Your essay’s central claim, that the West has lost the primacy of God, is not merely a theological observation but a diagnosis of a civilization’s slow apostasy. The East, with its unbroken chain of incense and prostrations, its monks who still weep over their sins as if the world were young and the Fall still fresh, has preserved what the West has largely traded for syllogisms. The irony is exquisite: the heirs of Augustine, the great doctor of grace, now preside over a Church where grace has been bureaucratized, where the filioque is less a theological proposition than a symbol of the West’s fatal habit of preferring its own logic to the givenness of revelation.
But the deeper question is whether the West can even want what the East has. The East does not have a doctrine of the Incarnation so much as it lives the Incarnation, with a fierceness that would frighten a modern Catholic, accustomed as he is to a God who respects his boundaries. The hesychast does not argue about the essence-energies distinction, he sees the Uncreated Light, because he has become, in some terrible and glorious way, a mirror of the Transfiguration. That is the real difference: the East still believes that God can happen to a man, that theology is not a discipline but a kind of death.
The West, by contrast, has spent centuries building a civilization where God is discussed but rarely encountered. The Scholastics, for all their brilliance, turned theology into a chess game, and the Reformation, for all its fury, only succeeded in democratizing the same disease. Now we live in the aftermath: a world where even the Church speaks of God in the cautious tones of a therapist, afraid of saying too much.
Fascinating comment; to the line asking “whether the West can want what the East has,” I’m not sure ‘we’ can as an aggregate. I wonder if this is where Paul Kingsnorth would say ‘the West’ must die before it can be reborn to experience God as we should.
I can tell you there are many Westerners who want what the East has, or at least seek to know God the way so many ‘Easterners’ appear to. Our institutions may be beyond saving but the people never are.
Indeed, Kingsnorth’s lens is apt. The West’s spiritual exhaustion often feels like a prelude to either dissolution or rebirth, though history suggests such transformations are rarely tidy. Perhaps the question isn’t whether the West can want what the East has, but whether those who ache for it can endure the cost. The hesychast’s path demands everything. Are we, as children of a therapeutic age, prepared to pay?
The irony, of course, is that the East’s treasures were never meant to be its exclusive property. The tragedy of our bifurcated Christendom is that the West forgot its own mystical roots. Augustine’s Confessions are as raw and personal as any hesychast’s cry. Maybe the way forward isn’t imitation, but a reckoning with what we’ve suppressed in ourselves. The East’s light could help us see our own buried fire.
Alas, He knew we would be weaklings. Pick up your CROSS! We kind of failed. I failed, still do. Orthodoxy is not easy but it's real! We need to be the example, right? Failed at that, too. Keep working on it and hold fast to what we believe! Thanks, Steve. Just thinking out loud.
Beautifully said, and yes, weakness was always part of the equation. That’s why the Cross isn’t just a command but a mercy. We fall, but we fall into grace. Keep going!
This is very beautifully written and a well considered argument brother. I pray that the West recover the truths that it abandoned as can be seen by the totally degenerate social order we live under. Christ is King and needs to be returned to his proper place in our lives.
Hot take: this reads like a *wildly Romantic* view of Orthodoxy. It's almost syrupy. The kind of rosiest of rose tint. A triumphalism that that would make even an Ultramontanist say "ok, chill bud." And the view of how distinctively misguided "the West" is...is...something! Apart from the papal authority thing, it reads like someone who only heard about Catholic theology one time in a Photian diatribe or something. The brushes you paint with are large enough to cover a football field. Surely by now you must know how unconvincing these binary diagnoses are ("East good, West bad!"). If only I had known that the Filioque = Enlightenment secularism, I would have skipped all of the nuanced historical and theological research and just rested content with a diagnosis based on cardinal directions! Not targeting you by any means but just trying to communicate how silly this polemic line will always seem to those not having drunk from the Palamite cool aid. Orthodox intellectuals riffing on the cultural fate of "the West" makes it so much harder for me to take Orthodoxy seriously.
Absolutely wonderful article, Michael! This one’s going in the vault for sure.
One thing that I wish more Orthodox thinkers noted, however, is that reason is not contrary to God. I am a Protestant who is close to converting to orthodoxy, and I am also a philosopher. The more I have studied the nature of reasoning (my main academic focus at the moment), the more I have found that it reflects the orthodox conception of God more than anything. All reasoning proceeds from revelation. General revelation can get us to important truths (hence, why Plato has had such an impact on the church fathers of old) but it cannot get us the true nature of God’s relationship to His creation (hence the heresy of rejecting church doctrine in favor of views like Plato’s).
Often, many orthodox are not careful in the way they speak: they speak as though reason is something to be rejected in favor of church tradition. This is not possible — a human cannot act but on his reasoning. The idea that tradition has primacy over other intellectual influences is itself a reason used to make decisions in the Orthodox Church. The real distinction that is meant, I think, is the distinction between reasoning that proceeds from humility and reasoning that proceeds from pride. Scholastic reasoning proceeds from anthropocentric pride — the idea that man can understand God on our own terms. Orthodox reasoning proceeds from humility — the idea that we must look to what God has actually established to understand Him.
It’s not a matter of reason versus dogma — it’s a matter of humility in reasoning versus pride in reasoning. This is an important distinction to make, as the polemic used by many Catholics is that the Orthodox reject reasoning — they do not! They reject the proposition that man apart from the grace of God can come to understand Him.
In Denzinger, it has both “We believe” and “I believe” in the text. So I don’t think it is established that only one is allowed, as the conciliar records support both.
Absolutely brilliant. The West assumes that revelations were only in the past. However as Meister Eckhardt understood, it is only through an emptying that divinity can enter.
As Iain McGilchrist has pointed out a logic that includes scholasticism involves the left hemisphere whereas revelation involves a shut down or an emptying of all presuppositions and conceptions to make room for divine inspiration.
May I humbly suggest a graphic to serve as a goal—a triune vision?
We believers in Jesus Christ all need to be crushed because pride has always been and will continue to be our undoing.
Like the three colors of grapes in this .gif we need to be fully contributive to the Light as when:
Red (255)
Green (255)
Blue (255)
send their respective particle/waves toward our eyes and what we appreciate as White Light (via the cone receptors) bears witness to the Divine Oneness.
God is the vintner.
At what appears to be the 11th hour—when the cup of iniquity is overflowing—please consider:
Red... Catholic
Green... Orthodox
Blue... Protestant
It's folly to think that anyone on this good earth can fix nearly 2000 years of broken relationships.
Your essay’s central claim, that the West has lost the primacy of God, is not merely a theological observation but a diagnosis of a civilization’s slow apostasy. The East, with its unbroken chain of incense and prostrations, its monks who still weep over their sins as if the world were young and the Fall still fresh, has preserved what the West has largely traded for syllogisms. The irony is exquisite: the heirs of Augustine, the great doctor of grace, now preside over a Church where grace has been bureaucratized, where the filioque is less a theological proposition than a symbol of the West’s fatal habit of preferring its own logic to the givenness of revelation.
But the deeper question is whether the West can even want what the East has. The East does not have a doctrine of the Incarnation so much as it lives the Incarnation, with a fierceness that would frighten a modern Catholic, accustomed as he is to a God who respects his boundaries. The hesychast does not argue about the essence-energies distinction, he sees the Uncreated Light, because he has become, in some terrible and glorious way, a mirror of the Transfiguration. That is the real difference: the East still believes that God can happen to a man, that theology is not a discipline but a kind of death.
The West, by contrast, has spent centuries building a civilization where God is discussed but rarely encountered. The Scholastics, for all their brilliance, turned theology into a chess game, and the Reformation, for all its fury, only succeeded in democratizing the same disease. Now we live in the aftermath: a world where even the Church speaks of God in the cautious tones of a therapist, afraid of saying too much.
Fascinating comment; to the line asking “whether the West can want what the East has,” I’m not sure ‘we’ can as an aggregate. I wonder if this is where Paul Kingsnorth would say ‘the West’ must die before it can be reborn to experience God as we should.
I can tell you there are many Westerners who want what the East has, or at least seek to know God the way so many ‘Easterners’ appear to. Our institutions may be beyond saving but the people never are.
Indeed, Kingsnorth’s lens is apt. The West’s spiritual exhaustion often feels like a prelude to either dissolution or rebirth, though history suggests such transformations are rarely tidy. Perhaps the question isn’t whether the West can want what the East has, but whether those who ache for it can endure the cost. The hesychast’s path demands everything. Are we, as children of a therapeutic age, prepared to pay?
The irony, of course, is that the East’s treasures were never meant to be its exclusive property. The tragedy of our bifurcated Christendom is that the West forgot its own mystical roots. Augustine’s Confessions are as raw and personal as any hesychast’s cry. Maybe the way forward isn’t imitation, but a reckoning with what we’ve suppressed in ourselves. The East’s light could help us see our own buried fire.
Alas, He knew we would be weaklings. Pick up your CROSS! We kind of failed. I failed, still do. Orthodoxy is not easy but it's real! We need to be the example, right? Failed at that, too. Keep working on it and hold fast to what we believe! Thanks, Steve. Just thinking out loud.
Beautifully said, and yes, weakness was always part of the equation. That’s why the Cross isn’t just a command but a mercy. We fall, but we fall into grace. Keep going!
This is very beautifully written and a well considered argument brother. I pray that the West recover the truths that it abandoned as can be seen by the totally degenerate social order we live under. Christ is King and needs to be returned to his proper place in our lives.
Hot take: this reads like a *wildly Romantic* view of Orthodoxy. It's almost syrupy. The kind of rosiest of rose tint. A triumphalism that that would make even an Ultramontanist say "ok, chill bud." And the view of how distinctively misguided "the West" is...is...something! Apart from the papal authority thing, it reads like someone who only heard about Catholic theology one time in a Photian diatribe or something. The brushes you paint with are large enough to cover a football field. Surely by now you must know how unconvincing these binary diagnoses are ("East good, West bad!"). If only I had known that the Filioque = Enlightenment secularism, I would have skipped all of the nuanced historical and theological research and just rested content with a diagnosis based on cardinal directions! Not targeting you by any means but just trying to communicate how silly this polemic line will always seem to those not having drunk from the Palamite cool aid. Orthodox intellectuals riffing on the cultural fate of "the West" makes it so much harder for me to take Orthodoxy seriously.
Bravo, well done!
Thank you!
Absolutely wonderful article, Michael! This one’s going in the vault for sure.
One thing that I wish more Orthodox thinkers noted, however, is that reason is not contrary to God. I am a Protestant who is close to converting to orthodoxy, and I am also a philosopher. The more I have studied the nature of reasoning (my main academic focus at the moment), the more I have found that it reflects the orthodox conception of God more than anything. All reasoning proceeds from revelation. General revelation can get us to important truths (hence, why Plato has had such an impact on the church fathers of old) but it cannot get us the true nature of God’s relationship to His creation (hence the heresy of rejecting church doctrine in favor of views like Plato’s).
Often, many orthodox are not careful in the way they speak: they speak as though reason is something to be rejected in favor of church tradition. This is not possible — a human cannot act but on his reasoning. The idea that tradition has primacy over other intellectual influences is itself a reason used to make decisions in the Orthodox Church. The real distinction that is meant, I think, is the distinction between reasoning that proceeds from humility and reasoning that proceeds from pride. Scholastic reasoning proceeds from anthropocentric pride — the idea that man can understand God on our own terms. Orthodox reasoning proceeds from humility — the idea that we must look to what God has actually established to understand Him.
It’s not a matter of reason versus dogma — it’s a matter of humility in reasoning versus pride in reasoning. This is an important distinction to make, as the polemic used by many Catholics is that the Orthodox reject reasoning — they do not! They reject the proposition that man apart from the grace of God can come to understand Him.
Well said. As an Orthodox Christian, I think you’re spot on here.
Powerful essay. Curious: how come the Orthodox use the Nicene creed starting with 'I believe' rather than 'We believe' as in the original?
One of the reasons, I think, is that it is first and foremost a Baptismal creed: The _individual_ must confess his or her belief to join the body.
The point is that it’s not clear why any change is allowed.
In Denzinger, it has both “We believe” and “I believe” in the text. So I don’t think it is established that only one is allowed, as the conciliar records support both.
Absolutely brilliant. The West assumes that revelations were only in the past. However as Meister Eckhardt understood, it is only through an emptying that divinity can enter.
As Iain McGilchrist has pointed out a logic that includes scholasticism involves the left hemisphere whereas revelation involves a shut down or an emptying of all presuppositions and conceptions to make room for divine inspiration.
May I humbly suggest a graphic to serve as a goal—a triune vision?
We believers in Jesus Christ all need to be crushed because pride has always been and will continue to be our undoing.
Like the three colors of grapes in this .gif we need to be fully contributive to the Light as when:
Red (255)
Green (255)
Blue (255)
send their respective particle/waves toward our eyes and what we appreciate as White Light (via the cone receptors) bears witness to the Divine Oneness.
God is the vintner.
At what appears to be the 11th hour—when the cup of iniquity is overflowing—please consider:
Red... Catholic
Green... Orthodox
Blue... Protestant
It's folly to think that anyone on this good earth can fix nearly 2000 years of broken relationships.
Shine HIS LIGHT and hope and pray for HIS RETURN.
https://substack.com/@mikerizzio/note/c-116024058
Man, this is good.