When we think of the popular distinction between Eastern and Western thought, it is common to place Greece, and indeed everything west of India and north of Mongolia, in the western camp. Because the scholastic tradition, called Western, has its roots in Aristotelian logic, and because monotheism (whether Christian, Judaic, or Islamic) dominates Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East just as surely as it dominates Western Europe and the Americas, the tendency is to lump these areas together, in contrast with the presumably more mystical Near and Far Eastern religious traditions of India, Nepal, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. But this is a mistake.
While I do not know enough to speak of the Judaic and Islamic traditions, both of which do appear to reverence, consciously or unconsciously, the Aristotelian methodology, -- though, like Protestantism, Catholicism, and Anglicanism, they too contain an underground, esoteric strain (in the forms of Cabalism and Sufism), -- I do know just enough to conclude that the champions of Aristotle were not entirely successful in bringing Christianity under the dominion of rationalistic, scholastic, and hierarchical philosophical tendencies.
Too many of us in the West (and I am referring now to much of Europe and the Americas), being somewhat familiar with the Protestant Reformation and the history of the Catholic Church, both of which seem to have sprung from the soil of the Early Christian Church, but which really have their roots, due primarily to the work of Augustine, Barlaam and Aquinas, in the scholastic and rationalistic philosophy of Aristotle, -- too many of us somewhat familiar with Protestantism and Catholicism (and to a lesser extent with the Protestant-Catholic hybrid Christianity of the Anglican Communion, or Church of England) yet remain embarrassingly ignorant of the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the development of Christianity to the east of Italy.
More specifically, we have very little, if any, knowledge concerning the Great Schism of 1054, when the philosophical and scholastic approach of Aristotle, which was becoming more and more dominant within the Christian tradition, came up against a much deeper strain of mysticism; one which might, with some liberality, be traced as far back as Heraclitus and the Pre-Socratics, but which, at the time of the Schism, was championed by the Thessalonian archbishop Gregory Palamas and the Hesychasts, or quietists.
This ignorance is remarkable when one considers that the "blindspot" essentially encompasses the entirety of Eastern Europe (including Greece; the birthplace of Aristotle and Aristotelian logic) and Northern Asia, all of which are primarily aligned with (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity, and the fundamentally monastic tradition of seeking God, not through philosophical arguments or scholarship, but, through the meditative experience of the Uncreated Light.
With Palamas's victory over Barlaam, and by implication over Aristotle, the Hesychasts' beliefs of the path of the Threefold Way survived and were preserved for posterity in ancient monasteries like those of Mount Athos. Interestingly, leading transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber, in his masterful critique of Western thought, claims that Western Civilization lacks a "yoga", or a method of acquiring knowledge beyond the senses and the intellect. Western thought remains therefore trapped within its intellectual and scientific constructs. Wilber, like most transpersonal theorists today, finds this "yoga" in Eastern philosophy and religion, particularly Zen. Nowhere in his work is there any mention or awareness of the Hesychast tradition or the concepts behind the Threefold Way.
~ Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence (p.235)
The Great Schism of 1054 epitomized the distinction we now hear so much about, between East and West.
What is essential to grasp is that the form of Christianity which survived within the Orthodox Church has far more in common with the mystical and intuitive religions of the Far East, than it does with the more scholastic and intellectual forms of Christianity familiar in the west. While the former are properly theological, the latter are more typically philosophical in orientation, and it is only by a stretch of the imagination that their doctrines may be regarded as true theologies.
Within the Orthodox Church, the writings of the saints, or Ecclesia, take precedence over any doctrines or mandates produced by more worldly, less mystical, authorities. Orthodox Christians are far more likely than their Catholic or Protestant counterparts to flock to meet holy men and women, often unassuming elders who have been meditating for many years in obscurity. While they do not have a rigid hierarchical structure with a worldly dictator at the top (such as the Catholic Pope), considering Christ the only head of the Church, the clergy that does exist is far more willing to recognize the visions and messages reported by various holy men and women in the laity, despite these people having no clerical credentials, but only the grace of God, to recommend them.
Moreover, the concept of vicarious salvation through faith in the mediation of Jesus Christ, while retained within the Orthodox tradition, is not allowed to eclipse the ultimate goal of theosis, or divinization, as articulated in the words of St. Athanasius: "God became man so that men might become gods."
No comments:
Post a Comment