ORLAPUBS P. R204: LETTERS TO A LATIN FRIEND

I fear that sincerity of belief will always interfere with that kind of tolerance of different Christian beliefs among the various kinds of Christians, especially in the "lower" (everyday) things that people are more likely to run up against with one another in their everyday dealings. Seems to me that it has seldom worked at any level, except maybe in interdenominational divinity schools. I've heard stories that indicate for at least one higher-up in the world ecumenical movement, that tolerance is not all that it may seem. We can agree on abortion and many other things, including Christ's being true God and true man. The catholics, Papal and Orthodox, could probably agree on a fair number of aspects of the Mysteries/ sacraments--and who cares whether you all have rosaries, benedixion, and stations while we have akathists, moliebens, and parakleseis? But it's the outlook (paradigm) that will always get in the way, or at least always has; I mean the assumptions about what it all means.
Suppose that I had to put money on which situation would reduce friction more:

(i) either ignoring our paradigm assumptions and just letting 'em all co-exist or
(ii) examining the sources and coming to an understanding of the causes of why the Orthodox say that Grace is uncreated energy (cf. the NT in Greek); RCs say its a created non-operative habit of the soul infused into a soul; and Protestants say that it's divine goodwill

the Orthodox say that Salvation is partaking of God's uncreated Energies; RCs say it's various things, including partaking of God's essence . . . but non autem quantum ad modum essendi (Aquinas), since God's Essence is imparticipable; and Protestants say that it's virtual righteousness attributed (imputed) by God to those who really remain sinners . . . hence no Saints, since all sins and good deeds are equal! we are dealing with fundamental issues.

I think I'd put my money on (ii)--the why's. Even if we dislike what a person says or does, we can put up with it with better Grace if we understand what leads that person to say or do it. Just lighting candles together, etc., can paper over belief differences only so long. Even the most UN-intellectual people will eventually want to know why THEY differ so much from US on something that seems important (it is in fact quite often not at all important--priest's beards?). I would lay my money on examining the axioms of each paradigm to see WHY people interpret things differently and WHY they cannot accept one another's points of view . . . as opposed to laying money on just getting along without openly disagreeing with one another. I think the former course (actually [ii] above) would create more politeness and harmony, because people would understand the reason WHY people say or do this or that . . . it would NOT be just because of stupidity or ill-will. I know I can tolerate disagreements if I understand them better than I can understand those that look like the result of blatant stubborness or ill-will or whatever. And I don't think I'm all that different, at least on that.

Anyhow, most of the other approaches have been tried, however briefly or sporadically, and little has resulted except where people had no choice. I understand there is a Greek island or so where Latins and Orthodox more or less communicate in one anothers' temples because there is usually only one in a given town. It is said to work. But Uniatism and Orthodoxy have seldom worked in most places where they have co-existed, e.g. Ukraine. I'm certainly willing to listen to contrary arguments. But I can better tolerate a down-home Baptist for certain things that look silly to me if I have some insight into why s/he does it than if I don't. Given the duty to missionize, we and they will be stepping on each others' toes if we are in the same place, however tolerant we are. I have never seen it work except where both sides had a fairly relativist outlook.

(Vanderbilt now has a Unitarian-Universalist university chaplain, I understadn, though it's a Methodist foundation! That's the type of thing I cannot understand and therefore feel less tolerant of because it clashes with logic--the fact that few of the students are U-Us--just as someone else might rightly feel if an Orthodox priest were appointed to be the University chaplain there. It will work IF all parties are relativist--but that it is a deadly price to sacrifice truth for, even for the sake of harmony. Moreover, you get no martyrs out of relativists, although "the blood of the marytrs is the seed of the Church."

If this analysis (of over-generalizing) is correct, the solution would seem to lie in explaining that people are of a different race (one that is not bad in itself) through no choice of their own; or that they belong to a different religion for reasons that can be called good or neutral as well as bad--even though good intentions or other non-bad causes end up in what are judged to be untruths from the point of view of whoever is doing the judging.

If someone grows up in a paradigm that turns our values upside-down, let's blame the paradigm, not the individuals who unconsciously succumb to it. Look how topsy-turvy (as I have elsewhere put it) the American religious culture and ambiance is. Despite the reasonableness and provable ethic of Orthodox views of guilt (there is no idea of a transfer of guilt from Adam to newborns descended from him, something that the OT itself disallows forbids) and Orthodox respect for created matter and time, Orthodoxy is viewed as exotic while Calvinism-Reformed-Presbyterianism is not considered exotic--despite its notions that God condemns Adam's descendents for the guilt of Adam's own sins and, at least officially, even makes God the cause of evil by saying that this guilt of Adam is imputed by God to newborns and that it is arbitrarily ignored in certain individuals that have been so predestinated. They can even prove that that is "just"!!

Our Protestant-secular culture has turned everything that was traditional in the first millennium upside-down. That God became flesh to ennoble matter and time (tradition) for good religious roles has become a cause for condemnation--not just of icons but of Mysteries/Sacraments, and even of outward beauty in prayers (rites) and in ceremonies. The chants, the words, the awe-inspired by the beauty of holiness are desacralized and thus turned upside-down. What has been put in the place of that ancient Faith? A book (seriously mutilated by Luther [and other heretics] so that they could claim to be "biblical"), the idea of the Creator as a word, the idea that icons, relics, and Mysteries are no better than magic. (Despite their respect for the word and the book, even Islam and Judaism did not resort to the word-magic of thinking that words are more potent than offering creation back to God--its Owner . . . in short the Sacrifice of the Altar--so that the God-addressed Altar should be replaced by the human addressed pulpit. Even prayers for human needs get termed "worship"!

Everything has been juridicalized in the West--novel theories of satisfaction, Atonement, Justification (virtual righetousness in Protestantism), redemption (ransoming), covenantal Unity with God (rather than ontological Unity with His uncreated Energies), legal adoption, virtual rebirth rather than an ontological "new creating" (distorted as "new creature"), etc. . . . all to avoid treating the real as real. And what hasn't been juridicalized has been Gnosticized--as in the popular version of the NT (you'd never know from it that energy is a basic NT concept!) which often renders sarx "flesh" as "sinful human nature." Luther's two "modernisms" (how strange for some to call this "conservative"!) were (a) the via moderna (his will-based Nominalist philosophy that put will above reason) and devotio moderna (the disdain of matter and time--in short, the Incarnation and Resurrection themselves, which no longer play a role in Salvation--only the juridical Immolation of Christ on the Life-giving Cross is soterial. The NT concepts of energy/energize/energetic are found in no Western translation that I've seen; and the popular NIV often translates sarx "flesh" as "our sinful nature" . . . as if Jesus became sinful nature.

Should one condemn those whose axioms are juridical and Gnostic and in one's opinion wrong axioms to build Christianity belief and practice on? How can "they" help having axioms that are unconsciously accepted as right? "They" are not even aware of them. We should condemn the axioms--their cognitive paradigms--when we think them wrong, but not those that "fall" for them. Before an Orthodox or Latin or Protestant falls into prejudiced towards people, rather than what one regards as false teachings, it seems to me that potential prejudice against "them" can be metamorphized into disagreement that is not necessarily devoid of respect for "their"' sincerity, once one sees the historical steps that led--seemingly logically and certainly with a certain inexorability in some instances--to positions "they" now held to be true, even though (as with original guilt) the postion violate ethics and make God the promoter of more evil in the world.

In the six and a half centuries of Dark Ages--think of the time from 1350 to 2000!--what few people were literate had no access to the Greek Bible or the Greek Fathers. The few that could read read Augustine--whose majestic and beautifully worded ideas convinced them, however far those ideas departed from the Greek original. They can hardly be blamed for that; what else were they to do? They had lost contact with original Christianity through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, their rescue (and the end of the Dark Ages) came from the Muslim Aristotle in Latin translations. The advent of these translations caused a great sensation in the second and third centuries of the second millennium, historians tell us. How could people with no intellectual background (other than Augustine, if they could read) not be impressed by Cordovan learning--where lived the best scholars of the age. Those scholars were transforming pagan Greek learning into Shari'aized or Torahized theology even while some were inventing al-gebra and al-chemy. The translators preserved many Greek learned writings that would have otherwise been lost to us today. The savants produced important and very learned commentaries that were cited by Thomas Aquinas as authoritative.
There was Cordova, a giant city with plumbing and Byzantine ("Turkish") baths, not to speak of 700 mosques. Cordova was almost as large as Vyzantion and bigger than Baghdad. (By then, Rome, Ravenna, Trier, and Milan had become villages; as the Roman roads had fallen into disrepair and terror prevailed, most people seldom went more than a few miles from their homes.) Cordova was home to the best Arab and Arab-language Jewish scholars the world had ever known, scholars that rivaled the great scholars of the Byzantine world (in the larger sense, including Asia Minor and other parts of the Byzantine Empire).

    Those Latin-speaking German peoples could hardly avoid accepting a juridicalized model of reality and theology, one with concepts that would have been gobbledygook to the energy-based thinking of Christians of the first millennium who spoke Greek.   Latin-speaking papal Scholastics built a great edifice on the Cordovan base, and the Nominalists and Reformers built another on the same basis--one that was more Islamic. (Calvin's church-houses were like mosques . . . no wall decor except words of the relevant Law, a pulpit in the middle to focus on people-addressed preaching about words and the Book more than even of God-addressed Worship (at the Altar).  For some reason, they rejected some Islamic customs (ultimately inherited from Vyzantion when the Arabs conquered parts of the Byzantine Empire in Asia and Africa), namely, prostrations and other aspects of religion.
     At the time when St. John was Grand Vizier to the Islamic Umayyad Caliph in Damaskos, Jews, Arabs, and Christians freely exchanged views . . . and St. John even taught the Jews a thing or two about Philo the Jew (whose life overlapped that of Jesus); he was the one from whom St. John got the concept of the Logos "Reason [of GOd]" in the opening verses of his Gospel . . . St. Paul preferred to go back to the deuterocanonical Old Testament's concept of Christ as the "Wisdom of God"; wisdom is practical reason, a more Semitic-oriented concept.) The Orthodox spoke of the LOGOS "Reason" and SOPHIA "Wisdom" of God and dedicated the Great Temple in Constantinople to "the Wisdom of God."