IEP and SEP have entries on Aristotle's biology

SEP (by James Lennox)
IEP

John Rao, Is the Pope Greek?

a history of Greek influences on the Church of Rome

Check out his Catholic Social Thought: Europe (An entry for Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press), to be published, 2006)

Dr. Chojnowski's articles

someone's posting them at this blog

Dr. Dennis McInerny's books

are available through Fraternity Publications

The Philosophy of Nature
Philosophical Psychology
A Course in Thomistic Ethics
Metaphysics
Natural Theology
Being Logical

Medieval Latin and Latin paleography

Frank Mantello

Medieval Institute Summer 2006

Bischoff, Bernhard, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1990)

· ---, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (1994)

· Boyle, Leonard E., Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (1984) – updated online here.

Bryn Mawr CR Review of Bischoff
Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography
Latin Paleography (Cambridge)

Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography

Paleography and Codicology Bibliography


wiki
Latin Paleography Network
Abbreviationes
Exercises in Latin Paleography
Paleographic Fonts
Medieval Latin Paleography
Latin Paleography
Codicology 2007

Courses
Hist 509

Some Online Resources (links last checked 30 Jan. 06)

· Arrighi, Ludovico degli, La Operina (1522): introduction to Italic script.

· Cappelli, Adriano, Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (Leipzig, 1928): scanned images of the German translation.

· Cours de paléographie: mostly (very) late medieval and early modern in scope.

· Dave Postle’s Palaeography Tutorial: a great interactive site.

· Digital Scriptorium

· Ductus: demo version of commercial palaeography software.

· English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course: hosted by the Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service.

· Exercises in Latin Palaeography: English version of Italian web-site.

· Introduction to Palaeography and Bibliography: homepage for a course at Lancaster University, UK. [dead link!]

· Lector - Transkription von mittelalterlichen Quellentexten computergestützt üben: pdf file.

· Lindsay, W. M., Notae Latinae (Cambridge, 1915): scanned images can be downloaded in various formats, inc. pdf.

· Manuscript Studies: Medieval and Early Modern: homepage for a course at University of Alberta, Canada.

· Medieval Writing: excellent links section as well as palaeography exercises.

· Palaeography: Reading Old Handwriting 1500 – 1800: A practical online tutorial from the National Archives, UK.

· Paläographisches Lesetraining für lateinische Schriften des 5. – 20. Jahrhunderts: German site by Thomas Frenz, Universität Passau.

· Paléographie & manuscrits en ligne: useful collection of links.

· ScottishHandwriting.com: Early modern palaeography based on MSS from Scotland.

· Steffens, Franz, Paléographie latine (Paris, 1910): pdf files of French translation of his Lateinische Paläographie.

· Vocabulaire codicologique: Explanations of terms used in codicology.

Stanford Phil 314
Latin 260
RBS Course M-40
University of Verona
Indiana Hist H715
UNC course reserve

Byzantine Paleography
Greek and Byzantine Paleography Links

On the Faith-Reason Synthesis

On the Faith-Reason Synthesis

"A Precious Patrimony for Western Civilization"

VATICAN CITY, JAN. 28, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today before reciting the midday Angelus with several thousand people gathered in St. Peter's Square.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

The liturgical calendar remembers today St. Thomas Aquinas, great doctor of the Church. With his charism of philosopher and theologian, he offers a valid model of harmony between reason and faith, dimensions of the human spirit, which are fully realized when they meet and dialogue.

According to the thought of St. Thomas, human reason, to say it as such, "breathes," that is, it moves on a wide, open horizon in which it can experience the best of itself. Nonetheless, when man limits himself to think only of material and experimental objects, he closes himself to the questions of life, about himself and about God, impoverishing himself.

The relationship between faith and reason is a serious challenge for the present prevailing culture in the Western world, and it is precisely for this reason that our beloved John Paul II wrote an encyclical, which was entitled precisely "Fides et Ratio" -- "Faith and Reason." I also took up this argument recently, in the address to the University of Regensburg.

In reality, the modern development of the sciences brings countless positive effects, which must always be acknowledged. At the same time, however, it must be admitted that the tendency to consider true only that which can be experienced constitutes a limitation for human reason and produces a terrible schizophrenia, evident to all, because of which rationalism and materialism, and hypertechnology and unbridled instincts, coexist.

It is urgent, therefore, to rediscover in a new way human rationality open to the light of the divine "Logos" and to its perfect revelation that is Jesus Christ, Son of God made man. When Christian faith is authentic it does not mortify freedom or human reason; then, why should faith and reason be afraid of one another, if on meeting one another and dialoguing they can express themselves in the best way?

Faith implies reason and perfects it, and reason, illuminated by faith, finds the strength to rise to knowledge of God and of spiritual realities. Human reason loses nothing when it is open to the contents of faith; what is more, the latter calls for its free and conscious adherence.

With an amply extended wisdom, St. Thomas Aquinas established a prolific confrontation with the Arabic and Jewish thought of his time, in such a way that he is considered as an always-present teacher of dialogue with other cultures and religious. He knew to introduce this Christian synthesis between reason and faith that represents a precious patrimony for Western civilization, to which recourse can be taken also today to dialogue effectively with the great cultural and religious traditions of the East and South of the world.

Let us pray so that Christians, especially those in the academic and cultural realm, are more able to express the reasonable character of their faith and to witness to it with a dialogue inspired by love. We ask this gift of our Lord through the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas, and above all Mary, Seat of Wisdom.

[After praying the Angelus, the Pope made an appeal for peace in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip]

In recent days, violence has again bloodied Lebanon. It is unacceptable that this path is undertaken to defend one's political reasons. I feel immense sadness for this beloved population. I know that many Lebanese feel the temptation to abandon all hope and feel themselves disoriented by all that is happening.

I make mine the firm words pronounced by His Beatitude Cardinal Nasrallah Pierre Sfeir to denounce these fratricidal confrontations. Together with him and the other religious leaders, I invoke the help of God so that all Lebanese without distinction might be able and willing to work together to make of their homeland an authentic common home, surmounting those egoistic attitudes that prevent them from being truly dedicated to their country. (cf. "A Hope for Lebanon," 94, apostolic exhortation of Pope John Paul II). To the Christians of Lebanon, I repeat my exhortation to be promoters of a genuine dialogue between the different communities, and I invoke over all the protection of Our Lady of Lebanon.

I also desire, that violence in the Gaza Strip end as soon as possible. I wish to express my spiritual closeness to the entire population and assure them of my prayers so that the will might prevail in all to work together for the common good, undertaking peaceful paths to overcome differences and tensions.

[Translation by ZENIT]

[After praying the Angelus, the Holy Father greeted pilgrims in six languages. In English, he said:]

To all the English-speaking visitors and pilgrims here today, I extend affectionate greetings. In particular I welcome the boys from St. Philip's School in London and their teachers. Your patron saint is known as the Apostle of Rome -- let his gentleness and love for Christ be an inspiration to you. Upon all who are here today, and upon your families and loved ones at home, I invoke God’s abundant blessings.

© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Kenneth Minogue, How Civilizations Fall

How civilizations fall
by Kenneth Minogue

How do civilizations fall? Islamic thinkers had an image for it. Consider a civilization based upon a court in a thriving city— Baghdad, for example. Arts and the intellect flourish. But over several generations, as the great Islamic philosopher of the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun put it, the civilized become decadent with luxury. They lose their sharpness and think only of the good and the beautiful. And then some tribe of fierce Bedouin, smelling out weakness, come thundering in from the desert and storm the city. As barbarians, they do not understand the usages of civilization. They stable their horses in the libraries and use sculptures as doorstops, pictures for target practice. Given a pillow, Ibn Khaldun tells us contemptuously, they suppose it to be a bundle of rags. In time, however, the power of a superior culture is felt, and these people adopt and sometimes extend the ways of civilization, until they too are overthrown in their turn.

This is the way the world goes. Sometimes it happens in one lifetime, as with those barbarian soldiers who rose to become Roman emperors, sometimes in slow motion, as with the fall of the Roman Empire, in which many centuries were to elapse before the new civilization emerged from the disorders of the barbarian invasions. With us, the decor is quite different, but the realities may be closer than we suppose.

One reason we may not realize this is that the very distinction between barbarism and civilization has been suppressed by the current relativism, which asserts the equality of all cultures. Nobody, of course, seriously believes this. Quite apart from technology, the moral inequality of cultures is conspicuous in the position of women in different cultures. It was only the West that abolished slavery. But it is a mark of current decorum—perhaps avoidance of the dreaded “triumphalism”—that we should not proclaim any superiority in European civilization, even though it is the one place the millions want to get into. Instead, we must make do with a rationalist doctrine which transposes the usages of European civilization into a rather unsatisfactory set of abstractions about universal rights. By this device, all cultures (including the Western) can equally be found guilty of moral violation in one way or another.

In the past, civilization was a sensibility shared by a class of people, while barbarism would be found not only in tribes beyond the frontier, but also in the slaves and the servile within the realms of civilization itself. In modern liberal democracies, this clear relation between a culture and a class has disappeared. Everyone is touched by the higher forms of culture. Schooling, museums, and the media are available to all. But barbarism remains an active force in modern societies, partly in gracelessness and ignorance, and partly in a loss of cultural coherence found among those who mistake a few years at an institution of higher learning for education itself.

In modern Europe, we don’t quite have Bedouin storming in from the desert (merely millions of depressed migrants trying to slip through the gates), but the tendency towards barbarism is an active force all around us. Hence the formula for overthrowing a Western society must be not “storm the walls” but “organize your own barbarians” within the walls. Those who hate European civilization know that it cannot be taken by direct assault. It must thus be captured from within. This was the plan adopted by many revolutionaries, most notably, of course, by Marx who constructed a new and hostile tribe within the West called “the proletariat.” They could be made into a revolutionary tribe by equipping suitable people (industrial workers for example) with a unified consciousness, so that in every transaction they understood themselves as a collective. They were being victimized by the oppressive bourgeois. Like the guardians in Plato’s Republic, these revolutionary insurgents had to be taught to be docile within the movement while snarling at those without.

Marx provided the model for all subsequent movements aiming to take power. His “make your own tribe” kit was found useful by nationalists, anarchists, and many brands of socialist. Hitler made the most creative use of it by playing down victimization and representing every Aryan as a superior type of person. It took the world in arms to get rid of him. But before long, revolutionaries discovered that a revolution based on the proletarian tribe only really worked if you were dealing with pretty unsophisticated peoples—preferably non-Europeans who lacked all experience of freedom and genuine political life. In socially mobile European states, the workers mostly found better things to do with their time than waste it on revolutionary committees and the baby talk of political demonstrations. Something new was needed.

It was provided by such socialists as Mussolini and Lenin who adopted the principle of the Praetorian Guard: a tightly knit vanguard party, which could use the masses as ventriloquial dummies and seek power on its own terms. This development was part of a wider tendency towards the emergence of oligarchies ruling through democratic slogans.

In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan’s radical feminists. It was a tribe constructed out of women who had taken some sort of degree and were living domestic lives. Technology had largely liberated them from the rigors of beating, sweeping, and cleaning, while pharmacology had released them from excessive procreation. In tactical terms, radical feminists made one innovation that has turned out to be crucial to the destiny of the West over the last half century. They suppressed almost completely the idea that their project involved a transfer of power and operated entirely on the moralistic principle that their demands corresponded to justice.

What lay behind this momentous development? It is a complicated question, but I think that Diana Schaub understood the essence of it in her essay “On the Character of Generation X”: [1]

[Betty] Friedan was right that the malaise these privileged women were experiencing was a result of “a slow death of the mind and spirit.” But she was wrong in saying that the problem had no name—its name was boredom. Feminism was born of boredom, not oppression. And what was the solution to this quandary? Feminists clamored to become wage-slaves; they resolutely fled the challenge of leisure.

And by “leisure,” Professor Schaub means something classically Greek: the higher employment of the mind once the necessities of life have been dealt with.

The first task of this new movement was to create the shared consciousness necessary for tribal functioning. Like all forms of psychic collectivism, “consciousness raising” (as it is known) exploits indignation and cultivates righteousness. It operated in this case with the basic liberatory image of the prison and, identifying happiness with being in the labor force, argued that only male oppression over the centuries had “confined” women to the domestic sphere. What radical feminism essentially did was to deny complementarity between the sexes and set men and women up as competing teams playing exactly the same game, but a game in which all the rules were stacked against the women. It was only on this eccentric assumption—i.e., that women had identical talents and inclinations to men—that they could support the conclusion that there had been foul play. As with Hitler’s appeal to the Aryan race, the basic principle was one of flattery: women, it revealed, are a marvelously talented set of people who have been iniquitously suppressed by males running a patriarchal system.

This message entrenched identity politics, an emerging form of fundamentalism in which every judgment must begin from a supposedly essential self-identity as female. One implication (as with Marxism) was that a class of experts understood social reality better than any particular woman could, and any woman failing to agree needed the falsity of her consciousness corrected. Joined together, these judgments constituted the new doctrine now simply called “feminism.” This was a massive psychic transformation in the life of European peoples. Back in the Second World War, Rosie the riveter was certainly a woman, but she was also a wife, a patriotic American involved in a struggle against fascism, and many other things besides. Most fundamentally of all, radical feminism attacked the very conception of the feminine as something that had been imposed upon women by superior force and had been reinforced by a culture of romance found in European art and literature.

All of this might be construed (as it was by radical feminists themselves) as a massive access of confidence among women, but it might also signify a complete collapse of the feminine in the face of a wider and more ambiguous project using women to create a totally androgynous (and manipulable) world. In such a world, men and women would become virtually indistinguishable.

Here then was nothing less than an attempt to destroy not merely an existing structure of power, but also the civilization that it sustained. In Ibn Khaldun’s terms, it was an attempt to conquer the West from within, not by directly attacking its power (for no one doubted that the men had all the power needed to repel such an attack), but by exploiting certain features in its culture. And in order to understand the significance of this movement, we need to characterize the European civilization that was the object of their attack.

The most obvious fact about it is one that we can hardly mention, now that the revolution has succeeded, without embarrassment or derision, because it is a fact which powerful contemporary forces make recessive. It is simply that this civilization is, in the crude terms of creative hits, the achievement of white males. The history of Western civilization is a succession of clever men developing the set of traditions or inventing the benefits which, intertwined, constitute the West. And from Thales and Euclid to Einstein and George Gershwin, nearly all of them were male. They constitute the set of “dead white males” whom the radical revolutionaries in the sub-academic culture have denigrated and vowed to remove from their pedestals. I once heard a feminist put it this way: “There’s no such thing as a great mind.” This doctrine is so powerful that the simple factual statement that it has been men who have created what is commonly meant by Western (and for that matter, any other) civilization seems like an insensitive affront to the equality of mankind. And the next step in my argument must be to deal with this as a problem.

To say that men created all these things is true, and significant, but it is rather like stranding a lot of fish on a barren shore. It leaves out the medium of social and political life without which none of this could have happened. Like all social life, Europe was a world of sexual complementarity, and there is no reliable way of sifting out what was contributory from what was not. But of women we may say what Falstaff said of himself—namely that he not only had wit but also was a cause of wit in others. But by seeming to set women up as a weak team in relation to inventive men, I am merely pointing to the mistake radical feminists, who have accepted the abstract idea that the one thing that counts is who invented this or created that, themselves make. It is in pursuit of this mistake that they have attempted to set up a competing canon of writers, philosophers, painters, and so on whose talents were suppressed by the patriarchy. These resuscitated figures are often worth looking at in their own terms, but they cannot serve as a new canon. Camille Paglia famously said that if we had waited for women to invent civilization we should still be living in grass huts. It is also true that if we had waited for men to make life comfortable we should still be living in pigsties. For centuries women have determined the way we live. Radical feminist doctrine is that this is not enough: women can only be recognized as equal, and enjoy equality of esteem with men, if they are recognized as excelling in exactly the same activities as men. Women must, as a team, be able to point to a scoreboard of artistic and technological achievements on the same scale as men. Feminist tribal consciousness depends upon absorbing this and similar beliefs. But the whole rigmarole depends upon assuming that women are the same as men, that their happiness is found in exactly the same areas as that of men. But this is quite untrue, and it is a mistake that could only have occurred to a set of women whose minds had been deranged by a superficial contact with education in the humanities.

The point can be put another way: Western civilization is distinguished by an unusual curiosity about both nature and the lives of other societies. Europeans have appropriated many of their ideas and inventions from other civilizations. Partly for this reason, it has been extraordinarily open to others who wish to engage in its activities. Its religion, its languages, and its knowledge have been widely diffused, and by the twentieth century people from all over the world had become scientists, historians, novelists, artists, etc., in the Western manner, many of them indeed coming to live in the West. Some people from customary societies abroad have found Westerners cold and remote, but many more have experienced the West as a liberation.

The same is true for women. At various times in the past many women have had access to education, and, from the eighteenth century onwards, some women developed an increasing taste for taking up professions previously restricted to men. By the late nineteenth century they were making their way into universities. In doing so, they often suffered a certain derision from the more brutish among their male confrères. Other men were always on their side, however, and during the first half of the twentieth century women broke into many fields previously restricted by convention. Radical feminism as a tribal consciousness needs to tell this story as a struggle against oppression, and so in some ways it was. But we ought not to get this out of proportion. We are not talking of slavery or war.

The beneficiaries of this new development were for the most part middle-class white women, and they were merely experiencing the resistance common to any form of upward mobility. They were unmistakably following a rising wave created by the increasing flexibility of Western societies. It was in any case a Christian civilization, which meant that individual character counted as much as customary status. In most civilizations, human beings fit into a customary schema as warriors, wives, priests, scholars, artisans, merchants, and so on. The West became, as Ernest Gellner used to put it, “modular” in that individuals have multiple talents and skills and can fit together with others in flexible ways responding to new situations. Like furniture that can be rearranged at need, Europeans have the versatility to fit into many possible arrangements of work or pleasure. As women began to develop a taste for education and had opportunities to participate in a world beyond the domestic (previously available only to the rich), they soon succeeded (as they usually do) in getting what they wanted. Liberal feminism was thus a natural development from within the civilization. Suddenly in the 1960s, this development was overridden by the new radical doctrine that women could and should do everything men did. Liberal feminism emerged from the Western tradition, and traditions are flexible. It had no problem in admitting women to new professions without dramatically altering the wider relations between the sexes. But, radical feminism was doctrinaire and demanded that all women should live in the one true manner. A melodrama of oppression was needed to fire up the new tribe. Just as Buddhist priests must meditate on a human skull so that they will develop the right consciousness of human mortality, so feminist doctrine thrives on horror stories of women not allowed to take degrees at Oxbridge until this century. By contrast with the horrors of the twentieth century (or indeed the situation of women elsewhere in the world), we may diagnose a certain lack of proportion.

The openness of Western cultures is shown by the way in which, during the first half of the twentieth century, Western women were enjoying higher education and finding distinction in professional and academic fields. The numbers of women who largely devoted their lives to these fields was relatively small, and some people thought this was a problem, but it was only a problem for those who took their bearings from statistics rather than from the responses of actual people. The false assumption of male and female isomorphism is, however, the reason why at frequent intervals feminists in journalism become lobbyists and set up, as a defect in society, any difference in average wages between men and women or in the relative percentages of women in top jobs. This was the continual drip of the movement against patriarchy, and it is a well-known principle of propaganda that a proposition repeated enough will crush opposition. But these figures and this argument make no rational sense, and the fact that they appear regularly in newspapers as if they did make sense is why they must be challenged.

The key to modern Western civilization is its openness to talent wherever found. The feminist demand for collective quotas has overturned this basic feature of our civilization. The crucial point is that the character of a civilization is revealed by its understanding of achievement. European civilization responded to achievement wherever it could be found. To replace achievement by quota entitlements is to destroy one civilization from within and to replace it with another. We are no longer what we were. The problem is to explain how the West collapsed.

It did not result from warriors storming the walls of a decadent civilization, but by a fifth column exploiting weakness from within. And the weapon of attack was not the sword, but a moral rhetoric demanding justice. Economic and political implications (such as that able men would be denied jobs now having to be filled by quota) seldom featured in discussion. The defenders of the status quo found themselves profoundly confused, partly because they had earlier acquiesced in regarding moral and religious ideas as merely subjective. They could not agree on a line of defense, and the attack often came from within their own families. The objective of the attack was to get women with degrees into the higher ranks of the labor force. Of the more profound implications of this structural collapse, I am are not here concerned. I must concentrate on the more pressing question of why the defenders so easily capitulated.

In earlier centuries, the project of getting women into the labor force would have been visionary, partly no doubt because no one thought in terms of a labor force. For one thing, women were necessary to keep the home fires burning. In any case, the world of work outside the hearth was hardly inviting. Ploughing the land required relentless physical input beyond the strength of most women; nor were they keen to exercise the broadsword. And, during a longish stretch of life, women would have their hands full with bearing and nurturing children.

In the modern world, however, getting women out of the home and into work was not at all visionary, since the thing called “work” was now largely done in centrally heated offices in front of a computer. In the push-button world men had created, physical strength was hardly ever needed, especially in the more attractive jobs. Work had been the curse of Adam, parallel with childbirth as the curse of Eve, but work now turned out to be a rather agreeable shuffling of symbols in an office full of friendship and event. It was not difficult to present this kind of work—the kind that interested the humanities graduates who largely fuelled the radical movement—as a liberation from the confinement of family life and the tedious babble of the toddler. And it fitted into a wider socialist notion that a person’s value was the contribution made to the welfare of others. It had been an old dream of Zionist socialists and Bolsheviks (among others) to absorb the family into society with everyone living communally, restaurants and daycare centers replacing family arrangements, and women working each day alongside the men. Here this dream was reborn, no longer as an aspect of utopia, but as the final achievement of justice against an oppressive world.

Let us now turn to the nub of this question: why did the insurrection succeed? There was no question of the insurgents disposing of superior firepower or warrior virtues, though the tribe of radical feminists certainly displayed intrepidity of the first order. Indeed, the key point is that it was their very weakness that was the condition of their success. Even the fact that, intellectually speaking, radical feminism had nothing to say that had not been said by earlier forms of social perfectionism merely meant that the opposition had already been softened up for victimological attack. And for all the indignation about oppression, radical feminists were less a moral force than a naked interest, demanding jobs for their members, jobs carrying the same salaries and status as men. It was even commonly admitted that outstanding women had not in recent times had much trouble making their way in the academic and workaday world. The issue was to get women of merely average abilities into these positions.

In principle, the men held all the cards. They were the managers, the rulers, the professors, and the directors of enterprises. And they were the trustees of the one thing on which their civilization depended: namely, the career open to talent. No doubt there were times where prejudice prevented women from getting such and such a job, but hiring able women was something managers had long been doing. For in the early twentieth century, women resembled Jews: some people might not want to hire them but the failure to recognize ability would soon be punished by competitors stealing an advantage. These considerations soon ceased to apply once radical feminism has established the basic idea (always denied) that the program was to establish a 50 percent quota for women in all desirable jobs.

We may understand what happened by considering a similar assault on tradition mounted about the same time as the radical feminist challenge. In the 1960s the universities of the Western world were shaken by enemies who turned academic self-understanding against itself. Universities were commonly recognized as communities of scholars and students. “Well,” said the radicals, “if it’s a community, why are we students left out in the cold, with no power on university committees? Why are we not consulted about the content of our curricula? Why are we subject to god-professors imposing on us courses of study irrelevant to our needs?” Dazed and confused by these questions, which were often expressed (as is the technique) with almost samurai displays of fearsome aggression, the dons yielded. They betrayed their trust in the scholarly vocation partly from confusion and partly in order to avoid unpleasantness.

This example not only illuminates the success of radical feminism, but also reveals something of the long-term significance of these massive shifts of power. For the real threat to universities came not from students but from government. Students were a minor irritant in academic life, but governments were now bent on destroying the autonomy of the institutions of civil society. Students merely functioned as their fifth column. They had the effect of forcing universities even more into a public domain. Students wanted the academic to become the political and that was the effect they had. Before 1960 universities largely ran their own affairs. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, they had all succumbed to the state subsidies that destroyed their autonomy.

The success of the radical feminist assault on European civilization operated in a parallel fashion. “You say you believe in equal opportunities for women, but why are there no women in management, or as bishops, or as professors, or heads of big corporations?” “Why are women paid on average only x percent of what men get paid?” The real answers to these questions would take one deep into the role and structure of the traditional family, the difference between the things that make men and women happy, and the different relative suitability of men and women for different tasks. And such real answers would obviously have to dissolve the rather gross distinction between “men” and “women” in order to recognize that, over a wide range of activities, especially activities such as those of management, it was the individual that counted, not what in technical femspeak is called “gender.”

Any recognition of these complexities dissolved before the fact that the questions being asked were rhetorical. In fact, as with student radicals, they were not questions at all, but slogans masquerading as questions. These pseudo-questions set the agenda, and the only admissible answers would be the dogmas of the doctrine: Only patriarchal oppression prevented men and women being equally represented in “positions of power.”

The politics of this assault were clear enough, and they illustrate what Mancur Olsen diagnosed as the Achilles heel of democracy: that a small group passionately campaigning for specific benefits will always prevail against a large majority whose direct interests are but marginally affected. Radical feminists were a relatively small group, but their message was plausible at some level to most women, and in families men had wives and daughters whose good they wished to promote. No political party would take up all of this program, but it did electoral prospects no harm to convey a general sympathy for the cause, and once in government enthusiasts would advance legislation under the motherhood slogan of equal opportunity. Very soon a network of powerful bureaucracies was bringing radical doctrine to bear on all areas of government. The courts could be relied upon to extend their power by regulating contract and by extending the law of tort. Within a generation, the revolution had not only succeeded but also created throughout Western nations an occupying army of equal opportunity officers entrenched in personnel departments up and down the country.

And why not? It might well be demanded. Many women have great abilities and a modern society ought not to abide by conventions which may have been necessary in the past but which progress had made unnecessary. The most successful societies have been those in which women have been freest to participate widely. All of that is true and was already recognized in the advance of liberal feminism before the 1960s. The problem only arises with female quotas throughout the world of work.

In a few significant areas, however, no such demands are made. These areas are either where women graduates have no wish to go (rough outdoor work) or where lack of ability could lead to instant disaster, such as brain surgery or piloting commercial aircraft. Women are to be found in both, but only on the basis of ability. Universities are obviously a soft touch because the consequences of educational betrayal take decades to emerge. The effect of university quotas for “gender diversity” for example has often been to fill humanities departments with women in order to equalize numbers “distorted” (one might say) by technology and the hard sciences where even passably able women are hard to come by. Many women in the humanities departments are indeed very able, but many are not, and they have often prospered by setting up fanciful ideological courses (especially in women’s studies), which can hardly pretend to be academic at all.

What however of areas where women are patently unsuited—such as the army, the police force, or fire fighting? They have in fact all been under attack because although women are unsuited to the rough work at the bottom, these areas have enviable managerial opportunities higher up. They are one more irresistible gravy train. The fire-fighting case was dramatized by the New York judicial decision that a test of fitness for the force that nearly all women failed must be discriminatory, and therefore illegal, an extension of the idea of “the rule of law” far beyond any serious meaning. This was the doctrine called “disparate impact.” Similar considerations have affected women in the armed forces. Standards of entry have been lowered in order that women may qualify. One argument for so doing is that the rejected tests looked for qualities only rarely needed in the field, and that may indeed be true. Yet, the idea that soldiers are heroic figures doing something that women generally cannot do has forever been part of the self-understanding of men, even those who have never heard a shot fired in anger. A small boy inclined to cry out at the sting of iodine or the prick of an injection might be told “be a soldier.” Today according to the feminist doctrine he is more likely to be told to express his feelings.

The assault of women on areas such as the church raises similar issues. In principle there is not the slightest reason why women should not take on a priestly role, and one might indeed suspect that feminists may be right in diagnosing resistance in part to an unhealthy attitude to women on the part of some of the clergy. In a pastoral role, women might well be better than men, as some women are in politics. The problem is that women priests raise very awkward questions of Christian theology. Jesus selected only male disciples. Was the son of God then merely a creature of his own culture? Here most conspicuously the entry of women changes entirely the conception of the activity and not for the better. Female clergy have done little to reverse the current decline of the church. Indeed while women as individuals have often enhanced what they have joined, the entry of women in general has seldom done much for any area previously dominated by men—except, significantly, bureaucracy.

It is the military case that is the most telling. No one doubts the inferiority of women in physical strength and sport. No football team would think of fielding women against a first-class team of men. Yet the governments of Western countries, currently feeling unthreatened by any major military power, are prepared to gamble their security on female warriors. It would not be so serious if female battalions had been formed whose performance in action could over time be tested in real situations without endangering the security of Western countries. But the feminist program is to make the army, like the rest of society, conform to an idea, and the women want to go where the men are, to be fully integrated so that when dirty and unfeminine jobs must be done, there are men to do them. Liberal feminists took the risk of setting up academic colleges of their own, but radical feminists needed to have men around. They wanted to be integrated. And all of this happened not because political wisdom declared it necessary for the defence of the country, nor because the electorates pushed for it, but as the result of agencies set up legal and bureaucratic strings.

Let us now return to the teasing question of why the male custodians of our civilization sold the pass. Some element of cowardice must certainly be recognized, because the radicals were tribal warriors making ferocious faces and stamping their feet. The defenders were white, male, and middle class, and the radicals had long been engaged in a campaign to erode the morale of each of these abstract categories. They denoted racism, sexism, and elitism respectively. Caricatured in terms of these abstractions, men found it difficult not to be written off as oppressors of women. Again, the defenders were not united. Many had been longstanding advocates of liberal feminism and from confusion believed that radical feminism was merely a rather hysterical version of classical liberalism. Retreat is a notoriously difficult maneuver to control. Each concession could be used to demand further concessions in the name of consistency. Hence the appearance in all English-speaking countries of legislation mandating equal opportunities—and who could possibly be against that? Before long, the movement had taken over the universities, many public bodies, industrial firms and, above all, the media. Quite rapidly, hiring for status-giving jobs requiring degrees had become closely circumscribed by a set of rules. The dogma was that 50 percent of all jobs belonged to women, though the reality of quotas was long denied.

There are, of course, deeper currents. One of them is that men tended to react to radical feminism with a high-minded feeling that nothing but justice, a notoriously fluid idea, should determine public policy. The balancing of justice with power, which constitutes the art of prudence, was being lost. This was a collapse of practical wisdom not difficult to explain. It is a consequence, we may guess, of the collapse of religion in the West. Christianity requires individuals to sacrifice everything for the nicest points of perfection, but it does not require that worldly institutions should do the same. But cocooned as prosperous Westerners so often are from the immediate consequences of folly, and increasingly detached from any profound understanding of the culture that had produced them, the trustees of our civilization have indulged in the most exquisite forms of self-abnegation. They were soon believing, for example, that language itself had rendered women invisible and that justice required the corrective use of the generic feminine. They were no doubt able to indulge such fancies because they had long ago picked up the idea that political correctness was really a bit of a joke, something of no practical significance in the real world. Hardly a week could pass without some piece of politically correct absurdity surfacing and being laughed over and forgotten by the men who had now lost both the will and the capacity to resist.

But beyond lie far deeper currents in Western societies. Just as the ferment in universities led rapidly to the state taking them over, so the ferment of radical feminism carries out the old Bolshevik program of creating a community of homogeneous creatures animated by some single project —in fact, the totalitarianism which, as an external assault on the walls of the West, we thought we had vanquished in battle with external enemies.

My view is, then, that the radical feminist revolution is nothing less than a destruction of our civilization. It has all happened in such a way that people have not yet realized what has happened. And there are some who might say, well, at least it has improved the condition of women. But this, I think, is a mistake. Such a view would accept the initial dichotomy, so fatal to European civilization, that men and women have separate destinies. In fact, of course, they do not. Still, it is no easy business to give an account of quite how they fit together. Indeed, no comprehensive theory of this relationship can be given. But many things we can confidently say. One is that women have specifically feminine qualities of their own which prevent them, as a general rule, from fitting entirely successfully into the structures men have created. No problem, say the radical feminists: let us change the structures! That can indeed be done, but something is lost. The point is that “men” put “women” (if we may generalize wildly) on a pedestal, and also despise them as weak; love and adore them in chivalrous terms, but also tend to oppress them and use them. A parallel ambivalence will be found in the way women treat men. A whole world of games and conventions has grown up around these attitudes, and they look different viewed from the barracks and from the bedroom, in the sitting room or in the shop. Radical feminism is essentially a humorless rationalism which seeks a single right attitude to be imposed on men and women alike.

There is a further point, and a more complex one. European civilization, we might say, has only stayed ahead of the game of world power because it is so remarkably innovative. It lives off ideas. Sometimes academics attempt the paradoxical business of trying to theorize innovation and creativity, but the results are inevitably banal. Creativity is essentially mysterious. Yet every so often, some movement gets into its head the idea that it has cracked the innovation code and found the formula for progress. This is what I am inclined to call the Bolshevik fallacy, because Lenin and his associates actually believed it, and the Soviet Union showed us what happens as a result of such hubris.

But the problem is wider. The whole world is now involved in the business of modernization, which means copying the mode of life constantly being transformed in Europe, and now in America—by white males, now often joined by clever individuals (both men and women) from other parts of the world. Globalization and the computer are the latest of the marvels with which our civilization has astonished the world. The point is that so far, no other civilization has been able to pick up the torch of innovative leadership. It may even be that Europeans themselves have lost the trick, or gone as far as they can go; or it may not. We simply cannot know.

What does seem to be clear, from the record so far, is that women do not have this capacity to innovate. They bring great talents to developing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” but they have no record of creating the “paradigm shifts” that lead in new directions. It may be, of course, that as the feminists sometimes claim, this is because they were never encouraged to engage in these activities. But to need encouragement, to depend on models to follow, is precisely not to have a capacity to innovate. It has been men who have invented things and found challenges in nature, such as climbing high mountains or sailing alone around the world. And once men have done it, women will also do it. These remain highly notable enterprises, well beyond the reach of all but a few men, but they also exemplify the fact that innovation remains largely the specialization of white males. Women can do marvellous things with a house, but they do need the house to be there in the first place.

My argument is, then, that European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness—some people even deny that it exists—but it is a manacle around our hands. It binds us quite tightly, though some freedom must be left, because without the contribution of subjugated males, things would very rapidly decline. What political correctness amounts to in reality is a treaty of accommodation reached between the conquerors and the conquered. Women have forced their way into money and status, sometimes beyond their merits, but they have also lost a freedom (Professor Schaub calls it “leisure”) that might have saved them from being formularized in terms of contemporary Western styles of work. Had this not happened, we might well have been saved from some of the discontents that currently afflict us. To be “socially included,” as women have been in the workforce, has many practical advantages, but it involves a spiritual loss. So far the conquerors have not destroyed the geese that lay the golden eggs, so the surface of our civilization does not reveal how profound the change has been. But underneath that surface, there are currents which no one understands.

There has been a revolution, then, but a silent one. It has taken place with such stealth, and so gradually, that people have become accustomed to it little by little. I am reminded of the famous Chinese executioner whose ambition it was to be able to cut off a head so that the victim would not realize what had happened. For years he worked on his skill, and one day he cut off a head so perfectly that the victim said: “Well, when are you going to do it?” The executioner gave a beatific smile and said: “Just kindly nod.”

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. See The Public Interest (Fall 1999). Go back to the text.

13th century text hides words of Archimedes

NOT EASY READING: Rare books expert Abigail Quandt places part of Archimedes’ text into an X-ray machine at Stanford University.

(Paul Sakuma / AP)

EUREKA! The 3rd century BC text of Archimedes appears perpendicular to lines from later writers.

(Paul Sakuma / AP)

13th century text hides words of Archimedes

The pages of a medieval prayer text also contain words of ancient Greek engineer Archimedes. It takes high-tech imaging to read between the lines.

By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer
December 26, 2006

THE book cost $2 million at auction, but large sections are unreadable.

Some of its 348 pages are torn or missing and others are covered with sprawling purple patches of mildew. Sooty edges and water stains indicate a close escape from a fire.

"This manuscript is, by far, the worst of any manuscript I've ever seen," said William Noel, curator of manuscripts for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it now resides. "It's a book that is on its last legs."

The sheepskin parchment originally contained a 10th century Greek text, which was erased by a 13th century scribe who replaced it with prayers. Seven hundred years later, a forger painted gilded pictures of the Evangelists on top of the faded words.

Underneath it all, however, is an exceptional treasure — the oldest surviving copy of works by the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the 3rd century BC.

About 80% of the text had been transcribed and translated in the 1910s after it was rediscovered in an Istanbul monastery, but since then much of it became unreadable again because of deterioration.

Fully deciphering its mysteries has had to wait for advanced technologies, some of which had never been applied to ancient manuscripts.

The unusual cast of detectives includes not only the imaging specialists who helped photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also a Stanford University physicist who studies trace metals in spinach with a particle accelerator.

Together, they have been carrying out one of the most remarkable "salvage jobs" in the history of codicology, the study of ancient manuscripts.

Archimedes, it turns out, is only one secret of the text.

AMONG the mathematicians of antiquity, Archimedes was one of the greatest and most cunning.

He was one of the earliest to devise ways to calculate the area beneath curves and was the first to prove that a circle's circumference and diameter are related by the constant pi. He developed the Archimedes Screw to lift water and invented deadly devices, such as the Claw of Archimedes, which was designed to grapple enemy warships.

Archimedes died in 212 BC, when Syracuse was sacked by the Romans. Legend holds that he was drawing figures in the sand. "Don't disturb my circles," he supposedly told the soldier who killed him.

Knowledge of Archimedes' work is derived from three books.

Codex A, transcribed around the 9th century, contained seven major treatises in Greek. Codex B, created around the same time, had at least one additional work by Archimedes and survived only in Latin translation.

Codex C has been an enigma.

It was originally copied down in 10th century Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Three centuries later, the manuscript was in Palestine. By then, it was no longer a precious vestige of ancient learning but an obscure text that could be put to better use as a prayer book.

A scribe began by unbinding the pages. He washed them with citrus juice or milk and sanded them with a pumice stone. He cut the sheets in half, turned them 90 degrees and stitched the new book down the middle.

The scribe wrote prayers over the blank pages. Codex C had become a "palimpsest" — a recycled book.

The book eventually was brought back to Constantinople, where it sat until the 1890s, when a Greek scholar wrote down a fragment of erased text that he was able to read.

That fragment was brought to the attention of Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906, then the foremost authority on Archimedes. Armed with a magnifying glass, he translated everything he could read, publishing his work in 1910.

The palimpsest disappeared amid the chaos of World War I, only resurfacing in 1998, when a French family named Guersan offered it for auction at Christie's in New York. An anonymous book collector paid $2 million and deposited it at the Walters Art Museum for conservation.

Mold had attacked much of the manuscript, and four forged paintings of the Evangelists made in the 20th century covered some of its most important pages.

"That was our worst nightmare," said Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of rare books and manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum.

ROGER L. Easton Jr., a 56-year-old imaging specialist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, had just come off his success revealing hidden text in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Christie's had commissioned him to make ultraviolet images of the palimpsest for the auction catalog, and now he offered his help to the museum.

Easton and his colleagues began their work in 2000. They tinkered with different methods for capturing the image with the ultraviolet light, which makes the parchment glow more whitish.

They then merged those images with another set taken under a tungsten light, which enhanced the reddish hue of the Archimedes text. The resulting "pseudocolor" image made it easier to distinguish the black prayer book writing from the burnt sienna words of Archimedes.

Using this painstaking method, Easton and his team took two years to uncover another 15% of the text.

They were stymied in penetrating the rest.

Two more years passed before Stanford physicist Uwe Bergmann, 43, read a magazine article about the Archimedes palimpsest that mentioned it had originally been written with iron gall ink.

One of Bergmann's projects at Stanford was investigating the process of photosynthesis in plants by using the synchrotron X-rays to image small clusters of manganese atoms in spinach.

"Why not find traces of iron in an ancient book?" he asked.

Bergmann sent an e-mail to the Walters Art Museum, and the museum agreed to a test.

Bergmann set up the palimpsest experiment at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. Spread over an area the size of a football field, the synchrotron is part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a Department of Energy facility set in the foothills of Menlo Park.

The synchrotron hurls electrons at near light speed, forcing them to give off X-rays as they veer around bends. That X-ray beam is channeled away into the laboratories.

Bergmann figured the powerful and precise beam could be used to make iron molecules fluoresce, thus allowing him with a sensitive-enough detector to pick up even the faintest traces of ink.

Bergmann first had to determine the exposure time. Too much time and the powerful synchrotron X-ray could damage the parchment. Then, they adjusted the intensity of the beam, which could be so strong that it blinded the detectors that picked up the glow from the iron gall ink.

After two years of refining their technique, Bergmann and his colleagues began the laborious process of imaging the palimpsest this summer.

Each side of a page, mounted in frame that moved in front of the beam, took 12 hours to record. The machines processed the pages continuously for two weeks.

Beneath a moldy, torn painting of St. John emerged two layers of writing.

On the edge of the first page, they saw a signature dated April 14, 1229: "By the hand of presbyter Ioannes Myronas."

It was the name of the priest who had erased Archimedes.

IN an office near Memorial Church at Stanford, Reviel Netz flicked off the lights. Netz, a slight 38-year-old with dark hair, leaned close to the screen of his laptop.

Bergmann's X-ray work had produced a black-and-white picture of a page from "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," a text found only in the palimpsest.

One phrase — "let them be arranged so they balance on point theta" — had already been translated by Heiberg, although he had had to guess about the word "on," which was unreadable.

Netz, a professor of classics, looked at the X-ray image and nodded. He smiled.

The actual word was "around."

"That's not trivial," he said, explaining that the change altered the meaning of Archimedes' calculations involving an object's center of gravity.

The X-ray image also revealed a section of "The Method" that had been hidden from Heiberg in the fold between pages. It contained part of a discussion on how to calculate the area inside a parabola using a new way of thinking about infinity, Netz said. It appeared to be an early attempt at calculus — nearly 2,000 years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the field.

The discoveries may seem small, but they are significant in the understanding of ancient mathematics, Netz said.

One passage he studied several years ago involved the innumerable slices and lines that could be made from a triangular prism similar to a wedge of cheese. Netz said the passage, which was unreadable to Heiberg, showed that Archimedes was grappling with the concept of infinity long before other mathematicians.

For Netz, a specialist in ancient mathematics and cognitive history, the chance to decipher the palimpsest "is the fulfillment of an incredible dream," he said.

One of his biggest breakthroughs involves a quirky part of the palimpsest called the "Stomachion," which literally means "Belly-Teaser."

Stomachions were children's games in which 14 geometrical shapes were rearranged to create new shapes. Heiberg translated fragments of the manuscript but paid little attention to it, thinking it was just a game.

Netz saw a deeper significance. Archimedes asked a more restricted question in his "Stomachion": How many different ways could you combine the 14 triangles to make a square?

Netz believes the fragments address an area of mathematics known as combinatorics that scholars have only recently believed interested the Greeks.

For all the high-tech efforts, there are still gaps remaining in the Archimedes text, perhaps 2%, Netz guessed.

AMONG the jumbled fragments are clues that perhaps the deepest secrets are yet to be found.

A century ago, Heiberg copied down two lines that he couldn't identify. They began: "The youngest had been abroad for so long that the sisters wouldn't even know who was who."

The passage was not Archimedes.

In 2002, scholars were able to cross-reference the quote. It came from "Against Timandros," written by a 4th century BC Athenian orator named Hyperides.

Although Hyperides is little-known now, contemporaries frequently compared him to Demosthenes, an acknowledged master of oratory.

No complete versions exist of "Against Timandros," which Hyperides had written as part of a lawsuit over an inheritance, said Judson Herrman, a classicist at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

Further study determined there were 20 pages of Hyperides in the palimpsest, including a previously unknown text called "Against Diondas."

The palimpsest, it turns out, took parchment from seven texts, including what are believed to be a commentary on Aristotle's "On the Soul" and a group of biographies of the saints, plus two still unidentified texts.

The works are even more difficult to discern than the Archimedes because the ink is different and the pages more thoroughly scrubbed.

"I have been cursing all morning," Herrman said of his work on a few lines of Hyperides.

The scientists aren't giving up.

Easton's team recently began experimenting with precisely tuned light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to illuminate the text. The team also is using angled light to detect the outlines of letters etched in the parchment by the acid in the ink.

The team made progress on a few pages, but it may take decades — or longer — before technologies are developed that can unveil all the texts.

"We'll probably leave something for future scientists to work on," Netz said.

---

jia-rui.chong@latimes.com

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Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America

Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America
Fr. Josiah Trenham

Keynote Address

The Very Reverend Josiah Trenham, Ph.D.
Diocesan Parish Life Conference in El Paso, TX - June 15th, 2006
Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of America
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Your Grace, Basil, Bishop of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America; my dear brothers in the sacred priesthood; pious and Christ-loving Deacons; brothers and sisters in Christ:

I greet you with sincere affection in our common Savior, and bring the greetings of His Grace, Joseph, Bishop of Los Angeles and the West to all of you. I am greatly honored to be here in El Paso at the 2nd Parish Life Conference of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. I have the opportunity to speak to you on a subject most dear to my heart, and I believe to yours also: the unity of the Orthodox Church in America. I have entitled my presentation, "Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America", but before I begin please allow me to ask your forgiveness ahead of time for my mistakes and inadequacies, and to beg your indulgence. I do not speak from any position of expertise or authority on this subject, but as a concerned priest of the Church grasping for a way forward.

Psalm 132 and the Unity of Israel

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head, coming down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard, coming down upon the edge of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, coming down upon the mountains of Zion; for there the Lord commanded the blessing- life forevermore." Psalm 132:1-3

Brothers are meant to dwell together in unity. That is the good life. That is the pleasant life. When men dwell in unity, they are invigorated with strength, and find their union producing immense fruits, exponentially greater collectively than the sum of what they could have produced as separated individuals. The union of all men, for which we pray in every divine service, is the will of God. All men united in Jesus Christ is the desire of the Lord. All earthly races united in the one heavenly race- which is the race of the New Adam, Jesus Christ, the Christian race, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. This union of all men in the Holy Church is the will of God from all eternity and the purpose of the Almighty, which animates all of His redemptive acts. As a witness and demonstrable expression of the life of the renewed humans, who are Christians, is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The Church is a miracle of unity for it is the New Man, and as such is the only miracle of unity in the cosmos. In confronting the Church all men are to witness a living organism that defies and transcends human divisions. Sadly today, when most outsiders encounter the Church and hear we are Orthodox Christians, a question immediately follows, "Are you Greek? Are you Russian?" and so by our divisions we have fostered an earthly identification of ethnicity and nationalism that leads the observer to conclude our Church is designed only for particular groups of people, and not for them.

When the holy Church is divided the prescriptive will of God is negated, the light of the holy Gospel itself is eclipsed, and the truth of the Lord is suppressed by man's unrighteousness. Misdirected men, in their lack of proper priorities, hold down the unity of the Church only with great effort, like compressing a great and mighty spring. The unity of the Church, like a powerful spring, is always ready to leap forth, and even when compressed and smothered by men's sins and indifference, this unity resists its suppressors. This is why division cannot last in the Church. It is like a cankerous sore to which the Body dispatches antibodies, and will not ignore until it is healed. Against this power of self-correction lie those who, at least by their actions, would like to make cankerous sores permanent fixtures of the body.

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!" Unity is life. Division is death. We might recite the antithesis of Ps. 132 in these words,

Behold how evil and miserable it is for brothers to dwell in division! It is like a sulphuric stench in the nostrils, coming down upon the eyes. It is like the odor of Babylon, coming down upon the parched plains of Sodom; for there the Lord commanded the curse- everlasting death.

Such is the glory of unity, and such is the horror of division. Sadly today such Davidic opinions of the value of brotherly unity appear to be shared by too few. Brotherly unity is esteemed little, and placed beneath many other pseudo-priorities such as the status quo, power, property, ethnic affinities, and national loyalties.

Psalm 132 is one of fifteen Psalms of Ascent, chanted by the people of God as they made their way to the central sanctuary in Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts of the Lord. The chanting was of a tangible unity expressed not just in faith, but also in the deeds of a common worship and a common pilgrimage. Can you imagine this hymn being chanted by the pilgrims in any meaningful way if when the pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem they were divided by their 12 tribes, and each tribe was made to go its own different way, to its own different temple, presided over by its own different high priest, sitting in different places for the feast and never experiencing tangible unity?

The thought is ludicrous and grotesque, but has many parallels to contemporary Orthodox Christian life in America. Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to apply Psalm 132 to our present ecclesiastical miseries in America. We do not presently know the blessings of the unity described by Psalm 132. We do not enjoy the unity for which our Savior shed His precious blood. We do not experience the unity inspired by His Holy Spirit, established by His Holy Apostles, required by the Sacred Canons, and defended by the Holy Fathers. We have a measure of unity- for sure, but incomplete, mangled, and intolerable. We call the unity we possess by various names - a unity of faith sometimes we say, or a eucharistic unity. Some clergy even suggest that the only unity that matters is that various Orthodox in America can commune together. But this compromised and deficient unity does not satisfy our Savior, and is positively dangerous, threatening by its very inconstancy and instability to shatter the unity of faith and chalice that we do have. Orthodox Christians have never imagined historically that a unity of faith or communion could co-exist with a disunity of synod, praxis, and interchange. Two Sundays past we celebrated the Sunday of the Holy and God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicea. We celebrated a common Orthodox faith defended and confessed by a common Orthodox synod. In our present experience we have only half of the equation. We share a common Orthodox faith with our fellow Orthodox Christians throughout America, but we have no common synod. As a result nothing is defended or confessed as it should be, and we are weaklings in the face of encroaching secularism and heresy. Without a common synod we are sitting ducks to lose even our unity of faith.

The Trivialization of Disunity

We trivialize our disunity but calling it simply a disunity of jurisdictions or an administrative division -- as though the division we sustain is not a matter of the heart or essence or faith of the Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction and administration ring in our ears as merely external and relatively unimportant divisions, and so the tragedy of our division is belittled. As though our present divisions are merely the unfortunate turns of history, which we must benignly endure until they naturally go away. I beg to differ from such an appraisal. Such tamed and pacified descriptions of Orthodox disunity in America are untrue, inconsistent with Orthodox theology, mask the very serious nature and consequences of our present division, and steal the sense of urgency that the Spirit of God births in the hearts of the faithful in the face of disunity.

And make no mistake. The Spirit of the Living God does not tolerate disunity, which is the un-doer of His divine work and the spoiler of His mighty wonders. He is not going to passively stand aside when the unity He effects has a stake driven into it. The Holy Spirit has always inspired and guided the saints to rail against disunity. King David himself, the inspired author of Ps. 132, was exceedingly zealous to preserve and enhance the unity of the Old Testament Church. While King Saul was reigning and persecuting David, David was exceedingly careful to preserve an attitude of reverence for Saul and not to divide the people. Despite the danger to his very life, let alone the material losses he constantly suffered, David refused to set himself up as a rival monarch and thus effect schism in Israel. He refused to establish his jurisdiction against Saul's jurisdiction. After Saul's death David was received as King only by southern portion of the Kingdom, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Far from being content shepherding just his tribe, David gave himself for seven years and six months to reconciling all the twelve tribes and reunifying the Kingdom. He considered himself weak, though King, as long as the Kingdom was divided. And as long as there is division we will always be weak. For thirty-three more years King David ruled the entire nation, and eventually passed the throne to his son, Solomon.

If King David was so zealous to preserve and deepen the unity of the Church in the Old Covenant, how much more ought the pastors of the Church in the New Covenant be zealous to preserve and deepen the unity of the Church when the Holy Spirit has been poured out and our union with Christ and each other is no longer a union of shadows but of reality?! Since we live after Holy Pentecost, on which day the Spirit was poured out calling all men into unity, as we say in the Festal Kontakion, how can we not be zealous for unity? Where was the spirit of King David in 1921 when competing jurisdictions were first sinfully established in this nation? I am afraid the spirit of unity left our land with the departure from this life of St. Raphael (Hawaweeny), Bishop of Brooklyn, who labored in and for a united American Orthodox Church, and fell asleep in the Lord in 1915. St. Raphael ought to serve as the heavenly patron of American Orthodox unity. His spirit is profoundly expressed in his duly famous words, "I am an Arab by birth, a Greek by primary education, an American by residence, a Russian at heart, and a Slav in soul." Such hierarchic sensitivity to the unity of the Church is desperately lacking at the current time. Where was the spirit of King David in the aftermath of the Ligonier meeting of 1994? How grieved we were when our holy hierarchs, having been so attracted to each other when face to face by a divine magnetism that they could not but declare themselves to be an episcopal assembly -- a forerunner to a common American synod -- and unanimously issued two magnificent common statements: On the Church in North America and On Mission and Evangelism, and then when they encountered opposition from various quarters walked away from the quest for unity at Ligonier, some even renouncing their signatures and one his mere presence? Forgive me, but the immediate aftermath of Ligonier and the days since have been shameful days in which disunity has been tragically increased and expanded, days of sorrowful memory that we wish to consign to oblivion. We look for better days, days of unity and refreshment.

Under King Solomon the unity of Israel was preserved, and deepened and as a unified nation Israel bore witness to the unbelieving peoples throughout the world. Pagan kings and great sages and the whole earth itself journeyed to Israel in those days to behold the Servant of the Lord, Solomon, who ruled a united kingdom in unsurpassed wisdom. Unity is the key to successful witness. Even heretics when united have great strength.

The Mormons may have a theology worthy of disdain, but their unity has made them a powerful force in the world and they increase mightily. American Muslims, Shia and Sunni, have forged a unity in this country that has brought them great strength. American Muslims, by their desire for unity, have overcome far greater obstacles than any two Orthodox jurisdictions have with each other, and have established significant cooperative ventures such as ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), AMC (American Muslim Council), the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Alliance, the Islamic Circle of North America, IMANA Islamic Medical Association of North America), the Muslim Student Association, some 1000 Islamic academies to insure their Muslim children remain Muslim, and a host of Islamic journals and magazines. By their unity these non-Christians without the Holy Spirit have accomplished much. We Orthodox Christians ought to compare our respective numbers closely with American Muslims. There are approximately 1,600 mosques in America, just as there are approximately 1,600 Orthodox church temples in America. They are fairly united. We are significantly divided. Let us see who does the growing in the next decade. And why is it that the Roman Catholics in the United States have been able to care for the pastoral needs of its multiple ethnicities in this country, while on the whole maintaining episcopal and synodal unity? In the face of these examples we are without excuse.

After Solomon's death the throne passed to his son, Rehoboam. It was during King Rehoboam's reign that the rupture and division of the Kingdom took place. It was this disunity which led to Israel's eventual collapse and utter exile. By Rehoboam's sinful disregard of unity the ten northern tribes rejected his rule, and enthroned Jeroboam as King. The fruit of such disunity was immediate and tragic, leading to internal sin, strife, and cultic deviations, and within slightly more than 200 years the 10 northern tribes were taken into exile by the Assyrians -- an exile from which the vast majority would never return. Can you just hear the Israelites in the north saying during these years under Jeroboam and his successors- "when God wills we will be reunited with the southern tribes" or "unity will happen but not in my lifetime" or "we are not mature enough for unity with Jerusalem yet"? I can see King Jeroboam aggressively publicizing these nonsensical quips and propaganda throughout his schismatic kingdom, all the while fearing that he may lose power if reunion with Jerusalem were effected. If any Israelites were saying such things as I suggest during those days they were idiots, and they probably knew themselves to be such as they walked with hooks in their noses into Assyrian lands in A. D. 722, consigned for all time to utter exile and oblivion.

The division of American Orthodox Christians in what we call jurisdictionalism is not just unfortunate, or an unenviable quirk of modern church history. It is a heinous sin, and a lamentable grieving of the Holy Spirit, Who is the divine cement of our unity. Listen to the words written in 1976 by Father Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory, former Dean of St. Vladimir Seminary and one-time member of SCOBA's Commission on Unity in America,

When today, almost two hundred years after the implanting of Orthodoxy on the American continent, one hears endless debates about the future Orthodox unification in America as a remote and not too realistic ideal, to which one ritually pays lip service while in fact opposing its realization, one is amazed by the conscious or unconscious denial of a simple fact: that this unity did exist, was a reality, that the first "epiphany" of Orthodoxy here was not as a jungle of ethnic ecclesiastical colonies, serving primarily if not exclusively the interests of their various "nationalisms" and "Mother Churches," but precisely as a Local Church meant to transcend all "natural" divisions and to share all spiritual values; that this unity was broken and then arbitrarily replaced with the unheard-of principle of "jurisdictional multiplicity" which denies and transgresses every single norm of Orthodox Tradition; that the situation which exists today is thus truly a sin and a tragedy." (emphases his).

A sin and a tragedy. These are his words, and the divisions are worse today in 2006 than they were thirty years ago in 1976. Far worse. We are not moving forwards. For at least 12 years, since the failure following Ligonier, we have been moving backwards. Maybe you consider Fr. Schmemann's statements extreme. If you do, perhaps you have been poisoned by the indifference of persons who are fond of pontificating on the theme of Orthodox unity by saying things like, "It will happen, but not in my lifetime" or "When God wills" or "We are not mature enough for it yet." Fooey and ix-nay on all those statements. Let us examine these quips a bit more closely.

Quip #1. "It will happen, but not in my lifetime."

Really? Says who? Where is it written that the Church will prevail apart from the fidelity of its clergy and laity? Is such faithfulness promised? Did God inspire someone with a prophecy assuring that the American Orthodox Church would overcome its pettiness and triumph over its divisions? I know of no such prophecy. Certainly the Church of Jesus Christ is indefectible and indestructible and will triumph over the world. There is no question about that. But such victory is not promised to every Orthodox person, every Orthodox clergyman, every Orthodox parish, or every Orthodox national church, irrespective of will. God honors our freedom by allowing us to ruin ourselves if we so desire. If a particular Orthodox Christian wishes to jump into the arms of the devil and ruin his life he is free to do so. If an Orthodox parish wants to grieve the Holy Spirit by pride and infighting to the point of dissolving and no longer existing as a parish it is free to do so, as we can see by how many parishes are dying throughout our land. If an Orthodox priest or bishop wants to dance with the demons and embrace heresy and find himself severed from the Body of Christ and defrocked from the holy priesthood he is free to do so. And if a national Church wants to perpetrate division and turn a blind eye to grievous family disunity to the point of rendering itself irrelevant and eventually non-existent it is free to do so. And don't think this has never happened. Read the letters of our Lord Jesus Christ to the particular 1st century churches of Asia Minor found in the Revelation of St. John, chapters two and three. The message of our Lord was clear. Pull yourselves together or I will remove your candlestick. He was telling them to live their faith or be snuffed out. Some of them were.

Orthodox reunion in America (and I choose the word "reunion" carefully since we are striving for the re-establishment of a unity we already had not the creation of something completely new) ... The unity of the Orthodox Church in America will take place in our land when the Church in America wants it to take place in our land. If we repent our divisions and recover ourselves and apply the antidote of humility to the bitter unfolding of recent local church history our disunity will be healed. And we ought stop blaming others for our ills, and accept responsibility for our divisions. If we continue to walk stubbornly according to our own jurisdictional drummers, studiously indifferent to the greater unity of the Church in our land there will never be one American Orthodox Church. God does not force His will upon unwilling children. If we want to continue in sin, He will let us, unless His judgment falls first. But there will be no proper Orthodox unity in our land apart from our commitment to such unity. And frankly, such commitment is seriously lacking at the present. This should greatly concern us, and the voice of faithful clergy and laity should be raised, and the trumpets should be sounding- but, of course, those who somehow have a mystical assurance that "it will happen but not in their lifetime" are not very concerned. Why should they be? They have their bogus assurance.

This improper perspective on church unity in America is also detrimental to our efforts at Orthodox reunion because of the assumption that the divisions we sustain presently are so great that no significant change is possible "within my lifetime." Such notions insure that no great efforts will be taken toward unity by such believers. Tell me- who sacrifices his life for a cause he believes is doomed to failure throughout his lifetime? Who will shed his blood for a cause that he believes will not be very helped by his blood? St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in his treatise On the Trinity, says it this way, "When anyone entertains no hope of attaining his end, then he either loves lukewarmly or does not love at all, howsoever he may see the excellence of it." As long as we continue to think that the unity of the American Orthodox Church cannot be established in a generation we will continue to love our unity lukewarmly or not at all.

Quip #2. "When God wills."

Now normally such a statement is most beautiful. But in this context it is simply an awful distortion of reality. Is there really any question at all what God wills in this matter? We know His will very clearly. He wills what He commands, and He commands the unity of the Church -- one bishop in one city, one synod in one nation, one local brotherhood of priests, one body of the faithful, and no overlapping jurisdictions. To say "When God wills" in this context of division is to imply that God has something to do with our divisions. It is at best meaningless and at worse a sinful backhanded reproach of the Almighty. A more accurate statement would be "When we will." No one is arguing over what God wills in the matter. Everyone basically agrees. We may not agree on who exactly is to be the head of the American Orthodox Church, but no one is suggesting that we are not to have one synod of bishops in our land. We know this is God's will. That we find ourselves broken into more than 10 different jurisdictions is a commentary on human fallenness not God's will. Can you imagine if someone you know fell into the heinous sin of adultery? For years he refused to stop, and in response to your loving and firm entreaties that he repent he answered you that he would, "When God wills." How ridiculous. God does not will adultery, nor does He will division.

Quip #3. "We are not mature enough yet for church unity."

The unity of the Church is not the reward of maturity, but the expression of it! Mature people do God's will. They do not get mature and then start doing it. The doing of God's will is the maturity. If a Church exists it is by definition as a Church mature enough. If it were not it would not be a Church. And on top of that, disunity is not immaturity -- it is sin. A young national church may not have as many saints, or as many parishes, or as many monasteries, or as many universities, charities, or social influence as an old and more mature Church- but if it is a Church it must be united according to the requirements of our Savior. If it is not, it is deficient in its very churchliness. Besides that, as Father Schmemann so poignantly mentioned, it is a historical fact the Church in America used to have unity. We used to have an ethnically diverse but united synod of bishops. Our unity was lost at a definite moment in time, and our task is to recover it. Orthodox reunion, not Orthodox union, is the call of the hour.

The Bitter Fruits of Disunity

While virtually every American Orthodox Christian has some story or other to relate how our divisions have wounded them personally and caused grief it is important I think to face something of a substantial enumeration of the sad fruits of our division. Our division manifests itself in many practical and pastoral ways:

1. Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive persons from Latin and certain Protestant bodies into Holy Orthodoxy by baptism and chrismation, some by chrismation alone, and some merely by confession of faith.
2. Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive Latin clergy converting to Holy Orthodoxy merely by vesting, while others ordain.
3. Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize all marriages performed outside Holy Orthodoxy as being real marriages (though certainly not sacramental) whether performed for an Orthodox or non-Orthodox, while others recognize no marriages performed outside Holy Orthodoxy whether performed for an Orthodox or a non-Orthodox. This results in someone being denied a fourth marriage in one jurisdiction while being permitted a marriage (and a first one at that!) in another jurisdiction; someone being denied ordination in one jurisdiction because of a previous marriage outside the Church, while being accepted as a candidate for ordination in another jurisdiction; a non-Orthodox married couple having to be married by the Church when they convert one jurisdiction, while in another they are received without a need for an Orthodox marriage service to be performed for them. In some jurisdictions "inter-faith" marriages mean those that are between an Orthodox and a non-Orthodox, while in other an "inter-faith" marriage means a marriage even between two Orthodox Christians from various jurisdictions.
4. Some Orthodox jurisdictions bury suicides under certain circumstances, while others forbid the burial of suicides under all circumstances.
5. Some Orthodox jurisdictions bury a person who was cremated with all funeral rites in the church temple, others permit only Trisagion Prayers of Mercy in the funeral home, some forbid any prayers anywhere for a person who was cremated.
6. Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize civil divorce as complete and sufficient for ecclesiastical purposes, while others do not recognize civil divorce at all and insist on Church Tribunals, while yet other deal with divorce in other ways.
7. Some Orthodox jurisdictions penance a person when he/she is divorced (either by civil or Church court), while others penance a person only after he/she enters into a second or third marriage.
8. Some Orthodox jurisdictions accept clergy suspended or even deposed by other Orthodox jurisdictions.
9. Some Orthodox jurisdictions ignore bans of excommunication pronounced by hierarchs of other Orthodox jurisdictions.

These divisions of pastoral practice, which are so confusing to our people and to outsiders, are sustained only because our bishops do not meet together in a common synod. And these are simply some of the pastoral anomalies engendered by our divisions that are detrimental to the health of the Orthodox flock. Besides the pastoral pains of division, there are also the very serious theological issues at stake in the elongation and tolerance of our disunity. Is it just my nose, or do others smell the foul stench of the heresy of phyletism lying behind the present indifference to unity? When phyletism was condemned as a heresy by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in A. D. 1872 in the face of Bulgarian attempts to set up an ethnic Bulgarian jurisdiction with the Patriarchate of Constantinople was not just this sort of staking of ethnic divisions within one nation categorically forbidden and castigated as heresy?

Are parallel ethnic dioceses intolerable heresy in the Ottoman Empire, but in America parallel ethnic dioceses are Orthodox, or at least tolerable? I do not understand. Such a perversion of Orthodox ecclesiology was not tolerated for one moment at that time by the Ecumenical Patriarch, and was definitively ruled against within two years while under Ottoman domination. We have been suffering in our canonical chaos already for eighty years. It does not take a neurosurgeon to see that some, evidently, do not care much about our tragic disunity. It is in this light that we should listen carefully to the counsel of His Eminence, Metropolitan Philip: "Nothing will happen unless we make it happen." And, indeed, for a long time nothing has happened, for we have not made it happen. Do we not see the love of ethnic tradition rising above love of the pan-ethnic and transnational Church of Jesus Christ, in which particular nationalisms and ethnic make-ups are but minor matters?

Today, as a result of the long exile from canonical fidelity in which we have been walking, most American Orthodox Christians, when they speak of their "church", sadly, most often mean their jurisdiction in America, not the corporate American Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction has replaced Church in our distorted phronema and divided state of existence. As a result we really have no idea what is going on in American Orthodoxy. If we are Antiochians we may speak about the Church "growing" for instance. But what we really mean is our "jurisdiction" is growing. We are not privy to the fact that some Orthodox jurisdictions are significantly shrinking, and so our missionary optimism is skewed. We may think our Church is prospering financially and taking good care of her clergy, but in reality, overall, the Church in our land may be mired in debt. We simply do not know because we are isolated in our jurisdictions.

In this deformed type of spiritual life we are not able to fully live as members of the Body of Christ. How are we to weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice, when the joys and sorrows of the majority of our Orthodox brothers and sisters in our nation, and even in our own cities and towns, remain beyond our knowledge since we are insulated and isolated from the true corporate body by our jurisdictional lines of communication? How many Orthodox failed to pray for the repose of Archbishop Iakovos simply because he was a bishop of another jurisdiction? In our divisions we live apart from the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, since the New Testament makes no promises of a catholicity to jurisdictions, but to a united Church. Our spiritual life is hampered.

What about the massive loss of resources due to our divisions? I have a recurring nightmare at our bi-annual Archdiocesan conventions. In the nightmare our hierarchs are in a terrible accident while they are in a limousine or plane in route to the convention. All are killed, and the Archdiocese is doomed since, as a result of jurisdictionalism, we do not have sufficient celibate candidates to replace our hierarchs. Since our Archdiocese has none of "its own" monasteries in America many of our young people with celibate callings have become monks in the monasteries of other jurisdictions. I have two talented young people from my parish alone that have become monastics of OCA monasteries. Such young people become ineligible to serve our jurisdiction as future bishops because they are in the monasteries of other jurisdictions. This is a fine example of how the fullness of spiritual gifts promised by our Savior to the corporate Church may be lacking to a jurisdiction. Our very catholicity is imperiled by jurisdictionalism.

What are the consequences of willful negligence and disregard of the sacred canons? Since the holy canons make up a portion of Holy Tradition, of the common life in the Holy Spirit which Tradition is, how is the fullness of our Christian life being compromised? Who can live a full spiritual life at all in this sustained compromised ecclesiastical ethos? And then we have the awful abuse of the word diaspora to apply to the American Orthodox faithful as though we are sojourning here in America and hoping to return to some other land on this earth. And what of the appearance in the last 80 years of a completely novel interpretation of Canon 28 of the Holy Fourth Ecumenical Synod about the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the appearance of papal theories of ecclesiology? These are matters of Orthodox faith and practice, not simply crusty matters of church polity. And ought we not draw some conclusions from the fact that our jurisdictional multiplicity in our land was inaugurated by an ecclesiastical personality of the likes of Patriarch Meletios IV (Metaxakis) of Constantinople? Though he was a man of immense energy and made many positive contributions to the Church, by his actions he shattered the unity of Orthodoxy in our land by establishing the Greek Archdiocese, "the first ecclesiastical body to be organized in America on a purely ethnic basis and independently from the canonically established territorial North American Diocese."

There is also the serious crimping of our evangelical witness. We have our lamp under a bushel. Let me give you an example of the bitter fruit of our divisions and how it kills our missionary endeavors. Many Americans are coming face to face with Orthodoxy for the first time. Many of our parishes have significant classes of catechumens each year, despite the fact that we have no formal evangelistic programs. Yet we are not receiving into the Church all that we should be. For example, my parish began to catechize a wonderful family two years ago. Husband, wife, and four children. Very sincere and devoted. Unfortunately, this family has not become Orthodox and now only occasionally visits the parish. When I asked why this was the case the husband said, "I simply find it hard to believe that you are the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and are so divided." Brothers and sisters, the souls of human beings are in the balance because of our divisions. Before you say, "This family is nuts. They should have gotten over it and not made such a big deal," listen to the statement of SCOBA's Ad Hoc Commission on Unity as reported in the Minutes of the SCOBA Meeting XI in 1970, presented by such lights as Frs. Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, in which just such a hampered missionary witness is predicted,

The Orthodox Church cannot claim to be the true, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church if she is actually divided into a plurality of mutually independent, competing, and overlapping jurisdictions. This division has long ago ceased to be justified by the peculiarities of Orthodox immigration in America, and has become an open scandal to the faithful, a source of demoralization and dissatisfaction in the laity, and an obstacle to any effort or progress.

And who can blame someone for not wanting to join a divided family? A family where all the uncles almost never meet together, and rarely speak? Imagine the "Smith" family for a moment. Would you not consider it a tragic state of affairs if a family made up of parents, children and grandchildren, while all living in the same city, routinely met together only in select and separated groups? If certain members of the family studiously drove right by the homes of their brothers and sisters and never stopped in, communicated, or regularly gathered? Who would want anything to do with such a family? In many ways this is how a good portion of our Orthodox family is in America. We are a broken family, out of touch, uninterested in each other's lives, and happy to go about our own isolated jurisdictional business. Like two people who are unjustifiably and sinfully divorced- the only solution is reconciliation and remarriage. Time alone simply will not heal the schism, as 85 years have demonstrated.

Recommendations for the Accomplishment of Orthodox Church Unity in America

As Galadriel said to Frodo I now suggest to you, brothers and sisters: "The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. One misstep and all may be lost." We have seen in recent church history that the pursuit of unity is more sensitive than anyone really imagined, and fraught with danger on many sides. What will the Mother Churches say? What will the other bishops do? What will the American faithful say? What will the recent immigrants say? Every one has a task to fulfill in the quest for unity, and the Lord God expects every Orthodox man and woman to do his duty in this regard. The Mother Churches have an important role to play; the bishops of the various jurisdictions that constitute SCOBA have an important role. The clergy have their own task, and the faithful a unique calling in this quest.

But if I may be so bold, I suggest that the solution lies primarily and fundamentally in the hands of the bishops in America. On many occasions, when I have suggested unity lies within the will and purview of the bishops I have been countered with comments to the effect that the bishops are often bound by their people's desires. That has not been my experience or observation. If that were true then probably we would have unity already since the people appear to be more committed and desirous of unity than the hierarchs. If the will of the people was so powerful as to hinder the bishops, then why has it not hindered their inactivity in the cause of unity? I suggest that the truth is more simple- that Orthodox bishops, who are to be by definition the very symbols of the unity of the Church, have, in fact, in a most contorted reversal, become the very symbols of disunity in the Church ... and don't seem to be too concerned about it. Where are the initiatives coming from the various synods? Where are the nursing of cross-jurisdictional episcopal unity? Forgive me, but the shepherds are responsible, not the sheep. If the sheep are responsible, it is perhaps that they have not bleated often or loudly enough as to secure the attention of their shepherds.

Towards a practical accomplishment of unity I would like to offer the following suggestions, as ways to move forward. I have designed the following recommendations to be basically unobjectionable from the standpoint of the Mother Churches, that is, I have designed these recommendations in such a way that they do not require anyone's official approval.

1. The long-dormant SCOBA Commission on Orthodox Unity, which was established and very active from the inception of SCOBA in 1960 until the grant of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970, be re-enlivened in order to address all the issues of unity, beginning with pastoral/canonical matters which directly impact the lives of each and every Orthodox person (clergy or lay) in the United States. This Commission should pursue all areas of unity that do not require official endorsement from our Mother Churches, legal changes, or anything else that may be thrown at us by any naysayers. Chief amongst these should be the establishing of common pastoral practices so as to end our divisions of pastoral economy.
   
   
2. Each jurisdiction should fund the creation of an official Department of Church Unity that would gather together the most talented and dedicated workers for unity within each jurisdiction in order to promote and further their efforts. Can we be taken seriously about our commitment to missions if we fund no Department of Missions and support no missionaries? Can we be taken seriously about our commitment to church education if we fund no church education, publish no books, and hold no educational conferences? Why would we expect anyone, and God most importantly, to take our commitment to unity seriously if we spend not a single penny on accomplishing it? "Oh sure, we are committed to unity. Really we are! We do no serious thinking about it, publish no material, spend no money on the cause, hold no conferences, but we do spend five minutes every two years at our conventions and pass a resolution saying we want it." Who would be ignorant enough to believe, based on this evidence, that it is a priority? We must put our money where our mouths are: period. If we Antiochians are serious about Church unity we need to show it with $. This department would have numerous duties including at least the following:
   
   
• Interview extensively all of the hierarchs of the Orthodox Churches in America, discern their thoughts, and gather their opinions and suggestions on unity, in an attempt to reveal the true opinion about Church unity of each. This should be done using a detailed questionnaire. This will enable the Church both gather great wisdom and discern who really cares about unity and who does not. I suggest we may find that some hierarchs are more interested in uniting with Roman Catholics and/or Protestants than with their own Orthodox brethren.
• Those bishops that have promoted worthy initiatives for unity should be highlighted, and their good efforts documented and distributed.
• Report annually to the diocesan assemblies, clergy symposia and/or summer conventions.
• Travel as a delegation to the Holy Synods of the Mother Churches and present our case and seek the support, guidance, and blessing of the Mother Churches.
  
  
I presented this proposal to a leading layman in our Archdiocese several years ago for consideration. His response at that time was that he liked the idea very much, but that it would not happen since it costs too much money. I assured him at that time that our clergy and people care for nothing more zealously than the unity of the Church, and that if we publicized our intention, announced the Metropolitan's pick to head the Department, and then solicited funds we would certainly raise even more than we need. Today I can respond even better by making a very tangible financial proposal to cover the initial costs of the Department. My proposal is simply this: abolish our Department of Communications and give up the idea of having our own separate jurisdictional web site which costs us some $200,000 every year and is one of the most obvious examples of how disunity presents an image of a fractured Orthodoxy to the general public as it pillages our treasuries as we also invest in multiple overlapping ministries. Unite the web sites of the various jurisdictions under an official SCOBA site, pay one webmaster for us all, and save hundreds of thousands of dollars and then use that money to launch of Department of Church Unity!


3. Each jurisdiction should dedicate their Clergy Symposia (perhaps the next several until it is done) to the theme of the American Orthodox Church. The majority of priests would like nothing better I assure you. Bring in speakers who have thoughts to guide us in accomplishing unity. Study the history of other Churches that have achieved autocephaly. Educate. If the priests are educated, then they will educate their people, and then maybe they could get the bishops interested.
   
   
4. By means of Archpastoral Letters call the faithful to consecrate Great Lent (and/or other appropriate fasting seasons) to pray for the accomplishment of Orthodox Church unity in America. Ask the priests and faithful to fast sincerely and beseech the Lord for forgiveness for our divisions and indifference. Create petitions to be added to the Litany of Fervent Supplication in our divine services that supplicate the Holy Trinity for an end to the schisms of the churches in America, and for the speedy establishment of one American Orthodox Church. Thus we ground our quest for church unity in regular prayers. This would raise the consciousness of the clergy and the people significantly. Compare this situation to slavery in America. Abolitionists raised the consciousness of the sin, and kept it raised until it was abolished. We must not just raise the consciousness, we must sustain it until it is fixed.
   
   
5. Orthodox jurisdictions should organize joint summer conventions so that we never again have overlapping jurisdictional conventions. At these conventions there can initially be separate rooms used for general assemblies of the various jurisdictions to do their business, but our divine services, teaching times, youth meetings, and social functions, etc. would all be together. Our bishops would meet together. Our priests would fraternize. All would cross-pollinate. What is to stop such an easily accomplished thing except the will to act for unity? And we would save lots of money at that.
   
   
6. A new commemorative book ought to be written lauding and memorializing Ligonier 1994, re-publishing its documents, explaining the immense tragedy that has taken place since 1994, and detailing the nature of the sinfulness of church division in our country. We need a simple place to refer to see how our current situation is theologically heretical, canonically irregular, and practically devastating to our witness. Its goal should be to convince the reader that this is not a matter of fixing an unfortunate problem when it is convenient to do so, but of repenting of an intolerable and unnecessary schism.
   
   
7. Expose un-Orthodox ecclesiology in the footsteps of St. Raphael of Brooklyn, who wrote several critical exposes (even under a pseudonym) of ecclesiastical injustices, making an exposé of ecclesiastical injustice wherever it is found suppressing and hindering the unity of the Church. St. Paul writes, "Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but even expose them."
   
   
8. Remove all ethnic and jurisdictional references in the titles of our churches both in letterhead and church signs and promotional materials. Our churches should be called "St. N. Orthodox Church" or "St. N. Orthodox Christian Church" but no longer "St. Andrew Greek/Russian/Antiochian/Serbian ... Church". Such designations may be necessary for "in house" identification, but they certainly sound confusing, restrictive, uninviting, and foreign to the greater non-Orthodox world. Why are we proclaiming our divisions and encouraging people to think that Orthodoxy is only for foreigners or only for people of a certain ethnic or geographical background? We can and ought be proud of our heritage, but without waving the flag of jurisdictionalism in the face of America.
   
   
9. Request of our Orthodox Seminaries to foster serious academic engagement over the quest for Orthodox unity, both engaging each other in cooperative ventures and nourishing the Orthodox phronema in our seminarians on this subject of Orthodox unity.
   
   
10. Nurture support for American Orthodox church unity from Orthodox Christians around the world, making the case to them for a strong undivided American Church, and soliciting the good will, financial support, and constructive advice of Orthodox leaders throughout the world who can lend much needed moral support to our efforts. In the 1960s Archbishop Iakovos insisted upon such an effort by SCOBA's Commission on Orthodox Unity in America.
    
    
11. Fulfill your personal obligations to pursue unity. These personal obligations should include the following: daily prayer for the unity of the Church, speaking correctly regarding your self-identification as an "Orthodox Christian in America" and not as a Greek, Serb, Arab, or Englishman, or part of some ethnic tradition in Orthodoxy, embracing all Orthodox Christians in your parish from whatever backgrounds they come and working against the formation of ethnic cliques in parishes (by the way- Anglo converts can be just as ethnic and clique-ish as any other group), supporting the use of English in the liturgy, celebrating the patronal feasts of all the Orthodox Churches local to your place of residence regardless of jurisdiction, speaking to your bishop and priest regularly about your sincere desire for their leadership in the quest for unity, financially supporting efforts for unity, encouraging foreign language parishes where such are justified by pastoral need in serving recent immigrants, etc. None of these pursuits require anyone else's cooperation. They can and should be fulfilled as holy obligations by every Orthodox Christian in America.
    
    

An Encouraging Word in Conclusion

I have not intended to overwhelm you, my dear brothers and sisters. Please forgive me for my mistakes, my ignorance, or my poor judgments. I am not offering any last word on the subject of unity or even anything inspiring or definitive that has not been articulated by those who love the unity of the Church more than I and know the path to reunion better. I have simply made an effort to articulate as best as I can what I believe to be the mind of Christ, which is the mind of the Church, on this pressing subject of the divisions we are sustaining. I know the days are dark, the clouds are overhead, and it looks bleak. But we are not without hope. There is no word sufficient to hymn the Lord's wonders, and He is not a God who turns a deaf ear to the humble petitions of His children, at least not yet I am trusting. The unity, which we can hardly foresee, may simply be hiding close behind the dark clouds, which obscure our vision. No one desires the unity of the Church in our land more than the Lord God Himself.

I leave you with this encouraging story. It comes from the pioneers of our nation, the pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation. The story concerns one indentured servant name John Howland, who was traveling on the Mayflower with his master, the soon-to-be first governor of Plymouth, R. Carver. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean was frightful, and one day the Mayflower encountered a huge gale. Being in danger of sinking, the captain turned the boat against the wind, lowered the sails, and attempted to ride out the storm. All the 102 pilgrims and strangers were sent below deck, and ordered to remain there for their safety's sake. Young John Howland, however, grew restless and so he ventured upstairs and wandered out on the deck. No sooner had he stepped out but a large wave struck him and he was hurled in the wind right off the side of the Mayflower into the stormy sea. The sailors considered him certainly lost, and in truth John was fast being driven by the wind away from the ship and under water. As he was flailing for his life his hand passed over a rope from the mast, which was unfurled and also flailing in the water. With all his strength he grasped on to the rope and help on for dear life. In that position he was suppressed more than 10 feet under water by the storm, when the sailors noticed that the rope was taught and began to hurriedly attempt to pull John Howland out of the deeps up on to the deck. They were successful at getting him above water and then using a fishhook on the end of a long pole they pulled him up on to the deck safe and sound. That John Howland endured, and he went on to outlive all the other pilgrims, to marry a beautiful wife named Elizabeth, to raise ten children of his own, and eighty-eight grandchildren and to contribute significantly to the initial establishment of what would become our dear nation!

Brothers and Sisters! We too are pilgrims seeking to live in the promised land of the Church, and we are in the midst of a great storm, the Tempest Disunity. In many ways it seems that we will never reach the shore, and frankly, at times it appears that we are holding on for dear life to a very thin rope. Do not let go my dear brothers and sisters. It may be that we are on the cusp of being pulled up and out of our distress and of obtaining the very thing we seek, and that soon, as it was in John Howland's case, fruitfulness, the fruitfulness of unity, may be upon us to the true up building of our Church in America. May it be, by the grace of our God, by the prayers of your holy Bishop, and for the salvation of our people.

Fr. Josiah Trenham is pastor of St. Andrew Church in Riverside, California.