Mohr on MacIntyre on Stein

Two books about Edith Stein by Alasdair MacIntyre get "thumbs up" from Eric Mohr of Duquesne University (quondam universitatis ohioensis) at The Charioteer. MacIntyre is perhaps best known for his work in communitarian moral theory, a brand of ethics that traces its lineage back through Saint Thomas Aquinas to Aristotle and Plato. (He was teaching at Duke when I was a graduate student there; he was the only professor to assign a Greek text [the OCT of the Nicomachean Ethics] as the basic textbook for a course.) The books are Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922 (Rowman and Littlefield 2005), and Edith Stein: The Philosophical Background (The Origin and Development of her Thought) (Continuum 2006) and, as Eric notes, the titles suggest that there is more to come. One hopes that there is Mohr to come as well from that excellent blog.

Sorry about that. I'm up to my ears in grading of final papers, and one gets a little giddy.

Thy Will Be Done

One of the most basic prayers of Jesus in the Synoptic tradition is that the Father may bring about the accomplishment of His will (Matt 6.10; Mark 14.36). The life of the Johannine Jesus is a perpetual "Your will be done," because Jesus does nothing on his own (John 5.19). His very food is to do the will of the Father (4.34). It is this prayerful attitude that is summed up in John 11.42: "I knew that you always hear me." His is a supreme confidence in the Father because he always does what is pleasing to the Father (1 John 3.21-22). He knows that whatever he asks is according to the Father's will and that, therefore, he is heard (1 John 5.14). He demands this same confidence in the prayer of his followers (John 14.12-13, 15.16, 16.23, 36).

Raymond E. Brown

Further Proof that Google is in League with Oceania

As many of my readers know, this site has a mirror at StBlogs.com. Using the testing site, GreatFireWallofChina, I've discovered that this version of An Examined Life, the version running under Google's Blogger, is not blocked in China, but the other version, the version running under StBlog's version of WordPress, is blocked. I suppose this means not that the Chinese government has mixed feelings about my blogging but that Google is kissing their ass. But we already knew that.

Saint Paul the Docetist

As I mentioned last week, one of my Lenten activities each year is to read through the New Testament in Greek from cover to cover, beginning on Ash Wednesday and finishing up on Holy Saturday. That amounts to roughly 15 pages per day, which doesn't sound like all that much until you actually sit down and try to do it every day. Now, New Testament Greek is famously very easy to read - - much easier than most of the classical Greek that I have to work with (Plato and Aristotle). Indeed, there is a story about Oscar Wilde taking a scholarship examination viva voce at Oxford and being asked to translate the Passion of St. John's Gospel before a committee of examiners that underscores just how easy it is. After reading several paragraphs quite fluently, his examiners told him "That will be enough Mr. Wilde, thank you," but Wilde kept reading. The examiners repeated that he could stop, but he said "No no! I'm quite keen to see how it ends!"

After reading a text day in and day out for several days one begins to notice the little things. Like how many times Jesus says idou (behold) or how tenderly some scenes are rendered in their very simplicity. Today I noticed something that reminded me of an essay I read over at Adoremus.org. In the first chapter of Luke's Gospel, when the angel Gabriel is telling Our Lady that her son will be great he says: houtos estai megas kai huios hupsistou klêthêsetai. Literally, that says: "This one will be great and he will be called the son of the most high." What jumped out at me was the verb klêthêsetai, "he will be called." He won't just be called that, I thought to myself as I read it, he'll be that. This reminded me of an essay at Adoremus by Ralph Wright, who criticizes (rightly, in many instances) the "Infelicities in the New Lectionary for Mass." One such infelicity is the translation of Philippians 2.7, which the Lectionary renders as:

Rather He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance.

Wright worries that this smacks of Docetism:

The Word, after all, did not take on the "appearance" or the "likeness" of human nature; He took our very manhood into His divine nature in the mystery of the hypostatic union, and we believe that He will continue to have that nature for ever.

True enough. What does Fr. Wright prefer? The alternative that he gives is from the old Jerusalem Bible:

but emptied Himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as all men are

Now that's great literature for you. But I digress. The interesting thing here is that the Greek text is actually much closer to the Lectionary version than to the Jerusalem Bible version:

alla heauton ekenôsen morphên doulou labôn, en homoiômati anthrôpôn genomenos, kai skhêmati heuretheis hôs anthrôpos

Here the words morphên, homoiômati, and skhêmati all smack of the very sort of Docetism that Wright is worried about (to say nothing of that rascally word heuretheis - - sounds like something Gabriel might say). I notice that Wright does not give the Greek here, as he does in most of the other cases of passages he finds fault with - - possibly because he knows he's on shaky ground. What he's really after in his essay are those cases where the new Lectionary uses inclusive language and comes off sounding stilted, and in most cases I think he's right to point out the genuine infelicities of style that result from trying to pander to political interests.

On the theological front, I should add that Saint Paul is not really a Docetist (though I'm sure I'll manage to boost my hits with my title). Some of the words in this passage are fascinating. The word morphê, for example, cannot help but remind one of Plato's doctrine of Forms; homoiôma is straight out of Aristotle (Plato uses it too) as the word designating the precursor of the conceptual entity that arises in the soul when we grasp the universal in the particular by means of our intellect; and skhêma has a long and fascinating history in Neoplatonism. Saint Paul wasn't a Docetist; he was a Platonist! Christ is the image of the Father, literally a likeness (homoiôma) of him, but his humanity is as real as - - indeed it is the very same as - - ours, according to the Church, so perhaps it is not good to push these connections too hard. It is preferable, however, to say that Christ's humanity is in accordance with the same Platonic Form as ours is, rather than to say that Christ is somehow just an image of a human the way he is an image of the Father.

Tomorrow I begin my discourse on the word kai.

What Sam Brownback Should Have Said

This morning I listened to an interview with Sam Brownback on NPR (now available online here). The interviewer was Renee Montagne, and she used a rather clever rhetorical device on the self-styled "Bleeding Heart Conservative." In her lead-up to a question about abortion, she began by talking about something she characterized as a kind of political "compromise":

...the late governor of California, Pat Brown, who was against the death penalty as a Catholic, but he was also a Democrat and a liberal — but he was against the death penalty personally and morally, and yet he signed off on executions because it was the law. He separated out even his moral position from what he had to do as the representative of those who had voted for him.

The question, of course, had nothing to do with the death penalty (which Brownback, a convert to Catholicism, already opposes), but abortion:

Taken to other issues such as abortion or stem cell research, if stem cell research was the law and you were president, what would you do?

I called this a clever move on Montagne's part because her lead-up to the question was an instance of what rhetoricians call a captatio benevolentiae, a "seizing of good will", that is, it was intended to lull her interlocutor into a comfort zone, perhaps thinking "Oh, this question is a slow pitch" prior to springing the actual question, which was not intended as a slow pitch at all. It is extremely likely that Renee Montagne opposes the death penalty, and just as extremely unlikely that she opposes abortion. She wants to feel comfortable with the prospect of someone like Brownback holding public office. She wants to come right out and say, "You're not one of those nut cases who wants to play moral watchdog and rob women of their hard-earned rights are you?" But she can't ask that on national radio (though you can pretty much get away with it on national public radio, but there's this pretense of objectivity that's always getting in the way). So instead of saying something like that outright, she takes a case that she thinks everyone will find extremely congenial - - a governor who signed off on executions even though he was opposed to them - - in the hope that any sane and rational person will feel the same way about abortion: sure I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I would never dream of letting my own personal moral views have any effect on how I perform my public duties. This was the same fix that John Kennedy found himself in as long ago as 1960 when he tried to reassure a group of Baptists that, if he were to be elected president, he would not be taking his orders directly from the Vatican.

And just as John Kennedy dropped the Catholic football on that occasion, Sam Brownback dropped it on this one:

Well, I'm going to execute the law. I'm a constitutional officer now; I'd be a constitutional officer then. I'm going to comply and do the law. That will not keep me from advocating a different system or a different scenario. But I'm going to comply with the law as a constitutional officer sworn to uphold the constitution.

There's a subtle subtext here. By saying that he would be "advocating" a different system while emphasizing that he would "comply with the law", Brownback leaves the impression that his pro-life activities will consist principally in verbal opposition but peaceful co-existence with the status quo. That may not be what he was thinking when he said that, but I suspect that he chooses his words very carefully, especially when he's being interviewed for a liberal outlet like National Public Radio.

In reality, "advocating" is not good enough, especially if one understands just why it is that one ought to oppose abortion and stem cell research. Just because one is a "constitutional officer" there is no reason to think that there are no constitutionally acceptable ways to actively oppose abortion. One can make it a point to nominate pro-life candidates for the federal bench, for example, or veto laws that threaten human life. Saying that you intend to do such things, however, would probably be political suicide, since to openly express such sentiments prior to being elected would be tantamount to hanging a sign around your neck reading "right wing extremist" or "religious fanatic". Instead it's a lot easier to say that you will "advocate" for what you believe in, rather than actually "working for" what you believe in. Politicians aren't beyond a little captatio benevolentiae of their own, after all.

One does grow rather tired, however, of the pretense that there is no place for personally held convictions in politics. Oh, I know, it's only the religious convictions that we're supposed to be too ashamed of to mention in public. It's OK to say that we think illegal aliens ought to be hunted down like dogs in the desert and shipped back to wherever they came from in four-panel trucks, or that we're outraged by drug trafficking. Nobody ever characterizes those kinds of issues as things that one should keep to oneself, even if one is "personally opposed" to such things. You would never find anyone looking embarrassed upon hearing a politician do more than merely "advocate" for equal rights for African Americans - - indeed, a politician who did nothing more than "advocate" such things would quickly lose support, since nowadays we expect our politicians to do something about such injustices, not merely "advocate" for something better.

Why should religious convictions be any different? When you hear that a politician is in favor of a living wage, do you ask if he favors it for religious reasons? If she is in favor of ending discrimination against African Americans, do you ask if she has religious reasons for thinking that all people are equal? Maybe she thinks people are equal "in the eyes of God" or some such rot, so we needn't take her seriously. All moral judgments are grounded in values that are particular to the individual who makes the judgment, and yet we act as though religious values are somehow more to be avoided than, say, utilitarian calculations.

I'd be willing to bet that the folks who complain the loudest about religious convictions creeping into politics don't really care about religious convictions at all, they only care about keeping abortion safe and legal. Latching on to the shibboleth of religious convictions is just the easiest way, politically, of keeping the pro-lifers on the outskirts of acceptability. You never hear people complaining about anti-death penalty protesters that they are trying to impose their religious convictions on the rest of us, and you never heard such complaints about the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, and yet both movements had and continue to have many people who believe in them for religious reasons, just as there are plenty of folks who oppose abortion for reasons that have nothing to do with religion.

You simply cannot use such a criterion anyway, since it is not testable. Suppose I oppose the death penalty for purely religious reasons, but no one knows that I am religious; it is not a difficult matter to compose arguments against the death penalty that have nothing to do with religion, and I could always say that my convictions against the death penalty are grounded in those arguments. I suppose someone who was really religious would not be too ashamed to give the real reason for his opposition to the death penalty, but then nobody would vote for him, for fear he would feel the same way about abortion and stem cell research. Better to have a sophist in office than some religious nut.

I know that Sam Brownback is not afraid to say what he thinks, because here's what he said when Montagne asked him about the possible benefits of stem cell research:

You know, you could destroy me today and harvest my body parts and save a number of lives — you know — with my heart, kidneys, liver. Is that a greater good? Now, some might suggest it is, but it just is morally wrong to take one human life for the benefit of another.

Not exactly the way I would have put it myself, but it is a version of the same argument that I would have given in response to that question, and it ought to be the end of the discussion for anyone except the most base sort of utilitarian.

So here's what Sam Brownback should have said in answer to Montagne's question about political "compromise":

Well, I'm going to do everything that is within my power, legally, to bring about a change in these morally repugnant policies. I'm a constitutional officer now; I'd be a constitutional officer then. Everything that I do will be within the limits of the law and my constitutional duties, but that will not keep me from doing what I know is the right thing to do and bring about a different system. But of course I'm going to comply with the law as a constitutional officer sworn to uphold the constitution, so all of the change that I help to bring about will be accomplished by democratic means.

Good luck hearing anything like that before November 2008.

Ad orientem

Fr. Jay Scott Newman has a nice little post up in defense of the traditional stance of the celebrant during Mass. Our Holy Father has also defended this stance in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy (available from Ignatius). It seems that there are more and more places turning back towards the liturgical East, even in parishes where the newest rubrics are in use (nothing in the current rubrics forbids this orientation), and to me, at least, it seems like a good idea, for the reasons offered by the likes of Fr. Newman and the Holy Father.

HT: Pontifications.

Intelligent Artistic Design

Whether or not the universe has an intelligent designer, the concept of "intelligent design" that is often bandied about by cosmopundits is completely useless as a scientific notion, since it is both untestable and incompatible with the sort of materialism required in contemporary science. Don't get me wrong: I believe that the universe does, indeed, have an intelligent designer. But there is no reason to believe that the universe itself provides any evidence for that claim, contrary to what some folks desperately want to believe. To believe it requires an a priori metaphysical commitment on the order of, well, the same sort of a priori metaphysical commitment required to believe in materialism. You either accept it or you don't, and no amount of empirical testing can compel belief in one commitment to the exclusion of the other.

Now comes a report in yesterday's online edition of the New York Times that some scientists are engaging in some speculation of their own about possible intelligent design, but this time it's not the cosmos but medieval Islamic architecture that is the object of speculation. Peter J. Lu, a physicist, thinks that the geometric patterns found on many instances of medieval Islamic architecture exhibit the characteristics of quasi-crystals, mathematical objects only fully understood by modern scientists less than three decades ago.

The findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, are a reminder of the sophistication of art, architecture and science long ago in the Islamic culture. They also challenge the assumption that the designers somehow created these elaborate patterns with only a ruler and a compass. Instead, experts say, they may have had other tools and concepts.

What was that you were saying about not drawing inferences of like causes from observations of like effects? Oh, that doesn't apply here, you say? Hmm....

Mr. Lu's thesis adviser, Paul Steinhardt, who helped him with some of his research, was not quite as enthusiastic, perhaps, as his student:

Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that it was not clear how well the Islamic designers understood all the elements they were applying to the construction of these patterns. “I can just say what’s on the walls,” he said.

Ohhh.... But hope springs eternal in our youth:

Mr. Lu said that it would be “incredible if it were all coincidence.”

Yep, it would just bowl me over to find that the universe, er, I mean, those buildings, did not have intelligent designers after all. But come on, now, let's give credit where credit is due:

“At the very least,” he said, “it shows us a culture that we often don’t credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought before.”

What's that you say? Those morons knew about geometry? You mean they weren't just sitting around in caves painting pictures of bison on the walls? Man, this is revolutionary.

Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, let's get back to science.

In a separate article in Science, some experts in the math of crystals questioned if the findings were an entirely new insight. In particular, Emil Makovicky of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark said the new report failed to give sufficient credit to an analysis he published in 1992 of mosaic patterns on a tomb in Iran.

Oops! Man, I hate when that happens! Did I say "revolutionary?" I meant "unremarkable". Sorry about that. More importantly, however, let's, um, get back to science!

The article quoted two other experts, Dov Levine and Joshua Socolar, physicists at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Duke University, respectively, as agreeing that Dr. Makovicky deserved more credit. But, the article noted, they said the Lu-Steinhardt research had “generated interesting and testable hypotheses.”

There you go! The magic word: "testable". There are some testable hypotheses in there. Like, these patterns look just like quasi-crystals. Yep, you can test that one pretty easily, and it looks like lots of folks have done just that.

I wonder what the other "testable" hypotheses are supposed to be? After all, this is science we're talking about here, not some kind of fundamentalism.

The Ascent of Love

When I was in the 7th grade I had an overpowering crush on a girl in the 6th grade by the name of Cynthia Shook, whose beauty, to my 13-year-old brain, excelled that of any other entity in the ordo creationis. The crush was a rather consuming one: whenever I saw her in the halls at school my heart would begin to palpitate and I would get a feeling in the pit of my stomach not unlike the feeling one gets on the morning of an extremely important final exam that one has failed to study for. Years later, when I thought I had forgotten about her, I saw her at the student center of the university where I was an undergraduate, and I was rather surprised to find that my reaction to seeing her was virtually unchanged, in spite of the fact that I was rather seriously involved with another woman at the time.

Such experiences are probably rather common in the lives of adolescents, but I didn't begin to understand it fully until I read Plato's Symposium. If you don't remember the conversations in there or if, by some travesty of justice, you've never actually read the Symposium, at 202a Socrates and Diotima are discussing the question whether Love (that is, the god Erôs, though clearly it's meant to be a metaphor for the Platonic concept of Love Itself) is ugly or beautiful, and Diotima introduces the notion of human understanding as a means to elucidate what she has in mind.

"What do you mean, Diotima," I [Socrates] said. "Is love then ugly and evil?"

"Hush," she cried. "Must that be ugly which is not beautiful?"

"Certainly," I said.

"And if something is not wise, it must be ignorant? Do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?"

"And what may that be?" I said.

"Right opinion," she replied, "which, as you know, being incapable of giving a reason is not knowledge (for how can knowledge be devoid of reason?), nor again, ignorance (for neither can ignorance attain the truth), but clearly is something that is a mean between ignorance and wisdom."

"Quite true," I replied.

"Do not then insist," she said, "that what is not beautiful is of necessity ugly, or what is not good, evil; or infer that because, as you agree, Love is not beautiful and good, he is therefore ugly and evil; for he is a mean between them."

The suggestion that there can be intermediary stages between two extreme manifestations of some property was probably one of Plato's most significant and interesting discoveries. It is something that we take for granted these days, but for the ancient Greeks, at least until Plato came along, it seemed valid to infer that, say, justice is just because it is not unjust. They saw opposed properties as contraries rather than contradictories, and this rather severely limited the scope of their conceptual space.

In Plato's metaphysics we begin to see an analysis of the scala naturae that attempts to explain (even if in rather metaphorical language) how it is that human understanding progresses from meager beginnings to full comprehension via a series of ever more precise abstractions from the domain of experience. For Plato, this sequence of abstraction is not a process of discovery but of recollection, because he believed that the fundamental objects of knowledge are already familiar, in some sense, to our rational faculty right from birth. It is the very essence of the rational faculty to have knowledge of these fundamental objects (or substances, ousiai), and so in a certain sense every human being desires, by nature, to acquire knowledge in the sense limned by Plato in his epistemology. Although we do have other desires, material as well as intellectual, it is this desire for knowledge that, at least in principle, ought to govern the best sort of human life. On this account, even the love that we feel for other human beings is really nothing more than a material manifestation of the immaterial (or spiritual, if you will) desire of the intellect for knowledge.

Our intellect desires different sorts of knowledge, because knowledge has different sorts of objects. But there is one object of knowledge that, in a sense, surpasses all others in power and dignity: the object of knowledge that is the Form of The Good Itself. Plato illustrates this metaphorically with a story about an ascent of sorts in the objects of love (210ad):

"These are the lesser mysteries of love," Diotima said. "He who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful bodies; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such body only, and in it he should engender beautiful thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one body is akin to the beauty of another; and then, if beauty of appearance is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty present in all bodily forms is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful bodily forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the soul is more honorable than the beauty of the body, so that someone even of slight beauty, but virtuous in soul satisfies him, and he loves and cares or him, and brings to birth argument of the kind to improve the young until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not servilely in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave, mean and small-minded, but drawing toward and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.

The higher mysteries of love, which Diotima goes on to explicate for Socrates, consist in the study of the Form of Beauty Itself, an eternal and unchanging object of the sort most deeply desired by the soul.

For Plato, then, the physical love that we feel for one another is but a manifestation of a deeper intellectual longing for the Form of the Good. The Christian version of this story holds that the physical love that we feel for one another is an image of the deeper love that we have for God and he for us. It is something that is built into our very nature, that we cannot avoid. It is as automatic as that sense of jitters that I used to get when I saw Cynthia Shook walking down the hall. Of course there is a biological explanation for that, but the materialist who focuses on the physical explanations will necessarily miss the metaphysical truths that make the physical explanations true. My early crush was soon replaced, as is everyone's, by a more mature form of love, and that more mature form was itself replaced by yet another, even more mature form. Eventually I found myself married, with children, feeling ever deeper loves not only for my family and my fellow humans, but for my creator as I made the ascent from mere crush to love of God. It is a journey that never really ends in this lifetime, for our final cause is the Beatific Vision, which will serve as the final step in the ascent.

In a scheme such as this we can see quite easily why love of one's enemies is better than love of one's friends. Even sinners love their friends, but to love one's enemies requires a more profound understanding of what love actually is, a deeper experience with loving and a more complete knowledge of what the proper object of love is. Lent is a rather useful time for experimenting with this, because we are asked to abandon our lusts in favor of loves: by immersing ourselves in prayer, we abandon our lust for time to ourselves in favor of love of God and neighbor; by fasting we abandon our lust for material comfort in favor of love of God and neighbor; by giving alms we abandon our lust for material possessions in favor of, well, God and neighbor. In abandoning these lusts in favor of loves, we learn to experience love, we habituate ourselves and teach our soul-body compounds to prefer the one over the other so that we may continue the ascent more easily, more naturally. Soon we come to see that the distinction between love of God and love of neighbor is not a genuine dichotomy, because there aren't two loves, but One Love. If we make it that far we have a better chance of making it to that state where the One Love is all in all.

New Ecclesiastical History Blog

Mr_jargon, who recently has commented on some posts at this blog, has started a new blog himself whose focus will be ecclesiastical history. It is called Neochalcedonian and, if it is possible to tell such things from comments left at other blogs (such as this one), I suspect that it will both interesting and learned. I will be checking there regularly to see what's going on. Readers of my recent posts on Farrell's book will know that I am particularly interested in the historical context within which ecclesiastical history takes place, and this would appear also to be among the central concerns of Neochalcedonian. Good luck to mr_jargon, and good reading to everybody else!

New Edition of Nestle-Aland Scheduled

Here's some exciting news for you bibliophiles and textual critics out there: the 28th edition of Nestle-Aland is scheduled for publication later this year or early next. Nestle-Aland is the standard, scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament.

I don't know that the 28th edition will represent a significant change over the 27th in terms of information in the apparatus criticus (the Greek text itself hasn't changed since the 26th). Apparently the apparatus will be made more "user-friendly", but I've seen no indications that it will include a greater variety of witnesses. Indeed, the apparatus in the 27th edition was not significantly fuller than that in the 26th. The 28th edition will come with a CD-ROM, however, and that should facilitate things very nicely.

I will probably get the 28th edition. I always get the new edition. It's getting kind of expensive, as the new editions appear with rather alarming frequency these days, and I have this rather unhealthy passion for leather-bound editions, which aren't cheap. I tell myself it's worth it, and I always make it a point to actually use them (I read the New Testament in Greek from cover to cover every Lent as a kind of devotional practice), unlike some of my books.

I hope the CD-ROM has nice pictures on it.

Some Virtues of the East

In my dealings with Orthodox writers, bloggers, apologists, and clergy I have formed a very personal opinion about Eastern Christianity in general that will perhaps come as a surprise to some, but not to all: I wish that Western Christianity could be more like it. Because this is a very personal, intuitive attitude, it is difficult for me to explain, in quasi-technical terms or philosophical jargon, just what it is, exactly, that I am reacting to, but here are a few thoughts about ways in which the West could benefit from being more like the East.

1. Spirituality. Whether clergy or layman, young or old, scholar or punk blogger, the Orthodox whom I have encountered manifest a life of deep faith guided by prayer, communal liturgy, and lectio divina that is both striking and admirable. Obviously there are always exceptions to such things, and I certainly can't claim that my sample is either large or representative, but I do think that the contrast class differs in some obvious ways with what I have felt from my Orthodox brethren.

2. Separation from the world. As I watch our culture slide ever more thoroughly over the edge of materialism, hedonism, and secularism, one cannot help but notice the numbers of folks calling themselves Christians who either will not or cannot fight the prevailing tide. Again, my experience is limited, but the Orthodox whom I have met are not so timid about rejecting the values of the world. Western Christianity certainly has its representatives in this struggle, but - - again, in my limited experience - - there seems to be a greater density of resistance from the East.

3. Theological insight. Metaphor can be a wonderful thing, and Orthodox theology is filled with wonderful metaphor. Very often I think this reflects a deep insight intot he ineffability of certain truths: we cannot say what such-and-such is, but we can say what it is like, and thereby come to have some form of experience of it that is communicable in some small degree. The West can be so analytic that some of these insights are lost.

4. Charity. Christian charity requires two things: love of God and love of one's fellow men. We cannot say that we love God if we do not love our fellow men, nor can we say that we love our fellow men if we do not love God. Putting the two together means that our love cannot be compromised by ungodly ideals: when our fellow men are in need of fraternal correction, we have a duty to offer it, and when we stray from God, we have a right to receive it (correction) ourselves - - charitably - - by our fellow men. The Orthodox whom I have met appear to know, more deeply than many, precisely what this cardinal virtue requires. It is easy to point out the errors of others, less easy to point them out charitably, with love and Christian fellowship, in a spirit of guidance and fraternal care. Again, there are always exceptions, but for the most part I have to say that I am impressed with the degree to which charity informs the lives of the Orthodox whom I have encountered.

Of course, all of these virtues are also present in some degree among Western Christians, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. I'm talking about an intuitive feeling based on my own, personal, and limited experience, an experience of a community that seems admirable and good, and one wants very much to share in what is good to the extent that one can. For this reason I have particularly enjoyed my recent inquiry into Maximos, Palamas, and the essence/energies distinction, because it has afforded me an ample opportunity to see these virtues up close, and spread out over the course of history. It is wonderful and inspiring.