Dormition fast, August 6; as things are.

Fr. Stephen comments on the famous line from Solzhenitsyn:

The spiritual battle which confronts us all is to be found in the human heart - our own human heart. This insight, not unique to Solzhenitsyn, but characteristic of Orthodoxy in general, can be news to those who have not heard the faith spoken of in this manner. All too easily the battle between good and evil is externalized and one side settles for a legally defined morality while the other sets for a legally defined immorality and neither side understands anything. Even the debate on Abortion gets completely obscured by the externalization of its legal/illegal status, and fail to see, too often, the great battle that is waged inwardly to bring a life other than my own into the world. What is the state of the heart in this great moral debate?

The same can be said of any number of public issues - and even of issues within the Church. The Church necessarily raises the “level of the playing field” allowing everyone involved to speak in the most absolute terms and to judge quickly and with assurance. Easily lost is the state of the heart throughout all of our battles - both public and ecclesiastical.

Part of the genius of Solzhenitsyn, similar to the genius of Dostoevsky in the century before, was to move issues away from the abstract and bring them to the existential level of the human heart. Nothing was exempt from this requirement. There is no moral “free-ride.” Thus Raskolnikov discovered in Crime and Punishment that there was no greater good that could justify the murder of some “meaningless soul.”

Some years back, when I was involved with certain pro-life activities, I noticed that for some, the pro-life cause had become what appeared to be their religion. This was true of those from a variety of ecclesial backgrounds. These had become soldiers, serving a cause. One recalls the famous line from Dostoevsky, those who love men in general hate men in particular, and I met persons in the pro-life movement who certainly seemed to love the unborn and their mothers generally and yet were quite awkward or forced or manipulative when dealing with the unborn and their mothers particularly (I, of course, met many folks who loved particularly with no reserve or apparent duplicity). But Fr. Stephen, as is usual, is quite right in what he suggests here. The pro-life movement, cause, political machine, what have you, directs its energy, its emotional force, its rhetorical maneuvering, its whole ethos toward a love that is general.

Forgive this statement that is too bold, and correct me if I am wrong here - in Orthodoxy there is no function for general loves. The Church blesses with her rites and her mysteries. The Church blesses expecting mothers, mothers in labor, mothers who have just given birth, babies just born. The Church blesses babies who have died in the womb, it forgives mothers who have killed their children or, as is more often the case, had children killed through the coercion of others. When a priest stands with a mother with a child in her womb, struggling to bring this life to a moment of breath, or when he stands with a mother who has ended the life of a child in her womb, struggling to be hidden with Christ in God, there is at this point no pro-life movement, no cause. Adherence to political positions does not matter. All that matters is the soul or souls that the priest must answer to God for. The general does not matter. The flesh and blood and spirit, right here, right now, matters.

I think this is what Fr. Stephen suggests with his thoughts on morality. The Church knows no positive law, in the sense of law for the sake of law or a law which is its own justification and its own judge, that exists for the sake of itself. To be against abortion simply or primarily because the act violates some concept of law, natural or divine, is an abstraction and a distortion of sorts. An Orthodox seeks to preserve the life of this child in this womb because Christ is in our midst and because of this we recognize His likeness and goodness and beauty in this mother and in this her unborn baby. The Church blesses these lives, as the Church blesses the life of each person. The Church cannot, under any circumstances, bless the forceful taking of any human life. This is simply something the Church cannot do, ontologically. The Church is life, it is ontologically incapable of blessing death, not to mention that there is nothing in death which could be blessed. Thus this talk we hear of certain bishops in Romania granting a blessing for the murder of an unborn child conceived during an act of rape or incest is utterly meaningless to me. The Church cannot bless murder. Any cleric who poses such a blessing ceases to act with the Church and as a minister of the Church the moment he speaks or motions his hands in such a blessing. Such a blessing is simply impossible in Christ.

Such a blessing is an obvious act of advocating a "greater good that could justify the murder of some 'meaningless soul.'" And the whole notion obviously stems from the entering into certain ecclesial circles a politic which is foreign to the Church.

When it comes to the language regarding homosexuality and the language regarding abortion which I discuss in the post below and in other posts, the problem is not simply that the bishop speaking thus about homosexuality or abortion has advocated, or seems to be sympathetic toward, the wrong ideological side. The problem is deeper than that.

The Church cannot and will not bless homosexual unions or homosex. That discipline is ingrained in the experience of the Church, and to undo it would be to undo Orthodox anthropology and soteriology. It is not going to happen. The Church cannot and will not bless the taking of unborn life. The Church will forgive and bless those Orthodox who confess and repent of homosex or abortion. But because the Church cannot bless a given act, does not, as it were, place the Church ideologically. The Church is not, by necessity, a part of the pro-life movement because it cannot bless abortions. Again, who the Church is, and what the Church does, has nothing to do with general loves. This does not mean that the Church stands against all pro-life political acts, it simply means that the Church, as Church, does not play a part, through rite or Mystery, in those political acts. The Kingdom of God is known and manifested in the Church only and ever in the particular.

Back to the problem, if I may. A wise Evangelical pastor who taught a marriage and family class at my bible college once told me this - as soon as you allow some other woman to compete with your wife for your affections, your wife has lost the competition. This is because in marriage there can be no competition. You are one flesh with your wife. She is you, the other woman is not you. As soon as you have your wife compete with the other woman you have ontologically cast aside your wife, as it were, and denied in your mind and spirit who she really is. Having done this, you have already been unfaithful to your wife.

Following this pastoral "logic," this is the problem I have with comments made by a few prominent Orthodox clerics which suggest that because Orthodoxy has found itself in modernity we are obliged to struggle through a supposed dialectic between a prophetic call to recognize homosexual unions and a conciliar traditional call to remember and keep the old disciplines. As soon as we acknowledge a "competition," we have lost the unity and reality of one-mindedness we once had, and frankly, we have brought a foreign politic into the Church. There should not need to be a debate against homosexual unions within the Church (just as there should not be a debate for them in the Church). What do sociological, anthropological, physiological, psychological, historical-critical, or legal arguments for or against homosexual unions have to do with who the Church is and what she does? To again follow my probably poor analogy, I might have all sorts of great analysis and theory leading to great arguments for why it is I should remain faithful to my wife and not enter into a relationship with the cute girl at the cd shop, but the mere serious engagement of those arguments means I have already been unfaithful in my heart with regard to my wife. There should be no need for the arguments for or against, as there should be no competition. There should be no arguments for or against homosexual unions or abortion in the Church, as the Church blesses what she blesses and cannot bless what she cannot bless.

Moralism always involves saying that x activity is better than y activity. Thus there would be moralism in play if your best friend came to you and said, "I think you should remain faithful to your wife. Here is a list of the positive attributes of your wife, and here is a list of the negative aspects of Suzy down the street." This is not what a true friend would say. A true friend would say, rather, "You are married. Be who you are. Know only what is for you to know." This, it seems to me, is the difference between moralism and holiness. Moralism compares different actions in a dialectical fashion in which there is a moral competition between all possible acts. Holiness is the unselfconscious being of who one is - a humble acceptance of one's nature.

Thus when a cleric says we Orthodox need to have a dialogue regarding homosex or abortion, it almost does not matter which side of the ideological fence they happen to be on. It could just as well be a conservative saying, "we Orthodox need to have a dialogue regarding homosexual unions in order that we might publicly express traditional Christian morality, decisively place ourselves in the traditional family values camp, and combat anti-family forces in the world today" - this could be just as harmful as a cleric calling for such a dialogue using rhetoric that is sympathetic to pro-homosex ideologies. The Orthodox Church does not need to have a dialogue regarding homosex. The Orthodox Church will simply continue to bless those things imaged in Christ, such as Christian marriage and babies. She will continue to offer an image of repentance for all of us who have been caught up in self destruction and death.

Such a view is not, in my estimation, fideism. It is not a matter of "the Church teaches it, I believe it, that settles it." That would be a needlessly judicial manner of looking at things. Rather it is a knowing veneration of an image. We Orthodox Christians knowingly venerate the image of a Christian marriage. We knowingly venerate the image of a human life in the womb. We do not and cannot knowingly venerate the image of a sexual act that ends in itself. We do not and cannot knowingly venerate the forceful taking of a human life in the womb. Here we can see that one can avoid a positive law approach to these and similar issues, while at the same time speaking unequivocally regarding certain acts, just as Dostoevsky’s existentialism could speak unequivocally concerning the murder of a “meaningless soul”. One can be unequivocal, and at the same time not participate in ideology.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the liturgical texts commonly, when referring to heresiarchs and troublemakers in Christian or biblical history, make note of the politicizing qualities of those who pursued agendas with regard to God's people - a stirring up of excitements, a causing of competing ideas within human hearts, etc. This seems to be usually contrasted with truth, in the liturgical texts, which always calls persons back to true piety, which is to say, the truth calls persons back to themselves.