Orthodox Reflections

By Austin Martin

A lot of what went wrong in 20^th century diaspora Orthodoxy is that academic theologians have published their own ideas as the Tradition. Sometimes these ideas brought out things that had become dusted over in the Orthodox self-conscious. Other times they were completely without any reference in the actual primary sources of the Eastern tradition. Often, the reality is a mix of both. But then these ideas are taken as the baseline for the Orthodox tradition for all times and all people, which historically just is not true.

One of these things is theosis. Theosis is the center of Orthodox theology, yes. But it’s something drawn out from only some of the Fathers. I don’t think that Chrysostom or the ecumenical councils ever taught it. When St Gregory Palamas started talking about theosis and energy-essence, people said, “That’s not in the Tradition,” and he said, “Yes it is,” and they said, “Wait, what?” And they were shocked to discover that it had been lying there all along.

But it’s not something that most people thought about, and it still remained largely obscure until the 20^th century. This idea that the norm for all times in all places is that theosis is the primary Orthodox model of salvation – it’s just not true. Vast amounts of Fathers and historic texts make no mention of it at all. If you want to know how the Church historically taught salvation, without contrasting itself to Western heresies, read the “Sermon on Law and Grace” from the dawn of Russian Orthodoxy. That’s the norm of how the Orthodox have historically described themselves.

Likewise, often the academic theologian crafts a narrative of Church history, and that narrative may not be wrong in itself, but then it’s taken for granted as being objectively true. No history works like this. History is always an interpretation of events.

Part of this common narrative of Church history, taught at probably all of the diaspora seminaries, is that our theology became very Westernized in the 1600s up until the 1900s, when scholars like Romanides, Meyendorf and Florovsky opened us back up to the Fathers. This period is often known as the “Western Captivity”, and Florovsky called it a “pseudo-morphosis”, particularly the work of St Peter Mogila. You will find a cult-like attachment to these same academic theologians both in the “modernist” jurisdictions and in “traditionalist” ROCOR.

Frankly, there’s some truth to this narrative, but it’s greatly exaggerated. Really, this narrative is a Protestant approach – the Tradition has become distorted, and we need to re-examine the primary sources to reconstruct the correct beliefs from scratch. When your seminary is telling you that 300 years of Theology are a write-off, you know that you’re not doing Orthodoxy anymore. And basically all seminaries in America teach this, which means that most priests take it at face value, which means that it’s taught in catechism, which means that most Orthodox Christians who are a little familiar with these concepts believe this narrative as objective fact. The worst offenders are St Vlad’s and Holy Cross.

The Russian Orthodox Church put out a massive amount of academic material in the 1800s up until the Revolution. Almost none of this is available in English. It seems to be something that we’ve forgotten exists. Surely that wasn’t all “Latinized”. They were reading the historic texts of the Church and writing dissertations, if for no other reason, than to have something to write. So what did they find? No one seems to know or care, as most of that material has not been translated into English or extensively studied.

The religious psychology of America is consumerism. We consume a religious identity, even if no money or merchandise is exchanged. We become Orthodox, and then we fill our lives with Orthodox things, Orthodox ideas, and Orthodox sounds. By “Orthodox”, I don’t mean “correct”. I mean big-O Orthodox – things associated with the Orthodox Church in an anthropological sense.

For example, whatever merits Jay Dyer may have, listening to every latest release he puts out is a form of consumerism. It’s consuming Jay Dyer like he’s pop culture. And that’s true with any number of big-O Orthodox things. You can know this because you would have the same approach to whatever else you might have converted to. If instead of converting to Orthodoxy, you had become a traditionalist Catholic, then you might consume Dr Taylor Marshall with the same energy that you consume Jay Dyer.

None of that is a criticism or an endorsement of the things themselves. My criticism is directed at the approach we take towards religion, which I think is nearly impossible to break out of. The best we can do is recognize that we’re doing it.

With that in mind, let’s look at the Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship and its conference. This is a group that is supposed to represent Southern Orthodox Christians. It’s sort of neo-Confederate, but not entirely explicitly. This is the approved Southern Orthodox nationalism that the gatekeepers have presented to you to consume. If you want to do Southern Orthodoxy, this is what has already been decided.

Within ten years it will be probably as Marxist as the St Moses the Black race heresy group, because that’s how these things always go. The group is entirely astroturfed. There is nothing organic about it, and many of the conference speakers have little or no connection to the South. It’s just a venue for the organizing clergy to get together with their friends for another opportunistic speaking engagement. In my opinion, serious people shouldn’t take this conference seriously.

Most obvious is the fellowship’s appropriation of the legacy of Philip Ludwell – a real man whose life and experiences are greatly at odds with the aims of the fellowship that bears his name. Recently we published an article about how different groups are trying to take over Charlie Kirk’s legacy and reinterpret that narrative to serve their own ends. But we Orthodox are often no different. The fellowship named after Philip Ludwell has taken this historical figure and shoved him into the narrative they need. That’s not fair to Philip Ludwell at all, nor is it fair to us.

Who was Philip Ludwell the historic man? He was from the wealthy planter class of colonial tidewater Virginia. That’s not the same caste or culture as the lowland Scots and English slaves who settled the Southy South, and whose descendants still make up the bulk of its population. Other than him being Orthodox, I (like most Southerners) have no connection to him. What do I have in common with some wealthy landowner from English nobility? My ancestors were the wild men from the borderlands who hated people like Ludwell. He might have even owned some of my ancestors as “temporary” slaves.

“This history of White people has never been told in any coherent form, mainly because most modern historians have, for reasons of politics or psychology, refused to recognise White enslaved people in early America as just that. Today, not a tear is shed for the sufferings of millions of enslaved white people. 200 years of White slavery in America have been almost completely obliterated from the collective memory of the American people.”  – from the introduction of the book White Slaves

That is to say, Philip Ludwell was ethnically, culturally and socially different from most Southerners. Why is he our representative? And today tidewater Virginia is just an extended DC exurb. Does eastern Virginia still count as the South?

Although Ludwell converted to Orthodoxy, and that’s all well and good, there is no continuity between him and us. His Orthodoxy died with him. So what is this legacy exactly? He didn’t found a community and convert people. For all that the conference talks about the need to convert the South to some kind of Tsarist nostalgia neo-Confederate Orthodoxy, the historic man seems to have done little or no evangelism.

Particularly cringey from the fellowship is the Russian cross with Confederate flag stars and coloring on a portrait of Philip Ludwell, who obviously was not a Confederate sympathizer, and who was likely at least vaguely loyal to the English royalty. Ludwell actually died in London before the American Revolution. The cringe of the revised portrait slightly surpasses the Virginia state seal as St Michael defeating Satan, instead of a half-naked Lady Liberty murdering Tyranny. Just as the fellowship appropriated Philip Ludwell and made him into their pioneering forefather, so also do they assume that St Michael the Archangel is on their side and approves of them.

If you went to Philip Ludwell the historic man and asked him what Orthodoxy is, would he give the same answer that the people at his conference would? Many of the people who organize, promote and speak at the conference often write about St Gregory Palamas, hesychasm and theosis as the anti-thesis to the West. The West believes in penal substitutionary atonement, but we Orthodox correctly believe in theosis. Would Philip Ludwell say that the difference between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism amounted to hesychasm and theosis?

Fortunately we have an answer, because Ludwell translated a work for us. But to the dismay of the opportunists and ideologues at the conference named after the man, it’s the very Confession of St Peter Mogila that they say is westernizing apostate pseudo-morphosis heresy.

But what else was Ludwell supposed to do? St Peter’s confession was the Kallistos Ware of his day (and I mean that in the best sense possible). It had mistakes and gaps, but it was the first thing of its kind since St John Damascene 900 years before. St Peter was opposing the Uniatism of what is now Ukraine and Belarus, and so he had to speak at their own level and in their own context, which Fr Seraphim Rose explains very well in one of his talks. Of particular importance was that, in St Peter’s time, all the law was written in Latin, and the Orthodox peasants would get taken advantage of in court.

St Peter’s confession was endorsed by all four Greek patriarchs and nine other bishops. A wealthy lay person paid to have it printed and distributed for free. That is to say, it is the most well-received book of the second millennium. If that doesn’t count as tradition and catholicity, then what possibly would? But the godless psychopaths who teach seminary and make YouTube videos will never tell you that – “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

It is from this work that we get the idea of seven sacraments, which academics and Internet priests want you to know is Latinizing influence from the wicked Catholics who did not have hesychasm. And okay, St Peter took that language from the Catholics, but so what? The Church had never thought about the question of what specifically is a sacrament, and is not a sacrament, until the Protestants started claiming that there were only two sacraments. And so St Peter showed how all seven are in Scripture.

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But the professionals who write our Orthodoxy have no interest in either Scripture or the primary source texts of this era in Orthodox history. They do not try to understand why previous generations of Orthodox Christians thought differently than they. All they know is that three centuries of Orthodox theology were a wash until Romanides and Florovsky came along and reconstructed the secret, true Orthodoxy from ancient texts, just like the Protestants they look down on have claimed to do. They spit while standing on the shoulders of giants like St Peter of Kiev, St Cyril Lucaris and Dositheos of Jerusalem. And then all the while, they are pathologically attached to the renovationist Russian liturgy from this same era of theology they hate so much. ROCOR’s definition of Tradition is “whatever we were doing in 1916,” and the OCA merely bumps that date up to the 1960s.

Ludwell was received by chrismation, which is supposed to be heresy according to many of the people who speak at the conference named after him. Does that make him an ecumenist modernist? Chrismation is the historic norm (with frequent exceptions) of the Church for receiving Protestants and Catholics, but some of the clergy at the conference make their living teaching that this is invalid and blasphemous.

This “westernized” early modern Orthodoxy is the Orthodoxy that Philip Ludwell III actually believed in and converted to. He did not read Schmemann and Meyendorf. It’s unlikely that he had ever heard of hesychasm, theosis, energy-essence, or the Jesus Prayer. The liturgies he attended were in “dead” languages. The historic man Philip Ludwell had little or nothing in common with the cassocked boomers who have appropriated his name and legacy for what that they call “Traditional”  Orthodox Christianity.

Beyond distorting Philip Ludwell the man, the conference also wants to baptize the Confederacy in Russian Orthodoxy. At least we know that we’re no longer in Obama’s America.

The Civil War is a more complex issue than simple good and evil. Like most modern wars, it was poor people slaughtering poor people so that the rich could get richer. That’s just as true for the South as for the North. The South was very foolish to rush into war, and it paid dearly for its pride and greed.

As you study the various personalities of the war, you realize that much of the reason that the South lost was because its generals would sabotage each other, in the hope of winning fame that they could cash in on after the war. For the sake of their own egos, they sacrificed the civilians depending on them to hold back an invading army wanting to steal their crops and burn their houses. If there’s any reason that “the South was right”, it was to protect itself from the Northern raiders once the war was already too far in to back out of. But many of the generals readily betrayed the civilian people that they were supposed to defend.

Furthermore, the leaders of the Confederacy held most of the Enlightenment, Freemasonic, Americanist ideals that the speakers at the conference otherwise inveigh so heavily against. Did you think they were building some kind of Tsarist Orthodox utopia? The CSA’s constitution was just an edited version of the USA’s.

Confederate General Pike was an ultra-Mason whose books are still studied today. The Secretary of War was a Jew so Jewish that his name was Judah Benjamin. General Jackson had a supernatural discipline and mystical transcendence, both of which flowed out of his staunchly Calvinist beliefs. General Lee was an Episcopalian, which at the time was probably a diet Calvinism. General Forrest was non-religious.

Jefferson Davis seems to have been a sort of all-embracing ecumenical-minded Episcopalian, who believed very passionately in something he couldn’t begin to define. But maybe he was just vaguely “spiritual but not religious” like Lincoln. I had trouble finding a clear answer.

And anyway, Davis was just some rich guy who looked down on common people. Maybe he would have gotten along well with Philip Ludwell the historic man. He probably would have also liked the kind of people who speak at the conference named after Ludwell. Maybe that’s the connection between history and the conference – rich people with time to kill, trying to build connections so that they can promote themselves. I identify more with Andy Johnson– a Southern, Democrat politician of extremely humble origins who ran with Lincoln as his VP in 1864 on a “unity ticket”.

This letter was written two years before the 17th President’s death. The picture is a transcript from the Andrew Johnson museum in Greeneville, Tennessee. I couldn’t find it online.

For all the rhetoric of North versus South, no one ever wants to defend Andrew Johnson, who is just as representative of the South as Jackson or Lee. Johnson was not a Northern progressive, and he held the normal racial views of his day. But he also wasn’t a Southern secessionist, even though he owned slaves and believed that states should hold most of the political power. Johnson was a working man from Appalachian Tennessee, not a low-country wealthy planter like Ludwell and Davis. He didn’t inherit money like Lee. Also often forgotten is Sam Houston, who likewise refused to go along with secession, but no one could claim that he doesn’t count as an authentic Southerner. So it’s all more complicated than a singular, monolithic (White) Southern culture. Which means that trying to “baptize” the secular Southern government as some kind of enduring model is just as problematical as trying to “baptize” the Union. Sometimes, both sides are misled by rich assholes to the ruin of everyone else.

To state an obvious truth that is often overlooked, our Southern White ancestors had views on slavery and race that no one at the Philip Ludwell conference believes in. If I walked in and said the kinds of things that our ancestors believed about slavery, or even the things that Chrysostom said about slavery, they would tell me to leave. In total, much of the conference appears to devolve into nostalgia and mythology for historic heroes whose humanity has been sanitized out of them. It reminds you very much of those who would mythologize the 50’s “Leave it to Beaver” culture. You can’t build a stable future on a foundation of lies, half-truths, and wishful thinking.

To make a neo-Confederate Southern Nationalist Orthodox conference is just as ridiculous as shoving Orthodoxy into Science Fiction. Many of the people at the Ortho-Dixiecrat Conference also support the Fellowship of St Moses the Black. Or, more accurately, the St Moses White Guilt Fellowship, which writes akathists about how evil slavery was. Conference speakers, and attendees, are also nostalgic about Late Imperial Russian Orthodoxy with all its pomp and circumstance. A legacy they have no ethnic connection to. When you talk to these Russophile convert clergy, they acknowledge that there are other models of Orthodox Christianity out there somewhere, but they can’t imagine having any involvement with them, or doing things differently than the Russians did in 1916. But then they claim to want an organic Southern Orthodox Christianity, with themselves cast as the St Patrick who will inaugurate it. Is this just misguided, or insane?

Far too many Orthodox in America believe you can just invent your own Orthodoxy, shove it into your consumerist identity, and it will work fine as long as you remember to slather an icon of the Theotokos over it all. In such a model, the timeless tradition of Orthodox Christianity is whatever you want it to be. If we keep that going, in another generation Orthodoxy will become something else, and our descendants, looking back, will be absolutely amazed that we didn’t believe in whatever new theological trend the seminaries of the future are spewing out.

By far, the most controversial part of this post has been the section on the Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship. Here are some posts from the fellowship itself:

Building Upon a Southern Ethnos Through True Faith

and

From Fr John Whiteford:

Southern Agrarianism and Orthodoxy