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2.
If
not culture, how do we explain the so-called “division between East and West”?
The emergence of a new religion (and culture), a distortion of “the Faith once
delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). The
cause of the “division” is largely the work of one man --- Augustine of Hippo
(“father of the Schoolmen,” Khomiakov called him) --- whose
religio-philosophical synthesis, his ambition to elevate “faith” to cognition (credo ut intelligam) gradually and
fatally infected the Latin West. Put another way, “insofar as the ‘Western’
tradition in theology is different from the ‘Eastern’,” writes A.H. Armstrong,
“it is because it is Augustinian rather than because temperamentally, racially,
geographically “Western’ or Latin or Roman.”
He adds that the sine qua non
of Augustinianism is Neo-Platonism (2).
The dominance
of Augustinian theology begins during the Carolingian era. Charlemange slept with a copy of The City of God under his pillow, and
his minister of education, Alcuin of York (735-804) wrote De fide Trinitate with Augustine as “the bedrock of his argument”(3). The work is little more than recitation of
Augustine’s new model of the Trinity with the filioque. Such a cataphatic triadology signifies the formation of a
new religion which includes a Nestorian dissolution of traditional christology
(4) and, therefore, a bifurcation of the visible and invisible Church
(for which Protestantism will be forever grateful), including the Mysteries
which, incidentally, provide only a created grace. Augustine also joined the
Platonic Ideas (kosmos noetos) to the
divine Word which, among other things, linked them with his theory of double
predestination. During the last decade of his life, he abandoned the
traditional soteriology of the Church, that is, deification (5).
There
are other theological errors to be discussed, but what has been delineated
here sufficient to make the point. The
numerous questions he raised (and failed to answer) were the offspring of
rationalism hitherto unknown in the Church.
Augustinianism has numerous components, some of them personal, but
mostly it is a superbia cognescendi,
the womb of theories born “in the fury of the dialectic hunt” (6). Having succumbed to the Graeco-Roman culture
of his time, he fatally altered for himself and his posterity the Christianity with
which he was entrusted. From his daring
speculation came new religions and, indeed, a new culture. To honor Augustine
with a place among the Fathers, to call him “saint” or “blessed,” is not only
to render a consensus patrum
impossible, but to conceive culture rather than religion as
“transcendent.” The “transcendence of
culture” is an invitation to doctrinal innovation, for culture changes and, if
it dominates the religion with which it is associated, then, religion in its
substance must change. What else has
the philosophy of the post-Orthodox West demonstrated?
Such was the result of the religio-philosophical enterprise
of both Augustine and Origen --- the unlawful use of pagan Hellenism ---,
although Augustine succeeded in doing to the West what Origen failed to do to
the East (7). Augustine is the source of every heresy that has hitherto
tormented the West. Without the dualism (8) which characterized his
thought, Western Orthodoxy would not have become the Roman Catholicism which
spawned the multiplicity of Christian sects known as Protestantism.
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