Note: this excerpt
was originally made public on the web at Energetic Procession.
Christian
civilization — or what remains of it — stands,
apparently exhausted and
irreparably divided, on the uncertain terrain of a century’s
and
millennium’s finish, ill-prepared to carry any cogent or
consistent
witness into the third millennium and twenty-first century of its
dispensation. This is because the equation of
“Western European” with
“Christian” civilization is itself founded upon a
schism which resulted
in a kind of cultural and historiographical heresy.Such statements may
seem like good news to the “multiculturalist”, so I
wish to dispel any
lingering and seductive causes for rejoicing that they may have
engendered. First, these essays are not an attack on Western
European
civilization. They are rather an analysis of the roots of
that
civilization, and of its origin in a theological heresy and of the
cultural and moral crisis that heresy has sired. For this
reason,
these essays are a spiritual effort, akin to the process of
self-examination before confession. By the same token, these
essays
are more of introspection and retrospection than of argument in any
sense that a modern historian, philosopher, or
“theologian” would
recognize. I believe that I have managed to surpass intuition
in these
pages, but it would indeed be presumptuous for me to claim that
argument has been achieved, or that an exhaustive articulation of what
is a very complex hypothesis has been accomplished. I
maintain only
that, at the end of these essays, a very complex phenomenon will have
been surveyed, and that, like all surveys, it is subject both to the
usual omissions of fact, and to the hazzards of
over-generalization
here or too exclusive and narrow a focus there.
“Multiculturalists”
will find no support
or cause of joy for their projects in these pages for a second
reason.
The undertaking represented here was attempted because of my personal
conviction that our “culture”, as one contemporary
adage has it, is in
a state of profound moral crisis, a crisis which affects every aspect
of our life — social, political, economic, and religious
— for every
aspect of our cultural conventions are at stake. I do not,
however,
seek the ultimate causes for this crisis in material, and for that
reason, superficial causes. The crisis is
not founded
on any merely economic, political, scientific, or legal
basis. Still
less it is founded, as the conservative opposition to multicultaralism
has it, on “the collapse of moral
values”. Nor is the crisis founded
on any combination of these factors.These essays argue rather that the
crisis is a specifically theological one,
for what has been lost is not “spirituality” or
“moral values” or any
such meaningless abstraction.
“Spirituality” and “moral
values” have
collapsed because the theological, ecclesiastical, and liturgical
context in which they are born and nurtured has long since crumbled
into the stew of competing theological illiteracies of
“denominations”,
themselves the result of specific doctrinal assumptions made and
adopted by a part of our culture long ago, and specifically rejected by
yet another part of it.And lest these terms —
“theological” and
“doctrinal” — be misunderstood, I mean
that the crisis has specifically
doctrinal and
therefore conceptual roots.
It is in large measure attributable to a constellation of theological
and philosophical paradigms which, once adopted, worked themselves out
in the History of Christian Civilization itself.Finally,
“multiculturalists” and their conservative
counterparts who pretend to
defend “Judeo-Christian”, by which they mean only
Western European,
civilization, and who profess to do
“objective”history, will not find
much of comfort here, for these essays are in the final analysis an
intensely personal statement. They are an examination of my
own
spirit, both as one raised and at home in that Western European
civilization, and as one who, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, lives
every day confronted by the tragedy of the Schism between Eastern and
Western Europe. These essays are an attempt to resolve a
profoundly
internal and personal struggle.
Christian
theology has left an indelible imprint, a presupposition, which
permeates the “popular historiographical
consciouness” of the
Second(Western) Europe, with its persistent division of History into
the tripartite scheme delineated by various sigla: “Ancient
History,
Mediaeval history, Modern History” or “Classical
Ages, Dark or Middle
Ages, Modern Age” being the two most popular. The
origin of this
discernible form is, not surprisingly, the Trinity — Father,
Son, and
Holy Ghost — or rather, the dialectically formulated and
deconstructed
“Trinity” of the post-Augustinian Christian
West. This
Augustinian-Trinitarian civilization, which in these pages is
designated “The Second Europe”, was erected on the
foundation of the
Orthodox and Eastern Europe, which is similarly designated
“the First
Europe.” The basic thesis of these essays is thus
that there are Two
Europes, Eastern and Western, First and Second respectively, and that
both are the effects and consequences of very different and ultimately
contradictory theological presuppositions and methods. These
essays
argue that these different and mutually exclusive presuppositions and
methods have permeated every facet of legal, social, and cultural
conventions. But to say this is to say nothing new, nor
terribly
original, and certainly nothing terribly upsetting to the
“multiculturalist” or “Judeo-Christian
Conservative.” The thesis of
the Two Europes is explored in these essays from the presupposition
that the Western, Second Europe is derivative and aberrant.
Lest multiculuralists or conservatives still misunderstand, this may be
plainly stated: these essays argue that The First Europe is
“first” in
the sense of cultural primacy and that it is therefore the canonical
measure of Christian civilization. That the Second Europe
came
eventually to regard itself as the canonical measure of Christendom,
with all the tragic implications that this pretense engendered, is, in
large measure, the task of these pages to elucidate.When the main
thesis of this work is posed in this manner, certain obvious questions
and dilemmas present themselves, with the First Europe and Russia in
the foreground, exposing the insufficiency of any merely secular,
political, economic or sociological approach to a historiographical
analysis of the crisis. Why is this so? It is so because
Byzantium and
Russia function as mysteries even to the modern exposition of Mediaeval
History in textbooks, textbooks which continue to treat of both
entities as separate phenomena from each other, and more importantly,
from “Europe”, meaning “Western
Europe.” Why the separate treatment?
Because having assumed its own cultural canonicity, the historiography
of the Second Europe cannot contend with the sharp and cumbersome edges
that Byzantium and Russia offer for analysis; they cannot be squeezed
and moulded into the paradigms appropriate to Western European
Scholasticism or feudalism. One well-known textbook on
Mediaeval
History summed up this attitude by treating of Byzantium in a chapter
entitled “Europe’s Neighbors”.
But the real problem is that Byzantium
and Russia expose the inadequacy of the Ancient, Mediaeval, and
Modern”
tripartite paradigm of the Second Europe’s historiography,
for in the
Western sense, Russia has no ancient history,
and an arguable case could be made that it is only just beginning to
have a “modern” one. It has no
“ancient” history in even a sense that
would be recognizable to a subject of the Byzantine Empire, for prior
to its conversion to Orthodox and East Roman Catholic Christianity
rather than to the West Roman and Latin, it possessed no high literary
culture at all. Russia possessed nothing analogous
to the classical
pagan inheritance possessed both by Byzantium and the Latin
West.
Hence, Russia’s very existence and history as a nation is
more
intimately bound up with Christianity than any other.
Orthodoxy was
both father, mother, and mid-wife to Russian nationhood. If
Russia
therefore be an enigma or a mystery or a riddle to the Second Europe,
it is not because Russia is Russia but
because it is Orthodox. We
now draw nearer to the task of these essays, for they do
constitute an attempt to do Orthodox theological historiography, or
perhaps even an Orthodox version of the great “philosophies
of history”
of the Hegelian Geistesgeschichteschule,
or at the very least, an attempt to outline the necessary form that
such an analysis must take. Thus, we draw nearer to the task
of these
essays if we but appreciate one rather obvious, though overlooked, fact
about intellectual and cultural history: The Second Europe
“rediscovered Aristotle” in the twelfth century,
and thereby unleashed
a process of massive theological revisionism. But the First
Europe
never misplaced him, and Russia never had him to begin with.
This highlights another important
cultural phenomenon: The East Roman Empire never lost the Aristotle
that became so important for theology in the West, and indeed, did not
regard Aristotle, or any other philosopher, as having all that much to
do with theology. What presuppositions were present in
Byzantine and
Eastern Christian thought, then, that impelled the Eastern Church not to
transmit this part of its heritage to Russia in its first exportation
of Orthodox culture to the Slavs? Whatever they were, those
presuppositions are already vastly different than those operative in
the West, where for a lengthy period it became functionally impossible
to do theology without Aristotle, and, indeed, without philosophy at
all.In these essays, then, I propose to acquaint the reader as
thoroughly as possible with the Patristic theology of the Orthodox
Catholic East, and, on that theological
basis, to examine the theological foundations of the Second Europe, and
the cultural effects of those foundations. This may seem to
be a
cumbersome, and lengthy, method, but even this is an implication of the
thesis driving the work: that
the Second Europe is incapable of undertaking a comprehensive
integration of Mediaeval Western and Eastern European studies because
of the inherent shortcomings and errors of its own theological
foundations, foundations which, as we shall see, created the Two
Europes in the first place. In short,
ex oriente lux.
These
essays are about the Two Europes and the Three Trinities on which they
are based. The first Trinity is the Holy Trinity of classical Christian
doctrine, uncorrupted by its Augustinian formulation, the Trinity of
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. As the
first term
of the second Trinity is St. Augustine of Hippo’s Dialectical
Formulation of the Holy Trinity; as the second term of the second
trinity is the History which that dialectical formulation moulded and
shaped, and as the third term of the second trinity are the divisions
which resulted from the application of Augustine’s
trinitarian
dialectics in History, the resulting schisms of
“Europe” into First
Europe, Second Europe, and Russia. The causes for the Second
Europe’s
tripartite division of History into its Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern
Ages is thus to be credited to St. Augustine’s dialectical
formulation
of the Trinity. This transubstantiation of the Trinity from a revealed
Mystery to a dialectical deduction, and finally, to a dialectical
process at work within History itself is simply unintelligible without
Augustine. In the thirteenth century, Joachim of
Floris’ Age of the
Father, Age of the Son, and (coming) Age of the Spirit, or
Petrarch’s
or Gibbon’s Golden Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance, or
Hegel’s
well-known Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, or Comte’s
“superstitious, metaphysical, and scientific”
periods, and finally, our
own superficially academic and objective divisions of Ancient,
Mediaeval, and Modern “History” are but tired
exhausted reworkings of
the original heresy which split the Latin Church from Eastern Orthodoxy
and created the Two Europes. The Second Europe’s
historiography, even
in its most avowedly secular form, Marxism, is thus one of many logical
implications and inevitabilities of the Augustinizing of doctrine which
took place from the fifth to the ninths centuries in the Christian
West. The term “inevitabilities”, however, should
not be construed to
mean that I take the History of the Second Europe as inevitable in the
Stoic and Calvinistic sense, as something that could have happened in
no other way. Indeed, St. Augustine himself taught a doctrine
of “pure
futuribles,” that is, a multiplicity of possible worlds and
circumstances that could derive from a given constellation of
circumstances. Whatever the merits or demerits that this
theory had as
an explanation of the Incarnation or of divine predestination,
Augustine’s theological system may be
viewed as a whole set of logical entailments, a plenitude of
implications, which subsequent history actualized
in a certain way. Thus, in describing this or that phenomenon
as
“inevitable”, I do not mean to imply
anything beyond their dialectical
form: they are “inevitable” in the sense that there
is a discernible
logical derivation and pedigree which it is necessary to trace, step by
step, to reach and actualize within history certain conclusions
implicit, among many others that may never see such actualization,
within the Augustinian system. The Second Europe is
“inevitable” in
this dialectical sense, and not in the Calvinistic or Stoic.These
“inevitabilities” are to be contrasted with the
First Europe, at the
core of which lies The First Hellenization of the Gospel and its deliberate, explicit,
and formal rejection by
the Eastern Church and the Culture she influenced. This
contrast is
clear and acute, for at the core of the Second Europe is the Second,
and Augustinian, Hellenization of the Gospel, and its deliberate, explicit, and
formal acceptance
by the Western Church and the schismatic and heretically based culture
she influenced and created. The historiographical task of
these essays
is therefore massive, for there were not originally two Churches,
or even a distinctively “Latin” Church as opposed
to a distinctively
“Greek” one. Rather, there was within two
segments of a unified
Christian Church a simultaneous movement toward, and away from,
Hellenization. The task of these essays is therefore to expose the
specifically Augustinian dialectical formuation of Trinitarian doctrine
as the root of these two very different historical movements, and to
demonstrate the Augustinian departure from traditional doctrine, and to
trace the departure in its cultural effects in the
development of law, science, and philosophy.
Thus the thesis of this work is quite simple: the Two Europes worship
different Gods.
This may seem a surprising, perhaps even an irreverent, assertion,
until one recalls why the doctrine of God is so significant. It
is the doctrine of the Trinity which is at the core of the
Church’s
belief and the ultimate basis of Her cultural influences. The
differences in the theological formulation of that doctrine therefore
reflect, illuminate, and cause the difference of the Two Europes. Once
the profundity of Augustine’s dialectical formulation of the
Trinity is
grasped, we shall come much closer to the fundamental influences
driving much, if not most, of the intellectual development of the
Second Europe. We may highlight the seriousness of that
development by
asking some rather obvious, though deeply serious, questions.
Why did
the western half of Christendom split along so cleanly dialectical
lines during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic
Counter-Reformation? Why, for example, is it not only
conventient but possible
to describe that split by a series of polar oppositions: Faith versus
works, Scripture versus Tradition, “private conversion
stay-at-home-and-watch-television religion” versus
“public,
sacramental, institutional” religion; predestination versus
free will,
Kernel versus Husk, Kerygma versus Dogma, Luther versus Zwingli, Calvin
versus Arminius, Whitefield and Edwards versus the Wesleys, Henry VIII
versus the Pope? It has its secular counterparts as well: Empiricism
versus Rationalism, Materialism versus Idealism, Science versus
Religion, Creation versus Evolution, hard versus soft disciplines, and
so on. One could cite an endless litany of similar
oppositions.
Indeed, theologians, philosophers, and historians of the Second Europe
have long written about this or that pair of these either-or
polarities, but astonishingly, have either done so in isolation of an
examination of the paradigm of dialectical opposition itself, or they
have accepted that paradigm as an inevitability of Christian theology
or of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. The phenomenon of this
acceptance is therefore deeply rooted, and must be accounted
for. These
essays argue that the paradigm is itself a direct consequence of
Augstine’s formulation of trinitarian doctrine. But
the movement from
the specifically Augustinian formulation of the Trinity to these
cultural consequences is certainly not an easy one to recount, and
thus, many theologians — those most adequately equipped to
undertake
the task — fail to do so, for they view the original dispute
between
the East and West over that formulation as a dispute about
words. The
troublesome questions multiply: Why did a
Church and a culture, which believed absolutely in the complete union
in Christ of the utterly spiritual and the completely material, without
separation and without confusion, lose sight of the implications of
that belief in the movements of the dialectical deconstruction of its
thought and institutions? Why did the same Church, which,
heir to the
doctrine of the Trinity, ought to have believed in the
“both-andness”
of Absolute Unity and Utter diversity find itself embroiled in
life-and-death constitutional struggles between the Empire and the
Papacy, or more fundamentally, between endless contests between One
Pope and Many Bishops? We may inject the First
Europe into this series
of questions to ask a new series even more profoundly disquieting: Why
did the First Europe not go
through the Reformation? Is it to be explained adequately on
the basis
of merely secular causes, as the result of the “cultural
isolation” of
Russia? Or because its “dogmatic mysteriological
piety” locked its
culture in the reliquary of “unchangeable
ritual”? Or because of the
Mongol invasion and conquest of
Russia? Or because of the “timely but
inevitable” Fall of
Constantinople scarcely a century before the Reformation
began? Or is
the lack of the dialectical movement of Reform and Counter-Reformation
to be explained on the basis of something much more fundamental and
spiritually rooted? It is the task of these essays to show that the
Byzantine and Russian detachment from these upheavals in the Second
Europe is unrelated to any merely secular explanation of them, for the
root causes of that detachment predate the Mongol invaions of the
thirteenth, or Ivan the Terrible’s Drang nach Osten and
“collection of the Russian lands” in the sixteenth
centuries. These
essays explain this detachment as a result of the continued rejection
by the First Europe of Hellenization, and its insistence that
Augustinism was but a recasting of formal heresies previously condemned
by both East
and West when both segments were still a part of one Church, and
therefore, both a part of One Europe. Thus we arrive at a
corollary to
our thesis. Only
the First Europe has an adequate theological basis on which to analyze
the movements of the intellectucal histories of the Two Europes from
one consistent perspective; the Second Europe, to the extent that it
becomes increasingly “Augustinized” is to that
extent incapable of
performing the task.
For those who prefer Ockhamist lucidity: I argue that Western Christian
civilization is bound with
dialectical inevitability to misinterpret both itself, the Eastern
European Christian civilization, and the antiquities common to both;
only that First European civilization and its theological paradigm are
adequate to undertake a genuinely comprehensive
and universal history of Christendom.
Theology
— not philosophy, literature, geography, economics, politics,
law, art,
music, or science — was and is the mainspring of our culture
and
history. It is that which set it in motion, and maintained its cohesion
and harmonious movement. When the theological unity of Europe
was
fractured in that original break of 1014, the movement became
disjointed, with the Two Europes tied together like racers in a
three-legged race, tied together in the leg of a common history, but
now with two “minds” and two different
sets of historical time
operating. This Geistesgeschichte
is
therefore an unabashedly theological work based upon traditional
Eastern Orthodox dogmatics. But this should not be taken to
mean that
it is merely about
theology. It is rather about the consequences of
theology, both heretical and Orthodox, in all areas of culture: law,
politics, constitutional development, philosophy, and science. The
great nineteenth century historian of dogma, Adolf von Harnack, first
popularized the notion of “Hellenization” of the
Gospel, of the very
early, universal, and permanent corruption of the
“simple” Gospel of
“Jesus” with the subtleties of Greek
philosophy. For von Harnack and
the historians of the Second Europe, this
“Hellenization” was a
universal phenomenon. Such a conclusion could only be derived
by
massive over-simplification of the evidence. As we shall see, the First
Hellenization did occur in the Eastern Roman Empire in the first three
centuries of Christianity, but at no time, nowhere, was it ever
universally accepted in its totality. There were dissenting
voices,
even among those engaged in the process of Hellenization.
This First
Hellenization was summed up by Origen in the third century in a
statement which, when we encounter it, we shall call “The
Origenist
Problematic”. This is not yet the place to examine
the entailments of
that Problematic. It is what happened after Origen
that constitutes the problem for the Second Europe’s
historiography of
the First Europe, for in the coming centuries, the Eastern Church
struggled with the full set of implications deriving from that
Problematic, and rejected
each and every one, and came ultimately to
reject any notion of the marriage of Christian Theology with any secular
Hellenic philosophical system. For the First Europe,
philosophy not only is not
the
handmaiden of theology, it is not even on the staff of
servants. For
the Second Europe, as almost everyone knows, philosophy is
the handmaiden of theology.In the ironies of historical development,
one encounters the Two Hellenizations being formally adopted and
accepted by the Two Europes at approximately the same time, in the
ninth century. In that space and in that time, they clash openly for
the first time, and the ikon of that clash, with all its attendant
historiographical implications, is the coronation of Charlemagne by
Pope Leo III in 800 A.D. As we shall see, tragically the
Second Europe
is incapable even of interpreting Pope Leo’s actions or
activities with
anything like consistency, and that fact will highlight the first
occurrence of a persisting problem in Second European historiography,
for the clash more than anything else will demonstrate that it was the
East’s which was the orginal Christian orthodoxy and
civilization, and
that the West of Charlemagne constituted the departure and
digression.
We will fail entirely to understand the alarm of a St. Photius later in
that century, or the careful diplomacy of a Leo III at the beginning of
it, or the monumental hubris of a Pope Nicholas I, if we do not
penetrate to their ultimate theological origins.Indeed, we shall see
that the fact that the Second, Augustinized Europe of the West should
come to view itself as the canon of “Judeo-Christian
civilization” is
the result of
that departure and clash, and of the growth in its own eyes of its
status as the canonical measure of what is genuinely
“Christian” or
“European” civilization stems ultimately from the
Carolingian equation
of Augustinism with its own imperial orthodoxy and ambitions.
Even the
massive historical systems of a Hegel or Toynbee are the products of
this assumption.Thus, by adopting the First Europe rather than the
Second as the canonical measure of Christian civilization, I mean to do
more than merely Orthodox dogmatic evaluations of the civilization and
culture of Western Europe. The canonicity of the Orthodox
East has been assumed
both as the result of my personal commitments to it, but also for the
sake of comprehensive elucidation. Our flight is to
the East, but unlike Gurdgieff’s, does not land us in
Peiking,
Calcutta, Lhasa-Asa or Angkor Wat, but in Jerusalem, Constantinople,
Antioch, Alexandria, Kiev and Moscow.
And hovering
constantly in the background, like a scrim or a basso ostinato,
is Rome. Why Rome? The question is almost so simple and obvious that
one almost hesitates to ask it. But to leave it unasked would
justifiably relegate this work to the dustbin. Why
Rome? Because the
Two Europes and Two Hellenizations that lie at their core are the
result of an even deeper, underlying, and unifying conflict.
For long before the Empire or Philosophy embraced the Church, the
Church was already an Empire, metastasizing subversively like a tumor
in the body politic of pagan imperial Rome. The basic
historiographical and theological significance of this fact, however,
is often overlooked. This significance must be stated as
baldly and
nakedly as possible in order for it to be perceived and apprehended in
all its enormity, for
the
presence of the Church in the Empire means that long before
“culture”
became Christian, the Church was already a self-contained, autonomous
culture, inclusive of its own constitution and its own
historiographical tradition. In short, she possessed all the
elements
not only of government, but of society, and of culture. She
was
culturally autonomous from all that surrounded her. This
fact made her the enormous danger that the pagan Romans, with much more
intelligence than most moderns, saw in her. Thus, long before
the
Empire and the Church embraced, they were at war. And even
the embrace
was less a peace settlement or a surrender of one to the other, than it
was an armstice. Even that warfare, which was the first
“Culture war”
and the basis for all other and subsequent “culture
wars”, the Two
Europes and Two Hellenizations interpret in two fundamentally different
manners. As the First Europe is the historical and cultural
actualization of the process represented by the First Hellenization,
the First Europe therefore constitutes herself spiritually and
theologically as a rupture,
as something ultimately and culturally discontinuous with
the Graeco-Pagan universe of thought and culture in which it, to the
Second European observer, apparently moves. The First Europe
at its
core is discontinuous with the Hellenistic intellectual world of
ancient Rome; but it is
continuous
with with that early Hebrew and Christian cultural autonomy of the
Apostles and Apostolic Fathers. The Greek philosophical idiom
of that
First Europe serves only to confuse Second European interpreters such
as a von Harnack. Orthodox Christian Tradition
is its core essence, and because of that cultural autonomy, it is able
to transplant itself into a variety of vernaculars. It is
able
therefore to create in Russia a nation whose origins and national
culture do not
depend
on the simultaneous transmission of Graeco-pagan culture in any sense,
even in the sense of the transmission of that pagan heritage that
became typical of the Second Europe after Augustine and down to our own
day. The Second Europe, predictably, represents the
dialectical
counterpart to the First, for it represents the acceptance of the
process of Hellenization, and therefore, also is a culture which is based
upon the
principle of the negation of the Church’s cultural autonomy.
The complexity of this observation may baffle the historian who thinks
he “knows better”, who knows of the Investiture
controversy and of the
Papacy’s assertions of its “autonomy” and
“superiority” to the temporal
power; or who thinks he knows all about the alleged
“caesaropapism” of
Byzantium. Perhaps the best and simplest way of putting this
complexity, however, is to point out the fact that St. Augustine,
architect of the vast philosophical Cathedrals of the Second
Hellenization, was in his time still a part of the Church of the First
Europe, an Orthodox Christian father dwelling in the First
Europe’s
Church. Such a position he ardently wished to maintain, and
such a
position he still has on the rolls of the Eastern Church’s
saints.
Thus the ambiguities of Augustine and Augustinism are at the core of
the historiographical task to be performed by these essays. For
Augustine the bishop and Augustinism the system are two different
things. Augustine the bishop insisted, no less vigorously
than his
great counterparts in Cappadocia — Sts. Basil of Caesaria,
Gregory of
Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus — on the direct continuity of
the
Church with the ancient Hebrews and with the cultural autonomy
conferred on them by God. But Augustine the Hellenizer
erected a
system founded upon a contintuity of theology with Greek
philosophy, a
continuity of incalculable enormity: the identification of
The One(to
en)
of Greek philosophy with the One God and Father of Christian
doctrine.
That marriage of Theology and Philosophy occured not at some secondary
level of doctine, but at the core, at the height, of all Christian
belief, the doctrine of God Himself. So long as this
cohabitation went
undetected and unchallenged, so long did its hidden implications take
root, grow, and eventually overwhelm and choke the Christian
component. Our current moral and spiritual crisis is the
result of
that marriage, and will not be resolved until the churches which
persist in it, beginning with Rome, repent and recant the
error. For
Augustine saw discontinuity with that Graeco-pagan world, but the
theologians, philosophers, and humanists who came after him and who
were the heirs of his system, came increasingly to see continuity.Thus,
at its core
the Second Europe
is pagan, for it worships a pagan definition of God, pagan, for it is
crumbling from within, overladen only with an increasingly thin and
superficial veneer of a Christian idiom.
From the
standpoint of the First Europe, then, the Second is in the continual
process of actualizing the unwitting, but nevertheless, great apostasy
contained in the system of Augustine. Even its
“bold” and “radical”
modern “reinterpreters” of Christianity —
an Elaine Pagels or a Rudolph
Bultmann or a Julius Wellhausen — are less revolutionary than
they
think, for they are as much products of the Second Hellenization as
their mediaeval forefathers. In fine, in the Second Europe, the case of
a Galileo is impossible without an Augustine to preceed him.
In the
First Europe, the case of a Galileo is simply impossible.
And
so the inevitable word about presuppositions and method.
These have, I
believe, been sufficently outlined in previous pages that all that is
needed here is a simple reiteration: These essays presuppose Eastern
Orthodox dogmatic formulations as the basis on which the philosophical
and historical analysis of the West is undertaken. Part One of this
work therefore consists of a detailed examination of that cultural and
theological autonomy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, from the Apostolic
Fathers through the Apologists and on down to the Sunday of Orthodoxy
in 843. Part one therefore examines the process of the First
Hellenization and its rejection as exhaustively as possible, and
in toto.
Since most readers are unaware of the patristic basis of Orthodoxy,
this exhaustive examination is undertaken partially in order to make
the subsequent examination of the Augustinian West more intelligible,
and in order to assist in ending the theological illiteracy on which
Augustinism continues to survive. Part Two deals with an examination of
the Augustinian dialectical formulation of Trinitarian doctrine itself,
and draws certain predictive conclusions as to the implications of that
doctrine. Part Three encompasses that period when the Second
Europe,
exploring the consequences of the continued marriage of Theology and
Philosophy, passes from passive defense of the rationality of Christian
Faith to active proof and demonstration by examining Scholasticism and
the political results of active proof and demonstration in the
Crusades. These, and other, cultural implications are
explored from
the standpoint of the West’s new assumption of the
intelligibility of
God, without which the Crusades, scholasticism, and the legal theories
of the Papacy and Holy Roman Emperors are unintelligible. Part Four
begins with the dialectical counter-movement to Part Three, for if one
assumed that doctrines were provable dialectically, one also assumed
their inevitable dialectical disproof. A new cultural
movement in the
Secnd Europe is thereby discerned in the dialectical defensibility of
Atheism and the increasingly secular basis of cultural, legal, and
political organization. This movement passes from passive defense of
the rationality of Atheism to the active attempt to found societies
based upon Agnosticism and Atheism in America, France, and
Russia.Finally, the cycle is concluded when it ends with the active
dialectical demonstrability of Atheism or Evil in the founding of the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, societies established to return mankind
to a universal and global version of Simplicity, wherein no class, or
racially-based, distinctions would remain in society to promote
disharmony. The motivation of this work, however,
is not polemical,
for even though I am committed to them, the canonicity of the First
Europe and its doctrinal formulations are employed here not for
evangelistic, but for illuminative, ends, as the means to reinterpret
the obvious, inject new considerations into old formulations, highlight
the forgotten, detail the obscure, and recast the meaning and
significance of familiar concepts or events from a fundamentally
different, but still Christian, and I hope, more universally applicable
and valid theological and cultural perspective.Finally, a word about
how to read this work. The common complaint against Hegel was
— and is
— that he took the elegance and expressive power of the High
German and
performed such turgid and torturous gymnastics with it that, in the
end, he remained barely comprehensible. I hope that my
occasional
utilization of the dramatic, hyperbolic, and rhetorical device will
overcome the difficulty of the subject matter, but the fact remains
that in this work the reader may at times find himself plunged into a
difficult, strange and arcane world of facts and arguments whose parts
may seem disparate and unrelated. Intentionally recursive
diction is
the inevitable complement of conveying the logical form of seemingly
disparate events or disciplines or concepts, since they must be
increasingly subjected to analysis from a variety of angles.
Perhaps
the analogy of a fugue is the best, for the leitmotifs constantly recur
in a variety of permutations and disciplinary contexts. And,
like a
fugue, this little prologue has been the first muted exposition of the
theme, and, like a fugue, the author suggests it be re-read as a
recapitulation at the end of the work. And so then, it is now time to
add the polyphony, and let other voices speak.”
Copyright 1996-2007 Joseph Farrell.
