Comments by "Ivan Engel" (@ivanengel8887) on "Dr. Timothy Patitsas - Ethics of Beauty" video.

  1. Meek does not mean lukewarm, it means that we don't want to rush to judge, and that we ultimately leave it up to God. But there are times where we need to embody God's will on Earth despite vengeance being only His. Those times come when we come to a place where we do have legitimate authority. And even the lowest on the rung have some responsibility for their fellow man, however small. I'm not the first person in a group who would rush to say that the line of presentation of "meekness" I hear in Dr Patitsas ends up being not only ineffective, but it is also a defense of ineffectiveness itself. I don't want to be that guy. And I also agree fully with what he says regarding the saints and the healing that saints can effectively do by their mere presence. Love works. But the "works" part is not redundant. Otherwise it's just gummy-bear Gnosticism. I'm saying all of this with a prayer in my heart. We cannot be expected not to do anything just because we are not saints yet, the miracle is that even our broken love works sometimes by reasons we can't fully comprehend. We mustn't rush to solutions which are not ours to offer and tradition is about respecting the hierarchy and knowing our place in it. But the idea that meekness is somehow this soppy attitude towards the foreign I don't think we need to "slow down" as much as repent. But we cannot repent for others. And love is not a warm fuzzy feeling.
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  2.  @BarbaPamino  Yes, exactly.
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  3. I would challenge the idea that science can know. It doesn't have the epistemology for it. Either we go full Revelation, and accept "science" is just a misnomer, and it fully depends on Revelation for it to even make sense, or we make this ever-bloating and increasingly expensive attempt to save the Enlightenment from itself on its own terms. We can definitely correct them to keep the good stuff, but if we grant too much to it then we will err. And granting it the possibility of knowing, when knowing is an incarnational thing, is probably going too far already.
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