CONVERSION TO ORTHODOXY IS NOT ENOUGH!
Long term readers will know that our most fundamental question -- or perhaps our only question is -- where and when did thinking in the West diverge from the East and why was it so wrong that its result is the present mess? In recent days a few new perspectives have been added tο οur analysis by the contributions of Dr Nathan Jacobs and Father Stephen de Young. We will go through the main points of both, before returning to the writing of our manuscript for the e-book that is aimed at making this abstract concept clear to Western readers. Here are a few very brief outlines without going into the details, which would by far exceed the space of a single blog post.
Nov. 10, 2023 Ancient Faith: Lord of Spirits - What Does Stuff Mean? [Ep. 79]. (Playlist).
In this episode of the Lord of Spirits, "What Does Stuff Mean?" Father Stephen de Young goes in part into these details. He explains that as modern Western people "we try to get away from context, relations, the particular, materialism and the messiness of human life".
He does not go into why we have that tendency, although he coined the term 'plato brain' for that typically modern condition. Plato divided the universe into two separate realities: the visible, physical world of matter and the invisible world he called the world of forms, where universals and ideas reside.
So a cat is materially walking the earth, but cat-ness is in the realm of forms, as are abstract ideas like justice and goodness.
Plato's student Aristotle later corrected the mistake, instead positing that universals are in the thing itself, and in so doing rejoined the visible to the invisible and restoring unity to the universe. In other words, the spiritual, meaning, purpose is in the physical thing itself.
But Western Christians were and are still hopelessly attracted to Plato's notion of a material world that is separate from what might be identified in the Christian context as Heaven, per Plato somewhere 'out there' instead of Aristotle's 'here within'.
As a consequence the visible world became a soulless shadowland without inherent value. How this idea could take root so deeply in the West, can be explained by the extraordinary influence of the theologian, Saint Augustine (350-430), a Latinized Berber hailing from what is today the country of Algeria (link).
Saint Augustine was heavily influenced by Plotinus, the Neo Platonist (link) before he converted to Christianity. He was not a mere follower of Plotinus: he even integrated key Neoplatonic concepts in his theology. By his own confession he wasn't able to read the works of the Greek Church Fathers in the East. Nathan Jacobs has that story.
Jan. 5, 2026 Gospel Simplicity: "The Church Doesn't Have Two Lungs" | Dr. Nathan Jacobs.
What remains of the physical world after it has been stripped from its soul, is a realm in which there is no relation between one thing and another. There cannot be, as meaning is now residing in a realm somewhere 'out there'. Everything becomes a soulless thing in itself, a zombie in other words.
Comprehension becomes impossible. The context disappears and you end up in nihilism, because a thing by itself is meaningless. A person who is not related to anything else, is no one. This is the reason why universities have faculties, professions have specialists and there are silos in governance. The universalist, holistic approach has become a thing for quacks.
As Father Stephen explains, there is no system or a process that can rejoin the material thing and its meaning 'out there' once the mental separation has taken place. A thing that is outside of reality, can't be referenced with reality, if it is real or not.
Vice versa, reality loses its anchor, when it is separated from the material world. If you do a lot of mental work thinking in abstractions, like intellectuals and many professionals do, it is easy to lose your anchor in material reality, supposing there ever was one, which there probably wasn't.
What does not help the situation, is the almost fathomless arrogance in Western intellectuals. They have no sense of humility, and seriously believe they have discovered eternal truth, while never failing to express their disdain for anyone who holds an opinion they consider outdated.
In universities, philosophy studies jump from Plato straight to Kant in the Liberal Enlightenment. History is only marginally better, going from Classical Greece -- that they don't understand -- to the later Middle Ages. They are leap frogging over Western Church Father, Saint Augustine because he lived in a period that Modernity is trying hard to bury.
And who could be interested in 'the Dark Ages' anyway? Modernists are revolutionaries: they have burnt their bridges with the unpalatable past. In other words, they will never discover this fatal mistake. And as Nathan Jacobs says, every failure is an outgrowth of this fundamental mistake in understanding the nature of reality.
Since this problem is upstream from Christianity, the conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy by itself is not enough. This becomes clear when we see that Western converts are simply applying Western Modernist tropes and narratives to Orthodoxy, not realizing that the fundamental thinking about reality itself has to change.
When they understand that 'heaven' is not somewhere 'out there' but in the 'here and now', that there is an indivisible unity of the physical and the spiritual as premised in the doctrine of the bodily resurrection (link), perhaps then the penny will drop.
The concept is clearly shown in the Eucharist, which is not symbolic or allegorically performed by the Priest, but an actual fact in the here and now.
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