The City and the City

To continue my last post, Douthat has continued speaking on these issues with a mention from a reader of the Mythological Escape. The reader uses Tolkien to make the point, which is actually a very good place to start. Evolution, “nature red in tooth and claw” are products of the Fall, which then (it is implied) creep backwards into time.

For Tolkien there is no “Fall” as such. There is a pre-man (this is not exactly accurate in Tolkien, an unfair term, but “pre-fleshly sentient” is a horrible substitute) Fall in Tolkien, when Melkor disrupts the song of the Valar. Secondly, there is the long Atlantean saga of Numenor in the Second Age of Middle Earth which concludes in a true catastrophe which actually undoes the previous nature of the planet: The True West is removed from the middle-earthly realm and the world itself, once flat, is now made round. Obviously this is an example of a change in the world, wrought by Divine power, that uniformitarianism in geology (and thus, paleontology) is unequipped to deal with.

However, the problem with applying this to our Earth is that the Bible and the Fathers suggest nothing of the sort. The order of nature was certainly changed by man’s fall, but as for that fall creeping back into time and altering the entire history of the planet? While I played with this idea far too much as a young Christian, it seems like theological speculation on the level of the dorm room bull session. An interesting topic of discussion if not taken too seriously (on the level of all sorts of counterfactuals), but a non-starter.

Notably, the Bible does not use the mythological escape. I had forgotten to mention this in the former post, but was immediately reminded during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts yesterday. Scripture takes, perhaps, the opposite view, instead finding God’s glory, even in “nature red in tooth and claw”: “The young lions roar after their prey, seeking their food from God” (Ps. 103 (104))

How we coincide this imagery with those of the redeemed New Earth being that place where the lion lies down with the lamb is difficult, but it shows another “side” to the Biblical account of nature, one of the sublime. I have heard good arguments from Orthodox about whether or not this sort of “sublime beauty” actually has a place in Orthodoxy as such, and once again, it places us in very speculative territory.

The problem, for the Orthodox, is that discussion of either the denial or acceptance of evolutionary biology and even moderated forms of historical evolutionary meta-narrative land us in terra incognita, and the appropriate response to such territory is often to “walk in faith”. However, the Church has certainly, in the past, spoke on questions that probably seemed like terra incognita to those at the time, each time not departing from the deposit of Christ and the Fathers. There is no Newmanite “Development of Doctrine”, there is rather Orthodoxy expressing itself anew against the heresies of the age. The question of how it will speak to the heresies of this one is worthy of prayerful consideration.

I find this difficult, which is why this blog is difficult for me.

I have long been of the opinion that the greatest threat to Christianity found in evolutionary biology is not the descent of man or even the implied long-view of time. It is, rather, to be found in the subversion of traditional narratives of the Fall, for with evolution we now say that death was very old before mankind around.

Ross Douthat wrote along similar lines today, and this bit is worth quoting:

As this provocation suggests, the debate over Darwinism and Christian faith, properly understood, has less to do with the question of whether we should think of God as a designer who fine-tunes flagella, and more to do with how the theory of evolution fits into the deep and interesting tension that’s always been at the heart of Christian accounts of creation.

Douthat mentions the Fall, but never explicitly states the problem; if the Fall is from human action, then a Fall that predates man’s appearance is a problem. Outside Origenistic schemes and other problematic mythological solutions (e.g., the “Earthly Paradise” existing off of this planet and before it), any naturalistic reading of the evidence we have–evidence most of us are sitting on right now–contradicts the theological narrative.

I am unimpressed, for example, with the objection given to this challenge I once received from an Orthodox philosopher. (As he was speaking “off the record”, it would be very unfair to name the person, especially as he was likely going outside his comfort zone in giving one at all.) Essentially, he toyed with doubts as to the literal existence of “time” as given by some circles in physics, plus some astronomical suggestions about the age of the universe, to mystify the whole problem. We don’t understand time; therefore, we shouldn’t worry. While this may be acceptable to some, I have no doubt that it seems like so much hand-waving to most educated moderns, and those seeking to apologize for the Faith should feel compelled to try better.

Mostly, however, the problem is ignored. We focus on the issue of design because it is easier, though full of the very same pits that drug us down into the current situation, anyhow. Talk of “methodological, not epistemological” naturalism also comes up as weak, because it begs the question of “Why the methodology?” for Christians, who are not (or should not be) instrumentalists in any sort of fundamental sense. There is a God because he is the I AM, not because it is the most useful hypothesis. Even a “plain” methodological instrumentalism for scientific endeavor is not a solution, I fear, though it does seem more sustainable.

I have no answers for these problems that are satisfactory, other than clinging to and being clung by Christ and the Church. However, I feel unsatisfied with that; if not for myself, then for those for whom I hope to be used in bringing them into that same embrace.

To our Readers (all five of you):

Forgive me, my brothers and sisters, for all my sins and failings. As a blogger, but, more importantly, as a Christian.

–Ezekiel

The discussion continues*, and I have a few things I wished to add to yesterday’s post.

As an exercise, there’s not much wrong with “must-read” lists as long as they are given with a sense of humility. “This is what I would have wanted, you see…”

The Ochlophobist’s list has a lot to recommend for it, especially his final, imaginary tome. (Orthodox publishers, do you hear us?) It stands, largely, on texts which are simply parts of the liturgy, the school of the saints. There is nothing in them to lead you wrong, but they can be very hard to understand, even when experienced as prayer, rather than as simple text.

However, the attempt is enough to remind me that commenting on the idea without offering my own ideas is something like cowardice. I accept that, though, as I’m terrified by the prospect of trying. Instead, I’ll simply make a list of books that were, for me, instrumental in my arrival to the Church. My goal here is to lay out how individual our experiences of “reading theology” are, and how our negative lessons can be as powerful as our positive ones. None of these, expecting the first, are “must-reads”. They are the reads I could see as must, if I did not trust that the Holy Spirit may have used any number of other ways to lead me to the Church.

1. The New Testament

This is in no way meant to be flippant. I joke that, after leaving the atheist materialism I cultivated throughout middle and high schools, I came to the doctrine of the Church and of the Eucharist in a very Appalachian sort of way. I read the Gospels and Epistles. Near-literally. And alone. This is perhaps as purely Protestant of an experience as one can have, but it led me away from Protestantism before I even made a stop in it. I was baptized Anglo-Catholic in the APCK with the conviction that it was in no way a Protestant church, but the historic one, and I never looked back.

2. John Fischer, On a Hill Too Far Away: Putting the Cross Back Into the Center of Our Lives

The summer before I was baptized (the same summer I was reading the NT), I was working for a camp in eastern Kentucky, and ran out of reading material for my breaks one week. I borrowed this from my director and devoured it. I can hardly remember a thing about it now, but remember coming away from it with this distinct sense that the limits of the church I had seen as a child were not the limits and that if those congregations had got critical things wrong, why should I fight to reintroduce them when I could go to those who–literally–kept the faith? To be honest, I probably read the convictions I was having of the NT into Fischer’s critiques of Evangelicalism, but it hardly matters; when Fischer spoke of the centrality of the Cross, all I could think of was the Eucharist.

3. Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator

I read this about a year after I was baptized. Within a few months, I was a catechumen in the Orthodox Church, and looking back on it, there was a clear connection. Gunton introduced to the facts that there was a theological “counter-tradition” of a sorts that the Protestant-Catholic war had largely ignored. His talk of restoring the idea of the Trinity to the theology of Creation, in a manner that (he admitted) already existed in Greek thought, was an experience much like the former. I had certainly been prepared for it by a number of prior experiences, but the conviction was instant. And like many other Orthodox converts, I discovered in patristics and Orthodox theology the best expression of what I already believed.

4. John Milton, “Paradise Regained”

The semester after I read The Triune Creator, I took the class in early modern English lit that I mentioned a few posts ago. I encountered, in Milton’s poems, interesting (though mostly theologically problematic!) echoes of the soteriology that I was slowly learning from the Greek Fathers. This led me down a scholarly rabbit hole of unpublished dissertations, Milton scholarship, Arianism, biographical detail and patristics that resulted in one of the best-researched and least-confident papers of my undergraduate career. I got top marks and a few emails, but the result of immersing myself in so much data–theology of creation, soteriology and Christology–left me Orthodox in all but fact. The fact followed a few weeks after finals.

5. John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology

In those few weeks, I devoured a few dozen books, waiting for summer classes to begin and filling the time between them. Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology left the biggest impression, and has been the only one to become an old friend, one of those books I pick up just to read from at near-random pages. It immersed me in the theological waters I had been cautiously treading about for the past six months, and the experience was breath-taking. I never experienced that flush of “convert joy”; it was difficult beyond belief, an experience that still brings tears to my eyes, to leave the family that had baptized me and sheltered me in those first twenty-one months. However, the excitement and feeling of drama was there all the same; I go back and read what I wrote–to myself and others–and I see a person who was completely shocked by what I was discovering, what I was experiencing, what happened to me at that first Orthodox vespers.

*Such that it is a discussion from my vantage. I’m offering outside commentary, the easiest kind.

Lest I live up to predictions that I am “all talk”, I will talk some more*.

This post at Orrologion discusses the idea of a list of ten “must reads” for inquirers or others looking to learn about Orthodoxy. Part of the problem is thinking that the two classes have much in common, but that is probably unfair to the original post, which was simply going off of an idea taken from another post. A while back, on a very short-lived blog (which is long-eaten by the university host from whence it came), I attempted to try my luck at a similar meme, one of a list of five books for the Christian college student.

Looking back, of that list, I can only heartily endorse St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation of the Son of God”. This is a kind of ridiculous perfectionism, though, as few ever read such lists as representative of anything more than the preferences of the author. (This is part of the problem with them, however.)

I mentioned that I particularly disagreed with the (very common) recommendation of Met. Ware’s The Orthodox Church (and, though less common, The Orthodox Way), which have become something of book-length tracts in the realm of introductory catechesis in the Anglosphere. The problem with this is that they were never written with that in mind, especially the former.

I read The Orthodox Church early in my own days as a catechumen, and while I enjoyed it, I took little from it. I will read a few dozen books of history in a typical year (sometimes much, much more), so my enjoyment of The Orthodox Church should be considered in no way normal, and I think that those of us who write about Orthodoxy on the internet share a number of habits of mind and such that mean we are very likely to assign a lot of importance to, let’s say, bare historical overviews than most would. The book’s importance is easy to understand, though: It is accessible, ubiquitous and in a culture where even very educated Christians can go most of their lives knowing nothing of Orthodoxy, it has the air of revelation to many. (Maybe the lack of impression for me is because I read it when I was already “in deep”. My notebooks from the time leading up to my becoming a catechumen are full mostly of scribblings regarding Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology and the collected works of Georges Florovsky vols. 7-9. Well, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but we all have our outliers.)

Many converts may view Ware’s work through rose colored glasses, given the confusingly liberal and tentative tones he gives to discussions on, for example, women’s ordination. The discussions on it in The Orthodox Church imply an air of open discussion, and his use of the theological term “mystery” in reference to it is even somewhat odd. Ware was writing to a popular, non-Orthodox audience, and such a tone is probably very much warranted with that in mind. But for the average convert in the Anglosphere, who likely is already nominally Christian, conservative in temperament and likely fed up with liberal creep like women’s ordination in his own denomination… well, we begin to see the issue.

The Spirit certainly uses what we read to guide us to the Church, and I have no doubt that many souls can honestly say that Ware’s work helped lead them to communion. For myself, a book by the Reformed theologian Colin E. Gunton was perhaps the most instrumental work–it was, at least, at the fulcrum–but I would not dream that anyone would understand why who did not let me explain. (This being the internet, I am now fearing eating these words.)

My sketch of my problems with Met. Ware’s book as one for “inquirers” is by no means exhaustive, but I need to move on to the idea of creating a list of these things, at all. For the person who wants to learn about Orthodoxy in a certain fashion (a category that does not totally overlap with all “inquirers”), Ware’s book is close to necessary, as it is the only accessible single-volume work on Orthodox Church history.

Part of the problem with the idea of books for inquirers is that it reinforces the model of “self-catechesis via literature” (or worse, the internet), that so many converts endure and so many priests allow to endure out of laziness or (worse) disinterest. One person in the thread that sparked this whole post mentioned the simplicity of Fr. Hopko’s “rainbow books“, but their simplicity is an asset in an era of self-catechesis, whatever their other problems.

The problem is that many, laics and priests, have our little lists of books (even I find myself falling into that model, giving away copies of The Life of the World as if it is somehow self-evident in a way even the Gospel is not!), but little idea of what evangelism and catechesis mean beyond the intellect and a few notes about “come and see”. While the model of the catechetical academies seems overly rigorous and even obscene to us today, something very like them is worth thinking about in an age in thrall to a poison that makes ancient paganism seem like a child’s plaything.

*This is my idea of a joke.