First Thoughts

“The Greeks build metaphysical systems; the Romans build roads.”  Old adage comparing Eastern and Western Christian theology

Contemplative prayer was effectively lost to Western Latin (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christianity by end of the 17^th century.  It first began to erode seriously in the 12th century when the Western monks re-discovered the works of Aristotle and Aristotelian logic, which fueled the whole “Scholastic” movement in Western Latin theology.  Contemplative prayer was further diminished by the focus on the “rational” verbal argumentation and bickering of the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century (which continues unabated to this day).  The coup de grâce came with the deification of the rational mind in the Enlightenment of the 17^th century and the emergence of the scientific method.  By that time, true contemplative Primitive Christian Prayer had virtually disappeared even from the monasteries of the West.  And so it remains to this day; to the point that the West no longer even recognizes a distinction between the rational mind and “nous” and has no understanding of the difference between the concept of an “individual” and that of a “person”.

And what about the Protestants?  Well, to be blunt, they just have no contemplative Primitive Christian Prayer tradition at all.  By the time the Protestant reformers came along and broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, contemplative prayer had virtually disappeared from the church.  Sorry, but that’s the truth.

I have to be fair and again stress that the Eastern Orthodox did not ever lose their contemplative Primitive Christian Prayer tradition.  As I have mentioned, the Orthodox tradition of “hesychasm” is alive and well today in its monasteries.  To their further credit, for centuries the Orthodox chose their Bishops for the institutional church solely from the ranks of their contemplative monks.  Much of the wisdom of the early Church Fathers I have quoted comes from an Orthodox book called the “Philokalia” (meaning “love of beauty”).  The “Philokalia” is a collection of texts written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian contemplative tradition. First published in Greek in 1782, The “Philokalia” is the foundational text on “hesychasm”, with a long history dating back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers.

All of these facts lend credence to the old adage that, “The Greeks build metaphysical systems; the Romans build roads”.