An article by the young English blogger Patricius – Assumption thoughts… – brings me to think of one of my favourite pieces of poetry by Walt Whitman:
Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,
Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life?Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who Justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours, Cold earth, the place of graves.)Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,
Perhaps even now the time has arrived.After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
Should I dismiss this way of writing as coming from an unbalanced person, someone to be stigmatised as insincere in his religious commitment? Should we dismiss Patricius as an impetuous child who throws tantrums? I take another and more critical view. I don’t know the individual well enough to assess him as a person, and I am not a mental health professional. I may be wrong, but I think I read somewhere on his blog that he had Asperger’s Syndrome – something that makes the sufferer focus on a narrow interest with such intensity that he cannot relate to anything else in life. Asperger’s Syndrome comes in degrees as does any other neurological condition. However, that is not the purpose of my writing today.
I believe that Patricius would like to be a committed Christian, but he – like many of us – cannot relate to the various ecclesiastical options currently available. The thought is simplistic: there was an era when Catholicism was perfect and Papal absolutism came along and ruined everything. There is a truth there under the rubble, but a lot more complex in historical terms. “Roman rite is accursed” – really? At the root of the gripe, we find the various modifications made by Pius XII: a new formula for the Assumption Mass, the use of a standard common of popes instead of celebrating confessor and martyr popes as bishops, the famous Holy Week rites – a general tendency to make the liturgy attest to the primacy of papal authority over truth itself. I have had many discussions with a friend of mine in London, Rubricarius (The St Lawrence Press) who has studied the liturgy extensively. I don’t think a position against many of these modifications is wrong. After all, I have consciously opted for a liturgical rite that has not changed for centuries precisely because it fell out of general use or was abolished by acts of law.
Some comments on Patricius’ blog reprimand him for being an eternally unsatisfied soul. Is that not part of the fallen human condition? Is this dissatisfaction the despising of things earthly for eternity (doceas nos terrena despicere et amare celestia) as the liturgy expresses constantly? Are we not all the victims of the ravages of time, not only on our own ageing bodies but also on the world in which we live and understand less and less as each day goes by? Is this not part of the blessedness of the poor in spirit?
Patricius’ style of writing is intemperate, and this takes away credibility. Many of his commenters tell him to “get a life” and be a Christian with the same degree of indifference to the liturgy as most of his contemporaries. After all, the Novus Ordo is just as valid, so he has only to go to his local church and get his ration each week!
Even if anyone could resurrect the Uses of the mediaeval English Church, it would be empty, shorn of authenticity, and all that’s left would be sentimentalism, nostalgia, and regret about the waning of lore and the passing of the years.
Who is that meant for? I have no idea, but he is not entirely wrong. There is such a rift between life and religion that only counter-cultural religion, pure-and-hard monotheism of The Book can survive. Do we want a form of Christianity that would do the same thing in the west as Islam in countries like Iran and Afghanistan? Would we want to see a kind of Gestapo-Taliban driving around in jeeps and rounding up the heretics? I don’t think so. Freedom is part of the Gospel faith. Finding a freedom-based version of Catholic Christianity with traditional liturgy is about as difficult as finding fishbones in a turkey!
But maybe this was doomed to be. Good liturgy is a thing of the past, gone long into the grave with out catholic ancestors, and all that is left will die out with my generation. Knowledge of Latin and Greek is waning among men, so also is the memory of things past, things needful for the wise to know. There is no hope left, which is why I have disavowed religion – or at least religious people.
Men in the nineteenth century wrote in exactly the same way. What’s new?
We all have to suffer and we grieve over our loss – but the answer is always within our reach. Life has to go on, and we should beware of returning to our nostalgic dreams as a dog returns to his vomit. I have a great deal of sympathy for our young friend Patricius, but if we have something to say, the least desire of relating to the world, then we all have progress to make.
And this is also a symptom of a vast field the official Churches have left to overgrow. Real progress would also be rebuilding the wastelands. Any bishops out there ready to meet the challenge?
The Blue Flower 
Gone when it is needed most: the Society of St. Pius I:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1406639/posts
Yes, of course, anything can be shot down by reductio ad absurdam. Of course the “Society of St Pius I” is a satire. I’m sure you realise that we might get a good laugh out of it, but we are not helping anyone that way. If the Church is just infallible authority, a kind of spiritual Orwellian “Big Brother”, then most of us are better off going sailing, or playing football, or having a cup of tea in Pickering…
Unlike many of his critics, I have a sense of empathy for Patricius, because I read through the intemperate language and see something other than a sectarian soul. He has gone a step further than I. There is nowhere for Christianity to go in the world in which we live, no connection or “interface”. He focuses on details of liturgy that few others see as important – that has unhealthy tendencies, but he is not wrong in the substance of things.
The real issue is knowing what kind of Christianity has anything remotely to do with Christ…
“…having a cup of tea in Pickering…”
Exactly what I have been doing.
I shall also stand up in support of Patricius. Although his language may appear to be intemperate, his conclusions are often very correct. When I was in seminary and the liturgical revolution was taking place my own conclusion was that the Roman Church, since 1870, had rejected the old Catholic faith and it would soon also have to reject the old Catholic practices to reflect this theological revolution codified by Vatican I. It seems that Patricius has also come to conclusions very similar to my own. His often intemperate language is perhaps more often a case of youthful passion, but his passions are not, in my mind, misplaced. He does understand that one prays as one believes…as much as the modernist Romans may reject this concept, I do believe it to be true.
I am also impressed that he continues to fight the good fight regardless of the slander and hatred expressed by so many against his person. This is an admirable quality.
I do wish sometimes that he could temper his reactions with humour, at least sometimes!
I rejoice, father, that I still hold a place in your heart (of hearts), but I don’t think that Asperger Syndrome has anything to do with my religion, and in the spirit of another age try not to live under any labels, whether they be mentally ill, crippled or homosexual. I am not focused on the minutiae of liturgy for naught (am I even focused on that at all, I would ask?), and when I condemn dispositions and attitudes at variance with the Tradition of the Church, I speak with reason and justice. Who cares about credibility? If people think I’m a raving lunatic, then that’s their problem.
You put to us a very cogent question when you ask what kind of Christianity has anything to do with Christ. I would say that Rome, having been so demonstrably corrupted in the last 500 years, has little (if anything) to do with Christ, and that sincere Roman Catholics would do well to cut off their communion with the papacy (which, in my view and the views of many, is an evil and unapostolic institution). My concern is for a Divine Service fitting in the eyes of God. Since I no longer perceive much in the Roman Rite to be valuable, having been so changed in a thousand years, naturally I have decided to look elsewhere. Who could go to any modern Roman Rite liturgy and NOT think ”papacy?”
Yestermorn I went to a service of BCP choral Mattins, a decent, scriptural and increasingly rare service nowadays, which was pleasant – parochial but sung quite well by an amateur choir, and without the tat on shew in a Roman or Anglo-Catholic church. Better the 1662 Prayer Book, which is scriptural and older than the 20th century, than aught else. Let the Traddies just try and condemn me for that! They would be in danger of hypocrisy anyway, what with their newfound esteem (only realised after Anglicanorum Coetibus – funny that!) for the Anglican Patrimony!
But the classical Anglican liturgical formularies are a product of the the mid-second millennium, produced in reaction to the Roman Rite, the Roman Church, and its papal supremacy. They are profoundly influenced by secular philosophy and other problematic phenomena and only in the most tortured, indirect way represent a return to the fountains of the Apostolic Faith.
To put it very simply: at all too many points, the Reformation went beyond throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It threw out the baby all right, but kept the dirty bathwater! First case in point: the filioque, a distortion of the Trinitarian doctrine of God that reinforces the papal supremacy that embraces it and imposes it upon the entire Western Church.
Please excuse me, but this sounds like Byzantine imperialist claptrap.
Thank you, Patrick, for sending a comment. You come up with a capital point, avoiding labels in particular. As religion becomes increasingly distant from culture, it is forced to reinforce its identity. Before the present “manichaen” climate, one could be “middle-of-the-road” with a liturgical and spiritual life that would now characterise us as extreme reactionaries. The greatest problem I had to deal with as a neo-Catholic was the dichotomy between authority and traditional ecclesial life – the two were opposing. “Obedience is a part of tradition” – but a “part of tradition” consisted of spitting on what we loved and adoring what we eschewed. Faced with such a contradiction, relief is only found by rejecting the whole – lock, stock and barrel.
Anglicanism and Old Catholicism kept the old “freedom with tradition” for longer. These two “competitors” for the noble title of Catholicism have only more recently begun to use authority to destroy. You may well be happier with the kind of “middle-of-the-road” Anglicanism, and I hope you find peace and the spirit of God in one of those lovely Wren churches in London or the many country parishes in Kent.
I have thought much about the state of Christendom lately, and one thought that keeps coming forth is that God’s plan has almost always been to bring order out of chaos. The Creation, the Exodus, the rebuilding of the Temple, the sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost: all examples of God bringing order out of chaos.
The prayer of Jesus for unity is another example of bringing order out of chaos, yet modern Christians (more often than not) create most of the chaos we experience. Our egos take over and we fight over which form of “church” is best, rather than allow the Spirit of God to bring about peace and harmony. We argue about structure, language, form, and a myriad of other issues; but we forget to simply be still and listen for that “still, small voice in the wind”.
We have become modern “Judiasers”; forcing others to do only what WE think is right in the eyes of Almighty God! Only rather than circumcision, we obsess over whether or not the Mass is said in Latin or English; if the hymns were written before or after 1700; if the KJV, RSV, NRSV, or ASV is the “real” Word of God…and I won’t even start about which Prayer Book should be used.
My own opinion is that while liturgy and form are important, we who are the clerics must remember that the folks in the pew are the People of God If the liturgy doesn’t help them grow closer to God, then why bother at all? Allow people to attend whatever Christian worship best suits them, and stop trying to make everyone the same. God created each person as a unique creature, made in His image. We are different in many ways; we don’t all like the same things…live with it! Order does not require we all be alike. We are not clones…we are people.
+Ed
I would agree, having been an Anglican choirboy and organist in the 1970’s. Most of the services we had were more or less in the kind of language we were used to, so no one made a fuss about the exact prayers used. The problem comes when someone devises a new form of services and gets it imposed on all by means of authority. Then people are told they have to “get with it”. All this stuff is wearing and has worn many of us down. Those of us with grey hair are looking over a period of about forty years, just about all our lives.
One thing I found good about many of the parishes I went to is that they could have a choice of liturgical expressions according to the fundamental churchmanship. If you didn’t like it in one parish, you went to another and no one complained. But I’m talking about the 1970’s. Now it’s polarised into extremes – for us or against us, everyone has to take a position and defend it.
I have come to the conclusion that people shouldn’t be thinking of becoming Catholics, or Orthodox, or Anglicans or Lutherans – but finding a warm and welcoming Christian community of some kind (if they still exist) and sticking with that.
In other words, in the way my thought has developed, congregational or parochial ecclesiology isn’t such a bad thing, with the authority of bishops strictly and tightly so regulated by bureaucracy that they can’t go to the toilet without authorisation and opt-out rules of every kind. Of course I’m talking about “official” churches. Why should one man have the possibility of ruining the spiritual life of a whole region – in some parts of the world, bigger areas than could be driven in a day? We have only to tell him to “shove it” where it hurts the most! Then priests would be less prone to “purple fever”!
When someone starts ministering to the weak and the “shipwrecked”, then I might find that expression of “church” that little bit more credible.
Amen! So many folks are always “making a point” or “standing their ground”; all the while ignoring those who are doing the same thing on the “other” side (where ever that may be). I personally like many different types of worship services, each for different reasons. How I desire to worship at any given time often depends on what mood I am in, because different services help me relate to God in different ways. So I am a full supporter of many different styles, as long as they give glory to God, and help His people come closer to Him.
By the way, I really appreciate the comment concerning being part of a loving community rather than a denomination. For too long we have put weight in what “church” we belong to, and what line of succession we are in. It reminds me of Paul’s admonition of the Corinthians concerning their quarreling about who they “belonged” to ( 1 Cor. 1:12-15).
It is for many of these reasons I do not mourn the idea of a post-Christian culture; after all history pretty much points out that when the church is persecuted, it does its best. It is only when it has been in power that it has had the time to worry more about internal quarrels than about the needs of those it has been called to serve. Besides, I know that in the end it is God who will have the victory and His creation will ultimately be reconcilled to Him.
One last thing concerning the comment, “Real progress would also be rebuilding the wastelands.” Perhaps the challenge isn’t in the rebuilding, but in the re-evaluating. Perhaps the wastelands aren’t wastelands at all; perhaps they are the only real good, healthy land left.
Peace and grace,
+Ed
OH, and I forgot. Be happy you have grey hair, because many of us don’t have enough to even be grey. Then again some of us were already out of school in the 1970’s so we are just a wee bit older than others. 🙂
Sorry, Dale, but the derailing of the faith of the Western Church goes back to Augustine (high doctrine of Original Sin,the doctrine of Predestination, and the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit embodied in the filioque). It continues with Anselm’s writings about how we are saved, not from sin, Satan, and death, but from Divine wrath. It goes on to embrace the filioque and papal supremacy as dogma, leading directly to the First Vatican Council which, as you correctly point out above, itself leads directly to the Second Vatican Council.
This has nothing to do with Byzantine imperialism. The non-chalcedonian Orthodoxy in which I am rooted is at least as allergic to THAT as to Western theological deviations (not to mention the West’s own imperial pretensions).
I do believe that that is SAINT Augustine.
The orthodox belief that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father through the Son has always been accepted: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” The Latin procedit and the Greek ἐκπορευόμενον do not translate exactly. The Greek term means the originator, the Latin has a very different, and orthodox meaning. A stream may originate in a lake, but proceed through many different lakes before reaching the sea, but in Greek only the lake of origin is meant. To attribute papal authority to the filioque is simply ludicrous. Should it be in the Creed? No. But your contentions are simply bizarre. One should also mention that it was not the Popes who placed the filioque in the Creed, but the Spaniards to counteract Arianism (an eastern heresy), it was later placed in the Creed by Charlemagne, an act protested by Pope St Leo III. St Cyril of Alexandria, was very close to the theology of the filioque as well.
One should add that for centuries the insertion of the filioque did not bother the eastern church too much, until they could use if for both political as well as ethnic ends.
And the question of origin is precisely what is at stake, in either Greek or Latin. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (who also generates the Son) and who is the unique source of Deity. The Spirit, proceeding from the Father, “rests on the Son” and thereby completes the perichoretic cycle. We see this also in the economy of salvation in the role of the Spirit in the Incarnation and at the baptism of Jesus. Thus, we see the Trinity, not a top down affair of Father to Son to Holy Spirit, but as a perichoretic community, a triangle within a circle, if you will, in which each Divine Person has a unique relationship with the other two Divine Persons.
And how does this impact the Church? The Church is the ikon, the image of the Trinity.
Each local Church, an entity presided over by a bishop, is fully Catholic, and the universal Church is a communion of these local Churches. But what of the Roman Communion? It is conceived of as an entity that is completely top-down, from the Pope to Cardinals to the Bishops to the lower clergy to the faithful! So you see that the distortion of the Trinity found in the filioque is mirrored in the doctrine of papal supremacy which in turn imposes it upon the entire Western Church at precisely the time the papacy is beginning to assert this doctrine of supremacy, first in the West and largely unsuccessfully, in the West as well.
One should also add that the doctrine of original sin is taught not only by St Augustine, but by St Athanasius as well. You might find the readings of the eastern fathers on original sin found in J.N.D. Kelly’s “Early Christian Doctrines” to be informative.
The early Eastern Fathers did not teach what Augustine taught on original sin. Hence, the reference to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, not to any such doctrine whatsoever. We all obviously inherit the consequences of the sin of our first parents, primarily death (which, in turn, tends to lead us into sin through our own fear of same. See Hebrews 2:14-15), but we do not inherit guilt for that sin. We are only guilty of the sins we ourselves commit.
Augustine approached the Bible largely apart from the Tradition of the fathers who came before him, bringing to his reading a neo-Platonic background, one similar to that of Origen. They both stumbled in very similar ways, each related to the monism of neo-Platonism. Origen could not conceive of humanity as being really ontologically distinct from God. While it is not clear to me whether or not Augustine addressed this question directly, he, for his part, could not conceive of humanity with genuinely free will.
I strongly suspect, but cannot really prove, that Augustinian determinism sets the stage for Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” of salvation which, to my mind, is the single most problematic aspect of Western theology in that it turns God into that which from which we must be saved. This too reinforces papal supremacy as secular authority.
So you see, the First Vatican Council does not emerge from a vacuum…
But your original contention that papalism is a direct result of the filioque is simply untenable. There have also been parallel developments within eastern Christianity as well. With the fall of the emperor of the west it was only natural for the Popes to fill this political vacuum and to take upon themselves certain political regalia, such as the tiara, and political authority. The exact same thing happened with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 where the the Greek patriarch stepped in to become the ethnarch of the Greek race. The Patriarch, much as the earlier popes, adopted byzantine imperial regalia, such as the crown and rejecting the traditional episcopal phelon for the imperial sakkos. The main difference is that whilst Roman papalism remained above ethnicity and remained universal, that of the Greeks became very racial. For centuries the Greeks controlled all of the Balkan Orthodox communities and appointed only Greek racial bishops; the artificial Greek patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria are a prime example, for centuries they were simply Greek appointed, pretend patriarchs who lived in Constantinople. The “ecumenical” patriarch of Constantinople even to this day declares that they have a universal jurisdiction over all “Barbarian” lands. The only thing that seems to keep the Greeks from further papal developments are the Russians.
You also seem unaware that the full triumph of papalism in the west was only accomplished in the 19th century. Previous to that time there was a divide between conciliarists and papalists. Actually, during the time of the Council of Constance in the 15th century the conciliarists looked as if they would be the winning party with the disposition of a setting Pope and the promise of the elected Pope Martin V who accepted, in principal, that a council of the full Church was superior to that of the Pope’s personal power; later when he returned to Rome he rejected this promise. It is interesting to note that the Greeks of that time supported the papal position and rejected overtures of the conciliarists. It was the Germans, much as the Russians in the Byzantine Church, who supplied a curb on papal authority; but with the loss of the Germans to Lutheranism, the papalist began to take full power, with their final triumph in 1870. It is interesting to note that even in Vatican I, the main opposition was from the Germans.
In the present situation in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India the Syriac Patriarchate of Antioch is claiming a universal jurisdiction, also highly tinged with racism where in India the group claiming pure Syrian blood are given preference to all higher church positions (I have this information from discussions with two Indian Orthodox priests; they claim that in the Syrian Church of Antioch there is a movement very close to that of a personal universal jurisdiction held by the Patriarch).
So one can see that papalism is not at all a question of the filioque as you have insinuated. It is alive and well in the eastern church as well, only less developed and is usually a reaction to a political or social reality. Personally, given the choice between the universal, non-racial papalism of the west or the very racial, ethno-centric developments in the east, I would prefer the western variety.
So in the end, the east, without the filioque has quite happily developed its own papalism; your original contentions seem rather a-historical.
If I stated that “papalism is a direct result of the filioque”, I misspoke. I am arguing that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the doctrine of papal supremacy and the filioque, imposed upon the (pre-Reformation) universal Church of the West by the papacy itself, such that each reinforces the other in that the filioque distorts the doctrine of God by turning the Trinity into a 1-2-3 top-down affair, while the doctrine of papal supremacy similarly distorts the Church, and does so upon the basis of claims for the Divine origin of the papacy that simply cannot be made in any other situation in which a Patriarchate claims or has imposed upon it extraordinary authority. (The basis for the claims of the Syriac Patriarchate, for example, are canons promulgated at the first Council of Nicea, and these claims do not, in any event, extend to the universal Church as a whole, regardless of location or rite.)
If you prefer such universal extraordinary authority as that claimed by Rome, that is your right, but bear in mind that distortions elsewhere in the universal Church cannot justify those of Rome and further, one must still deal with the matter of the TRUTH of the filioque as well as the other doctrines, mentioned above, which are unique to the West, and which have inflicted untold damage on the spiritual lives of millions of people by turning God into a being to be saved from instead of the Being Who Saves.
Forgot the situation of the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria which kept the Ethiopian Church in a position of complete imperial subjugation for centuries, allowing only one bishop for the whole country, an Egyptian who was only loyal to his own racial group; this situation only changed because of the political demands of the emperor of Ethiopia in 1959! That is indeed papalism. The Coptic Church does not have the filioque.
i fail to find your arguments convincing. It is bad and nasty when the west does it, but good when the east does the same thing? This is the worst form of ethno-centric racism one can think of.
One should also mention that the conciliarists of the west also had the filioque, and were bitterly apposed to papalism in any form.
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