My Journey to Orthodoxy (2 of 2)

Theological Letters

In 2012, SVS Press published a volume entitled Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith. The book compiles essays from philosophers who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in which they share how and why they became Orthodox. The press has decided to compile a second volume in which I will be included. I recently finished the essay, and I posted the first half of its contents here for my readers. The following is the second half, available to only paid subscribers. Enjoy!

To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscribing and supporting my work!

A Philosophy of Process

For those unfamiliar with process philosophy, the view is a form of panentheism, neither conflating God and world (pantheism) nor fully separating them (theism). Instead, God and world are both open systems, each in development and in reciprocal relationship, affecting and being affected by one another. Not surprisingly, then, the view rejects the classical divine attributes, accepting that God does in fact change, that his knowledge grows with the world, that his control of cosmic events and free creatures is limited, and so on.¹ 

Two things drew me to process thought. The first was the dissonance between the God of the Scriptures and the God of Latin theology, explained above. The process God seemed to me much closer to the God I read about in the Bible, especially the Old Testament (OT). And I discovered I was far from alone in this conclusion. A great many OT scholars also had process sympathies. Many saw a very different God in these Ancient Near Eastern texts than the God of Plato or Aristotle, and a number of these scholars, such as Terence Fretheim and Robert Gnuse, explicitly embraced process philosophy as a more accurate model for OT theology.² Such trends vindicated my findings and endeared me to process thought.

The second was the problem of evil. The classical formulation is David Hume’s summary of Epicurus: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”³ The problem attempts to demonstrate an incompatibility between the existence of evil, on the one hand, and the divine attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence (and tacitly the other omnis), on the other. While ample literature exists on the compatibility of evil and classical theism, process philosophy has an easier time resolving the tension because it rejects the classical divine attributes.

Throughout my philosophical-religious journey, I took the problem of evil extremely seriously.⁴ Evident to me was the problem’s status as the chief anti-proof for the existence of God. Less evident to me, however, was the success of this anti-proof. I do not mean that the horrific evils of our world are without force in causing one to question whether God is watching or cares. They have such force. But it was clear to me that good and evil in the moral sense that the problem presumes cannot exist in the world of the atheist. A material world of chance and chaos cannot include justice, fairness, good, or evil.⁵ It may produce sentient beings who experience pleasure and pain; such beings may label the desirable “good” and the undesirable “bad”; they may feel entitled to the desirable and to freedom from the undesirable, calling such entitlement “fair” or “just.” But all of this can indicate nothing more than preferred experiences. The notion that things ought to be a certain way and ought not be another way has no place in such a world. Yet, the central premise of the problem of evil is that evil exists. The indictment of God by the problem presumes duties of goodness incumbent upon a good God. In short, the problem requires transcendent values, the very sort of values it undermines if it succeeds in proving atheism. Hence, I saw the atheistic use of the problem as incoherent. But this is not its sole use. The problem can just as well be used to problematize classical theism, showing that the reality of evil requires a God who is not of the kind posited by the omnis. This conclusion was what sent me into the arms of process philosophy.

Following my embrace of process thought, my research program forked into two parallel tasks. The first was defending metaphysics against its supposed demise.⁶ I learned that many contemporary philosophers believe metaphysics is dead, being some relic of the past only practiced by those who have yet to receive the memo. Because my own journey propelled me immediately into metaphysics, I had trouble seeing how this was possible. My finding was that this contemporary snobbery was not based on any demonstration that metaphysics is impossible or unnecessary but upon a post-Modern acceptance of the subjectivity of reason and its inability to discern objective truth. The result reduces philosophy to sociology, psychology, and anthropology paired with a deference to contemporary physics on the nature of reality. To this post-Modern disposition I was unsympathetic. I could see how such cynicism follows from the failures of Modernity. But I did not see how this failed experiment proved the impotence of reason to yield truth. As I said, I had no preconceived bias favoring the new to the old. I could grant that the Modern project failed, but I saw this as little more than a set of warning signs about deadends. I was not sympathetic to skepticism. As a first principle, I was committed to the idea that properly functioning faculties are aimed at truth-telling. And I saw something incoherent in the post-Modern disposition to speak decisively about the limits and subjectivity of reason, as if they were describing objective truths about reality, all while simultaneously denying the capacity of reason to discern objective truths about reality.

I found that many traced the “death of metaphysics” to Immanuel Kant. Thus, I devoted years to studying Kant’s work, seeking to understand his thought and his case against metaphysics. I would become known as a Kant scholar because of the influence of this research.⁷ However, unlike most Kant scholars, who delve into his writings because they find him insightful, my disposition was quite the opposite. Few figures in the history of ideas do I think are more wrong than Kant. As for his attack on metaphysics, I was underwhelmed. If Kant is the murderer of metaphysics, then the report of the death of metaphysics is grossly exaggerated. Suffice it to say for our purposes here, I determined that Kant’s rejection of metaphysics begins with a supposition, namely, his own system. If one rejects his system (specifically, his “turn to the subject”),⁸ then nothing Kant says follows. And I did reject Kant’s system. I saw it as little more than a symptom of the burgeoning failures of the Modern project. Nonetheless, so as to fortify my commitment to metaphysics against critics, I devoted inordinate amounts of time to his work.

The second prong of my research program was constructive. Here, my heretical impulses flourished. I delighted in questioning the assumptions of classical theism, challenging the various omnis traditionally predicated of God. I proudly opposed the God-world divide of theism, embracing panentheism and even toying pantheism. I happily questioned the infallibility of Holy Scripture, arguing that the evolution of the sacred texts is as developmental as both God and world. Although I retained a commitment to the Trinity and dual-nature Christology — these being remnants of the catechesis I received as a youth — my commitments bore only a thin resemblance to the most superficial reading of the formulations of Nicea and Chalcedon. I eyed body-soul dualism with suspicion, being prone toward physicalism.⁹ As a result, I questioned the immortality of “the soul,” presumed in the traditional doctrine of Hell, and gravitating toward annihilationism.¹⁰ And the list goes on. 

Beneath all of these innovations sat a disdain for Platonism as the poison to be expunged from the anemic body of historical Christian doctrine. My remedy to Platonic realism was my commitment to nominalism,¹¹ and my remedy to its dualism was my commitment to materialism — commitments borne out in the types of innovations cataloged above.

A critical shift occurred in my thinking when finishing my master’s thesis, however. My work had evolved into a direct assault on the metaphysics of the Augustinian tradition in order to make way for an alternative metaphysic of nominalism and materialism — essentially a resuscitation of the Mechanical Philosophy with a trajectory toward process thought. But during the construction of my alternative, I hit a roadblock. I realized that my burgeoning system of thought required the concept of corruption, of a distinction between the normal and the abnormal, the properly formed and malformed, not as descriptions of general commonalities but as normative prescriptions. Yet, within my nominalist-materialist framework, grounding prescriptive norms proved difficult. The only solution I could offer was that God has an ideal concept of the thing in question, and the material formulation is divergent from that ideal. In this moment, I became a Platonist, accepting the concept of divine archetypal Ideas. Realism suddenly seemed inevitable and nominalism indefensible. The specific form of realism to which I would ascribe was not yet clear to me, but I knew I could no longer embrace nominalism or its fruit.

The shift upset my entire project and sent me back to the history of ideas with fresh eyes. Now ancient philosophy seemed to me like a steady trek toward truth. I saw in these ancient writers a shift from the early materialist philosophies of the pre-Socratics toward something approaching realism, a trajectory that culminates in Plato and flowers in Aristotle and the NeoPlatonists. The embrace of realism by the Alexandrian Jews (especially Philo) and early Christians now seemed more reasonable, more defensible. In relooking at Modernity, I could now diagnose its fatal cancer that led to skepticism and the death of reason, namely, nominalism. I saw how empiricism and the Mechanical Philosophy was essentially an anti-Aristotelian experiment.¹² Now, when reading the warning signs of Modernity, I found that they declare the very thing I had learned in my own journey: Turn back, o man, for nominalism is a dead end. 

Yet, for all of this clarity on the history of ideas, my perspective on the doctrines of Western Christianity were unchanged. I could now understand why Latin theology embraced Platonism. But I continued to see dissonance between the portrait of God painted by the Latin scholastics and the portrait painted by Holy Scripture. Hence, while my nominalism (and, by extension, materialism) crumbled in my hands, my commitments to the process picture of God remained. 

Encountering the Eastern Church Fathers

My study of the history of ideas has always favored primary sources. From the start, my preferred method was to read a figure thoroughly without any outside influence in order to gain a sense of his thought and then explore the scholarly literature. This allowed me to form a sense of the figure’s thought based on careful textual analysis that I would, then, carry into the scholarly discussion. Having familiarized myself with the source material and developed a perspective of my own allowed me to assess these debates in an informed way, but it also helped me to see whether I had something to contribute, whether I had seen something that others had missed. (In the case of Kant studies, this was certainly the case, and it would not be the last such instance.) 

Upon entering my doctoral program, I was initiated into research methodology, the method endorsed by the program and taught by Richard Muller, one of its premier scholars who would become my Doktorvater. I was delighted to find that Richard used the same approach I did — only better. This emphasis on primary source analysis pervaded my doctoral program, and it was this method that ultimately led me to the Eastern Church fathers.

I enrolled in a class on the disputes from the Council of Nicea (325 AD) through the Council of Constantinople (381 AD). My study of Church history had familiarized me with the events of this time and with its key figures, but I had never delved into the primary sources with any depth. The reason was that my entry point for the history of Christian thought was Augustine. Augustine admits that he hated Greek and read so little of it that he could gain virtually nothing from the Greek fathers.¹³ Hence, my research program, which began with Augustine and then moved to both his influences and those he influenced, never intersected with Eastern patrology. When that changed, so did my life.

The class began with the Arian dispute. The assigned texts included a myriad of texts by Athanasius and Arius, of course, but also included works by Alexander of Alexandria and the Council of Nicea itself. From there, we went on to study the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus) and their opponents, such as Apollinaris, Aëtius, and the Eunomians. Truthfully, I did not expect to find much that was new in these works. By this point, I had familiarized myself with the various “systems” of Christian thought — Latin patristic, medieval and post-Reformation, Protestant and Catholic. I rarely encountered theological works that surprised me. If one understands Thomism, for example, the works of a Thomist tend to contain the expected. However, when reading the Eastern Church fathers, what I encountered was jarringly unexpected, unfamiliar, even perplexing. 

When reading on the Trinity, what the Cappadocians seemed to describe was three members of a common species, a stance utterly foreign to my understanding of the Western doctrine.¹⁴ Were this not perplexing enough, they spoke of a distinction between the essence of God and the energies of God, but I had no idea how to parse the difference.¹⁵ I was nonetheless struck by the ways in which their talk of God’s energies used language that mirrored my process sensibilities, describing God’s energetic activity as free, spontaneous, active, imminent, accessible. I could see its importance to their religious epistemology, that somehow the divine essence is unknowable but the energies are not. Equally evident was that knowledge of God via his energies required some kind of participation in God by sacrament and holiness.¹⁶ But as intriguing as all this was, the essence-energies distinction was utterly opaque to me. 

On matters of salvation, I noticed a conspicuous absence of penal substitution. Salvation, it seemed, was accomplished by the Incarnation itself, though the crucifixion and resurrection were certainly part of this — as was Christ’s descent into Hades, which these fathers appeared to treat as salvific, on par with the crucifixion and resurrection. Evident enough was that the Son of God’s acquisition of our nature somehow healed that nature, but how was unclear to me — not least because the divine energies played a role. And within this context, I stumbled again and again on the shocking language that salvation has as its goal that the believer is “made God” by his participation in the divine nature.¹⁷ 

Amongst these many anomalies, I also discovered commitments that, far from mirroring Western orthodoxies, more closely mirror the moral intuitions that drove me from Western orthodoxies. Not only did I find no doctrine of inherited guilt, the very notion seemed alien to the Eastern mind. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, dismissed out of hand the idea that deceased infants are damned, since they are not yet moral agents and thus bear no guilt.¹⁸ As for whether God may freely do with sinners whatever he pleases, Athanasius argued the contrary — it would be unworthy of God to allow demonic schemes to undo his creation, making it incumbent upon the provident God to rescue his creatures.¹⁹ On predestination, I found that the Cappadocians (and Origen before them) dismissed outright the notion that God predetermines that a person should be damned and then orchestrates this outcome. For this would be unjust and to ascribe such a deed to God would be blasphemous.²⁰ In this, I discovered a hermeneutic principle that pervades the Eastern fathers, namely, that a text must never be read in a way that runs contrary to what we know to be true of God. Hence, Gregory of Nyssa instructs that one never read the OT as ascribing passions of vengeance to God, for example. Rather, he, like Origen before him and the other Cappadocians with him, show how OT passages that appear to preach divine vengeance are in fact aimed at the redemption of the wicked — even in the cases of Pharaoh.²¹  In such principles, I found, not a violation of my moral intuitions, but resonance with my view that such intuitions are a window into the divine. Thus, the dissonance between conscience and Christianity (as presented in these writers) began to evaporate before my eyes.

For all that remained unclear to me about Eastern Christianity, one thing was abundantly clear: This was a form of Christianity unlike anything I knew, a Christianity that was upending all of my conclusions about the history of the Christian religion. In these Eastern writers, I was discovering a form of Christianity that resonated with my moral intuitions, one that presented a dynamic deity in concert with that which I sought in process philosophy, one that, in short, offered everything I sought to construct on my own. And yet, this Christianity was not the fabrication of some contemporary metaphysician in rebellion against tradition but the work of figures central to the formation of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th century. An obsession grew within me to not only understand their thought but to discover whether such theology existed outside of this handful of figures. 

All of the aforementioned threads would prove important to my thought, but my point of entry was the Arian dispute.²² I noticed that Athanasius consistently argued that Arius’ position (that the Son was created) carries a host of entailments. According to Athanasius, if the Son did not exist and then came into being, it follows that he is mutable, corruptible, accidentally good, and incapable of offering life to humanity. The case seemed to me to be a non sequitur. Why can’t God create an immutable creature? Arius himself raised the same question. Or rather, he pivoted to asserting exactly that — the Son is created, but he is created immutable. Yet, Athanasius rejected the reply as impossible. To be created is to be mutable. I wondered if the response was empty rhetoric, but the other pro-Nicenes argued the same. So it seemed there was a rationale I was missing. 

As I dug deeper, I discovered a form of realism beneath Athanasius’ case, a realism that sees generation similarly to Aristotle.²³ Athanasius presumes that anything that did not exist and then came to exist has a nature (or form) that was once a mere  abstraction — the type of abstraction brought to mind when considering its possibility prior to its existence. The shift from mere abstract to concrete reality occurs when something with the potential to manifest that form changes, moving that potential into concrete reality. Like Aristotle, matter is identified as the locus of potential. We might think of matter, here defined, like a shapeless bit of fabric that has the potential to take on any number of shapes. Were it draped around a ball, for example, it would take on sphericality. The manifest sphericality would not be native to the fabric but communicated to it by the ball. So, in the same way, matter is potentially any number of things. Or phrased otherwise, matter has the potential to bear any number of forms. Generation is the manifestation of form in matter, when material potential moves into concrete reality.  

Such a view of generation was evident in the fact that while Athanasius spoke about creation out of “nothing” (ouk on), when speaking about generation, he would speak of the movement from “non-being” (mē on) into being — mē on being the ancient term for matter as potential. I found that the reading is confirmed by Arius himself, who replies that he does not believe the Son of God derives existence from matter, confirming that this is the case against him.²⁴ 

The revelation unlocked for me Athanasius’ case, and the case of the pro-Nicenes generally. In suggesting that there was a time when the Son of God was not, Arius is admitting that there was a time when the Son was an abstract possibility that then transitioned into concrete reality. The reason there is no getting around his mutability is because the shift from potential to real is a mutation. Hence, to say the Son is created mutable lands in formal contradiction: He cannot mutate, but he mutated into being. This metaphysics also illuminated the other entailments of Arianism, argued by the pro-Nicenes. For example, corruption. Keep in mind that matter is nothing but the potential to be something. Forms that manifest within it are not native to it, and thus any form that enters matter can also retreat from matter. For this reason, the same potential that makes generation possible (receiving form) also makes the inverse possible (the release of form), which is called corruption. Thus, every creature has the innate potential for either positive (generation) or negative (corruption) change. And in the case of free creatures, who have moral and spiritual potential, such capacity includes the capacity to grow in virtue or descend into vice. Hence, the pro-Nicene charge that Arius’ Son is not only corruptible but could become evil, like the Devil.²⁵

More importantly, however, this insight unlocked for me the pro-Nicene understanding of Christianity generally and its gospel specifically. Having followed the train of reasoning to the conclusion that creatures are corruptible of metaphysical necessity, this naturally raised the question of whether there is any escaping corruptibility. Can a creature ever hope to become good and rest in that goodness? Or does the threat of falling into vice always remain? To my surprise, I found that the Eastern fathers were not only attuned to such a question, but it was central to their understanding of Christian hope. 

Evident already was that the Incarnation had as its end the healing of humanity and the believer being “made God” — deification. In their talk of deification, it became clear that they understood Christ’s offer of immortality and incorruption in the resurrection to come by participation in the divine nature. In other words, God offers to the creature his own immortality, his own incorruption. And I found that the Eastern fathers understood incorruption to include “unturnability,” a participation in God’s own benevolence that allows the creature to rest in Goodness and ends the prospect of retreat into moral or spiritual corruption. 

I could see that deification was closely linked with the divine energies. As I dug deeper into the essence-energies distinction, I could see why.²⁶ I found that the distinction is traceable to Aristotle, was received and developed by Alexandrian Judaism, and echoes in Paul before ever arriving in the hands of the Eastern fathers. I found that the distinction is between a nature and its operative powers, such as the distinction between mind and the power of speech that expresses mind. The Eastern fathers, like Alexandrian Jews before them, recognized that in some cases, the operative powers, or “energies,” of a nature are communicable to something of a different nature. To use a favorite analogy of the fathers, the nature of fire expresses itself in the energies of heating and lighting. Metal has an innate susceptibility to these energies, such that metal can commune with fire until it comes to glow and burn. The inflamed metal does not become fire, but it nonetheless participates in the nature of fire via the energies of fire. So, in the same way, man as an icon of God is susceptible to the attributes of God.²⁷ We are made to commune with God and, through that communion, participate in the energies of God. And amongst these energies are immortality, incorruption, and unturnability. Such participation was offered to man prior to the Fall, and the Incarnation has as its goal the restoration of this participation.

The view made sense of the Arian disputes and the Christological disputes to follow. Athanasius and the pro-Nicenes saw Arianism as deadly poison because the Incarnation offers humanity a bridge back to the divine nature, the only nature that can offer immortality, incorruption, and unturnability. But if the Son is a creature, then his nature is no less susceptible to corruption than our own. In short, Arianism undermines Christian hope. And so it was in the Christological disputes of Constantinople. Apollinaris’ Christology undermined the full humanity of Christ, and the concern here was the same. Christ takes on our nature in order to heal it and reunite it with God. If his appropriation of our nature is incomplete, then so is our healing.

Here, I discovered a picture of Christianity unlike anything I had ever known. In all that I had read from Western writers, Christianity was a judicial religion. God is primarily a moral lawgiver and judge. The human condition is marked by moral defect, moral infractions, and future judgment. The Incarnation provides judicial rectitude to rescue believers from impending condemnation. But in the Eastern fathers, I found a different picture. Man, as an icon of God, is made to partake of the divine nature, and in that partaking, he transcends his own nature, putting off his mortality for immortality, his corruptibility for incorruptibility, his turnability for unturnability. By partaking of the divine nature, man’s higher nature — the rational soul, which is the icon of God within him — is not only deified but this icon communicates divine life to man’s lower nature, raising it up, enabling it to partake of God in ways it otherwise could not. And this really is the vision of the cosmos writ large. Those things that are most godlike — the hierarchy of angels and the soul of man — are meant to serve as conduits, mediators, imbibing God’s energies and carrying those energies to things lower in the chain, like inflamed metal that carries the heat and light of fire within it. These icons are made to carry divine light down to things lower in creation, to things otherwise incapable of deification, such as animals and plants. Such is the Eastern patristic vision of the cosmos: God pouring himself out, cascading divine energy down through the hierarchy of angels to man, to animals, plants, even rocks, until all things are energized, deified, aglow with uncreated light, transformed and elevated, partaking of God as much as they are able.

Yet, this cascade is impeded when the icons of God fall. When angels or man turn from God, these conduits of divine energy cut off the channels of God to the world, stopping the flow of life to things subordinate to them. And in cutting off divine life, death takes hold. In angels, this turning from the Good is a spiritual twisting, a distortion of their nature. In man, the higher nature is subjugated to the lower nature, and the natural mortality of the lower takes hold, as do the passions, which gain unnatural sway over the soul, crippling its ability to deify. And for those things beneath man, set in his care, for whom the deification of man is their only means of partaking of God, these, too, are cut off from God, bound by their innate mortality. 

This is the demonic scheme aimed at dragging the cosmos away from God, banishing from the world the light of God, plunging the cosmos into darkness and death. And it is into this darkness that the Creator himself enters, becoming a creature, bearing human nature. He enters our nature in order to untwist his creation from within, setting it right and uniting it again to himself that he might pour life into it and heal it.

I found the vision compelling, even beautiful. Though years earlier, the metaphysical commitments of the Eastern fathers would have troubled me, my newfound commitment to realism made me more than open to it. What I saw in their realism, however, was something more than mere metaphysics. I saw how realism informed the Eastern patristic view of creation, which set the table for the creaturely condition. I saw how the common nature of the members of the Trinity was central to the insistence that the life of the Father is also in the Son, who is of the same nature. I saw how the common nature of man is what makes it possible for Christ to heal humanity, taking on that which is within each of us. Suddenly, realism and its role in Trinitarianism and Christology was not simply a tool for schematizing a set of Christian commitments or solving a puzzle; instead, it bore very real importance to the Christian hope. The doctrine of the common nature of the divine persons, the common nature of man, and the union with that common nature in Christ with the divine nature was all exceedingly practical, central to understanding what has gone wrong in the world and what has set it right. 

I was staring into a Christianity unlike anything I had ever encountered and which offered everything I had sought to construct on my own, only far better, far more compellingly, far more beautifully. The question that grew within me was whether this strange form of Christianity was relegated to these 4th century figures or whether it could be found in other Eastern Christians. So, I obsessively dug, looking backward into the Eastern fathers before the pro-Nicenes and forward into the other five Ecumenical Councils and later fathers, such as Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, et al. 

Much to my surprise, I found that these other fathers and councils carried within their breast the very same understanding of Christianity that I had read in the 4th century. Even more shocking was that they insisted that this was the Christianity they received from the Apostles themselves, which was entrusted to the fathers before them, and which they now seek to preserve and propagate. Candidly, I had never seen such continuity of thought across so many hundreds of years. I recognized developments in language or in the articulation of concepts, but I saw no real innovation, no real divergence. The continuity struck me as miraculous, as did the frequency with which the Ecumenical Councils course corrected against all odds. Here, in these writers and in these councils, it seemed I was staring at the hand of providence, at the fulfillment of Christ’s promise to lead his Church into all truth.

My lingering question was whether this Christianity still exists. Keep in mind that I studied all of this by tracing the works of the fathers. I had not yet encountered Eastern Orthodoxy. But I soon connected the Eastern in Eastern Orthodoxy with the Eastern patriarchates of Rome and thus with the Eastern fathers. So I determined to investigate whether this tradition persisted today within the Orthodox Church.

A Journey East

By the providence of God, I lived only blocks from a very large, very beautiful Orthodox Church. I entered in search of a priest and met ​​Fr. Raphael Daly. He listened to my rather lengthy story about my spiritual journey and what I had discovered in the Eastern Church fathers. He then confirmed that the theology I was describing was indeed the theology of the Orthodox Church. He pointed to icons around the temple of the very figures I had been reading. The tradition they articulated and defended is the same tradition lived today in the Orthodox Church. I was razed to the ground. How had I never encountered this tradition before? At Fr. Daily’s invitation, I resolved to attend a Divine Liturgy to see for myself this lived tradition.

Here, I should offer an aside for further context. The temptation, when telling the story of a journey, is to create a straight line, and sometimes, in the telling, excursions and sideroads fall away. A pair of such sideroads are critical to understanding the impact of my first Divine Liturgy. 

The first concerns the intersection of art and religion. As an artist, I had always been fascinated by religious art that adorned temples and cathedrals. Such artwork drew me in, not only for technical reasons, but because it seemed somehow transcendent, as if its religious function elevated it, as if it somehow served as a conduit for something greater than itself. Such artwork and the temples they adorned seemed to carry that odd intersection indicative of holiness itself, which lays one low by its sublimity and tempts one to retreat with dread while simultaneously drawing one in by that very same sublimity and dread. I found the phenomenon alluring, captivating, seductive, but I also had no place in my thinking — especially in the days of my nominalism — for understanding this phenomenon as anything more than a psychological effect, though it certainly felt as if it was something more. 

The second bit of context was my fascination with ancient worship. As I am sure is evident from the foregoing, I was drawn to the ancient religion of the kind I read about in the OT. Temples. Priests. Ritual. Fascination is the wrong word for what I saw in these. I saw true religion. Or rather, if religion is real, if the gods are real, if there is an invisible world that man may approach by means of religion, then this is what it should look like, what it should feel like. Approaching deity should not feel safe or comfortable. Its dwelling should not feel common but sublime, otherworldly. For this reason, one of my favorite texts during my process years was the book of Leviticus. Strange as it may sound, peering into a priest’s manual of the ancient world conveyed something of the nature of the Hebrew God and, with this, the prescriptions for approaching such a deity. In this, I saw true religion. But I presumed that such religion was a relic of the past, something no longer practiced in our world today — a fact that deeply lamented.

My experience of the Divine Liturgy drew together these disparate threads. Not only did I enter a living, breathing embodiment of the philosophy and theology of the Eastern Church fathers I had grown to love, but I entered temple worship of a kind I thought had been lost to time and history. Within this temple I encountered holiness and sublimity, and adorning every inch was religious art that carried that sense of transcendence. With every sense, I was assailed with the reality of what I had groped after only abstractly. Impossible though it seemed, I was beholding the object of my soul’s longing. 

I wish I could say that this marked the end of my journey, but it did not. As compelling as the Divine Liturgy was, I was left with a great many questions, questions that are all too common when a person first encounters Orthodoxy — about Mary, hagiography, iconography, and so on. I began to meet regularly with Fr. Daly to dialogue about such matters. He wisely pointed me back to the very fathers I had been reading, insisting that these practices are traced back to them, as are the answers to my questions. So, I began to dig back into the Eastern Church fathers, and time and again, I found that their answers were far more compelling than my objections. As one objection after another fell, I finally crossed a threshold: While questions remained, I had seen enough to be convinced that whatever question I might ask of these fathers has a compelling answer. In this moment, I shifted from understanding in search of faith to a faith seeking understanding. And I resolved that this was indeed the true Church, established by Christ and his Apostles, a keeper of the faith once given over to the Saints, which had been preserved in all truth. 

My final entrance into the Orthodox Church would take years. My wife, at the time, had neither knowledge of nor interest in the Orthodox Church, and at the guidance of Fr. Daly, I became a catechumen and resolved to wait for her. The waiting took seven years, a bout with cancer, and the whole of our life falling apart. But in the dust and ashes of that, we finally determined that the one thing we needed more than anything else was the Church. And so, our entire family was chrismated in the Fall of 2015.

1. The standard work on Process Philosophy is Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1979). Second in prominence to Whitehead is Charles Hartshorne. For an introduction to process thought, see John Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976).

2. E.g., Terence Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2005); and Gnuse, The Old Testament and Process Theology. Jewish thinkers influenced by the view include Samuel Alexander, Max Kaddushin, Milton Steinberg, and Abraham Heschel. Heschel in particular was of interest to me during these years.

3. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Penguin, 1990), 108.

4. Both my master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation focus on the problem of evil, the former from a process perspective, the latter as addressed by Leibniz.

5. Based on the arguments from contingency and the principle of sufficient reason, I would go so far as to say that the concept of any world without God is itself incoherent. That is, the world posited by the atheist is no more than semantic nonsense on par with “square circles.” Nonetheless, I grant here, for the sake of argument, the sort of world the atheist dreams that he lives in.

6. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy so named because it deals with matters that are after or beyond physics, such as the fundamental nature of reality, first principles, causality, God, abstract natures, substance, and so on.

7. My most well-known work, credited by many scholars as having a definitive impact on the study of Kant’s philosophy of religion, is my book (co-authored with Chris Firestone), In Defense of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).

8. Kant’s entire system is based on a “Copernican Revolution” in epistemology. Rather than presuming, as the Modern empiricists did, that the mind is a passive blank slate that the world presses in on through the senses, Kant posits the “turn to the subject,” where the mind has innate structures by which it actively organizes that which it encounters through the senses (The Critique of Pure Reason, Bxvi-xviii). Kant’s entire philosophy plays out this supposition. But if one rejects the supposition, one undermines the entire system.

9. Physicalism rejects the existence of the soul, presuming that man is a material body only. Some forms of physicalism, such as emergentism, grant a distinction between mind and body, arguing that consciousness is a phenomenon distinct from the material that gives rise to it, like a magnetic generating a magnetic field. But physicalism rejects a substance distinction between mind (or soul) and body. My own tendency was toward emergentism, largely because I believed that reductionistic materialism ends with determinism, and determinism makes God the cause of evil. For Christian renditions of such anthropologies, see Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Clifford Williams, “Christian Materialism and the Parity Thesis,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 39 (1996): 1-14; Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

10. Annihilationism is the view that the damned are destroyed by God, ceasing to exist, not consciously tortured in perpetuity in Hell. See, e.g., Edward William Fudge, The Fire that Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Judgment, 3rd ed. (Eugune, OR: Cascade Books, 2011, first published 1982).

11. The distinction between realism and nominalism concerns the referent for general nouns. A universal habit of the human mind is to identify generic properties (such as redness or spherical), species (such as human or dog), or genera (animal or plant) and apply the abstraction of these generics to several things that share that property or are members of that species or genus. The question of realism is whether the mind does this because these generics are part of the structures of reality — multiple objects do in fact share common properties or common natures — or whether these generics are mental fictions that the mind invents and imposes on multiple objects that, in reality, have no connection one to another. “Realism” is so named because it takes the position that these generics are real. “Nominalism” is so named because it takes the position that these generics are mere names (from the Latin nomen) that the mind fabricates and imposes on reality. For an overview of realism, see Frederick Copleston, “The Problem of Universals,” in History of Philosophy, 9 vols. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1950), vol. 2, 136-55.

12. For a history of the Mechanical Philosophy and its anti-Aristotelian roots, see Marie Boas, “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy,” Osiris 10 (1952): 412-541. The empiricist opposition to realism is evident in the groundwork of Locke’s project, which attacks innate principles and ideas, hallmarks of Platonism. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols., ed. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book I.

13. Augustine, Confessiones, I.xiv; and De Trinitate, iii.1.

14. In an effort to avoid littering this essay with a catalog of patristic citations, I will instead point readers, as often as possible, to my own works on these topics, which contain the relevant citations and quotations. On the Eastern patristric view of the Trinity, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “The Begotten-Not-Made Distinction in the Eastern Pro-Nicenes,” Religious Studies 55 (2019): 503-535; “Understanding Nicene Trinitarianism,” Christian Research Journal 41:4 (2018): 21-26; and “On ‘Not Three Gods’ — Again,” Modern Theology 24:3 (2008): 331-62.

15. The definitive work on the essence-energies distinction is David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an example of my own understanding of the distinction, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “The Metaphysical Idealism of Eastern Church Fathers,” in The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism, eds. Joshua Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke (Routledge, 2022), sect. IV.

16. See Nathan A. Jacobs, “Kant and the Problem of Divine Revelation:,” in Kant and the Question of Theology, eds. Chris L. Firestone, Nathan A. Jacobs, and James H. Joiner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and “The Revelation of God, East and West,” Open Theology 3 (2017): 565–58.

17. See Nathan A. Jacobs, “Athanasius of Alexandria,” in Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Christian Apologists and Their Critics, eds. R. Doug Geivett and Robert B. Stewart (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming); and “Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory of Nyssa),” in Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion, eds. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

18. Gregory of Nyssa, De infantibus praemature abreptis, 5-6, both Greek and English in On Death and Eternal Life, trans. Brian E. Dailey (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2022).

19. Athanasius, De Incarnatione, 5-6, both Greek and English in On the Incarnation: Greek Original and English Translation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011).

20. Origen, De oratione, XIX; and Philokalia, XXI and XXIII; Commentaria in Epistolam B. Pauli ad Romanos, 7.16.3-8. (PG 14.1143-47); Gregory of Nyssa, Logos Katechetikos, 30.2-31.2, both English and Greek in Catechetical Discourse: A Handbook for Catechists, trans. Ignatius Green (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2019).

21. See Gregory of Nyssa, De oratione Dominica, homily 1 (PG 44:1120b-36d). On Pharaoh, see Origen, Philokalia, XXI and XXIII. Lest any balk at the fact that the latter source is Origen, the Philokalia is a collection of approved texts of Origen, edited by Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus. The same sort of case — that the drowning of the Noahic rebels was ultimately for their redemption — appears in Maximus the Confessor: Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 7 (PG 90.284b-c).

22. For a full exploration of the metaphysics of the Arian dispute discussed here, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “On the Metaphysics of God and Creatures,” passim. On the connection between such metaphysics and the free will defense, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, eds. Joshua Farris and Charles Taliaferro (Ashgate, 2015), 261-75.

23. Cf. Aristotle, Physica, 192a25-33.

24. Arius, Epistula ad Eusebium Nicomediensem (PG 42:212b).

25. For a full catalog and explanation of the entailments of moving into being, see my article, “On the Metaphysics of God and Creatures in the Eastern Pro-Nicenes,” Philosophy & Theology 28:1 (2016): 3-42.

26. My initial efforts to understand the distinction focused on Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 1997), ch. 4. I later discovered the work of David Bradshaw—first his article “The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies,” Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006): 279-98 and then his book Aristotle East and West.

27. On the connection between man as an icon of God and our susceptibility to divine attributes, see Jacobs, “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers,” IV.