Second Terrace

the pathology of decline

 

In the nation where Christianity changed profoundly, and was adopted as part of its cultural identity, this same Christianity is now in sharp, irreversible decline.

And that is just because Christianity was changed, molded, re-engineered to fit into the nation.

In polling conducted by the Pew Research Center in the last year, Christian churches and institutions are found to be losing population share in every index. At the same time, the "nones" are on the rise -- again, on every index:

Of course, some people have immediately responded to this decline by promoting their own options or alternatives. Anxious "strategic" conferences have been held. Various strategic "withdrawals" and defense postures have been advertised.

But before restructuring programs are embarked upon, I think a pathological study is called for on this decline.

Here are some of the obvious causal factors, for your consideration

1. The co-terminous melding of American politics with the protestant ethos -- a melding that began at the very beginning of the American political order (long before Independence).
   
   
2. The rootedness of secularization (i.e., the sociological application of scientific, deterministic and voluntaristic materialism) in America, and its corollary hyper-commodification of nature and desire.
   
   
3. The reduction of Christian thought to a univocal, anti-metaphysical immanence -- practically confined to a Kantian immanential frame. This is as true of fundamentalist Christianity as it is of mainstream "liberal" Christianity, and it might even be truer.
   
   
4. The disregard of angelology (as found in Christian Philosophy that is, not in New Age sentimentality), and the inane preference for demonology (with spectacular exorcisms) and implicit, dynamic demonism.
   
   
5. The decay of Christian philosophy in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant communities, to the point where many members are really fundamentalists who are in possession of a larger digest of sola scriptura proof texting sources (i.e., the Fathers appended now to Scripture), and who are more accurately recognized as "evangelicals of the Byzantine rite," and not as radical (i.e., "from the root") witnesses of the Apostolic Tradition.
   
   
6. The alliance of Christian communities with partisan affiliations and the corollary wholesale identification with political agenda. It's one thing to criticize prophetically political issues, but it's quite another to become members of partisan groups -- e.g., Pastor Jeffress producing a "hymn" in his megachurch that pretty much hails the President and his distinctive politics.
   
   
7. The horrible, hyper-capitalistic voodoo of the health and wealth movement. The inevitable disappointment produces not an atheism that can be dealt with, but rather a dull-witted agnosticism and cynicism that is calcified against any transcendental.
   
   
8. The voluntaristic suppression of the sacraments and sacramental theology, and the acceptance of generalized commodification (and technological exploitation) of nature. The diminution of Creation into a univocal field of potential wealth.
   
   
9. The rejection of humanity as heart of Creation and beginning of universal transfiguration. The acceptance of the term "individual." The re-definition of "person" as an isolated existential ego. The superficial rendering of this ontological rejection as the replacement of theosis with juridical categories like "justification" and "sanctification" as discrete status.
   
   
10. The lack of real Trinitarian theological thinking at the heart of the Christian community, and its corollary failure to construct a sophiological worldview. Consciousness is thus fragmented into a series of discrete, unconnected moments, where thoughts do not survive from one moment to the next. Jesus Himself is reduced to opinion, and is practically held as a demi-god hero (much like Arius did).

I'm sure there's more.

But I'm convinced that only one therapy will penetrate this general low-intensity demonized haze. It is not a program, or a "renewal project," or a hegemonized lay-monasticism

I think what remains is a return to the "full Gospel" of Apostolic establishment of the faith, an establishment that is more sophiological, more metaphysical, more charitable, more generalized communion.

More Trinity, more Christ. More Cross and love. More peace. More wisdom. More recognition of and wonder at Creation, and being overwhelmed by the Creator.

the problem of demons

" ... as Jesus arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, there met him a man from the city who had demons; for a long time he had worn no clothes and he lived not in a house but among the tombs" (Luke 8.26).

The problem of demons takes full attention in this frightening Gospel story. It is important to read this passage with “fresh eyes,” because when we listen to well-known old stories, we often remember them in broad outline, but we disregard important details

And there are extremely important details in this episode of the Lord’s earthly ministry.

Demons should never be talked to or even addressed

First, notice that the demons have no name. The Lord asked the poor man his name, and he answered “Legion.” “Legion” is a term for a Roman military unit like “battalion” or “regiment,” and in this case it was a designation for a thousand soldiers. So this crazed, victimized individual was infested with too many demons to count. The point that needs to be emphasized here is that “Legion” is not any name. A “name” is something that only a person can bear. In turn, a “person” is someone that only a human being or an angel can be, and this is assuming that the person has accepted their “creaturely calling” — which is to accept and reflect the Divine Nature of Love. Obviously, Satan and his rebellious colleagues reject this calling, and thus have rejected their “names.” It should be noted that “Satan” and “Devil” are not names but functions. “Satan” means “adversary,” “persecutor” or “accuser” (the complete opposite of Paraclete, which means “Advocate” and “Comforter”). “Devil” means “slanderer.” Before his rebellion, Satan had a proper name: “Lucifer” (i.e., “Morning Star”). But he bears that name no longer — according to Orthodox Tradition, that title now belongs to the Forerunner, John the Baptist.

Practically, this means that Christians (and everyone else) are never advised to ask the names of demons, despite what you see in the movies and on television, which are quite horrible sources of information. There is also, in popular media, a splurge of books, articles, and web sites on “demonology” which delve into demonic names and hierarchies: such study is not only dangerous but is completely fabricated. What truth could ever be gained from a source known to be the root of all lies and deceptions?

The Lord indeed performed an exorcism in this episode. But notice the complete absence of spectacle. And note, too, that the Lord asked the man his name: He did not ask this of the demons.

Demonic intelligence is stupid (St Dionysios said this)

Secondly, the demons “begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss.” This shows the undeniable (for all bodiless powers, demons and angels) fact that the entire angelic order is committed and drawn to Creation. There is no bodiless power that is not connected to Creation and its salvation. Despite the fact that Satan and all the demons rejected God’s love, and the call to reflect the Divine Nature, they were still “linked” to the material world. We see this powerfully demonstrated by the demons’ desperate plea (“they begged Him”) to not be evicted into the non-material world of rejection (i.e., “the abyss,” or in other Scripture texts, “waterless places,” “the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”).

Of course, for demons, this desire for the physical world is perverted. Where the faithful angels delight in human faithfulness to God, the demons are attracted (like maggots) to human sin and darkness. They seem to “feed” off of human sinful passion, like gluttony, lust, greed, rage, and most of all, pride (e.g., “I am the most important”). There is also a process where one demon’s perverse pleasure in human passion attracts the presence of others. The Lord speaks of this in Luke 11.24-26: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest; and finding none he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”

Here, the demonic is not depicted as an evil mastermind like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, or C S Lewis’ Screwtape, or David Bentley Hart’s effete, sophisticated demon in “The Devil and Pierre Gernet.” Much as I enjoy two of these writers, their depiction of the demonic assumes too much of demonic intelligence. A more accurate view is from St Dionysios the Areopagite: “Demonic intelligence stupidly has no idea how to obtain what it really wants and indeed does not want it.”

The demonic — just because it is so thoroughly “anti-Wisdom” (i.e., “anti-Sophiological”) — is completely insane. And that it why it is better to think of the demonic as a chaotic swarm, or as a gangrenous infection.

What we know, and what we cannot know

This brings us to our third observation: there is no clear line between demonic possession and demonic obsession. In fact, these are Western “scholastic” terms that try to impose rationalistic and clinical categories onto the problem of demons. However, this problem cannot be rationalized by human science. There is much that cannot be known or predicted when it comes to any of the bodiless powers, whether they are angelic or demonic. One “unknowable” is the relationship of Satan to the rest of the demonic powers. We know that he is not “in charge” or immediately present and active, as he is “bound in the abyss” by the Trinity in the Resurrection (actually, on Great and Holy Saturday). We know, however, that the demonic “spirit of the Antichrist” is very much active now. What exactly is the relationship between the spirit of the Antichrist and the demoniac is, on one hand, and Satan himself , on the other, we do not and cannot know.

But we can know some important facts. Holy Tradition — especially Scripture — tells us that the demonic spreads throughout society, from person to person, and within the person’s soul and body, mainly through language. Recall that “Satan” means “accuser,” and “Devil” means “slanderer.” The Lord Himself called Satan “the father of lies.” To some people who were thinking, darkly, that he “had a demon,” the Lord said this: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8.44).

This fact — that the demonic spreads through language, thought and speech — is one of the most important themes of Jesus’s own “prayerbook,” which is the Psalter of King David. Throughout the Psalms, the “Enemy” is not human but the demonic, which is constantly at work to slander the faithful, to corrupt human society, and ultimately to claim that God is not real, or worst of all, that God is evil and cruel. The deep and powerful mystery of the Psalms is that the faithful, repeated singing of the Psalms is precisely exorcistic — praying the Psalms, the way Jesus (and the Theotokos and the Apostles) did, can drive the demonic away.

Another “unknowable” is precisely how the demonic influences a human victim. Can the demonic be explained away by dismissing it as pre-scientific superstition? Other cases of demonism in the Gospels are explicitly associated (especially by modern English translations) with epilepsy (e.g., Matthew 17.15, in this case “lunatic,” or literally, “moon afflicted”). So can we say that just because we can detect modern pathologies like epilepsy, or in today’s Gospel story, schizophrenia, that this is “all” the Gospel writer meant and we can dismiss the problem of demons?

No. I do not think we can make such a tidy, modernistic dismissal. Just because we might be able to make a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis does not at all discount the presence and the filthy insanity of the demonic. As a clinician (and as a priest), I will never call someone “demon possessed.” But I will notice the effects of the demonic, and will try to “have faith the size of a mustard seed” and try to move mountains (Matthew 17.20).

Passions and human participation

The “demonic” (and I use that term because we will never be able to identify individual or groups of demons, because they come only in chaotic swarms, like flies) is present as at least an “influence” in all occurrences of sinful passion. If the passion is allowed to get strong enough, then in can break out into actual behavior and action. If amplified by the demonic to an extreme, it can even motivate behavior that is injurious to others and to self. We see this in the pitiful episode of a father who described his victimized son to Jesus: “he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water” (Matthew 17.15).

In the worst historic cases, the demoniac is most obviously active in horrendous acts of human evil. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot come easily to mind as examples of deliberate human participation in the demonic. But I would also suggest that the industrialized West’s oppression of slaves and the poor, and its consumeristic sacrifice of millions of unborn infants, is also demonized. And this is also true, on a smaller scale, but even more poignant, of the cases of physical and sexual abuse that infest modern society, along with the recent uptick in mass shootings, especially against school students..

In this sort of demonic action, human participation was fully voluntary. The demonic is obviously present, since this sort of extreme inhumanity can only come about with demonic assistance. Human nature by itself — even fallen human nature — is simply incapable of such horror.

But there is another sort of demonic action, where human participation is involuntary — as in the case of the poor boy who tried to throw himself into fire and water.
For my own part, in clinical experience, I have rarely witnessed such egregious self-destruction in a child, but I know it can occur, and in those rare cases I recognized the demonic perverse delight in the defilement of human beauty.

That sort of involuntary human participation is and always will remain a horrific mystery to me. I do not want to ever understand this.

Demonic motivation

In any case, we can come to understand demonic motivation and process. Recall that demons are angels who have rejected God’s love, and they refuse to reflect the Divine Nature of love, wisdom, harmony, balance, wholeness, and peace (qualities that the Fathers summed up in one term: divine apatheia). The main problem here about demons is that they are rejecting their own essence. They are like organisms that completely resist and reject their own DNA. Demons depend, utterly, upon God’s Love for their own existence, and yet they set their own existence completely against God’s Love. The fatal misery of such an existence defies all thought and explanation, and frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to even try.

But unfortunately, I am able, and responsible, to say that the demonic is utterly enslaved, miserably, to the satanic mission of destroying any and every appearance of God’s Wisdom in Creation.

In the story of the Gadarene Demoniac, that toxic and filthy destruction is underscored by the terrifying sight of swine hurling themselves into a watery death. The reason they did so was obvious: they, being pigs, could not tolerate, or accommodate, the revolting presence of the demonic.

Obviously, this means that the demonic will try to deface and pervert every single sign of Divine Nature in Creation: “They said in their hearts, all of them bound together: Come, let us completely destroy all God’s feasts on the earth” (Psalm 73.7 LXX). But more immediately (and in psychology), the demoniac tries to pollute and disable human nature. They will destroy the possibilities of intact human thought, memory, and control of human emotion and behavior.

Anyone who has wrestled with human psychology and its problems (and this is everyone) has already wrestled with the presence, influence and effects of the demonic.

The problem is much, much worse than the spectacular (and dubious) portrayals in movies like “The Exorcist” and its many imitations, and YouTube recordings of exorcisms (even in Orthodox settings, these moments should never, ever be recorded and broadcast). I am professionally and spiritually skeptical about all such dramatic spectacles. Better the simple, private, peacemaking approach of the Lord (and His Apostles) than the stuff shown in theaters and on megachurch and televangelist TV.

The cure

But the problem is also much more solvable in Orthodox Tradition. The Apostles tell us that the demonic cannot abide the Name of Jesus Christ, and the very thought of His coming in the flesh, manifesting Divine Nature on the Cross, and achieving complete victory over sin and death in the Resurrection. Mention this, and believe this, and pray this, and the demons will run.

The Lord Himself said that that it takes the mustard seed faith that moves mountains (Matthew 17.20) to confront the demonic — that faith which is qualitative, non-quantifiable (hence the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Mountain) is the full recognition-and-reflection of the Divine Nature — the Presence of Christ in the Spirit … precisely what the demonic refuses to do.

We should remember that in the Byzantine Church of Constantinople, over a hundred exorcists were employed. Interestingly, they were the “catechists,” i.e., the Sunday School teachers, the teachers of doctrine and theology — the teachers of Wisdom.

The conviction that the Byzantine Church had, before the downfall of thought in the so-called “Enlightenment” of the modern age, was simply this: the best way to fight the demonic is through the learning and practice and prayer of the Wisdom of Christ and the Holy Spirit. A clear mind and heart, wise and fully open to the Father’s Love and rooted in Eucharist, is utterly closed off to the pernicious infection of the demonic.

Let us be wise then, “clothed and in rightness of mind.” Pray in Jesus’ Name. Commune in Sacrament, Word, and Spirit. Love, be at peace. Be a mirror of Divine Nature. Become what the devil refused to be.

the better angels

 

Right before the Lord’s Prayer, my community offers the “Litany of Supplication.” One of the supplications is this: “For an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies, let us pray to the Lord.”

It’s prettier in our old language: “Anhela mira, v’irna nastavnika, chranitel’a dušam i t’ilom našim, u Hospoda prosim.”

I think that outside the Orthodox, Catholic, and other traditional communities, there is no such equivalent prayer in the worship service. I grew up as an evangelical protestant, and I’m quite certain we never offered any such prayer on Sunday morning.

In general, there isn’t much attention given to angels in sermons or articles. Unfortunately, this may be true of the Orthodox community as well.

This is a shame. Angels have always been a crucial part of Orthodox doctrine. Over time, especially in the modern era, “angelology” (yes, there is such a thing) has fallen into neglect — despite the fact that Old Testament prophets, New Testament apostles and Church fathers have said much about the “incorporeal powers.” Moreover, we refer to them repeatedly in our divine services and prayers.

It would be necessary to get back to traditional “angelology” if only because it is part of the Apostolic proclamation.

But it is even more important now, because this moment — as in Fall and Winter of 2019 — cries out for the “rumor of angels” and an awareness of “entertaining angels unawares” (Hebrews 13.2) -- a critical moment when, as Lincoln once said, we pine for "the angels of our better nature."

We are in a crisis moment when people -- left and right -- are more likely to be molded by events, demagogues, and anxieties rather than molding events by their good character: human persons are created to happen to time, rather than time happening to individuals. I’m afraid that the main reason for this decline of human character is that we have lulled ourselves into thinking that we live in a material, angel-less world -- a worldview that is cardboard and superficial, compared with the real Creation that is of enormous, beautiful physical and metaphysical depth.

Any visitor from the pre-modern age, if he had the misfortune of showing up these days by some sort of time machine, would probably be shockingly unimpressed with our culture. We’d show him -- proudly -- our cable TV with hundreds of channels, our cellphone with constant contact with anyone in the world 24/7, our dizzying array of consumer choices in the grocery and the online stores, our amazing entertainments and celebrities and adventures, and especially our glorious internet that opens an ever broader vista of possibilities.

Our ancient visitor would be not only unimpressed, but totally distressed. “But your world is so flat!” he might say. “Oh you poor thing,” we respond, “Of course you think the earth is flat, but in this age of science, we know better.”

“No, no,” he protests, “We’ve known that Terra is spherical for centuries .... I mean, your mental world is so terribly small: you know nothing of the larger, metaphysical world. You know so little about angels.”

And with that, our visitor from the Christendom of fourteenth century Byzantine Empire or Western Europe would sit us down somewhere outside, in a grove of trees, under the rustling autumn leaves.

He’d take a deep breath, and talk of angels.

He’d say that there are vastly more angels than the entire population of humanity from the beginning of time to its end. That the nine ranks of angels are the created reflections -- or, as the Fathers say, “second suns” -- of the uncreated Divine Nature. That the highest ranks of the angels -- the Cherubim and the Seraphim -- receive the greatest knowledge of God and pass it down the angelic hierarchy all the way, finally, to humanity.

Here we get a little hot and bothered because we moderns do not like hearing about hierarchy or order. We like everything democratic and convenient and untroubling. We want everything and everyone flat, on the same playing field.

Our old friend stares at us with a look that starts in surprise then turns into pity. “Oh, I see,” he says. “This is what your philosophy has done to you.”

“But we don’t like philosophy,” we protest, “We don’t have any of that. We’re only practical.”

He sighs again, at the painful irony of it all. It turns out that the whole hierarchy of Creation is a hierarchy of servanthood, of self-sacrifice. The entire angelic order “dies to self,” he says, for the sake of love for heaven and earth, and especially of the heart of Creation, which is humanity.

Then his voice softens and becomes hushed. “The angels are this way because they reflect the fact that the Trinity is just this way, the Divine Nature itself. The Father gives Himself away to the Sonship of the Word and the Procession of the Spirit. They, in turn, surrender Themselves completely to the revelation of the Father.

“And,” he pauses, closing his eyes, as if to hear his thoughts more closely, “the only word we have for that mysterious act of surrender is prayer.”

This, he says, is exactly what the angels reflect throughout the universe. There is no place, no moment, without their radiance of being “second suns.” There is no such thing as being “alone with God” without anyone else around. “You are always in higher company,” he says: “That is the real Christian philosophy ... there is no alone with the alone.”

"But we already know about God's grace, about His energy," we protest, trying, for the last time, to protect our modern advantage.

"His love in Creation is never un-accompanied by His second suns." Our visitor was showing signs of wear: the task of translating a very non-contemporary theology into modern speech was taxing. "That is how the angelic assembly is so, well, immediate in your here-and-now."

“The angels are all around you," he went on, "bearing the Cross, serving you, constantly expressing, in their beautiful and total self-sacrificial artistry, the unending glories of divine wisdom.”

He continues. Everything in Creation, he says, is watched over by angelic ministry. “There is a power or principality that expresses the transcendental number pi, or e, or even the Golden Mean. There is a dominion that superintends the Planck Constant, another for the speed of light, and for each of the twenty constants you know about and all the others you know nothing about.”

He goes on, despite the obvious fact that his audience is feeling incompetent, too deep in, way over their heads: “If you think about it, it should occur to you that Christian philosophy has corrected and enhanced Plato’s notion of the world of Ideas. Instead of Ideas, there are, in reality, Angels. Instead of abstract theories, there are personal ministers of divine light.”

We shake our heads, having forgotten that there is such a thing as “Christian philosophy.” Clearly, we were mistaken as to who is enlightened, and who is not.

“I’m sure you’re familiar with the one hundred and forty-seventh Psalm,” he went on, seeing that we are by now quite out of sorts, “He shall heal the shattered in heart, He shall bind up all their wounds. He measures the multitude of stars, calling each one of them by name.”

He whispers: “Don’t you understand that that each name is an angel? Divine Love is accompanied by angels everywhere, from the edge of the universe to the human heart?”

“I’m going to leave you in a moment,” he says as he gets up, brushing dust off his red philosopher’s cloak. “This has been, err, interesting, but frankly your modern enlightened society is giving me a smashing headache.”

“But before I go, I’ll leave you with this. Of all the angels, the ones most important to you, the ones you must know about right now, are the lowest ones … the ones closest to you. And by now you should know that their being the lowest rank in the hierarchy should not trouble you in the least.”

Closest to our experience are the Guardian Angels. Even though the entire angelic assembly takes on guardianship of the physical creation and humanity, as its heart, it is the ninth and lowest, the ones we know by name, that are explicitly known as “Guardian.” There are guardian angels for nations, like the Archangel Michael for the historic people of God. There are angels for churches, as seen in the first chapters of St John’s Apocalypse.

But in particular, every human has a Guardian Angel, whose entire task is to help us become utterly transformed by divine love: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones,” the Lord said in Matthew 18.10, “for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.”

“Your guardian, your heavenly custodian, was assigned to you long before you were ever conceived, long before, even, the physical universe was created. Your Guardian Angel was waiting for you, and now he prays for you and serves you and waits upon you … just to help you become what you should become.”

“What’s that?” we call out, as he starts to disappear in that Star-Trek-like shimmer of a transporter beam. “Powerful? Successful? Pretty? Ever-young? Comfortable?”

We finally call, “Saved?”

From a distant echo, we hear his last words: “Real.” Then silence.

The Divine Love of the Holy Trinity is the very basis of all reality. Your guardian angel, whom you will see one day, is simply trying to help make you Real -- or, to put it another way, more congruent with the way things really should be, rather than the way things have gone awry.

We would do well to make friends with our better angels.

Things have gone awry, and that’s for sure. But the way things should be -- a "hyper-reality” of God giving Himself away for us, and our giving ourselves away for our weaker neighbors and thus to Christ, and the angels helping all along the way -- this way of love still remains, and obtains.

It’s a good thing our better angels remember this -- just because they behold the face of the Father -- even when we might not.