Christ United to All Men: What “Traditionalists” Need to Understand

June 5, 2010 4 Comments

St. Irenaeus: Early Bishop & Teacher of the Recapitulation

What Latin Traditionalists Need to Understand

By: Jay

My purpose here is to correct a tendency and misconception, which sometimes leads to an error.  Debating the status of this document’s authority is also not in view, either.  The Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, stated (with the relevant citations of Constantinople II and III):

“22. The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come,(20) namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.

He Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15),(21) is Himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled,(22) by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice(23) and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.(24)”

And the references are:

20. Cf. Rom. 5: 14. Cf. Tertullian, De carnis resurrectione 6: “The shape that the slime of the earth was given was intended with a view to Christ, the future man.”: P. 2, 282; CSEL 47, p. 33, 1. 12-13. Read more of this post

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Maximus, Sartre, and the Dialectic of Time-existence

May 24, 2010 1 Comment

Jay

Sartre explained that the average man hides behind masks and sustains himself on a kind of false existence of wearing masks and role-playing. Nietzsche said much the same of the masses. It is hard to deny this to be the case. The ancient pre-socratic philosophers alternated within this same dialectic, too, with Heraclitus claiming all reality was constant flux and Parmenides rebutting that all reality was actually permanence. These are two sides of the same dialectic found in post-lapsarian time-existence.

What occurred to me was that these pre-Socratics were looking for an ultimate impersonal ontological grounding, while the modern existential philosophers were concerned with this issue anthropologically and socially. When one thinks of Sartre’s man who steps forward to dispell the viscous, as he calls it, and begins to be being-for-itself, one of his characters ends in suicide.  The ultimate act of chaos, change, and rejection of the permanent.  Someone like the rock star comes to mind.  (But isn’t this just a role as well? Yes, it is.)  On the other hand, you have the masses, dumbed down as obeisant sheep who follow blindly whatever Übermensch comes along.  In other words, same dialectic protracted through the history of philosophy. Read more of this post

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Monergism = one energy = monothelitism

May 2, 2010 12 Comments

Response to Turretinfan’s Monothelitism Post
Turretinfan, just as with the single subject issue, doesn’t understand the argument.

A fully human will, with its own natural energy, is part and parcel with orthodox Christology, if one accepts Chalcedon and councils 5 and 6. Will is a property of nature, and hence there are two wills in Christ as the Calvinists will admit, and one will in the Godhead. If they admit a human will in Christ, then absurdquestions arise: will they admit that is raised/deified? Nope. If not, then our wills are not healed/raised/deified. If we no longer have a natural will, then Christ is not consubstantial with us, even if he had two. St. Gregory of Nazianzus stated it perfectly when he said, “what is not assumed [by the Logos], is not deified.”

The Calvinists can’t grasp that they have a faulty anthropology and view of pre-lapsarian man, which inevitably screws up their Christology. They don’t understand that theology begins with Christology, not soteriology. God hammered it out that way in the councils. Every Calvinist who does grasp this has left that heresy (and I know several). Once they stop confusing nature and grace as well as nature and person, they see they light. Read more of this post

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Why the Eastern View of the Eschaton Makes More Sense

May 1, 2010 15 Comments

“He, the Eternal King, recapitulates everything in himself” (Adversus haereses, III, 21,9)

By: Jay Dyer

For a long time I assumed that the Eastern notions of the eschaton sounded universalist and heretical. This was based on my staunchly Latin view of the eternal state, based in turn on what I had accepted as understood in the Augustinian and medieval milieu.  I want to thank Steven Kaster for taking the time to explain things to me much better. When I first read “River of Fire” by Kalomiros, I was struck by how unbiblical it sounded. It still does to me.  Kalomiros proposes that no one has understood what “justice” means in the west. That’s hard to accept.

As I read further, I encountered Isaac the Syrian and Basil in more depth, as well as soaking in St. Maximus, Von Balthasar and others, and the Nyssan-Maximian notions of perpetual progress in the eschaton.  More recently, reflection upon Anslem’s ideas of the meaning of the atonement have become increasingly ridiculous, too. Pope Benedict XVI wrote of how incoherent this view was back in 1968 in Introduction to Christianity, sharing many of the standard Eastern criticisms of the Latin ideas.  This is also the basis for the controversial Vatican Declaration on Limbo from a few years ago.  And you can see from its footnotes it’s relying on Eastern Fathers.  Read more of this post

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Aquinas, Simplicity and the Convertibility of Being and Beauty

April 22, 2010 2 Comments

Critical Ruminations

By: Jay

Being a big fan of Eco, I like Eco’s critique of being. Not generic being, but the convertibility of being in Aquinas. I like being, too. In his The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Eco proposes that beauty cannot be convertible with being and that this is a defunct concept that fell the way of archaic ideas once Ockham’s nominalism showed up; this led to the idea that there is no magic chain binding the transcendentals in an object. And thus philosophy went introspective. And so Eco is an agnostic gnostic now.  I’ve always wondered why it didn’t occur to Eco that maybe Thomism isn’t the end all, be all of Christian theo-philosophy.

But Eco is right that strange problems arise when we say beauty is convertible with being and the good. For Thomas, beauty adds nothing substantial to the notion of being, but only conceptually, and is coextensive with it.  And they are only conceptually distinct. This article traverses land, sea and air analyzing the current scene as regards theology-as-aesthetic and it’s neat-o in that regard, but what no one really seems to mention is that it appears this whole idea is connected to Thomas’ idea that God’s essence is “beauty,” “true” and “good,” and that these predicates are also one in God, and only conceptually distinct.  Thomas says:

“Hence it is manifest that God alone has every kind of perfection by His own essence; therefore He Himself alone is good essentially.” -S.T. Ia Q. 6, Art. 3

“I answer that, As good has the nature of what is desirable, so truth is related to knowledge. Now everything, in as far as it has being, so far is it knowable. Wherefore it is said in De Anima iii that “the soul is in some manner all things,” through the senses and the intellect. And therefore, as good is convertible with being, so is the true. But as good adds to being the notion of desirable, so the true adds relation to the intellect.” -S.T. Ia Q. 16. Art 3 Read more of this post

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Pagan Dualism, the Occult and the Trinity

April 14, 2010 3 Comments

By: Jay

A common thread in non-Christian religions and worldviews is that of dualism. In fact, nature itself does exhibit all forms of dualities, such as night and day, masculine and feminine, black and white, etc. In philosophy there has been the problem of mind versus body, while in physics there is the wave versus particle debate. In one sense there is a legitimate duality, in that these entities and things are not, of course, evil in themselves. No thing is inherently evil, as all things are created by and have their summation and meaning in the Logos (Col. 1:15). Thus what has being has it’s being and meaning or archetypal predetermination (logoi) in the Logos. The many logoi are one in the one Logos of God.

Non-Christian systems of thought, and paganism in general, never transcend the dualities that are prevalent in nature, however. In fact, dualism is itself a hallmark of those religions. Think, for example, of the dialectic of matter and spirit in gnosticism, where matter was viewed as base and grotesque. Gnosticism in general is defined as:

“A collective name for a large number of greatly-varying and pantheistic-idealistic sects, which flourished from some time before the Christian Era down to the fifth century, and which, while borrowing the phraseology and some of the tenets of the chief religions of the day, and especially of Christianity, held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a deprivation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour.” (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Gnosticism”) Read more of this post

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MP3 – Review of Benedict’s “Introduction to Christianity” (4 pts.)

April 12, 2010 2 Comments

In this second episode, I review Benedict XVI’s scholarly Introduction to Christianity and elucidate it’s Eastern emphasis, as well as the influence of Maximus the Confessor and the Logos/logoi exemplarism, Greek philosophy and Hellenism, epistemology and problems in Thomism, as well as Benedict’s refutation of the Anselmian (and by extension, classical Protestant) view of the Atonement via Cur Deus Homo.

Read more of this post

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Definitions of Various Relevant Theological Terms

April 12, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay Dyer

Many are confused about the meaning and terminology of the debates that have been occurring lately in regards to Calvinism, the Trinity, Nature, Person, etc. So, an explanation of what these terms have come to normatively mean in theological discourse is appropriate. If we grasp these terms, the rest falls into place in a cogent system for talking about the Trinity, Incarnation and soteriology. If we are to have fruitful debates and dialogues on these points, the terms need to be grasped.

(1) Persons- or Hypostases (also subjects). answering the question “Who is doing it?”
(2) Energies answering the question What is it that They are doing?”
(3) Essence or Nature or ousia, answering the question what are the they, that are doing these things.
(4) Manichaeanism is an ancient heretical system influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism where there are two eternal principles good and evil, ever at odds.

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Resolving Essence/Energy Disputes With Christology

April 11, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay Dyer

No one should be afraid to read someone even the West believes to be a Doctor of the Church. Some Latins, however, actually discourage people from reading St. John of Damascus. Ironically, Aquinas himself read the Damascene and cited him extensively.

Since I can’t seem to get anyone to read Book III, I’ll post the relevant chapter that explains it all. Why do I keep harping on Book III? In this Book of On the Orthodox Faith, St. John give his exposition of the teaching of Ephesus, Chalcedon and Constantinople II and III. These councils are key, as they focus on Christology. Christology is central, since that is our bridge to God, and not speculation and philosophizing about God’s essence in supposed “natural theology.”

It is in Christ that we meet the Father and the Spirit. It is the Incarnate Christ who shows us the Trinity. So if we want the clearest, most explicable understanding of the meaning of the essence/energy discinction and what hypostasis is, or what enhypostatized means, we should look to Christology, as it should be evident that what we formulate about the ontological Trinity must match up with our doctrine of Christ Incarnate. In other words, it makes no sense to come up with some hyper-philosophical, speculative view of God “ad intra” and God “ad extra,” as if we can come up with views that don’t have to match up with what we are saying about the divine hypostasis Who assumes human nature.

Everything about Christology proves the essence – energy distinction and is the doctrine of the 6th council in particular. Below, St. John exposits perfect Christology, as it culminated in the 6th Ecumenical Council.

Confusions resolved. Read more of this post

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Critique of the Protestant & Thomist Views of Absolute Divine Simplicity

April 6, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay Dyer 

When Taylor Marshall and crew originally fussed about this, they were content to dismiss it as “Palamism” – some form of obscure medieval Byzantine mysticism. Now, after more reflection and realizing that the Eastern Fathers all teach a distinction between essence and energy in God, it’s now become an exercise in seeing if oil and water can be mixed. I tried to do this for a while as well. Is there some way to reconcile the two? As a good buddy of mine put it the other day, if the two communions have argued against one another on this issue for hundreds of years, is it really plausible that the Church needed Mike Liccione’s bad arguments to reconcile the two? Nope.

So let’s look at some recent arguments given in attempt to both prove Thomistic absolute simplicity or reconcile it. My friend Ben follows Taylor Marshall in trying to argue that because St. John of Damascus talks about the one energy in God, somehow this is to Thomism. This is false for two reasons. First, it’s false because Thomas explicity rejects any distinction between essence and energy, and second, St. John says both that the energy of God is both one and multiple. Ben argues that this “oneness” of energy means that “in God” all actions and attributes are one and identified. Calvinist blogger Steven Wedgeworth (who won’t allows my comments) argues this here. A reading of the entire Book I is necessary to get the complete meaning of what St. John is saying, as well as Book III where St. John applies the essence – energy distinction at length to Christology. Read more of this post

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