Luke 24:36-53 (Matins)
Hebrews 7:26-8:2
John 10:9-16

The Great Divide

Historians termed the period from the fifth century to the eleventh century the Dark Ages because of the loss of Graeco-Roman civilization. We had lost the ability to build superior roads and harbors. We could not again construct a dome such as that overarching over the Pantheon (125 A.D.) until the fifteenth century. And, of equal importance, we had lost Aristotle's six books of logic. Even the Greek language was lost to the West. Augustine, the greatest doctor of the Western Church, could not read the Bible (for translations are themselves different versions, or worse, theological commentaries). He could not read the Philokalia. And he was not familiar with the great Church Fathers. In the case of England, reliable Greek grammars and lexicons would not appear until the early sixteenth century.

It is true that Aristotle was known to some isolated monasteries possessing fragments of his logic based on Hebrew and Arabic translations. These like-minded monks would birth an Aristotelian system called Scholasticism, which is best understood as a rule-based technology not very different from logic programming of today (for example, the languages Zed or Prolog). The important thing to note about any technology, is that, yes, it makes things makes possible which before were impossible. But, within their semantic sphere, they also make impossible, inexpressible, unthinkable that which had been thinkable before. This was particularly true of Aristotelian logic which its practitioners thought revealed hidden Divine truth.

It would be the thirteenth century when all six books of Aristotle's logic were rediscovered in Constantinople and later assembled into one book, the Organon (translated the Instrument), and rendered into Latin. This book was widely and excitedly circulated throughout the West. Nothing again would be the same. All former intellectual efforts were deemed laughably inadequate. And all-things-Greek became something of a cultural mania. In England men like Desiderias Erasmus, Thomas More, and Roger Ascham were lionized as humanists meaning that mankind could again stand erect to his full stature. My own edition of the first English translation of the Aeneid of Virgil (London, 1987) demonstrated that even the setting of type, with new typefaces, was controlled by authors who wanted the authenticity of Greek hexameters in their verse. And the new logic could be seen everywhere even in prayer-books which featured graphs and trees of hierarchical vices or virtues.

Like the computing revolution of our time, the advent of the Organon was epoch-making. Before Aristotle, intellectual discourse proceeded on more or less a stream of consciousness basis with one thought giving rise to the next organized under general subject headings. But once the Instrument appeared, examination and inquiry became surgical: topics and subtopics were laid out of the operating table, atomized, with individual particles pinned down and then arranged in oppositions and hierarchies. Now at last (it was thought), we were able to see the truth. We can imagine with what haste this technology was applied to theology producing monstrosities which continue to bedevil us. A prime example was the eleventh-century theory proposed by the monk Anselm (Father of Scholasticism), that Jesus died on the Cross in order to placate the imagined wrath of God the Father. The idea that God the Father should demand His Son's blood is too grotesque even to discuss, but the new technology could not be resisted, for it was deemed to demonstrate truth itself. It was the "truth machine."

The Organon was a colossus steamrolling all things to conform to its technological requirements. Under its system coequal to life was its opposite death (though in reality death is no more than a material illusion). Coequal with God was God's opposite the devil (though in reality to God the devil is no more than a bothersome fly). Coequal with good was its opposite evil (though in reality God created good while evil has no entis or being of its own but is a perversion of God's creation). And vice? Vice became a whole industry of atomization and dissection with graphs and charts appearing everywhere.

Into this nascent world Gregory Palamas would be born and educated. We remember him chiefly for his Triads composed to combat the Aristotelian Barlaam. I believe Gregory's title laid a challenge down to Barlaam whose Scholasticism was founded on a binary system of opposites. In fact, the form of Gregory's works — three sets of threes — both honored the Holy Trinity while it declared war on Scholasticism, as if God could ever be subject to bifurcation. The individual subjects to which Gregory addressed himself — Uncreated Light, Hesychasm, and the more general category of Divine essences (ousia) and Divine energies (energeiai) — are all artifacts of the larger project, which was to stop Scholasticism in its tracks.

Indeed, the Organon, in general, was misapplied to the spiritual world. And when that impoverished lifeworld in the West had crawled across a desert, fed only Aristotelian logic and Thomistic metaphysics for a thousand years, it turned in the end to Greek Fathers for water. In 1938 the Jesuit monk Henri de Lubac sought to free the Church from the death-grip of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, with his landmark work Catholicism. His readership bought the book enthusiastically. Based on its title, they expected a masterful treatment of Thomistic metaphysics. But when they opened the book, they realized they had bought an anthology of the Greek Fathers. He would follow this in 1950 with a reader on that most influential Father, Origen.

Under the influence of de Lubac and his fellows, called the Communio school, John XXIII was persuaded to convoke a General Council (Vatican II), which might liberate the Church from the chains of Scholastic metaphysics. The battle cries of Vatican II would be "Ad fontes!" ("Back to the pure springs!") and "Ressourcement!" ("Back to the sources!") and "Aggiournamento!" ("To the day!" meaning "Let us throw open the windows and let in God's light and Heaven's air to disperse the suffocating vapors of Scholasticism). The only hope, these partisans felt, was to begin again with the Greek Fathers. But a devilish calamity intervened: John XXIII succumbed from complications of cancer. It is widely reported that his last words were "Stop the Council!" because he saw that liberal forces within the Church were attempting to hijack its purposes.

Seeing that their once-in-many-centuries opportunity lay before them, liberals seized the moment to turn liberation in the cause of God to liberalizing the Church for their own purposes. A few years after the catastrophe, a member of the Communio school, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, was asked what happened. He said,

We have lived to the see tragic aftermath of this hijacking. But we did not see it in the Eastern Church. And this is in no small part due to the hero we honor today, St. Gregory Palamas. For the past eight hundred years, Orthodox Christians have been free of the monster of Thomism. They have prayed with the good hope of experiencing God's energies directly. And they have fared forward in their journey of theosis knowing that they too in the end might be bathed in the light which certain Apostles saw on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.