Evangelicals, the Philokalia, and You.

The conversation which ensues depresses me. By the way, I know two of the people on the thread, but don't let them know I'm talking about them.

What is missing is a realization of what the Philokalia is. The Philokalia is a collection of snippets taken from other writers on a certain subject. It is a sort of commonplace book. The compiler, St. Nicholas of the Holy Mountain, compiled it for a certain purpose. That the contents can seem to approve of a Protestant individualism apart from the sacramental reality of the Church ignores both the context of the compilation and the context of the quotes.

This is the same St. Nicholas of the Holy Mountain who compiled The Rudder [a collection of canons, decrees of councils, and the like], that other infamous book which is easy to misread, so obviously he is concerned with ecclesiology and in no wise an individualist.

The Philokalia quotes heavily from St. Maximos the Confessor, but these quotes don't say a thing about ecclesiology or the relationship of the person to the Church. However, it would be complete ignorance of his entire life, work, and ongoing significance in the 20th century to suppose that he was silent on the matter and woudl approve of the sort of separation from the Church that the one respondent was drawing from the Philokalia.

Similarly with many of the other writers excerpted in that book. The Philokalia cannot be read apart from the sacramental life of the Church because that was the context it was written in and intended to be used in. This is left unstated in the work itself because it was taken as a given by the compiler, one need only look at the excerpted works in toto or the lives of the authors to realize this of them as well.

It makes about as much sense as an Evangelic reading Juan de la Cruz's Ascent of Mount Carmel and not realizing that he's a post-Tridentine Thomist and that his mystical theology is straight out of Prima secundae and colored with a Counter-Reformation lens. Oh, wait, I've seen people do that before, too.

I think this phenomenon is an indication that some people are arguing only on the level of slogans and their aversion to the apostolic Church is allergic rather than doctrinal, since they don't actually know anything about doctrine. Granted, Protestantism has some good slogans, but the real difference comes in mystical theology - which they're quite happy to confuse and interchange.

Emergents are such wankers sometimes.

Contentless emo post later in the day. I, for one, believe in the whole Christ, caput et corpus.