we do, that’s not what we’re talking about. it’s entirely possible that every condemned heretic is ultimately saved. that doesn’t change that what they profess about God in this life is heretical.
I think the great scholar of our time Dr. David Bentley Hart stated this well: "I ask this, because, the most intransigent and extreme members of our respective communions—and those, I fear,
who in the East are usually at present the most impassioned and obstreperous among us—seem often incapable or unwilling to acknowledge any recognizable distinction between substantial and accidental differences, between real and imagined difficulties, between obvious and merely suppositious theological issues, and between matters of negligible import and those that lie at the heart of our division. As regards my own communion, I must reluctantly report that there are some Eastern Christians
who have become incapable of defining what it is to be Orthodox except in contradistinction to Roman Catholicism; and among these are a small but voluble number who have (I sometimes suspect)
lost any rationale for their Orthodoxy other than their profound hatred, deranged terror, and encyclopaedic ignorance of Rome. For such as these, there can never be any limit set to the number of grievances that need to be cited against Rome, nor any act of contrition on the part of Rome sufficient for absolution."
He moreover states: "When a certain kind of Greek Orthodox anti-papal demagogue claims that the Eastern Church has always rejected the validity of the sacraments of the ‘Latin schismatics’, or that that the real church schism dates back to the eighth century when the Orthodox Church became estranged from the Roman over the latter’s ‘rejection’ of the (14th-century) distinction between God’s essence and energies, the historically literate among us should recognize that what he takes to be apostolic Orthodoxy
is in fact based upon ecclesiological and sacramental principles that reach back only to 1755, and upon principles of theological interpretation first enunciated in 1942, and upon an interpretation of ecclesiastical history that dates from whenever the prescriptions for his medications expired.” On the matter of the eastern radicals and phyletists, Hart declares the primordial predicament to be the ‘acute manifestation of a chronic pathology’ by which clouds their judgement and prevents the fullness of union to be actualized, saying: "I do not believe that, before the middle of the 20th century, claims were ever made regarding the nature of the division as radical
as those one finds not only in the works of inane agitators like the altogether absurd and execrable John Romanides, but also in the works of theologians of genuine stature, such as Dumitru Staniloae, Vladimir Lossky, or John Zizioulas in the East or Erich Przywara or Hans Urs von Balthasar in the West; and until those claims are defeated—as well they should be, as they are without exception entirely fanciful—we cannot reasonably hope for anything but impasse."
He notes that the most damaging consequence of Orthodoxy’s 20th century pilgrimage ad fontes has been an increase in the intensity of Eastern theology’s anti-Western polemic, which I extensively spoke on in my previous work. As Hart states, particularly on the “aforementioned John Romanides, for instance, has produced expositions of the thought of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas that are almost miraculously devoid of one single correct statement; and while this might be comical if such men spoke only for themselves, it becomes tragic when instead they influence the way great numbers of their fellows view other Christians.” He then states: “Since at least the time of Vladimir Lossky it has become something of a fixed idea in modern Orthodox theology that Western theology has traditionally forgotten the biblical truth that the unity of the Trinity flows from the paternal arche and come to believe instead that what constitutes the unity of God is an impersonal divine essence prior to the Trinitarian relations.” He cites Theodore de Regnon’s 1892 work which first suggested a distinction between Western and Eastern styles of Trinitarian theology which was “seized upon, rather opportunistically, by a number of 20th-century theologians, and now we find ourselves in an age in which we are often told that we must choose between ‘Greek’ personalism and ‘Latin’ essentialism.”
Hart then states: “It has become so lamentably common among my fellow Orthodox to treat this claim that Western theology in general posits some ‘impersonal’ divine ground behind the Trinitarian hypostases, and so fails to see the Father as the ‘fountainhead of divinity’, as a simple fact of theological history (and the secret logic of Latin ‘filioquism’)
that it seems almost rude to point out that it is quite demonstrably untrue, from the patristic through the medieval periods, with a few insignificant exceptions.” What is important in this quote is what follows: “
In fact, I would go so far as to claim that the understanding of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit found in Augustine is not only compatible, but identical, with that of the Cappadocian fathers—including Gregory’s and Basil’s belief that the generation of the Son is directly from the Father, while the procession of the Spirit is from the Father only per Filium (sed, to borrow a phrase, de Patre principaliter).” He observes that both Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa even distinguish generation and procession within the Trinity in terms primarily of the order of cause: that is, both claim that the procession of the Spirit differs from the generation of the Son principally in that the former occurs through the Son. As Gregory writes (in a passage that would fit very well in, say, Book V of Augustine’s
De Trinitate): “... while confessing the immutability of the [divine] nature, we do not deny difference in regard to cause and that which is caused, by which alone we discern the difference of each Person from the other, in that we believe one to be the cause and another to be from the cause; and again we conceive of another difference within that which is from the cause: between the one who, on the one hand, comes directly from the principle and the one who, on the other, comes from the principle through the one who arises directly; thus it unquestionably remains peculiar to the Son to be the Only Begotten, while at the same time it is not to be doubted that the Spirit is of the Father, by virtue of the mediation of the Son that safeguards the Son’s character as Only Begotten, and thus the Spirit is not excluded from his natural relation to the Father.”
This is the very argument—made by Augustine in De Trinitate—that scores of Orthodox theologians in recent decades have denounced as entirely alien to Eastern tradition. This is extremely important in the coagulation of St. Petro Mohyla’s work with the Cappadocian Fathers and general Orthodoxy: “The Latins proceeded with wisdom, demonstrating that there was controversy between the Greeks and Latins only on the primacy [seeing that they had not imposed on the Greeks the insertion of the clause a Filio [from the Son] in the Symbol [the Creed], and that this clause [being admitted on the theological plane], the Romans requested only its avowal and not its addition to the Creed.” Hart then goes on to state that, since the time of Lossky, various modern Orthodox theologians have adopted an exaggerated ‘Photianism’ and have, in their assault on ‘filioquism’, argued that—though, within the economy of salvation, the Spirit is breathed out by Christ upon the apostles—the Trinitarian relations as revealed in the economy of salvation are distinct from the eternal relations of the immanent Trinity. Hart states on this topic: “This [view] is theologically disastrous, and in fact subversive of the entire Eastern patristic tradition of Trinitarian dogma. Were this claim sound, there would be absolutely no basis for Trinitarian theology at all; the arguments by which the Cappadocians defended full Trinitarian theology against Arian and Eunomian thought—in works like Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto and Gregory’s Adversus Macedonianos—would entirely fail.
Orthodoxy would have no basis whatsoever.” Hart suggests that whatever differences may exist between the two traditions, “none of them is of any appreciable magnitude, and even if they were they would still constitute only differences between theologoumena, not between dogmata.” Hart blames this on “some desire to rationalize and deepen the division between the churches, the sheer speculative plasticity of theological reflection and language allows for an endless multiplication of ever newer ‘ancient’ differences.”
Later in his thesis, he states on the matter of the filioque: “Indeed, were this simply a matter of theology,
my impulse would be to defend the clause,
so long as it is understood to mean that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son (the Father being, as scripture clearly reveals,
the soul wellspring of Godhead),
because I believe that that is the authentic Eastern teaching as well, and the only teaching that can at once be made congruent with the evidence of scripture and the logic of Orthodox theological tradition.” He states that not everyone in the east agrees, such as Vladimir Lossky and others who have argued the opposite; but Hart find their arguments not only unpersuasive, but historically absurd and theologically catastrophic. I agree.
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