An Orthodox Perspective on the Crisis of Western Civilization

An Orthodox Perspective on the Crisis of Western Civilization

by Paul Rosenboom

Is there any doubt from a Christian perspective that we in the West are currently living in a time of steep cultural decline and civilizational crisis? Whether in the areas of art and music or technology and science or philosophy and religion and most certainly in politics, the West is a civilization paralyzed, rendered impotent by a vague secular humanism without purpose or direction. Contemporary Western man is suffering a new Age of Anxiety; his life is marked by confusion, fear and uncertainty. As a society, the age old social bonds of extended family and community have been broken; the foundational institution of marriage has been shaken by “routine” divorce; reproduction has become problematic with unusually low fertility; gender roles and genders have become blurred and confusing; technology in the form of AI and genetic engineering, is rapidly advancing beyond our tired, dated humanistic ethical models; social reform movements, empty of any sense of inner life, develop into all-consuming ideologies, religious in character, but which externalize all evil. In these ideologies, man is viewed as the product of economic forces, race or gender and, as a consequence, the idealogues reduce all solutions to the acquisition of political power. The Faustian humanism and unbridled individualism of Western civilization, while having achieved astounding advances in the areas of industrial production, prosperity and technology, have nevertheless left modern man spiritually empty and forlorn. 

The futile attempt to forge a philosophy of humanistic personhood in the past two hundred years has been swallowed up in the labyrinth of modern psychology or the attempt to exalt man through an empty philosophical nihilism and existentialism, or, more recently, transhumanism’s ambitious promise to transcend  our biological limitations. Such philosophies lead only to despair and an unbridled individualism which inevitably descends into the fragmentation of identity and personhood. Radical individualism claims the potential to be anything it desires and ultimately reveals a frightening nothing but incessant indulgent desire. 

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of commentaries, conferences and speeches proclaiming the need to redeem the culture.  Speakers include figures as varied as Rod Dreher, Ian McGilchrist, Douglas Murray, Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, Roger Scruton, Eric Metaxas, Ben Schapiro, Hirsi Ali, Bishop Robert Barron and others. Conferences such as ARC invite a wide range of speakers to offer perspectives on and solutions to the cultural crisis. Some of these writers and thinkers view the solution to the crisis as political, others cultural and still others, spiritual. Among those with a spiritual, faith-based perspective, we hear calls for a return to Christianity in the forms of traditional Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The traditional Christian culture of western Europe is credited with the greatest achievements of western literature, thought and art and, according to these Christians, only a return to Christ will preserve this precious heritage and provide the sense of direction and purpose necessary for a revitalized culture. 

As Christopher Dawson argued, religion is the wellspring of culture; we cannot understand the essence of a society unless we understand its religion. We cannot truly understand its cultural achievements unless we understand the inspiration and beliefs that lie behind them. Contemporary Western culture, however, has been divorced from its Christian origins and inspiration; it is now deeply and pervasively secular humanist in character. The original religious beliefs underpinning the formation of our culture may indeed survive in secularized form, as Tom Holland argues, but the West can hardly be considered a Christian culture anymore(see Holland). As a result, the foundations of this imposing edifice of Western modernity are fragile and insecure, as witnessed by the many catastrophes of the twentieth century. As Dawson maintained, “The present plight of Western culture is due…to the fact that the real values we are defending… are values that have been divorced from their religious and metaphysical foundations, and are  in so far indefensible but which remain the highest values which we possess.” (Dawson, p.63)  A sad example is the fact that the fundamentally Christian idea of the absolute value of the human personality has, since the Enlightenment, been historically used against the Church. Believing that all culture has a spiritual core, western Christians contend that the only way to the revitalization of our culture is to return to Christian values.

The Orthodox Christian, however, enters this conversation from a distinct perspective, offering a unique diagnosis of the causes of our civilizational ills. For the Orthodox Christian, a “return to Christ," or “Christian values”  or the “Christian heritage” cannot be separated from the Orthodox Church and its cultural legacy of Christian Hellenism. Christ cannot be abstracted from the Church or diluted among many different churches. Christ, who is Truth incarnate, is found in His Church and the true faith and life that springs from Her. And so, the Orthodox Christian may posit: what if the seeds of this secular humanism lie in the character of western Latinized Christianity and the destructive legacy of Rome’s separation from the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christian culture? What if western Christian man since the later Middle Ages has been cut off from the authentic spiritual experience of the historical Church and as a consequence western Europe has endured a long history of cultural upheavals and disruptions that inevitably led to our current secular humanistic society?

The estrangement of Rome from the Christian Greco-Roman world of the Orthodox East was at first gradual, driven by political, cultural and linguistic factors  A de-hellenized and increasingly authoritarian Christianity arose out of the ruins of the barbarian invasions and the subsequent growth of a Frankish society and culture that formed the cradle of the late western medieval period. By 800 AD, we may discern in western Europe the beginnings of a self-centered and self-reliant world, independent from that of the Christian East. With the expansion of Frankish culture in the west and the reformed Hildebrandine papacy of the 11th century, we see the  new and permanent foundations of a society different in spirit and temper from the Orthodox Christian society of the east. “Rome had ‘lost living and organic contact with the culture and empire to which she had given birth and structure” (Stephanou, p.8).  Herein were sown the seeds of future tensions and cultural disruptions. The impact of the spiritual violence done to the unity of the Church and civilization by papal ambitions cannot be overstated. A subsequent militarized Papism manifested in the form of the Crusades, which damaged Byzantine civilization to a far greater extent than  Muslim civilization, set altar against altar and made permanent a schism initially viewed as temporary. The violence of the Latin crusading war that turned against their Eastern brethren sealed with blood the spiritual violence done to Christian unity by the claims of Papal supremacy (Guetee,pp.364-366;Runciman,Hist.471-6).

With this sundering of the unity of the Christian world, gradually, a new Church tradition took root in the West wherein the Latin Father St. Augustine was established as the singular interpreter of Christian faith, detached from the thought of the Eastern Fathers. A profound thinker possessing deep psychological insight and love for God, he nevertheless remained heavily influenced by a neo-Platonist approach to understanding both God and human nature. In this respect, Augustine’s thought, later transformed into a crude Augustinianism, was destined to have  tremendous ramifications in the West; torn from the Christian Hellenism of the East, Augustinianism’s Platonic emphasis on the unity of nature over distinction of person as well as the distorted development of isolated elements of St. Paul’s writings became a permanent part of the structure of Western thought (Fitzgerald, p.699).

With the sundering of the unity of the Church by the Reformed Papacy in the 11th century, separating the West from the thought and culture of the Christian East, a new and distinctly Latin way of theologizing took shape, influencing the view of the relationship between God and man and the nature of grace and salvation. By the 12th century, the Roman Catholic West began to understand salvation in a fundamentally external and legalistic way. The legalistic imagery was no longer seen as a metaphor but as expressing the very nature of sin and man’s salvation. Soon, salvation could be conceived only in terms of an external, moral likeness to God. The Western understanding of salvation was largely reduced to a legal transaction modeled on Roman law. 

The flourishing of Scholasticism in the 12th and 13th centuries, a dynamic but disparate form of Christian Hellenism, amounted to a distorted intellectualized  attempt to regain what had been lost in separating from the Christian Hellenism of the East.  “The setting of theology by 1200 had shifted permanently from the monastery to the classroom. Done in the new city schools by secular urban teachers or masters, the prominent part played by the monastery in the preservation, creation and diffusion of culture in the West since the 6th century was lost.…More fundamentally, by then theology was also no longer liturgical, contemplative or traditional. Henceforth it was to be shaped almost exclusively by deductive rational thought, or by the techniques learned from the study of dialectic”(Papadakis, Meyendorff pp.). John W.Montgomery aptly described the philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas as largely  "Aristotelian philosophy in Christian dress". The counter example of St.Bernard of Clairvaux and the
nuanced arguments of St. Bonaventure, both stressing love and mystical experience, did not withstand the formidable new methodology  of Scholasticism and Thomism. 

The new exalted Papacy exerted a massive gravitational force, pulling all things having to do with Western Church life into an authoritarian organizational structure. Ecclesial discipline superseded ascetic experience and the Orthodox ethos. Theology became captive to the definition of God as actus purus. This new Western culture would gradually lose contact with the Eastern Patristic theology of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Christian Hellenic concept of inner authority was forgotten. The continuity between faith and reason was lost.  Spiritual turmoil and intellectual dissatisfaction were the inevitable results.  Man, it seemed, was incapable of knowing God directly. By the end of the late Middle Ages, Orthodox and Catholics did not simply use different words for the same reality, but experienced different realities that affected the way we view Christian life and the nature of the Church(Carlton,97-103). Within this problematic theological and metaphysical framework, a new western Chrisitian social order and culture took shape.

The Russian philosopher Alexei Khomiakov, attempted to summarize the differences between the East and West in the conception of authority.  According to Khomiakov, the ultimate difference between Orthodoxy and the whole of western Christianity, lies in a conflict over authority in religion. In the West, “authority became external power,” and “knowledge of religious truths was cut off from religious life.” (Schmemann, pp.50-51 ) The authority of the Roman Church vouchsafed these truths to the human intellect as necessary for salvation; whereas in the Reformation the external authority of the Church was replaced by that of Scripture. In both cases, “the premises are identical.”(Ibid.) The externalization of authority in Latin Christendom did not correspond to Christian Hellenism’s inward authority of the human spirit in communion with God through the indwelling of the Spirit. The verification of truth is actual corporate ecclesial experience. This inner affirmation of Truth is spiritual, not static; it is a dynamic and inward union with Christ in the Holy Spirit within the life of the Church that affirms the authenticity of the Truth.

Khomiakov writes: “The Church is not an authority, just as God is not an authority and Christ is not an authority, since authority is something external to us. The Church is not an authority, I say, but the Truth - and at the same time the inner life of the Christian, since God, Christ, the Church live in him with a life more real than the heart which is beating in his breast and the blood flowing in his veins. But they are alive in him only insofar as he himself is living by the ecumenical life of love and unity; i.e., by the life of the Church.” (Ibid.)  Khomiakov sees running through the entire Western theological development a common scepticism. The security of an external authority - the Pope or the Bible -  became a necessary answer to doubt. (Meyendorff, Living Tradition p.44)) In the Christian Hellenic tradition, the one ultimate authority and infallible criterion in the Church is the indwelling Logos and Spirit.

In reaction to the corruption of the Roman see, the Reformation, in all its zeal and fury, was a far more devastating blow to Christian unity, ecclesial order, apostolic succession and sacramental worship than the Great Schism between East and West. With the Reformation of the 16th century, whole regions of western Christianity were torn away from the liturgical and ascetic character of Orthodox life and thought. The very foundations of apostolic continuity, the canon of the Scriptures, Christian faith, life and sacramental worship were overthrown in a furious, inflamed rebellion against Sacred Tradition. The Reformation eventually rejected all hierarchy and sacramentality, adopting an outlook that remains anti-liturgical, anti-sacramental and anti-tradition. This modern iconoclastic movement significantly contributed to the decline of Christian culture, surrendering it to anti-Christian secular humanists. 

In this light, the Western Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment may be viewed as cultural disruptions rather than organic developments. In one sense, they may more properly be regarded as transformative cultural revolutions. Western Society was formatively misshaped by this centuries long period of continual cultural upheavals. The pseudo-Enlightenment itself may be viewed as the child of three cultural revolutionary movements: Scholasticism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Here lie the sources of Western Europe’s  debasement of Holy Mystery, loss of the sense of the sacred, rebellion against God, and eventual projection of mortal men as new gods.

 These upheavals are, at their core, the expression of Western man’s desperate search for intellectual and religious contentment; they were in some sense abortive attempts to recover the Christian Hellenism which Western Europe lost in the later Middle Ages. They express the West’s desperate search for direction and purpose, grappling with authority and freedom, unity and diversity, church and state, faith and reason. Separated from the unity of the historic Church, Roman Latin and Protestant Christianity could never satisfy the spiritual and intellectual needs of humanity. Both Western Christian traditions impoverish man. It is in these cultural revolutions that we find the origins of secularism and deism. Existentialism and utopian ideological reform movements are the natural culmination of Latin thought, expressing the anguish of the human soul. Modern philosophy and art illustrate the bankruptcy and de-Hellenization of modern thought. 

The term Christian Hellenism has been used here several times and it may be useful at this point to expand on its meaning. In its simplest sense and consistent with its use by Fr. Georges Florovsky, Christian Hellenism denotes the theological and spiritual tradition of the Greek Fathers as opposed to the tradition of late Western medieval thought. It is the inheritance of all Orthodox Christians, regardless of ethnicity or nationality. This inheritance consists not only of the new application of old philosophical terms to articulate the faith but of whole categories of thought including the constitutional relationship between God and man, the harmony between faith and reason, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and deification of man, an understanding of Christ’s salvific work as an act of love, the Logos as the unifying principle of all reality, ecclesiology as communion and the primarily  liturgical and ascetical experience of God’s presence. We must be mindful that the Christian Hellenism of the Orthodox East gave a cultural scope to the mission of the Orthodox Christian faith;  “By the end of the 4th century, the cultural synthesis of Christian Hellenism was fully consummated, giving permanent direction and structure to a revitalized eastern Roman civilization, commonly referred to as the Byzantine Empire.” (Stephanou, p.8) This Orthodox Christian Society was characterized by a cultural unity and vitality that is often ignored in western scholarship. Fr. Schmemann describes this Byzantine society as not only nominally but essentially Christian. The whole life of Byzantine society was permeated, he argues, by the concepts of Truth. Beauty, Asceticism and Philanthropia understood in the light of the Orthodox faith.  

“Not by accident the Byzantine period of Church history coincides with the patristic age, with the unique and truly unsurpassed effort of the human ‘logos’ to ‘enter into the Logos of Truth…’  The Byzantine mind understood Christianity as both the revelation of Divine Truth and “man’s ontological ability to receive it, to know it, to appropriate it and to transform it into life.” Schmemann writes:  “The great theological controversies of the patristic age are never abstract, never merely intellectual. They are always soteriological and existential in their ultimate significance, for they deal with the nature of man, with the meaning of life, with the goals of his praxis”(Schmemann, Church, World, Mission, p.47).  It is in these debates that are to be found the roots and the presuppositions of all Christian “humanism,” of a Christian vision of the world.  Christ as the Theanthropos is the very source of all theological and metaphysical truth. 

Byzantium also excelled in the creative expression of that same Truth as Beauty in the liturgical arts. Creative expression in liturgical worship, that is,  architecture, iconography, hymnography, time, space, movements, all these strived to manifest the Kingdom of God, to make people “taste of its celestial beauty, truth and goodness, and live in the light of that experience.” The Orthodox liturgical year takes the whole man into its Paschal and penitential rhythm and scope. It transfigures all of creation. The liturgical poetry of the Church is unsurpassed in literary beauty and theological depth (Schmemann, Church World Mission  pp.48-49). Byzantine iconography is supreme in evoking contrition, humility and the deep mystery of the living God.

Byzantine culture can also be termed ascetical but an asceticism that  may only be understood in the light of man’s purpose and goal in Eastern spirituality: the deification of man by the grace of the Holy Spirit or theosis. It is this supreme ideal by which Byzantine society ultimately measured itself. Asceticism is the means by which man ascends  to his true nature and calling (Schmemann,  Church, World, Mission p.50).

Schmemann also describes the absence of alienation in that society because of the one and unifying vision of man. “There existed in Byzantium, and later in other Orthodox lands, a sense of community and interpersonal relationships, a spirit of philanthropia, a constant opening towards a full human experience seldom achieved elsewhere ... .One has only  to read the funeral hymns of St. John Damascene or the Byzantine Mariological hymnology to grasp the tremendous wave of compassion and solidarity, mercy and brotherhood that never completely died in the daily existence of the Byzantines.” (Schmemann, Church, World, Mission, pp.50-51)

Orthodoxy and its cultural expression as Christian Hellenism could play a vital role in reshaping Western Christianity, especially at a moment when people, particularly young adults, are increasingly concerned for the truth and rediscovering Christianity in the form of Traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Perhaps they are more ready than before to understand the language of prayer, contemplation, and spiritual experience. There is an important sense, therefore, in which our witness today as Orthodox Christians must be rooted in the tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, where the fulness of the Christian tradition has been preserved and lived through centuries. If the last hope of cultural survival in our age is the power of the Orthodox faith, then the tradition of Christian Hellenism as found in Orthodoxy.must be re-integrated into Western culture.

What spiritual and anthropological insights does Orthodoxy offer?

Orthodox spirituality is experienced through worship, ascetic struggle and spiritual beauty. Orthodox worship has for its purpose communion and union with God and the Orthodox Christian encounters God through liturgy, prayer and askesis(spiritual discipline) as opposed to intellectual understanding. The Orthodox tradition remains opposed to an intellectualized approach to Christian truth; the Holy Mysteries remain Holy Mysteries, without rational explanation or definition. While this experience of mystery has been lost in the West, for the Orthodox, love, poetry, mystery and spiritual beauty more accurately describe the fullness of Christian life. For most non-Orthodox observers, the power and beauty of Orthodox liturgical worship evoke a sense of awe. They sense they have entered into a dimension of human life quite different from the world or other forms of Christian worship. According to the Benedictine scholar, Dom Olivier Rousseau, the Eastern Church is the liturgical Church par excellence. Orthodox liturgical life most perfectly expresses the fulness of Christ on earth.  “All to which Orthodox man aspires, all for which Orthodox man prays , and all to which he lays claim, both in this world and the next, are contained in the Divine Liturgy.” ( Bush, p.92)  And through this salvific liturgical union, all aspects of our lives, even the more worldly, become imbued with a sacramental light.

Christian Hellenism  also emphasizes ascetical striving and watchfulness (nepsis). The Western Christian no longer engages in a dynamic inner life or spiritual struggle. The Orthodox Christian’s life is the continual striving for purification,, illumination and sanctification, acknowledging at the same time that these are not earned or achieved but remain a loving gift in the self-offering of the Lord Himself to whom we open our hearts in loving gratitude. A relationship with Christ, like true love, requires a continual effort to surrender one’s ego so that one may love selflessly. We resolutely strive to become like Christ, confident that through the power of God, man can become enlightened, transformed, and made new. The Orthodox tradition of the Eastern Fathers offers the Western Christian a return to spiritual struggle, fasting, prayer and contemplation as an essential and vital part of human existence. The use of the Jesus prayer, the constant loving invocation of the name of Jesus, purifies the mind of its illusions, and the heart’s worldly, sensual desires. It joins the mind with the heart in selfless love.

The Orthodox tradition in liturgical poetry, architecture and iconography has expressed with great beauty and sublimity the truths of revelation, man’s pain and anguish in separation from God and the redemption of man in Christ. The Church’s psalmody presents to the soul the deepest mysteries of the faith in rich Christological and theological content. The sacred music evokes contrition rather than delight. Likewise with painting; in the West, Christian art is often merely secular art with a religious theme whereas Byzantine iconography is genuine Christian liturgical art, leading man to taste of immortality. Experiencing the liturgical arts of the Christian Hellenic tradition, the heart experiences a unique spiritual warmth. Like the Gospels, everything in the liturgical arts is simple, unaffected and solemn. (Cavarnos, p.)

Christian Hellenism affirms a constitutional relationship between God and man. Man by his very nature participates in God. Grace is a constituent of his nature and is what makes man fully human. This is to acknowledge that we “live and move and have our being in Him.” Man’s existence is only by participation in the divine life.  As Fr.John Meyendorff states: “Man has been created not as an autonomous, or self-sufficient, being; his very nature is truly itself only inasmuch as it exists ‘in God’ or ‘in grace.’ Grace, therefore, gives man his ‘natural’ development. This basic presupposition explains why the terms ‘nature’ and ‘grace,’ when used by Byzantine authors, have a meaning quite different from the Western usage;  rather than being in direct opposition, the terms ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ express a dynamic, living and necessary relationship between God and man, different by their natures, but in communion with each other through God’s energy or grace.”  (Meyendorff, Byz Theol. p.)

The Orthodox Christian strives to cleanse and transfigure his human faculties through the ascetic and liturgical life of the Church. In the Holy Church we find the grace-filled power to transform our lives, our thoughts, our feelings, our deeds. In fact, the whole life of the Christian soul consists of the purified and transfigured coordination between the passionate faculty, the intellect and the will. Man is made an integral whole. When the humble soul of the Christian is united with the Spirit of God and becomes wholly spirit and knows God intimately and loves Him passionately, and acts always according to His will -  this is deification (theosis). 

At the core of the doctrine of creation and deification is Divine Immanence and the essence and energies distinction. By divine immanence is meant the indwelling of the Logos and the Holy Spirit in creation and particularly in man. Christian Hellenism affirms the presence of the divine in all creation. “From the Holy Spirit the streams of grace well forth; they water all creation, so that life be engendered.” Of course, we cannot partake of the very essence of God but we may participate in His Divine energies. The key, then, to the mystery of the universe is the God-man, Christ. In Him we may find the beauty and love of God in the world. The incarnate Logos is the unifying principle of the universe, representing a true unity of God, man and the world. All truth and knowledge assume an integral meaning in Christ. “In the Holy Spirit is the wealth of knowledge of God, contemplation and wisdom. For in Him the Logos discloses all the dogmas of the Father.”  In this Christology, Pneumatology and metaphysic, we may find a restoration of the sense of the sacred.

But we must be careful. The reinvigoration of Western culture by means of Orthodoxy is not achieved with a cultural platform or social agenda. Paul Kingsnorth, a recent convert to Orthodoxy, rightly warns us against Christianity becoming a tool serving cultural revival.(2024 Erasmus Lecture). The struggle to live a Christian life is Itself creative - of oneself and, potentially, of the larger culture. Our focus as Orthodox must be on living a Christian life in humility, repentance and selfless love. We must acquire the mind of Christ  and become vessels of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of that life may serve to build something good and enduring in this world.

Bibliography / Works Cited

Bush, William, The Heart of Orthodox Mystery  Salisbury MA: Regina Orthodox Press,  2003

Carlton, Clark,  The Truth:  What Every Roman Catholic Should Know About the Orthodox Church   Salisbury, MA.  Regina Orthodox Press, 1999  

Dawson, Christopher, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture   NY Harper 1960 

Fitzgerald, A., ed. Augustine Through the Ages  Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s, 1999

Abbe Guetee, The Papacy   New York, Minos Publishing Co., 1966

Holland, Tom,  Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,  NY Basic Books,  2019

Khomiakov, Alexey, “Thoughts Concerning the Orthodox Church and the Western Confessions” in Fr. Alexander Schmemann ed., Ultimate Questions   NY, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1965  

Kingsnorth, Paul,  Lecture: 2024 Erasmus Lecture: “Against Christian Civilization”  NYC, Union League Club,  Hosted by First Things  October 28, 2024 

Meyendorff, John Living Tradition,  Crestwood, NY,  SVS Press, 1978

Meyendorff, John,  Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes

New York,  Fordham University Press, 1979   

Papadakis, Aristeides,Meyendorff, John,  The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy    New York, SVS  Press,  1993

Portalie, Eugene,  A Guide to the Thought of St. Augustine, trans. R. Bastian Chicago: Henry Regnery,  1980

Runciman, Steven,  A History of the Crusades  Vol. 3  Cambridge University Press,  1954, 1987   

Schmemann, Alexander,  Church, World, Mission   New York, SVS Press, 1979

Stephanou Eusebius, “An Orthodox Interpretation of the Crisis of Western Society”  Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Seminary Press, 1957.  An eloquent and insightful lecture from a Greek-American theologian which largely inspired this talk. Sadly, in the early 70s, Fr. Stephanou fell into the emotionalism and errors of the charismatic movement.