Since Nicholas Aggelopoulos lives in Germany, and might very well be familiar with Lesch, here is my series in German against that kind of unhistorical infidel: Contra Lesch · Dialoge unter dem Lesch-Video · Ein Geschichtler hat Lesch auch angeprangert · Andrej hat noch mehr zu TerraX zu sagen!
But, to the video and then my comments:
Why was there no Inquisition in the Orthodox Church
Nicholas Aggelopoulos | 8 Sept. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbOEnWULEQ
1:12 "the Inquisition had deemed the use of reason in the advancement of science as a threat to Christianity"
Do you get this from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, or from some Greek Bishop who had it from some Russian Bishop who had it from the Soviet Academy of Sciences?
Scientists are not good historians of science, usually, Soviet biassed ones even less so, so ...
1:12—1:36
"perhaps influenced by Tertullian a third century Christian Layman who wrote in Latin and who considered the Old Testament the only source of Truth the Inquisition used [s]purious passages from the Old Testament whenever the deemed it convenient to stifle and condemn scientific discourse"
Did you have enough sleep? Do you need a coffee? Do you have a hangover?
The Inquisition used very genuine passages from the Old Testament, not spurious ones, to refute and condemn, not "scientific discourse" but the heresy of Heliocentrism.
Why is it a heresy?
a) It counteracts Geocentrism as proof for God, which is probably what St. Paul meant in Romans 1; so it helped in the ensuing 50 years or 100 years to bolster atheism.
b) It involves Joshua saying his miraculous words in Joshua 10:12 to the wrong entities, not the one that needed to miraculously change behaviour under God's authority. Was His namesake Jesus also speaking of the wrong thing when driving out demons?
c) It involves in our days a visible universe 13.8 light years in globe radius, which is contrary to any view of Biblical chronology, whether Ussher or Syncellus or the chronology of St. Jerome which we find in the Roman Martyrology for Christmas Day.
d) For the same reason, it also makes the idea of Heaven as a place above the fix stars moot.
e) And even in their day, Galileo and St. Robert, Galileo and his later judges in 1633, knew that Galileo's position involved NOT taking Scripture as the final word in science, only in matters pertaining to personal salvation — an attitude which the Inquisitors found, rightly, condemnable.
2:33 Your comments on "the great divide" make simply no sense, you are attributing to the Roman Catholics a position like that attributed to Calvinists and Judaising Fundamentalists (perhaps spuriously) by their opponents.
This is not our position now, it has no place in St. Thomas Aquinas and would have made St. Robert Bellarmine snicker if he had heard you attribute such a position to him.
Christ's miracles are fully rational. That doesn't make them non-miraculous. The thing is not that "laws of nature are broken" but that God adds an agency which is not described by them. Remember, the laws only describe what causes in physics need to get as results, if nothing interferes. They do not say that all causes are physical, nor that nothing will interfere with the results. A physicist can calculate with physics at what speed and impetus a pen will fall to the ground if I drop it, but he cannot calculate whether I'll prefer to catch it before it touches the ground.
The Orthodox Church at least locally did find cause against Galileo. While the "sigillion of 1583" may be a forgery, it would go back to real decisions by patriarch Jeremias II Tranos in 1583, 1587 and 1593.
Here is a quote from the more mediatised text printed on Mt Athos in 1858, New Skete, considered as a forgery and perhaps better considered as a conflation:
"and wishes to follow the newly-invented Paschalion and the New Menologion of the atheist astronomers of the Pope"
Why the phrase "atheist astronomers"? Was it a reference to Galileo?
If this phrase is lacking in all three decisions by Jeremias II Tranos, could it be that Father Iakovos from New Skete in 1858 had a beef with Heliocentrism?
- Nicholas Aggelopoulos
- @NicholasAggelopoulos
- There was an inquiry by monks in a Russian monastery that found no objections to the theory of Copernicus and the observations of Galileo. They cited that the geocentric view is not supported by scripture and attributed it to Thomas Indicopleustes, a Byzantine writer of fantastical stories.
On your other point, I understand that the position of the Roman Catholic Church on the Inquisition has changed. Some Orthodox writers have written in the same vein. I imagine there is no exact consensus in the Orthodox Church about the degree to which reason and logic overlap. Knowledge is based on the association of a cause with its outcome. However, Orthodox scholars and Saints do not take a clear position on whether logic and reason are the same thing.
From a scientific viewpoint, my personal viewpoint not the Church's, it would seem impossible that life, which is tied up with knowledge, would have evolved to detect relationships that are not causal. If so, which seems to stand to reason, such non-causal events are outside the capacities of living organisms to know them. Let's say there would have not evolved such a sensibility, a part of our organism responsible for detecting non-burning fires. A "burning" bush that was not burning away and was not showing any changes related to entropy would provide no physical stimuli that the brain would detect as a fire. A bush not burning would not be detectable as burning. On the other hand, other phenomena can be rationaly explained, but only when they do not violate the laws of physics: I have been told so in our theology lectures at school over a generation ago, for example regarding the curing of the lame as possibly the lame not being physically incapable of walking only psychologically hindered in some way because of psychiatric disability. Such incidents of psychiatric patients believing that they cannot walk or cannot see abound in the modern medical literature. The lame who were cured by Christ were never missing their legs and the blind were not actually missing their eyes, Lazarus had only been thought to have passed away some time prior to the arrival of Christ on the same day.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @NicholasAggelopoulos "There was an inquiry by monks in a Russian monastery that found no objections to the theory of Copernicus and the observations of Galileo. They cited that the geocentric view is not supported by scripture and attributed it to Thomas Indicopleustes, a Byzantine writer of fantastical stories."
[Cosmas] Indicopleustes was a Flat Earther and not simply a Geocentric.
A Russian monastery that makes an equation between Flat Earth and Geocentrism sounds like one put under pressure by Communists — unless it was by Peter the Great or his successors in the time of Lomosonov. Even under the Czars, monasteries did frauds of the type we think of as Communist. The story of "St. Peter teh Aleut, Neomartyr" is one such fraud.
Whether it was the time of Lomosonov or the time of the Commies, you did not tell what time the Russian monks made this blunder or direct fraud.
"On your other point, I understand that the position of the Roman Catholic Church on the Inquisition has changed."
No, the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition N E V E R held or judged that "reason is the enemy of faith" ... it's not a question of my projecting the modern position back, it's a question of my knowing a thing or two about Roman Catholicism in the time of the Inquisition that judged Galileo.
"Some Orthodox writers have written in the same vein. I imagine there is no exact consensus in the Orthodox Church about the degree to which reason and logic overlap. Knowledge is based on the association of a cause with its outcome."
No, scientific knowledge is. And by the way, the natural laws do not determine the outcome, they can only say what outcome that particular cause or that particular combination of causes will give. If there is a cause the scientists habitually do not reckon with or have not reckoned with in such and such a case, the outcome will not be the one that they predicted from the causes they did study.
"If so, which seems to stand to reason, such non-causal events are outside the capacities of living organisms to know them."
It doesn't stand to reason, the very idea of reason or logic being a product of evolution is contrary to the validity of them.
"I have been told so in our theology lectures at school over a generation ago, for example regarding the curing of the lame as possibly the lame not being physically incapable of walking only psychologically hindered in some way because of psychiatric disability."
Psychiatric disabilities are not naturally healed with normal created causalities in one moment.
"The lame who were cured by Christ were never missing their legs"
Neither was Mr. Roosevelt, though poliomyelitis does not usually strike at birth. (As far as I know, I might be wrong.)
"and the blind were not actually missing their eyes,"
Neither is Stevie Wonder, even if the type of artificial oxygenation that deprived him of eye-sight would not have existed in Jesus' day.
"Lazarus had only been thought to have passed away some time prior to the arrival of Christ on the same day."
If you read the actual Gospel text, he had been dead four days. The Orthodox liturgy actually calls him "St. Lazarus the Four-Days-Dead" ... ditch the theologians you have consulted, flee them like the plague. Whether you go to Seraphim Rose or Mgr Lefebvre or Pope Michael II, don't remain with those guys.
2:37—2:43
"it had decided that the Miracles of Christ do not have a rational explanation"
Quis, quid, ubi? Quibus auxiliis? Cur, quomodo, quando?
Or what inquisitor decided on what affair, in what city? By what proof texts? Why (on his view, not on yours)? How did he argue? What is that decision dated to?
It was certainly NOT either of the two affairs of Galileo.
I call your bluff. Either you are lying, or you are repeating a lie. Precisely as Paul Balester, Gk Orthodox Bishop in Mexico, pretended (by some) martyr, lied or repeated a lie about what St. Robert had said about the papacy.
[Mystagogy posts certainly false allegation on St Robert Bellarmine · Pseudoquote identified. What De Romano Pontifice, book IV, chapter V really says (quote) · Further faults of fact in the Mystagogy post]
3:20—3:34
"hence the World created by reason according to the Greek text was created against reason according to the view eventually developed by the Roman Inquisition"
Is Rome situated on the North Pole too? Does the Pope have three legs?
In other words, are you stark raving mad?
- Nicholas Aggelopoulos
- The Inquisition disagreed with Galileo's observations not because they found some fault with his telescope, that is clear.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @NicholasAggelopoulos The Inquisition never disagreed with Galileo's observations at all.
Jupiter has four moons, observed. Fine.
Venus is sometimes behind and sometimes in front of the Sun. Fine.
The Milky Way involves lots of small stars. Fine. One Inquisitor who was also an astronomer (Clavius, I think) noted that not all the fudgy white could be found resolving into small stars and modern astronomy actually accepts there is interstellar matter, confirmed the Inquisition against a minor point in Galileo.
Earth revolves around the Sun, not fine. Also not observed.
Earth revolves around itself, not fine. Also not observed.
To this day it has not been conclusively observed, since, even if it was observed from the Moon, we Geocentrics would answer it was the Moon that was moving.
4:05—4:15
"Western Scholars are so accustomed to the enmity to science among Western fundamentalists that they do not seem ever to consider"
Do YOU ever consider that what you say about Western Fundamentalists is a lie, or at best a cry of hysteria, totally devoid of reason in judging the other person or party?
What you make of Westerners is what Hitler made of Jews ... or what Fritz Hippler and Goebbels made of them.
4:41 Mikhail Lomosonov may be as little representative of Orthodox in his time, as Galileo was of Catholics in his. He was a layman who wrote in Russian, not in pure Slavonic.
Discovering the atmosphere of Venus would not have been what Galileo had to answer for.
Discovering the Venus passage was not what Galileo had to answer for.
But perhaps Lomosonov had to do with far less circumspect Orthodox priests than the Catholic ones Galileo had to deal with.
He did not have his discourse from Orthodox priests, or you would have cited them. He did get lots of his education in Germany and had it from the German Enlightenment, which was addicted to Galileo, and also to his views on Scripture.
5:20 "energeia" is typically translated "operatio" in Latin.
Ephesians 3:7 for instance:
οὗ ἐγενήθην διάκονος κατὰ τὴν δωρεὰν τῆς χάριτος τοῦ Θεοῦ τῆς δοθείσης μοι κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ
cujus factus sum minister secundum donum gratiae Dei, quae data est mihi secundum operationem virtutis ejus.
Of which I am made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God, which is given to me according to the operation of his power:
- Nicholas Aggelopoulos
- Thank you for this very helpful response, especially with the quotes. It is, indeed, helpful that the Latin translation is close to the Greek meaning. There is still the question of how operatio is translated into English. I have come across English translations of energy being translated as grace of God or power of God. Some of these translations may give to the layman the wrong impression. I have the feeling that in the early centuries, during the Synods, the Latin and Greek-speaking branches of the Church sought to retain a consensus on theological points but that the consensus was not seamless especially after the Great Schism. My argument is that some practices in the West were caused by a belief in the Old Testament as God's unalterable truth, irrespective of how the Apostles, Evangelists and patrisitc tradition had qualified the position of the Old Testament in the Church, something that has come to haunts us again with religious fundamentalism in America.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @NicholasAggelopoulos "grace of God or power of God"
I think you are somewhat badly equipped to read texts.
The grace and the power of God are also mentioned in the verse, namely by Greek charis and dynamis.
"My argument is that some practices in the West were caused by a belief in the Old Testament as God's unalterable truth, irrespective of how the Apostles, Evangelists and patrisitc tradition had qualified the position of the Old Testament in the Church,"
That's not lacking in the East.
Apostolic Tradition accepts two truths in the Old Testament:
- the one that even unbelieving Jews know, the one known by St. Timothy even before he heard of Christ by St. Paul;
- the one that Jesus revealed to the Disciples on the Road to Emmaus, the Christological truth.
They do not contradict. The second does not alter, but confirm the former. You cannot pretend the OT has been abrogated as to its truths. Commandments, yes, since the priesthood is changed, but truths, no. Including historic ones.
[Below comments have been hidden or deleted under the video]
7:04—7:13
"that view would imply that the created world is perhaps a freerunning no longer Divine end result something partly separated from logos"
It is actually the view shared by scientists that is implying that.
Geocentrism involves God being the one Who day and night turns the universe around Earth, because obviously nothing else can effect that.
8:08—8:23
"this approach could lead to the eventuality that if scientific observations suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun but some statement from the Bible could be construed as indicating that the sun revolves around the earth"
1) Scientific observation is not in itself of a different order than everyday observation. God is not granting someone senses six or seven just because he gets a PhD. The scientist meets the exterior world by five senses, like everyone else.
2) Observation does not suggest or even less show that the Earth revolves around the Sun, in and of itself it shows the Universe, including the Sun, revolving each day around the Earth, and furthermore the heavenly bodies known as planets as revolving in longer periods (a year for the Sun) around the Zodiac.
3) Joshua 10:12 cannot be construed as anything other than Sun and Moon normally revolving around Earth, unless you want miracles to be made by people adressing the wrong things when it comes to what to give orders to.
9:05—9:29
"because it is a belief in reason and in reality the Orthodox belief has always been that the created world around us the physical law causality inference our human reason our empirical knowledge and our capacity for free will are the energies of God"
Are inferences never our own bad choices?
9:29—9:38
"that means that everything is the energies of God except for actions of our own individual human free will"
What about collective uses of the individual human free will? Obeying Nimrod and trying to reach heaven by a tower, was that an energy of God?
If you admit that bad choices are not the energies of God (actually, good choices that are so are also acts of human free will!), why would Galileo not have made a bad choice about how to interpret his observations?
9:38—9:50
"on the other hand, in the view of the Roman Inquisition, presumably, causality and reason are unfortunate accidents of God's creation"
Causality didn't enter the Galileo debate or the Copernicus debate.
Copernicus' mathematical argument was not about causation, but he couldn't do the math for Spirograph patterns, so presumably God couldn't create things or wouldn't create things that couldn't be described mathematically.
When Galileo ventured into causation, he gave a wrong explanation of tides and one of the Inquisitors was from Portugal and had seen them with his own eyes. Galileo might not even have seen the Mediterranean. If you live in Quito and your view of causality tells you that water boils at 90° C at the Ocean coast, and someone from the Ocean coast has seen it boil at 100°, will he be interested in your views of causality?
10:11—10:30
"to the Inquisition Copernicus and Galileo had reached that conclusion by the unfortunate accident of using rational thinking and empirical observation from what we know there was no effort to oppose a theory with a rational counter argument"
From what you know? Then you don't know much.
There was an ample chance given to Galileo in 1616 if he could rationally prove Heliocentrism. When he couldn't, his book was condemned.
What he had proven was that Ptolemy was wrong on some detail, therefore Copernicus had to be right.
St. Robert Bellarmine and his men mentioned Tycho Brahe, a man who did believe the Spirograph patterns we observe, for instance in Venus or Jupiter, if Earth is taken as completely stationary and orbits are taken as how they look from Earth.
Galileo had an a priori prejudice against Spirograph patterns. This doesn't seem more rational thinking or more empirical observation to me than it did to St. Robert Bellarmine.
In 1633, when he was on trial, the scientific debate was already over and the question was posed did he believe the Bible?
10:50 Thank you very much for analysing Joshua 10:13, and the character was Joshua.
Verse 13 taken by itself can be considered as only saying how things looked to people, not the physical realities behind it.
Verse 12 involves the citation of words of Joshua, not the ones in his prayer, but the ones that made the miracle.
If you believe Earth stood still when Sun and Moon were adressed, do you also believe psychological processes were adjusted in miraculous hyperspeed when Jesus adressed demons and told them to get out?
11:06 When exactly had reason been "deemed the enemy of faith"?
Galileo process 1633? No. Galileo process 1616? No.
W H E N ?
It hadn't. If it had, you would have cited the decision.
In St. Thomas Aquinas, reason is the subject of faith. Like will is the subject of virtue and of vice, as well as of lots of less important choices, reason is the subject of faith and of infidelity, as well as of lots of less important intellectual positions.
11:21 "some seeing the Earth as only about 7,000 years old"
Were you in Liturgy on September 1st?
As I recall, that is Orthodox liturgical New Year and therefore when you state what year after Creation you are.
Liturgy, Church Fathers, Bible, everything should tell you that the world is only about 7,000 years old.
11:57—12:10
"to our fellow fundamentalists Christians he may be pointed out that Stories being told at a time before literacy let alone before science cannot be held as proof of reality"
Your priest tells you this, then he's a harlot of Soviet Communism.
The idea of "before literacy" is moot, we do not know when exactly writing was invented.
The lack of science does not mean someone cannot observe what happens, accurately, and therefore not that his stories are "not proof of reality" ... but if it could, you would just have cut off the credibility of the New Testament, since the Apostles also lived before Newton and Galileo.
Your view of what counts as proof and what doesn't isn't rooted in Palamas, but in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev.
13:00 Well, I don't ignore them.
Perhaps you do.
E V E R Y event in the Old Testament was interpreted as saying something prophetically about Jesus or His Mother or His Church or the enemies thereof.
But N O N E of these interpretations involve the idea that the events didn't happen as described.
13:17 "scientific and encyclopedic knowledge of their time"
They couldn't have, since such an entity did not exist.
There was no knowledge (real or falsely so called) that a specific institution of scientists was spreading to all of the world in their time, there were just different schools of philosophy.
There were no encyclopedias, so knowledge couldn't be encyclopedic.
The word encyclopedia (encyclo|pedia) comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[13] transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning 'general education' from enkyklios (ἐγκύκλιος), meaning 'circular, recurrent, required regularly, general'[6][14] and paideia (παιδεία), meaning 'education, rearing of a child'; together, the phrase literally translates as 'complete instruction' or 'complete knowledge'.[15] However, the two separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error[16] by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470.[17] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the Neo-Latin word encyclopaedia, which in turn came into English. Because of this compounded word, fifteenth-century readers since have often, and incorrectly, thought that the Roman authors Quintillian and Pliny described an ancient genre.[18]
If you mean knowledge transferred in general education within the Greco-Roman world, that was a knowledge very different from what we would call "encyclopedic" ... it was knowledge of law, institutions, plus such items as happened to fall within the scope of Homer, Virgil or other poets.
Virgil mentioned figs? General education involved people around the Roman empire knowing of figs. Homer didn't mention customs in Germania? They weren't part of general education. They were known to readers of Caesar, or Tacitus, but it's anyone's guess how much that influenced general education.
As a certain type of "institutionalised knowledge" didn't even exist, it is obviously false to say that Church Fathers referred to their time's version of it, and would admire our update.
When it comes to Earth being round, St. Augustine and St. Basil agree that this is what the philosophers say, but only St. Augustine makes a point of believing it and taking it into account in his teaching. That's why his work on Genesis involves 12 books, while that of Basil involves some sermons. In one of them St. Basil enumerates philosophical opinions and finishes off "but who cares really?"
13:32—13:43
"unfortunately with their attacks on science they achieve little other than embarrass themselves and also embarrass pollute and harm the church"
First, conflating "attacks on science" (i e against Heliocentrism and Evolutionism) with seeing logic and reason as the enemy (see your previous words), is an ad hominem.
Second, "embarass ourselves" ... before whom? We may not consider scientists the ultimate judges of human worth. Unlike some who conducted experiments on handicapped peoples in certain camps.
And when it comes to "embarass, pollute and harm the Church" I think you and your priest, or if you are a priest (which I doubt) your bishop are actually harming the Church, but the Church, unlike Pharisees, is not harmed by being embarrassed.
13:43—13:52
"atheists will misunderstand their ignorance as being representative of the Christian church as a whole"
Poor sensitive atheist, who can't read history correctly, unless informed by your misinformation, and unless it includes malevolent attacks on the Roman Inquisition and on US Fundamentalists!
And poor you, who cannot clear up someone else's mess (if such) other than by a prolonged attack!
Are you the Church? No, people like you are NOT the Church.
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