I am uncomfortable with this argument as I do not think the causation has been made out to my satisfaction:
1) the author admits this was a risk in Christian teaching pre-dating significant Christian contact with the Buddhist world.
2) in the more recent era where contact does exist the author doesn’t show how the “Christian buddhists” are drawing these ideas from Buddhism vs. the historical tradition of error in this area predating contact with Buddhism.
So maybe the focus should be on the original error and Kenois, not the click baity headline re Buddhism.
Yes, this was my exact thought, once I figured out what the author was saying: "It's a good observation, but the title is clickbait." I suppose a man has to eat, but the word "Buddhism" here is an obstacle to understanding. I spent the first few minutes reading this trying to figure out how Buddhism and Buddhists are directly involved in what we're describing here, as opposed to just a parallel the author is choosing to draw.
Drawing parallels works much better if it's a popular reference that we all understand well. For most of us, Buddhism is alien to our experience and knowledge. Maybe we took a World Religions class in high school and spent a time or two reading about Buddhism on Wikipedia since then. It's not a religion that most of us give much thought to; it might have 1/10th of our mindshare compared to Islam or Rabbinic Judaism.
Thank you Aaron for your writing. I really valued your recent work on Emmanuel Todd.
You write about kenosis: "The essential idea is that weakness, lack of assertion and debasement are pleasing to God and are the ideals of the Christian life."
Perhaps my understanding is unconventional, but my approach to kenosis is quite different: following St. John of the Cross, I seek to empty myself of my own will that I might be filled with God's will. And, ideally, filled with this will, I become incorruptibly strong, assertive, forceful, and implacable in service of God. Far from weak or feminine, I become a pillar of fortitude and forbearance. I believe there is a powerful form of masculinity available here. It's the kind of masculinity that could stand against the shallow self-satisfactions of the manosphere.
Unrelatedly, I've been a student of Buddhism and I think the early characterizations of many Buddhist traditions -- particularly in the East Asian Mahayana that is found in China, Japan, Tibet, Korea, and Vietnam -- as passive, nihilistic, or pessimistic is incorrect. These traditions hold that we are originally pure, good, whole, and innocent -- this is our essential nature, our "buddha nature" or tathagatagarbha -- and it's only our inability to recognize this that leads to suffering or dukkha, which is best understood as simply the lack of ease that arises alongside any desire for things to be different than they are. We want more of this or less of that, and that wanting causes a lack of ease. In many ways, this understanding holds that abiding in a state of dukkha is akin to a fallen state. We fail to see our fundamental wholeness and goodness and must learn instead to affirm the world as it is, always already perfect and good. In short, we have fallen because of our desire for selfish things.
This doesn't change your argument about contemporary Christianity, only I'm not sure the "buddhist" clarifies more than distracts.
I don't agree with the idea that God wants to drain us of our will and replace it with his own. That's the obliteration of personality that TSP was talking about. It's also inches toward pantheism.
The Bible does talk about denying ourselves, about following God's will other than our own. But it also positively describes self-assertion and will. For example, in the Garden of Eden, Adam didn't talk God what to name the animals. God asked Adam how to name the animals.
If God is a Father, then as fathers do we want to annihilate the wills of children such that they become passive vehicles that are animated by our desires? No.
Thanks, Aaron. I really value your perspective here. Much to explore as I continue developing my understanding and practice.
I think of Jesus in Gethsemane asking that the cup be taken from him. And I ask myself: what am I being asked to do that I fear doing? Here there is a model of courage and strength that does involve self-refusal and self overcoming (if not self-emptying). How do I bring forward my particular talents, personality, and vocation in this world while heeding the deep call to serve God that must be primary to my desire for status, wealth, security, and so on? There's real strength available here, including something of the masculine, but I also hear how easily it tips over into self-abnegation and servility as the only acceptable way. It'd be all to easy to mistake serving others (in their contemporary and likely feminist ideas of the good man) for serving God. Like you, I want men to be appreciated intrinsically.
I think we need to explore the difference between "conforming my will to God's will" and "emptying myself of my will." I suspect we will find these are not just different ways to phrase the same concept, and that it is important to understand the difference.
I think the key is that there are opposing principles that need to be reconciled. God's sovereignty and man's free will being an example. Or Jesus as fully God and fully man at the same time.
For example, the Bible says that unless you hate your father and mother and wife and children, you can't be Jesus' disciple. But it also says that he who does not provide for his own family has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
It's not so much that any of these individually are wrong, but if we stress them to the exclusion of the other principles, we fall into error. In fact, many classic heresies like Arianism involve just this.
One more comment. Almost on cue, Paul Kingsnorth throws up on his substack this morning an affirmation of "Buddhist Christianity."
I quote:
"... Spiritually, we must all descend into the grave. This is what a Buddhist would call detachment from what a Sikh would call Maya, because in all spiritual traditions it is understood that attachment to the things of this world is a trap that will keep you from the truth.
For a Christian, of course, the truth is Christ, and through Him, the creator of all things. ‘The world’ is what stands between us and that relationship. The world is not the same as the Earth. The Earth is the artwork of its creator: the glory of creation itself. The world is the human passions and their inevitable results, one of which is the ongoing destruction of that creation.
This, it turns out, is why Christianity has all those unfashionable teachings about refraining from lust, drink, gluttony, materialism and all the other things we never listened to our R.E teacher about. It is why Christianity, like those other spiritual traditions, teaches asceticism as a first principle. It is also why the world hates us in turn. This kind of thing, to the spirit of the age, is very threatening indeed. It seems to suggest - whisper it - that all the values our society has taught us from the cradle might in fact be entirely wrong."
Christianity certainly represents a real challenge to the masculine in that all humans, male and female, are feminine next to God. The feminine has a certain passivity, an openness to the masculine which enables the possibility of new life, analogous to our human openness to God and the new life that he gives us when we accept him into ourselves. The feminine has gradually been gaining political ascendency and the masculine is struggling to respond. The task of de-Buddhist-izing would be found in asserting, not just in words but actions, the masculine virtues of authority, strength, self-improvement and power.
I've never considered Buddhist thinking as feminine but they do share a certain passivity. In the end, however, Buddhist thinking has been absorbed into our culture and religion because of its flexibility, not its femininity. It claims no God or gods, therefore there can be no false gods in Buddhism, as long those gods help the individual to follow the four noble truths and eightfold path. This slips in nicely with the current "diversity" theme; hold whatever god you want but keep it private so that you don't challenge the path of politically correct narrative to utopia. I might point out that not so long ago that narrative was Enlightenment Reason and Science, but lately has been replaced by Social Justice and Woke. Part of the task of de-Buddhist-izing our country is to be found in the active push-back against the woke social justice warriors
IF ascetic practices are becoming more common and even a problem, I'd say that they responding to the excessive libertinism and encouragement of transgressive behaviors that are blossoming everywhere around us. As with all things, there are always a few who overreach, but I'd be reluctant to endorse much pushback against them.
Very cool to get Social Pathologist to write! Yet his reading of ascesis and Balthasar are a step backward. What model should we suggest to train Christian action, especially for young men? Christian Asceticism isn’t about straightforward rejection of the self but about training in virtue, hence its etymology as ‘exercise.’ In this Balthasar follows his teacher Maximus Confessor who used ascetic training to strengthen his voice. Training helped him build a culture and theology regarding Christ’s full human and divine wills (see Balthasar’s The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor).
SP is right that kenosis can’t be an end to itself. The kenosis of God (and especially the Son) is for the mission of uniting humanity and creation to himself. Kenosis always has to be for mission, vs in Buddhism self denial is for escape. The whole ongoing project of Vatican 2’s architects Balthasar, Ratzinger/Benedict, and co is about properly directing modern goods, philosophy, and technology in right relation to tradition for personal and Church training (ascesis). Kenosis and ascesis have always been fundamental Christian concepts that add depth to the Christian narrative. What would he say are their purpose in the modern age?
Balthasar's ideas with regard to Kenosis are also integral to his ideas of being and love/caritas. His ideas of kenosis have their analog in Buddhist thinking. Even his idea of being as relational, has a near analog in Buddhist thought.
Whereas in the theology of Aquinas, love perfects being, in Balthasar's kenotic conceptions of caritas, love empties being, so that it becomes being without essence, it is the destruction of personality, the Christian analogy the Buddhist conception of Anatta.
In the Thomistic tradition, sin privates a good, and love seeks to remedy the good, reaffirming the good in the process. In the Balthasarian tradition, love seeks to annihilate the self in order to be restored. (Read up on his understanding of Trinitarian dynamics)
I have no love for Buddhism (I'd prefer a neo-Confucian basis if a native Chinese theology were ever to develop like how Western theology adapted Greco-Roman thought), but guilt by Buddhist association is not so much an argument in theology. It would be helpful if you could bring a specific source. I recall following the East that Balthasar talks more about the action of love in divine economy as illustration of what God is like, but he rarely ever speaks of divine essence. To my memory he never says anything like annihilation or destruction of personality in his treatment of the Trinity, especially in his systematics, i.e. Theo-Logic, but I could be mistaken.
I'd say with Balthasar that (human) being is relational and has some analog in God's action, sure. The upshot for him is that love indeed requires sacrifice, and that in the action of sacrificial giving the givers and the recipients find more, not less, of themselves. Aquinas's great analog is that action and attention, especially divine attention, are responsible for giving and perfecting being so that being and action are reciprocal: one who receives more can act more, and the more of the doer there is, the greater capacity to act and to be (see De ente 92). Unlike some Thomists I have no vested interest in whether someone adopts my particular metaphysics, and if one finds Balthasar's angle on things unhelpful by all means leave it.
Sorry for the late reply. I don't wish to imply a Buddhist contamination of Christianity rather a Christian morphing religious form that is akin to Buddhism.
He never speaks of a divine essence because his metaphysics of identity implicitly rejects the notion. He presupposes a relational other who imputes an essence onto the other through the mechanism of kenosis.
Love and pain are integral to Balthasar's notion of Christian love: To love you I have to hurt me. Christian love when perfected becomes and endless source of pain for the individual. On the other hand, traditional theology held onto thenotion that God does not become diminished or suffers when he acts on me to improve me. i.e. Christian love is not synonymous with pain.
There's a strong element of this in current Reformed (Calvinist) churches: the idea that the world is totally fallen and corrupt, but temporary and totally unimportant anyway, and Christians should not concern themselves with politics, art, science, civic life, neighborhood, but seclude themselves with Children, Cooking, and Church, prayer being the primary weapon for everything, not action. It's a kind of inconsistent monasticism, since in practice we don't spend hours in prayer and worship, though we do spend hours on church activities like bible study, meetings, and church work days.
This was a great article, honestly it all sounds like Gnosticism to me. Lately I've been feeling a bit torn as an eastern catholic because I've been at the wrong end of Trad hate for whatever reason they're pissed at ECs for... but I know some people that struggle with the meaning of life and having a very orthodox pious life is like jet fuel to them. While it is great that we deny our unhealthy passions, there is something lately in reading the eastern saints and more recent Latin ones that make me feel like they just don't get it... or had the luxury too. I struggle with telling someone to not be mad anymore, or I don't read writings from saints as enthusiastically as much lately. Some of the stuff I read I can't imagine saying to a person in my care or friend. The Christian Buddhism is real. The message seems to be sometimes absolute docility, feminine, and on the other side seems to be a complete rejection of self and God's creation.
I recently re-read John Calvin’s “a little book on the Christian life.” We should always try to be fair to historical figures, and in that vein, it does a good job of reflecting a pastoral heart. However, I got the sense that that it was promoting the aforementioned ideas. There is a world of difference between believing that self-denial is the cause of goodness, and recognizing that goodness can require self denial.
I think it is important to bring out the issues with Kenosis theology. In my Reformed Protestant circles some have gone as far as to say “Because Christ is God he emptied himself”. The participle in Greek is ambiguous, so the “because” is an interpretation. I didn’t see the Buddhist connection here, thanks for that. As I think through it, Podles offers a helpful corrective when he reintroduced the concept of honour. The emptying is for the sake of honour, “name above every name”. Honour is the key here. It is not in the nature of God to empty, rather it is in the nature of God to be honoured and glorified - the emptying is for the sake of the Son being eventually honoured and glorified.
It is a simple issue of confusing ends with means. The end of the Christian life is glory and reward and inheritance (if you’re Orthodox you might even get your picture on the wall to be honoured by the generations to come). The means to said end is humility and sacrifice. Humility and sacrifice without the hope and goal of glory is nihilistic indeed.
Interesting approach. My understanding is that Eastern religion, generally, was first introduced in America at a series of lectures concurrent with the 1893 World Expo in Chicago, which, as the story goes, FL Wright and the Greene brothers also visited, were influenced by Japanese architecture. I wonder if de-Buddhism might be also matched with re-Judaizing of Christianity? Ie strong sense of agency and active engagement in the world, changing it, improving it, turning desert into oasis mode.
Thought provoking. Another similar line of criticism is the gnostic influence in modern life.
I'll say it's interesting to see a Catholic write this, given the nearly brutal asceticism of some saints. But sometimes average churchgoing Catholics seem quite less "Buddhist" than the average churchgoing Protestants.
To get the other side of it, Catholic philosopher Max Scheler approaches the root of Buddhist-like elements in 19th Century German Protestantism. The easiest primer to his approach is probably his book, Ressentiment, in which he argues that the root of Buddhist thought in Christian societies is the rise of the bourgeois class whose particular psychological characteristics (as described by Weber, for example) made them vulnerable to axiological deformations typified by ressentiment and scheelsucht (envious value-inversion and propensity to disparage the good out of spite).
The tendency to reduce Christianity to a mere moral code justified by airy religious reasoning permits the world-contextualizing passages to be reformed as world-denying passages, which better fits with the tendency of the anti-agonistic and anti-physical bourgeois personality. Remember that the bourgeois archetype of the 19th C. is someone like Howard Taft - proudly obese, anti-physical, and intellectual. Despite the reputation of the bourgeois as hypercompetitive, in reality the highest virtue of bourgeois society was comfort and pleasure, of securing wealth and passing it to one's children. The robber-barons were the tails of the curve, not the median.
Resentful of the very physical and agonistic aristocracy, and filled with self-hatred at the unaesthetic and diseased life they lived, the bourgeois naturally adapted a Buddhist Christianity to themselves. The Will of God is replaced by democratic ultramontanism, love with Social Gospel politics (explicitly in the case of Richard Ely), and the Christian mind-body fusionism with a mind-body dichotomy justifying the neglect of the physical in ourselves.
I recommend Scheler's Ressentiment for further reading on this topic. He manages to incorporate and correct Nietzsche on this topic, which is a profound accomplishment in itself.
I disagree. Ressentiment is an interesting topic but it is not the cause of Christian Buddhism.
Asceticism is the motive engine of Christian Buddhism and unless unchecked transforms Christian values into Buddhist ones. It's a fine line between self-denial and self-loathing.
I honestly think it comes about from action of human cognitive biases and sloppy thinking when it comes to the subject of Religion. A balanced mind is hard to achieve. Just look about you.
I am uncomfortable with this argument as I do not think the causation has been made out to my satisfaction:
1) the author admits this was a risk in Christian teaching pre-dating significant Christian contact with the Buddhist world.
2) in the more recent era where contact does exist the author doesn’t show how the “Christian buddhists” are drawing these ideas from Buddhism vs. the historical tradition of error in this area predating contact with Buddhism.
So maybe the focus should be on the original error and Kenois, not the click baity headline re Buddhism.
Yes, this was my exact thought, once I figured out what the author was saying: "It's a good observation, but the title is clickbait." I suppose a man has to eat, but the word "Buddhism" here is an obstacle to understanding. I spent the first few minutes reading this trying to figure out how Buddhism and Buddhists are directly involved in what we're describing here, as opposed to just a parallel the author is choosing to draw.
Drawing parallels works much better if it's a popular reference that we all understand well. For most of us, Buddhism is alien to our experience and knowledge. Maybe we took a World Religions class in high school and spent a time or two reading about Buddhism on Wikipedia since then. It's not a religion that most of us give much thought to; it might have 1/10th of our mindshare compared to Islam or Rabbinic Judaism.
Thank you Aaron for your writing. I really valued your recent work on Emmanuel Todd.
You write about kenosis: "The essential idea is that weakness, lack of assertion and debasement are pleasing to God and are the ideals of the Christian life."
Perhaps my understanding is unconventional, but my approach to kenosis is quite different: following St. John of the Cross, I seek to empty myself of my own will that I might be filled with God's will. And, ideally, filled with this will, I become incorruptibly strong, assertive, forceful, and implacable in service of God. Far from weak or feminine, I become a pillar of fortitude and forbearance. I believe there is a powerful form of masculinity available here. It's the kind of masculinity that could stand against the shallow self-satisfactions of the manosphere.
Unrelatedly, I've been a student of Buddhism and I think the early characterizations of many Buddhist traditions -- particularly in the East Asian Mahayana that is found in China, Japan, Tibet, Korea, and Vietnam -- as passive, nihilistic, or pessimistic is incorrect. These traditions hold that we are originally pure, good, whole, and innocent -- this is our essential nature, our "buddha nature" or tathagatagarbha -- and it's only our inability to recognize this that leads to suffering or dukkha, which is best understood as simply the lack of ease that arises alongside any desire for things to be different than they are. We want more of this or less of that, and that wanting causes a lack of ease. In many ways, this understanding holds that abiding in a state of dukkha is akin to a fallen state. We fail to see our fundamental wholeness and goodness and must learn instead to affirm the world as it is, always already perfect and good. In short, we have fallen because of our desire for selfish things.
This doesn't change your argument about contemporary Christianity, only I'm not sure the "buddhist" clarifies more than distracts.
Jonas, thanks.
I don't agree with the idea that God wants to drain us of our will and replace it with his own. That's the obliteration of personality that TSP was talking about. It's also inches toward pantheism.
The Bible does talk about denying ourselves, about following God's will other than our own. But it also positively describes self-assertion and will. For example, in the Garden of Eden, Adam didn't talk God what to name the animals. God asked Adam how to name the animals.
If God is a Father, then as fathers do we want to annihilate the wills of children such that they become passive vehicles that are animated by our desires? No.
Thanks, Aaron. I really value your perspective here. Much to explore as I continue developing my understanding and practice.
I think of Jesus in Gethsemane asking that the cup be taken from him. And I ask myself: what am I being asked to do that I fear doing? Here there is a model of courage and strength that does involve self-refusal and self overcoming (if not self-emptying). How do I bring forward my particular talents, personality, and vocation in this world while heeding the deep call to serve God that must be primary to my desire for status, wealth, security, and so on? There's real strength available here, including something of the masculine, but I also hear how easily it tips over into self-abnegation and servility as the only acceptable way. It'd be all to easy to mistake serving others (in their contemporary and likely feminist ideas of the good man) for serving God. Like you, I want men to be appreciated intrinsically.
I think we need to explore the difference between "conforming my will to God's will" and "emptying myself of my will." I suspect we will find these are not just different ways to phrase the same concept, and that it is important to understand the difference.
I think the key is that there are opposing principles that need to be reconciled. God's sovereignty and man's free will being an example. Or Jesus as fully God and fully man at the same time.
For example, the Bible says that unless you hate your father and mother and wife and children, you can't be Jesus' disciple. But it also says that he who does not provide for his own family has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
It's not so much that any of these individually are wrong, but if we stress them to the exclusion of the other principles, we fall into error. In fact, many classic heresies like Arianism involve just this.
One more comment. Almost on cue, Paul Kingsnorth throws up on his substack this morning an affirmation of "Buddhist Christianity."
I quote:
"... Spiritually, we must all descend into the grave. This is what a Buddhist would call detachment from what a Sikh would call Maya, because in all spiritual traditions it is understood that attachment to the things of this world is a trap that will keep you from the truth.
For a Christian, of course, the truth is Christ, and through Him, the creator of all things. ‘The world’ is what stands between us and that relationship. The world is not the same as the Earth. The Earth is the artwork of its creator: the glory of creation itself. The world is the human passions and their inevitable results, one of which is the ongoing destruction of that creation.
This, it turns out, is why Christianity has all those unfashionable teachings about refraining from lust, drink, gluttony, materialism and all the other things we never listened to our R.E teacher about. It is why Christianity, like those other spiritual traditions, teaches asceticism as a first principle. It is also why the world hates us in turn. This kind of thing, to the spirit of the age, is very threatening indeed. It seems to suggest - whisper it - that all the values our society has taught us from the cradle might in fact be entirely wrong."
-Nate
Great catch.
Christianity certainly represents a real challenge to the masculine in that all humans, male and female, are feminine next to God. The feminine has a certain passivity, an openness to the masculine which enables the possibility of new life, analogous to our human openness to God and the new life that he gives us when we accept him into ourselves. The feminine has gradually been gaining political ascendency and the masculine is struggling to respond. The task of de-Buddhist-izing would be found in asserting, not just in words but actions, the masculine virtues of authority, strength, self-improvement and power.
I've never considered Buddhist thinking as feminine but they do share a certain passivity. In the end, however, Buddhist thinking has been absorbed into our culture and religion because of its flexibility, not its femininity. It claims no God or gods, therefore there can be no false gods in Buddhism, as long those gods help the individual to follow the four noble truths and eightfold path. This slips in nicely with the current "diversity" theme; hold whatever god you want but keep it private so that you don't challenge the path of politically correct narrative to utopia. I might point out that not so long ago that narrative was Enlightenment Reason and Science, but lately has been replaced by Social Justice and Woke. Part of the task of de-Buddhist-izing our country is to be found in the active push-back against the woke social justice warriors
IF ascetic practices are becoming more common and even a problem, I'd say that they responding to the excessive libertinism and encouragement of transgressive behaviors that are blossoming everywhere around us. As with all things, there are always a few who overreach, but I'd be reluctant to endorse much pushback against them.
Very cool to get Social Pathologist to write! Yet his reading of ascesis and Balthasar are a step backward. What model should we suggest to train Christian action, especially for young men? Christian Asceticism isn’t about straightforward rejection of the self but about training in virtue, hence its etymology as ‘exercise.’ In this Balthasar follows his teacher Maximus Confessor who used ascetic training to strengthen his voice. Training helped him build a culture and theology regarding Christ’s full human and divine wills (see Balthasar’s The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor).
SP is right that kenosis can’t be an end to itself. The kenosis of God (and especially the Son) is for the mission of uniting humanity and creation to himself. Kenosis always has to be for mission, vs in Buddhism self denial is for escape. The whole ongoing project of Vatican 2’s architects Balthasar, Ratzinger/Benedict, and co is about properly directing modern goods, philosophy, and technology in right relation to tradition for personal and Church training (ascesis). Kenosis and ascesis have always been fundamental Christian concepts that add depth to the Christian narrative. What would he say are their purpose in the modern age?
Balthasar's ideas with regard to Kenosis are also integral to his ideas of being and love/caritas. His ideas of kenosis have their analog in Buddhist thinking. Even his idea of being as relational, has a near analog in Buddhist thought.
Whereas in the theology of Aquinas, love perfects being, in Balthasar's kenotic conceptions of caritas, love empties being, so that it becomes being without essence, it is the destruction of personality, the Christian analogy the Buddhist conception of Anatta.
In the Thomistic tradition, sin privates a good, and love seeks to remedy the good, reaffirming the good in the process. In the Balthasarian tradition, love seeks to annihilate the self in order to be restored. (Read up on his understanding of Trinitarian dynamics)
I regard him as the Kim Philby of Catholicism.
I have no love for Buddhism (I'd prefer a neo-Confucian basis if a native Chinese theology were ever to develop like how Western theology adapted Greco-Roman thought), but guilt by Buddhist association is not so much an argument in theology. It would be helpful if you could bring a specific source. I recall following the East that Balthasar talks more about the action of love in divine economy as illustration of what God is like, but he rarely ever speaks of divine essence. To my memory he never says anything like annihilation or destruction of personality in his treatment of the Trinity, especially in his systematics, i.e. Theo-Logic, but I could be mistaken.
I'd say with Balthasar that (human) being is relational and has some analog in God's action, sure. The upshot for him is that love indeed requires sacrifice, and that in the action of sacrificial giving the givers and the recipients find more, not less, of themselves. Aquinas's great analog is that action and attention, especially divine attention, are responsible for giving and perfecting being so that being and action are reciprocal: one who receives more can act more, and the more of the doer there is, the greater capacity to act and to be (see De ente 92). Unlike some Thomists I have no vested interest in whether someone adopts my particular metaphysics, and if one finds Balthasar's angle on things unhelpful by all means leave it.
Sorry for the late reply. I don't wish to imply a Buddhist contamination of Christianity rather a Christian morphing religious form that is akin to Buddhism.
He never speaks of a divine essence because his metaphysics of identity implicitly rejects the notion. He presupposes a relational other who imputes an essence onto the other through the mechanism of kenosis.
Love and pain are integral to Balthasar's notion of Christian love: To love you I have to hurt me. Christian love when perfected becomes and endless source of pain for the individual. On the other hand, traditional theology held onto thenotion that God does not become diminished or suffers when he acts on me to improve me. i.e. Christian love is not synonymous with pain.
There's a strong element of this in current Reformed (Calvinist) churches: the idea that the world is totally fallen and corrupt, but temporary and totally unimportant anyway, and Christians should not concern themselves with politics, art, science, civic life, neighborhood, but seclude themselves with Children, Cooking, and Church, prayer being the primary weapon for everything, not action. It's a kind of inconsistent monasticism, since in practice we don't spend hours in prayer and worship, though we do spend hours on church activities like bible study, meetings, and church work days.
This is true. Any form of strong Augustinianism sails close to Christian Buddhism.
This was a great article, honestly it all sounds like Gnosticism to me. Lately I've been feeling a bit torn as an eastern catholic because I've been at the wrong end of Trad hate for whatever reason they're pissed at ECs for... but I know some people that struggle with the meaning of life and having a very orthodox pious life is like jet fuel to them. While it is great that we deny our unhealthy passions, there is something lately in reading the eastern saints and more recent Latin ones that make me feel like they just don't get it... or had the luxury too. I struggle with telling someone to not be mad anymore, or I don't read writings from saints as enthusiastically as much lately. Some of the stuff I read I can't imagine saying to a person in my care or friend. The Christian Buddhism is real. The message seems to be sometimes absolute docility, feminine, and on the other side seems to be a complete rejection of self and God's creation.
I recently re-read John Calvin’s “a little book on the Christian life.” We should always try to be fair to historical figures, and in that vein, it does a good job of reflecting a pastoral heart. However, I got the sense that that it was promoting the aforementioned ideas. There is a world of difference between believing that self-denial is the cause of goodness, and recognizing that goodness can require self denial.
I think it is important to bring out the issues with Kenosis theology. In my Reformed Protestant circles some have gone as far as to say “Because Christ is God he emptied himself”. The participle in Greek is ambiguous, so the “because” is an interpretation. I didn’t see the Buddhist connection here, thanks for that. As I think through it, Podles offers a helpful corrective when he reintroduced the concept of honour. The emptying is for the sake of honour, “name above every name”. Honour is the key here. It is not in the nature of God to empty, rather it is in the nature of God to be honoured and glorified - the emptying is for the sake of the Son being eventually honoured and glorified.
It is a simple issue of confusing ends with means. The end of the Christian life is glory and reward and inheritance (if you’re Orthodox you might even get your picture on the wall to be honoured by the generations to come). The means to said end is humility and sacrifice. Humility and sacrifice without the hope and goal of glory is nihilistic indeed.
Nate
Interesting approach. My understanding is that Eastern religion, generally, was first introduced in America at a series of lectures concurrent with the 1893 World Expo in Chicago, which, as the story goes, FL Wright and the Greene brothers also visited, were influenced by Japanese architecture. I wonder if de-Buddhism might be also matched with re-Judaizing of Christianity? Ie strong sense of agency and active engagement in the world, changing it, improving it, turning desert into oasis mode.
Hinduism was studied extensively in the 1840's by the Transcendentalists and led to the New Thought movement well before 1893.
Thought provoking. Another similar line of criticism is the gnostic influence in modern life.
I'll say it's interesting to see a Catholic write this, given the nearly brutal asceticism of some saints. But sometimes average churchgoing Catholics seem quite less "Buddhist" than the average churchgoing Protestants.
Early Christian missionaries to Asia remarked how many of the Buddhist monks resembled Christian saints.
To get the other side of it, Catholic philosopher Max Scheler approaches the root of Buddhist-like elements in 19th Century German Protestantism. The easiest primer to his approach is probably his book, Ressentiment, in which he argues that the root of Buddhist thought in Christian societies is the rise of the bourgeois class whose particular psychological characteristics (as described by Weber, for example) made them vulnerable to axiological deformations typified by ressentiment and scheelsucht (envious value-inversion and propensity to disparage the good out of spite).
The tendency to reduce Christianity to a mere moral code justified by airy religious reasoning permits the world-contextualizing passages to be reformed as world-denying passages, which better fits with the tendency of the anti-agonistic and anti-physical bourgeois personality. Remember that the bourgeois archetype of the 19th C. is someone like Howard Taft - proudly obese, anti-physical, and intellectual. Despite the reputation of the bourgeois as hypercompetitive, in reality the highest virtue of bourgeois society was comfort and pleasure, of securing wealth and passing it to one's children. The robber-barons were the tails of the curve, not the median.
Resentful of the very physical and agonistic aristocracy, and filled with self-hatred at the unaesthetic and diseased life they lived, the bourgeois naturally adapted a Buddhist Christianity to themselves. The Will of God is replaced by democratic ultramontanism, love with Social Gospel politics (explicitly in the case of Richard Ely), and the Christian mind-body fusionism with a mind-body dichotomy justifying the neglect of the physical in ourselves.
I recommend Scheler's Ressentiment for further reading on this topic. He manages to incorporate and correct Nietzsche on this topic, which is a profound accomplishment in itself.
I disagree. Ressentiment is an interesting topic but it is not the cause of Christian Buddhism.
Asceticism is the motive engine of Christian Buddhism and unless unchecked transforms Christian values into Buddhist ones. It's a fine line between self-denial and self-loathing.
But what is the cause of asceticism?
I honestly think it comes about from action of human cognitive biases and sloppy thinking when it comes to the subject of Religion. A balanced mind is hard to achieve. Just look about you.