Eastern Orthodox Christianity and American Higher Education

Theological, Historical, and Contemporary Reflections

Ann Mitsakos Bezzerides, Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Ann Mitsakos Bezzerides, Elizabeth H. Prodromou

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101299
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Over the last two decades, the American academy has engaged in a wide-ranging discourse on faith and learning, religion and higher education, and Christianity and the academy. Eastern Orthodox Christians, however, have rarely participated in these conversations. The contributors to this volume aim to reverse this trend by offering original insights from Orthodox Christian perspectives that contribute to the ongoing discussion about religion, higher education, and faith and learning in the United States. The book is divided into two parts. Essays in the first part explore the historical experiences and theological traditions that inform (and sometimes explain) Orthodox approaches to the topic of religion and higher education—in ways that often set them apart from their Protestant and Roman Catholic counterparts. Those in the second part problematize and reflect on Orthodox thought and practice from diverse disciplinary contexts in contemporary higher education. The contributors to this volume offer provocative insights into philosophical questions about the relevance and application of Orthodox ideas in the religious and secular academy, as well as cross-disciplinary treatments of Orthodoxy as an identity marker, pedagogical framework, and teaching and research subject.

PART I

HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL ROOTS

CHAPTER ONE

EDUCATION (PAIDEIA) AS KERYGMATIC VALUE IN THE ORTHODOX TRADITION

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

In the ancient world—that so-important cultural-placental context in which the Orthodox Church first emerged, and whose attitudes and presuppositions shaped it so forcibly (whether it conformed to them or fought against them)—it is important for us to remember that (at a fair guess) 95 percent of all men were illiterate; 99 percent of women were illiterate.¹ This did not make them stupid; and we should not fall into that common assumption of cultural superiority that textualists have over nontextualists, and moderns over premoderns. It simply made them express their deep native intelligence in ways other than the obsession with texts that we take for granted today. Our ready access to textuality has come at the cost of other forms of intelligence. In antiquity there was a widespread allegiance to narrative tales orally conveyed as a medium of understanding and expression. If one had a puzzle to resolve, it was not first and foremost to a text that one would turn (or an online reference, for that matter—oh the innocent days before Google and Wikipedia!). Rather, one would search for a story, preferably one with a good patina of history. We are not all that removed from the ancients, despite our layers of postmodern textual sophistication. If we were to pass by a venerable elder and overhear, “A long long time ago, in a far distant land . . . ,” who among us would not stop and listen? Oral narrative for most of history has been king; and even if he is in disguise today, in the blizzard of stories and imagery whirling around us, his rule is not over.

THE CHURCH AS NARRATOR, THEOLOGY AS NARRATIVE EXPANSION

The Christians told stories from the beginning. Their stories were educational. They were important. Believers had more than enough mythic tales to entertain them in the surrounding society, which had taken mythic narrative to heights never seen before and never to be seen again until the twentieth century gaily dived into this sea once more.² They wanted to tell serious stories about freedom, cleanness of heart, joyful resistance, how to gain peace of soul, and what the journey of the soul in the afterlife would be like. They carefully pared myth, whittled it like clean white wood until a new form came out from the dense and pagan undergrowth. Their stories accumulated around the stories of the Great Storyteller, Jesus himself, whose choice to enshrine all his saving kerygma in the twin loci of symbolic deeds (his healings, exorcisms, his fearless braving of the Roman authorities) and parabolic wisdom sayings became a form of authority for passing on the saving kerygma of the Christian gospel chiefly in the medium of the story. We even “narrate” our most holy mysteries: cardinal sacred events in the church we also choose to describe by the Greek verb myein (noun: mystērion), which signifies the action of “keeping silence.” We are inveterate narrators, so it seems.

The Gospels took shape in the latter half of the first century precisely as stories about Jesus’ saving deeds and his wise words. Theology is there in abundance as well as much deep reflection from the evangelists and apostles. Fundamentally, all the literature we now call the New Testament is a sustained exercise in preaching the good news of Jesus’ salvation; it arrived in print not because it was good literature, but rather because it was excellent narrative preaching that could be reused as a sermon by generations of liturgical preachers after the apostolic generation. It was this constant use as story material that led to its compilation in text form and its eventual emergence as the canon of the New Testament. But it was authoritative preaching long before it was acclaimed as canon. Even to this day we Orthodox read the gospel to the faithful in church, proclaim it as story; we never suggest all the congregation “turn to page ten” and read silently to themselves. Jesus said: “Listen, you who have ears to hear” (Mark 4:9, my translation). From the very beginning, then, the church is a gathering, “a coming together to hear the story.” The word “gathering” in Hebrew is qahal, the assembly (of Israel); remembering this, the Greek Septuagint used ekklēsia—our root word for “church”—to connote the same thing. To be church is to gather around the Lord in order to hear his stories, believe them as true, thus believe in him as in the true Messenger (malakh) who preaches them, and so become enabled to pass them on through history—not as “rumors from a distant land,” but as living truth, out from which the church lives, in whose energeia of Holy Spirit the church subsists.

ORTHODOX EDUCATION AS MYSTERY, ILLUMINATION OF PAIDEIA

In short, from the beginning of the Orthodox Church’s existence it has been attentive (prosochē). To be church means to be attentive. Only from its attentiveness has it been enabled to hear the Word. Not all could listen to the story of the Word. Some were (and sadly still are) “on the outside,” and the story (even from the mouth of the Master Storyteller) came across to them as riddles (Mark 4:11) or appeared to them as foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18–23; 1 Cor. 2:14; Matt. 27:41–44). They had ears but they could not hear, and it remains the same to this day—part of the mystery of God’s dispensation of his mercy revealed to the humble of heart, but kept back from the proud and self-enlightened (Matt. 11:25). This is what Orthodox culture is rooted in and founded on. It is the jewel in the box of all Orthodox educational philosophy—that sense of the “mystery” of education—or paideia, as the ancients called it. And here I do not use the word “mystery” loosely—as so often we hear it bandied about in Orthodox discourse circles. I use it quite precisely and with the theological freighting it bears in terms of a sacramental and holy thing (to mystērion). For among the Orthodox, at our best, we seek the illumination of paideia with the inner spirit of wisdom: a spirit of holiness which belongs to Christ as the Divine Sophia itself, passing on his wisdom in the aliveness of his church, through the grace of the Holy Spirit of God. Wisdom as we pass it on, in and through the church (the semantic root of the word “tradition” [traditio] means “to pass on”), is thus, in every sense of the phrase, a holy mystery. We are never authorized to treat it as less. Never for us, if we remain true to our Orthodox sensibility, could we evoke such a concept as “secular learning,” or liberal humanism, as our pedagogical goal. What we offer up, as Gregory the Theologian says, is “words and ideas in the service of God the Word”—which in his most elegant Greek is much more cleverly put: “Logoi in obeisance to the Logos.”³

Now this understanding of what being “learned” means implies that our educational goals, as Orthodox Church-men and -women, will be no less strenuous than the goals of the other learned ones of our age—people who operate schools that set standards that we ought to look to constantly to see whether we are in the same league or not, whether we have sufficient resources to justify our claim to offer a serious high-quality educational experience wherever we are located on the educational horizon, from grade school to university college. Constant reality checks keep us honest and solidly based. We must always want to make our missions (for any school we have is no less than an Orthodox mission) the very best we can possibly make them. Mediocrity is not a reverent option, any more than it would be to settle for mediocrity in liturgical celebration: such a settlement becomes, de facto, sacrilegious.

Many a time, in various places in the world, I have been in Orthodox schools whose self-promotional literature (and obvious self-originating identification) proclaims them as “world leaders,” while their product and support base actually tell a very different story. Who are we fooling, I wonder? Certainly not the outside world, whose educational standards have served to inspire us, not the other way round. So that leaves ourselves, I suppose. The old Russians had a word for this: prelest. And prelest (delusional pride) has so much to say to the issue of seeking a learnedness that is truly wise and spiritual, that we really ought to propel it to the forefront of our reflections on Orthodox paideia. Our goal for higher education is harder and more profound than that of most secular schools today, which have often and largely given up on the ancient concerns, and have been more willing than at most other times in history to separate cleverness from being wise, to cut off knowing about things from knowing the how and why of things, to divorce living to learn from learning to live—and in the process have made so many of our campuses a veritable desert of spiritual and cultural life, even as they still aspire to be focal points of a nation’s wisdom. This disconnect is staggering; but apparently it is not all that much of a concern that the emperor has no clothes.

Orthodox paideia, it seems to me, does not necessarily demand a cleverness of intellect from each believer (though certainly that should be expected of its elite intellectual faithful, and we ought to know in the church precisely what that would look like), but rather definitely demands a most profound sense of discernment—that native intelligence of the soul which is God given, and which is possessed by every child as well as the most well-read scholar. This is that which we call “wisdom,” and it is a divine gift: not cherished enough in the church, not honored enough, not demanded widely enough. This is the “spiritual intelligence” the early fathers used to call nous. English is “a very limited language” (as Gregory the Theologian once said of Latin!), and it does not have the range of words the patristic Christian Greek had with which to describe the various levels of different types of understanding, and different levels of soul perception, possessed by each of us. Because of this we translate nous as “intellect,” and often imagine it to be brain function. But when the fathers speak, as they do so often, of nous, it really means that spiritual acuity in the human being that is given to each as part of the divine image embedded in every human soul: that, in other words, whereby we are able to know God, on the principle of like to like. The Byzantines were unique in the annals of the history of philosophy, it seems to me, in positing this form of consciousness as the most acute area of human perception and the goal of the overall evolution (epektasis, they would say—or endless stretching out of the human instinct) of consciousness. Modern secular understandings of education have lost this ethos to a very large degree, and thus appear more and more to Orthodox as the Hellenic schools did to the fathers: places where cleverness is highly prized, but where wisdom is often an embarrassment.

The classic patristic doctrine of the image of God in the human being is entirely soteriological in function: it means that the nous, redeemed by the deifying presence of the Lord, is liberated from fraction and ignorance, and enabled to recognize reality in perceiving the presence of God once more. This fundamental patristic doctrine of salvation—one summed up in much Orthodox discourse as the theology of deification (theiopoiēsis)—is nothing more (but by no means anything less) than the other great New Testament themes and stories that try to describe the self-same mystery in terms such as “atonement,” “redemption,” or “transfiguration.” This perception of God’s presence and action in our life is the very heart of what the Orthodox Christian means by “knowing salvation.” For to know God truly is to know him as Savior. And this is why Orthodox existence is at heart a fundamentally noetic experience. That is to say, it is not merely an “intellectual” experience, but the growing consciousness in correctly interpreting life’s realities; the life of an individual believer grows into union with the Lord—becomes “in Christ,” as the apostle Paul used to repeat so often. I think this noetic basis of the union between the soul and the Lord is why an Orthodox theologian should insist on describing the experience of union with God as “enlightenment” (phōtismos). I know that a few great fathers spoke, rather, of the meeting with God in terms of “divine darkness”; but they were few, and even then relying on the biblical idiom and story that the darkness enveloped Sinai to protect the Israelites from the blinding revelation of the Shekinah light of God’s glory. In Hebraic thought the kabod, the heavy weight of the storm cloud, was the chariot or carrier of the lightning flash of the Shekinah, which was more rightly the epiphany of the awesome presence of God addressed to his people.⁴

It seems to me, therefore, that Orthodoxy is, at its very heart, in its core understanding of redemption, a religion of enlightenment. It celebrates the opening of the eyes of mortals, and the opening of their minds to the wondrous presence of God as something sacred, mystical, unitive, delightful. Nothing so saddens me as to hear, occasionally, some of our believers taking delight in opposing Orthodoxy to “Enlightenment.” I know they often mean Deism by that. But just as often, it would appear, some among us seem to think that holiness is somehow served by obscurantism in place of clarity, bigotry in place of openness of mind and heart. It is to me one of the most depressing betrayals of the beauty of that icon of the Orthodox Church which we are meant to depict for, and in, our modern world, because Orthodoxy, at all times in history when it has been fully functioning, has consistently proven itself to be a religious tradition loving enlightenment: delighted by books, inspired by art and culture, tolerant of a wide range of other “learnednesses,” even when it did not find them exactly to its own prescript.⁵

And yet, to speak honestly, the church leadership has not always given good example in terms of encouraging that delight of the eye of the mind opening to the sense of God—what we might call the true and final goal of all human perception and sensibility. At times, in fact, it has definitely been a force for bigotry and narrow-mindedness. But overall, I think, the church’s record throughout its two millennia of history can show that it has always been (at least in the cases of its greatest and most spiritual teachers) one of the most profound forces for the education of a deep human civilization. It has loved learning. It has wanted to educate its people. It has told them luminous stories. It has produced countless books, at great cost of labor. It has loved (and invented) the codex. It has delighted in men and women of learning. But always, it has known where its learning was looking. It has, to repeat the axiom of Saint Gregory the Theologian, “put letters in obeisance to the Word,” his pun used on several occasions—whenever, in fact, he thought his audience had not heard it before.⁶ The saying has the elegance and weight to merit its incision in stone over the lintel of every Orthodox academy.

HISTORY OF PERSECUTION AS CRIPPLING FACTOR IN THE CONTINUITY OF ORTHODOX HIGHER EDUCATION

Some of our history, however, has not positioned the Orthodox as well, educationally speaking, as some of our other Christian contemporaries in the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Now let me save time here, and share the reply I would give immediately to anyone criticizing the Orthodox for their relatively “poor showing” in terms of intellectual standards and cultural achievements in the last few hundred years (a criticism that has been elevated in extraordinary ways in recent times by the likes of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” caricatures of the Orthodox as equivalent to a “closed mind-set,” while the European West—apparently—has an “open mind-set”⁷). The real reason for the loss of any “Renaissance equivalent” in the Greek East is no cerebral cortex difference (this whole argument seems to me to have unhappy resonances in it of the earlier bankrupt science of the “measurement of skulls” of different races), but rather the story of the advance of the armies of Muhammad. Orthodoxy lost several things in that crucible period that saw the ascent of Western Christian higher education from the universities of the high Middle Ages to the new academies of the Renaissance: first in line were territories, second were incomes, third were imperial and aristocratic leadership, fourth were schools and libraries, fift...