The Big Three: Rome, Geneva, and Constantinople

http://www.christiantruth.com/orthodoxyapophaticism.html

A new inter-faith dialogue is springing up, one not dominated by the World Council of Churches. As Rod Dreher perceptively analyzes in "Crunchy Cons" (see his book and his website) and as the anonymous Spengler of Asia Times Online has pointed out, Christians of traditional bent have discovered more in common by going outside their own communions than by continuing to try to talk to the liberalizing elements within their own branches.

The Johannine community of hope (Orthodoxy), the Roman community of love (Petrine Catholicism), and the Pauline community of faith (Evangelicalism) are beginning to understand each other. The above link illustrates a scholarly and improved attempt to promote the growing consensus. This consensus is not a Descartian, liberal, or scientific effort, but one based on maintaining Truth in the midst of, not a converging outlook, but a convergent "sight" of what we all agree is paramount : the living truth of God Himself, alive and well in a modern world.

Franz Rosenszweig, a Jew who very nearly converted to Christianity (in my opinion, he was a latent Christian), has outlined all of this in his seminal "Star of Redemption". Sometimes an outsider can see things more clearly in the forest of experience, and in this case, what he saw was the commonality of spirituality in the Judeo-Christian faith traditions (as opposed to the Islamic tradition, which represents an inversion of Judeo-Christian categories into a paganized, polytheistic monotheism that depends upon a capricious Allah recreating by fiat the world at His whim through the miracle of Koranic speech: as Rosenszweig puts it - sorcery by God the Revealer aimed at God the Creator, along with a materialistic redemption provided by worldy power and a legalistic and sensual afterlife).

There are several issues at stake here:
1) Orthodoxy has a tension between a very visible Church (outside of which there is no Church) and apophatic theology of negation that attempts to approach the energies (not the essence) of God.
2) Evangelicalism has a tension between upholding living truth and reconciling a divergency of individualistic outlooks where every prophet/priest/king interprets the Bible.
3) Catholicism has a tension between its rich Christian Kultur and the need for separation from the world.
These are simplistic starting points, but they give some idea of what the "traditionalists" are up against. There is no question that a community of faith and tradition aids the individual. All three traditions, however, are struggling with modernity and globalism. A synergy of the three will probably be necessary to confront postmodernism, and, indeed, that is what is happening.

I would like to suggest that the Orthodox begin by looking at the Evangelical doctrine of New Birth (Regeneration) in order to balance their critique of the "juridical/legalistic" categories of Western theology (as opposed to the ontological/energetic categories of Eastern theology). The Catholics are going to have to follow Ratzinger's thinking on the issues of the day and go back to Ur von Balthazar's theology of "Only Love is Credible". And the Evangelicals are finally going to have to confront their Gnostic-paradigms that deny the role of time and matter and hierarchy in aiding the individual's quest for God.

Those are the starting points.

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2005_03.html

Orthodox Spirituality

http://incommunion.org/articles/conferences-lectures/the-passions-enemy-or-friend
This is how they make you a bishop...! The eloquence of this man is patent, and his argument, invaluable. We are to be transfigured, and transfiguring is the death of our old man and his passions.
The importance of this insight is immense. As Kallistos comments, though we are as meek as oysters, even oysters have enemies. It is permissible for a Christian, for example, to hate (let the reader properly understand - we are not to hate as the Gentiles hate). We must keep our passions, without letting them destroy us, and (in secularese) channel them into something higher. That something higher is not some vague psychobabble, as it would be coming from the mouth of Sigmund Freud in his Viennese Biedermeier sitting room (as he wondered what the poltegeistian clapping sound from his bookshelf was, debating with Jung over whether it was a spiritual experience or not!), but is to be specifically understood as an entering into the life of Christ, the inside of the Trinity, the inner life of God.
Until I read Thomas Merton, I didn't understand that God had an inner life. Just like a real person. God is love, God is free, God is liberty. God is a person.

More Germans...

"Good fellows! Good fellows!" he repeats enthusiastically. "Do you know what they are yelling? Death to the Sultan! Good fellows! The old despotism is done for. The good times are at hand."
Schröder doesn't respond. He looks back in the direction of Constantinople -- a feeble strip of light shows him where it is; the sky is lighter there -- a pale reflection of the city lights. Far away, at the edge of the eastern horizon a black cloud gathers. And it seems to Schröder that this cloud has taken a strange shape... like a giant hand raised in threat from some far-distant, unknown place.
(Translation © Kenneth Kronenberg 2004)
From Die Hand des Unsichtbaren Imam
"The Hand of the Invisible Imam is the work of a very perceptive and politically astute outsider--Paul Farkas was a Hungarian Jew--and is a contemporary novel of the time. Extremely critical of German and Great Power short-sightedness, Farkas lost no opportunity to satirize the characters who came under his lens. However, the larger backdrop of the novel is the chasm between the thinking of European Enlightenment-based liberalism and that of parts of the East. The novel is a cautionary tale about the dangers of romanticization, ignorance, and arrogance."

Pride and Prejudice

http://www.workingtitlefilms.com/featurePhotoSet.php?featureID=89
http://www.sndc.demon.co.uk/japp.htm
It's not easy to admit that one of the greatest works of English Literature was written by a woman. Peter Leithart has done a great job of arguing that Austen was a real Aristotelian, a student of human nature, and a precise minaturist of morals. The fact is is that I can't think of a single contrived scene in her book - there is no Deus Ex Machina, no pathetic fallacy, no jarring disharmony of characters. Everything occurs, as Shakespeare would have it occur, according to a Nature that is striving to move to Supernature, but without giving itself away to the fact. Her characters are always in character. Elopement leads naturally to scandal and coverup, which in turns provides the impetus to reunite Darcy and Lizzie, who were separated by the pre-scandal to start with (the scandal of being from a loud family without riches). A perfect circle.
The new movie is, in my opinion, less well done dramatically than the older television version. Each version emphasizes different scenes and different lines. Collins, in particular, received more attention in the first. However, the production values far surpass the older, and I can forgive its shortness, as its for the cinema. And the characters are well cast, with the exception of Judi Dench as Lady de Burgh. The old one was immensely better. Keira Knightley is very well indeed (a bit of all right), and Matthew MacFayden, that god among Englishmen for charisma and stage appeal, does a better than passable job. All in all, worth owning and rewatching. Jane Austen is wearing better and better with time.

More Shakespeare

http://cathasach71854.googlepages.com/shakespearepage
Here it is - the beginning of my Shakespearean criticism. I am a little nervous, as my love for the Bard started small and grew slowly. Many have gone before me, and there are links supplied to most of them.

Orthodoxy and Protesting

Churchianity. It's the great tendency of any church. On the one hand, it is quite true to say that outside of the Church's pale, there is no salvation. Defining the frozen limits is where God and the devil lie, in the details. To illustrate, Eastern Orthodoxy argues that you are to take up your cross, and follow Him. Monks and clerics then tell you what your cross is, and how to do that. Crucifying your passions, you are then illumined with the Incarnational life of Christ contained in the sacramental existence of the Church. Protestantism tends to say, no, take up your cross, and follow Him. There is no need to look for a cross, they say, it's right here - abstain from immorality and fleshly lusts that war against the soul. That is the true sacrament of the individual human body and temple.
These debates can go too far, and usually do. Like Satan arguing over the body of Moses, a particular Church tries to claim every inch of heroic, virtuous ground (Moses' body) for their very own, lock him away within the hallowed precincts, and threaten to shut the Church doors on any who don't get inside before the deluge. Protestantism is as guilty as Orthodoxy or Catholicism. Hence, the Spirit blows on, like the wind, wherever He wills, for saying that you can only reach God inside the Church is tantamount to claiming God can't reach someone where He wishes at all. It is one thing to warn of judgement outside the Church, and another to think that the host of witnesses and the energies of God are locked up within human categories and institutions. Thus arises Churchianity, and thus the tendency of the Church to refer to herself as Mother Kirk, the female principle, which if allowed to progress unchecked, will stifle the God Who prefers to be identified primarily as manly.
This is not to deter or degrade the Sophia principle, or the feminine characteristics of the Holy Ghost. God is also like a mother hen, and tends to all His Creation like a Mother. However, the Spirit's vision is too large for humans to completely regulate and grasp, like a woman tending her home. The prodigal can and does return. Out under the Dantean stars, in the midst of hell and war and all things gone awry thanks to men, and especially then, sometimes, in the midst of the operation of the angels of death and blood riding the whirlwind, the still, small voice of the consuming fire that does not burn can speak to the eternal rebels of man who always fly the skull and bones in their doubt and despair.
God loves even the lonesome cowboys and the cutthroat pirates of our race.
And He shall reveal it in His time.
The greatest rebel of all time was that man called Christ, who laughed at and loved all Creation, even to the depths.

Westernism

One of the biggest problems in the West is our tradition of Platonism. You know the attitude, because it predominates everywhere - if the facts don't fit your theory, so much for the facts! Um schlimmer fur die Tatsachen! remarked Herr George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, when questioned a little too closely. Our theologies are not uninfected, nor our politics, nor our ideology. In general, it's assumed that absolute rules or Ideas or God govern reality, when in point of fact, Life remains a lot more like poker or horse racing than chess (hence, Reagan won the Cold War against the Russians). Statistics and trends govern reality. In one sense, there are no absolutes. Who would make anything absolute except God, and who can absolutely know Him absolutely? There is room in the human condition for Divine doubt, paradox, ambiguity, shadow, questioning, and seeking. Only in the religion of Islam and the universe of Allah is there any such thing as absolute certitude, perfect assurance, or invincible arguments. In this sense, every Westerner is a born humanist. That is, he believes in the principle of Incarnation, which states that Grace perfects Nature rather than altering or obliterating it, as Allah is wont to do when sufficiently enraged or capricious. Allah's will is His only limit. A Westerner believes there is room in even heaven for curiousity and the honest doubt. God condescends to our condition, and ennobles it. Resurrection is a change of condition, and not an annihilation of our kind, as in Platonism, in which the soul lives on, outside the body, gone forever. We just keep forgetting this and fall back into trying to be philosophers. As Blaise Pascal wrote so long ago, his life was illumined when he realized that the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In this sense, we have to continually go back to our Bibles in humility, back to our inmost hearts, back to our roots, back to our Church Fathers, back to our childhood, in short, and re-evaluate our priorities in the light of wisdom gained. What assumptions are disproven by the existence of the modern Jew or the caterpillar transformed to butterfly or the shining stars of deep heaven? Is what we believe a philosophy we have contrived, or a theology we have proved with suffering? Is Reality fundamentally misleading or is it merely veiled and subtly different than it appears at first glance?
The answers to these questions will determine whether we remain, not only recognizably Western, but (I would argue), meaningfully Christian.
We cannot remain in our comfortable fortresses, with our stock reactions, and our old proverbs.
http://www.isteve.com/philosophy.htm
http://groups.google.com/group/Until-the-Day-Dawns/about