I. Introduction
Wendell
Berry confesses the Christian faith, but it is nevertheless an easy task to
find criticism of Christianity in his writings.
In one place he even suggests that Buddhism is superior to Christianity
in how it approaches man’s relationship to the creation: ‘Buddhism, for example, is certainly a
religion that could guide us toward a right respect for the natural world, our
fellow humans, and our fellow creatures.
I owe a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists’ (‘Christianity
and the Survival of Creation’, p. 306).
He has stuck with Christianity, though, but not, seemingly, because its
teachings contain more of the truth than Buddhism or any other religion, but
mainly because he was born into it. It
is his ‘native religion, for better or worse’ (ibid.). Such statements are no doubt a cause of
consternation to the tradition-minded folk of the South, who see Christianity,
agrarianism, and the South as being closely intertwined, if not
inseparable. What can be done, then, to
heal this rift that exists between Mr Berry, Christianity, and his native land?
II. Western Christianity
and the Creation
The
first thing that can be done is to realize that the Christianity Mr Berry is at
odds with is not the genuine Christianity found in the Orthodox Church, the
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, but rather its Roman Catholic and
Protestant forms (what we shall call Western Christianity from here on), which,
like other sects that have gone into schism from the Orthodox Church, like the
Nestorians, Monophysites, or Iconoclasts, have added to and/or taken away from
the Apostolic Tradition she retains unimpaired.
When he says, for instance,
Throughout the five
hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist
has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming
that their causes were the same.
Christian organizations, to this day, remain largely indifferent to the
rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures. It is hardly too much to say that most
Christian organizations are as happily indifferent to the ecological, cultural,
and religious implications of industrial economics as are most industrial
organizations. The certified Christian
seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy
to murder Creation (ibid, pgs. 305-6).
he
is speaking of Western Christianity (as we shall see).
He
then points out what he sees as the root of the evil in the Western denominations:
dualism.
I have been talking, of
course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity,
between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion
and economy, worship and work, and so on.
This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease that afflicts us
(ibid., p. 313).
But
this dualism is not a part of Orthodoxy; it is an innovation brought into
Western Christianity by the speculative theology of St Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas, which is much different in kind than the experiential theology of
Orthodox theologians. Philip Sherrard
tells the story in his book The Rape of
Man and Nature:
In the fallen world as
seen by St Augustine—the world in which we actually live—things are far worse,
and this separation between the uncreated and the created is now truly abysmal. Through the Fall man and the rest of the
natural order are deprived of even that extrinsic participation in grace which
they possessed in their pre-fallen state.
Their original and true nature is now vitiated, totally corrupt and
doomed to destruction. It is a lump of
damnation.
. . .
From St Augustine we may
turn to the other major representative of western mediaeval theology, St Thomas
Aquinas; and it is against this background of the radical disparity in St
Augustine’s thought between the world and the Church, nature and grace, or
nature and what is now regarded as the supernatural, that the efforts of St
Thomas to ‘save’ the natural world must be viewed. Unless it is viewed against this background the
fact that his thought helped to consolidate the rift between the world of
nature and the divine and so contributed to the process of desanctification we
are tracing may seem inexplicable.
It must be remembered that
by the time St Thomas set out upon his attempt to reconcile all views, however
contradictory they might appear, in an all-embracing synthesis, the idea of the
separation between the natural (understood now in the non-Augustinian,
Aristotelian sense as a physical reality) and the supernatural was so deeply
embedded in Latin thought that is was impossible to establish any genuine
ontological link between them. . . .
. . .
The immediate conclusion
is that there must be different principles appertaining to the natural and the
supernatural spheres. There must be, as
St Thomas put it, a double order in things.
This means that nature itself—the natural as such—is now accorded a
status of its own, to all intents and purposes independent of the divine; and
the Augustinian dichotomy between nature and grace is replaced by a dualism between
the natural and the supernatural.
Assuredly, God is still regarded as the author of nature, but
essentially nature works according to its own laws, and it is quite sufficient
to take account only of these laws in order to discover how nature does work.
. . . Indeed, the only knowledge which man as
a rational creature could effectively obtain was said to be that which he could
derive from the observation of phenomena through the senses—a proposition which
is at the very basis of the later scientific attitude to knowledge.
. . .
Analytical Thomist
methodology, . . . effectively promotes the idea that there is an uncrossable
boundary between God and man, between the divine and the human. Implicit in it is a failure to grasp the full
significance of the unity of the two natures in one person; and the immediate
consequence of this was to be the neglect of the possibility of man’s personal
participation in the divine and a growth in the conviction that he may know the
truth concerning God only indirectly by means of his rational faculty operating
within the one sphere accessible to it, that of the natural world. And here again what is implicit is not man’s
supra-rational and personal participation in the inner meaning, the indwelling logos of this world, or his disclosure
of God’s self-expression within it, but a belief that he may decipher,
articulate and eventually dominate it as a self-sufficient entity by the use of
his individual reason in disregard of, if not in contradiction to, the truths
of the Christian revelation (pgs. 105-9).
One
may discern in the above much of what troubles Mr Berry about modern Western
Christianity.
III. The Orthodox Church
and the Creation
Now
that we have established some of the fundamental ideas about God and the creation
in Western Christianity, we ought to look at what the Orthodox Church teaches
about them. Mr Berry’s note on church
buildings will serve as a good lead-in:
The holiness of life is
obscured to modern Christians also by the idea that the only holy place is the
built church. This idea may be more
taken for granted than taught; nevertheless, Christians are encouraged from
childhood to think of the church building as “God’s house,” . . . (‘Survival’,
p. 309).
Again,
this is the Western view:
As for the communication
of grace, through which alone man and the world may be redeemed from depravity,
this, it was thought by St Augustine and his mediaeval successors, was confined
to the visible Church and depended on the performance of certain rites, like baptism,
confirmation, ordination and so on, which it was the privilege of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy to administer to a submissive and obedient laity. The magnificent scope of the Logos doctrine
with its whole ‘cosmic’ dimension—the idea of God incarnate in all human and
created existence—which from the time of the Alexandrians and Cappadocians down
to the present day has been one of the major themes of Orthodox Christian
theology, was tacitly but radically constricted in Western thinking. . . .
In these conditions to say
that everything in the created order by virtue of the simple fact of its
existence possesses, even if unaware of it and so in a potential state, an
intrinsically sacramental quality which unites it to the divine, would have been
tantamount to blasphemy. Instead, there
was a radical separation of the sacred from the secular: everything inside the Church (understood as
an earthly society) was sacred; outside the formal limits of the Church, or in
nature, the activity of the Spirit was denied:
everything outside these limits was secular, deprived of grace,
incurably corrupt and doomed to disintegration (Sherrard, p. 106).
However,
the Orthodox say of the Church:
The Church is the union of
all that exists, or, in other words, she is destined to encompass all that
exists: God and creation. She is the
fulfillment of God’s eternal plan: the unity of all. In her are found both the eternal and the
temporal, with the latter destined to be overwhelmed by eternity; both the
uncreated and the created, with the latter destined to be overwhelmed by the
uncreated, to be deified; both the spiritual things of all categories and
matter, with the latter destined to be spiritualized; both heaven and the earth
permeated by heaven; both the nonspatial and the spatial; both “I” and “thou,”
“I” and “we,” “we” and “thou,” united in a divine “Thou,” or in a direct,
dialogical relation with Him. The Church is a human communitarian “I” in
Christ as a “Thou,” but at the same time the Church’s “I” is Christ. The Church is the “I” of the prayers of all
sentient beings: earthly beings, angels, and saints; in this way prayer has a
great unifying role. In the Church all
pray in me and for me, and I pray in all and for all. In the Church all things are united but
unconfused in this unity. The Church is
the body of Christ and as such is united with Him and distinct from Him. The
Church is the immanence that has transcendence in herself, the Triune community
of Persons full of an infinite love for the world, maintaining in the world
a constant movement of self-transcendence through love. The Church is Christ extended with His
deified body in humanity, or, in other words, she is this humanity united with
Christ and having Christ imprinted on her with His deified body. If the Son of God had not become incarnate
and had not deified the body through the Resurrection and Ascension, then the
link that connects God with creation would be missing, just as God’s love—meant
to be poured into us and to attract us to the union with Him in love—would also
be missing.
The Church, therefore, has
a theandric constitution. Her content
consists of Christ united with the Father and the Spirit according to His
divine nature, and united with us according to His human nature. Being included in the incarnate hypostasis of
Christ, the Church could be called Christ, if we understand Christ as extended
into humanity. The Church is “Christ
Himself, who exists from before the ages in the bosom of the Father, who at the
fulfillment of time became man, who is and always lives with us, and who works,
saves, and extends Himself throughout the ages.”
These two factors, Christ
and humanity, are so united in the Church that one cannot be seen without the
other, nor can we speak of them separately (Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, pgs.
13-4).
What
we mean to show with this quote is that the dualism in Western Christianity
between God and His creation is not present in the Orthodox Church. God is present in His creation and vice
versa. Mr Berry is at pains to show this
to his Western kinsmen in this passage and in others:
We will discover that the
creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal
creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant
participation of all creatures in the being of God (‘Survival’, p. 308).
In
the Orthodox Church, this idea has always been a vital part of her doctrine
about God. The Metropolitan Bishop
Kallistos Ware writes,
God, although absolutely transcendent, is not cut off from the
world which He has made. God is above and
outside His creation, yet He also exists within it. As a much used Orthodox prayer puts it, God
is ‘everywhere present and filling all things’.
Orthodoxy therefore distinguishes between God’s essence and His
energies, thus safeguarding both divine transcendence and divine
immanence: God’s essence remains
unapproachable, but His energies come down to us. God’s energies, which are God Himself, permeate all His creation, and we experience
them in the form of deifying grace and divine light. Truly our God is a God who hides Himself, yet
He is also a God who acts - the God of History, intervening directly in
concrete situations (The Orthodox Church,
p. 209).
Vladimir
Lossky adds,
Every created thing has
its point of contact with the Godhead; and this point of contact is its idea,
reason or logos which is at the same
time the end towards which it tends. The
ideas of individual things are contained within the higher and more general
ideas, as are the species within a genus.
The whole is contained in the Logos, the second person of the Trinity
who is the first principle and the last end of all created things. Here the Logos, God the Word, has the
‘economical’ emphasis proper to antenicene theology: He is the manifestation of the divine will,
for it is by Him that the Father has created all things in the Holy
Spirit. When we are examining the nature
of created things, seeking to penetrate into the reason of their being, we are
led finally to the knowledge of the Word, causal principle and at the same time
end of all beings. All things were
created by the Logos who is as it were a divine nexus, the threshold from which
flow the creative outpourings, the particular logoi of creatures, and the centre towards which in their turn all
created beings tend, as to their final end (Mystical
Theology, pgs. 98-9).
Indeed,
all of creation was made for union with God:
The general basis of the
mysteries [i.e., sacraments--W.G.] of the Church is the faith that God can
operate upon the creature in his visible reality. In this sense the general meaning of the
mysteries is the union of God with the creature, and the most comprehensive
mystery is the union of God with the whole of creation. This is a mystery that contains everything,
and there is absolutely no part of reality not contained within it. This union begins with the very act of
creation and is destined to find its fulfillment through the movement of
creation toward that state in which “God is all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Is there anyone who can explain the meaning
and the depth of this union, the way in which the Word of God is present within
the reasons of created things and the way He is at work, sustaining and
governing them toward their goal of complete union with Him? (Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 5, p. 3)
IV. Healing Divisions
The
sundering of God from his creation is only one division Mr Berry is concerned
with. There are others: ‘The modern urban-industrial society is based
on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife,
marriage and community, community and the earth’ (‘The Body and the Earth’, p.
132). Again, he will find the Orthodox
Church concerned with healing all divisions as well. Turning again to Vladimir Lossky, he writes,
. . . as we have seen, when examining the
teaching of St. Maximus on creation, Adam was destined to unite in his own
being the different spheres of the cosmos, in order that deification might be
conferred upon them, through union with God.
If these unions or successive ‘syntheses’ that surmount the natural
divisions are brought about by Christ, it is because Adam failed in his
vocation. Christ achieves them
successively by following the order which was assigned to the first Adam.
By his birth of the
Virgin, He suppressed the division of human nature into male and female. On the cross He unites paradise, the dwelling
place of the first men before the fall, with the terrestrial reality where the
fallen descendants of the first Adam now dwell . . . . At His ascension, first of all, He unites the
earth to the heavenly spheres, that is to the sensible heaven; then He
penetrates into the empyreum, passes through the angelic hierarchies and unites
the spiritual heaven, the world of mind, with the sensible world. Finally, like a new cosmic Adam, He presents
to the Father the totality of the universe restored to unity in Him, by uniting
the created to the uncreated (Mystical
Theology, pgs. 136-7).
Through
his union with Christ in the Orthodox Church, man is able to take up once again
his original vocation of reconciling and uniting all things.
But
as Mr Berry is particularly concerned with the division of body and soul,
In its [dualism’s--W.G.]
best-known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the
dualism of body and soul.
. . .
But to despise the body or
mistreat it for the sake of the “soul” is not just to burn one’s house for the
insurance, nor is it just self-hatred of the most deep and dangerous sort. It is yet another blasphemy. It is to make nothing—and worse than
nothing—of the great Something in which we live and move and have our being
(‘Survival’, pgs. 313, 314).
we
ought also to assure him with the Orthodox approach to them and their
healing. Bishop Kallistos says,
Man stands at the heart of
God’s creation. Participating as he does
in both the noetic and the material realms, he is an image or mirror of the
whole creation, imago mundi, a
“little universe” or microcosm. All
created things have their meeting-place in him.
. . .
. . .
Being microcosm, man is
also mediator. It is his God-given task
to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to
unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent
capacities of the created order. . . .
Man is able to exercise
this mediating role only because his human nature is essentially and
fundamentally a unity. If he were just a
soul dwelling temporarily in a body, as many of the Greek and Indian
philosophers have imagined—if his body were no part of his true self, but only
a piece of clothing which he will eventually lay aside, or a prison from which he
is seeking to escape—then man could not properly act as mediator. Man spiritualizes the creation first of all
by spiritualizing his own body and offering it to God. . . .
But in “spiritualizing” the body, man does not thereby dematerialize
it: on the contrary, it is the human
vocation to manifest the spiritual in and
through the material. Christians are
in this sense the only true materialists.
The body, then, is an
integral part of human personhood. The
separation of body and soul at death is unnatural,
something contrary to God’s original plan, that has come about in consequence
of the fall. Furthermore, the separation
is only temporary: we look forward,
beyond death, to the final resurrection on the Last Day, when body and soul
will be reunited once again.
. . .
An essential aspect of
guarding the heart is warfare against the
passions. By “passion” here is meant
not just sexual lust, but any disordered appetite or longing that violently
takes possession of the soul: anger, jealousy, gluttony, avarice, lust for
power, pride, and the rest. . . . The
passions, then, are to be purified, not killed; to be educated, not eradicated;
to be used positively, not negatively.
To ourselves and to others we say, not “Suppress”, but “Transfigure”.
This effort to purify the
passions needs to be carried out on the level of both soul and body. On the level of the soul they are purified
through prayer, through the regular use of the sacraments of Confession and
Communion, through daily reading of Scripture, through feeding our mind with
the thought of what is good, through practical acts of loving service to
others. On the level of the body they
are purified above all through fasting and abstinence, and through frequent
prostrations during the time of prayer.
Knowing that man is not an angel but a unity of body and soul, the
Orthodox Church insists upon the spiritual value of bodily fasting. We do not fast because there is anything in
itself unclean about the act of eating and drinking. Food and drink are, on the contrary, God’s
gift, from which we are to partake with enjoyment and gratitude. We fast, not because we despise the divine
gift, but so as to make ourselves aware that it is indeed a gift—so as to
purify our eating and drinking, and to make them, no longer a concession to
greed, but a sacrament and means of communion with the Giver. Understood in this way, ascetic fasting is
directed not against the body but against the flesh. Its aim is not destructively to weaken the
body, but creatively to render the body more spiritual.
. . .
St Paul, however, is
careful to say: “I know that in my flesh
dwells nothing good.” Our ascetic
warfare is against the flesh, not against the body as such. “Flesh” is not the same as “body”. The term flesh, as used in the passage just
quoted, signifies whatever within us is sinful and opposed to God; thus it is
not only the body but also the soul in fallen man that has become fleshly and
carnal. We are to hate the flesh, but we
are not to hate the body, which is God’s handiwork and the temple of the Holy
Spirit. Ascetic self-denial is thus a
fight against the flesh, but it is a fight not against but for the body. As Fr Sergei
Bulgakov used to say, “Kill the flesh, in order to acquire a body.” Asceticism is not self-enslavement but the
way to freedom. Man is a tangled mesh of
self-contradictions: only through asceticism can he gain spontaneity.
Asceticism, understood in
this sense as a struggle against the flesh, against the sinful and fallen
aspect of the self, is clearly something that is required from all Christians, and not only from those
under monastic vows. The monastic
vocation and that of marriage—the way of negation and the way of
affirmation—are to be seen as parallel and complementary. The monk or nun is not a dualist but, to the
same degree as the married Christian, is seeking to proclaim the intrinsic
goodness of the material creation and of the human body; and, by the same
token, the married Christian is called to asceticism. The difference lies solely in the outward
conditions under which the ascetic warfare is carried on. Both alike are ascetics, both alike are
materialists (using the word in its true Christian sense). Both alike are sin-denying and world-affirming
(The Orthodox Way, pgs, 49, 50, 116,
61).
Mr
Berry’s answer to all these difficulties and divisions is ‘good work’ or
‘right-livelihood’, ideas he finds mostly absent from the Western Christianity
he is familiar with:
As the connections have
been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by
restoring the wholeness of work. There
is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into
meaninglessness. And there is work that
is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of
connections–as one is now said to work “for a living” or “to support a
family”—but the enactment of connections.
It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the
sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love
(‘Body and the Earth’, p. 133).
The
virtues he believes will manifest themselves when good work is practiced are
faithfulness, gratefulness, humility, neighborliness, an active, this-worldly
charity of acts and good skills, courage, life-long devotion, perseverance even
in small things, stewardship, and priesthood (man acting as priest of creation)
(‘The Gift of Good Land’, pgs. 272-81).
Here,
too, he will find that the Orthodox way fulfils his longings.
Fourthly, deification is
not a solitary but a ‘social’ process.
We have said that deification means ‘following the commandments’; and
these commandments were briefly described by Christ as love of God and love of
neighbour. The two forms of love are
inseparable. A person can love his
neighbour as himself only if he loves God above all; and a person cannot love
God if he does not love his fellow humans (1 John iv, 20). Thus there is nothing selfish about
deification; for only if he loves his neighbour can a person be deified. ‘From our neighbour is life and from our
neighbour is death,’ said Antony of Egypt.
‘If we win our neighbour we win God, but if we cause our neighbour to stumble
we sin against Christ.’ Humans, made in
the image of the Trinity, can only realize the divine likeness if they live a
common life such as the Blessed Trinity lives:
as the three persons of the Godhead ‘dwell’ in one another, so we must
‘dwell’ in our fellow humans, living not for ourselves alone, but in and for
others. ‘If it were possible for me to
find a leper,’ said one of the Desert Fathers, ‘and to give him my body and to
take his, I would gladly do it. For this
is perfect love.’ Such is the true
nature of theosis [i.e., the Orthodox
idea of salvation: partaking of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4)--W.G.].
Fifthly, love of God and
of our fellow humans must be practical:
Orthodoxy rejects all forms of Quietism, all types of love which do not issue
in action. Deification, while it
includes the heights of mystical experience, has also a very prosaic and
down-to-earth aspect. When we think of
deification, we must think of the Hesychasts praying in silence and of St
Seraphim with his face transfigured; but we must think also of St Basil caring
for the sick in the hospital at Caesarea, of St John the Almsgiver helping the
poor at Alexandria, of St Sergius in his filthy clothing, working as a peasant
in the kitchen garden to provide the guests of the monastery with food. These are not two different ways, but one
(Bishop Kallistos, Orthodox Church,
p. 237).
St
Justin Popovich of Serbia (+1979) likewise declares,
And what is the culture of
the evangelical, historical, Orthodox Theanthropos (God-man), the Lord
Jesus? What is it based on? It is based entirely on the Person of Christ
the Theanthropos. God became man in
order to lift man up to God. This is the
beginning and the end between which Orthodox theanthropic culture moves. Its motto is:
The God-man must be pre-eminent in all things. Neither God alone nor man alone, but the
God-man. This personifies and actualizes
the closest unity between God and man:
God is not degraded on man’s account nor is man on God’s. An ideal balance is thus achieved, and an
ideal harmony between man and God is found.
Man achieves the fullness and perfection of his personality through
unification with the God-man.
Theanthropy is the only category through which the manifold activity of
Orthodox culture is revealed. Beginning
with the God-man, it concludes with the ideal, integrated, theanthropized
man. In the center of the worlds stands
Christ the Theanthropos. He is the axis
around which all worlds, both high and low, revolve. He is the mysterious center towards which all
souls that hunger for eternal truth and life gravitate. He is both the project and the source of all creative
forces of Orthodox theanthropic culture.
Here God works and man collaborates; God creates through man and man
creates through God; here the divine creation is continued through man. To this end, man brings out of himself all
that is divine and puts it into action, creation and life. In this creativity, all that is divine, not
only in man but also in the world around him, is expressed and brought into
action; all that is divine is active, and all that is human joins in this
activity. But in order to collaborate
successfully with God, man must accustom himself to thinking, feeling, living,
and creating by God. All this reveals to
us the goal of Orthodox culture.
What is this goal? To bring more of the divine into man and
realize it in him and in the world around him.
In other words: to incarnate God in man and the world. Orthodox culture is, therefore, the cult of
Christ our God, the service of Him.
Indeed, Orthodox, theanthropic culture is the unceasing service of
Christ our God, unceasing divine service.
Man serves God through himself and all creation around him. He systematically, deliberately, brings God
and the divine into all his work, all his creativity. He awakens all that is divine in nature
around him, so that nature, led by man with his yearning for Christ, can serve
God. In this way, all creation
participates in the universal, divine service, for nature serves man, who
serves God.
Theanthropic culture
transforms man from within, moving from the inner to the outer. It refines the soul and, through the soul,
the body. . . . The God-man first
transfigures the soul and then the body.
The transformed soul transforms the body, transfiguring matter.
The goal of theanthropic
culture is to transfigure, not just man and mankind, but, through them, the
whole of nature. How can this goal be
achieved? Only by theanthropic means:
through the evangelical virtues of faith and love, hope and prayer, fasting and
humility, meekness and compassion, love for God and one’s fellow-man. Theanthropic, Orthodox culture is built by
exercise in these virtues. By practicing
them, a man makes his ugly soul beautiful, his dark soul light, his sinful soul
holy and Christ-like. The body is
transformed into a framework for its Christ-like soul.
Through the practice of
the evangelical virtues, man gains control over himself and nature around
him. Driving sin out of himself and the
world around him, he drives out the savage and destructive forces, completely
transfiguring himself and the world, taming nature in and around him. This is best exemplified by the saints. By sanctifying and transforming themselves
through the practice of the evangelical virtues, they sanctify and transform
nature around them. Many of the saints
were served by wild beasts and, by their mere presence, tamed lions, bears, and
wolves. Their relationship with nature
was prayerful, gentle, meek, and compassionate, not rough, cruel, inimical, and
savage.
The Kingdom of God on
earth, Orthodox culture, is not created by external, forcible and mechanical
intrusion but by an internal, willing and personal acceptance of the Lord
Christ through the constant practice of the Christian virtues. . . .
The first and greatest commandment of Orthodox culture is,
therefore: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of
God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you”
(Matt. 6:33). All bodily needs will be
added: food, clothing and shelter (cf. Matt. 6:25-32); all in addition to the
Kingdom of God. Western culture seeks
this addition first . . . . In this lies
its tragedy, for it has worn out the soul with worry about material
things. . . .
The list of needs that
modern man has invented for himself is unending. For the satisfaction of his numerous
senseless needs, man has turned this precious planet of God’s into a slaughterhouse.
The Lord, Who loves mankind, has long
ago revealed the one thing necessary
to each man and to mankind (cf. Luke 10:42).
What is this one thing? Christ the Theanthropos and all that He
brings with Himself: divine truth, divine righteousness, love, goodness,
holiness, immortality, eternity, and every other divine perfection. This is the one thing needful to man and mankind, and all other human needs are
so peripheral in comparison with them as to be almost unnecessary.
When man seriously contemplates
the mysteries of his life and the world around him in the light of the Gospel,
he is forced to conclude that his ultimate need is to renounce all needs and
resolutely follow the Lord Christ, being united to Him by the practice of
evangelical ascesis. If he does not do
so, he remains spiritually sterile, insensate and lifeless; his soul withers,
dissipates and decays, and he dies gradually until he is completely lifeless
and nothing remains. . . . (‘Humanistic and Theanthropic Culture’, pgs. 49-52)
This
saying of St Isaac the Syrian’s (+ c. 700) about love may be the most
reassuring of all the Orthodox teachings on right-livelihood for Mr Berry:
What is a charitable
heart? It is a heart which is burning with a loving charity for the whole of
creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons — for all
creatures. He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature
without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion
which seizes his heart; a heart which is so softened and can no longer bear to
hear or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being
inflicted upon any creature. This is why such a man never ceases to pray also
for the animals, for the enemies of truth, and for those who do him evil, that
they may be preserved and purified. He will pray even for the lizards and
reptiles, moved by the infinite pity which reigns in the hearts of those who
are becoming united with God (‘St. Isaac the Syrian’).
V. Conclusion
Mr
Berry has some knowledge of the Orthodox Church. He mentions ‘the Greek Orthodox theologian
Philip Sherrard’ (‘Survival of Creation’, p. 308). Howsobeit, either he has not studied about
her thoroughly, or else he has conflated Orthodoxy with post-Schism Western
Christianity, which it is not. The
Orthodox Church is the eternal and unchanging Church of Christ, manifested in
time at Pentecost. The Great Schism of
1054 A.D. took Western Europe and her children away from the Orthodox Church,
which began the process of disintegration that so greatly distresses Mr
Berry. This separation between East and
West was not something that happened all at once. It began as we have seen with St Augustine
(+430), but really didn’t develop all that much from there until the rise of
Charlemagne (d. 814) and the Franks who found his theological innovations
useful in bolstering their imperial pretensions again Constantinople, the
center of the Christian world at that time.
The Schism was not long in coming thereafter.
He
is not alone in perceiving something amiss in the West after the Schism. Richard Weaver, to name another Southerner,
noted this at the start of his book Ideas
have Consequences. Yves Congar, Tage
Lindbom, and others have written about it as well. But for all this, he needn’t abandon
Christianity altogether for another religion (especially Buddhism, which denies
the reality of every bit of the creation Mr Berry cares so much about), nor
need he weary himself with reforming Western Christianity’s teachings and
practices. All that is needful is his
entry into the Holy Orthodox Church, the original, pre-Schism Church of the
West, and his proclamation of her teachings to those who are near at hand and to
all who are afar off (Acts 2:39).
Works Cited
Berry,
Wendell. ‘The Body and the Earth’. The Art
of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Wirzba, Norman, edr. Berkeley, Cal.: Counterpoint, 2002.
--. ‘Christianity and the Survival of
Creation’. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Wirzba, Norman, edr. Berkeley, Cal.: Counterpoint, 2002.
--. ‘The Gift of Good Land’. The Gift
of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berkeley, Cal.:
Counterpoint, 1981.
Lossky,
Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius,
trans. Crestwood, Ny.: SVS Press, 1976
[1944].
Popovich,
Saint Justin. ‘Humanistic and
Theanthropic Culture’. Man and the God-man. 1st ed. Stanley, Benjamin Emmanuel, trans. Alhambra, Cal.: Sebastian Press, 2008.
‘St.
Isaac the Syrian (640? – eight century)’.
The Orthodox Fellowship of the
Transfiguration. 2016. http://www.orth-transfiguration.org/resources/library/writings-of-the-saints/st-isaac-syrian-640-eighth-century/. Opened 12 June 2017.
Sherrard,
Philip. The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences
of Modern Science. Ipswich, Suffolk:
Golgonooza Press, 1987.
Staniloae,
Father Dumitru. The Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 4: The Church:
Communion in the Holy Spirit. Ioan
Ionita, trans. and edr. Brookline,
Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012.
--. The
Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 5: The Sanctifying
Mysteries. Ionita and Barringer,
trans. and edr. Brookline, Mass.: Holy
Cross Orthodox Press, 2012.
Ware,
Bishop Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. 2nd
ed. New York, Ny.: Penguin Books, 1997.
--. The
Orthodox Way. Crestwood, Ny.: SVS
Press, 1995.
No comments:
Post a Comment