Applying psychological, much less psychoanalytic, constructs to a social group or a tradition is dicey at best. Even when applied to individuals, psychological and psychoanalytic constructs tend to be used reductionistically, that is, they minimize (or even ignore) human freedom. When applied to a social group insights meant to help us understand something of the individual in his or her life situation homogenize a community—it causes us to lose sight of the person for the group.
That said, however, there is still something to be said for identifying personality general styles or traits that are favored within a particular social group. Even as "I" have a preference for certain patterns of thought and action, so to do "we" or even "they" seem to reward and discourage particular ways of engaging the world of persons, events and things. Before I go on, it is very important to emphasize that in the context of this post, "world" is used more in an existential and empirical sense and not as a theological construct. "World," here means a social reality and not, as it does in John's Gospel, the creation as fallen and in rebellion against the Creator.
Earlier I hinted at the idea that Catholic and Orthodox Christians tend to favor different very broadly defined styles of engaging the world. Jesus toward the end of John's Gospel tells His disciples that we must be in the world, but not of it. Especially since the Second Vatican Council, I the Catholic Church, this has tended to take the form of a fundamental openness toward the world of persons, events and things outside her visible boundaries. For the Orthodox Church, the movement has been somewhat different—even opposite. Orthodoxy favors not a movement toward the social world outside her visible boundaries, but more a movement away from it.
Looking around the world of psychology, I think Karen Horney's work of neurosis is helpful here. So before I can look at Catholic and Orthodox polemics, I need to explain a little bit of psychoanalytic theory.
For Horney a neurosis is fundamentally a coping mechanism, it is a way of dealing with conflict. As a way of negotiating conflict—both conflicts with environment as well as our inner conflicts—a neurosis isn't necessarily pathological. Only when the neurosis becomes rigid, that is, only when we pursue some needs at the expense of other, equally legitimate needs, do we enter into the world of the pathological.
In her work Our Inner Conflicts, Horney identifies three forms of neurosis and the underlying needs that they help us meet. There is a summary on Wikipedia (which I think tends to lump healthy and pathological response to conflict together, so I've edited it for my purposes here):
Moving Toward People
The need for affection and approval; pleasing others and being liked by them.
The need for a partner; one whom they can love and who will solve all problems.
Moving Against People
The need for social recognition; prestige and limelight.
The need for personal admiration; for both inner and outer qualities—to be valued.
The need for personal achievement.
Moving Away from People
The need for self sufficiency and independence.
The need for perfection.
Looking through the summary, it is clear that our movements toward, against or away from, others are all attempts to met very specific psychological and social needs. We all of us need both to love and be loved (moving toward), even as there is a legitimate desire for self-sufficiency and independent (moving away).
Horney will later summarize these three movements as compliance, aggression and detachment respectively. And again, these only become pathological when they are not appropriately balanced by the other two movements or responses to outer and inner conflict.
In my next post, I want to look what seems to me to be the different basic styles of Catholic and Orthodox traditions in relating to the world understood psychologically. In brief, I would suggest that in the main the Catholic Church's tradition tends to be one that favors a 'movement toward" the world. The tradition of the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, is one that values more a "movement away" from the world. In the West, grace perfects nature; in the East, grace is what makes possible the transcendence of nature. Obviously these are overly broad categories. One can find easily counter examples in both traditions. That said, I think that it is a helpful way to think about East/West Christian relations.
When in Genesis God creates the heavens and the earth "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep." (1.2) Creation is presented in Genesis not ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing), but rather as a divine ordering of chaos. Slowly, methodically, God brings a shape and form to chaos. As land appears when the waters are set in their place, so to creation emerges from chaos as God brings order to the void.
For six days God labors to create and "when were finished" God "on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made." (2.2-3) Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in his work The Sabbath that "In a well-composed work of art an idea of outstanding importance is not introduced haphazardly, but, like a king at an official ceremony, it is presented at a moment and in a way that will bring to light its authority and leadership." The Sabbath, the Seventh Day, is Heschel says is just such a kingly idea—it introduces to humanity not the holiness of place, but of time. "This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place—a holy mountain or a holy spring—whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first."
It is only after the holiness of time is proclaimed that God proclaims at Sinai "the sanctity of man." It is only after, as Heschel observes, that we succumb "to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded. The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last. Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses."
On the Seventh Day God proclaims the Sabbath: "The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world." The beauty that we encounter in the Church's worship, in the music, the icons, and the architecture of the church building, are all, I would suggest, the manifestation Eternity in Time. Beauty is the encounter, the experience, in time of the Eternal
And if, as Heschel suggests, there is a hierarchy to the sanctity of creation—time, the human, and only finally space—this doesn't mean that we can neglect one in favor of another. To use an image I have used before, the three are nested within each other—space is sanctified by humanity, humanity by time, time by God. Thinking about time as sacred opens up for us new avenues of understanding of the heavy, some have said over, emphasis on liturgy that we see in Orthodox Church.
Continuing yesterday's thoughts on the saving character of Beauty…
In the catechumen classes at the parish I serve we have been discussing the structure of the Divine Liturgy. This past Sunday we looked at the Prayer of the First Antiphon:
Lord, our God, save Your people and bless Your inheritance;
protect the whole body of Your Church;
sanctify those who love the beauty of Your house;
glorify them in return by Your divine power;
and do not forsake us who hope in You.
As a group our attention was captured by the third petition: "sanctify those who love the beauty of Your house." In the Old Testament especially, God is holy not so much because He possess moral perfection but because He is free. In God to be holy is to be free of all that would limit Him and constrain His will; as with God so to with us, we are called to be free of everything that would compel us to act against our nature and our vocation.
Growth in freedom, growth in holiness, requires from me that I love the beauty of God's house.
As we talk about this we began, naturally enough, with the beauty of the church building itself and then of the services. Slowly, however, we began to see that God's house is really rather more than simply the church building, the services and the Tradition of the Church. All of creation is the house of God. How, we asked ourselves, can we say that we really love the beauty of the church building on Sunday morning if we our indifferent to the beauty of creation?
And, again as we thought about things, how can I say I love the beauty of creation if we are indifferent to the beauty of our neighbor who is created in the image and likeness of God. And if I say that I love the beauty of my neighbor how can I then dismiss my own beauty?
Stepping back from our reflections, I mentioned to the catechumens (and other listeners) that what we experience in the church can't be separated from the rest of life. If you will we can think of the experience of beauty in the Church's worship as a preparation for the experience of the beauty of creation. In fact, I suggested, to try and limit beauty to either the Church or creation is a bit like the young man who told me he didn't know much about his girlfriend—they were only seeing each other for sex.
To fail to see Beauty, to ignore Beauty, or worse to be indifferent to it, is to be unchaste. God tells the prophet Hosea (1.2):
"Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry
And children of harlotry,
For the land has committed great harlotry
By departing from the LORD."
To see Beauty only here and not there is to limit God, to deny His holiness and so to deny Him as He Is. Once that is done, then everything else in my life falls into chaos and ugliness.
But, to return to Solzhenitsyn, there is a whimsy, unpredictable, unexpected quality to Beauty that makes it such a fit symbol of Divine Grace. Beauty can "soar up," to quote Solzhenitsyn once more, "to that very place" where I turned my back on Truth and Goodness and, once there, "perform the work of all three."
An interesting post from The Ochlophobist in which he reflects on the difficulties of embodying the Orthodox faith in American culture. He offers five comments that are worth reflecting on:
1. What authentic human culture existed in American locals in prior generations is now dead, even if it remains in caricature form. Thus Orthodoxy is not to "incarnate" into American culture, or to save or baptize American culture. There is no authentic American culture anymore. Orthodoxy in America must seek to create an American culture. There are certain local cultural "ingredients" which might be used, but what needs to be sought is a new cultural creation.
2. This can only be done by coming to terms with the secularism that rules American life and disabuses what would otherwise be authentic American cultural forms. Until we acknowledge the pervasiveness of secularism and its dreadful hold on virtually all aspects of our lives, we are simply playing the games of boutique religion.
3. The fundamental problem - if one seeks for Orthodoxy to become fully fleshed and blooded in America, completely embedded in the existential ethos of this place and people, how does one go about it in a pluralist society in which all things are sought (usually with success) to be commodified and delegated to a percentage of market share? How does one avoid, on the one hand, becoming a particularly placed fleshed and blooded micro-culture that is separationist (the Amish), or, on the other hand, how does one avoid becoming a religious movement which fully collaborates with secular materialist culture (Evangelicalism)? Assuming that we do not want to run to the hills, how do we fully confront and transform an ever morphing ethereal pluralist materialist übercommodified anti-culture?
4. Should we even be seeking the transformation of America at large? America is colossal, too big in any number of ways. Would it not be more modest, and might it not be more appropriate with regard to discernable human culture, to seek rather a Delta Orthodoxy, an Upper-Midwestern Orthodoxy, a New England Orthodoxy, an Appalachian Orthodoxy, a Pacific Northwestern Orthodoxy, a Canadian plains Orthodoxy, and so forth?
5. There must be no agenda. As soon as we have as our agenda to “win America for Christ” Orthodoxy style, we have become one agenda competing in a saturated market of agendas, and we have then condemned ourselves to petty market share. The American Orthodoxy of mission statements and evangelism strategies is simply more of the Evangelicalish-materialist banality. If there is to be a full existentially realized Orthodox culture in America, it must come to be because this is what Orthodoxy is, how she realizes herself in a place. There is a charismatic and fragile human element to this. Such will not be brought about because Orthodoxy has been marketed well. Ironically, those most concerned with religious market success doom Orthodoxy to cultural failure, precisely because they do not understand their own commitments to secularist materialism, and the fact that there can be no Orthodox-secularist culture that is truly a culture. Not to mention the pragmatically obvious – that in a pluralist-materialist setting, Orthodoxy will never rise above the fray of constant competition (a competition which assumes and implicitly teaches a fundamental relativism among competing truth claims) and the trite mechanisms associated with such an environment.
Thinking about my own experience of the Orthodox Church both in the "rust belt" and the West Coast, I think Ochlophobist is on to something in point 4. The Orthodox Church on the West coast, and for that matter in much of the Pacific Northwest and old West, is relatively wealthy. Unlike the midwest and middle Atlantic regions, small economically and demographically struggling parishes are relatively (though of course not absolutely) unknown on the West coast (and the Pacific Northwest and Old West). Ethnic identity is also less intense in the western United States.
Point 5, the necessary of not having an agenda, is also on target, though I would prefer the notion of detachment to the phrase "no agenda." For better and worse, the large number of ex-Evangelical Christians has set the tone for Orthodox witness here in America. Again, while there has been some good from this, for exactly the reasons outlined by Ochlophobist, I would be hard press to say that this infusion of Evangelical Christian sensibilities is a good thing.
While yes, we must take Evangelical Christianity seriously as the religious language of American society, it often seems that it embodies a religious world view that as commodified as the wider American milieu. And then there is the toxic convergence of phyletism and Evangelical sectarianism that especially, though not exclusively, on the West coast takes the form of 19th century Russian peasant chic (i.e., let's all dress as we imagine the dressed and spoke in Holy Russian in the golden age of the 19th Century--think a rather distressing tendency of some converts to dress like Fundamentalist Later Day Saints.)
Where I might disagree (and his and your comments are welcome on this point) from the Ochlophobist is with his assessment of American culture--or rather the absence of an American culture. Here I think I would say that yes, on a popular level at least, American society is increasingly less humane--less humanistic in the best sense of the term. But there is underneath this popular culture, a deeper, more humane, more humanistic culture grounded not simply in the Enlightenment, but also in some of the best of western culture (in is hard for me to read Thomas Jefferson and NOT hear echoes of Aquinas). We see this deeper culture evident not simply in the classical works of American political philosophy (e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the supporting literature, but also the US Constitution and its apology in the The Federalist Papers, and before that the writings of de Tocqueville) and contemporary thinkers in that tradition (for example, John Courtney Murray). And then there is the range of American literature, novelists, short story writers and essays, as well as the arts, musicals and films to which we can appeal to as embodying the best of American culture as such.
All that said, I think Ochlophobist is on to something--we are not as a Church prepared to actually incarnate the faith in an American context. This is not, I hasten to add, primary a matter of a deficient theological education. No, it is not that we do not understand the Fathers (though there is much work that needs to be done there for sure), but that we do not understand the foundations of the very society in which we live.
As I have alluded to at other times, putting aside for the moment our interest in Orthodox theology, there is to my view of things, a very disturbing anti-Western, and really anti-intellectual, trend in the Church. As a quick example, more often than I care to recount, I have sat with Greek immigrants and Greek-Americans who were quite proud of the Greek language, but woefully ignorant of classical Greek philosophy and literature. More than once, I have found that I was the only one at the table who had read Aristotle or Homer.
What I'm getting at is this, to embody the faith in American means that we need to not only be well grounded in that faith, but also the deep cultural roots of America. Sadly, and this is significantly weaker a word that I would like to use, for many Orthodox Christians the point of being in the Church (and this includes not only "converts" but also "cradle" Orthodox) is to NOT have to wrestle with the culture.
In a word, for all our newly found evangelical enthusiasm, we remain sectarian. We are more interested in the "low hanging fruit" of unhappy Evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants and disappointed Catholic and Episcopalians then we are in really doing the work required to present ourselves as a credible alternative to secular culture. To use a phrase I heard recently, we are concerned more with "nickels and noses" than in doing the hard work of transfiguring American culture.
So thanks to the Ochlophobist for his usual insightful and provocative obsevations.
