Nut and gristle

Here's a nut to crack, or a gristle to chew on.

At the commencement exercises of Holy Cross just a few weeks ago, Dr. Christos Yannaras delivered a very important address. You can read it here.

I am sure that my sympathy for the good doctor's ethical announcements is not up to par. He warns against zealots, who -- judging from his earnest tone -- must be like the proverbial barbarians at the gate against which we should all take up emotional arms. I suppose that by "zealot" he means the ever-threatening fundamentalists here, who are plagued with "certainties" like buboes.

I do not argue with Yannaras on his intended proposition -- that we ought not oppose Western Christianity on the basis of of a simplistic catalog of poorly studied Councils and over-extrapolated statements of elders.

In fact -- despite my many misgivings about his own simplistic understanding of pietism -- I find myself unwillingly agreeing with this poignant flourish:

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, and closely related to them in the language of art, Baudelaire, Kafka, Bergman, and Fellini: All those who have proclaimed painfully that the alienating transformation of a relationship with God into ideology and legalism has led to the death of God - the God of individual "convictions" and crutch of egocentric Morality has died: "we are all his murderers" - Wir haben ihn ge late t, wir aile sind seine Marder [sic]!

Yannaras lists here some people of less than stellar character. I suppose from their perspective, they profited from a close view of the lower infrastructures of the age. That they "proclaimed painfully that the alienating transformation of a relationship with God into ideology and legalism has led to the death of God" is the best face one could put on this gaggle of nazi-sympathizers and ennui-addicts.

I am not so sure that the so-called "death of God" can be laid at the feet of pietists and "ego-centric" moralists, or "zealots." I have heard this before. It put me off then, and I am still peeved.

One can say that the idea of a voluntarist God darkened the revelation of perichoresis. One can say that consequently, a deterministic distortion of divine economy desiccated the meaning of divine and human love. One can say that a deterministic sub-theology produced a heretically-mandated system of usury that flies under the colors of hyper-capitalism.

But one cannot say, as Yannaras seems to, that fundies killed God. No they did not. Academics did. Rich men did. Poor revivalists and baptists did not, thank you very much.

Yet, Yannaras is correct in agreeing with these critiques against the modern Hegelian project. If he wants to read more of Baudelaire and watch more of Fellini in order to feel more confident against modernism, then he can knock himself out and have at it: it's a pretty harsh diet -- rather like a gallon of acidic koolaid. 

I wish, however, Yannaras (and his friends) were not so reverent toward Heidegger.

So let's look at the scoreboard thus far. I agree with Yannaras' main contention about the insufficiency of the usual blah-blah complaints against the West. But I disagree with his insufferable and more prominent (though logically secondary) complaints against fundamentalists -- who, I suspect, are whoever Yannaras (and his friends) finds outré, those bumpkins who come early and earnest on Sunday mornings. 

This is old stuff dealt with in prior snit fits and will be, I'm sure, taken up in future misgivings.

But for today, I have a hickory nut for the author of The Freedom of Morality. And a piece of connective tissue in a cheap cut of beef.

First, the nut. What does Yannaras do with the devil? Is he, or isn't he? I could get along better with Yannaras (and all his friends and his philosophical agencies and really all ethical programmes) if Boethius' theory of evil were sufficient. It would be nice to say that evil is meon and nothingness, and the decay of substance into such perversity.

And while this is true in eternity, it is not sufficient in experience. Boethius is good for philosophy, but not for history. Experience insists, painfully, that evil has entelechy, whether substantial or no. It acts with intelligence and seems to violate Providence and Divine Will not just occasionally but frequently.

The presence of evil is insufficiently explained by Yannaras' system too, just as evil is insufficiently accounted for by almost every other philosophical programme. The postmodern ethic cannot tolerate the idea of the Evil One, and has nothing at all to say about the etiology or nature of the antichrist.

Oddly enough, the error of postmodernism may turn out to be that it blames man for too much evil: man is not as inherently bad as Derrida or Calvin says he is. I am anxious that modern Orthodox thinking jumps down the same rabbit hole.

Second, the gristle. Just as Yannaras ignores the devil, he also cannot account for the present. The entire postmodern project complained about the insufficiency of the Hegelian narrative. Heidegger and company are just as lacking (and even more culpable, since they judged first).

Yannaras' ethical critique does not account sufficiently for the miasma of moral ambiguity in which we American Orthodox find ourselves -- perhaps we are noticing this better than anyone else (and that is no commendation). The great problem, or moral challenge, is really not informed by the terms of "personal ontology," much as I wish it was. 

It is not enough for life to be authentic. Sincerity, by itself, is a distortion and in isolation soon turns meaningless and ego-centric.

Saints are holy, not authentic (certainly not in the Sartrean sense). Their becoming "persons" only because the Trinity is Personal should highlight the need for holiness, not the meaning of "personhood."

Holiness has more to do with obedience than Yannaras would like to think, I think.

Not only does this ethical critique fail to account for the current ethos, the moral status quo of our Orthodox culture. It also does not point the way out.

There is no solution in morality understood as existential freedom. There is philosophical comfort, and some vague aesthetic pleasure I'm sure. But no answer.

As a pastor, I can readily and tragically attest to the fact that this moral miasma is everyday experienced by Orthodox adherents. They feel it keenly as misery, anxiety and guilt. Most of the time, they (and I) deserve it, for our souls have been tempted and we gave assent, and passions grew and darkened.

You know what I worry about? Call me neurotic if you will, but I wonder about the virtual life of my community. At any moment, there are broadcasts of wretched trials of adolescent mothers, accounts of children sexting because their sophomoric national leaders must twitter their groins, adolescents using video-controllers fashioned as pistol grips and slaughtering hundreds of virtual antagonists.

You know what I hope is not is not the case? What if the words of our Lord applied to these virtual displays: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Matthew 5.28).

Modern (or postmodern) ethics has little to offer here. It is not enough for ethicists to be studious. They have a prophetic task that may not be shirked ... and new sins cannot displace the old ones.

It would be nicer had we paid more attention to the Decalogue and the Lord's moral legislations in the Sermon on the Mount and that troublesome, sawdusty book of James. Then we wouldn't have shirked our duties to the poor around us and in our families. Then we wouldn't have experimented with eros outside the marriage crown. Then we wouldn't have blown off the mountaintops of the poorest state population (ever notice that this practice is not done in the Berkshires, or wonder why?). Then we wouldn't have rebelled against decent clergy ... or as clergy, we wouldn't have acted like simpering and closeted fools. Then we wouldn't have continued the use of foreign language to keep out the unwashed and hoi polloi. Then we wouldn't have grown men throwing histrionic fits or sending crazy emails. Then we wouldn't have violated old-fashioned precepts against lying, stealing, gossip, adultery, vulgarity, swearing, usury, moving boundary stones.

Maybe then, if we'd have been a little more old-fashioned in our ethics, instead of attempting a narrative that is more amenable to sophisticated sensibilities, then we could recognize the prowling lion better, and understand that he is real.

Comments

[Robert]

Thank you, father.

["Rastislav"]

Thank you for this. I was in the audience for the address. The part that especially prompted guffaws (but not universally) was his assertion that we needed to learn repentance from the modernist rogues' gallery. Whatever happened to learning repentance from St John the Baptist, the Lord Himself (Matthew 4:17), and St Peter on Pentecost?

[James the Thickheaded]

Thank you!

... and then maybe we wouldn't worry so much about the men and women in our churches, but about the men and women who aren't: Do they know something about us that we don't? or are we just hard enough hearted that we care more (or only) about our own salvation (or what we can make of it) and not theirs... here and now... or what they can make of it.

[David]

I seen plenty of Orthodox, particularly the over-educated (be they lay or ordained) treat cataphatic and apophatic theology as dialectic.

We are all of us infected, unable to think clearly. Our heads are crowded with thoughts. We are chronically, pathologically and terminally overstimulated.

We can know nothing that is not revealed to us and who will speak revelation? Who now can possibly bear the Word of God?

But I will not accept nihilism. Rather, I simply hope that God will bring about through His mysteries a miracle, raising son's of Abraham from among we stones.

[FrGregACCA]

Indeed, David. The only thing that will save us, that CAN save us, both as individual persons and as community, is personal communion with the Thrice Holy Trinity via union with one of them, the crucified and risen Christ, a union and communion which can only take place fully within the context of the Church where she is most herself: at worship, in the liturgy, and via the pursuit of the traditional disciplines of personal prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, and this in the context of an ongoing relationship with at least a confessor and, ideally, a spiritual parent.

Kyrie Eleison
Kyrie Eleison
Kyrie Eleison.