“Reason is what attunes us to the reality of where we live, in a way that makes possible the fullest mutual movement of life and intelligent communication. It is to be understood theologically as the embodiment in time and space of the eternal receiving, communicating, and responding that is the life of the second divine metamorphosis,” he said.

“To live consistently as human spirits within this logos-animated exchange is deification—theosis—in the sense of growing into the filial identity for which we are all made.”

Williams, a distinguished theologian and cleric who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, delivered “The Embodied Logos: The Renewal of Mind and the Transformation of Sense,” on the second day of the Patterson Triennial Conference. The conference, which is held every three years by Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, is possible thanks to a 2008 gift from Solon and Marianna Patterson. The two were honored in March at Fordham’s 18th annual Founder’s Dinner.

In his talk, Williams reflected on the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian monk who lived from 345-399. In particular, he focused on writings such as Ponticus’ The Gnostikos, which translates as “the person with knowledge.”

In it, he said, Ponticus proposed that there are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge we acquire from the outside, and knowledge that comes from God. The former allows us to engage with the reality of the material things around us, while the latter “brings realities into direct contact with our intellective capacity.”

A key challenge for us, he said, is to fully embrace the latter. When we allow ourselves to become enamored with the knowledge we acquire ourselves, or “passionate knowledge,” we neglect to see how we are connected to all things, and are thus prevented from experiencing logos—the Greek word for the word of God, also thought of as the principle of divine reason and creative order.

“The problem then is not that we have made a mistake about our world, but that in one crucial sense, we have mistaken what the world itself is. We have acted, or reacted as though the world were a separate agent or set of agencies with an interest or a gender standing in rivalry to our own individual interests,” he said.

“True knowledge is to know what we know in its relation to its maker. … To know anything or to know anyone is to know them in that way.”

Before introducing Williams, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, presented His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, with the President’s Medal, one of the University’s highest honors.

The Archbishop was awarded an honorary degree from Fordham in a ceremony in 2007, and given his retirement a month ago, Father McShane said it was fitting to honor him again for bringing the community of the Greek Orthodox church to a “position of great renewal.”

“He has been a man of deep learning and deep holiness,” he said.

“When I introduced him to Pope Benedict when the pope was here in New York, I reflected afterward that it was a great honor to introduce the pope to a saint. I stand by this. He has simply been an amazing presence in the United States.”

The archbishop, for whom the Orthodox Christian Studies program’s first chair was named in 2013, was equally effusive in his thanks, saying it was a great surprise to receive it.

“This is a tremendous gift, and knowing that Father McShane is a person of truth, in what he does, what he is, and what he says, that makes this offering that much more important,” he said.

“To be truly American in the most extreme way is to be a sort of proteus, capable of becoming just about anything,” said David Bentley Hart, Ph.D., research fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

“That may amount to a kind of cultural genius, but it does raise questions regarding what becomes [of]the many eastern Christians Orthodox traditions in this country, when immersed in an element of ceaseless dissolution and transformation.”

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, only 53% of Americans who were raised Orthodox still identified as Orthodox Christians. Therefore, the church can benefit from the dynamism, energy, and charisma of converts to the faith, said Hart, in his lecture, “Orthodoxy in America and America’s Orthodoxies.”

Just as importantly, converts can help the faith finally shed the burden of preserving ethnic pride and identity.

But they can also negatively change the faith through shallow understandings of its theology, he said.

“Many are accustomed to think of Christian faith as simply a uniform set of explicit beliefs,” he said.  Some of these attitudes are attributed to the innate character of the United States, which he described as “a nation more constructed than cultivated, built around a political and social project, always somewhat in flux, but also more or less relentlessly oriented toward the future” and “generated out of its own native ideals and values rather than out of any traditions that it might have inherited from the lands its peoples left behind.”

He saw a particular danger posed by converts from Evangelical backgrounds who are drawn to Orthodox Christianity because of their opposition to the Catholic Church.

“There are real differences that divide Christians, [so]it’s absolutely imperative that we not allow ourselves to deepen those divisions by exaggerating, misrepresenting, or to put it bluntly, celebrating them,” he said.

Hart said he was apprehensive but hopeful that a new form of “self-aware” orthodoxy is taking shape in the United States.

“[It] has at long last severed its mission to speak the gospel from its institutional and cultural subordination to nations, governments and discreet peoples,” he said.[It] will remind the convert that there is neither Jew nor Greek nor South Carolinian. All are one.”

In his benediction, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, contrasted his own upbringing in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, to his current residence on East 79th Street in Manhattan.

“How do you feel if you go from a history and a country with 95 percent orthodox people, and you come to this kind of situation where there are 198 different nations, countries, religions, languages, and everything is different?” he said. “You’re a special species. You create the contemporary orthodoxy rooted very strongly in the past, but looking to the future.”

Hart’s lecture was presented by Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

]]> 78271 https://now.fordham.edu/living-the-mission/fordham-awards-honorary-degree-to-archbishop-demetrios/ Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:57:17 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=35035 Fordham University awarded His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, the primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, an honorary doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, at a special ceremony on June 14 as part of Fordham’s Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series inaugural conference.

The honorary doctorate was conferred on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the archbishop’s elevation to the episcopacy. In presenting the award at the University Church on the Rose Hill campus, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called the archbishop “a man of graciousness and transparent holiness.”

“The archbishop has worked tirelessly to heal the division that exists between the Eastern and Western churches,” Father McShane said. “He is a master teacher, a teacher who yearns for, and who builds, the Kingdom with his every word and his every deed.”

Since 1999, the archbishop has served as the spiritual leader of 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians in America. He was born in 1928 in Thessaloniki, Greece, and attended Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972. He received a doctorate in theology from the University of Athens in 1977.

The archbishop is the final recipient of a Fordham honorary degree this academic year. Seven others received honorary degrees at Fordham’s Commencement and diploma ceremonies in May.