Here is an interesting post at JN1034: “The Gospel According to Ontology – The Mind Is Never the Wiser (We’ve Empowered the Christian Intelligentsia to Slaughter the Heart)”. Read it and please send any disagreements you might have. I have a few myself although in general I agree. First, I didn’t find an explanation of our leaving the ways of the old church and arriving to our present condition. Second, (which, I think, is due precisely to the absence of an explanation), the author of the post seems to underestimate intellectual activity.
Just a few remarks. Since our mind has/acquired a rationalizing ability and our faith encompasses this ability even to respond to heretical thoughts (or discern what is heretical and what isn’t), we have to understand and experience God even in this ability of ours, in any case to exercise our freedom to explore possibilities and form our churces. Intellectual/rationalizing thinking is not to be abandoned nor does it ‘slaughter’ the heart by itself, as it did not in the very old church that we admire. Compared with St Maximus Confessor our ‘intelligentsia’ is not more but less intelligent, with a weaker rationalizing power. We may understand the superiority of the heart, but this understanding too needs the intellectual ability.
Therefore what is our problem really? Our problem is, in my opinion, that we focused on rationalization instead of seeing in it a relatively inferior power. This started to happen mainly in the Western scholasticism, and is due to our weakened immediate experience of living together with God, known also as ‘mystical’ experience. This way we passed from being faithful to being followers of an ideology, and this is the start, not all the way. One step further brought us to our present condition. This step is the mass culture.
Page 12
