Fb2 Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition ePub

Far from being forgotten, Father Andrew Phillips has managed to help create
an Orthodox haven in Colchester, England. This book is not meant to be
a work of objective scholarship, and the message I received from it was
not the one that the other reviewer obviously received and resented. Instead,
I was given a vision of the richness of the original Orthodox Christian tradition of
England and all English-speaking people. Even a small corner of Orthodoxy --
in England or in whatever state you live in in the U.S. -- should be treasured
as the fortress of the faith once delivered to the saints and still alive and
available to us today, if we only make ourselves present to it. May God grant it!

This book is primarily composed of a series of articles written by the author an published in a variety of places, though where they were originally published is not explicitly stated. At its core, naturally disjointed as it is, the work is primarily a critique of Western Christianity when compared to Orthodox Christianity.

Phillips is to be commended on at least some levels. For one thing, he recognizes that the estrangement between East and West took place gradually, and as a result of the two churches finding themselves in vastly different circumstances. Second, he (rightly) points out that when the division of Eastern and Western Christianity took place, those living at the margins (that is, ordinary clergy and laity not directly touched by the conflict, which would have been the majority) did not recognize that anything truly remarkable had happened.

But, Phillips is problematic in that the theology he produces is based on faulty evidence, and the unsteady ground upon which the balance of the work rests is apparent from the second chapter. For a few examples, Phillips assumes that the Norman invasion resulted in a marked shift in the ecclesiastical life of Anglo-Saxon Brittan (it did not) and that the connection between Insular and Roman Christianity was only tenuous (ignoring that since Augustine of Canturbury Rome and the English Church enjoyed rather close relations). Second, he presents a narrow and simplistic (one might even say stereotypical) view of the so-called 'Dark Ages', which he dates from roughly 450-1150, especially in his claim that the light of learning had all but been extinguished in the West with the exception of Isidore and the Venerable Bede, noting that 'Rome all but fades as an intellectual center at this time.' One is left to wonder how he reconciles such a statement with the literary output of Gelasius I and Gregory I, just to name two prominent literary Popes of the period.

Ultimately, the author's bias comes through in the second chapter/article: the ills of the world, the division of the Church, the loss of Christendom to secularism is exclusively the fault of Western Christianity. On pages 17-18, Phillips proceeds on a litany of 'if onlys' which he sees as having had the potential of averting schism in the Church (one of the more amusing of which is his assertion that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III was an excellent candidate to bring about cultural unity between East and West; while it is true Otto desired a united Christian Empire, he wished to rule that empire from Rome, not Constantinople, and while he did introduce Byzantine court customs into his court, he also greatly revered Charlemagne, whom Phillips holds in extreme contempt). However, Phillips nowhere offers the possibility that anyone in the East made any error or missed any opportunity to avert schism, entirely passing over the hot-headed nature of Patriarch Michael Keroularios, the anti-Armenian and anti-Western canons of the Synod in Trullo, the lack of interest in aiding the Papacy on the part of the Eastern emperor, or the cultural xenophobia rampant in the Christian East at this period. The message of this passage and the entire work cannot be missed: the West is responsible for the breakup of Christendom because it was not the East. This circuity dominates the balance of the work as the author goes on to attribute every ill imaginable not being Eastern: everything from racism to World War II is the responsibility of Western Culture for not becoming (indeed, for never having really been) Eastern.

On the whole, what is provided in this work is a cautionary tale that a little bit of knowledge, a whole lot of assumption, and the desire to polemicise can produce a product full of falicies that would be amusing if the author did not intend himself to be taken seriously. There are indeed many better, more rigorously academic (not to mention more historically balanced) monographs available for the serious reader. This work should be passed over and forgotten which it seems has mercifully been the case.