ORLAPUBS P. R234: RELATIVISM

This reply to a recent posting is written for the purpose of sounding a note of caution to readers other than the person that posted the message who might be inclined to succumb to a relativism based on experience at the expense of contradictions that offend reason. I write this because 1 Pet. 3:15 admonishes us to be “ever ready for a rational defence to everyone asking [us] for the reason [logos] of the hope in” us. I avoid mentioning my correspondent's name so as to avoid seeming to single the writer out or to put the her down personally; but I quote her letter in avoid to obviate the charge that I have made these things up just for the sake of refuting them. I write because I think that relativism (the basis of most ecumenism) is the most debilitating approach one could opt for—for the precise reason that it reduces convictions to how you view them, feel about them, will them to be such-and-such (see below on hermeneutics in some contemporary literary and theological circles. I hardly dare mention the approach of “You get your choice of this doctrine, and I‘ll have my choice on the next"). Theological truth goes by the board when nothing is true or false. We do not know what absolute truth is, but we know that both sides of a contradiction cannot be true.

Though tolerating contradictions would be considered totally foolish in most enterprises— running one’s business, building a spaceship, etc.—it can pass as a commendable view in no few religious circles. It is less forgivable among those who have been trained to understand theological principles (presumably the author of a book my correspondent quotes) than among those not so trained. I can understand the feelings of, say, a pious grandparent distraught over seeing one’s children or grandchildren embracing an alien form of Christianity (or other religion) and grasping for some way to be reconciled with what will seem a disaster to a true believer--or anyone perplexed over the destiny of parents of a different Faith. But Christ, Who is the Way and the Truth (John 14:6) told us (John 8:32), that it is the truth that sets us free. St. Paul (2 Tim. 2:15) commends rightly discerning the logos ("rationale" of truth—which is the very opposite of pretending that opposites are compatible. Any child knows that a thing cannot be four feet tall and not four feet tall in the same respect. Not even the Trinity can be three and one in the same respect—at least if it was the LOGOS (“Reason”) and SOPHIA (“Wisdom”) of God (as St. John and St. Paul respectively tell us in the New Testament) Who created our brains and “all that has been made.” It is impossible to hold that Christ rose (in a given respect, say bodily) and did not rise from the dead (in the same bodily respect). If only someone would cite a Scripture that tells us that it is experience that sets us free . . . Aside from that, it is worth pointing out that the term Orthodoxy would be pointless if there were no cacodoxies—false beliefs, wrong praises. There have to be cacodoxies for an orthodoxy to have import.

There is one other preliminary matter of a general nature. My website often receives communications in which every attempt to deal with truth gets reduced to a matter of will (or it may be emotion . . . or to what often comes down to the same thing—a matter of personalities). This was the motivation for R177 on this site. Reducing the cognitive to the volitional or emotional seems to be an infection peculiar to literature and theology. Both have much-bruited “hermeneutic paradigms” put forward as new, though they are old as Gnosticism and (the millennium and a half later) Protestantism. Interestingly, one of the current “inventors” of the “new paradigm” for theology is H. Ku(e)ng—a Roman Catholic of sorts. The presupposition is simple: “Let the text mean whatever you can get out of it without strict regard for what the writer meant.” Although the dragging of every discussion down to the niveau of will or emotion—with an orphaning of cognition—did not give birth to these “new” paradigms, both kinds of philistinism have the same Gnostic parentage. While the patristic approach forbids reason to probe and dissect infinite Mysteries beyond the capacities of finite human minds, the Fathers show us how reason (together with piety and experience) plays a critical role in those finite realms where it is valid—e.g. recognizing a contradiction—not embracing it. If we check our brains at the narthex door and don’t offer God our minds as well as our feelings, we are not offering Him one of our highest faculties—certainly not our all. The holy Martyrs who died for Orthodoxy (even to keep a single iota out of the Standard of Belief) died in vain if truth doesn’t matter enough to prevail over experience and will in the criterial instances.

If love is the greatest of all virtues, as St. Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 13, this feeling (strangely, a willing in Western theology) cannot be contrary to our uniquely human ability as creatings according to the Icon of God to think rationally and to interpret revelation with reason . . . exactly the way a skyscraper depends for its stability on its foundation, even though the purpose of the building is "higher" than that of the foundation—which is justified by the building constructed on it. Note that it is love that is the end; thinking is the means--a necessary means for loving the right things. To reduce all cognitive concerns to feelings leaves a human no better than an animal in one's approach to religion or anything else. Love and goodwill are also part of interpreting revelation; the Orthodox approach is holistic, not fragmented. One must recognize that love divorced from reason as well as love of self, not to speak of false experiences like letting any and every consideration overrule right reason, are at the basis of a large percentage of the crimes in the world. Bombing the Trade Center is a valid experience in one kind of cacodox paradigm. Though Worship is an experience—the highest part of any religion—when reason does not govern and inform this experience, there is no tenable distinction between idolatry or worshiping a false god and worshiping the all-holy Trinity. Just toss all experiences in the basket and pull out any that you like!

"Truth must be preferred to absolutely all else--even life itself. It is desired to be lived with, and dying for it is preferable to living without it." [St. John of Damaskós]

Both St. Gregory the Nyssene and St. Maximos the Confessor spoke in favor of the rational life as opposed to a life dominated by whims and passions.

Unavoidable relativism to a paradigm is very different from the dishonest relativism that says that opposed and contradictory beliefs are saying the same thing.

Now to address the recent reply to my earlier reply to the exceptions taken to an original posting by me. In the first place, feelings of “rapture and bliss” in various religions are no doubt similar. One can make use of that similarity to claim a similarity of quite differently conceived religions, religions that are oriented differently from a cognitive perspective as well as from a volitional viewpoint . . . something that goes to show how worthless feelings are as the ultimate validators of a religion. Saying this is NOT to say that the feelings are unnecessary; nor does it constitute a denial of the view that the absence of sublime emotions and experiences offers valid grounds for questioning a religion (e.g. Liberal Christianity or the anticredal relativism that the Barna Group has detected among Evangelicals). To say that a given vitamin is necessary in our diet is not to hold that some other vitamin is not. The grounds cited for thinking that experience should overrule reason—differences in the way East and West cross ourselves, responses to Rorschach blots—do not rise to a cognitive level . . . even if one held that we cross ourselves differently just in order to show how differently we believe. Humanity was created “according to” the Icon of God—which the Fathers have taken to be the capacities (dynámeis) for participating in the divine Energies of reasoning and willing--which which a human would be or become an animal, since those capacities distinguish humans from animals. Before the Assimilation to God (according to which Adam was also created; Gen. 1:26) got lost at the Fall, the capacities of human Essence created according to the Icon (“Image, Likeness, Similitude”) of God had been energized to please God by those same uncreated Energies of the Assimilating to God—Grace, God’s Life. The Assimilation to God is the beginning of Théosis, which culminates in the Vision of uncreated Light (the purest form of any kind of energy). I challenge anyone to show that Salvation as ONTOLOGICAL THEOSIS or Divinization by the uncreated Energies of God [Orthodoxy] is saying the same thing as Deification or Apotheosis though a virtual—intentional (conceptual: Thomas) or covenantal (will-based: Calvin)—unity with God’s Essence in a JURIDICAL soteriological framework.

I find it strange to insist many times on the need for experiencing Grace, seeing that I have never questioned it. A presentation goes astray in two ways: First, the idea that giving a high place to either reason or experience automatically excludes any role for the other is a position that cannot be sustained. It would be as though we had to be blind in order to hear or deaf in order to see. Second, the idea that either experience or reason can “do justice” to “total reality” is simply unthinkable. The Fathers taught that finite human reason is not “adequate” to fathom the divine Essence and other Mysteries of the Faith. But when the magisterial Calvinist Berkhof teaches in effect that a “sacrament” is a virtual sermon, reason is quite “adequate” to show us that that conflicts with Orthodox teachings about the Mysteries. I agree with my correspondent that no definition of a Mystery is “complete” or “does justice” to any “total reality”—so why emphasize that point? What a verbal conceptualization can do is offer us a handle on a Mystery that sets bounds (the literal sense of de-fin-ition) to what we are allowed to think so long as we wish to stay consistent with other beliefs of our Faith. In doing that, it also tells a reasoning mind what we cannot think if we wish to stay consistent with other beliefs of our Faith. Grace cannot be uncreated and created; it cannot be both Energy and (by explicit definition) a non-energetic human quality. Conceptualizations or “definitions” —which are designed to exclude heretical views more than or at least as much as to “do justice” to an infinite Reality—help us in the task of “correctly discerning the truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). Anyone who asserts that contradictions are compatible should feel obligated to show how such is the case; it would have to be on the same cognitive level as the contradictions to be relevant. As I said in my previous response, all that anyone has got to do to nail me is to show that the three conceptualizations of Grace are not incompatible. If one is unwilling or unable to do it, if one doesn’t even try to do so but rather reiterates assertions about the need for experience that have never been called into question, my words are in vain: Definitions of anything are, like axioms, unaffected by reality—will, activity, feelings, or experience.

Despite what I said about paradigms in my response to my correspondent’s first letter, my correspondent's more recently posted reply displays no awareness (pardon me if I am wrong) of (1) how axiomatic paradigms are neither true nor false but simply presuppositions accepted by the will (a different dimension from that of intellect) for one reason or another; and (2) how they impose their assumptions on whatever we say or read in the Bible. . . which is why Western Christians find it so difficult to come up with proper translations of the many energy words in the New Testament. The result is to leave the West fairly ignorant of the outlook of users of Greek in the first centuries of our era. (One may be aware that Thomas Aquinas recognized Aristotle’s energy under the hardly adequate terms of actus or operatio; but his inclusion of energies in essence robbed that insight of its utility for theology. (If the Energies of existing, knowing, and willing are found in the divine Essence, then predestination is the only conclusion, as Fr. John Romanides has pointed out, that it is possible to draw.) To see how the energy words can be properly translated, I refer the reader to Dr. George Gabriel’s rendering of Fr. J. Romanides The ancestral sin.) The classical example of paradigms is found in the way Ptolemy, Galileo or Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein looked at the same sky (maybe a different sky before the telescope became available) and came up with opposed accounts—in the instance of Copernicus, a diametrically opposed account. When my correspondent tells us “what truly matters,” she is stating a premise that she cannot prove and I cannot disprove, unless a lot of context not provided is invoked. It doesn’t matter if someone may imagine that the statement has factual content. Aside from that, when I invoke reason, I am not excluding experience from the picture or denying it its proper place. If experience were decisive for truth, then we’d have (so far as one has been told) to admit as equally valid contradictory experiences as opposed as the bombing the Trade Center for the supposed sake of Allah and the sacrifices for truth made by our holy Martyrs for the sake of the holy Trinity.

Incidentally, one errs on a less abstract level when one writes (of Orthodoxy and the Roman Church) that “both use the same holy book that talks about the same God, about Christ, and share in the same Holy Spirit.” The Latins’ translations into Latin and European languages are as errant as are Protestant translations. (However, Protestants don’t accept a number of books in the LXX [the oldest Old Testament manuscripts available], and Luther decanonized six books of the New Testament, putting them in a kind of appendix at the end of his German translation of the New Testament. Cf. Marcion’s allowing only a bowdlerized version of Luke in his Bible. When one eliminates writings that disagree with private opinions and deletes some of the Scriptures canonized by the Orthodox Church in the later fourth century, it is easier to claim that exotic views are “scriptural”!) If “what truly matters” is sustainable, one should not have neglected to offer proof, especially in view of an unwillingness to deal with the real problem of showing why three contradictory views of Grace (or any other Mystery) are as negligible as apparently assumed—though not demonstrated on the cognitive level (the only level that “truly matters” for dealing with contradictions). We can’t argue with a premise—which is really based on will though the words seem cognitive. No amount of counterevidence will convince a racist that people of color are not inferior to White people, seeing that such a person premises the contrary . . . and interprets everything in accord with that axiom. Experience that isn’t guided by reason and informed with truth can lead to El Qaeda, Nazism, . . . just as a kinder experience can be represented by the Christian mystics invoked by my correspondent. If an Evangelical premises that the Bible is infallible, s/he is implicitly claiming an infallible ability to know that it is so—or an infallible ability to recognize some body that is able to know infallibly that it is so. Deliver us from premises disguised as statements having factual content!

We read: “Miracles, answered prayers, rapture & bliss, divine consolations, interventions—all fall into the category of Grace, but still the definition is not complete [sic].” But these things, found in probably all religions, are not Grace: They are rather results of Grace insofar as they may be connected with Grace. At all events, rapture and bliss “fall short” of telling us how saving Grace can be both uncreated Energy and “a created non-operative (non-energetic) habitual form of the soul” or even “nothing other than God’s benignity”—to take one example (the one I offered) out of dozens. Showing the compatibility of those three conceptualizations of Grace would have been relevant to the original cause of this correspondence. I had begun this letter with a list of assertions in the letter replying to things that I had never denied, but decided it would be a waste of words to include that list here. No definition or conceptualization of an infinite Mystery can be “adequate,” let alone “complete.”

“Also, for your information,” I read, “there is a book” by an Orthodox layman (at least he is titled “Mr.”) that “states that the Greek Orthodox faiths [?] and Roman Catholics are more alike than different in their beliefs.” We thus finally come to beliefs rather than experiences. If the assertion is meant to be a verifiable or falsifiable statement of fact, one is entitled to inquire whether the author in question shows how some twenty-five or thirty basic contradictions between the two Faiths are compatible. More cogently, does he recognize our wholly incompatible paradigms or thought worlds? Does he recognize the way the same Biblical words can be imagined to mean diametrically opposite things—the way “literalist” individualists interpret 2 Pet. 1:20 and the self-invented worship or piety condemned by St. Paul in Col. 2:23? That there is but one Holy Spirit (I refer to the penult comment in the letter that I’m replying to) does not mean that there is a single conceptualization of Him: There is one conceptualization agreeing with John 15:26 and one that inserts the logically opposed Filioque into the Standard of Belief (often ludicrously mistranslated as the “Symbol of Belief”—by people that know Greek!)
Readers should be aware of the disaster that overtook Orthodox theology during the four-centuries-long Balkan Dark Age under the Turks, when a scholar in many Orthodox countries had no choice but to frequent institutions in the West. If you read seventeenth-century “Confessions of Faith,” it’s often hard to tell they are not Papal documents. But Western theologians—evidently including the Pope—rely on these (and in the Pope’s case, perhaps what Uniates’ tell him) as correct presentations of holy Orthodoxy. Compare the introduction to F. Gavin’s Some aspects of contemporary Orthodox thought (1923), which I once heard a Greek Orthodox priest in a university town cite as authoritative. Please note that what is being argued in the immediate foregoing is not whether Eastern or Western theology is correct; the matter is simpler: You cannot embrace opposites (in the same respect) when they are contradictory and incompatible. Readers should be aware that (I have it on impeccable authority) when the theological faculty in Athens was created after the liberation of the Greeks from the Turks, it was based on Western approaches. Today, you can get Orthodox prayer books called manuals for “Holy Week and Easter,” not to speak of translations of Greek that mistranslate Logos, all of the words referring to energy as well as those referring to Energizations (e.g. “new creature” for “new creating”). The biggest boner of the last group is writing “likeness” (a synonym for “icon,” “image,” or “similitude”) for “assimilating”—which easily misleads a reader to conclude (wrongly) that Gen. 1:26 has two redundant objects of a single preposition; it also confounds an eneryeia with a dynamis (“potential”) of a created entity’s essence. (Though Hebrew and Greek constructions differ, both have two separate prepositional phrases. So there is no synonymity of their objects.) On my shelf, I have a recent book or two about Orthodoxy that (apart from, say, a footnote or two inserted into a later edition) could have been written by a Latin. That is something that makes it a vital enterprise to consider paradigms—the Greek-language energy ontology of the New Testament (missing in heterodox translations) and the Cordovan-derived, juridicalized thought worlds of the Latins and Protestant Reformers.

I conclude with what I said before: The only way to argue against my contention that saving Grace cannot be both “uncreated Energy” and either “a created non-operative (non-energetic) habitual form of the soul” or “nothing other than God’s benignity” is simply to show how they could be compatible. Let us be told in a way compatible with the thinking of the Apostolic Age how the Holy Spirit can proceed from the Son as well as the Father and also proceed only from the Father. Has any real advance in this direction been made by th’other side of this contention? But it’s not going to go away and was in fact a cause of my correspondent’s first objections to what I had originally said. I can imagine various grounds for why one would wish that there were no insurmountable differences—I myself wish there weren’t any—but I cannot bring myself to accept any view that requires embracing contradictions and entails that the holy Martyrs wasted their suffering and blood in vain . . . whether for the sake of excluding one iota or for any other basic Orthodox belief. It is necessary to consider whether one is obligated to grapple with the original and basic issue if one is going to commit to writing ideas about things derived from it or otherwise related to it. Proposing ideas that are so foreign to the way one thinks rationally—so at variance with commonsense and so irreconcilable with the thinking of the Apostles and Greek Fathers—cannot offer an alluring way to proceed.
Ideas contrary to the way one manages a profitable business, untenable for creating machines and spaceships, potentially disastrous for making decisions affecting our lives and destinies—ideas contrary to the spirit of the authors of the New Testament—can hardly commend themselves. Only by setting aside truth and concentrating solely on experiences—and interpretations of them—that are common to various religions is it possible to maintain that religions are saying the same thing when what they say is contradictory. Even when they say the same things, they are not saying the same things! . . . something that brings us back to contrary paradigms and thought worlds (as frequent readers knew it would). Alternatively, one might try to show that reason and logic should not play the role in religion that they play in other aspects of life—that, as Luther said (in his [in]famous Prelude on the Babylonian captivity of the Church), the true Christian evening sacrifice is the slaughter of reason (occisio rationis). That would at least be grappling (negatively) with the mooted issue—something not done in reiterations of contentions not denied by anyone, viz. the importance of experiencing Grace in order to understand it and profit from it.

We really should give others credit for meaning for what they say and also not credit them with intending to say what they clear haven't intended to say.
I have to say that Salvation has got to reverse the Fall . . . and that IF the Fall was ontological and not juridically penal, so must Salvation be. I suppose that a beginning for interfaith talks on Salvation would be to recognize the ontological unity with human nature in the Incarnation and with the ontological unity of individuals through the Resurrection in the risen Body of Christ, with them sharing his uncreated Energies or Life. I don't know why the Pope hasn't approached Orthodoxy in terms of the Energies--Aquinas's Aristotelian actus/operationes. (I imagine he gets his information, despite or perhaps because of his Polish up-bringing, from the Uniates and 17th century "authoritative" materials.) It would then be necessary for him to take the next step of taking the Energies out of the divine Essence, and that would blow up the Scholastic concept of the Essence as Pure Existence, not to speak of knowing and willing. Once the Energies go by the board in favor of the CHANGELESS Essence, predestination has got to follow, as Fr. Romanides pointed out. I think that that brilliant writer tended, at least in that writing, to make the Crucifixion too incidental to the Resurrection in his assumed worry over expiation (not "propitiation" of an angry God in various translations. But expiation is a religious concept, not a juridical concept. If the Fall was not a punishment (and God did not impose death on humanity as a penalty)--and was the ontological condition of hamartía (not of hamártema "a sin") in which humans were separated from God and the energization of the Icon of God's capacities for participating in the divine Energies of knowing and willing--of course sinning (hamártesis) resulted (Rom. 3:23, 5:12) and the devil imposed death.
What I cannot see is how a moral trait like sin or guilt could be inherited . . . and likewise for transferring Someone's merits to another individual virtually (by imputation) or any other way. I can see how it could happen if one person became a member of another, sharing that other Person's Life and all that He had done. I cannot see why God would be angry at infants for the very guilt that He transferred from Adam to them--which would make Him the Cause of evil (as well as death).

Finally, I'd rather converse with a person who disagrees with me but can give reasons for one's beliefs and ask or answer questions about it . . . much more than with a relativist who rejects humanity's faculty of reason--and all of those Biblical references to Christ's being the Truth, truth's setting us free, etc.,, which it shares with the Angels--but which animals lack.