Thursday, January 21, 2016

Seraphim Rose: A philosophical icon

The scroll reads: "Evolutionism is the key to the philosophy of antichrist"

11 comments:

  1. This could be profound if only it had an actual context to give it significance. The fact that this is a Romanian icon sheds some light on the iconographer's possible intention, but I am not sure all or even most of Fr Seraphim's views ought to be regarded as canonical (in the informal sense of "normative") among Orthodox Christians. That said, I do not doubt the man's sanctity - I have been to venerate his tomb myself. My parish is very close to the monastery.

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    1. Fr. Seraphim (Rose), outside of the ROCOR posturing, held to patristic views normative of the Holy Mountain and Russian Orthodoxy. His views are Orthodox.

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    2. Fr. Seraphim (Rose), outside of the ROCOR posturing, held to patristic views normative of the Holy Mountain and Russian Orthodoxy. His views are Orthodox.

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  2. It has enough context to give it significance. St. Paisios of Mount Athos:

    "Christ was born of a human being, the Panagia. Are we to believe that His ancestors were apes? What blasphemy! And those who support this theory don't realize that they are blaspheming. They throw a stone and do not check to see how many heads they have cracked."

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    1. I don't know what is more humiliating: to be formed from mindless dirt or to come from a long line of irrational primates.

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    2. mindless dirt?? what about the Divine Spirit breathed into the mindless dirt?......

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  3. Fr. Seraphim Rose was wrong about evolution; St. Paisios is wrong about evolution. Since the human genome has been sequenced, doubting human evolution is like doubting that the sun is at the center of our solar system (though I am sure there are still some poor souls out there who have such doubts).

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    1. When evolution reconciled with Newtonian physics and the second and third laws of thermodynamics we will talk. My religion is not empiricism or evolution. Science is a tool, not an ideological weapon.

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    3. Evolution is theologically impossible. It is to admit that death preceded Adam. But what then is the significance of Christ conquering death as the second Adam (as St. Paul says in scripture) if it was not Adam himself who brought mortality, death, frailty and sin into the world? Evolution then becomes a non-sequitur if you give priority to theology. As in, if you put God first.

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  4. Seraphim Rose doubted certain facts that are presented about evolutionary science. About some of these he was doubtless wrong. But there are several things to remember about his views in their historical context (remember that he was at Berkeley in the 60s).

    1) The philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was becoming very popular among the theologians of Fr. Seraphim's day. This philosophy essentially maintained that man's evolution was ongoing, and Christ's incarnation was the catalyst which would allow man to evolve into God. This was Chardin's idea of theosis; a physical process with a spiritual aspect. Fr. Seraphim (rightly, I think) rejected all such ideas.

    2) Fr. Seraphim, as "maximus" above mentioned, was formed by a traditional phronema which would naturally reject Darwinian science as being foreign to the Orthodox tradition. Regardless of how accurate his scientific understanding was, this phronema did allow him certain insights as to theological truth. We can unpack that if anybody would like to.

    3) There is much to dislike, theologically, about properly Darwinian evolutionary theory. For example, its heavy reliance on death for the development of advanced life-forms. Also, its propensity for deconstructing human telos to a biological state which almost inevitably promotes amorality. These hurdles might be overcome, but to Fr. Seraphim it was not clear how. He considered it a simpler solution to reject the new science wholesale. It is hard to blame him given the very sketchy job that biologists of his day did of presenting evolutionary theory.

    The cosmologists have always been better when it comes to evolution. The sequencing of the human genome has been helpful on the bio end, but in many ways raised more questions about our origins than it answered. For peering backward in time, the telescope currently sees farther than the microscope.

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