A Short Defense of St. Peter Mogila's Catechism

In the 20th and 21st centuries, as the Orthodox Church in the Anglophone world was deeply engaging with the Church Fathers, translating Patristic and Liturgical texts, it became popular among some to criticize St. Peter Mogila's 17th Century Catechism. There were moments when some Orthodox theologians could be heard declaring that Orthodox Christianity doesn't even "do" systematic theology. In this light, St. Peter's Catechism was seen as too Western, too capitulated to Romanism, and therefore it can be safely ignored and set aside as, at best, a curiosity that bears no meaningful authority.

The problem with this attitude towards the Catechism is that it is truly self-defeating. In order to criticize St. Peter Mogila's Catechism, one ends up criticizing its conciliar nature, and so conciliarity itself. For the document was amended and formally received by the four highest Patriarchates: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Furthermore, it was officially received at the Particular Council of Jerusalem in 1672 held under Patriarch Dositheus. To criticize St. Peter's Catechism is then to criticize these Fathers, to criticize the conciliar nature of its unanimous acceptation, and so to say that the whole Church was capitulated to Romanism. For it is not merely St. Peter Mogila's Catechism; it is claimed as the Catechism of the Orthodox Church itself. What is worse, this criticism ends up treading upon the promise of Christ to the Church, that She cannot fail, and so moves in the direction of unraveling the very fabric of Orthodox ecclesiology.

The Church has never been captive to the Latins. Therefore, for Orthodox Christians to be skeptical towards St. Peter Mogila is for them to be skeptical of the Orthodox Church, and this ends up becoming truly self-defeating. If, in light of its conciliar and formal acceptance, we cannot wholeheartedly embrace and trust the Catechism, then we cannot embrace and trust the Church which produced it and unanimously declared its canonicity, and then, finally, we cannot even trust the contemporary theologians who sought to criticize it. If we cannot trust St. Peter Mogila, and the Patriarchs and Councils which formally approved his Catechism, then we certainly should not trust some 20th or 21st Century theologian who seeks to minimize and diminish its importance. Rather, it looks like those who seek to criticize it have placed themselves in a position contrary to the phronema of the Orthodox Church.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping

Man, Nothingness, and Being: A Short Reflection on How the Gospel Might Speak to Atheism

Man is created in the image of God ex nihilo, out of nothing, and so in a sense when he looks honestly into his soul man sees a double reality: on the one hand the fact of an infinite gaping nothingness, and on the other hand the infinite embracing reality of Being. This internal tension demands and takes an enormous toll on his psyche, and in his fallen state man is ever striving towards being, as if standing precariously on and gripping an impossible incline, ever fearing lest he slip into the bottomless nothingness which he senses, if not recognizes, within himself deep below.

At times the nothingness can appear almost sweet, like an infinite ease, while at other times terrifying in its overwhelming power to destroy, through a kind of inexorable negating power of absence, all meaning, connection, and value. Similarly, at times Being can be reassuring, affirming, and uplifting (as out of the nothing), while at other times seem impossible in its rigid demands, its edges and consequences, terrifying in its overwhelming, overshining presence, like a terrible judge ever threatening to pronounce guilt at one’s inability to live up to reality’s infinite realism. In certain moments these two can seem almost to coalesce, to become as if one, where total absence is an infinite presence, and infinite presence a space beyond the cacophony of things, i.e. of matter and form. 

The urge to atheism that some feel is just this thirsting for truth, real truth, as a radical denial of all pious opinions and romantic ephemera, the urge to acknowledge as meaningful the absolute nothingness which appears as such an inextricable part of one’s experience of being (however paradoxical that may sound). Atheism, in this nearly religious sense, is the denial of infinite Being in favor of infinite nothingness. It is finally a kind of mystical nothingness which moves, even bizarrely and as if against the will of the atheist, towards the recognition of a transcendental fecundity at the heart of all such nihilism. This is the path out of atheism by taking the path through atheism, to recognize that beyond all mythologies and speculations there is a bedrock of reality that, often frustratingly, demands recognition. The reality of nothingness finally becomes reality, becomes presence.

From this vantage, and for some perhaps only from this vantage, one is at last able to see that what was once a pervasive absence is now a pervasive presence, and it becomes undeniable that there is a positive reality which pervades all things, and that this has always been so. In this one is even able to see that at the heart of religious faith there is a kernel of truth, one inadequately married to name and form, to be sure, but one to which name and form can become translucent, transcendental reality accommodating itself to the imperfect minds of men. 

This transcendental reality, moreover, has produced time and space, and so pervades all things while not being touched by them. This transcendental reality even has all power. It stands beyond all name and form, all time and space, all laws and all entropy, and in this the true meaning of God starts to dawn on the mind: That which is beyond, but also within, for in this Truth we live and move and have our being. And even here insight is not exhausted, because, beyond the vagaries of personality, the personhood that stands at the heart of our experience is no longer perceived as merely accidental, but reflective, like a deep echo, of what is true at even the most fundamental level of reality. And so transcendental reality is known not merely as an It, but as Person, and here one stands at the threshold of the transcendental Trinity of Persons: the Origin, the Logos, and the Spirit.

Having created all reality, its very Master, the Logos is able to enter into time and space. Almost as if the Dreamer had entered into his own dream, He entered into the stream of history, time and space offering no resistance to Him. For how could they? And so, having lived perfectly according to the laws of nature, and sensitive to their origin beyond time and space, after dying miserably on a cross it were as nothing for Him to transcend them, as if mocking the law of death that governs all things in this world, by rising from the dead, manifesting the mastery of Being over nothingness. This message echoes throughout the world, that conquering death through dying, passing through nothingness Being is victorious, both in time and in eternity, on earth as it is in heaven: This being the recapitulation of the insight that Being is the fundamental Truth, and that even nothingness gives way to He Who Is.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping