The Reversion Book Club - Weekly discussion and notes on The Orthodox Survival Course by Fr. Seraphim Rose (Lecture 5)
Upcoming: Our next book club meeting will be Thursday, June 18th at 8pm EST - reading Lecture 7 & 8 (Revolution in the 19th Century). If you’re a paid member, make sure you are in our Discord server where all our meetings and communications take place.
This week’s 2+ hour discussion outlines the following:
Recap on The Renaissance lecture
The emergence of the western mind and the new scientific worldview
Isaac Newton’s occult influnce
Occult influence of modern cosmology
The emergence of the new western scientific mind
The faustian spirit in western Christianity
Age of Enlightenment as the Age of Lucifer
Idea of encyclopedic knowledge and man’s ability to “know everything”
The concept of all knowledge being contained within books
Fragmented knowledge in the digital age (Wikipedia as an authority of truth)
Enlightenment philosophers become authorities on matters of theology
John Locke’s new criteria for salvation
Synthesis of OSC with previous two books
What would the west look like without the influence of the Enlightenment & European conquest
Orthodoxy in the west
How occultism entered the Roman Catholic Church
Catholicism and Protestantism arguments in current discourse
Off topic conversation:
Q&A Session
What are my plans for The Reversion content moving forward?
Eschaton Audio
Noteworthy excerpts:
The is the age, actually the end of this period is the age of the Encyclopedia in France, a great undertaking particularly by Diderot, to bring the whole of knowledge into one great book of many volumes. It should be understood first of all that this very idea of the encyclopedia is something quite new, that is, the idea of bringing the whole of knowledge into one place and arranging it, as in later encyclopedias, even alphabetically. So everything is sort of flattened out and placed just within the compass of a certain number of pages, so that if you want to find out about anything, you simply look up in the index or look up alphabetically and you find article on that subject. (p.25)
In this new synthesis, the idea of nature actually replaces God as the central idea, even though we will see that the idea of God was not thrown out until the very end of this period. One of the French thinkers of the late eighteenth century, Holbach, thus describes his worship of nature. (p.26)
Orthodox Survival Course: The Enlightenment