The reinforcements and affirmations of Romanides concerning “no similarity between the created and uncreated” is a phrase found often in the fathers and in Romanides’ works is often brought forward to dispel the Western conception of analogia, be it the Thomisitc doctrine of the analogy of being or the Protestant doctrine of the analogy of faith. While my immersion into Orthodox theology (already based on years of patristics) resulted in my gradual dismissal of Roman Catholic theology, there was still a point of departure between my Romanidean friend I could never put my finger on. At that time, my friend and I had numerous debates and exchanges concerning the question of revelation, Scripture, inspiration, inerrancy, the notion of analogy, etc.
#ANCESTRAL SIN ROMANIDES HOW TO#
Causing me a great deal of difficulty at the time, I decided to move eastward (in both Church Fathers and Church attendance).īefriending a Romanides scholar, a paradigm shift eventually occurred wherein many of the questions, difficulties and issues within traditional Roman Catholic theology I had serious problems reconciling (such as the dismissal of Tradition through modernism and its culmination at Vatican II) now had a context for how to understand them: The Roman Church had adopted erroneous assumptions that manifested over many centuries, and the filioque doctrine, as well as many other notions, and at root was the issue of divine simplicity, the denial of the essence-energy distinction and the resulting analogia entis of Rome. John Romanides, and at that time, I read what works I could find in English, the most relevant of which (to me, at least) were his Ancestral Sin and his online books and essays (and later his Patristic Theology). Various encounters with Orthodox writers challenged me to reconsider my assumptions and considerations of how Augustine and Aquinas conceived of “created grace,” the “light of God” in illumination and epistemology, and the meaning of “divine simplicity.” It was here that I was introduced to the writings of Fr. I had, to be clear, imbibed thousands of pages of Augustine (both his early and later works), and a considerable amount of Thomistic research, including entire volumes of both Summas. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse.” -Romans 1:20Īlmost a decade ago I was confronted with a challenge to my Augustinian and Thomistic presuppositions.
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