Cultural Marxism and Public Orthodoxy

Bolsheviks pause to take a group photo after looting a Church

One could make a career of responding to all of the nonsense that "Public Orthodoxy" spews on a regular basis.

Recently, Ashley Purpura has made the unlikely argument that the services of the Church somehow promote gender fluidity, in her [dare I presume her binary gender?] article: "Beyond the Binary: Hymnographic Constructions of Orthodox Gender,"which begins with the manifestly ridiculous assertion:

"Much like gender itself, Orthodox understandings of gender span a spectrum of diverse views."

Of course, anyone with any concern for the truth who actually knows anything about the Orthodox Church knows that this is not even slightly true. There is not the most microbial fragment of a basis for such an absurd claim. Not even the remotest hint of such a microbial fragment....

But how does this presumably intelligent and educated woman come to make such a baseless statement? One has to be extremely mal-educated to ignore all of the evidence to the contrary of her thesis.

To provide the thinest of a veneer of something like evidence, she argues that there are hymns that celebrate the bravery and endurance of certain women martyrs that speak of their "manly" courage. And so we have to assume that Orthodox monks, who for the most part are the authors of such hymns, secretly wished to promote gender fluidity.

What other evidence does she cite? Well, in our hymns, male chanters sometimes read hymns that speak in the voice of women characters. For example, at the feast of the Annunciation, at the canon, there is a dialogue between the Archangel Gabriel and the the Virgin Mary, and so the fact that a man would read this canon is somehow an example of "gender-bending." By this logic, no one could ever read the Bible aloud without falling into "gender-bending" at some point, since they will inevitably speak words that were spoken by members of the opposite sex.

And so we are supposed to conclude that centuries before anyone ever knew that gender-bending was a thing, the hymns of the Church expressed a widely diverse perspective on gender, and embraced the notion that gender is "fluid"

But then Ms. Purpura asks how it is that the hymns of the Church could embrace gender fluidity when "so much elsewhere in the tradition... reinforces gender expression exclusively along an essentialized binary". Of course the simple solution to this concocted problem is to come to the reasonable, and historically defensible conclusion that Ms. Purpura's starting premise is nonsense, and then no such problem exists.

But the most perplexing question here is how it is possible for someone who is educated and intelligent to come to a conclusion that is so obviously lacking in any actual basis in history or evidence? Well, if we look at her bio at Purdue University, we find the answer. There we find that she

"...reevaluates Byzantine constructions of ecclesiastical hierarchy in light of critical theory...." 

What does that mean? That means she uses a Marxist approach on the material she studies. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Critical Theory:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

Critical Theory seeks to analyze what it studies in terms of Marxist theories of class struggle, and to identify who the oppressors are, and who are the oppressed in any given context, and to interpret their subject matter in ways that liberate the oppressed. So you see, Ms. Purpura most likely does not really believe that centuries of Orthodox monks have been promoting ideas of gender fluidity, but the LGBTQWXYZ community today is (in her view) "oppressed" by ""cisgendered" Orthodox, and so if she can "reinterpret" Orthodox hymnody in a way that helps to liberate the oppressed, it doesn't really matter what the actual truth is, it only matters that the oppressed are liberated from their oppressors.

And all of this is designed simply to overturn the existing order, in order to pave the way for something new. Never mind that the history of Marxism, when put into practice has resulted in the worst slaughter and misery the human race has ever seen. Truth doesn't matter, because, they hope that just maybe... despite all human experience up until now, the next attempts at a Marxist utopia will work in practice as well as its devotees think it works in theory.

One has to wonder, at what point does Archbishop Demetrios in particular and the Greek Archdiocese in general, become bothered by their close association with the so-called "Orthodox Christian Studies Center" at Fordham University, which so consistently promotes the LGBTQWXYZ agenda, not to mention pretty much everything else they publish contrary to actual Orthodox Christian teaching.

Update: In the fuller version of the article, which is referenced at the end, and found here:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/693162

We find the following statement which crosses the line into outright blasphemy:

"Despite stemming from a Byzantine tradition that sanctifies a literary corpus of transvestite or andromimetic nuns, homoerotic mystical imagery, and a patristic tradition of resolving gender division on the path to salvation, present-day Orthodox Christianity through its official and public hierarchical channels maintains a gender binary and the cisgender performance of that binary as normative and spiritually necessary" (p. 528).

When she speaks of "transvestite or andromimetic nuns" she is referring to nuns like St. Theodora of Alexandria, who was a married woman who fell into adultery, and in repentance decided to become a nun, but because she feared that he husband would find her, chose to dress as a man and go to a monastery, where her husband would never think to look. She was later falsely accused of having fathered an illegitimate child, and she did not defend herself, endured the shame, and raised the child herself. Her innocence was only discovered at her death (see her life for more). Such examples are unusual, but exceptional cases due to circumstances, and the Church commemorates her as a woman, not as a man, and certainly not as a gender fluid person of some other non-binary category. To use such examples to promote the acceptance of homosexuality or transsexualism is ridiculous. The suggestion that the services are full of homoerotic imagery is both perverse and blasphemous. The farthest thing from the minds of the hymnographers of the Church would have been anything remotely supportive of the homosexual or gender-queer agenda.

For more information, see:

The Frankfurt School, from "In Our Time BBC Radio 4"

 

Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism, by Jordan B Peterson

Orthodoxy Today has more on the views of Ashley Purpura:

Ashley Purpura: Orthodox Church Needs Women Priests and Bishops

Update 2: Since this article was originally published, Ashley Purpura has gotten a lot bolder. Now she says Christ is queer, gay marriages should be blessed, and sodomy is a path to theosis:

Where it stops, nobody knows.

New, but not improved... A Response to Public Orthodoxy, on the Creed

The botched restoration of the Catholic Icon "Ecce Homo!" (Behold the Man!)

Defacing the English Language, one word at a time...

John Fotopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, in their recent article "Women and the Creed: Who For Us Humans and for Our Salvation," (published by "Public Orthodoxy") have expressed their unhappiness that the Greek Archdiocese has decided to use a translation of the Creed that is in line with pretty much every other translation that English speaking Orthodox Christians have been using for as long as we have had Orthodox Christians speaking English. They are offended by the use of the word "man". Here is the line of the Creed in question,as it is usually translated:

"Who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man..."

And here is their suggested "improvement" to that translation:

"Who for us humans and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became human..."

Aside from the fact that this sounds like a translation done by a Federation Starship's computer, it is simply ugly and unnecessary. It has long been said that the Greek Archdiocese has intentionally used the worst English translations possible, in hopes that people will just forget the whole thing, and keep using Greek. In this case, they are moving in the right direction. The folks at Public Orthodoxy, however, would have them opt for an even more ugly translation then they had previously ("Who for us and for our salvation...").

Their argument, in a nutshell, is as follows:

"...“men” is not the most accurate translation for the word ἀνθρώπους in contemporary English. Rather, translating ἀνθρώπους as “men” can be viewed, at best, as an expression of outdated English usage and, at worst, as an expression of gender exclusive English translation. There is no good reason to use outdated English in a new translation of the Creed or to use a gender exclusive English term when ἀνθρώπους is meant to be inclusive. The word ἄνθρωπος is the generic term for a human being in ancient Greek, while there are other terms for “man” and “woman.” 

It is certainly true that "anthropos" is not a gender specific word in Greek, but "man" is also not a gender specific word in English -- it can be, as the usage has developed, but we still use it in its non-gender specific sense... all of the time.

The PO folks may not have noticed, but the offending word "man" is also found in the word "woman". That is because a woman is a particular variety of man. The word woman comes from the Old English 'wīfman" -- "a wife man." Males use to be referred to as "werman" (a male man) but gradually the first syllable dropped out of common use. So should we opt for "wo-person" over "woman"?

A friend of mine told me about an English professor he had in college (who was a woman) who insisted on using traditional words like "man" in the generic sense, and she had a young female student who objected. The professor responded: "If you were at the beach, and you were told that there was a man-eating shark in the water, would you go swimming? Because if you wouldn't, you're a hypocrite, because you understand full well that "man" refers generically to all human beings."

If someone accidentally killed a woman, and was charged with manslaughter, I doubt a defense that hinged on manslaughter laws applying only to male victims would go very far.

The word "man" goes very deep into the history of Indo-European languages. We find a form of it in Sanskrit: "manu", which has the same meaning. To purge English of the generic use of "man" you would have to deface a good bit more of the language than just that word "man" itself. Even the word "human" has the offending "man" root word. So should we opt for "hu-person"? Or perhaps we should just go with "hu", since the last three letters in "person" might offend those who want to neuter the language. While this might expand the possibilities for future versions of the old "Who's on first?" routine, it is all just silly, and nonsensical.

The translation proposed by PO is certainly defensible in terms of accuracy, but it is indefensible in terms of the aesthetics of the English language. The reason why the King James Version has stood the test of time, whereas no other modern translation has approached its beauty is because the translators of the KJV were not just accomplished biblical scholars, well versed in the pertinent languages they were translating from -- they also were well versed in the language they were translating the Bible into. They had a sense of the English language that few scholars today have -- and clearly John Fotopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou are not among those few, regardless of how well they no doubt grasp the original Greek.

If we followed their proposal here consistently, we would have to make the following changes to our translations of Scripture:

Instead of Pontius Pilate referring to the blooded and beaten Christ with the words "Behold the man!" (John 19:5) we would have him say "Behold the human!" 

Instead of Christ saying: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20), we would have him say "the Son of Human," or more loosely "The human being has no where to lay his head."

And instead of putting off the "old man" at baptism, and putting on the "new man" (Colossians 3:8-10), we would put off the "old human" and put on the "new human."

None of these steps would be an improvement to accuracy, and they certainly would not add to the beauty and majesty of the services in which they were read.

On the broader question of neutering the English language -- there are two major languages that have no gender distinctions at all, and so the two cultures associated with these languages should have been feminist utopias, if gender neutrality was the key to such a thing. The two languages I refer to are Turkish and Chinese. However, I think one could easily defend the argument that women in European cultures have been treated significantly better in the past two thousand years, despite them having to suffer the indignities of being forced to use languages that make gender distinctions. In fact, I think one would be hard pressed to find two literate cultures in which woman have historically been treated worse than that of the Turks and the Chinese -- and I say that as one who otherwise loves Chinese culture, but the way women were (and to a large extent, still are) treated is not the high point of Chinese civilization.

To this day, Chinese girls are often killed at birth, or aborted selectively before birth, because of a very low view of the value of women. When I was in college, I once worked in a Chinese restaurant, and one day I was asked about my family by an elderly Chinese woman who worked there. When I told her that I had four brothers, she said "Your momma have five boy? Oh, she very lucky!" But my mother had five boys because she wouldn't give up trying to have a girl, until having five boys had sufficiently worn her down. One woman came from a culture with perfect gender neutrality in their language, and the other didn't. Feminists somehow think that the culture with gender distinctions is the one that needs to be fixed. Go figure.

Update:

Giacomo Sanfilippo made a comment worth passing on in response to the article at Public Orthodoxy on Facebook: "To say that ἄνθρωπος is un-gendered strikes me as a bit simplistic, and requires nuance. Gen 2 (LXX) uses ἄνθρωπος interchangeably/synonymously with Adam, going so far as to say the ἄνθρωπος (not ἀνήρ) leaves father and mother to cling to his wife."

Christ Himself also quotes this passage (Genesis 2:24) in the Gospels (Matthew 19:5), and the Greek text uses "anthropos" to refer to a male who leaves father and mother and is joined to his wife.

Furthermore, in Matthew 10:35, Christ says: "For I am come to set a man [anthropos] at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."

James Latimir provides yet another example: "Consider 1 Esdras 9:40, where anthropos is used in clear opposition to gyne, as in, ‘men and women.’ (Jerome even translates anthropos in this case as vir!) That would make no sense if anthropos meant genderless ‘human’ (‘humans and women’: Public Orthodoxy are the real bigots! 😂), rather than inclusively masculine ‘man.’"

So clearly anthropos can be used to refer specifically to a male, just as the English word "man" can.

For more information, see:

An Orthodox Look at English Translations of the Bible

King James English and Orthodox Worship

Stump the Priest: The Churching of Boys vs. the Churching of Girls

Question: What is the reason for the difference in practice of churching boys, who are taken behind the altar, and the churching of girls, who are not?

In Baptism, a person is united with Christ and His Church, and becomes a full member of the Church. The Rite of the Churching of an infant who has been baptized is the solemn act of bringing the child into the Church, and offering them to God. Baptisms are now often done inside the Nave of the Church, but historically, baptisms were either done outside (in a flowing river or lake), or in a baptistery that might be separate from the Church altogether, or which is located in the Narthex of the Church. And so, historically, after the Baptism concluded, the newly baptized was brought into the Nave for the first time.

Why is it that boys are brought into the Altar, but girls are only brought in front of the Royal Doors? Both are being offered to God, but their service to the Church in this life will be different. Fr. Victor Potapov says that boys are brought into the Altar, because this is "a sign that he may become a minister of the altar" (On the Significance of the Rite of Churching).

The fact that this has been the universal practice of the Church should be sufficient to convince us that we should accept it, and pass it on without change. However, in our times, when many seek to erase all gender distinctions, many now object to this practice as being "unfair.' And this, of course, also raises the question of having altar girls, as well as the ordination of women.

First off, it should be pointed out that there is not an absolute prohibition against women entering the altar. No one should go into the altar who does not have a blessing to do so. Normally, the altar servers are in fact all male, but in convents, nuns often serve as altar servers, as can been seen in this video which shows Greek nuns censing the Kursk Icon:

(If you click here, it will take you to the point of the video in which the censing begins -- which is done very impressively)

It is also true that there were deaconesses in the early church, who did not serve in a way identical to male deacons, but who did enter the altar.

As for the question of the ordination of women as priests, it is often argued that the long standing practice of the Church to the contrary was simply based on cultural prejudices of the day, and that perhaps it never occurred to the Apostles that women might be ordained. The problem with this line of argument is that while Israel had a male only priesthood, the Canaanites had priestesses, and so did the Greeks and Romans during the time in which the Early Church took shape. So clearly Christ and the Apostles made a conscious decision that Presbyters and Bishops would be males only. Not because women are not smart, or capable -- because obviously they are -- but because they have other roles to fill.

I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, which allowed for the ordination of women from its founding (1908). And early on, about 20% of their ministers were women, but by the time I was growing up in that denomination, I never saw a local Church that had a woman functioning as a pastor. When I was studying to be a minister, there were some women that were also preparing for ordination, but when you asked them what they wanted to do as ministers, the ones I went to school with all wanted to do things that they could have done in the Orthodox Church without having been ordained: children's ministry, music ministry, etc. So why is it that in a denomination that allowed women to be ordained as elders, that almost none of the women wanted to serve as pastors? Because being the pastor of a Church is a fatherly role. Like it or not, men and women are different, and they each have unique attributes that they bring to a parish that are necessary for a healthy and balanced community. Priests in the context of the Church play a fatherly role, and usually their wives, along with other strong women in the parish play a motherly role. Both roles are needed.

When I think of the best examples of Orthodox womanhood, I think of the Most Holy Theotokos, for one, who was never in the limelight during her life, but who is more honorable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim. Aside from the God-man Himself, there is no other human that has ever lived that even comes close to her -- man or woman.

I also think of the Holy New-martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who was a strong woman who did great things for the Church, was loved by the people, and died a Martyr's death. She lived a life of humility and service, and was fearless in her intention to remain faithful to Christ. And while in this life she may never have entered the altar of a Church, in my parish's altar, on the Holy Table itself, there is a relic of hers that is in our Antimins, upon which we celebrate every liturgy, and without which we could not celebrate the Liturgy at all. Whether we are able to enter the Altar in this life is not nearly as important as the space we will occupy for all eternity.

One of the most important Christian virtues is humility, and one of the most important arenas to exercise that humility is when it comes to receiving the Tradition of the Church, and passing it on without change to the next generation. It is not for us to judge the Tradition of the Church -- it is for us to be judged by that Tradition. It is not for us to conform the Tradition to the fads of our time, but rather for us to conform ourselves to that Tradition, despite those fads.

Update: Fr. Andrew Damick makes a somewhat contrary case in his article: "The Churching of Infants: Reflections on Liturgics in a Pan-Orthodox World." In the comment section, he commented on this post:

"...Fr. John’s piece is basically explaining his understanding of why his church does things the way they do. But it is only one practice among several and a relatively later one and not historically normative. He does say of his church’s practice “this has been the universal practice of the Church,” but offers no evidence that that is so. The notes from Fountoules demonstrate that this is not so."

I would note however, that the notes from Fountoules, which he references, specifically state: "Today, only males are taken into the altar, baptized or not." Which shows that this has been the universal practice. Whether it has always been is another question.  And in fact, the Book of Needs, published by St. Tikhon Seminary Press states in a note:

"The pattern for entering the Altar with the infant is not stated in the Book of Needs [i.e., it is not spelled out], but it is taken from St. Simeon of Thessalonica: The Priest carried the infant (if a male) into the Altar through the south door, and, circling the Holy Table (when he reaches the east side) he inclines the infant to the Holy Table, as a sign of veneration to the Holy Table, and then, having placed the infant by one of  the icons in the Altar, near the place where is the Table of Oblation (if it be in a separate room), he takes him up from the Altar and sets him on the Ambon. But, if the infant is female, then the Priest does not bring her into the Altar, but sets his face towards one of the Icons near the Royal Gates, and then places her on the Ambon" (The Great Book of Needs," Volume I, St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 1998, p. 15).

In any case, there may well have been different practices over the centuries, but the practice which we have received is in fact the practice that the entire Church had adopted, at least at some point.

See also: Stump  the Priest: The Priesthood