I’ve already discussed in another post the distinctive political implications [link] that Solovyov draws from this, and how the ideas are developed in the political theology of one of his followers, Valentin Sventsitskii, with his idea the “the world is in the process of becoming the Church.” [link] The latter even presents a nice little argument that such a picture of the end of history is required for us to make sense of life as meaningful:

Indeed, could a rational God, by his creative act, create life, freedom of people, the world, if all life, continuously flowing century after century, in its external form as if connected into something single, in essence has no internal meaning, is not united by anything rational, but represents an endless mass of disparate episodic phenomena, some of which are rational and good, others are unreasonable and evil? Is it possible to speak of any connection between life and God, since there is no integral world life as a single growing organism, but only some kind of flickering kaleidoscope?...

If history has no meaning, then our life has no meaning, and if our life has no meaning, then there is no God...Life, history is the organic growth of the cosmos. It is a gradual restoration of the broken harmony and therefore each age of history has its tasks, its feats, its sins. By understanding history as a divine-human process, Christianity reveals to us a unique and highly complete idea of ​​progress (”The Significance to the World of Ascetic Christianity”).

So far I’d only been interested in the forward-looking implications of this idea, the way Solovyov and his followers put it to use in supporting a generally liberatory “leftist” approach to politics. But I’ve been reading Nikolai Lossky’s history of Russian philosophy, and he brings out what seems to me an equally interesting, backward-looking development of the underlying idea, focused on how Christians should think of biological evolution.

Though he (perhaps distractingly to some) puts it in terms of Sophia, his fundamental idea is that creation has an ideal divine image and “the entire cosmic and historical process is a process of its realization and embodiment in the great variety of forms and degrees” (Solovyov). Creation thus has two aspects. It has the divine element of goodness and unity-in-difference as a potentiality, and it also has the natural, material, dispersed, and particularized element. “However, every particular being tends to become all-onenes and gradually moves toward that goal, uniting oneself with God. The process of establishing all-oneness in the world is the development of the world” (Lossky).

Initially, this process is guided by purely natural laws, externally imposed as it were, then it is driven by inherent but still largely unconscious laws. Finally, at its highest level it is transformed to “inner all-oneness, on the basis of ethical principles” (Lossky). “Thus we must distinguish two degrees in the development of the world: before man, development is achieved under the form of the evolution of nature, while in human activities it is achieved under the form of history. In its final issue, the development of the world is the establishment of the Kingdom of God, ‘the reality of absolute ethical order, or--and this is the same thing--general resurrection and re-establishment of all’” (Lossky, quoting Solovyov at end).

Now I will simply quote Lossky’s exposition at length:

The lowest degree of this process, the evolution of nature, is the creation of preliminary stages and conditions for the oneness of the world. There are five of these stages: “the mineral kingdom (or the non-organic), the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, the kingdom of man, and the kingdom of God.” These degrees “represent the most clearly defined and characteristic steps of ascension of being from the point of view of ethical meaning, achieved in the divino-material process.” In reality, the characteristic traits of these kingdoms are as follows: the minerals represent the category of being as inert self-assertion; the plants emerge from this inertia, as representing life, which “unconsciously tends toward light, warmth and moisture. The animals, through the media of their senses and free movements, seek the fullness of sensual being: the satisfaction of hunger, the fulfillment of sexual life, the joy of existing (play and song). Natural man, in addition to all this tends rationally through science, the arts and social organization toward the improvement of his life; he actually achieves this improvement under various aspects and finally ascends to the idea of absolute perfection. Spiritual mankind, or mankind born from God, not only grasps with the mind, but also accepts with the heart and through action this absolute perfection as the actual beginning of that which must be in everything, and tends to achieve it fully or to incarnate it in the life of the entire world.” “Every new type presents a new condition necessary for the achievement of the highest and final goal-the true coming into the world of the perfect ethical order of the kingdom of God or the revelation of the freedom and glory of the sons of God.” Indeed, “in order to achieve his highest goal, or to manifest his absolute significance, the being must of all be, then it must be alive, then conscious, then rational) and finally perfect” (239, 247 c).

Every preceding kingdom serves as material for the next one: it evolves the instruments and organs on which the next, higher kingdom will lean in order to achieve a superior, more valuable, more abundant activity: nonorganic matter is the foundation of vegetable functions; vegetable functions are the foundation of animal functions; animal functions are the basis of the mind’s activity.

Inasmuch as the lower level is not lost, but unites with the more perfect activity, evolution “is not only a process of development and improvement, it is also a process of unifying the universe”: plants physiologically absorb the milieu; animals psychologically embrace in their consciousness and through the senses a still wider sphere of phenomena; man “includes in himself through reason more distant spheres of being which are not directly perceived by the senses; he can embrace all in one, or understand the significance of all; finally, the God-man, or the Logos, not only understands in the abstract, but actually achieves the significance of everything, in other words, the perfect moral order, em- bracing and linking all through the force of living personal love” (248).

This strikes me for a couple different reasons. First of all, I think it is just a beautiful unifying idea of reality, one which provides a way for Christians not to reject evolution, but see it as part of the unified and unifying process by which Christ is made “all in all.” Second, it seems to me possibly relevant for a Christian approach to the problem of natural evil, when combined with a view like that I discussed in “Why God Couldn’t Have Created Us Already Perfect” [link]. Obviously, making that connection and that argument requires further work. But it seems to me worth doing.

Such rhetoric seems to me extremely harmful. I’ve been told it is a mistake to take it literally, that he was only being hyperbolic because of all those who use extreme examples to avoid obedience in more mundane particulars, and that his real aim was to get people to just listen to their local priests and bishops. It’s a bit hard for me to take that seriously, since the hyperbole only works if there is some general principle in the area it is an extreme example of and which he accepts. It also seems to me that the situation in which it was said, a youtube livestream with some somewhat controversial Orthodox “influencers" and “apologists,” is more likely to have an audience of those who are more ready to place undue burdens on people and make an idol of obedience and hierarchy rather than to shirk authority.

In either case, the statement seemed worrying enough to me that it is worth addressing somewhat. Of course, the claim is absurd and perverse on its face, but I think it’s also important to show that it does not reflect the Orthodox tradition. So, being maximally charitable, just in case anyone was tempted to take it at face value, consider this a brief statement of why they shouldn’t.

(1) First, it’s important to note, though this is often overlooked, that there is no canonical definition of a “spiritual father,” nor any general requirement that each person will have a spiritual father in the specialized sense at issue. One is expected to confess to and respect one’s parish priest, but it is a mistake to confuse the “spiritual fatherhood” of a priest over his parish with the specialized relationship of absolute submission to a spiritual father which is an important part of (some but not all forms of) monasticism.

(2) Second, many church fathers do, in fact, speak in very high terms of individual conscience and its importance.

St. Isaac the Solitary says “if we do not obey our it will abandon us and we shall fall into the hands of our enemies, who will never let us go.”

St. Mark the Ascetic says “The conscience is a true teacher, and whoever listens to it will not stumble.” He also says “If you want spiritual health, listen to your conscience, do all it tells you, and you will benefit.”

St. Thalassios the Libyan says “The conscience is a true teacher, and whoever listens to it will not stumble.”

St. Philotheos of Sinai says “Nor should we try to evade our conscience when it speaks to us of things conducive to salvation that we ought to do, and constantly tells us what is right and what is our duty.”

According to St. John Chrysostom, “The only real betrayal is the betrayal of the conscience: betray not thy own conscience, and no one can betray thee.”

The same saint also says that conscience was specifically given to us by God so that we are “self-taught” about what is right and wrong, and he even specifically mentions the fact that not killing was a part of this: “[W]hen God formed man, he implanted within him from the beginning a natural law. And what then was this natural law? He gave utterance to conscience within us; and made the knowledge of good things, and of those which are the contrary, to be self-taught...And that you may learn that we know this from the first, the Lawgiver, when He afterwards gave laws, and said, “Thou shalt not kill,” did not add, “since murder is an evil thing,” but simply said, “Thou shall not kill;” for He merely prohibited the sin, without teaching. How was it then when He said, “Thou shalt not kill,” that He did not add, “because murder is a wicked thing.” The reason was, that conscience had taught this beforehand; and He speaks thus, as to those who know and understand the point.”

(NB, this is all on a quick search of just a few sources (which I am happy to provide). The sources could be multiplied indefinitely I am sure.)

(3) Finally, it may be objected that conscience is important in general, but advice of a spiritual father should always trump that. This is also untrue.

St. Anthony the Great says to “always keep in mind that human authorities have power over the body alone and not over the soul. Therefore, should they command you to commit murders or other foul, unjust and soul-corrupting acts, you must not obey them, even if they torture your body. For God created the soul free and endowed with the power to choose between good and evil.”

St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic says “If anyone whatsoever opposes us in the fulfillment of God’s commandments, even if it is our father or mother, we ought to regard him with hatred and loathing, lest we be told: ‘He who loves father or mother or anyone else whatsoever more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (cf. Matt. 10:37).”

Even in the stricter monastic situation, St. Symeon the New Theologian says one has the duty to compare a spiritual father’s teaching with Scripture and the Fathers and reject anything that is contradictory: “Implore God with prayers and tears to send you a guide who is dispassionate and holy. But you yourself should also study the divine writings - especially the works of the fathers that deal with the practice of the virtues - so that you can compare the teachings of your master with them; for thus you will see and observe them as in a mirror. Take to heart and keep in mind those of his teachings that agree with the divine writings, but separate out and reject those that are false and incongruent. Otherwise you will be led astray.”

In the very same passage, St. Symeon also explicitly rejects the odd interpretation of St. Paisios’ words that the priest gives. He continues, “A blind person who undertakes to guide others is a deceiver plunging into the pit of destruction those who follow him. As the Lord said: ‘If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit’ (Matt. 15:14).” Notice that those who reject the need for discernment and follow along fall into the pit along with those they follow.

Again, these are only a few quick examples, and the general point should be rather obvious. But I hope this shows that the tradition itself has been sensitive on these matters.

One of the interesting things Watts insists on is that the two approaches are in a sense complimentary, that they’re both necessary for a healthily functioning society (and individual). And he grounds this in the nature of ultimate reality itself. For he presupposes (rightly) that Being itself, the source and ground of contingent being(s), is beyond all knowledge and conceptualization. Once you have conceptualized it, you are dealing with abstractions rather than Life itself.

Nevertheless, we cannot live successfully as individuals or as a community without some such abstractions, without dividing reality into more or less neat concepts. While children are perhaps more attuned to the joyful spontaneity of reality, children must grow up. This is what Confucianism is all about - providing structures, rules, and rituals, within which human beings can grow in virtue and provide a healthy political community. Thus, the “Confucian stage” is a necessary stage for human development.

Nevertheless, the danger of this “Confucian” approach is that it can become too rigid, that it can make us think that everything must fit into neat little boxes, that we can “rectify names” to the extent that every name refers to exactly one thing, “carving nature at the joints.” But fundamental reality is not like that, and to forget that can make individuals and societies lifeless and brittle.

The function of Daoism, then, is that of a release valve and a reminder. The Daoist sage reminds us of the artificiality of so many of our rules and rituals, reminds us of the fundamentally mysterious nature of the world around us and its invisible ground, and allows us to return to (whatever measure of) spontaneity on the other side of adolescence and adulthood.

§2. This way of thinking about Daoism and Confucianism brought to mind a thought I had once that seemed insightful to me at the time about the Lord of the Rings. I was puzzling over Tom Bombadil (as one does) and realized that part of the magic of Tom Bombadil is that he can be thought of as a sort of Daoist Sage in a fictional universe that is otherwise very Confucian. Part of what is attractive about the Lord of the Rings is its representation of people and social structures that are governed by ritual and hierarchy and tradition, that strive for virtue, and to master the world and themselves, to secure order, etc.

Bombadil stands outside of all that. He lives in nature and has a certain power (Virtue) over it without trying. He is attuned to the seasons, is full of joy and effortless wisdom. He lives simply and is detached from the strivings going on around him. He has no desire to control anyone or anything and so cannot be touched by the allure of the ring.

On the other hand, it’s not clear that he represents a truly human ideal. Still, he serves the role of reminding us of another order, of mysterious realities and ways of being that defy our human conventions.

Still, on further consideration, I don’t think the ‘Daoist’ element can be confined to Bombadil alone. In a way, all the non-human elements serve the same general purpose. The elves still value order, tradition, and ritual, but they are still distinctly outside our own ways of doing things. And in places like Lothlorien, we see a way of living more attuned to the magic of nature, where time is suspended and beauty is seen as at least as important as utility.

Similar contrasts in other ways could be made with regard to Gandalf, the Ents, and even the Shire at its best. They all serve to show us a world where order is necessary and has a beauty of its own, but where that order itself depends on an openness to a reality that transcends it.

§3. And that makes me think that Watts’ appreciation of Daoism in fact serves much the same role that fairy stories in general serve for Tolkien and like-minded thinkers like C.S. Lewis, Stephen Clark, and David Bentley Hart. In his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, Tolkien says the fantasy serves three essential functions: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.

First, they allow us to recover our childlike--and more accurate--picture of the world as a mysterious and magical place, one which contains both particulars and a fundamental ground which we will never be able to completely grasp in a rational way. Second, they allow us to escape the brittle and lifeless world we often find ourselves in, one which is dominated by ugliness and striving for power. For at least a time, they allow us to live in a more beautiful reality. Third, they awake in us a desire and a hope that the world of beauty we’ve glimpsed is in fact the real world. They inspire us to live in that world, even now.

We need structures within which to live and develop. We strive for concepts and understanding. But we also need reminders that the structures we build are not ultimate; that, as St. Gregory of Nyssa says, our concepts can become idols and must in the end give way to wonder. Fairy stories, mysticism, the image of the Daoist sage help to awaken this wonder and reopen the world for us.

One aspect of his writings that stands out to me (perhaps unsurprisingly, given my interests), is his insistence on the radical implications of Christian talk about union with God, about being God’s members, about God dwelling with in us, etc. He was also one of the first to talk about the role of the Eucharist in theosis. These are not unconnected, and together they make up what seems to me a paradigm of a distinctively Christian non-dualism. God fills the universe and in a mysterious way especially the Christian, and when we consume the Eucharist, our bodies literally become Christ.

Interestingly, and somewhat controversially, St. Symeon repeatedly insists that it is the essence/substance (ousia) of God in which we and the universe participate, and with which Christ comes to be in us: “He is everywhere and in everything and He fills the universe completely with His Substance, with his Nature, and also with His Reality...” (Hymn XXIII)1

He thus explicitly rejects the idea that Christ is transcendent in his nature so that he is only present in the universe in power or operation: “O You, who are above with the Father and are with us, not as some think, by Your mere Operation, not as many believe, by Your mere Will, nor by Your mere Power, but also by Your Substance...” (Hymn XLVII)

Similarly for Christians, “[w]hen we take the Spirit of our Lord and God, we become partakers of His Divinity and Substance...” (Ethical Treatise I. 3). And of the Eucharist he says, “...inapproachable in Your Nature, You still definitely appear to me, and mingle yourself with the substance of my nature. For Your properties are not separated and cannot be divided at all, but Your Nature is Your Substance and Your Substance your Nature. Thus, partaking in Your Flesh, in fact I partake in Your Nature and I participate truly in Your Substance, becoming a partaker in the Divinity and even an heir to it...” (Hymn VII)

The repeated claim that we and in some way all of reality participate in the nature and substance of God is remarkable enough. But it also leads to some striking claims about myself being God and God being myself that are the closest thing I’ve found in the Christian tradition to some of the statements one can find in Shankara and other Advaitins. I’ll end with three selections.

“For if you wish, you shall become his member...and each of our members shall be the whole Christ. For while we become many members He remains one and indivisible and each part is the whole Christ himself. And so thus you well know that both my finger and my penis are Christ. Do you tremble or feel ashamed? But God was not ashamed to become like you, yet you are ashamed to become like Him?” (Hymn XV, trans. Golitzin)

“All humans have been made in the form of God, and in all of them is formed He Who cannot be contained, the immutable God, unmoved by nature, the one Who desires to dwell in all as worthy, as each one has within them the whole King, the Kingdom itself, and the goods of the Kingdom” (Hymn I, trans. Golitzin)

“I know that He who is immovable descends;
I know that He who is invisible appears to me;
I know that He who transcends all creation
takes me into Himself and hides me in His arms
apart from all the world;
and then I, small and mortal in this world,
I see the Creator of the world within me
and know that I can never die
because I am within all life
and all of life wells up in me.

He is in my heart, He is in heaven;
both here and there He reveals Himself to me
in equal glory.” (Hymn XV, trans. Easwaran)

[1] All translations, unless otherwise noted, come from Istvan Perczel’s illuminating paper, “Saint Symeon the New Theologian and the Theology of the Divine Substance,” Acta Antiqua, 2001. He also includes the Greek for each selection for those interested. Other than the last selection, I have also decided not to preserve the original poetic line breaks for readability.

§2. One thing that has caught my attention is that there have been at least three Orthodox writers fairly recently who more or less explicitly accept(ed) a fairly strong version of Perennialism, and the main point of this post is to introduce them very briefly. Still, before I get to that, it’s worth pointing out that the influence of Perennialism in recent Orthodox thought has gone beyond explicit acceptance. In fact, the first I ever heard of any of the main Perennialists was in reading Hieromonk Damascene’s biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose. There, he discusses how René Guénon in particular was an essential part of leading Fr. Seraphim to Orthodoxy. Guénon helped rid him of his naturalist worldview, and also planted in his mind the idea that Western Christianity had more or less abandoned central aspects of its tradition, which were still held onto in Eastern Christianity. In one of his letters near the end of his life, Fr. Seraphim seemingly encourages a spiritual seeker in his reading of Guénon: “I look back fondly now on René Guénon as my first real instructor in Truth, and I only pray that you will take what is good from him and not let his limitations chain you.”

Somewhat surprisingly to me, some of the most inclusivist if not perennialist statements about other religious traditions in mainstream Orthodoxy come from the otherwise very conservative St. Nikolai Velimirovich. (Though I don’t think many know this, St. Nikolai studied philosophy at Oxford around 1909 and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of George Berkeley(!)). One of the most stunning examples comes from his well-known work Prayers by the Lake, written in 1922. In the 48th prayer, he adjures his soul to receive wisdom from the “prophets” of various eastern religions as genuine messages from God meant for his soul. I’ll quote the whole thing:

All the prophets have from the beginning cried out to my soul, imploring her to make herself a virgin and prepare her­self to receive the Divine Son into her immaculate womb;

Imploring her to become a ladder, down which God will descend into the world, and up which man will ascend to God;**1**

Imploring her to drain the red sea of sanguinary passions within herself, so that man the slave can cross over to the promised land, the land of freedom.**2**

The wise man of China admonishes my soul to be peaceful and still, and to wait for Tao to act within her. Glory be the memory of Lao-tse, the teacher and prophet of his people!

The wise man of India teaches my soul not to be afraid of suffering, but through the arduous and relentless drilling in purification and prayer to elevate herself to the One on high, who will come out to greet her and manifest to her His face and His power. Glorious be the memory of Krishna, the teacher and prophet of his people!

The royal son of India teaches my soul to empty herself completely of every seed and crop of the world, to abandon all the serpentine allurements of frail and shadowy matter, and then–in vacuity, tranquility, purity and bliss–to await nirvana. Blessed be the memory of Buddha, the royal son and inexorable teacher of his people!

The thunderous wise man of Persia tells my soul that there is nothing in the world except light and darkness, and that the soul must break free from the darkness as the day does from the night. For the sons of light are conceived from the light, and the sons of darkness are conceived from darkness. Glorious be the memory of Zoroaster, the great prophet of his people!

The prophet of Israel cries out to my soul: Behold, the vir­gin will conceive and bear a son, whose name will be — the God~man.**3** Glorious be the memory of Isaiah, the clairvoyant prophet of my soul!

O heavenly Lord, open the hearing of my soul, lest she become deaf to the counsels of Your messenger.

Do not slay the prophets sent to you**4,** my soul, for their graves contain not them, but those who slew them.

Wash and cleanse yourself; become tranquil amid the turbulent sea of the world, and keep within yourself the counsels of the prophets sent to you. Surrender yourself entirely to the One on high and say to the world: “I have nothing for you.”

Even the most righteous of the sons of men, who believe in you, are merely feeble shadows which, like the righteous Joseph, walk in your shadow. For mortality begets mortality and not life. Truly I say to you: earthly husbands are mis­taken when they say that they give life. They do not give it but ruin it. They push life into the red sea and drown it, and beforehand they wrap it in darkness and make it a diabolical illusion. There is no life, O soul, unless it comes from the Holy Spirit. Nor is there any reality in the world, unless it comes down from heaven.

Do not slay the prophets sent to you, my soul, for killing is only an illusion of shadows. Do not kill, for you can slay no one but yourself.

Be a virgin, my soul, for virginity of the soul is the only semi-reality in a world of shadows. A semi-reality–until God is born within her. Then the soul becomes a full reality.

Be wise, my virgin, and cordially receive the precious gifts of the wise men from the East, intended for your Son. Do not glance back toward the West, where the sun sets, and do not crave gifts that are figmental and false.

Similarly, in a 1917 book, The Agony of the Church, St. Nikolai is happy to refer to “St. Krishna,” “St. Buddha,” and “St. Confucius” (not to mention, St. Francis and St. Therese as Christian saints!) :

The Church ought to know only two denominations— in politics and social life, inter-human as well as international and inter-racial relations in trade and business, in education and family life—i.e. saintliness and unsaintliness. If you ask what saintliness ought to mean, Christianity has not to argue but to show you the saintliness in the flesh. Christ the saintly Lord, St Paul and St John, Polycarp and Leo, Patrick and Francis, Sergius and Zosim, St Theresa and hundreds of other saints. And if somebody thinks still that a few thousands of Christian saints are not a sufficient argument to show that saintliness is practicable, then the Church has still not to give her ideal up and to take as her ideal thousands of great and small Napoleons and Bismarcks, and Goethes and Spencers, or Medics and Cromwells or Kaisers and Kings—no, in the latter case it would be much nicer for the Church to point out the saintly men outside of Christian walls, like St Hermes and St Pythagoras, or St Krishna and St Buddha, or St Lao-Tse and St Confucius, or St Zoroaster and St Abu-Bekr. Better even is unbaptised saintliness than baptised earthliness.

Saintliness includes goodness and sacrifice, and excludes all the earthly impure spirits of selfishness, pride, quarrels and conquests. Therefore, when the Church returns to her fundamental ideal, she will return to her elementary simplicity in which she was so powerful as to move mountains and empires and hearts at the beginning of her history. That is what the world needs now just as much as it needs air and light, i.e. an elementary spiritual power by which it could be moved, cleared up, purified and brought out of its chaos to a solid and beautiful construction.

This is a far cry from the typical attitude in Orthodoxy one sees these days, where mention of Krishna, for example, can only elicit accusations of demon worship, without any attempt at charitable understanding, similarity-seeking, or general good will. I know from personal experience that any mention of Hinduism in particular evokes extreme push-back. Much preferable is the attitude of St. Valentin Sventsitsky, who, without hesitating to discuss differences and disagreements, was happy to say about Sri Ramakrishna:

“Ramakrishna is perhaps the most brilliant preacher of modern times...Is “’the greatest saint of modern India’ a friend or foe to a Christian believer? I am convinced that I am a friend, despite the differences. I think brother, because these differences are less than the similarities...

Many passages from the works of the fathers could have been included in the text of the Proclamation of Ramakrishna, and no one would have noticed it. And much of the “proclamation” reads as if it were written by an Orthodox saint. The attitude towards God, the call to solitude, the teaching about prayer and the fight against passions - all this is completely homogeneous with Christianity.”

§3. Anyway, on to the explicit Perennialists. The first is Philip Sherrard. Sherrard is best known for his translations of modern Greek poetry, as well as translating (with GEH Palmer and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware) the Philokalia into English. I’d heard of him that he was a Perennialist, but I couldn’t confirm until I got his book Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, published by Holy Cross in Brookline:

This attitude [of exclusivity] must be replaced by a theology that affirms the positive attitude implicit in the writings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocians, St. Maximos the Confessor, and many others. The economy of the divine Logos cannot be reduced to His manifestation in the figure of the historical Jesus: the idea of God-manhood possesses a significance that is intrinsic to human nature as such, quite apart from its manifestation in a historical figure who exemplifies it. Correspondingly the Church cannot be reduced to a visible institutional and sociological form. The Church, in Origen’s words, is the cosmos of the cosmos. It is the innermost reality of humanity and of creation itself, even if this is not recognized. It is the locus within which the Christic mystery is continually unfolded. It is also the locus of the Pentecostal event - of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit who in person reveals to creation the interior presence of the Logos.

It is the task of Christians and above all of Christian theologians to recognize and affirm this presence and this mystery not only within the boundaries of the historical Church, but also in those other testimonies to this presence and this mystery that are to be found in other religions....The Logos in His kenosis, His self-emptying, is hidden everywhere, and the types of His reality, whether in the forms of person or teachings, will not be the same outside the Christian world as they are within it. Yet these types are equally authentic and any deep reading of another religion is a reading of the Logos, of Christ. It is the Logos who is received in the spiritual illumination of a [Hindu], a Buddhist, or a Moslem. Indeed, if the tree is known by its fruits, only spiritual blindness can prevent us from recognizing that those who live and yearn for the Divine in all nations already receive the peace the Lord gives to all whom He loves (Lk 2:14).

...Truth is one; but in expressing Itself in a way which is accessible to the human intelligence, It has to take account not only of the limitations of the human state as such, but also of the various, though relative, divisions within mankind that are themselves expressive of various facets of the divine plentitude....At different times and different places, the Supreme, either through direct revelation of a Messenger or Avatar, or through the inspired activity of sages and prophets, has condescended to clothe the naked essence of these [metaphysical] principles in exterior forms, doctrinal and ritual, in which they can be grasped by us and through which we can be gradually led into a plenary awareness of their preformal reality. These forms may be many - in a sense there may be as many ways to God as there are individual human beings - but beneath this multiformity may always be discerned, by those who have eyes to see, the essential unity of the unchanging, non-manifest, and timeless principles themselves.

(He goes on about this and develops these ideas much more in the book.)

§4. Another recent scholar, much more well known as an explicit Perennialist, was James Cutsinger, who was a professor of religious studies at the University of South Carolina up until his death in 2020. Cutsinger was one of the foremost scholars of Frithjof Schuon and the Traditionalist school as well as a practicing Orthodox Christian. Many of his writings defending Perennialism can be found online. Some representative statements:

“Christian perennialists conclude that it is a mistake to confuse the uniqueness of the only-begotten and eternal Son of God with the alleged singularity of his historical manifestation in first-century Palestine. . . . Following the thread of such clues, one begins to sense that the Son or Word, far from being limited to a single religion, is the divine principle behind all revelation and the eternal source of salvation in every authentic tradition“ (Perennial Philosophy and Christianity)

“The other religions are ‘Christian’ inasmuch as they have the universal Christ, who is the Word that inspires all Revelation...- A ‘true ecumenism’ must honor and uphold the importance of traditional dogmas, irreconcilable as they may appear exoterically, while at the same time appealing, on the basis of prayer and contemplative insight, to ‘the wisdom that can discern the one sole Truth under the veil of different forms.’ (The Mystery of the Two Natures).

§5. Finally, and still living, is the priest and scholar Fr. Christopher C. Knight, a senior research associate at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England. Knight advocates for a “neo-perennialism” that seeks to avoid the historical and philosophical flaws he perceives in “classic” perennialism while retaining the core belief that there is “one mountain but many paths to the summit”. His approach is deeply rooted in apophaticism, which maintains that the Divine Reality is ultimately ineffable and that theology at its mystical heights should involve an “attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God.”

This especially appeals to me since, as soon as I understood the idea of apophaticism and God as incomprehensible and “beyond being,” a lot of Christian responses to other religions became immediately suspect. For example, I had always heard, and more than once myself said, something like “Christianity and [x religion] cannot both be true because according to Christianity God is personal and according to [x] God is not. Only one can be true.” But the problem is, if none of our concepts are adequate to God and St. Dionysius et. al. are correct, “God is personal” and “God is not personal” are both equally true. Suddenly, it becomes obvious that different descriptions of mystical experience could all be genuine experiences of God qua ground of being, even if their various inadequate conceptual descriptions seem contradictory.

Knight is especially influenced by the apophatic theology of Vladimir Lossky, by way of which he makes essentially this exact point:

In relation to this spectrum of opinions, one of Lossky’s observations is of considerable interest. This is his contention that a radically apophatic approach to theology implies acceptance of a degree of apparent logical inconsistency—what is sometimes called antinomy—that contemporary analytic philosophy would usually reject. As he has put it,

“theology will never be abstract, working through concepts, but contemplative: raising the mind to those realities which pass all understanding. This is why the dogmas of the Church often present themselves as antinomies … It is not a question of suppressing the antinomy by adapting dogma to our understanding, but of change of heart and mind enabling us to attain to the contemplation of the reality which reveals itself to us as it raises us to God, and unites us, according to our several capacities, to Him.”

This emphasis on contemplation and the role of antinomy would appear to be applicable—in a way that Lossky himself does not consider—to many of the philosophical arguments sometimes used to attempt to refute a pluralistic understanding. In these arguments, incompatibilities between the doctrinal “truth claims” of different faith traditions are stressed in order to conclude that pluralism is incoherent because no more than one of these “competing” truth claims can be true. If we accept Lossky’s antinomic approach to theology, however, then apparent incompatibilities of this kind cannot automatically be seen as definitive for assessing compatibility at a deeper, contemplative level.

The point here is that when we expand Lossky’s antinomic and contemplatively focused understanding to differences between the doctrinal frameworks of the various faith traditions of the world, these doctrinal frameworks may—at least in principle—be seen as something other than as sets of “truth claims” of the abstract kind often assumed by analytic philosophers of religion. They may be seen, instead, as what Lossky calls “images or ideas intended to guide us and fit our faculties for the contemplation of that which passes all understanding.” They may, in other words, be seen as relating to noetic apprehension rather than to discursively developed understanding.

For pluralists, this understanding may, I would argue, be linked straightforwardly to the well-known “one mountain, many paths to the summit” analogy, in which the various spiritual pathways provided by different faith traditions are seen as beginning from different starting points but ending at the same destination. This analogy points to the way in which, because they start from different cultural “locations,” different spiritual pathways inevitably require different “signposts” as guides. These signposts may be seen as functioning, not primarily at the conscious, discursive level of the mind, but at the deeper, intuitive level that relates to the nous. Their role is—through their use in meditative, sacramental, or liturgical contexts—to serve as guiding “methods” or “means” that are appropriate to the particular contemplative pathways to which they relate.

§6. There is much more that could be said, but it seemed to me worthwhile compiling a few sources for investigating Perennialism from an Orthodox perspective. (I have left out David Bentley Hart, in part in deference to his disavowal of the Perennialist label, though I recommend his The Experience of God at a brilliant and pretty clear example of Perennialism as I have defined it.) More on the topic to come.

The inclusivism-pluralism spectrum

Inclusivism and pluralism sit on a spectrum concerning the evaluative question of how traditions rank relative to each other. What they share — against the exclusivist — is a conviction that multiple religions can be seen as seeking the same truth or being oriented toward the same reality. This shared conviction is their entry ticket to the conversation I’m interested in, so to speak; it’s what distinguishes them jointly from the exclusivist, who denies that other traditions can be seen as oriented toward anything real at all, or at least in a way that holds out possibilities for salvation or liberation.

But inclusivists and pluralists differ on symmetry. Pluralists tend to see all religions as roughly equally valid (or equally limited), whereas inclusivists privilege one religion or tradition over others as a fuller or more adequate expression of the truth toward which all are oriented. Rahner’s “anonymous Christians” is a classic inclusivist position: Hindus and Buddhists may be saved, but they are saved by Christ, and their traditions have value insofar as they participate in a grace that is properly understood only through Christian theology. A pluralist rejects that kind of asymmetry.

I should note that this is a spectrum rather than a binary. Some positions sit genuinely in between. One could hold that one’s own tradition has a certain priority while also thinking that other traditions genuinely illuminate dimensions of truth that one’s own has underexplored — which is stronger than standard inclusivism typically allows but still not fully egalitarian pluralism. David Bentley Hart may occupy something like this middle ground, as we’ll see. Christopher Knight’s notion of “reciprocal inclusivism” — a methodological inclusivism that holds open the genuine possibility of pluralism — is another attempt to inhabit this intermediate space.

Perennialism

Perennialism is a separate question about what the traditions actually share. According to perennialists, there is a discernible common metaphysical and ethical core across the great religions, one that is basically correct and generally represents the most essential aspect of each. This commitment is independent of where one falls on the inclusivist-pluralist spectrum.

One can be an inclusivist perennialist — thinking, for example, that Christianity best expresses the common core while other religions genuinely approach the same core from different directions. Hart may fit here (though he rejects the label of ‘perennialist’, for reasons that will be more clear in a later post), insofar as he argues in The Experience of God that the major traditions converge on something like classical theism (God as the unconditioned ground of being, not a being among beings) while also (I think) regarding the Christian tradition as the fullest or most salvifically complete expression. One can be a pluralist perennialist — thinking the common core is real but that no single tradition has clear priority in expressing it. Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy may fit here, as might Knight’s neo-perennialism. One can be a pluralist non-perennialist — thinking all religions are oriented toward the same reality, but that any positive statement of a shared metaphysical core is impossible. This is roughly Hick’s view, where the “Real” is beyond all predication and traditions are culturally conditioned phenomenal responses to it. And one can be an inclusivist non-perennialist — thinking there is enough truth in other religions to allow for salvation, while holding that they still fundamentally disagree on essential metaphysical or salvifically-relevant historical claims. This is probably most Christian inclusivists.

It’s worth noting that perennialism is often associated with the esoteric/exoteric distinction — the idea that each tradition has a surface layer of doctrine and practice (exoteric) and a deeper contemplative or metaphysical core (esoteric) where the traditions converge. This distinction is important to many perennialists but seems not essential to the basic perennialist commitment. Some perennialists, like Hart, largely reject (or at least are very suspicious of the uses of) the esoteric/exoteric framework while still affirming a common core. Others, like Knight, redefine it: the “esoteric” isn’t secret knowledge transmitted to initiates but simply the deeper understanding of public teachings that develops through sustained spiritual practice. And for the Traditionalists — Guénon, Schuon, and their school — the distinction is central and heavily elaborated.

Syncretism

Syncretism concerns the question of whether it is permissible or helpful to mix different religious traditions, either theoretically or practically. This is a question about engagement and method, and it cuts across both of the other axes independently.

Schuon and other Traditionalist perennialists thought mixing was impermissible, partly because they saw the distinctness of traditions as divinely ordained and thus inviolable, and partly because they thought each tradition’s teachings formed a coherent whole that falls apart when elements are abstracted from their context. Hart, by contrast, seems to be a theoretical syncretist, at least, insofar as he (in)famously claims that Christians can better understand their own core commitments by engaging deeply with Vedantic philosophy. He also thinks Christianity has already done this historically by absorbing Neo-Platonic philosophical insights. But it’s worth distinguishing theoretical from practical syncretism. One could freely borrow philosophical insights across traditions while strictly maintaining a single liturgical and devotional practice, or conversely participate in multiple traditions’ rituals while keeping their theological frameworks separate. Hart seems to exemplify the former — intellectually syncretist, but still working devotionally within a Christian (specifically Orthodox) framework.

Whether practical syncretism — participating in the devotional or liturgical life of multiple traditions — is defensible from a perennialist perspective is a further question that seems underexplored. Bede Griffiths may be the most illuminating example here: a committed Catholic Benedictine monk who lived in a Hindu ashram, adopted the lifestyle of a sannyasi, and incorporated Hindu contemplative practices into his Christian devotional life, understanding the two as genuinely deepening each other rather than diluting either. He’s an inclusivist perennialist who is syncretist at both the theoretical and practical levels — a rare combination that shows perhaps that the position is livable, even if few have occupied it.

What’s left out

This taxonomy doesn’t capture everything. It doesn’t address the question of why traditions are diverse — whether that diversity is divinely ordained, a natural result of cultural variation, or a falling away from an original unity. It doesn’t fully account for approaches like Francis Clooney’s “comparative theology,” which deliberately refuses to theorize the relationship between traditions in favor of patient, particular encounter. And it doesn’t address the growing literature on “dual belonging” — practitioners who claim to genuinely inhabit two traditions simultaneously, which raises questions none of the standard categories are designed to handle. But as a map of the major axes along which positions vary, I hope it’s a useful start.

The former point is something that has been repeatedly stressed by a hero of mine, David Bentley Hart. He expresses the point this way at the end of his Tradition and Apocalypse:

And it seems to me also that, obedient to the call of that antecedent finality and cosmic destiny, Christian thinkers might find it worthwhile fruitfully to draw on resources outside the historical, cultural, and even religious continuum of the tradition as currently understood. The example I suggested (and one perhaps peculiarly close to my heart) was that of Vedānta (whether Advaita or Viśiṣṭādvaita); other possible examples, however, are legion. Just as Christian thought in late antiquity naturally drew upon Platonic tradition not only to enunciate, but better to understand, its doctrinal content, there is no reason why these other remarkable traditions should not also come to inform Christian self-understanding. I am convinced, at the very least, that there are certain dimensions of the great Christian narrative of divine and human communion in Christ—both necessary logical premises and necessary logical conclusions—that have rarely been fully articulated in the tradition, except in rare instances, often at the boundaries, and in a largely mystical vein; and I am no less convinced that, say, the thought of Āḍi Śaṅkara might cast new light on, for instance, the thought of Maximus, and that this in turn might cast new light on the tradition as a whole. I would even argue that the whole rationality of the Christian tradition—creatio ex nihilo, divine incarnation, human deification, the vivifying Spirit of God breathed into humanity, and so forth—entails and requires a kind of metaphysical monism that has only sporadically manifested itself within the tradition, but that certain schools of Vedānta (not to mention certain schools of Sufism) have explored with unparalleled brilliance. But it would be wrong, I hasten to add, to see this process merely as the appropriation of foreign sources for purposes that would be alien to them.

He has elsewhere explicitly used the label of “Vedantic Christianity” to discuss this approach (see, e.g., the beginning of You Are Gods). And while in this case he is mainly talking of the metaphysics of the God-world relation, in Roland in Moonlight he also draws out some of the spiritual/teleological implications: In short, the structure of all thought is a relation of the mind to God. In fact, teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see—but to become—infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known. Which may be one way of saying that, as the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad tells us, Ayam Ātmā Brahma: Ātman is Brahman. It may be that this is the first and most obvious of the truths of reason.”

This has got me thinking of how else we might characterize a more general approach to Christian life/theology that might be called “Vedantic Christianity.” To be clear, this is not an interpretation of Hart’s notion, but rather an attempt to capture how my own approach to Christianity has changed in response to reading and being influenced by writers like Hart, Bede Griffiths, Neo-Vedantists like Swami Prabhavananda, as well as the primary texts of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

Without spending much time on explication or defense (perhaps this warrants a larger project at some point), I’ve narrowed down the “style” or shape of a Christian vision broadly inspired by Vedanta to five main characteristics:

(1) Appreciation and application of Vedantic metaphysical insights, in particular acceptance of some form of non-dualism. Again, with emphasis that this is a helpful way of drawing out under-appreciated aspects of the Christian tradition and implications of its metaphysics, rather than merely importing something foreign. (For a couple things I’ve written on this here, see this and this.)
(2) Appreciation and application of maya/illusion as an important if not primary aspect of sin/fallenness. Not the crude idea that everything is a hallucination, but the recognition that our normal (fallen) relation to the world depends on profound distortions. On the one hand, if we agree with the tradition that evil is privation and lacks reality, and especially if we accept the idea of “pre-cosmic fall,” then it follows that our fallen world as we experience it is less than fully real. It’s also true that if we accept that “being is communion”, then our view of ourselves as atomic individuals and the selfish anxieties it generates are in some sense cognitive mistakes - not just morally disordered but metaphysically false.
(3) Salvation as realizing union, “becoming God” (theosis), involving both ethical purification and a contemplative attempt to see things as they are. Salvation involves both “liberation” from our selfish impulses and the illusory way of seeing they are based on, and “realization” of our complete dependence of God, of the fact that God is (to quote Palamas) “the Being of all beings, the Form that is in all forms as the Author of form, the Wisdom of the wise and, simply, the All of all things.”
(4) A general stance towards other religions of generous interest and inclusivism rather than opposition and difference. The working assumption is that the great religious traditions, when understood at their most serious and profound — through their greatest saints, contemplatives, and thinkers rather than their most popular or debased expressions — tend toward significant overlap on fundamental metaphysical and ethical truths. The correct response is not defensiveness, but a willingness to see and appreciate truth, goodness, and beauty, wherever it is found, and an openness to learn through other traditions better to understand and love one’s own.
(5) Acceptance of the legitimacy of different religious paths within a broader tradition. Drawing on, or analogous to, the wide diversity within Hinduism and the explicit acceptance of the different paths of jnana yoga (knowledge), bhatkti yoga (devotion), and karma yoga (action) in the Bhagavad Gita, Vedantic Christianity doesn’t see affective personal devotion as the only legitimate spiritual path, where one’s emotional reaction to the person of Jesus is the measuring standard. It also makes room for those who are more drawn to quiet contemplation and metaphysical speculation, as well as those whose religion is mainly expressed through love for others and unselfish works of piety. God is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and different people may approach him in one of these aspects more than others.

Together, these represent more or less my current conception of Christianity (though obviously, much that is distinctly Christian is left out). It seems to me an attractive picture. What do you think? If you have similar predilections, what would you add (or subtract)?

[1] See, e.g., my comparative paper with Rico Vitz, “Mencius, Hume, and the Virtue of Humanity” in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy
[2] The first fruits of which, perhaps, are my forthcoming review of Daniel Soars’ The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu–Christian Conversation in Agatheos - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion.

I’ve been Orthodox for about a dozen years now, and vegan (or mostly vegan with occasional lapses into vegetarianism) for about six. In that time, I’ve competed in and done very well in or won my weight class in several powerlifting meets (best competition lifts at 198 pounds are 314 lb bench press, 500 lb squat, and 600 lb deadlift). Two years ago I competed in a bodybuilding competition. So (though I’m currently a bit out of shape--I’m working on it!) I’ve got some experience building strength on a vegan diet as well as cutting fat while maintaining muscle. Because of this, I’ve been asked several times over the years by friends for advice on building or maintaining muscle during the fasting periods. Since Lent is now upon us, I thought it might be a good time to make a public guide that others might find helpful. (And obviously, since Orthodox fasting involves, practically speaking, a plant-based diet, the same information applies to those considering going vegan more generally.)

What Actually Matters For Muscle

When people interested in fitness worry about navigating the Orthodox fasts, the worries often focus on disconnected minutiae and outdated talking points. In practice, muscle retention and growth are governed primarily by just three factors: adequate protein intake, consistent resistance training, and an appropriate calorie intake for your goal. If those three are in place, fasting or a vegan diet is simply not a problem. If one of them is missing, progress becomes difficult no matter what kinds of foods you eat.

Protein provides the raw materials for muscle repair and growth. When you lift weights, you create a stimulus for the body to rebuild muscle tissue, but without sufficient protein the rebuilding process is limited. For most lifters, this does not require extreme or bodybuilder-level intakes. A solid, consistent daily intake—especially spread across a few meals with meaningful protein in each—does most of the heavy lifting. Plant-based diets can absolutely meet these needs, but they require a bit more intentionality because the protein density of many fasting foods is lower. (More on this below.)

Resistance training provides the signal. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue, and the body fully maintains it only when given a strong enough reason. Regular, reasonably challenging strength training tells your body that the muscle is still needed (or that it should probably grow more). Without this signal, even a high-protein diet will not preserve strength and lean mass very effectively.

Finally, calories determine the overall environment in which all this occurs. In a calorie surplus, the body is more disposed toward building tissue; in a deficit, the goal is usually to preserve as much muscle as possible while losing fat. Many Orthodox fasters are, intentionally or not, in a mild deficit during longer fasts, which makes adequate protein and consistent training even more important. Sleep, recovery, and general stress management certainly matter too, but in my experience (and my understanding of the scientific literature) these three—protein, resistance training, and calories—account for the overwhelming majority of success or frustration when trying to stay strong through the fasts (and in meeting one’s fitness goals in general).

How Much Protein? (And Is Plant Protein Good Enough?)

For most people who ask me about fasting and lifting, total calories and regular strength training are not the main obstacles. Protein is usually the sticking point. I said above that getting enough protein is one of the three main pillars of muscle/strength. But how much is *enough*?

There’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the ideal is more than most people will get without a little bit of planning or change of habits. (Importantly, though, I mean “ideal” for maximum muscle growth/retention, not general health. For general health, as long as you are getting enough total calories, you are almost certainly getting enough protein.) The good news is that it isn’t nearly as much as bodybuilders commonly recommend, and it isn’t all that difficult to get enough on a vegan/fasting diet.

While bodybuilders often recommend getting 1 gram or even 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, the best recent research suggests that additional benefits level off around ~0.82 g/lb. A reasonable case can even be made that most benefits plateau somewhere above ~0.64 g/lb.[^1]

Given normal margins of error—and the fact that there is no single magic number—the simplest practical target for most people is this: men can generally aim for about 120–130g per day, and women for about 100–110g per day. In practice, this usually means building three meals that each contain roughly 30–40g of protein.

That’s how _much_ protein is needed—but doesn’t the _type_ of protein matter too? Not nearly as much as many people think. It is true that leucine appears to play a key role in stimulating muscle protein synthesis, and plant proteins tend to be somewhat lower in leucine than many animal proteins. In practice, however, this simply means that total protein intake matters.

It is a persistent myth that plant proteins “lack” essential amino acids or must be carefully combined within the same meal to be complete. In reality, virtually all whole plant protein sources contain all essential amino acids, though in varying proportions. What the evidence consistently shows is that total daily protein intake—especially when reasonably distributed across meals—is the primary driver. Several recent studies have found that protein-matched vegan and omnivorous diets produce no meaningful differences in muscle growth over time.

Some Example Meals

I said that for most people, it’s good enough just to focus on getting in three meals per day with 30-40g of protein. For getting through fasting days, then, it’s mainly a matter of planning out a few such meals you like and can repeat or mix and match. As an example that may be helpful, here are a couple examples for each meal that I enjoy and which are standards for me, by no means meant to be exhaustive.

Breakfast

- Overnight protein oats. (Basic recipe: scoop of oats, 1-2 scoops of protein powder, optional tablespoon of flax or chia seeds, some nuts and or fruit. Throw it all in a bowl or cup the night before and put it in the fridge, eat it in the morning).

- Even more simply, I often like just a handful of nuts, a piece of fruit, and a shake with 1-2 scoops of protein powder.

- Tofu Scramble (see below - also good at any time of day)

Lunch/Dinner

- High protein pasta (chickpea, lentil or edamame). (My favorite is edamame/soy bean pasta, tossed with some tahini and sriracha or chili crisp.)

- Baked tofu (or other meat alternative) with rice and vegetables. (Classic bodybuilder meal.)

- Chili or other bean stew (red lentils with curry are probably my favorite). But note that beans are generally not the best protein source on their own. If just having beans for multiple meals, I’d just throw in another protein shake sometime.

- General meals with mock-meats replacing the usual protein source. My favorites with higher protein ratios are morningstar sausage patties and field roast sausages. I also enjoy the tofurkey deli slices, which can be used in sandwiches or chopped up and added to salads.

Bonus: Tofu is Actually Good

It’s something of a cliche to think that tofu is flavorless or hard to prepare, but that’s just because, for whatever reason, people tend not to prepare it properly. Here are three recipes that I *dare* you to make a few times and then tell me you don’t like tofu:

- Tofu scramble (though of course add lots of veggies!): https://www.noracooks.com/tofu-scramble/

- Baked tofu bites: https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com/baked-tofu-bites/

- Shredded barbecue tofu: https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com/vegan-bbq-shredded-tofu-shredded-chicken/

Appendix: Supplements Worth Considering

For most people eating a reasonably varied vegan or Orthodox fasting diet, supplementation needs are actually quite modest. Two nutrients are worth special attention.

Vitamin B12.
This is the one supplement that is essentially non-negotiable on a long-term vegan diet. Reliable B12 is not available from plant foods in meaningful amounts, and deficiency can develop slowly but seriously over time. Most adults can cover their needs with either 250–500 mcg daily or 1000–2000 mcg once per week.

Omega-3 (DHA/EPA from algae).
Plant foods such as flax, chia, and walnuts provide ALA, a precursor to DHA and EPA, but conversion in the body is limited and variable. For that reason, many people find it prudent—though not strictly mandatory—to take a small daily algae-based DHA/EPA supplement (typically ~250–500 mg combined).

Depending on individual diet and circumstances, some people may also need to pay attention to vitamin D, iodine, iron, or calcium. But for most healthy adults eating a reasonably varied fasting diet, B12 (essential) and omega-3 (optional but helpful) cover the main bases.

[^1] My standard recommendation for a presentation of the relevant studies on protein requirements is: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein-intake-for-bodybuilders/

.

God and the World as *Non-Contrastively* Related

For me, the fundamental philosophical point, one which many Christians forget in thinking about God, is that *God is not a thing*. In contemporary analytic philosophy of religion it is common to start with thinking about God in a more or less explicitly anthropomorphic way as “a being with the properties of omniscience, omni-benevolence, and omnipotence” (as I learned in one of my first philosophy classes) or as “something like ‘a person without a body’” (a direct quote from Swinburne on how to conceive of God). But for the more ancient Christian theological tradition, God is specifically not “a being” but rather “subsistent Being itself,” or, in another sense, “beyond being.”

It was David Bentley Hart who first awakened me from my dogmatic slumber on this point, in his *The Experience of God.* He is worth quoting at length:

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Bahá’í, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things.

One thing that I found helpful in Soars is that he points out the way that this problematizes talk about a *distinction* between God and the world. It shows that any way of relating God and the world must be “non-contrastive”: we typically distinguish two things by setting them side by side and contrasting their properties. But God is not a being we can set alongside the world to inspect. He does not belong to the same order as anything else.

We normally compare something only by assuming some common class in which they both can comfortably fit. If someone asks you to compare peaches to apples, you more or less know what they mean. If they ask you to compare a peach to a shoe, you are likely to be confused. You’d be even more confused if asked to compare a peach to the number five. This line of thought comes directly from Aquinas, who insists that “­ things not in the same genus are not comparable; as, sweetness is not properly greater or less than a line” (ST I.6.2.). God, however, is “not in the same genus with other good things” and in fact “is outside genus.” But these means there is no common background against which we can compare God to anything else.

Soars quotes a nice illustration of the line of argument from Denys Turner:

the less ­ things differ, the easier it is to describe how they differ. It is easy to say how a cat and a mouse differ, ­ because we can readily describe what they differ as; they belong, we might say, to a readily identifiable community of difference—­ that of animals. But how does this piece of Camembert cheese differ from 11.30 in the morning? ­ Here, the community of difference is too diffuse, too indeterminate, for this difference, obviously bigger as it is than that of chalk and cheese, to be so easily described. In general, the bigger the difference, the harder, not easier, it is to describe the manner of its difference...

the question of “sameness” and “distinction” can arise only as between creatures. If this is so, then clearly ­ there can be no good sense, but only a misleading one, in any, even casual and meta­phorical, calculation of the greater and lesser degrees of “distance” which lie between Creator and creatures as contrasted with that between one creature and another; for it is not on some common scale of difference that ­ these differences differ. Indeed, that is precisely what is meant by saying that nothing can be predicated univocally of both God and creatures (quoted on p. 23).

Two Implications

There are two implications that follow from this line of thought which stood out to me. In the first case, there is an implication for the way that we conceive of, or the terminology we use to describe, the relation between God and the world. I’ve published a couple papers defending the use of the word “panentheism” to describe the God-world relation and I think that makes sense in the context of the philosophical discussions I was entering into. (Soars is also happy to use this word.) But I’ve also argued that good cases could be made for “non-dualism,” “monism,” and even “pantheism.” And that still seems true to me, too.

But reading Soars has convinced me that *advaita* or *non-dual* is actually the most proper way of describing God’s relation to the world. I had already inclined towards this mainly for the reason that it is the only of those terms with any real philosophical-theological history as a self-description for actual traditions of thought (though perhaps it risks ironing over differences between the Christian view and the vedantic view). But the line of thought above seems to me to make the case even stronger. For while Christians who accept the tradition cannot accept that God and the world are one and the same thing in the sense of identity, neither can they accept that God and the world are two distinct things, either. For God is not a thing with which we can contrast other things. The negative description is actually the most accurate: God and the world are not-one, but neither are they two. They are not-two.

The second implication has to do with how we think of *creatio ex nihilo* as related *creatio ex deo*. These two are sometimes seen as opposed, and it is said that the former is the Christian view whereas the latter is the Vedantic view. But Soars argues they are in fact compatible and only represent a difference of emphasis. To see this, once must see that “creation from nothing” is an apophatic denial, not the positing of some actual void or nothing-principle that exists parallel to God.

On the contrary, the “nothing” is a grammatical marker indicating only that the world has no being of its own but receives (at every instant) its being from God. Thus, Soars says that “ex nihilo” should best be parsed as “not-from-some-one-thing extraneous to God.” When we keep in mind the non-contrasting relation between God and the world, and even someone like Aquinas’s willingness to speak of creation as “a simple emanation of being,” this becomes practically indistinguishable from *creatio ex deo*.

Yes, I’ve had a hard time looking away from the news as well, even though I know how negatively it affects me. In another sense, though, it feels like it would be sacrilege to turn away. Our anger is itself the recognition of the irreplaceability and holiness of a human being, of every human being.

Still, I’ll say that it has caused what feels like a crisis for me. Or rather, the meanness and insensitivity and blindness of other Christians, and the silence of the Church, have caused a crisis for me. Laying awake last night, with my heart still pounding, I had almost decided I was done. That I wanted no more to do with these people and the religion, the God, they claim to represent. The thought of standing next to someone who would at one moment worship the poor suffering migrant God executed by the state, and in the next cheer on or at best turn away as the migrant-hunting state executes a fellow citizen, made me ill.

But then where would I turn? Things looked differently to me this morning, though without resolving the difficulties or removing the anger. I realized it would be just as wrong for me to turn my back on the suffering migrant God as it would be to turn my back on the suffering migrant in my midst. We find ourselves in an absurd world where it seems the best we can hope for or offer is solidarity. But solidarity is the Gospel of Jesus, and what could be more fitting for an absurd world than a God who becomes a creature, a king who becomes a servant, the deathless one that dies for the sake of others? What could be more absurd than hope, faith, and love?

So I feel I must stay a Christian, where this means one who stands with Jesus, who stands for what he stood for. And it means, for better or worse, standing in community with others who also stand with Jesus. Many of these will be those who do not profess his name, and may even in their ignorance sneer at it. And many who do profess his name will find themselves cast out (for a time at least) of his Kingdom of solidarity. The Church, in its earthly aspect, still lacks true being, and its final shape cannot be seen. But we are bound to say that all that is good and true and beautiful in the world has its place in it. And all that is not will be melted away.

To believe this is, I believe, to be a revolutionary, in more ways than I can get into here. As Fr. Herbert McCabe put it, “Like Peter and the 12 we remain Christians because there is nowhere else to go: if Christianity is not the revolution, nothing else is.” To be radicalized by injustice is not necessarily to be moving away from the Church. It may instead be an awakening to the Church’s true mission. Or so I hope it will be, for us, and for many others.

Yours,

j

I start with this broad understanding of technology because I think in many discussions about technology and its value or danger, it is too easy to assume everyone knows what is being talked about. And it is too easy to criticize “technology” where what is really being criticized is something very specific, like, for example, “short-form crowd-sourced media monetized by advertising and served using algorithms designed entirely to capture attention for as long as possible” or “artificial intelligence which requires large data centers that use up 720 billion gallons of water annually for cooling costs alone.” The obvious problem is that, even if we grant there are legitimate criticisms of these technologies, it is not just that they are technologies, or even advanced technologies that is the problem. The problem is with how the technologies are produced or the ends to which they are put. And, perhaps more fundamentally, that they are produced in a capitalist system which involves inescapable pressures towards misuse and irresponsible creation.

One could try to define “technology” in a narrower way, but I’m not sure how one could do so. It is sometimes said that technology is problematic insofar as it involves a sort of “violence” or “magic,” an attempt to “master being” and “shape what is” for one’s own purposes. But the only sense in which that seems true, it seems true for all art and culture. What is music or poetry but the attempt to use matter (sounds, shapes, the bending or striking of strings or vocal chords, the marking of paper, etc.) in order to bring about some desired effect in readers or listeners, or even just to attempt to make manifest in nature one’s own inchoate inner state? Plato famously thought of writing as a dangerous technology that should be resisted in the *Phaedrus*: “If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” Yet I doubt those writers keen to reject technology these days are willing to go quite so far.

If you read my last post, you can probably guess the subtext here is Paul Kingsnorth, whose recent book *Against the Machine* has been at the very least a helpful foil for thinking more positively about modern culture and technology. I have seen several people say that he is not anti-technology in general, but only anti-dehumanizing technology. How could anyone be against, for example, life-saving or pain-reducing medical treatments? Alas, he is not so clear about this in the book. Near the end, he explicitly calls out those who “have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology,” and earlier says that “science, always and everywhere, is handmaiden to technology, and technology is, in this time, neither neutral nor innocent.” So he either seems to think that *all* technology is positively bad, or he is using “technology” to refer to something more specific, like perhaps “technology as produced in the context and for the purposes of that complex of societal forces given the label of the Machine.” But the first seems a pill to hard to swallow (remember, writing is a technology as well), and the second risks being fairly uninformative. *Of course* technology is not neutral if we are defining “technology” in such a way that it only includes those things seen as symptomatic of dehumanization and civilizational decline!

As in the case of the City discussed in my last post, I think the fundamental problem with Kingsnorth’s approach is that he starts with the worst aspects of technology in current secular capitalist society and then rejects the whole thing. But surely the right approach is instead to start by asking “what is the best Christian view of technology and its role in history?” Only that will give us an approach that is not just reaction and rejection. And, as the title of the post indicates, I think the proper Christian view of technology sees it as intrinsically good, though we must take some care in stating what that means.

§2. In saying that technology is intrinsically good, I am not saying that all actual technologies are good. Instead, I am making a formal and teleological claim, about the *essence* and the *end* of technology. In a framework that takes teleology seriously, we can say, e.g., that acorns become oaks, and this is true as a teleological/formal claim, even if it isn’t true that every particular acorn will become an oak tree. If an acorn fails to become an oak tree, then its nature has in some way been thwarted or corrupted. Perhaps more to the point, if more difficult to understand, Christians can say that the Church is the Body of Christ, that it is his spotless Bride, that it is the arbiter of religious truth, even if the historical church at times seems mostly to capitulate to error and is a den of the worst sorts of evils. There is a truth here that C.S. Lewis discussed many times: the “higher” or “more perfect” a thing is, the worse it becomes when corrupted. This, in brief, is what I think is true of technology: developed appropriately and for proper ends, it is one of the greatest things of which we are capable; developed inappropriately and for improper ends, it is one of the greatest evils.

But let’s back up a bit and lay the theoretical foundation. As in everything else, a distinctively Christian approach to technology must be based in the incarnation, both as a historical fact and as the *telos* or destiny of all things, for, as St. Maximus the Confessor says in Ambiguum 7, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” As Vladimir Solovyov and his followers in the Russian Religious Renaissance stressed, the idea of Divine Humanity or Godmanhood is the key to an eschatological approach to culture and politics. (On the latter, see my post here and here.)

The very possibility of the incarnation shows something absolutely central to our understanding of reality: that matter and divinity are not mutually exclusive, that a biological organism made of “dust” can *be* God. The revelation of Christ as the second Adam shows this to be the *telos* of every human being. And if St. Maximus is right, it provides a clue to the destiny of all of creation. The telos of creation is the coming of the kingdom of God, which is nothing else than the the incorporation of the world into the Church, which is the body of Christ. When all the world is included in the church, which is Christ, then God will be all in all.

Importantly, the journey to this end, which just is history, is a “divine-human process” (as Solovyov and his followers put it), in which all human action has a role to play. And in the end, everything done in love or genuine freedom, everything good or true or beautiful, will find a home. As Valentin Sventsitskii puts it: “The Church is the body of Christ, it is the center of Good: everything positive strives for it, it accepts everything into itself....Outside Christ, outside of the Church, there can be neither Truth, nor Goodness, nor Beauty. I know that this infinitely expands the boundaries of the Church, but it also infinitely narrows them. The Chief Procurator may not be included in them, but Beethoven’s work will find its place there. In its struggle, the world strives towards this creative source of life, towards the Church. The world is the Church coming into being!” (Thanks to Pete Murray for the translation.)

What this means for technology is this: Every thing we create out of love, everything we make that is good or true or beautiful, that serves or builds up others, that increases freedom and communion, is literally a way of incarnating Christ in the world. It is, in its own small way, a divinization of matter, a revelation that matter was always receptive to Spirit. Here is how Sergei Bulgakov puts it in his paper “The Economic Ideal”: “Matter ceases to be just matter for us only when the forces of nature serve our human ideals. The triumphs of technology are nothing but the spiritualising of matter, the annihilation of matter considered simply as such. The greatness of a nation’s wealth, the successes of technology and industry, these are the expressions of a gradual spiritualising of matter.”

§3. It is perhaps easy to see how this is so in the case of technologies such as poetry or music. But there is no reason it should not also be so with more advanced technologies. Medicines and vaccines which bring health and healing, digital technologies that allow children to converse with grandparents who live far away. If we do not always appreciate these things, that is partly our own fault, the insensitivity bred by riches. Think of the fact that only a few hundred years ago, a music lover might be able to hear their favorite pieces performed fully or well only a handful of times in their whole lives. Whereas we now have devices which somehow, with a few taps, can turn metal and electricity into the most beautiful music ever written or performed. (This is not to say, of course, that a move away from a culture that emphasizes live performances and making music together towards mostly private listening involves a great loss. But I don’t see why these need be mutually exclusive, why a culture couldn’t embrace both.)

However, the problem is not only our insensitivity. It is not that all actually existing technologies are wonderful, are matter taking on the Spirit and we simply fail to notice it. Some technologies do de-humanize us, some do destroy nature rather than revealing its receptivity. This is of course in part because humans make technology and humans are vicious in all sorts of ways. But perhaps more than anything, our inhumane capitalist economy places pressures on the development and use of technology that cannot but be distorting.

But the solution is to try to get rid of that system, to resist it as we can, to develop and use technologies as individuals in ways that increase freedom and creativity and beauty and goodness. And, yes, it will require in many ways a type of technological asceticism. And here it may seem like Kingsnorth and I are not very far apart. But I see technology, including digital technology, as a good thing that has been corrupted, whereas he (apparently) sees it as a literal malevolent spiritual force. Still, it takes an angel to make a demon, and it is the angels who help to defeat the demons. When we see the good that technology is meant to be, we better appreciate how badly it can be corrupted. But the solution is to increase and promote the good and fight the bad, not to cede the world to the devils. The world is the Church in the making, and we must play our part in the divine-human process.

To begin with, let’s start with the City. That is the topic of his eighth chapter, “The Great Wen.” The chapter presents the increase of urbanization as a transformative and fundamentally destructive force of history (a “wen” is a boil or cyst, and the chapter’s title comes from a derogatory term for London coined by William Cobbett in the 1820s). On the one hand, he rightly points out many of the problematic features of late modern cities (if not cities in themselves): disproportionate and wasteful energy use, the ease of anonymity and separation from nature, unsustainability.

On the other hand, it is a bit surprising (for reasons that will become clear) that he can apparently find nothing good to say about the city. Indeed, he seems to believe that the triumph of “the Machine” is so tied up with the city that the former cannot ever be defeated so long as the latter exists. From the end of the chapter: “The Thing—the Machine—is in its pomp. Ozymandias sits on his throne at the heart of the Wen, smiling down on the uprooted, directionless masses at his feet. His statues are everywhere. We can all be assured that they will last just as long as the city.”

What makes (or at least ought to make) this so surprising is how out of step such a strong critique of city-hood in general is with Christian history and theology, even if this point has become rather forgotten. Consider, first of all, the historical fact that early Christianity was almost entirely an urban movement. Rodney Stark, for example, in *The Rise of Early Christianity*, demonstrates both that early Christianity was overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon, and that this fact was absolutely central to its success. Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome itself: it was no accident that St. Paul’s missionary strategy explicitly targeted major cities in the Roman Empire. Among other things, cities provided several features without which Christianity would never have been able to spread as it did:

• Dense social networks, which allowed rapid transmission of ideas;

• Diversity and displacement, which provided a population of migrants and similarly rootsless people most open to new communities to provide a sense of belonging;

• Struggle and social upheaval, which allowed early Christians’ radical care for the sick and poor to provide survival value and impress others with its moral community

• General literacy, which provided for the kind of textual and intellectual engagement that Christianity called for and would provide for its future.

If its true that Christianity began with cities, it’s also true that it claimed to end with one. If the Old Testament ends with exile, the hope of all the prophets was a restored city. Christians throughout time have also identified with this theme of exile (”I am a poor, wayfaring stranger..”), but the culmination of the book of Revelation is the descent of “the holy City, the new Jerusalem” as the dwelling place of God with humanity. Scripture depicts humanity as beginning in a garden, but ending in a city.

Even if this were not so, the very use of a heavenly City as an image of the redemption of the world shows that the city must have some positive spiritual content, that we must be able to think of an ideal city which is intrinsically good, and whose goodness even imperfect human cities can instantiate to various degrees. For Charles Williams, one of the more neglected of the Inklings (the group that famously included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien), this ideal of the city formed the primary image of the Church, to the degree he at times seems to use the City as another name for the Church.

This is because of the way that cities exhibit “co-inherence,” the fundamental spiritual idea of Williams’ philosophy. Just as the Trinitarian persons “co-inhere” with one another in relations of mutual love, indwelling, and dependence, human beings are called to lives of interconnected dependency and substitution. This is in fact, in some sense THE human vocation, and is expressed in the city like nowhere else.

Perhaps most surprisingly, it is precisely this sense of co-dependence that Kingsnorth singles out as one of the worst things about a city: “A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city. If she is lucky, the city will also serve her.” This is a remarkable complaint for a Christian to make, especially if one remembers Williams’ connection between Church and City. The country, in Kingsnorth’s telling, is the space of mostly independent and self-sufficient family units living, with plenty of space, mostly with others who share one’s same culture, look more or less like oneself, etc. But the city is where one is thrown together with others who are not like oneself, who depend on you, and on whom you are made to depend, and where in the best case this happens through a sort of loving exchange and self-sacrifice. And doesn’t that sound like the Church?

Now obviously, cities are also corrupt and evil places in all sorts of ways, some of which are distinctive to them. A defense of the goodness of cities, or of the City, is not a defense of all or any actually existing cities. And it is a basic spiritual principle that the better, the “higher,” a thing is, the worse it becomes when it is corrupted. But it is only in starting with the ideal that we can appreciate the goodness of what is and properly diagnose the nature of its corruption.

On the one hand, I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising. From the killing of animals and smearing their blood on the doorposts, to the sudden death of who knows how many innocent children, it’s a gruesome and traumatic story. However, part of what surprised me was just that I don’t remember ever having any issues with the story as a kid. But how could it ever have seemed natural to me?

No doubt some will think the answer has to do with a general “softness” that has become characteristic of recent generations, or with a loss of the idea of the “holiness” of God, or something. And I don’t doubt that our moral sensitivities have changed over time in various ways. However, I’m inclined to think that worries about God himself killing innocent children, if really new, signal a genuine improvement in moral education.

My son James was certainly worried. Even several days after our watching, he suddenly asked me “Baba,” —what my children call me— “why does God kill people?” Not knowing the context, I insisted he doesn’t. “Yes he does, he killed all those kids in Egypt.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Both then and after the movie I tried to say some things about God’s purpose for Israel and how it must have been the only possible way to free them from slavery in Egypt. And I think this is probably the best one can do given a literal understanding of the story - a simultaneous insistence on the absolute goodness of a loving God who desires not the death of the wicked along with the acknowledgement that the narrative certainly seems to present something that completely contradicts that understanding. The only possible resolution is the likelihood that if there were some further facts about the situation and counterfactual histories of the world that would make the moral justification clear, they would be beyond our ability to think of or fully grasp. Still, it’s not (to me) a very satisfying response.

A few weeks later, I happened across the fact that St. Gregory of Nyssa directly discusses this very episode and defends the very intuitions against its possibility felt by my son:

How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right hand and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty for his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can history so contradict reason? (The Life of Moses, II.91)

What is his solution? To interpret the story allegorically. For St. Gregory, the story symbolizes the Christian fight against vice, of the slavery to it that is inevitable if we are not willing to put to death the firstborn signs of it in ourselves.

Though I did not mention this passage from St. Gregory, I wrote a whole post earlier showing that the claim that, for the Church Fathers who interpreted scripture allegorically, the allegorical reading never replaces the literal, is not true. I list several cases where those interpreting the Scriptures (all saints) were more than happy to deny the literal or historical meanings. Significantly, St. Gregory here also says that we should not at all be unwilling to dismiss the historical meaning:

Do not be surprised at all if both things – the death of the firstborn and the pouring out of the blood – did not happen to the Israelites and on that account reject the contemplation which we have proposed concerning the destruction of evil as if it were a fabrication without any truth (ibid., 11:100).

Note here that he is appealing to a principle of ethically-influenced interpretation defended in his Homily on the Song of Songs:

[O]ne ought not in every instance to remain with the letter (since the obvious sense of the words often does us harm when it comes to the virtuous life), but one ought to shift to an understanding that concerns the immaterial and intelligible, so that corporeal ideas may be transposed into intellect and thought when the fleshly sense of the words has been shaken off like dust

As a corollary, it’s worth pointing out that he also clearly rejects the sort of objection I see often used to claims about God or Scripture, that we simply cannot judge God according to our own moral standards, especially those not directly based on Scripture itself. While he does appeal to inconsistency with other Scriptures, St. Gregory is happy to reject the historical reading simply for its apparent contradictoriness to reason. The rest of his appeal and the principle just mentioned also indicate that he is willing to take into account ethical intuitions which do not come directly from Scripture.

I have to admit that, though my heart and mind agree with Gregory here (and also about universalism), I also find myself (at times) uncomfortable fully expressing all the same opinions. Most likely this is due to their relative unpopularity, and hang-ups from the Christianity of my youth, and the worry of being too heterodox. But in spite of all that, this seems to me a pretty strong principle: If St. Gregory of Nyssa, called “a Pillar of Orthodoxy” and “the Father of Fathers,” clearly believed and defended something, then believing it cannot be inconsistent with being Orthodox.

As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, I’m (very) slowly working with a close friend on a project introducing and translating some works of a neglected figure of the Russian Religious Renaissance, Fr. Valentin Sventsitsky. I’ve posted a few things related to particular aspects of his thought here and there, but not much about his biography. In fact, despite the objectively interesting features of his life, his influence on and interaction with figures of now general interest such as Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, and the fact that he has (somewhat ironically, as will be clear) been venerated as a saint by figures such as Fr. Seraphim Rose, very little about him has been published in English that is not either brief hagiography based on his last years or secular ridicule based on his early years. What follows is a portion of a draft of a paper I am working on discussing his political theology that, despite its brevity, amounts to the most complete biography of Sventsitsky yet published in English.

Introduction

Formed in the summer of 1905, the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society was at the center of a firestorm of intellectual activity in major Russian cities. Hundreds of the city’s most educated citizens attended overcrowded meetings to hear religiously-minded philosophers debate the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian society and its relationship to the revolutionary fervor that was rapidly spreading everywhere. Some of the late Silver Age’s brightest lights were prominent members or regular attendees: Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky, Peter Struve, Aleksandr Elchaninov, Vladimir Ern, and more. But a main impetus towards its formation, and a large portion of its early presentations, came from a thinker who has for too long been overshadowed, Valentin Pavlovich Sventsitsky. (According to a list of reports delivered at the meetings by A.V. Volokov, Sventsitsky was the main presenter at five of the 25 meetings during the society’s initial period from 1905-1907. Only Ern presented more times. Florensky and Bulgakov both presented once, as well as the Symbolist poet Andrei Bely. Berdyaev presented twice.)

Sventsitsky was an activist, journalist, novelist, and philosopher. Mark Vishniak, the legal scholar and later leader in the Socialist-Revolutionary party, who after his exile taught Russian Literature at Cornell University, considered him the most talented person he had ever met. He created, along with his friend Ern, the Christian Brotherhood for Struggle, perhaps the first ever organization which attempted to present a distinctively Orthodox social-economic platform. The year of the revolution, he was ordained a priest, and, after dying in internal exile, has been venerated as a saint and new-martyr by many in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (and other groups still in schism). In spite of all this, there has been no serious sustained discussion outside of Russia of his religious or political thought.

Life and Times

Sventsitsky was born on November 30, 1881 in Kazan. His father was an attorney of minor hereditary nobility and his mother was a Russian townswoman. His father came from a Roman Catholic background, but he was given an Orthodox upbringing thanks largely to his maternal grandmother. When he was ten years old, the family moved to Moscow. This is the time that he met Mark Vishniak, who saw him right away as an exceptionally brilliant but also difficult character, “a Dostoevsky type.” According to Vishniak, he read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in two days and knew it thoroughly enough to argue with with established Kantians (though he showed no concern for other subjects, like mathematics, and simply refused to learn what did not interest him).

This combination of brilliance and difficulty led to conflicts, and after one particularly troubling conflict with a teacher, his mother petitioned for his withdrawal, and he continued his early education on his own and in a private gymnasium. In 1903, at age 22, he was enrolled in the Imperial Moscow University. It was during this time that he became close friends with the later important philosopher Vladimir Ern, and also became acquainted with the poet Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Elchaninov, and Pavel Florensky. In a letter to Elchaninov in 1903, Ern says of Sventsitsky, “He is an extraordinary person. In his presence you feel your pettiness, narrow-mindedness and vulgarity, just as you feel in church....[H]is enormous mental strength is striking; he understands the most difficult and confusing questions easily and with such confidence that this confidence is transmitted to others; he has fully understood the most complex and difficult philosophical questions and his worldview amazes with its harmony and integrity even those who do not agree with him at all.”

Sventsitsky’s star was rising and when revolutionary feeling reached an early peak after Bloody Sunday in 1905, when the imperial military fired on groups of marching strikers, killing at least several hundred, he was soon to be found in the center of Moscow’s religious intelligentsia. That same year he and Ern formed the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle. In light of the contradictory and ineffectual voice of the church, they felt that an organization was needed which could speak authoritatively to the people about questions of politics and social justice from the standpoint of Christianity. Though short-lived, this organization involved Ern, Elchaninov, Florensky, and Bulgakov.

In his own discussion of the founding of the brotherhood, Sventsitsky, remarkably, states the following three tasks as its fundamental goals:

1. The fight against the most Godless manifestation of secular power - against autocracy, blasphemously hiding behind the authority of the Church, tormenting the body of the people and shackling all the forces of good in society.

2. The fight against the passive condition of the Church in relation to government power, as a result of which the Church serves the basest goals and clearly betrays God to Caesar.

3. The establishment of the principle of Christian love in socio-economic relations, thereby promoting the transition from individual, rights-based property to communal, labor-based property.

A bit later that year, Sventsitsky also helped to form the Moscow Religious Philosophical Society in Honor of Vladimir Solovyov. He met Sergei Bulgakov for the first time in planning the group (Bulgakov would become co-chair of the new society with Sventsitsky). Bulgakov discusses this meeting in a letter from June 1905: “I was passing through Moscow at a conference about the Solovyov Society being planned there. I met Sventsitsky there and was charmed by him. He is a huge figure even now, and what will become of him!”

Sventsitsky continued to write and play an important role in the Religious Philosophical Society until a series of personal disasters struck beginning in late 1907. First, he was expelled from the university for failure to pay his fees, and his attempts to be re-instated were rejected. Second, he was brought to trial for the publication of a journal on the basis of testimony that he felt amounted to a personal betrayal by two friends. And in fact, he had several criminal cases being brought against him during this time for supposed anti-state activity. But to top it all off, and worst of all, a personal moral failing which could not help but surprise everyone came to light: he had been in a love triangle of sorts with two women who were friends with one another, and had gotten both of them pregnant.

As mentioned above, Sventsitsky was almost certainly not easy to get along with— uncomfortably intense and penetrating, alternating between extremes of reserve and passion, and (despite his favor with women) apparently without much attention to personal grooming standards. Yet at the same time, he was clearly unnaturally gifted and seemed to have a sort of charisma and magnetism that some have unfairly but understandably compared to Rasputin. And so, though his early Moscow compatriots were initially overawed with him, this soon turned to a sort of embarrassment and estrangement for many of them. And when the personal moral failure involving two illegitimate daughters came to light (the details of which are still far from clear), even his closest friend Ern decided he had to be shunned (not least for the sake of his own repentance). He was forced to resign from the Religious-Philosophical Society, and, so far as I’ve been able to determine, his co-chair Bulgakov never mentioned him in writing again. Berdyaev seems to have blocked out the whole period, and Bely’s later memoirs recall Sventsitsky only with scorn. Only Vishniak shows some indication of hearing of Sventsitsky’s later, more pointedly religious, writings.

Sventsitsky fled Moscow and for the next period of his life, wandered throughout Russia, continuing to write literary and religious works. His former compatriots moved in their own different directions. Ern turned to more purely academic pursuits and left political activism behind completely. Bulgakov maintained some interest in politics and economics, for awhile, but moved in a more liberal as well as academic direction. The Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society continued on, though its character changed fairly drastically without Sventsitsky.

Thus, Kristiane Burchardi distinguishes between three periods or phases of the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society. The first, 1905-1909, which more or less coincides with Sventsitsky’s leadership, was primarily concerned with reconciling Christianity with aspects of revolutionary political activism. The second, 1910-1912, was a period of reconsideration and realignment. The third, 1913-1918, involved a retreat from political activity and a move in a more conservative and nationalistic, if still broadly liberal, direction. To take just one example of how things changed, consider, for example, that just before the 1917 revolution, Bulgakov underwent a sort of “conversion” to Tsarism, whereas Sventsitsky had argued earlier during their time working together that autocracy was the one form of government actually incompatible with Christian belief, and never recanted from this position.

Svenstsitsky also moved away from direct political activism and in a more religious-literary direction, though this was likely less because of any substantive change in his views, and more likely because of constant trouble with the authorities and the increasingly apparent fact that the revolutionary opportunity of 1905 and the years immediately following had passed, at least from an explicitly Christian position.

In 1909, he was briefly close to the Old Believer Bishop Mikhail (Semyonov), whose Golgotha Christians movement mirrored Sventsitsky’s quest for a politically radical Christianity. Starting in 1913, he made several trips to visit the hermit monks of the Caucasus mountains. He wrote a book about his travels during this time, Citizens of Heaven: My Journey to the Hermits of the Caucasus Mountains, which was widely read (this was the book Vishniak long in his exile mentioned hearing of, though he called it “uninteresting”), as well as many literary works. After marrying Evegenia, the daughter of an archpriest--Sergei Iosifovich Krasnov--whom he met near Tsaritsyn in 1909, he was ordained to the priesthood on September 9, 1917, by Bishop Gennady (Tuberozov) of Narva.

His initial appointment as priest was at an army headquarters of the Northern Front. Soon after all clergy were dismissed from the military in 1918, he served for a time as priest in the Volunteer Army. During all this time, he continued writing on issues dealing with politics and war. Health problems forced him back to Moscow in 1920, where he served often with the Patriarch St. Tikhon, then settled as rector at the church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (eventually completely destroyed by the Soviets), preaching popular sermons, and trying to reform parish life. (He is mentioned a couple times in passing as a figure of deep prayer and holiness during this time by Sergei Fudel in his book Light in the Darkness).

In January, 1928, six months after Metropolitan Sergius, acting as patriarchal locum tenens, issued his (in)famous declaration of complete loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church to the government of the Soviet Union, Sventsitsky reluctantly decided to break communion with the official Church. Five months later, he was arrested and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. While there, he wrote one of his most famous works, Dialogues ( available for the first in an English translation just this past year), hoping to make the fundamentals of Christianity accessible and attractive to non-believers.

In 1930, he became seriously ill but was denied the opportunity to receive treatment. In September 1931, he was reconciled with Metropolitan Sergius (though some schismatic groups who revere him as a saint still dispute this) and died a month later. He was buried in Moscow another month later, observed by a large crowd, with his body seemingly abnormally non-decayed (incorruption being a common sign of saintliness in the Orthodox Church).

After that, he was largely forgotten. Scholars of Russian history (occasionally) note him as an almost comically extreme revolutionary figure (Magnus Ljunggren, e.g., in a strange essay which is the only one published directly on Sventsitksy in English, calls him “symbolism’s charlatan,” and depends for his information entirely on the negative memories of Bely and Vishniak). On the other hand, despite his advocacy of extreme left parties and his claim that autocracy is the only political view unavailable for Christians (and a correspondingly very negative view of Tsar Nicholas II), conservative Russian groups, including various Old Calendarist jurisdictions and ROCOR at the time of Fr. Seraphim Rose, have venerated him as a saint. Neither is willing to give this clearly brilliant figure the careful attention he deserves. I hope our forthcoming volume can be a first step in the right direction.

Addendum

When I first began researching Sventsitsky, I took for granted that he was a saint. If you search for him online, most of what you will find refers to him as “St. Valentin Sventsitsky,” and a profile referring to him as that (actually with the a common mis-spelling of his last name as “Sventitsky") was published in 1980 in Fr. Seraphim Rose’s publication The Orthodox Word. He shows up with a feast day of October 7 on various online calendars, like on the Orthodox Wiki. However, after doing some research, I found that he is not listed on the official calendars of any jurisdiction, and concluded that he was never officially canonized. What I believe happened is that he was preemptively recognized as a saint by Fr. Seraphim Rose’s St. Herman Monastery/Press, and through their influence he became referred to as a saint in various other places. A friend in seminary reports that one of his professors claimed he was considered for canonization, but not granted it due to the scandal of his early life (a bizarre bit of reasoning for a church that so reveres St. Mary of Egypt, to give just one example). At any rate, official canonization is not required in the Orthodox Church to recognize someone as a saint, so I will continue to refer to him often as St. Valentin Sventsitsky.

Today I came across a wonderful passage in the works of the early Confucian philosopher Xunzi:

“Heaven does not suspend the winter because men dislike cold; earth does not cease being wide because men dislike great distances; the virtuous person does not stop acting because petty men carp and clamor. Heaven has its constant way; earth has its constant dimensions; the virtuous person has his constant demeanor. The virtuous person follows what is constant; the petty person reckons up his achievements…

The king of Chu has a retinue of a thousand chariots, but not because he is wise. The virtuous person must sometimes eat only boiled greens and drink water, but not because he is stupid. These are accidents of circumstance. To be refined in purpose, rich in virtuous action, and clear in understanding; to live in the present and remember the past—these are things which are within your own power. Therefore the virtuous person cherishes what is within his power and does not long for what is within the power of Heaven alone…Because the virtuous person cherishes what is within his power and does not long for what is within Heaven’s power, he goes forward day by day.”

I was a bit surprised at just how Stoic this sounded. Epictetus, for example, famously locates the beginning of wisdom and happiness in distinguishing what is in our control and what is not. External events are in general not fully in our control, but our actions, and our re-actions, are. We cannot control what others think, our reputation, wealth, status, etc., but we can control our judgments, our choices, our inner life. And once we realize that goodness only truly attaches to things that we can control, then we realize that living a good life is always in our power, that no one can take it from us. Knowing this can provide a sage-like confidence and tranquility as we navigate life.

Xunzi, writing 300-400 years before Epictetus, sounds very similar notes here, denoting ‘Heaven’ as the source of what is not in our control, similar to the Stoics’ notion of Fate. The only way to ‘move forward day by day’ in life is to focus on what is in our power, and trust that ‘Heaven’ will take care of the rest. And I particularly like the list of things Xunzi picks out as in our control - to act virtuously, to set purpose for our life, to improve our understanding, and to live in the present.

These are things I need to hear often. I’ve noticed that the biggest trigger for frustration, depression, and temptation in my life is resentment at a lack of control, especially of my time. That I cannot rest when I want, read when I want, write when I want; that others constantly make demands that seem unfair. I need to realize that the things I want to accomplish are not actually my main goal in life, that my main goal in life is (or ought to be) to live well, to be virtuous. And doing this means precisely responding virtuously to those things that I cannot control and protecting the things I can.

This is perhaps an overly-self-indulgent post. Hopefully it can still impart or remind of wisdom. But in bringing up Confucianism, it is perhaps a nice warm-up for my next post, which will be on the Neo-Confucian spiritual practice of “quiet-sitting.” Until then.

The discussion was occasioned by the publication of a chapter by Jesse on the topic in a new book edited by Steven HAuse called Christ Saves All: Christian Universalist Perspectives. Jesse was kind enough to dedicate the chapter to me, and I was hoping to join the conversation as well, but couldn’t get it to work with my schedule in time. But, to be honest, it was probably better without me and my presence would only have put a lie to the very kind things they say about me in the first few minutes. All joking aside, it was a wonderful conversation that strengthened my faith. Check it out.

Secondly, I must apologize for my relative absence the past few weeks. Things tend to be a bit busier for me, and my schedule less in my control, in the summer months. But another reason is that I’ve caught a bit of the “entrepreneurial bug” and have been busily trying to code an app in a relatively short time while I’m not working at the day job. Seeing so many of my professor friends struggling with AI plagiarism, and remembering my own frustrations with the hassle of managing student writing, I thought I’d try to make an app which will both improve over the usual methods of plagiarism-detection and make the grading process a bit easier for teachers. It’s (provisionally) called PaperMind, and the gist of it is that, rather than focusing on the final product and trying to work backwards to figure out if it was plagiarized, it focuses on the process of writing: the students write their essays in an in-app editor that records all changes as they happen, and flags suspicious events like large or frequent copy-and-pastes, abnormally fast typing, lack of edits, etc. The teacher can then “play back” the whole composition process, comment on and grade the paper in the app, and email it back with the click of a few buttons. I’m hoping to have an MVP available for a few users to test in time for the beginning of the fall semester. If you are a college/university teacher, or know someone who is, please help me out by filling out or sharing this short survey I’ve made to collect some initial user data: https://forms.gle/U16eLGXDNoMKUvFC9

Anti-Theodicy

The first thing to note is that the view is anti-*theodicy*. This means that it need not necessarily reject something like the free-will *defense*, which does not attempt to *justify* God's allowing of any particular evils, or show how evil in general fits into some grand plan of God's which is itself good. Rather, it aims simply to show that, if evil is directly attributable to the free actions of finite creatures, and if finite creatures like us are necessarily capable of voluntary choice, and if such voluntary choice involves at least the possibility of choosing wrongly, then there is at least no *logical* contradiction between the existence of evil in the abstract and the existence of God.

But what about the particular evils we see? God surely could prevent at least some of them. And it seems at least possible he could prevent almost all of them. And even if not, there are some particularly horrendous examples that it seems practically certain he could. So why doesn't he? (This is sometimes called the *evidential* problem of evil, in contrast to the *logical* problem.)

On this point, a proponent of dogmatic anti-theodicy need not reject the answer of the skeptical theist: given our finite and limited understanding compared to God's, if he exists, we just shouldn't be surprised at our lack of ability to understand why any particular evils are allowed or not prevented, if there are any such reasons. (Though at this point I think there is a move towards the problem of divine hiddenness, which requires a separate treatment.)

But dogmatic anti-theodicy as I intend it goes beyond this skeptical theist answer in at least two ways. First, it claims there is an element of the irrational, of the confused, in evil that makes it *in principle* un-understandable. In the classical metaphysical tradition, evil is a privation, it is in some sense unreality. Though these are deep and muddy waters, this might be thought to imply that any attempt to *fully* understand evil, what it is, why it is, is bound to fail. In the Christian understanding, evil has no *point * or *telos*, no *reason*. How could it, if evil is precisely a *failure* of a thing's reaching its telos, is intrinsically irrational?

Second, it insists that the attempt at theodicy is itself almost always evil (or, to sound less dramatic, morally problematic). In the face of great suffering, the attempt to explain it away, to convince that it is somehow a necessary part of a greater good, is both an insult to God, for whom death and evil is *always* an enemy, and to the sufferers themselves. The dehumanization, torture, abuse, of any human being is an infinite offense that cannot be 'outweighed' by any possible good. (See, on this point, Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamzov.) The Christian dogmatic stance is that God is Good, and always therefore absolutely against any evil. He will, somehow, *redeem* these evils, work to bring good out of them. But he never *justifies* them. Morally speaking, they are unjustifiable.

Dogma

This leads directly to the "dogmatic" part of the approach. On the one hand, we must not deny the existence of evil, we must not think that it can be justified in any rational or moral sense, and we must not even try. We are left with the presence of evil, with all its terrible irrational hatefulness. What then? We must reject it and fight against it. With what understanding?

The Christian understanding (and this is just the stating of basic Christian dogma) is that God is absolutely Good. That evil and death are the enemy. That this "isn't the way things are supposed to be." That we ought to make evil our enemy as well. That God is love, and that in the incarnation God himself, as St. Maximus says, "[takes] upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one and until the end of time, always suffering mystically out of goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering." That someday, somehow (in a way we can't comprehend), good will triumph over evil, and that we have a necessary role to play in that triumph.

In my view, this understanding of reality is preferable, is a more "fitting" response to evil than one which involves a rejection of those dogmas. The sense in which it is "preferable" is a little harder to pin down. Certainly, I think, aesthetically.[^1] It also seems in some way to better capture just how bad evil and suffering are (and I suppose I mean this in an epistemic or explanatory way). Evil is not just something which *feels bad*, is not just an unavoidable part of the human condition, is not just violation of abstract moral principles; it is a tragic and infinitely offensive distortion of reality. And, existentially, Christianity presents us with a series of teachings and practices to communally *protest* evil, *mourn* its effects, and work *hopefully* for its defeat. Dogmatic anti-theodicy neither denies the horror of evil nor offers an instrumentalizing justification—it insists on resisting evil and trusting God, in a way grounded in the story and basic dogmas of Christian faith.

[1] To echo David Bentley Hart's statement (except that I have perhaps *some* emotional investment in Christianity in the abstract as well): “I have no emotional investment in Christianity in the abstract, but only in a certain vision of God’s dealing with humanity in and through a crucified slave who, impossibly enough, is the center of all human history and the very form of God... It’s only the figure of Christ—the peasant agitator and radical lover of the poor, murdered by the state and the interests of the enfranchised, but still a boundless source of love and forgiveness, the good shepherd who never abandons even one of his sheep—that holds me in place.”

In short, the basic problem I think is a refusal to take seriously enough material conditions, the failure to see the ways that history and economic modes of production block from us certain possibilities for leading good lives. I was initially going just to comment on that, but (thanks to the comments of a couple friends) I came to see that a very similar charge can be raised against many on the progressive left as well, based on the work of Musa al-Gharbi and his concept of “symbolic capitalism,” the way that (mostly) elites of various types use adherence to certain symbolic aims in largely symbolic ways to reproduce the very sorts of injustices they claim to be against. In both the conservative and left versions, social commitments become largely performative, lacking any real power for transformation.

II. On the conservative side, there is all of this talk about community, tradition, and virtue. There is railing against individualism and acquisitiveness, and a call to envision life as reflecting a cosmic and social order that we are called to make real and inhabit. We ought to love truth, create lasting beauty, live in stable and loving families in stable caring communities.

So far, so good. But why have communities and families become so unstable? Why are we less concerned with truth, with beauty? The answer isn’t, as most conservatives seem to think, simply that generations have been brainwashed by professors or advertising (though the latter is closer to the truth). It’s that in a market economy, the whole social structure is set up to undermine these very things. As David Bentley Hart puts it in his essay, “Mammon Ascendant”:

The history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages. Any dominant material economy is complicit with, and in fact demands, a particular anthropology, ethics, and social vision. And a late capitalist culture, being intrinsically a consumerist economy, of necessity promotes a voluntarist understanding of individual freedom and a purely negative understanding of social and political liberty. The entire system depends not merely on supplying needs and satisfying natural longings, but on the ceaseless invention of ever newer desires, ever more choices. It is also a system inevitably corrosive of as many prohibitions of desire and inhibitions of the will as possible, and therefore of all those customs and institutions—religious, cultural, social—that tend to restrain or even forbid so many acquisitive longings and individual choices.

This is what Marx genuinely admired about capitalism: its power to dissolve all the immemorial associations of family, tradition, faith, and affinity, the irresistible dynamism of its dissolution of ancient values, its (to borrow a loathsome phrase) “gales of creative destruction.” The secular world—our world, our age—is one from which as many mediating and subsidiary powers have been purged as possible, precisely to make room for the adventures of the will. It is a reality in which all social, political, and economic associations have been reduced to a bare tension between the individual and the state, each of which secures the other against the intrusions and encroachments of other claims to authority, other demands upon desire, other narratives of the human. Secularization is simply developed capitalism in its ineluctable cultural manifestation.

As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it somewhere, the problem with conservatives is that by the time they realize what needs conserving, the revolution has already happened. There is no going back, only forward. And as he puts it in his introduction to Virtue and Politics, "As you and I encounter the resistance elicited by any systematic attempt to achieve central human goods, we learn how to define what we are politically." Doing this requires taking seriously our place in history (e.g., in the absence of some global catastrophe, a globalized and digitalized world) and the actual causes of the declines we regret. When conservatives call for a return to symbolic orders without addressing the forces that destroyed them, they are left with nothing but grievance and nostalgia.

III. On the other side of the spectrum, those who consider themselves most progressive are often equally guilty. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi describes a class (or pseudo-class) of “symbolic capitalists.” These are not usually owners of capital in the traditional sene, but those who collect and wield symbolic capital—prestige, credentials, moral and epistemic authority—like academics, journalists, managers, etc.

These figures often loudly position themselves as critics of capitalism and the inequalities and marginalization that results from it. Yet by focusing on identity and representation, educational and symbolic initiatives, etc., rather than real accountability or material redistribution, they continue to benefit from and perpetuate the system without bringing about any real (non-symbolic) changes. They give the capital owners a clean conscience without significantly helping the marginalized in any way. The left wins cultural battles in elite spaces while ceding material ground everywhere else. (My favorite meme version of this is an image which shows a business that proudly displays a sign saying that their restrooms are gender neutral, whereas visible in the periphery is another sign which also adamantly insists that restrooms are for paying customers only.)

III. Both left and right, then, are too often involved in a politics of performance. Conservatives perform tradition without doing what is necessary to build the institutions required. Progressives perform justice without changing the basic structures.

And, unfortunately, this isn’t likely to go away any time soon. One reason is that performance is easy while actual politics is hard. Another is that media rewards and amplifies such performance. Anger pleases the advertisers and wins the elections. Symbolic politics is both cheap and profitable. It is also hollow.

What we need instead is practice and real solidarity. Both tradition and justice require material conditions to thrive and survive. Families need time and security. Virtue is formed through stable institutions. Justice requires real redistribution. More than symbolic inclusion, people need shelter, stability, education, and care.

Faith as Intention to Believe

1. In Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, Fr. Andrew Louth points out that the Nicene Creed, the most important Christian statement of faith, has functioned historically as a primarily liturgical text, "belonging, first of all, to the baptismal liturgy". It is "part of our initiation into a life, not a summary of things to be believed".[1] This makes faith seem to be more practical than theoretical, more to do with what one does than what one believes. Nevertheless, in expressing faith through that same creed, Christians express themselves in terms of belief: "I believe in one God, the Father almighty..." This confluence is part of what makes religious faith seem so puzzling - the way that it combines both distinctly cognitive as well as conative, theoretical as well as practical, elements. A satisfactory account of faith must do justice to both of these aspects, and, if possible, unify them or say which is more primary.[2]

Most understandings of faith so far have failed to do so. According to what Daniel Howard-Snyder calls "the Common View", faith just is, or else is partly constituted by, belief. This fails to do justice to the distinctly practical orientation of faith and the fact that faith may sometimes fail to involve full-blown belief. He and several other philosophers working on the topic[3] have rejected this view in favor of one which, while still having cognitive elements, sees faith as having no essential connection to belief. While I agree that faith need not involve full belief, it is a mistake to divorce the two entirely. At the very least, belief seems to be part of the goal or end of faith.

How can we capture all of these facets of faith in a single conception? My suggestion is that we see faith as at base an intention to believe. This suggestion is best clarified and filled out, I think, in responding to two objections that immediately present themselves. So clarified, it presents a picture of faith that explains how practical and theoretical attitudes play the complementary role that they do in religious life.

2. The first difficulty of the account is to understand what it would even mean to intend to believe something. The problem is that we tend to think of our beliefs as states over which we do not have direct control. Try as I might, I just cannot get myself to believe, as I sit here typing, for example, that I am actually sitting on a beach in Hawaii. I can say it, I can imagine it, but I simply cannot believe it.

Part of the issue here has to do with the constraints that constitutively govern choice and judgment. I cannot deliberately form a belief that p if I know that ~p, and I cannot deliberately form an intention to f unless I think it is possible to f. I will return in section four to the implications of these constraints for our understanding of faith. For now, my question is rather what is involved in intending to believe, in the sense I have in mind. What do I do when I intend to believe in, say, Christianity or the Nicene Creed?

To answer this, I need to say a bit more about what an intention is, and about what a belief is. An intention is an irreducible state of commitment to action which can be picked out in terms of its functional roles. In particular, intentions are stable, conduct-controlling states. They are stable insofar as they allow us to commit ourselves to courses of action in advance and tend to persist and to resist revision unless significant new information is discovered. They are conduct controlling insofar as they are sufficient on their own to motivate action, all things being equal (unlike, say, desires, which only influence conduct and must be weighed against contrary desires).[4]

A belief, on my view, is a sort of state of commitment to the truth of something which is at least partly constituted by a certain set of dispositions. These dispositions, for a simple case of belief that p, include things like a tendency to feel conviction that p, to recall p as relevant for certain types of practical reasoning, to report that p when asked, or to draw further theoretical inferences from p.[5]

Putting these two pieces together, we can now see what it might mean to intend to believe. As a first approximation, we can say that to intend to believe in Christianity is to intend to act in such a way that one has the dispositions which are at least in part constitutive of believing in the truth of Christianity. We cannot believe at will, but we can will to have the same basic dispositions we would have if we did believe.

Putting it this way leads perhaps to the next obvious objection, which is that so far we don’t really seem to have an intention to believe, but only an intention to act like we believe. On the one hand, the view doesn’t seem much different from the view that faith is a type of acceptance, where acceptance involves being willing to act as if p and use p in one’s reasoning, but without necessarily believing p. On the other hand, it may seem worse off than the acceptance view. For on my view, faith involves the attempt to cultivate all the dispositions (at least partly) constitutive of belief, including using the language of belief in describing one’s state. Thus, it seems to involve a sort of lying, or at least to be a type of “bad faith”.

Two further clarifications are in order. The first is a minor addition to the account. Importantly, the intention is aimed at full-blown belief. The point of intending to have the dispositions constitutive of belief is thereby to have the belief, either because the dispositions one has as a result of the intention themselves fully constitute belief, or because one’s intention is causally responsible for bringing it about that one has the full belief.

This move also helps us to answer the worry about bad faith or self-deception. The key thing to note is that a person is not necessarily infallible about their own beliefs. Even if we take the view that I cannot be mistaken about my positive avowals of my conscious beliefs, it doesn’t follow from this that I cannot be mistaken by failing to recognize that I in fact believe something.

This sort of thing is perhaps most commonly associated with a clinical setting (though the same thing could happen through a long talk with a friend). We can imagine, for example, coming to realize that one has been full of resentment toward a dead parent for years, or that one has consistently sabotaged a relationship with an old friend because of an unconscious feeling of betrayal by their past behavior. One could be thoroughly convinced on the basis of an honest look at one’s behavior that one has these attitudes, even if one would have fervently denied having them previously, and even if, on reflecting, one denies that there is anything to be resented or that one was really betrayed.

These sorts of cases are perhaps fairly rare. I’m not sure. The point is just that a person’s behavior can be convincing evidence that they have a belief or other attitude, even where that attitude lacks for them the usual distinctive phenomenology of first-person access. In cases of faith, where one wants to believe and where one is purposefully acting out belief, the line between someone who really believes and someone who “just” has all or many of the dispositions usually involved in belief will be difficult if not impossible to draw, even first-personally. The fervent expression of something one hopes to be true need not be self- or other-deceptive. In this way, we might see the exclamation of the man from the gospel, “I believe; help my unbelief!”, as a characteristic statement of faith.

3. The primary virtue of this account, as may be guessed, is the way that it connects and illuminates the practical and theoretical aspects of faith. Other approaches have, of course, aimed to do the same thing. What is distinctive is the way that this account makes a connection with belief an essential aspect of faith, without requiring that the person of faith has full-blown belief.

Full belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith, for reasons that have been adequately discussed elsewhere.[6] In short, it is not sufficient because faith requires that one care about or value the truth of the object of faith. It is not necessary, because faith is consistent with several features which are not typical of full belief, such as doubt, or a lack of feeling that one really believes.

But it would be equally mistaken, in my view, to completely separate faith from belief; either, for example, as Schellenberg does[7], by saying that faith is completely incompatible with belief, or as Howard-Snyder does[8] by saying that belief is just one cognitive attitude among others that may play a role in faith. The main reason I think this complete separation of faith from belief is a mistake is that it fails to do justice to the experience of lived religious faith.

As indicated in the opening paragraphs, it is a striking feature of religious faith that it is almost paradigmatically expressed in terms of belief. In traditional Christianity, this is most obvious in the cases of the Creeds, which begin “I believe…” Even for those who eschew such formal dogmatic lists, there is the clear biblical connection: “If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9).

This consideration may not be decisive, since in the ancient languages of the church, Greek and Latin, belief is not clearly distinguished from faith, and the phrase “I believe” in the creeds could equally well be translated as “I trust” or “I have faith in”. Still, it seems to me that full belief is part of the aim of faith. Faith, we might say, is what we have when full belief is out of our reach; we have faith in order to have, perhaps at a later stage, full belief. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:12).

This helps to explain, in part, the role of religious practice and ritual in the life of faith. Since the practical orientation of the person of faith is aimed at belief, this will involve, in addition to cultivating the dispositions I’ve focused on above, putting oneself in the best position possible to be receptive to whatever evidence there may be that would make full belief possible and rational. This is at least part of why Christians pray, attend liturgy, receive the Sacraments, etc. Among other things, these are ways that they open themselves up to experiences which will put them further along in their journey toward full belief, toward “knowing as they are known”. (Thus, Pascal’s urging people convinced by his practical argument to attend Mass, etc., even if they don’t believe, can be seen simply as a recommendation to have faith.)[9]

4. Now that I’ve brought in the idea of evidence, it’s time to say something about the connection between faith, reason, and evidence. As I mentioned in section two, the fact that faith involves both cognitive and conative elements brings with it unique constraints and rational norms. The implications of the way that these elements combine in faith has been, to my knowledge, not very adequately explored. So I will only have space here to mention a few of the more obvious things, and those which are distinctive of my account.

The first thing to note is that intention is a response to reasons – as Anscombe famously claimed, the defining mark of an intentional action is that it is one for which a certain “Why?” question is applicable, that which asks for reasons. To see something as having reasons in its favor is to see it as in some way valuable. An intention is a conative state, it involves or is a type of desire in the broad sense of that term. And faith on my view is an intention aimed at belief. There is a satisfying unification here. Daniel Howard –Snyder[10], for example, calls faith a “complex propositional attitude”, insofar as it involves (a) positive evaluation, (b) positive conative orientation, and (c) positive cognitive stance. But it’s less clear on his view how or why these all hang together in a single attitude. He simply defines faith as an attitude which has these three features. My view, on the other hand, shows how they are connected.

The view also has an interesting implication for the connection between evidence and faith. It is commonly accepted that there is at least some belief condition on intention. On a strong version, intention to f requires a belief that one will f. On a weaker version, which I accept, intention to f requires at least belief in the possibility that one will f. Belief, on the other hand, is “aimed at truth”, where this plausibly explains why the question of whether one believes p is transparent to the question of whether p is true, and where this latter question can arguably only be decided by looking at evidence for p. Given all this, one can only intend to believe that p if one believes it at least possible to believe that p. And it is arguably only possible to believe that p if one has some evidence for p. Since faith is an intention to believe, it follows that one can only have faith that p if one either has some evidence for p or at least sees such evidence as forthcoming. This shows that it is wrong to think of belief against evidence as a defining feature of faith.

Finally, there is something to be said about the ways that the rational norms governing intention and belief may interact. When we talk about reasons for belief, we may mean either practical reasons (things that make the belief valuable), or theoretical reasons (things which count as evidence for the belief). Since we are unable to form beliefs at will, practical reasons for belief can only be responded to by something like the intention that on my view constitutes faith. So faith involves a sensitivity to both of these sorts of reasons, and talk of the rationality of faith will have to take both into account. When a potential truth is both valuable and has a lot of evidence in its favor, then it obviously makes sense to believe it (or intend to believe it). But what about a potential truth that one finds extremely valuable but has very little evidence in its favor? If faith involves sensitivity to both sorts of reasons, then it seems reasonable to think that gains in one might offset losses in another. Something like this seems to be part of William James’s argument in “The Will to Believe”, that it would be absurd to say that one cares most fundamentally about believing the truth while not allowing the possibility of risking error for the sake of believing really good truths. So we have the beginnings of a way of defending the rationality of faith which, while not against the evidence, may go beyond it.

5. I recognize that a lot of these arguments have been very quick. The point here has not been to give the last word on faith, but rather to try to give sense to a distinctive way of understanding faith and show how it explains or illuminates several aspects of the concept. With some refinements arrived at along the way, the basic picture is this: to have faith that p is to intend to believe p, where this involves both the intention to have the set of dispositions which are partly constitutive of believing p, as well as a continued effort to expose oneself to the sorts of situations which may provide one with evidence for p.

This account is meant only to capture distinctly religious faith. It may in the end only capture Christian religious faith, and perhaps only of a distinctly modern sort. At the very least, I have tried to capture what it is that I mean, when I say that I have faith in the truth of Christianity. I am hopeful that it will fit with the experience of others as well.

[1] Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013, p. 2).

[2] I will use Christianity throughout as my example of religious faith. This is because it is what I am most familiar with. I hope that my account will apply to other types of faith as well.

[3] See Daniel Howard-Snyder, "Propositional Faith: What It Is and What It Is Not" (2013), as well as, e.g., William Alston, "Belief, Acceptance, and Religious Faith" (1996), Andrei Buckareff, "Can Faith Be a Doxastic Venture?" (2005), John Bishop "On the Possibility of a Doxastic Venture: A Reply to Buckareff" (2005), and Jonathan Kvanvig, "Affective Theism and People of Faith" (2013).

[4] The basic picture here, as well as the terminology, comes from Michael Bratman. See especially Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987).

[5] For the details of a slightly stronger view that I find attractive, see Eric Schwitzgebel, “A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief” (2002).

[6] For a nice summary, see Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Propositional Faith: What It Is and What It Is Not” (2013).

[7] Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (2005).

[8] Op. cit. However, my view may not actually be incompatible with Howard-Snyder’s. This is because he is interested in what he calls propositional faith in general, whereas my main concern is with religious faith in particular. It may be that in other contexts faith may be equally at home with other attitudes than belief, while religious faith, or even just Christian faith, forms a subset where reference to belief is essential.

[9] I am reminded here of the way that, at the end of every Orthodox liturgy (my own tradition), the faithful sing “We have seen the True Light!...We have found the True Faith!”

[10] Op. cit.

Like most Protestants, the Virgin Mary was conspicuously absent from my religious life and thought.  Calling her the Mother of God seemed strange, if not blasphemous, and I was quite sure that the devotion showed to her by Roman Catholics (Orthodoxy was not something I was familiar with) was idolatrous. Like most converts, leaving those ideas behind and replacing my former devotional habits with new ones was not something that happened overnight. But it did happen fairly painlessly, simply as a result of immersing myself in the life and prayer of the Church. In spite of any initial reservations I may have had, my experience was not of something unnatural or on the borderline of idolatry, but of something fitting, something right, fulfilling a need I didn’t know that I had. Still, there were a few turning points or revelations that did help me on my way, and I thought I'd share them, in case they might be helpful to anyone else.

The first happened almost by accident, when I had first begun thinking my way towards an Orthodox understanding of things. I was at my dad’s house and, as I almost always do when I visit a house, I was browsing through his bookcases. A little book – *On the Apostolic Preaching* - by St Irenaeus (a second century saint who was taught by those who knew the apostles), stood out to me and I picked it up and began flipping through it randomly. I don’t even remember the context, and am not even sure of the exact passage, but in the page I read he argued that, just as Christ was the second Adam, who re-united God to man in his person and through his obedience undid the disobedience of Adam, so we need to think of Mary as a second Eve. Her role in salvation history was not accidental or a mere prerequisite. Rather, it was her ‘yes’ to God, her free acceptance of the will of God, that undid the original ‘no’ of Eve.  Just as Adam’s fall depended on the prior sin of Eve, the advent of Christ depended on the prior godliness of Mary. [I think the passage I had in mind must have been from *Against Heresies*, actually: "Thus Mary's obedience undid the knot of Eve's disobedience; for what the virgin Eve had bound up by her unbelief, the virgin Mary set free by her faith" (3.22.4).]

I’m not sure why reading this affected me the way that it did, but I felt suddenly as if my eyes were opened. It became clear to me that Mary must be seen as occupying a place of importance in the Christian story of salvation that is second only to Christ. Her role and the respect owed to her is greater even than the apostles.  And the thought occurred to me: God does not do anything arbitrarily. Is it really the case that he could have chosen just any woman to play her part? Or would it not require someone incredibly special to be worthy to be the mother of God? [St. Gregory of Palamas says "... God pre-ordained her before all ages, chose her from among all that had ever lived, and deemed her worthy of more grace than anyone else, making her the holiest of saints..."]

And this leads to the second revelation, which came from a renewed focus on the personhood of Christ. As I studied the early heresies and the great councils of the early church, a theme emerged: the controversies that rocked the church were not just about abstract details of speculative theology. They were about how we have to understand Christ for the faith even to make sense. They were about who Christ must *have been* (and must *be*) if he is to be our savior. And a couple important truths were held to be essential: That Christ is both fully human and fully God, and that these two natures are united in a single person. In other words, our Lord was a human being who was also God. This is why the Council in Ephesus declared in 431 AD that Mary must be confessed to be Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God; because she gave birth to that human person who was and is God.

And this made me think: Jesus, though God, was a fully human person who had a mother. And if love for a mother is a good thing, then Jesus, the perfect Man, must have loved and respected his mother even more than the best of us loves and respects his or her own mother. Would she not always be special and near to him? And if we are co-heirs with Christ, his adopted brothers, and in some mystical way part of Christ himself in the Church, then she is our Mother too; and in fact the Church has always understood Christ’s words to St John, “Behold your Mother,” as applying to the whole Church. Therefore, we must love her as well.

Finally, her importance as a role model has become more and more apparent to me, especially in the current age. First, as mentioned above, she is the ultimate example of obedience to God and openness to his will in spite of appearance to the world (an unwed mother) or personal cost. And if we think of salvation as theosis, as bearing God in our bodies, incarnating him through our virtue, then, again, she illustrates this in the most extreme and literal way possible. Second, and I got this from a very interesting essay from St. Maria of Paris, she exhibits a particular and unique kind of holiness that is much in need in our day. Many of our saints are monastics and ascetics; separate from the world and doers of great deeds. They set an example of extremes. And in today’s climate of extreme interconnectedness and social media, where every act must be performed for the approval of others, we are tempted to think that a thing done quietly, without notice, cannot be truly worthwhile. But our Mother sets a different example. In spite of her greatness and her centrality in the worship of the Church, little is known of her life and, besides her initial obedience, we celebrate no great and singular works. She was satisfied with ‘the little way’, serving God and his people in the little things, in the everyday and the ordinary, the things that mostly go unnoticed but without which nothing good can be accomplished and no one can become holy. And that little way is also what most of us are called to, despite our pretensions and our preoccupation with ‘greatness’; and like her Son, I think our Mother here beckons to us, “Come, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

There’s much more that could be said, of course, and what has been said is barely a beginning.  But I hope this will be helpful to someone.