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How to Acquire an Orthodox Phronêma in the West: from Ecclesiastical Enculturation to Theological Competence

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How to Acquire an Orthodox Phronêma in the West: from Ecclesiastical Enculturation to Theological Competence Copyright © 2019 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. All Rights Reserved Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies Vol. 58 (2017) Nos. 1–4, pp. 251–279 How to Acquire an Orthodox Phronêma in the West: From Ecclesiastical Enculturation to Theological Competence Augustine Cassidy The Eastern churches have much to offer the West. By way of examples, I might list dignified and solemn worship, fi- delity to the apostles and their successors, a living witness of saints, rich piety, exuberant joy, irreproachable theology, mys- ticism grounded in a holistic view of this good creation, time- honoured disciplines for spiritual development, aesthetics that make present the holiness of God, ancient principles that lead to union with God, a profound sense of communal identity, compassionate understanding of sins coupled with the recogni- tion that sin is not central to human life, courage and perseve- rance in the face of oppression even unto martyrdom, unflin- ching opposition to heresy, and access to a wealth of theology not otherwise available. These blessings are not necessarily all equally available, nor are they presented as such by Eastern Christians, nor indeed are they all mutually consistent. Some are probably aspirations rather than realities. This is, in effect, to admit that my list is synthetic, uncritical, and indicative of what people have claimed to find in the Eastern churches. And a similar list could assuredly be populated with problems en- demic to the Eastern churches that no Westerner would find appealing or attractive in the least. But I begin with a register of the blessings that, having freely received, Eastern Christians freely give, since my purpose in this paper is to analyse some aspects of Western conversions to Eastern Christianity. To be Copyright © 2019 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. All Rights Reserved 252 Augustine Cassidy very specific, I will focus on aspects of conversions from wes- tern Christian backgrounds to parishes in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in North America and to the Orthodox Church in America. I am specifying my sources in this way not to ex- clude other experiences, but rather because I am working from sources that emerge from that precise setting and because the population of converts into Orthodoxy in North America is sufficiently large as to generate interesting phenomena. I offer the paper with some hope, based on anecdotes and limited first-hand observations, that my analysis and provisional fin- dings will not be limited to the communities that provide the evidence. To the contrary, I think the complex negotiations by which Western Christians become Orthodox are an important part of the broad-based interactions that make up Eastern Christian life in twenty-first century Europe. In the following pages, I will give a specific example, taken from contemporary American Orthodoxy and chosen as a representative specimen of convert literature from the late- twentieth century, that offers (amongst very many other things) plentiful and uncompromising advice about how to acquire and to maintain an Orthodox mindset and manner of living – the “Orthodox phronêma” of my title – in the West. This section I am calling “The neophyte and his fictional priest.” Despite its distinctive features, I claim that the text is representative and I justify that claim in the second part of my paper, entitled “Opting for Orthodoxy.” In this section, I will identify findings from a recent publication of fieldwork amongst converts to Orthodox Christianity in North America. That publication, along with the one central to my first section, both bear witness to important and, I think, instantly recog- nisable patterns of behaviour that are frequently ignored. In concluding, I will comment on problems that I have identified in the first part of this paper, and indicate how they may well impede the flourishing of Eastern Christianity in the West. My contention is that the attitudes surveyed in this paper foster a profoundly distorted sense of theology and advocate precisely this distorted theology as the consummation of Orthodox life. Such a distortion is deeply problematical, not least because when it is compounded over time it inhibits the possibility of Copyright © 2019 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. All Rights Reserved How to Acquire an Orthodox Phronêma in the West 253 witnessing to God’s abiding presence and reduces Orthodox Christianity to an ethnic perspective, worthy only of passing cultural commentary. The Neophyte and His Fictional Priest Frank Schaeffer, son of noted Presbyterian evangelist and philosopher Francis Schaeffer (a significant figure in the Ame- rica Religious Right), was already acclimatized to public attention when, in December 1990, he was received into Orthodoxy at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in New- buryport, MA. The evolution of Schaeffer’s public persona is an interesting story in its own right. For decades, he has cour- ted controversy, not least by revising his public allegiances – as when he famously, or notoriously, turned on his father, or more recently, when he reversed his staunch support for the Republican Party and began supporting Democrats instead. For our purposes, it suffices to say that Schaeffer had a public pro- file before his conversion; for that very reason, his entry into the Orthodox Church was noted with interest and comment by many religious communities in the United States. Schaeffer wasted no time before putting forward his vision of what was wrong with America and what Orthodox Christianity offered to heal those ills. Although Schaeffer made heaviest use of political and social terms for his analysis, the bracing diagnosis he offered can be paraphrased by borrowing the title of an earlier publication that came to similar conclusions about the malaise of the West and prescribed comparable measures to deal with it: “Religion Is a Neurobiological Sickness, but Orthodoxy Is Its Cure,” a phrase so memorable that its author, the Greek-American scholar, Fr. John S Romanides, used it several times in the 1990s.1 1 John S. Romanides, “Η θρησκεία είναι νευροβιολογική ασθένεια, η δε Ορθοδοξία η θεραπεία της,” Ορθοδοξία, Ελληνισμός, πορεία στην 3η χιλιετ- ηρίδα (Mt Athos: Koutloumousiou Monastery, 1966), 67–87; idem., “Church Synods and Civilisation,” Theologia 63 (1992): 424–450; idem., “The Sick- ness of Religion and Its Cure. A Medical Key to Church Reunion,” http:// www.romanity.org/htm/rom.20.en.the_sickness_of_religion_and_its_cure.01 .htm#1 (accessed November 19, 2015); and idem., “The Cure of the Neuro- biological Sickness of Religion. The Hellenic Civilization of the Roman Em- Copyright © 2019 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. All Rights Reserved 254 Augustine Cassidy What united Romanides and Schaeffer in common cause was not only an unflinching conviction that Western civilisa- tion had been corrupted through its estrangement from the ancient practices and teachings of Christianity preserved and promoted within the Orthodox Church; it was also their urgent insistence that Orthodox Christianity is not merely another form of Christianity. The title of Romanides’ piece makes that point more clearly than Schaeffer managed to do. Orthodoxy is not only not one religion amongst many, it is the cure to the di- sease for which mainstream Christian religion is in fact a vec- tor of transmission. Romanides’ signature reconstruction of history might or might not have appealed to Schaeffer,2 but his fearless denunciations of Western Christianity for doing more harm than good – and indeed the ringing, emotive lists of fi- gures whom he would have any right-minded Orthodox Chris- tian similarly denounce – would find a natural place in the pages of Schaeffer’s Letters to Father Aristotle.3 That book and its immediate predecessor, Schaeffer’s Dancing Alone,4 both passionately address the state of Orthodox Christianity in America, but the later of the two – a collection of letters that Schaeffer wrote to a fictional priest, discussing the Orthodox Church, American society, and the interface between them – is much the more interesting of them. Unlike Romanides, poor Fr. Aristotle lacked clear vision and confidence, though he seemed a rather decent man who had a sound grasp of basic practicalities. Happily for him, Fr. Aristotle also had access to Schaeffer for wise counsel and forthright encouragement in cases of uncertainty – as when he pire, Charlemagne’s Lie of 794, and His Lie Today,” published online at http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.02.en.the_cure_of_the_neurobiological_si ckness_of_rel.01.htm (accessed November 19, 2015). 2 The two major statements of Romanides’ synthesis of historico-cultural analysis and theology are in John S. Romanides, Ρωμηοσύνη-Ρωμανία-Ρού- μελη (Thessaloniki: Pournaras, 2002) and idem., Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine: An Interplay between Theology and Society (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981). 3 Frank Schaeffer, Letters to Father Aristotle: A Journey through Contem- porary American Orthodoxy (Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox Press, 1995). 4 Frank Schaeffer, Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994). Copyright © 2019 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. All Rights Reserved How to Acquire an Orthodox Phronêma in the West 255 faced insurrection led by the president of the parish council, who hoped to use the church facilities to host a fundraiser for a Greek-American presidential candidate (a thinly-veiled refe- rence to Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massa- chusetts and Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1988). Not only does Schaeffer steel Fr. Aristotle’s resolve, he also takes the opportunity to warn against allying the church with secular powers, to denounce several policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and to endorse a reading of Sir Steven Run- ciman’s The Great Church in Captivity which, according to Schaeffer, “has a direct application to our present-day situation in North America.
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