A Little Child Shall Lead Them

I learned a very poetic fact about the Coptic Church the other day. The way they elect their Pope (which for the Copts is an honorific title for the Patriarch of Alexandria) is lovely: after the old Pope dies, the Church instigates a remarkably democratic process that involves the nomination of candidates (monks at least forty years old, who have at least fifteen years of monastic experience) by at least six bishops or at least twelve members of the General Lay Council of the Church. All the candidates are voted on by an electoral college, convened for the purpose in St. Mark's Cathedral in Cairo; the college consists of bishops, monks, priests, and laypeople. The three men who receive the most votes have their names written down on slips of paper, which are then placed in a box on the altar of the Cathedral. Here's the impressive part: a blind-folded five-year-old child, selected from the congregation, is then led to the altar, and takes a name from the box. The man who is picked in this way becomes the new Papa of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Whimsical? Sure. Faith-filled? Indeed. Endearing? Definitely.

My Resolution

Over the years, I've had various brushes with Orthodox Christianity. There's a Greek Festival in my home town that we attended a few times when I was younger, and apparently my family went to a presentation on Greek Orthodoxy one time while we were there. This was when my older brother and I were very small, so I remember only the barest minimum of what we saw and heard; mostly what I recall is us misbehaving and Mom and Dad having to leave early. Later on, I took a few safaris through the jungles of darkest Wikipedia, and wound up reading about Orthodoxy on more than one occasion. Gradually, the distinction between the Greek and Russian Churches, as well as that between Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy, became clearer. I realized that the history of the Eastern Church- beset by recalcitrant heresies, Byzantine intrigue, Islamic conquest, and more than one kind of dhimmitude since- resembled the kaleidoscopic beauty of its vestments and liturgy. It was startling, to say the least, to someone raised in the Latin Church, who also had a fondness for the spareness of the Middle Ages. We in the West are so used to thinking in straight lines that appreciating the intricate spirals of the East comes with a certain unavoidable disorientation.

There are two formal cuts that have kept the septua-sacramental Christian world severed from full union. The first was not a cut and dry affair, taking years to crystallize into a full-on anathema. This happened after the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, which specified how Christians should understand Jesus Christ as both divine and human. The formula lays down that Jesus is one divine person with two natures, human and divine. The word 'physis,' in Greek, has many meanings, one of which is 'nature;' thus this formula is called the 'dyophysite' formula. An earlier heresy had said that Christ had only one divine nature, his humanity being something he put on, like an emanation or an act; thus he was not really a man. This was called the 'monophysite' heresy.

Now, certain Churches did not entirely agree with the Chalcedonian formulation. Interestingly enough, these Churches were primarily semitic, anchored around Alexandria and the ecclesial family of Syria. These communities referred to themselves as 'miaphysites,' proclaiming a 'united' nature of Christ. Over the years, with the hardening opposition of Byzantine higher-ups, the miaphysites distanced themselves from the Chalcedonian position to such a degree that they were formally anathematized. Thus, the first large-scale unresolved schism in the Church occurred sometime in the late 5th century... a long time ago.

The second and better-known of the great splits occurred in the middle of the 11th century, but it, too, had been brewing for generations. The Pope of Rome and the Patriarchate of Constantinople cut themselves apart with mutual anathemas in 1054. Interestingly again, the split was once more along cultural lines: the Latins and the Greeks divided cleanly into the newly separated Churches.

It doesn't seem coincidental to me that these formalized cuts should be along cultural fault lines. Cult creates culture, no doubt, but culture is more than cult: Christianity takes the ethos, the average temperament, the innate desires, and the geographical necessities of a certain people, and proposes Christ in that context. What the Celts were before they heard the Gospel and what they were after are seamlessly related; after they converted, all that they had before was channeled towards helping them live the divine life. This is inculturation. Thus, different peoples necessarily make different Christians; they can't help it. They have the same faith, the same sacraments, the same love, but different contexts. These contexts shape how the culture speaks about its religion, and how it understands the one truth it professes. The manner in which a Greek Byzantine would do theology is necessarily different from that of an Egyptian Copt. Their minds work differently, so their way of understanding will be different. There's no problem here: the Greek and the Egyptian can believe in the One Christ while using different words- or worse, the same words, understood differently- to express that belief. The pitfalls are obvious, of course, but the point here is that, to maintain true orthodoxy, one needn't impose a uniform culture. Just because the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church says a 'miaphysite' creed, it might very well believe the same things in substance that are expressed in a 'dyophysite' formula.

This whole question interested me, because I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between Christianity and culture. I'm not sure it's a good thing to try and influence the culture too much, as a Christian; it can backfire when other exigencies enable the culture to escape from the Church's embrace. This is something I'm looking into, so I don't have anything definite to say as of yet; suffice it to say that I think it's healthy for the Church to have some distance from the seats of public culture.

This leads into the real point of this post: for the New Year, I have resolved to investigate more thoroughly (meaning, beyond the confines of Wikipedia!) the thought and culture of both Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy. I'm going to start by reading some of the works of Kallisos Ware, an English bishop, and some of the works of Pope Shenouda III, the late Patriarch of Alexandria. As I read, I'm sure this will all come up again, and in more detail.

My main hope in writing this blog is to think through things that interest me. I like to talk- a lot- and I also love to write; as a result, I wanted to write in a place where other people could read. That way, this exercise becomes something like a conversation. Who knew? Anybody who reads this has the chance to become an 'interlocutor!'

God is not one thing among many things; he is being. Just so, He is not one of my interests. I want him to be my only interest. I hope to write in such a way that He and I are writing what He and I think together. This blog is going to be a very Catholic thing.

That's my perspective, or what I would like to be my perspective. My interests... well, the kinds of things I tend to think about most are theological. There will definitely be some philosophy. According to my understanding, there will probably also be some math and science, maybe even some music and art. There will almost always be the personal, whether on my part or on the part of someone close to me. The friends I have, I have. Thinking about them as I do, I might also write about them now and then.

Love is another thing. I will un-apologetically talk about love as often as I please. If that suits you, well; if not, stick around for a while. I'd like to learn something from you.