I talk a lot about the effects of technology, the technical system and the way of thinking called technique, but they are sustained by a way of seeing the universe that we might broadly call: "Deism"
Hi Kruptos, I really enjoyed this post, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed the simple, down-to-earth, connected vision you shared. A long response with a couple of quotes incoming... It is interesting see you link to a review of an Eastern Orthodox book, and express ideas that seem congruent with Eastern Orthodox thought. Is Eastern Orthodoxy something you have explored?
You wrote, "The clockwork idea of God allowed us to harness the forces of creation to serve our desires to know all things, command all things and to make money, to possess all things. We wanted to command the power of God in creation. Because of this, though, we have build a framework of knowledge and technology that empowers us, allows us to uses the energies of God and bend them to our will, but also builds layer upon layer of mental architecture between us and God."
Yes, this is a good point. We live in an age of ubiquitous nihilism where life seems to be meaningless, random, and with a heavy emphasis on materialism (even to those who are religious, as this feeling permeates all of culture). But it didn't used to be this way. Society used to be one which offered man a meaningful place in the world. Per Richard Tarnas in "The Passion of the Western Mind":
"Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high Middle Ages—with virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and poor, the sacramental rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian religiosity in every sphere of human activity—all this can hardly fail to elicit a certain admiration for the magnitude of the Church’s success in establishing a universal Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission. And whatever Christianity’s actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe."
Or per Timothy/Kallistos Ware in "The Orthodox Church": "Not without reason has Byzantium been called ‘the icon of the heavenly Jerusalem’. Religion entered into every aspect of Byzantine life. The Byzantine’s holidays were religious festivals; the races which he attended in the Circus began with the singing of hymns; his trade contracts invoked the Trinity and were marked with the sign of the Cross. Today, in an untheological age, it is all but impossible to realize how burning an interest was felt in religious questions by every part of society, by laity as well as clergy, by the poor and uneducated as well as the Court and the scholars. Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council: ‘The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask ‘Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made from nothing.’"
You also write, "One of the challenges that many of us will have to overcome is our own Protestant faith. In many ways, by rejecting the excesses of the “superstitions” of the Roman Church, we prepared Christendom for the technical reality by rationalizing the Christian faith."
Yes, the introduction of Aristotelean reason led to Protestantism which led to modern secular liberalism, which is a common criticism of both Catholicism and Protestantism from the Orthodox perspective. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has a great article addressing head-on Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity. He agrees with Nietzsche and Heidegger’s interpretations to an extent (you reference Heidegger), but he believes that modern nihilism is not the final form of Christianity but merely the result of it’s receding, that Christianity was so great, and so fully conquered the Hellenistic Gods that came before that there is simply no room to go back to them, and that all there is to be done is re-embrace Christ and Orthodoxy. The article is here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/10/christ-and-nothing
Yes. I was, as a Reformed Christian introduced to the Orthodox in undergrad and they have always had a pull there for me. I agree that there no way out of the western dilemma but to dedicate ourselves anew to Christ and worship again the living God. I have written on this in the past. The future is Christian, but if I had to venture as guess it will be some mix of Reformed, Calvinism of a European, specifically Dutch extraction combined with Orthodoxy. It is practical institution building combined with mysticism. There will have to be some coming together, and I see those as the main two streams.
But the thing is, is that I don't think we live in a *Deist* world but a more agnostic or atheistic world. (Maybe I'm just biased.) The reason being, that Deism doesn't adhere to an *organized* religion (our motto is "God gave us reason, not religion"). It's not that organized religion is bad--it's great in many contexts, from the communal ties to awesome architecture--but it can be easily corrupted by those in power. Rather than rely on a priest or pastor telling you what to do, Deism allows people to "get it from the source," so to speak. One is able to strength their own connection to the Most High without doctrine or rituals. Many Deists believe we have a direct linkage to God--if he is the Watchmaker, then we are the watch and the gears within. If God made the cosmos and nature, then we are the cosmos and nature itself.
In modern society, however, there is a severe lack of spirituality as a whole. A Deist world wouldn't allow for this. If we had Deists in power, we'd be living in a time of Thomas Paines and Jeffersons.
Goosebumps, waves and waves of them. Sending this to people, this is like a sermon. I hope you do this more often. I'll have to read it again. Thank you
Kruptos - have you ever read any Rene Guenon? Once you read Guenon's thesis about the West, I don't think you look at things in the same way. Like Ellul. There's very few on the right reading Guenon for whatever reason. I lumped him mentally with Evola for the longest time. He would seem to be your cup of tea.
"The Crisis of the Modern World" is very short and an easy read. His shortcomings as a thinker are somewhat obvious too. But he lays his thesis out in that short book at the very beginning and it's quite a read.
You mentioned overcoming some of Protestantism and like many I left an Evangelical upbringing, and then rejected Catholicism out of a sense of it still being logic bound. I feel/know/live the difficulty of having been raised to see myself as mostly a brain operating a body and this is difficult to overcome. Likewise, it is a challenge to see God immanent - especially when most of life is spent in cities, indoors, cut off from natural life and ensconced in man's mini creation.
As for the story I understand the desire of ecumenism and without argument I will just posit that sort of thing could be the result of the abstracted principle oriented mind.
As someone who is Orthodox and with the Eucharist being what it is I must bring up that you are correct that the Eucharist is what is binding that group together. Also. any Orthodox partaking in such a ritual in the story would need to go through the rite to bring them back into communion with the Orthodox.
Stories are one of those things. I know all the institutional and theological challenges. I am myself perhaps trying to sort out what was “meant” in some of these things. What would a coming together of believers look like? Even if, say, a whole bunch of Calvinists joined the Orthodox en mass, or the other way round, it would change things. There is no way around this. But what does that look like. I sense a coming together. Does that mean institutional coming together? Liturgical? Confessional? I want to get past “the plan” and story seems a good way to explore these ideas in a way that is grounded. It was a new thing for me. I hesitated at first and then went with it.
That's cool. We're currently experiencing internal stress with outreach from some patriarchates reaching out to the RCC and it's something I am sensitive to, if that makes sense. I also just read Fr Seraphim Rose's Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (which is not about what he saw in New ageism and pentacostalism outreach from Buddhism, Hinduism into America ay the time. Easy breezy read, touches on ecumenism and reminded me of the recent PR about LLM universal religion.
Within Orthodoxy there is richness in history and tradition but it is generally ethnic in flavor. All the same doctrine, etc. I have been thinking a little about American Orthodoxy and what those characteristics would look like given US historical revivals and also our stereotyped behavior and culture.
Hi Kruptos, I really enjoyed this post, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed the simple, down-to-earth, connected vision you shared. A long response with a couple of quotes incoming... It is interesting see you link to a review of an Eastern Orthodox book, and express ideas that seem congruent with Eastern Orthodox thought. Is Eastern Orthodoxy something you have explored?
You wrote, "The clockwork idea of God allowed us to harness the forces of creation to serve our desires to know all things, command all things and to make money, to possess all things. We wanted to command the power of God in creation. Because of this, though, we have build a framework of knowledge and technology that empowers us, allows us to uses the energies of God and bend them to our will, but also builds layer upon layer of mental architecture between us and God."
Yes, this is a good point. We live in an age of ubiquitous nihilism where life seems to be meaningless, random, and with a heavy emphasis on materialism (even to those who are religious, as this feeling permeates all of culture). But it didn't used to be this way. Society used to be one which offered man a meaningful place in the world. Per Richard Tarnas in "The Passion of the Western Mind":
"Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high Middle Ages—with virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and poor, the sacramental rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian religiosity in every sphere of human activity—all this can hardly fail to elicit a certain admiration for the magnitude of the Church’s success in establishing a universal Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission. And whatever Christianity’s actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe."
Or per Timothy/Kallistos Ware in "The Orthodox Church": "Not without reason has Byzantium been called ‘the icon of the heavenly Jerusalem’. Religion entered into every aspect of Byzantine life. The Byzantine’s holidays were religious festivals; the races which he attended in the Circus began with the singing of hymns; his trade contracts invoked the Trinity and were marked with the sign of the Cross. Today, in an untheological age, it is all but impossible to realize how burning an interest was felt in religious questions by every part of society, by laity as well as clergy, by the poor and uneducated as well as the Court and the scholars. Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council: ‘The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask ‘Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made from nothing.’"
You also write, "One of the challenges that many of us will have to overcome is our own Protestant faith. In many ways, by rejecting the excesses of the “superstitions” of the Roman Church, we prepared Christendom for the technical reality by rationalizing the Christian faith."
Yes, the introduction of Aristotelean reason led to Protestantism which led to modern secular liberalism, which is a common criticism of both Catholicism and Protestantism from the Orthodox perspective. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has a great article addressing head-on Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity. He agrees with Nietzsche and Heidegger’s interpretations to an extent (you reference Heidegger), but he believes that modern nihilism is not the final form of Christianity but merely the result of it’s receding, that Christianity was so great, and so fully conquered the Hellenistic Gods that came before that there is simply no room to go back to them, and that all there is to be done is re-embrace Christ and Orthodoxy. The article is here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/10/christ-and-nothing
Yes. I was, as a Reformed Christian introduced to the Orthodox in undergrad and they have always had a pull there for me. I agree that there no way out of the western dilemma but to dedicate ourselves anew to Christ and worship again the living God. I have written on this in the past. The future is Christian, but if I had to venture as guess it will be some mix of Reformed, Calvinism of a European, specifically Dutch extraction combined with Orthodoxy. It is practical institution building combined with mysticism. There will have to be some coming together, and I see those as the main two streams.
You made some really good points.
But the thing is, is that I don't think we live in a *Deist* world but a more agnostic or atheistic world. (Maybe I'm just biased.) The reason being, that Deism doesn't adhere to an *organized* religion (our motto is "God gave us reason, not religion"). It's not that organized religion is bad--it's great in many contexts, from the communal ties to awesome architecture--but it can be easily corrupted by those in power. Rather than rely on a priest or pastor telling you what to do, Deism allows people to "get it from the source," so to speak. One is able to strength their own connection to the Most High without doctrine or rituals. Many Deists believe we have a direct linkage to God--if he is the Watchmaker, then we are the watch and the gears within. If God made the cosmos and nature, then we are the cosmos and nature itself.
In modern society, however, there is a severe lack of spirituality as a whole. A Deist world wouldn't allow for this. If we had Deists in power, we'd be living in a time of Thomas Paines and Jeffersons.
Thanks for the thoughts. Something to think on.
Goosebumps, waves and waves of them. Sending this to people, this is like a sermon. I hope you do this more often. I'll have to read it again. Thank you
Thanks! It means a lot to hear that.
I am reminded of the Kierkegaard quote:
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
Yes. There is something to that.
Kruptos - have you ever read any Rene Guenon? Once you read Guenon's thesis about the West, I don't think you look at things in the same way. Like Ellul. There's very few on the right reading Guenon for whatever reason. I lumped him mentally with Evola for the longest time. He would seem to be your cup of tea.
I know of him and he is on the long list of authors I have yet to read. Perhaps I should bump him up the list.
"The Crisis of the Modern World" is very short and an easy read. His shortcomings as a thinker are somewhat obvious too. But he lays his thesis out in that short book at the very beginning and it's quite a read.
I will have to bump it up the list then, I suppose.
With other people broaching the topic:
I didn't realize Mr Haywood was Orthodox as well.
You mentioned overcoming some of Protestantism and like many I left an Evangelical upbringing, and then rejected Catholicism out of a sense of it still being logic bound. I feel/know/live the difficulty of having been raised to see myself as mostly a brain operating a body and this is difficult to overcome. Likewise, it is a challenge to see God immanent - especially when most of life is spent in cities, indoors, cut off from natural life and ensconced in man's mini creation.
As for the story I understand the desire of ecumenism and without argument I will just posit that sort of thing could be the result of the abstracted principle oriented mind.
As someone who is Orthodox and with the Eucharist being what it is I must bring up that you are correct that the Eucharist is what is binding that group together. Also. any Orthodox partaking in such a ritual in the story would need to go through the rite to bring them back into communion with the Orthodox.
Stories are one of those things. I know all the institutional and theological challenges. I am myself perhaps trying to sort out what was “meant” in some of these things. What would a coming together of believers look like? Even if, say, a whole bunch of Calvinists joined the Orthodox en mass, or the other way round, it would change things. There is no way around this. But what does that look like. I sense a coming together. Does that mean institutional coming together? Liturgical? Confessional? I want to get past “the plan” and story seems a good way to explore these ideas in a way that is grounded. It was a new thing for me. I hesitated at first and then went with it.
That's cool. We're currently experiencing internal stress with outreach from some patriarchates reaching out to the RCC and it's something I am sensitive to, if that makes sense. I also just read Fr Seraphim Rose's Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (which is not about what he saw in New ageism and pentacostalism outreach from Buddhism, Hinduism into America ay the time. Easy breezy read, touches on ecumenism and reminded me of the recent PR about LLM universal religion.
Within Orthodoxy there is richness in history and tradition but it is generally ethnic in flavor. All the same doctrine, etc. I have been thinking a little about American Orthodoxy and what those characteristics would look like given US historical revivals and also our stereotyped behavior and culture.