REPLY TO A "WESTERN ORTHODOX" 
WHO HAD FIRST GOTTEN IN TOUCH WITH ME 

© 2001 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 2-21-01]

Dear in Christ 

     I will readily admit to the small size of my understanding of the Orthodox paradigm. Yes, I am Western Orthodox, a converted [Protestant clergyman] into . . . a Western rite.

Bless, Father.

     It is in seeking clarification, rather than pointing fingers, that I write to you. . . .  I felt that you would be the person to contact regarding this extrapolation of the excellent message you are putting accross: that God had a reason for the time/place of Jesus' birth which might be understood by men. The point I made was that perhaps there was a definite reason for Jesus to be born during the reign of the Roman Empire.

      I take no exception to that.  The only thing I took exception to was a misunderstanding of the rôle of the Greek language in conceptualizing Orthodoxy and in providing the medium in which God presumably wanted the new Faith to be formed and communicated.  (As I said before, the Hebrew attitude toward the role of time and matter in religion apparently needed the Greek mind to formulate it in a non-juridical manner; the stability of the Roman Empire had to replace the instability of Alexander's successors to provide the time and place for this to happen--the time and place for Jesus to be born in.  I am not trying to read God's mind, but simply inferring circumstances that would make the timing of the Incarnation planned rather than random.)  

     There is nothing holy or magical about Greek.  What it does offer is a morphology in which deverbative nouns can be distinguished as energetic and resultative--an energetic morphology that is lacking in Latin and in dozens of languages that I know at least a little about.  For people who spoke Hellenistic Greek, an energetic-developmental view of reality that saaturates the Apostolic Epistles in the New Testament and was "built in" to the thinking of early Christians.  Rather than advocate the use of Greek now,  I prefer to adapt English to the Eastern phronema, something that goes astray if we use traditional Western theological terms to convey the ideas of a paradigm a dozen centuries older than the two Western paradigms derived from the Cordovan Muslim Aristotle.  My point was simply that Greek offers a way of thinking about the Hebrew respect for time and matter that lifts it from the intuitive to the level of noûs at a time when the Rabbinical tradition was making it ever more juridical--a Semitic trait of mind also found in Islam, not to speak of the founders of Western theology--Ambrose the Roman and the three of ex-Punic Carthaginians (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine) and in the Germanic founders of Latin theology near the end of the Dark Ages--Anselm and Peter, both Lombards.  No other language could presumably have done that.  At a time  when Hellenic culture (including Roman culture) was becming gnositicized with a contempt for time and matter in religion, the Hebrew-content plus Greek-form offered what--humanly speaking--was an ideal time for Christianity to emerge from the welter of Eastern religions. 

     I have had the same objection as yours from others unfamiliar with Greek morphology, but once one starts thinking of omoíosis (feminine) as an energization--"assimilation to God," as not only Christians but Stoics and Neo-Platonists called it--one will cease speaking of it as an inert "likeness of God"--which is a result (omoíoma, a neuter) of the paired energization.  Speaking Greek made St. Paul, St Eirenaios, St. Vasil, and the later Fathers all think that way.  'Twas the same with a "new creating" (ktísis, not "creature" ktísma).  Even pístis "faith" is an energization.  St. Gregory Palamas thought of nous as an energy, though Aristotle said that it is dynatón (dýnamis-like, without itself being a mere dynamis or potential power).  While the energy view of being is embedded in the Greek New Testament, it is totally alien and unintelligible to Western thinking--as is evidenced (a) by Western mistranslations and (b) by Western failures to understand any of it and to sigh and say, "It's all Greek to me!" 

     The idea that I, a professional linguist, should fall into a magical view of language is not on.  The idea is not that Greek is holy but that when the West calls the Creator-YHWH-LOGOS a "Word" (Latin verbum--or sermo "saying"--one sense of lógos, originally a "gathering" or "calculation"-- inapplicable to the Creator)--that is word magic from the git-go.  If I displayed impatience in my prior reply to you, it's the result of a chain of such exchanges having no relation to my views. 

     This would fit easily into the necessity of a Greek paradigm in approaching understanding of God; as the Roman Empire is, according to the authors on romanity.org, a Greek site.  I was just seeking your thoughts on the matter. I am sorry if I offended you by seeming "anti-Greek"  While my command of that language is extremely small, my respect for the contribution of the Greco-Romans to western civilization is immense.

      Well, two important writers of the Romanity articles and  the translator of some, would probably not dissent from what I've said.  A few authors have told me that they accept [some of?] the things on a page of the site I edit:  http://orlapubs.org/opR191.html.  Should you look at it, you will see "my" arguments against using Western terminology, the grounds for my position being that Western terminology entails a lot of alien Western baggage and hence misleads readers as to what is really being said.   On the lowest level, Epiphany reflects the Magi and lots of other things that are quite unconnected with our Theophany--while Theophany evokes the Baptism and other things unconnected with the Epiphany.  (One wonders what Western Orthodox do with respect to the "Epiphany"--read about the three Wise Men?)  All that the two festivals have in common is the date.  It becomes even less defensible when one calls the Dormition festival the "Assumption," given the two crucial and fundamental dogmatic differences.  Now raise that lowest level to a high level--Grace, Salvation--and the paradigm differences become crucial because they are definitive. 

     I have got to assume that, given that you are Western Orthodox, such ideas are not congenial.  The ideas, however, have got nothing to do with disrespect for the Roman Empire's rôle in the whole business--without which the Greek and Hebrew factors mentioned above would have had no context.  But Rome was as juridical a culture as were the Hebrew, the Punic, and the Germanic culture of the Middle Ages that bred Anselm and Peter.  You have to stand on your head or turn around 180 degrees from all of that IMHO to understand Eastern theology.  After attending temple services for three decades, I didn't understand the Orthodox thought patterns very well.  Friendly exchanges with a then eminent Latin apologete led me to see that we were engaged in what I have since learned Fr. Romanides calls "cross-talk."  When I realized that my words meant something different to the Latin apologete and that his words didn't mean to me what they meant to him, I saw that we were talking across paradigms--on which a great deal of information has accumulated since 1968 in other disciplines.  Chr. Yannaras and Fr. Romanides had the idea but not the word or an exact characterization of the thing in terms familiar to other disciplines.  Once paradigms are clear, it's easy to check on their historical origins . . . and also to see that cross-paradigm "development" (Card. Newman and the Latin apologetes, etc.) is nonsense.  For misleading cross-talk cannot be avoided when the assumptions, presuppositions, premises of each paradigm are discontinuous--as they always are.  (Otherwise everyone is in the same paradigm; even the two Western paradigms--those of Thomas and the Nominalist Reformers--are utterly discontinuous).   But the Western paradigms have the same language and derivation--which the Orthodox paradigm in no way shares with them.  I now realize that when I read Augustine in Latin and the Greek Fathers in English translations (or even when I read them in Greek), I missed the whole point of energy.  If St. Paul teaches that we need to become new creatings in Christ, I would like to suggest that become such includes the creation of a new paradigm in Western Christians and of course members of other religions or of no religion.

     As a linguist, it's not my role to teach the clergy, but I will say that those who wish to help non-Orthodox potential converts understand our Faith and "get into" our phronema should think about paradigms.  Cradle Orthodox, who have never made the paradigm-shift, are not usually good communicators with the otherdox.  I never understood Lossky till I "shifted"--after decades of being exposed to Orthodoxy thought and practice.  (Even so, some Orthodox have questions about some of his teachings.)  If I were to speak of strategies for getting others to understand Orthodoxy, strategies for fostering conversions, I would (as a linguist) have to deplore Western terminology as throwing dust in the eyes of the reader or hearer.  I base this on personal experience.  You are welcome to look at http://orlapubs.org/opR191.html to see some of the reasoning involved, reasons that a few Orthodox writers have come around to agreeing with.  You might wish to look at the forthcoming 2d ed. (it may be out already) of the ORTHODOX NEW TESTAMENT by the sisters of Holy Apostles Convent (online site:  Dormition Skete) in Buena Vista, CO.  For the first edition translated the energy words right.  (The language of this  Bible is suitable for liturgical readings.)  You might also go to http://orlapubs.org/opR145.html#reconciling. 

     Till I started to think about paradigms, I had no serious complaint against what little I knew  of Western Orthodoxy--but not because of any use of English--which I in fact advocate, provided the translations rise above (a) the misrenderings of Greek ideas in Western terms and (b) do not represent faulty attempts to recreate the English of four centuries ago.  My problem has ben that I haven't been able to see how the Orthodox phronema could flourish with Western pews, vestments, prayer books, etc.--presumably icons are present.  It is not my practice to condemn that which I have no experience of--at least when apriori grounds are not self-evident.   But in view of what has been said above, the weight has since tilted me against Western things as not being able to phronematize in an Orthodox way.  I stress that it's not some holy character of the Greek language--English is fine and to be commended when it reflects the Greek.  Of course, some terms like katanyxis are really hard to render and had best be kept in Greek.  The same could well be said of LOGOS, Theotokos, theosis (which is not apotheosis--the "deification" of dead Roman emperors that students of Rome are familiar with--but rather "divinization").  

     A paradigm is not easy to shift into; look how hard it was for former thinkers to become Copernicans, then Newtonians, then Einstinians, and on!!!  For this objective reason, I am of the firm opinion that we should do whatever we can to assist the paradigm-shift.  And not just because I am a linguist do I say we should begin with language.  Any psychologist could take the same position for the same simple reason that language moulds our thinking; we can't think without language.  Those ancients who thought of being in energetic--and developmental--terms simply did not, and may well have been unable to, think of it in the static terms of Western theology.  They were, it will be remembered, intent on contending against Gnostic views of creation--of time and matter.  The reference above to http://orlapubs.org/opR145.html#reconciling will show that the loose ends of theology COHERE in Eastern thinking . . . in other words, it's not just a list of words/terms but a mutually affecting and affected SYSTEM of terms . . . that the various ideas (the same is true of the practices) fall into place with one another, once one makes the shift.  The cradle Orthodox are not seldom unable to convey this to the non-Orthodox; they win converts like you, me, and many others for one reason or another.  But on the level of thinking, the level of doctrine that underpins and justifies all of the rest, nothing basic happens but embracing some extra things to assent to and to do:  The genuine phronema is hard to come by without the thinking.  This is not rationalism--the misuse of reason in attempt to analysis the Being beyond being and other Mysteries--which Orthodoxy opposes except when revealed information about such matters is understood apophatically.  We all agree on that (though when we term it "mystical" rather than "mysteric" thinking, we easily mislead Western readers).

     I hope that the above (more than you wanted, I'm sure) will justify my position.  I am sorry if it conflicts with what I guess is yours, but that's the way I see it.  If the energy view of reality, Mysteries, and all of the things on opR75.html and opR145.html#reconciling can be embraced without a paradigm-shift, I could back down.  But since I do not see how that could be, I am bound in honesty to hold my position that such won't happen.  This by no means condemns the sincerity of Western Orthodoxy or even Uniatism . . . any more than it questions those pioneering and learned non-native-speakers-of-English who co-opted then current Western theological terms in English in their attempts to express Orthodox ideas, persons who, however, failed to achieve the desired goal.  Ecumenical confrontations prove this.  Hence, my position is not a subjective one of what I might like or dislike but rather an objective take on the situation.

     Everything on the Orlapubs website has aimed at exhibiting and creating the Orthodox phronema, or ethos, rather than just giving a list of beliefs (R9 may be an exception; I hope not).  One would now say that that a phronema cannot be created without English terms of usage that reflect Eastern rather than Western ideas.   I have a book on my shelf that reads like lecture notes from a German or Swiss (at any rate, Barthian) class.  The author even has got Barth's three steps (actually he adds a fourth to Barth's justification, sanctification, and calling) in place of the Orthodox triad of catharsis, illumination, and theosis (union, glorification).  I assume that most Western Orthodox could accept most of what I have seen in that book, since that seems to be exactly what the author was by education; one could accept a couple of footnotes that try to Orthodoxize his first-edition text.  But a non-Orthodox reader might feel little doctrinal impetus to become Orthodox.  One might be attracted by the beauty of Orthodoxy (something that a false religion lacks, but which in itself does not prove that a religion is the true Faith) but it could well be the case that one could in good conscience remain a Catholic or High Anglican or Lutheran.

     What would you say to the argument that, at least in practice, Uniatism conveys the Eastern phronema more than does Western Orthodoxy?  I don't think I was ever in a Uniate or Western Orthodox temple, but surficially it would appear Orthodox (except for the pope's name in the Uniate litany).  I don't claim to know, but I have a large and well-produced book on the spirituality of the Christian East by one Spidlik and a three-vol. NT commentary by a Latin with an Eastern name--Spicq (I believe that both are SJ's)--and neither mentions, so far as I have been able to discern, "energy."  This is so, even though the contents of the NT dictionary is articulated with Greek entries and the spirituality volume has got to be dealing with what we call the Orthodox phronema.  What I precisely fear and expect is that speaking of Eastern spirituality in the absence of even a word about Energy--makes for an unintended but inevitably bogus presentation. 

     I cannot judge your Western Orthodoxy or that of various others online that get in touch with me from time to time, but till I have clear evidence that it promotes the Orthodox phronema, I have no choice but to remain deeply suspicious on objective grounds.  My intention is not to offend or instruct my betters, but simply to state the truth as I see it and to act accordingly.

May God grant you a productive Great Fast.

Pray for me, a fallible sinner