{"id":549,"date":"2017-10-29T14:55:01","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T11:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=549"},"modified":"2017-10-29T14:55:01","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T11:55:01","slug":"the-old-church-and-our-christian-intelligentsia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/549\/the-old-church-and-our-christian-intelligentsia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old Church and our Christian intelligentsia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Just a few remarks. Since\u00a0our mind has\/acquired a rationalizing ability and\u00a0our 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<\/a> our ‘intelligentsia’ is not more but less intelligent, with\u00a0a weaker rationalizing power. We may understand the superiority of the heart, but this understanding too needs the intellectual ability.<\/p>\n

Therefore what is our problem really? Our problem is, in my opinion, that we focused on rationalization instead of seeing in it a relatively\u00a0inferior power. This started to happen mainly\u00a0in the Western scholasticism, and is due to our weakened immediate experience of living together with God, known also as ‘mystical’\u00a0 experience. This way\u00a0we passed from being faithful to being followers of an\u00a0ideology, and this\u00a0is the start,\u00a0not all the way. One\u00a0step further\u00a0brought us to our present condition. This step is the mass culture.<\/p>\n

Some time ago a person who wanted to know not theology, but just painting or music, had to find a great master of that art,\u00a0had to undergo many pains in order to find him,\u00a0be accepted by\u00a0him and probably\u00a0achieve that knowledge. In the mass culture we created, thousands of bored\u00a0‘students’ may attend the most demanding of arts, as is theology, and then be named en masse “theologians”, even “Masters” of Theology.<\/p>\n


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