Reason & Revelation

[There was a feature on Slate for a while, called “The Breakfast Club”, in which a small group of friends who were also semi-luminaries chatted about important topics.   That is a wonderful thing to be an active participant in yourself, in real time;  but somehow it didn’t translate well to the page.

At the risk of similarly irking our readers, and in pursuit of our Lenten agenda, we offer an exchange of emails between myself and Dr Massey:  with only this excuse, that, as this correspondence dates from two years ago, it has had time to ‘cool’;  so that if it seems to me worth reading now, it might so seem to you.
Note:  This exchange concerns the role of Revelation in general.  For the Biblical book of that name, click here.

Here you go.]

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Dr J:

From the current New Oxford Review:

"Catholics are open to both Athens and Jerusalem, 
 to both reason and revelation."

This resonates profoundly;  as does much else in this issue (e.g. the review re Darwin).

Now... you have traveled the whole trajectory that I have,  and gone one step further -- to Eastern Orthodoxy,
which is still  mysterious to me.
The Catholic practice of Reason is well-known, and profound.  
Where is Eastern Orthodoxy, on that branch of this most necessary  dichotomy?
Who are their Scholastics, and their modern Catholic equivalents?

~

Dr K:

The original Athens/Jerusalem dichotomy comes from Tertullian (North Africa, second century) who asked "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? (De praescriptione, vii)".

His point was that Christians have to ultimately pick revelation over reason.

At the same time, however, Christian writers were quite rightly bringing reason in the back door and applying the methods of philosophical discourse to their treatment of theological matters.

I am a student of antiquity. When I wrenched my gut over the pain I would inflict in abandoning my Lutheran upbringing, I eventually found the strength to do it for what Augustine already in the year 400 could describe as the Church:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!  You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. (Confessions 27.38).

Augustine of Hippo

But upon my entrance into the Western Branch of the Historical Church I discovered, to my horror, that I had wandered in during what seems to the first and only thirty year span of the Roman Church going completely off her rocker. All the beauty I anticipated  had already been a decade earlier jettisoned in the name of bringing Mass down to less than an hour so the Soccer Moms could fit it into their busy schedules.

In my previous account I focused on why I am, in my heart, a Roman Catholic, but sojourning in the Eastern Church.

Let me refine that description just a bit and explain that I am an Historical Christian who believes that the ancient Faith once practiced jointly by West and East is the True Church instituted by Jesus.  A part of that True Faith is an important role to be exercised by the successor of Peter in the Bishop of Rome. But he is currently presiding over a shambles.

A clincher for me was, while working in Canon Law, I received an amendment to the Law that would now allow a cremated body to be in the Church and stand for the body.

You may think, what's the problem with that?

The problem is that the Church condemned cremation two thousand years ago as a rejection of the resurrection. It was what set us apart from the pagans around us. And the Church had made the concession that cremation could be done. But the ashes resulting could not be then brought into the Church and stand where the casket should have.

And I was bewildered to think that *I* should be living through a two thousand year old Christian principle being abandoned.

The Orthodox, of course, do not allow it. That's because we practice still the Christian Faith as the entire Church was practicing it in the year 900.

And so, despite my still firm belief that the Bishop of Rome has an important role in the Church, I am more comfortable in a Church where I don't have to look over my shoulder and wonder what two thousand year old and cherished practice will be canceled next Tuesday.

Back to the matter at hand. While Orthodoxy does maintain, in an almost ossified fashion, the Faith as practiced in 950, it has been perhaps her injury of being out of Communion with the Bishop of Rome that she has not produced a truly notable theologian since then. The high period of Western Scholasticism, which finds its pinnacle with St. Thomas of Aquinas, is a tribute to the application of logic to revelation.

In earlier centuries, however, the East produced profound thinkers, such as Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus.

It is also possible that the East's waning can be attributed to the fact that shortly after those notables, the entire Eastern Church was brought under the domination of Islam.

I come back to the theme I have pressed in my various treatises on this topic. The Eastern and Western Churches need each other desperately. The West needs the balance and solidity that the East has kept. The East needs the sense of the living spirit that the West has cultivated.

And I've told you that I long ago, even as a Protestant, believed I had a particular mission in this.

It's all that matters.

[For further theological essays from Dr. Massey:
http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/ ]

Footnote for  Latin lovers:
The quotation from Saint Augustine is famous; we give the Latin here:
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.