Comments by "Ivan Engel" (@ivanengel8887) on "Heavy Things Lightly"
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I think the doubts agbout Pageau, who I admire deeply, come from a place of envy. I envy people who are comfortable with the West in the West, and by this I mean: I want to be surrounded by Orthodox people who help me get deeper in the faith, I long not just for fellowship but also the very ascetical effort in communion to the very heights of sainthood. Being surrounded by Westerners is the opposite, and I feel it as a blunting and stunting of the faith. So Christ can go to the lepers and the prostitutes, but I'm not Christ. When I'm a saint perhaps I can go back down from the center back into the margin, but I hate it here. It's filthy, degraded and not what I believe I was made for. But on the other hand, I was made for being able to endure it, so there's that.
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Super glad you asked the question about finding a wife for orthodox male converts. Speaking as an unmarried man who's dated many orthodox women before, they're mostly feminists even if they'd say the opposite. You can say, "What? How do you know my daughters are feminists?" I might be wrong about them in particular, but I've also listened to you speak, and I've also heard the "I don't like rigorists" before from lots of women. It's basically "I don't want to be yoked". Every man who would expect them to be wives is seen as a tyrant. This does not bode well.
If you're going to do a podcast about how the old world is better because they weren't rugged individualists and they weren't offended by notions of authority or submission, I must stress, we don't get to be too picky about who we submit to. I don't make Christ to my liking. I don't make my spiritual father to my liking, I don't make my bishop to my liking. That is "Church-of-one" behavior. People don't want to be subjugated. But Christ did come to subjugate us all, we just don't want to call it yoke. Though it is easy and the burden is light, it is still a yoke. I pray your daughters don't grow old before they realize that prince charming ain't coming to sweep them off their feet and fulfill their fantasies, or that they pick a weak man because he doesn't have a standard so they're free to do whatever they want (and in the end, they end up resenting them and becoming debauched). In the name of the "best ideals" we don't manage to do the least. I see it all the time.
Women tend to think that because they might be physically attractive and because they have the market to their favor that they're a great catch when it comes to their way of being. They mistake the validation they get for their beauty as if it was validating their virtue. Most of the times a man will date a woman for a year until they find something they dislike in them and ditch them, and he's usually better off because it's not hard for a man to find a younger wife. But how many years do women have to date? The window is very small, it's always later than we think, and women who jump from one man to the next quickly don't really confront who they ought to be in order to be fitted to someone else, they're trying to find someone who fits with their idealized lives (or the ones that their parents gave them). By the time they wake up they're no longer as physically attractive and they haven't worked on their own flaws or their own salvation enough to justify the fact that they're simply not as young, not as attractive, not as colorful or cute. They're just... spent on frivolities. It's the same for men who are older and poor. To be young and poor, but driven, is almost charming. To be old and poor sucks.
Men might be poor and immature nowadays, but the women I've met are, generally speaking, much worse spiritually speaking. It's just not as evident because women's flaws aren't as noticeable. I see the men struggle mightily, while the women I know have either had really good parents do the heavy lifting for them (and they're a very small minority), or are simply coasting by and using appearances to seem better while their inner life is terrible. The quiet/shy/insecure ones are the most deceptive in this regard.
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I got the Nous, and the example Uncle Seth gives of rules being different for different people already exists and is called "economia" and personalism (kings being the ultimate arbiters). Traditional societies didn't have a rigid concept of laws like modernity but relied on people making contextual decisions. He's right about Constitutions not being good, and free speech being a lie. But Uncle Seth should really read more philosophy and understand where those ideas come from, cause Orthodox people aren't big fans of "free speech". That's an Enlightenment idea. Constitutions are post-Enlightenment creations.
Uncle Seth's argument about the *percentage of people who can follow "the rule" being small is inherently technocratic*. It's what the Spanish Inquisition tells Christ in "The brothers Karamazov": your laws (Christian love) are too harsh but ours are meant to make these useless idiots into good cogs in the machine. See? Our laws are so good, so go and don't come back! We're the experts and are successfully managing this enterprise.
Which leads to his argument that laws exists to make society continue. Tell that to the Spaniards who are on the brink of losing Catalonia and Basque country. Why would people want to remain a part of "the society" and not fragment when they can have their own "laws" and pay no taxes upwards to a centralized government? His argument is "pope of one" liberalism, the kind that thinks that authority comes from below and that this can somehow give unity. But *authority doesn't come from below*, that's just fragmentation, death, reducing to the lowest common denominator.
So is he denying the Western decadence we're seeing right now? Fragmentation is the inevitable consequence of liberalism. So the "whatever keeps the society together" becomes a rudderless tyranny where "good" becomes completely relative to what the technocrat believes is good. But there is no way to know "what's better" without first knowing what is good.
Empiricism cannot give you morality. The idea that morality can come from empiricism is ridiculous, and it denies the fact that worldviews are prior lenses through which we see the world, not post-hoc rationalizations. Light people be rationalists with a wrong anthropology and gnoseology. They literally don't "know". They say "scientific knowledge" without knowing it means "knowledgy knowledge". So they go "my knowledgy knowledge which I deduced out of my experience gives me the right to rule the world". How about no? How about I'd rather die than let you despoil the world?
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It's a great ad... Is it bad that I know I do not want this for myself? I already have a path I'm pursuing. I don't want to dump on the philosophy behind this because it's what you're always talking about, it seems to be your "authentic" beliefs and you might be attached to them, but I do feel like saying this is important. I agree with the criticism against the Enlightenment, and I'm the first one to espouse it, but it does seem to me that God commanded us to rule creation. We cannot go so far to the other opposite direction that we forget that God's call is pointed and clear. We need to gain the phronema, clear our nous, and embody God's mind in our own, to be transformed in the renewing of our mind. Sacrifice is necessary, but the question is what do we sacrifice and to whom? What shape will it take?
I don't know all of the fruit I will bear or not, but I'm already in the process of transformation, and although I agree we should focus on real relationships, on building things through love, I don't believe that the exact shape of the sacrifice we ought to make appears brightly as a by-product of our interaction with the other... there is a sense of losing ourselves to them and their wants. That is the same thing that the woke want and believe. I believe the shape of the sacrifice we ought to make, our destiny if you will, is written in God's plan, and is both unique and universal.
It's universal in the sense of me not needing to stress too much about my "essence", or my "true or authentic being". I'm a human being and God's instructions are clear. And it's unique in the sense that I have gifts and loves which guide me towards fulfilling my existential promise and actualizing my potential for good. How can we know beforehand? To me it seems impossible.
And in that sense, I do believe that we need to take responsibility for our will and will the good as we are able to actualize it, within ourselves, within our limitations, praying to be able to transcend somewhat the evils of our limitations and embrace them as a means of apprehending the divine in our souls. To the point that we can go to the cross willingly, to forget the divine on the cross, to lose our minds, without losing ourselves.
I believe that meaning is given from above, and in that sense, it's not only sacred, but also a mystical aspect of life that cannot be replaced. Helping other people will certainly bring us closer to God and to the real possibility of mystical transformation. In a sense, it cannot fail. But in another sense it's like the discussion about faith and works: our works often overshadow our faith, and we become proud to the point that works themselves become stumbling blocks to the real encounter with the other. Even the encounter with the other can become an impediment to truly encounter the other, like the woke teach us daily. We hide ourselves in our jobs, in the people and activities we love, but the Lord knows our heart. I feel like going would be a way to hide, instead of being a way to "find myself" (which I don't need to do, but follow Christ and insofar as I'm transformed I'm finding myself in Him).
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I understand all of the arguments you present, I even agree with most of it. Philosophy aside, what is your solution other than finger-wagging? Because I've got plenty of friends like that, and you will not convince them.
I know you have black daughters and a black wife and this is personal for you, I apologize if I offend, it's not my intent at all. But these "white nationalists" come with true statistics that support their claims (which is why they keep growing in size) and they don't want to be part of a polity with "other" people.
I don't think racism is compatible with Orthodox Christianity, but neither is "multiculturalism". We need fewer words and more practical solutions.
Would you allow whites who want to separate to do so? Would you suggest stronger policing and differential taxes? Would you force the whites to get stabbed at higher rates (and to pay higher taxes for the privilege) just to be "color-blind" like progressives?
Let's remove the inherently racist element. I don't think it's unchristian to want to disassociate from godless ghetto people when you yourself have not been either responsible for nor benefitted from the ghettoization. What does a nation in an empire owe another nation? Because if they have a different culture, that might as well be a different nation.
The US is an empire with many nations. Why should the nation of middle-class white people have to pay tribute to the nation of poor ghetto blacks? And how would denouncing their desire to not pay that tribute be Christian? Who would you be to decide for them? You are asking people to lift a burden it's not clear it's theirs to lift. Who are you to decide for them?
Not everyone is called to give their testimony in the same way, and I doubt you will convince white nationalists or people who buy their rhetoric with the line of reasoning you are pursuing. They will think you are "cucked", because your arguments seem to lead to something indistinguishable from progressivism in practice, but also because of your own personal decisions of not marrying within your race (which I don't fault you at all for). I'm just telling you what they would say because I know these folk pretty well, they would say that you are compromised, and at best disregard your opinion because your personal choice to marry a black woman, as if it showed a lack of loyalty to your race or personal degeneracy, etc.
If America doesn't have "one culture", and if this culture is not virtuous, then it's a free-for-all. It is war. Which is why you have a culture war in America that is spreading all over the world. Why should a middle-class white American Orthodox Christian identify himself with a ghetto black atheist American over a middle-class white european Orthodox Christian? Reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus.
If the social contract is broken you don't get to repair it by demanding people who are angry and who feel victimized to keep sacrificing in the name of the very cause they are fighting against. They would sooner consider you an enemy. Without Christ there is no solution.
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@mystic_disciple The Church is not full of saints, it's full of sinners. Where have I said that you need the perfect Orthodox wife? Bold assumption. I think you're presupposing what hasn't been said. It's better to be in the desert than to have a contentious wife. I've had plenty of orthodox women want to marry me, but I turned them down not because I expected perfection, but simply because they weren't fit. There's a difference between the minimum and perfection. People like to dump on men, but the problem is not in men. Most women aren't fit to be good mothers and wives.
Also, what I have said is not polemical at all, on the contrary, it's actually against the canons of the Church to marry outside the Church. To decide to overlook that canon is something a bishop has to choose, it's not a given that we can pretend to normalize. Modernists need to understand the implications of what they attempt tp normalize, because they take grace for granted. One thing is to relax a law, another is to say it doesn't exist altogether.
Pageau was married before he became Orthodox, it's a different situation. Just because his wife didn't convert doesn't mean that he's correct in telling others to find wives outside of the Church.
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I agree with you, John. This is completely backwards. Monarchy and democracy are virtually identical in administrative terms, the biggest difference comes with the whole spiritual and ideological underpinnings of each system. Systems are not value-neutral, they have their own spirit.
Monarchy is not idealistic. It's the only system which recognizes God's authority and which is compatible with Orthodox theology. Why would it be a problem that we're not getting a monarchy ever again? Because it would mean we're in a different age than when monarchies existed, and that the world is soon for destruction.
To simply disregard the fact that monarchies are better than democracies because they might not reapear is weak and inherently progressive. Things are always going downhill in terms of the fall, the alternative is the worldly kingdom that ironically was denounced (simply because there's a fringe of monarchists who want to retake Constantinople). The problem is not empire, the problem is not seeing the royal path and idolizing politics.
I actually think it's the other way around, Fr Siluoan Justiniano is the one expecting an earthly kingdom and over-correcting. Just because we feel that monarchy is probably not going to reappear doesn't mean that wanting one is bad. He doesn't want the world to end, but it will, and he's playing too loose in order to prevent the inevitable. He sounds scared of the end of the world and saying it's others who are scared and finding refuge in ideology. It's not always the case. It was prophesied that the world would end. Jesus reprimanded St Peter when he tried to prevent Christ's death.
Monarchy is not about better governance, it's about faithfulness. I'd support it even if it meant a worse life. Who cares if I'm being persecuted when to be tempted is much worse? Who cares about ease and so called "freedom"? The damned.
I'll pray for Fr Silouan Justiniano who seems gripped by the same worldliness that affects Pageau of trying to redeem the secular... which is the spirit of the world... simply because their view of art is incomplete at a paradigmatic level. It's bad sociology pushing out the pattern of hesychia.
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@sparkomatic I too worry that Pageau extends too many olive branches that should not be offered, and that some of what he teaches is flat out wrong. I think he still makes the margin into the center, to use his language, despite himself denouncing it. There is hipocrisy there, no doubt. But I think that to simply accept or reject is not the appropriate Christian solution, because we're not Christ. If our brother is wrong, we must pray for them, and if we may correct them, we must correct them too. But to disregard or to correct wrongly worsens the problem, to my mind. Ultimately, we know the Father through the Son, which means that we know God by loving our neighbor (which means being in relationship to them). Both the rigorists and the lax have abstracted themselves out and are acting antisocially. Even our parishes are full of people who don't know how to relate, and if people respond to what Pageau is saying (positively or negatively) it is because they are seeking communion. Whether they find it or not is another thing. Pageau can't offer communion, but he can still point, dimly if not perfectly, at the Church. Hopefully he repents of his mistakes.
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@PrayersfromtheRedwoodForest I haven't specified any single flaw nor gone into any single case in particular. As for your comment on me being bitter, it's' completely out of place. You can keep your opinions to yourself, which is something that for some cultural reason Americans don't seem to understand. In due time they will after God has finished allowing your destruction. You seem to be losing your country precisely because of the degeneracy of its culture (which includes brazen comments such as these).
I'm good-looking, strong, smart, cultured, fun. Before I became a Christian I have dated plenty of models, and I get lots of attention from women, after I became a Christian I've had no problem having my pick. I'm not bitter at all, I'm simply defending my brother's interests by stating the fact that a lot of people are modernists and like to shit on men when the reality is that there's a reason why most converts are men.
Men really are becoming more pious than women, that's a fact. Otherwise women would be converting and wouldn't be leaving the faith at such alarming rates, there wouldn't be such a strong feminist move inside the Church trying to subvert it from within or bratty women larping as Orthodox when in reality they're more interested in Instagram than the faith.
The ones who want to pretend these things are not happening are out of line and need to get a reality check, which I'm happy to give them. They're weak, they're lukewarm, they're completely out of place and out of their depth, and they're not living the life they ought to. They are thin-skinned, infantile and girly.
As for it being easier for older men to marry younger women: young men are a liability, while older men are tested and proven, which is why in every culture in every time period except the West at this particular time, it has been the norm for age differences with the older party being the man. Only a modernist who cannot see beyond their own time and particular culture knows this. Women have a brief reproductive window, men do not. It's not complicated.
Men age like wine in this respect, women age like milk. Not only does fertility drop precipitously after 30, but you're not get the years you haven't had children back, so an older women means less children. If you start late you're going to have less children, full stop. Children are not pets or toys, you are commanded to have as many as you can, to say a woman's age does not matter goes against this principle and betrays modernist tendencies.
The "dad bod" point was dumb, but to indulge you in that silly line of thinking: men until the age of 50 can be in shape with relatively little effort. It takes going to the gym 3 times a week and eating properly. It's not hard to do. After 50 it becomes a little bit harder because testosterone drops significantly, but even then it's doable. To even evaluate whether a man is physically strong or as sensually beautiful betrays a modernist bias where women would rate physical beauty higher than virtue (which can improve with age) or potential to support a family (which again can improve with age).
Only an idiot marries just for looks, and while strength and vigor show character and health, the pressure is not hard for men to weather, while it is impossible for women to endure. There's pretty much no argument to be had on that.
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