Schizo Orthodox & Autist Catholics
on Christendom's 2 lungs [+brains]
Before we get started, you should listen to our interview with Emmett Rensin on mental illness, faith, & politics [YouTube, Spotify, Apple].
Happy Julian AND Gregorian Easter! Sorry to our Orthodox habibis, but no discounted chocolate bunnies for you this year. Also lol @ everyone making a big fuss about how the Western and Eastern calendars have lined up…even though this literally happens pretty much every three-ish years.
We thought this would be an opportune moment to drop the piece you’ve all been waiting for on my theory that “Western spirituality breeds rationalistic neurotic autists while Eastern spirituality breeds magical-thinking psychotic schizos” (which I alluded to in my piece on why I am no longer Orthodox).
Surely, this is not a shocking statement. In general, “the West” is commonly associated with rationalism and legalism, and “the East” with the mysterious and exotic. And I’d argue that the apophatic, mystical, poetic imagination of the so-called East describes various eastern cultures and religions, including Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
The Church’s 2 brains
Let’s start with the cultural imagination of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the mental aberrations it disposes people to. Part of the inspiration behind my theory is my grandmother who was born on a small island in Greece. My grandma was prone to “magical thinking,” attributing very mundane happenings to supernatural causes, or recognizing forces at work that others did not perceive. This was in part due to the fact that she actually had paranoid schizophrenia. It was also due to the fact that she practiced a syncretic form of folk witchcraft1 (akin to a Greek version of Santeria).
But it was also part and parcel of being culturally Greek; I knew plenty of other old Greek ladies who probably didn’t have schizophrenia, but who would say “schizobrained” things like my grandma did.
My grandma spoke of having visions of the saints and the Virgin, of miracle healings and people putting curses on her, of premonitions of receiving certain gifts in the mail, of the looming sense that certain people were out to get her, and that there was a mysterious man trying to burn her house down. The reality is that while some of this was the stuff of pure delusion (no one ever tried to burn the house down), there was indeed varying levels of truth in many of things she said.
This type of magical thinking tends to perceive disparate things to be connected, sensing that everything is conspiring against you or that everything is coming together in your favor thanks to good luck or a blessing. My conviction that Greeks are prone to being schizobrained magical thinkers solidified during my first visit to the motherland, as did my conviction that this is very much linked to the role that Eastern Orthodoxy plays in the culture (thought it’s hard to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg). Orthodox Christians tend to have a mystical/poetic imagination that flouts the limits of reason and has a penchant for hyperbole.2
On the flipside of Orthodox schizos are Catholic autists. Western rationalism breeds people who are more obsessive than paranoid, neurotic than hysterical/psychotic, fixate on details and relegate things to separate categories rather than thinking everything is connected, and view things in an empirical, mathematical light rather than a mystical or poetic one. (Just as the Orthodox imagination is influenced by the “oriental” culture of its homebase [Constantinople], Catholicism is influenced by the culture, spirituality, and governance of Ancient Rome.)
While the Orthodox are floating in the clouds, Catholics have their heads down in a book or working out rational proofs. Orthodox are intuitive, Catholics are calculative. Orthodox dramatize, Catholics explain. Orthodox monastics are ecstatic, Catholic monastics are sober. Just listen to the difference between Byzantine and Gregorian chant, the theology of John Chrysostom and that of Aquinas, the stories of recent saints like Saint Nektarios vs Carlo Acutis. This is why so many spergs become trad caths (read more about this in my very controversial piece for NCR).
