12-30-22 Bulletin

Many label the Orthodox Church today as anachronistic on account of its Holy Tradition, the fact that it maintains a close relationship to its past. For these, Orthodoxy, with its exotic rituals and its bundle of antiquated customs, is a dead religion that has nothing worthwhile to contribute to the modern world. A closer look reveals something different, however. What appears as old and dusty—the holy Orthodox faith—is actually quite vigorous and dynamic. In fact, I would answer that just because something has a long history, that it has a living connection to its past, does not necessarily mean that it must also be outmoded and obsolete. In fact, there are many things in our contemporary world having a long history that are by no means uselessly outdated. Our Church is one of them.

Several illustrations are worth mentioning. Modern philosophy, for one, maintains an active link going as far back as 2500 years, beginning with Plato, “the father of Western philosophy.” No one studies philosophy without learning the famous dictum that ”Plato IS philosophy and the rest is footnotes.” There is not a philosopher alive who would deny Plato (and Aristotle) their rightful place in the making of modern thought. Meaning that people in the West today “think the way they do,” in part, because of ancient Greek philosophy. The same can be said about democracy, which is (alas!) as old as Plato. No one in their right mind would ever say that the great political tradition of democracy is dead. So here one recognizes how these two things, philosophy and democracy, though ancient in origin, maintain a strong and continuing influence in the shaping of the modern world.

My contention is that the Orthodox Church belongs in this same category, of how something can be both old and new at the same time. But unlike the worldly realities of philosophy and democracy, the vital association in the Church between its past and present is brought into being not by a tradition of human thought (philosophy or politics) but by the direct outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Who gives the Church its very life and being. Orthodox Christianity is unique in this peculiar way: that not only all the best of its past is gathered, prioritized, interpreted, and then utilized (e.g., in the teachings of the saints), but that even the future Kingdom is brought to bear upon what is always being “present.” In this sense, the “mystery” of the Church lies in its pentecostal foundation. Here is the place where past, present, and future are “posited” and united into a wholly new and transcendent plane of being, into a “spiritual singularity” belonging solely to the new age of God’s Kingdom. All this, of course, is experienced and declared by the faithful at every Divine Liturgy.

Now the word “tradition” in the scriptures, “paradosis,” means a transaction between parties – the “dead and the living” that includes two operatives: the first being the act of someone from the past handing over to another in the present something valuable, an “inheritance,” and the second being the act of those in the present receiving the inheritance which is being passed on – from their predecessors. This second point about how the inheritance of Holy Tradition must be properly received is crucial because it ensures that the faith of the Church remains something that is vital and energetic. The act of the reception of the inheritance also assumes that its inheritors value the gifts and privledges being presented to them.

A good analogy can be drawn from the study of Egyptology. To this day, the study of Egyptian archeology remains both widespread and fashionable; that is, it continues to have a dominating effect on the study of ancient history. No one studies human history without at least a cursory investigation into the 3000 year political and cultural continuity that was ancient Egypt. However, it must also be noted that the subject matter of ancient Egypt, its religion, politics, law, social customs, etc., remains something wholly dead, i.e., relegated to the past, proven by the fact that one must usually go to a museum in order to actually see it. Egyptologists pass their knowledgeable “tradition” on, to be sure, but only in the limited academic sense. In a word, very little of Egyptian thought has been adopted by the modern Western world as normative. People today may study the “Egyptian Book of the Dead” from the point of religious phenomenology, but no one takes the text of this book as something factual in the same way, let us say, that Amenhotep III the Pharaoh did in 14th century BC.

To be continued…

Fr. Paul Jannakos