What Is Eastern Catholic Theology?: Questions and Answers Revisited and Revised

so I have a pretty challenging task today because this volume where is it gone is it being passed around oh here it is this volume of logos which is one of our slimmest but I find to be one of the richest in terms of what it offers to me as an Eastern Catholic theologian in terms of a consent under mandate for what is yet to be done so I'd like to try to summarize what I think of a salient points in four discreet articles that were a part of this a panel on what is Eastern Catholic theology back in 1998 and then I'll proceed from there to give you a sense of where I'm going with my own work continuing to engage with Paul Ricca in order to advance in the the future of Eastern Catholic theology and if there's time I'll get down to nuts and bolts about a small aside project which relates to women deacons in the Eastern Churches and it can be considered as a kind of case study of the challenges attending someone who wants to do a truly Eastern Catholic theology now you may recognize some of these fine gentlemen here archimandrite Robert tuft of the Society of Jesus father Peter for the Trotsky and miroslav to Taunton and I put his book there in case you didn't know you may know more about father Peter and father Trotsky simply because they're part of this Institute but father to Tana who teaches out at st. Jerome's in the University of Waterloo is also an accomplished theologian and author as well now these four figures who have all been significant in various ways particularly the first three and in my own formation but also reading some of other Meir slavs work who presented in the Catholic theological Society of America as I said in 1998 and the fact that this is the title of this panel what is Eastern Catholic theology was not meant to be tongue-in-cheek this is a legitimate question many people even today don't know what Eastern Catholicism is or that there's an Eastern Catholicism and they certainly are not aware that we have our own theology curiously this question even among Eastern Catholics has not been discussed very much it's since this panel the the literature on this topic is shall we say wanting there's much more that could have been done and I'm not sure it's whether because we haven't had a as effective a circulation of these papers as we might like or whether there is just perhaps more plausibly a certain amount of inertia among Eastern Catholic theologians to begin to address these big issues that are as it were lurking in the background taps article is called Eastern Catholic theology is there any such thing and the other three paper is built on that they were intended to be responses to his panel the methodology and all figures it acknowledged this has yet to be rendered explicit even when we have a sense of what Eastern Catholic theology is we're not exactly clear on how we would go about doing it in other words we haven't had enough thinking about thinking or theologizing about theologizing and that is what i would like to do today ultimately of course and in light the work that the book hopefully that will uh in the mature be the mature fruit of the reflections i'm sharing with you today ultimately everybody's concerned about practical issues of course and everyone has opinions on practical issues right and anyone can voice their opinion nowadays through social media very readily and perhaps a temptation there among all the positive aspects of that is for us to rush to make a judgement have a verdict on some crack issue a practical concern well that's whose importance is immediately relevant to us but fail back and see how our different opinions go here right and traditionally we have the discipline of systematic theology which although it's often accused of being somewhat dry actually has a deeply pastoral aim as even does canon law if you look the final canon of the latin code says that this salvation of souls is the supreme law of the church so salvation is important even for canonists it's certainly important for systemic theologians but we have to take our time getting to where we need to go there's no as it were helicopter to the top we have to track the trail step by step and sometimes as you've never been hiking there's a number of switchbacks you go one direction in order to have to go back with seemingly the way you've come because you can't go straight up you have to pace yourself and you have to allow the trail to unfold in a manner that is doable so that's what I hope you'll see that I hope there's some wisdom than in trying to go over the terrain and it's already been covered highlight what is important I'm not going to be overly critical not just because I don't because I hold these gentlemen for high regard but because I think that in in balla on balance the insights that are there are significant and what is lacking is not so much that these is for these insights to be challenged but simply that we take them and we go further with them so to begin with father Taft Eastern Catholic theology is there any such thing Taft in his very in his customer with his customary prolixity and he can speak and write with in a very voluminous manner his article is certainly the longest and he gives a very fascinating survey of where Eastern Catholic theology has been in the past several centuries and where it is going today and he gives with copious footnotes as one might expect if you know his work at all you can if you acquire this volume again an appreciation of all the journals that are out there the major authors well whether in the Byzantine or the Syriac sphere or any number or the other spheres of the eastern of Eastern Catholicism I'd like to just like to focus in on where he arrives near the end of his work and that is in identifying what he calls the key characteristics of an Eastern Catholic theology and so here they are the order that he gives them although I have a numbered them firstly he says Eastern Catholics are in reaction and not so much in a positive sense of being in reaction but in that we are put into a corner hmm we are pressured as it were in a not entirely comfortable way because of the indifference not to say rejection that we continue to encounter and certainly have an countered in the past and may well continue to encounter depending on the context in question now this isn't sort of the word to play a violin or to seek pity from anyone but simply to give a honest appraisal of the situation in our day and age we're very sensitive to people who have been victimized or been traumatized to people who have been marginalized in the course of you know in the course of history think of the First Nations in in Canada for example and therefore Taft rightly notes that it's understandable that Eastern Catholics are somewhat at a loss flummoxed as to how to give a coherent and thorough accounts of who they are and what they believe indeed we tend to oscillate between the two poles if prior to the Second Vatican Council especially there was a model of thinking like Latins and praying like Greeks subsequent to the Second Vatican Council we've seen a number of people for whom the default position is simply to emulate whatever the Orthodox are saying and doing without necessarily thinking through the discrepancies that might arise on that sighs it's kind of a cognitive dissonance on both on both ends or both models secondly he says it's something that's in the making hopefully you agree or else you wouldn't be here if you thought you knew already what was going on you could have stayed home watch Netflix or you know done something else so it's not we're on on the way in via there is it is future-oriented rather than oriented to the past now I'll quote they qualify that in a little while but and you might think that's really surprising you might even believe some christians are we eminently concerned about the past well yes we are but we hopefully and following the the axiom of Yaroslav Pelican who said that a traditionalism is the dead faith of the living tradition is the living faith of the Dead a tradition then by its very nature means not just what has been handed on but the handing on of what has been handed on right we don't just receive but we pass on to others what we have and therefore we can't and must not think of it as something that's already certainly been accomplished but something that is yet to be accomplished even if it is in reference to what has gone before this in being in the making he says we also because we're minorities whether as Catholic Easterners or as you know what's Eastern Christians who are Catholic or as Catholics who happen to be Eastern in both contexts were minorities and therefore he says we have a consciousness of the other of the others which perhaps comes less readily to those who are part of the majority community again you could think of all sorts of political and social cultural analogues to this thirdly says we're self-conscious and again this has not some not so much in the positive sense that you know people who are rational Express you know or that their their self-consciousness right man this are rational animal we are self-conscious in a way that animals are not know this is self conscious and the sense of being preoccupied with ourselves you know like worried about the zits on our face we might say because we are small and we know we're small and we're not just small size-wise but often small in stature meaning what meaning that we lack institutions we lock universities we like colleges we like seminaries we lack monasteries we lack even many of the things that our Orthodox counterparts but do very well in and for a monastic life would be a case in point right Eastern Christians although we have a tradition that that includes very rich monastic life have often failed to preserve that and extent Eastern Catholics that is within in in the context of our union with Rome and for all sorts of reasons even if we've done new things like create religious orders along the Western model so we are small and we're worried that we're may be insignificant not least because sometimes other people make us feel that way so again without being pitying theirs is to recognize you know and a mouse does need to be aware that it's a mouse if it wants to get a void being trampled on by the Elif fourthly he says it is open and unashamedly eclectic and this she means in a positive sense sometimes people mean eclectic and a negative sense like lacking coherence he says no eclectic in that it blends east and west which is actually what you would expect if you're in communion you think of classical Christology in which women and Caledonian Christology in which we distinguish between the divinity the humanity only to say that there's a commingling as a communication of idioms kkona kkona Katsura dear madame right and that is the divinity in the humanity are not separate they're distinct but they share they interact with one another so if communion were simply about I'll do my thing over here and you to do your thing over there and we won't condemn one another well that would simply be mutual and different so I'm gonna be tolerance it would it be communion so he uses the example of Madonna house and says here is a woman Catherine Doherty the founders of Madonna house who founded a community of the explicit intention of it breathing with both lungs even though she didn't use those terms but she was doing it with the help of Archbishop Joseph Raya Melkite archbishop long before people were using that vocabulary made famous by john paul ii and this he says is a positive thing it allows Eastern Catholics to be creative in ways that would not necessarily occur to people in one sphere or the other that is a lot in West to the Greek East because of a sense of perhaps embarrassment and mixing things now Eastern Catholics also sometimes are embarrassed about our having mix things in the past specifically our Latinization and therefore this eclecticism amay it's maybe something that you want to have discuss later in the Q&A be debatable about its merits that is it can certainly manifest in a positive way that can also manifest itself in an in a negative way he says Eastern Catholic theology rejects the pseudo antithesis between East and West and false polarization right it takes as an a priori that if there is a conflict the conflict ought to be resolvable and probable probably is resolvable at any rate one doesn't start off with a view of the other as hostile you have heard this proverb perhaps that you know and apologies to anyone who is Russian I think I believe I heard this from a Russian Christian source northa doc said when a Russian sees a foreigner they say huh might be an enemy when an Arab sees a foreigner he says AHA might be a customer all right whether you see the other as potentially dangerous perhaps because of your historical experience of being invaded and and subjugated by others or whether you see it as an opportunity to grow and expand and network to collaborate to profit from the other nosov the other mm-hmm this is he says we Eastern Catholics in principle have this and of course in practice we may have all sorts of ideas of polarities whether authentic or false but this is top stake then he says it forms an integrated whole and again you might say well this is in tension with the previous point about being eclectic he says it forms a whole in the sense that the theology and the liturgy and the spirituality and the Canon Law go together right the thinking has a an existential frame of reference an ascetical context prayer and fasting an aesthetic context in terms of an inherited tradition of music and art and architecture that allows anyone engaging Eastern Eastern Catholic theology to in principle have a holistic approach to the matter at hand and a holistic frame of reference finally says it is ecumenical it seeks not only to reconcile and unite but to avoid their this is in line with what he said about false antithesis avoid the domination that Eastern Catholics believe they themself have suffered at the hands of one of their more imposing a brethren whether on the Latin West okay the Latin West or on the Orthodox side so these are tiles theses and I think in general they're very sound is it premises and we can work with them even if we may want to debate one point or another now where I would like to take issue whoever is where Taft despite his demonstrable mastery of the entire tradition of traditions of the Christian East sometimes falls back into a kind of a dyadic view of the church and as it's in and I think it whether it's because the Byzantine Rite is the largest of Eastern traditions whether because that is the tradition in which he was ordained or whether it is because there's a habitually the dialogue habitually between Orthodox and Catholics has focused on the relationship between the Greek East and the Latin West often everybody who is Caledonian has been happy to ignore the non Caledonians so Taft will say that this first millennium of the church is our reference point right it is where we see this essential complementarity of East and West the period of the undivided Church of the seven holy and ecumenical councils now enquiring Minds however want to know if we could really speak that way Eastern Catholics are conscious that there are four families of Eastern Christianity the Assyrian Church of the east the Oriental Orthodox the Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics and that all other non Byzantine Eastern traditions are represented in the Catholic Communion right in the twenty three churches that comprise that are the Eastern Catholic churches within the twenty-four churches that make up the Catholic Church the 23 only or 1.5 percent but nonetheless we matter it's a very small lung but it matters so in that respective TAF were here I would like to ask whether we can so with in that matter whether it's not so much facile to speak about this first millennium of undivided unity perhaps we need to backtrack a little bit and take seriously the divisions of Ephesus and 431 in count calcitonin 451 from which we have lost period we have effectively lost communion with these other apostolic traditions and it's not just that we've lost communion with individual Christians or groups of Christians but we've lost that that that theological liturgical canonical and spiritual heritage mm-hmm that is over time the Biz the Eastern Orthodox the Caledonian churches were Byzantine eyes to the point that the traditions which existed then before other euchre forms of the Eucharist for example not to mention other aspects of these Eastern traditions were were lost and until the reunion of these churches with the Catholic Church there was a couple exceptions like the Maronites who argue that they always been in communion but in principle until for example the reunion of the reunion partial though it was say of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Catholic Church in which the Armenian heritage was reappropriation at least in principle by the Catholic Church the Catholic Church was happy to consider itself as the Latin Church right it took its own particularity to be normative to be exclusive to be the whole the part understanding itself as the whole and of course the Greek East was happy to do likewise and if they didn't then they at least thought about one other but not about all these other others right so they thought in a dyadic manner so I think that is to me a portent point that Eastern Catholic is well poised to take as as a as actually say to take as our frame of reference that we see the multiplicity of the church not simply as two discrete traditions as important as they are and as long-standing as their dialogue and their conflict with one another is but that we are always thinking about the multiplicity within the Christian East itself we lament the loss of communion with the Greek East and the Gallatin West but we also lament the loss of communion and I'm not casting aspersions at the moment on whose fault it was but the simply fact of the tragedy of losing the Assyrian tradition losing the Coptic tradition losing Ethiopian the Armenian and the Malon Carr traditions that Jacob by tradition eventually present in India as well from our consciousness as Catholics and if I were an Orthodox I think I would want to say I would become as readily to me to say that it's a tragedy also that the Eastern Orthodox Church lost communion with these folks and not only lost communion but developed a habit of hostility in which things that previously had been tolerated without quibble become real they stick in the craw right they become real shibboleths such as the Armenians not mixing white water with their wine or using unleavened bread never mind that the Armenians said nothing about the procession of the Holy Spirit in the classic form of their Creed even though this was a really big deal for the Greek East and Latin West that a the Latin West had modified the Creed so the form of the the fact that they changed it and be the content of the change and neither seem to notice the Armenians had a Creed which neither had the Filioque but didn't even say anything about the spirit proceeding from the father they were using an earlier form of the Creed since nobody speaks Armenian I think it passed everyone's attention so but these weights worth these kinds of things are worth noting because it reveals to us that there was that even prior to this loss of communion not only a richness in this tradition but perhaps a way of approaching something that later on would be seen as an either/or and there was earlier a model of a neither/nor or perhaps of both and Taft also says that we have to take account of the full spectrum of tradition he says that even though he bets just a prior disgust the first millennium as the model and I think there's a little bit of a tension there I'm sure if I pointed out he'd have a very sharp and brusque reprimand for me fest you know but I've either misunderstood him or of course he knows that and just didn't have the time to say so I've only had one or two personal conversations with the venerable Taft the first one shocked me in such a manner in the positive sense I was so overwhelmed that I've been very careful about voicing my opinion thereafter but he on the one hand is aware of this full spectrum and yet inclines toward this dyadic model and I think that is a tendency that we need to avoid secondly he says that those who have unilaterally modified the capital-t tradition in their small tea traditions are responsible for resolving the conflict and here he's being a very good Roman Catholic so Maher colpa Mia culpa mea Maxima culpa he generally wants the Latin Church to repent of anything it's done to change the common tradition but again he tends to rethink of that common tradition as what it shares with the Greek East I don't hear taps saying yeah the Greek East in the Latin West we should really think twice about you know those ecumenical councils four or five six seven because we've unilaterally the two of us that is bilaterally modified the share tradition we had with the Oriental Orthodox and with the Assyrians and they didn't sign on the Armenians were busy fighting the Persians as we heard a few weeks ago and so it wasn't their fault it couldn't be at the council and they're not going to receive something that they weren't a part of perhaps we should think we should you know think twice about the account of the community of those councils a tap doesn't go there I'm not saying necessarily that we should but it should be a possibility in other words if we take his maxim seriously that the common tradition matters and changes from that should oblige us and conscience to see when and why and how and by whom those changes happened and if they were indeed necessary for everyone or perhaps just necessary for us then we will act accordingly and finally he says an authentic Magisterium cannot contradict itself sorry that doesn't now there should be contradict itself and here again he shows his Catholic mind that he takes for granted that there the authentic Magisterium is going to be the teaching office of the church will be will manifest as continuity over time and there perhaps I'd like to put some questions to him about whether that in in perhaps even if I agree with that in principle may make light of why Orthodox have often with deep deep deeply felt and deeply felt in good conscience or the deep conviction have felt unable to acknowledge developments in the West because they don't see it as the this authentic Magisterium necessarily moving on to someone who we all know father Peter glad Zog with fear and trembling I summarized this article with him sitting in front of me he points to the Second Vatican Council as the occasion of a paradigm shift I say this in parentheses he doesn't use the word paradigm shift and George why we'll just wrote about in force things recently that Catholics don't have paradigm shifts but I think he's a bit on there on the defensive but galata says there is this paradigm shift because Eastern Catholics from the point of the Second Vatican Council onward have an officially stated approval for their own distinctiveness embracing not only Wright and Canon liturgy and law but theology and spirituality a full and very fulsome fourfold patrimony and the theology piece is central there because if you've compared for example the new catechism the killing of John Paul the second with previous categories like the Baltimore Catechism you will see a conscious effort to quote from the eastern father's as well as the eastern liturgies as well as the eastern canons and even in very sensitive issues like Trinitarian theology to suggest that there are different models of how to thinking about the Trinity one rooted in agustin one rooted in the Cappadocia --nz and if neither is absolute eyes both can each in their own way be useful in helping us grasp truly if not exhaustively the Trinitarian mystery so this this fourfold taxonomy is indicated multiples Vatican 2 documents not and whether or not it's in this has been acknowledged in the often the debates about the spirit of Vatican 2 it's certainly there in the letter of Vatican 2 hmm and we can take consolation from that and as it were take our marching orders from that if we have our own liturgy what we tend to know what that is our own canon law that has emerged over time both the general code and the particular codes which are still emerging our own spirituality this is still becoming clarified to what extent we can be eclectic like an authority move with ease between say the Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration to celebrating the Byzantine liturgy which they do with Madonna house all of the above or whether in fact as father Trotsky will say in his piece our own spirituality means a kind of focus on HESA chasm on the Jesus Prayer we'll hear both out this Thursday and other classically Eastern in this case Byzantine forms of devotion to the exclusion of Western devotions whether or not there were comfortable with and finally the theology then is the naming of my notice the naming of this in a coherent manner of our own distinctiveness and a connecting of the dots and this is perhaps where the greatest amount of work is to be done Galata says that we have missed this sometimes in the fifty years most of 20 years ago that he wrote this but then still 30 years since the Second Vatican Council because we've been fixated on the Orthodox Catholic axis I might even say this when hopefully without casting aspersions but we might have been fixated on a ukrainian orthodox ukrainian catholic axis depending on if we're ukrainian or some other Eastern tradition in other words not even on the global relationship between say a Greek East and Latin West but our own particular instantiation of it and often with a kind of parochialism that is inhibited but very creative theological development addressing matters of ultimate concern so he invites us to sort of move beyond this fixation and to think of a theology that will address all people right that will address ultimate concerns that we'll take seriously theology as dealing with the really real hmm but will G doesn't mean that we're not dealing with real things and we're debating the the niceties of liturgical practices but rather that we see those debates that we may have as related to much larger existential questions but the theology in that sense is as the eastern fathers have repeatedly said is about the experience of God right it is about the encounter with the relationship with God divinization faces deification as of Agrius and others say the theology is a is prayer right true theology the true theologian is one who prays and the one who prays truly is already theologian I'm sure you've heard that quoted ad nauseam so in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in this effort to rehabilitate our tradition very often as I said a little while back we've simply turned to the Orthodox and taken it in lock stock and barrel and that's been very good for us it's been a tonic to read Orthodox theologians to follow Orthodox examples in many respect and as it were to take cues from the renewal that happened in certain Orthodox circles in the twentieth century most particularly with the expatriate community Russian expatriate community in France and then as that migrated to North America for example in the community associated with the same Vladimir's seminary in Crestwood New York and all those who have been influenced by that but there is there is there something insufficient about that right there's a net that's a necessary aspect but it's not sufficient why because not only do the Orthodox himself to address certain areas whether because they haven't had the time or the energy or because a certain myopia perhaps a focus on their own issues means that they neglect things that might be also important for them but nobody can do everything right and so AG lotsa says there are areas that have been neglected and that therefore are right as it were for the picking work that is ready to be done that needs to be done and why not us why wait for the Orthodox to do it in doing this we'll have to move away from our parochialism what he calls very cleverly assult off' eyeing particularism in favor of a legitimate particularity we don't want particularism but we do need to work from our particularity and another homely many years ago i remember somehow things are stick in your mind and then the father peter talking about our ascetical tradition fasting for example and saying we are not absolute relativists we don't say well you do this you do that you know everyone just does their own thing but we are relative absolutists we say we Byzantines we Greco Catholics we Ukrainian Catholics we need to do this because we know it we need it for our salvation we need the great Canon of Santander Creed we need forgiveness Vespers we need these fasting disciplines that we observe very poorly we need this stuff and we're not sure that everybody needs it we're not sure that this is the way but we are sure that it is a way and for us it is our way right and so there's a very different very diff good thing to name this in the in and and it's a word to hold to this that we're not saying it's our way or no way nor we saying there's an infinite number of ways and therefore ours isn't really that important or that significant there's no reason why you might want to consider it between the one and the many is the several which already you know ancient Greeks wrestled with this what's the relationship of the one and the many there is between an infinity on one side in the end they and there's more the the the conformity but of all things to one model on the other there is the model of our healthy plurality the the several these are some of the things that he says need to be done and because he is my boss I just like to take this chance to tell him that I think I am working on some of this stuff okay so anthropological psychological and the psychological political study of Rights I do some of that in my book if we're interested in that critical church historical research well I've done some of that in other piece on Orthodox sacramental theology in the Oxford Handbook the modalities of Revelation I'm looking at in this project now I have not dealt with quantum physics in faith I'm sort lief other Peter I cannot fulfill your wish list entirely but we do have other up-and-coming scholars like Louis st. Germain who is engineer master's in engineering who is now doing a thesis in Eastern Christian theology so we look to other bright lights who are coming up in our church and other Eastern Catholic churches to address some of these fascinating questions which not all of us have enough we don't all have enough years left in our lifetime to become experts in these areas father Trotsky now the third of our fourth figures he is article is entitled Orthodox in communion with Rome and I start with this very I think engaging quote to be in eastern cow because to believe one can simultaneously live the fullness of orthodoxy and enjoy the fullness of Toffler communion but this leads to an unresolvable tension and he loves the word antinomy might to law against another law paradox a teaching alongside another teaching i would say an enigma of what it means to live in a situation which some people most people see as contradictory rather than as complementary all right most Orthodox tend to see their distinctiveness as being at odds with certain aspects of the Latin West tradition and it has been reciprocated on by the Latin West and Trotsky says as Eastern Catholics we have this unique modus operandi not just a unique modus vivendi a way of living but a modus operandi are as theologians our way of thinking is that we start with the idea of complementarity and as it were we give the benefit of the doubt to that it's like a witness being innocent until proven guilty rather than not a major city it's like you know people are guilty until proven proof you know proven innocent but it's we're gonna start by as we're having a some perhaps naive childlike idea that we're all part of a family and we're all different but we can also be part of the same family and we can all eat at the same table and we can have a cordial conversation and learn from one another and realize that we are different without feeling that we therefore need to move into separate residences all right now of course this isn't to cast aspersions on the trauma suffered on shall we say I think predominantly on the Orthodox side if you've ever met a Greek Orthodox Christian and you talk about being a uni eight pretty soon you'll probably hear about 1204 and that's what I've been told before was only eight hundred years ago come on you know what happened twelve Oh fourth crusade right sack of Constantinople this kind of memory or rather the memory of someone else's memory because of course nobody living it has the memory but they have a they have a tradition of remembering the memory it causes people to vicariously be traumatized in the presence right and to feel that there isn't there is a wound that can never be healed right so we don't want it all to make light of that but Eastern Catholics we do try to say you know maybe behind that within that before that even through that trauma there's the possibility of a relationship right and therefore if we don't try for that we don't hope for that you know it's but but I just headspace I'll be were safe we don't know we're never gonna get anywhere right so if God all things are possible so Trotsky says we should see this in conscience in a sentence he says if we didn't believe this we would be fake we would be we would have a false communion we would live with this cognitive dissonance they're like yeah I mean I do this but I really shouldn't you know we'd almost feel bad about what we're doing and he says no we can't do that we have to start with the view that we see it as complimentary and the if there's a conflict it has to be worked through and perhaps where others see a contradiction we have to help discover the complementarity we can't simply point to their what they see a contradiction say but that's complementary because it may not be from from a critical point of view people may look at it saying no in fact there is a real conflict here we can't brush off other people's concerns we have to work through them work with them but with as it were a from a conviction that in and through that process we will find at least a sufficient complementarity to warrant continuing and communion and that itself is already something because even among Orthodox themself as I show in a recent blog post on orthodoxy and dialogue the sharing all things in common notionally is no guarantor of being in communion people are quite capable of breaking community with one another even when they agree on all the faith the entirety of the faith Communion and lack thereof gets used as a punitive measure sometimes their disciplinary measure so that should in a weird way console us that if you can lack communion even you have everything else in common then perhaps having everything else in common is not itself the necessary condition for having communion invite you to go if you've not seen this interesting fellow or he's worked for the Peter song are working with him among other scholars here doing his doctorate and at Trinity College and he maintains a blog called orthodoxy and dialogue and it makes for lively and I won't say anymore but he's very good at getting all sorts of people to post all sorts of provocative things and so one of them was can you be Orthodox in communion with Rome and I was asked to contribute a piece in favor of that proposition Trotsky says that East and West end up at the same destination though they follow different routes now he also has in his programmatic section he says for example that Eastern Catholics should be interested and try to make a contribution to introduce dialogue and I obviously agree with that but in whether an Eastern religious inter-religious dialogue or in acumen ISM one has to proceed very carefully because the idea that we follow different routes and end up at the same place while very attractive immediately raises the process that in other words how can you know that for certain can that be demonstrated right because of course the church is historically have not just criticized one another's positions but they've been advertised each other basically saying kind of go to hell literally because they felt that the differences were of such an order that they had the potential to lead people to hell and that it wasn't enough to simply say no we don't like that no this is better that you do this it's don't you dare think that or do that or you might end up you know we're right so although obviously with Trotsky if I were I didn't believe this I wouldn't be an Eastern Catholic we want to be really careful in our own theologizing about saying that this were complementarity that we Intuit that we believe and that we experience within the Catholic Communion is such an obvious thing that just like what's wrong with everybody else that they don't already get it right how come they think that maybe different roots actually leave different places all right and this is again a question has to be asked in the face of a political climate of great hostility where people for understandable reasons want to just affirm everything and affirm everybody right there may be many paths up the mountain but some of them make co-op cliff okay they don't all necessarily arrive at the summit even if they do go up so we want to entertain as it were leave henshin that we cannot know this a priori we can hope for it we can work for we can strive for it we can seek to verify it but we cannot know it perhaps until the eschaton when please God will find out that whether the choices and no viewpoints and practices that we've embraced is the very you know terrifying Gospel of Matthew 25 tells us there's not much to do with theologies there you know but a lot to do with practices and what is so frightful is that we're not even it seems the sheep in the gold are not even aware of the bright of whether they've got it right the things that they think they should be doing or the things that they're not doing they're not even clear on that nonetheless trotsky's starting point is obviously very productive the fruit the institute is the fruit of this man's vision and the idea that we can move somewhere we can start on a journey with the idea that it's worth doing what we do and it's worth trying to affirm what others are doing can take us a long way it means that we can have the confidence that we have something to offer right we can enter into an orthodox fear orthodox precinct and not simply be cowering in the corner like we don't have anything to add because I mean worries the Catholics let me know that you guys you know I mean you wouldn't want to hear oh we have to think or vice versa in a Catholic living a Catholic sphere to the contrary we can say Catholic we love it Orthodox we love it Armenian yes Coptic this is awesome we love all of you guys we want to be part of everything we want to affirm everything with a certain kind of critical reason but yes we're in principle we're behind you all and we all need encouragement right all the churches need encourage in this day and age of secularism especially these ten Christians not least people like the cops who are suffering persecution or the Chaldeans in Iraq or having work trying to recover from Isis so it's actually seem to a very sane thing to start from a point of view of giving the benefit of the doubt to the other and believing that we can in principle get behind it if at some point we have to part company if at some point we do have to raise a note of dissent it should come after we've had the patience and the charity to kind of walk with who are different from us hoping that indeed we are walking with the Lord towards the Lord finally Miroslav to Totten I think in a wonderful way he exemplifies what Galata is inviting that when he says that we need to move beyond familiar ways of thinking and engage what is historically other even in the space of this short article - tada in quotes of Lonergan and Bernard Lonnegan oh you missed some of you may know very important 20th century philosopher I think we call philosopher as well as a theologian and then Paulo Freire a who I didn't whose work I did not know prior to reading this article but who writes about liberation and tatin and is bringing into into dialogue discrete spheres right in other words he's about the first person to put Lonnegan and Freddy together with a discussion of eastern Catholicism and if you've seen his book on you know finding the disability finally the Trinity and disability you got a sense of the creativity in this thinker that he's able to do really to make a new contribution in a very in a very vital vital area Lonnegan gives us this famous definition of theology is mediating between religion and its cultural matrix alright and that and say I don't know long again in fact have been a little bit afraid of a mad I might actually blame my dr. falter because at one point when I was writing the dissertation I became this book I was worried that doing the worker wasn't enough and maybe I should try to bring long into the water again into it father Peter said to me god forbid so I either that was a judgment on my ability to engage with lonegan or father Peter just was believing that the best dissertation is a dumb dissertation and if I go on into that I would never get done so that will have to be for another book - Tarryn uses the model uses the term classicism and I just want to linger on this for a minute he says what is classicism in his definition is when you take the part to be the whole and you evaluate everything with respect to yourself so the Latin West he says in the Greek East have both been guilty of this class assigned classicizing tendency to assimilate like levorg and stop words you know it's the start or rather you know everything will be assimilated you will become part of us right or else they said that model for understandable you know I'm just understandable historically the Greek East and Latin West have both been powerful politically but that very political power that very and you know being infra enfranchised in that manner has tended to make them ignore not to say stomp on the minorities and push them into a position of being marginalized such that they have difficulty then recovering from that victimization and making a constructive contribution this is where he says we need to move to liberation we need to realize the harm that's been done realizes it were the place from which we've come but don't stay there might not remain a victim not become a victimizer does that sometimes happens or ipbun victims and go ahead and victimize someone else as I were to get it out of their system you know we have to recover from being a victim in order to make a to be healed to be liberated and make a constructive contribution and he says here Eastern Catholics have a unique unique opportunity to show the other nosov the other right because this is a great theme in like contemporary philosophy sort of other her Altera t right other nough spall occur or oneself as another what does he mean by that he means that often we don't encounter the other as other because we immediately try to domesticate or tame the other nests other and by making it like us right and sometimes it's done for the best of motives you know I've met I've been with Roman Catholics who you know introduced me to another Roman catacomb kinda to another Roman Catholic and people say he's an Eastern Catholic and they say oh he's one of us he's one of us right he's under the Pope you know and almost like that's it's all songs rolling to the Pope doesn't really matter if y'all were to disperse Rick Siebert's Ralphie cantaloupe who cares the render the Pope okay cook is one of us and you want to take the compliment you're giving it right yeah one of you yeah I guess don't you know don't leave buy me a beer too right you know okay but the point is that if we are truly different we have we are else that were like that pebble in the shoe that makes it difficult for Roman Catholics if their conscientious to walk comfortably without thinking about the Orthodox with whom they're not in communion right in other words do not forget we served as a were this unprepped an enviable task of help the Catholic West and by West of course we mean the whole world now in Koreans Catholics are Western Catholics in that sense even though they're oriental so the Catholic West not forget about the rest of the church because we're think we're here and we're like tight with those guys over there that's yeah just like that's our tradition too we're with you ish right like we're in the Catholic communion but we really really love these guys we want you to not forget about them right and similarly among our Orthodox brethren and for example we have father Jeffrey ready here who is this gracious and a Renick an Orthodox priest you can meet him on that first time I went over to the Orthodox Christian Fellowship and I cantered for the Vespers and he introduced me at the fellowship time afterwards and I I said yeah I'm an Eastern Catholic and I mean that might be confusing for some of you and you might wonder why was I can turn your father Jeffrey you said we'll talk about that after you leave damage control kind of like oh do we go these two topics thank you for the Vespers right so there's an other Necedah balandin understand so in one sense you know being an Eastern Catholics are being Eastern Cathy Logan is not for everybody thank all we don't have enough money to pay everybody anyway so you don't want to do this but it's certainly not for everyone to apply because it's much easier to be an orthodox theologian in a sense right because just a lot of Orthodox around and you've got a strong sense of being in a big crowd you're part of a going concern right and it's also much easier to be a Roma cow because there's like a lot of them to like 1.6 billion right and you know you're with a way you've got your with a winner right and there's lots there as it were to support you when you're an Eastern Catholic you risk as it were being ignored and neglected or pushed around on either side not necessarily people being hostile but maybe just people being indifferent to you're right and I've said conversations with people because I'm the former Protestant evangelicals I know who have wanted to convert to Orthodox your Catholicism and trying to figure out which to do I said well here's the problem I said if you become Catholic you can here you know you have to embrace a certain theology but the spirituality will be in many ways similar to what you have known because you've been Western Christian the building blocks of Western Christian piety even and Protestant context come from the heritage of the Latin West if you choose orthodoxy you've got a whole new you know liturgy and spirituality to deal with but you've got lots of em ammo for why you won't be Catholic because you can find among the polemics and so if you're willing to accept that spirituality and liturgy you'll find it available to you all over the place and many different cultural and linguistic manifestations if you want to be an Eastern Catholic you first have to believe in the Catholic ecclesiology to accept the papal primacy at some level you've got to do all these nasty Catholic moral issues like not being in favor of contraception and but then you still have to love the eastern spirituality but you actually have to fall in love with a particular manifestation of it like the Ukrainian manifestation or them the Marinette manifestation because there's no such thing as sort of Eastern Catholicism as such and miroslav to Tana and his article also notes as he says we should be careful even about that polarity not just Greek East and Latin West but Eastern Catholic versus versus what Eastern Orthodox but Eastern Catholics include Maronites who don't have a don't share theology liturgy and spirituality canon law with the Byzantine Orthodox Rite they're on a different axis the Syriac axis right so even the notion of eastern catholicism belies the fact that there is a radical particularity you gotta go through three hoops I want to be Catholic okay good now I want to be Byzantine - excellent and now I want to be at least an honorary Ukrainian okay finally you have good you can be an Eastern Catholic more power to your right so it's not easy and I have told people perhaps I shouldn't admit this but I have said it just might be easier for you to become Orthodox and maybe that's what God's calling you to or become Roman Catholic just because moment you that can imagine someone saying well that's rather relativistic well we'll talk about that another day but I think it's so there's a sense in here that you know Eastern Catholicism is a real it's it's a challenging vocation and certainly Eastern Catholic theology we are as all the authors say finding our way we're figuring it out and of course that is what this institute is all about is helping the helping us all figure this out and make and help us make a real contribution to the church's from which we come I have been engaging for many years now Rico why because this thinker to me who was a French Protestant but he had profound insights on all sorts of levels that I think offer us tools for developing and advancing our own our own theology now the reason I make mention in this context of translation is I think the idea of translation the paradigm of translation gives us a way to think about what our vocation is in terms of Eastern Catholic theology now translation is in therefore I outline at least two three ways and I can have this presentation sent around so you can go over more leisurely oh if you could actually Louise if you could collect people's emails and I'll send out when I can put on the website everything but I'll send this presentation up for people who might like to review it so there's these three ways we can think about translation and I have it a little bit play on words here so the first is to think about Eastern Catholicism as translating traditions meaning our focus is on translating the traditions that exist in the Christian East this is the Byzantine the Armenian the East Syria in the West Syrian the Coptic ethiop ik and in doing that we study the languages we should need to do more of that here we've started at least with our Greek for breakfast events that will have a Slavonic for breakfast and maybe because we know a guy who's working on guys Ethiopian language and if we can get him to make a contribution maybe we can all do that too at the very least we foster an awareness of the diversity that is there and the need to translate this vast these vast array of sources many of which are not yet available in Western languages so that people can encounter these treasures for themselves and this is a very kind of straightforward understanding of translation we're actually doing the work of translation but there's a deeper sense that when we translate we face the prospect of untranslatable 'ti we can't always find an equivalent in English of French or German for something that is found in say Greek or Arabic or Slavonic and that then invites the commitment of the translator to what extent are we invested in this work of translation to what extent do we believe it matters enough to keep trying to do it and how are we go to know if there's no tertium quid no third option that we can make reference to right and there you can see how we're on to how this serves as a model for theology if I were to say well the if the Latin tradition is the normative tradition and the Armenian and the Greek Byzantines make sense as long as they kind of are are as long only with reference to the the Latin tradition I might seem to solve the problem except that the Latin tradition is itself particular it's in a particular language as is the Armenian and as is the Byzantine Rite and we have no access to the gods I've you know direct access we can't get behind these languages whether Latin or Greek or Armenian to see what God really thinks all we have is the particular Latin tradition the particular their meaning that particularly the Greek so we never know when we're translating it we're using a term like FeO seized from Greek for example and we say well this is like you know divinization to the Latin word of deification well do we really know that that's an exact equivalence does the equivalence have to be exact and if it does how do we know when we have it so Raquel's is this model of translation is really a way of helping us understand the Enigma of thinking because when we translate we don't just have moved from one language to another but we have to convert thoughts from one way of thinking to another we can't do we say that this is that sometimes we have to say this is like that this is similar to that this could be thought of in terms of that and again you see the relevance if you're an Eastern Catholic and an Orthodox puts to you the blanks at a blank question do you believe in the validity of the Filioque all right and you're kind of like if I say yes it's sort of like what do you notice dude was John sent from from God you know kind of Jesus doesn't like if we say yes then that's not good if we say no that we're down to do damned if we don't write embora is if we take a translational model we said well does the Filioque translate as it were does it express the mystery of how the Holy Spirit Cohen here's with the father in the son and in the eastern Greek speaking context it was sufficient to name that as proceeding from the father but when the Latins literally translated the Creed into Latin the Latin word for proceed right Pro today was much more ambiguous than the Greek word for proceed and they felt the need in translating eventually felt the need to add something which was not of course a translation in the strict sense it was an addition but in the deeper sense of translation it was a making manifest of what they intuited to be necessary to capture the meaning of what was there in the original see now you can see how if you think of it that way you can say the Filioque in the West is similar to the proceeds from the father through the son which Maximus the Confessor and other Eastern father said this is not original I didn't discover all this so please there other very vino a very accomplished scholars who figured it out this out what I think is helpful perhaps the old is new is to see use record all helps to see that it's not always an either/or right that when you are discovering equivalences doing discovering a translation sometimes you actually need to construct the equator via the equivalents you need to help people see a connection that they may not have seen before right you to propose an analogy how about we think of the Filioque as similar to the proceeding from the father as proceeding from the father and son as being similar to proceeding from the father through the son how about we think of from and through and see whether we can bring those two whether they might translate and think about other examples in which we might need to use a different preposition even from ink French to English in other words to communicate a similar idea so the model of translation which as you can see somebody who accusing me of this is rather slippery slope you can almost say you can get away with anything if you're familiar with the range of biblical translations in English for example you often find a shocking discrepancy between how two translators account for the same verse because they're got different ideas of their audience and perhaps a different even ideological agendas and so forth but I think Riccar helps us see that it is a messy business from the get-go so when someone puts to you a black seemingly black and white question perhaps need just step back and ask whether the question itself is ill put whether in other words the idea of an either/or is not the way to start you might have to end up there is Jesus God or not I've seen a video on YouTube of Muslim divan list Muslim polish a'practice Dawa which is like Muslim apologetics and he catches people as Treaty says do you believe Jesus is sent by God or the Jesus is God like oh I'm not well he's sent by God if he's to be sent by God you're already a Muslim no he is God you believe he is God wasn't he sent by the father well I know sent by God oh yeah I sent by God so then you believe he's a prophet oh well I guess he was brother so you're already a Muslim because you don't believe it just somebody he's really clever he doesn't the British accent extremely charming and like 10 minutes later guys walking away for Quran and there's like I think he just made a Muslim just made a Muslim and the guy was Serbian Orthodox okay you can see how you would say well what Jesus sent by God or was he was yes or is he God yes no no no you're not allowed to answer that you have to be one or the other you see well that that is in fact not the case on many of these questions I mentioned that they know that when we translate therefore we're dealing with the notion of the untranslatable there's something that we can't quite get across directly and I say that part of what we do as Eastern Catholics is we dwell with these issues by dwelling with these traditions we reflect on them we struggle with them we try to translate them literally we try to understand them and explicate them in other terms by engaging with the other Eastern traditions with the Western tradition with philosophy and more than this we actually try to pray these things whether they're the lives of the saints or liturgical texts or the scriptures and to understand them from within by living them and not simply understanding them as it were with our discursive reason and in all of that we don't have the assurance that we'll come up with a legitimate translation but again we do this in the hope that this kind of activity is fruitful and if indeed as it's possible there are obviously going to be conflicts at times but that is in his worth that's par for the course but the the idea of translation what good translator realizes that everything they do is provisional there's no final translation it's only until a better translation can come along right and that translation by the nature of the case is for others right you're not primarily translating for yourself if you're sharing a translation you're trying to enable people to experience what is other and in that way you're making the familiar the foreign become familiar and something familiar foreign right because you're bringing two worlds together two languages two worlds two ways of thinking and therefore enlarging the and widening the horizons of both the second and third models I are implemented develop in in the rest of the presentation are that we are not only translating traditions but we're translating tradition with a capital T that is we're carrying over what has been handed down and this means to really enter into enter into depth to explore what it means to think about a capital T tradition versus a small T tradition this is where there's a hard work of systematic theology right we all believe certain things as Christians and we all want to know you know as you've often heard a quote in essentials unity and non essentials diversity in all things charity that's great as long as someone tells me what the essentials are right if I knew that I could relax but the problem is I don't know what something's essential whether it's non-essential right I don't know when it's a capital T tradition or a small T tradition and that's why it's oh it's the temptation for us just to think that the small tradition is a capital T tradition right how it's much easier that way if I just think that the Latin Rite is the light and there was a time when Latin Catholics thought that way they thought it was sort of the normative way of worshipping and these other things was of these tolerated operations these exceptions right if then then it just solves the problem my tradition is the tradition it's like I am the tradition we are the tradition and so Eastern Catholics we've said well no translation here helps us think that there's always a matter of recognizing this plurality but then seeking to show how the plurality is not division but it's diversity it's not units it's not uniformity but there is unity there's not division but there is diversity and that means showing how this you guys sing the salvia Regina AHA we sing that you know it is truly right to bless you o / Jinnah mother of God salvia Regina it is truly right at the oxy ministry you know that's kind of like they're not translations they're different texts different melodies different times that they used illiteracy but they both participate in a vector of marry and devotion that sort of it presents the mother of God in a certain way right and therefore if someone were to think that well you guys don't sing this therefore you must not believe that Eastern Catholic wants to say that's true they don't sing that but they do sing this and we don't do that but we do do this but they do that but we do do that and so you're continually zigzagging moving across between traditions as it were trying to justify as TAF we call it a contest of love that you know French has articles they have blue and la they have these gendered nouns it's really strange English doesn't have that but that doesn't mean that they should get rid of it nor does that mean that we should adopt it we might be able to speak English with English speakers and French with strenght speakers and appreciate the genius the charism of both languages without trying to collapse them into a Esperanto or saying that nobody's allowed to be bilingual right and that's where I think there's that model and the third aspect I mentioned and I won't go into so I can you have not time for discussion is the notion that we are not only translating traditions but we are translating traditions meaning that our role is always ancillary this fits in with what Karofsky and to Todd and talk about this about our Eastern Catholics are we provisional like we there for the long haul are we just hanging out until the Orthodox and Roman Catholics come together and then we can just like disappear because nobody needs us anymore we'll just be absorbed you know and some of the translator is normally about his trying to get themself out of the way right they're there to put a text into another language or you think of a simultaneous interpreter in a political context you know they're there to be so efficient that nobody even notices are there they take what one person says immediately interpret to the other other language and that person hears when they speak back and it's interpreted back and in the end of the day all you see is the two people speaking you don't even notice the person the background was interpreting and I asked this and I that remains a question for me to what extent are we as it were called to a kind of a role of Martha you know as it were of being busy about in facilitating an encounter between east and west because it's ultimately not about us it's about Jesus Christ and if people don't notice the Ukrainian Greco Catholic Church per se that might not be a bad thing because we are there not so that they notice us but so that they come to God as it were that they come through us through what we have to contribute to what is in fact of much greater significance so another day we can talk more about that [Applause]

Channel: Sheptytsky Institute

Views: 7,854

Keywords: Eastern Christianity, Assyrian Church, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholicism, Syrian tradition, Coptic tradition, Ethiopic tradition, Jacobite tradition, Paul Ricœur, Sheptytsky Institute, Східне християнство, Восточное христианство

Id: PG3lV0OSCsg

Length: 64min 25sec (3865 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018