As we have seen until now, Christianity is the only worldview that proposes a real and unique solution to the problem of the One and the Many in a way that does not involve dialectical Either / Or thinking or goes back to the One of the philosophers in one way or another.

However, as we are about to see, the three main Christian denominations historically embraced different responses to this problem.

J.P. Farrell, in his book “God, History and Dialectic”, defended the existence of two different Europes. The first was the consequence of early patristic Christian theology. The second was born when Roman Catholicism began to exist through the Great Schism of 1054, re-imagining the non-dialectical Tri-Une God into a dialectical one through St. Augustine´s of Hippo’s later Hellenistic reformulation of the Trinity.¹Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic (Volume I): God, The Foundation of the First Europe. Prolegomena.

Europe´s history, in his profusely documented view, was shaped and moulded by the addition of the Filioque clause to the Creed.

This clause states that the Holy Spirit does not proceed only from the Father but from the Father and the Son, being conceived as a mediator or as the love between both of them. This need for such a mediator figure, in turn, implies the need of a third term that equilibrates the two other principles, meaning that they must have an intrinsic degree of tension or opposition between them.

The historical effects of the Filioque, as documented by Farrell, can indeed be seen as the proof that small theological modifications (how we understand God to be) have major consequences for common everyday life, implying changes in how we understand reality, morality, spirituality and even how to organize society.

The primacy of human reason over revelation that took place in Catholic doctrine can be clearly exemplified by the switching of the classical order of doing theology.

Early patristic Christianity followed revelation by starting all theologizing from the revealed Persons of God (who He is), unfolding then all the implications of these historical self-revelations and deducing the generalized conceptions about His particular attributes and Nature (what He is). The order followed was: Persons, Energies (also called Attributes or Operations) and Essence (or Nature).

Roman Catholic theologians, in contrast, tended to start from a philosophical general notion about God´s Essence and, from there, deduced God´s Attributes. Only after this would they tackle the notion of God´s Personhood and the particular historical manifestations of the Persons of the Trinity. The order, in this case moving in opposite directions, was: Essence, Attributes, Persons.

As a consequence, the Latin Church, by beginning all theologizing by defining God´s Essence through a combination of revelation and human reason, ended up operating in a different paradigm containing different axiomatic pre-suppositions about God´s Nature. Human reason was given more freedom in defining God´s Essence, which opened the doors to give greater weight to classic philosophical thought (e.g., Aristotle in Thomas Aquinas).

This, in turn, had other far-reaching consequences that became evident over time. For example, as Farrell noted:²Ibid., p. 22.

“Thus, because the First Europe observed rigorously the categorical distinctions of Person and Nature, it avoided the dialectical dilemma which will plague the Second Europe after Augustine, the dilemma which opposes divine grace and human free choice as irreconcilable opposites.”

The consequences of modifying Christianity´s most basic revealed dogmas and axiomatic beliefs were well known centuries before Roman Catholicism was born. We can find some of the most dramatic examples in Gnosticism and the theology of Origen of Alexandria.

In the following sections we will briefly summarize the consequences that the addition of dialectical thought had in those systems in order to better understand the fears that the addition of the Filioque, working under a dialectical paradigm, aroused in those who knew the historical precedents.

In Origen´s system, a highly Hellenised version of Christianity, the usual metaphysical consequences of introducing dialectical thought can be clearly seen.

For Origen:

• The diversity of the world is dialectically and unavoidably linked to the sinful exercise of free choice in the pre-existent World of Souls, or the Henad (absolute Unity).³Origen. On First Principles. Section 1:8:2.

As he directly stated: “Now since the world is so very varied and comprises so great a diversity of rational beings, what else can we assign as the cause of its existence except the diversity in the fall of those who decline from unity in dissimilar ways?” ⁴Ibid., 2:9:2, p. 130.

• Again, an attribute of God, simplicity, is equated with God´s Essence.

• This simplicity makes it mandatory to transform the co-equal Trinity into a sequential system comprised of “First, Second and Third Gods”.

• Which in turn faithfully reproduces Plotinus´ Neo-Platonic first three emanations: The One, Nous and World-Soul.⁵Quasten, Johannes (Vol. III). Patrology. Thomas More Press, p. 8.

• God is then, inevitably, implicated in the definition and origin of evil because anything outside of God´s simplicity, even Creation, implies a lesser degree of (even moral) perfection.

Therefore, matter is evil, as Origen dramatically demonstrated by emasculating himself.

• Souls are conceptualized as semi-components of the total simplicity or unity of the Godhead (similar to the Gnostic and Kabbalistic “Holy Spark” motif).

• Salvation is Universal (Apokatastasis). An unavoidable consequence of, knowingly or unknowingly, defining the Godhead as the All, the One, the Absolute.

Needless to say, the character of a God that values absolute simplicity devoid of any particularity as the highest good is a complete inversion from the Christian one. Instead of rejecting what makes us unique, the Christian God loves each person in their particularity, which is a manifestation of the specific reason (logoi) that God willed for them.

The Gnostic “Trinity”, in turn, was also defined by its dialectical structure, with the Persons being conceptualized as Father, Mother (Holy Spirit) and Son.⁶Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage, p. 52. This conception is found in the Gospel to the Hebrews. The Hebrew for “Spirit” is ruah, a feminine word. This was just another version of the ancient philosophical motif of the Androgyne which, as a symbol of God understood as the Absolute that contains it All, resolves all moral and metaphysical opposition through a synthesis and Union of Opposites.

In systems that share this doctrine, as Zaehner and Farrell both highlighted, it is difficult to justify a concrete moral order. The presence of at least a modicum of moral Relativism, necessary in systems that conceive God as being “beyond Good and Evil”, is always part and parcel of the constellation of metaphysical beliefs surrounding this notion of God as the Absolute.

It is not surprising, then, the extreme variety of “moralities” found in Gnosticism, ranging from the extreme asceticism of the Cathars (similar to the Catholic flagellants, as we will later see) to the antinomianism of the libertine Borborites.

Given the drastic changes in metaphysical doctrine that it produces, as we have just seen, it is no wonder that the Eastern Church fought so fiercely to avoid any mixing of dialectical thought with Christian theology.

There is no doubt that theologians such as Origen or St. Augustine had Christianity’s best interests in mind when they formulated their theories. However, as Farrell dramatically noted, embracing St. Augustine´s personal interpretations beyond the actual consensus of the Church Fathers carried the risk that Christianity would slowly transform itself into the largest Gnostic mystery religion in the world.⁷ Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic, Volume I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe, p. 109.

By having a clear picture of the dangers just outlined, the fears of St. Photios, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople who had to refuse the addition of the Filioque to the Eastern Creed, are easier to understand:⁸of Nyssa, St. Gregory. Against Eunomius (1:14). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Cosimo Inc., p. 51.

“ […] For my part I think that it is a prelude to his complete denial of the ‘being’ of the only-Begotten and of the Holy Ghost, and that this system of his is secretly intended to effect the setting aside of all real belief in their personality.” 

― St. Photios the Great

Thus, for St. Photios, the real danger of the Filioque was that it initiated a path that could logically end in an impersonal view of God, eventually leading to a subordinationist view of the Persons of the Godhead and a return to the God of the philosophers and of human reason.

The response given by the Patriarch was the only one that can be given through an Orthodox lens: to reject all innovation while reaffirming the tradition received through apostolic succession, concisely summarized in the following quote of St. Gregory the Theologian that states that unity is not the enemy of plurality:⁹St. Gregory, as part of the Cappadocian Fathers, was one of the key figures in unwrapping and making explicit all the implications of revealed Christian doctrine and how it solved the problem of Unity and Multiplicity while at the same time avoiding dialectical thought.

“The three most ancient opinions concerning God are Anarchia, Polyarchia, and Monarchia. The first two are the sport of the children of Hellas, and may they continue to be so. For anarchy is a thing without order; and the Rule of Many (polyarchy) is factious, and thus anarchical, and thus disorderly. For both these tend to the same thing, namely, disorder; and this to dissolution, for disorder is the first step to dissolution.

But Monarchy is that which we hold in honour. It is, however, a Monarchy that is not limited to one Person, for it is possible for a Unity at variance with itself to come into a condition of plurality; but one which is made of an equality of Nature and a Union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity… so that though numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence. Therefore Unity having from all eternity arrived by motion at Duality, found its rest in Trinity.”

― St. Gregory of Nazianzus (emphasis added)¹⁰of Nazianzus, St. Gregory. The Third Theological Oration. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Cosimo Inc., p. 301.

As Farrell perceptively concluded:

“For all the dialectical rhetorical constructions of patristic theology have but one goal:

To teach the faithful habits or forms of thought and perceptions of spiritual realities which cannot be reduced to the “either-or” of a polar opposition.

Its theology has, as it were, the persistent characteristic of dialectical rhetoric being employed against dialectics itself.” ¹¹Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic, Volume I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe, p. 23.

In the following sections we will analyze the consequences that adding dialectical pre-suppositions into Christian theology had for particular doctrines and beliefs, comparing it to early patristic Christianity.

The modifications, as we shall see, are not minor.

Aquinas was one of the most prominent proponents of Natural Theology (also called Physico-Theology¹⁵Physicotheology. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved on October 2020.), a current of thought that looked for arguments in favour of Theism through the use of human reasoning and science.

Regarding the problem of Unity and Plurality, he believed that particularity was an attribute of matter. Therefore, in his view (similar to that of many classical philosophers), unity had primacy, thus putting at risk the classical Christian non-dialectical solution to the problem of the One and the Many that was so characteristic of foundational Christian orthodox theology:¹⁶Aquinas, Thomas (1265-1274). Summa Theologica, I, Q 30, A 4.

“Hence Plato said that unity must come before multitude; and Aristotle said that whatever is greatest in being and greatest in truth is the cause of every being and of every truth, just as whatever is the greatest in heat is the cause of all heat.” ¹⁷Ibid., Q 44, A 1. 

As R. J. Rushdoony noted, an uneasy balance was established between the Both / And logic characteristic of Trinitarian theology and the Aristotelian philosophy found in Thomism:¹⁸Rushdoony, R.J. (1971). The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy. Chalcedon / Ross House Books, Ch. VII: The Return of Dialectic Thought; 7. The One and the Many in Aquinas.¹⁹See also Sister Mary Fredericus Niemeyer. The One and the Many in the Social Order According to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1951, pp. 26-27, 73ff.

“This is the basis of Thomas’ doctrine of “creation”, the one as the cause of the many because the many must by definition originate in the one. For Aristotle, this made man a creature of the state, the social one, and the universe the creature of chaos, the cosmic one. The source for Aquinas is the one, and the goal is also the one, unity, in which the many find their perfection. He did, of course, try to maintain a balance between the one and the many, between universals and particulars, holding, that, to have real existence, the universals must exist in the particulars as their essence, not as abstractions beside them.” 

By returning to the use of dialectics, the understanding of Roman Catholicism regarding the Fall of mankind (St. Augustine´s Original Sin) is different from the original view of the early Christian Church (Ancestral Sin).

Catholicism believes that we all inherited the guilt and the sin of the first archetypal human persons, Adam and Eve.

Orthodox doctrine, in contrast, explains that what we inherited was the consequence of sin: a broken nature with a tendency to miss the mark (the meaning of the word sin).

By employing their free wills in a mode contrary to their natural use, our archetypal ancestors opposed their persons to their natures, creating an internal conflict between inherent aspects of themselves previously in communion. This tearing apart of one´s own being and the creation of a dialectical opposition not originally present in their nature, in turn, willed into existence that which cannot naturally exist:

• Evil: the acting in a direction that opposes and negates God, the good.

• Sin: the error of acting contrary to our own nature, thus missing the whole point of our existence.

• Death: the impossibility of such a reality to have independent ontological existence.

The understanding of Ancestral Sin, in turn, has two important corollaries.

In Christian thought, death cannot ever be conceived as a necessary characteristic of multiplicity, as happens in pure Monism.

As we will see, in the Christian final state of deification (Theosis), particularized multiplicity can become divinized and achieve an ontologically co-equal state with unity. The dichotomy between the existence of either an immortal and eternal absolute Oneness or the existence of non-immortal particular beings is rejected by Christianity. Particularity and uniqueness do not imply temporal existence, imperfection and death.

As a consequence, Orthodox spirituality is based on repentance, understood not as guilt and self-flagellation, but as ceasing to move in a direction that leads away from God. The emphasis is on attuning our will to the Will of God while ceasing to oppose different aspects of our own nature, created in His image.

We can speak, then, of a Christian self-integration that re-unites and re-establishes communion between different aspects of our broken human nature. However, this process does not include the integration of the totality of the contents of our unconscious psyche, as Jung proposed (Jungian Shadow).

The Christian God is not the Absolute, the All, including both light and darkness. Therefore, the final aim is not to integrate our personal repressed unconscious demons into a totality, understood as our True Self.

There is no Union of Opposites that includes any instinctive dark aspect in Christian thought. The Christian Both / And inclusivity excludes that ultimately non-existent reality called evil, which is nothing more than a negation of God and therefore of ourselves, while instead of an alchemical marriage between the light and dark aspects in ourselves, proposes a marriage between our soul and God.

Orthodox Christian theology and Roman Catholicism are also at variance in their views on salvation. We will begin by describing the former.

All Christian denominations view the resurrection as a general event that applies to all on behalf of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who assumed and deified human nature, therefore liberating it from having to ever die. However, the subjective experience of particular persons in this eternal state of being can be very different.

For Orthodox Christians, depending on our affinity and attunement with God´s Will, experiencing His Presence and His Uncreated Energies can be a cause of eternal well-being or eternal ill-being.

A person who rejects God, while having free will to define himself in this manner, won´t experience happiness in His Presence, when He is “All in all“. This is the “burning” of Hell, having defined ourselves in opposition to God, and experiencing His Presence and Light as an undesirable reality (“the fire that is not quenched”) accompanied by regret (“the worm that does not die”, Mark 9:48).

The same reality, however, is experienced as a state of divinization and ultimate bliss for all persons who pursue closeness to God, with Him interpenetrating (Unity) each saved person and freely giving what He is (His Uncreated Energies) to each one, who then become capable of instantiating those energies in manifold (Multiplicity) ways, all equally good.

Deification (Theosis), then, includes the ever deepening personal relationship with the inexhaustible transcendent God who reveals to us who He is in His Essence, while receiving what He is through the interpenetration of all His Energies.

As the above description shows, the original Christian understanding regarding the life to come included both Unity and Multiplicity, Essence and Energy, the Will of God and the many wills of the saved persons in communion with Him.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”

― St. Paul. 1 Cor. 13,12. New King James Version

In contrast to the Orthodox doctrine of deification, the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation, because of its underlying dialectical (and even monistic) tendencies, became increasingly mentalist over time.

The Latin Church interpreted the final heavenly state of salvation, called the Beatific Vision, as the single-pointed contemplation of God in all His Glory or the union with Him through sharing in His Essence or Nature through sanctifying created grace.²⁰Catechism of the Catholic Church – Part 1 Section 1 Chapter 3 Article 1 (scborromeo.org).

This doctrine was also incorporated into various Protestant denominations, including the Lutheran and Methodist Churches.²¹“God in Heaven”. Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Archived from the original on May 2009.²²“What United Methodists Believe”. Spring Lake United Methodist Church. Archived from the original on 27 September 2008.²³Wesley, Charles (1989). Maker, in Whom We Live. The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, clarified the nature of this final state of being as shown in the text below, in which we can finally see the full extent of the danger that trying to create a synthesis between philosophical thought and Christian theology implies:

“Article 1. Whether the human intellect can attain to the vision of God in His essence?

Question 92. The vision of the divine essence in reference to the blessed

Therefore, since the Divine essence is pure act, it will be possible for it to be the form whereby the intellect understands: and this will be the beatific vision.

When therefore intellectual light is received into the soul, together with the indwelling Divine essence, though they are not received in the same way, the Divine essence will be to the intellect as form to matter: and that this suffices for the intellect to be able to see the Divine essence by the Divine essence itself may be shown as follows.”

― Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Vol X. Article 1, Question 92

Through a brief analysis of this short text, the following dangers characteristic of dialectical thought, all of them well known by now, can be easily identified:

• Emphasis on the Intellectual Aspect of Salvation: achieved through conceptualizing salvation as “vision”. It is the beginning of a Spirit / Body dichotomy that is the logical conclusion of defining God as an Absolute Divine Simplicity or Essence devoid of any (Uncreated) Energy. It contrasts with the Essence / Energies distinction of Orthodox theology.

• Actuality / Potentiality Dialectic: common in the doctrines of the One or the Absolute, as we saw earlier, and a natural consequence of an excessive dependence on Aristotelian thought.

• “That Are Thou”: the indwelling of the very Essence of God in us. Salvation as participation in God´s very Nature itself. This bears the risk of walking a path that has as its ultimate logical conclusion purely monistic interpretations of God and the view of salvation as fusion with the Godhead. In short, the risk of going back to the One and the famous Vedantic dictum of the Upanishads that identifies each person´s soul with God Himself.

This understanding of union with the Essence, needless to say, is contrary to the union of human and divine natures shown by Jesus Christ, which interpenetrated each other instead of being fused into a third, different entity which could not have led to the assumption and, therefore, the salvation of human nature.

This previously mentioned, barely hidden, dialectical tension between Spirit and body present in Catholicism could be seen in full force in the tendency towards severe asceticism. This tension, characteristic of Monism (e.g., Gnosticism²⁴Some Gnostics, for whom matter was intrinsically deficient, believed that Jesus was a pure disembodied spiritual apparition. However, for Christianity, no greater statement about the sacramentality of creation can be conceived than that of God Himself choosing to partake of the full human nature, which includes having a body., Neo-Platonism) but contrary to Trinitarian Both / And logic, was dramatically exemplified by the flagellants and their practices aimed at the mortification of the flesh.

Contrary to Orthodox doctrine, which states that the flesh is a combination of the body and the passions, with only the latter being the enemy of spiritual life, the Catholic animus towards the body as a source of temptation led to excesses and the invention of devices such as the cilice (also sometimes used by some Protestant churches such as the Lutheran²⁵Neve, Juergen Ludwig (1914). The Augsburg Confession: A Brief Review of Its History and an Interpretation of Its Doctrinal Articles, with Introductory Discussions on Confessional Questions. Lutheran Publication Society, p. 150., Anglican²⁶Knight, Mark; Mason, Emma (2006). Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, p. 96: “Pusey regularly endured a hair shirt as well as self- imposed flagellation and fasting routines.”, Methodist²⁷Bergen, Jeremy M. (2011). Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront Their Sinful Pasts. A&C Black, p. 255. and Scottish Presbyterian). This rejection of the body, however, seems difficult to justify and even a self-contradiction in a religion that sees each human person as the potential temple and receptacle of the Holy Spirit and that, especially, saw God incarnating in a human body while leading a sinless life.

In Catholicism, however, this can be interpreted as a logical consequence of the previously seen belief in salvation as the Beatific Vision. A purely cognitive / spiritual view of salvation implies that the body, even a deified one, is not worthy of achieving that state.

Given the above considerations regarding the latent dialectical oppositions between, for example, Actuality / Potentiality and Spirit / Body in Roman Catholic theology, it is not surprising that Aquinas found the need to reformulate the notion of creation out of nothing (Ex-Nihilo) to bring it closer to the doctrine of emanations of the philosophers.

As Aquinas himself stated in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica:

“On the text of Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created,” etc,

I answer that,

As said above (I:44:2), we must consider not only the emanation of a particular being from a particular agent, but also the emanation of all being from the universal cause, which is God; and this emanation we designate by the name of creation.”

― Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. First Part, Question 45, Article 1

Summarizing all the modifications just seen, we can see that the Filioque clause introduced into Roman Catholic theology a dialectical way of thinking that was contrary to the original character of the Tri-Une God of Christianity, hitherto characterized by His transcendence of the problem of the One and the Many.

Because of this deviation from apostolic and patristic tradition in order to mingle with classical philosophy, familiar doctrines of Panentheism (the One), such as the fusion with God, rejection of the body or Emanationism, showed a tendency to resurface in a more or less veiled form.²⁸Perhaps this is why Roman Catholicism has been the ground from which philosophies and worldviews as alien to Christian thought as the highly dialectical philosophy of the former Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (see HERE) or the openly Gnostic vision
(Marcionism) of the also ex-Jesuit Salvador Freixedo (see HERE) were able to emerge.

1. The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy. R.J. Rushdoony.
2. God, History, and Dialectic. Volumes I-III. Joseph P. Farrell.
3. Five Theological Orations. St. Gregory Nazianzus.

1. Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic (Volume I): God, The Foundation of the First Europe. Prolegomena.
2. Ibid., p. 22.
3. Origen. On First Principles. Section 1:8:2.
4. Ibid., 2:9:2, p. 130.
5. Quasten, Johannes (Vol. III). Patrology. Thomas More Press, p. 8.
6. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage, p. 52. This conception is found in the Gospel to the Hebrews. The Hebrew for “Spirit” is ruah, a feminine word.
7. Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic, Volume I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe, p. 109.
8. of Nyssa, St. Gregory. Against Eunomius (1:14). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Cosimo Inc., p. 51.
9. St. Gregory, as part of the Cappadocian Fathers, was one of the key figures in unwrapping and making explicit all the implications of revealed Christian doctrine and how it solved the problem of Unity and Multiplicity while at the same time avoiding dialectical thought.
10. of Nazianzus, St. Gregory. The Third Theological Oration. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Cosimo Inc., p. 301.
11. Farrell, Joseph P. (2016). God, History, and Dialectic (Volume I): God, The Foundation of the First Europe, p. 23.
12. Küng, Hans (1994). Great Christian Thinkers. New York: Continuum Books, p. 112.
13. Mullady, Brian (2006). The Angelic Doctor – Thomas Aquinas.
14. Code of Canon Law, Can. 252, §3 “Code of Canon Law” (vatican.va). Archived from the original on 8 May 2011.
15. Physicotheology. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved on October 2020.
16. Aquinas, Thomas (1265-1274). Summa Theologica, I, Q 30, A 4.
17. Ibid., Q 44, A 1.
18. Rushdoony, R.J. (1971). The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy. Chalcedon / Ross House Books, Ch. VII: The Return of Dialectic Thought; 7. The One and the Many in Aquinas.
19. See also Sister Mary Fredericus Niemeyer. The One and the Many in the Social Order According to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1951, pp. 26-27, 73ff.
20. “Catechism of the Catholic Church – Part 1 Section 1 Chapter 3 Article 1” (scborromeo.org).
21. “God in Heaven”. Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Archived from the original on May 2009.
22. “What United Methodists Believe”. Spring Lake United Methodist Church. Archived from the original on 27 September 2008.
23. Wesley, Charles (1989). “Maker, in Whom We Live“. The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House.
24. Some Gnostics, for whom matter was intrinsically deficient, believed that Jesus was a pure disembodied spiritual apparition. However, for Christianity, no greater statement about the sacramentality of creation can be conceived than that of God Himself choosing to partake of the full human nature, which includes having a body.
25. Neve, Juergen Ludwig (1914). The Augsburg Confession: A Brief Review of Its History and an Interpretation of Its Doctrinal Articles, with Introductory Discussions on Confessional Questions. Lutheran Publication Society, p. 150.
26. Knight, Mark; Mason, Emma (2006). Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, p. 96: “Pusey regularly endured a hair shirt as well as self-imposed flagellation and fasting routines.”
27. Bergen, Jeremy M. (2011). Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront Their Sinful Pasts. A&C Black, p. 255.
28. Perhaps this is why Roman Catholicism has been the ground from which philosophies and worldviews as alien to Christian thought as the highly dialectical philosophy of the former Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin  (see HERE) or the openly Gnostic vision (Marcionism) of the also ex-Jesuit Salvador Freixedo (see HERE) were able to emerge.