The Roots of the Problem of Disconnect between Christianity and the Scientific Community [1]

The Scholastic Paradox

The dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract, disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate from and superior to that of sensible objects and movements became the most characteristic feature of Western philosophical and by a curious confluence of events, the last vestiges of Orthodox Christianity were snuffed out in Western Europe at a time when the only alternative sources of intellectual influence there were nascent in Spain: the Moslem schools of philosophy which would arise in the Iberia of the Saracens. The great Aristotelian scholars of Islam — such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the royal librarian of Bokhara, and his Iberian born disciple Ibn Roshd (Averroës) — were still in the future, but the foundations for their massive influence on Western theology and thought were laid in this epoch, almost ironically by the Arab movement of falsafah which might be called the Moslem Scholasticism. In the 800s, the falsafah had discovered the Hellenistic classics and began to apply both “natural science” and Greek metaphysics to Islamic thought. The scholars (called faylasufs) in this movement ranged from the mystic Abu Nasir al-Farabe, who died in the 980s to the rationalist Yakub ibn Isak al-Kindi (d.874) and Abu Bakir al-Razi (d.925) who introduced Gnostic ideas into his system. They were reformers of a sort, and inclined to asceticism and in a curious way are the progenitors of the Christian Scholastics.[i]

        In the 800s Charlemagne (742-814) managed to exterminate Orthodox Christianity in Gaul, and his successors carried this through in the rest of Western Europe. They did so, not as a matter of theology, but as a matter of power and control and, in the words of Fr John Romanides, “The incorporation of the episcopate of Carolingian Francia into the Frankish army and its [the episcopacy’s] occupation by military officers, whose duty was to pacify the revolutionary Gallo-Roman population, is the key to understanding the so-called Great Schism between Roman and Latin Christendoms.”[ii]

        In fact, Charlemagne desired to be crowned Roman emperor. When the Gallo-Roman bishops refused, reminding him that there was a Roman emperor in Constantinople already, Charlemagne is reported to have responded, “But there is a woman on the throne, therefore the throne is vacant.” St. Irene the restorer of the holy icons was on the throne at that time. Charlemagne, through violence and threats, created a schism and crowned himself emperor with the helpless assistance of the Bishop of Rome. Roman Catholicism was literally created by the Carolingian rulers of the Frankish kingdom, based on political foundations laid by Charlemagne and his minister of education, Alcuin of York, and philosophical foundations laid by Augustine of Hippo. The birth of the Roman Catholic Church took place in an inauspicious, shadowy era between the closing decades of the Western Dark Ages of barbarian rule and the beginning of the medieval “awakening.”[iii] This was an era in which the great intellectual resurgence in Constantinople[iv] could cast no more than a noctilucent glow toward the West, when the cruelty and savagery of the Dark Ages penetrated the religious philosophy of the West with the rudiments of “juridical justification theology,” and penetrated the faithful with dark superstitions and fears that have still not vanished. It was also the era when the Platonism and quasi-Gnosticism of Augustine of Hippo distorted theology in the West into a system of philosophical speculation, and forever separated it from the existential, living theology of Orthodox Christianity.

        Western scholars were cut off and isolated from Constantinople increasingly by language, as the command of Greek was lost,[v] and sometimes by Carolingian and later Frankish imperial policy[vi] and by the Arab control of the Mediterranean. When the Dark Ages did draw to a close and the resurgence of learning began in Western Europe, the new schools would turn toward Spain, toward the Moslem academies, for their inspiration and direction This development would produce the new movement among scholars called “Scholasticism” or “schoolmen.” While this whole series of events had a catastrophic doctrinal and spiritual result in the West, it also provided for an energetic resurgence of learning that would lead, eventually, to great advances in all the sciences and in medicine. Paradoxically, it would also lay the foundations for the huge conflict between religion and science in Western Europe — a conflict that is still being played out in America in the 21st century.

        In the system of the newly arising Latin philosophical theology, the “schoolmen” failed to realise that dogma and doctrine,[vii] are only the algorithm for theology, and the artificing and refining of the algorithm became, for them, the very meaning of theology itself. Indeed, it often appears to us that the West in general lost the algorithm and ended up developing doctrine by means of iteration or in a heuristic process. In such a circumstance, theology lost its existential power as a vector for the ascent of man in real spiritual transformation and the experiencing of the uncreated energies of God and became no more than a system of religious philosophy and a school of ethics. The concept that theology is a living, healing force, experienced in the very depth of one’s being, could not even have occurred to the schoolmen. Doubtless this is why Latin spirituality,[viii] strangled by the dry, lifelessness of philosophical theology and the moralistic religious fascism that it produced with its speculation in ethics, collapsed into romantic mysticism and thus into spiritual delusion (plani; prelest), as would Russian spirituality during the three hundred year “Latin captivity of Russian theology,” until it began to be emancipated by St Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and his co-workers.[ix]