Replies

I wrote: "Miracles are facts."

Kolokotronis responded: "Interesting comment; I guess I would never have put it that way, though I suppose its true. Its a fact that I am sitting at a key board, but that doesn't really say much. What I mean is, in the East, miracles are real events that happen at a place where the divine and the mundane meet for the benefit of the mundane. Like the Liturgy or the Mass, they occur "off the timeline" and somewhere that isn't really here. Miracles are not mundane at all but occurrences of divine connectedness with us. Why would we even imagine that "fact" as defined by the world, would have anything to say about the divine?
I do accept your premise about the Western mentality and suppose that the media hype atmosphere surrounding so many miracles may be a necessary tool to get the secular, Western "rational" world to at least look at these divine instances. It does, however, speak volumes about how far Western, secular society has fallen away from the True Faith."

I would respond thus: the West had not really "fallen" very far. It was never all that different. Think about the history. As barbarians, we were not very "otherworldly" about our various forms of paganism, but focused on practical supplications and sacrifices for practical benefits. There were readily identifiable Celtic and Teutonic religious patterns, despite the wide variations, and while they were mystical, they were very, very pragmatic. THIS stone is sacred, because if you sit on it, you will win battles. THIS combination of mistletoe and hawthorne is sacred, because if you keep it about you, it will ward off that form of evil. THIS form of human sacrifice is sacred because it appeases the gods...and also lets us have the entertainment of burning, drowning and cutting our enemies to pieces. There was plenty of religion in the pagan West, but it was a religion aimed at results. Appease the gods...so you can WIN! Sacrifice the foes to appease the gods...and to get rid of them and have some fun in the process. Christianity was not a hard-sell in the pagan West, but think about why: because the reward/punishment gradient was very appealing. Here was a religion that offered the promise of eternal life - a good deal in a world where life was nasty, wicked, brutish and short - and which had very mild sacrifices and costs in return. Of course, the punishment of eternal damnation was also hanging out there to worry the barbarian mind, but it was a particular practice in the early Christian West, often, to delay baptism until terminal illness, specifically in order to be able to wash off all the sins at once, and not have to stop sinning completely. Westerners were never mystic and humble Easterners. They always calculated costs and benefits. They did it in pagan times. They did it at the time of their conversions - the Celts converted practically without firing an arrow, and the Teutons with only slightly greater force. And they continued to do it in the Middle Ages (think the mathematical precision of indulgences). The Protestant Reformation is the perfect incarnation of the Western mind. Think about it: thoroughgoing monarchic power is avoided, all of salvation is kept, and the old grace/works equation is discarded for "grace alone", even as the Church is discarded for "Scripture alone". All the payoff, with less and less cost and effort.
Paschal was an intensely devout Catholic mystic. But the mathematical mind of the West came through him. This passionate mystic could not resist the urge to reduce religious conversion to his famous four-box "Paschal's Wager".

(I am certain that everyone here knows what that was, but for the benefit of those just reading who may not be familiar, the great mathematician drew four-box rectangular grid. At the left side he labelled the two rows: "Don't Believe in God" and "Believe in God". At the top, he labelled the two columns "God Does Not Exist" and "God Exists". He then proceeded to go through the grid this. In the first row, first box, if you Don't believe in God, and God Does Not Exist...if you put your spiritual capital there...you win nothing. Because when you live, your lack of belief gets you nothing good, and when you die there is nothing. On the other hand, in the first row, second box, if you don't believe in God, and God exists, you gain nothing good in this life from your unbelief (and you may suffer the effects of divine displeasure in this life), but when you die, you go to Hell. That's a losing bet.
On the other hand, if you do believe in God, but there is no God, you lose nothing in this life due to your belief, and you lose nothing when you die, because there is nothing. But in that fourth grid spot, if you believe in God, and God exists, here you go to Heaven. Therefore, no matter what the reality of the God is, the only possible winning bet is to believe in God.
There is a relentless logic to this.
I would imagine that Easterners would find it shocking and ugly...belief based on calculation.
Westerners have always found this to be a pretty persuasive argument.

I will take it even further. How much hell fire and brimstone is preached in the East? How much has ever been preached in the East? Does the East use the fear of loss and eternal torture as an argument for faith very much?
In the West, this has been an important part of the argument. Westerners have always presented Hell as a very strong reason to worship God: worship God so that He does not cast you into the fires of Hell when you die for your sins, and for not worshipping Him. This is by no means the sole basis of Western faith, but it is one of two pillars. Worship God because you should love God, and if you love God, He will bless you in this life and the next -that is the carrot that draws in the more mystic and "Eastern" of the Western calculating, barbaric mind. Worship God because if you don't, you will be tortured for eternity in Hell and will never get out - this is the stick that drew, and still draws, the more calculating Western barbarian into the Church who otherwise wants to rob, revel, feast and fornicate himself into an early grave.
Again, I would imagine that the Eastern mind finds this, if technically true, rather barbaric, and the wrong emphasis. But one cannot deny that this is the tone of the Western mind. Dante wrote three books: the Paradiso, the Purgatorio, and the Inferno. Nobody in the West ever reads anything but the Inferno, because Hell and its pains are more interesting to the Western mind than Heaven and its pleasures (which apparently are not fleshly, and therefore not of direct interest to the living pragmatic Westerner - reading about the ethereal pleasures of heaven is boring...sure, we'll like it when we get there, no doubt, but for the moment it's not interesting.) Reading about lakes of fire and captives in eternal torment without death as a relief: THAT is exciting. The East, recall, never devised anything like the Roman Colosseum, where mass torture and death was THE national spectator sport!
As disturbing and disgusting as it may be to the subtle and civilized Eastern mind, this is what Peter and Paul had to contend with when they came this far West...and remember that it was in the West that both were finally killed.
If we look even at secular military history in the time of the Romans we see the pragmatic difference between East and West. With all of the tens of millions of people in the East, the Romans regularly stationed only 7 of their 36 legions in the East: 1 in Asia [Minor], 4 in Syria (includes Palestine), and 2 in Egypt. The other 29 were parked in Gaul or Illyria or Britain, massed against the barbarians within and without.
Why?
Because in the East, the subtle mind of the Easterner could spin out the consequences. Yes, a revolt could probably smash THIS Roman legion or THAT Roman cohort, but there were always more troops, always more legions that Rome could send. And if there was any attack on Rome, the Romans certainly WOULD send those legions. It might take a year, or even two, but at the end of the day, the legions would certainly come, they would certainly invest every town in rebellion, and capture every place in rebellion. Every male rebel would be crucified or sent to the colosseum to die for entertainment, or sent in chains to the fields and mines to die in the hot sun, and every woman would be reduced to a slave for the pleasure of the Roman conqueror. That happened in the initial Roman conquest, and it happened to the Jews when they revolted. The Romans even parked two legions, at enormous expense, in the Judaean desert for two long years, and built a three mile long siege rampart to take out a mere 600 defenders of the last Jewish fortress at Masada. The Eastern mind understood this, and could envision the future, and the East did not rebel. But the Western barbarians, they did not calculate like this. If they did not SEE the pragmatic power of Rome sitting there, in the form of legion after legion on all the walls, they poured in and ravaged the countryside. That the Romans would eventually come and counterattack was not in their calculations. Wherever there was a gap, they plunged through. One sees this in the middle ages too. Drive about France or England. Every village has its castle or keep. Perhaps they are in ruins. But the truth always was that there was no rule or order at all anywhere the armed lords were not physically present...EXCEPT out of fear of God. The Church could administer lands without having to have an armored warrior in every hamlet.

In an earlier post, I admitted that this is a flaw of the Western mindset: I said "We were too violent." But in the violence there was a relentless pragmatism - if there is no lord to see me and stop me, I can better myself by taking that thing over there. And only a belief in the Lord, above, was historically sufficient to bring an imperfect sense of law and order to the West, as barbarians self-restrained out of fear.

There was no "Golden Age" of the West when Westerners did not think like this. We did when we worshipped Odin and the gods of the Druids. We did when we converted to Catholicism. We did under the Protestant lords. And it is through police power and surveillance that the authority of the State is maintained to this day. Things in the West are taken relentlessly to their logical conclusions.

And that happened with science too, which explains why "Miracles are facts", which you find so unpalatable and even religiously degrading, is an operating root of Western thinking.
The birth of science is often presented, by people who don't really know the history, as a reaction to and opposition to the Church. But that is completely false. Science was born primarily as a PROOF of religion, in Western minds that relentlessly need concrete indicators to believe in anything...be it Roman military might or God above.
Start with Acquinas. What was really his point? That there is a fundamental unity between spiritual realities of men and observed nature, because nature is an emanation of the mind of God. THEREFORE (and the THEREFORE is important to understand the root of science in the West), nature MUST be organized, rational and logical. That follows relentlessly from the truth that God is reason and God is law. Love, yes, but also reason and law. Since God made nature, THEREFORE, nature must be completely rationally organized according to divine law, and that divine law must be discoverable by man if we only look. And by looking, we will discover those laws, and thereby prove by empirical fact the truth that we know by faith as well.
Don't bolt from this logic, because this is PRECISELY what Bacon, Galileo, Newton and Kepler, and all of the other pioneers of Western Natural science believed in their very souls. They believed there was God, and because they believed that, they KNEW that if they looked long and hard enough, they would find that nature is organized with mathematical precision and economy - and here is the payoff: and by proving this in nature, the truth of Christian religion would be EMPIRICALLY proven by VISIBLE nature, thereby revealing the hand of God DIRECTLY to the eyes, and proving the faith. That was why they were so persistent.

And, of course, they were RIGHT. God did in fact design nature rationally, and he designed humans by the same law, and humans, therefore, have been able to find the patterns of God's mind in nature, and to prove the existence of God via nature. There was no greater proof of rational religion that Newton's great Principia. HIS reaction to his study was to devote himself utterly to theological studies for the rest of his life. As far as he was concerned, he had proven the existence of God beyond a reasonable doubt. And that was the whole purpose of Western science in its first 200 years.

Now, with the bust-up of Catholicism and the bloodiness of Christian war, and then the age of Revolution and nationalism, and especially the rise of commerce (reason applied to money), new structures of thought arose that gave even greater potential power over THIS Earth and THIS life to participants than Christianity ever could.

Consider the once-universal ban on loaning money at interest. In a non-capital society, this was not an onerous rule. But once real advantage and comfort could be gained in THIS life by lending money at interest, the religion came under stress and had to be modified to allow people to charge interest on money. Westerners were not going to sacrifice pragmatic advantages in THIS life based on the claim that interest would deprive them of paradise in the next. And being rational souls, they found biblical passages to justify Christians' charging interest and got over the matter.

Of course science, which was Western Christianity's baby, grew up to be THE chief challenge to Christianity in the West (not so much the East).
And that is why, today, the most powerfully persuasive thing to the Western mind - ever pragmatic and ever focused on facts - are the eruptions of miracles which break the steady laws of nature which have become the "god" of many, many Westerners outright, and the furtive object of worship to many more Westerners who still consider themselves Christians.

Now, that was long, and I apologize for it. But it links straight back into a recurring theme on our thread. The West really is not the East. We are as different from you in the interior makeup of our minds as the Chinese or Japanese. Indeed, in some ways, the pragmatic-but-superstitious Chinese are much more the Western "type" than the Eastern Orthodox with his phromenas (-ae?) and his mystic and loving approach.

This difference in mindset is so profound, that I don't think it would work to try to make the Orthodox Latins, or the Latins Orthodox. You would bore us. We would revolt you. Always have, and probably always will. The different ethnic Churches, Latin and Eastern, really do fill the cultural niche of their people. Of course that means that the Latin Church has always been very pragmatic in ways that worry the traditionalist East. The Teutons have sacred trees? Put a star on top and say it commemorates Christmas. The Celts have riotous rituals on Walpurgisnacht to appeal to the dead? Remind everyone that ghosts are spirits who go to heaven, call it all soul's eve, and let them keep their carved gourds (later pumpkins). In the new lands, the captive Indians want to pray to idols? Teach them to put candles at the feet of images of Mary and Jesus and pray about them. (And if they pray TO the statues...well...who can really be sure of that? Tell them not to once in awhile, and if they keep paying the tithe, their alms and good deeds with cover the multitude of their sins, including idolatry).

In our thread, what some of you have been trying to say is that we need to become more like you. I don't think most of us could become Easterners even if we wanted to. I don't think there are any Easterners who have ever wanted to become Westerners, other than in matching the power and wealth of the West. It is like an Frenchman becoming Chinese, or vice versa. It's a bridge too far.

What is not a bridge too far is to settle back in wonder at how really DIFFERENT God has, in His wisdom, seen fit to allow the Western and Eastern mind to be. The dispersion from Babel was not just linguistic, but even more fundamental than that, I suspect. Just as men and women really do think DIFFERENTLY, I think that there are broad cultural groups on the world, that identifiably have different modes of mental operation, and these are so old and ingrained that they are not any less determinative than language differences. We were NEVER Easterner. You were NEVER Westerners. Once we supped at the Lord's table anyway, when we had a great Roman Empire banging our heads together and enforcing discipline. When that collapsed in part and nobody was there to link us, we fell away from each other too.
The challenge God has placed before us is to figure out how to recognize each others' distinctive style of worship and be able to respect both in sacramental fellowship.
This is very different from the Latin West mentally becoming the East. We CAN'T. We are not wired that way by God.
What we can do is wonder at the difference, and import a bit MORE of Eastern mysticism and Western pragmatism, and share the same sacraments. And if we leave it at that, we will have done enough to consider each other real family, without having to move into the same apartment.

Miracles are very impressive facts to the Western mind. Rather than be revulsed that the Western mind thinks like that, and thinking that needs to change, see if you can imagine tolerating that Westerners are just "that way", but that it doesn't really make an ultimate difference in the faith we share so long as they don't try to make YOU be that way too. And then reverse the argument East and West, and see if it's not just possible to imagine a world where we can take communion in each other's Churches.

That was WAY too long for the little content it contains. Having written it, it seems a pity to destroy it. So I'll send it in the understanding that if anyone really reads all the way to this sentence, if I were God, I would grant him an indulgence for having indulged me.

"I will take it even further. How much hell fire and brimstone is preached in the East? How much has ever been preached in the East? Does the East use the fear of loss and eternal torture as an argument for faith very much?"

Not very much. We don't have a "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" phronema (it is phronemas in English, phronemata in Greek). We really talk much more about theosis. This is not to say that Hell doesn't have a role. It pops up all over the place as a location of torment by demons for unrepentant sinners. There is a great icon called the Ladder of Divine Ascent. The following on that icon and the book of the same name by St. John Climacos will tell you quite a bit about the Orthodox view in this area:

"The icon is connected with the famous spiritual classic entitled The Ladder of Divine Ascent of Saint John Climacos, who flourished in the seventh century. His memory is celebrated by the Orthodox on March 30 and on the Fourth Sunday of the Great Lent.

In this book, he describes thirty stages of spiritual development, which he likens to thirty steps upward on a ladder. The steps lead the spiritual striver to theosis, divinization, salvation—the ultimate goal of askesis or spiritual struggle.

In the icon which is inspired by this book, the ladder stands on the earth and reaches Heaven, symbolized by a vault from which emerges Christ. The ladder stands at an angle. Sometimes, the lower half of it is at a forty five degree angle, while the upper half stands upright. This is done in order to convey the idea that more effort is required for rising to the highest levels of spiritual development.

At the right side of the scene is shown a building, symbolizing a monastery, and outside its entrance stands Saint John Climacos. With his right hand he points at the ladder for the monks who stand behind him, while in his left hand he holds a scroll on which is written: "Ascend, ascend, Brethren."

Over the top of the ladder is Christ, emerging from Heaven. With His right hand He blesses the monk who has climbed to the top of the ladder, or holds the monk’s hand. In His left hand He holds a scroll, symbolic of His Gospel, or a crown which He is about to place on the head of the victorious monk. Below, there are other monks at various stages of ascent. Some stand on the ladder firmly, and are about to rise to the next rung. Others, however, are barely retaining their hold, as they are drawn by demons. The latter are flying at the left of the ladder. One of the monks has fallen off the ladder and is being swallowed below by a great dragon with wide open jaws. The dragon is used as a symbol of Hell.

Near the right side of the ladder are portrayed holy Angels encouraging and helping the ascending monks. This is in accord with the statement made by Saint John and other Eastern Church Fathers, that those persons who struggle for the acquisition of the virtues are helped both by God and by His Angels.

The Angels are shown with halos, clothed with light-colored garments and large, strong wings. The demons, on the other hand, are depicted without halos, without garments, with small, weak wings. Their bodies are of dark, dull colors, and have something that the bodies of the holy Angels do not have: tails. The latter symbolize the fallen state of the demons, their animalistic state. For the rational faculty, with which God endowed them when He created them—and which distinguishes both the angelic nature and human nature from that of the beasts of the field—has been corrupted by their rebellion against God.

The demons are depicted in order to remind the beholder that there exist such evil incorporeal beings, who act upon us through mental suggestion and assaults, and also to symbolize various "passions" (negative emotions and desires) in us. Saint John describes and minutely analyzes the nature of the passions, namely, pride, gluttony, lust, anger, despondency, malice, and so on. Positive qualities—the opposites of the "passions"—e.g., humility, temperance, chastity, gentleness, hope, love, etc.—are symbolized by the holy Angels, who are also to be viewed as real beings.

The statement on the open scroll held by Saint John Climacos is taken from the concluding exhortation of his book. It begins thus: "Ascend, ascend, brethren, ascend with eagerness and resolve in your hearts, listening to him who says: ‘Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of our God, Who maketh our feet like those of the deer, and setteth us on high places, that we may be victorious with His song.’"

The Ladder of Saint John Climacos, which the icon depicts, is inspired by the Ladder which the righteous Jacob saw in a dream. Jacob saw a ladder which rose from earth to Heaven, on which some Angels were ascending and others were descending. His dream—or, better, his vision—is described in the book of Genesis as follows: "Jacob dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to Heaven, and the Angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord leaned upon it and said: I am the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac; be not afraid.... And behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places wither thou goest" (28:12-13, 15—Septuagint).

Saint John’s Ladder expresses the Orthodox view that spiritual perfection, theosis, salvation is not something attained all at once, as by a leap, but comes after a long arduous process of spiritual striving or askesis. In this process, with sustained effort one rises gradually from lower to higher and higher levels of spiritual development. Thus, in the ninth step, Saint John remarks: "The holy virtues are like Jacob’s Ladder. For the virtues, leading from one to another, bear him who chooses them to Heaven." Later, in the discussion of the fourteenth step, he observes that "no one can climb a ladder in one stride."

Commenting on this, Saint Symeon the New Theologian says: "Those who want to climb these steps climb the first rung of the Ladder, then the second, then the third, and so on.... In this way one can rise from earth to Heaven" (Tou Hosiou Symeon tou Neou Theologou ta Heuriskomena Panta, p. 368). The first step of spiritual ascent, says Climacos, consists in these three virtues: guilelessness (or truthfulness), fasting, and temperance. "All babes in Christ begin with these virtues, taking as their model natural babes. For in these you will never find anything sly or deceitful. And they have no insatiate appetite, no insatiable stomach, no body that is on fire or bestialized." These three virtues will serve, he says, as a secure foundation for the rest."

This mentality is very real and pervasive in Eastern Christianity. Can it become part of a Westerner's mindset? Absolutely. I've seen it hundreds of times myself. My own dear wife is an example. I don't believe that we are entirely captives of our history, especially when it comes to God.