Harry "Postmodern" Potter

The sixth book in the Harry Potter series is out, its themes and subject matter darker and more adult than the previous books. This is no surprise, since Harry is growing up, too; and the debate goes on: is the series bad for our children, for us?

This is a complicated question: we’re not talking about The Gossip Girls series, which is thinly disguised soft-porn tailored to capture young teenage girls; or the Goosebumps series: grotesque, juvenile horror stories- but neither are we talking about the goodness of The Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles, or The Little House on the Prairie books. Instead, we are talking about a cultural phenomenon, in that these books have taken hold like wildfire, and that they are the first of their kind: postmodern literature for children, with a classical facade. Thus, they are somewhat of an unknown, and in this lies the confusion about whether or not the books are ‘safe’.

No one who reads the books for the sake of the story can deny that JK Rowling is a talented writer, who has created a story that is more than just pure entertainment. She is a master on different levels- from the purely witty and entertaining, to suspense and the real depth of a classical story about good and evil, love in war, friendship and coming of age; heroism and humility, suffering and overcoming hardship. But is it truly classical? I will call it “pseudo-classical, postmodern literature”. In this term is couched the underlying danger of the series to the formation of young minds and hearts.

In order to explore this question of danger, and what it means to be a pseudo-classical, postmodern book, we’ll first go over the basic terms of literature, what makes a classical story, and what differentiates a postmodern book from truly classical literature.

Aristotle’s Poetics describes the very basic and primary elements of all story telling: it is imitation, an activity natural to us from childhood. Stories imitate reality, perhaps not the whole of it, but at least some part of it. Aristotle states that Tragedy represents the nobler, better characters among us, and Comedy represents the baser, lesser characters among us. He says, “Character is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents- the sort of things that they seek or avoid”; and, “Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions-what we do- that we are happy or the reverse”. Therefore, it is in the actions of the characters, or the plot, that we discern the real essence of the story, the theme, as it were.

Again, a classical story is made up of some basic elements: subject matter, character, theme and plot. The subject matter is usually part of the setting, in that it is the part of the environment or outer lives of the characters: i.e., the Harry Potter series is basically about young people in England, but within a magical society that is at war. The characters are obviously the people who the author has placed within the setting who will act out the story and drive the plot. The theme is the deeper “about”- and there is usually more than one theme, although there is one that is at the deepest level- it is what ‘end’ the whole story is pointing to, the message at the heart of the work: it drives every other element of the story and gives it its true meaning. Within the plot, there usually lies some kind of introduction (setting up the story for the reader), a build-up, a turning point, and a resolution. Like the themes, there can be a complexity of plotlines, there can even be comedic plotlines alongside tragic ones, but one main plotline, reflecting the main theme, must encompass these. Aristotle describes classical poetry (including any story) as having to have a “whole-ness”, in which no matter how complex, the different plots, characters, settings, themes, must fit together so that none can be lost without radically changing the whole direction. Any element that does not fit tightly is considered superfluous and thus a distraction. The ‘end’ of the story must remain the only end: for instance, in the Narnia series, the end is salvation, which, in turn, points to God as a final end. In The Lord of the Rings, the end is the sacrifice of the noble for the simple, the humility of the greater reaching down in reverence of the lesser in order to love, which in turn leads to the transformation and saving of the good in the world, for the sake of saving lives- and the end of salvation- and again this ‘train of ends’ clearly leads outside to the final end, which is God. I know that I am making a radical statement here, but I stand firmly on the belief that good and true classical literature must lead ultimately back to the Prime Mover, the inexhaustible richness of God.

There may be need here to clarify some concepts, in order to grasp the real problems with Harry Potter. First, Aristotle spoke of imitation, of representing; or presenting again: but imitating, representing what? Reality. A thorough reading of Aristotle, the Physics and the Metaphysics, and his other works of which the Poetics is a part, convinces us that the philosopher saw all of reality as leading toward one Prime Mover, one final end which is also its beginning. Aquinas and Augustine recognized God, the Trinity, in this Prime Mover of Aristotle. Therefore, in a classical and a Catholic sense, all literature must be a representation of reality, a reality that has its final end as the metaphysical, the transcendent, the supernatural. Why? Because the metaphysical realities give meaning and order to the physical, they are the true ordering principles, based in the actions and character of the Prime Mover. Everything flows from Him, and should flow back to Him, in virtue, meaning and order, if it is to be reality. All else is disorder, or a distortion of reality. What is properly tragic, comedic, and dramatic is seen within the framework of the virtues and actions of the metaphysical realities. All else, as I said, is disorder and thus malforms the person who is imbibing the story. I will state unequivocally that for a story to fulfill its true purpose, it must lead back to God in some way, whether explicitly or implicitly: for God IS reality, He encompasses all that is true, good and beautiful; and we are not meant for anything less.

Let us then clarify virtues, in the Aristotelian sense, as well as in the Catholic sense, because they are different. One could say that the Catholic understanding of the virtues (the means toward God, the means toward Order and not Disorder) has been built upon the Aristotelian foundation, correcting it and deepening it. Aristotle spoke of the virtuous man as a man balanced between extremes- a man who was ordered and because of his right balance and order, was thus happy. Happiness, for Aristotle, was not a feeling in the individual in response to some gain, but rather a result of living a balanced life. The Catholic understanding of virtue takes the ordered happiness and fecundates it with the love of God; that balance and order are essential for a man to be able to love well; but the idea that virtues lie in the actions and the will of a person, rather than the feelings or desires, remains a Catholic ideal.

Thus, in a story that follows classical and Christian lines, all the elements of it should lead toward a representation of events and characters that evolve toward order, virtue and love-but love outside oneself, love and happiness as ordered toward love and service of The Good, God; or, as in comedy, to show the foibles involved in less-than-perfect creatures striving towards order and their final end. The transcendent informing and driving the story is absolutely essential to the story being truly ‘classical’ or “Catholic”.

One must look at JK Rowling’s’ six (to be seven or eight) books as parts of a whole story. They cannot stand on their own, thus when discussing her writing, we will be discussing the series as a whole. They revolve around the maturation of a young orphan into a young man who must shoulder the responsibility of heroism and fight the most evil person his society has ever known. The fact that it is a magical, wizarding world is problematic in two ways: one, that young people might be attracted to the unsavory, evil, disordered and stupid world of witches, and ultimately Satanism and the occult. This problem is real and has been discussed ad nauseum. The second way it is problematic is in that can be said to be a representation of unreality and thus fails as a good or classical piece of literature. This is a charge leveled at Tolkein and CS Lewis, and any fantasy writer. However, as in these other, wonderful stories, JK Rowling’s’ magical world has a real-life order of its own: one of the real delights of her books is precisely that she can make the magical, imaginary society so tightly knit, so REAL. She is a bit like Tolkein in this respect. There is a consistency and an order about it that is quite masterful. So, in the end, the magical part of the book is by no means the most unreal: the true disorder of the plot lies somewhere between the main theme and the main plot, the marrow of the stories, and it is here that we find that the story is truly postmodern and not classical or Catholic at all, and that this postmodernism actually deforms the imbibing reader.

Postmodernism is a movement of thought and art, philosophy and religion that is basically anti-foundationalist: that is, it means that there is no real foundation to anything, that it is basically accepting the individual as an independent being in a flux of ‘truths’. Thus, ‘reality’ cannot really be discerned, nor, according to the postmodernist, is it desirable or ‘good’ even to try to discern it. But by what standards do we act, or decide what is good? How do we discern evil and fight it? In postmodernism, it seems that there is a strange boomerang effect back towards the individual: as in the US Supreme Court decisions pertaining to Casey vs. Planned Parenthood and Roe vs. Wade, it is the right of the individual to decide how the moral universe is ordered and how it relates to him (paraphrased). Society is to be a framework that simply guarantees the ability of the individual to build his own moral universe- I suppose, as long as he doesn’t step on the rights of others who can articulate their position. And postmodernism even goes farther: that there is no foundation for anything that a human being can discern as being the true foundation: it is assertion of the failure and demise of the classical and Catholic, even Enlightenment, notions of reason and natural law. Frightening? It should be. It is. Estragon and Vladimir have stopped waiting for Godot and are turning in upon themselves, imploding. It is Nietzsche on psychedelics.

How does Harry Potter fit in with postmodernism? As I said, it is somewhere between the deepest and main theme, and the main plot line that we find the virus of postmodern thought. For the main theme, and the end of the main plot, is about the power of love, love born of a mother’s sacrifice of herself to defend her baby son, to overcome evil; and that this evil cannot understand the simplicity of love, and the power of “an untarnished, pure and whole soul”, because by actions born in selfishness and hatred, this evil has torn itself into a complexity of parts.

Is it apparent here that this theme has a profundity and a depth, and it is this that is grabbing people’s attention. As I said, this story is not teenage flotsam. But if the theme sounds good, and profound, where is the danger? Isn’t it rather a good story, with many powerful lessons for a young population hungry for something of substance? If one is looking with eyes formed in a foundation of truth, one will project that foundation into the story: but if one is coming from no foundation, or confusion, as many kids are, they will read their own emotions, their own perceptions of the moral universe into the book. The story does not give a representation of reality, but instead acts as a vehicle by which the reader can project his own reality.

What makes the book postmodern is that there is no reference to truth, or a reality outside itself. In fact, the ‘real’ world, the world of non-magical Muggles, is seen as comic relief- they are the lesser, baser beings, whose unchangeable position is that of those who are fumbling toward obscurity and blindness. And the magical, higher world has no transcendent reality attached to it. It is truly non-foundational, truly immanentized, truly postmodern. It runs on the ‘traditional’ social paradigms of institutions like school, home, family and work, buses, death and achievement, but there is no direction toward an end outside itself. For the world of Harry Potter, there is no foundation except itself: and thus, each part of the whole is directed at self, at the gaining of a happiness based on the individual’s perception of the universe. Now it seems that JK Rowling, in presenting Harry as the hero, is also presenting his ideas of caring for friends and seeing kindness, charity and loyalty as ends, or goods; this is her own perception of the universe, but she does not seem to be able to make a bridge into the transcendent, thus truly providing the essential ‘metaphysical viewpoint’.

One can see this quite clearly when one compares Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings. References to a higher order, a transcendental order, a metaphysical reality, are rife, and drive Tolkein’s story, providing an end outside itself, thus grounding it in reality and making it classical and Catholic. Gandalf’s and Galadriel’s pointed remarks to Frodo that “he was meant to have the ring” and “we cannot decide the time in which we were born, but only what we must do with our time”; and Gandalf’s journey into death and then “sent back to fulfill my task” are essential pointers toward the real end of the story. These raise the question: “Who is the Being who ordains, and orders it so that the characters grow in goodness?”

In JK Rowling’s’ story, these questions are never raised. The ends are circular: to the self, the circle of essential others to the self: friends, family, society- but not outward to the Prime Mover. Therefore, the reader is formed unwittingly into a very noble-seeming world of the self- a truly postmodern project. One can begin to see the malformation of characters even within the story itself, even as the author is trying to present Harry and his friends and the great Dumbledore as the virtuous: there are grotesque people within the world, in such horrifying conditions, and yet they are accepted and used as comic relief. There are the ghosts, who haunt the castle and are in a perpetual state of limbo, even retaining the wounds that caused their death (Nearly Headless Nick); and the pitiful Moaning Myrtle, who lives in the sewage pipes of the school. The odd thing is that the characters, who are supposedly the virtuous, seem unconcerned about these lost souls, and there is no transcendental explanation or resolution for their plight. It is as if they are no longer people and so don’t really matter. This is a characteristic of the postmodern, this completely immanent indifference to those outside our immediate understanding, like the unknown, inarticulate child in the womb. All of this is characteristic of the world that has shut out the transcendent, and no longer seeks judgment on its actions from a higher world, from God. This false teleology is what will malform the reader, precisely because stories are meant to teach at the deepest levels, and Harry Potter is a powerful teacher of postmodernism.

Part Five: Exiles and the Spirit of Elias

I am a Third Culture Kid. This was a term coined for those of us who have lived in different countries as children; those of us who don’t belong wholly to any culture: our parents often have a home, or ‘first culture’ and we have lived in another country or countries as ‘second cultures’. Thus, in the end, we live between cultures, we live in the limbo of the Third Culture: a culture of movement, of fluidity of friends and environments, religion and language, changing taboos and chameleon social expectations.

The term, “Third Culture Kid” is a kind version of a truer term: exile. We are foreigners both abroad and at ‘home’, and often our own parents cannot understand the exile we feel when they are finally, with a sigh of some relief, settling back into their home culture life. The exile for the child is hammered home also in the moves; like a political exile, in an international move, you lose everything: everything. The plates you’ve eaten dinner on, the furniture, the pets, the climate, everything. Often I think you also fall into grave danger of losing any religion, because for all of us, but especially for children, the acquisition and deepening of faith is deeply connected to the physical environment and culture in which it is first received.

I have, all my life, felt the grief, the deep and unnamed sorrow of the exile. I have felt like I lived in a desert which was only peopled by the things and memories I could somehow smuggle out of the places I’d left. I have also felt guilty for this sorrow, because after all, I was privileged enough to see so many good things, from the lapis-laden ruins of Khandahar to the salt-bleached temples of Delphi and Corinth. I played happily all day in the crystalline waters around the islands of Greece and camped across Europe. No, I would not trade those things. But since my return to my parents’ home culture, I have been in exile. And as a young adult, I understood that I was also an exile even in my happiness, a foreigner in an ancient Muslim culture and a Greek Orthodox culture. No matter my love for these places, I was an exile.

Now, I have found home. It is the Catholic Church: precisely because She shares two things with me that are essential parts of me: She is international, and She is an Exile; but primarily because She has as Her Head the Extremely Humble, the Willing Exile, Christ in the Eucharist.

As we have been talking about the possibility of the Holy Orthodox and the Catholic Church uniting, we discussed the two basic differences which, in my theorizing, are the principal differences. One was the nature of the Church, the nature of St. Peter himself and the role he was given: the other is the mode of Christian perfection for the believer. And it is here where I think there is hope of any unity.

The Orthodox see the Christian life as a pursuit of perfection, as the Catholic does. But there is a sense in the Orthodox understanding of it , as being a totally otherworldly, spiritual pursuit, one that is helped by the Church. There is, in my understanding, a sense of the necessity of withdrawal from the world, as epitomized in the monks of Mt. Athos. I believe, imbedded in this, is the sense of being an exile, and the hope of return, the return within oneself to find the Kingdom of Heaven. I think, from my research, that the Orthodox impression of the Catholic is that we do not have enough of the sense of withdrawal from the world, that we are trying to establish some kind of Kingdom of Heaven that is visible rather than purely spiritual, and thus we have compromised with the evils of the world. They see us, I think, as losing the identity of the Christian exile.

Herein, I think, lies the key to unity: for as a follower of Christ, we are by His example, exiles. It is the nature of a Christian. If one is a Christian, one is an exile yearning for heaven, yearning for the fullness of the Beatific Vision: but I think that there is also a sense of urgency to evangelize: to seek and to save the lost. This is where I think that Orthodoxy fails. Our Lord came, in the physical, to seek and to save the lost. He sat with sinners, and yet he remained an exile, rejected by those who should have been His own. He was crucified outside of His own House, by His own priests. And yet He told His disciples to go out to every nation, and to take nothing with them, to live as exiles, in detachment, in order to seek others to save them.

As we know from modern life, a person’s environment and upbringing affect how they can receive the Gospel. It has become harder and harder to reach people, immersed in such a culture as we have now, mainly in the West, but this culture of death is spreading over the globe. And there are other modes of the death culture in the East, the communism and atheism, the devil worship and the worship of the nothing. Therefore, the idea of the Catholic, to try and transform culture to become a fertile ground for giving others the Gospel, is a sound one. But the Orthodox warning that there is a danger in this of forgetting one’s nature as an exile is a warning that we should look at carefully, especially in the Church after the sixties and Vatican II.

Our meeting ground with the Orthodox is in the desert of the exile. It is in the hope and spirit of Elias, of John the Baptist, “a voice crying in the wilderness”. It is in persecution and death in the service of love, of Him who is love, that all who truly seek Christ will be able to see His Body. Let me elaborate on this by quoting extensively from Fr. Romano Guardini’s book, The Lord:

And Elias? It is not too much to call him the mightiest of the prophets. Not as a speaker; there is no record of exalted or path-blazing words from his lips. He left no book; hardly a sentence that is in itself anything out of the ordinary. Nor did he have any remarkable visions or revelations. Yet no other prophet looms as huge against the bottomless depths of divine mystery as Elias; nowhere in the whole history of prophecy do we find an existence of such huge proportions. However, it is encrysted in the immediacy of the moment, and that moment is terrible.

It is the reign of King Achab, a man who so hated God, that down the centuries it was said that because of him God’s wrath still hung over the people of Israel. There he stands in the Books of Kinds, the prototype of rebellion, with him his wife Jezebel, who was even more hardened in wickedness that he. It was she who erected everywhere the altars of Baal and taught her people the worship of idols; she who annihilated the priests of the Lord. For years Elias had to hide from her wrath. During Achab’s reign darkness covered the land, the darkness of hell. It was against this dark the Elias had been sent. He never was able to proclaim the tidings of the coming kingdom; he had to fight to the end against a wall of blackness, hardened disbelief; against the violence, blasphemy and bloodthirstiness that stalked through the land, Elias’ life is one titantic struggle against the powers of evil. The spirit of the Lord seethes in him, lifting him high above the human plane, spanning his strength far beyond the human breakingpoint. Once the tension relaxes, he sinks to the desert sand like a spent animal and begs for death. But again the angel touches him and strengthened by divine refreshment, he wander forty days to Horeb, the holy mountain. Thus he fights the terrible fight to the finish, relentlessly breaking the power of the idols, until at the given hour, the fiery chariot swings him off and bears him to the unknown.

The description of the kingdom of Achab and his satanic queen should sound eerily familiar to us, a kingdom that Pope John Paul II named, “The Culture of Death”. And like Elias, the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, the Church Militant, must fight this to the end. We will meet in the desert; we will finally meet as exiles, in the spirit of Elias. We are waiting for the spirit of Elias: for the return of the Orthodox and the return of the believers in Christ who are too at home in their ‘first cultures’- mainly the Protestants- which will occur in the desert of exile, in the spirit of Elias, in anticipation of the Return of the King.

Holy Orthodoxy and Catholicism: Part Four

In pondering the question of the recent Orthodox resistance to Catholic bishops in their own territories, we come once again across a thorny field, thick with complicated disagreements-which have only festered over time. There is an interesting dichotomy of thinking in the actions of the Orthodox, which, I think, reflects some of the confusion inherent in the theology. This is seen in a theology about the nature of the Church that percieves Her to be largely other-worldly; and yet the fruit of the Orthodox churches is often a nationalism that seems incongrous with the theology of "catholic(universal) and other-worldly".

As was discussed, the Church that Christ founded is a reflection-or better yet, a continuation of His Presence in the world. Therefore the Church must have a two-fold nature, the meshed nature of spirit and flesh. It must be "in the world but not of it." The Orthodox have criticized the Christian West- and they tend to see Catholicism and Protestantism as cut from the same cloth-for its apparent compromise with the world to the point of being corrupted fundamentally. This is a serious accusation and shows clearly that traditional Orthodox thought regarding the Western Christians is that Catholics and Protestants alike are outside the True Church of Christ. As was mentioned in Part One, when one looks at the seriousness of these accusations, imbedded so deeply for centuries in the relations between Orthodox and Catholic, one sees that the final unity of Orthodox and Catholic is a work of Our Lord. This is not to give up, but as St. Augustine said, "Pray as if everything depends on God(it does), but work as if everything depends upon you." I think the work here for us is prayer.

It can be asked here, "Is the Christian West all from the same cloth? Has the Catholic Church become worldly so that it is not the true Church of Christ? First of all, the Christian West is most certainly not cut from the same cloth. The core of Catholic theology and understanding of the word "church" alone is so different from Protestant thinking as to constitute different religions. The Church as purveyor of the salvific sacraments is fundamentally lost in much of Protestant thinking; and the real point we are getting to, the nature of the true Church of Christ and Her relationship to the world-being in the world but not of it- is a point of basic disagreement between Protestants and Catholics- and between Orthodox and Catholics. It is my basic understanding that the Protestants see the Church not as a visible institution at all- it is a spiritual network of believers, a mystical body, that can be manifested in the home just as well as in a building with others. The Catholics see in the Church the two-fold nature of the Body of Christ, that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of the Church, yet through Her members, her continuation of the Holy Sacrifice, the Sacraments, and Her teaching and tradition, the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation in a mystical and real way. The Orthodox, much like the Protestants, see the interconnection of believers as primarily a mystical or other-worldly reality, yet there is a connection to the flesh nature of man through the use of Tradition, Sacraments, hierarchy, etc.

What is the true nature of Christ's Church? I have made the argument that if the Church is the continuation of Christ's Prescence and His mission, it must be as He was; that is, the Church must be an incarnate Presence of the Spirit of Christ and come to save the sinners. The Church, like Christ, must go into the world and transform it, one person at a time. Therefore, the argument made by the Orthodox that the Catholic Church has compromised with the world may be flipped on its head. One could say instead: Has the Catholic Church, founded on St. Peter the Rock, stumbled through on Her mission, Christ's mission, to be in the world but not of it? Have her members utterly failed and compromised? The answers to both questions could be yes. Of course corruption and compromise have taken hold in the ranks and history of the Catholic Church. But has the fundamental nature of the Catholic Church been corrupted? This would, of course, mean that it would not be Christ's Church.

For the Orthodox, to answer that question we would have to go back to the first ten or eleven centuries of Christianity, and say that the Catholic Church, indeed the Bishop of Rome (Pope) went into schism from Christ's Church by asserting authority in two places that it could not. The real issue is over the right to decide the truth. Was there one bishop with the right to decide the truth without recourse or full agreement with the other bishops? Was the Bishop of Rome true successor to St. Peter or not? Indeed, is the argument also about the nature of St. Peter the Apostle's authority or not? Is there an authority incarnated still in the person of St. Peter (his successor)?

If indeed, it is true that St. Peter's successor was meant to be The Rock, and the term "rock" not just referring to his confession of faith; but rather that confession of faith marking Peter as the rock in his person and his successors after him, if this is true, then the bishops who are in union with St. Peter are the true and visible hierarchy of the True Church.

Who shall decide? Scripture scholars? Human interpretation of Scripture is suspicious at best; what is rationalized in interpretation is belief already present. St. Paul said, "Our faith is won not by argument..." Argument and dialogue have their place, but they are not the real catalysts for "having ears to hear and eyes to see" truth. The marks of the Church of Christ are these: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Christ's Body can be wounded but not separated from itself by heresy: it must be One. It must be Holy, that is, not "of the world"- fundamentally, nonwithstanding human weakness and sin- the Church must possess a purity and separateness for God- this can be most easily discerned in Her traditions and teachings, in the continuity and steadfast loyalty to the commands of Christ and Holy Scripture. It must be Catholic, universal-not based primarily in nationality or ethnicity, for in Christ there is "no Jew or Greek". Finally, it must be Apostolic- that is, the bishops of the Church descending by ordination and confirmation in an unbroken line from the Apostles- and unmarred by the acceptance of heresy.

But how is this to be when it must be carried out by sinners? The Apostles, especially St. Peter, must have felt this the weight of this insecurity tremendously: and they failed, as long as they tried to think in worldly terms. The people of the Church fail inasmuch as they think in worldly terms. Yet evidences of failure because of wrong-thinking about the Kingdom does not mean that the Church is no longer the Church. St. Peter still became St. Peter even though he failed. The Church remains the Church because of God's will, not because of human success and failure.

In the holy grief of love, we must pray. Not because the individuals of Orthodox and Catholic stamp have no guilt, no, there has been much hurt in the name of Christ. Nonetheless, we must pray, for a schism is a scandal and the world has too much scandal of its own. We must be reaching out, and now more and more, as the world darkens and shrinks at the same time, we need the unity once more.

Upon the election of Benedict XVI, there was a very profound and quiet statement made to the world. Perhaps it was missed by many, but I think not to the Orthodox bishops of the world. It was a symbolic statement that caused some confusion and criticism in Catholic circles, but was rather quickly forgotten. Perhaps it would have been seen as yet another nod to democratic and egalitarian thinking, but that it came from a man who is pointedly not a modernist nor prone to such facile thinking as to 'make the Church more democratic'. What it means for the future, I cannot tell. But it is interesting, in light of the new Pope's more clear declarations on his commitment to healing schisms and bringing Christians back into Christ's fold. What was this quiet statement?

If one looks at the coat of arms chosen personally by the new Pope, one will see a very interesting change of protocol and heraldic tradition. Instead of the triple tiara crowning the coat of arms, Benedict XVI chose a bishop's miter. Another question to ponder: but the real work is prayer.

Holy Orthodoxy and Catholicism: Part Three: "The Church"

The Tower of Babel lives on, but it has been planted too in the midst of those who wish to follow Our Lord, and yet cannot communicate with other followers who come from different traditions. Words like "Communion", " priesthood of believers" and the like are actually stumbling blocks now, to those of us who sincerely seek the truth and each other in Christ. They are obstacles because of the hundreds of years of separate history, history being the fertile soil in which language grows and changes, soil in which the truth sometimes is buried.

Obviously, Holy Scripture becomes a focal point for differing interpretations over the years, and thus a separate tradition of theology grows, out of which comes the visible traditions of liturgical and communal practice. Just who interprets Scripture for the rest, thus sounding out the meaning of these important words for the rest, becomes of paramount importance. Only Our Lord's true "Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" could interpret Scripture. But then here I am thinking like a Westerner and not like an Orthodox....so let's discuss one of these stumbling blocks between Catholics and Orthodox believers: the word "church". Out of this confusion comes the hydra-headed disagreements about interpretation of Holy Scripture, the role of believers, and the means of salvation, among others. The list is endless; because how one sees the Church is how one sees Christ. There is no difference.

Christ is the Logos, the Word of God made flesh. The Incarnation is a physical sign, a meeting place for God and man, like the place between the fires, in Abraham's time, through which the lamb was passed in the making of a covenant. The Church which Christ established was to be a visible and mystical continuation of that Incarnation, the Way through which all who looked for Christ would find Him and be saved; for we are not spirit only, but a conglomeration of spirit and flesh; and in our meshed nature, we need both the Flesh and Blood of God and His Spirit to save our flesh and spirit. Our Lord wished to establish a Church, His Church, and He prayed that it would be one, a sign of the unity of the Godhead. The Church, in a very real and mystical way, both flesh and spirit, was to become Him, to be His Body. It is said that at the time that the Church, His Body, has matured in time as He did, then the world would end. What this means is hard to understand before it happens; but surely the drawing of all true believers in the Lord, those who desire Him but do not yet know Him and those who know Him but yet imperfectly; and finally those among us who are most like Him, His saints- surely these must come together as part of the process of maturing.

The Catholic and Orthodox have a similarity here, in that each sees the necessity of a True Church of Christ, a Body which is both visible and mystical, and has members performing different tasks; also there is a similarity in the concept of the necessity of unity. However, the different understandings of what the Church is and how It was meant to develop and function is very different. And this is not meant simply in hierarchical or political matters; this difference strikes at the very elements of the Church and how they relate to the whole.

I am not an expert on Holy Orthodoxy, but I am a devout Catholic who has a love for the Orthodox: I lived as a child in Greece, and so lived with the Orthodox there; and I lived in Russia for a time and studied the history and culture of that country with great interest. I have always had a love of the Orthodox liturgies and the mysticism that literally pours out of the church walls and the processions, especially at Easter. I sensed, both as a child and as an adult, the visible and powerful signs pointing to the Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist as well as in every believer, every priest. This is not to say that all Orthodox believers are saints- it is just that there is such tangible evidence that each person coming devoutly to an Orthodox church is focused on the otherworld, that world of love and saints and holiness. There is a lack of attention on the present world in the posture, the clothes, the facial expressions of the devout Orthodox. I remember two events in Russia, and one in Greece which have stayed with me and fostered my admiration for the Orthodox Faith. The first was the sight of a man dressed in a black habit, laying on the ground in the dust in front of a little church just outside Moscow. He was laying in front of the church like a man lays in front of a bishop as he is ordained a priest, his arms stretched out on the ground like a man on a cross. He was covered in dust, and to this day I think of the dust and equate it with sin, and guess he was a penitent. The other memory from Russia is when I was out in the countryside, near a small village. I walked over the bridge towards the distinctive onion domes and as I drew closer, I heard singing. I stopped in my tracks and was simply transported; the very scene around me gathered a glow into itself, every color and sound was drawn into that glory. It was the church choir practicing. In Greece, when I was a child of eight or nine, I traveled with my parents to the edge of Mt. Athos. I waved goodbye to my father and watched him ascend the mountain, to where the monasteries were perched on separate peaks. It was like he was dying and going to heaven, and we were left to look after him in hopes of meeting him there someday. I always think of the monks of Mt. Athos, as sinful men who were halfway to heaven.

These are cursory memories, surface impressions only of a Faith which I did not and do not understand very well. However, I believe it is very worth the attempt- for all of us- because we cannot forget the Orthodox as they cannot forget about us. Surely Our Lord would have wished us to work towards love and understanding, as a sign to the world of our maturing. However, the two obstacles I think are paramount are that of "Church" and the purpose and mode of the Christian life.

My memories, therefore, served to interest me in love and admiration for a Faith which sees the Church as Itself, and Itself as the Church. The Catholic Faith claims the same, so we have a problem. Why aren't they both the Church, two different arms of the same body? They cannot be, because the true Body of Christ can be wounded but never completely divided, and His Body cannot have two heads, or twenty, for that matter. Either the Catholic understanding of the Church is correct fundamentally, or the Orthodox understanding is correct fundamentally. They cannot both claim to be the Truth and yet anathematize the other. A man cannot bite his own face.

The Holy Orthodox see the Church as fundamentally a mystically united body of churches, or believers. The believer is the Church and the Church is the believers. The Church is seen from the inside out, that is, from the Spirit that holds Her members as one Body, rather than from the outside in- that is, from the evidences of hierarchy and teaching. As I mentioned before, in one of the previous parts of this series, the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches were united until the early part of the second millennium. The original Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome were the centerpoints of the Body of Christ. To the Catholic, the Patriarchate of Rome was given primacy indirectly by Our Lord, through the presence and martyrdom of St. Peter. Therefore, the Bishop of Rome was Petrus in persona and carried all the authority which Christ gave to St. Peter: the keys of the Kingdom, the command to "feed My sheep"- thus placing St. Peter's ecclesial descendents in authority over the rest. This authority, to the Catholic, has meant temporal ecclesial authority in matters of hierarchy and governance, as well as the spiritual authority to speak solemnly on matters of faith and morals ex cathedra.
The Church became a visible structure centered on the Bishopric of Rome; the bishops of the world are seen as equal in a spiritual sense, yet the Pope is "First Among Equals". I always imagine the Pope as the father in a family, who always serves the others in love and humility, yet must at times, for the sake of clarity, comfort, and unity, preserve the family with the final decision on certain matters.

The Orthodox bishops traditionally saw the Bishop of Rome as "First Among Equals" but only in the sense of love of St. Peter, in the honoring of the First of the Apostles. Therefore the Bishop of Rome is granted honor and respect but not deference in doctrinal or temporal matters. They saw the Patriarchates as equal, indeed they see each Orthodox church as possessing a certain independence of the others. How, indeed, was the teachings, the liturgy, the doctrines, to remain intact? Does this not make the Orthodox a bit like the nice-sounding "World Council of Churches", where there is no real agreement on fundamental doctrines? The Orthodox understand their faith as kept together by the Spirit of God, much like the Catholic understanding of the Holy Spirit's guiding of the Church. However, the Orthodox see the Spirit of God, not as a guide of the Church, but as Her entire existence. The Orthodox see the Catholic understanding of a temporal hierarchy with an authoritative, visible Peter, as a sellout to "the way things work in the world". In the split of 1054 AD, one of the reasons was the perceived encroachment of a temporal figure from Rome, appointing Western bishops to Eastern provinces. It reminds one of the current issue between the Russian Patriarch and Rome, that of Catholic dioceses in lands where the Orthodox churches have traditionally served the population. It is not so much a battle over territory, as it is a battle over which conception of the Church is the true one. From the Orthodox point of view, if the Bishop of Rome understood the Orthodox Patriarch of Russia to be his brother in equality, and each church in the territory as the visible sign of the Spirit of God present in all the believers, then why is he sending Catholic bishops to Russia?

As this question can be pondered for more than a few minutes, I will continue in Part Four.

Can Holy Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism Unite? Part Two: History and the Search for the Fault Lines

Pentecost: and the fire spread outwards, to the nations of the earth, as Our Lord commanded. The Holy Orthodox understanding is that originally there were the Churches of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch, Rome and Alexandria, each founded by one of the Apostles. St. Peter founded the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and then Rome. He was martyred in Rome. Other Patriarchates followed, spreading the Gospel into Greece, Russia, and what is now the Middle East. It is very important to understand here that the Holy Orthodox teaching is that the Churches were self-governing, in the sense that they were not subject to any other Church, only to the Seven Ecumenical Councils (in the first centuries of Christianity). This is important in order to understand Holy Orthodoxy today: there remains a kind of independence between the Patriarchates, and so it is a serious question as to just who speaks for the whole. There does not seem to be a doctrine of “First Among Equals” as we have well defined in the Roman Catholic Tradition. If a theory may be posited, it may be that the Holy Orthodox Tradition, in the teachings and lives of the Holy Saints and the teaching preserved in the liturgy and the Holy Scriptures IS the center and unifying force of the Holy Orthodox Church- although the Russian Patriarchate has traditionally been understood as the strongest and most central.

In the history of the Church of Christ, as set out by the Holy Orthodox, the Church of Rome left the unity of the other Patriarchates in 1054 AD. By this time, either the barbarians from the North of Europe or the Muslim heresy had destroyed the Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. Constantinople had been under siege. The great Hagia Sophia was destined to become an empty shell. There had been weakening of these Patriarchates by the separations in the 5^th and 6^th centuries, by groups such as the Syrian Orthodox Church. But the torrent of Muslims and barbarians in the major, original Patriarchates left a physical fault line between the last remaining of the original Churches, the Patriarchate of Rome, and the other, newer Patriarchates of the East. Constantinople fell in the 15th century, but the differences in language and historical developments had already produced a pulling in the fabric of unity, which would fully unravel by the time, in the early years of the 11th century, the legate of the Pope in Rome laid the Bull of Excommunication in front of the Eastern Patriarch , just as he was getting ready to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There are other great wounds in the unity of the Body which we will explore further.

What happened to culminate in the 1054 AD definitive split? The true story may never be known until Christ Himself tells it; yet it is said that the claims of the Bishop of Rome to “First Among Equals”; or the Filioque dispute drove the Orthodox Patriarchates and the Patriarchate of Rome apart; it is also said, more sensationally, that there was an agreement made on both these points, yet due to a deception on the part of some bishops, the Orthodox faithful never understood this agreement and so over time, grew away from both the West and Rome. The Orthodox contend that Rome left the other Churches; but this seems hard to understand since none of the other original Patriarchates was in existence at that time, besides the waning Patriarchate of Constantinople. It may be closer to the truth that Rome, because it was also the seat of the Roman Empire, and had come to the rescue of the other Patriarchates (although futile, at the end), asserted its primacy as the Seat of St. Peter and the last remaining Patriarchate established in person by an Apostle. The reason for this assertion of primacy may be the perceived need of an authority to settle doctrinal disputes and to defend against heresies- and that the other Patriarchates were suspicious, in part, because the Bishop of Rome was too closely identified with the worldly power of the Emperor of Rome. Whatever the truth, it seems apparent that there was a final split in 1054 AD and the two branches of Christianity began to each look upon the other as “the separated”.

Many Westerners think that the major points of contention are the subtle but essential differences on the Filioque doctrine and the Succession of St. Peter as a “First Among Equals”. Perhaps these are important, but in the end, they are perhaps not quite at the root. Closer to the root of the separation has to do with the conception of “Church”- one of the same differences that Catholics have with Protestants, although the Orthodox and Protestants certainly do not have the same conceptions. The other fundamental difference has to do with the raison d’etre of the Christian life. East and West agree on Whom the Christian life is founded upon, but as I will explain, the Holy Orthodox claim a tremendous gulf in this area, and accuse the Catholic Church as being founded on worldliness rather than Christ; and thus, the life of the Catholic faithful is also corrupted by worldliness. The Orthodox see Protestantism as a logical outgrowth of this worldliness, “A Heresy the Daughter of a Heresy”. These two fundamental points, the conception of “Church” and the asserted corruption of the Christian life of the individual in the West, are the fault lines. In Part Three, we will discuss these two points.

Extreme Humility 

Holy Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism Unite: Part One

Can there be unity between Holy Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism?

Let this question stand for a minute, think about it. Think of the earth moving far beneath the surface, giant plates scraping one another; for this is the current relationship between the two oldest of the Christian Confessions. It is this fault line which has petrified into hardness and a millennia of separate development- the second wounding of the Body of Our Lord, after the wounding of His own people who rejected and crucified Him. He prayed, “Let them, Father, be one as We are One…” But yet, since the later centuries of the first Christian millennium, we have been separated.

Then, think- imagine these two coming together again. A great council, perhaps the Council of Kiev. The Pope and the Patriarchs come together and embrace: and it means something, it is an embrace of Oneness. It is real. What a movement of the earth! The plates fuse, the great fault line melds together and cannot be discerned. It is a reversal of nature, you say. It cannot be done; it goes against what we know as reasonable, it flies in the face of history, which declares that "the center cannot hold"- that there is a centrifugal force that dismantles any hope of re-unfiying, once the unity has been lost.

The answer: for the fault line to be melded, it requires melted stone. It requires the fire from the center of the earth to billow forth, melting the deep rock in its path, a fountain of fire. It is beyond the hope of humans: it is beyond our weak capacity for love.

The Lord came up the last crest of the hill leading to the gate of the small city. The sandy road was worn down in rivulets from the rains and the wheels of the working men. Wiping His brow in the sun, He stopped and heard the moaning of the East, the mourners following a plain coffin. A small figure moved slowly just behind, her head below her shoulders and her miniature white hands clutched at her heart. He saw inside her heart, and His heart was moved. Putting a hand on the coffin passing by, He quietly asked the bearers to stop. There was a heavy silence and people stared at this break in custom. Asking the men to open the coffin, He prayed and waited. The young man in the open box on the ground fluttered his eyelids and the rush of people came around the edges. The widow looked with love at the figure disappearing through the empty city gate.

The Lord whose throne is the cosmos, moved nature, remolded a soul and body, because of what He saw in the heart of a widow. He did not thwart nature, He supernaturalized it. What was in her heart? Perhaps inconsolable sadness at the suffering of her son, and the separation from him. She was a humble figure, and this outward appearance must have been true to the inside of her heart, for a proud person would have repelled Him, as it happened many other times. It seems it was her love, her grieving love. Not her worthiness or eruditeness; she was not of words; not by her compromises or dialogue; she was too full of grief to theologize or rationalize.

Is it this that will meld the fault line in the Body of Christ? True grief and helplessness which awakens the love and help from the Heart of Christ?

In reading about Pope Benedict’s actions and statements since he was elected Holy Roman Pontiff, it seems that he has two deeply-felt goals: to reawaken the Christian roots of Europe, and to unify the Body of Christ. It seems also that the Holy Orthodox Patriarchs are more interested in dealing with Benedict than with John Paul II. There is a very interesting correspondence in the compendium of letters and talks, Called to Communion, by the Pope, between then Cardinal Ratzinger and a high-level Orthodox prelate. It elucidates the beginnings of this Pope’s attempts to heal the fault line. Why would this be important? It may seem a facile question to some, but to others, used to the reality, it may seem pertinent. Look at it, think about it. It would mean the sealing of a great wound, and a great strengthening of the Body, greatest since Pentecost: it is a Great Sign precisely because it goes against all expectation. And it can only be done by the Lord.

To gain a historical and realistic understanding of the enormity of this unity, one must at the history, the structure(which reflects the theology) and the spirituality of Holy Orthodoxy and thus it becomes apparent that the healing of the Body of Christ will come from the Lord, it seems, in a spectacular way, like the fire from the earth, like the raising of the son of the Widow of Nain.

In the next installment will be covered the history of the two Churches, and we will look at Orthodoxy more closely in order to hopefully gain more understanding of the gravity of the problem, and why it requires true grief: and prayer from the members of the Body of Christ.