Derek Holt's List: Orthodoxy

• His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality). 

  That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free." 

  The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles.

• I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes. 

  But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party. 

  That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all. 

• It turns out, more often than not, that they were not taught at home, growing up, over Sunday dinner, the noble stories, the beautiful myths that had the winsome virtue of psychic ordinance – the interiorization of the Sacred Order. They did not see the mother fill the room with light and grace, sustenance and healing, commanding love by the sheer presence of her quiet love and forgiveness. They did not see the father talk deep on memory and stand on ceremony.They did not see the father command himself before he ever thought to lead his wife and children.

  (For that is what "headship" means: all command is predicated on self-command ... all external order is based on and structured by internal order. That is the simple, ridiculously simple, and sole reason why only an insufferable dolt insists that women and children "submit" to him: the very act of stating thus is itself an transgressive rejection of self-command.)

  • Can I learn this still, so late in the game?
• I tell them to never yell in front of the children, that they should walk away into their own sanctuaries, like their bedroom, or taking a walk outside.

• If I were a secular therapist, an priest-adept of the posthuman religion, I'd suggest all sorts of things. Such measures would be so popular that I could put up a shingle and charge a lot of money (which I don't at all). These measures would get compliance, certainly. I'd suggest rage therapy, separate mini-vacations, trial separations, masturbation, fantasizing about other partners during intercourse, free association, the swinging of rubber foam sticks "to get the aggression out," puppet theater, psychopharmacology of some sort, the reading of astrology, the reading of Mars and Venus and electric women, the science of sexuality and genitalia. 

  And if all else failed (which these measures do, in spades), then I'd relent, and the three of us would sigh finally in relief because we really tried hard, and I'd finally say (and give permission): "Well, you might as well divorce." 
• It requires giving up and surrendering in verbal arguments: even and especially husbands should say, simply, "You're right," pick up his socks and muddy boots, and let her have the last word.
• I think that all verbal arguments should be ended with surrender. Let them win. For all your victories have been pyrrhic, no?

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• The question of the diaspora, especially North America, is today in our opinion the foundation of the current problem and what brought to light the intellectual divide which had long remained hidden.

  • Perhaps in the future we will look back and see this as the cataclyst for rectifying this long-held temporal arrangement.

• And what is to be said about the canonical disorders that we’re up to our ears in over there?

   

  The situation of all the Orthodox eparchies dependent on mother churches in North America is uncanonical. There is one Orthodox church in those lands whose situation is sound and canonical: the American Orthodox Church (OCA).
• If these eparchies and mother churches on which they depend were to be logical with themselves and consistent with Orthodox ecclesiological and canonical thought, in the true sense of the word, then they would belong to the OCA or would at least enter into an understanding with it and the thorny crisis of the Orthodox presence there, theologically and canonically, would end.
• The simplest position and the most sound is for us to leave the Orthodox in North America to themselves and to encourage them to arrange their affairs themselves! We and the other mother churches are the ones who are complicating their affairs!
• I will return to the subject of the bishops and I will say that the hidden cause behind the debate going on between those who hold to the concept of titular, helper bishops and the concept of local bishops over a people and a territory is, in reality, related to the passions.
• The issue of the episcopate, which has long been outside the genuine ecclesiology, will not be solved by emptying it of its pastoral content and enshrining its titularity, and not by, in response, idolatrously harping on the application of cannons but rather by the metropolitan embracing the bishops as brothers, and the bishops the metropolitan.

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• "The multitude of those immortals is called the cosmos, that is, perdition, by the Father and the 72 luminaries who are with the Self-Generated and his 72 Aeons. In him the first human appeared with his incorruptible powers. And the Aeon then appeared with his generation, in whom the cloud of knowledge and the angel is called El. [...] aeon [...] after that [...] said, let 12 angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld. And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means rebel; others call him Yaldabaoth. Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created 6 angels as well as Saklas to be his assistants and these produced 12 angels in the heavens, with each one receiving a portion in the heavens. The 12 rulers spoke to the 12 angels [...] the first is Seth, who is called Christ. The second is Harmathoth. The third is Galila. The fourth is Yobel. The fifth is Adonaios. These are the five who ruled over the underworld, and first over all chaos."

   

   This is the "truth" of  The Gospel of Judas.  Little wonder that no Christian would consider The  Gospel of Judas  to be a Christian text. It is clearly a Gnostic text, this particular codex written nearly two centuries after the  Gospel of John , the last of the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament to be written and, as can be seen from actually reading it, this newly published "gospel" has virtually nothing in common with the four Christian Gospels or the Christian faith except the use of the names Jesus and Judas.
• dam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, summarizes the place of  The Gospel of Judas : "Orthodox Christians will point out, correctly, that there is no new challenge to the Church in the Judas Gospel, much less a crisis of faith. This is an ancient heresy, dealt with firmly throughout Church history. The finding of this new Gospel, though obviously remarkable as a bit of textual history, no more challenges the basis of the Church's faith than the discovery of a document from the nineteenth century written in Ohio and defending King George III would be a challenge to the basis of American democracy."