As I am writing my senior thesis on certain aspects of Gregory of Nazianzus' life and thought, I find myself back with the Fathers again, for the first time in a long time. It is hard to read their letters and sermons and not feel compelled to rigorous traditional Christianity. I start to feel pious. I think about acts of asceticism. Suddenly, things - all things - seem simple and clear. I think about Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy ORTHODOXY, that simple and invincible solution to all wiles of the devil. Yet I don't trust this instinct. First and foremost, there is some doubt as to whether this is the instinct which the Fathers themselves were trying to instill. Yes, they were in some ways pious traditionalists, but their lives and setting were so dramatically different from ours that I just cannot easily assume that, for example, an ultra-traditional ROCOR setting would be the first choice for the likes of Gregory or his friend Basil.
Moreover I cannot convince myself for any long period of time that modernity didn't happen and that many of my most basic assumptions about the way in which the world works are very different than ancient assumptions. I don't think the deserts are full of demons. When a famine hits some poor country in Africa, it is not my first inclination to think God is reprimanding those people for falling away from him. I certainly have not seen many miracles in my life, and the ones which may or may not have occurred I am very willing to doubt. The heart, after all, is above all things deceiving.
Yet I do believe that the content of the Christian faith which the Fathers handed down to us is in some way or another true. How it translates into this contemporary world of ours, however, is a question which confounds me. There is a well-known and good-hearted Orthodox priest blogger who instructs us not to live in a "two-storey" world, in which God is up there and we are down here and a great gap has come between us. It's a nice thought, Father, but it’s really too late. In a very real way God is dead and we have killed him as Nietzsche declared (pointing out what was only obvious). A great sundering has happened and it has changed the human mind and heart and many an effort to undo this change look, to me at least, like games of make-believe.
That Jesus of Nazareth rose from the tomb is something I somehow believe, something I even assuredly believe. Yet the collective conscious of humanity has rejected this truth. Even those who believe it subjectively cannot help but be effected by humanity's decisions to disbelieve it. Our belief has been handicapped for we cannot escape the fate of our common humanity. We are flesh and blood and our flesh and blood has been changed by our age. We can not see things which those before us could see, thus for all intents and purposes these things do not exist. God has died in modernity. We are again waiting outside his tomb.
A late comer comment, but AMEN. There is not a straight line from 5th century Orthodoxy to 21st century American monkabee-ism. The phenomenom of the straight line is evidence of our disease, not our piety.
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