Posted on 08/30/2003 6:54:36 PM PDT by Destro
You are entirely mistaken on this. It is precisely conflicts over St. Augustine, especially the Protestants OVER reliance on him, that was the cause of the Reformation (and also the Jansenist heresy).
Again, the Catholic Church does not follow St. Augustine in our understanding of original sin, on predestination, on the necessity of faith for good works, etc. That is why Catholics and Protestants will never come to an understanding on justification. Until you understand this, you'll never get a good grasp on Catholicism, but continue incorectly thinking we believe in a parody of it coming to little more than Calvinism with a Pope, Sacraments, and Saints.
And here we get to the nub of the matter. When the Greeks re-encountered the Latins after the dark ages, they found them frequently hanging all theology upon St. Augustine. What they apparently still do not appreciate is that while the west has always revered St. Augustine as a great teacher, our second greatest doctor in fact after St. Thomas Aquinas, we do not follow him in all things.
St. Augustine, because of the myriad contrversies he involved himself in, was the first Latin Father to provide enough material for a systematic expostion of the Catholic Faith. He also stood up and put down the Pelagian heresy and systematized western thinking on grace and related topics. But, his excessive zeal lead to a need to correct his intemperance in protecting truth from error, something which began at once by his disciple St. Prosper of Aquitaine, who modified and molified many of his stances.
It seems to me the confusion comes in from our great reverance for St. Augustine in the west. Because we quote him so much as an authority on certain topics, the Greeks seem to assume he is to be taken as an authority for Catholicism on all things in his works without question. Not so. We are guided in all things only by the Sancta Romana Ecclesia - the Holy Roman Church - and NOT by St. Augustine.
"When anyone finds a doctrine clearly established in Augustine, he can absolutely hold and teach it, disregarding any bull of the Pope. ... Condemned and prohibited as rash, scandalous, evil-sounding, injurious, close to heresy, smacking of heresy, erroneous, schismatic, and heretical respectively." (Decree of the Holy Office, confirmed by Pope Alexander VIII, 7 December 1690)
I agree, His talk about how moved he was by seeing fathers take their children up for communion in an orthodox church seems a little phoney. Like he was shocked to see that anyone other than his group, might have religious devotion, or good family relations. I guess it's a good thing he was not invited to visit a mosque, or maybe he'd be changing his name about now.
Plus his "Biblical Studies" on the issue seems a little on the light side. It appears that he made up his mind to switch and is now trying to justify it.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that he was invited to the orthodox church by then girlfriend, now wife.
"Would you say that the Orthodox Church is closer to the Roman Catholic Church than to the Protestant churches?"
"....as one Russian theologian put it in the last century, it is probably true to say that the Roman and Reformed Protestant churches are much closer to each other -- historically, spiritually, theologically, culturally, psychologically -- than the Orthodox Church is to either."
I hope this helps to explain. I completely understand in advance that this is not how you view things and I apologize in advance for anything here that is offensive. My intent in posting is only by way of explanation.
"Orthodoxy lies way distant from the Enlightenment because its approach to the human mind is so radically different. We do not believe that the human mind is so pure that the exercise of unaided reason will inexorably lead to certain self-evident truths about God and humanity, or simply, just humanity. We cannot even tread part of the way with David Hume because it must remain a sorry little faith that only relies on evidence.
"We might be tempted perhaps to join with Protestants in our emphasis on revelation rather than reason or evidence; but no, our understanding of revelation and evidence is of quite a different character. If a Protestant Christian cannot accept revelation as God’s steamroller grinding into history and flattening everything before it, he must eventually side with the rationalists and have done with such debased notions of God‘s action. This is, indeed, what many Protestants have done as their Calvinism has collapsed under the weight of modernity. We cannot even side with what we may call the "heart-Christians," the Methodists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. They would make of Christianity a "warm glow" and little else, reducing it as surely as the Quakers did before into pious platitudes and social activism. Orthodoxy is bound to regard all western reform movements as well intentioned but essentially suspect until a more radical analysis of the problems of the western Christianity is undertaken.
"One good place to start is the relationship between the mind and the heart. It was the medieval scholastics led by the Dominicans who had first begun the grand enterprise of Reason, namely, to discern and confirm the great purposes of God using the faculties of the human mind. Although Protestants rebelled against this, many Reformed Churches eventually substituted their own scholasticism of the mind.
The Enlightenment was the inevitable anti-Christian resolution of this trend. Developing in a parallel fashion, both before and after the Reformation, the religion of the heart was propagated by the Rhineland mystics, the Spiritual Franciscans, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, the Methodists and the Pentecostals. However, these two tendencies in the West, the mind and the heart, remained quite distinct. Sometimes, open warfare broke out between them, but each, essentially had its own separate domain, method and spirituality and each was often defined against rather than for the other.
Enter now Orthodoxy, a quite different idea, or one should say, a different ascetical practice, now largely forgotten in the West. In the highest work of Man, prayer, the mind descends into the heart. There, the mind remains in tact, still active and functioning; but in the heart it listens to a Song wider and deeper than its own reasoning, the murmuring of the Holy Spirit who reveals the Living Word, Christ-God, whom it must worship before it understands.
However, having met Christ in the heart and having battled against all the demons that would seek to dethrone His just and gentle rule, the mind resurfaces to the active realm to understand the blessing it has received. This understanding combines all that is good and noble in the human and natural sciences, not in an "easy" humanism that would sell its Christianity for acceptance by the world, but in a new synthesis, the transfiguration of all that is human by the Word and Power of God.
In this synthesis of Holy Orthodoxy there are no battles between Faith and Reason, between Heart and Mind, between Religion and Science, between the individual and the community. All are one in God and this unity extends from humanity to the whole Cosmos."
Exactly. Thank you for this.
"Concerning Roman Catholicism, not long after its falling away from us because of their adoption of Augustine's Filioque heresy, Thomas Aquinas, who considered himself to be — and indeed thoroughly was — Augustinian, eventually converted the whole of the Latin Church over to his ritualistic theology, a theology which now is the foundation and cornerstone upon which all Roman Catholicism stands. It was Augustine's view of a totally depraved and guilty mankind that necessitated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Thomas Aquinas taught Augustine's presumptuous doctrine that merely by the priest properly performing the right ritual can original sin, which damns one, be removed automatically. In reaction and opposition to this, a second solution was formed for original sin. An Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther, protesting against the hypocritical aridity of the former view (and its automatic priestly absolvements upon anyone who paid for monetary indulgences from the clergy), baptized the populace into his mystically saving experience."
"In the reformations of the sixteenth century, both Protestant and Roman Catholic reformers appealed to different aspects of his teachings to support their claims. Roman Catholics cited his teachings on ecclesiology and sacramental theology. Protestants invoke his teachings on the Christian's dependence on the grace of God for justification. Martin Luther quotes him more than one hundred times in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans alone. Augustine's ideas have provided arguments for political arrangements. His approval of the Donatists' suppression influenced theories of just war, and his social theory, described in City of God, urges the maintenance of a hierarchical ordering in society. [19. 13-15]
In contrast to the theology of the Orthodox Fathers of the East and the West, the Frankish theological tradition makes its appearance in history reading and knowing in full only Augustine. As the Franks became acquainted with other Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking Fathers, they subordinated them all to the authority of Augustinian categories. Even the dogmas promulgated at Ecumenical Synods were replaced by Augustine's understanding of these dogmas.
It is largely because of the development of these Augustinian heresies, that there has arisen the general confusion of secularism, which, in a sense, is just a more firm attachment to the justification initially provided by original sin, that sin is natural to us and therefore requires not remedy but pardon (i.e. toleration), as well as an attachment to the initial faithless despair behind original sin that there is no true redemption within this mortal existence — it being inherently sinful — but rather is something you just have to live with. Capping off this general spirit of Western heresy is Augustine's heretical validation of the baptism of heretics, a view that has contributed greatly to the present Ecumenical movement and its divergent heresies that he largely created."
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