Philosophy

This is really a page devoted to debunking anti-Christian philosophies.

Free Thought

"Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain." - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Skepticism

"As a politician, [the Skeptic] will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time." - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"The man of this school [Skepticism] goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts." - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Nihilism

"All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses." -- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Deicide Leads to Suicide

"Man without God is seventy kilograms of bloody clay, a sepulcher prior to the grave. ...Deicide always ends with suicide. Remember Judas: first he killed God, and then he destroyed himself, such is the inevitable law of the history of our planet." -- St Juston Popovic, 2015 At this link

Philosophy vs Ideology

"Ideology is the opposite of philosophy. Philosophy is the curiosity which guides its inquiry according to universal principles. Ideology is a prior prejudice that seeks out an echo-chamber of reaffirming information." -- Archimandrite Maximos, Facebook post, 5 Feb, 2016

Avoid Dogmatic Discussions

"Flee from discussions of dogma as from an unruly lion; and never embark upon them yourself, either with those raised in the Church, or with strangers." --St Isaac the Syrian, Homily 17

An Old Man's Memory

AN OLD MAN’S MEMORY

Ezra Ham

February 28, 2019

Old men, with heads full of memories, often forget why they entered a room. Today I chanced to enter my cranial attic and relived a fifty-year old Then and Now.

Fifty years ago along with some of you, I was a student at Oklahoma Baptist University. Paul Tillich, one of the leading Protestant theologians of the 20th century, having passed away in 1965, was very much in vogue in the Religion and Philosophy Departments. I recall an Adjunct Professor being out of town and asking me to lecture for him in his absence. Upon his return he asked me to suggest a book he might give me by way of thanks. Though no gift was necessary, I nonetheless told him a 3-volume Collective Works of Tillich was available as a single volume. I still have the book.

Tillich belongs to my formative discovery of learning how to think philosophically and theologically at OBU. Seminary took me into Rudolph Bultmann and the Bultmannians in biblical studies and Martin Heidegger in philosophy.

The only time I recall thinking of Paul Tillich in the last fifty years was in a conversation with Cecil Garlin, a manat least ten years my senior, who had studied under Tillich at Harvard. Cecil, like myself, had become Orthodox. He attended a weekly Orthodox Bible Study I offered. It was he who brought up Tillich. I no longer remember the context. Two former Tillichians now Orthodox—what are the odds?

That was the only time I had thought of Paul Tillich since OBU. Until today.

Fast forward fifty-plus years from OBU. For the last six weeks I have been making my way through The Triads (9 treatises written between 1338-1341). The book is edited with explanatory endnotes by John Meyendorff, himself a leading Orthodox theologian of the 20th century.

For six weeks as I flipped back and forth from text to endnotes, I was struck by Meyendorff’s use of the term "ground of being" to explain Palamas to a contemporary American audience. Today, encountering "ground of being" for yet the umpteenth time, I decided to turn aside and ponder this.

Meyendorff’s edition was published in 1983, well within the life span of Tillich’s influence (13 years after my graduation from OBU). Yes, it seemed possible that Meyendorff was acquainted with Tillich’s work.

This led me to consider whether the term ground of being was unique with Tillich, or was it a general philosophical and theological term used by many others. A quick google search gave me only Paul Tillich’s name.

The light in the cranial attic shined. I was twenty again struggling to grasp what Tillich was saying. I smiled at my younger self. Here I was today joyfully being challenged by Gregory Palamas and Meyendorff’s endnotes on the "ground of being."

The bookends of an old man’s life struck me. On the one hand a 20-year old kid having no clue what Tillich was talking about. On the other a 71-year old man at least knowing what Palamas was talking about (if not fully grasping).

Fifty years later I understood the context: the division of Christianity into East and West, the experiential East versus the rationalistic-philosophical West. The context begun by Augustine in the 400s, implemented in the Great Schism of 1054, was epitomized by the ongoing public debate between Barlaam and Gregory Palamas. It was a heavy weight boxing match between East vs. West.

It was at this point, standing in that cranial attic I understood Paul Tillich. In his own way, he was arguing against Barlaam as well. Palamas, a child of the East, stood against Barlaam’s Western rationalistic Christianity on the front end. Tillich, six hundred years later and a child of Barlaam’s Western rationalistic Christianity also stood against Barlaam’s Christianity on the back end.

The details of the debate are not the point. It is the similarity between Palamas and Tillich that struck me—a similarity suggested by Meyendorff’s use of "ground of being" in his endnotes to explain Palamas.

I have oversimplified this old man’s story: Two bookends, fifty years apart, and yet standing side-by-side encompassing my intellectual and spiritual journey. Like the blind men of Sodom the 20 year-old me wearied himself trying to find the door. I don’t know if Tillich found it, but thank God the 70-year old me found the door and went inside.

Willie sang it best, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.” Reminiscing is a game played by old men talking to themselves.

-- Dn Ezra (Herb) Ham, Facebook Post, February 28, 2019

Why I Went to the Attic

Why I Went To The Attic

Herb Ham/Ezra Ham

March 1, 2019

By speaking of “the experiential East versus the rationalistic-philosophical West” I was referencing the epistemological issue of whether knowledge is limited, dare I say restricted, to human reason? The issue itself does not create an either-or dichotomy between reason and experience. That there may be different ways of knowing does not, in itself, eliminate other ways of knowing.

Oriental religious philosophy certainly champions the experiential over the rational, the immaterial over the material. Neoplatonism certainly emphasized the spiritual over the material. However, for the first four hundred years of its existence the Church stood against the latent docetic Gnosticism of Neoplatonism.

Unlike the ancient Greeks who thought matter was eternal and a foe of mankind, the Church had a different cosmology: a Creator who created out of nothing a good creation. Furthermore, in an event called the Incarnation, the Church proclaimed the Creator within space and time became human. The Incarnation was scandalous to the Greeks. After all, a good spiritual deity would never entrap itself within the evil matter of a human body.

The philosophical cosmological presuppositions would not allow the Greek mind to entertain that the immaterial and material could co-exist equally. There could be no Creator-deity nor Incarnation because matter and spirit were mutually exclusive contradictions.

For four hundred years the Church proclaimed both a Creator who had become incarnate in space and time. Instead of adapting the Church to Greek paideia, the Church Christianized Greek philosophy. Plato and the Neoplatonist as well as Aristotle were Christianized and corrected by being read and understood through the cosmology of an Incarnate-Creator.

After Constantine moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople in 324 A.D. the city of Rome was reduced in population. What knowledge of Greek existed in Rome after 324 A.D. became almost non-existent. A hundred years later, Augustine’s City of God (426 A.D), written in Latin, became the theological/philosophical foundation of the Latin West, Medieval Europe and Western Christianity.

The Christianity that is presently dying in the United States and Western Europe is Augustine’s Western version. The Christianity rejected by Voltaire and the Enlightenment was Augustine’s Latin version. The issues of science and faith, rationality vs spirituality et cetera exist inside Western culture's fight with its paternity—its fight with its father Augustine. (Talk about an Oedipus Complex!)

Many of my contemporaries, as well as their children and grandchildren, like sons leaving home, have left their father’s Augustinian home as well. Most have found their way into rationalism. Many have become compartmentalized schizophrenics—hanging on to the deity of their childhood while living as a functional atheist in their adult lives. Some have made their way into Buddhism or Hinduism. A few are drawn to the fundamentalism of Islam. Others have embraced cultural liberalism or the Social Gospel which is social justice-social activism masquerading as a religion.

I have a great affinity with those who have abandoned Western Christianity. I abandoned it also. I left the childhood comfort of Western Christianity for I shared part of that story in These Things I Believe (Amazon.com). In my case I ran headlong into Eastern Christianity.

The point of all this is to say this. When I spoke of “the experiential East versus the rationalistic-philosophical West” I was speaking from within the cosmological framework of Eastern Christianity in which the material and immaterial are affirmed and understood as sources of knowledge.

The debate between Barlaam and Palamas was a debate between cosmologies. The debate was not about the existence of God, but whether God was only knowable by human reason or was also knowable by experience.

Barlaam’s God was the rational God painted as a white-haired old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—a being—albeit a Super Being, but a being nonetheless—knowable to the senses. Palamas’ God was the I AM—the giver of existence to everything that exists, without whom nothing that exists would exist.

This God is unknowable in his essence by our five senses. He cannot be contained by our human words or our human concepts. He cannot be depicted in a picture or a painting. Our descriptions cannot express that which is inexpressible, ineffable and incomprehensible. He is knowable to the extent he chooses to be known—chooses to make known his presence through revelation and illumination. But he is never knowable in his essence. He can be experienced as Mystery but he cannot be reduced to an academic concept or a theological statement. One who experiences such a moment “knows what he knows without knowing how he knows.” He “knows what cannot be taught.” Such “knowledge” does not negate rational knowledge. It exists alongside it.

Paul Tillich, 600 years later, made the same argument against Barlaam. For Tillich, the One who is the source of all being was not himself a Being, even a Super Being. This One who Is, is in effect the “ground of being.”

It was Meyendorff’s endnotes using Tillich’s term “ground of being” for statements Palamas was making that caused my daytrip to the cranial attic.

(The Greek Fathers of the Church became more easily accessible in English translations when they were surprisingly included The Classics of Western Spirituality series published by Paulist Press: for example: Gregory of Nyssa (1978), Gregory Palamas (1983), Maximus Confessor (1985), Pseudo-Dionysius (1987), and Pseudo-Macarius (1992) to name a few. Not surprisingly, each of those mentioned here have prefaces, introductions or are edited by Orthodox scholars. Also of note, these appeared well after I had graduated from college and seminary, but coincided with my first encounter with the Orthodox Church in 1988. I must confess it took being Orthodox twenty-two years until I began reading the Greek Fathers first-hand rather than using secondary sources.)

Dn Ezra (Herb) Ham, Facebook Post, March 1, 2019