Pano Kostouros

(cont.) My point in "defending" Fr. John as I've done, is to encourage this proper exercising of discernment so that his insights can be gained and appropriated going forward. Fr Seraphim Rose's "correctness" disease goes both ways.

@jaydyer I've recently decided to re-read Fr John Romanides' English material more carefully, and while he definitely does make odd errors, e.g. appeals to higher criticism, evolution, and biochemical CSF mixing as an image of how the souls' faculties of discursive intellection ("dianoia") and the heart ("nous") can be confused via their bodily correlates. Whatever the actual scientific merits of that claim, it isn't my place to judge, as I'm not a medical doctor. It makes for a great meme though, lol. Regarding his supposed belief in "aliens," I read through that old periodical people love to circulate now, and it honestly looks like he's attempting to show in so many words how robust our Orthodox worldview is in handling such shocking information if it were true that aliens exist on other planets. It's odd, but nothing to lose your mind over in my view. I address it here: xitter.gq/PeeksProduction/status… I do believe (based on what little I know) that we, and I include myself, have misread Fr. John Romanides in some key areas. I'll try to clarify a few of his seemingly ambiguous or misunderstood claims below, in the hope of inviting a more charitable reading from everyone who has the time or the inclination. I'll start off with the idea that Fr. John supposedly disbelieved in the existence of "universals" of all kinds. Simply put, this is flat out false. He appears to be in full agreement with Saint Maximos on this point, i.e. "universals" are created just as particulars [or individuals] are. Saint Maximos says that there is a "logos" (Creative-Will in God) for "universals" and a "logos" for particulars. Fr. John says explicitly: "From the experience of theosis or the vision of God the prophets, apostles, and saints know that there is no similarity whatsoever between the uncreated and the created. This means that the created beings are not copies of uncreated archetypes and forms. Creation is unique as creation per se as the uncreated is unique per se. This means that if universals do exist they do not in any case belong to the uncreated dimension of existence." - Fr. John Romanides, "The Christology of St. John of Damascus, VI: The Divine Presence in Creation and the Participation of Creation in the Divine Glory." johnsanidopoulos.com/2020/12… So, in other words, he's saying that if we are to entertain some notion of universals then they are to be seen as created in the same way that our "conceptions" are, which I will address in greater detail below. This "if" can be taken as conditional logical framing in Greek, or it can simply mean that Fr John doesn't much care about the status of universals as his primary focus was on prayer. So be it. He was a theologian and pastor and not a philosopher. Now, I'll try to clarify the difference between Divine "Naming" and "Knowing," which is so often misunderstood when reading Fr. John. In the Fr. Seraphim Rose quote I provided from "Genesis, Creation and Early Man", he also says what Fr. John Romanides taught about not being able to "think God's thoughts". The "conceptions" we derive peripatetically are in nowise like those in God's Mind, strictly speaking, apart from what has been analogously disclosed (Divine Names, Book 3, Section II) to us noetically by Him via His Willed Logoi/Energies for beings and other illuminations as He so Wills. In this qualified sense of "willing" can we refer to His "plan", "mind", "scheme" or Lossky's "thought-will" for a created being. This is because Essence pertains to full mind-dependent descriptive knowledge of a being and only the Three Persons of the Trinity truly know their Essence. But Energies are not Essences , and therefore are not known via the acts of gnomic discursive intellection, which employs "logismoi" and creates "thoughts" and "conceptions" for expressive purposes. To truly and fully "know" God's Energies can only happen with another faculty of sense, that Aristotle and the other philosophers could never fully apprehend as they were outside of the Church. That is the faculty of the "nous". The "object" of the "nous" as a kind of "spiritual eye" is to behold Uncreated Energy. This is important to keep in mind when you read Fr John Romanides on "abolishing all analogia" because we wouldn't say, for example, that the eye, nose, or ear engages in the dialectic, analogical reasoning, or creates "names". That would be silly. The "dianoia" or "discursive intellect" harvests all the information from these faculties of sense and engages in the aforementioned activities, and in a proper spiritual disposition, according to Fr John, God blesses these "lower" faculties of sense and their ability to "name" things, including naming the Energies that the "nous" sees. That is perfectly fine and given to us by God as a wholly good part of our human nature. In the Fall, however, the faculties of "nous" and "dianoia" became twisted. The "nous" was evicted from the heart in the same way that Adam and Eve were evicted from Paradise, and to compensate for this loss, the "dianoia" took its residence in the heart and is now attempting to work "two jobs", as it were, both as a now dialectically oppositional guiding "eye" and as limited destabilized gnomic deliberation because of its loss of the Grace it once had in Paradise. Due to this loss of Grace, the posterior created effects that the lower faculties were made to see and name are also often misinterpreted as the Uncreated Affects (God's Energies). Saint Gregory of Nyssa says the same thing here as an epistemic caution for us after the Fall: "The divine word at the beginning forbids that the Divine be likened to any of the things known by men, since every concept which comes from some comprehensible image by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the divine nature constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God. Religious virtue is divided into two parts, into that which pertains to the Divine and that which pertains to right conduct (for purity of life is a part of religion). Moses learns at first the things which must be known about God (namely, that none of those things known by human comprehension is to be ascribed to him). Then he is taught the other side of virtue, learning by what pursuits the virtuous life is perfected." - St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, Paulist Press, pg. 165-166. This is why I also think that your charge of Fr. John Romanides being a nominalist in the flavor of Occam is to misunderstand what Fr John was saying about the history of Western ideas that led to the formation of the Protestant Solas. The Analogies of St. Augustine hadn't been fully refuted by Occam, which left the door open for Reformed nonsense. I address it here: xitter.gq/PeeksProduction/status… The whole point in Fr. John Romanides' speaking starkly the way he did in a manner that seems "nominalist" is to shock his freshmen university students at that time into a kind of a "Socratic Aporia: Apophatic Style". He was a typical educated Greek who was clearly using the language of "Dionysian darkness" as a rhetorical gesture to ensure that the students do not idolize the "names" and the "conceptions" that they would later on be taught in their theological education as was a huge threat in Greece at that time, having imbibed much of the catechetical material from the Latin and Protestant Churches. Fr. John Romanides explicitly says in his "NOTES ON THE PALAMITE CONTROVERSY and RELATED TOPICS" and at the end of "Empirical Dogmatics Vol 1" that God inspires different kinds of "words" and "conceptions" in a person at different stages of his spiritual journey, and that we can't bypass the "conceptions" of the lower levels like the Bible and the writings/lives of Saints because then we won't be properly healed and cured. So, he's clearly engaging in the same flowery philosophical Athenian rhetoric of St. Dionysios the Areopagite, as later on in Patristic Theology, pg. 107 (attached bellow), Fr. John Romanides explicitly says: "But the Fathers do not observe this [logical] law of Aristotle if they are speaking about God. Although this law is invalid in Patristic theology, the heretics both accepted it and used it. But why don’t the Fathers observe Aristotle’s law of contradiction, this axiom from Aristotle's logic? Because there is no similarity whatsoever between the created and the Uncreated. And since no similarity whatsoever exists, no description of the Uncreated whatsoever can be made. Furthermore, since there is no similarity, there also cannot be any difference." If Fr. John says that no similarity AND no difference exists between Uncreated and created, then how is he possibly espousing a nominalist anti-metaphysic or an ontology so radically apophatic that we creatures cannot "know" God at all immanently? Nominalism reduces everything to mere "names," which is what Nikephoros Gregoras accused Saint Gregory Palamas of being, marshaling quotes from the Cappadocians against Saint Gregory Palamas in the same way that the Neo Trad Cat Thomists are doing against us today. Gregoras couldn't understand the difference between "knowing/seeing" God's Energies "noetically" via the heart and the joint act of "naming" God via the "discursive intellect," discerningly gleaning information from the posterior created effects of those Energies active in this world, the individual soul and the Scriptures, to apprehend the Logoi among other Energies God may permit us to participate in. Anyway, simply put, "knowing" and "naming" God are two co-extensive human acts that are not meant to oppose one another. They only do so in the soul of someone to the degree to which his passions are not purified or "makes idols" of the "names" and "created effects". So, while Fr John Romanides said that the pure nous ought to "dominate" the other faculties of body and soul, he also said that this "domination" isn't had at the detriment or expense of any other faculty: "Although the physical and intellectual faculties no longer exercise any influence whatsoever on the noetic faculty, they are themselves, however, dominated by the noetic faculty's unceasing prayer in such a fashion that they are spiritually cleansed and inspired and at the same time may engage in their normal activities ... ... Once attained to, hesychast spirituality makes it possible for one to go about engaging in his daily physical and mental activities while the noetic faculty… is occupied uninterruptedly in prayer alone, even during sleep." - Romanides, "Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics," Greek Orthodox Theological Review 9.2 (Winter 1963–64), "Prayer and Anthropology." romanity.org/htm/rom.15.en.n… romanity.org/htm/rom.15.en.n… (Note that Fr. John also comments on Barlaam's misreading of Saint Maximos the Confessor as well) We see this in the Burning Bush where the Uncreated Light doesn't destroy or consume the bush's physical integrity. The view of the "heart" and "intellect" being intrinsically dialectically opposed was, in fact, the view that Barlaam had, which led him to attack the monks for "daring" to say that the whole man, body, spirit ("nous") and soul can participate in God's Grace. Anyway, thank you if you've read this far. I believe that you are overexaggerating some of his ways of speaking and perhaps unknowingly disregarding huge sections of his material and overemphasizing his oddities. If I got anything wrong here at all, don't hesitate to correct me or help me better understand. Take care!!