Michael Azkoul
Orthodoxy and the transcendence of religion: a comment
A response to Em. Timiades, Saint Photios on Transcendence of Culture
Written especially for Myriobiblos
IF WE DEFINE religion as the experience of the relationship between man, the cosmos and the Divine; or, perhaps, as man’s “ultimate concern,” to borrow the words of Paul Tillich; then, religion is the basis of culture, not the product of it. Culture is the manifestation of religion. Historically, Orthodoxy, in whatever culture she has been incarnated, has become the new substance, displacing the old, which the cultural forms reveal. Today she is everywhere challenged by the religion of secularism.
1.
In the first millennium of her existence, the Church spread to numerous cultures which explains, in large part, the diversity of customs, rites, calendars (1), while, nevertheless, sharing “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5). Diversity of cultures did not translate into diversity of creeds, precisely because the cultures were transformed by the religion they welcomed --- the reverse of what is occurring today.
For example, East and West Christian Rome, whatever their cultural differences, shared the same Orthodox Faith. Thus, the Easterner, St Justin Martyr, founded a catechetical school in Rome. Disciple of St Polycarp of Smyrna, St Irenaeus, became bishop of Lyons in Gaul. St Firmilian of Caesarea supported St Cyprian of Carthage in his struggle with Pope Stephen. St Athanasius of Alexandria ignited the monastic movement in the West. The Scythian, St John Cassian, ordained to the deaconate by St John Chrysostom, visited the Egyptian thebaid, carrying its wisdom to the West in order to advance “the highest philosophy.” The monastic ideals of St Benedict of Nursia were inspired by the works of St John Cassian and St Basil the Great. A Benedictine monastery will eventually come to Mt Athos. The Latin Father, St Jerome established a monastery near Bethlehem. Several writings of another Latin Father, the Orthodox Pope, St Gregory the Great, were translated into Greek. St Theodore of Tarsus became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
During the seventh and eighth centuries most of the Popes of Rome were Greeks. Pope Gregory IV, despite the vehement objections of the iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus, called upon the entire Church to celebrate the feast of All Saints (instituted by his predecessor, Gregory III), in honor of those who died for the sacred icons. After the restoration of the icons (843), the West continued to paint icons, as we observe from its temples (e.g., St Mark’s in Venice) and book illumination (e.g., the St Gall and Lindisfarne Gospels).
Interesting, too, is the marriage of the Byzantine Princess, Theophano, to Otto II of Saxony (973-983). She filled the Aachen palace with icons --- the malignant legacy of Charlemange notwithstanding. Later, in Rome, at the coronation of Otto III (983-1002), the new emperor offered the crown of the German empire to the Greek monk, St Nilus the Wonderworker. Naturally, he declined the generous offer. We are aware of the missionary work in the West by two Greeks, Sts Cyril and Methodius, with the Pope’s permission. Such occurrences demonstrate, despite many disputes between Rome and Constantinople, that the Church possessed a single Faith. Culture, sometimes an obstacle, did not alter the common life in the Body of Christ.
2.
If not culture, how do we explain the so-called “division between East and West”? The emergence of a new religion (and culture), a distortion of “the Faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). The cause of the “division” is largely the work of one man --- Augustine of Hippo (“father of the Schoolmen,” Khomiakov called him) --- whose religio-philosophical synthesis, his ambition to elevate “faith” to cognition (credo ut intelligam) gradually and fatally infected the Latin West. Put another way, “insofar as the ‘Western’ tradition in theology is different from the ‘Eastern’,” writes A.H. Armstrong, “it is because it is Augustinian rather than because temperamentally, racially, geographically “Western’ or Latin or Roman.” He adds that the sine qua non of Augustinianism is Neo-Platonism (2).
The dominance of Augustinian theology begins during the Carolingian era. Charlemange slept with a copy of The City of God under his pillow, and his minister of education, Alcuin of York (735-804) wrote De fide Trinitate with Augustine as “the bedrock of his argument”(3). The work is little more than recitation of Augustine’s new model of the Trinity with the filioque. Such a cataphatic triadology signifies the formation of a new religion which includes a Nestorian dissolution of traditional christology (4) and, therefore, a bifurcation of the visible and invisible Church (for which Protestantism will be forever grateful), including the Mysteries which, incidentally, provide only a created grace. Augustine also joined the Platonic Ideas (kosmos noetos) to the divine Word which, among other things, linked them with his theory of double predestination. During the last decade of his life, he abandoned the traditional soteriology of the Church, that is, deification (5).
There are other theological errors to be discussed, but what has been delineated here sufficient to make the point. The numerous questions he raised (and failed to answer) were the offspring of rationalism hitherto unknown in the Church. Augustinianism has numerous components, some of them personal, but mostly it is a superbia cognescendi, the womb of theories born “in the fury of the dialectic hunt” (6). Having succumbed to the Graeco-Roman culture of his time, he fatally altered for himself and his posterity the Christianity with which he was entrusted. From his daring speculation came new religions and, indeed, a new culture. To honor Augustine with a place among the Fathers, to call him “saint” or “blessed,” is not only to render a consensus patrum impossible, but to conceive culture rather than religion as “transcendent.” The “transcendence of culture” is an invitation to doctrinal innovation, for culture changes and, if it dominates the religion with which it is associated, then, religion in its substance must change. What else has the philosophy of the post-Orthodox West demonstrated?
Such was the result of the religio-philosophical enterprise of both Augustine and Origen --- the unlawful use of pagan Hellenism ---, although Augustine succeeded in doing to the West what Origen failed to do to the East (7). Augustine is the source of every heresy that has hitherto tormented the West. Without the dualism (8) which characterized his thought, Western Orthodoxy would not have become the Roman Catholicism which spawned the multiplicity of Christian sects known as Protestantism.
Endnotes:
1. Nicea (325)adopted a calendar for the entire Church; but not all the local communities complied. Their refusal to accept the decision of the Council was not culture but faith. For example, the Church in Britain rejected the Nicean revision of the Julian calendar on account of its fidelity to the tradition of Sts Anatolios of Laodicea, Patrick, Columban and Aidan of Lindisfarne. In the eleventh century, however, she finally accepted the Nicean calendar. In this regard, the Orthodox Church was liturgically united until the twentieth century (see L. Gougaud, Christianity in the Celtic Land. Trans. By N. Joynt. London, 1932, p. 192f.; St Bede, Hist. Eng. Church. II, 3; III, 25)
2. "St Augustine and the Eastern Tradition," Eastern Churches Quarterly V, 7 (1943), 167; Hermann Reuter agrees that "Augustin hat die Trennung des Occidents und Orients verbereits, eine bahnbrechende Wirkung uand den ersteren ausgeuebt" (Augustinische Studien. Gotha, 1887, 229). B.B. Warfield says, "But it was Augustine who imprinted upon the Western section of the Church a character so specific as naturally to bring the separation of the Church in its train" (Calvin and Augustine. Philadelphia, 1956, p. 307)
3. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church. Oxford, 1964, p. 211.
4. Augustine viewed the humanity and Divinity of Christ as mated by grace --- created grace (Ench. IX, 36 PL 40 250). See also R.A. Greer, “The Analogy of Christ in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Christology,” The Journal of Theological Studies XXXVI, 1 (1983), 82-98; and J. McWilliam Dewart, “The Influence of Theodore of Mopsuestia on Augustine’s Letter 187,” Augustinian Studies X (1979), 113-132.
5. Augustine recognized neither the distinction between the transcendent and economic Trinity; nor, indeed, between Essence and Energies in God. He saw in these distinctions a violation of the divine simplicity. For this very reason, he developed his peculiar triadology --- “relation of opposites” (See V. Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Triadology,” The Eastern Churches Quarterly VII, 2 [1948], 31-53). His first sortie into the subject of deification left him with the conclusion, “Before we are made partakes of His immortality, He was first made the partaker of our mortality. However, He was made mortal, not of His substance, but of ours. Because we are made immortal, not of our substance but of His…” (Enna. In Ps. CXLVI, 11 PL 1906-1907). Later, Augustine said, God is God by nature, but “the rest of us are made gods by His (created!) grace, not of His substance, that they should not be the same as He…” (Enn. Psal. XLIX, 2 PL 36 565).
6. Reuter, s. 10.
7. See the valuable discussion in H. Chadwick, “Christian Platonism in Origen and Augustine,” Origenia Tertia: the Third International Colloquium for Origen Studies [The University of Manchester, 7th-11th, 1981. Ed. by R.Hanson & H. Crouzel. Rome, 1985, 225-230; and B. Altaner, “Aukgustinus und Origenes,” Historische Jahrbuch LXX (1951), 15-41.
8. See K. Flasch, “Le conflit d’Augustine,” in Augustine. Ed. by P. Ranson. Paris, 1988, 40-51.
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