was the equivalent of our exchanging telephone numbers. If you knew someone’s “area code,” in ancient Greece—if there were such a thing—you’d have a good idea of what gods would be worshipped. It’s taken for granted: if you were Athenian, you worshipped the gods of Athens (and if you were like Socrates, who questioned the gods of Athens, you were killed for atheism). I don’t think that was a good thing.

We have freedom. Freedom is a good thing. Fundamentalism is, I think, bad for faith. A reflective person in a society which is pluralistic has made certain choices. They don’t have to be philosophical: thank God, most people

aren’t philosophers. But even a very simple person has to figure out what he really believes. There are situations that force him to, especially marginal situations of life—serious illness, death, bereavement, or whatever. Or moral choices which are difficult.

I think the project to restore taking-forgrantedness is futile, because you know that you are not forced. To take an extreme case: We used to live in Brooklyn, a few blocks from Williamsburg, which is the Hasidic center. If you go around there or visit it, you’d think you were in a shtetl in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. People speak Yiddish, they have their own schools, the kids don’t watch television, they don’t go to movies—it can become a kind of takenfor-granted thing. It’s very difficult to escape. There’s a very good sociological study that came out last year by a sociologist, Lynn Davidman, called Becoming Un-Orthodox. She describes how people get out of such Orthodox neighborhoods. It’s not easy, it’s wrenching, but you can do it. And she describes it—if they really want to get out, men cut off their sidelocks, put on a baseball cap, and take the subway to Manhattan.

Same in Mea She’arim, in Israel: They speak Yiddish, they throw rocks at taxis that go there on Saturdays. But you can get out of that—you can take a bus to Tel Aviv.

So fundamentalism is actually difficult to maintain in a modern world. You have to have the door tightly closed. If you open it a little bit, the whole dynamic of pluralism comes flooding in.

Is that what makes fundamentalism go on the offensive?

Yes. If you can’t deal with doubt, you have to prevent anybody from spreading doubt: kill them, throw them out, or at least stop them, don’t talk to them. That’s not very easy. In Christian The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

terms, it requires a sort of totalitarian society. Sects like Hasidic in Brooklyn are mini-totalitarianisms. They don’t have physical coercion, but psychologically there is a very strong coercion.

The last attempt to do this on a national scale in Christian terms was in Franco’s Spain, which I visited in my youth. It was the only time I was arrested, in a small town in Andalusia.

There was a Corpus Christi procession and everyone knelt down—and I didn’t. I stood very respectfully.

The whole procession stopped. There were soldiers with fixed bayonets and drums. The priest pointed me out and two policemen came and took me away. Fortunately, nothing happened.

I told them I was American. “Did you mean disrespect to the Catholic religion?” I said, “No, no, I was ignorant.”

They let me go.

“Fundamentalism is actually difficult to maintain in a modern world.

You have to have the door tightly closed.

If you open it a little bit, the whole dynamic of pluralism comes flooding in.”

That was the last attempt, with a good deal of brutality. But it worked, in a way. What happened? For economic reasons they opened up to the rest of Europe. In fact, Opus Dei convinced them that the market economy was the way to go if Spain was to overcome poverty—and they were right. And all of Europe flooded it. The Pyrenees were no longer the iron fence. And the result is that Spain today is one of the most secularized countries in Europe.

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Fundamentalism, unless it is loosened up, is bad for the individual, obviously.

But it’s also bad for the society. It leads to either a coercive regime, or an ongoing conflict—civil war. In the U.S., I’ve had the occasion in the last few years to observe very closely what goes on in the Evangelical community. Most of them are not fundamentalist, but how far can they accept the secular space?

It’s very interesting.

Do you believe it is a universal religious phenomenon, or is it pertinent to some religions only?

No, fundamentalism can occur in any religious tradition—and it can be secular. It doesn’t have to be religious: there are political fundamentalisms, even aesthetic fundamentalisms. There are secular ideologies which are fundamentalist, there are fundamentalist feminists, there are fundamentalist vegetarians.

You name it! But of course, when it’s linked to state, then it becomes lethal.

If you have a state in with the rule of law—and where religious freedom is enshrined in the law, which is true in every Western democracy—there are ways of getting out. And it makes sense to try to infiltrate these communities. The public school sometimes does it inadvertently; they don’t want to do it, but it happens.

And totalitarianism does not have a good success rate in the twentieth century, which is good news. Because unless you want to shut off your society against all outside contacts, you can’t have a modern economy. The result is something like North Korea. Half the population starves to death and you have some horrible regime in charge that kills everybody who disagrees.

Well, North Korea doesn’t have a very happy future ahead of it. The Spanish example is much less horrible—at least after some years the Franco regime mel20

lowed somewhat, unlike North Korea, which is still as awful as it was in the beginning—but the world economy is a good thing. Not in everything, but in this it’s a good thing.

Religious Experience Describe your personal experience of the Orthodox Church.

I remember the profound impression that I had of Father Alexander Schmemann after several personal encounters: a thoroughly modern man—indeed a very French intellectual—yet who also radiated a very strong spirituality—not French at all. I’ve enjoyed attending the Liturgy. The first time I attended an Orthodox Easter service was in New York at the old Russian cathedral on Second Avenue, which was in communion with Moscow during the Soviet period. The congregation was Russian émigrés. It was a wonderful experience: it started at midnight, we all went around the church, and when we came back the lights were on. I was enormously impressed. I was moved. And the one very funny thing that happened—I was standing in the back as all of this was going on and suddenly a side door opened and in came an old man in a full uniform of a tsarist officer. But I don’t have as much personal experience with Orthodoxy as with many other religions, including Islam.

So what about Islam?

One of my experiences of transcendence was in Istanbul at the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque. My institute had a project in Turkey, long before the Erdoğan party came to power, on Islamic business organizations. And while I was there, I was trying to reach [my wife] Brigitte on the phone, and I couldn’t get through. I was getting very worried. I was sitting in my hotel room and I didn’t know

what to do. And someone offered to show me some of the mosques. I hadn’t been to the Blue Mosque yet. Inside are all of these beautiful blue tiles. When we went, there was no service; it was completely empty. There was just an old man sleeping, I think, in the back. I was alone in that space. And that vast, empty space—very Muslim. The presence of God hits you in it. A very Islamic experience.

Could you verbalize what is “Muslim” about the space?

Empty spaces are very important symbols of God’s transcendence in Islamic architecture. It was an experience mediated by an Islamic building. Islam is not ISIS. Every religion can become murderous—certainly Christianity did, God knows. So did all the others. Buddhists think they are the religion of peace, but look what is happening in Sri Lanka and Burma. But Islam, at its core from the beginning, emphasized the greatness and justice and compassion of God. I find it enriching to study Islam and Judaism, in part because of how it makes me reexamine my own faith.

If you are clear about what the core of your faith is, these other experiences don’t attack the core. I’m sure a Muslim or an Orthodox Jew would not accept that Christ is risen from the dead and that this is the center of religion, but the fact that there are practicing Jews and practicing Muslims does not attack or undermine my faith in the core of The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

Christianity. The difficulty I have with Islam and Judaism is that both are religions of law. In fact, the Arabic word for law is the same as the Hebrew word: dīn. A Muslim can ask an Orthodox Jew, “What’s your dīn?” And, “Oh, I see you don’t eat pork.” But I can’t buy that. I don’t want to be forced to eat halal meat or not answer the telephone on Saturday or something like that.

Philosophically and theologically, Islam and Judaism are a lot closer to one another than either is to Christianity.

They understand each other much better.

Still, the three monotheistic religions are, in some basic way, similar. There’s an interesting Jewish author, a French Talmudist and philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. He wrote something wonderful: “Beyond the Law, there is a vast ocean of mercy.” That’s a wonderful sentence. And likewise, in the Islamic Hadith, God is supposed to have said, “My mercy has overcome my anger.”

Interior of Sultan Ahmet Mosque, Istanbul. Photo by Christian Perez.

“The three monotheistic religions are, in some basic way, similar.”

I’ve argued that the great antipodes in the history of human religion are Jerusalem and Benares—very different worlds in their understandings of reality and redemption. Jerusalem, the location of the Jewish Temple, the place where Jesus was crucified and rose, the place where Muhammad started his journey to heaven; and Benares, the holy city in Hinduism, where you can immerse yourself in the Ganges and thereby in the eternal flow of divinity. Benares is noisy with thousands of pilgrims, but just a short distance from it is wonderfully quiet Sarnath, where the Buddha, after his enlightenment, preached his first sermon and got his first disciples. Those are the antipodes. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily contradictory, but they are much more difficult to relate to Christianity than Judaism or Islam.

The basis of reality in Hinduism and all religion coming out of South Asia 21

2 Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1979), 54–55.

is reincarnation (which has had Christian proponents, Origen being the most famous of the Greek Fathers— and there’s a Kabbalistic notion of reincarnation—but it’s very minor in Western monotheism). In Indian religion, it is central. And there are three universal truths for Buddhism which the Buddha preached, the first time near Benares. All reality is transient, all reality is suffering, and all reality is non-self: Nothing in the world is permanent, everything flows. Suffering is universal and repeats itself endlessly in each individual incarnation. The self is an illusion. I would say Western monotheism has a core principle in opposition to each one of these. God is permanent and ultimately real. Reality does not just flow. Yes, suffering permeates the world, but there is redemption from suffering, which is the promise of a future with God. And the self is not an illusion: the self was created in the image of God.

The Orthodox Church in America In your 1979 book The Heretical Imperative, you stated that the recent formation of the Orthodox Church in America “has revolutionary implications, for there now exists, for the first time in America, an Orthodox church that is no longer defined ethnically, that uses English as its liturgical language, and that is a self-consciously pan-Orthodox presence on the American religious scene.”2 When you state that the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in America has revolutionary implications, what exactly did you mean? Did you think that the OCA would be able to make a positive contribution to religious— that is, Christian—and inter-religious dialogue in a pluralistic context?

I have a weak spot for Orthodoxy. I couldn’t be Orthodox; there is too much 22

baggage there that I couldn’t carry. But Eastern Orthodoxy is a wonderful corrective to Western Christianity. I think I mentioned Paul Evdokimov, I read one of his books. One of my students is Michael Plekon, who translated some of these guys. He’s an OCA priest. He did his doctorate with me—a very interesting man. He made me read some St. Sergius people. And one passage in Evdokimov made me sit up. It said that Western religion, both Catholic and Protestant, back to Augustine, is focused on a relationship between God and man that takes place in a courtroom. Man is guilty, depraved; Christ takes on the sins of the world; God forgives and man is justified. In the Eastern tradition, the relationship between God and Man takes place in a hospital.

Suffering and death and sin are part of one disease.

And that means that ideologically or theologically, they might agree. I’m sure there are Lutheran-Orthodox dialogues, the Catholics have a cottage industry of dialogue, they find they all agree on this or that. The Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue went over the Filioque for three years and then decided, let’s give it to the East; we don’t need the Filioque. Great—I can see why the Orthodox didn’t like it. The theologians can always find formulas on which most people agree. The laity don’t know what this is about and couldn’t care less. But they know what the differences are instinctively. An Orthodox person knows, when he goes into a Catholic or Protestant church, that there is something different from what happens in his church. A different spirit.

Eastern piety focuses on Easter Sunday. Western piety focuses on Good Friday. And there is that wonderful Eastern Orthodox hymn, “Christ trampled death with death.” It’s a wonderful sentence.

“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

That’s right. That’s very powerful.

Christ is the victor. And the resurrection is a tremendous victory, which initiates the final redemption of the entire cosmos. This legal business, this Latin theory of atonement—Anselm started it in the West. There’s a Swedish Lutheran theologian, Gustaf Aulén, who wrote a book in the thirties or forties called Christus Victor, in which he argues (whether historians would agree with this I don’t know) that the original Lutheran reformation is much closer to Eastern Orthodoxy than it is to Anselm. It’s a very good book.

Now let me get back to why Christians should be happy about pluralism: for people with any degree of reflectiveness, pluralism undermines the takingfor-grantedness of any religious tradition. People are naturally afraid of this: they would like to be whatever they are—Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or whatever—just as they have a certain color of hair or anallergy. No choice, that’s who they are. That’s their real self. Well, that becomes difficult when you’re surrounded by people who don’t take for granted what you used to take for granted. Why is that good for you and good for the church?

Because it forces you to reflect on what is essential to your faith and what isn’t.

Rabbi Hillel the Elder, one of the founders of Rabbinical Judaism, was asked—I think, mockingly, by some student— could you tell the meaning of Torah while you stand on one leg? And he then uttered probably the first formulation of the Golden Rule (Christians think Jesus first said it, but Jesus quoted Hillel), and his version was: “Do not do unto others what you would hate to have done unto yourself.” And then he added, “the rest is commentary.”

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

With all due respect to Hillel, is there a Christian statement you could make while you stand on one leg? Yes: “Christ is risen.” Now, when you say “Christ is risen,” you start thinking a hundred questions. First of all, who is Christ? Was there an empty tomb, too?

If there had been a police camera in the tomb, what would it have shown after the resurrection? What was the post-resurrection body of Christ like?

According to the New Testament accounts, it wasn’t a resuscitated corpse.

It went through walls. And then of course the most important question: what does it mean for me and for the whole world? So lots of questions. But that is what it’s all about.

Now you can ask, what about all the rest of the miracles reported in the New Testament? Did Jesus walk on the Sea of Galilee? I have no idea. If Jesus was what he said was and what Christians believe he was, I wouldn’t exclude it. There may be miracles. God is omnipotent. Maybe he did walk on the Sea of Galilee, but if it turns out he didn’t, it wouldn’t affect my faith one bit. And that has to do with lots of questions.

“Pluralism undermines the taking-forgrantedness of any religious tradition.”

If I have a chance to sit down with the president of Gordon College, I will ask, Do you really think homosexuality is a key issue for Christians? I would say no. Sexuality can be an instrument of humiliating people, hurting people, but it can also be a wonderful experience, or it can also be something which is neither wonderful nor terrible. I don’t think there is a Christian doctrine of sexuality beyond the Golden Rule.

Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.

Look, the OCA is a very small group.

Most of American Orthodoxy is still in the Babylonian captivity of ethnicity.

And to have an Orthodoxy which carries what I think is the main message 23

“The notion of human rights has become secular discourse, but no one can really question that it has Christian roots.”

of Orthodoxy, in the Liturgy, in the English language—without carrying all this ethnic baggage—is a great contribution to the rest of Christendom in America.

Moscow is that they don’t like the secular discourse. They want their discourse to be the public discourse. Which precludes pluralism—and probably, in the long run, precludes democracy.

What did Orthodoxy do? They were involved in the ecumenical movement from the beginning. They’re always very visible in the big hats, very colorful. Mostly what they said was “no, no.”

To all the nonsense the World Council of Churches was proclaiming, the Orthodox said “no, no, no.” A useful contribution. But I think they have a more useful contribution to make, which is this: What is the faith all about?

Given your contacts with the Russian Orthodox Church, what advice would you give to the OCA, as its dependency on the Moscow Patriarchate increases?

Ideology and Religious Conflict Given the Orthodox Church’s reluctance here and especially in Eastern Europe to speak and act on behalf of human rights, can you offer any suggestions as to how it might overcome its inertia?

The Orthodox don’t think there are human rights?

The Ecumenical Patriarch does. The Moscow Patriarchate is more equivocal, and the diaspora is reluctant to get into the topic.

What is their objection?

The objection is to a notion of universal human rights that is secular and ostensibly does not relate to the relationship between man and God. Sure, since the French Revolution and the American Revolution, the notion of human rights has become secular discourse, but no one can really question that there are Christian roots to this.

That would be a distortion of history.

The basic metaphor is man created in the image of God. You destroy human dignity and you spit in the face of God. I think the problem with the Orthodox in

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Stay away from Moscow. Yes, I know there are people in the OCA who are tempted to go back to Mother Moscow. Mother Moscow is an ugly hag at this point. I think there are wonderful priests in some Siberian villages, but in Moscow it stinks. I had a fight with one of them, Hilarion Alfeyev. He was then the bishop for Western Europe. He gave one of these lectures as if he was proclaiming unassailable truth. “The earth goes around the sun”—in that tone.

And I said to him, “That’s all very interesting, Father Hilarion, but there are very few people outside of Russia who would possibly agree with you on this.”

He didn’t like that at all. For the OCA I can only say: Stay away from Moscow.

Can we talk about Ukraine and the religious component of the war there?

Many consider the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, to have a strong religious dimension: people are motivated to kill each other because they do or don’t believe in the “Orthodox civilization,” “Holy Rus,” and so forth.

I don’t know that much about Ukraine.

I think the danger is not religion itself; it’s the linkage of religion with political power, which has been the bane of Orthodoxy for a hell of a long time.

The Putin regime has established a relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate which is as if you were still in the time of [nineteenth-century power broker Konstantin] Pobedonostsev. It’s an unholy alliance between state and church, and Kirill—well, they benefit

from each other. The church gets privileges, the state gets legitimation. And Ukraine, the state of Ukraine, is a very pluralistic society. They have two or three Orthodox churches.

And Catholics, and Baptists.

And the state doesn’t embrace any one of them. So I don’t think there’s an issue here of religion; it’s not intrinsic to Eastern Orthodoxy. It’s an unfortunate relationship with the state.

That leads to a question about ISIS. Many of our readers are Christians from the Middle East. Do you have any prediction what that region will be after the Islamic State? Can the West do anything to change the situation there?

Look, American policy on ISIS has been totally dominated by Obama’s absolute refusal to put American boots on the ground. Which is an inherent contradiction: ISIS is a threat to Western civilization, a threat to America, and all we’re going to do is send a couple drones and advisors who are not supposed to go into combat with troops, and find other people to put boots on the ground. It’s not very successful.

I have no liking whatsoever for Mr. Obama. I have a visceral reaction against him, the immense hubris of this man. But I can understand American public opinion, after two defeats,

in Iraq and in Afghanistan—let’s call it what it is—and general weakness all over the world, which is in a way the fault of the opposite policies of George W. Bush, with his machismo. So I don’t know where this is going to end. But something like ISIS cannot be argued with, no dialogue is possible. You have to kill them. So the question is, who is going to do the killing? If we don’t do it, we’re going to have to find somebody or this will go on and on and spread as it already is.

American public opinion recognizes that ISIS is an indirect result of two long and failed campaigns.

They failed for a reason. The original mistake in Iraq was that we didn’t plan for the post-Saddam future. It was a terrible mistake to disband the Iraqi army. It could have been co-opted. Get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime and the rest of the people will applaud us and sing “God Bless America.” Then Obama in Afghanistan wanted to get out come hell or high water, and announced, “we’ll leave by such-andsuch a date.” They more or less did, with just a few troops left. So, I have no answer to that. If I did, I would— Run for president?

No, I couldn’t, I’m not born in the United States. Anyway, I wouldn’t be a good president. Heaven forbid.

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

Dr. Peter L. Berger is Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University. He has taught previously at the New School for Social Research, at Rutgers University, and at Boston College. In 1992, Berger was awarded the Manes Sperber Prize, presented by the Austrian government for significant contributions to culture.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

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FAITH AND REASON

A Phony War Gregory Hallam

It has become a truism for many in the West that faith and science belong to two conflicting worldviews. An atheist may say that science is rational, based on empirical observation and necessarily self-correcting as new theories eventually modify or replace old and outdated ones. Faith, on the other hand, is said to be irrational, defined by static religious texts and immovable religious authorities, which can be neither challenged nor revised. The religious fundamentalist often regards science with suspicion, seeing its allegedly ungodly encroachment in territory governed by unquestioned divine revelation. There is another view that regards this conflict as a needless clash of two titans of similar breed: fundamentalism in religion and triumphalism in science. Rather than a genuine standoff between two antagonists, this account suggests a phony war based on a cartoon version of both disciplines and, therefore, a misunderstanding of the true purpose of each. This reconciling approach sees no necessary conflict between truth-seeking in science and faith but rather regards both as mutually dependent and complementary.

At its best and in its most authentic expression, Orthodox Christianity shares a common platform with these more positive voices, but with its own distinctive approach.

The trouble with this alienation between faith and science is that it is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it seems blind to its own myopic 26

view of reality and the spiritual and intellectual origins of its unquestioned assumptions. In propaganda terms, atheist popularizers have a vested interest in attacking a caricature of religion as normatively fundamentalist. In the general population, the level of religious literacy is so low that many simply buy the half-baked notions that seem to be continually recycled in the latest paperbacks of authors who have made a very decent living out of the whole sorry enterprise. Since many people unquestioningly assume that all Christians are the same and believe the same things, it has become almost impossible for Orthodox Christians to contribute to the debate without being written off as self-serving or idiosyncratic. I do not think, however, that we shall be able to improve on this situation until we can put some clear blue water between the caricature and the reality, with respect to both science and religion.

Something from Nothing The Jews did not know God because they philosophized about him, but rather because they had entered into a relationship with the One who had made friends of Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets.

His ways had been made known in salvation and judgment; and this required from those who wished to be his friends continuing faithfulness and love, repentance and hope. The expression of this relationship was a personal and existential knowledge of the cre-

ator, utterly transcendent of anything created—literally the Uncreated One. This transcendent Being whom they came to know as above and beyond infinity, space, time, and created reality itself was so sacred that even his name could not be spoken. Later in Israel’s history, and particularly after the emergence of the Wisdom writings in the post-exilic environment of Hellenism, the people of God began to reflect more thoroughly on the presuppositions and implications of their faith in an utterly transcendent creator. There is then a marked progression and refinement in understanding, for example, between Genesis, which only considers creation from the starting point of unformed matter (1:2), and 2 Maccabees 7:28, which follows the received faith to its logical conclusion, namely that the cosmos was made out of nothing (ex nihilo) or rather, more properly, out of that which had no being.

creation makes itself, there being no extrinsic divine agent to bring it into being. However, such spontaneous creation is never actually explained in these theories without some sort of precursor. Two favored current theories involve a quantum irregularity in the substrate vacuum, which super-inflated like a bubble in a boiling pan of milk, and the collision of two higher-dimensional sheets or branes which triggered the Big Bang in the energy of their collision. None of this solves the puzzle as to why there should be a bubbling quantum foam or a system of colliding branes in the first place. The precursor may be necessary and true, but whatever “it” is, this precursor is not nothing or non-being. The search for a first cause or an origin only ceases if a beginning is considered unnecessary—and then one is stuck with the brute fact of an eternal, infinitely regressive universe.

The implications of the ex nihilo doctrine are radical when contrasted with the confusion of nature and God that is often characteristic of pagan and polytheist faiths. St. Augustine emphasized that both space and time were created with matter and energy, making the terms “before creation” and “after creation” meaningless. So there is both creation before time (a singular Big Bang or multiple primordial creations) and creation in time as the one cosmos or the multiverse evolves. Before-time creation is possible insofar as God, in his essence, utterly transcends everything he creates. In-time creation is possible because God embeds himself in the cosmos from the outset by his energies.

The question about whether or not the universe is eternal still ignores the favorite old elephant in the corner. This is the crucial question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Science is not equipped to answer “why” questions such as this, whereas such unfathomable existential issues are food and drink to the philosopher and the theologian. The hubris of an all-inclusive positivism enables atheist scientists to claim scientifically that no such theological answers can exist in principle.

That is to step beyond the boundary of empirical science itself into belief—in this case the belief we call “unbelief.”

It must be recognized that there are questions and answers in life that do not submit to the scientific method, because they deal with references that are by definition not measurable. Measuring my heartbeat alone will not reveal whether or not I am in love.

The atheistic scientific approach, on the other hand, denies the a priori existence of anything other than the cosmos, (or in the “many-worlds” hypothesis, the multiverse), in this case, the existence of God. Under this view, The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow described the conundrum of existence 27

from a religious point of view. He described both the terror and the beauty of our existence very succinctly. The choice is stark and uncompromising: the void or God? “All creatures are balanced upon the creative Word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them, that of their own nothingness.”1 1

Quoted by Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 92.

“Cosmic Holiday Ornament”: Planetary nebula NGC 5189 as photographed

by Hubble Space Telescope. NASA/ Hubble.

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God Beyond and Within the Cosmos The transcendent majesty and glory of God—his singular unexcelled and excellent being—is the concern of all truly monotheistic faiths. Any conceptualization, image, or formulation concerning God in his essence or being is idolatrous and should be rejected.

There can be absolutely no ontological overlap between God the creator and Uncreated One and creation. However, to say that God is utterly distinct from creation at the level of his essence is to contribute nothing to an understanding of how he can be known by humankind through his covenanted grace, his theophanies or self-manifestations, and supremely by his Incar-

nation in the Word made flesh (John 1:14). The scriptures and the tradition of the Church teach that God manifests himself in creation without being absorbed by it or fused with it, which of course would be pantheism. By way of contrast, the Orthodox teaching that incorporates the reality of the Divine Presence is called panentheism, which received its classic formulation in the distinction made between the essence and energies of God in the works of St. Gregory Palamas. The energies of God are sometimes referred to as his immanence in creation. God is not to be thought of, therefore, as only acting “from beyond.” He also (by his energies) acts from within.

Orthodox theism, therefore, is wholly compatible with a scientific account of the world in which the lineaments and workings of natural processes in space and in time are accounted for without thinking of God as supplanting those natural processes supernaturally. If, for example, primitive men believed that hurricanes happened because God sneezed, then weather forecasts would be pointless. With our meteorological knowledge we can have instead a true picture of the world, revealing both the beauty and power of God’s creative acts, even when terrible destruction is involved. When the forces of nature threaten human existence, this is not an evil but an aspect of creation’s necessary dynamism, and hence, its life-creating potential. These embedded creative potentialities cannot be explained by invoking the erratic interventions of a episodically active deity in the supposedly chaotic, frequently fragile and dangerous evolutionary processes. Such extrinsic and invasive actions of a god from beyond the cosmos—the classic form of supernaturalism—neuter both science and theology.

The divine creative imprint is rather to be found in the beauty, elegance and fittingness of the natural operations

themselves which are both emergent in their complexity and convergent in their function. Consciousness, for example, is a fluid and dynamic artifact of emergent complexity; physiological commonality a functional convergence of evolution. Neither is a deterministic process, but each nonetheless has its own teleology (that to which it tends), notwithstanding the apparently (to us) chaotic and random factors involved.

God, then, only acts “from beyond” when, ex nihilo, he creates space, time, energy, and matter. He acts “from within” to sustain and drive forward both the cosmos and emergent life within it as these evolve toward consciousness and therefore also the worship and cooperation of sentient intelligent beings.

This characterization, however, may suggest a scheme of primary and secondary causes with God in the backseat and nature in the front. How then is this different from deism, the belief that the God who is aboriginally involved in creation is subsequently absent, or Neo-Thomism, the idea that divine intervention is a more subtly conceived additional layer of supernatural causation? The only way such a model of divine action can be different, at least in Christianity, is by building it on a radically different foundation than that which has been commonplace in the West since the Middle Ages. This foundation is neo-patristic, in that it learns from the fathers’ engagement with Hellenistic philosophy while at the same time striking out into the arena of this century and its concerns.

There are three theological references that we need to consider in order to make progress in constructing an “old but new” model of divine activity that compromises neither science nor Orthodox Christianity. These three theological references are truly basic and biblical: the Word of God, the Spirit The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

of God, and the Wisdom of God. The Word of God (that is, the Logos) and the Holy Spirit are two hypostases of the Trinity, the Father’s agents in creation. The Wisdom of God has often struggled to find a place in this scheme, for she (in reference feminine) certainly is not an additional hypostasis, nor the essence or energy of God, but something else. Rehabilitated from ancient Christian tradition by the sophiological school of Russian Orthodox Christian thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Holy Wisdom, is, I submit, a shared divine attribute which we can apply to all three hypostases or persons of the Holy Trinity in the summation of their activity in the cosmos as one God. I shall refer, therefore, to Wisdom in relation to each and all of the hypostases in the following account. The Father is in relation to the Son or Word and the Spirit as the timeless source of the Trinity. He is never without them, nor they without him. In the course of this proposal, therefore, I shall proceed in my argument from the Logos in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Spirit) to the Spirit in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Son). The Father, of course, timelessly imparts Wisdom to both the Son and the Spirit in their coordinated actions as one God in creation.

2 I am indebted in much of what follows to Christopher Knight, whose reasoning and conclusions I largely follow; the sophiological speculations are my own. Christopher C. Knight, The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

Logos Christology St. John the Theologian, in the prologue to his Gospel, taught that it was the Logos (the Word of God) that was active in both the creation of the cosmos and in the Incarnation.2 St. John deftly achieved two goals in his use of this Logos Christology. First, he showed the universality of the Incarnation by using a term that was familiar to Jews and pre-Christian Greeks— the Logos. The Jewish diaspora in Alexandria (Philo) had already united the Hebraic concept of the Word of God (dabar) with the Hellenistic Logos, 29

3 A physical expression of the logoi well documented by contemporary science is the principle of emergent complexity.

By means of a few simple rules, systems of matter and energy seem to follow a line of higher and more complex organizational function and integration, of which life and consciousness are perhaps the most extraordinary and beautiful examples.

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the divine seed inherent in all things.

Second, by using the single term Logos, St. John ensured that Christ would be received rightly as the Lord of all creation. Christians such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen continued to develop this synthesis and used it as a bridgehead for the communication of the Gospel in Greek culture. Pre-Christian Greek philosophy, at this stage heavily influenced by Plato, contributed something of great value to Christianity: the means to express the inclusion of both nature and revelation as within the sphere of God’s action. The Church reimagined Platonism from a dualistic philosophy in which created forms were mere shadows of more substantial heavenly ideals to the Judeo-Christian confession of the goodness of creation itself.

Important progress in the development of these ideas is reflected in the cosmological teaching of the Byzantine theologian St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662). St. Maximus explored further this idea of the logoi in all things created as manifestations of the creative Word, the Logos imparting both inner essence and ultimate fulfillment to one and all.3 In this account, the Incarnation was not an abrupt intrusion or invasion of the Logos into the created order from which it was originally absent, but rather the personal and particular development and refinement of an existing and universal creative presence of the Word, now united to human flesh and nature in the person of Christ. Although the Incarnation happened so that death might be destroyed and humanity—with creation—restored to the path of dynamic transformation, the East generally held that the Word would have been made flesh in the context of this process even if humanity had not fallen. It is, after all, the nature of Divine Love to make itself known through self-giving.

St. Maximus, together with all of the Greek fathers and their successors, had a panentheistic conception of God’s immanence that harmonized ideas from both pagan and Hebraic religion without sacrificing God’s transcendence.

Later generations of theologians, most notably St. Gregory Palamas, articulated this conception by distinguishing between the nature or essence of God, forever transcending anything created, and his energies, also God and uncreated but manifest in every space-time coordinate and in every physical and immaterial creation. After the Great Schism in 1054, when the West began to lose touch with Greek Christian culture, this vital insight was gradually lost. Later Western theologians assumed as axiomatic the principle that God had to “move,” as it were, from heaven to earth when he needed to act, his presence otherwise being rather nebulous and erratic. This was the source of supernaturalism, the notion that grace had to be added to nature.

This view prevailed for centuries until the Enlightenment finally dispensed with supernature, leaving the West in the grip of deism or the worship of the goddess Reason. Secularization rapidly followed as the sea of faith made its melancholic withdrawal from the public consciousness. However, the Christian East continued with what we might call its theistic naturalism, in which the Lord pervaded the whole of the cosmos, without the need to suspend natural laws at whim in order to achieve his purpose. Creation has complete freedom to be itself, and yet at the same time there is a natural and grace-full growth in the logoi or Logos towards an end or telos in God. In the Christian West, science only flourished after the Catholic Church’s inflexible intellectual control had been broken.

There never seems to have been such a problem in the Christian East, and for good reason. The phony war between science and religion never broke out

beyond Rome’s dominion—nor could it, because Roman Catholic theology was so radically different.

The Life-Giving Spirit The unique theological perspective of the Christian East, which the Orthodox believe to be the simple witness of scripture and tradition, is expressed in its understanding of the person and work of the Holy Spirit as well as the Logos. The Holy Spirit is the life-giver, the power of creation, of revelation, of guidance, of cleansing, of renewal, of holiness, of justice, and of peace. The action of the Holy Spirit in human life and the cosmos itself is simply to bring the fullness of life to all that is latent within the logoi of created things. This, however, is not a vitalism that constitutes or replaces the energies of creation, but rather that which restores and enhances these energies according to their divine purpose.

Consider the healing of the sick. This is achieved through the skill of doctors, nurses, surgeons, and drug researchers, in addition to the care for the whole person manifested through pastoral support and prayer. The Holy Spirit works in and through the logoi of each means of healing, once more revealing the Wisdom of God in action, bringing everything to its proper fulfillment in Christ.4 The Holy Spirit also continues to work in creation, so that in the Wisdom of God the cosmos is transfigured and, in the case of humans, made in the divine image and likeness, deified. Again, St. Maximus the Confessor reveals that this cosmic regeneration is possible by reaffirming a pre-Christian notion of

Greek philosophy—namely, that humankind is a microcosm. If humanity is restored and set free by the Holy Spirit, so shall the cosmos be (Rom. 8:18–23). This glorious vision is not of course what we see in the world today. We have inherited the legacy of a quite different view of the earth in which divine transformation is very far from the mind of those who are its unwitting stewards. The impact of this legacy is plain for all to see. The recovery of Earth’s ecosystems will only occur when humans exercise once again an ascesis of self-restraint and live out anew their connectedness to the cosmos. This will require a spirituality that does not see the natural world as a mere stage for unbridled human activity but rather a gift to be respected and cherished. To achieve this respect and deep sense of being cherished, it is essential to honor the divine logoi that inhere within all things.

I have contended that there is no conflict between science and religion, when each discipline is properly understood. More specifically, it should be recognized that Orthodox Christianity has developed important insights into that fine structure of the cosmos which allows for divine action without compromising or controlling creation’s freedom to move toward its goal in God. It should now be clear that both creationism and scientific atheism are dead doctrines based on a weak understanding of both science and religion. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity offers the freedom to humanity to explore the inner workings of the cosmos in all its glory and beauty.

4 The origins of this Orthodox tradition of holistic healing have been set out in Holistic Healing in Byzantium, ed. John T. Chirban (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010).

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

The V. Rev. Gregory Hallam serves a parish in Manchester, UK, and belongs to the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland. He also serves on the Theological Committee of the Assembly of Bishops for the British Isles.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

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Sucevița Monastery, Romania. Scene from the Tree of Jesse fresco, depicting pre-Christian philosophers.

Credit: Petra Steinmair-Pösel.

FAITH AND REASON

What Has Paris to Do With Byzantium?

Crina Gschwandtner Many contemporary Orthodox theologians regard philosophy with suspicion, and this has encouraged the same attitude within the wider Church. Several of the texts of the so-called neopatristic synthesis indulge in repeated condemnations of “Western” and “scholastic” philosophy and instead laud the “mystical” approach of the Eastern tradition. Orthodoxy, on this telling, has no recourse to philosophy because it has direct experiential access to the mystery of faith, which not only requires no rational exposition but would actually be harmed by it. Philosophy destroys mystery. Thinking is antithetical to faith.

It was not always so. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of his sister Macrina as “the Philosopher,” and for much of the early centuries of the Church a dedicated

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Christian life was called “philosophic.”

Philosophy, literally “love of wisdom,” was characterized both by learning and by single-minded devotion to ascesis.

Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were philosophers in both senses of the term—lovers of wisdom in the broadest sense. Many of the great patristic thinkers and teachers of Orthodoxy (including the Cappadocians, Dionysius the Areopagite, Nemesius of Emesa, Maximos the Confessor, and John of Damascus) made extensive use of Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Stoic sources to articulate Christian faith and theology. Most of their arguments about the soul, the human person, the will, the moral life, providence, and the divine energies make little sense without at least a basic— and sometimes a fairly sophisticated— knowledge of ancient philosophy.

And Gregory the Theologian argued emphatically, against Emperor Julian “the Apostate,” his earlier schoolmate from the Platonic Academy in Athens, that the philosophy and literature of ancient Greece was as much a Christian possession as a pagan one and that Christians should not be denied access to its wisdom for their own teaching.

Philosophical treatises continued to be copied by scribes throughout the Byzantine era. In later centuries, thinkers like Photios the Patriarch of Constantinople and the monk, philosopher, and diplomat Michael Psellos were firmly dedicated to ancient learning and tried to reinvigorate it at a time of cultural and academic decline.

What about today? Does philosophy still have anything to say to Orthodox theology? Can Orthodox thinkers turn to philosophy for insight or maybe even for an articulation of Orthodox faith and practice? I want to suggest not only that Orthodox thinking can make good use of contemporary philosophy, but that drawing on philosophical sources and methods may help to articulate Orthodox faith and practice in a larger intellectual conversation, without betraying core theological insights or jeopardizing the “mystery” of Orthodox faith. Let me give three examples to illustrate this claim.

How might one examine the truth of faith? The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues that the best way to do so is to look at the language of faith, its discourse, that is, the way in which it articulates itself. In his view, the best place to look for this discourse is in the biblical texts, which he considers the most primordial and most basic sources of faith. The biblical texts open a world that we are invited to enter and where we are challenged to conceive of ourselves differently. These texts are characterized by the many voices of The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

the variety of biblical genres (history, prophecy, wisdom, parables, etc.). We can learn to understand the texts and articulate their truth by assuming that these discourses are meaningful to the community of faith and by entering the particular world they create and set forth. In other places in his work Ricoeur recognizes that actions can also function as a form of discourse and meaningfully shape our identity.

Life prefigures narrative, narratives configure life, and life is then refigured or transfigured via our appropriation of the narrative. Besides his analysis of the biblical texts, in his larger hermeneutic work Ricoeur focuses primarily on historical and fictional narratives.

Yet his insights about how interpretation helps us understand discourses and how they shape our meaning and identity are eminently useful for articulating Orthodox faith and practice.

What is the “language” of Orthodox faith? What is its central discourse?

Liturgy. And as Ricoeur explicates for the biblical texts, liturgy is even more obviously polyphonic: many voices interact, such as in the antiphons (usually based on texts from the Psalms), the kontakia (remnants of dramatic liturgical poems), the canons (poetic embellishments of biblical odes applied to the occasion or feast), the biblical texts assigned for the day, the litanies, the homily, and much more. All these discourses interact with each other to create a multiform world of meaning. Yet this is about much more than simple texts: liturgy is performed as dramatic action in processions and entrances (which in early Constantinople often included processions through large parts of the city and multiple stops at different churches), in the lighting of candles and the veneration of icons, in chanting and singing, all culminating in the Eucharistic action of breaking and sharing the bread. And these dis33

courses—literal and figurative—open a world, a world that is both poetic and physical—think of the magnificent architecture of Hagia Sophia and the arrangement of liturgical space more generally.

We are invited to enter this liturgical world and are challenged to be transformed by its narratives. This is what Fr. Alexander Schmemann consistently emphasized about the Liturgy: it is entry into the Kingdom. And that is true not only of the Eucharistic liturgy but of every aspect of liturgical life. For example, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, which helps us begin Great Lent (and sustains our energy in the fifth week) achieves this by parading before us endless biblical examples, while we reiterate over and over again: “Let me be not like...” but instead “let me be like...” Its message of repentance becomes intensely personal by creating a narrative world in which we are to take on the examples modeled, to imitate their repentance or refuse to imitate their sins. Historically, the dramatic kontakia of St. Romanos the Melodist, the colorful poetic hymns of St. Ephrem the Syrian, and the highly rhetorical homilies of SS. John Chrysostom, Jacob of Serug, Proclus of Constantinople and others functioned similarly, staging a narrative world before the congregation in sound, rhythm, and drama with which the hearers could identify and which they were called to imitate or appropriate. Moreover, the liturgical year as a whole mimetically creates a world that, in Ricoeur’s language, helps us deal with the struggle between “discordance” (Lent) and “concordance” (Pascha) and refigures our identity by shaping us through its narratives. Liturgy reflects and articulates our struggles in all their existential depth, but it also narrates and performs a world that can in turn transform us. Several 34

contemporary liturgical scholars affirm the idea that the Liturgy is “doing the world as it was supposed to be done.” The Liturgy is a microcosm of the world, it “practices” the world and equips us for living out the core message of Christian faith: that God was in Christ—this is what the Liturgy “configures”—and that therefore we are to be in God through him—this is how the Liturgy “refigures.”

Of course this does not happen automatically. The world of the Liturgy has to be entered and its narratives appropriated. Liturgy teaches us who we are and how we are to live in the world.

It articulates and performs a narrative identity of Orthodox faith and practice.

In doing so, it establishes a hermeneutic circle along the entire length of the liturgical year: we need both fasts and feasts, must continually enter the liturgical world anew to understand and appropriate its meaning more deeply, and cycle back and forth not only between the multiplicity of discourses, but also between our individual lives and the communal reality of the Liturgy. Practicing repentance during Lent and celebrating Pascha only once is not enough: it has to be lived and appropriated anew over and over again.

The insights of contemporary hermeneutics not only help to make good sense of what liturgy does and how it works, but they may even aid in understanding why liturgy sometimes goes wrong or does not function as it should: when the liturgical world becomes too small or too insular, when its meaning is no longer practiced or appropriated, when identity is shaped more by the narrative world of consumerism or technology than by the poetic world of liturgy.

How is Orthodox faith experienced and how does experience become meaningful? Not only hermeneutic

tools, such as those of Ricoeur, but also phenomenological ones may be useful for articulating Orthodox religious experience. Phenomenology began in the early twentieth century with a call to return to “the things themselves” and a desire to examine our conscious experience as carefully as possible, setting aside the modern preoccupations with proving objectivity or existence on purely empirical grounds. Thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger tried to take human experience seriously in all its complexity and to examine the meaning of our perceptions, judgments, memories, moods, or, more broadly, our ways of being in the world and with others. Phenomenological work has grown in depth and complexity throughout the past century, and several contemporary French thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, JeanYves Lacoste, and Emmanuel Falque, have begun to apply its insights also to religious experience.

How might we examine an experience of God or articulate an experience of revelation? Marion, for example, contends that such an experience would have to be examined as it gives itself entirely on its own terms. The task of phenomenology is to unfold this experience in its abundance and excess, paying close attention to how it actually gives itself. Marion calls this a “saturated phenomenon” and often uses icons as his example. When I venerate an icon I do not impose my own gaze on it, but rather expose myself to the gaze that envisions me through the icon. In prayer I become vulnerable to the wholly other who calls me and comes to me. A new version of the self emerges in these philosophical treatments, a self that is no longer a strong Cartesian subject in control of the objects in the world, but a self that is called by the other, responds to the The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

other, becomes devoted to the other in love. Marion’s philosophy is intensely apophatic and firmly dedicated to protecting the mystery of God’s utter alterity. We name the divine only in praise, not through propositional statements or proofs. At the same time, he provides an account of how God becomes manifest, how revelation is actually experienced here and now.

This sort of philosophy seems eminently more suitable for expressing the particular character of the Orthodox faith (indeed it might also be more useful for speaking of Christian faith more generally) than other modern philosophical trends, which tend to be preoccupied primarily with proving the existence of God, making sense of theodicy, or analyzing the compatibility of God’s properties. One of the legacies of modernity has been a definition of faith solely in terms of personal adherence to doctrinal statements that is often separated from or at least ignores religious practice. Contemporary French philosophy recognizes that experience and practice are far more central to identity. Indeed, in the Orthodox tradition, doctrine is always deeply embedded in liturgical life and practice. It grows out of it and articulates it. For example, both the affirmation of hesychasm and the so-called “triumph of Orthodoxy” over iconoclasm were deeply rooted in experience. The iconoclasts fought an uphill battle against the common people’s devotion to icons that was ultimately vindicated. The Palamite monks argued for a theology that most authentically represented their experience of the divine. The theological affirmations about Mary as Theotokos grew out of Marian devotion that preceded theological articulations. Hierarchical affirmations of sanctity usually come after the emergence of sustained local practices of veneration. Orthodox theology, then, is deeply rooted in ex35

perience and practice. In this sense it is much more akin to contemporary philosophical approaches than to those of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant or Hegel.

A philosophy focused on analyzing experience, action, practice, and identity is thus far more appropriate for articulating how Orthodoxy is meaningful than one that focuses narrowly on rational faith statements or purely private belief. Yet, this does not mean that such reflection is therefore irrational or that it abandons rigorous thinking.

Rather, this is a different kind of rationality, one that takes into account actions and practices, and tries to unfold and explicate how revelation is given and experienced. Focus on experience can easily become purely subjective, especially when dealing with something as intensely personal as faith and relation to God. A more rigorous phenomenological analysis may well help to prevent an account of religious experience from sliding into a purely arbitrary affirmation of my own personal, empirical experience and instead serve to articulate and explicate its larger (communal) structures of meaning.

These contemporary philosophical approaches are often (at least in the English-speaking world) identified with what is called postmodernism, a term taken up by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard to depict our increasing incredulity toward the modern grand narratives of communism, capitalism, consumerism, scientism, and technology. There is no longer one universal, overarching, abstract, coherent way of making sense of the world, based on some absolute, indubitable foundation. Rather, we increasingly live in multiple smaller narratives that are often incompatible and even in conflict with each other. Injustice results from the clash between 36

narratives, when minority voices are drowned out or even eliminated by the larger narrative. Smaller stories get no hearing; sometimes their very languages are incompatible with the dominant discourse, which seeks to control all conversation by ensuring it happens only on its own terms.

Lyotard tries to recover and make room for such minority voices, to give them a hearing without turning them into a new master narrative. Similarly, other philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault try to deconstruct the dominant discourse and to challenge structures of power. Central to late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury philosophical approaches are hospitality and care for the vulnerable, coming out of Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy, which draws on the biblical injunction to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Richard Kearney points to Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the Hospitality of Abraham and to the closing hymn of Holy Friday Vespers— Give me this stranger, who from his youth has been received as a stranger in this world. Give me this stranger, who has no place to lay his head. Give me this stranger, whom an evil disciple betrayed to death. Give me this stranger, the refuge of the poor and weary. Give me this stranger, whom his mother saw hanging upon the cross. . . .

—to illustrate the centrality of this theme in the Christian tradition. One could add many other examples, such as the establishment of xenodochia (hostels for travelers and strangers) in ancient Antioch and Constantinople, the founding of hospitals and orphanages, Chrysostom’s constant exhortations of his audiences to generous almsgiving and hospitality to strangers, St. Basil the Great’s homilies on care for the poor as the proper leitourgia, and St.

Gregory the Theologian’s insistence that to embrace and care for the leper is to invite—indeed to touch—Christ.

Hospitality to the stranger and care for the vulnerable other thus are at the very core of Christian identity and practice.

St. Isaac the Syrian even argues: Just as a grain of sand will not balance against a great weight of gold, such too is the case with God’s justice when it is weighed against His compassion. When compared with God’s mercy, the sins of all flesh are like a handful of sand thrown in the sea (Homily 50).

Instead of a “balance” between justice and mercy, as is often assumed in theological discussions, Isaac presents God’s mercy as incomparably greater than God’s justice and counsels compassion even to the most vulnerable creatures. Contemporary philosophies of hospitality and care for the stranger may help warn us against establishing meta-narratives that deny a voice to the other or an insular attitude of fear that is threatened by anything unfamiliar, and that instead recall us to the deeply Christian message of compassion and radical openness to others.

Philosophy, then, not only has had a significant role in the Church’s past, but can also aid us today in articulating the Christian message for a new generation living in a postmodern cul-

ture, by providing rigorous tools for analyzing and articulating Orthodox practice in ways that are thoughtful and substantive, neither reducing the mysteries of the faith to abstract rationality nor giving in to anti-intellectual pietism or blind fundamentalism. In fact, Orthodox thinking is well situated for making an original contribution here: Ricoeur’s Protestant background predisposed him to a fairly narrow emphasis on biblical texts in his hermeneutic approach, and the Roman Catholic and French Enlightenment background of most phenomenologists colors their insights significantly by focusing almost entirely on individual experience of the divine and ignoring more communal dimensions. Drawing on the rich Orthodox liturgical traditions in all their diversity can make a genuine contribution to broadening this narrow focus on individual spirituality in contemporary philosophical analysis. Hospitality to the insights of contemporary philosophy thus both enables considered and meaningful articulations of Orthodox self-understanding, identity, and practice, and makes possible genuinely Orthodox intellectual contributions to dialogue with the larger culture. Not only has Paris something to say to Byzantium, but if Orthodoxy is able to pursue the “love of wisdom” anew in all its contemporary rigor, Byzantium may have something to say to Paris in reply.

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

Crina Gschwandtner teaches Continental Philosophy of Religion at Fordham University and has published several books, articles, and translations in this field. She provides an introduction to many of the thinkers mentioned here in Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2012).

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

37

FAITH AND REASON

On Dominion and Progress:

Sacramental Action in a Secular World Anthony Artuso Humanity and Creation in Christian Theology

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Paradise, 1530.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

For good or ill, it has come to pass.

Humanity has multiplied, filled the earth, and gained dominion over it.

The earth’s ecosystems, biodiversity, geochemical cycles, and climate are all now powerfully affected by human decisions. The influence of humanity is so pervasive that geological societies have been debating whether to formally recognize the start of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. And now we have also begun to fumble with tools that could shape our own evolution.

We could debate whether we have come into our dominion by birthright, accident, or treachery. But that would be a distraction, since abdication is not

a viable option. The more immediately relevant questions concern what type of rulers we should seek to be and to what end should we exercise our dominion.

To begin, we must recognize that we share this planet with millions of other species and with generations unborn. Taking our obligations to the rest of the biological world into account, I think it would be best for all concerned if we sought to be godly; we should use as a model what we hope and believe to be God’s relation to humanity and creation. What I have in mind is the conception of God that is at the foundation of any thoughtful Christian theology, that of a being immensely concerned with the welfare of humanity and of all creation, so concerned as to allow us the freedom to work out our destiny without coercion or excessive interference.

Of course in Christian theology, God’s concern for creation is more than simply benign neglect. Throughout the scriptures, the beauty and bounty of the world is celebrated as evidence of God’s care. There is also, in some mysterious way, guidance—and even intervention—on our behalf, that nevertheless leaves human autonomy and responsibility intact. God is understood as seeking to enable our full, perfected expression, which requires that we remain free to do as we wish and that we be responsible for the conse-

38

quences of our actions. God’s concern is manifested fully in the Incarnation, in which God takes flesh so that we and all of creation may be transformed and exalted. According to St. Irenaeus, God “became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.”1 Whether such a God exists or is merely the God we would like to exist is not an essential consideration for environmental ethics. If the God we hope exists is an omnipotent being who is nevertheless respectful of our autonomy, who has made the world beautiful and bountiful for our enjoyment, and who—in ways that do not restrict our freedom—seeks to enable our perfected expression, then even as part of a secular environmental ethics, that conception of godly concern could serve as a model for our own rule over the earth.

Beyond providing a conception of God worth emulating, Orthodox Christian theology directly links the functioning and fate of nature to humanity’s spiritual condition. Humanity is called to serve as mediator and priest, participating with God in sanctifying all of creation. The scriptural underpinnings for this understanding stretch from Genesis through the Epistles.

After the creation of the world, God brings all creatures to Adam to “see what he will name them.” In Hebrew and many ancient languages, names have specific meanings that are understood as both reflecting and influencing the essential nature of the person or thing. The naming by Adam should therefore be understood as a creative act that continues throughout history.

The cave art in Chauvet, the totems carved by the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the sequencing of genomes are all examples of an ongoing process of “naming,” by which we are seeking to The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

define the essence of other creatures and our relationship to them.

The deep connection between humanity and nature that is implied in Adam’s naming of the animals is starkly revealed by the repercussions of Adam’s transgression. Not only is humanity expelled from the garden for Adam’s transgression, but the transgression causes a profound transformation in the ecology of the world.

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you.2

1 Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Lib. 5, Preface.

2

Gen. 3:17–18.

3

Isa. 55:7–13.

It would be possible to understand the curse as the angry response of a temperamental God, but that would mistake imagery for meaning. As Genesis makes clear, the deep spiritual relationship between humanity and the rest of creation is a fundamental element of God’s design, built in from the beginning, and our actions have profound consequences.

Isaiah envisions a time when the disastrous results of Adam’s transgression are overcome, humanity returns to God, and a harmonious, fruitful relationship with nature is restored.

The language Isaiah uses mirrors that found in Genesis.

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD. . . .

For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle.3 39

4

Matt. 18:18.

5

Rom. 8:19–21.

6

Matt. 18:20.

The essential message of the Gospels is that the joyful restoration foretold

by Isaiah has begun. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. But the kingdom is not of this world. It operates on completely different principles. Power and might are revealed in humility. The ruler is servant and the meek inherit the earth. God has returned to rule, but not by the coercive means used by earthly rulers. Humanity’s freedom, autonomy and responsibility for the earth, embedded from the outset in the fabric of creation, are renewed and given new authority by Christ. “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”4 The deep spiritual connection linking the fates of humanity and the rest of creation is summed up again by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; Because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.5 Not only humanity but all of creation will partake in the redemption and transfiguration initiated by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ.

Through the revealing or emergence of humanity as sons of God, all of creation will realize its full potential. But this process of transfiguration, while made possible by God, requires our active involvement. As the body of Christ, the mystical Church, we are active participants in the salvation of the world. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”6

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Our Modern Secular Faith The dominion verse in the first chapter of Genesis and the Abrahamic faith traditions that recognize the book of Genesis as a scriptural reference are often blamed for sanctioning humanity’s rapacious use and abuse of the natural world. The brief sketch I have provided above is intended to show that such a view is quite at odds with Christian theology. Decidedly less clear are the practical implications in a secular, pluralistic society of the Christian understanding of our sacramental relationship to the natural world. There are few questions more urgently in need of our attention.

Political liberalism and the separation of church and state emerged from the Enlightenment. What is less widely acknowledged is that they were brought into the world by Christian culture, accompanied by all of the pains associated with childbirth.7 The original political idea of the Enlightenment was to create a religiously neutral public sphere where governments, supported by the will of the people, would make decisions to enhance overall welfare.

Political and legal safeguards were instituted to ensure that majority rule did not become tyranny and that government did not interfere in the private exercise of religion. The market, even in the view of its most famous patron saint, Adam Smith, was understood to be a useful servant—capable, in the then-narrow realm of commercial transactions, of transmuting self-interest into public benefit, but always under the guidance and management of the state, which alone was entrusted with safeguarding the interests of all.

Over time, as religious and other traditional views of the common good were abandoned or confined to the private sphere, the servant grew strong and in-

dependent and the master grew feeble and confused. Markets have extended their reach into every facet of life and into every corner of the globe. Meanwhile, no political justification can be found for them other than to continue to support an increase in production and consumption, along with the continued development of technology as a guarantor of further progress. Other than for the most egregious abuses involving blatant fraud or immediate damage to persons or property, political leaders have lost all moral authority to constrain exchange between market participants. The result is a rapidly accelerating application of science and technology, guided, or rather propelled, by a collective pursuit of pleasure and comfort, with government acting as supporting player and occasionally as referee, stopping the action momentarily if one of the participants commits an obvious foul.

Do not mistake my meaning. There is no doubt that over the past two hundered years, market economies supported by investment capital have improved living conditions and increased life expectancy in almost every part of the world. In the past twenty-five years, that progress has been quite rapid, with the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty dropping from 41 percent in 1990 to less than 12 percent today.

With almost a billion people still living in extreme poverty, there is more to be done to spread the benefits of material prosperity. But a decent standard of living, or even a steadily increasing material prosperity for all, should not be the sum total of our aspirations. In higher-income countries, it is not at all clear that further increases in material wealth will lead to increased well-being. Yet we seem to have lost the ability to define any collective purpose beyond that. We have entrusted The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

ourselves to the invisible hand of the market which we vaguely conceive as being wielded for our benefit by the god of progress.

G. K. Chesterton saw this very clearly almost one hundred years ago: Progress is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress. That is we meet every proposal of getting something we know about with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.8 The eschatological nature of our modern faith in progress is on full display in the teachings of a small but highly influential sect of true believers, the transhumanists, who count among their members some of the richest and most influential members of the tech community. The transhumanists expectantly await a time in the not too distant future when exponentially accelerating advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, most important, artificial intelligence will make it possible to upload our consciousness to machine-based intelligence capable of indefinitely perpetuating itself.9 When that brave new world arrives, we, or at least the select few who are fortunate enough to be able to afford the price of admission, will become immortal.

It is open for debate whether this vision of the future offers us a glimpse of heaven or of hell. Unfortunately, that debate seems to be largely confined to Hollywood films and science fiction novels. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence continue to be developed, networked, and connected to ever-growing databases. Technologies for enabling direct neural connections between biological brains and computers are moving from

7 Early proponents of allowing minority religious communities full participation in political life were Christians and based their arguments on Christian principles.

See Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (1644); John Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659); and John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689).

This tolerationist view had to overcome earlier justifications for religious compulsion such as Augustine’s interpretation of “compel them to come in” from the parable of the feast (Luke 14:15–25).

8 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Heretics (1905; New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007), 26.

9 See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin Books, 2006); Nicholas Bostrum, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); http:// whatistranshumanism.org/; and http:// humanityplus.org/.

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science fiction into practice. Numerous firms and a network of militaryfunded research labs are making rapid progress in developing robots capable of autonomous learning and autonomous movement in complex, newly encountered environments.

10

For an accessible introduction to these technologies and some of the ethical challenges they are likely to create, see Jennifer Kahn, “The Crispr Quandary,” The New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2015.

Whether artificial intelligence could ever become human-like and whether it is wise to pursue such a goal are important questions with significant philosophical and even existential implications. Philosophers continue to debate whether human beings do or do not have free will. While this is not the place to rehearse the arguments in that debate, it is worth noting that humans are sufficiently unpredictable to have enabled the debate to continue for millennia. This suggests that a humanlike artificial intelligence would have to pass something more comprehensive than the celebrated Turing test, in which a human interlocutor attempts to determine whether he or she is conversing with a human or a computer.

A more complete test of whether an entity possesses general, human-like intelligence is whether it is capable of independently developing new skills and capabilities, can interact with us as a human would, and appears to be motivated by a purposeful but not fully predictable will of its own.

The thought of creating a self-improving intelligence with what appears to be free will should give us pause. But in the world of artificial intelligence, pause is not on the agenda. The component elements needed to achieve general, human-like intelligence are being feverishly pursued, not as a result of collective agreement after a thoughtful debate in democratic forums, but rather from the uncoordinated actions of profit-seeking firms combined with the accelerant of military competition between nation-states.

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I do not mean to single out the field of artificial intelligence for special treatment. The same driving forces and reasons for concern apply to other applications of our rapidly advancing technological capabilities. As a result of very recent advances in biotechnology, almost anyone with a graduate degree in biology and a modest amount of money to spare can now quite precisely edit the genome of almost any organism—including humans—and, if desired, ensure those changes are inherited.10 This technology is rapidly being incorporated in applied research programs in academia and industry, and there is little doubt it will eventually be widely deployed in a new wave of genetically modified organisms and designer babies, most likely before we are fully capable of assessing the social or ecological implications.

A Choice to Make It is often argued that, as new challenges arise, humans muddle through, learning and innovating as we go, always finding our way to a better place.

This may be true with respect to localized or narrowly defined problems.

But when the problem is global, when the response requires either pervasive action or restraint, and when the benefits or costs are not immediate or easily captured in market transactions, we have not shown ourselves capable of responding quickly enough to avoid serious harm. This is illustrated quite clearly by the inability of the global community, after more than three decades of effort, to fashion an effective response to anthropogenic climate change. Preventing the release of dangerous forms of artificial intelligence and controlling the harmful effects of an onslaught of genetically modified organisms will be at least as challenging in a market-driven, militarized world.

Just as we have extended our dominion over all the earth and are learning to wield tools capable of affecting the course of evolution, it seems we no longer possess, or at least agree on, a worldview or ethical system to guide our actions. From a purely secular perspective, questions regarding humanity’s purpose are unintelligible or at best self-referential, based entirely on our own desires and preferences. Yet for all our modern, secular trappings, we still hold an essentially religious faith in progress. Climate change, the steady erosion of biodiversity, and the near elimination of a private realm not subject to commercial manipulation show that we are ready to sacrifice many things that we hold dear in the expectation of attaining some future state of bliss. The more extreme versions of our secular faith appear as dark parodies of Christianity, complete with the need to die to our old selves in order to be reborn into an eternal, digitized existence. Whether it is a parody of Christian faith, the real thing, or some other vision of humanity’s purpose that should guide the exercise of our dominion is a question we must answer. If we simply continue to satisfy whatever whim or fancy takes hold of us, then by the time we finally come to our senses, if we do, we may find we have done irreparable harm to ourselves and the world.

A genuine understanding of humanity’s role as servant ruler, responsible

for tending all of creation and revealing its beauty and majesty, is more urgently needed than ever. However, if this calling is to be widely embraced, Christians must provide a visible witness of its practical application. This will require wading deeply into the complex ills and opportunities of the modern world to fashion an intelligent, Christian response to issues ranging from climate change and biodiversity conservation to bioethics and income inequality. In communicating what we have found, we cannot take faith in God or an acceptance of scripture as a given, or we will only be talking to ourselves.

If we are to act as leaven in a pluralist society, we will need to find ways to speak persuasively to those who are not Christian or are Christian only by historical affiliation. As a starting point for that dialogue, I suggest we seek to measure the exercise of our dominion in terms of three virtues: love of beauty, humility, and compassion for others, human and non-human.

This world with its creatures is a work of art, billions of years in the making.

Even after all our advances in science and technology, there is still so much we do not understand or cannot effectively control. Before we take actions to modify the world, as inevitably we must, we should first ask if we are quite confident that our actions will enhance its beauty and benefit those most in need.

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

Anthony Artuso has held executive positions at several life science companies, served on the faculties of Rutgers University and the University of Charleston, worked in government at the federal state and local levels, and served as an advisor to the World Bank, the United Nations, and other international organizations.

He holds a BA in environmental science from Columbia University, a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a PhD in natural resource policy and management from Cornell University.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

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EARS TO HEAR, EYES TO SEE

Miniature Worlds Margaret Artuso Walking in the hills above Elliot Bay in Seattle, I am greeted by unique images that call out to my attention. A design formed by moss climbing the stairs, ancient maps on the stones, the play of light against a wall, a precious color reflected off a petal only at this moment, on this day, in this season. Beauty that sometimes hides and at other times trumpets its presence.

Beauty in the shape of a calla lily as it unfolds, reflecting the lines and movement of a dance.

Of tree bark that mirrors beautiful silk fabric or a cathedral window. Miniature worlds revealing themselves, vines that cover walls like lace, pavement melting in water. Strength held in chains at the point of yield.

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Photo by Inga Leonova

STATE OF AFFAIRS

The Problem of Fear

A Reflection on the Words of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Inga Leonova The author wishes to thank Fr. Robert Arida for his inspiration and invaluable help with this essay.

“Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent.” – Acts 18:9 “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

– John 16:33 In June of 2000 Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh gave a long interview in London, part of which was published several days later by the Parisian Russianlanguage newspaper Russkaya Mysl. In that interview, Vladyka Anthony pondered the atmosphere of internal fear which was beginning to permeate the Orthodox Church: I have a very clear or rather gloomy feeling that as we enter the third millennium we are entering some obscure and complex and, in a certain sense, unwelcome period. As for devotion to the Church, our faith must cer-

48

tainly retain its integrity, but we must not be afraid of thinking and expressing ourselves openly. Everything will eventually settle into order, but if we keep just endlessly reiterating what has been said long ago, more and more people will drift away from their faith (I mean not so much Russia as the world as a whole), not because everything that was stated before is erroneous, but because the approach and language being used are all wrong. Today’s people and the time they live in are different; today we think differently. I believe one must become rooted in God and not be afraid of thinking and feeling freely. “Freely” does not imply “free thinking” or contempt for the past and for the tradition. However, God does not need slaves.

“I no longer call you servants, I call you my friends...” I think it is extremely important that we think and share our reflections with him. There is so much we could share with him in this new world we live in. It is so

good and so important to think openly without trying to conform. Intellectuals with great receptivity must come to the fore by their thinking and writing.

The Church, or rather clergymen and some of the conscious churchgoers, are afraid to do something wrong. After all these years when people could not think or speak openly with each other and thereby outgrow, as it were, the nineteenth century, there is much fear, which leads people to be content with mere repetition of what has been adopted by the Church long before and what is known as Church language and Church doctrine. This has to change sooner or later.1 For Metropolitan Anthony, this developing fear of open discourse stood in sharp contrast to the years of his formation in Western Europe in the atmosphere of active and open Orthodox and interconfessional dialogue. The ensuing years have shown that this concern went far beyond the Church of Russia, which was the subject of Metropolitan Anthony’s remarks. As the Church is being drawn deeper and deeper into the thick of the so-called “culture wars” and challenged with expectations to respond to contemporary issues at the speed and within the format of tweets and blog posts, its reaction, more often than not, is to retreat behind the safe walls of familiar formulae. Yet, as events everywhere seem to demonstrate, this approach does not appear either to further the Church’s evangelical mission or to nurture the development of internal and external theological discourse. In the eyes of the world it seems to present, tragically, an image of a fearful tyrant on the defensive instead of a fearless witness to the Truth.

We must face the fact that much of our contemporary life in the Church is permeated by fear of thought, fear of The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

questions, and fear of discourse. This fear divides and silences us, or gives rise to loud and vitriolic defenses and expositions that seek to alienate and stifle new and challenging voices. The era of open dialogue, which has been associated in the West first with the “Paris School” and later with the luminaries of Russian Orthodox theological thought in North America, seems to have become a distant and almost fabled memory. No matter what challenges we face—evangelization, liturgical reform, gender and sexuality, political and socioeconomic issues— there seems to be no room for an open and respectful discourse, and self-censorship has become a sad norm.

1 Met. Anthony of Sourozh interviewed in Russkaya Mysl, June 18, 2000.

2

Ibid.

“One must become rooted in God and not be afraid of thinking and feeling freely.”2 The freedom that Met. Anthony refers to does not translate into irreverence to tradition, contempt for Church history, or self-indulgence. It is rather the creative freedom of the Spirit which is nourished, as in patristic times, by contending with reality and engaging the questions that grow from that encounter.

These thoughts appear in Met. Anthony’s writings and talks over the years as he wrestles with various topics that arise both inside and outside the Church. In May of 1989 he gave a series of talks under the general heading “Man and Woman.” In them he both acknowledges the challenges of the time and describes, with characteristic sharpness, the failure of the Church to engage the challenges in a manner suited to its tradition: The subject of man and woman has become more and more essential in the course of the last decades, not only because a number of people have been very vocal about the situation of women both in the Church and in society, but because more and more, 49

the Christian vision has ripened, deepened, and problems which did not exist a century ago have come to the fore—not only forced upon the Christian consciousness by circumstances, but coming from within the Christian consciousness. . . .

3 Met. Anthony of Sourozh, “Man and Woman,” talk presented May 1989, http://masarchive. org/Sites/texts/198905-09-1-E-E-C-EW01002Man&WomanEdited.html.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

The Orthodox Church in the last decades has spoken. It has spoken with great assurance and without any ground either for the assurance or for the affirmation that she has made. 3 These harsh words come from a wellfounded frustration with the growing rift between the closed mind of the Church and the reality of the world in and to which it is called to witness. This rift, for Met. Anthony, is the fruit of a misunderstood, claustrophobic vision of Church tradition and of a fear of engaging with an ever-changing culture.

What we call the tradition of the Church is something much less simple than how we see it. There is a great deal in the history of the Church that was the rule at a certain moment and has been discarded at another moment or has been created.

We must give thought and ask ourselves whether the rules which we observe, the situation which is ours now, is truly what the Gospel teaches and what Christ became man for. . . . All the Orthodox and Orthodoxy as a body must begin to think, to think deeply, intensely, ask itself questions, question its own self before one can say radically yes or no to a question that has never existed in our Orthodox Church before.4 Repeatedly, Met. Anthony points out, the Church has reacted to contemporary challenges by rejecting them as “irrelevant” to its life and by declaring certain questions off-limits for discussion. Yet one may ask whether the ap-

50

proach to ignore or label as irrelevant is antithetical to the very mission of the Church. For Met. Anthony, there are no forbidden topics and no irrelevant contemporary challenges. The Church is present in the world today just as it is present in eternity. It unifies the time of humankind with the time of God, and therefore its duty is to preserve and foster this connection rather than sever it.

I believe we must, all of us, think, study the Bible, look into the history of the Church, look into the context of the Church’s history in the secular world, try to see clearly what influences came upon the Christian community in different epochs. For the Church is at the same time a body in which God dwells and the Holy Spirit acts, but also it is a body of men and women who are deeply ingrained in the society, the history, the time in which they live and who therefore are influenced by a great many more factors than the action of the Holy Spirit or the sayings of the Holy Scriptures.5 But if the Church is present in its time, what causes this fear of engagement with the contemporary?

On the surface there is fear emerging from practical consequences of ex-

pressing a divergent or controversial opinion. How many can be expected to risk their livelihood and the wellbeing of their families—including, in the case of clergy, their parishes— in defense of an opinion? This fear is fostered and sustained by those in positions of authority throughout the Church, and it is very effective. Ironically, this fear sustained by the Church unveils its own inner fear stemming from a lack of trust in the Spirit.

Intolerance of discourse is an inability to process the complexity of our relationships with each other—the human complexity that accounts for each person’s absolute uniqueness. To see the other as a person rather than an object engages the need to become vulnerable to the other, to interact at a level where we are unprotected by a defined system of values and standards and are only guided by the commandment to love each other. We must never forget that our values, canons, commandments, and traditions are not an end in themselves. Rather, as Christians, we are called to “put on Christ” and to interact with the other from the place of vulnerability of love rather than from the place of superiority and safety of the Law. This responsibility is terrible and terrifying, and it is a responsibility that we reject, preferring the safety of prescribed rules and regulations.

The challenge of much of the contemporary discourse having shifted into the realm of online forums, where we have become accustomed to interacting with abstract avatars, where the nuances of emotion are lost and the format does not permit careful exposition of thought, has further eroded our ability to view each other as persons.

One of the greatest fears known to mankind is the universal, gripping fear of the unknown. This fear is born of not having recognizable boundaries The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

within which our mind can always find a reference point. This fear is familiar to everybody: every one of us has to deal with it when we encounter a situation outside the realm of our frame of reference. Sickness, death, betrayal, crime—all kinds of crises challenge the boundaries of our experience and terrify us. This fear is personal and corporate. As a protective measure, the personal and corporate mind desires to be sheltered in a safe circle of the familiar and explicable and to have an answer to every situation and every challenge.

The Church offers solace, healing, and protection. But that does not preclude wrestling with doubt. To ignore doubt and therefore the possibility of conflict between the fixed ideal and the surrounding reality becomes unbearable and leads the way to a closed or sectarian mindset.

6

Met. Anthony of Sourozh in conversation with Valentina Matveeva, “Missionerstvo. Platochki.

Somnenie. Vybor svjashhennikov,” 18 April 2001, http:// masarchive.org/ Sites/texts/2001-04 -18-R-R-I-EM04-01 7MissionaryWorkDoubtSelectionOfPriest.html.

Yet Met. Anthony says that doubt is a good thing. It is the sign of the vitality of the human mind: People are afraid of doubt, and they shouldn’t be, since doubt is born of the fact that we do not know the entire truth, and pose a question. . . . When doubts appear in me it means that I have outgrown my incomplete idea of God, my imperfect knowledge of Him, and God is telling me, “Look, you have learned all this, and now look at Me—I am bigger than all of it. You cannot be satisfied with the picture which you have painted for yourself. It is as small as you yourself, your intelligence, your education, as your imagination. Open yourself and pose the question: What can the others think of this? What other answers may be there? And do not be afraid. I will not be insulted by you questioning Me, because you are not questioning Me as Me, but your notions about Me . . .6 51

7 Met. John Zizioulas, “Communion and Otherness,” Orthodox Peace Fellowship Occasional Paper 19 (Summer 1994), https:// incommunion. org/2004/12/11/ communion-and-otherness/.

8

See Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1972), 37–55.

9

Met. Anthony of Sourozh, “Retreat at Ennismore Gardens: Opening Talk by Metropolitan Anthony,” March 1972, http:// masarchive.org/ Sites/texts/1972-0300-1-E-E-R-EW03-160 OnStayingYourselves. html.

10

1 Cor. 11:19.

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What Met. Anthony seeks to stress is that what we as Christians seek in the Church should not be reduced to a system of rules of conduct that would allow us to live “good lives.” As Christians we are called to be followers of Christ, who tells his disciples that whoever follows him will find the cross—that whoever follows him will be naked like him, homeless like him, hated and persecuted like him—all because those who follow him make themselves vulnerable to each other.

St. Paul writes that Christians are called to put on the mind of Christ, which is not a system of moral conduct. If we follow the Gospel narratives, we see that time and again Christ transcends the Law but fulfills the commandment of love, which is the foundation of the Law. Christ shows us that he sees everyone he encounters as his child, as his image, as a unique person, boundless, not fitting into a system or code of law, and thus not as a Jew, a Gentile, or a Samaritan.

The challenge of encountering the other as Christ sees each and every one of us is fundamentally the challenge of overcoming the fear of our differences, the fear of how we challenge one another with our incomprehensibility, our unpredictability. Met. John Zizioulas has the following to say about fear of the other: The fact that the fear of the other is pathologically inherent in our existence results in the fear not only of the other but of all otherness. This is a delicate point requiring careful consideration, for it shows how deep and widespread fear of the other is: we are not afraid simply of certain others, but even if we accept them, it is on condition that they are somehow like ourselves. Radical otherness is an anathema. Difference itself is a threat. That this is universal and pathological is to be seen in the fact that even when difference does not in actual

fact constitute a threat for us, we reject it simply because we dislike it. Again and again we notice that fear of the other is nothing more than fear of the different. We all want somehow to project into the other the model of our own selves.

When fear of the other is shown to be fear of otherness, we come to the point of identifying difference with division. This complicates and obscures human thinking and behavior to an alarming degree, with serious consequences. We divide our lives and human beings according to difference. We organize states, clubs, fraternities and even Churches on the basis of difference. When difference becomes division, communion is nothing but an arrangement for peaceful coexistence. It last as long as mutual interests last and may easily be turned into confrontation and conflict as soon as these interests cease to coincide. Our societies and our world situation today give ample witness to this.7 The Church, therefore, if it is to overcome a communion of peaceful coexistence, has to strive toward fulfilling the commandment of love. If we put on the mind of Christ, we learn to love each other as he or she is and thereby acquire the unity of sobornost (catholicity), in which each one of us by rejection of self and acceptance of the other mysteriously acquires all others as part of his or her person.8 Sobornost in the Church is the catalyst of creative thought, whereas the fear of otherness stifles personal ascent and transforms the community of persons into a faceless mass which can easily be turned into a mob. It is only in the unity of sobornost that we can truly become lifegiving to each other: Let us be aware of the extraordinarily rich presence of God and of all those who have ever lived, in our midst, around us, together with us, because their life gives us life.9

Metropolitan Anthony echoes the words of St. Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.”10 I believe it is extremely important that we start thinking and sharing our ideas, even at the risk of falling into error. Someone will always correct us, that’s all.11 The conciliar mind of the Church is the living mind of the people inspired by the Holy Spirit, always wrestling with reality and coming to consensus as the body. If this work ceases, if we replace this work, as Met. Anthony said, with “endlessly reiterating what has been said long ago,” whether it relates to the ever-evolving nature of our experience of reality or not, then our true witness to the world will cease and we will turn into a museum of beautiful—perhaps even educational—but lifeless artifacts. When we eschew the responsibility of engaging with the challenges of the world, we risk becoming irrelevant not only to our surrounding culture, but also to ourselves, as we fall into the heresy of excluding the complexity and the boundlessness of each other and of all creation.

(1 John 4:18). Love is contrasted not with hate, but with fear. How deep and true it is. . . . Fear is, first and foremost, the absence of love, or rather that which, like weeds, grows where there is no love.12 Manifesting Met. Anthony’s love and commitment to the essence of the spirit of sobornost, the transcript of the talks on “Man and Woman” ends with a very simple line: “Let us think together.” It is worth noting that while many of his talks and writings have become a staple of Orthodox bookstores in Russia, the key part of his legacy—the ever-present challenge of a living discourse—is being summarily neglected. If we are to be faithful to his spirit, we must assume responsibility for furthering this work.

11 Met. Anthony of Sourozh interviewed in Russkaya Mysl, June 18, 2000.

12

Alexander Schmemann, Dnevniki, 1973–1983 (Moskva: Russkiĭ put’, 2005), 386. Translation by author.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote in his journal entry on September 26, 1977: Feast of St. John the Theologian. Early Liturgy. Apostle: “Perfect love casts out fear.” © 2016 The Wheel.

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

Inga Leonova is a practicing architect and educator. She teaches a course on Monotheism, Culture, and Sacred Space at the Boston Architectural College and serves as a thesis advisor at the New England School of Art and Design. She is the author of several publications on Orthodoxy and cultural issues, including liturgical architecture and ecology.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

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Francisco Goya. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, detail, c. 1799. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

STATE OF AFFAIRS

Orthodox Fundamentalism: From Religion to Politics Cyril Hovorun 1 R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008).

In this paper, I want to explore the phenomenon of fundamentalism, which has become an inalienable part of contemporary religious discourse. First, I want to chart the origins of the fundamentalist movement in antimodernist Protestantism and its parallels in the Roman Catholic sphere, and to look at its development in the later twentieth century. In the second part of the essay, I will examine the rise of Orthodox fundamentalisms in various forms and the recent development of Orthodox fundamentalist politics, especially as this has developed in the Ukrainian conflict.

Early Fundamentalism The fundamentalist movement began with a collection of leaflets, “The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth,” published in twelve volumes in Chicago between 1909 and 1915.1 On July 19, 1920, Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist newspaper the Watchman-Examiner, used the term fundamentalist for 54

the first time in print, with none of the pejorative connotations it would later have. Before the World War I, fundamentalism focused on polemic with modern biblical criticism and Darwinism, but after the war it opened a wider front against modernity in general. The rhetoric of the fundamentalists began to feature military metaphors of skirmishes, battles, and crusades against modernists. Sometimes they did what they said, and applied physical violence.

The early fundamentalists presented modernism as a different sort of religion. In 1923, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote that liberalism was a new religion, different from Christianity: The present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive

of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called “modernism” or “liberalism.”2 Early fundamentalism came to understand itself as embodying a Reformed spirit of protest, no longer against Rome, but against modernism.

Fundamentalism pushed forward against modernism with the so-called Scopes trial in 1925, during which the state of Tennessee prosecuted the schoolteacher John Scopes for teaching evolution. The prosecution was represented

by William Jennings Bryan, a threetime presidential candidate and an outspoken fundamentalist, while the defense was mounted by a lawyer from New York, Clarence Darrow, who also engaged scientists and theologians.

Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but this was a Pyrrhic victory: the trial discredited the fundamentalist movement. The media, mostly from the north of the United States, used it as an opportunity to stigmatize fundamentalism as aggressive and behind the times, which was only partially true. After 1925, the conflict between progressives and fundamentalists became polarized as a highbrow-lowbrow, north-south, urban-rural rivalry.

Early fundamentalism was not uniformly received, and the fundamentalist-modernist opposition caused splits in many Protestant churches throughout the United States. At the same time, it facilitated interdenominational alliances, such as the World Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) founded in 1919, in which ideological conservatism became more important than the doctrinal differences between denominations. The WCFA nevertheless failed to create a sustainable supradenominational structure on the basis of ideology, and in The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

the 1920s and early 1930s, the moderate fundamentalists reconciled with their denominations. The more militant fundamentalists reappeared in 1941 to found the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC), a radical alternative to the ecumenical Federal Council of Churches. In 1942, the more moderate National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) welcomed those who chose not to follow strict fundamentalism. Harold J. Ockenga, who cofounded the NAE, coined the term “new evangelical” to describe a moderate fundamentalism that firmly upheld the faith while engaging a wider intellectual and social agenda.

Postwar Fundamentalisms In the late 1970s, these moderate “neofundamentalists” or “post-fundamentalists” continued their work defending the “fundamentals” of Protestant Christianity, while also relying on secular intellectual, social, and media instruments. They joined forces with a variety of conservative Christians, including Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. Thus far, fundamentalism had been regarded as an exclusively American phenomenon.

The term was coined in the U.S., and the movement developed mostly there.

But the word began to be applied more widely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, when the word was first used in a non-Christian context.

2 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 2.

3

Martin E. Marty & R. Scott Appleby, The Fundamentalism Project (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991–1995).

In the mid-1980s, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences funded a study of fundamentalism with as broad a scope as possible. The project, led by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, resulted in the publication of five volumes demonstrating that fundamentalism extends far beyond the Protestant milieu and is present in all religions.3 The study established that fundamentalisms are alike in de55

fending the core of their beliefs while also identifying threats to their “fundamentals.” Appleby identifies these threats as:

4 R. Scott Appleby, “Fundamentalisms” in Robert E. Goodin et al., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 405–6.

5 Richard T. Antoun, “Fundamentalism” in Bryan Turner, The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 6 R. Scott Appleby, “Fundamentalisms,” 407.

56

• religious plurality, which transgresses the traditional religious boundaries and penetrates religious enclaves; • relativism, which has become an outcome of the globalization and liberalization of the societies; • the “divided mind” of modern persons, who perceive themselves as belonging to multiple incompatible domains; • secularization.4 As Richard T. Antoun has remarked, “the ethos of fundamentalism, its affective orientation, is one of protest and outrage at the secularization of society.”5 Paradoxically, however, in wrestling with secularization, fundamentalism itself becomes a secular and secularizing phenomenon. It becomes an instrument of the self-secularization of the Church. As Appleby writes: Herein lies a defining irony of fundamentalisms: these self-proclaimed defenders of traditional religion are hardly “traditional” at all… Fundamentalists have little patience for traditionalist or merely conservative believers, who attempt to live within the complex and sometimes ambiguous boundaries of the historic tradition. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are “progressives” in the sense that they seek to mobilize the religious tradition for a specific temporal end (even if the final victory is expected to occur beyond history).

Involvement in politics, civil war, liberation movements and social reform is central to the fundamentalist mentality: religion is, or should be, a force for changing the world, bringing it into conformity with the will of God, advancing the divine plan.

In this aspiration fundamentalists are little or no different from other “progressive”

religious movements for social change and justice, including the Latin American proponents of liberation theology.6 Despite its breadth, the Fundamentalism Project paid little attention to hierarchical churches such as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, where fundamentalism has specific nuances. In Protestant churches, where fundamentalism may be supported widely, it still cannot be converted into an obligatory policy, because there is no one hierarchical center to impose it. But in hierarchical churches, if the leadership embraces fundamentalism, it becomes a mainstream—effectively official—doctrine.

As in the Protestant world, the early decades of the twentieth century were the heyday of Roman Catholic fundamentalism. The “culture war” against modernism was not marginal, but a mainstream phenomenon. Pope Pius X condemned “Modernism” as heresy in two documents issued in 1907, known as Lamentabili and Pascendi, and in 1910 he introduced an “Oath against Modernism” for all bishops, priests, and academics. Modernism remained anathema until the Second Vatican Council, which, while reconciling the “Modernists,” provoked a new wave of Catholic fundamentalisms.

One such movement features nostalgia for the Council of Trent and the ethos of the Counter-Reformation. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) became the embodiment of opposition to the Second Vatican Council. This movement tends to oppose “liberal” popes, such as Francis, and implicitly or explicitly doubts papal authority when this authority supports what seems (to the fundamentalists) to be liberal apostasy.

The Lefebvrian brand of Roman Catholic fundamentalism is the counterpoint

to another form, which ascribes to the popes an ultimate and unconditional authority, beyond even the definitions of the First Vatican Council.

Orthodox Fundamentalisms All fundamentalists in all traditions seek unquestionable sources of religious authority. As we have seen, for fundamentalist Roman Catholics, the pope is one such authority, but there are also “visionaries” who are believed to receive direct messages from Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary. The cult of charismatic spiritual authorities plays an even more important role in Orthodox fundamentalism, which often appeals to “elders” (gerontes or startsi).

Roman Catholic idolatry of the papacy and Protestant biblical absolutism have been absent in the Orthodox Church, but the impulse to which they give expression is present nonetheless in what might be called gerontolatria (elder-worship). Obedience to a spiritual elder is undoubtedly an important part of the Orthodox tradition, which generally works in a positive way. From the time of the figures of the early Christian Apophthegmata up to modern-day personalities such as John Krestiankin in Russia or Païsios the Hagiorite in Greece, elders have played and continue to play an important role in nurturing the faithful and edifying the Church. However, as with any institution of human authority in the Church, the practice of obedience to elders is vulnerable to mistakes and abuses. One such form of abuse of starchestvo (the cult of the elder) is known as mladostarchestvo, the cult of the young elder, in which an inexperienced and immature person plays the role of a spiritual authority and develops a kind of personal absolutism or gerontokratia (elder-rule). Such persons often promote other kinds of fundamentalism among their followers.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

Another form of Orthodox fundamentalism focuses on the fathers of the Church. On the one hand, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of “the fathers” in the life of the Orthodox faithful. Orthodox Christians believe that the Church fathers constitute the most reliable magisterium of the Church and this attitude shapes the characteristic identity of the Orthodox and forms how we like to differentiate ourselves from other Christians. When patristic authority is abused, however, it becomes patristic fundamentalism.

The Orthodox then begin to treat the writings of the fathers as absolute authorities, without any reference to their historical context or any recognition of their human limitations. Paradoxically, patristic fundamentalism often misrepresents the fathers (in the same way as fundamentalism in any tradition effectively disrespects the sources it claims to be authoritative) by treating them selectively and tailoring their writings to a contemporary ideological agenda.

A further form of Orthodox fundamentalism relates to the way in which we Orthodox express ourselves most authentically—through liturgy. This form of Orthodox fundamentalism, which can be branded as “ritualism,” functions at the level of popular individual piety and can also manifest itself through organized sectarian movements. The two most well-known fundamentalist liturgical movements are the so-called Old Believers and the Old Calendarists.

The Old Believers (who are more correctly called Old Ritualists—staroobryadtsy rather than starovery) came into existence in the seventeenth century in opposition to the liturgical reforms of the Patriarch Nikon of Moscow. The movement was concerned with more than just reforms of how to cross oneself (with three fingers instead of two) or 57

7 See http://conservativetribune.com/ graham-picked-obama-putin/.

Accessed November 1, 2015.

how many times to sing alleluia (three times instead of two times), which are its most oft-repeated questions of interest. The staroobryadchestvo became the locus of social protests and expressed some of the divisions in Russian society at that time. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that these social protests took the outward form of a struggle over the minutiae of ritual. Liturgical purity and traditionalism were placed at the very center of the movement.

A more recent movement of ritual fundamentalism is expressed by the socalled Old Calendarists, who emerged in the 1920s at approximately the same time as Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. The pretext of their appearance was the adoption by some local Orthodox Churches of the civil Gregorian calendar, which replaced the older Julian calendar. The Church of Greece in particular faced protest movements, which eventually separated from the mainstream and appointed their own hierarchy. Like the Catholic SSPX, they effectively became sects, which would probably have joined an alliance with other fundamentalist churches, surpassing doctrinal divides, if they had not been anti-ecumenical on principle.

For many Old Calendarist groups, ecumenism has become a signature of modernism. In order to differentiate themselves from Orthodox churches that participate in ecumenical activities, these fundamentalist jurisdictions have adopted names such as the Genuine Orthodox Christians (Gnēsioi Orthodoxoi Christianoi) and the True Orthodox Churches (Istinnyje Pravoslavnyje Tserkvi). These groups often rebaptize those who join them from the “ecumenist� jurisdictions that they consider to be heretical.

At the core of the quarrels regarding ritual, the calendar, and ecumenism

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is a conservative agenda that opposes liberalism. Sometimes Orthodox fundamentalists do not hide their ideological preferences, and openly join the culture wars in other contexts; they jump into the trenches in which Protestant fundamentalist groups have been fighting for decades and become their unqualified allies. These new relationships between Orthodox and Protestant fundamentalists resemble the attempts to create transdenominational fundamentalist alliances on the basis of common conservative social values in the 1930s and 1940s. But this flirtation is plainly bizarre. Orthodox fundamentalism challenges, in every possible way, American dominion in the world, which is in fact a political priority for Protestant fundamentalism.

For Orthodox fundamentalists, their anti-modernist agenda is also strictly anti-Western. It is, in fact, as antiWestern as the Western fundamentalists are anti-Eastern, whether this sentiment is applied to Muslims in the Middle East or Asians in the Far East.

Furthermore, these unholy alliances enable American Protestant neo-fundamentalists to turn a blind eye, for instance, toward Russian aggression against Ukraine, despite the fact that their brothers and sisters have suffered and even died as a result of this aggression. When there is a chance to promote their political agenda, the blood and pain of others do not stop ideological fundamentalists, as they have not stopped, for instance, Franklin Graham from praising Vladimir Putin.7

Orthodox Fundamentalisms and Politics It seems that many Orthodox fundamentalists are excited by the reign of Putin and his activity in eastern Ukraine. Orthodox fundamentalism is much at work there. Many fundamentalist ideas have been translated

into political action in the quasinational entities of the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk (DNR) and the People’s Republic of Luhansk (LNR), which have been designed and constructed with the support of the Russian Federation. These entities clearly feature elements of religious fundamentalism as a strong ideological motivation. Quite a few separatists are driven by the ideology of the “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) which has been crafted as a substitute for Soviet ideology. Post-Soviet fundamentalism is one reaction to the transition from the Soviet political system to a liberal democracy. In Russia, this fundamentalism has exploited the social inertia that followed perestroika and has given it a religious motivation. It encourages a reverse drift of the Russian political system back to the USSR. Such a system is being restored in Crimea and the DNR and LNR. The war that adherents to the ideology of the “Russian world” wage in east Ukraine is both antiliberal and anti-Western. It is a war for the USSR, and a form of revenge for defeat in the Cold War. They consider Ukraine, which has chosen democracy and integration with the West, to be their enemy.

The DNR and the LNR have absorbed a number of Orthodox activists who profess what became known in Ukraine in the 2000s as “Political Orthodoxy.” This movement was identified and explicitly condemned by the synod of bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2007. At that time, Political Orthodoxy activists marched with icons in the streets of Kyiv, under banners bearing slogans against NATO and the West. In the war with Ukraine, some of these same activists took weapons into their hands and began killing Ukrainians for the very same slogans. For instance, Igor Druz’, a protagonist of the “Russian Spring” The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

in Donbas, had previously been an active participant in the marches of Political Orthodoxy, but with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, he became one of the ideologues of the “holy war” against Ukraine, with a Kalashnikov in his hands. In support of his cause, Druz’ likes to refer to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and invokes other classic figures of global fundamentalism.

The example of his case demonstrates how short the way is from ideological agenda to political activism, including the most brutal forms, in fundamentalist groups.

The political activism of fundamentalists can easily pass over into terrorism.

It has been noted among scholars that fundamentalist activism is by nature separatist. It tries, when it can, to create enclaves, where its ideas may be implemented without opposition. This is precisely the motivation behind the DNR and the LNR. They are enclaves separated from the rest of Ukraine in which the ideals of the “Russian world” are to be implemented. These ideals have been celebrated by modern Russian writers such as Zahar Prilepin and Sergey Shargunov (a son of the conservative priest from Moscow, Fr. Alexander Shargunov), who have praised the DNR and the LNR as utopias where the true Russian soul may thrive.

In reality, however, these utopian enclaves have turned quickly into dystopias, embodying the worst of the Soviet past, including gulags, propaganda, and militarism. According to the reports of the international organizations, media, and social networks, the only line of thinking tolerated in the DNR and the LNR is the one officially propagated by its military leaders. People are afraid to express disagreements openly.

The Soviet phenomenon of stukachestvo (the reporting of dissenting words and thoughts to organs of state security) is 59

now widespread in the territories of the DNR and the LNR. Some members of non-Orthodox Christian denominations have been killed, tortured, or forced to leave. Nor are all members of the Russian Orthodox Church tolerated there, but only those who subscribe to the doctrine of the “Russian world.”

Thus, a number the Orthodox priests who doubted the official line and expressed pro-Ukrainian views had to flee the occupied territories. Coercion has become a common practice; those who do not obey face incarceration or forced work for the good of these “People’s Republics.”

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

The worldview propagated in the DNR and the LNR is dualistic. It sees the world in black and white. On the dark side of this world are Americans, Europeans, and Ukrainians, who dream of the destruction of the bright side of the world, which consists of the people of the DNR and the LNR, the Russians, and their allies, including far-right and far-left groups throughout the world. Putin is presented as the universal president of this bright side of the world. This view is enforced by violence, propaganda, and fear, and many inhabitants of the region, including their leaders, consider themselves to be encircled by invisible forces plotting against them. This kind of dual-

ism and paranoia proceeds directly from the fundamentalist mindset.

Conclusions I have presented the Ukrainian situation in some detail here as one example of the direction of travel of fundamentalism in the Orthodox world. The DNR and the LNR are a laboratory in which religious fundamentalism can be seen fully unfolding as political fundamentalism. And the result is scary.

There are, of course, many other areas in which the fundamentalist tendency of some members of the Orthodox Church has begun to take effect. I have briefly surveyed this phenomenon with respect to gerontolatria, patristic literalism, and resistance to ritual development. As a whole, this situation should urge the Church to a greater concern over fundamentalism as an ideological standpoint. The first task is to recognize the innovative presence of fundamentalism in the midst of the Church. Fundamentalism cannot be eliminated altogether. Instead of tolerating and even encouraging fundamentalism, however, the Church must work to contain it. If we are unable to do this, Orthodox fundamentalism unleashed will surely lead us to yet more of the crimes against humanity that are now occurring in Ukraine.

The V. Rev. Dr. Cyril Hovorun is Associate Dean of St. Ignatios Theological Academy (Sweden), Director of Research at the Institute of Theological Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine), and a research fellow at Yale University (USA). From 2007 to 2009, he chaired the Department of External Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. From 2009 to 2011, he was the first Deputy Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church.

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POETRY DESK

Hypatia Norman Hugh Redington 1.

In the time of disturbances When the idols were overthrown Abba Bessarion stood for fourteen days With his arms outstretched.

His disciple thought, “Surely he is dead by now, And I am next.

There is no more water.”

Then Abba Bessarion lowered his arms and said, “A judgement will come from above, And every false god be destroyed.

Come, let us go hence.”

2.

The disciple, however, fell on his face and cried: “Father, it has been fourteen days, And there is no more water.”

So Abba Bessarion set a sheep-skin down in the sand, And when he picked it up again, It was full of water, Very cold and clear.

3.

As they walked down the trail toward Lycopolis They passed a hermit with no beard Who sat unmoving in the mouth of a cave on the hillside And did not greet them.

Abba Bessarion said: “Perhaps this Father will have a word for us On our way home.”

Toward evening, as the sun was setting, They reached the little hut of Abba John.

(It was he who had watered the dry stick For a year at the Lord’s command.)

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While the three of them were praying, A brother dressed all in white went by on the road, Dancing for joy and singing.

He called out to them: “We country monks have taken Alexandria!

We have cleansed the city!

God is greater!”

Abba Bessarion’s disciple said: “Father, it is just as you prophesied: Every false god is destroyed.”

But Abba John sat on the ground and said: I have had a vision.

I have had a memory.

I have had a vision.

4.

I see a fire lit in Alexandria . . .

Knotted prayer-ropes . . . sharpened bits of oyster-shell . . .

I hear a woman screaming on the avenue . . .

In hers I hear another’s cry as well.

Lord, I remember: Golden-voiced . . . her age not very far from mine . . .

The notaries . . . the courtiers of Maximin . . .

The wheel. She remarked on its design.

She was . . . Christ God, I could not watch her martyrdom.

I say I could not watch, and yet I stared.

“From past the spheres, my Jesus, Love, You’ve come for me!”

They gave the order, and the trumpet blared.

And then, great Christ, the panic of the multitude: Milk was pouring from her severed head.

At last I see the meaning of this miracle: Her blood remained for monks to spill instead.

5.

Abba Bessarion’s disciple and the brother in white said: “Father, we do not understand.

Speak to us plainly.”

But he gave them no answer, Not even a word.

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6.

In the morning, the brother in white said to Abba John: “Father, let me stay here.”

But Abba John said: “This place is not your home.”

So the brother turned to Abba Bessarion and said: “Father, is my home with you, then?”

Abba Bessarion told him: “Perhaps.

Come and see what God will show you.”

So Abba Bessarion left by the way he came, And his two disciples went with him, Heading toward the desert.

As they were walking, The first disciple pointed out the hermit who had not greeted them Still sitting in the mouth of the cave on the hillside: “Here is a holy Elder deep in prayer: He has not moved a bit all night.”

Abba Bessarion answered, “Clearly, That is because the holy Elder has died!

Go, prepare the body for burial.”

7.

So the two disciples went up to the place where the hermit sat, But they ran back at once in confusion: “Father! It is a woman’s body!

Has such a thing ever been known in this land of Egypt As a woman Elder?”

8.

Abba Bessarion answered them: “Look: Women are taking the kingdom of heaven by violence, While we men run about in the streets of the capital.

Go, prepare the body For the Resurrection.”

Norman Hugh Redington a mathematical physicist, is coeditor of the online Saint Pachomius Orthodox Library. He lives in West Texas.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Talks on the Beatitudes Alexander Schmemann Translated by Inga Leonova

“Blessed are the peacemakers” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9)—thus says the seventh Beatitude. What does it express, what does it point to in the teaching about being human that is given to us in the Sermon on the Mount?

First of all—what is peacemaking? The enemies of religion and Christ very often point to the contradiction between this commandment of Christ and His other words, “I have not come to bring peace to the world but a sword” (Matt.

10:34). They refer to Christians participating in wars, and blame them for supporting various causes that result in war. What can be said to this? Let us emphasize, first of all, that the criticism of Christianity by the propagandists of “scientific atheism” is astonishingly superficial. When they speak of peacemaking, they understand peace solely as an absence of war between nations and states. But war is, after all, only the conclusion—albeit the most terrible and tragic—of the condition of division and animosity which has become an essential quality of men, and manifests itself not just on the battlefield but also in the everyday life of mankind. Christianity begins by condemning precisely this tragic condition that has turned our life into a constant struggle, and poisoned it with fear and hatred. Therefore Christian peacemaking has nothing in common with hysterical and hypocritical screams about “world peace.”

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One might not believe in God, not know theology, and still see the strange duality of a human being. On the one hand, everything in him is designed and arranged for communicating with those like him, everything is conducive to love and friendship, solidarity and collaboration, that is, to peace in the deepest and most authentic meaning of this word. A person does not simply depend on another person physically and morally, but only in communion with the other does he gain that sense of meaningfulness and fullness of life that he himself calls happiness. Truly friendship, love, and creativity are incomprehensible outside of human communication and interaction. The very physical makeup of a man makes him a being created for love, harmony and accord. Yet on the other hand— and here lies before us the tragic paradox of a human being—everything “peaceful” in him invariably crashes into a certain terrible force, inwardly confronting him with another. And then friendship turns into suspicion and enmity, collaboration into competition, love into hatred. We all know from personal experience how hard it is to achieve peace, and how easy to destroy it, how the ties of friendship are torn, how love breaks down. Man’s nature demands peace, but his life conduct constantly opposes it. Why? The materialistic worldview that is presented by its preachers as the most advanced teaching about a human be-

ing not only does not give an answer to this question, but does not see the question itself. It reduces all human divisions to economics and the distribution of earthly goods, while the overcoming of those divisions is reduced to struggle, including armed struggle. Therefore calls for “world peace” smack of a terrible hypocrisy on the lips of the representatives of a materialistic worldview that does not, in essence, recognize peace. There cannot be true peacemaking where there is no person to be reconciled to, to reconnect with, where there is no one with whom harmony, accord, and love can be reconstructed. This is because, from the point of view of materialism, there is no peace in the very nature of man; there are only animal needs, the satisfaction of which does not pacify but only affords a sense of satiety.

The Christian approach to man sees in division and strife a tragically irrational disparity with respect to his true nature and calling. The cult of natural demands to which, in essence, all materialistic anthropology is reduced is seen by Christianity as a sinful perversion of the original concept of a human being. Division and strife came about precisely because man had become satisfied with minimalistic self-valuation, had accepted a caricature of himself.

Therefore the central place of peacemaking is in restoration of the true person and true humanity. Peacemakers will be called the sons of God because reconciliation is the transcendence of the boundaries of one’s “I,” the recognition of one’s brother in another, the reconstruction of life as the unity of love, the regaining of paradise lost.

Everyone must remember from one’s childhood how dark and meaningless life would become when peace in the household was disturbed, when by committing a transgression we would distance ourselves from mother and father. The sun suddenly stopped shinThe Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

ing, the toys were no longer enjoyable, and the entire world became a dark, sad prison . . . And then there would be reconciliation and the return of light and joy. Christianity blesses peacemaking, seeing it as the way to man’s recovery of his own essence. A true peacemaker is the one who not only reconciles the adversaries, but brings the joyfully lifegiving power of brotherhood and love into daily life, into its very fabric.

Having learned this, we begin to also understand which sword Christ was talking about, which division he had brought into our life. In a certain very deep way, Christianity really declares war on every denial of true peace, on every teaching and ideology not founded on love and brotherhood, on every reduction and perversion of the human image. Peacemaking is not a sentimental rhetoric, but a sober and courageous guarding of the divine teaching about man, the struggle within and without oneself for the liberation of man from sinful division.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” The Gospel Beatitudes of the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers are followed by that of persecution for righteousness’ sake. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, says Christ, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 5:10).

Nowadays these words sound like a terrible dissonance, given that complete and unconditional obedience is declared the greatest quality, the utmost virtue of man, and that every doubt in official, flat, and petty ideology is considered a crime. How important it is to remember that this Beatitude, about those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, is included by Christ in the Beatitudes that reveal the fundamental teaching about man. Doesn’t this mean 65

that the principle of spiritual freedom, each person’s calling to be faithful to the highest and absolute truth even if this faithfulness results in persecution—that is, casting off by society, loneliness and suffering—is the indispensable element of human nature?

1 Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet, interpreter, essayist.

In February of 1964 he was arrested on charges of vagrancy.

In March of the same year he was sentenced to five years in exile. The sentence was commuted after a year and a half due to pressure from world public opinion. From 1972 until his death he lived and worked in the USA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.

I repeat: this principle is not just violated in our days. Violations of norms have existed always and everywhere.

No, it is openly derided. One does not have to go far for examples: For instance, recently a Leningrad court tried the poet Joseph Brodsky.1 He was tried as a vagrant because he subsisted on a pauper’s income, possessing a single suit, and found the entire joy and meaning of his life in writing poetry.

The transcript of that trial is a truly horrifying document.

Here a female judge asks Brodsky: “Tell the court why between jobs you didn’t work, and led a parasitic life style.”

BRODSKY: I worked between jobs. I did what I do now: I wrote poems.

JUDGE: You wrote your so-called poems?

And what was useful about your frequent job changes?

BRODSKY: I began working when I was 15 years old. Everything was interesting to me. I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people.

JUDGE: What did you do for your motherland?

BRODSKY: I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced . . . I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

JUDGE: Can one subsist on the income you are making?

BRODSKY: Yes. While in prison, I signed off every day that forty kopeks were spent on me. I made more than forty kopeks a day.

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JUDGE: But one needs to buy clothes!

BRODSKY: I have one old suit. It is what it is, and I don’t need another.

And so this nightmarish dialogue continues to develop. Brodsky is accused of one thing only: that he preferred his poems and the truth that he was embodying in them to the compulsory doctrine declared to be the truth.

And the dialogue is followed by the unavoidable sentence: five years in remote places with forced labor. Persecution for righteousness’ sake. But what makes an impact in the transcript of the Brodsky trial is that he turns out to be the only truly blessed one. In this world of turpitude, betrayal, and malicious hooting only he knows what he lives for, only he has experienced real happiness, only he knows in the bottom of his heart that he is right. Those who insult, deride, and humiliate him, threatening him with irrelevant laws, present a miserable sight.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake . . . In this world the old yet also the eternally new story constantly repeats itself, and it contains the entire meaning of Christianity. The Gospels are kept away from the people not because they contain “unscientific” notions of nature, but because they tell about the man who turned out to be stronger than the state, the party, brute force, and slander, the man who had rejected all power, all coercion, and still was more powerful than all. So much more powerful that when he was finally killed, he conquered the entire world by his life, by his teaching and example, and that a powerful state in our day is compelled to fight him with force.

The inclusion of the persecuted for righteousness’ sake in the Beatitudes uncovers the meaning of Christianity as the teaching on the inalienable

freedom of man. Official antireligious propaganda especially insists that religion has always been one of the forms of enslavement of people, that it has ostensibly only taught humility and patience, non-resistance to evil, reconciliation with injustice. Thousands of books, brochures and articles are written on this subject. Yet if this statement contained even a modicum of truth, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount could not have contained this beatitude: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. These few words uncover the lie of all antireligious propaganda, just as it is uncovered by the entire history of Christianity beginning with Christ himself.

Even more important is that truth here is placed at the head of the entirety of human life and calling. During the Brodsky trial, the judge, the prosecutor, and the witnesses for the prosecution keep harping on “usefulness”: what was Brodsky’s “usefulness”? And it is this subjugation of everything to “usefulness”—utilitarianism—that is the root contradiction of the system which persecutes Brodsky and Christianity.

Not usefulness but truth is the primary concern of man, and the meaning, the value of this truth are so great that for the sake of truth one has to be ready to endure exile and suffering. Christianity teaches that it is here, in the free search for and discovery of truth, that the divine dignity of man and his royal calling are contained.

And again it is clear that in this truth— and not in empty blabber about the

“unscientific character” of religion—is the source of hatred of Christianity by all those who have replaced truth and freedom with their small and pathetic “usefulness.” If there exists a truth that can be loved, to which one can give oneself so fully as to be ready for exile, then everything that is being taught by official ideology, its reduction of the person to economics and materiality, is a terrible lie and slander. If Brodsky is right, with the millions of madmen, martyrs, and sufferers before him who preferred truth to usefulness, then even in that very usefulness there is no usefulness.

Thus in the Sermon on the Mount, in those Beatitudes, the image of a truly blessed man is slowly uncovered— blessed by that blessing, that joy about which the Gospel says, “and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). It is a man who knows that his destiny is to seek and find the truth: not a small momentary truth about this and that, but the truth about life itself, its meaning and final purpose. It is a man who further knows that this truth cannot be found without freedom, without personal responsibility, without paying with the effort and blood of the heart. It is a man, finally, who knows that the way to this truth leads through loneliness, exile, suffering, and the cross. But by the cross joy comes into the world, and every effort of consciousness, every standing for the truth and in the truth sooner or later prevails. That is the bottomless and joyful meaning of the eighth Beatitude.

© 2016 The Wheel.

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

The Rt. Rev. Alexander Schmemann was an Orthodox theologian who played a central role in founding the Orthodox Church in America. He was a graduate of St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris.

He was Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary from 1962 to 1983, and also taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Union Theological Seminary.

The Wheel 4 | Winter 2016

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In the next issue Davor Džalto “Contemporary Orthodox Architecture” Robert Arida “A Meditation on Sacred Space” Sophia Kishkovsky on challenges to contemporary art in Russia . . . plus the coverage of Saint Nicholas Shrine project at the World Trade Center site.