Reason Applied to Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism

[sokoticasiva]

Am I getting any closer?

Most of it almost completely spot on!

Allow me to emphasize “scientifically” and I will respond to your unanswered questions later on. (The answer is mostly in 4 - methods, but 1-3 are pre-condition to understand 4.)​

1.) Goal = Knowledge.
1.1.) Statements/expressions of knowledge are the messages to other humans.
2) Human ability to gain knowledge about certain things does have certain limits.
3) Subject matter of knowledge
3.1.) God
or
3.1.a) Any other subject matter about which humans are not able to gain the complete “perfect” knowledge - e.g. distant space, distant stars, core of the Sun, “black holes” etc.

3.2.) What’s been revealed about God
or
3.2.a) Any other subject matter about which humans are able to gain the knowledge we call complete or “perfect” knowledge - e.g. bread, nuclear energy, etc.

4.) Methods/methodology/tools
4.1.) “Scientific” tools/methods, the result of which can be examined

4.1.1.) Observation (of events)
4.1.2.) Experience (accumulated memory of observation of events)
4.1.3.) Experiment (creating all conditions to induce an aimed event)

Note that 4.1.1.-4.1.3. are all “first-hand” witness, when knowledge is gained without an intermediary.

4.1.4.) One’s intellectual procession of one’s own observation/experience/experiment and make of certain conclusions.

4.1.5.) Intellectual procession of otherone’s statements/messages (1.1) which can be examined (4.1.)

Note 4.1.5. is a “second-degree” witness, when knowledge is gained through an intermediary.

4.2.) “Non-scientific” tools/methods, the results of wchi cannot be examined

4.2.1.) Revelation - an event caused without the activity of a human that can’t be explained (Apocalypsis of St. Apostle John, U.F.O.'s, etc.)
4.2.2.) Ecstasy - an event caused by the activity of a human that can’t be explained

Note that 4.2.1. and 4.2.2. are also “first-hand” witness, knowledge gained without an intermediary.

4.2.3.) Pre-cognition - suffice is to say that all people/nations do have pre-cognition about certain things, God being one of them - we know that from the reports of anthropologists about distant communities/tribes whom all worship some God.

4.2.4.) One’s intellectual procession of one’s own experienced revelation/ecstasy/pre-cognition and make of certain conclusions.

4.2.5.) Intellectual procession of otherone’s statements/messages (1.1.) which can’t be examined (again “second-degree” witness, through an intermediary).​

Knowledge gained by methods that can be examined is subject to examination by reason. Knowledge gained by methods that can’t be examined is not subject of examination by reason - either one believe or doesn’t believe. Yet, mutual relations and consistency of various revealed messages, as well as of the entirety of a system is subject to examination by reason.

Reasoning generally and dialectic reasoning specifically are under 4.1.4.,4.1.5, 4.2.4. and 4.2.5. To make true assertive statements, we must check if otherone’s conclusions are true. Even if we pay the attention to differentiate all the items under 3 and 4 above and see if are we talking about the results that can be examined or about those ones that can’t be examined, the problem is that statements/messages (1.1.) may include the conclusions of the intermediary which does not necessarily contain the complete “perfect” truth.

As you, yourself put it:

TOmNossor:

When those exercises produce results that are unacceptable, we should not declare that reason does not work; but instead declare that some (name removed by moderator)ut was in error.

Example: Bread (3.2.a) is delicious.

Problem: What’s the use of such a statement/message? What does it explain about bread? What can we do with such an explanation? Did it learn us to make bread? Did we know to eat bread even without such a statement/message?

But we are not speaking about the subject we are able to gain knowledge about (3.2.), but about the subject we are not able to gain knowledge about (3.1.), though there is the promise (3.2.) revealed (4.2.1.) that “we shall see Him as He is”, but that would be something inconceivable, the final revelation, the knowledge about which will be gained by experience (4.1.2.)

Also:

TOmNossor:

I was very surprised when an EO in another thread suggested that homiousius was a word that described a mystery associated with the revelations of God, but Transubstantiation was inappropriate because it was about God or something

/continued…

 

[sokoticasiva]

…/continued

To the limited extent I’m able to reason it - Orthodox do have the problem with Transubstantiation because it tries to explain the fashion/mode/moment of transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Our concept of Epiklesis doesn’t explain the fashion/mode/moment. It’s a mystery to us, though we know there is the transformation (there are various witness of that).

Moreover:

TOmNossor:

Has it been revealed that humans have free will?

Though there is the revelation about that in the Bible, we can prove that by observation and experience, too.

TOmNossor:

I think you have said that God may or may not be impassible, but that God is impassible is not something that has been revealed. Thus, we may find value in discussing God as impassible, and He may indeed be impassible (perhaps completely, perhaps only in a certain sense); but we cannot take this valuable concept and use reasoning upon it.

Spot on. Or, I’d say it’s value is approximately the same as “bread is delicious”. And it’s a conclusion, not the established fact. It may have the value for a specific purpose, within a specific logical/philosophical system, but is far from explaining incomprehensible/inconceivable God by reason.

And, finally, about 1, the goal.

Aquinas emphasized on reason. That’s fine if the goal is knowledge. But the ultimate goal of a Christian is not knowledge about God, but salvation, when those saved will be in union with God. And, one’s salvation does not depend on one’s intellect. But that’s completely another subject.

Aristotelos and Plato laid down the systems, comprehensive ones. Some thoughts of theirs made various Christian thinkers to make various errors. Torturing heretics to death, justified by Aquinas (I believe he actually needed to justify what’s already been practice of Rome), can be traced through St. Augustine’s “City of God” to Plato’s “The State”. The main error of Aquinas, in spite of my highly regard of him, was that he tried to reconcile the system of Aristotelos as such with Christianity.

The source of a computer program coded in C doesn’t work in C# (well, at least I think so). These are different systems, different logic. Apples and oranges.

“God is impassible/immutable” does have the meaning in Plato’s/Platonist’s system of thinking. Or, we can go even farther, to Leukip’s logic. Within these systems impassible/immutable/Creator-distant-from-creation/etc does create problem in explaining the Judgment. But Judgment is not part of those systems. Nowhere it’s been mentioned in those systems. And impassible/immutable/Creator-distant-etc is simply non-issue in Christianity.

Consequently, human’s actions don’t affect/change God, but each one of us will be judged according to God’s perfect “perception” of these actions that don’t affect Him. But this “logical” explanation of mine is of zero value - we will be judged by The (Perfect) Justice not because the previous sentence solves the logical “puzzle”, but because that’s been promised to us.

To determine the proper relation between the philosophy/logic/reason/reasoning and Christianity, read Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St. John of Damascus. There are 70 philosophical chapters there presented as the system. No, don’t read it, study it. Everything is there, systematized, waiting for you for about 13 centuries. Also, take another several readings of St. Maximos’ On Knowledge, the link in my post #2 as the starting point.

 

[TOmNossor]

Sokoticasiva,
I have printed out the first two books of An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith and I will certainly read some or all (am in the middle of two books and waiting on a third to become available & I am the tortoise of reading not the hare).

As I read through your last two posts I had the impression that I was beginning to see some broad strokes concerning when reasoning is appropriate (with just a few difficult points); but as I try to define these difficult points they are looming larger and suggesting to me that perhaps I have not gotten there after all.

I want to challenge a few things you offered that I perceive are not entirely consistent (or perhaps more likely I am just confused)

Challenge #1
3.1 and 3.1a mean that God is a subject about which humans are NOT able to gain complete “perfect” knowledge.
3.2 and 3.2a mean that what is revealed about God is a subject about which humans are able to gain complete “perfect” knowledge.
4.1 and 4.2 talk about scientific and non scientific tools from which to gain knowledge. 4.2.1 says that revelation is a non-scientific tool “the results of which cannot be examined.”
Does saying “the results of which cannot be examined” mean something different than “the results of which cannot be reasoned upon to derive further truths?”

It would seem that if revelation is in the realm of “perfect knowledge” then it should be able to be reasoned upon, but it gets put into a bucket that seems to be suggesting this cannot be the case.

I may be somewhat subconsciously trying to make #3 and #4 mean the same thing and instead your point is that the two #3 categories do not map to the two #4 categories. I will need to read over this more later. This may be my issue in “Challenge #2” too.

Challenge #2

Knowledge gained by methods that can be examined is subject to examination by reason. Knowledge gained by methods that can’t be examined is not subject of examination by reason - either one believe or doesn’t believe. Yet, mutual relations and consistency of various revealed messages, as well as of the entirety of a system is subject to examination by reason.

Per 4.2.1 Revelation is “knowledge gained by methods that can’t be examined” thus it “is not subject of examination by reason” (you go on to say “either one believes or doesn’t believe,” but I was not originally thinking this was intended to limit the applicability of this prohibition on what one can do with revelation).
Then you say “mutual relations and consistency of various revealed messages, as well as the entirety of a system is subject to examination by reason.”
The system is built upon the “mutual relations and consistency of various revealed messages.” If we cannot reason from “revealed messages” how do we examine or even develop the system that comes from “revealed messages.”

I will continue by restating and expanding upon what I tried to state previously.
cont…
Charity,TOm

 

[TOmNossor]

I tried to suggest in a previous post that you were saying that we can reason from revelation, but not from conclusions about God developed from reasoning.

Here is what I meant.
God reveals A, B, and C.
It is appropriate to use reason and declare that A & B mean X is true.
However, if one then says, we know X is true and it is inconstant with C so we have a real problem we have taken reason too far. A, B, and C are true of God. X can be embraced as truth if it is helpful since it results logically from A&B, but X can not be used to deny C could be true because X is the product of human reason.
Similarly we may reason from C to notX. But, we cannot take notX and declare that either A or B is not true revelation because notX is the product of human reason.

We are left with the paradox that the orthodox person may believe X or notX because such is implied by reasoning from revelation. How this all integrates into a systematic whole is beyond human reason so should not be used to claim there is something seriously flawed here.

If what I outlined with A/B/C and X/notX is a good exposition of what the limits of reasoning are within Orthodox thought, I (short of direct revelation from God to do so) will likely never be able to embrace them, but at least I can understand what we are talking about.

I at some time would like to go back to Theodicy and Creation ex Nihlo. And impassibility.

I will stop here.
Charity, TOm

 

[Hesychios]

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Hello TOm,

I am not up to your level as a logician. I am just an ordinary bloke, so please bear with me. I am not equipped for an extended conversation on this subject but I feel I can make a quick statement.

Here is what I meant.
God reveals A, B, and C.
It is appropriate to use reason and declare that A & B mean X is true.

That is what a Roman Catholic might state. Much of professed RC teaching is actually derivative, it is believed because it makes sense from their point of view.

But that is also how heresy has been created from time to time, we have learned from sad experience. Almost every heresy has a reasonable explanation. (Unless we refer to gnosticism, which seems to include a lot of exotic fantasizing.)

The Roman Catholics will be quick to remind us how the east was riven with heresies. The east was where most of Christianity resided for the first several centuries, and it was populated by a whole bunch of classically educated folks. So naturally, these people had a whole bunch of ideas that made a great deal of sense to them. Orthodox know how dangerous this can be, we have seen it at work around us.

God’s ways are not our ways, what makes perfect sense…perfect logical sense…to creatures like us may be folly to the Divine.

Ideally, we don’t wait to see if X conflicts with C to say it is not acceptable, we don’t go to X and we have no opinion about X.

If heretics go to X, we might have to point to it’s inconsistency with C to refute it in the minds of those who are stuck in this rational argument. But that is not really satisfactory, because the X idea should not have been floated in the first place. If Jesus did not express this specific idea through the Apostles, it is probably not very important, actually.

Now if someone wants to take this A & B = X and run with it, they can just dig out the Bible and start applying it, and find all of the contradictions it can create. That is the error of the Protestant reformers, they use the tradition of relying on human reasoning, a tradition which they inherited from the Roman Catholics, and apply it to their own Biblical scholarship. Often then contradicting their own forerunners in many places instead of accepting the received teaching.

So then, X makes perfect sense? We choose not to teach it if at all possible, and if it gains currency anyway it might be tolerated as a theological opinion to avoid the spectre of schism, particularly if it is not an essential teaching (which new ideas would not normally be).

Sadly, almost any theological opinion might have been expressed by some of the church Fathers. So if one wanted to make a case for a new dogma, just a small percentage of Fathers might yield dozens of quotes in favor of it. That is no indication that the majority of Christians believed such an idea most of the time, although some people would like to represent it as meaning just that.

Then we get those terrible arguments all over internet boards.

I say to rely human logic to better understand the Divine is folly, and unnecessary.

Michael

 

[TOmNossor]

Michael (aka Hesychios),
Thank you for your response and kind words. I am actually just an amateur logician, but I can type pretty fast.
Would you agree that you and Sokoticasiva do not agree exactly on the appropriate use of reason concerning God and His revelations? If you and he agree then I do not understand one of you (him probably).
I suspect that your position is a very safe one. We take what God has revealed and we do not pollute it with human reason. It would seem to me that this may be a good direction for the thoughtful believer, but cannot be the position of the Body of Christ as a whole. The reason I say this is that the councils certainly used reason to determine what the revelations of God mean for the orthodox as opposed to what they do not mean though some heterodox folks thought they did.
I am interested to see if you and Sokoticasiva think you agree completely (which would indicate that I am way confused).

Thank you again for your time.
Charity, TOm

 

[Hesychios]

Michael (aka Hesychios),
Thank you for your response and kind words. I am actually just an amateur logician, but I can type pretty fast.
Would you agree that you and Sokoticasiva do not agree exactly on the appropriate use of reason concerning God and His revelations? If you and he agree then I do not understand one of you (him probably).
I suspect that your position is a very safe one. We take what God has revealed and we do not pollute it with human reason. It would seem to me that this may be a good direction for the thoughtful believer, but cannot be the position of the Body of Christ as a whole. The reason I say this is that the councils certainly used reason to determine what the revelations of God mean for the orthodox as opposed to what they do not mean though some heterodox folks thought they did.
I am interested to see if you and Sokoticasiva think you agree completely (which would indicate that I am way confused).

Thank you again for your time.
Charity, TOm

Hi TOm,

I might get a look at what he wrote later, time permitteng, but I simply wanted to put forward what I think and did not reference his posts at all.

Basically, the east relies more heavily on apophatic thinking to reference the Divine. That is pretty evident in the Councils.

The councils engaged in a paring back for the most part. That is why the condemnations are so important. The ‘heretics’ (choosers) came up with multitudes of new ideas about the religion and these sprouted like new branches on a bush.

The Council Fathers did judicious pruning where ever they felt it was necessary, like giving the religion a haircut!

The Divine is primarily described not by what God is, but what He is not (in apophatic thinking). It is the way of negation.

It is particularly interesting to read about the Christological crises of the early centuries. The Jewish converts did not seem to have a problem with it, they had a basic understanding that Jesus was the Messiah of God and that was petty much fine. But as the Faith spread beyond the Jewish communities they not only had to teach about Jesus, but in conjunction with that what a Messiah was.

Apparently, this became confusing. Some people thought He was a creature adopted as Son of God, and some thought he was just a man. Some, like Origin, speculated that all souls were pre-existing which left open the possibility that we are only different from Him by degrees. These are cataphatic statements, and they are each unique.

This was frightening to those who believed that Jesus the messiah was fully Divine, a concept that they had always held but did not describe with any detail. We know this from their liturgy, which had them praying to Jesus as if to God. And from the Holy Eucharist, which was mystically the Body and Blood of the Christ from the very beginning, long before any Conciliar decrees. It was through the prayer of the people, shared universally, that these beliefs were transmitted.

They were forced into making the declaration that Jesus was God, a cataphatic statement, to have a position from which to dispute with the others. But this was drawn out of them because of the religious speculators who let their imaginations lead them into false rationalizations about the mystery.

If they all could have just accepted the mystery all that would have been unnecessary.

We have seen the folly of this kind of thinking played out already in church history. Today scholars are trying to say the there really is no difference between how the Miaphysites and the Diaphysites (and the pseudo-Nestorian Church of the East as well) thought of Christs’ nature. It’s supposedly all a big mistake and therefore we can all be one big happy family again.

That is where the application of logic has taken us. No one knows how many people may have died in persecutions and rebellions of decades or even centuries…over a mistake.

Now we have people who want to describe just precisely how the Holy Gifts could become the Body and Blood of Our Lord. They cannot accept that it just happens. They want to reason it all out and declare only one possible explanation understandable to humanity. And give them an excuse to condemn everyone else.

What are we going to say in the future if Rome comes to an understanding with the Lutherans some day that both confessions are simply using different words to describe the same mystery? Look at the thirty years war in the German lands. It could mean (should such an understanding ever be reached) all of that death and destruction was over nothing so much as a misunderstanding.

The only way those to parties could ever come to an understanding over the Holy Eucharist would be to retreat into the mystery once again, and admit they truly cannot define how it happens. Or that somehow when the two parties used different words they really meant the same things!

It’s for reasons like this that I don’t believe that Consubstantiation nor Transubstantiation are adequate to describe the mystery of the Real Presence. I don’t think that there will ever be an adequate term for it in human words. I don’t believe that it’s worth killing over, or excommunicating over or arguing over.

I don’t think we should go there.

Michael

 

[sokoticasiva]

Does saying “the results of which cannot be examined” mean something different than “the results of which cannot be reasoned upon to derive further truths?”

It does, I wasn’t carefull enough to phrase it in English appropriately, and I’m still not sure if I’m able to.

4.1.) “Scientific” tools/methods, the result of which can be verified by examinination by applying the same or similar scientific method and achieving the same or basically same result - example: experiment

4.2.) “Non-scientific” tools/methods, the results of wchi cannot be verified by examinination by applying the same or similar scientific method and achieving the same or basically same result

Its the method/tool.

And, it’s not “an Orthodox dogma/doctrine/faith”, just a pure logic as the method** Orthodox use, so my bro Michael and me do not differ here. BTW, in examining the Ecumenical Councils don’t miss to see the Holy Spirit as the helper, invoked by prayer of Orthodox clergy. So the decisions are, in spite of using the reason, not the result of the reason only.

The reason as the single method is not used in forging the Orthodox Faith.

Now, I’m sorry but I’m going to be banned here, forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=3336435&postcount=89
so basically I won’t be permitted to continue this interesting debate.**