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Cavaradossi
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Out of curiosity, have you read John Zizoulas? Not all Orthodox theologians are philosophical slouches. I’m not sure that it’s wise to promote Aristotelian metaphysics as being the framework for existence.
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PbloPicasso
Guest
Very interesting. I can see how you fell in love with Aquinas. My philosophy is limited, but I do plan to pursue an MTS from Franciscan University. I’m trying to build up enough nerve to apply. I’m currently a graduate student seeking teacher certification as a second half of my life career/vocation to free up my time for clerical work, possible work in a Catholic School or for my diocese one day -
- prayerfully seeking ordination to the diaconate.
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Khalid
Guest
Yes (he wrote “Being and Communion”, right?) and Vladimir Lossky, who I believed was a good deal better.
I think it is not only wise, but necessary, both practically and philosophically (as the truth is always necessary) to promote Aristotelian metaphysics as the metaphysics - the framework for everything. Or at least a derivative of them. Platonic metaphysics, Aristotelian metaphysics, and Thomist metaphysics all have some things in common. So, no, Aristotelian metaphysics isn’t necessary per se (although I believe the Four Causes are), but any of a number of derivatives, generally lumped under headings such as “Essentialism”, “Real Essentialism”, “Philosophical Realism”, “Naive Realism”, “Philosophical Naive Realism”, and other similar headings. I personally think Aristotle and, specifically, St Thomas Aquinas’s elaboration and reworking of Aristotle, provide the best and most accurate metaphysical picture of being and somethingness. However, Plato had his followers, and even as St Thomas was to Aristotle, Plotinus and St Augustine were to Plato (albeit that Augustine is as much a derivative of Plotinus as Plato); Plato’s metaphysics are defensible, even in the hands of mystics such as Plotinus.
Why do you believe Aristotelian metaphysics are possibly bad? Because theologians and philosophers wielded the “final cause” with a heavy hand as a hammer to end all reductive and empirical inquiry in to things for far too long? That’s not a problem with Aristotle’s metaphysics, it’s a problem with confusing a final cause with a scientific explanation.
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Filioque
Guest
The Catholic Church accepts as valid the Sacraments you received as an Orthodox, in fact most Eastern Catholics recieve Baptism and Chrisimation as well as first communion as infants at the same time. Chrisimation (Confirmation in the West) is not simply a rite in which you confirm your faith in Christ and His Church, but a Sacrament which brings the Graces of the Holy Ghost to us in a special way, therefore when someone has received it from someone with unquestionable Apostolic Succession like an Orthodox priest or Bishop, there is no need to recieve it again. Some Orthodox priests will not require that the sacraments recieved in the Catholic Church be given again as a requirement for receptionin into Orthodoxy, others however do not recognize Catholic Sacraments as valid. My aunt and uncle who entered Orthodoxy because he was divorced after his wife committed adultry and they could not marry in the Catholic Church were required to recieve Baptism and Chrisimation then recieved Communion at their wedding. Three of my friends who converted from Orthodoxy to the Catholic Faith, simply made a Profession of Faith, and went to confession, then recieved communion at the next Mass they attended.
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Khalid
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I would recommend an Ignatian retreat, as I have found the Exercises of Ignatius to be most helpful in the discernment of vocations. The problem is it’s impossible, and maybe damaging, to work through them on your own. There’s nothing in the Exercises themselves that’s incompatible with Orthodoxy if you overlook a few statements about the Holy Father (they’re not in the core of the meditations in any case). Ignatian spirituality is very mystical for Catholicism. I can’t speak highly enough of the Exercises, although I think, albeit that many persons religious go to one retreat a year, that the profound effect of them the first time is never going to be repeated nor even approached. It’s kind of like a joke, in that way; it may incapacitate you for minutes the first time you hear it, and have no effect the second time.Very interesting. I can see how you fell in love with Aquinas. My philosophy is limited, but I do plan to pursue an MTS from Franciscan University. I’m trying to build up enough nerve to apply. I’m currently a graduate student seeking teacher certification as a second half of my life career/vocation to free up my time for clerical work, possible work in a Catholic School or for my diocese one day -
Purgatory is in there, but so is it in Orthodoxy, even if you don’t have a name for it - or else prayers for the dead are useless. I find the Orthodox doctrine of pseudo-purgatory to be much like the Orthodox doctrine of the Real Presence, that is, sort of fideist. If you ask an Orthodox about the Real Presence, you don’t hear “transubstantiation” or “consubstantiation” or any theory - you hear, “it’s a mystery of faith”, which, more than most fideism, I respect, because human reason is never going to truly grasp the re-presentation of the eternal sacrifice of our Lord, brought out of eternity and in to spatio-temporality for the Sacrifice of the Mass, and his actual bodily presence therein, the Most Blessed Sacrament.
You can buy a copy of the Exercises and thumb through it without doing them to see if it can be made to work for you; if it can, I can recommend nothing more for someone who is trying to discern a vocation, whether to the life religious, ecclesiastical, or matrimonial.
I had hoped and had (and have) my sights set on one day becoming a Jesuit, from the Exercises, but I’ve heard a bit about their liberalness, which I will have to learn more about before I would enter in to formation, or a Dominican otherwise after the example of him who I venerate and admire greatly, St Thomas Aquinas (it’s quite awesome to be able to read the writings of an intercessor in Heaven): both of the orders known for their excellent learning, theology, philosophy and scholarship combined with a missionary zeal for the salvation of souls and “to renew the world in Christ”.
One reason I am such a staunch supporter and lover of philosophical theology is that it gives a firm foundation for legitimate, rational, warranted faith instead of the fideism of Karl Barth and contemporaries, and, indeed, most theists since the time of Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza (and especially since that dastardly assassin of the Western intellectual and philosophical tradition, the [brilliant] sophist Hume); and because it gives us the closest and most accurate relationship with and understanding of God and his most Holy religion that he has entrusted to the Church that we will ever have without mystical experience.
And, face it, less than 1 in 1*9.99^10000 or even less of people are ever going to have a mystical or direct experience of God, no matter what path of spirituality they choose or how much hesychasm is engaged in (I have other problems with hesychasm as a form of self-hypnosis and possible Adversarial influence on the experiences it generates); thus, the best knowledge we can have of God - and we are required to attempt to gain the best knowledge of him as possible, so that we may better know him and thus love him, and banish our misunderstandings of him - comes from philosophical theology. And, those who do have mystical experience of God can not communicate the actual experience to anyone else; eventually, taking St Gregory of Nazianzus’s or any of the other Orthodox Theologians’ (theoria-experiencers) word on the matter is the same as taking the word of a philosopher or theologian, just without any logic to back it up; it devolves in to authoritarianism, when one can’t learn for oneself.
There is no doubt that for the people to whom it is granted the direct experience of God is unimaginably greater than the greatest outputs of philosophy and theology; it is as much or more greater than philosophical theology than philosophical theology is to blind faith based on nothing but received traditions of the parents, with all evidence against it. One must admit this: even St Thomas Aquinas, likely the greatest theologian ever to have lived, said, after he received the reward of a direct experience of God after having spent a lifetime trying to come to know him as best as possible through the means of philosophy and theology, “Burn all of my writings… they are as worthless as straw” - and this is the author of the incomparable Summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles, which are pure Gold.
(continued below)
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Khalid
Guest
(continued from above)
This was a Saint and Doctor who was such an incomparable human being, that, as a teenager who had discerned his calling to religious life, his parents objected, heavily, and eventually placed him under house arrest. A teenager, with raging hormones then as now: to attempt to lure him away from the narrow and crooked path that leads to the narrow gate of life, they sent prostitutes to his room after he had been in absolute seclusion for some months; the teenage Thomas grabbed up a log out of the fireplace, aflame at one end, and used it to chase the whore out of his chambers, and scribbled on the wall a cross in charcoal using the extinguished brand. Before this cross he prayed for the grace of lifelong chastity, which God granted to him; he now wears a crown of white.
His intellect was, if anything, stronger and more acute than his sexual morality, and this intellect, he put to paper: after a direct experience of God, he considered it worthless. That is the superiority* of the direct experience compared to the speculative theology; but hardly anyone will ever have direct experience. Everyone who is of at least average intelligence can have a basic philosophico-theological knowledge of God, even if they don’t truly understand it and take even the arguments and logic themselves on authority, and everyone of higher intelligence can have the knowledge in a true sense (i.e. accompanied by an understanding), and maybe even build upon it, even if not in a way that shatters paradigms, as St Thomas did.
*Without trying to speculate on whether such things are Adversarial deceptions trying to lure him to destroy his work which would save so many souls and increase the world and Church’s understanding of God and his Religion so greatly, and would have such a great and noble effect in general on all things Spiritual, Religious, Ecclesiastical, and for a time, even Temporal, albeit the Scholastics did lay the groundwork that was necessary for the moderns such as Descartes to come in and destroy a millennium and a half of philosophical wisdom and understanding and replace it with prediction and control of nature.
Technological acumen and mechanical aptitude are not synonymous with wisdom and understanding, albeit the push for technology has effected great wonders and successes in its own right; without the science of Alchemy, which, under the influence of the mechanists lead to Chemistry, which lead to Pharmacology and the widespread availability of medications as we know them, I would likely die several times over each week (if such was possible, instead of a single death), likely would have died from infections as a child even before that, and probably would not have been able to retain my sanity for as long as I have. Aristotelian-ly speaking, the progress of the technologies of the mechanists, especially in medicine, have enabled my continuing and more perfect instantiation of the act of rationality of the inhered potency of rationality in the form “rational animal”, and, without their developments, would have lost act to mere potency and instantiated “animal” without the act, but only the potency, of “rational”: thus, the mechanist-inspired sciences and developments have helped me more fully instantiate a form that naturally I would have likely been unable to, at least for long periods of time, and a form itself that likely would not exist except for the machinations of mechanism and technology as it wouldn’t have a body to inhere in in the first place, leaving the act nor potency to have no form to inhere in.
This was a Saint and Doctor who was such an incomparable human being, that, as a teenager who had discerned his calling to religious life, his parents objected, heavily, and eventually placed him under house arrest. A teenager, with raging hormones then as now: to attempt to lure him away from the narrow and crooked path that leads to the narrow gate of life, they sent prostitutes to his room after he had been in absolute seclusion for some months; the teenage Thomas grabbed up a log out of the fireplace, aflame at one end, and used it to chase the whore out of his chambers, and scribbled on the wall a cross in charcoal using the extinguished brand. Before this cross he prayed for the grace of lifelong chastity, which God granted to him; he now wears a crown of white.
His intellect was, if anything, stronger and more acute than his sexual morality, and this intellect, he put to paper: after a direct experience of God, he considered it worthless. That is the superiority* of the direct experience compared to the speculative theology; but hardly anyone will ever have direct experience. Everyone who is of at least average intelligence can have a basic philosophico-theological knowledge of God, even if they don’t truly understand it and take even the arguments and logic themselves on authority, and everyone of higher intelligence can have the knowledge in a true sense (i.e. accompanied by an understanding), and maybe even build upon it, even if not in a way that shatters paradigms, as St Thomas did.
*Without trying to speculate on whether such things are Adversarial deceptions trying to lure him to destroy his work which would save so many souls and increase the world and Church’s understanding of God and his Religion so greatly, and would have such a great and noble effect in general on all things Spiritual, Religious, Ecclesiastical, and for a time, even Temporal, albeit the Scholastics did lay the groundwork that was necessary for the moderns such as Descartes to come in and destroy a millennium and a half of philosophical wisdom and understanding and replace it with prediction and control of nature.
Technological acumen and mechanical aptitude are not synonymous with wisdom and understanding, albeit the push for technology has effected great wonders and successes in its own right; without the science of Alchemy, which, under the influence of the mechanists lead to Chemistry, which lead to Pharmacology and the widespread availability of medications as we know them, I would likely die several times over each week (if such was possible, instead of a single death), likely would have died from infections as a child even before that, and probably would not have been able to retain my sanity for as long as I have. Aristotelian-ly speaking, the progress of the technologies of the mechanists, especially in medicine, have enabled my continuing and more perfect instantiation of the act of rationality of the inhered potency of rationality in the form “rational animal”, and, without their developments, would have lost act to mere potency and instantiated “animal” without the act, but only the potency, of “rational”: thus, the mechanist-inspired sciences and developments have helped me more fully instantiate a form that naturally I would have likely been unable to, at least for long periods of time, and a form itself that likely would not exist except for the machinations of mechanism and technology as it wouldn’t have a body to inhere in in the first place, leaving the act nor potency to have no form to inhere in.
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azerty
Guest
St Thomas is also why i love catholicism. I also love St Bonaventure, his mysticism has a solid intellectual fundation.
What orthodoxes do not like and criticizes is the baroque thomism of Cajean, Jean de St Thomas which fell into naturalism, and the cold and rationalist neothomism of Garrigou Lagrange. (The pope didn’t seem to like this thomism either)
A look at the writings of the jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (who was no modernist) would clear a lot of misconceptions on St Thomas and St Augustin.
What orthodoxes do not like and criticizes is the baroque thomism of Cajean, Jean de St Thomas which fell into naturalism, and the cold and rationalist neothomism of Garrigou Lagrange. (The pope didn’t seem to like this thomism either)
A look at the writings of the jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (who was no modernist) would clear a lot of misconceptions on St Thomas and St Augustin.
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Filioque
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With regard to the licity of the Sacraments of the Orthodox, I do believe that when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athanagoras lifted the mutual excommunications they both agreed that the other has full Jurisdiction over their own people. In essence admitting that the Catholic Church recognized not just the validity of the sacraments of the Orthodox, but also the licitness of their administration to Orthodox Subjects. The same was granted by Athanagoras to the subjects of the Pope.
One problem with this from the Orthodox side is that the Patriarch of Constantinople does not legislate for all Orthodox, and the Episcopal Synods of each Orthodox Jurisdiction must ratify such pronouncements for them to be adopted. Therefore there are some Orthodox who accept Catholic Orders and Sacraments, and others who don’t. There is no single understanding of Orders among the Orthodox. Some profess that if a priest is not una cum (I don’t know the various Orthodox terms for it) A bishop who is in good standing with a Canonical bishop, all the sacraments he attempts are not simply illicit but invalid. These groups tend to see all Catholic sacraments and orders invalid because they see Rome as schismatic, and heretical, as well as non-Canonical.
Part of why some areas of Orthodox theology did not develop with the same gusto as Western Theology include the assaults on orthodox theology by various Protestant “reformers”. There is however a very deep and rich theological, philosophical and spiritual tradition in both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
One problem with this from the Orthodox side is that the Patriarch of Constantinople does not legislate for all Orthodox, and the Episcopal Synods of each Orthodox Jurisdiction must ratify such pronouncements for them to be adopted. Therefore there are some Orthodox who accept Catholic Orders and Sacraments, and others who don’t. There is no single understanding of Orders among the Orthodox. Some profess that if a priest is not una cum (I don’t know the various Orthodox terms for it) A bishop who is in good standing with a Canonical bishop, all the sacraments he attempts are not simply illicit but invalid. These groups tend to see all Catholic sacraments and orders invalid because they see Rome as schismatic, and heretical, as well as non-Canonical.
Part of why some areas of Orthodox theology did not develop with the same gusto as Western Theology include the assaults on orthodox theology by various Protestant “reformers”. There is however a very deep and rich theological, philosophical and spiritual tradition in both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
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Ghosty
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Khalid: In the Catholic Church you won’t be re-Chrismated. All that’s technically required for an Orthodox to become Catholic is a profession of Faith in the Catholic Church, such as an acceptance of the Papacy and such. Beyond that you (and all other Orthodox) are already considered “Catholic” in the Faith, so there’s not much of a process for transfer. Even “conversion” is not a term generally applied to Orthodox who become Catholic.
That being said, most parishes will still want to put you through some kind of formation before any “official” welcoming ceremonies, but under Catholic Canon Law you could begin attending Catholic Liturgies and receiving the Sacraments right now, even without wanting to become Catholic, as the Orthodox are considered that close.
As a side note I’d love to talk more with you about the Faith. I myself am a Melkite (in practice) and I also have a huge appreciation for St. Thomas Aquinas. I actually keep his Summa Theologica at my bedside. I agree with you about philosophical foundation, and you might be surprised to learn that our view was common in the Byzantine East not so long ago; the Summa was translated into Greek by the Patriarch of Constantinople, in fact. If you haven’t read it, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith” by St. John of Damascus is a great example of the more philosophically grounded Eastern theology.
I also love Eastern mysticism (and Western mysticism), and I’m sure your feelings are more based on the exaggerated nature of your environment than any real rejection of that spiritual approach. A true marriage of rational theology and mystical prayer and experience is the best, IMO, which is another reason why St. Thomas Aquinas is one of my favorites (his mystical experiences occurred throughout his life, not just the famous “my work is straw” incident).
Peace and God bless!
That being said, most parishes will still want to put you through some kind of formation before any “official” welcoming ceremonies, but under Catholic Canon Law you could begin attending Catholic Liturgies and receiving the Sacraments right now, even without wanting to become Catholic, as the Orthodox are considered that close.
As a side note I’d love to talk more with you about the Faith. I myself am a Melkite (in practice) and I also have a huge appreciation for St. Thomas Aquinas. I actually keep his Summa Theologica at my bedside. I agree with you about philosophical foundation, and you might be surprised to learn that our view was common in the Byzantine East not so long ago; the Summa was translated into Greek by the Patriarch of Constantinople, in fact. If you haven’t read it, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith” by St. John of Damascus is a great example of the more philosophically grounded Eastern theology.
I also love Eastern mysticism (and Western mysticism), and I’m sure your feelings are more based on the exaggerated nature of your environment than any real rejection of that spiritual approach. A true marriage of rational theology and mystical prayer and experience is the best, IMO, which is another reason why St. Thomas Aquinas is one of my favorites (his mystical experiences occurred throughout his life, not just the famous “my work is straw” incident).
Peace and God bless!
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Khalid
Guest
If you want to take it in to another forum, PM me or send me an e-mail through the CAF system. If you don’t, ask anything you like here (or state anything you like, as I likely will have something to say in return, as always). Thus dialogue begins.
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Fox
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The Orthodox believe that it is the Catholic church and the Latin church broke from them, your point is moot. Again the Latin church trying to scare people with the ole “fire and brimstone” tactic.
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choliks
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Orthodox Church Sacraments are valid and licit. Licit because the Orthodox are their own authority.
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ConstantineTG
Guest
They are not illicit. They are outside our the Catholic Church and therefore beyond the reach of Canon Law to define what is licit or not.
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ConstantineTG
Guest
No, they are not valid because of Canon Law. They are valid because we recognize that they are valid Apostolic Churches. There is nothing our own Church canons can do to invalidate them. The Orthodox themselves would have to ruin their faith to lose their ability to ordain priests, and thus confer valid Sacraments.
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