Peer Reviewer's Messsage - Dr. Archbishop Chrysostomos
Academically, I have benefited significantly from the journal, which consistently publishes excellent, perceptive articles and studies of everything from religion and literature to technical philological issues. There are so very few journals of this sort, in this age of specialization to the point of compromising the acquisition of unitive knowledge for the sake of scholarly minutiae, that I feel obliged to express my appreciation for your gargantuan efforts to find order in the increasing chaos of cheap scholarship and to do so with an open-minded, yet critical spirit. When I hear in the din of the city the proverbial vox clamantis in deserto - which yours certainly is - I cannot but be encouraged personally and academically.
If I may further abuse your kindness, please allow me to make a few general comments - hoping that I am not making an editorial letter the occasion for an article-length discourse - about the importance of the guiding principle of transdisciplinarianism, under the philosophical umbrella of which I would place the stated goals of your journal. I often reflect on the modern idea that somehow knowledge and wisdom are separated and that knowledge is a kind of empirical pursuit of adventitious evidence that is unrelated to the phenomenological ideal of wisdom. In fact, those who collect empirical evidence and who study the specific are the builders of that composite theory that we construct from observations and which leads us to more general insights: wisdom, if I may use the term in a somewhat operational way. When collectors of data become somehow incognizant of their rôle in serving theory and wisdom, we fall to the folly of “knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”
Seekers of knowledge who ignore the goal and importance of wisdom often forget that, at a simple methodological level, a good scientist begins his examination of the specific by drawing the hypothetical elements of his limited studies from theory itself. In other words, the pursuit of empirical knowledge ultimately rests - if we are more than mere compilers of random observations - on conceptual hypotheses that we derive from theory (wisdom, if you will). Knowledge, in the final analysis, not only confirms theory, but, if it embraces its true goal, its operative principles are drawn from unexamined theory. Knowledge, then, serves to confirm wisdom, in the form of theory, just as wisdom as theory gives shape and purpose to knowledge. Knowledge and theory and wisdom complement one another in a very complex interaction that we completely miss when we lose a sense of the unity of knowledge and wisdom, which is a fact reflected, again, in the spirit of transdisciplinarianism, which sees all fields of inquiry from the light of a unitive knowledge - drawn from many sources of observation - that is wisdom, the composite witness of theories tested and untested.
I am also extremely pleased that, in an intellectual atmosphere where not only has religion degraded itself, in many cases, but where religion has been attacked in the language of simpletons passing as philosophers, you have decided not to exclude, as a source of theory and wisdom from which we draw our inspiration and the content of our pursuit of knowledge, the concept of the revealed, concrete, or supernatural truth that forms and informs theology and, indeed, some aspects of classical philosophy. There is, to be sure, an obvious level at which science and theology correspond to the search for specific empirical knowledge drawn from theory. Methodologically, science and theology work in the same way. A scientist seeks to confirm theory through empirical knowledge, which theory, confirmed by observation, becomes scientific wisdom. In theology one seeks to confirm revelation by examining it empirically as it is manifested in the world, though the purpose of that examination is not simply to confirm revealed truth, but to effect the transformation of knowledge itself, through the power (Grace) of revealed truth, into wisdom. This quite essential difference in the result of theological inquiry does not invalidate, however, what I have said about the complementarity of the two pursuits. Only in the spirit of true transdisciplinarianism, as I see it in your publication, can such complementarity survive the mediocrity of the confrontation of religion and science as we see it in such anserine debates as those in which the celebrated Professor Dawkins, now, once removed from Oxford and turned into a popular crusader for unbelief, conducts in such domains as his Internet “blasphemy” challenges, which should embarrass him and anyone else with a level of intelligence beyond that of an ape or a level of maturity beyond the sophomoric.
I hope that my overall support for your journal and its works has not been lost in these comments about my very broad interest in transdisciplinarianism and my somewhat more personal concern for religion within the context of transdisciplinary study. I also hope that you will forgive me for such a lengthy statement, which I hope that you can somehow accommodate, despite the editorial policies of your journal. If not, I fully understand.
Most Reverend Chrysostomos
Archbishop Chrysostomos received his doctorate in psychology from Princeton University. He is at present Senior Scholar at the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, a private Orthodox research facility attached to the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery in Etna, California. He also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Byzantine history, has taught at a number of American and European universities (including the University of California, Ashland University, the Theological Institute of Uppsala University in Sweden, and, in Romania, the University of Bucharest, the A.I. Cuza University in Iasi, and the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest), and also served for a year as Executive Director of the U.S. Fulbright Commission in Romania, where he was himself a Fulbright Scholar several years earlier.
His Eminence is the former holder of the David B. Larson Fellowship in Health and Spirituality at the Kluge Center of the United States Library of Congress and has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, Oxford University, the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and the University of Washington at Seattle.
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Glossa (ISSN 1931-7778) Publicada por la Escuela de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas de la Universidad del Turabo.
