This quote comes from the book you include in your post, right?: "Genesis, Creation and Early Man: “The Orthodox Christian Vision”.
Does the writer actually demonstrate the above described affects of The Fall in Orthodox tradition? The tone and details of the lengthy quote strike me as rather Roman Catholic, rather than Orthodox.
Please advise. Thanks!
No, it’s the review that I linked. That’s why he listed page numbers to references. The book’s author is an Orthodox priest. The Patristic period (100-450) belongs to all of Christendom, not just the Catholic or Orthodox branches.
Absolutely agreed.
But this raises an interesting question. The Orthodox tradition frequently (but depending on the national body involved, not always) varies from the Roman Catholic tradition regarding Original Sin and what it was supposed to mean.
For example, other than material produced by the Russian Orthodox community, most of the Orthodox material I read on the need to baptize infants avoided the usual (Roman Catholic) position that an infant was already tainted by sin.
Most of the Orthodox writings said the point of infant baptism is for other, “traditional”, reasons. The usual Orthodox narrative on Adam’s sin was not that his sin was transmitted to future generations, but that Adam was the First to Sin, as a vivid demonstration of the inevitability that all of Adam’s descendants would be unable to avoid sin as well.
So: Assuming this distinction amongst the Orthodox is, in general, an actual distinction, it means that the paragraph that I quoted from your post above either inaccurately reflects the Orthodox position in the patristic period, or that the Orthodox tradition moved away from that description after the Patristic period closed.
Follow me?
@gbrooks9 Yes, but those things in the paragraph have to do with natural conditions before and after the Fall, not with original sin or its transmission.
Edit: You should ask @GJDS these questions. He understands his own tradition far better than I do.
I think you missed the fireworks between me and @GJDS regarding his interpretation of Orthodox Traditions, and virtually every piece of writing I could find on the internet which disagreed with him.
The Russian Orthodox publications tended to side on the Roman Catholic side.
As for your comments about “natural conditions” . . . I haven’t examined that specifically. But it does come to mind that if many sections of the Orthodox tradition reject the Roman view of “Original Sin” - - it is quite possible that they don’t think there was a Cosmic-wide shift in metaphysical reality the moment that Adam sinned.
Like I said, I haven’t yet looked into that specific facet of the various Orthodox traditions.
Jay, either you have not read many of my posts, or else your have not understood them. In stating the position of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II stated that, although scientific evidence supported the (Darwinian) theory of evolution for the development of all biological life on earth–including the biological nature of humankind–what is distinct about humankind is our Spirit, our Souls, and these are created separately and individually by God. Atheistic science cannot allow for any human exceptionalism of this kind, especially since it concludes that this exceptionalism was NOT the result of evolution as directed by chance; i.e. by natural selection. As you know, Alfred Wallace, evolution’s co-discoverer with Charles Darwin, thought humans were an exception, and strongly disapproved of the latter’s book “The Descent of Man”. Lacking today’s evidence that supports exceptionalism, Wallace turned to Spiritualism, and lost credibility with the scientific community.
Early in the 20th century a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, saw the clear evidence for evolution before his superiors (or the Vatican) did. He saw that humankind, with its ability for abstract thought and the ability to communicate it through language, actually ushered a new Sphere into the universe–a Nous-(Mind)-Sphere which followed upon the Cosmosphere and the Biosphere. The increase in primate brain size was very rapid on an evolutionary time scale–over 3-fold in 3 million years–but still could be explained by sexually transmitted favorable mutations, selected by survival rates. The key point in the argument I am making is that about 50K yrs. ago the behavior of Homo sapiens took a Great Leap Forward. They buried their dead with valuable tools and gifts for an afterlife (dawn of religion; the Covenant of Scripture), artistic talent (sculpture, painting) worthy of the best of today, and communication skills that fostered larger cooperative societies. All this in direct contradiction to “small chance mutations causing very small changes in no particular direction”. Theologians predicted that humans arrived suddenly on the earthly scene. The GLF was no surprise to them. Science is as yet unable to suggest a mechanism. Sure, it is as if the primate Brain circuits already present were ‘programmed’ to become Mind. That’s just a hunch that may tell scientists the best places to look. I’ll wager that eventually science is going to discover the mechanism God chose to use. But until then, Theology leads the way to the Truth.
Al Leo
So Rose has dated the origin of the common epithet: “No s—t!”
Al Leo
Jay, have you been hanging out at sites that spew triumphalisms or creationist reactions to them? I’m starting to worry about you. Those that revel in (or recoil from) some scoreboard in these alleged competitions have already missed the boat --demonstrating that they probably have an inflated view of science and some serious issues of their own when it comes to understanding religion. Sure, there are those who want to press their religion into service (to do science’s job) explaining the mechanics of the world. And they are the ones who are sensitive then about this stuff. Imagine it this way – and we’ll move this to less polemically volatile comparisons: What if your brain (religion) got suckered into feeling inferior to your senses (science)? The brain says to itself – I know what my surrounding ought to look like and yet my eyes and ears, keep over-riding what I think I ought to see, but my eyes keep telling me otherwise! I thought the door was closed,but now my eyes tell me it’s been open. I hate that almost every time my brain and my senses have a disagreement, it’s my brain that does the adjusting and never my senses. […and meanwhile the rebellious senses have started their own web site and are even now jeering at how useless the brain is because the sensory inputs keep being right and it is always the brain having to do the adjusting.] This is silly of course – almost as silly as the actual situation being parodied.
Religion (when it’s doing its job) is providing context, direction, motivation, meaning. Science (when it’s doing its job) is helping us understand the mechanics of the physical world. We see in Scriptures that people of those times were expected to be able to directly observe/know/assume things about creation so that such knowledge could be used as a vehicle for this or that parable or spiritual lesson. Real scientists (a great many of them Christian) are quietly and earnestly practicing their scientific professions happily within the context of their faith with nary a thought that there would be competition between the two because they aren’t trying to turn faith into a science or vice versa. That gig is left to those who have already fallen into category error and have been unable as yet to get out. They are consigned to the sports stands somewhere shouting for their favorite team – Go brain! Go eyes! These people are in need of education, not more shouting company. Leave that relic sport behind and join the joyful masses who through history have always delighted in having all the members of the body working together.
Clarified edit: I should have said above: Religion (As it’s doing its job) is providing context …
because there is no escaping it --not by the atheist, nor anyone else. We all have a religion (broadly construed here as worldview) that transcends science and everything else. It is never a question of “Is somebody religious” but always: “what is their religion” (and it will always include multiple foundational elements that completely precede any scientific evidence whatsoever.)
…and other clarifying edits have been made as well.
I see what you mean and I agree there was a great deal of speculation on all sorts of things. My comment was meant to deal more with what was considered a human being, and for example, Gregory of Nyssen discusses the mind/rational aspects of humanity, and within this discussion we find mention of composite as some may discuss at that time, the four elements, platonic notions - all of which would appear strange to us today. In some cases they extrapolated into odd areas - however my reading is they accepted a lot of this as speculation and more often were concerned with the pagan teachings that were associated with such ideas. Thinking during such periods ranged far and wide, but the theology would come back to what we understand on God and how humanity was understood with Christ.
I put it to you their concerns were for theology and human intellect and they more or less noticed natural philosophy as a matter of taste. The pre-fall world was also discussed in ways that you mention, and I interpret that more along the lines of the need for salvation and the new heavens and new earth.
This discussion may go into perhaps a fruitful area by bringing up an example of theology and science. I am looking into one orthodox doctrine that has enjoyed a resurgence, and that is Palamas’ energies of God. I mention this because it is an example of theology that stands purely on theological grounds, and yet I, for one, may speculate that it is consistent with our understanding of the world of quantum mechanics (QM). Clearly I am speculating, and this in no way renders the doctrine guilty of odd science.
Briefly, the doctrine emphasises the transcendence of God and also He is not in any way part of the Creation. Yet it also teaches the imminence of God - but ensures the distinction. This may to some, contrast with Thomist teaching of God as the primary cause, as this may link God to His Creation.
Scientifically, I am inclined to the view that both indeterminacy and the ‘reality’ of QM may be understood as resulting from the activities (dynamics) of the energies, and these ensure the creation conforms to God’s will in every sense of creation.
I offer this as an example where science may be correct in so far as it is science, and yet speculation may continue without harming either theology or science.
If you have hard facts of biology or physics sitting on your laboratory table right in front of you … are you suggesting that we should - - every once in a while - - completely ignore the witness of our eyes and ears in order to preserve a point of theology or metaphysics that cannot be confirmed one way or the other until you pass to the Undiscovered Country?
Christians have been adjusting their views on scripture in light of scientific advances for centuries - for me, the question is “why would we stop now?” Does anyone think our theology would be improved by revisiting (and rejecting) heliocentrism, etc?
If one believes that both scripture and nature have the same author, then it’s not one versus the other - both are sources of God’s revelation to us, and we can use them in a complementary way. It’s not a zero-sum game.
I would challenge this statement - Christians have kept the accepted theology, and were able to handle discussions outside of this, as would anyone who is curious about our surroundings. The constant appeal to the heliocentric outlook is tedious as it is abundantly clear this was the current “science” derived from Hellenic sources, and Christians corrected this. At no point did this change in natural philosophy cause a change in our understanding of the Trinity, the nature of Christ, the Law, or Salvation. It seems as if this acceptance of faulty outlooks on science and theology inevitably stems from those who want to promote biological evolution and those against them, the YEC and IP proponents - none of which imo have much in the way of theological insights or contributions to Orthodoxy.
And yet we have this endless repetition - we are supposed to adjust scripture to fit in with such odd outlooks, clothed in so called scientific garb! 
EDIT: I should have said heliocentric outlook is one of two from Hellenic sources, and the other is geocentric (see my comment below). The latter was widely accepted until Copernicus developed his heliocentric view, and the debates raged on from that time. The debate was fuelled mainly by those who defended the geocentric view. During this period most of the educated belonged to the Roma Catholic tradition and this is how biblical quotes and authorities are part of that debate. Christians who supported heliocentric outlook finally won the debate.
Yeah, no. The reason why Christians accepted it was because they found it in the Bible. Looking at Christian arguments for geocentrism, we find they consist almost entirely of Bible verses, not scientific observations. Christians didn’t use theology to correct geocentrism, they used science.
The usual rhubarb; if anything this should serve to warn Christian scientists from being too eager to accept anything that sounds scientific, esp if it seeks to sound theological. Since Wikipedia stand tall in this forum, I (drum roll please) present:
_"Although the basic tenets of Greek geocentrism were established by the time of Aristotle, the details of his system did not become standard. The Ptolemaic system, developed by the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus in the 2nd century AD finally standardised geocentrism. His main astronomical work, the Almagest, was the culmination of centuries of work by Hellenic, Hellenistic and Babylonian astronomers. For over a millennium European and Islamic astronomers assumed it was the correct cosmological model. Because of its influence, people sometimes wrongly think the Ptolemaic system is identical with the geocentric model.
Ptolemy argued that the Earth was a sphere in the center of the universe, from the simple observation that half the stars were above the horizon and half were below the horizon at any time (stars on rotating stellar sphere), and the assumption that the stars were all at some modest distance from the center of the universe. If the Earth was substantially displaced from the center, this division into visible and invisible stars would not be equal.
In the Ptolemaic system, each planet is moved by a system of two spheres: one called its deferent; the other, its epicycle. The deferent is a circle whose center point, called the eccentric and marked in the diagram with an X, is removed from the Earth. The original purpose of the eccentric was to account for the differences of the lengths of the seasons (autumn is the shortest by a week or so), by placing the Earth away from the center of rotation of the rest of the universe. Another sphere, the epicycle, is embedded inside the deferent sphere and is represented by the smaller dotted line to the right. A given planet then moves around the epicycle at the same time the epicycle moves along the path marked by the deferent. These combined movements cause the given planet to move closer to and further away from the Earth at different points in its orbit, and explained the observation that planets slowed down, stopped, and moved backward in retrograde motion, and then again reversed to resume normal, or prograde, motion._
The deferent-and-epicycle model had been used by Greek astronomers for centuries along with the idea of the eccentric (a deferent which is slightly off-center from the Earth), which was even older. In the illustration, the center of the deferent is not the Earth but the spot marked X, making it eccentric (from the Greek ἐκ ec- meaning “from,” and κέντρον kentron meaning “center”), from which the spot takes its name."
I’ve not read this book, Jay, but I have read the Fathers extensively, and reach a diametrically opposite conclusion about their views on the pre-fall world. My fairly extensive review of sources is here.
It’s far from complete, but typical enough that on reading further material from St Basil this week, in the midst of a passage explaining the positive role of carnivores, poisonous plants etc in the context of the good creation of Genesis 1, I was surprised when he suggested that roses before the fall had no thorns.
Note that he was basing this on a strictly limited literal interpretation of the curse on Adam - to say that poisonous plants and fierce animals were part of the original creation, but that the text specifically excepts thorns, may be erroneous, but is scarcely letting ones imagination run wild, nor creating a radically different pre-fall world.
Almost the only exception, and that within close bounds, is Chrysostom. Otherwise the idea of a radical cosmic fall dates mainly to the time of the Reformation, when modern science was beginning to be in the air.
The Patristic attitude to then-contemporary science was, predominantly, cautiously respectful, whilst recognising (in a way unusual today) science’s epistemological limitations, and treating the Bible as the word of God - capable of misinterpretation, but utterly truthful in itself. @AdCaelumEo AdCaelumEo has made a significant point in the context of Evolutionary Creation.
You didn’t address what I wrote. Specifically, you didn’t address the issue that the earlier Christians found geocentrism in the Bible, and argued in favor of it from the text of the Bible.
There was a huge discussion about exactly this topic a while ago:
Yawnnnnn… there is always something else and some question we must answer - good heavens!
That kind of response is why support for Biologos is growing.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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