Note: One of the “additions” I plan on making to Opus Publicum in the new year are brief book reviews. Hopefully they will prove to be of some value.
Archimandrite [Archbishop] Job Getcha, The Typikon Decoded (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2012), 313pgs.
Thus did He manifest His Almightiness, born of the Virgin, preserving the virginity of the Virgin intact, and He was born of God with neither complication, travail, evil nor a separation of forsaking the immutable Divine Essence, born God from God. Since mankind abandoned God, in place of Him worshipping graven images of humans, God the Word thus assumed the image of man, so that in banishing error and restoring truth, He should consign to oblivion the worshipping of idols and for Himself to be accorded Divine honour, since to Him becometh all glory and honour unto ages of ages.
– St. Gregory Thaumatourgos
David Bentley Hart’s essay, “The Myth of Schism,” which was published nearly seven years ago, won’t go away. Though given little notice by the Orthodox community at the time of its release, it has since become one of the lynchpins of Catholic (and some Orthodox) ecumenical hopes and dreams. Just when I assumed the essay had been mined (and criticized) for all that it is worth, along comes Mark Shea to quote the essay’s most perplexing, and some might say mythical, paragraph. Here’s a sample:
I like to think—call it the Sophiologist in me—that the tribulations that Eastern Christianity has suffered under Islamic and communist rule have insulated it from some of the more corrosive pathologies of modernity for a purpose, and endowed it with a special mission to bring its liturgical, intellectual, and spiritual strengths to the aid of the Western Christian world in its struggle with the nihilism that the post-Christian West has long incubated and that now surrounds us all, while yet drawing on the strengths and charisms of the Western church to preserve Orthodoxy from the political and cultural frailty that still afflicts Eastern Christianity. Whatever the case, though, we are more in need of one another now than ever.
As a Catholic, I don’t feel compelled (right now) to offer an intervention on what has turned out to be a fascinating exchange between Fr. Stephen Freeman (Orthodox Church in America) and several Orthodox critics on the topic of “moral Christianity.” Freeman’s posts are linked below. You can find links to his critics from there.
Addendum: Because I have already received one iMessage from a perplexed reader, let me be clear that I do not endorse a good deal of what Freeman says; though I believe his writing accurately reflects a certain type of thinking which is prevalent in contemporary Orthodoxy. Also, anytime “the West” is mentioned in a discussion among Orthodox, my eyes roll automatically.
The Monomakhos web-log is exceedingly silly, even by Orthodox blogging standards, but a recent comment by one Ashley Nevins is worth mulling over. I have some reservations about several of Nevins’s remarks, and I am certainly no fan of his ecclesial orientation. However, Nevins’s comments on the role of shaming in contemporary American Orthodox “spiritual circles” is not entirely off the mark. To give you some background, his son, Scott Nevins, was a monk at the Ephraimite monastery, St. Anthony’s, in Arizona. He committed suicide.
I had no intention to write so much on “things Eastern” at the start of this week; it just worked out that way. What I had wanted to do was write a few words on St. Josaphat, the great Ukrainian Catholic martyr whose feast day is celebrated this week by Eastern and Western Catholics who are on the Gregorian Calendar. That may be too inflammatory at the moment. While in years past I facetiously wished my Orthodox friends and readers a “Blessed feast of St. Josaphat,” the ongoing tensions in Ukraine lead me to conclude that such well-wishing would be in bad taste. After all, none of the Orthodox sent me a special greeting on August 6, the feast day of Maxim Sandovich. (If there is an objective, non-polemical, account of this Orthodox priest’s life, I’ve never seen it.)
The delightful and insightful Fr. John Hunwicke has posted his thoughts on Metropolitan Hilarion Alfayev’s recent paper on primary which was delivered at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary. There’s nothing surprising in Hilarion’s paper, which is to say that there’s nothing new in it at all. If you’ve paid even a modicum of attention to the public spat that has been going on between “Second Rome” and “Third Rome” concerning primacy then you already know where Hilarion stands. Hunwicke, not wanting to ignite a fresh round of “First Rome/Second n’ Third Rome” fisticuffs, refrains from critiquing Hilarion’s paper. Instead he draws out two points concerning local particular churches and the true meaning of synodality respectively and applies them to the present situation in the Catholic Church. Hunwicke then goes on to offer a post scriptum on the Metropolitan of Volokolamsk and his recent behavior at the “Extraordinary Synod on the Family”:
I thought I would never find myself writing this . . . but three cheers for George Weigel! His latest piece at First Things, “Ecumenism and Russian State Power,” speaks forcefully in defense of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church against the half-truths and outright lies of the Moscow Patriarchate while calling on Rome to serious rethink ecumenical ties with the present representatives of Russian Orthodoxy. From the article:
No “dialogue” is worth the appeasement of aggression abetted by falsehood. Nothing is accomplished in terms of moderating Russian Orthodoxy’s historic deference to Russian state power (be that tsarist power, communist power, or the “managed democracy” of Mr. Putin) by giving Hilarion a platform like the Synod. And despite the fantasies of some Western pro-life and pro-family activists, there is nothing to be gained for those great causes in tandem with the current leadership of Russia, or of Russian Orthodoxy.
Stemming and then reversing the tide of Western decadence cannot be done by compromises with the truth.
Although I have some reservations concerning the Western-liberal lens through which Weigel views current events in Ukraine, his other piece, “Ukraine Rising,” at National Review Online is also worth reading.
My contributions to this web-log may be a bit spotty this week. As such, let me take a moment to highlight another corner of the blogosphere where you can direct your reading time: Professor Adam DeVille’s Eastern Christian Books. (You can read a brief profile on DeVille over at the Ochlophobist’s blog here.) Whether you’re trying to keep tabs on the latest Eastern Christian scholarship or looking for suggestions for your Christmas wish list, ECB is the place to go. ECB contains not only reviews of new Eastern Christian titles, but also interviews, commentaries, and pieces of DeVille’s own scholarship. Go forth and spend hours there.
Given the heavier nature of the previous three posts, I thought I would post something more relaxed while also striving to answer a question that several people have posed to me over the years, namely, “Don’t you miss the Orthodox liturgy?” (Admittedly, this question has been pitched in various ways, some more “polemical” than others.) That question, when it comes from the Orthodox, is usually bound up with their not-incorrect sense that the Church of Rome, at this point in her storied and sometimes tumultuous history, is by and large a liturgical wasteland with only a handful oases to sustain the faithful.
