When I began watching this video I could not help but reflect on several contemporary trends in Orthodox theology. The first to come to mind was Fr. John Romanides' teachings on what he referred to as the "neurobiological sickness of religion and its cure". (http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.02.en.the_cure_of_the_neurobiological_sickness_of_rel.01.htm)
Some of what this young man said certainly resonated with Fr. John's message but overall his message is little different then the early reformers, the difference being that his message is clothed in 21st century dress. I have three quotes to respond to what this young man has said:
Some of what this young man said certainly resonated with Fr. John's message but overall his message is little different then the early reformers, the difference being that his message is clothed in 21st century dress. I have three quotes to respond to what this young man has said:
1) Christ’s Body the Church
What is all this, dear friends? No! We live in common and we see in common. Why do you think of yourself as an individual and not as a member of Christ? Is the faith and experience of others foreign to us? What did we say before? “It is said that God dwells in darkness”. And the mystic, the heavenly author, goes on to say concerning the Apostle Paul, and this is surely true, that he saw Christ: “And, indeed, the divine Paul is said to have known God”.What does this mean? It means that the saints say, the Scriptures mention time and again, the Fathers confirm, Paul confesses and the experience of the mystical life proclaims that God dwells in darkness and in light. If you have not seen Him, not recognized him, what does that matter? Are you the touchstone of truth? No. Which is why the experience of the Church has told it, tells it and writes it. And, since you have heard it – which is precisely why it has greater significance – your senses are not deceiving you. Elder Aimilianos
2) The Danger of “Spirituality” Without Dogma
Nevertheless, let the idealist reject religion and be a freelance follower of Jesus Christ. How will he know that he is following Christ and not just his own reflection? He might favor “spirituality” over “religion,” but spirituality is slippery. The young man in the video was clearly attracted to a Jesus Christ who was a young, table-turning radical. His Jesus was impatient with the religious establishment and on the side of the sinners and revolutionaries. His Jesus was the quintessential outsider—the rebel with a cause—a punk who all those rich hypocrites excluded and persecuted. In other words, he was just like the young man in the video.
We all fall into the trap of making Christ in our own image, so it is understandable, and if understandable, forgivable. This, however, is the main justification not only for religion, but also for a dogmatic religion. A dogmatic religion corrects our tendency to make Jesus in our own image. Fr. Dwight Longenecker
We all fall into the trap of making Christ in our own image, so it is understandable, and if understandable, forgivable. This, however, is the main justification not only for religion, but also for a dogmatic religion. A dogmatic religion corrects our tendency to make Jesus in our own image. Fr. Dwight Longenecker
(http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/01/the-jesus-and-religion-video This is a Catholic response but I feel that the sentiment here expressed by Fr. Dwight is quite pertinent).
3) Communion & Salvation
We now come to the crucial point of our homily: in what manner can the Church cure man in practice?
First of all, we need to clarify a misunderstanding that is broadly prevalent. The Church does not cure so much with what She has, but rather, with what She is. This detail is extremely important. As a rule, we all seek the means for salvation inside the Church, but salvation lies in the very event called "Church", and our incorporation in Her. The difference is huge, and it has a practical significance, in regard to therapy.
The Church has spiritual fathers and the mystery (sacrament) of Confession (which should more correctly be called Repentance). Much emphasis and significance has been placed on this element, when it comes to therapy. The perfect spiritual father-confessor and a perfect method of confession etc. are sought out, but what is overlooked is that it is not the spiritual father who heals. He might be tired during the hour of confession, or, he may not have the appropriate knowledge: quite usual things. Therapy will not occur during the hour of the Mystery, quite simply because the Mystery has man's incorporation in the Church as its objective, and only in there will therapy occur, slowly and in the long term. How will that happen?
The Church is a therapeutic clinic, because She provides man the potential to transit from the state of an "individual" to that of a "person". What is the difference? And how does that occur in the Church?
"Individual" is an arithmetical notion, which springs from one's isolation from other individuals - which simply is what it is, because it is not something else. Deep down, "individual" is a negative notion. When man exists and acts as an individual, he fences himself off psychologically; he "excises" himself from others. This is a pathological condition, which constitutes a host of morbid phenomena and perhaps is the very source of all sicknesses - it is that which Maximos calls "self-love". "Individual" does not only comprise a problem of a moral or psychological nature; it also has ontological dimensions. It is linked to death, which is the par excellence "feeder" and simultaneously disintegrator of the individual; death is that which highlights individualism, by separating it finally from other individuals (each one of us dies individually), and eventually disintegrating it, into decomposition and nonexistence. Individualism is a carrier of sickness or sicknesses, precisely because deep inside it lurks the fear of death - the ontological nihilism - if this bizarre albeit true contradiction may be permitted. The same applies, for the body. If, like Maximos, they link self-love to the body, it is not because the body is evil, but because it expresses par excellence the fortress of individualism where lurks the potential for excising ourselves from the others and where death eventually sets its sights and succeeds. Individualism is the first pathological stage that man goes through, when he is need of therapy.
The second stage is that of communion. For man to be cured of individualism, he needs to move on, to his relationship with others, with any form whatsoever, even if a negative one: to get angry, to beat or even kill someone. What is usually known as "defusing" is a form of transcending individualism - a form of "therapy" according to psychiatry. This is not about the notion of "person"; it is however a form of relationship and communion which appears as therapy, without actually being.
The stage that the Church aspires to bring mankind is beyond this stage, and to the stage of "person".
The Church borrows the notion of "person" from Her faith in the Trinitarian God and, after taking it through Christology and Pneumatology, applies it inside the Church. In the Holy Trinity, "person" is a positive notion - an affirmative notion - and not a negative one. The three Persons of the Trinity differ between each other, not because they are isolated and excised from each other, but on the contrary, because they are joined together inseparably. The more inseparable the unity, the more it will give birth - produce - otherness. This fact secures ontological completeness and stability, absence of death, and true life. The "other" not only is not an enemy, but is the confirmation of my own identity and uniqueness: it is the You that makes me a "Me" and without which, the "Me" is nonexistent and inconceivable.
And something more. In the Holy Trinity personal otherness and uniqueness are not justified psychologically, but ontologically. The characteristics that distinguish between the three Persons are only ontological: each Person is what It is, and nothing else. The person is not judged by its characteristics, but by the simple affirmation of its identity as a unique and irreplaceable being. The person is not a personality - that is, a coordinate of characteristics (height, beauty or ugliness, virtue or malice, genius or stupidity etc.); the person is free of characteristics and is not judged by them.
This perception regarding the person is passed into the Church in the form of God's love and freedom towards the world, the way it was expressed "in Christ", with His love towards enemies and sinners. The Church is the place in which man is not judged by his characteristics (that is what forgiveness means, which he receives with Baptism and Repentance), but by the fact that he is who he is. Forgiveness and acceptance of someone as a person, as a unique and irreplaceable identity, within the community of the Church, is the quintessence of ecclesiastic therapeutics. The Church heals, not with the things She says, but by that which She is: a community of love, a love that is not a sentiment (so that we might seek it in the inner self and the disposition of the individual), but a relationship, which demands coexistence and acceptance within a specific community - a community of love, without exclusivity and conditions. The Church heals, by being such a community, in which the incorporated person becomes freely addicted to loving and being loved; where, in the words of Saint Maximos, «perfect love does not split the one nature of humans... but, forever aiming at it, loves all people equally... That is why our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, in displaying His love for us, suffered for all of humanity... » (chapters on love, I, 72).
The practical and relentless question however, is: Is the Church a community of love, a place where one passes from "self-love" to "brotherly love"? From sickness to healing? To the degree that the answer is affirmative, one can refer to the Church as a therapeutic clinic. Otherwise, She is a pharmacy, which provides people with analgesics, without transforming them from individuals to persons. Because the term "persons" has the prerequisite of "relationship", and "relationship" entails "community"; otherwise, they continue to be isolated individuals with an "illusion of sanctity". Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (there is no salvation outside of the Church) — not because that is where the means for salvation exist, but because in there is where the Trinitarian mystery of the inter-embracing of persons is manifested.
Most people in The Orthodox Church have, to a large degree, lost the awareness of "community", and if today they speak of a "therapeutic clinic", they probably mean it as a pharmacy. But the Church continues to be the true Ark of Salvation, because She has preserved unadulterated not only the faith in the Personal Trinitarian God and the Christ of all-encompassing love, of the Cross and of the Resurrection, but also because She continues to be the genuine eucharistic ("thanksgiving") community, in which are offered those loving relationships that can heal man, by transforming him from an individual to a person. It is this faith, this synaxis and community that we must preserve genuine and active, if we want to regard the Church as a therapeutic clinic.
Going over what I tried to say, I feel that I must point out the following:
For the Church and theology, therapy is not a psychological or moral matter, but an ontological one. The aim of therapy is not to provide relief for the symptoms of man's sickness, but to ensure his rebirth, by transferring him from the space of self-love where passions are born, into the space of brotherly love, where true therapy through love is found. This passage from the one space to the other is painful, because it has the Cross as a prerequisite, or, in the words of Saint Maximos, the experiencing of the pain that coexists with pleasure. It is a passage that must be guided with care and philanthropy, «so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather, be healed» (Hebr.12:13).
In this attempt, the Church and theology can provide, not so much the technique, the specialization, but rather the faith in the personal God, from which springs the faith in man as a person, an image and a likeness of God; also the love of Christ which has no boundaries and exclusivities, and the Church, as a eucharistic (thanksgiving) community which actualizes that love, as a personal existence and relationship. The battles against passions and their riddance do not constitute an end in itself for the Church. They aspire to the surfacing of the true person from within them, to the re-joining of fragmented nature, and for man to rediscover his proper relationship with God, with other people and with material nature. Health, for us, is the proper relationship of man with these three factors (God, fellow-man and nature), which comprise the definition of the human being. "Sickness" is the upsetting of this triple and three-dimensional relationship. Perhaps this is what hugely differentiates theology from psychiatry - or perhaps not; you will be the judge. What is certain, is that both the Church and medical science must coincide in this basic discovery, should a dialogue develop between them.
Metropolitan John zizioulas (From the Minutes of a Meeting on «Theology and Psychiatrics in Dialogue» Minutes published by the Apostoliki Diakonia pages 141-156, (extract) Source: http://www.pemptousia.com/
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