Thanks for your reflections. Nothing to add, just wanted to say that I love how you expressed this:

“After all, Jesus did not mean to stand up in favor of prostition, when he refused to condemn the women taken in adultery. He was not abolishing the “rule” that prostitution is destructive to human well-being. But he was taking the rule back to its deeper spiritual roots (its archai) and challenging those who had stones in their hands (and hatred and fear and self-righteousness in their hearts) to examine themselves as regards their own motives and their willingness to be spiritually honest…”

Scott, regarding differing Bishops, the idea of the local Church comes to mind. There aren’t supposed to be overlapping jurisdictions as the Orthodox currently have in America, which makes Church hopping for that sake a sad reality, though you weren’t speaking to that but to moving to a different diocese for another reason. A local Bishop, while maintaining the unchanging tradition, is called upon to decide certain issues that come up, and his flock are to abide by them. For instance, some jurisdictions re-baptize converts and others don’t. I think obedience to one’s local Bishop keeps you under grace, unless there is some other more extreme problem is going on. But hopefully even then, following proper channels will restore peace in that parish without anyone having to move.

This exchange on how to know WHEN to BREAK the rules has been helpful to me in trying to explain to myself the structural ways that modern rationalism differs so much from premodern rationalism, quintessentially Greek (and early Christian) rationalism. The contrast involves the loss of something like Aristotle’s “four causes” and something like a depth dimension that constitutes all things in their thinghood….

In other words, in the older worldview a rule is given for “reasons” (causes)! It is not arbitrary, but has a deeper multi-faceted level of explanation and justification, if you will. So we MUST always ask why the rule is as it is given — i.e. what is its telos and what are the means to that telos and why are we seeking that telos and not some other? In a nutshell, in the Socratic tradition of the liberal arts prior to early modern rationalism, we must engage in dialectic about what is “essential” to any given kind of thing and distinguish this from what is relatively “incidental” to it.

The “letter” of the law can be moribund, but the deeper structure of its spiritual goals and principles originally gave life to the rule and that same deep structure can be explored and engaged within the Christian disciplinary community, and this can cause the individual person to choose to transcend the rule, in a given situation. And wise persons may well disagree, as Scott points out, but for their own substantial reasons of giving emphasis, when genuine priorities conflict. That is part of the dialectic that is always going on in the human journey of knowing more deeply aobut anything. We can always be wrong in these judgments at any point in our lives or in the journey of the Church, but through faith we have the hope that the journey is worthwhile. God, in every age, looks upon the heart.

So our God always sees beneath the relatively superficial level of external rules. God looks into the interior motivations of our hearts, our deepest values and goals, and our willingness to jeopardize our certainties if it deepens holiness and love — and no doubt God always sees very foolish persons and rejoices in very wise persons who are on both sides of any historical Church controversy.

After all, Jesus did not mean to stand up in favor of prostition, when he refused to condemn the women taken in adultery. He was not abolishing the “rule” that prostitution is destructive to human well-being. But he was taking the rule back to its deeper spiritual roots (its archai) and challenging those who had stones in their hands (and hatred and fear and self-righteousness in their hearts) to examine themselves as regards their own motives and their willingness to be spiritually honest about their own sexual and moral struggles and failures.

This matter of discerning the most essential elements of something from incidental elements is always an ongoing process, because, as Aristotle says, “in human affairs, things are always changing….” The laws are enduring in their deeper sense, but situations are always changing and to preserve the deep truth the surface recipe has to change. This is really what the precious sphere of “freedom” is in the philosophical and in the Christian traditions. Freedom is the growth of the unique individual insight and volition to act in unprescriptable ways to conform to an underlying spiritual reality. It takes a disciplinary tradition and community for any individuals to reach this point, and they won’t all choose to do the same things, either, on the surface level….

So we learn from the rules an experiential wisdom that will help us to discern when and how to apply the rules. (And we learn it most from our mistakes!) None of this learning and growing is ever ended or can ever be finalized in a single overt prescription for what “wisdom” is. As time goes on in our journeys, we hope to gain a deeper and deeper apprehension of what are the more essential elements and what are the relatively incidental, vis-a-vis entering into any given situation with our Christian teloi in our hearts.

In other words, in the older tradition every-thing had a relational structure or organization on a deeper level than the overtly given (the appearances) and therefore its real structure could be explored dialectically. In modern logic and Newtonian-era scientific rationalism, things are simply “lumps,” either physical lumps (“objects”) or mental lumps (“ideas” or “concepts”)and accordingly a “rule” too is just overtly what it “is,” a formula or presecription, rather than being arisen out of a deep-structure that causes them to be what they are.

This is why the modern “concept” of “existence” is misleading us, in the kinds of questions it conditions us to ask. “Is” did not mean merely “to exist” in its flat and barren modern sense. Moderns ask, “Does God exist?” Premoderns asked: “What does it mean to be the alpha and the omega, or to be the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, or the water of life?” “What does it mean to be the origin of the originating principles?” (Aristotle).

This older under-standing of being involved the opportunity to look into what stands-under the being of each kind of thing. It was incommensurate with our notion of mere inert existence. What the ancients meant by being (to on) and by the kinds of beings (ta onta) meant that the liberal arts could study each of the ta onta because there was a formal structure or organization there to be explored in terms of what was more essential to this kind or mode of being and what was less. “Is” was able to refer to the distinctive structure of a given kind of being, including its various causes that participated in that organization.

To ask ti esti, “what is (Justice), or “what is (Humanity)?” was to ask what elements of the constitutive structures and functionings we find grouped under this “name” need to be taken as being formally essential to its being-what-it-is and which safely can be taken as relatively incidental. In a dialectical tradition, this remains open to reconsideration, and we are not trapped into the modern bogey-man of “essentialism.”

That we can explore the inherent deeper structures of all things is what Socrates called attention to and what the liberal arts then came into “existence” to pursue and exploit. In other words, the liberal arts could not “exist” or “be” unless there was a structure there within the rich appearances themselves to be formalized by the discipline. So a genuine discipline does not “exist” because it has faculties and departmental letterhead and publications. It exists or has its distinctive mode of being insofar as its formal discovery procedures and its methods of validity testing and its formalizations of its subject-matter open up ways for its community into deeper knowing of that subject-matter, based on the distinctive identity of what that subject-matter actively continues to be.

I think that “to ask the question of Being,” or to ponder the ontological difference, was Heidegger’s way of re-covering the Greek dis-covery of the structural-functional character of all beings, that they always “are” kinds of beings in order to be at all — and the inevitable implications of that for the metaphysical mind.

It is the dropping out of that deep structure of active constitutive relationships and ongoing mutual-reciprocal organizations, in order to deal instead with “things” (lumps”) and “rules” (one-dimentional linear operations like “Given an A, Do B”) that causes the modern consternation.

But why do we want to impose an artifical separating out of a lump of being from its own processes and purposes of being? The reduction of organized and on-going relational structures to isolated lumps (archetypally of matter) that are governed by (immaterial) laws simply didn’t enable us to deal with the complex realities of the physical world — or of the social and spiritual worlds embedded in the physical world.

Things are ever structured on several levels, that is to say. And each of those levels will be functioning and organized differently from the others, while sustaining and constituting the WHOLE. “Wholes” and not “objects” are the key units of structure for the premodern disciplines of knowing. And wholes are always potentially open and porous to other wholes, as Plato’s Sophist so brilliantly advances…. Godel’s theorums only shock when there is a cultural expectation of closed and hermetically sealed systems….

This is why I wanted to open a conversation about the intellectual expectations or principles that would prepare us for following the kind of thinking that Bulgakov is doing with the Trinity and the Oneness of its divinity, for example, or for thinking the divine and creaturely Sophia, who are one — the very divinity or life of God — and are mediative through being not one…. Not to mention the hypostatic union of two natures in the one unique person of Jesus Christ….

Fascinatingly, the human word as a “whole” is structured in exactly this same way, of course, since it is a (porous) whole on the level of the sign (morpheme), for instance, and then again it is composed, on the deeper level of the phoneme, or letter, by several constitutent wholes. (Stoicheia was the Greek word for the letters of the alphabet AND for the elements out of which it seemed to them that the natural world must be composed.) The notion that anything-that-”is” must be constituted — in its congoing be-ing — on a deeper level by other, quite different wholes that add together into that kind-of-thing is everywhere in Plato and Aristotle….

And I got off onto a riff on a Saturday afternoon….

so typical of your maleness to step in and cut off an interesting conversation….
I think it’s wiser if you “annul” the conversation rather than divorcing it from its participants.
Anyway, that’s what I believe would be the most reasonable thing to do, and since reason is universally extensive….

Great stuff all.
Too bad I got here after last call.

BS

But please do recall that in my first post re kenosis/women, I said:

“Its a tricky discussion, b/c no one wants to over-identify particular vices with particular sexes, right? It’s not like kenosis and humility are only for boys, and etc.”

Peace,
Matslacker

I’m not trying to squash the productive conversation that is happening right now. Just hoping to head off any heated language or language that would provoke heated language that might be coming down the pike.

Besides, many of really should be focusing on term matters anyway.

What _institutional_ changes do you think the EO patriarchs have made so as to support your claim that EO is more sensitive toward woman than the RCC. I can think of one counter-example that shows RCC is more sensitive — head-coverings. I don’t suppose anyone here has read a certain article about historical medical background to Paul’s discussion of head-coverings (or as the author would have put it ‘genital coverings’)?

I don’t mean to be crass. I had a certain theological mentor once who told me that if he had to choose btwn. RCC and EO, he’d go with RCC b/c it is more sensitive toward woman — and the reason is b/c RCC historically has gone through and survived the Enlightenment, but EO hasn’t had to go through such a purge/challenge.

To my knowledge, the discussion has nothing distinctive to do w/ EO Church. Except that Maximos raises it–but like I said in my post, I have no idea how/what the EO Church has done with that part of his work, if anything. My sense is they’ve made very little of it.

But I appreciate your concern for women! What I can say, and I’d stand by this, is that in certain respects the EOC is much more open to womens’ roles than the RCC. After all, St Gregory of Nazianzus says of his parents (his father was also Bishop of Nazianzus), that the mother was the spiritual leader in the household, and he praises her highly for it. And his work on gender roles has been, acc. to Fr. John McGuckin, determinative for EO understandings of the family. But that’s a whole other discussion.

I’m sorry to say the following, but I feel compelled. It is difficult not to hear discussion of male-sin and female-sin as though being male necessarily means having a given kind of vice, and being female necessarily means having another kind of vice — both of which need to be restored. It is difficult not to perceive this as sexist.

I realize that this is one difference btwn. many EO people and Western folk – that is, many EO people really like established gender roles, which is a condition for thinking that men a like this, and women are like that. Besides, what is the aim of such an analysis of sin? Is it to find one foundational vice, which if discovered and healed, the rest of the vices will come crashing down? It would seem this kind of analysis of sin and vice is rhetorical and not … practical.

Does that make sense?

Andrea,

I get what you are saying about the wise person. For example, Aristotle certainly talks about this person and that we learn how to be wise by learning from wise people. So, my question is this: suppose you live in parish A, and there is some dispute and the Bishop is called in to make a practical decision to settle the dispute and then gives his judgment. But then for some unrelated reason you and all those involved in the dispute move to parish B, and then a new Bishop is called in to settle the same dispute, but the second Bishop gives a very different judgment. Suppose both Bishops are very wise, educated, sensitive, etc. Is there any way to decide which judgment is better?

This scenario is not so peculiar — for example, in the Episcopalian world if you live in one diocese you’ll get one ‘wise judgment’ and in another diocese you’ll get another ‘wise judgment’. What would one do in such a situation?