ORTHODOX-WESTERN DIFFERENCES

© 2002-2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[20020309, 20030119]

     I recently read that “Our priests refuse to learn the truths of Catholicism [sic] and/or refuse to pass on the honest similarities which connect us.”  If by “Catholicism” the letter-writer is referring to the Papal persuasion, the absence of any explanation of how to deal with the direct contradictions between Orthodox and Latin catholicism on virtually all important basic points leaves me not a little bewildered.  I do not ascribe to the letter-writer a presumably unintended notion that “truth doesn’t matter” (which would contradict the name that our Faith goes by and is known by) or the philistine relativism of “we are all saying the same things even when we contradict one another.”  Unless shown contrary evidence, I will sanguinely assume that the letter-writer presumably knows as well as I do that theology is not a list of beliefs, i.e. not something in which a belief can be added or subtracted without affecting the others . . . It is not a picture in which the Pope paints a tree and an Orthodox patriarch paints a stream . . . but is more like a mosaic or, say, a triangle, which ceases to be a triangle if anyone subtracts a side or—as the Latins have been doing over the centuries—adds a side.  I do not question the integrity of the letter-writer and trust that the we can rise above a personal level.  And I assume that the letter-writer accepts that logic plays a role in religious thinking (anyone would reject the contradictions, “There are three Persons and one Person in the Godhead” and “There is one God and there are three Gods”), even though the Orthodox restrict the role of finite reason to probe and analyse mysteries, where it is not competent.  (I will have more to say about reason.)  
     I find it hard to imagine that doctrines formulated according to such vastly conflicting axiomatic paradigms as those of  Eastern  and Western Christianity can be compatible.  Once one looks at the paradigms of East and West, one will be inclined to think of a koan:  “When we say the same things we are not saying the same things.”  I am not against finding out what the Latins say in their axiomatic paradigm.  On the contrary, a failure to have done that evacuates some Orthodox arguments that one comes across.
      If it is incumbent on the letter-writer to tell us how to resolve the contra­dictions that the Orthodox would have to accept in embracing so-called Latin “truths” on important beliefs, it equally devolves on me to demonstrate the contradictions that I allege . . . so that I won’t be charged with likewise failing to adduce evidence to substantiate what I am saying in a matter that is too important, given the seriousness of the issues, to be left in a Latin Limbo of a few unsubstantiated slogans.  It is not hard to show that the Latin axiomatic paradigm invented a dozen centuries after the Resurrection is so greatly at odds with the Greek-language energy paradigm of the New Testament and Greek Fathers that terms “similar” to ours have such diverging senses and connotations—and such diverse contextual relations to other ideas—that little is to be gained (and much would be obscured) by agreeing on verbal formulas whose ambiguities would surely give rise to future quarrels rather than to harmony . . . as well-known past Orthodox-Latin set­tle­ments amply show.  
     If it not hard to defend my position, laying out the arguments will take more pages than some readers may tolerate.  Caveat lector!  I will ignore the political and practical dimensions (e.g. whether consecration occurs at the Epíklesis of the all-holy Spirit, priestly marriage, statues [graven images], unleavened bread, whether Pascha must follow the Jewish Passover each year, etc.) and stick to matters of doctrinal truth, since that is what all of the rest depends on.  I assume that I can safely assume from the letter-writer’s use of “truths” and “honest” that we are both in accord on this approach.  That makes it less confrontational, more of an objective dialogue—something that not everyone is trained to do or is constitutionally able to manage.
      Both Western (viz. Latin and Reformation) definitions of Grace stand in direct contradiction with the Orthodox view—and Grace is too fundamental to ignore.  I recognize that some differences in Eastern and Western Christianity are simply due to handed-down traditions rather than to differences that are at base doctrinal.  But this piece will deal with explicit teachings that contradict or otherwise conflict with one another.  So far as I can see, neither the “created, non-energetic habit of the soul” of the Latin textbooks nor sheer divine benignity—Grace in Reformation and Protestant interpretations, despite Luther’s early views on “infused” Grace—is reconcilable with Orthodox Grace, viz. the uncreated Energies of Christ’s divine Life.  Since unity with Christ is “intentional” (i.e. conceptual) for the Latins and “federal” (i.e. covenantal) for the Reformers—in either case, a virtual unity with God’s ontologically imparticipable ESSENCE—how can either be squared with the Orthodox teaching of worshipers’ ontological unity with the uncreated ENERGIES of God’s Life in the vision of uncreated Light?   (I realize that the Vision is part of Latin thinking.  How could a cultured person forget the breath-taking and immortal words of Dante, at least in the original Florentine language, if not in the available translations?  But catholic seeing has always contrasted with Protestant hearing—though both “observing” and “hearkening” can mean “obeying.”)  
     The long and short of it all is that no one advocating that we recognize Latin truths should avoid showing us how the Latin teaching of Grace is a “truth.”  And so with the other basic doctrines I will mention.  (CLICK HERE for over two dozen basic differences between the Latins and Orthodox, not counting matters of polity and practice/piety; CLICK HERE for the concept of "sister churches.")  By no means am I assuming that the letter-writer advocates the particular Latin beliefs I refer to in this writing—though I will have covered a respectable amount of the territory of basic beliefs by the end.  It’s too bad that the letter-writer did not name a few specific similarities.  To avoid one error, let it be said that our general agreement with Rome and even the Reformers on dogmas (Trinity, the necessity of Grace, Salvation through Christ alone, etc.) means little when the doctrines that set boundaries to those dogmas and energize them conflict the way they do.
    That the Eastern and Western thought worlds, outlooks, or frames of reference (axiomatic paradigms) are very different is sufficiently clear from the fact that in Western Christianity, death is a punishment for sin (the consequences of which for theotocology will be taken up below), whereas Eastern Christianity denies that death is a penalty imposed by God:  Death is the result of human­ity’s ontological separation from the uncreated Energies of Grace and slavery to satan, who imposed death on humanity.  Unlike the West, the East does not believe that the soul is immortal by nature.  
     The will-based thinking and categories of the West have their sources in will-first cultures:
—the founders of Latin theology were Semitic (Punic) and Roman:  Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine (all former law students).  St. Ambrose had been a Roman judge.  Both Punic and pre-Byzantine Roman culture were will-based.
—the highly influential Anselm, Gratian the influential jurist, and Peter Lombardus [whose Opinions were the textbook for theological lectures right down to Luther’s time] were Lombards; Bernard was a Burgundian; and Aquinas the Neapolitan as well as the Oxford predecessors of the via moderna and the luminaries of Nominalism were Normans:  Duns Scotus, Bacon, and Ockham (Luther’s favorite).  (The Eastern Vikings, the Varangians, fought on Constantinople’s side against the Norman Vikings.) 
—the Semitic (Muslim and Jewish) philosophers of Spanish Cordova whose views were influenced by the Shari‘a (Islamic Law) or Torah (Jewish Law) respectively.
--the Teutonic popes from 1100 to 1300 were, as A. Papadakis tells us, almost all lawyers!   
     From the time of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, educated literates of the Hellenistic Age distinguished dynamis and eneryeia.  A dynamis is a potential; what makes it real and functional is energy.  The energy paradigm is evident in 26 uses in St. Paul’s Epistles alone; there is one use even in St. James’s Letter.  That’s the way one did one’s thinking.  That is the Orthodox paradigm.  What do we find in the West?  There is the contrast of  potentia and actus or operatio in Thomas Aquinas— Aristotelian ideas he got from Cordovan learning.  But in accepting the distinction of dynamis and eneryeia from the Muslim and Jewish philosophers of Cordova, Aquinas lamentably failed to understand that eneryeia is an emanation from essence quite distinct from essence—not a part of the essence.  As a consequence of this failure, Thomas lost the theological value of energy.  Sources (e.g. like Jerome’s Vulgate Bible) inadequately understood eneryeia in the Bible as actus or operatio; the verb and adjectives were respectively rendered as operari “work, function” and perficere “accomplish” and as activum or operativum.  Thomas followed suit.  Evidently, he didn’t find the distinction between essence and energy in Voëthios’s translation of Aristotle’s logical works or in Voëthios’s own theological writing.  The translation of the Damascene’s Exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith by John Sarrozin [John the Saracen] that Thomas used has been reported to have been of an inferior quality. In time, Thomas’s followers more or less reduced dynamis and energy to static matter and form, respectively, though the formidable Canadian Jesuit philosopher B. J. F.  Lonergan maintained that Thomas distinguished two “actus”—a formal actus simultaneously related to matter as act but to an operative “second” actus (he must have been referring to Aristotle’s kinesis) as matter.
     If the Western claims that the Icon of God “according to” which humanity was created got “marred” or (as the Reformers maintained) got lost, humans, deprived of the dynámeis of the Icon’s capacities for reasoning and freechoice, would have become animals.  (That was no problem for Luther, who in his commentary on Galatians, insisted that occisio rationis “the slaughter of reason” is the true and proper Christian evening sacrifice.)  The idea that God imputes Adam’s sins to newborns has the consequence that He would not only be unjust but also the cause of evil.  The Orthodox treat the Fall as ontological, but not as a loss of the Icon of God with its capacities to reason and will; what got lost was what energized those capacities or faculties (Greek dýnameis) to know and will in ways pleasing to God—viz. the Assimilation to God “according to” which humanity also was created (Gen. 1:26). Without the Assimilation, all humans old enough and mentally fit enough to be responsible are prone to sin—and to die.  It is to be observed that Assimilation is ‘omoíosis, an energy verbal noun in Greek and not ‘omoíoma, a verbal noun expressing the result (“likeness”) of the corresponding energizing.  The capacities of the Icon to reason and to freely choose reflect God in some way, though not in the manner of Augustine’s “analogy of being” (on which see below; cf. the way created halos reflect the uncreated Light of the uncreated Energies; that Light can be seen by humans only through a miracle, as happened in the Transfiguration on Mt. T[h]avor).  
     It is natural in the Orthodox energy paradigm to ask what energizes the dynameis or potentials of the Icon of God to please God—according to the Fathers, the capacities of reason and freechoice.  Neither the Greek nor the Hebrew of Gen. 1:26 join Icon and Assimilation as conjoined objects of the single preposition “in accordance with”; there are two prepositional phrases (differently arranged) in the two languages.  I can cite SS. Eirenaios, Athanasios, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damaskos as well as Diadochos and recently Bishop Joseph (The Word [Oct., 2001], p. 9) for the Orthodox distinction of the Icon and Assimilation.  In summary, what got lost at the Fall was unambiguously the Assimilation to God, not the Icon of God.  Until Adam (Hebrew for “humanity”) lost it by sinning, the Assimilation had energized the dynámeis of human essence to know and will in ways pleasing to the divine Majesty.  If the loss of the (ontological) Assimilation left the dynámeis of the Icon unenergized to please God, it did not leave those capacities impotent to reason and will for other purposes.  The ontological recovery of the same Assimilation constitutes ontological Salvation culminating in theosis “Divinization.”  (This is not apotheosis “Deification,” as Thomas Aquinas incorrectly translated théosis but correctly named his own view of a believer’s “conceptual” unity with the “ideas” of God’s ontologically imparticipable Essence, though it is only a virtual [“intentional”] unity in his teaching.).  
     While I have no reason to believe that the author of the sentence cited at the beginning confuses the parameters of reason and will the way the West has done, the letter-writer’s favorable view of Latin theology is somewhat undermined by the realization that, in the West, an item on the will-based moral dimension—Adam’s guilt—is (despite Deut. 24:16, 2 Kg. 14:6, 2 Chr. 25:4, and Gal. 6:5) supposedly inherited on the physical dimension “by natural generation.”  The Western tenet represents a category confusion of ontology with volition.  Thinking of Turretin’s silly justification for the position in question, I have to conclude that many Western theologians fail to distinguish knowing something on the dimension of being (ontology) from willing on the moral parameter.  One would have antecedently supposed the distinction between the province of knowing what IS (ontology) and willing what NOT YET IS (juridical morality) would be obvious on all sides.  But such an apperception is not as general as one might like.  At all events, willing is not on any dimension of truth and falsity—except in respect to the fact that something is indeed willed or not willed and, from another perspective, the fact that a positive law does or does not serve as a means to promote the goals of natural law.  Incidentally, Orthodox theologians who speak of the Ten Commandments as natural law fall into the same confusion of ontology and volition.
     Latin theologians like the Jesuit J. Pohle deny that the ontological Resurrection is integral to Latin juridical soteriology, and Protestants agree.  Let’s glance at the ontological roles of the Incarnation and Resurrection of OLGS Jesus Christ in the Orthodox understanding of Salvation.  Although the Incarnation for the West is just a step on the way toward the soterial Crucifixion, Orthodox thinking finds in the Incarnation a renewal of the cosmos and, in soteriology, an essentially ontological rôle, viz. that of uniting the nature of all humanity with God.  In parallel fashion, the essential ontological rôleof Christ’s Resurrection is to overcome death and satan and to make it possible for an individual worshiper to be united with (or incorporated into) Christ’s risen Body as an ontological new creating (ktísis, an energy verbal noun, not ktísma “creature” the result of ktísis)—a member that ontologically shares God’s uncreated Life—Grace.  The new ktísis is achieved in holy Baptism and consummated and perpetuated in the reception of Christ’s Body and Blood (John 6:53-54).  Partaking of the uncreated Energies of Christ’s divine Life (2 Pet. l:4) is what Salvation is for the Orthodox.  (The Biblical passage last cited speaks of the divine Nature, not Essence.  Though the usage of physis fluctuated in ancient Greek, a nature in philosophy is a function of essence—pretty much what an energy is.)  
     How does the letter-writer square the ontological rôles of Incarnation and Resurrection to make of each worshiper a new creating and to unite her or him with God as a member of Christ’s Body—something that Christ’s Self-Offering on the Life-giving Cross was not meant to do?  In the absence of an ontological Salvation, one can see how the Cross is even more central than the Resurrection victory in the West.  While no one could maintain that Christ’s Immolation and His Offering of Himself on the Altar of the Life-giving Cross is not central to Orthodox thinking, behavior, imagery, etc., the Cross had the purpose of expiating the religious obstacles blocking the unity available for humanity in the Incarnation and the unity available for an individual worshiper in the Resurrection.  (Many sacrifices, e.g. in Levitikon [the third book of the Old Testament], do not require a prior immolation the way expiatory sacrificial Offerings do.)  Our Savior returned a perfect part of creation to God in acknowledgement of God’s ownership of and sovereignty over the entire created cosmos—which is what Worship is.  Since the East does not see Christ’s Immolation or His Self-Offering on the Altar of the Life-Giving Cross in the juridical-satisfaction terms of punishment and substitution that the West clings to even in our day, can the letter-writer show that the juridical view of the West can complement or be “satisfactorily” married to the ontological soteriology of Orthodoxy?   If so, let it be done.  I don’t see how it can be done—but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be done.
     Though Christ’s Immolation cannot be repeated—the Epistle to the Hebrews says that it was (ep)hápax—His sacrifice, i.e. His Offering up (Anaphora, Oblation) of Himself can be repeated and is repeated by Him in His members at every divine Liturgy, as the prayer during the Cherouvikón perpetually reminds us.  On this point, the letter-writer is correct:  Western and Orthodox catholics are similar.  They understand that Sacrifice is an offering of something created to God, that Christ is the only perfect Offering, and that the Offering of His Body and Blood is the only perfect Worship—what all other worship depends on.  (The letter-writer may have read Canon Masure’s writings.)
      Given the difference between ontology and willing, it would be interesting to see if the letter-writer can show them to be complementary rather than worlds apart and contradictory.  Pending such a showing, I see no advantage and only great disadvantages in any Orthodox Christian’s accepting the juridical apparatus of Western soteriology—satisfaction, atonement, redemption (an idea put forward by Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa but decisively put down by St. Gregory [of Nazianzos) the theologian), justification (in a Western sense), virtual regeneration and unity with God, legal adoption, etc.  I would very much like for Christians to be united—above all:  the Orthodox in North America—; but the juridical-virtualist orientation of Western soteriology does not mesh with the Eastern energy-ontology view.  Energy is of course as foreign to Western theology as juridicalism is to Eastern theology (but unfortunately not to Eastern ecclesiastical behavior).
     I agree that it would be silly to deny that the Orthodox need to understand the Latin position in order to have dealings with the papacy, but the obligation is mutual:  The Latins should understand our position—which was articulated for a thousand years before Anselm.  Will the letter-writer concede that it is impossible for the West adequately to interpret our beliefs in their own late-invented paradigms?  (Failure to see this is what eviscerates much or most Orthodox literature written with a Western readership in view.) Latin thinking is obviously not as juridical as that of the anti-ontologically oriented Reformers, who allow virtual reality to overrule ontological reality in God’s calling an unrighteous person righteous—simul justus et peccator “at the same time righteous and sinner.”  As with God’s alleged wrath at newborns because of the very sins He Himself arbitrarily imputes to them, the Reformers justified predestinated, imputed righteousness with the Nominalist slogan, justum qui jussum “right because of commanded.”  I am not contesting the idea that Latin theology is not as juridical as its Muslim exemplar or even as “forensic” as its Western counterpart—Protestantism.  
     Why is there is no whiff of “satisfying” divine justice in Orthodox theology?  The answer lies in the fact that the Orthodox, unlike Western Christians, do not accept the idea that divine justice has got to exact suitable punishment in order for God to forgive—as both Latin and Reformation theologians insist.  For these very clear reasons, I don’t think the letter-writer can bring Latin and Orthodox views together on soteriology.  In the denial that an individual can be either condemned for the guilt of a separate individual or pardoned for the sake of the merits of a separate individual, one does not include Christ’s members, since for the Orthodox Christ's members ontologically share the uncreated Energies of His divine Life and are not ontologically “separate” from Him, but really take part in what He has done and in this way benefit from it.  If the West offers a teaching that is just as acceptable, let the letter-writer tell us what it is.  The Pope is held to have the authority to release a reposed Christian in purgatory from the punishments of their sins by transferring the collective Saints’ merits to them with an indulgence granted to some living person that performs certain pious acts or to honor special occasions.  I can’t believe that any Orthodox persons sees that as a truth.
     Since the innovating paradigms that underlay both Latin and Reformation theology were derived from Islamic Cordova, both are similar to each other in many ways and different in many ways from Orthodoxy.  But as already intimated, there are important differences between Latins and Reformers—who rejected ontology generally—something that the Latins do not do.  In particular, the Latins do not accept the two late-Mediæval “modernisms” that formed the matter and form of Luther’s theology—the antimysteric (antisacramental) and Gnostic devotio moderna and the will-first via moderna, both of which promoted individualism.  The Latins are similar to us in having a certain respect for tradition and thus dissimilar to those on the theological left—the radically anti-traditionalist, anti-credal Liberal and Evangelical disciples of the Reformers.  But then, for all I know, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Muslims, and others are like us in that respect.  Luther got around 2 Pet. 1:20 in the only honest way open to him—de[utero]canonizing the books of the New Testament that he was honest enough to realize to be inconsistent with his theology and re-writing Romans 3:28.  But as it is not similarities with every Western doctrine that the letter-writer speaks of, I do not need to show what “similarity“ means in the overall context of Western theology; so I can dispense with further comments on Luther on this point, except to draw the reader’s notice to the fact that, although Reformation theology has shown scant durability over the few centuries of its existence, its paradigm is as strong as ever on the anti-credal Christian left—in Evangelicalism and Liberalism.  
     The Semitic—Islamic and Jewish—influence of Cordova easily filled the vacuum of seven barbaric and illiterate centuries of Dark Ages in the West, when the West lost lineal continuity with the Eastern paradigm.  As Rome, Ravenna, Milan, and Trier declined to country villages, huge and wealthy Constantinople and (in the second millennium) the equally huge and wealthy Arabic Cordova flourished with Greek-based learning.  (Arabic translations saved for posterity a good deal of Greek scholarship that would have otherwise been lost.)   Both metropolises had modern plumbing and what came later to be known as “Turkish baths.” Cordova had 700 mosques, and the crusaders said that the temples of Constantinople were past counting.  No wonder the West was overwhelmed (as histories tell us) with the sensational advent of Cordovan learning in Latin translations of Arabic translations of pre-Christian Greek scholarship made at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad around 800.  (Incidentally, the Cordovan Jew Avicebron’s influence, transmitted via Nicholas of Lyra, on Luther’s exegesis was so obvious that the wags of the day sang the ditty, “If Lyra hadn’t strummed on his lyre (lyrasset), Luther wouldn’t’ve danced (saltasset).”
     I recur now to my earlier promise to mention the consequences of the West’s view of inherited guilt and penal view of death for theotocology.  (What is said here comes from a prominent Orthodox lay theologian, whose name I refrain from mentioning only to avoid associating him with my presentation in case he should not wish to be associated with it.)  Since the West believes that death is a punishment for sin, an all-pure Theotokos cannot die in Latin thinking; and of course if infants can be guilty of Adam’s sin at their birth, an immaculate conception of the Theometor had to be invented.  The systematicity of all of this shows that Latin ideas hang together with other relevant premises that are far from being axiomatic in the Orthodox paradigm.  Our views of the all-holy Theotokos fit into a very different pattern, one in which no infant is born with Adam’s sin or guilt and one in which death is not a penalty for sin.  So when we are told to look favorably on a Latin belief, it would be pointless folly to view it in isolation from the premises and other views that it depends on and relates to.  I hope that the letter-writer will make it clear that this is not being advocated in the sentence cited at the beginning of this writing.  It is not the special Grace and all-purity of the Theotokos or her ontologically mediating role in human Salvation that are problematic for the Orthodox, as our prayers make clear.  The problem lies rather in the alleged inherited guilt of all other newborns and the idea of death as a penalty for sin.  If the letter-writer can square Latin and Orthodox views, I would be interested in seeing how.  (If we can accept an ontological-mediatorial role of the Theotokos in Salvation, it doesn’t follow that we would be willing to call her “corredemptress” with Our divine-human Savior.)  There is an odd paradox in the systematicity of Latin theology:  If the ontological aspects of Salvation are neglected (in favor of, say, juridical teachings), the Theotokos logically will only have an incidental role, as in Protestantism.  What is peculiar about Latin thinking is that it manages simultaneously to embrace the non-ontological satisfaction-atonement of Anselm and an exalted view of the Theometor.  How the Latins manage this has to be explained by the fact (I suppose) that Anselm arrived too late—after views of the Panayia had been established—though it remains paradoxical that her status has been constantly enlarged by the Papacy (building on Bernard’s initiatives) throughout the second millennium on down to the present.
     The letter-writer may well know (better than I do) that, besides the Latins’ having no Saints’ days for the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets in the Orthodox manner, they do not (I believe) agree with us that Jesus is YHWH of Exod. 3:14, as our Savior Himself said in John 8:58; or that, as the Orthodox hold, Christ is the Ancient of Days and the Angel of the Lord that appeared to Old Testament personages.  We both agree that the Theotokos is the Mother of YHWH, as St. Elizabeth, the mother of the Prodromos, said (in the Hebrew or Aramaic original of) Luke 1:43.  It looks like it would be better for the Latins to borrow Orthodox truths than to lend theirs to us.  If the letter-writer were to wish to do no more than wave benign hands at such problems, doesn’t there exist an obligation to tell laity as well as priests how to resolve the main basic contradictions already laid out—or at least reveal the similarities the priests are apparently being advised to learn and “pass on” . . . and give some reason for calling them “true”?  

     I have mentioned various contradictions on basic issues that one needs to deal with.  I could go on, but will restrict myself to the big one (since it appertains to the very God that we worship—the Filioque (“and from the Son” in the Standard of Belief [ridiculously translated by some as “Symbol of Belief/Faith”]).  If the Filioque cannot be gotten out of John 15:26 in the Orthodox framework, it is otherwise in the Western framework because of three un-Orthodox axioms (of which the first and third are laid out in Augustine’s treatise On the Trinity) that make the Filioque unassailable in  Western Christianity:  (1)  In God, relations are “substantial,” i.e. substance-creating (though apart from God, common sense dictates that it is entities that create real but not substantial relations).  (2) Essence and energy are not distinct, and consequently existing, knowing, and willing can be “of God’s Essence”—Thomas held that God’s Essence is “to exist.”  (3) Augustine’s “analogy of being,” which leads to the conclusion that whatever is said about Christ’s “sending” the Paraclete in the economy (management of creation) has got to parallel the Spirit’s procession in the Trinitarian Essence:  The latter can be rightly inferred from the former.  The clash of Eastern and Western premises thus comes into focus in the Filioque (whose historical origins were fairly ignoble).  In view of the conflicting premises of East and West, our letter-writer might be better advised not speak of “Catholic truths” but of deductions drawn from a Mediæval paradigm that stands in opposition to the Greek-language energy paradigm of the New Testament and Orthodox Fathers and Mothers.  
     The reader should not forget that axioms and definitions are not vulnerable to falsification, since they lay down what can and cannot be true for whoever embraces them.  The problem for the letter-writer to consider is that one can neither challenge the Filioque in the Latin framework nor accept it in the Greek framework.  The premises that constitute a paradigm determine what the words of Scripture or a Father or Mother of the Church “mean.”  It will be difficult for the letter-writer to obviate the conclusion that Orthodox doctrines are false if one sets out from Latin (Augustinian and second-millennium) presuppositions.  On the other hand, Latin doctrines are false if you set out from the Greek-language energy-paradigm of the New Testament and Eastern Orthodox premises about reality and religion.  If axioms are not vulnerable to challenge as such, they can be vulnerable to a failure to be mutually consistent.  Their date and source are important, since it will be easy to show that an axiom cannot be attributed to thinkers living prior to the time of its invention.  Thus, the idea of inheriting guilt was foreign to early Christianity—and it has always been alien to Eastern Christianity.  
     Given the incompatibility of the Orthodox and the Latin and Reformation paradigms, the Latin apologia that Western Mediæval and later Papal teachings “stand in lineal continuity with views held by the pre-divided Church, later innovations being unfoldings of what was implicit in the beliefs of the still united Church,” is self-evidently untenable as well as implausible to begin with.  There is no continuity of views across different paradigms.  The meanings attached to concepts in the early Greek-language paradigm (Greek was the language of Christians at Rome well into the third century) were different from verbally “similar” concepts in the Western Middle Ages and Renaissance.  The Renaissance (the time of the Protestant Reformation) grew out of pre-Christian Greek learning brought to Venice (which had long had close connections with Constantinople) and spread from there to other parts of Western Europe as a consequence of scholars’ flight from Constantinople after its recent conquest by the Turks.
     Am I being too “rational” for the reader’s taste?  One is not questioning the position of the letter-writer when one seeks to obviate a possible misunderstanding on this score.  The Orthodox believe that the REASON (LOGOS; St. John) and WISDOM (St. Paul) of God created the cosmos and made it logikós, though finite human reason is not competent to probe divine mysteries and should not presume to analyse God’s Essence beyond what revelation has revealed.  But the Patristic consensus never admitted or espoused a philistine position that favored checking one’s reason at the temple door in matters in which it is competent—matters in which human reason, a reflection of the Creator LOGOS, imposes its own clear obligation to be employed.  Common sense suggests that, when views contradict each other, at least one has got to be wrong.  When the letter-writer speaks of Latin “truths,” one would like to know which truths are in the letter-writer’s mind—something that has been left undisclosed.  If a Latin truth contradicts an Orthodox teaching, then the Orthodox view is false.  Speaking of “truths” excludes the options of contending that conflicting ideas are both right, that both are wrong, or that both are half-truths that are amenable to a mutual compromise in some sort of pious pantodoxy.  The sentence in the letter being contested here may have been written in haste or perhaps was due to a momentary lapse of good judgment—which no one (certainly not my own self) is at all times free of.  At any rate, the search for truth needs to be conducted with reason as well as love (which cannot make the false true or the true false; but it can grease the wheels of a discussion) when matters of this seriousness are at stake.  
     How can one fail to recognize the radically diverging thought worlds of East and West—different paradigms made up of conflicting axioms or premises with conflicting conclusions drawn from them?  Is the letter-writer opposed to making use of a good tool of contemporary thinking for comparing belief systems?  (I obviously do not have in mind the allegedly “new” “hermeneutic” paradigm of Küng and company, which is really as old as the hills!)  I keep recurring to the letter-writer’s obligation to explain which Latin teachings are consistent with Orthodox teachings . . . and to concede that any that contradict Orthodox teachings are not “truths” unless the contradicted Orthodox doctrines are false.  I have cited either-or teachings con­cerning the Fall, death, Salvation, the Trinity, Theotokos, and so on to show that the contention that Latin and Orthodox basic teachings are “similar” cannot be maintained except on the lexical (vocabulary) level, where words that look and sound alike disguise vastly different conceptions.  Not even the Orthodox conceptualization of the Mysteries (sacraments and sacramentals) and their non-enumeration or the Orthodox view of nine Ecumenical Synods is similar to Latin thinking.  Chrismation and tonsure are part of Baptism, though Chrismation can be separated from Baptism and even be repeated when lapsed Orthodox return to the Home of Grace.  Chrismation energizes a “valid” Latin Baptism and makes it afthentikon “(real, genuine”) when it is brought into the home of promised Grace.  A priest can serve it with chrism blessed by Bishop, and does so to infants as well as adults; likewise infants as well as adults receive Christ’s Body and Blood immediately afterwards—and subsequently.  In what way does Chrismation resemble Western Confirmation?  
     Our letter-writer has got to choose.  In the case of the Panayia:  Did the Theotokos die or not die before being carried off to Heaven?  Both cannot be true (in the same way or respect), since the truth of one falsifies the other.  One can rebel against one’s paradigm in a paradigm-shift, or one can provisionally step into another paradigm to see how another person is reasoning.  The latter is the least that ought to happen to all participants in interfaith discussions.  But given the unconscious nature of most of one’s axioms and assumptions about reality and religion, this is hard to do.  For it requires a certain talent or mental flexibility (not to be confused with the flexibility of a relativist).  But when have the Orthodox delegates to an interfaith gathering insisted on the West’s examining the Eastern paradigm?  
     It seems clear to (fallible and unworthy) me that there is no escape from the choice between adhering to the energy paradigm of the Greek-language New Testament and the Greek Fathers or adhering to the inventions of Augustine and the Western thought world derived in the second millennium from a Germanic will-based culture and, more tellingly, from Islamic Cordova—whose Shari’a-influenced and Torah-influenced scholars Aquinas frequently cites as authoritative.  Who but a person that has not looked into them can doubt that the juridical thought worlds derived from Cordova differ fundamentally and enormously from the Greek-language energy paradigm of the New Testament and Eastern Fathers?
     I see no justification for Orthodox attendance at even an informal interfaith discussion unless the conceptuology and definitions of the Orthodox thought world (paradigm) are accorded equal place with the centuries-later paradigms of the West.  For only by framing a discussion in this manner can sense be made by one side of the other.  A “Western Orthodox” person once questioned my contention that the Theophany and Epiphany have nothing in common but their dates; he was unable to understand that a common primitive history is insufficient to create a later identity—as if birds and dinosaurs were identical because of their common ancestry in past eons.   Orthodox theologians (which august company I make no claim to belong to)  can and should do better than that.  
    There is—let it be admitted—no denying that there is a problem here.  For discussing axiomatic paradigms not only makes it all too clear that agreeing on words (e.g. “There is no Salvation without Grace” or “Jesus died to save ME”) does not make for veridical agreement unless the import (presuppositions, meanings, connotations, contextual rela­tions, etc.) of the words is antecedently agreed on.  Worse for the West, discussing paradigms also gives a clear advantage to the Orthodox, which otherdox Western Christians would not wish to concede.  So we mustn’t hold our breath in insisting on a level playing field on which the Orthodox goal does not lie uphill and the Western one downhill.  As soon as our delegates insist on the Hellenistic understandings of “energy,” “energize,” and “energetic” (say, in the New Testament), others will surely backpaddle.  Yet, in the unprecedented eventuality that our delegates should, like “the Pillars of Orthodoxy”—St. Athanasios the Great, St. Photios the Great, St. Mark Evgenios of Ephesos, and St. Gregory Palamãs—display the legendary Orthodox stamina to hold others to truth (rather than, say, polity-and-practice) as the indispensable condition and criterion of ecclesiastical union, the Orthodox conscience would be clear.  Today, one doesn’t have to die for the Faith in North America, as did the Greeks and Armenians under the Turks, and the Jews and Romanies as well as honest Christians under the Nazis and Communists, during the last century.  If the Orthodox were resolute in insisting on the way one’s doctrines debouch from the stream of axioms and definitions concerning reality and (in this instance) theology that constitute one’s cognitive paradigm (something everyone has got to have in order to think), one could endorse interfaith conversations with the otherdox as an informative, and even a missionary, enterprise.  If paradigms are ignored, discussions waste time and money in futile cross-talk (as an eminent, recently reposed brilliant Orthodox theologian called it).  The ancient, Mediæval, and recent history of interfaith talks between Orthodox and otherdox makes this contention indisputable.  A preliminary to valid interfaith discussions would involve an honest acceptance of the real senses of LOGOS, ‘omoíosis, ktísis, and every energy word in St. Paul’s Epistles plus the single instance in St. James’s Letter.  These terms are misunderstood and mistranslated into Western languages (except in the two-volume Orthodox New Testament published by the Holy Apostles Monastery).  One could begin interfaith exchanges with the relevant section of Armitage Robinson’s old commentary on Ephesians.  (Of course, the NIV’s Manichaean rendering of sárx “flesh” in many places as “our sinful nature” would have to be ruled out as blatantly heretical as John Calvin's term for the body--the ergastulum ["prison"] of the soul.
     It is hard for me to see any defensible basis for the view that there are Latin “truths” that we should look to.  Unless enlightened further, I can only assume (with all deference) that the letter-writer either is insufficiently aware of the contradictions discussed here to be aware of how intractable resolving the paradigms or axiomatic frames of reference and  basic tenets of either side is—and how parlous it is to exhort the priests to learn and “pass on” Western Catholic beliefs.  Till then, the exhortation implied in the letter under scrutiny would seem to have a shaky basis. If our letter-writer knows of some way of resolving the contradictions and is willing to reveal it rather than keep it unrevealed for reasons equally unrevealed, let it be done.  Challenge my fairness to listen objectively to a reasoned argument. 
     If the proper way to approach interfaith meetings were to substitute good feelings (which cannot make the false true) and political haggling for discussions of truth—and I am not ascribing that view to the letter-writer—a delegate would be either an undiscriminating ecumaniac or fall into the opposite extreme of condemning all—not just past—ecumenics as heretical and leave it at that.  For all of that, however, ecumenics can be turned to the advantage of truth if established on the very different basis laid out in the foregoing pages.  It might not convert many of our hard-nosed opponents, but it would have the potential of converting some to true Worship and belief.  Instead of promoting Rome’s cacodoxies, why not exhort the Orthodox to be willing to die for Christ’s truth, the way so many martyrs did in the past century—many more in Eastern Europe than in all past centuries in East and West?  If the Orthodox laid down the conditions already mentioned before attending interfaith discussions, they would go in with the confidence that they would not seem to be speaking gobbledygook to the Western theologians and with the confidence that they would not come out defeated, as consistently in all past encounters.  The Orthodox could lift their heads rather than putting their tails between their legs.  So let’s be Orthodox by putting truth and Worship in the center and leaving the two P’s of polity and piety on the fringes—not because they are unimportant but simply because they depend on what is true.  
      “Honest similarities which connect us” is not a satisfactory formula for harmonizing conflicting views when the similarities are merely verbal and hence disguise radical and irreconcilable differences.  Even so, like RCs (and unlike Protestants) the Orthodox don’t think that belief is the highest aspect of religion or all that there is to religion.  No.  Priesthood (doxology and sacrifice that Christians offer to God) and diacony (offering something to human worshipers—from the pulpit, by praying for human needs, through charitable deeds, or in missionizing unbelievers) are both higher.  (The priestly function is higher than the diaconal.)  But as with a skyscraper, these lofty functions are nothing if they do not rest on a firm foundation—in this instance, “right thinking” as well as goodwill.  Since belief alone can only make a philosophy and in itself is no more able to constitute a religion than goodwill and charitable works (the basis of a service organization) can, Worship is the indiscerptible characteristic of a religion—its heart, its conditio sine qua non.  One is grateful that the Orthodox Church is known as “the worshiping Church.” 
     Unity with otherdox Western Christians is something that I wish were possible, but I can discern no way of achieving it without sacrificing honesty, which (as I agree with what I take to be the letter-writer’s position) has got to be a precondition of at least Orthodox ecumenics.  But isn’t the letter-writer putting the cart before the horse, since it makes better sense to achieve unity among the Orthodox in North America before looking for unity with the otherdox?   If we cannot unite in Orthodoxy, what is the point of looking for similarities with other forms of Christianity?  The other order—working for unity with the papacy prior to looking for Orthodox unity—seems to me, frankly, to be a brummagem approach.  Anyhow, the Orthodox are not so flexible as those who believe that only one or two ego-tilted slogans like “Jesus died for me” suffice (with no intimation of how what someone else has suffered or otherwise done could accrue to EGO’s benefit, and with Jesus not defined as true God co-essential with the Father and Paraclete:  A Lord and Savior is a demigod, whereas Jesus Christ is Lord, GOD, and Savior for the Orthodox).  Nor are we as flexible as those who contend that when we contradict one another, “we are really saying the same things.”   Even when we say the same things, we are seldom saying the same things.
      Should anyone prove to me that a given either-or contradiction really has a middle ground that reconciles opposites, I’m willing to listen to a reasoned argument.  I’m far from being viscerally opposed to three-valued logic—though I have yet to be shown how it can make Latin countertruths into “truths.”  At any rate, I think that if anyone ever makes such a claim—and I am not saying that the letter-writer does—that person has a self-evident obligation to show our priests how to do what is recommended before downbraiding them for not “passing on” Latin cacodoxies. 

in Christ God,