Going meta: just because we don’t believe the myth that lighting is Jupiter’s arrow, it does not mean we should doubt lighting is a real phenomenon. Just because we don’t believe the mythical explanation behind Original Sin (i.e. Adam and Eve), it does not mean we should assume Original Sin is not a real phenomenon. Non-mythical Original Sin is largely the idea that human nature has factory bugs (see: biases) (probably due to not being evolved for a civilized life), that it manifests itself in being too vulnerable to temptations (see akrasia), that one common way it manifests is the three libidos (Augustine): desire for sex, power and money going beyond rational limits and becoming destructive, and yes Seven Deadlies is another manifestation.
The problem with discussing the utility of religious ideas for atheists in English is that apparently a lot of English speaking people were exposed to literalist, fundamentalist versions of religion and tend to assume it is all made up, instead of being just mythical explanations of perfectly real phenomena. In other words, English speaking people tend to assume actual experience, historical experience, historical testing of what works has no effect on religion when of course it does. Catholicism got paganized enough to be pragmatic, to focus on creating mystical explanations for real, actual, functional experiences and problems instead of making everything up from the ground up. The make everything up stuff largely began with Calvin and Protestantism because they took the Old Testament too seriously, which is way, way more made up than say Thomism. It was quite simply a regression towards a much earlier stage.
At any rate, this kind of psychology can possibly work. If we use our model a pre-Calvin Christianity which looks for mystical explanations for real problems, and the set of real problems and their properties it updates as historical experience demands to, when they no longer seem functional, then we can use it basically as a database of psychological experiences during the middle ages.
Interesting. Where would you put Eastern Orthodox Christianity? As it manifests in my country, it seems closer to literalism and fundamentalism than to any sort of theological sophistication. People’s religious practices around holidays and such, especially in rural areas, get heavily mixed with magical and superstitious practices; old and sickly people form huge queues for the better part of a day, in hostile weather conditions, to worship and kiss encased saint corpses which they believe have magical healing properties; nothing “sells” a saint’s biography better than miracles performed and extreme acts of abstinence. I’ve talked to people with a higher education that believed in literal ancient giants, because the Bible claimed they literally existed. People observe the trappings of spirituality more than spirituality itself, taking more care to, for instance, eat all-vegan during days of fasting, keep their heads covered even outside church (most women past the age of 65) and go to church every Sunday (and more often than that, in fact) than to refrain from lashing out in anger at others or to perform altruistic acts. And as far as church dogma goes, the ideal of the Eastern Orthodox Church seems to be to maintain its faithful in a Byzantine stasis; if it was right between 300-900 A.D., it’s right now. Probably its most progressive act in recent times was to get itself official TV and radio posts (despite technology being the devil and all that), to propagate its message more effectively and to give religious people “holy” alternatives to watch/listen to.
I’m not too well-versed in the sociology of religion, just a casual observer of the craziness around me, but religion as it appears in my country seems positively medieval. The West seems to have it much better, even the backwater parts of America.
Sorry for the late answer. It is kinda weird. On the elite level, say, monks of old times, the Eastern Orthodox is the least-conventionally religious and most spiritual/esoteric form of mainstream Christianity, for example I have read somewhere the word they use for faith, pistei, is not simply belief, but more like a form of action. Yet, in practice, EO tends to be seriously weird.
My opinion is that EO was corrupted beyond recognition by heavily entanglement of particularly brutal forms of statism, tyrannical tzarism and so on, actually going back to Byzantine times.
I would not call EO medieval. Medieval or Middle Ages is a Western, Roman Catholic concept, and one of the major characterisics is the weakening of state power, basically kings not being too powerful (as opposed to barons). Now it seems to me EO kept on operating withing a framework of very strong state power and very centralized organization, from Bzyantine basileoi to Tzars, and in this sense never really entered the Middle Ages but more like stayed in the age of caesars.
I think it is all related. A very hierarchical social framework does not really demand or allow the common folk to smart up. If there is not much social mobility the peasants may as well believe bullshit as long as they work hard. It is the breakup or weaking and flexibilizing of social hierarchies such as weak medieval royal power and barons and bishops going their own way that makes it useful to try getting more rational.
Very insightful, thank you for the explanation. Yes, this entanglement with state power is something I’ve noticed myself (although I’ve had more opportunity to observe the Church’s relationship with more recent regimes). Here, Orthodox Christianity is as much of an official state religion as you could get in a European country. The Patriarch is present at most important non-religious events; a Church representative was there at the opening of my university year (and I mean, I’m in engineering, he had no inherent business being there). Politicians use the mass appeal of the Orthodox faith to win sympathisers during elections, and people care very much about non-mainstream religious affiliations of rulers—anything non-Orthodox is bound to reflect badly on them. There’s a huge cathedral being built somewhere in my city, and I just recently found out that it was being built within the perimeter of the seat of government… talk about caesaropapism, now they made it official! In high school there was a sort of essay I had to make for the religious education class I had been forced into, and when I said I was going to write on Church activity during the Communist era, all the teachers were on me to coerce me into only highlighting how badly the Church got oppressed by the regime, and not mentioning a word on all the collaboration some priests did with it. Apparently my business there was earning them sympathy. This is about how much power they have.
Interesting how you connect historical decentralization to the onset of the Middle Ages, thus claiming that Eastern Orthodoxy is not even medieval (I never really thought of how there might have been no exact Eastern European equivalent to the medieval era, just took the whole thing chronologically), and then that to a betterment in the intellectual condition of the populace. Some people say that, from a sociological point of view, it was Orthodoxy holding us back; just like how (I think) Weber claimed that Protestantism favoured the development of capitalism in the West (mostly countries with a Germanic language, it seems to me), so it might be that some specifically Orthodox paradigms which bled into non-religious aspects of life were what stopped Eastern Europe from witnessing the same rhythm of development as Western or Central or even Southern Europe. I don’t know what those are, but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
I think what I proposed is a factor, but it does not explain everything. While the medieval decentralisation of Germany, Italy, or even France (where Burgundy could wage war against his liege and it was not really seen as something abnormal, or how pairage / peerage meant in a sense being equal to the king), Hungary was about as Catholic as it comes and yet it was more centralized, at the very least beginning with the Anjou era in Hungary, Caroberto. In fact the Hungarian pattern seems similar to the Eastern Orthodox one, just Catholicized. E.g. at 20th Aug the birthday of the country the embalmed right hand of King Saint Stephen is carried around in a procession by bishops. A very clear unity of throne and altar.
I think the chain of causality is closer to factor X → decentralisation, weakening of state power → religion keeps some distance from the state, rather than religious statism preserving the strength of the state. But I have no idea what the factor X may be.
That’s a pretty great explanation on how the Eastern Orthodox get to be so weird. When Church and State become really closely related both get pretty effed up. I like that you pointed out Byzantium was the continuation of the Roman Empire and thus had caesars/ basileoi and a pretty hierarchical social structure. Your byzantine history is spot on. I guess education didn’t improve much since their monastic orders were into mystical theology.Thanks for the lesson!
The American Orthodox Churches are not nearly as weird and tend to be a little more intellectually sophisticated and democratic. One their best writers is David Bentley Hart. He’s actually a pretty good thinker to wrestle with. If you, like me, prefer reading each factions best thinkers, I’d read some him.
I think there is always a distinction between the folk version of a religion and its intelligentsia. The same goes for all factions I assume. From capitalism and communism to Baptists and Democrats, there are always the ruddy followers and the intelligent skeptics.
As it manifests in my country, it seems closer to literalism and fundamentalism than to any sort of theological sophistication. People’s religious practices around holidays and such, especially in rural areas, get heavily mixed with magical and superstitious practices; old and sickly people form huge queues for the better part of a day, in hostile weather conditions, to worship and kiss encased saint corpses which they believe have magical healing properties; nothing “sells” a saint’s biography better than miracles performed and extreme acts of abstinence.
That’s not literalism. If you look in the bible you will find nothing about the healing properties of saints’ corpses or nearly all of the superstitions you observe. These traditions are in fact examples of a paganized legacy.
I’ll take your word for it, I have never read the entire Bible. It’s typical of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to accept a much larger body of traditions than the Scriptures in what it considers “canon”; basically almost all the church activity during the Byzantine Empire (minus, majorly, the iconoclastic period), with a few pre-Schism Western influences. I get that Protestantism and its derivatives reject church tradition (?), while Catholicism has its own unique tradition, developed in parallel and on different lines than Orthodoxy. That’s what paganization means, accepting non-Bible influences into a Christian religion? (Going by the name, I thought it meant including influences of polytheistic pre-Christian religions.)
Going meta: just because we don’t believe the myth that lighting is Jupiter’s arrow, it does not mean we should doubt lighting is a real phenomenon. Just because we don’t believe the mythical explanation behind Original Sin (i.e. Adam and Eve), it does not mean we should assume Original Sin is not a real phenomenon. Non-mythical Original Sin is largely the idea that human nature has factory bugs (see: biases) (probably due to not being evolved for a civilized life), that it manifests itself in being too vulnerable to temptations (see akrasia), that one common way it manifests is the three libidos (Augustine): desire for sex, power and money going beyond rational limits and becoming destructive, and yes Seven Deadlies is another manifestation.
The problem with discussing the utility of religious ideas for atheists in English is that apparently a lot of English speaking people were exposed to literalist, fundamentalist versions of religion and tend to assume it is all made up, instead of being just mythical explanations of perfectly real phenomena. In other words, English speaking people tend to assume actual experience, historical experience, historical testing of what works has no effect on religion when of course it does. Catholicism got paganized enough to be pragmatic, to focus on creating mystical explanations for real, actual, functional experiences and problems instead of making everything up from the ground up. The make everything up stuff largely began with Calvin and Protestantism because they took the Old Testament too seriously, which is way, way more made up than say Thomism. It was quite simply a regression towards a much earlier stage.
At any rate, this kind of psychology can possibly work. If we use our model a pre-Calvin Christianity which looks for mystical explanations for real problems, and the set of real problems and their properties it updates as historical experience demands to, when they no longer seem functional, then we can use it basically as a database of psychological experiences during the middle ages.
Interesting. Where would you put Eastern Orthodox Christianity? As it manifests in my country, it seems closer to literalism and fundamentalism than to any sort of theological sophistication. People’s religious practices around holidays and such, especially in rural areas, get heavily mixed with magical and superstitious practices; old and sickly people form huge queues for the better part of a day, in hostile weather conditions, to worship and kiss encased saint corpses which they believe have magical healing properties; nothing “sells” a saint’s biography better than miracles performed and extreme acts of abstinence. I’ve talked to people with a higher education that believed in literal ancient giants, because the Bible claimed they literally existed. People observe the trappings of spirituality more than spirituality itself, taking more care to, for instance, eat all-vegan during days of fasting, keep their heads covered even outside church (most women past the age of 65) and go to church every Sunday (and more often than that, in fact) than to refrain from lashing out in anger at others or to perform altruistic acts. And as far as church dogma goes, the ideal of the Eastern Orthodox Church seems to be to maintain its faithful in a Byzantine stasis; if it was right between 300-900 A.D., it’s right now. Probably its most progressive act in recent times was to get itself official TV and radio posts (despite technology being the devil and all that), to propagate its message more effectively and to give religious people “holy” alternatives to watch/listen to.
I’m not too well-versed in the sociology of religion, just a casual observer of the craziness around me, but religion as it appears in my country seems positively medieval. The West seems to have it much better, even the backwater parts of America.
Sorry for the late answer. It is kinda weird. On the elite level, say, monks of old times, the Eastern Orthodox is the least-conventionally religious and most spiritual/esoteric form of mainstream Christianity, for example I have read somewhere the word they use for faith, pistei, is not simply belief, but more like a form of action. Yet, in practice, EO tends to be seriously weird.
My opinion is that EO was corrupted beyond recognition by heavily entanglement of particularly brutal forms of statism, tyrannical tzarism and so on, actually going back to Byzantine times.
I would not call EO medieval. Medieval or Middle Ages is a Western, Roman Catholic concept, and one of the major characterisics is the weakening of state power, basically kings not being too powerful (as opposed to barons). Now it seems to me EO kept on operating withing a framework of very strong state power and very centralized organization, from Bzyantine basileoi to Tzars, and in this sense never really entered the Middle Ages but more like stayed in the age of caesars.
I think it is all related. A very hierarchical social framework does not really demand or allow the common folk to smart up. If there is not much social mobility the peasants may as well believe bullshit as long as they work hard. It is the breakup or weaking and flexibilizing of social hierarchies such as weak medieval royal power and barons and bishops going their own way that makes it useful to try getting more rational.
Very insightful, thank you for the explanation. Yes, this entanglement with state power is something I’ve noticed myself (although I’ve had more opportunity to observe the Church’s relationship with more recent regimes). Here, Orthodox Christianity is as much of an official state religion as you could get in a European country. The Patriarch is present at most important non-religious events; a Church representative was there at the opening of my university year (and I mean, I’m in engineering, he had no inherent business being there). Politicians use the mass appeal of the Orthodox faith to win sympathisers during elections, and people care very much about non-mainstream religious affiliations of rulers—anything non-Orthodox is bound to reflect badly on them. There’s a huge cathedral being built somewhere in my city, and I just recently found out that it was being built within the perimeter of the seat of government… talk about caesaropapism, now they made it official! In high school there was a sort of essay I had to make for the religious education class I had been forced into, and when I said I was going to write on Church activity during the Communist era, all the teachers were on me to coerce me into only highlighting how badly the Church got oppressed by the regime, and not mentioning a word on all the collaboration some priests did with it. Apparently my business there was earning them sympathy. This is about how much power they have.
Interesting how you connect historical decentralization to the onset of the Middle Ages, thus claiming that Eastern Orthodoxy is not even medieval (I never really thought of how there might have been no exact Eastern European equivalent to the medieval era, just took the whole thing chronologically), and then that to a betterment in the intellectual condition of the populace. Some people say that, from a sociological point of view, it was Orthodoxy holding us back; just like how (I think) Weber claimed that Protestantism favoured the development of capitalism in the West (mostly countries with a Germanic language, it seems to me), so it might be that some specifically Orthodox paradigms which bled into non-religious aspects of life were what stopped Eastern Europe from witnessing the same rhythm of development as Western or Central or even Southern Europe. I don’t know what those are, but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
I think what I proposed is a factor, but it does not explain everything. While the medieval decentralisation of Germany, Italy, or even France (where Burgundy could wage war against his liege and it was not really seen as something abnormal, or how pairage / peerage meant in a sense being equal to the king), Hungary was about as Catholic as it comes and yet it was more centralized, at the very least beginning with the Anjou era in Hungary, Caroberto. In fact the Hungarian pattern seems similar to the Eastern Orthodox one, just Catholicized. E.g. at 20th Aug the birthday of the country the embalmed right hand of King Saint Stephen is carried around in a procession by bishops. A very clear unity of throne and altar.
I think the chain of causality is closer to factor X → decentralisation, weakening of state power → religion keeps some distance from the state, rather than religious statism preserving the strength of the state. But I have no idea what the factor X may be.
That’s a pretty great explanation on how the Eastern Orthodox get to be so weird. When Church and State become really closely related both get pretty effed up. I like that you pointed out Byzantium was the continuation of the Roman Empire and thus had caesars/ basileoi and a pretty hierarchical social structure. Your byzantine history is spot on. I guess education didn’t improve much since their monastic orders were into mystical theology.Thanks for the lesson!
The American Orthodox Churches are not nearly as weird and tend to be a little more intellectually sophisticated and democratic. One their best writers is David Bentley Hart. He’s actually a pretty good thinker to wrestle with. If you, like me, prefer reading each factions best thinkers, I’d read some him.
I think there is always a distinction between the folk version of a religion and its intelligentsia. The same goes for all factions I assume. From capitalism and communism to Baptists and Democrats, there are always the ruddy followers and the intelligent skeptics.
That’s not literalism. If you look in the bible you will find nothing about the healing properties of saints’ corpses or nearly all of the superstitions you observe. These traditions are in fact examples of a paganized legacy.
I’ll take your word for it, I have never read the entire Bible. It’s typical of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to accept a much larger body of traditions than the Scriptures in what it considers “canon”; basically almost all the church activity during the Byzantine Empire (minus, majorly, the iconoclastic period), with a few pre-Schism Western influences. I get that Protestantism and its derivatives reject church tradition (?), while Catholicism has its own unique tradition, developed in parallel and on different lines than Orthodoxy. That’s what paganization means, accepting non-Bible influences into a Christian religion? (Going by the name, I thought it meant including influences of polytheistic pre-Christian religions.)
Yes, much veneration of Saints is the syncretized version of the worship of pre-Christian gods.