Second Terrace

Be all the judge you can be

I was at a conference recently (I generally, in my crankiness, do not go to these things), where I heard a nice presentation by a young lady.

Her speech was appealing, until the very last line, when she concluded a travelogue with this non sequitur: "And I learned on my trip that the most important thing for an Orthodox Christian is to not judge."

I think she and I might be in agreement, ultimately, once we paddle together through the semantic miasma that separates us. But I'm not sure she would be too keen on my lecture tomorrow, as I present this text in our first ethics class of the season at seminary (please excuse the conversational tone: it's the introduction, after all):

“Judge not,” our Lord said, “lest ye be judged.” “Do not look for specks in the eye of your brother,” He also said, “when you have a log in your own.”

This is as clear a condemnation of judgmentalism as can be. And we know exactly what it means. It means that we should not be putting ourselves on a higher level than others, or putting others on a lower level than ourselves.

And yet, this course is all about judging. This class and all our readings invite you to no less than a lifestyle of judging. In fact, I suggest right here and now that you probably haven’t been judging enough. Not nearly enough.

There is a clear difference between the judging that I recommend, and the judgmentalism that the Lord condemns. Judgmentalism is aimed at other people. It forgets that another person is made in the image of God. It overlooks that the other Christian is on a life journey toward nothing less than theosis. It is blind to the fact that the other human being is immortal by grace, destined for eternity in blessing or fire.

Judgmentalism is guilty of forcing square pegs into round holes. It raises theories and categories to near godlike status, and distorts reality to fit into preconceived notions. It says cockamamie things like “all members of such-and-such a class are all alike.” It says people are defined by their racial heritage, or their psychiatric diagnosis, or their astrological sign, or their genetic composition, or their place on the evolutionary ladder.

That is judgmentalism. You have doubtlessly concluded, by now, that it is not a good idea, and quite a bad thing to do.

That said (and there is more to be said in this volume about judgmentalism), we should conclude, on the other hand, that we should be more dedicated to the business of judging: you know, “be all the judge you can be.”

What I mean by “judging,” as opposed to “judgmentalism,” is probably better served by the word “discernment.” The judging that I recommend is better commended in Scripture, and it has to do with how we think, what we think, and the way that society thinks. “Brethren, do not believe every spirit,” St. John said in his first epistle, “but test the spirits to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4.1).

There are certainly, in this life and society, influences that are certifiably not of God. It is up to us to “discern” these influences to figure out “where they are coming from.” Earlier in the same epistle, St. John warns that “For all that is in the world -- the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world” (1 John 2.16). “World” here should not be understood as the planet Earth, or even society in general, but rather as the realm of darkness under the sway of the Evil One and his despairing company. After all, the same Apostle wrote, in his Gospel, that “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son” (John 3.16) – obviously, “world” is used in different senses, depending on the context.

What makes “judging” necessary in this life and in this society is that we are faced by a dark world of lust and pride all the time, and there are many, many spirits, or “influences,” that are not of God. There certainly are real, evil spirits that are part of Satan’s regime. They insinuate suggestions to our souls frequently. These suggestions are called logismoi, in the terminology of the Fathers. If such suggestions are permitted to linger and have their sway on our thinking, then the soul “darkens” and becomes ill, infected with passions.

The Fathers of the Church call us to “watch” over the influences, ideas and suggestions that demand admittance into our thinking. We should examine each thought carefully, much as a guard at military facility “watches” each person that comes in. Failure to stay alert in this watchfulness (or “nepsis”) can have disastrous effects for a military facility, or – more importantly – the soul.

This makes loads of sense, of course. No one wants to end up being a puppet for the dark side. It is obvious that we should watch against easily identified insinuations such as “Go ahead and rob that bank,” or “Just blow your family budget on crack cocaine.” But the devil usually does not work in such an obvious manner. He does not wear a red flannel suit with pointy ears, hooves and a long tail ending in a barb. Neither does he go about attired like Jason or Freddy Krueger. Rather, if he wears anything at all (he doesn’t, since he is bodiless), he is more likely to wear a designer suit straight from the glossy pages of GQ.

I mention this only to emphasize that the enemy works subtly and underground (no pun intended, for once). He would rather that people not believe in him, since his best agents are those who are unaware of their employer. For good reason he is called, by St. Paul, the “Prince of the Air,” since he works best in chaos and ambiguity. He is slippery, to be sure, and he does not want to be found, even by the tragic fools who consider themselves his adepts. Satan is embarrassed by Satanists. He is much happier with those who say he does not exist.

Satan works hard at orchestrating conditions of unbelief. This is his number one goal of behind all his work of influence. It is the objective behind his every suggestion. “In the case of those who are perishing,” St. Paul wrote, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, Who is the Likeness of God” (2 Corinthians 4.4).

So in this life, we are confronted by a complex program of influences. Some of them are obviously diabolical. Many others are just as corrosive, but are not nearly so evil-looking. Then again, to make matters even more complicated, some influences and ideas are not obviously Christian, but are good and true nonetheless.

This is why St. Paul wrote, in his first epistle to the Thessalonians, to “test everything, to hold fast what is good, and to abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5.21-22). We are called to test, to watch, to examine what goes into our heads. After all, we become not what we eat, but what we think.

It should go without saying that you cannot think about obviously religious things alone. You and I live outside the monastery, and so we must look at billboards while we drive. We will listen to the radio, watch TV, surf the Internet, and hear the conversations of our friends, colleagues at work, and teachers at school. We cannot escape the hard work of judging by merely ignoring society, and dismissing it as “worldly.” Some people try to do this, and I think that they neglect the command to be “salt and light” in this world. We have to cultivate the discipline of discernment, not only so that we are able to “watch” the influences and “guard” our souls, but also so that we can fight against the darkness, and reinforce the light.

To this end, here is St. Paul again: “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10.5). This means that we have to figure out the message behind cultural influences, and to decide to agree with them or not. For example, we need to ask ourselves just what Britney (Spears) is ultimately advertising, or what Howard (Stern) wants us to become (i.e., "grown up" like him?).

Well, okay, that was too obvious. More to the point, we should ask troubling questions like “Why is evolution so aggressively promoted?” “Why does multiculturalism preach tolerance for everything but Christianity?” “Why is homosexuality given the same status of victimization as minority and disabled groups?”  "Why is consumerism so entrenched in the Christian community?" Or, "Why are conservative Christians so strongly aligned with the political agenda of industrialism?"

But troubling questions are not enough. Once we find out the answers to these questions, we have to do more than just go along with the crowd, or throw up our hands in despair. I am calling here for a lot more decisiveness in acceptance or rejection of cultural influences. There is much in American and the modern world that we should recognize as good. But then again, there is much that is not. In the past, when faced by the “not so good” or downright “icky,” we have only shrugged our collective shoulders and muttered profound things like “Oh well,” or (my favorite) “whatever.” It is too late, anymore, to say whatever, for the enemy has been very busy at dismantling our civilization. Secular historians like the inimitable Jacques Barzun, in his masterful work From Dawn to Decadence, and even Marxist scholars like Eric J. Hobsbawm have concluded that Western civilization is deeply gripped in the throes of decadence and decline. You and I have just been too close to the action to notice the severity of the change: it’s that “not being able to see the woods for the trees” sort of thing. So while we were shrugging our shoulders and not actively fulfilling our critical task, skyscrapers have plummeted into dust and ashes, infants and the infirm have been discarded, and the media has re-defined “lust” as “liberty.”

We need to become critical in this world – not against people, but about influences and ideas. We do not need to condemn society in broad pronouncements, mainly because society is not completely or even mostly evil to warrant such generalizations. But we do need to make judgments about what is going on in the world around us: we need to tell – not just ourselves, but our children and friends – right from wrong.

This course is all about telling right from wrong. It is about judging the truth and worth of influences and ideas. You will hear repeatedly how important it is for you to become a discerning critic of modern trends, fads and fashions.

I cordially invite you to become a critic and a judge. I do not mean by this that you should become a crank. Criticism is not the same as cynicism, despite their frequent confusion. Cynicism involves constant complaint, pessimism about nearly everything, and the constant assumption of bad motives and the worst interpretation of people and events. On the other hand, criticism is the search for goodness, beauty and truth. The cynic, like his master Diogenes who searched Athens for an honest man, cannot ever find goodness because he doesn’t believe it exists at all. The true critic knows better, because he believes in God, Who has distributed His signs of goodness, beauty and truth liberally throughout the cosmos.

Criticism is not crankiness, to be sure. It is also not eggheaded academic intellectuality. One needn’t have a degree to be a good critic – in fact, you are probably better off as a “real” critic if you don’t have one. This course will have more to say about the present state of education, especially in its failure to train students in good criticism (this is, according to the Blessed Augustine, the main purpose of education). I suspect that the main reason why Christians are not as confident as they should be about criticizing culture is simply because they have swallowed the nonsense that criticism belongs to Ph. D’s (and other degrees).

That is nonsense, and we should stop swallowing it. Criticism not only belongs to you. It is your job as a Christian, especially as an Orthodox Christian. You have experienced Paradise already, in prayer and holy mystery. Perhaps the experience has been small and under your perception – but you really have tasted grace, and you have known sweetness and light. In other words, you have been visited by God with His goodness and beauty. You have known the Truth, and the Truth has set you free.

From this perspective, you and I ought to be able to discern, to test the spirits, and to discover God’s will. It requires practice and discipline, to be sure, but we have all the tools we need, and we have all the heavenly assistance we must have. What remains for us is to practice to “be all the judge we can be.”

The most helpful passage about judging the ideas and influences we admit into our souls from culture is found in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4.8).
Think about good things. Savor them. Treasure them. Cherish them. The main cultural problem for Orthodox Christians today is that they simply do not think about good things nearly enough, or strongly enough.

That is what this course is about: thinking about these things.

There is a little story by a modern writer, whose name is Italo Calvino. In his short book, Invisible Cities, the voyager Marco Polo narrates his travels to Kublai Khan. The traveler describes a journey through the good and the bad, the wonderful and tedious, the lovely and loathsome. Through this travelogue, Calvino accidentally describes the pilgrimage of life for an Orthodox Christian, for we face all of these things – in this life and in this world, we visit glimmers of paradise, but we also suffer the smog of Hades and inferno.

I mention this story not only to commend it for your reading, but also to quote, here, Calvino’s conclusion, which is a motto for us all: … seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

That is one way of describing the goal of Orthodox ethics -- to discern in the midst of a darkening world the good, and to give it space.

More morbidities

A few days ago, a correspondent commented on the post about suicide and euthanasia. Here is what he said:

I have worked with people in deep anguish either from physical pain or absolute hopelessness and depression. They say "I pray for relief, and God does not give it, I can tolerate no more." How can I say to them, "This is an opportunity for cross bearing and repentance, it will be worse for you if you end your life now,” when they have reached their limit. I grieve for them and pray that God gives them some relief. I‘m not sure that I could, in their place, bear their suffering either. It is easy to give theoretical answers, “You are rejecting the gift of life that God gave you and don’t trust His Providence enough.” If I, in empathy to their pain, can understand and see how they could succumb to hopelessness and despair, feel compassion for their suffering, and not be sure that I could stand it myself, how could God not respond by easing their suffering so that they can bear it (of course sometimes He does)? If God does not seem to answer the prayers of some desperate people and they continue to feel abandoned what can we say to them?

A most poignant query. Here is my response:

The point of "Morbid Fragments" was not about what should be said to desperate people in deep anguish. It was rather about what should not be said.

There are extreme points of shocking pain and despair where the giving of any theoretical answer will be hollow at best, and maybe even damaging.

But even at these extremities, the sufferer cannot wreak self-destruction while assuming he has consent from his friends. This consent may be only implied. It may be from close friends and family -- say, in one case, where the family of an accused pedophile left the house for two days after purchasing at WalMart a "strong enough" clothesline.

Or, more likely, it may be passive, even from the Church itself, whose ordained representatives -- "apostles" sent to the existential trials of others (like the "helpers" of Job) -- often assume that compassion and dogma are mutually exclusive.

I strongly believe, from personal experience with my own professional (secular psychiatry) failures and more successful pastoral (Orthodox clergy) interchanges, that one may bring the comfort and compassion of the Church, while expressing the simple truth that self-destruction, even in desperation, is still sin.

In those few successes I didn't give theoretical answers, but instead I prayed, discussed the Gospel and even dogma, and simply stayed. I found that as the situation became more intense, the needs of the sufferer became more primitive, and less sophisticated, so that the worst of my suicidals needed simply a friend at best.

And there have been times where the sufferer needed to know, clearly, what was expected by Heaven of him. "This is your cross," I have said, without any hint of theory, "and this is given to you for some mysterious participation in redemption." I have also said, baldly, that suicide will bring no relief, only exaggeration. I always thought that a suicidal ought to know this at the least, since he already knows quite a lot of information about his pain, and even about possible exits and the legalities thereof.

(I had been constrained in psychiatry, mainly because the profession doesn't, officially, permit any talk about the soul. In my present position, psychology is not censored or truncated.)

God may not have eased these extreme sufferings in the next hour or day, but in every case, He eased them all into repose. This repose took the form of an alleviation of at least the most acute agonies, even an emergence from a depressive trough. Or the repose took the form of the final one, what the gentiles call "death," but we call sleep for the penitent. A suicide, in these extremities, would have only hastened death by a few days or weeks at most, and at what horrible cost.

I am sure that if you asked a friend of mine, who reposed after a long hellish bout with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), whether he is glad that he remained steadfast to the end ... and if you asked him this today, where he is, I am sure that he would say, today, that he is simply glad -- and that gladness made the years of suffering worthwhile, and true.

Every suicide, and every suicidal ideation, and every suicidal thought (include in this category every sin and passion, every logismoi and fantasia, because suicide is where sin will take you) is essentially a question of theodicy. Suicide is an ultimate complaint against Divine Providence. When I suffer (my lack of real anguish in my life is embarrassing here, to even compare with the Martyrs), I carnally tend toward anti-prayers like "I don't like this moment" or "I don't like this place" and "It shouldn't have been me." And I lurch into the fantasia of "it should have been" and "God You're wrong for letting me be." The whole philosophical tradition of theodicy is predicated on our disagreements with Providence: it is the ancient existential complaint rooted deep in the antichrist vocation of suicide.

But no adequate reasoning can be made of the moral ambiguities of this life, in this life: resolution happens only in the shade of the River of Life, under the healing leaves. The first concern of Christians is for peace and repentance in this life, and for the blessing of salvation. If that is not the case (a rubric, I suspect, that obtains in many bio-ethical discussions), then Christians are forced to speak of what they do not know, and they are forced, rhetorically, to shut the treasure chests of their heart (which is a common occurrence with Christians who try to accommodate modernity).

Christianity is all about proclaiming the Gospel in extremity. The Gospel is contaminated when it is confined by rhetorics of theodicy. The Gospel must be free and revolutionary -- not "liberated" in an accommodationist sense -- but free in the scandalous sense of experiencing the beauty of the Trinity and the fellowship of Jesus Christ in the depths of every trial. Our greatest, most historic proclamations of the Gospel, our most dynamic rhetorics of peace, are made in the profoundest depths of suffering.

Compassion, prayer and anointing are Sacraments that must always violate determinisms (which are always symptomatic of Christianity lapsed into intellectual cowardice) and scandalize modernistic sensibilities (Christianity must always offend certain fraternities in the agora and on Mars Hill) ... and, if not done in a mere "theoretical" manner, this Unction is always sufficient grace for every desperation.

It is better to pray than to philosophize with someone in pain. It is better to read the Gospel and dogma than to read, to the dejected, the texts of modern complaint. It is better to apply the ecclesial oil of the Good Samaritan to the sufferer, than to drink with the wounded man the koolaid of Kevorkian and Sartre, Singer and Fletcher.

A priest who does this can do this only insofar as he himself is a man of prayer and virtue. One can speak of peace insofar as he is a witness of peace.

Priests are not meant to answer questions of theodicy (a subject that cannot escape its bourgeois roots), because when it comes to justice, he knows, more than any, that salvation is the most unjust thing of all.

Why I am not a good ethicist

For one reason or another, I receive essays on ethics for perusal. The day before yesterday, my e-mail program announced, with a ding, the odd arrival of an old article from the Boston Review, written by a man who claims Orthodoxy now as his “faith tradition,” having been drawn out of Roman Catholicism about a decade ago.

There is much to commend in the article. Its complaints about racism and consumerism won nods from my stiff neck. It faithfully affirmed Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s definition of secularism (i.e., reducing religion to a particular “department” of life). It discussed the reality of the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ, and how we Christians are transformed by that singular transformation.

But the nods soon faded into sighs. The obligatory “I personally think that abortion is appalling” vote was cast, but it was quickly conditioned by an acceptance of the doctrines of privacy and individual freedom. There was the old saw about the abortion rate increasing during Reagan’s years, but decreasing during Clinton’s (I’m not sure what point is being made here).

There was that equally tiring saw about how there just isn’t any political party to suit the Orthodox taste:

I am troubled that there is no political home for my consistent ethic of life, but I also take comfort in the knowledge that electoral politics is not all there is to politics. If Chesterton’s idea of an America with the soul of a church has any validity, I believe it lies in our tradition of voluntary activity, through which faith can mobilize people to participate in the long and difficult grassroots struggle to transform our communities into a more just and peaceful society.

Well, yes, I have looked for a party for a long time, and there is just no Eagle and Child to be found in Pittsburgh. And who can argue against the need for voluntarism? Everyone, and not just Christian voices, knows that we should do more for the poor, the powerless, and all of Creation. Yes, yes, yes, by all means, we should attend to the “liturgy between the liturgies,” we should attend to the altars of the suffering poor on the streets outside the Temple.

That will never change. “The poor you will always have with you.” We should build houses in New Orleans, serve the soup lines in our boweries, and clear up the mess in Greenfield, Kansas. We should take care of addicts, protect children, feed the hungry on the other side of the world and the working poor in our town, and preserve families.

No one doubts this. I certainly don’t. But what sets me apart from most of my ethicist brethren (and sistren) is that I also do not doubt that the poor we will always have with us. We will never end poverty, or war, or injustice. We wait for the Messiah, and work whilst it remains day, for the night is coming, and the harvest is great.

I believe, coming out of my “faith tradition” as I do, that the main reason why we feed the hungry here is not to acclimate them to the world, but to help lead them into the next.

Yes, and I’m sure we should probably do more about justice, but I am not nearly as confident about the particularities of political struggles and social justice as are my professional colleagues in ethics. I am confused when hierarchs like +Archbishop Iakovos (of thrice-blessed memory) are applauded when they walk with Martin Luther King, but other hierarchs are denigrated, with those sherry-and-canape academic harrumphs, when they are seen slumming with the National Right to Life March.

I am quite sure about the pro-life movement as an appropriate movement for Christian political involvement, as it is a clear moment of ecclesial prophecy. In all of its phases – anti-eugenics, anti-abortion, pro-decent provision for the fatherless and single-mothers, and anti-euthanasia (or, more accurately, anti-“geriatricide”) – the Orthodox ethic is clear.

I’m not sure that such clarity is achieved in other, more radically chic, political endeavors. For example, I do not think that the politics of homosexual liberation has any place in an Orthodox prophetic witness. Neither do I think that the gender politics of inclusive language or female ordination have anything to do with justice, in the Christian sense (perhaps it has something to do with other senses).

The problem here is a tension that emerges not from what Albert Raboteau said in his rather fine article, but from what he didn’t say. And here, I should mention that I’m picking on Raboteau mainly because of the esteem I’ve felt for him since his old interview with Franky Schaeffer in the Christian Activist (that erstwhile, occasional magazine whose publication schedule was a Messianic secret). Raboteau said, in his Boston Review piece, that he was drawn to Orthodoxy because of deeply-felt affinities between his African experience of "joyful sorrow," and the same experience in the Apostolic Church of the ancient East.

Yes, yes, and yes. I agree with all my heart. But what I disagree with here is that Raboteau failed to proclaim the substance, the salient point of the Orthodox ethic and the prophetic witness of the Kingdom of God:

We do not protest injustice (in the Marxist manner).

We do protest wickedness and sin.

We are against slavery and abortion not primarily because they are oppressive acts of socio-economic bondage and tyranny against the powerless. We oppose these bad things (and many others) mainly because they are unclean works of the devil … because they are evil and demonic, not because they deprive the meek of material goods.

We do not primarily affirm social justice.

We affirm, instead, holiness and spiritual peace through Jesus Christ, and in His Communion.

Oddly enough, in Raboteau’s article, and in the essays of most Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and even conservative Protestant ethicists, there is very little mention of the word “sin.” There is just as patent an aversion to the word “holiness.”

It may be that there has been a decline of the frequency of these horrid old-fashioned and patriarchal terms concurrent with the decline of the place of metaphysics in the intellectual agora. With the loss of divinity as an acceptable referent in polite conversation, the only terms that can be pronounced are jaundiced words like “ethics,” or, my favorite, “faith tradition.”

There is a common push toward the recovery of a “patristic worldview” in the Orthodox and Roman realms, and even in the Protestant constellation. There is, in this worldview (a term probably too hard for the Fathers to understand), an affirmation of a sacramental or liturgical lifestyle, even an “eschatological ethos.” Under these rubrics, it seems that old-fashioned words like “sin” and “evil” have been modified into more progressive meanings (like “oppressive,” or “insensitive,” or “patriarchal,” or “colonial”).

Pastors and parishes receive, in annual or semi-annual batches of snail-mail and e-mail, the voluminous statements and study guides from official ethics committees (the publication of study guides, videos, and "resources" exist as rationale for next year's budgetary allocation: "See? We put out thousands of pages on modern concerns? How could they get along without us?"). As the cluster headache fog of mystification descends on the native intelligences of the rank and file, the last clear ethical thought goes something like this: "Why is it that the more these committees work, the more I'm confused, and the more old-fashioned sinners are left off the hook?"

It is hard to defeat the notion, held in the back of many lay minds, that central administration commissions do a lot of cultural accommodation in the obfuscating language of bureacrateze (or is that "bureaucratish"? -- you know what I mean: that special melange of rhetoric and vocabulary that enables corporations and commissions to defer responsibility, edit reality, and manage re-education).

The odd thing, here, is that those very Fathers who are the source of things "patristic" were quite firm (and offensive) in their use of words like “sinful” and “wicked.” St. John Chrysostom, as is well known, railed against the rich and their failure to give to the poor, but he also railed against their failure to attend Divine Liturgy regularly. He protested against the Empress, to be sure, but his protest was against her rather self-serving silver statue, not against her wars.

His social protest and the sum of his ethics – like that of all the Fathers – were aimed against wickedness, and he and they urged Christians to attain holiness and piety.

A real, Orthodox ethic might agree with an article like that of Professor Raboteau (and with the articles of many other salon Orthodox writers, Yannaras amongst them). Yes, the environment should be cared for. Yes, the hungry should be fed and the poor sheltered. Yes, racial prejudice should be suppressed. Yes, hurricanes, tsunamis and tornadoes should be responded to with great generosity.

But you could read this sort of thing from anywhere. Tony Campolo and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say the same thing – that your sense of social justice and politics should be informed by your Sunday morning identity.

But an Orthodox ethic shouldn't even be called an “ethic.” “Ethics,” by itself, has to do with a false dichotomy between action and knowledge, existence and essence. It has been aberrantly set in contraposition to theology. A better word here is “prophecy,” and such a term is far truer to Scripture and Tradition. There were no committees on ethics or social issues in the Patristic era.

But there was prophecy.

There was no such thing as "worldview" (Dilthey notwithstanding).

The Fathers just said "world."

So an Orthodox prophetic witness would protest all the usual things that Raboteau and other Orthodox ethicists protest. But it would also rail against gambling, usury, excessive profiteering. It would not shy from denouncing the trendy agenda of legitimizing homosexuality, imposing egalitarianism, and deconstructing tradition. It would do more warning against celebrity-worship, pornography and unchastity than organizing boycotts of SUVs, rare woods and fur. It would complain trenchantly about church absenteeism, and the failure of Christian parents to lock the world out of their homes. It would condemn the pride that is inherent in slander and gossip. It would also excoriate the anti-clericalism and anti-hierarchalism that are rife today.

Never once, in my entire ethicistical career, have I ever heard mentioned, in committee sessions in Harrisburg, DC and NYC, the base problems of swearing and church absenteeism. And yet, these two problems in particular are mentioned frequently in the Gospels and the Epistles, in contrast to the complete silence on social issues more amenable to modern sensibilities. "Swearing" (not to be confused with vulgarity) is of enormous "ethical" concern in the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle of St. James. It is of little concern today.

And finally, an Orthodox prophecy would correctly identify the reason why all these things are happening. It would correctly identify, too, just where we are eschatologically – and not simply limit this identification to that commonplace (and quite protestant) simplification of “inaugurated eschatology,” the “now-and-not-yet.”

It would say that the root problem of Orthodox Christians is their failure to pray as Jesus taught -- sacramentally and ascetically. It would say that the root problem of the world is its refusal to protect and listen to the Apostolic and Orthodox Church.

And it would say that the reason why the world is warming is because of the usury of corporate dragons like Smaug, not because of all the poor people who have to gas up their cars to get to their McJobs.

It would say, too, that the Islamization of Europe calls not for a Crusade, but for repentance … and this for the simple reason that any prophet, like Amos, would have no trouble recognizing the new Islamic Jihad for what it really is: another incarnation of the Assyrians, a harbinger and agent of Dies Irae.

This is what prophecy would probably say. And it goes without saying that this is not what Raboteau and all the respective denominational social and moral issues committees would ever say.

They wouldn't say it because they are ethicists.

And that is the problem of the age, my friends: ethics and prophecy do not mix. And I'm afraid they can't.

Concatenation

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

But the cats didn’t like this, as this was too patriarchal for their tastes. So they arranged a Conference, and held long Committee meetings, and heard numerous Consultations and the reports of Commissions, and engaged in some serious Creative writing, couched in the first person plural but (rather not like the Divinity) invariably framed in the passive voice.

So the cats, conferring and consulting, and creatively commissioning, said:

As it has come to our attention that there is a frequently experienced phenomenon known as (but not limited to, as there are other understandings) “existence” or “life,”* we hereby affirm our commitment to our firmly-held conviction that this condition either has always been as we have experienced it, or it has developed over time and in different understandings (all of which are of equal incredibly unique and important value**) to become, incrementally and in seamless transition, what we have been in the here and now.

We courageously affirm the importance of our conviction that the embracing of this metanarrative, this understanding of understandings, has enabled us to experience richly the possibilities of “community-based ontologies” – that is, sociologically-conditioned theories of reality – rather than the outmoded and limited prejudicial theories (i.e., of only one “reality” and one “time”) that have produced regrettable notions of “rightness” and “wrongness.”

We are excited about the infinitely-varied and wide range of possibilities that have become available to our communal and individual consciousness. As together, in a community of freely-inclusive and self-committed individuals, we affirm a “phenomenal consensus,” and in that affirmation we have experienced a richer range of evaluative alternatives that can generate more effective affirmations of lifestyle choices (by re-framing them as extensions of individual psychologies and inevitabilities), we embrace the mandate of electing an ethic for every possible endeavor. We revel in the tapestry of multifaceted ethics, in which each one articulates a new narrative of consciousness, liberation, commitment and free decision-making.

We value and greatly respect the treasuries of past understandings, and freely and inclusively embrace the legacies of sectarian traditions, each of which apprehended its own particular affirmations of totality. We, however, have sought a more affirmative and wider understanding of the present and the future. We believe that it is more effective to model our own experience upon our convictions, rather than “react” to paternalistic possibilities of “creation.” These negative possibilities inflict an undue burden upon the potentialities of future narratives, and restrict the range of future decision-making. This paternalistic pattern has even gone so far as to consign some valid potentialities or choices to the biased and hate-speeched modalities of “wrongness” and “sin.”

We reject these stereotypes that stem from obsolete ethical theories, and we gratefully remind ourselves that we have been privileged to reframe the ethical enterprise into a consensus-based, democratically-conditioned endeavor. We have benefited from the new, hopeful possibilities – an “eschatological narrative of hope” – of the enjoyment of “committee” over the confining prejudices of “creator-ism,” “truth/goodness-ism,” and “morality-ism.” Now that we have identified the implicit narratives of liberation and consciousness underlying the God-myth of more provincial traditions, we have courageously accepted the responsibility of defining our future by the identification and extrapolation of our psychologies and sociology. By this, we have transitioned the outmoded theories of “metaphysics” into more scientifically-acceptable tasks of cost-benefit analyses, management-by-objectives, and economic mobility.

But despite all this, God said “Let there be light”; and there was light, despite the concatenation of feline opinion. He said there is truth, despite the catastrophic, felonious multiplicity of theological ("all philosophy is theology"***) theories and ethical pronouncements. He said there is living water in one place, in spirit and in truth, despite the denominational, "narrative" impulse of cats.

And He said, of His Creation, that it was good.

But for cats there is no creation, only narrative, only ethics, and ontology by committee.

And that, even for a cat, is not too good.

* Cats love scare-quotes, as they cannot call anything anything: they can only "so-call"

** Only cat prose can come up with something like the abominable phrase "important value"

***This is true, and doubting it is the beginning of felinism

Another Hiatus: Lessons from the Tantrummers

I just noticed that Fr. Hans Jacobse' site, Orthodox Christian Morality Today, after some archaeological work, brushed off an ancient essay on Orthodox pastoral theology: "Ministry in General, Craziness and Art."

When I saw this, I remembered that I had meant to post this next essay soon thereafter as an example of "child psychology" in the Orthodox idiom (if anything can be idiomatic in Orthodoxy). I forgot. Sorry.

And what better example of Orthodox child psych than the Orthodox take on tantrums?

Here goes:

Lessons from the Tantrummers

The staff learned something new, during my days working as a psychotherapist on a child psychiatric unit a decade ago. On the unit, we had a quick therapy for kids who were throwing a tantrum, or about ready to do so. I should add, here, that we had kids who were supremely advanced in the art of conniption-fits and emotional explosion: I called them “professional tantrummers,” and I thank them, because they taught me some important things.

The therapy we had for the “tantrummers” made sense. When they started to go ballistic, we sent them to work with a punching bag, where they could beat the poor thing till the cows came home.

You can hardly blame the thinking. Famous well-paid psychologists and pediatricians had told us some pretty common-sense stuff. If a child is angry or upset, the best thing to do is to let him “get it out of his system.”

The idea was explained to me with a metaphor of a Coke bottle. Open bottle. Stick thumb firmly over the opening. Shake bottle. Shake bottle harder. That is anger inside the kid. Feel the force under your thumb? If you don’t allow the stuff to escape, he will explode.

So what we did with punching bag therapy was to simply take the thumb off the proverbial Coke bottle. Let the kid “let it all out,” and he’ll be okay.

There’s something rummy about a lot of psychobabble advice: much of it just doesn’t work. We discovered an odd thing about punching bag therapy. The more a kid punched a bag, the better he got at punching things (including little sisters) in general. The more a child “let it all out,” the more stuff he had to let out.

We were despondent. We finally noticed a gloomy thing. Punching bag therapy not only failed to achieve the desired goal of anger reduction – the “therapy” itself actually increased the level of anger, and the likelihood and intensity of future tantrums. A kid might knock himself out from flailing at Jr. Everlast, but he still glowered when he lurched back to his hospital room. And his commentary at the next group session was still at 212 degrees.

I then looked around, and noticed that the same fantasy of punching bag therapy was everywhere to be seen, despite the fact that this particular point (along with many others) of Sigmund Freud had been blasted out of the water by clinical data for decades. The “discharge of tension by physical expression” simply does not lower levels of anxiety, to put the idea succinctly in clinic-speak.

Nevertheless, people still permit extremities of violence and sexuality in the media, with the explanation that it lets them “get it out of their system.” The once disciplined and cultured nation of England encourages hooliganism at soccer matches, because extreme vulgarity and fan violence are thought to permit adults and youth to “let their hair down”: some of the politicians across the pond actually believe that permitting such behavior actually lowers the crime rate (which it doesn’t).

Many people believe that they have to express their feelings and vent their anger. They explain that if they are not allowed to do so, like that Coke bottle with the thumb released, then something awful might happen. What that something is, I don’t know – but I do know that something awful happens to other people, and to the soul itself, when anger is vented and is allowed full sail, and this passion of “irascibility” takes complete control of the soul.

Most children (and adults) who complain that they feel all bottled up are anxious not because they haven’t vented enough. They are anxious, and probably despondent, because they have vented too much already, and they are feeling the effects of shame, and an anger that continues to build.

I am not for repression or simply burying our feelings, but I am certainly all for control. “Be angry but sin not,” St. Paul advises in Ephesians 4.26. In the same Epistle, he tells parents – especially fathers – to not “provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (6.4). Indeed, some of the ascetical, or monastic, Fathers go so far as to say that no ventilation or expression of anger is ever right, especially if directed at another human being.

Clearly, the responsibility and power to promote peace in the Orthodox home, even with rambunctious children, lie with the parents. The culture of any group flows from the top. So here are a few practical suggestions, or lessons learned, from the Tantrummers:

1.    Try not to be upset or agitated. Most Tantrummers depend on the anxiety/anger of the adult to feed into the show. Don’t join in. “Allowing ourselves to be disturbed by these experiences is sheer ignorance and pride,” wrote Abba Dorotheos, “because we are not recognizing our own condition and are running away from labor.” A calm collected parent is an utter disappointment to a screamer.

2.    Trust in God when faced by a Tantrum, whether it’s your child’s or your own. I like to cite these verses from memory: “Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4.4) … or “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me” (Philippians 4.13) … or “We are more than conquerors through Him Who loves us … Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.37,39). There is more. Read your Bible.

3.    Respond to misbehavior and growing Tantrums when they are still small. It is rare that the Tasmanian Devil appears all at once: he generally starts out whining, tattling, or hiding from chores. The best way not to lecture, yell, or throw an adult Tantrum is to start sooner and discipline more often with smaller consequences. As Abba Dorotheos once said, “Pluck up [a small offense] before it spreads and covers the field.”

4. Do more work in Tantrum prevention than Tantrum response, and you’ll deal with less Tantrums. We are talking here of cutting off provocations and causes which provoke the passion of anger. St. John of Damascus advised that he who repels the provocation “cuts off at once everything that comes after.” You won’t like hearing this, but I will tell you this – and this is based on firm psychological and sociological research: if you really want to reduce the level of anger and the likelihood of Tantrums in a fell swoop, then yank the cable, dish the Dish, doom the cartoon, wash out the soaps in the afternoon and at night, turn off the news. Feed the mind, starve the passions. Go highbrow.

5. If you are hit with a full-blown Tantrum, follow your parental instinct that God has put in your heart. It will tell you to keep people safe. It will tell you to calm the yeller/stomper/pouter. It will coach you to say things like “I love you, but this is the way it is.” It will help you resist the temptation to fold by saying “If you stop, you can have your Count Chocula.” It will help you to isolate the Tantrummer with you, and away from social embarrassment. Stay calm. Trust in God. You are doing one of the most important jobs on this earth.

6. Have faith that this too will pass. All tantrums must come to an end. The very worst tantrum I saw in the hospital was when I sat with a true bonafide Superstar Tantrummer, and she could only perform at full blast for an hour (it was fabulous – you should have been there). And then exhaustion took over, as it always will.

Let them rest. Stay with them, for the Enemy is always apt to afflict sinners, even children, with frightful loneliness. Then bring them back into the family. Hold firm to the consequences. But always, always bring them back home.

Just remember: your house belongs to the Father Who brings back, over and over, the Prodigal Son.

Those are some Lessons Learned from the very best of my Tantrumming friends.

I can speak with authority, because, after all, I used to be one of them.

A few, not-so-innocent, questions at the end of this post

I’m steeling myself for a stint on a committee that’s bound and determined to tackle all sorts of important stuff. The docket is fizzy with pertinent issues like stem cell research, suicide, intelligent design, poverty relief, and the environment.

Just guessing, but the majority will say aye for some practical use of fetal stuff: can’t let it go to waste, what with the possibility of medical breakthroughs around every corner, like the revivalist optimism during those halcyon days in the South Korean labs. We will come out being against suicide in general, although our sensitive report will strongly recommend (as all recommendations are customarily made) that we should adopt a “pastoral” stance in bad situations like this. Poverty will be opposed, as it is important to hold regular votes against it. Hands will be rung, officiously, about the environment. I’m sure we’ll get around to saying something warm and fuzzy about the ordination of women, and how we should be nice to the homosexuals.

I expect these things, having served on consternation committees before. Everyone has their pedigrees plastered on the role call, and each represents her/his various professional and academic strata. We all have our friends and counterparts in the NCC, and simply must show the snuffness that we’re up to. After all, it’s the über-sophisticated Episcopalians who occupy the ecclesiological GQ-spot to which we immigrants aspire. They have position statements: shouldn’t we?

But there is one surprise on the agenda: intelligent design. I’m a tad mystified as to it’s cropping up as an ethical and social issue. One could say that it is a philosophical issue, or even – in the Western sloppy sense of the word – a “theological” issue. But “ethical,” or “social”?

I keep forgetting, in my passive-aggressive way, that I have the good luck to sit on a “progressive” committee, and groups of this sort never let a silly thing like a mandate put a damper on the expansion of self-definition, the evolution of self-awareness and the ever-increasing need for the increase of next year’s operating budget.

So we will argue about Intelligent Design: some of the lines have been drawn, already. I don’t relish the fight, because it is hard to screw up the motivation for something as milk-toasty and Deistic as ID. That is precisely my opening question to the Anti-ID folk: the theory is hardly anything new, and it hardly constitutes anything remotely religious, let alone Christian.

But the preliminary remarks reveal a certainty that Intelligent Design presents an assault on evolution. And that is certainly a horrible awful thing. Evolution must be protected at all costs if it is going to survive. As a concept, it may not be the fittest.

Take a step back and look at the view. An ecclesial group, with a hierarchical mandate, is going to seriously consider an official censure of, or at least the waggling of the schoolmarm’s finger at, Intelligent Design and all its proponents, for the strange purpose of defending evolutionary theory.

I understand the frightful urgency of evolutionary defense in places that do not like the Church or religion or anything that smacks of conservatism. Evolution is an important dogma in the intellectual industry of de-deification. Modern and post-modern myths must be smithed, and the forge is Darwin’s fantastic system. If you want to turn down that annoying godspeak knob, one must construct a self-starting, self-developing cosmogony without any frisson of logos or telos.

That makes sense, though it gripes me that no one has yet noticed that science is simply one form of alchemy that seems, for now, like it works … or that evolution is philosophically indistinguishable from those jolly old notions about spontaneous generation (you know, like rats somehow showing up from the coalescing of garbage).

Here are my questions, then, about the defense of evolution:

1. Even if a scientist believes the most offensive, fundamentalistic view of the Creation account in Genesis, is it possible for him to practice science? to be scientific?

2. Why is it important for humans to believe that they developed from the other life forms? Is it possible for man to care for his environment without believing that he was produced by it?

3. Is it possible for a Christian to believe in Creation as opposed to evolution, and still get a job in academia? Is it possible for him to keep his friends, and disagree with Darwin? Is it possible that evolution is this age’s Arianism, or Gnosticism?

4. Could it be that the only valid ethical issue, here, is whether it is possible at all for a Christian to adopt an evolutionary position and remain, intellectually, within the Orthodox mind of the Church? Is it possible that we have not reflected enough on the full implications of evolutionary dogma? Could it be that any element of trans-species evolution militates against the Gospel?

That the Gospel is the sole radical, and that Darwin and friends comprise, simply, a reactionary bourgeois movement that seeks to suppress the revolution of Christ?

The Nexus of Moral Discernment in the Church

Or, "How Ethics Should be Done by a Conservative Apostolic Church"

Today, in the sophisticated world of the West, there is a profusion of anxiety about the future, and about what is really happening underneath the simplistic reports on the evening news. There is a foreboding sense of danger on many horizons, and a rising level of unease about society and the state of the world.

The level of anxiety is not acute, since it is not enough to motivate real action, but it exists as background static. This static colors the thinking of contemporary men and women … it punctuates their speech … and it everywhere obtains as the prevailing mood in modern art and literature.

And while contemporary society will not approach the Church with its questions, at least not in an explicit way, the questions remain: “What is right, and what is wrong? Where is goodness to be found, if it exists at all? Where have we gone, in our headlong descent into a technological age, and what have we become? How much time do we have left?”

There is no question as to whether the Church should answer these questions. It should be self-evident that one of the chief endeavors of the Church, especially its leadership, should be the effective discernment of the difference between right and wrong, and the meaningful critique of modern values and trends.

The whole corpus of Holy Tradition is exemplary of this Divine expectation. Statements about moral issues from the Holy Councils, the Fathers, and Monastics fill the pages of ecclesiastical history. Their historic witness stems from the example of the Apostles themselves, who left written imperatives in their oral tradition and written Epistles. One of these statements is famous for its abrupt and pithy style. St. John the Evangelist, in his first letter, states simply to the faithful, these few words – “Test the spirits, to discern whether they are of God” (1 John 4.1).

Our Lord Himself emphasized the urgent need for moral discernment in the Church. In the Gospel of St. Luke, He said this to the multitudes in the Sermon on the Plain:

When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? (Luke 12.54-57)

Here, in the simple words of Holy Scripture, we witness a curious unity that links the discernment of what is right and good, and an apocalyptic awareness of the moment in time, both in the present and the future. And it is this “curious unity” that produces the basis of what we call the “prophetic witness” of the Church throughout the ages. Indeed, the common strain that binds the kerygma, or “proclamation,” of the Prophets, the Apostles, the Fathers and Saints is this very unity. It is a unity of ethical analysis and apocalyptic apprehension. It is a spiritual linkage of mystical perception with an intellectual critique of culture.

And without this unity, the prophetic nature of the Church’s moral discernment will of a necessity remain unheard. It will simply become just another intellectual formulation, just another “considered opinion” on ethical issues, amongst the many, many others.

There is no denying that we are proficient at “interpreting the appearance of the earth and sky,” as our Lord did say. This is the interpretation of current events and “things at hand.” It is the work of analysis, in which concepts are broken down into smaller and smaller parts. It is, as Blaise Pascal once said, the work of the “geometrical” temperament, a way of thinking that is marked by intelligent abstraction. It is the legacy of Western thought, and should be appreciated for its great achievements in science and technology.

We should note that Our Lord did not denounce this kind of thinking. He did not prohibit us from “interpreting the appearance of the earth and sky.” Rather, He censured us, in this parable, for stopping at the level of this thinking, and not going on to complete it with the “interpretation of the present time.” Pascal would say that our ethical statements are often lacking the temperament of finesse—the quality of intuition and spiritual critique.

It is often said that modern culture has very little interest in approaching the Church with moral questions. It is also said, just as frequently, that this is so because modern culture is fundamentally secular, and places no value on the opinion of the Church.

There is no denying the antipathy of modern society toward the Church. But it is the nature of prophetic witness to overcome all cultural and linguistic barriers. If the voice of the Church is truly prophetic, and truly discerning and apocalyptic, than any person who is open-minded will stop and listen, and consider well the voice of the Spirit. He will hear the words resonate in the heart, the very center of his soul.

This is always the psychological effect of the Word of the God, if the moral expression of the Church proceeds from the mind of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. This Word is the voice of eternity as it impinges upon the existential moment, and it must and will be heard. This has always been the experience of the Church throughout the ages: No matter how pagan or how reprobate the society which received the prophetic word, the Voice of the Spirit resounded, and the people responded. Open-minded persons heard clearly the call to truth and goodness, and they heard, with fear and trembling, the apocalyptic warnings of God’s judgment to come.

It goes without saying that presently, this receptive response from society is not forthcoming. And today, we have to go beyond the usual facile complaint that society must be “too deaf and insensitive.” We should consider the very real possibility that the problem is more profound: we should entertain the fact that society is not listening, because it never does. This is precisely the nature of a materialistic, decadent society, so we should stop wasting time complaining about the fact that modern man shows little interest in spiritual matters. To complain like this is akin to complaining that tornados are destructive, or that pollution is toxic.

It goes without saying that we should go beyond this glib lament. The real reason why society fails to show much interest in the “moral proclamations” of the Church is that our proclamations are too frequently comprised of ethical analysis alone. To be sure, our proclamations and opinions are usually produced by scholarship, professional dialogue and hard intellectual work—which are worthy endeavors to be sure—but they are not the composite result of the ethical analysis joined to the higher endeavor of mystical apprehension.

There is a fine intellectual tradition of ethical inquiry that has been bequeathed to the West from the philosophy of Aristotle. And through the magisterial work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the “school men,” the ethical categories of philosophy have been adopted by the Western Church. Because of these, Western secular society has been able to think clearly on matters pertaining to natural law. They have been guided, in everyday ethical matters and jurisprudence, by the Ten Commandments, no less, for as long as they accepted the classic authority of Western Christendom, they saw in the Ten Commandments a plenary statement of natural law.

But times have changed, and western society—as you may know—is no longer “western.” Several years ago, in an odd and telling metaphorical event in Alabama, there was much that was represented by the juridical demand for the eviction of a stone monument bearing the Ten Commandments from the State Supreme Court. The removal signifies the reality that there is no longer an allegiance to a theological basis of natural law, and that natural law as a value is in profound decline.

Western society has moved profoundly beyond the aegis of Christendom, and even the memory of that age. The old Roman synthesis of Church and Society no longer obtains. In its place is a deeply and darkly secular age, which looks upon the Church as just another obsolete institution, an artifact of a superstitious age, whose exit from the historical stage can’t come quickly enough.

What we must accept is the arresting fact that if Christendom has become but a memory, then the ethical method which relied upon the actuality of Christendom has become obsolete. That plain and unattractive fact is the very reason why our ethical statements and moral pronouncements are heard as simply another voice in the din of the agora. We are paid attention to as just another of many interest groups … just another institution … merely another constituency with an ethical opinion.

The Church has found itself in such a dismissive age before. In the generations before “Christendom,” before the society of Christian Rome, the persecuted Church of the martyrs and catacombs had much experience with a society that was just as indifferent and oppositional as the modern age. In that time, the Church was never shy about proclaiming its ethical and apocalyptic opinions, the fruit of its moral discernment. The character of these pronouncements, however, differed from the ethical statements of today. The difference is so significant that modern histories of ethics often claim that in this period, there were very few writings concerning ethics.

While I find such a claim disagreeable, I am not surprised. In the writings of the undivided Church, modern ethical scholars will not find much that is written in the language and categories of scholastic ethics. They are looking for anachronisms, which they will not find. But they have found a key for us, to unlock the conundrum of our time. Unwittingly, they have pointed the way to the simple, mystical and existential witness of the early Fathers, as a standard for moral discernment in this age.

In the tradition stemming from this earlier generation, we find that ethics does not exist as a separate academic category. It is not an artificially defined discipline. Neither is the work of dealing with “social issues” given over to committees of professionals, academicians and scholars. Doing so would have been practically impossible, to be sure, but the Fathers also knew that moral discernment went beyond the pale of philosophy. In fact, they subsumed the enterprise of ethical thinking under the subject heading of “praxis,” or the doing of the Faith. “Praxis,” in turn, was tied inextricably to “theoria”—a word meaning vision, a mystically experienced theology.

In the writings of the Fathers, there is a consistent expectation that the Christian who is given the grace of this vision, is then able to apprehend the substance of Holy Tradition, the revelation of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Accordingly, the witness of such a “deified” or “in-godded” Christian, who is properly called a saint, is in complete agreement with the witness and experience of all the saints—because they have all apprehended the same thing.

It is not surprising then that the heart and nexus of moral discernment remains perfectly consistent throughout the ages. The Holy Spirit is the same, yesterday, today and forever, and the Spirit’s articulation of Holy Tradition brings to bear upon every age the same eternal truth.
The Fathers of that early age were careful to locate the primary place of moral discernment firmly in the office of the episcopacy. To be sure, every Christian is called upon to test the spirits, and to judge for himself what is right. But in the dogma of the Church, the episcopacy is expected to be the keenest witness of Holy Tradition to the present generation.

St. Dionysios the Areopagite made this expectation clear, and for a particular reason. He stated, without apology or reservation, that the episcopacy should have attained the highest levels of morality and spirituality. Having attained this, the episcopacy is able then—and only then—to apprehend the mystical truth of theology.

St. Dionysios draws an arresting correspondence between the 3 ranks of clergy with the three stages of spiritual growth. The first stage is that of “purification.” In this stage, the Christian is aware of the forces in his own life, and in society around him, that contend against the Spirit. This stage corresponds with the diaconate.

The second stage is that of “illumination,” and it corresponds to the priesthood. In this stage, the Christian is able to recognize truth and meaning in reality. He is able to discern the “logos,” the divinely-ordained design and destiny of that which is created. He, in turn, is able to guide others to illumination.

The third stage is that of mystical union with Christ, and it corresponds to the episcopacy. The Christian is here inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he experiences “theoria,” or the “vision of theology.” Accordingly, he is given a profound awareness of the contemporaneous voice of apostolic tradition. Indeed, this is why we recognize the episcopacy as the vessel of the unbroken, continued presence of apodosis, or the apostolic witness of Holy Tradition.

Of course, it should be said that this schema of St. Dionysios does not discount the fact that there are many Christians who have been purified, illumined, or given the grace of theoria. Neither does it discount the tragic possibility that some bishops, priests and deacons may not have attained their corresponding stages.

The schema of St. Dionysios leaves us with two very clear points. One is that moral discernment for all Christians requires a faithful pursuit of spirituality, according to the teachings of the Church. The other point is that the leadership of the Church must experience the vision of theology, in its most mystical meaning, or else the moral discernment of the Church is reduced to a mere, ethical analysis.

The process of deification, which figures as the single, all-encompassing imperative of the undivided Church, inducts the Christian into a truly ecclesial epistemology. In such an epistemology, the soul has achieved independence from the passionate distortions of the world, which so often confuse and darken discernment. The soul has been enabled to take a truly realistic view of the world and its members. It is unhindered by completing philosophies or “spirits,” whether these are consciously learned or tacitly accepted. It apprehends reality, and is not distressed by contemporary values, nor is it conditioned by contemporary forces. Finally, it communes with the Holy Fellowship of the Trinity and the Church, the mystical Body of Christ. It hears the contemporary voice of Holy Tradition, and the Spirit’s trenchant criticism of society at present.

In short, deification alone prepares the soul for theology, and imbues it with the agency of moral discernment—an agency marked by the unity of ethics and apocalypse.

The soul that is deified is a soul that is independent not only of biology, but also of sociology. Thus it it can and should be said that saints are the only free men. It should also be said that it is only out of this freedom that spirits are tested, logoi are apprehended, God's Will is discovered, and moral discernment can be done. This is the work of ethics proper to an Apostolic Church: any other kind of ethical endeavor is native to the heterodox.

For this reason, St. Maximos the Confessor called this true theology nothing less than the mystical vision of the Trinity … it is unforgettable spiritual knowledge, written into the very summa of the servant-hierarchy of the Church.

If there is any time that calls for the clear sight of moral discernment, it is this moment. People are anxious, and they should be, because they are sensing the ubiquitous symptoms of a culture in decay. For centuries, the society of the Renaissance and the so-called “Reformation” has stood as an over-arching culture over Europe and the New World. But now, the energy of this culture is leeching into decadence, and the pillars of Church and the classic world are disappearing from view. Loyalties to society in general are giving way to liberation movements and interest groups. Violence and crime occur on the neighborhood level in too many neighborhoods, and too many of the victims are children. Governments are full of good intentions, but have less and less power to achieve them. Our economy is built on mass production, and we are required to consume in mass quantities. Self-discipline and respect are evaporating values, as our celebrities appear in ever-increasing levels of unkemptness, undress and disordered lives. In the arts, the hero has largely disappeared: literature is filled instead with characters possessed by self-loathing and a hatred of life. The visual arts have turned away from the sublime, and are now typified by Andy Warhol’s minimalist definition: “Art is what you can get away with.” Relationships are characterized now by demands and financial contracts, instead of commitment and joy. Too many children can now be described as “semi-orphan”—they are members of families with no stability, no rituals and customs, and not even a consistent set of parents.

There are many questions coming in from this world, to be sure. How will they be answered? Our Lord once looked upon the people of Israel, and He lamented their state of confusion. In the Gospel of St. Mark, we are told that when Our Lord went ashore, “He saw a great throng, and He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and He began to teach them many things” (Mark 6.34)

There is a great throng around us, in this moment, and truly, they are like sheep without a shepherd. They are confused, and do not know which way to go. Should we not have compassion for modern man, and “teach them many things” from the Words of Christ?

Is it not up to us, who are living at end of this civilization, to listen to Heaven enough, to witness its Vision, so that we can “know what is right” on this Earth?

Coma case raises questions about consciousness

Link: Coma case raises questions about consciousness.

Well.

I like this little quote from the article the best:

Dr. James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth medical school in New Hampshire and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, said the study showed it is possible to make a mistake in diagnosing a patient as unconscious.

"What we don't know is how often you see this discrepancy between the physical exam findings and fMRI findings," Bernat said. "Is this one case in 1,000? Is it 1 in 10?"

Some patients do recover after being in vegetative states for months, Bernat said. But this is difficult to predict.

"This is an important case because it shows us the limitations of the physical exam when we assess awareness at the bedside," Bernat said. "We can't get into the mind of another person and experience what they experience."

Of course, everyone is quick to point out that this has nothing whatsoever to do with Terry Schiavo's case.

Because if it did, then there would be another case, n'est-ce pas?

Maybe Alan Jacobs was right in cursing blogs

Some time ago, I complained about Alan Jacobs' complaint about blogs. He suggested that the structure of the "post and comment" system yielded half-baked propositions and a series of recursive comments that gravitated toward the inane.

He used the words "black hole" and "ADD" in a stunning juxtaposition.

I rebutted his argument with my usual populistic, quasi-GK appeal to the common man in the pub, suggesting that the proverbial common man (who probably does not exist) needs some  sort of venue for collegiality.

I'm close to taking all that back.

I still think that there is room for essay blogs, like this one (of course I'm biased -- some of you who know me know just how too biased I really am).

But I'm ready to curse the "community forum" type of blog, which seems to revel in comments of the neural flatulent sort, and derivatives thereof.

I am a convert to Alan Jacobs' thinking, mainly because I have two friends who have been destroyed by a community forum blog.

Just to give you a little background: one of these two bears responsibility for a significant wrong, and has made reparations as required by a disciplinary procedure. Despite his compliance, he cannot be called the most debonair, and he is sunk in a mini-culture that delights in the event-horizon of self-regard and complaint. His brashness makes for a poor match, to say the least, for a society (one of many) that is modeled on a union hall by a shut-down mill, where the kids have moved off to this year's better jobs, and where no one understands the land except as an occasional interruption of indoor stints.

It should have stopped there. But my friend didn't do the mea culpa convincingly, or cathartically, enough. The bill was paid, but there was insufficient blood-letting, so the audience has indicated its desire for more gore, pollice verso. Shylock has bellowed for his full pound.

And this is a Shylock world. Not that there is a miscarriage of justice where the innocent are prosecuted, because we are all guilty of one (or many) thing(s) or another. But rather, the injustice rankles when some of the guilty are caught and hauled up before the magistrate, and sent to the wheel so that all the other offenders may look on and jeer, perhaps in an ironic denunciation of their own shame.

So my friend now and his wife are on the web, quite indeliberately. They are the subject of community forum posts on a site thrown up by a self-anointed reformer of an entire county (a Limbaugh-loving "recovering Catholic," it appears, with a revivalist preacher somewhere in the family -- helping out, I'm sure, with the theological side of the barrage).

The posts on this symposium follow the usual pattern of degeneration: the post itself is of a sodden quality, which is responded to in a series of comments that become increasingly feeble and shrill.

Today, after a few months of revealing dialectic, now that the famous gossip-phone game has circumnavigated that circle of intellects not a few times, my friend has become guilty not only of a single act, but is now adjudicated as a felon from his mother's womb. His wife, my other friend, is now convicted as an accomplice, who must have been guilty of other unknown offenses. No one knows what these are, but, as is customary, the unknown is perceptible only to higher IQs.

Judge Roy Bean couldn't have done it better. Shylock is well-pleased. There's more, much more, than a pound of flesh carved away. A career is destroyed, maybe two, perhaps even a marriage. Children are involved, of course -- an added dimension (or bonus, depending on one's p.o.v.): they are, understandably, given to blue.

The Internet is powerful. Mere keystrokes on a screen of white have this day produced a cold appointment in a bureaucrat's office, an appointment that might have issued a pink slip to an innocent young woman.

In cyberspace, the killer clowns have played their harlequin court, and my guilty friends have been denounced by an entire town.

I worry about my friends, and I try to convert these worries  into prayer. I am less worried about the audience. As is His wont, God will prevent the full measure of what the guilty deserve: unforgiveness -- more than any other impiety -- is the invocation of all wrath, and every curse.

It still happens, His mercy notwithstanding, that an unforgiving group of people will wither as a group. Parishes who embrace the curse will shrivel. Families who rehearse their Sunday dinner diptychs of dudgeon will end up erasing their own name: even the granite carvings will erode in the rain. Corporations will file for one protection or another. Individuals will lapse into codes on Axis I, or even Axis II, or Medicaid.

All this on a blog, or a mail-list, or a list-serve (I am thinking, here, of about every Orthodox Internet list known to man).

My, how powerful we've become.

I would think, what with all the jihadists running around, and China looming in the east, and the waters rising, that we would become all the more faithful to the old faith, and forgiving to the fellow guilty.

I guess not. Because we are, after all, so smart and deserving, and life is just so unfair.