By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
Many conservatives often portray the Roman Catholic Church as the salvation of the West. A healthy Roman Catholic Church (i.e., a good and faithful Pope) is the key to a spiritually healthy West in their thinking. Examples abound, from Hilaire Belloc (via The European Conservative):
This our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.
To Rod Dreher (speaking here about a pilgrimage of traditional Roman Catholics to Chartres Cathedral in France, via The Free Press):
The reasons for the quiet revival of Catholicism among the young vary, but they all come down to the search for meaning, purpose, stability, and identity. These new converts—or “reverts,” for the baptized who have rediscovered their faith—are drawn to ancient forms of Christianity because these traditions are more rooted, and more demanding, than the looser, therapeutic model of contemporary Christianity. They also rely much more on liturgy and beauty to incarnate theological principles—“smells and bells,” as some have it. These things have stood the test of time.
The road from Paris to Chartres—also a stop on the famous pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—has been well trod over the centuries. The Reformation, religious wars, and later the French Revolution discouraged the faith journeys, but they began again in the 19th century, along with Catholic revival in France. A further revival in the early 1980s saw a group of traditionalist French Catholics fall in love with the pilgrimage. Today, in the midst of another Catholic revival, it is organized with bivouacs—temporary shelters—along the route to aid pilgrims, who camp along the way.
. . . Chartres stands to them as a beacon of what the world might be again. It is a prophetic manifestation of light and beauty amid the darkness of an ugly world that does not comprehend the message engraved in its walls, and proclaimed in the glow of its ruby, emerald, and azure glass. In the wonder of this medieval cathedral, a symphony of stone, they hear the Latin-chanted melodies and the beacons of bejeweled light summoning them out of the dark wood of modernity.
The Roman Catholic Church has an understandable allure, as Mr Dreher points out: It retains many external rites that seem to point to its possession of a deep, venerable tradition that can impart stability to individuals, families, and whole societies. It is a deception.
We will dispense with the usual rationalistic arguments, however. For those who want a tête-à-tête
argument about the fundamental differences between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, we would direct folks to the recent debate between Jay Dyer and Tim Gordon.
We want to focus instead mainly on the arts and the saints of the two confessions. Roman Catholicism claims to be the straight plumb line, the measuring rod, against which all other religions must be tested. But there is something disconcerting about, something disturbingly bent and distorted within, Roman Catholic faith and practice, and this manifests in the aforementioned arts and saints.
We begin with an image presented by the famous Roman Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton in his book ironically named Orthodoxy, a description of the quintessential Roman Catholic saint:
No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. . . . The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1995, p. 138).
We shall indeed find some interesting things. But first we must let Mr Chesterton elaborate a bit more on the meaning of this image of a Roman Catholic saint for the West:
That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics: but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves, a deity that disappears. Certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. But only we of [post-Orthodox western] Christendom have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in the chase (Ibid., p. 141; bolding added).
The first thing to note is the unfortunate truth that God did indeed disappear in the West because of the Roman Catholic faith that Mr Chesterton tried so hard to defend. Roman Catholicism posits a God that is only a transcendent, unknowable essence rather than an unknowable essence together with its energies that are knowable, in which man and the creation can participate, and in which he is invited to unite through the Orthodox Church. In positing such a God, the Roman Catholics have expelled God from the world. The Gothic cathedral at Chartres, and the other cathedrals elsewhere in the West, are a perfect reification of the Roman Catholic idea of the missing God: The high, empty vaults inside, the tall, pointed spires directing our eyes heavenward, are a testimony that God is precisely NOT with us, that we must ‘hunt Him like an eagle upon the mountains’. And millions in the West, faltering in that search that has been undertaken with erroneous directions from the Vatican, have given up in despair and become atheists, Muslims, and (no doubt to Mr Chesterton’s chagrin) Buddhists in a desperate effort to reconnect with the Meaning of Life that Roman Catholic theology took away and hid from them.
Roman Catholic Gothic cathedral in Amiens: The Christian God is not here, but the gods of the Pythagoreans might be.
Secondly, there is always a note of wildness in Roman Catholicism, of dangerous imbalance. Mr Chesterton praises this also:
It [traditional Roman Catholicism] was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; . . . and in my vision the heavenly chariot [the Roman Catholic Church] flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect (Ibid., pgs. 107-8).
This sort of ‘dramatic’ faith leads to excesses in the spiritual life. The main instigator of the worship of the Sacred Heart in Roman Catholicism, Margaret Mary Alaqoque, is a good example:
Until the 17th century, the sacred heart worship was not as popular as it is today, and that is due to Margaret Mary Alacoque who claimed to have received certain visions and apparitions from Christ, which kickstarted the universal adoption of the sacred heart worship in the Roman Catholic Church. Two passages from her life particularly showcase the spirit of this devotion:
She herself wrote out the donation, and signed this humble formula: ‘Sister Peronne-Rosalie Greyfie, at present Superioress, and for whom Sister Margaret Mary daily asks conversion with the grace of final penitence.’ This done, Sister Margaret Mary implored Mother Greyfie to allow her, in turn, to sign, but with her blood. The Mother having assented, Sister Margaret Mary went to her cell, bared her breast, and, imitating her illustrious and saintly foundress, cut with a knife the name of Jesus above her heart. From the blood that flowed from the wound she signed the act in these words: ‘Sister Margaret Mary, Disciple of the Divine Heart of the Adorable Jesus’
And later in the infirmary:
However, in the midst of the peace and joy that this great act had procured her, the generous and fervent Margaret Mary experienced one regret, namely, that the letters of the holy name of Jesus, which she had engraven on her heart and which she wished to be as lasting as her love, began, after some time, to grow faint, and to disappear. Resting on the permission that she had received, she tried once or twice to renew them by opening the lines with a knife; but not succeeding according to her liking, she determined to apply fire. This she did, but so incautiously that she soon had reason to fear having exceeded the limits of obedience. Trembling and humbled, she went to acknowledge her fault. Mother Greyfie, true to her custom, apparently paid little attention to what Margaret said, but ordered her in a few dry words to go to the infirmary and show her wound to Sister Augustine Marest, who would dress it.
She is not alone amongst the Roman Catholic saints in exhibiting these abnormalities. But this is the natural result of equating Christianity, as Mr Chesterton did, with a sort ‘sane madness’.
Wait just a minute, someone might object. The Orthodox Church also has crazy saints. It is true; she does have her Fools for Christ, such as St Xenia of Petersburg, St Nicholas of Pskov, and others. But the Fools for Christ’s Sake are only feigning madness before men in order to drive out pride and other vices from themselves so that they might have a lesser union with the fallen world and a stronger union with the Holy Trinity. In private or when they speak to their spiritual fathers and mothers, they act quite normally. The more exuberant Roman Catholic saints, alas, do not seem in many cases to be feigning madness.
The Orthodox Church shows a different way in other areas mentioned as well. God is not absent from the Orthodox Church. Acknowledging the energies of God means that God is in truth ‘everywhere present and fillest all things,’ as a prayer to the Holy Ghost says. This theology affects Orthodox church architecture just as profoundly as Roman Catholic theology shapes theirs. Orthodox architecture is uniquely incarnational. Unlike Roman Catholic architecture, it proclaims the presence of God, the immanence of heaven (to borrow some of Fr John Strickland’s words), in this present world.
Sts Nicholas, Constantine, and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, Roseland, New Jersey
Unlike the Roman Catholic saints extolled by Mr Chesterton, with their frantic, desperate, outward searching for God, the Orthodox saints calmly look within the heart – and find Him there. This is not the nihilistic Buddhist pantheism that innervates mankind, which Mr Chesterton rightly decries. It is rather the practice of hesychasm/stillness, the descent into the heart, the cleansing of the nous (the existence of which Roman Catholics have either forgotten or outright rejected), the encounter with God in the heart.
‘The kingdom of God is within you’ (The Holy Gospel according to St Luke 17:21); ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (The Holy Gospel according to St John 18:36) – the Orthodox affirm these truths; the Roman Catholics do not. For the latter, the Kingdom of God is an external kingdom, a kingdom precisely of this world, which they spread by worldly methods, ‘killing monsters’ per Mr Chesterton: crusades that slaughtered thousands of French Cathars, Protestants, Orthodox from England to Russia, Muslims, Native Americans, etc.
For the Orthodox it is not so; they wage war inwardly so that they might find God in the heart:
If you ardently long to attain the wondrous divine illumination of our Savior Jesus Christ; to experience in your heart the supracelestial fire and to be consciously reconciled with God; to dispossess yourself of worldly things in order to find and possess the treasure hidden in the field of your heart (cf Matt. 13:44); to enkindle here and now your soul’s flame and to renounce all that is only here and now; and spiritually to know and experience the kingdom of heaven within you (cf. Luke 17:21): then I will impart to you the science of eternal or heavenly life or, rather, a method that will lead you, if you apply it, painlessly and without toil to the harbor of dispassion, without the danger of being deceived or terrified by the demons (Nikephoros the Monk, in The Philokalia).
On the feast of the holy resurrection of Christ, Philimon and Paulinos were talking when the subject of the eremitical state came up. Philimon knew that Paulinos, too, aspired to this state; and with this in mind he implanted in him teachings taken from Scripture and the fathers that emphasized, as Moses had done, how impossible it is to conform to God without complete stillness; how stillness gives birth to ascetic effort, ascetic effort to tears, tears to awe, awe to humility, humility to foresight, foresight to love; and how love restores the soul to health and makes it dispassionate, so that one then knows that one is not far from God.
He used to say to Paulinos: ‘You must purify your intellect completely through stillness and engage it ceaselessly in spiritual work. For just as the eye is attentive to sensible things and is fascinated by what it sees, so the purified intellect is attentive to intelligible realities and becomes so rapt by spiritual contemplation that it is hard to tear it away. And the more the intellect is stripped of the passions and purified through stillness, the greater the spiritual knowledge it is found worthy to receive. The intellect is perfect when it transcends knowledge of created things and is united with God: having then attained a royal dignity it no longer allows itself to be pauperized or aroused by lower desires, even if offered all the kingdoms of the world. If, therefore, you want to acquire all these virtues, be detached from every man, flee the world and sedulously follow the path of the saints. Dress shabbily, behave simply, speak unaffectedly, do not be haughty in the way you walk, live in poverty and let yourself be despised by everyone. Above all, guard the intellect and be watchful, patiently enduring indigence and hardship, and keeping intact and undisturbed the spiritual blessings that you have been granted. Pay strict attention to yourself, not allowing any sensual pleasure to infiltrate. For the soul’s passions are allayed by stillness; but when they are stimulated and aroused they grow more savage and force us into greater sin; and they become hard to cure, like the body’s wounds when they are scratched and chafed. Even an idle word can make the intellect forget God, the demons enforcing this with the compliance of the senses (Abba Philemon, from The Philokalia).
This loss of hesychasm, of the uniting of the mind and heart, is evident in Roman Catholicism in another way. Their saints typically manifest either one or the other of these two aspects of the human person, the rational mind or the emotional heart. The two definitive saints of the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi, exemplify this division. Thomas is the manifestation of cold, dry rationalism; Francis is hot, irrational emotion. Without the hesychastic tradition that the Orthodox Church never lost (‘Pray without ceasing’ – St Paul in his First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:17), Roman Catholic spirituality will forever swing between these two extremes, never settling into a calm disposition for very long.
M. V. Lodyzhenskii in his book Light Invisible contrasts the ‘frantic’ Roman Catholic spirituality of Francis of Assisi with the hesychastic spirituality of St Seraphim of Sarov. The icon of St Seraphim is probably one of the best affirmations of the truthfulness of Orthodox spirituality, as his peaceful, loving gaze testifies to the true union with God that he attained while still in this world (the opposite, again, of Mr Chesterton’s frenetic Roman Catholic saints). In contrast, Francis’s bizarre actions would seem to indicate he was not advancing in that regard (see Mr Lodyzhenskii’s book for details on that, or re-read the sayings of Abba Philemon above about stillness being necessary to conquer the passions Also, one may contrast St Seraphim’s icon with the famed Roman Catholic painter Giotto’s depiction of Francis of Assisi, who appears to have quite an impish grin.).
One final example of traditional Roman Catholic’s hysterical piety is in the portrayal of the Lord Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion. Both the Kaufmann Crucifixion (c. 1360) and the Isenheim Altarpiece (early 16th century) depict Christ’s death in most shocking and grisly ways possible:
The contrast with an Orthodox icon of this same event is quite strong:
13th century icon from Vatopedi Monatery on Mt Athos
Christ in the Orthodox depiction is not slumped over, defeated by death, nor is he contorted by pain. Christ remains Almighty even upon the Cross. And the gore is notable by its absence (Many thanks to Fr John Strickland for his book Paradise and Utopia: The Age of Division for help with some of the above).
Also noteworthy is that this fascination of Roman Catholics with violent portrayals of Christ’s death is not limited to the past. Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ (2004) was nothing if not soaked with the Lord Jesus’s blood.
We do recognize the high value of many things that Roman Catholics have given the world: the exceptional writings of Mr Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, of Dr Russell Kirk, etc., etc. And I know all too well that I am not a better person than anyone I have criticized in this essay or any other.
Nevertheless, to promote Roman Catholicism, even in its more traditional forms, as having a power necessary to ‘save the West’ is a disservice to the peoples of the West. It is giving them a false hope. Roman Catholicism is not Apostolic Christianity; it is a deviation from it, as should be seen in the foregoing if we have done our job remotely well. That being so, it will necessarily lead astray those who unite themselves with that institution.
The Orthodox Church is the true Body of Christ, divinity and humanity joined together. The ancestors of Western peoples lived that reality for 1,000 years before the calamity of the Great Schism, creating a wonderful Orthodox atmosphere which produced an abundant harvest of holiness. Tell the young, tell the agèd; tell the men and the women, the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish; those in the fields, those in the forests; in the cities, in the mountains, or by the waters, in every corner of the West: In the Orthodox Church, and in no other, you will find hope and deliverance.
I’m not sure many people are aware of Orthodoxy as an option for Western Christians. For too many people, it’s associated with its ethnic modifier: Greek, Russian, Antiochian, etc. So it’s not unreasonable for Western thinkers to steer seekers towards Roman Catholicism. But we need to get it out there that as “good” as Catholicism might be, Orthodoxy is infinitely better – sez this former Roman Catholic.
First of all, the Vatican is bound at the hip with the Great Reset, and obviously with the New World Order in progress. They hope, that the powers that be will select the Roman Catholicism to be the religion of the New Brave World. In parallel, for at least four centuries they encourage any attack of the West on the Russian Orthodoxy. Nowadays, that was amplified to become a religious tumor.
On the other hand, The Passion of Christ movie mentioned in this article went to a length to show the Resurrection of Christ, the Mystery of Mysteries for us the Orthodox. Even the Gospels are silent about those moments. After that, the Angel talks to the Myrrhbearing Women without doing a press release in detail on how that was possible.