'THE QUESTION IS NOT, DOES GOD EXIST, BUT DOES EVIL EXIST'
Some time ago Father Andrew Damick has given an interview in which he highlights a few aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy that get overlooked easily. The media are concentrating on the Church's attraction to young men (link), which is very offensive if you are in the business of demonizing masculinity to death. But evidently the liberal globalist gender wars are not what is going on in the Church. Father Andrew is emphasizing that the question on most enquirers' lips is not, if God exists, but if evil is a thing? Because that is what they can't place, coming from a culture that denies the existence of not just spirits, but even questions good and evil.
June 2, 2025 Justin Brierley: Orthodox Priest on young men FLOODING into church.
Yet evil is what they experience all the time. When an entire culture is being primed to destroy you, evil is unmistakable. It is not just the immutable attribute of sex that is under attack (which makes assaults on sex akin to racism); every aspect, every carrier of the culture is under constant assault.
And it is precisely this question, to which Orthodoxy has an answer that is not just theological, but also metaphysical. Father Andrew expresses it beautifully: "the Church is where heaven and earth meet", "Orthodoxy makes the unseen, seen" and "it's a very crowded spiritual world".
This is why I am particularly focused on the renewed synthesis of the physical and the spiritual world. The separation of these two realms has been the key to the entire modernist project. As Father Andrew remarks, it is no coincidence that every assault somehow breaks down to sterilization.
From our limited perspective on history it may look like this did not happen in the West before World War 2. But in fact, it has been going on from the Great Schism onward. There may even be an argument to be made that it is what caused the schism in the first place.
In the book presently in production I look at the matter throughout history -- from classical Greece to the present -- and throughout cultural periods as Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and in Postmodernity.
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