One way we
may be quite certain that the West has lost its contact with the uncreated
Grace of the All-Holy Trinity is by considering the guideposts of those who
believe themselves to be the champions of traditional Christianity there. The names that come up most often for Roman
Catholics are Thomas Aquinas and J.R.R. Tolkien; for Protestants, C.S. Lewis is
their waymark. All three represent the
same two poles of the post-Great Schism dialectic in the West: Aquinas is the pole of cold, dry rationalism;
Tolkien, the warmth and emotions of the sensual/the imagination. Mr Lewis embodies both elements for
Protestants with his non-fiction (reason) and his fiction (imagination).
As the West
has plod her course after being torn away from the Orthodox Faith by the Bishop
of Rome, she has shifted from one pole to the other: from dry Scholasticism to the fleshy
Renaissance; thence to mechanistic Deism and its reaction, the volcano of human
passions that was Romanticism; followed by frigid scientism, which itself is
beginning to yield once again to man’s desire for something living and
spiritual.
Such
regular, abrupt changes, tending to disorder in society, have generally been
unknown in the Orthodox Church, for within her is the fulness of God’s Grace (this
has changed somewhat since the fall of the Protector of the Church, the
Christian Roman Empire, with the martyrdom of St-Tsar Nicholas II and his
family, making the Church more susceptible to worldly attack). But ever since the West lost that Grace, she
has been searching desperately for a substitute. Hence the never-ending dialectical swings
between reason and imagination; when the West surfeits on one, she then begins
to binge on the other.
Father
Seraphim Rose of blessed memory explains the movement in the West away from the
Orthodox Faith towards these two poles in his Orthodox Survival Course:
‘So we can see that here -- and he’s
[Thomas Aquinas—W.G.] the pinnacle of Scholasticism -- this is a
systematization of Christian teaching, and actually subordinates Christian
teaching to logic. But logic itself, of course, depends on the starting point.
And they thought they were starting with basic Christian revelation. We’ll
see soon that there are all kinds of other things entering in, which affect
reason. In this Scholastic system logicalness becomes the first test of truth,
and the living source of faith is placed in a secondary place. And that’s why
later people hated it so much because they felt it to be a completely dead
framework in which there’s no life left, idly discussing questions which no one
is concerned about, and when you do discuss true questions, you flatten them
out and deaden them. And a Western man, under this influence, begins to lose
his living relation to the Truth. And thus Christianity is reduced to a system,
to the human level. And this is one of the chief roots of the later errors in
the West, which can actually be summed up as the attempt to make by human efforts
something better than Christianity.
‘ . . .
‘Something else happened. And that is that
Orthodox tradition is not only rationalized, it also becomes mixed with
romance. The element of pagan legends entering into Orthodox Lives of Saints in
this time made it so that there are some Lives of Saints which we have in our
Orthodox sources, if you read the same Life of a Saint in a medieval Latin
source, you will be completely astonished.
. . .
‘And you can see obviously this is absolute fairy
tale introduced into a life of a saint, for whatever reasons we don’t
know, maybe there’s pagan influences, the result of very good imagination.
Well, anyway, this element of romance enters into even such a thing as the Life
of a Saint, becomes a total made-up fairy tale.
. . .
‘And many other cases we see that in the Roman
Catholic sources even from the height of the Middle Ages in the thirteenth
century, there are very many of these romantic elements enter in. We cannot
trust those sources. And this was the reason that later scholars came to
distrust the sources. Also, there, of course, are such things as the legends of
the Grail, which come up from Celtic legends, pagan legends, The
Golden Legend....’
Fr
Seraphim’s mentioning of the Grail is key to understanding what has happened in
the West. In their conversation on the
Grail legends (skip to the final ten minutes), Jonathan Pageau and
Richard Rohlin make the point that this story enters into the Western tradition
very quickly after the West’s break with the Orthodox Church, as though she
were admitting already that something essential (i.e., the Grace of God) has
gone missing, and that no effort should be spared to find it. All the subsequent history of the West is
simply a repetition of the Grail story:
Western man trying to satisfy the abyss that has opened in his soul now
that God’s Grace in the Orthodox Church has been ripped away from him.
For its
replacement, the West has tried many experiments of the reason and the
imagination, but they have been and always will be doomed to failure, as Metropolitan Hierotheos of
Nafpaktos ably explains:
‘I believe
that on the contrary, contemporary theology is conjectural, rationalistic. It
is based on the “wealth” which is reason. What Archimandrite Sophrony says is
characteristic: “One other kind of imagination about which we wish to speak, is
the attempt of intelligence to penetrate the mystery of being and apprehend the
Divine world. Such endeavours inevitably involve the imagination, to which many
are inclined to give the high-flown label, divine inspiration. The ascetic,
devoting himself to active inner silence and pure prayer, resolutely combats
this “creative” impulse within himself because he sees in it a “processus”
contrary to the true order of being, with man “creating” God in his own image
and likeness” (47).
‘Archimandrite
Sophrony also writes: “The theologian who is an intellectual [logician]
constructs his system as an architect builds a palace or a church. Empirical
and metaphysical concepts are the material he uses, and he is more concerned
with the magnificence and logical symmetry of his ideal edifice than that it
should conform to the actual order of things.
‘“Strange as
it may seem, many great men have been unable to withstand this [rationalism],
in effect, artless temptation, the hidden cause of which is pride.
‘“One becomes
attached to the fruits of one’s intelligence [rationalism] as a mother to her
child. The intellectual [logician] loves his creation as himself, identifies
with it, shuts himself up with it. When this happens no human intervention can
help him – if he will not renounce what he believes to be riches, he will never
attain to pure prayer and true theoria” (48).’
Since the
West has deformed the Holy Trinity with her doctrines of absolute divine
simplicity and of the Filioque in the Nicene Creed (a god resembling very much the god of the Neoplatonists), and also mankind
himself through the forgetting of the nous, she cannot attain ‘true theoria’,
the vision of and union with the uncreated Light of God; the vision of the
logoi of created things; nor converse with the saints and angels – much of
which is elaborated upon by St
Gregory Palamas
and all the other hesychasts who came before and after him. The best traditionalists in the West can do
at this point is to create fictional worlds, a fictional Heavenly Kingdom, in a
vain attempt to grab hold of that from which they have been cut off. Thus the fawning adoration for the
Legendarium of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings by Roman Catholics; and thus
the same for Lewis’s Narnia universe by Protestants. Sadly, this is the apex of Christian
civilization for the apostate West, sham substitute kingdoms of the mind that
they inhabit with imaginary figures who can help them not at all: Sam, Frodo, Galadriel, Aslan, Puddleglum –
The Great Eagles of Middle-earth are NOT going to save the West.
We
appreciate the wisdom and beauty that is present in works by non-Orthodox
Western writers like Tolkien and Lewis, but that does not change what they
are: replacements for the noetic Kingdom
of Heaven.
Yet it is
that very Kingdom that can save her, but it is buried – buried deep beneath the
layers of false teachings and destructive practices that have accumulated over
the last 1,000 years. It is the Kingdom
of the Orthodox Church, the Kingdom of the Saints of the West of the first
1,000 years of her Christian history. If
she can recover this Kingdom, she will live.
St Nicholas Cabasilas (+14th century), writes regarding it,
. . .
The rest is
at https://thesaker.is/the-two-poles-of-post-schism-western-religion/.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
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