Beyond Polemics: Ascetic Truth and the Loss of Phronema in East and West

Why the Crisis Is Not Theological but Ascetical

Abstract

This reflection is written in response to “Why the Eastern Orthodox Church Needs the Western Rite: Moving Past Polemics, Restoring the Whole Tradition, and Fulfilling Our Mission in the West” by the Very Rev. Fr. Patrick Cardine, originally published in The Basilian Journal (Fall 2020). While affirming Fr. Cardine’s critique of anti-Western polemics within contemporary Orthodox discourse and his call to reclaim the Western Christian patrimony, this response presses the question more deeply. Drawing from lived pastoral and ascetical experience within the Latin tradition, it argues that the more fundamental crisis shared by both East and West is not theological but ascetical: a widespread erosion of the Christian phronema as a lived, transformative way of life. The reflection seeks to move the conversation beyond questions of rite, polemic, and historical caricature toward the recovery of the ascetical heart of Christianity, without which no tradition, Eastern or Western, can fully bear fruit.

“Theology without ascetic struggle is the theology of demons.”

— St. Maximus the Confessor

Much of what Fr. Patrick Cardine diagnoses is accurate and necessary. The Eastern Orthodox habit of defining itself polemically against “the West” has often distorted history, caricatured theology, and impoverished catholicity. The Western Rite’s presence within Orthodoxy is a needed corrective to a false narrative, one that confuses cultural form with dogmatic substance and substitutes reaction for vision.

Yet there is a deeper wound beneath the polemics, one that cannot be healed simply by restoring rites, correcting misreadings of Augustine or Aquinas, or expanding historical consciousness. The crisis that afflicts both East and West today is not primarily theological. It is ascetical.

Christianity is, at its heart, an ascetical religion. Not as a specialization for monks, nor as a heroic option for the few, but as the very shape of baptismal life. The Gospel does not merely offer doctrines to be affirmed, but a way of life that dismantles illusions: about God, about the self, about prayer, about holiness, about the world itself. Where asceticism fades, Christianity becomes not false, but unreal. It remains correct while no longer being transformative.

This loss has occurred across confessional lines. Enlightenment rationalism, modern therapeutic culture, and the fragmentation of Christian life have together produced a form of Christianity that is increasingly notional. Beliefs are retained, but the atmosphere in which those beliefs become flesh has thinned. The phronema that once pressed the soul toward repentance, watchfulness, fasting, silence, obedience, and prayer of the heart has been diluted, sometimes replaced by moralism, sometimes by sentimentality, sometimes by ideology, sometimes by psychological substitution.

In this sense, the polemics Fr. Cardine critiques are not the disease but a symptom. When ascetical life weakens, identity seeks support elsewhere. Theological exaggeration becomes a substitute for lived struggle. Reaction replaces repentance. Defining oneself against the “other” becomes easier than allowing the Gospel to dismantle the self. The East defines itself against the West. The West defines itself against caricatures of the East. Both evade the same demand: to be crucified with Christ in concrete, embodied ways.

This explains a paradox many experience but rarely name. One can move Eastward liturgically, canonically, or culturally and yet find the same spiritual anemia reappearing under different forms. The problem is not the Byzantine Rite, nor the Latin Rite, nor even their historical divergences. The problem is what happens when Christianity ceases to function as a school of repentance and becomes instead an inheritance, an identity, or a system.

The Fathers, East and West, never treated theology as detachable from ascetical purification. Doctrine was not opposed to experience, nor was experience free-floating and therapeutic. Truth was known only as the heart was cleansed. This is why the loss of asceticism is so devastating: it produces Christians who can speak correctly about God while remaining inwardly untouched by Him. It produces churches full of language about grace with little expectation of transformation.

Seen in this light, the Western Rite is not merely a solution to Orthodox polemics, nor is it simply a pastoral accommodation for Western converts. Its deeper value, if it is to have one, lies in whether it can help restore an ascetical realism that has been weakened everywhere. The same is true of the Eastern Rite. Neither guarantees this restoration. Both can fail. Both can succeed.

What is needed is not a truce between East and West, nor even a fuller historical synthesis, but a renewed submission to the severe mercy of the Gospel. A Christianity that again expects fasting to wound the ego, prayer to expose distraction, obedience to shatter self-will, silence to reveal interior chaos, and repentance to reorder reality. Without this, catholicity becomes breadth without depth, and unity becomes cosmetic.

The great danger of polemics, Eastern or Western, is not merely that they misrepresent the other. It is that they distract from the one thing necessary. They allow us to argue about metaphors of atonement while avoiding the cross. They let us defend correct doctrines of grace while remaining strangers to compunction. They preserve orthodoxy of language while tolerating spiritual unreality.

If Orthodoxy in the West is to flourish, it will not be because Western Christians are allowed to remain Western, nor because Eastern Christians successfully export Byzantine culture. It will be because men and women once again breathe the air of the ascetical life and discover that Christianity is not primarily an explanation of the world, but a judgment upon it and upon us. A judgment that heals.

In that light, the real question is not whether the Eastern Orthodox Church needs the Western Rite, but whether the Church, East and West alike, will recover the ascetical heart without which no rite, however venerable, can bear fruit.

Where that heart is restored, catholicity ceases to be an argument and becomes a lived reality. Where it is not, even the most accurate theology becomes another way of standing at a distance from the fire.

And the fire, as the Fathers never tired of reminding us, does not ask whether we are Eastern or Western. It asks whether we are willing to be burned.