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Here are a couple of blog posts:
From Strauss to Christ, an interesting post which expresses some of my own concerns in the realms of apologetics, reason, and faith. Here's the conclusion:
Accepting revelation is not tantamount to turning off reason; it is not to become a fideist in the strictest sense of the word. It does mean, however, the dismissal of a purely intellectualized interpretation of the world. Reality means something more than what reason alone can examine. Reason’s limits are dismissed and with that dismissal comes a freedom more dangerous than one any atheistic “philosopher” ever drooled over in their shabby polemics. The philosophic life is, after all, a restricted life—not with regard to its questions, but to the chance it has any permanent answers. And is it not the answers, even the wildly fantastic answers, which give rise to the actions that shape the way in which we live? In the end, this all circles back to faith and not just any faith, but the Faith in God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior of all. “Faith” is the substantial evidence most scorned by non-believers and least defended by those aforementioned minds committed to a tensionless existence between what they have learned and what they claim to believe. It is, however, what must be taken or rejected if being a Christian is possible. Leo Strauss—a Jew who consciously renounced his people’s orthodoxy—saw this. He saw it so clearly that he knew if his choice for the philosophic life was to amount to more than a mere act of decisionism, revealed religion had to be confronted, exposed, and ultimately rejected. Unlike so many moderns, he believed and, dare I say, he demonstrated that such an assault had not been properly undertaken in modern times. Its claim to victory was a hollow claim; its acceptance came more by way of reception of a questionable tradition than an irreproachable demonstration. Christians—even Orthodox Christians—still receive this tradition; they still embrace it and from there believe that the reasonableness of the critique can only be met by showing, in some convoluted way, the greater “reasonableness” of their Christianity. They may be well-meaning, but they are still ashamed by the Cross. They want to know—and they want the world to know that they know—more than it.
The Ochlophobist offers some insightful comments on the topics of linguistics and flattery here. Here's a sample:
The degeneration of language that we now see is the sad putting on of appearances by demons still trembling in fear because of the word of the Theotokos spoken in accordance with the Word she accepted and bore. They have every reason to fear now, for in their pursuit of the flatteries and fabrications of Nothing their potential victims need only bend the neck and utter from the heart a "be it unto me" and the whole game is over - even in metal shops, and classrooms, and sales meetings, and Lord knows where else. God, who energetically seems to make occasion for irony, appears rather intent on expressing salvation in the most seemingly impossible situations. In fact, as St. Paul makes clear and as many of us have experienced, the greater the degree of realized need, the greater the degree of our potential clarity in seeing grace. Thus in Christ's new order, the order of Nativity, when things get worse, there is all the more power in what is better. Flattery abounds, but in such a context the icon of a real word spoken or written only serves to bear a greater witness.
Here are some of the things I've been reading today:
The Word Lifted Up in the Wilderness -- a blog post from the Ochlophobist who cites Josef Pieper's book: Abuse of Language -- Abuse of Power on the topic of flattery. Here's a sample:
What, then, is flattery?... The decisive element is this: having an ulterior motive. I address the other not simply to please him or to tell him something that is true. Rather, what I say to him is designed to get something from him! This underlying design makes the message a flattery, even in the popular meaning of the word. The other, whom I try to influence with what he likes to hear, ceases to be my partner; he is no longer a fellow subject. Rather, he has become for me an object to be manipulated, possibly to be dominated, to be handled and controlled.
I suspect this proclivity for power manifests in various forms when we objectify others; justifying the utilization, or rather, profanation, of living images of God upon the pretense of an ennobled end.
Free Choice in Saint Maximus the Confessor, by Joseph Farrell
It's taken a few months to complete this book, but it was well worth it. This is a book worth rereading -- it is packed with paradigm altering considerations. To avert the ineluctable discrepancies that would follow upon any attempt to recapitulate the content in my own words, I will simply quote the following:These observations on St. Augustine and St. Maximus permit us to speculate about possible applications of the Confessor's theology to the doctrine of predestination and free will, which speculations I present in proposition form for the sake of clarity.
(1) Proper theological method subsumes theological questions and doctrines under the two correlative headings of Christology and Triadology, for all properly theological doctrines would appear to have christological and triadological implications. Any proposition, method, or other statement which does not start directly and consciously from this context does not go under the name of Christian theology.
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(2) Proper christological method is recapitulational, for Christ possesses and is all the fullness of Deity and of humanity; He is the Logos and logoi of all universals common to Deity and humanity. In Him, therefore, are to be found the logoi of predestination and of free choice, and He is thus the means by which to distinguish any Christian doctrine of predestination from Stoic, Neoplatonic, Judaic, or Mohammedan counterparts.
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(3) The One Son freely chooses, according to the unique hypostatic mode of existence proper to Him as Son and Word, in both of His natures, each nature actively willing the salvation of all men.
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(4) In Christ's human nature which is consubstantial with all men, God humanly wills, decrees, and perfectly fulfills the salvation of all men [according to nature, and not to be mistaken for a universalism in respect of persons -- M], for no human being is untouched by His Incarnation, and nothing is detracted from His sovereignty as God if individual persons choose not to accept salvation.
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(5) Christ, being truly consubstantial with all men, truly died for all men, and thus His atoning Passion, Death, and Resurrection are in no way limited.
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(6) The distinction between person and nature is fundamental to any biblical exegesis on the question of predestination and free will.
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(7) Concepts such as prevenient grace should be referred to the Incarnation and to the Holy Spirit's eternal abiding upon the Word; God is thus in men "to will and work His good pleasure" by virtue of His Incarnation and because of the Holy Spirit's unique relationship in the Economy to the human nature in Christ.
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(8) The dispute between Calvinism and Arminianism perhaps results because of the lack of a clear theology and application of the categories of person and nature. Therefore, both parties in this iternecine dispute share a common lack of the distinction between natural will and the mode of willing.
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(9) From the standpoint of the theology of St. Maximus, the roots of any fatalistic system would therefore seem to be threefold:
1. in the failure to distinguish between person and nature
2. in the failure to distinguish between a nature and its energies, and
3. in the inability of any system which accepts the absolute simplicity of the divine essence to admit of a real plurality of Goods in the Good.
Here are some of the things I've been reading today:
Christ and Nothing by David Bentley Hart
For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it alone, in the history of the West, was a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting façade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open. David Bentley Hart also has a great little book on theodicy called The Doors of the Sea.
And speaking of theodicy, these blog posts by Perry Robinson are a worthwhile read.
Non-conventional psyche and Nameless and out of time from the Second Terrace blog. These are two posts that briefly touch upon an Orthodox demonology. From the first post:
But they are also lustful -- and this is not mentioned all that much, if at all. The signal characteristic of Hades is that the malevolent intelligences are subject to passions without any means by which these passions may be assuaged. In a horrific possibility, it seems that the demonic seeks any human soul to surrender to passion for the entertainment of the spiritual entity. At every act of lust, there is always a voyeur, if not a vicarious participant. That is why rape is always violent, as it is always, always demonic. I've found that reflecting upon the reality of our immaterial warfare confers a certain sobriety -- a sobriety which is fleeting in a world that either concedes only a token recognition or proffers an unwieldly caricature of the subject.
 Tomorrow (Old Calendar) there will be a Divine Liturgy coinciding with the commemoration of the holy Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica. (click on the image to read more about the saint and day)
I've recently finished reading Crime and Punishment (be forewarned, there are spoilers in that article) by the renowned Fyodor Dostoevsky. This classic furnishes insight into human nature and relationships -- an insight poignantly relevant to our own times. Those familiar with the life of the author should also appreciate the depths from which the tale is drawn.
An interesting lecture on the book can be found here (spoiler warning).
I'm hoping to tackle The Idiot next. It should be an interesting contrast, seeing that Crime and Punishment is about a guilty man, and The Idiot is about an innocent man.
Dostoevsky, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, once wrote:
If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
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