A REVIEW OF

THE GREEK EAST
AND THE LATIN WEST: 
A STUDY IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
by Philip Sherrard [ISBN 960-7120-04-3]

© 1998 by Orchid Land Publications

[2-8-98 + 2-23-98]

     After a somewhat apologetic "Foreword to the second edition," Philip Sherrard [1922-1998] devotes the first twenty-six pages of this 206-page volume to an interesting discussion of the divergent effects of Platonism and Aristotelianism on human thinking, politics,( and theology.  It is a different analysis from any this writer has come across--and very interesting, though the timelessness (or strictly, cyclical time) of Platonism bothers Sherrard more than it will many of us.  The main point is that the writer treats the subject thematically and systematically, not just as the list of unconnected items that one so frequently encounters--and unlike so many Denominationalist books, he begins with God (the One that worship addresses), not with human Salvation and behavior (those the pulpit addresses). 
    But a naive reader could deduce from the first chapter that Christianity was conditioned by the crossing of Plato and Aristotle in Athens and not by the crossing of Hebrew and Hellenistic cultures, as was the actual case.  (CLICK HERE for an outline of the historical development of Christian thought.)  (It will be seen that Sherrard's point of view is not unconnected with his  failure to thematize the role of will in different kinds of Christianity.  Christianity came into being at the divinely timed crossing (X for Christ)  of Jerusalem with Athens--viz. of timeless reason with concrete time and will.  
     Sherrard's thematic-systematic approach is important for the discussion of theology, which begins on p. 27.   (With the exception of Augustine, Christian theology was mainly Eastern till the Muslims conquered Mt. Athos and Byzantion;  Western exceptions, in addition to the all-too-formative Augustine, include other Carthaginians [of North Afirca] who preceded Augustine as well as St. Leo (the first patriarch of Rome by that name),  St. Ambrose, and--if one considers him to be "Western"--St. Cassian).    Theology is not, at least for a theologian, merely a listing of beliefs; it is a coherent account of the whats and wherefores of what is believed.  In addressing theology, Sherrard continues to treat his subject thematically; his treatment rises to marvelous heights at times, especially in dealing with the divine Energies--which tie theology together for the Eastern thinker. 
     To those Westerners who hear about "energy" in Eastern thought but cannot fathom what on earth it is or why it is so vital to Eastern thinking, Sherrard's account explains WHY the subject is so fundamental.*  One doesn't see how this treatment could be done better, though it needs to be read slowly and meditatively.  It is beautifully set forth on p. 44.    The passages from p. 28 to p. 40 and from p. 44 to 46 not only mightily deserve to be read by Denominationalist seminarians; this exposition is a must for Orthodox readers and those interested in, or needing to deal with, Orthodox Christianity.  For static-minded Latins and Anglo-Catholics like E. Mascall who confess to being mystified by the Orthodox concept of energy--in short, any scholar who thinks of Grace as a static "created form of the soul" in the scholastic manner--Sherrard makes it amply clear why the divine Energies (and, one can add, therefore Grace) have got to be understood to be uncreated.   Inseparable (except in our thinking) from what we call the incomprehensible divine Essence, the Energies have got to be uncreated at least (and not least) because of their having existed before the creation of the cosmos.  Sherrard effortlessly provides and neatly translates choice citations of the Fathers--SS. Athanasios, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximos, John of Damaskos, Gregory Palamas, etc. (see especially pp. 32-35, 40)--to show this and, importantly, to show why the unicity of the divine Trinity is so fundamental. 
     If the transcendent divine Essence is unique and imparticipable, the Energies (a Westerner might think of them in relation to the functional Nature of God, indivisible from the Essence) represent the immanent multiplicity of God's operations and relations with creaturely beings.  There seems to be no other resolution of this unavoidable fundamental question of theology--the question of how to reconcile divine transcendence and immanence (creation, etc.).  It's too bad that Sherrard doesn't go the whole way and relate that which he says on the Energies to the distinction between the Icon (Image) of God in humanity (reason and freewill mirroring the divine Logos) not lost at the Fall and the Likeness of God (the divine Energies of Grace), which did get lost at the Fall by our first ancestors.   [After all, aside from remarks by St. Ignatios and later writers, St. Maximos the Confessor gave a direct answer concerning the Likeness of God in   humanity.]
     For all of the remarkable qualities of ch. 2 (through p. 40), one finds p. 41 lacking in clarity, especially at the mention of will.  We see a failure to deal with will here and later, even when citing St. Maximos the Confessor, the first Eastern theologian to deal seriously with will.  (Of course, the Latins had long had will from Tertullian and Augustine from Roman Africa, a Phoenician foundation already being infiltrated with other Semitic tribes.)   But where Sherrard is good, he is great.  If p. 43 confuses logos and logoi with will, p. 44 beautifully ties things together--ontologically in the manner of the early Christinas, not theletically (volitionally) in the manner of the Reformation.  Both Orthodoxy and the Reformation account for the necessity of Grace in Salvation; but Sherrard's "energetic" account is in a different world from the Reformation account of WHAT Grace is (divine WILL, favor, selection--not ontological uncreated Energies) and WHY Grace is necessary for Salvation.  Aside from rejecting hereditary guilt, the East omits most of the Western juridical terminology (as one of our OLP publications [click here] emphasizes more than once) based on the role of will--covenant, adoption, justification, satisfaction, penance, sacrament, etc.--not to mention Calvinism's sabbatarianism.  (Incidentally, more than one Ecumenical Synod condemned the Latins' fasting on the Sabbath [Saturday]--other than on holy Great Sabbath before holy glorious Pascha.)
     It needs to be remarked again how refreshing it is to come across a text (whose first edition  was published in 1959) that begins and ends with God, one that doesn't concentrate on humans in the Liberal and Evangelical matter--whose books not seldom do not even mention "Worship [of God]" in the Index and speak of preaching services and prayers for one's own needs as "worship"!**
          Ch. 3 spends some time showing that Orthodox thinking is not rationalistic; Sherrard's objections to "philosophy" (which he understands as well as anyone) should, in this writer's view, be reworded as objections to "scholasticism."   The divine Essence is beyond being and knowing; only an uncreated Something that energizes in the finite world can help humans enter ( with gnosis, in its Orthodox sense) into the divine Mystery of God.  This point of view leads Sherrard to lay a perhaps disproportionate emphasis on myth and symbolism, superficially not unlike the Liberals of today.
      The author spends the remainder of Ch. 3 in a very complicated exposition of a crucial difference between Eastern and Western theology that led to irreconcilable views of the Trinity.  That the Western view is highly defective is made amply clear.  To cut through the complexity of the discussion, which every student of Christian thought should peruse, one can say that, while the East takes hypostasis (rather than essence, which is beyond being) to be real (formed) being, the West made the mistake of viewing the divine Essence--rather than the Hypostasis of the Father--as the Cause of all being.    The divine Energies play a role throughout the discussion.  Once the divergent assumptions (see p. 57, etc.)  had been made, the results followed on both sides.  The West unilaterally added-the Filioque (the words "and the Son")  to the Creed  to describe the "Cause" of the procession of the Holy Spirit, which led to the Great Schism between the continuing East and the  innovating West.   Sherrard insists that, since the divine Essence is not divisible, It cannot be divided up the way the Hypostases are divided into powers and energies capable of causing  (p. 62).  On the other side, the Augustinian essential/substantial relations--which distinguish the Hypostases in Latin theology--do not make sense since they imply a divided Essence (p. 65)--paradoxically, as  their goal is to exalt the divine Unity.   For "if, however, Essence and Being describe one and the same reality, as they tended to do for the Latins, then it becomes meaningless to say that the hypostasis, and not the Essence, of the Father is the cause and principle of being in the Trinity" (p. 68).   (Where the Latin scholastics define the divine Essence as Existence, the Orthodox name each Person of the divine Trinity "One Who IS" [Ex. 3:14 in the Septuagint]).    Latin theologians lay less emphasis on the Persons of the Trinity than Eastern theologians because of the failure of their doctrines to keep the divine Persons truly distinct from One Another.
     This writer disliked Sherrard's referring to the Paraclete as "It"--because the Greek word for "spirit" is neuter; after all, the New Testament (e.g. John 14:26, 16:14) uses the masculine pronoun to refer to Him.  This discussion of Trinitarian belief is less intrinsically  interesting and more difficult to understand than the author's enlightenment concerning the divine Energies; yet, it is not less important for all Trinitarian Christians and for those seeking to understand the error of the Western Filioque.    

[2-13-98 + 2-21-98]
     This writer would've preferred a discussion of the different theological goals and means of Eastern and Western ecclesiastical art (iconography, architecture) to some of Sherrard's topics discussed thus far and in the next chapter.  When one sets Murillo's "Saint Joseph and the Christ Child" side-by-side with an icon of the m.h. Theotokos and the Christ Child [e.g. the Theotokos of Vladimir in the Tretyakov in Moscow], of the Three Hierarchs, or of St. John the Evangelist in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore--or of a temple or oratory on Mt. Athos or Mt. Sinai side-by-side with Westminster Abbey or a Renaissance temple in Florence or Rome--it is clear that the soul of the East is of a very different texture from the texture of the soul of the West.  In the Murillo painting, the divine hardly shines through [the all too realistic and unstylized portrayal of Jesus the Child] for this observer.  [There is also] no mystical play of light and shadow in temples with stained-glass windows, glorious as the windows at Chartre or the Ste. Chapelle   incontestably are.  One is not claiming that a vertical-Gothic edifice with fanned vaulting is anything short of etherial--only that it is different from the mystical grandeur of the temple  of the Holy Athonite Monastery of Iveron  or the Cathedral of Christ the Holy Wisdom in Kiev.    Much the same could be said of chalices, patens, processional crosses, Gospel-book covers and decorations, etc.    (Three-dimensional religious art in the West cannot be compared with much in the East because of the prohibition of graven images in the later Ecumenical Synods, though a fair number of ivories continued to be carved with secular themes.)   Portrayals of the Crucifixion are vastly different in East and West; the divine shows through the one, while the Savior's Sufferings are high-lighted in the other.   The very publicness of the Altar in the most Western temples (not those in England where the Sanctuary is traditionally set off [with the choir] from the nave by a choir screen) destroys much of the atmosphere for an Orthodox observer.  It would be very significant to be instructed on the cognitive reasons why the goals of art in East and West are so contradictory.  [Written on the Lordsday of the Prodigal Son & the Meeting of OLGSJ Christ in the Temple, 1998]
    In Ch. 4, the discussion turns to the role of bishops in the East and bishops and the pope in the West--a long, involved chapter that, for Orthodox people at least, commanded more interest at the time of the book's publication than (one might opine) today.  Sherrard works (see pp. 82-83,86) at a strained link between the Filioque and the papacy in the West and the contrary on both accounts in the East--where (at least in theory) St. Ignatios of Antioch's dictum in his "Letter to Those in Smyrna" that "Where Christ is [i.e. in His Mysteries], there is the Catholic Church"--the parenthetical insertion being Sherrard's.  Sherrard sees every bishop representing Christ equally when He is present in the m. h. Eucharist.  In Western Trinitarianism, it is claimed, the Filioque makes the Persons of the Trinity so little distinct that a human head of the Chuch, the pope, is required--and each bishop directly represents that prelate rather than Christ.  [This view will be taken up again in the review of Ch. 6 below.] In actuality, however, we all know that the authority and power of Eastern and Latin hierarchs  is about the same, though no patriarch is over another patriarch in any jurisdictional way.  While one would have thought that 1 Cor. 12 indicates a hierarchical relationship among the members of Christ's mystical Body, Sherrard depicts the Byzantines (at the time of St. Mark of Ephesos and the Great Schism) as holding that episcopal hierarchies exist "by economy [dispensation]"--in effect, as a mere political expediency.  Sherrard's view could be taken literally to imply even more than such a "diocesan congregationalism" (not his term), viz. pure congregationalism; for wherever the Eucharist is served [celebrated] (this is no longer the prerogative of a bishop) laity are present:  Though they can offer up the bloodless Sacrifice in their intentions, laity cannot hold a Eucharist.   Sherrard in fact observes that Christ is equally present in every Christian.  Though the present writer fails to see the force of all of this, the chapter now begins to get interesting.   The writer got somewhat intrigued by Sherrard's showing (see p. 88) how "Corpus Christi" and "Corpus Mysticum" reversed their significations in Latin scholasticism, so that the former came to refer to the eucharistic Presence (instead of the Church) and the latter to the juridical Church (instead of the eucharistic Body of Christ). 
     Now for the real business of this chapter.  To grasp the situation, one needs to think in terms of Moses (the Law-giver; the regnum) and Aaron (the offerer of Sacrifices; the sacerdotium), interpreted in terms of Jesus's words, "Render to Cæsar, etc.":  The East had them separate; the increasingly teutonized Papacy wedded them, as some Fundamentalists today apparently seek.   The emperor was the supreme bridge-builder--pontifex maximus--between religion and society, while the patriarchs are the links between heaven and earth.   The pope assumed the title in both senses.  Sherrard gives two reasons, aside from the fact that Byzantion had an emperior while increasingly teutonic Rome was without an emperor at the beginning of the Dark Ages, as civil society was falling apart:   (1) The East accepted that bishops equally represent Christ when He is present in the m.h. Eucharist; and (2) that, in effect, Aaron wasn't Moses.  Sherrard doesn't mention the juridical inclinations of the  Latins, increasingly juridical as the Latins got teutonized in France, Italy, Britain, Scicily, and (briefly) North Africa--before becoming finally subject in many quarters to that Islamicized (theletized) Aristotelianism from Cordova that enabled them to bring their Dark Ages into the High Middle Ages.  (By that time, Byzantion had been devastated by the teutonic Fourth Crusade.)  Sherrard does rightly emphasize that charges of cæsaropapism in Constantinople are falsified by the fact that, when it came to a crunch at the time of the Great Schism, the episcopacy and other clergy and the laity sacrificed the empire rather than succumb to heresies like the Filioque, papacy, etc.--though an agreement that would have brought Western help to Byzantion when the Turks were at her gates.   (Her fleeing scholars then brought about the Renaissance in Italy.)  Through the efforts of the glorious St. Mark of Ephesos at this time, unaccountably unmentioned by Sherrard though he stood alone against the emperor at the Synod of (but not in) Florence, all of the Orthodox (except a few of those present at the Synod who Latinized; the others later recanted their concessions) refused to concede that Moses was Aaron.  That is not cæsaropapism!  (The leader of the few apostates later became a Latin cardinal; at the Fall of Byzantion, he amassed and preserved a huge volume of manuscripts brought to Italy by fleeing scholars; areas of southern Italy remained Greek-speaking till recently.)
     Sherrard points out two not wholly negative consequences of the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks:   It gave the Church a "providential" opportunity, very partially taken advantage of, to revert to the Apostolic situation of living and surviving in a religiously alien society.   (Consider how different Fundamentalism and its attitudes to the poor becomes in a non-Anglo-Keltic society; e.g. Brazil!)  By the hierarchs' coöperating with the sultan,  Hellenic culture became even more separated from Latin culture--something that helped the Church and her Faith continue intact.  But the terms of the settlement gave the partriarch the status of a civil exarch (or vasilefs "king"), or more exactly ethnarch responsible for the civil obedience of the Orthodox population in the Sultan's empire.  The negative effects of this were, in Sherrard's words, "immense":  The ecumenical patriarch, now wearing the symbol of the eagle beside the Cross,  became priestly-civil "popes" over their flocks in a wider sense than did the pope.  The other patriarchs under Muslim rule in Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria became in effect subordinate to the centralized administration of the Patriarch of New Rome.  Such laymen as got inducted into the Holy Synod  had  authority over bishops, leading to acts not in the interest of the Church.   Patriarchs could and did now buy their "election" from the Turks; and the cost was exacted by the higher clergy from the lower clergy.  Evil followed upon evil.  One can begin to appreciate the Slavonic independence--Moscow as the "Third Rome"--as the first Byzantine patriarch under the Turks termed doctrine issues "national" issues.  Even the Slavs began writing Latinized theological treatises, as did the Greeks--who, as Sherrard points out, began to equate nationalism and religion.  Both trends were abetted  by Jesuit inroads in the Turkish Empire.  The Communists in our time offered the Orthodox Church less than the Islamic sultans.  And even in Istambul, there are now only a handful of Orthodox Christians left.
     Sherrard makes it clear that any participation of the Church in a narrow alliance with a theocratic state entails deleterious consequences for Christian religion because of the divided loyalties that necessarily follow when the aims of the state and Church are antagonistic.  It's a lesson to be learned by some who, distorting the religion of the founders of our the USA, would, by means of a Constitutional amendment,  have school prayers (of a Protestant  Fundamentalist kind) instituted in the schools.  (What would prevail in areas that are predominately Buddhist, like parts of Hawai'i, is unclear.)  What the state gives, the state can take away;  churches cannot serve two masters when they conflict.  [Speaking for myself, I believe that a democratic state will always have to allow privileges to all that some reject for themselves; those "some" should not seek to impose their rejections on the whole nation--but simply insist that they not be required to act or pay for things against their consciences.] 
     With Ch. 5, the author comes to "the Platonic reaction in the Greek East."   One might suggest that it is here that Sherrard gets to what for him is the heart of the matter.   As the beginning of the chapter can easily lead a reader astray,  readers might be well advised to read the last three pages first.  Early on, Sherrard cites Clement of Alexandria to the effect that the wisdom of the Greeks was not simply by chance or co-incidence but was providential,  i.e. not without divine inspiration in its view of the natural world and natural justice:  Christianity  fulfills Greek and Hebrew theology.  Sherrard otherwise gives no nod to the Hebrew heritage of Christiany or the role of will (see below for an exception) except in contrasting Moses (the law-giver for  "exoteric" civil society--the "city of this world") and Aaron (the offerer of the world back to its Creator in the "esoteric" realm of the "city of God."  But the main theme is the difference between Plato (the philosophy that Sherrard favors; it was inspired by Zoroastrianism via the Pythagoreans) goes with the "esoteric"; Aristotle (the philosophy that Sherrard disfavors), with the "exoteric."   Aristotle denied timeless causation (as in creation), whereas Plato admitted it in the divine ideas--which Sherrard takes to be analogous with the uncreated Energies.   Sherrard also recurs to an earlier theme of his to deplore the (exoteric) need for "overdefining dogma," which he has earlier told us was due to the Empire's need for social unity.  Christianity was originally unconcerned with the exoteric, living, as it did, under hostile pagan governments.  When it came to power in Constantinople, it was accordingly unprepared for the task; so Roman precedent prevailed.  Justin the Emperor closed the philosophical schools in 529.
     The reason why the chapter is worth reading (aside from being awed at the author's vast learning) is its perceptive study of Plethon--the pagan philosopher in Mistra (near ancient Sparta) at the Fall of Byzantion to the Turks.   The subject is too involved to be compressed here, but the main onus  perhaps rests on Plethon's insistence on a God (Zeus) who is too perfect to change (either to anything better or of course to what would be worse) in a near-rationalist mechanical point of view.  While the higher of two mediators between this God and fleeting matter, Nous, admits of no distinctions, the lower mediator, World-Soul, is characterized not only by essence (as are God and Nous) and also by power (dynamis) and creative energies.  This contrasts with the Hebrew idea that God is characterized by freedom to act in different ways.  Christianity views God as both Reason (Logos) and Will (this is its only definite mention in the chapter).   Christianity's eventual hostility to esoteric Plato and its favoring of exoteric Aristotle was perhaps mainly due to the Neo-Platonists and the apostasy of the Emperor Julian.   If Aristotelianism produced the catalogues of Photios and the manuscript copying of Arethas, the Platonic views of Psellos, his pupil Italos, and of course Plethon evoked condemnation.  As one hears so little of Plethon's views nowadays, Sherrard's penetrating treatment on him in this chapter may be of interest.
     If Aristotle's exotericism stands in opposition to the kind of God that Christianity accepts, Sherrard in the end finds even Plato inadequate without a starting-point in revealed truth and the assumptions that follow from that.  As the ancients maintained, Christianity fulfills both Greek and Hebrew theology.

[2-21-98 + 2-23-98]
     Ch. 6 treats the change of theology to philosophy in the Latin West.  While it does not directly focus on the mysteric (sacramental) principle of matter's being a vehicle for spiritual energies (e.g. in the body-soul nature of humanity), it does assume this, as we will see.  (Incidentally, an unbodied soul could not experience physical deprivation or pain in hell.)  To show that Orthodoxy is a middle ground between the objectionable extremes of pure rationalism and pure empiricism/positivism, Sherrard adopts a strategy that is less than convincing in our time; and in dealing with the Latins (in principle Augustine and Aquinas), he fails even to mention the analogia entis.       Sherrard exalts noUs "intellect, mind" and gnOsis "spiritual knowledge" as being in kind far above lógos "practical reason" and diánoia "reasoning, discursive reason" AND attributes the former to the heart, almost disparaging the mental status of the latter.  But this metaphorical use of "heart" (a "faculty superior to reason and all other . . . .faculties") won't, one suspects, hold up very well nowadays.  Sherrard's goal is correct; his method, unconvincing, at least to this writer.  And, since he fails to mention the will--so pre-eminently fundamental for Scotism-Ockhamism (fifteenth-century "modernism") and its derivative, Reformation Protestantism, it would be better to speak of Orthodoxy as a middle ground in a triangle of rationalism, positivism, and theletism (voluntarism--where will is the ultimate reality and value)--though, admittedly, the latter two have often gone hand-in-hand, as  have often an antisacarmental spiritualism and rationalism. 
     In contrasting the beatitude of Aquinas, etc., with the theosis "divinization" (he misnames it "deification"--which is apotheosis) of Orthodoxy, Sherrard forgets that Aquinas accepted 2 Pet. 1:4b.  He treads on slippery terrain when he recapitulates his thesis (see comments on Ch. 4 above) that the same error underlies the Filioque--and the Latin failure to distinguish being/existence/energies from essence (the reader may recall the scholastic teaching that "God's Essence is to be")--as well as the need for a pope and so on.  He notes the relation of all of this to the Arian heresy and its parallels in   references to Jesus in contemporary writings that speak of Jesus's human Person, noting that it has always been held by the holy tradition that Jesus is human (as well as divine) in nature but it is the Person of the Logos or God the Son that is the one Person existing in the two natures of Jesus Christ.  (The divine-human Jesus is not the divine-human Person of Jesus.)   What Sherrard sees to be the basic problem for the West is how to know God if he is transcendent and unknowable--the failure to resolve which (as the East did with its distinction of the divine Essence and the divine Energies) necessitates created stand-ins like the "Vicar of Christ" (the pope).  It is true, of course, that if we cannot participate in Christ in this life--or even later--the most we can hope for is beatitude after death.  But this strikes me as a bit too heavy on the Thomists and even Augustine (whose thinking led to the Filioque).   The Latins hold, says Sherrard, that somehow a Christian becomes what one contemplates--the way, if I may paraphrase, a thing becomes non-dark when it receives the radiation or energy of light (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12).    If it is will that ties everything together for the Scotist-Ockhamist-Reformation line of Christianity, it is hard (for me at least) to see how Augustine's premises of the Trinity tie together so many beliefs beyond the Filioque--papacy, purgatory, and the rest--for the mainline Latins.
      In dealing with the Icon (Image) of God in humanity, Sherrard (as before) fails to mention the biblical Likeness of God--and to show how that avoids the error of hereditary guilt--though he of course does distinguish uncreated Grace (which the Likeness, lost at the Fall, refers to) from the bare Icon of God.  (See p. 141.)   On pp. 141f, Sherrard sums up succinctly as follows:

If, therefore, either the immanence of God in man, or the possession by man of such a faculty [scil. the heart] as that indicated is denied, then the realization [of humanity's divinization by the uncreated Energies of the Light of God] will be regarded as impossible; and the effect will be to shift attention from it, and to substitute for it the idea that the purpose of man's life, and the nature of the knowledge he may posssess of God, himself, and other created things, are conditioned by, and proceed from, the relative and natural faculties, whether mental or sensory, which he has at his disposal.

Sherrard's underlying view is summed up in his words (p. 151) that "not only can the truths of the Revelation not be realized apart from  .  .  .  intiation into them [i.e. the Christian Mysteries], but also on them is dependent any genuine knowledge man can posssess."  He adds that "the conclusions of the reason may only constitute a genuine knowledge, and this of a relative kind, provided that the reason first conforms itself to the truths of a supra-rational order."
     As a Briton living in Greece, Sherrard was not in a position to add the observation that, while academic Protestantism has now been thoroughly germanized, Denominationalist preachers and laypeople in the US have been getting more and more Americanized in their human-oriented emphasis on a few slogans referring to Salvation, self-help and a minimal asceticism, entertainment (including pop Gospel music), and of course $$$.  It is perhaps to be further regretted that Sherrard's emphasis on the main difference between Eastern and Western thought worlds has not more clearly highlighted the problem of Westerners trying to understand Eastern thinking.  By this I mean that when a Westerner approaches Orthodoxy as simply having a different list of tenets from those of Western groups, a Westerner simply cannot comprehend how the concept of uncreated energies ties so many things together (including the relation of the Likeness of God to the essential Icon of God in human nature).  A Westerner has got to begin with different premises and a different conceptual framework, including that of the otherwise unintelligible uncreated energies--a concept not at odds with modern science that ties together energy, light, and matter.  That's on the cognitive level.   On the practical level, given the centrality of Worship in Orthodoxy, how can one understand Orthodoxy apart from a close association with Byzantine rites?  It is fair to venture than one cannot understand Orthodoxy unless one is immersed in Byzantine Worship--together with, of course, the effects of the Orthodox Fathers and particularly of Orthodox monasticism on Orthodox life and piety.  If one belongs to a human-centered (Salvation-centered) denomination in which the sacrificial Altar of God-addressed mysteric (sacramental or spiritual-corporeal) Worship is supplanted by the pulpit of human-addressed preaching (instruction and exhortation), then Orthodoxy will not be intelligible for all of its biblical basis and unbroken continuity with the Apostles.   Orthodoxy then needs to be studied as another religion if one is to gain the faintest idea of what it is.  How can one see the point of bodily prostration (mentioned throughout the Bible), let alone the resurrection of the body, if one denies any role in religion to corporeality?

[ 2-23-98]
     Continuing with the same chapter, it will be observed that, after circling his subject the way a moth might do a flame, Sherrard now homes in on his subject in ever narrower and more explicit terms.  He re-states  (p. 153) his thesis that "these Western thinkers were committed to regarding the reason as a valid instrument for the discovery . . . even of a divine and absolute truth."  This follows a longer passage on the preceding page in which Sherrare contends that "once . . . it is accepted that man can have no knowledge of realities of a supra-rational [not sensory-based] order, . . . the understanding of the relationship between the truths of revelation and the conclusions of the reason . . . cannot be maintained."   Continuing, he reasons that either "the truths of revelation will now be regarded as beyond the capacity of man to realize in a direct fashion" or (in his contrast of the reason [lógos] and the intellect [noUs]), alternatively,

since the reason takes the place of the spiritual intellect as man's supreme faculty, its conclusions . . . will be thought to represent the most complete knowledge of the Divine accessible to man . . .  A purely natural faculty--the reason--which is, while untransformed through participation in the spiritual knowledge of the intellect, necessarily subject to diabolic activity, is now regarded as the instrument of human beatitude [as opposed to Divinization].

These are pretty strong words for the West if one accepts that there is a suprarational noUs--participative and intuitive knowledge--in the "heart" and only lógos in the brain.    (Sherrard would definitely hold that the West accepts Mat. 11:27 in a more exclusive sense--viz. without the final clause--than does the East.)  But some readers will remember that, while the New Testament (St. Paul, except for a single occurrence in Luke and one in the Apocalypse)  does use noUs, it calls Christ the Lógos, not the NoUs--which came to carry Gnostic interpretations.  In Philp. 4:7, St. Paul seems to separate noUs   "intellect" from hearts and thoughts, though in other passages he of course speaks of  noUs as a higher faculty (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 14:15,19; cf. Luke 24:45), whose corruption (Rom 1:28, Col. 2:18, 1 Tim. 6:5, 2 Tim. 3:8) is accompanied with disasterous consequences.   In Eph. 4:23, e.g., St. Paul, like Sherrard, associates noUs with spirit (pnevma, which for Sherrard belongs to the divine and uncreated order, whereas lógos (Aquinas's knowledge abstracted from created sensory objects) belongs to the natural (not supernatural) order--that of the soul (psychq).  For Sherrard, lógos is--apart from the higher noUs--unregenerate, undeified, and indeed devilish; where it concerns God, it is only "analogical" knowledge.  While noUs is about faith and the "why" of what is believed, lógos concerns only the "how" of what is believed.
     Our author proceeds to discuss Cartesianism--the natural consequence,  he maintains, of Latin scholasticism (with Aquinas not being well distinguished  from the will-oriented Scotist/Nominalists) "the scientific mentality."  The consequences also include the ills of the Latin Church, whose papacy (inter alia) Sherrard attributes to individualism and an abstract conceptualization of ecclesiastical unity--the only universality that the scholastics were able to concepualize.   Though both individualism and empiricism from the physical world are eventual consequences of the scholastics' understanding of knowledge, Descartes reversed Aquinas in an importat way:  

      . . . while for Aquinas there can be no question of surpassing individuality from, so to speak, above [NB thinking begins with concrete items, which the reason abstracts from], there is the necessity of retricting it from below:  the individual human mind, if it closes itself within itself, will die of inanaition, since a very condition of its determination is its capactiy to receive from the outside world impressions that provide it with the material upon which to act and allow it to make those abstractions which determine it.  When, however, with Descartes,  the human mind was declared independent of external objects for its knowledge, even this restriction from below on individuality was removed.  The individual human mind is now regarded not only as the arbiter of knowledge, but also is entirely self-sufficient; etc.

But didn't the Reformers make each individual one's own interpretative "pope," as some Anglicans declared at the time?   Incidentally, Sherrard would undoubtedly call himself an advocate of the superrational rather than of the irrational--the position of various moderns who scorn reason in religion for different reasons from Sherrard's--and at times concede that ignorance is no barrier to interpretation.  (Hence, the 28,000 denominations reported today.)
     In the final chapter, The non-Christian sequel:  Greece and the modern West, Sherrard delves into political issues as much as any Fundmanetalist.   No one can question that Byzantion involved Christianity in ways that the Faith had, while still a minority religion,  nothing to do with; or that the prior situation kept the Faith pure from the various corruptions of latter ages, though of course the Patriarch remained superior to the Emperor in things spiritual--without claiming to be both Patriarch and Emperor in the way that the Western pope eventually chose to enunciate.  That is, of course, not all there is to it; but Fundamentalists who  strive today for a "Christian America" do not seem to realize that the minority status of the early Christians (which they claim to emulate), not to speak of Orthodoxy under the Muslims and Communists, proved more healthy for the Faith in crucial ways than has the majority status of an officially recognized state religion--which corrupts with seductive concerns that go beyond and even above the religious.  One need only go to England or Germany, or to France or Italy, to see what  happens with state-sanctioned religions; and Sherrard speaks sadly enough of Greece--the land of his residence.
     The most memorable part of this chapter is the discussion of Plethon's arrival in Italy as part of the Byzantine Emperor's party at the fatal Synod of Florence (as before, Sherrard never mentions the great St. Mark of Ephesos) and of the establishment of the patriarchical academy under Cyril Lukaris.  Little good took place after this, according to Sherrard, for Greek learning transmogrified itself into neo-Aristotelian Western learning.  While speaking of the unifying nature of the Greek language, Sherrard carefully avoids the shunned topic of the alleged Slavic makeup of the Greeks in Greece.   (Most ethnic are claimed by some writers to have fled to southern Italy and the islands when the Slavs swept across Greece).  Except for Sherrard's discussion just mentioned, the rest of this chapter warrants (in my opinion) little need of discussion.  But it does give rise to other thoughts.  Had Sherrard been an American, he might have been interested in why the two parties on the antitraditional religious left--Liberals and Fundamentalists--have (recently, in the instance of the Fundamentalists) gone in such opposed political directions--the last-named ending up at the ultraconservative political pole, while the Liberals  (more consistently) ended up at the opposite pole.

      The final verdict?  First, this very erudite treatment offers a huge amount of information on specific points and issues.  But secondly, it couches crucial discussions in a psychologism that will fail to strike a chord in (one hazards saying) most educated contemporary readers.  The points made by the reader need to be rephrased in terms that would seem more credible than "heart" and the like.   There is nothing against the writer's presenting us with many difficult sections in technical language, since those he is addressing are educated readers.  But for that very reason, some of his concepts are bound to seem fanciful--more so than they would to a less-educated readership.  Finally--recurring to the beginning of this review--Sherrard has got his categories wrong; for Christianity was ordained to come into being at the crossing of Hebrew religion and Hellenism, not at the conflict between Plato and Aristotle (Plato had won over Hellenistic religion by then),  however much that conflict helps to explain some important subsequent developments.  From Semitic--Hebrew, and eventually more so, Islamic--thinking came the juridicalism of the West as well as its individualistic view of religious authority--the pope of the Latins, the individual believer of the Denominationalists-- . . . and indeed much else.  (CLICK HERE for further discussion of the role of will (as opposed to the role of being and reason) in the development of Cristianity.)

[3-1-98]
     As far as the USA is concerned, there is a lot of unsubstantiated lore--mythology--about the Christianity of the founders of the country.  According to a column by Richard Morin in The Washington Post National Weekly Edition of Jan. 12, 1998 (p. 37), only 17% of Americans were church members in 1776 (as against two-thirds today; of whom 44% claim to attend church once a week, not counting weddings, funerals, etc.).  That the "founding fathers" were "good Christians" ignores the words of not a few of the most prominent of those gentlemen themselves--not a few of whom were often deists or even admitted atheists.  America is in fact in the midst of its most church-going epoch; the same seems to be true also of belief in fortune-telling, horoscopes (one in three say that horsoscopes "can affect the course of their future"), and good-luck charms (one in five believe in these)--and one-third of respondents "converse with the dead"!   So there you are if there is where you are!

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         (A final Appendix on political evolution has been added to the second edition.  Not very approbative of democracy, Sherrard explains in his first chapter how the Ciceronians thought of monarchy as a unifying form of society and democratic policy as chaotic unformed matter.  In the Appendix, Sherrard gives an account of how Aristotelian influence, via Marsiglio of Padua and others influenced by him,  led to the sad condition in which he views the present Greek Church-and-state relationship--the Church being depicted as constitutionally subordinate (in important respects) to the state.
     *An OLP publication, the first (and as yet only) version of which can be viewed by clicking here , stresses how eneryeia ties everything together:   God's unknowable Essence-beyond-being and His working in Creation; the Icon (Image of God--reason and freewill--retained at the Fall} and the Likeness of God (saving Grace, lost at the Fall); Salvation through the Uncreated Grace as the Life and Light of Christ,  ontological Incorporation into the One Who IS through the Mysteries, and a Christian's final Resurrection; the role of Light and its connection with energy in contemporary science, and the connection of this with materiality (body) and especially time in Salvation; the final divinization of true believers and followers of Christ through the Vision of the Uncreated Light.  Liberals and Gnostics who "spiritualize" the resurrection forget that it is "of the body" and "not of the spirit."
    **This is the contrast between God-addressed Worship (Altar) and human-addressed education (Pulpit).