Political Alternatives?

 I have made no secret of my having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. You can see my posts on that subject by following the link to the right, listed as "religion". Or the link below.

Since my release, I have enjoyed reading Public Orthodoxy. Its writers have taught me. One such essay is Andrey Shirin's Political Hesychasm: A Viable Option?

The issue presented in the essay is:

Earlier this year, Christos Yannaras, a Greek Orthodox lay theologian, published a book titled On the “Meaning” of Politics. This short volume raised fresh questions about viability of what has been called “political hesychasm.”

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In his 2011 book titled The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political Hesychasm of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras, Daniel P. Payne offers an extensive examination of political hesychasm both at the time of its birth in the 14th century and since its rediscovery in the 20th century. Both thinkers operate in the context of debate about Greek identity in the modern world.

Hesychasm is not defined in the essay, it is probably too well known in the Orthodox world, but not to you. This is from OrthodoxWiki:

Hesychasm may involve specific body postures, and may be accompanied by deliberate breathing exercises. It involves acquiring an "inner stillness," ignoring the senses. The hesychasts interpreted Christ's injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to "go into your closet to pray" to mean that they should move beyond the senses and withdraw inwards to pray. Hesychasm often includes repeating the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me [a sinner]". 

I need to admit not having read its underlying texts, but I think Professor Shirin explains enough for me to state my own opinions.

 Romanides’ most pertinent contribution is his three-level theory of justice. The first level is that of the law. The second level is of those who have been purified and illuminated. They do not have the need for the law. The third, and highest, level is of those who have experienced the glory of God. Here the passions are stilled, and the person lives in perfect harmony with God and creation. This is possible to achieve in the church, which is the communion of transfigured people living in but separated from the state. Religious liberty is not necessary for the church to function. More detailed treatment of Romanides’ thought must wait for another occasion.

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In his latest book, Yannaras speaks of three types of politics, or “forms of organized coexistence.” The first is structured around the “religio-metaphysical axis.” Here the guiding motif for co-existence is utility: bonded together, people can achieve greater quality of life than they would if remained apart. Religion serves to legitimate the political order. In practice, this arrangement easily degenerates into a rigid individual-centered office, where societal cohesion is achieved through coercion.

I have for a long time thought that when a religion needs government for its survival, the religion is false. Another opinion held not quite so long, is that political power destroys whatever religious entity that takes political power. Iran proves my opinion as much as the Papal States.

Although one of the first philosophers I ever read was John Stuart Mill, history has not shown utilitarianism is not without its perils. The greatest good for the greatest number can slide into genocide. I do not think Mill thought of who might perform the utilitarian calculus. So I like that Yannaras rejects that ethical theory.

Yannaras rejects utilitarianism and deontology as principles of justice. The first confuses what is useful with what is true, and the second takes truth out of communal context. In his earlier work, The Freedom of Morality, he rejected virtue ethics as individualistic. Therefore, Yannaras does not see any of the three approaches to justice dominant in the West as valid. In their place, he proposes the ethic of freedom. In addition, Yannaras rejects rights, including human rights. The true ecclesial community will experience rules and rights as constricting its freedom, which is necessary for a communal body to form valid approaches to particular issues and circumstances.

That paragraph confuses me. The Orthodox Church advocates for virtues. it has been my reading of those virtues that they are how people live in a community. Is it then that these ethics of freedom promote or ignore the virtues supported by the church?

Then, too, I find it difficult to understand how human rights would apply to an ecclesial community. Rights, as I understand them, apply to secular government; they exist as protection against the power of the state. An oppressive ecclesial community would not be killing its dissenters, would it? Dissenters being heretics. That is the ultimate power of the state against the dissenter. The remedy of the ecclesial community to heretics would be, should be, separation, not death (it is hard to repent and atone after death):

Firstly, we must distinguish between those who have been condemned by the Church as heretics and those who embrace incorrect or heterodox doctrines. Like it or not, Latin Christianity has been condemned by numerous Fathers and several local councils as heretical. It is, indeed, a traditional Orthodox position that, lamentable though the fact may be, the Orthodox and Latin Churches are divided over the fall of the latter to heresy (e.g., papism, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the filioque innovation, etc.). Therefore, it is clear that Orthodox may not participate in joint services with Latin Christians. This applies, as well, to the separated Eastern Christians (Armenians, Copts, etc.), notwithstanding the fact that many of these Churches have embraced Orthodox views and beliefs in recent years and despite the fact that many modernist clergy, in unilateral decisions which show no understanding of Orthodox ecclesiology, admit the separated Eastern Christians to communion. Naturally, the Church also forbids us to join in prayer with single individuals who may have been condemned for heretical views. Placed in a medical model, the Church preserves us from diseased believers who might, because of the many things that they hold in common with us, pass on, with their correct belief, the bacterium of their wrong belief.

On Praying With Heretics

One may also want to consider the career of Tertullian, both a heretic and a Church Father.

How I see the constitutional order in America is the Constitution and its Bill of Rights provide a space for the community to organize itself. This is, I think, even more apparent at the state level where rather often the Bills of Rights are designated as Privileges and Immunities. I presume a citizenry inculcated with morality through religious training. If I were to trace this idea back to its source, it would be David Hume's essays on religion. There would then be an overlapping of communities - the religious and the secular. What we have now is an atomizing of both communities into individuals without knowledge or interest in acting communally. One Orthodox criticism I have read of Protestantism is that every Protestant thinks of themselves as their own Pope - infallible, straddling the temporal and the sacred - with an anarchic result destructive to both the secular and the religious.

As a Protestant who believes the heirs of the Reformation could be enriched by greater continuity with Eastern Christian traditions, I find some of Yannaras’s insights worth heeding, if not outright compelling. His trinitarian anthropology can serve as an important corrective to individualism so prevalent in the modern West. Even though the importance of communal participation has received much attention in Western theology in the past few decades, few are ready to attribute to it the kind of soteriological significance Yannaras does. His thesis of the alignment between the ecclesia of the demos and the ecclesia of believers offers fresh ways of overcoming the chasm between the sacred and the secular.

That said, Yannaras’ model has a utopian ring to it. To imagine that trinitarian love, powerful and important as it is, can by itself be a sufficient safeguard against the reifying temptations Yannaras talks about is exceedingly challenging. It is difficult to avoid the impression that a dose of Niebuhrian realism is needed, Yannaras’ aversion to everything Western notwithstanding. Yannaras admits that nothing close to his approach has been implemented in the modern world, and it’s difficult for us to picture such a society. The polis of ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire of the 14th–15th centuries cannot serve as such models: they are too remote from us, and both fell short of including all their members in communal flourishing.

And therein lies what I find the essay's most significant criticism of the underlying ideas. Temperamentally, I have no use for utopianism. Secondly, I find the wholesale rejection of Western ideas is senseless and high-handed. Lastly, the restoration of a Byzantine state seems both utopian and blind to what we recognize as humanity today - the inclusion of women and minorities into that grouping we call humanity.

sch 12/25