Capitol Imponderables

At the Orientale Lumen Conference last week, a genial sort of Roman priest asked me why the Orthodox don’t have a seminary in Washington: “Everyone else seems to,” he added, shoring up his query. I gave him the usual answers: our seminaries are mainly pastoral and thus are located by our population centers, none of which are near DC.

Then he sprang to the challenge: “Well, at least you should have some ongoing presence here in the Capital. There should be an office of some sort that makes you visible.”

Then he ticked off the list of visibles: “There’s us, for example, but there’s also the National Council of Churches …”

I scuttled my primal response, and opted instead for the ever-serviceable “Oh, ahh.”

He went on: “… and the Methodists, and the Episcopalians, and the Lutherans, and the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Southern Baptists.”

I got the point. The Orthodox are invisible. I also got his implicit point. The Orthodox are administratively disunited. One thing follows the other, so went the ESP (I wanted him to clarify, later on, what order he meant).

I assured him that I would let him know as soon as the situation changed, when he could have an Orthodox representative in Washington that would “interface effectively with his particular advocacy program."

Is this a Capital malady, that intelligent people in DC actually think in words like these? Have Homer and Virgil become so neglected? What about Dante (of course), Cervantes and that guy from Stratford? Is this all the fault of Dewey? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Oh, well, one despairs over the dithering age, and the necessity of having to agree, at least in part, with the likes of that gnostic curmudgeon, Harold Bloom.

His other implicit point was so ubiquitous it was coursing through the HVAC system: Because of the sorry shape you guys are in, institutionally-speaking, we all need to unite, to become “one.” Peace and love, man, unity. You would be much better off.

Some of my less-than-jovial friends suggest to me that this statement proceeds out of a groupthink mental sort of revenant from the old hippy communes. It’s almost like a spiritual way of wearing beads without looking so weird on the outside. It’s that insistent belief that a bigger tent is a better tent, that inclusivity will make for a more sincere pumpkin patch, to hasten the arrival of the Great Pumpkin at the “improvement of all things.”

There it is. The head of the nail. The ecumenicism at which I sniff is the stuff that is tied to that good old liberal eschatology of post-millennialism. I know that our Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic and Orthodox ecumenically-minded friends have a different take on the rationale for clumping up together. They (and I) believe that there should be a realization of our Lord’s prayer, “That they may be one.”

But what most of these of the ecumenically-minded don’t consider is the fact that other parties are guided by a much different rationale. Their “post-millennialism” is an eschatology that supersedes the sacramental, apostolic church: and in the modern age, a new, eschatological “community” rises up to absorb all the little distinctive quanta of a less perfect, benighted age.

There is a sharp divide between the advertisement and the reality. The former sounds like this:

I'd like to build the world a home, and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves. I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I'd like to hold it in my arms and keep it company. I'd like to see the world for once, all standing hand in hand. And hear them echo through the hills, "Ah, peace throughout the land" (That's the song I hear).

Makes you want to jump up, light a candle, hold your own hands for a circle of one, and sing “Let there be peace on earth.”

But then there’s another side – the reality of rejecting the past and negating time, of leveling distinctions and personality. Robert Nisbet, in Community and Power, slashes this facile eschatology: This is the appeal … of the totalitarian prophet – to “rescue” masses of atomized individuals from their intolerable individualism.

The liberal protestant ecumenicism is of a piece with the Rousseauean (how do you like that word – 5 vowels in a row?) ideal of the State of Man: no past, no tradition, no strictures of outmoded morality … just free individuals, joined together in the One Family of Man.

The only problem is that there is no real “family” in the Family of Man. There is no real “community” in the one universal community at the end of post-millennial history. There is only the individual who becomes a member, or a cog in the machinery.

It is at this point that the difference becomes, you know, “sharper than a two-edged sword” between the advertisement and the reality. The “accident” is the warm fuzzy jingle by the New Seekers of Coke. The “substance” of the liberal Ekumen is more along the lines of IT in Camazotz.

Communities and families and churches are all about the business of nurturing persons. In particularity, distinctiveness and oddity. From the past. Through time and not short-circuiting or denying it.

The ecumenical movement of the mainline protestant community is post-millennial, and has little to do with the meaning of ecumenicity in the Catholic community of the Roman, Eastern and Orthodox Churches (along with any conservative Protestant friends who continue to imbibe from the springs of dogma).

The ecumenical movement of the “apostolic and sacramental community” has a different rationale: Eucharistic and traditional. The state of this part of the movement is admirably summarized in detailed, theological histories like the one just published in Touchstone magazine (New Roads from Rome, by Kenneth D. Whitehead).

I have to think that the mainline, liberal crew who chafe at Nicene strictures ("superstition," I think, is their favorite word) must get a dull ache up in the cortex when they read such histories, based as they are on a traditional rationale.

I humbly suggest, in the face of these Capitol Imponderables at the Capital, that the discussion of ecumenicity and union proceed not just on the basis of the Eucharist. I am a fan of both Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Fr. Alexander Schmemann, despite the latter’s rather odd opinion of my home diocese. They, especially, put a lot of stock in “Eucharistic union”:

Eucharistic ecclesiology can guide us in our efforts to overcome 1000 years of separation. For it is a pity to hold the same conviction on the importance of the Eucharist but not be able to share it at the same Table. (Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Address to the Synod of Bishops, Rome, 11 October 2005, cited by Fr. Paul McPartlan at Orientale Lumen X, 19 June 2006).

The only real fall of man is his non-eucharistic life in a non-eucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred [the] world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into "life in God," filled with meaning and spirit. (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, p. 18, cited by Fr. Paul McPartlan at Orientale Lumen X, 19 June 2006).

Nevertheless, there is another dimension to Orthodox ecclesiology: it is the dimension of the theoria of the Apostolic Church, and the deification required to perceive it. The Ecumenicity of the Body of Christ is a reality, and it is able to be experienced. But the experience can only be gained through repentance and sanctification, through the particularities of time and faith in providence.

The road to reunion is through sanctification, most of all. Not just through churchmanship. Not just through grass-roots association. And certainly not just through dialogue.

If this is what is meant by “Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” then I’m all for the process of dialogue. But I’m rather sure (wink) that this is not at all what is meant by people who are busy re-christening the Trinity, who are ordaining and consecrating along the lines of “ollie, ollie in free.”

Comments

[Ben]

It's "RoussOVIAN" (as in, egg-laying Mother Earth)