More Orthodox Than the Ersadox: An Eastern Catholic Response

A friendly response to the Yankee Athonite on the subject of "Is Eastern Catholicism 'Orthodox LARP'?"

In a 2017 lecture by David Bentley Hart, he recounts an anecdote from his brother’s trip to Istanbul. Hart’s brother was on a tour bus in the city. Among the tourists was a recent American convert to Greek Orthodoxy, a middle-aged man from the Deep South who looked and acted like a typical Southern Baptist. At one point, the man said—unprompted—that “the Latins still don’t understand what the sack of Constantinople in 1204 means to us.” Hart’s brother, trying to be funny, responded that the Byzantines deserved it because of the 1182 massacre of Latins in the city. The convert didn’t understand the reference. Despite his lack of historical knowledge of the Greek-Latin relations of the time, somehow, the recent convert had internalized the event of 1204 as a deep personal tragedy. What is going on here? Hart suggests it has something to do with the nature of American culture, and I am inclined to agree with him. But what fascinates me most is how pervasive this mentality tends to be among Orthodox converts in general.

In fact, it often seems that many Orthodox converts quickly take on this sort of mindset and describe Orthodoxy and its “mentality” or “approach to things” with such ease and familiarity, one would think they had not just a few months or years prior converted from Protestantism or from Catholicism. Even more, they are quick to criticize those who remain Catholic as not being able to understand their mindset, being too bogged down in the Western mindset, and frequently, they define themselves in contrast to Catholicism.

I have in mind here some friends, so it is not my intention to be harsh. Instead, I want to give an apologia of the Catholic mind, its orthodoxy. In doing this, I also want to point out the evident scandals of the “Orthodox” mind referred to by some in contrast to the Catholic mindset. This “Orthodox” mindset that I am considering is not the many manifestations or schools of thought throughout Orthodoxy, and it is most certainly not synonymous with Orthodoxy (big or little ‘o') itself. Indeed, this is a response to Michael Davis, whose blog, the Yankee Athonite, is well written and insightful, though at times I feel the need to protest some claims, and this is one of those times.

The Catholic Phronema

In Davis’s essay, he begins with his own consideration of the Orthodox mindset or phronema. Quoting from Jude 3 and Fr. Florovsky, he sets up a mindset that is not much different than the Catholic one, if different at all. Catholics and Orthodox alike agree that the deposit of the faith is a deposit, and that public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle. Catholic and Orthodox agree that what Fr. Florovsky calls the “objective” and “subjective” sides of orthodoxy cannot be separated. Indeed, if the objective is the deposit of faith, that unchanging and immutable truth of revelation—while the subjective is the personal lived out experience of that truth by each successive age—there is no disagreement.

To get it out of the way, what seems to bother Michael is naming these eras, and at once we begin to see an inkling of what I take to be the error of what I will expound as the “Orthodox” mindset, or phronema. For example, Michael takes issue that Catholics (and, it should be said, many Orthodox as well) refer to a Patristic era that is “over.” Instead, Michael speaks of a never-ending Patristic era, for the term Father is said of both Augustine of Hippo and Paisios of Mount Athos in the Orthodox tradition. The issue is semantic. To treat this simply and in brief, the concept of a “Father” refers to someone who guides and instructs the Church. The Catholic communion gives this name in direct reference to a time period, and likewise a similar name—that in many ways delineates a similar idea—is given to those exceptionally noteworthy (free from any time), and this is the name of “Doctor.” If by Father we mean someone who has been an example of holiness, a defender of truth, a corrector of errors, and that is all we mean, I do not think you would find a single Catholic that would not be happy to call St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, or St. John Paul II a “Father.”

But the real underlying issue here is what is a growing divide between Orthodox and Catholics (at least in the online world), and that is the idea of doctrinal development. Davis mentions that some view Orthodoxy as the “faith of the first millennium, frozen in amber,” and he notes that this is not always a compliment. And this is more to the point. The Catholic Phronema sees the current era as more of an expression of the living Patristic era than the Orthodox do. Where the Orthodox are happy with the terms, the Catholics recognize that the living tradition of the Church can make pronouncements and clarifications on the deposit of Faith, that immutable Truth given by Jesus Christ, as they are currently and always guided by the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, the Catholic mindset takes the words of St. Gregory the Theologian quite seriously:

The Old Testament proclaimed the Father clearly, but the Son more obscurely. The New Testament revealed the Son and gave us a glimpse of the divinity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit dwells among us and grants us a clearer vision of himself. It was not prudent, when the divinity of the Father had not yet been confessed, to proclaim the Son openly and, when the divinity of the Son was not yet admitted, to add the Holy Spirit as an extra burden, to speak somewhat daringly…By advancing and progressing “from glory to glory,” the light of the Trinity will shine in ever more brilliant ways. Oratio 31, 26 (PG 36: 161-163).

Indeed, by the conclusion of his Fifth Theological Oration, St. Gregory calls for theology to move past metaphor and to speak more clearly on the topic of Divine things, in other words, to develop. And the idea of development is thoroughly Patristic in the living sense of that tradition.

Look at what Clement of Alexandria says concerning development:

Some, who have tasted only the Scriptures, are believers (pistoi); others, the Gnostics, have gone further and have become exact (akribeis) experts in the truth; but both are what they are in accordance with this same knowledge (epistemai). It is just as in ordinary life, where specialists (techne) possess something more than other men, and have more to say because they have gone beyond the average notions (koinai ennoiai) on the subject. In the same way we start from the Scriptures, and proceed to a perfect demonstration (apodeixis) based on faith, and are thus convinced by proof. (Strom. VII, 16: 95, 9-96, I).

Clement compares the doctrines of the faith to those of other sciences. For example, the basic principles, such as the postulates and definitions of Geometry, are there as a foundation, a deposit. However, the mature thinker or learner will recognize the necessary consequences of these principles and discover greater, more profound truths. Not that the truth is multiplied into many truths, but our articulation of the revealed faith becomes clearer and more transparent. It may be difficult to sees how a proposition in the fifth book of Euclid is rooted in the first two pages, but it undoubtedly is.

The Scriptures teach that God became a man. What is this God and what is this man? Does this refer to the idea that man is material, or both body and soul? Or, is he body, soul, and mind? Is it enough to say that God assumed only the body of man? Did God assume both the body and soul of a man but not his will or mind? Do the activities of God and the activities of the man assumed mix into one, or does each have a unique activity according to nature?

Council after Council was held to clarify these questions, and each time the Church made a determination, a “development” in the Catholic sense of the term was made. Why should such “developments” cease after the seventh ecumenical Council? The Catholic Phronema says it does not cease, for the Holy Spirit is the guide of the Church and protects her from error. The one Truth, revealed by Jesus Christ (John 14:6, 18:37), is the same Truth expressed in Scripture, at Nicaea I, and at Nicaea II and beyond. It is that same Truth that all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church defend under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, nourished by the sacramental life in Christ, and the providence of the Father.

The “Orthodox” (or more properly Ersadox) Phronema

So, what then is the Orthodox Phronema, and how does it differ? Well, ultimately, the error of the “Orthodox” mindset is that it mistakes the tools of the faith for the faith itself. What do I mean?

A simple example is the challenge of the calendar and the dating of Easter. Nowhere, in any of the controversies, is the use of a specific calendar used to uphold the standard—not the Jewish, the Julian, the Alexandrian, Seleucid, or Sassanian. Instead, the Sunday must follow the fourteenth day of the paschal moon, and this moon is determined to be paschal by the spring equinox. Indeed, we get the impression that Alexandria was intended to make this determination, and it is worth noting that Alexandria did not use the Julian calendar. The Church of Alexandria used the Alexandrian calendar. What it is to be a calendar is to be a tool for astronomical predications. You can use the metric system or the imperial system, but if you are asked to mark the distance of a mile and the yardstick is an inch too short or the meter stick is off by a few centimeters, you will fail to achieve your end.

Consequently, the calendar itself has no authority apart from its ability to conform to the natural realities it seeks to measure. The object is not fidelity to a particular system of reckoning, but fidelity to the events themselves: the vernal equinox, the full moon, and the Sunday that follows. In this light, the various reforms of the calendar—including the Gregorian adjustment—are not innovations upon the tradition, but efforts to restore the calendar’s service to its original astronomical purpose. The deeper principle is that the Church, in dating Easter, appeals not to human conventions, but to the constancy of God’s created order, which human systems must labor to reflect accurately.

At a deeper level, this reflects the Church’s confidence in the unity of faith and reason. The natural order—the movement of the sun and moon, the turning of the seasons—is not alien to the faith but is woven into its very substance. The Paschal mystery is not a timeless myth decreed to have happened on this or that date at an arbitrary whim: Christ truly suffered, died, and rose again at a real point in time, during a real Passover, marked by real signs in the heavens. The created order serves not as a rival to revelation but as one of its witnesses, providing the framework in which the economy of salvation unfolds.

When the Catholic phronema insists on aligning the date of Easter with the natural signs of spring, it is as a witness to the historical reality of the Incarnation and Christ our Pascha—that Christ’s redemption entered into, and sanctified, the fabric of creation itself. Fidelity to the natural order, then, is fidelity to the historical reality of the Gospel. To deviate from this and insist on the Julian calendar, to insist on using a broken tool, is not a real Orthodox phronema; it is an “Ersadox” phronema (Ersatz-Orthodox, i.e., “Artificial-Orthodoxy”)—an inferior substitution for the true Orthodoxy of the Apostolic faith.

Just ask yourself, would St. Alexander of Alexandria recognize the Gregorian or Julian calendar today if we consider the Council Fathers intention at Nicaea. I think the answer is obvious, and some Orthodox agree with me.

Similar critiques of the Ersadox can be made of their rejection of the substance of the doctrine of the filioque. On a theological level, no one denies the Monarchy (or in scholastic terms, the Auctoritas) of the Father. But, if one denies that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son or that the Spirit is in some way related essentially to the Son in His personal origin then one risks reducing the distinction between Son and Spirit to mere name or function and not of a real personal relation. That personal relations are the fundamental way of distinguishing the Divine Hypostases is a thoroughly Cappadocian principle. But, if the Son and the Spirit differ by activity or only in revelation (and not relation of origin), then the persons are no longer truly distinct in actuality but only appear to be. This is the essence of Sabellianism. And while the Ersadox, nor the more intellectually honest Orthodox, are not Sabellians, they hold principles that would result in heresy if considered objectively.

But let us say that the theology of the filioque is not the problem (as many Orthodox happily admit). The real issue is editing the words of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed. Alright, then why did no one raise that objection to the Armenians? If you did not know it, the Armenians recited a distinct creed from that of Nicaea-Constantinople for over one-hundred years before the 507 AD schism. How is it that communion was maintained for so long with such a vast discrepancy in language between the Creeds?

For those unawares, here is the Armenian Creed:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of God the Father, only begotten, that is of the substance of the Father. God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten and not made; of the same nature of the Father, by whom all things came into being in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, took body, became man, was born perfectly of the holy virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. By whom he took body, soul and mind and everything that is in man, truly and not in semblance. He suffered and was crucified and was buried and rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven with the same body and sat at the right hand of the Father. He is to come with the same body and with the glory of the Father to judge the living and the dead; of His kingdom there is no end. We believe also in the Holy Spirit, the uncreated and the perfect; who spoke through the Law and through the Prophets and through the Gospels; Who came down upon the Jordan, preached through the apostles and dwelled in the saints. We believe also in only one catholic and apostolic [holy] church; In one baptism with repentance for the remission and forgiveness of sins; In the resurrection of the dead, in the everlasting judgment of souls and bodies, in the kingdom of heaven and in the life eternal.

Pretty different, right? Or is it? It sounds like the substance of the Armenian Creed is much the same as the substance of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed.

Now, despite this creed being in use since about the time of Nicaea, when the Armenians were being accused of monophysitism by the Chalcedonians, there is no mention of “abusing” the faith of the Fathers in respect to editing the creed. What does this absence indicate except that the proclamation of the Creed is a proclamation of substance, not words (or in other words, tools of communicating the substance of the faith).

The Creed is not a sacred incantation of precise wording. Even moving from Greek to English has its challenges. For example, English has no perfect equivalent for homoousios, and neither does it have one for pneuma; or, if we look at scripture, no other language has a word that conveys all that is meant by the Greek Logos in the prologue to the Gospel of John.

Before moving on to the next section of this essay, I have to address another perfect example of Ersadoxy that Davis provides for us in his essay. He says that the “[Orthodox] would consider the Rosary problematic because it encourages the use of imagination in prayer. This, to the Orthodox, is extremely dangerous. It opens us up to prelest, or spiritual deception.” Of course, this alone is not the Orthodox Phronema, but an Ersadox one.

Is it wrong to use imagination in prayer? In the Catholic and genuinely Orthodox phronema, it is obviously not. We want to avoid the heresy of the Anthropomorphites, as the story of Sarapion in the tenth of John Cassian’s Conferences illustrates. And, it is true that Evagrius Ponticus says not to form sensory images during prayer (Chapters on Prayer, 67 and 114). But if forming images during prayer, or contemplating them, is always wrong, what good are icons? Again, the Ersadox does not reject icons, but they reject the images and imaginings they form in one’s mind. And so, like the calendar or the filioque (as doctrine or in the Creed), the Ersadox are confused about means and ends.

What is the Ersadox to say when we look at the Tradition, the voice of the Fathers as a whole, we see a more Catholic-Orthodox phronema. What St. John Damascene writes concerning images made of wood and paint should just as much be applied to those images we form in the mind. In Treatise 1.17 on Divine Images, he tells us that:

I say that everywhere we use our senses to produce an image of the Incarnate God himself, and we sanctify the first of the senses (sight being the first of the senses), just as by words hearing is sanctified. For the image is a memorial. What the book does for those who understand letters, the image does for the illiterate; the word appeals to hearing, the image appeals to sight; it conveys understanding.

To take from a more modern Orthodox saint, St.. John of Kronstadt tells us in My Life in Christ that:

Icons are a requirement of our nature. Can our nature do without an image? Can we call to mind an absent person without representing or imagining him to ourselves? Has not God Himself given us the capacity of representation and imagination? Icons are the Church’s answer to a crying necessity of our nature.

And, St. Theodore the Studite writes in a way that explicitly addresses the question at hand:

Imagination is one of the powers of the soul. It is itself a kind of image, as both are depictions. The image, therefore, that resembles the imagination cannot be useless…If imagination were useless, it would be an utterly futile part of human nature. But then the other powers of the soul would also be useless: the senses, memory, intellect [nous], and reason. Thus a reasoned and sober consideration of human nature shows how nonsensical it is to despise the image and the imagination.

In addition to being a catechetical tool, what are icons for if not to help sustain the imagination and keep it free from wandering? And, of course, neither tradition thinks of images in wood or imagination as the end. A painting or an imaginative reflection is just a means to an end. In St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, he articulates the use of images as a means:

Man is to make use of them [all things in creation] as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.

It is obvious that imagination, as a gift from God is not evil, and it has its purpose and must be sanctified and oriented toward the glorification of God. The Eastern Christian tradition articulates the usage of mental images—considering both scripture and creation—as the intermediate step on the way to theoria.

More orthodox than the Ersadox.

Davis goes on to say that as an Eastern Catholic must believe himself to be more “orthodox” than the Orthodox. He is right. An Eastern Catholic, and every Catholic, needs to hold that the fullness of the truth is more clearly taught within Papal communion. It seems to me that the error of the Ersadox is that they hold what would result in heretical opinions, and yet they do not hold heresies. They have arrived at the proper end: profession of the Trinity, veneration of images, respect for apostolic succession, but they reject the logos of how the Fathers arrived at those conclusions.

The rejection of reasoned articulation—the logos of theological development—is, at bottom, a rejection of how the Fathers themselves did theology. It was by logos, by argument, clarification, analogy, and distinction, that the Church came to speak rightly of the Trinity, of the two natures of Christ, and of the sacraments. The Catholic tradition holds that human logos—when rightly ordered—is not an intrusion upon the mystery of God, but a participation in it, made possible because the Logos became flesh. To deny that reason has a role in articulating and safeguarding the faith is to forget that the eternal Word came as a man who taught, reasoned, and revealed. The danger of the Ersadox mindset is not that it lacks reverence, but that it forgets the way in which the Fathers themselves used reason to serve the truth. If the Logos took on flesh, then He also sanctified our capacity to speak truly and logically about divine things.

The rejection of the lower-case logos of man’s reason is an implicit rejection of the Logos that became flesh—the Logos whose image man was made in. And, again, of course, the Ersadox do not reject Christ the Logos, but if taken to a strict and consistent conclusion, their position would risk rejecting essential truths.

Not making the jump.

Lastly, Davis points out five ways he imagines the Ersadox faith to be “easier.” These are 1) no cognitive dissonance, 2) less talking more doing, 3) no beef with Rome, 4) Community of faith, and 5) Not “Eastern,” just Orthodox.

This essay has largely been a response to the first of these, and it has been shown that the cognitive dissonance is laden throughout the Ersadox view. “Less talking, more doing” and “no beef with Rome” seem like empty criticisms. The internet is fraught with lots of talking and more beef than a Texas ranch, in both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox circles. As for a “Community of Faith” the Catholic Community is one community, and I do not really see the point being made here. And lastly, “Not ‘Eastern,’ just Orthodox” is nice to say, but indeed, any Catholic will say the same—not Eastern or Western, but Catholic. To paraphrase St. Thomas More, the Eastern Catholic can say “I am a practicing Byzantine, and a Catholic first.” And to this, I would not begrudge any Orthodox who said the same, depending on his rite.

I will say the resurgence of reading many of the less popular Western saints is a pleasant revival among the Orthodox, and yet the same revival is taking place in Roman Catholicism—many of whom are still on the Roman calendar and are still venerated and commemorated by those who attend mass or pray the office.

In the end, my aim is not to cast aspersions on the Orthodox tradition, which I deeply admire, nor to mock the earnestness of those converts who find a spiritual home there. My concern is simply with a posture—an ersatz Orthodoxy—that too often mistakes aesthetics for substance, style for authority, and inherited grievance for theological insight. What I propose instead is a return to the common roots that Catholics and Orthodox share: the Fathers, the Councils, the Scriptures, the Sacraments. There, in that living tradition guided by the Holy Spirit, we may yet find not only mutual recognition, but a path forward together—one in which the fullness of truth is not frozen, but being unveiled by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Thank you for reading.

Christ is Risen!