Fair enough. I’ll take you up on all your points.

Photios

Photios- Really? Then how about letting me make comments on your blog?

Fair enough. I’ll take you up on all your points.

Photios

Private judgment is inescapable for any person. Ever single person makes private judgment about one thing or another. Your willingness to follow the Pope and to come back again as a Catholic is in fact a private judgment, because it is all your own. It was your decision to make and no one made it for you.

I think you are confusing private judgment with what is normative. My judgment to follow Orthodox dogmatics is indeed my own and nobody else’s. My judgments in and of themselves are not sufficient to bind the conscience of the faithful barring a direct experience of God Himself. The Ecclesiastical judgments on the other hand are normative especially if they are following the teachings of those who are “Fathers.” In that respect, the teachings of the Church are not a “divine intervention” that “coopts” or determines the human will in such a way that it is divorced from the spiritual life that the teaching or dogma is based on, but rather grounds it.

Photios

I’m more than willing to work this out with you and listen to you as an Orthodox christian and to reconcile with you by any means necessary that is truth preserving. But I do not believe it is helpful for you to basically say I am a “fool” and an “idiot.”

I never had the intention to assert that you are a “fool” and an “idiot.” I asserted that a certain reading of Christian history is empty-headed; that is to say, it doesn’t answer to the evidence. You presented to me one piece of evidence, a text by Anastasius the Librarian; in my post, I gave an interpretation of why that evidence took the form it did, and presented you, in return, with a series of texts to show that the Augustinian view was, in fact, already widespread and authoritative in the West at the time St. Maximus wrote. The issue was not you; it was a theory, espoused by many people; I mention some of these others in the post (Jean-Claude Larchet, Theophanes Prokopovitch, Adam Zoernikavius). In your subsequent comments to the post, you consistently refused to address the evidence I had produced, and — in a way that I have found pretty predictable from previous exchanges — went directly towards telling me that my ignorance would be enlightened if I’d only pay attention to the great Farrell and read the indispensable Siecienski, and taking personal offense at supposed slights. It’s a routine, Mr. Jones, that I find pretty tedious.

If you want to engage in a dialogue on my blog, I would ask of you certain favors:

(1) Make it clear, in your response to a post, that you have actually read the whole thing and understood the argument that is being made in it, and respond to that argument.

(2) Do not present me with an ever-increasing battery of charges to which I am expected to respond in my unlimited spare time. Address a central point, address it with civility, and wait for a reply before you find additional things to say about it.

(3) Understand that a basic assumption of dialogue is the possibility of friendship in a common acknowledgment of truth. Do not cut off that possibility from the start by adopting a gratuitously adversarial stance.

(4) If possible, take the time to use proper grammar and spelling. The lack of it is a sign of haste and thoughtlessness.

The chief thing I would hope to see, on the part of both of us, is some acknowledgment that the other is, before all else, a fellow Christian, and both of us, from our different standpoints, love the same thing. Consider me as someone standing in the same congregation as you on a Sunday, someone whom you may not agree with on all things, someone who has perhaps irked you in various ways and whom you have repaid in kind, but who, when the priest comes out from behind the altar with the Body and Blood of Christ, also partakes in that same Body and Blood. We have, in fact, a responsibility to be at peace with one another.

Peter

But was Maximus unconcerned with authority? I think it can be demonstrated that it was a very real concern for him.

Doesn’t it really come down, finally, to authority? If authority is not part of the equation–indeed the crucial part–then are we not operating like the Protestants, choosing our church based on how closely it accords with our own views? Even if we have undergone a “paradigm shift” and changed our views…if we then switch churches based on that, based on our paradigm shift, then how is this not a typically Protestant exercise of private judgment? How can we possibly rest secure in such a choice, which is grounded in the incredibly subjective exercise of our own judgment–our own “take on truth”?

I ask this sincerely. I sense in you a sincere readiness to dialogue, and I would like to respond in kind.

2) Dr. Farrell is interesting. I have yet to find any referral to him or his work in any scholarly journal. I did find one referral in Henry Chadwick’s “East and West: The making of a Rift in the Church”. Professor Chadwick states that Farrell’s translation of Photius’ Mystagogy is adequate but for readers to avoid the introductory essay which he found tendentous. Farrell’s “magnum opus”, “God, History and Dialectic” is only available on the blog, “Filioque, the Sum of all Heresies”. It has not been reviewd by any scholar as far as I know.

3) I am intrigued by the references to Eunomius. Having just finished reading “Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution” by Richard Paul Vaggione, it seems to me that what happened to Eunomius was that he was a victim of being too reliant on a pre-Nicene theology believing it to be theologically and linguistically adequate for explaining the Incarnation. His faith in “tekne” ( rhetoric), and akribia, ( the exact definition of terms and concepts), made him unable to see the “grey areas” surrounding the Mystery of Incarnation. I find that there is, ironically, the same mentality among those who adhere strictly to the words and letters of some patrictic sources without recognizing or acknowledging the “grey area” of the context in which those words and letters are found.

P.S. Henry Chadwick died this past week at the age of 87.

A memorable quote; ““Nothing is sadder than someone who has lost his memory, and the church which has lost its memory is in the same state of senility.”

I was using my “Augustinism” as an example of my own personal development and paradigm shift. In other words, I’m capable of listening to new ideas, arguments, etc., and changing my mind.

I understand that you like to deal with the question of authority first. For me, I’m moved by the content of the faith as Maximus was.

Photios

Father Paul, that was my thought exactly, but you have put it so much better than I ever could!

Photios: Forgive me, but I almost wonder whether you haven’t simply moved from one ideology to another. Here’s what I mean.

OK, I’m a Cradle Catholic, so take it from whence it comes, but it would never remotely cross my mind to say, “I am Catholic because I am Augustinian.” No. I am Catholic because I’m Catholic. The Church comes before any individual theologian, no matter how influential he may be. The Church transcends her theologians and their theologies. It’s not like, say, Calvinism, where everything hinges on whether Calvin’s take on the Gospel is the right one.

Thus, for me, identifying the True Church is not a matter of pinpointing which communion has the “correct” theological system (according to my own private judgment). Rather, it’s a matter of pinpointing which Church Christ actually founded. (Which means it’s more an historical question than a theological or ideological one. For me, at least.)

For me, the Scriptural and patristic evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the Church Christ founded is the Catholic Church, in communion with the Successor of Peter. Once that’s esatblished, we can go on to decide whether we’re more Augustinian or Cappadocian, whether we’re Thomist or Molinist or whatever. The Catholic Church is a pretty big tent, and there’s room under that tent for a wide diversity of theologies and spiritualities (within the parameters of de fide dogma grounded in the Deposit of the Faith). We don’t have to squeeze ourselves into a certain narrow theological grid associated with one theologian or theological school. Indeed, it’s best if we don’t.

All we have to do is believe the de fide dogmas. In non-essentials, as Augustine himself said, we have liberty. Which is why I’m a happy Molinist in happy coexistence with my Thomist / predestinarian co-religionists. Some things are simply mysteries (apophasis, ‘member?)…and we can agree to disagree, because we just don’t know.

And that’s the beauty of the Catholic Church, the Church of “Here Comes Everybody.” And that’s why it’s a Church — the Church IMHO — not an ideology.