What have we done to Christianity..
Here is a text that makes me sad, being a delusion shared by millions of Christians or formerly Christians, and even by some who are not nor ever have been Christians. Read carefully this short text written by a simple blogger named Jeff Thayne, and you will have the clearest idea of what happened in the Greco-Roman-Christian world, in the world that we call today just Western or European, what happened in our world with the progressive alienation of the Western from the Eastern parts of Christianity, i.e. with the progressive fracture of ours, now desperately trying to heal.
By condemning defects of our culture, the author is thinking that he condemns Greek philosophy and the influence of Greek philosophy to Christianity, while in reality what he condemns is a certain interpretation, understanding and adoption of the Greek philosophy by the Western parts of Christianity in the progress of their alienation from a rather different experience of Greek philosophy in Byzantium.
This is not a mistake by a man who just hasn’t studied well and doesn’t know the subject, this is not a scholarly mistake, this is the wound of Christianity, the way millions of people conceive Christianity, whether or not arriving to the point of condemning it and searching for a change. For millions of people Greek philosophy is what this simple blog says to be, for millions of people Christianity is being understood and experienced in the miserable way this simple blog describes it.
According to Jeff, Christianity became a faith and devotion to an Unknown, Distant and Abstract Phantasm-of-God, thanks to our embrace of Greek philosophy.
This is all. All our illness. Just one simple sentence, yet it includes pretty much, the Platonic ideas as if being abstract, mathematical, schemes, the unknowing of the divine nature as a distant quasi-God, the knowing of the limitation of our concepts as a cruel compromise with having no relationship with God, no Father, just a life of negation and surrender to pure, absolute, eternal Incomprehensibility - and in the horizon of our past, a Greek philosophy that we “adopted”, as if it were something alien, as if it were not our blood, as if we could have abandoned it. We experience a non-Christian Christianity and a non-Platonic Platonism, whether we relate the two or not.
The blog I’m speaking about includes even some pictures/diagrams showing the analogy of (what the West thinks is) Greek philosophy and (what the West thinks is) Christianity as formed by (what the West thinks is) Greek philosophy. Read and see, slowly, especially the Orthodox, leave your comfort, nothing is self-evident, nothing is necessary, think how possible it was or can be even for you to experience a similar delusion and disappointment.
I read somewhere that a person before centuries in the West saw the Virgin Mary, and the Pope declared him a saint. What in the East is so common, to the degree that many converse with her and command her to “do this” and “do that”, in a familiarity that we have only with very close friends and relatives, so many people, even so many young, 15 years old, 20 years old, not monks, almost not even faithful!, see the Christ face to face - and in the West Incomprehensibility and Alienation reign.
Cf. Protestant and Orthodox iconography, Greek Orthodoxy - From Apostolic Times to the Present Day, Plato Home Page, Constantinople on the Web
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Tags : fracture | Christianity | divine nature | relationship with god | Greek Philosophy | Orthodox Christianity | Plato | Europe - West | Faith | delusion | alienation | Greek history | Byzantium | understanding | phantasm | compromise | greco roman
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The earliest example of this feeling in the West that I know of is Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), Lutheran theologian. He believed the Church had shipwrecked on the rocks of Hellenism quite early: with the opening verses of the Gospel of John. Before that in his view Christianity had been pure and true to its Hebraic roots, for what? … 50-70 years? Lutheranism, of course, under his guidance, would effect a correction (I haven’t seen it). Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote about the development of doctrine, which is just a phrase for the ongoing revelation by the Holy Spirit to His people of their own and His Sacred Tradition. It can look from the outside like syncretism, and I’m sorry to say that Harnack and your blogger you link to are, largely, outside the fold. In a similar vein to Newman, Justin Martyr thought highly of his fellow philosophers, judging them to have their share of God’s revelation which was becoming perfect in the Church. His comtemporary Tatian held what would become Harnack’s view, and became a heretic. Tertullian would later gloat over the prospect of philosophers burning in the Judgment; he also died out of the Church to become a Montanist. Without any genetic relationship, bad ideas will recur. Our human repertoire seems sadly limited.
I know you dislike the Catholic overreliance on Reason (I, Catholic, deplore it too, and am grateful I need only believe the dogmas, the body of which is quite small). But that overreliance is simply the healthy attitude of Justin Martyr hypertrophied. A far more traditional and numerous Catholic Church is doing very well in Africa and Asia; our future lies there, not in North America or Europe. The Catholic Church: always going wrong, always effecting some very good course correction (with help from above).
Lest you think you smell a fish, I have no wish to convert you. You have the Sacraments, the Apostolic succession. I love John Paul II, but he had a complex. I think the Orthodox Churches, the Church of the East also, the Thomasine Church in Kerala and probably others are doing quite well. Thank you for your work on the web. It’s the best.
To build upon your merry feelings, I think that in any case we can not speak about Catholics needing conversion to Orthodoxy or the opposite - not even of Protestants needing conversion. Conversion means an abandonment of something and a complete change - while Christianity needs, I think, enrichment, an enrichment that is not anything exotic, just a simple (and in the West forgotten more or less) demand to not have a faith of words and in words, but a living faith, a getting nearer to God, a meeting with Christ right here right now - or, at least, to not feel comfortable as long as this meeting is not happening. But we, on the contrary, have so many things to do, so many jobs, so many projects, so many ambitions and wishes - we don’t have time or desire for Him. Is it then strange that He remains away from us, as if He did not exist?
Thanks for your interesting comments and your kind remarks for the Blog.