The Problem with Trads

     

“We can get caught up in being so Orthodox that we forget to be Christian”

-Fr. Seraphim Rose homilies

Both extreme left and extreme right function to keep the faith becoming too rigid or too formless. Many would say our present condition is one of relativism, false ecumenicalism, thin or absent borders, a destruction of distinctions, and so we need a strong Right traditionalism to protect the Church from postmodernism, subjectivism, and the endless deconstruction that eats away at our heritage like acid.

Frankly, I think those who blame "trads" are out of touch, surely it is liberal Christians who are in the vast majority, simply look at opinions on gay marriage. Trads are a small but vocal minority on the internet, the average Catholic Church, or Orthodox, will will be deluged by liberalism. 

I tend toward the traditional stance myself, however it does have its problems.

Oftentimes Trads will turn dogmas into an idol, worshiping not the living God but the correct theological answers. Ironically, this is very much a protestant, modern conception of religion. I've written on how religion is a modern invention HERE.

What we affirm is the experience of the Church, the theories about those experiences are what we call theology. The experience of the Church is that Christ has forgiven our sins, however even Bishop Barron will say he doesn’t exactly know what that means, though Catholicism has many ideas on this.

John Bossy in his book Christianity in the West 1400-1700 is surely correct that that “Creedal orthodoxy” replaced Communitas as a supreme virtue, and Christianity became a system of beliefs and moral behaviors….

This was also compounded by the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan and son note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar, literacy becomes a substitute for the "communis sensus” birthing the Gutenburg Galaxy brain over audio communal doxological epistemology, HERE.

Instead of faith being a mode of perception, and religion being a “virtue” as it was for Aquinas, it become about concepts over resonance, information over initiation. See HERE.

Heck, even Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Francis Young points out "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life….

And John Behr points out that “Dogma” is really about setting boundaries, less about making positive statements about God beyond the basics.

Furthermore, Behr reminds us that dogmas cannot be separated from liturgy :

“The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’…”

Vladimir Lossky, the great Russian theologian of the mid-20th century, wrote:

Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God, .....This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life – both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge.

From Introduction to Orthodox Theology, pp. 16-17.

Thus the little old lady in the back of the Church who gives an incorrect definition of the Trinity, but has been grafted onto the Triune life of God by participating in His life giving mysteries, is perfectly “orthodox.”

Divine Disability in Pagan and Christian Tradition

      

I myself am an Orthodox Christian, but like CS Lewis I find great wisdom and even shadows of Christ in authentic Pagan spirituality.

For many Christians, the Pagan gods were indeed real, but flawed, and often over time were thought to have become degraded into forces for evil.

Others see Pagan myths as psychological forces.

First a Pagan perspective, then a brief Christian one.

Edward P. Butler is probably today’s most brilliant polytheistic theologian, in a recent exchange he writes 

“In Egyptian theology, we have many myths of divine injury and healing; healing never returns us to the previous state. Many prosthetics in Egyptian myth. One value of these is that humans are given a role to supplement a God's loss. 

To take a Hellenic example, one meaning for Hephaistos' being lamed is that He is the agent of human technology. So His disability is directly related to a potency of his in which we especially participate. 

Osiris' phallus is lost on the mortal plane because a crucial part of His resurrection lies in mortals going on. In this sense, His phallus is the mortal phalli, Hephaistos' walking is the mortal kinesis. 

I don't want to distract anyone from the mysteries of identification with these Gods through the experience of disability through this sort of reading, however. That embodiment, that presencing of the God, is sustaining for individuals and for communities.

@GalinaKrasskova: also something i think worth teasing out: healing not returning us to the previous state....begs the question of what is healing?

@DaphneLykeion: [RE: Hephaistos] It seems as some principle of transformation. As a god who is made lame, from previously being whole, that it gives him a certain access into changing a substance of one state into that of another. Breaking down and recombining that renders a specific service from the original form that the original could not.

Yes, and that's also suggested by His fall from Olympus to Earth, a "phase change".

@DaphneLykeion: I wasn't really thinking so much as a phase change but rather an undergoing of an "alchemical change". That the transformative process which renders change to create a greater product requires destruction and reform. 

In my mind this act of destruction inflicted makes the subject bearing higher potential to affect the world. Although not lamed I can see this situations were divinites are killed and brought back. 

Or even those gods who were "consumed" by Kronos and delivered again from him. But these are on a different scope from the more permanent evidential transformations that involve destruction. 

Yes, I think this is key, to distinguish the change whereby a God acquires a disability from other changes. My theory would be that this corresponds to an extraordinary capacity being acquired by mortals. One could test this hypothesis by looking at myths of divine disability to see whether there is a human capacity that corresponds in some sense to the disability suffered by the God.

@DaphneLykeion: The permanent disability however make these gods in line with processes of transformation and power. I think of it this way that Hephaistos who makes the greatest and powerful armor is himself physically unsound. His superior craftsmanship is inseparable from the fact that he is lame, whereas smiths are usually robust. 

As if an exchange of his vitality of form for the soundness and superiority of the forms that he creates. This exchange between his vitality and that which he creates is not separate from the destruction of his limbs. 

I think of it this way that Hephaistos who makes the greatest and powerful armor is himself physically unsound. His superior craftsmanship is inseparable from the fact that he is lame, whereas smiths are usually robust. 

As if an exchange of his vitality of form for the soundness and superiority of the forms that he creates.

@GalinaKrasskova: You see this with Weyland the smith too, a semi-divine Power.

@DaphneLykeion: Fascinating! It would seem that there is an exchange ongoing, from the process of disabling that lends its gift. The hand which is torn from a guard make him quite superior in his art. The torn eye giving the greatest sight.

@GalinaKrasskova: I could certainly see that with Odin and Heimdall.

@DaphneLykeion: The disabling on the gods acting as a process of strengthening some particular attribute to superior level.

@GalinaKrasskova: Precisely and it's interesting with Odin that He chose to pluck out His eye for that reason.

@DaphneLykeion: This would be related to sacrificed gods who by their all out death provide life/fertility. All different scopes. And this would provide new insight into Hera laming intentionally her son. Not as an act of cruelty as the myth seems to lend, for in Argos cult evidence shows very close relationship.

@GalinaKrasskova: She is the maker of heroes.

@DaphneLykeion: Exactly. If Hephaistos in Argos was called the war-like Zeus when he is lame, it would suggest a notable Heroic nature.

Also suggestive regarding the ontological status of warfare.

@DaphneLykeion: Quite so. And so we find a lame god who is superior in crafting physical forms and who is a great warrior.

Had some further thoughts on divine injury and disability. Note the value of certain founding moments of injury in diverse theologies, such as the castration of Ouranos in Hellenic theology or the dismemberment of Ymir in Norse theology. In these cases, the injury/dismemberment of a primordial God establishes what I would call "pantheon space". (In systematic Platonism, pantheon space is the intelligible-intellective or noetico-noeric plane, or so I have argued.)

Such acts localize the moment of self division or diremption of each henad, which releases the common space of being. Within the pantheon, it may be that all subsequent moments of divine injury participate this moment, as structurations of the field. A subtle moment of this in Egyptian theology is Re's self injury, which generates Hu and Sia, utterance and perception. Utterance and perception in this way become available for mortals to participate, and also subject to independent inquiry, epistemology. 

A question which occurred to me, is what would be the significance of a given theology having more injured/disabled Gods than another? If we follow out the theory propounded in last night's discussion, then it might be that the theology with more injured/disabled Gods would be experiencing more elements of experience as occurring immediately within the bodily presence (parousia) of the God.”
   

                                                      

Now onto Christianity.

“For the God we Christians must learn to worship is not a god of self-sufficient power, a god who in self-possession needs no one; rather ours is a God who needs a people, who needs a son. Absoluteness of being or power is not a work of the God we have come to know through the cross of Christ.”

- Stanley Hauerwas,

Kelby Carlson, himself, disabled, says a disabled person can be an actual image of God, of the reality of God, an vision of disability not as a sinful condition, but an image of Christ crushed upon the cross and therefore a disabled body can be a conduit of grace instead of a horror to be escaped from, for it is in suffering that we can “see” God, that is, when we recognize our own state of dependence and brokenness.

Rather than needing to be redeemed from a broken body, the disabled makes visible God, Christ who was crippled, betrayed, and broken :

“…disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing”….While brokenness itself is evidenced of a creation longing for release from bondage, an individual’s disability is, subversively, a venue for Christ to display his glory. 

Disability responds in graphic physical form to the idea of approaching God based on merit. Each disabled person with their twisted legs, nonfunctional eyes, or [whatever] visible or invisible disability they have, directly attacks the presumption of human glory.

Disability is a symbol or metonymy of the larger experience before God: one of weakness, alienation and dependence . . . .

Such a blunt assessment of disability’s pictorial significance might seem harsh, especially coming from a disabled person. 

If I left it there, it would be entirely inadequate. But disability is not merely a counter to theologies of merit constructed by man. It represents the opposite of that: a theology that finds its centerpiece in God’s death on the cross. 

The theology of the cross is a particular way of doing theology that disabled people can uniquely understand. It is the theology that acknowledges the “visible” things of God: 

namely the cross of Christ and visible suffering as the premier way of “seeing” God. God’s grace is manifested, paradoxically, in that which appears weak and nonsensical. 

In this view, one cannot blithely skip over the cross as a simple means to God’s vindication and resurrection. This results in an anemic view of suffering: something that is meant only to be patiently endured in the hope that perhaps someday things will get better . . . . 

Scripture reveals a redemptive way of looking at suffering, and consequently at disability (which, for a great majority of disabled people, involves suffering to one degree or another). Grace is seen as a means of living in and through suffering. 

Chronic weakness is seen as real strength. In fact, it is the only way to truly approach God in faith. Can we view this in an ecclesial way that might take account of the suffering of disabilities in the body of Christ?”

The Theology of Mental Illness

                                                       

Jean-Claude Larchet's Mental Disorders and Spiritual Healing, takes a patristic look at mental illness. He is a patristics scholar, not a psychologist.

First of all the Fathers were quick to recognize that some forms of mental illness had organic causes. For these they recommended such appropriate medical therapy as was available in their days. Larchet maintains that there is a difference between the mental and the spiritual and if the question is whether a psychologist can heal spiritual maladies, then the answer is no.

There is danger, he says, in recalling our old passions in detail. The Church Fathers advise us to confess our passions, to recount before God the sins we have committed – not just be aware of them – and of course to be able to confess all of our difficulties, as well. But the Fathers advise us against and discourage living in detail whatever in our past didn’t end well, whatever bears a connection with our sins. Larchet says, "That’s precisely because confession is not a recollection with which the patient is subsequently stuck, but something that we confess before God in order to receive His forgiveness."

And forgiveness, he says, "means exactly the elimination of all pathological effects, even of the very source of the illness or disorders connected – when there is a connection – with sin; in other words, God’s forgiveness really offers a therapy that secular “psychotherapy” essentially doesn’t."

Secular psychology, he notes, will treat emotion and emotional energy as if they could be dealt with without reference to morality or the basic disposition of the will, and certainly without reference to the Spirit.

He says, mental illness is from three sources: the somatic (body), the psychic (soul), and the spiritual. The somatic level is related to our familiar idea of that mental illness is caused by imbalances in brain chemistry and physiology, if not by actual physical trauma. 

On the psychic level, mental illness is caused primarily by demonic influence, though it is pointed out that demons are attracted to pre-existing psychic dispositions. 

The deformation of our will disposes us toward non-being and the disintegration of our personhood.

Prayer and fasting forms us toward integration with God and life.

Mental illness resulting from the spiritual level is based on the perversion of human free will—sin, in other words—though he makes it clear that the misuse of free will affects the other two levels as well.

In addition to a reorientation of the will through prayer and fasting, which the Fathers recommend, Larchet speaks of the spiritual intervention of the saints as a powerful form of treatment

According to the early Fathers, some (but not all) mental illnesses actually derive from the spiritual level, though their effects nonetheless appear on the level of the psyche per se:

“Mental illnesses of spiritual origin should not be confused with the spiritual illnesses themselves. Spiritual illnesses are formed by a disorder or perversion of nature (more precisely of nature’s mode of existence) in the personal relationship of the individual to God.  

According to the Fathers, the passions take control of our will and force us to passively act according to their agendas instead of being true to ourselves.



Thus the cure is action in its truest sense. Pure act is to center in God —who is Himself “Pure Act.” 

The essence of pure action is prayer which reorients the will to the source of life, God.  

The body and soul are one for the Fathers, therefore what we do with our bodies will affect our soul. Each and every act of the human being is at one and the same time an act and movement of both the soul and the body, therefore the food we eat, ht memories we concentrate on, and our experiences all affect us.

The activities of the soul develop in correlation with the formation and perfection of the body which is its instrument.

Other than organic causes, the main cause of mental disorders is a deformation of the will, for which prayer is the best remedy, and the demonic, which can be healed with the help of the partaking of the mysteries. 

As concerns the demonic,  Larchet says, “the Fathers considered the possessed not to be accomplices of the devil, but rather victims, and as such entitled to special attention and solicitude.”

The third etiology for mental illness from spiritual problems, is “generally defined as one or another of the passions developed to an extreme.”

The Fathers had intimate knowledge of the passions, and dissected them in minute detail. We’ll look at two. Sadness is a direct and conscious feeling of loss, while acedia is more like a general deadening of all life; one has “lost the taste for life.” 

SADNESS

The treatment of sadness, more than of other passions, “presupposes the awareness that one is ill and that one wishes to be cured.”

The first possible cause of sadness “is the frustration of an existing or anticipated pleasure, and more to the point the loss of some sensible good, the frustration of some desire, or disappointment over some worldly hope”; a second case of sadness is anger, “whether it follows from it or is the consequence of some offense suffered, frequently taking in such a case the form of spite.” Treating acedia is even more difficult, as “it has the peculiarity of seizing all the faculties of the soul and inflaming nearly all the passions.”

Treatment, Larchet says, comes through through resistance, patience, hope, grief and tears, the remembrance of death, manual labor and, above all, prayer.

ACEDIA

Acedia has the peculiarity of seizing all the faculties of the soul and inflaming nearly all the passions. St John Climacus tells us that 'acedia is a kind of total death." 

Resistance to this passion never provides immediate results. Almost always victory over acedia supposes a long and diligent struggle.' Above all treatment demands that one give proof of patience and perseverance.

Hope is another fundamental remedy and it should be joined to patience." The hopeful man, as St John Climacus teaches, 'slays acedia, kills it with his sword."

A third essential remedy is repentance, sorrow and compunction. One of the ancients taught that if the individual 'keeps his sins in mind, God will be his help in everything and he will not suffer from acedia.

Manual labor is also among the remedies prescribed by the Fathers. It helps the individual avoid the boredom, instability, torpor, and sleepiness that together form one aspect of this passion. It can contribute to establishing and maintaining diligence, the continual presence of mind, effort, and attention implied by the spiritual life and which acedia seeks to disrupt. 

Finally, Larchet tells us:

“God, in effect, does not grant healing unless it is asked of him, for he has granted man free will and in all the cases respects his will and will not act against it. However, the will of the individual is not always fully at his disposal. . .Those who are disturbed in a significant way cannot even ask for their own healing or give evidence of their faith. . . And yet it is possible for such individuals to be delivered and healed thanks to the faith and the prayers of those around them or accompanying them, as well as to those of the saint to whom they are entrusted.”  

For my own opinion on mental illness see my blog post "Is God Enough? Probably Not" HERE and my post on Anguish HERE 


For more on Larchet, check out these podcasts:


Can Suffering Bring You Closer to Christ? w/Jean-Claude Larchet & Nicole Roccas (Hank Unplugged

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk-LgQHaA90 

Hank Hanegraaff interviews Professor Jean-Claude Larchet on his book book, The Theology of Illness. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grOTUt2skCk 

The human composite and spiritual healing - Jean-Claude Larchet 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wh6AtmPL7Q 

Readings: Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses (sadness) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W1kBOuONeo 

Illness, Mortality and Counsel in the Liturgy 

https://anglican.audio/2019/11/09/fh35-illness-mortality-and-counsel-in-the-liturgy/