quotes Augustine frequently and IMO very western influenced.
Your name says “Catholic”, and yet at every turn you seem to be defending the schismatics, and even taking their views as your own!
In what sense is that - “Catholic” - supposed to be taken? As the One, Holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church, viz. Roman Catholic - or as the schismatic - excuse me,
heterodox Palamist hesychists suffocated by worship of the past, resistance to change, with a particular ethos inculcated by centuries of Mahometan rule that call themselves Catholics, but are called
Eastern Orthodox by the rest of the world. It seems that on a
Roman Catholic forum it would be best to openly display your colours as an
Eastern Orthodox, as most people here will generally take “Catholic” to mean, not “Eastern Orthodox ‘Catholic’”; if you’re not an Orthodox, it certainly seems you should be from the views you’ve herein expressed.
…And your admiration for St John Chrysostom. I love the sound of his liturgy as well, and have no doubt it would be legitimate and efficacious if celebrated within the bounds of the Catholic Faith, but
no one actually believes that all of the homilies attributed to him, let alone the liturgy named after him, were actually written by him - do they?!
The entire context of your above post equates ‘the West’ with ‘not good’ and by extension all of natural (that is to say,
correct and proper: that is to say, not the half-baked concept of auto-suggested self-hypnotic “hesychistic theoria”) theology as ‘not good’ as well. This is the wellspring of the decay of Eastern Orthodoxy: an over-riding love for the past - worship - and a strong parochialism, inter-related with but distinct from ethnic-ness.
Only Mahometans speak of “[the accursed] Western influence” in such a way outside of Eastern Orthodoxy (note: “the accursed” is rarely spoken aloud in Orthodoxy, unlike in Mahometanism, but it is implied, with the word “Western” and the phrase “Western influence” being uttered as if they were curses, the vilest of phrases that Satan himself spat at God during the Rebellion). This is the second prong of what I mean when I say “ethnic”, the first being that most Eastern Orthodox congregations are as segregated and cliquish as Apartheid South Africa. It’s cool to be a member of that group, whether as a Greek, a Copt, whatever - but that “coolness” stems from the mortal sin of pride, and is death to claims of catholicity, or “universality”. The Eastern Orthodox message can never be universal,
And only Mahometans, in my experience, with their incessant ret-conning of history to provide a back-story for their beloved Profit - peace and blessings of Allah be upon him! - (i.e. the Jesus is a Prophet, Jesus never claimed to be God, the Holy Mother of God was the sister of Moses and Aaron, Moses wasn’t a Jew, etc.) could achieve the astounding level of intellectual dishonesty to preach that Eastern Orthodoxy was the “original church”, even after several heretical “non-ecumenical ecumenical” councils (the Hesychast Councils) and a clear departure from the fullness of the deposit of faith.
No one, Eastern Orthodox or otherwise, can claim with a straight face that Eastern Orthodoxy hasn’t been deeply influenced by Mahometanism: this is evident in the (lack of) theology, fractured “unity” - most Orthodox churches aren’t even in communion with each other, leaving a web of communicant/excommunicant relations wilder than an Arab’s extended family relations, while still presenting a facade of “unity” to the outside world, just as Mahometanism does (while indeed it is a house deeply divided) -
style of prayer (hesychasm, dhikr, and salaat all bear more than a passing resemblance),
allowing of divorce, reverence for the past, resistance to all change without any consideration as to the benefits (or, as it may be, drawbacks), an aversion to, bordering on fear of, or
hatred of, the oft-mentioned scapegoat, “Western influence”, and a seeming
disdain for theoretical learning and knowledge.
**
This is evidenced best in advancement, or movement at all; not just neutral unchangingness, but “active” stagnation, if the very phrase isn’t a contradiction in terms. Eastern Orthodoxy, like Islam, has been dying for a thousand years - Eastern Orthodoxy has been dying ever since it cut itself off from the root of the Catholic Church, and Islam has been dying ever since it sucked all of the proto-Orthodox, proto-Catholic Byzantine learning dry after conquering Byzantium, never to create any knew knowledge of its own - because of a disdain for theoretical knowledge - and, enforcing Sharia and dhimma upon the former Byzantium, causing the “convert to Mahomet or die” mentality, and the “siege mentality” of unwavering reactionary-ism that Eastern Orthodoxy had to imbibe in order to survive, and an outward conformity to Sharia so it wouldn’t be stamped out all together - thus leaving it in the modern predicament of “jack of all religion, master of none, evil Western influence, philosophy is evil, let’s live in the past”.
**
I once heard or read an Eastern Orthodox describe his own religion as having a, what he termed, “double-headed Byzantine ostrich” approach to “new” or “difficult” matters. Such as birth control, or divorce: but the latter isn’t that new, or difficult.
Modern Orthodoxy seems to be as much a toned-down Charismatic Pentecostal version of a sort of Apostolic Lutheranism with strong Sufi and Mahometan influences than it does seem to resemble the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic faith.
(I should extend this in to an essay and make it its own thread, as I’ve had to truncate the already severely truncated even more severely in order to keep it legible and within the word limit.)
