Our Crown of Thorns

Cover for The Sign of the Grail

I remember meeting a couple; the memory is not entirely pleasant. Almost the first thing they told me after being introduced was that their son was “an accident,” and this was followed by telling me how hard it was to live their lives as they wanted when he was in the picture.

I do not doubt that they had no intent of conceiving a child, nor do I doubt that having their little boy hindered living their lives as they saw fit. But when I heard this, I wanted to almost scream to them that they should look at things differently. It was almost as if I was speaking with someone bright who had gotten a full ride scholarship to an excellent university, and was vociferously complaining about how much work the scholarship would require, and how cleanly it would cut them off from what they took for granted in their home town.

I did not think, at the time, about the boy as an icon of the Holy Trinity, not made by hands, or what it means to think of such an icon as “an accident.” I was thinking mainly about a missed opportunity for growth. What I wanted to say was, “This boy was given to you for your deification! Why must you look on the means of your deification as a curse?”

Marriage and monasticism are opposites in many ways. But there are profound ways in which they provide the same thing, and not only by including a community. Marriage and monasticism both provide—in quite different ways—an opportunity to take up your cross and follow Christ, to grow into the I Corinthians 13 love that says, “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me”—words that are belong in this hymn to love because love does not place its own desires at the center, but lives for something more. Those who are mature in love put the childish ways of living for themselves behind them, and love Christ through those others who are put in their lives. In marriage this is not just Hollywood-style exhilaration; on this point I recall words I heard from an older woman, that you don’t know understand being in love when you’re “a kid;” being in love is what you have when you’ve been married for decades. Hollywood promises a love that is about having your desires fulfilled; I did not ask that woman about what more there is to being in love, but it struck me as both beautiful and powerful that the one thing said by to me by an older woman, grieving the loss of her husband, was that there is much more to being in love than what you understand when you are young enough that marriage seems like a way to satisfy your desires.

Marriage is not just an environment for children to grow up; it is also an environment for parents to grow up, and it does this as a crown of thorns.

The monastic crown of thorns includes an obedience to one’s elder that is meant to be difficult. There would be some fundamental confusion in making that obedience optional, to give monastics more control and make things less difficult. The problem is not that it would fail to make a more pleasant, and less demanding, option than absolute obedience to a monastic elder. The problem is that when it was making things more pleasant and less demanding, it would break the spine of a lifegiving struggle—which is almost exactly what contraception promises.

Rearing children is not required of monastics, and monastic obedience is not required married faithful. But the spiritual struggle, the crown of thorns by which we take up our cross and follow Christ, by which we die to ourselves that we live in Christ, is not something we can improve our lives by escaping. The very thing we can escape by contraception, is what all of us—married, monastic, or anything else—need. The person who needs monastic obedience to be a crown of thorns is not the elder, but the monastic under obedience. Obedience is no more a mere aid to one’s monastic elder than our medicines are something to help our doctors. There is some error in thinking that some people will be freed to live better lives, if they can have marriage, but have it on their own terms, “a la carte.”

What contraception helps people flee is a spiritual condition, a sharpening, a struggle, a proving grounds and a training arena, that all of us need. There is life in death. We find a rose atop the thorns, and the space which looks like a constricting prison from the outside, has the heavens’ vast expanse once we view it from the inside. It is rather like the stable on Christmas’ day: it looks on the outside like a terrible little place, but on the inside it holds a Treasure that is greater than all the world. But we need first to give up the illusion of living our own lives, and “practice dying” each day, dying to our ideas, our self-image, our self-will, having our way and our sense that the world will be better if we have our way—or even that we will be better if we have our way. Only when we have given up the illusion of living our own lives… will we be touched by the mystery and find ourselves living God’s own life.

Creation and Holy Orthodoxy: Fundamentalism Is Not Enough

Cover for Origins Questions: Creation, Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Orthodoxy

Against (crypto-Protestant) “Orthodox” fundamentalism

If you read Genesis 1 and believe from Genesis 1 that the world was created in six days, I applaud you. That is a profound thing to believe in simplicity of faith.

However, if you wish to persuade me that Orthodox Christians should best believe in a young earth creation in six days, I am wary. Every single time an Orthodox Christian has tried to convince me that I should believe in a six day creation, I have been given recycled Protestant arguments, and for the moment the entire conversation has seemed like I was talking with a Protestant fundamentalist dressed up in Orthodox clothing. And if the other person claims to understand scientific data better than scientists who believe an old earth, and show that the scientific data instead support a young earth, this is a major red flag.

Now at least some Orthodox heirarchs have refused to decide for the faithful under their care what the faithful may believe: the faithful may be expected to believe God’s hand was at work, but between young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and “God created life through evolution”, or any other options, the heirarchs do not intervene. I am an old earth creationist; I came to my present beliefs on “How did different life forms appear?” before becoming Orthodox, and I have called them into a question a few times but not yet found reason to revise them, either into young earth creation or theistic evolution. I would characterize my beliefs, after being reconsidered, as “not changed”, and not “decisively confirmed”: what I would suggest has improved in my beliefs is that I have become less interested in some Western fascinations, such as getting right the details of how the world was created, moving instead to what might be called “mystical theology” or “practical theology”, and walking the Orthodox Way.

There is something that concerns me about Orthodox arguing young earth creationism like a Protestant fundamentalist. Is it that I think they are wrong about how the world came to be? That is not the point. If they are wrong about that, they are wrong in the company of excellent saints. If they merely hold another position in a dispute, that is one thing, but bringing Protestant fundamentalism into the Orthodox Church reaches beyond one position in a dispute. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking because I reached my present position before entering the Orthodox Church; or rather I haven’t exactly reversed my position but de-emphasized it and woken up to the fact that there are bigger things out there. But I am concerned when I’m talking with an Orthodox Christian, and every single time someone tries to convince me of a young earth creationism, all of the sudden it seems like I’m not dealing with an Orthodox Christian any more, but with a Protestant fundamentalist who always includes arguments that came from Protestant fundamentalism. And what concerns me is an issue of practical theology. Believing in a six day creation is one thing. Believing in a six day creation like a Protestant fundamentalist is another matter entirely.

A telling, telling line in the sand

In reading the Fathers, one encounters claims of a young earth. However, often (if not always) the claim is one among many disputes with Greek philosophers or what have you. To my knowledge there is no patristic text in which a young earth is the central claim, let alone even approach being “the article by which the Church stands or falls” (if I may borrow phrasing from Protestant fundamentalist cultural baggage).

But, you may say, Genesis 1 and some important Fathers said six days, literally. True enough, but may ask a counterquestion?

Are we obligated to believe that our bodies are composed of earth, air, fire and water, and not of molecules and atoms including carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen?

If that question seems to come out of the blue, let me quote St. Basil, On the Six Days of Creation, on a precursor to today’s understanding of the chemistry of what everyday objects are made of:


At this point, belief in his day’s closest equivalent to our atoms and molecules is called an absolutely unacceptable “spider’s web” that is due to “inherent atheism.” Would you call Orthodox Christians who believe in chemistry’s molecules and atoms inherent atheists? St. Basil does provide an alternative:


St. Basil rejected atoms and molecules, and believed in elements, not of carbon or hydrogen, but of earth, air, fire, and water. The basic belief is one Orthodoxy understands, and there are sporadic references in liturgical services to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and so far as I know no references to modern chemistry. St. Basil seems clearly enough to endorse a six day creation, and likewise endorses an ancient view of elements while rejecting belief in atoms and molecules as implicit atheism.

Why then do Orthodox who were once Protestant fundamentalists dig their heels in at a literal six day creation and make no expectation that we dismiss chemistry to believe the elements are earth, air, fire, water, and possibly aether? The answer, so far as I can tell, has nothing whatsoever to do with Orthodoxy or any Orthodox Christians. It has to do with a line in the sand chosen by Protestants, the same line in the sand described in Why Young Earthers Aren’t Completely Crazy, a line in the sand that is understandable and was an attempt to address quite serious concerns, but still should not be imported from Protestant fundamentalism into Holy Orthodoxy.

Leaving Western things behind

If you believe in a literal six day creation, it is not my specific wish to convince you to drop that belief. But I would have you drop fundamentalist Protestant “creation science” and its efforts to prove a young earth scientifically and show that it can interpret scientific findings better than the mainstream scientific community. And I would have you leave Western preoccupations behind. Perhaps you might believe St. Basil was right about six literal days. For that matter, you could believe he was right about rejecting atoms and molecules in favor of earth, air, fire, and water—or at least recognize that St. Basil makes other claims besides six literal days. But you might realize that really there are much more important things in the faith. Like how faith plays out in practice.

The fundamentalist idea of conversion is like flipping a light switch: one moment, a room is dark, then in an instant it is full of light. The Orthodox understanding is of transformation: discovering Orthodoxy is the work of a lifetime, and perhaps once a year there is a “falling off a cliff” experience where you realize you’ve missed something big about Orthodoxy, and you need to grow in that newly discovered dimension. Orthodoxy is not just the ideas and enthusiasm we have when we first come into the Church; there are big things we could never dream of and big things we could never consider we needed to repent of. And I would rather pointedly suggest that if a new convert’s understanding of Orthodoxy is imperfect, much less of Orthodoxy can be understood from reading Protestant attacks on it. One of the basic lessons in Orthodoxy is that you understand Orthodoxy by walking the Orthodox Way, by attending the services and living a transformed life, and not by reading books. And if this goes for books written by Orthodox saints, it goes all the more for Protestant fundamentalist books attacking Orthodoxy.

Science won’t save your soul, but science (like Orthodoxy) is something you understand by years of difficult work. Someone who has done that kind of work might be able to argue effectively that evolution does not account for the fossil record, let alone how the first organism could come to exist: but here I would recall The Abolition of Man: “It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient.” Someone who has taken years of effort may rightly criticize evolution for its scientific merits. Someone who has just read fundamentalist Protestant attacks on evolution and tries to evangelize evolutionists and correct their scientific errors will be just as annoying to an atheist who believes in evolution, as a fundamentalist who comes to evangelize the unsaved Orthodox and “knows all about Orthodoxy” from polemical works written by other fundamentalists. I would rather pointedly suggest that if you care about secular evolutionists at all, pray for them, but don’t set out to untangle their backwards understanding of the science of it all. If you introduce yourself as someone who will straighten out their backwards ideas about science, all you may really end up accomplishing is to push them away.

Conversion is a slow process. And letting go of Protestant approaches to creation may be one of those moments of “falling off a cliff.”

Orthodoxy, Contraception, and Spin Doctoring: A Look at an Influential but Disturbing Article

Buy Orthodoxy and Contraception on Amazon.

The reason for writing: “Buried treasure?”

Computer programmers often need to understand why programs behave as they do, and there are times when one is trying to explain a puzzle by understanding the source, and meets an arresting surprise. Programmer slang for this is “buried treasure,” politely defined as,

A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from crufty to bletcherous, and has lain undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically, because what is found is anything *but* treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. ‘I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using [the mind-bogglingly slow] bubble sort! Buried treasure!'”

What I have found has me wondering if I’ve discovered theological “buried treasure,” that may actually be wrong. Although my analysis is not exhaustive, I have tried to provide two documents that relate to the (possible) “buried treasure:” one treating the specific issue, contraception, in patristic and modern times, and one commentary on the document I have found that may qualify as “buried treasure.”

How to use this document

This document is broken into two parts besides this summary page.

The first part is taken from a paper written by an Orthodox grad student, with reference to Orthodoxy in patristic times and today. It sets a broad theological background, and provides the overall argument. One major conclusion is that one paper (Chrysostom Zaphiris, “Morality of Contraception: An Eastern Orthodox Opinion,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, volume 11, number 4, fall 1974, 677-90) is important in a troubling shift in Orthodox theology.

The second part, motivated by the understanding that Zaphiris’s paper is worth studying in toto, is a relatively brief commentary on Zaphiris’s paper. If the initial paper provides good reason to believe that Zaphiris’s paper may be worth studying, then it may be valuable to see the actual text of his paper. The Commentary can be skipped, but it is intended to allow the reader to know just why the author believes Zaphiris is so much worth studying.

It is anticipated that some readers will want to read the first section without poring over the second, even though the argument in the first section may motivate one to read the second.

Why the fuss?

The Orthodox Church appears to have begun allowing contraception, after previously condemning it, around the time of an article (Chrysostom Zaphiris, “Morality of Contraception: An Eastern Orthodox Opinion,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, volume 11, number 4, fall 1974, 677-90) which may have given rise to the “new consensus.” This article raises extremely serious concerns of questionable doctrine, questionable argument, and/or sophistry, and may be worth further studying.

A broader picture is portrayed in the earlier article about contraception as it appears in both patristic and modern views, which are profoundly different from each other.

Christos Jonathan Seth Hayward – CJSHayward@pobox.comCJSHayward.com

Patristic and Current Orthodoxy:
on Contraception


Patristic and contemporary Orthodoxy do not say exactly the same things about contraception. Any differences in what acts are permitted are less interesting than the contexts which are much more different than the differences that would show on a chart made to classify what acts are and are not formally permissible.

Much of what I attempt below looks at what is unquestionable today and asks, “How else could it be?” After two sections comparing the Patristic and modern circumstances, one will be able to appreciate that one would need to cross several lines to want contraception in Patristic Christianity while today some find it hard to understand why the Orthodox Church is being so picky about contraception, I look at how these considerations may influence positions regarding contraception.

How are the Fathers valuable to us?

I assume that even when one criticizes Patristic sources, one is criticizing people who understand Christianity much better than we do, and I may provocatively say that the Fathers are most interesting, not when they eloquently give voice to our views, but precisely when they shock us. My interest in what seems shocking today is an interest in a cue to something big that we may be missing. This is for much the same reason scientists may say that the most exciting sound in science is not “Eureka,” “I’ve found it,” but “That’s funny…” The reason for this enigmatic quote is that “Eureka” only announces the discovery of something one already knew to look for. “That’s funny” is the hint that we may have tripped over something big that we didn’t even know to look for, and may be so far outside of what we know we need that we try to explain it away. Such an intrusion—and it ordinarily feels like an intrusion—is difficult to welcome: hence the quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.”

Understanding Church Fathers on contraception can provide a moment of, “That’s funny…”

The Patristic era

My aim in this section is not so much to suggest what views should be held, than help the reader see how certain things do not follow from other things self-evidently. I would point out that in the Patristic world, not only were there condemnations of contraception as such, but more deeply, I would suggest that there was a mindset where the idea of freeing the goodness of sexual pleasure from any onerous fecundity would seem to represent a fundamental confusion of ideas.

We may be selling both the Fathers and ourselves short if we say that neo-Platonic distrust of the body made them misconstrue sex as evil except as a necessary evil excused as a means to something else, the generation of children. The sword of this kind of dismissal can cut two ways: one could make a reductive argument saying that the ambient neo-Gnosticism of our own day follows classical forms of Gnosticism in hostility to bodily goods that values sex precisely as an experience and despite unwanted capacity to generate children, and so due to our Gnostic influence we cannot value sex except as a way of getting pleasure that is unfortunately encumbered by the possibility of generating children whether they are wanted or not. This kind of dismissal is easy to make, difficult to refute, and not the most helpful way of advancing discussion.

In the Patristic era, some things that many today experience as the only way to understand the goodness of creation do not follow quite so straightforwardly, in particular that goodness to sex has its center of gravity in the experience rather than the fecundity. To Patristic Christians, it was far from self-evident that sex as it exists after the Fall is good without ambivalence, and it is even further from self-evident that the goodness of sex (if its fallen form is considered unambiguously good) centers around the experience of pleasure in coitus. Some contemporaries did hold that sexual experience was good. The goodness of sex consisted in the experience itself. Any generative consequences of the experience were evil, to be distanced from the experience. Gnostics in Irenaeus’s day (John Noonan,Contraception: A History of Its Treatments by Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 57, 64. Unfortunately, not only is there no recent work of Orthodox scholarship that is comparable to Noonan, but there is little to no good Orthodox scholarship on the topic at all!), Manichees in the days of Augustine (Noonan 1986, 124.), and for that matter medieval Cathars (Noonan 1986, 181-3.) would hold to the goodness of sex precisely as an experience, combined with holding to the evil of procreation. (I will not analyze the similarities and differences to wanting pleasure unencumbered by children today.) Notwithstanding those heretics’ positions, Christianity held a stance, fierce by today’s standards, in which children were desirable for those who were married but “marriage” would almost strike many people today as celibacy with shockingly little interaction between the sexes (including husband and wife), interrupted by just enough sex to generate children (For a treatment of this phenomenon as it continued in the Middle Ages, see Philip Grace, Aspects of Fatherhood in Thirteenth-Century Encyclopedias, Western Michican University master’s thesis, 2005, chapter 3, “Genealogy of Ideas,” 35-6.). Men and women, including husbands and wives, lived in largely separate worlds, and the framing of love antedated both the exaltations of courtly and companionate love without which many Westerners today have any frame by which to understand goodness in marriage (See Stephen Clark, Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences, Ann Arbor: Servant 1980, Chapter 18, for a contrast between traditional and technological society.).

I would like to look at two quotations, the first from Augustine writing against the Manichees, and the second as an author today writes in reference to the first:


There is irony here. “Natural family planning” is today sometimes presented as a fundamental opposite to artificial contraception. (The term refers to a calculated abstinence precisely at the point where a wife is naturally capable of the greatest desire, pleasure, and response.) Augustine here described natural family planning, as such, and condemns it in harsh terms. (I will discuss “natural family planning” in the next section. I would prefer to call it contraceptive timing for a couple of reasons.)


There is some irony in calling “‘Natural’ Family Planning” making a set of mathematical calculations and deliberately avoiding intercourse at the times when a woman is naturally endowed with the greatest capacity for desire, pleasure, and response.

Besides the immediate irony of Augustine criticizing the form of contraception to be heralded as “‘Natural‘ Family Planning,” (remember that “natural” family planning is a calculated abstinence when a wife is capable, naturally, of the greatest desire, pleasure, and response), Augustine’s words are particularly significant because the method of contraception being discussed raised no question of contraception through recourse to the occult (“medicine man” pharmakeia potions) even in the Patristic world. There are various issues surrounding contraception: in the Patristic world, contraceptive and abortifascient potions were difficult to distinguish and were made by pharmakoi in whom magic and drugs were not sharply distinguished (Noonan 1986, 25.). But it would be an irresponsible reading to conclude from this that Patristic condemnations of contraceptive potions were only condemning them for magic, for much the same reason as it would be irresponsible to conclude that recent papal documents condemning the contraceptive mindset are only condemning selfishness and not making any statement about contraception as such. Patristic condemnations of contraception could be quite forceful (Noonan 1986, 91.), although what I want to explore is not so much the condemnations as the environment which partly gave rise to them:

[L]et us sketch a marriage in every way most happy; illustrious birth, competent means, suitable ages, the very flower of the prime of life, deep affection, the very best that each can think of the other, that sweet rivalry of each wishing to surpass the other in loving; in addition, popularity, power, wide reputation, and everything else But observe that even beneath this array of blessings the fire of an inevitable pain is smouldering… They are human all the time, things weak and perishing; they have to look upon the tombs of their progenitors; and so pain is inseparably bound up with their existence, if they have the least power of reflection. This continued expectancy of death, realized by no sure tokens, but hanging over them the terrible uncertainty of the future, disturbs their present joy, clouding it over with the fear of what is coming… Whenever the husband looks at the beloved face, that moment the fear of separation accompanies the look. If he listens to the sweet voice, the thought comes into his mind that some day he will not hear it. Whenever he is glad with gazing on her beauty, then he shudders most with the presentiment of mourning her loss. When he marks all those charms which to youth are so precious and which the thoughtless seek for, the bright eyes beneath the lids, the arching eyebrows, the cheek with its sweet and dimpling smile, the natural red that blooms upon the lips, the gold-bound hair shining in many-twisted masses on the head, and all that transient grace, then, though he may be little given to reflection, he must have this thought also in his inmost soul that some day all this beauty will melt away and become as nothing, turned after all this show into noisome and unsightly bones, which wear no trace, no memorial, no remnant of that living bloom. Can he live delighted when he thinks of that? (source)

Let no one think however that herein we depreciate marriage as an institution. We are well aware that it is not a stranger to God’s blessing. But since the common instincts of mankind can plead sufficiently on its behalf, instincts which prompt by a spontaneous bias to take the high road of marriage for the procreation of children, whereas Virginity in a way thwarts this natural impulse, it is a superfluous task to compose formally an Exhortation to marriage. We put forward the pleasure of it instead, as a most doughty champion on its behalf… But our view of marriage is this; that, while the pursuit of heavenly things should be a man’s first care, yet if he can use the advantages of marriage with sobriety and moderation, he need not despise this way of serving the state. An example might be found in the patriarch Isaac. He married Rebecca when he was past the flower of his age and his prime was well-nigh spent, so that his marriage was not the deed of passion, but because of God’s blessing that should be upon his seed. He cohabited with her till the birth of her only children, and then, closing the channels of the senses, lived wholly for the Unseen… (source)

This picture of a “moderate” view of marriage that does not “depreciate marriage as an institution” comes from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On Virginity, and allowances must be made for the fact that St. Gregory of Nyssa is contrasting virginity, not with an easy opposite today, namely promiscuity or lust, but marriage, which he bitterly attacks in the context of this passage. The piece is not an attractive one today. However, that does not mean that what he says is not part of the picture. This bitter attack is part of a picture in which contraception could look very different from today, but that way of looking at contraception is not purely the cause of a rhetoric attacking marriage to praise virginity. I present this not to analyze St. Gregory’s exact view on marriage, but to give a taste of an answer to “How else could it be?” in comparison to what is unquestionable today.

Some attitudes today (arguably the basic assumption that motivates offense at the idea that one is condemning the goodness of the created order in treating sex as rightly ordered towards procreation) could be paraphrased, “We affirm the body as good, and we affirm sex in all its goodness. It is a source of pleasure; it is a way to bond; it is powerful as few other things are. But it has a downside, and that is a certain biological survival: unless countermeasures are taken, along with its good features unwanted pregnancy can come. And properly affirming the goodness of sex means freeing it from the biological holdover that gives the good of sexual pleasure the side effect of potentially resulting in pregnancy even if it is pursued for another reason.” To the Patristic Christian, this may well come across as saying something like, “Major surgery can be a wonderful thing. It is occasion for the skillful art of doctors, in many instances it is surrounded by an outflow of love by the patient’s community, and the difficulties associated with the process can build a thicker spine and provide a powerful process of spiritual discipline. But it would be really nice if we could undergo surgery without attendant risks of unwanted improvements to our health.”

It seems so natural today to affirm the goodness of the body or sex, and see as the only possible translation of that affirmation “the goodness of the pleasure in sexual experience,” that different views are not even thinkable; I would like to mention briefly some other answers to the question, “How else could it be?” The ancient world, in many places, looked beyond the few minutes of treasure and found the basis for the maxim, “Post coitum omne animal triste” (after sex, every animal [including humans] is sad), and feared that sex could, among other things, fundamentally deplete virile energy (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, New York: Random House 1985, 137): its goodness might be seen as a costly goodness involving the whole person, rather than simply being the goodness of “one more pleasure, only a very intense one, that is especially good because it is especially intense” or self-evidently being at the core of even a good marriage (Noonan 1986, 47-8).

This is not to suggest that Christians merely copied the surrounding views. Contraception, abortion, and infanticide were quite prevalent in the Roman world (Noonan 1986, 10-29). Whatever else Patristic Christianity can be criticized for in its strong stance on contraception, abortion, and infanticide, it is not an uncritical acceptance of whatever their neighbors would happen to be doing. And if St. Gregory of Nyssa holds up an example which he alleges is procreation that minimizes pleasure, it might be better not to simply say that neo-Platonism tainted many of the Fathers with a dualistic view in which the body was evil, or some other form of, “His environment made him do it.”

Modernity and “natural” family planning

In the discussion which follows, I will use the term “contraceptive timing” in lieu of the somewhat euphemistic “natural family planning” or “the rhythm method.” In my own experience, I have noticed Catholics consistently needing to explain why “natural family planning” is an opposite to contraception; invariably newcomers have difficulties seeing why decreasing the odds of conception through mathematical timing is a fundamentally different matter from decreasing the odds of conception through biological and chemical expedients. I would draw an analogy to firing a rifle down a rifle range, or walking down a rifle range to retrieve a target: either action, appropriately timed, is licit; changing the timing of an otherwise licit action by firing a rifle while others are retrieving their targets and walk in front of that gun is a use of timing that greatly affects the moral significance of an otherwise licit act. I will hereafter use the phrase “contraceptive timing.”

Orthodox implications

As Orthodox, I have somewhat grave concerns about my own Church, which condemned contraception before 1970 but in recent decades appears to have developed a “new consensus” more liberal than the Catholic position: abortifascient methods are excluded, there must be some openness to children, and it must be agreed with by a couple’s spiritual father. This “new consensus,” or at least what is called a new consensus in an article that acknowledges it as surrounded by controversy that has “various groups accusing each other of Western influence,” which is, in Orthodox circles, a good cue that the there is something interesting going on.

The one article I found on the topic was “lobbyist” scholarship that seemed to avoid giving a fuller picture (Zaphiris 1974.). This one article I found in the ATLA religion database matching the keywords “Orthodox” and “contraception” was an article that took a “new consensus” view and, most immediately, did not provide what I was hoping a “new consensus” article would provide: an explanation that can say, “We understand that the Fathers had grave reservations about contraception, but here is why it can be permissible.” The article in fact made no reference to relevant information that can (at least today) be easily obtained from conservative Catholic analyses. There was no discussion of relevant but ambiguous matter such as Onan’s sin (Noonan 1986, 34-6.) and New Testament condemnations of “medicine man” pharmakeia which would have included some contraception (Noonan 1986, 44-5.). There was not even the faintest passing mention of forceful denunciations of contraception by both Greek and Latin Fathers. John Chrysostom was mentioned, but only as support for distinguishing the good of sex from procreation: “The moral theologian par excellence of the Fathers, St. John Chrysostom, also does not stress the procreation of children as the goal of marriage.” (Zaphiris 1974, 680) Possibly, as for that matter it is possible to argue that Zaphiris does not see openness to children as something to shut off, and wrench that fact out of context to say that Zaphiris opposed contraception. St. John Chrysostom may not have written anything like the incendiary material from St. Gregory above. But “the moral theologian par excellence of the Fathers” did write:

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers has at times a legendary bias against against Rome (let alone against the Eastern Church), and renders Chrysostom as talking about abortion and infanticide but not obviously contraception. This is deliberate mistranslation. To pick out one example, In Patrologia Graecae 60.626 (the quotation spans PG 60.626-7), “enqa polla ta atokia,” rendered “ubi multae sunt herbae in sterilitatem?” in the PG’s Latin and “Where are the medicines of sterility?” by Noonan, appears in the NPNF as “where are there many efforts at abortion?” This is a deliberate under-translation.

[St. John Chrysostom:] Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where are the medicines of sterility? Where is there murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Do you see that from drunkenness comes fornication, from fornication adultery, from adultery murder? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with his laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing?… Do you teach the woman who is given to you for the procreation of offspring to perpetrate killing?… In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. (Homilies on Romans XXIV, Rom 13:14, as translated in Noonan 1986, 98.)

St. Chrysostom is not so quick as we are today to distinguish contraception from murder. Possibly, as Zaphiris writes, “there is not a defined statement on the morality of contraception within Orthodoxy.” But this is a treacherous use of words.

Let me give an analogy to explain why. People consume both food and drink, by eating and drinking. But it is somewhat strange to point out that a person has never drunk a roast beef sandwich, particularly in an attempt to lead a third party to believe, incorrectly, that a person has never consumed that food item. The Chuch has “defined” statements relating to Trinitarian and Christological, and other doctrines (source), and formulated morally significant canon law. But she has never “defined” a statement in morals; that would be like drinking a roast beef sandwich. And so for Zaphiris to point out that the Orthodox Church has never “defined” a statement about contraception—a point that would be obvious to someone knowing what sorts of things the Church does not “define;” “defining” a position against murder would, for some definitions of “define,” be like drinking a sandwich—and lead the reader to believe that the Church has never issued a highly authoritative statement about contraception. The Orthodox Church has issued such statements more than once.

Saying that the Orthodox Church has never “defined” a position on a moral question is as silly and as pointless as saying that a man has never drunk a roast beef sandwich: it is technically true, but sheds no light on whether a person has consumed such a sandwich—or taken a stand on the moral question at hand. Zaphiris’s “observation” is beginning to smell a lot like spin doctoring.

I have grave reservations about an article that gives the impression of covering relevant Patristic material to the question of contraception without hinting at the fact that it was condemned. Needless to say, the article did not go beyond the immediate condemnation to try to have a sympathetic understanding of why someone would find it sensible to make such condemnations. If I were trying to marshal Orthodox theological resources in the support of some use of contraception, I doubt if I could do better than Zaphiris. However, if the question is what Orthodox should believe in reading the Bible through the Fathers, submitting to the tradition in seeking what is licit, then this version of a “new consensus” theological treatment gives me even graver doubts about the faithfulness of the “new consensus” to Orthodox tradition. The Zaphiris article, if anything, seems to be an Orthodox document with influence, and red flags, that are comparable to Humanae Vitae.

There have been times before where the Orthodox Church has accepted something alien and come to purify herself in succeeding centuries. In that sense there would be a precedent for a change that would be later undone, and that provides one ready Orthodox classification. The Orthodox Wiki provides no history of the change in Orthodoxy, and a formal statement by the Orthodox Church in America (source), without specifically praising any form of contraception, attests to the newer position and allows some use of reproductive technologies, but does not explain the change. I would be interested in seeing why the Orthodox Church in particular has brought itself into sudden agreement with cultural forces beyond what the Catholic Church has.

The Orthodox Church both affirms that Christ taught marriage to be indissoluble—excluding both divorce and remarriage after divorce—and allows by way of oikonomia (a concession or leniency in observing a rule) a second and third remarriage after divorce, not counting marriages before full reception into the Orthodox Church. However, there is a difference between observing a rule with oikonomia and saying that the rule does not apply. If a rule is observed with oikonomia, the rule is recognized even as it is not followed literally, much like choosing “the next best thing to being there,” in lieu of personal presence, when one is invited to an occasion but cannot easily attend. By contrast, saying that the rule does not apply is a deeper rejection, like refusing a friend’s invitation in a way that denies any duty or moral claim for that friend. There is a fundamental difference between sending a gift to a friend’s wedding with regrets that one cannot attend, and treating the invitation itself with contempt. The rites for a second and third marriage are genuine observations of the fact that one is observing a rule with leniency: the rite for a second marriage is penitential, the rite for a third marriage even more so, and a firm line is drawn that rules out a fourth marriage: oikonomia has limits (source). If a second and third marriage is allowed, the concession recognizes the rule and, one might argue, the reality the rule recognizes. If one looks at jokes as an anthropologist would, as revealing profound assumptions about a culture, snipes about “A wife is only temporary; an ex-wife is forever” and “When two divorced people sleep together, four people are in the bed” are often told by people who would scoff at the idea of marriage as a sacred, permanent union… but the jokes themselves testify that there is something about a marriage that divorce cannot simply erase: a spouse can become an ex-spouse, but the marriage is too permanent to simply be dropped as something revocable that has no intrinsically permanent effects. And in that sense, an ex-spouse is closer to a spouse than to a friend that has never had romance. Which is to say that marriage bears witness both to an absolute and oikonomia in how that absolute is observed.

Even with noted exceptions, the Gospels give the indissolubility of marriage a forceful dominical saying backed by quotation from the heart of the Old Testament Scriptures. If something that forcefully put may legitimately be observed with oikonomia, then it would seem strange to me to say that what I have observed as Patristic attitudes, where thinking of contraception as desirable would appear seriously disturbed, dictate not only a suspicion towards contraception but a criterion that admits no oikonomia in its observation. Presumably some degree oikonomia is allowable, and perhaps one could not rule out the oikonomia could take the form of a new consensus’s criterion allowing non-abortifascient contraception, in consultation with one’s spiritual father, on condition of allowing children at some point during a marriage. However, even if that is the legitimate oikonomia, it is legitimate as the lenient observation of grave moral principles. And, in that sense, unless one is prepared to say that the Patristic consensus is wrong in viewing contraception with great suspicion, the oikonomia, like the rites for a second and third marriage, should be appropriate for an oikonomia in observing a moral concern that remains a necessary moral concern even as it is observed with leniency.


I am left with a puzzle: why is it that Orthodox have adopted the current “new consensus”? My guess is that Zaphiris’s quite provocative article was taken as simply giving a straight account of Orthodoxy and Patristic teaching as it relates to contraception. The OCA document more or less applies both his analysis and prescriptions. But, while I hesitate to say that no one could explain both why the Fathers would regard contraception as abhorrent and we should permit it in some cases, I will say that I have not yet encountered such an explanation. And I would present, if not anything like a last word, at least important information which should probably considered in judging the rule and what is appropriate oikonomia. If Orthodoxy regards Patristic culture and philosophy as how Christ has become incarnate in the Orthodox Church, then neither condemnations of contraception, nor the reasons why those condemnations would be made in the first place, concern only antiquarians.

Would it be possible for there to be another “new consensus?”

“Morality of Contraception: An Orthodox Opinion:” A commentary

The article published by Chrysostom Zaphiris, “Morality of Contraception: An Eastern Orthodox Opinion,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, volume 11, number 4, fall 1974, 677-90, seems extremely significant. It seems a lobbyist article, and in both content and timing the 1970’s “new consensus” as articulated by the Orthodox Church in America is consistent with taking Zaphiris in good faith as simply stating the Orthodox position on contraception. (This was the one article I found in an ATLA search for keywords “Orthodox” and “contraception” anywhere, on 13 May, 2007. A search for “Orthodoxy” and “contraception” on 14 May, 2007 turned up one additional result which seemed to be connected to queer theory.) I perceive in this faulty—or, more properly, deceptively incomplete data, questionable argument, and seductive sophistry which I wish to comment on.

I believe that Zaphiris’s text is worth at least an informal commentary to draw arguments and certain features to the reader’s attention. In this commentary, all footnotes will be Zaphiris’s own; where I draw on other sources I will allude to the discussion above or add parenthetical references. I follow his footnote numbering, note page breaks by inserting the new page number, and reproduce some typographical features.

Footnote from Zaphiris’s text

Chrysostom Zaphiris (Orthodox) is a graduate of the Patriarchal Theological School of Halki, Turkey, and holds a doctorate with highest honors from the University of Strasbourg, where he studied with the Roman Catholic faculty. His 1970 thesis dealt with the “Text of the Gospel according to St. Matthew in Accordance with the Citations in Clement of Alexandria compared with Citations in the Greek Fathers and Theologians of the Second to Fifth Centuries.” Dr. Zaphiris taught canon law and New Testament courses at Holy Cross School of Theology (at Hellenic College), Brookline, MA, 1970-72. From 1972 to 1974, he was Vice Rector at the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Studies, Tantur, Jerusalem.

* This paper was originally presented during the discussion held for doctors of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the surrounding area hosted by theologians of the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur on the question of the morality of contraception. At this point, I would like also to thank Br. James Hanson, C.S.C., for his help editing my English text.




This discussion of the morality of contraception includes four basic points: the purpose of marriage as viewed scripturally and patristically, the official teachings of Orthodoxy concerning contraception, the moral issue from an Orthodox perspective, and “the Orthodox notion of synergism and its implications for the moral question of contraception.”

It is possible through inference to determine that the Scriptures and the early Christian writers considered that, within marriage, sexual activity and procreation were not the same entity and that sexuality was to be practiced within marriage. These assertions are illustrated.

The official teaching of the Orthodox Church on contraception includes five points: a denunciation of intentional refusal to procreate within marriage, a condemnation of both abortion and infanticide, an absence of any commitment against contraception, and a reliance upon the medical profession to supply further information on the issue. The author offers a theological opinion on the question of contraception allowing for contraception under certain circumstances.

Synergism is the final issue discussed. Synergism is defined as cooperation, co-creation, and co-legislation between humans and God. When people use their talents and faculties morally and creatively, they are acting in combination with God and expressing God’s will. The Orthodox view of contraception is perceived within the dimensions of synergistic activity and serves as a contrast to the Roman Catholic view.

The essay concludes with some comments about contraception as a moral issue as perceived within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Allowing for individual freedom and responsibility, and in light of synergism, Orthodoxy avoids definitive pronouncements on such moral issues as contraception.


Contraception is one of the most important aspects of human behavior and family life, and thus it is a part of life which cannot be ignored by theology itself. There can 678 be no question of treating this moral question, but only of outlining the aspects which must be considered according to the Orthodox tradition.

I don’t know an exact rule for “what must be considered for the Orthodox tradition,” but besides of Biblical witness, the Patriarch of New Rome and one of three “heirarchs and ecumenical teachers” of the Orthodox Church, St. John Chrysostom, homilectically treating something as an abomination and calling it “worse than murder” would tend to be something I would include under “aspects which must be considered according to the Orthodox tradition.”

One reaction which I would like to address in many readers, even though it is not properly commentary is, “Contraception is comparable to homicide? It’s called “worse than murder“? Is this translated correctly? Is this gross exaggeration? Is it cultural weirdness, or some odd influence of Platonic thought that the Church has recovered from? Why on earth would anybody say that?” This is a natural reaction, partly because the Fathers are articulating a position that is inconceivable today. So the temptation is to assume that this has some cause, perhaps historical, despite moral claims that cannot be taken seriously today.

I would like to provide a loose analogy, intended less to convince than convey how someone really could find a continuity between contraception and murder. Suppose that destroying a painting is always objectionable. Now consider the process of painting: a painting germinates in an artist’s mind, is physically created and explored, and finally becomes something one hangs on a wall.

Now let me ask a question: if one tries to interrupt the process of artistic creation, perhaps by disrupting the creator’s state of mind and scattering the paints, does that qualify as “destroying a painting”?

The answer to that question depends on what qualifies as “destroying a painting.” If one disrupts the artist who is thinking about painting a painting, or scatters the paints and half-painted canvas, then in neither case has one destroyed a finished painting. You cannot point to a completed painting that was there before the interruption began, and say, “See? That is the painting that was destroyed.” However, someone who is not being legalistic has good reason to pause before saying “This simply does not qualify as destroying a painting” A completed painting was not destroyed, but the process of artistic creation that produces a completed painting was destroyed. And in that sense, someone who interrupted Van Gogh and stopped him from painting “Starry Night” is doing the same sort of thing as someone today who would burn up the completed painting. The two acts are cut from the same cloth.

Now my intent is not to provide a precise and detailed allegory about what detail of the creation process represents conception, birth, etc. That is not the intent of the general illustration. My point is that talk about “destroying paintings” need not be construed only as destroying a completed painting in its final form. There is also the possibility of destroying a painting in the sense of willfully disrupting the process of an artist in the process of making a painting. And, perhaps, there is room for St. John Chrysostom’s horrified, “Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation.” Now is this rhetorical exaggeration? Quite possibly; Noonan studies various penitentials, all from before the Great Schism, and although there is not always a penance assigned for contraception by potion, two assign a lighter penance than for homicide, one assigns the same penance, and one actually assigns a penance of four years for homicide and seven for contraception. Contraception could bear a heavier penance than murder.

It is somewhat beside the point to work out if we really have to take St. John Chrysostom literally in saying that contraception is worse than homicide. I don’t think that is necessary. But it is not beside the point that the Fathers seem to treat a great deal of continuity between contraception, abortion, and infanticide, and seem not to draw terribly sharp oppositions between them. Whether or not one assigns heavy-handed penalties from contraception, I can’t think of a way to read the Fathers responsibly and categorically deny that contraception is cut from the same cloth as abortion and infanticide. The point is not exactly an exact calculus to measure the relative gravity of the sins. The point is that they are all connected in patristic writing.

First, we need to study the purpose of marriage as we find it in the Scriptures and in the writings of the Greek Fathers. Second, we will reflect on the official teaching authority of the Orthodox Church on this question of contraception. Third, we will offer a moral opinion as to the legitimacy of the practice of contraception from an Orthodox viewpoint. And finally, we will discuss the Orthodox notion of synergism and its implications for the moral question of contraception.


Although the purpose of marriage is never treated systematically in the Scriptures or in the Fathers according to our contemporary viewpoint and questions, it is possible to infer the thoughts of these classical authors on the purpose of marriage. In general, what we find is that there is the presupposition that human sexual activity within marriage and the procreation of children are not seen as completely the same reality. And furthermore, both Scripture and the Fathers consistently counsel the faithful to live in such a way that human sexuality can be expressed within marriage.

The claim in the last sentence is true; more has been argued from St. John Chrysostom. But Orthodoxy does view celibacy and marriage as more compatible than some assume today. At least by the letter of the law, Orthodox are expected to be continent on fasting days and on days where the Eucharist is received, meaning a minimum of almost half days of the year, including one period approaching two months. I don’t know what degree of oikonomia is common in pastoral application, but an Orthodox might want to drop another shoe besides saying “both Scripture and the Fathers consistently counsel the faithful to live in such a way that sexuality can be expressed in marriage.”

The Scriptures present us with a Christian doctrine of marriage most clearly in Genesis and in the writings of St. Paul. In Genesis 2:18, God said that it was not good for man to be alone, but that he should have a helpmate which he then gave to Adam in the person of his wife, Eve. Is this help meant by God to be only social and religious?

Apparently the possibility that marriage could, as in the patristic world, be not only an affective matter of what people but a union of pragmatic help encompassing even the economic is not considered.

For a detailed answer to “How else could that be?” in terms of a relationship including quite significant pragmatic help, see Stephen Clark, Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences, Ann Arbor: Servant 1980. To someone who has read and digested that book, there seem to be an awful lot of assumptions going into what marriage is allowed to be for the husband and wife.

Or is it also intended by God to be a physical help provided to a man in terms of sexual complementarity?

Does “physical help” simply boil down to the C-word, as Zaphiris seems to mean? Are there no other possibilities? And why is “physical help” just something a wife gives a husband and not something a husband gives a wife? The euphemism sounds like the wife should be kind enough to join a pity party: “It causes him so much pleasure, and it causes me so little pain.” I would like to propose a much more excellent alternative: making love.

Perhaps it is also possible that “physical help” should also include assistance with errands, or provision, or getting work done as part of a working household? Besides Stephen Clark, Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: Servant 1980), Proverbs 31:10-31 describes the ideal helpmate who perhaps has children but is not praised for beauty or as any basic sex toy: she is praised, among other things, as a powerful and effective helpmeet. In the praises, physical beauty is mentioned only in order to deprecate its significance.

In reading Clark, it seems a natural thing to offer a wife the praises of the end of Proverbs. Zaphiris’s presuppositions make that kind of thing look strange. But the defect is with Zaphiris.

However we answer these questions, one thing is certain: the question of procreation as such is not raised by the author. Yet, procreation itself is encouraged by the author of Genesis 1:28, when God orders human beings to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Just as the author of the Pentateuch never makes an explicit connection between the creation of Eve and the practice of human procreation, so likewise St. Paul in the New Testament never makes this connection.

In the case of St. Paul, it is a question of sexual relations of continence within marriage or of marriage as opposed to virginity, but never exactly the question of procreation in any of these cases. Paul considers marriage and virginity as charisms within the life of the Church. He exhorts believers to the practice of virginity if they have this charism; if not, he encourages them to marry. This raises a subsequent question: “Does St. Paul encourage marriage first of all to promote the procreation of children or rather make up for human weakness which is experienced in sexual passion?” While I acknowledge that procreation of children is one of the reasons for marriage which Christian theology has consistently taught, it has never been the only reason for Christian marriage.

If we follow St. Paul closely, it is apparent that he encourages a man to marry, not simply to procreate children, but for other reasons, the most prominent of which 679 would be to avoid fornication (cf. I Cor. 7:2). It is because human persons have the right

I would like to make a comment that sounds, at first, like nitpicking about word choice:

Rights-based moral calculus is prevalent in the modern world, sometimes so that people don’t see how to do moral reasoning without seeing things in terms of rights. But the modern concept of a “right” is alien to Orthodoxy.

See Kenneth Himes (ed.) et al., Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Washington: Georgetown University Press 2005), chapter 2 (41-71) for an historical discussion including how the concept of rights became incorporated into Catholic moral reasoning from the outside. The change was vigorously resisted as recently as Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), today the subject of embarrassed explanations, but what Catholics apologetically explain is often closer to Orthodoxy than the modern Catholic explanation of what Catholicism really teaches. Even in modern Catholicism, officially approved “rights” language is a relatively recent development, and there are attempts to use the concept differently from the secular West.

Armenian Orthodox author Vigen Guorian’s Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1987, page number not available) briefly complains about the modern idea of placing human dignity on no deeper basis than rights; I would refer the reader to my homily “Do We Have Rights?” ( http://jonathanscorner.com/no_rights/ ) for moral-ascetical reasoning that rejects the innovation.

The reason why I am “nitpicking” here is that there is a subtle difference, but a profound one, between saying that sex is good within marriage (or at least permissible), and saying that husband and wife have a right to sexual pleasure, and this entitlement is deep enough that if the sexual generation of children would be undesirable, the entitlement remains, along with a necessity of modifying sex so that the entitled sexual pleasure is delivered even if the sexual generation of children is stopped cold.

Zaphiris never develops the consequences of rights-based moral reasoning at length or makes it the explicit basis for arguing for an entitlement to sexual pleasure even if that means frustrating sexual generation. However, after asserting a married right to sex, he not only fails to discourage this reasoning, but reaches a conclusion identical with the one this reasoning would reach.

to be married and to perform sexual activity within that specific context that Jesus Christ and St. Paul have condemned explicitly the practice of fornication (cf. Mt 5:32, 19:9; Acts 15:20; I Cor. 5:1, 6, 13, 18). Thus, in our study of the Christian tradition on marriage and the possibility of contraceptive practices within marriage, we must keep clearly in view this particular function of marriage as an antidote to fornication.

We find a similar sensitivity in the writings of Paul to the human need for sexual gratification in marriage when he counsels Christian couples on the practice of continence within marriage. “The wife cannot claim her body as her own; it is her husbands. Equally, the husband cannot claim his body as his own; it is his wife’s. Do not deny yourselves to one another, except when you agree upon a temporary abstinence in order to devote yourselves to prayer; afterwords, you may come together again; otherwise, for lack of self-control, you may be tempted by Satan” (I Cor. 7:4-5). In this passage, there is no question of procreation, but only of the social union between husband and wife within Christian marriage. While, on the positive side, Paul affirms that Christian marriage is a sign of the union between Jesus Christ and the Church and that the married couple participates in the unity and holiness of this union, more negatively he also sees in marriage an antidote or outlet for the normal human sexual passions. In this context, St. Paul always counsels marriage as preferable to any possibility of falling into fornication.

In saying this, St. Paul is obviously not opposed to procreation as the end of marriage. The bearing of children was naturally expected to result from the practice of sexual intercourse within marriage as he counseled it. Abstinence from regular sexual intercourse was encouraged only to deepen the life of prayer for a given period of time. This limiting of abstinence to a specific period of time shows well Paul’s sensitivity to the demands of human sexual passions and his elasticity of judgment in giving moral counsel. Thus, from the exegesis of Genesis of St. Paul, the whole contemporary question of the explicit connection between sexual intercourse within marriage and the procreation of children was simply not raised in the same form in which it is today.

I would like to take a moment to look at the story of Onan before posing a suggestion about exegesis.

I suggest that in the Bible, especially in portraying something meant to horrify the reader, there are often multiple elements to the horror. The story of Sodom portrays same-sex intercourse, gang rape, and extreme inhospitality. There is a profoundly naive assumption behind the question, “Of same-sex intercourse, gang rape, and extreme inhospitality, which one are we really supposed to think is the problem?” In this case, it seems all three contributed to something presented as superlatively horrifying, and it is the combined effect that precedes Sodom’s judgment in fire and sulfur and subsequently becoming the Old Testament prophet’s “poster city” for every single vice from idolatry and adultery to pride and cruelty to the poor. The story of Sodom is written to have multiple elements of horror.

There is one story where contraception is mentioned in the Bible, and it is one of few where Onan joins the company of Uzzah, Ananias, Sapphira, Herod (the one in Acts), and perhaps others in being the only people named in the Bible as being struck dead by God for their sins. This is not an august company. Certainly Onan’s story is not the story of a couple saying, “Let’s iust focus on the children we have,” but a story that forceful in condemning Onan’s sin, whatever the sin properly consisted in, has prima faciae good claim to be included a Biblical text that factors into a Biblical view of contraception. The story is relevant, even if it is ambiguous for the concerns of this question.

Likewise, in something that is not translated clearly in most English translations, the New Testament (Gal 5:20, Rev 9:21) pharmakoi refers to “medicine men” who made, among other things, contraceptive and abortifascient potions, in a world that seemed not to really separate drugs from magic. English translations ordinarily follow the KJV in translating this only with reference to the occult sin, so that it does not come across clearly that the Bible is condemning the people you would go to for contraceptives. This is ambiguous evidence for this discussion: it is not clear whether it is only condemning the occult practices, condemning what the occult practices were used for, or condemning both at the same time, but the question is significant.

Granted, not every Biblical text touching marriage is evidence against contraception. There are other relevant passages like Gal 5:21-33 which discuss the love in marriage with no reference to fecundity, but if one wants to understand the Bible as it relates to contraception, it is surprising not to mention passages that directly impinge on it, ambiguously but raising the question of whether contraception is a grave sin.

Zaphiris’s footnote:

1. Cf. Stromata, III, 82, 4.

Turning from the writings of Paul to those of the Greek Fathers, we will see that there is a continuity of Orthodox tradition in this understanding of the purpose of marriage. First, let us consider the statement of Clement of Alexandria who raises this problem as a theologian and as a pastor of the faithful. When he comments on I Cor. 7:2, he uses neither the allegorical nor the spiritual method of exegesis, but rather the literal interpretation of this Pauline text. Through this methodology, Clement, in spite of his usual idealism, recommends marriage over fornication and counsels sexual intercourse within marriage over the possibility of serving the temptor through fornication.[1]

Zaphiris’s footnote

2. See H. Crouzel, Virginité et mariage selon Origène (Paris-Bruges, 1963), pp. 80-133.

679 We find a similar line of thought in his successor, Origen. Although Origen accepts procreation as the end of marriage, he also sees in marriage the legitimate concession to human weakness in its sexual passions.[2]

Likewise Methodius of Olympus continues this interpretation of St. Paul in a very clear statement on the subject: “… The apostle did not grant these things unconditionally to all, but first laid down the reason on account of which he has led to this. For, having set forth that ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman’ (I Cor. VII, 1) he added immediately ‘nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife’ (I Cor. VII, 2)—that is ‘on account of the fornication which would arise from your being unable to restrain your passions.’…” Afterwards the author notes that Paul speaks “by permission” and “not of command,” so that Methodius comments: “For he receives command respecting chastity and not touching of a woman, but permission respecting those who are unable to chasten their appetites.”

Zaphiris’s footnote

3. Cf. The Banquet of the Virgins, III, 12.

Methodius applies similar logic to the possibility of the second marriage, in that he permits the second marriage, not specifically for the procreation of children, but “on account of the strength of animal passion, he [Paul] allows one who is in such condition may, ‘by permission’ contract a second marriage; not as though he expressed the opinion that a second marriage was in itself good, but judging it better than burning . . .” According to Methodius, the apostle speaks here, first saying that he wished all were healthy and continent, as he also was, but afterwards allowing a second marriage to those who are burdened with the weaknesses of the passions, goaded on by the uncontrolled desires of the organs of generations for promiscuous intercourse, considering such a second marriage far preferable to burning and indecency.[3]

4. See A. Moulard, Saint Jean Chrysostome, le défenseur du mariage et l’apôtre de la virginité (Paris, 1923), pp. 72ff.

The moral theologian par excellence of the Fathers, St. John Chrysostom, also does not stress the procreation of children as the goal of marriage. On the contrary, he adheres to the Pauline texts and to the apologists for virginity and concludes that marriage does not have any other goal than that of hindering fornication.

“The moral theologian par excellence of the Fathers” wrote the passage cited in the paper above:


There is arguably a degree of ambiguity in the Church Fathers. However, the ambiguity is of a far lesser degree. The Fathers argued most vehemently against opponents who believed the procreation of any children was morally wrong; contraception was seen as a duty in all intercourse, and not a personal choice for one’s convenience. See Augustine as cited on page 6 above. Acknowledging that the Fathers addressed a different situation, this does not mean that, since the Fathers did not address the situation of a couple not wishing to be burdened by more children for now, the patristic arguments are inapplicable. An injunction against suicide may say something about self-mutilation even if, in the initial discussion, there was no question of mutilations that were nonlethal in character.

There is some element of something in the Fathers that can be used to support almost anything: hence Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell 2002) teams up St. Gregory of Nyssa with Judith Butler, who is a lesbian deconstructionist and “bad writing” award winner, in pursuing the “gender fluidity” that is greatly sought after by queer theory and feminism (157-61). For that matter, I think there is a stronger case for Arianism, from the Bible, than Zapyiris makes from the Church Fathers on contraception, and it involves less “crossing fingers.” For the record, I believe the conclusions of both arguments I have brought up are heresy, but there is a reason I brought them up. We are in trouble if we only expect the truth to be able to pull arguments from the Scripture and the Fathers, or believe that an argument that draws on the Scripture and the Fathers is therefore trustworthy. My point is not so much whether Zaphiris is right or wrong as the fact that there’s something that can be pulled from the Fathers in support of everything, either right or wrong. His argument needs to be weighed on its merits. (Or demerits.)

There is some more complexity to the discussion; I have left many things out of the shorter article, but the much even of what I have left out would make the point more strongly. Hence Noonan discusses a view that sex during pregnancy is not licit because it will not be fruitful, discusses the Stoic protest of “even animals don’t do this,” mentions a third-century dissenter from this view (Lactantius) who allowed sex during pregancy only as an ambivalent concession, and then the well-read researcher writes, “This… is the only opinion I have encountered in any Christian theologian before 1500 explicitly upholding the lawfulness of intercourse in pregnancy” (Noonan 1986, 78.). Properly taken in context, this would support a much stronger position than I have argued, and one less attractive today.

Is the issue complex? There’s a lot here to understand. Granted. But in this case, “complex” does not mean “nothing but shades of grey,” and I am at a loss for a good, honest reason to claim to provide an overview Patristic theology as relevant to contraception, while at the same time failing to mention how it condemned contraception.


While there is not a defined statement on the morality of contraception within Orthodoxy,

To modify what I wrote above: I am not sure exactly what Zaphiris means by “defined.” The Church is not considered to have “defined” any position on morals in the sense of infallibly pronounced doctrines. In Orthodoxy, the Seven Ecumenical Councils may create canons that are morally binding, but irreversible doctrinal declarations are mostly connected to Christology. Under that definition of “defined”, the Orthodox Church would not have “defined” a ruling against contraception, regardless of its moral status. Neither would she have “defined” a ruling against rape, murder, or any other heinous offenses, even as she unambiguously condemns them.

This is one of several passages that raises questions of slippery rhetoric, perhaps of sophistry. Assuming that the above understanding of “defined” applies (a question which I am unsure of even if it seems that an affirmative answer would be consistent with the rest of the document), his claim is technically true. But it is presented so as to be interpreted as stating that the Orthodox Church has no real position on the matter, unlike other moral questions where the Orthodox Church would presumably have defined a position. This understandable inference is false. The Patristic witness, and arguably the Biblical witness, in fact do treat contraception as suspicious at best. If so, this is a case of Zaphiris saying something technically true in order to create an impression that is the opposite of the truth. That is very well-done sophistry.

Zaphiris continues with a small, but telling, remark:

there is a body of moral tradition which has a bearing on this question.

This short claim is also true. More specifically, there is a body of moral tradition which has a bearing on this question and tends to view contraception negatively.

First, the Church vigorously denounces any obvious case of pure egotism as the motivating force in Christian sexuality within marriage. Any married couple within the Orthodox Church who want absolutely no children sins grievously against both the Christian dispensation and against the primordial purpose of human life which includes the procreation or, as the Greek Fathers prefer, the “immortality” of the human 680 species.

It seems that Zaphiris may be, for reasons of rhetoric and persuasion, providing a limit to how much he claims, so as to be more readily accepted. Zaphiris provides no footnotes or reference to sources more specific than the “Greek Fathers” to buttress this claim, and does not provide an explanation for certain questions. One such question is why, if marriage is not morally required and celibates are never obligated to provide that specific support for the “immortality” of the human species, such obligation is binding on all married couples. Are all celibates exempt from “the primordial purpose of human life,” and if so, why is it permissible to fail to meet such a foundational purpose of human life? I do not see why Zaphiris’s logic justifies his making the more palatable claim that some openness towards children is mandatory.

This raises the question of whether he has a consistent position arising from his reading, or whether he is simply inventing a position and claiming he got it from the Greek Fathers.

According to the Greek Fathers, to refuse to transmit life to others is a grievous sin of pride in which the couple prefers to keep human life for themselves instead of sharing it with possible offspring.

Zaphiris’s footnotes:

5. See, e.g., Didache, II, i-3, V, 2, VI, 1-2; Pseudo-Barnabas, Epist., XIX, 4-6, Saint Justin, 1 Apolog., XXVII, 1-XXIX,1; Athenagoras, Supplic., XXXV; Epist. Ad Diogn., 5,6; Tertullian, Apolog, IX, 6-8; Ad Nationes, I, 15; Minucius Felix, Octavius, XXX, 2; Lactance, Divinarum Instutionum, VI, 20.

6. In this regard, we should stress the fact that the Greek Fathers forbid every induced abortion of a human fetus because abortion involves tampering with a human soul. In fact, the soul is not the product of the sexual act of the parents, but is rather the manifestation of the love of God or the result of a special direct or indirect action of God (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, VI. 135, et Eclogae propheticae, 50, 1-3). A study of the means of the transmission of the soul is beyond the scope of the present paper so that we do not try to explain it here. What is important is to emphasize that the parents cannot destroy any human life—even embryonic—because the embyro carries the soul which is transmitted by God.

7. We must stress the fact that a few non-Christian philosophers took issue with the pro-abortion majority and condemned abortion. Cf. Seneca, De Consolatione ad Helviani, XVI, 3; R. Musunius, p. 77; Desimus Junius Juvenalis, Satire, VI, 595f.; Philon of Alexandria, Hypothetia, VII, 7 (apud Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, VIII, 7, 7).

8. Among other Greek Fathers, see Clement of Alexandria, Eclogae propheticae, 50, 1-3.

Secondly, the Orthodox Church, following the teachings of the Fathers,[5] is totally opposed to any form of the abortion of unborn children. Human life belongs exclusively to God and neither the mother nor the father of the fetus has the right to destroy that life.[6] When the Fathers of the Church debated against the non-Christian philosophers[7] of the first centuries, they considered abortion as murder because the life of the fetus is animate being.[8]

(Note, for the closing claim, that the reason Zaphiris provides is articulated in a fashion which does not apply to contraception, at least not directly: destroying a painting is wrong precisely because an existing and completed painting is a work of art. What the rhetoric says, avoids saying, and leaves the reader to infer, seems to be exquisitely crafted sophistry.)

Thirdly, the Orthodox Church has universally condemned infanticide as immoral, following the same line of theological reasoning.

Zaphiris’s footnote:


Fourthly, it is important to stress that the Orthodox Church has not promulgated any solemn statements through its highest synods on the whole contemporary question of contraception. In general, I think it is accurate to say that, as long as a married couple is living in fidelity to one another and not allowing an immoral egotism to dominate their sexual relations, the particularities of their sexual life are left to the freedom of the spouses to decide.

Finally, it is important to note that the Orthodox Church looks to the medical profession itself to come to some unanimity in its biological research on the effects of contraception for human health. At the moment, the world of science does not furnish the world of theology such a unanimous body of opinion as would allow the Church prudently to formulate unchangeable moral teaching on this point. 682

There is probably a higher class academic way of making this point, but there is a classic anecdote, rightly or wrongly attributed:

Winston Churchill to unknown woman: “Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?”

Unknown woman: “Would I!”

Winston Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”

Unknown woman: “Exactly what kind of woman do you think I am?”

Winston Churchill: “We’ve already established that. We’re just negotiating over the price.”

This claim is not a claim that the theological status of contraception is to be determined by the medical profession. The paragraph quoted above means that the theological status of contraception has already been established, with the “price” left to the medical profession to work out.


Zaphiris’s footnote:

10. Clement of Alexandria, e.g., probably due to the influence of Greek philosophy, defines marriage as “gamos oun esti synodos andros kai gynaikos e prote kata nomon epi gnesion teknon sporai,” i.e. marriage is primarily the union of a man and a woman according to the law in order to procreate legitimate children (cf. Stromata, II, 137, 1).

From the material we have surveyed above, it should be obvious that there can be no question of entering into marriage without the intention of procreating children as part of the marriage and still remain faithful to the Orthodox moral tradition.[10]

Pay very, very close attention to footnote 10, immediately above. When a Church Father says that marriage is for the procreation of legitimate children, Zaphiris mentions this only in a footnote and immediately apologizes for it, explaining it away it as “probably due to the influence of Greek philosophy.” Are we really talking about the same “Greek philosophy” as Zaphiris describes above as only rarely having people speak out against abortion?

Zaphiris’s footnote:

11. When the patristic theologians comment on the Pauline doctrine of I Cor. 7:4-5, they consistently stress the temporary character of the sexual abstinence which was permitted by St. Paul to the marriage partners. This temporary period would be all that a husband and wife should agree to in order to avoid the temptation to evil (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, 79, 1).

However, it seems to me that a different question is raised when we consider the case of a couple who already have three or four children and cannot realistically face the possibility of begetting more children and providing adequately for their upbringing and education. Either they can act fairly irresponsibly and beget more children or they can abstain from sexual intercourse with the constant threat that Satan may tempt the couple to some form of adultery.

I see plenty of precedent for this kind of heart-rending plea in Margaret Sanger’s wake. Ordinarily when I see such a line of argument, it is to some degree connected with one of the causes Margaret Sanger worked to advance. I am more nebulous on whether the Fathers would have seen such “compassion” as how compassion is most truly understood; they were compassionate, but the framework that gave their compassion concrete shape is different from this model.

I might comment that it is almost invariably first-world people enjoying a first-world income who find that they cannot afford any more children. Are they really that much less able than people in the third-world to feed children, or is it simply that they cannot afford more children and keep up their present standard of living? If this choice is interpreted to mean that more children are out of the question, then what that means is, with apologies to St. John Chrysostom, a decision that luxuries and inherited wealth make a better legacy for one’s children than brothers and sisters.

If the first practice of continued sexual intercourse is pursued, there is the likelihood of an unwanted pregnancy in which case the child ceases to be a sign of their shared love, but risks being a burden which causes only anxiety and even hostility. It is not common that people in this situation of despondency opt for the clearly immoral act of abortion. If this radical action is avoided, and the parents go through with the birth of an unwanted child, there is still the danger that they will subsequently seek a divorce.

Apart from economic or possible emotional problems which accompany economic pressures in family life, there is the equally concrete problem that the health of one of the parents or the health of the possible child might be jeopardized should conception occur.

To limit as far as possible the moral, religious, social, economic, cultural, and psychological problems which arise with the arrival of an unwanted child—both for the parents and for the larger community—I believe that the use of contraceptives would be, if not the best solution, at least the only solution we have at our disposal today. I cannot distinguish between natural and artificial means because the morality of both is the same. If someone uses either a natural or an artificial means of birth control, the intention is the same, i.e., to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. The use of contraceptives can facilitate a sexual life which enjoys a minimum of anxiety.

With these reflections on the current situation of family life and based on the above understanding of St. Paul and the Fathers, I ask myself what is better: to practice abstinence from the act of sexual intercourse, an act made holy by the blessing of God, or to practice a controlled sexual life within marriage and avoid the temptation of Satan? As we know, sexual intimacy within marriage is a very important 683 aspect of the relationship between husband and wife. With the use of contraceptives this sexual intimacy can be practiced without fear of unwanted pregnancy or without the danger of adultery which may result from the practice of abstinence.

Here contraceptives appear to “save the day” in terms of marital intimacy, and the question of whether they have drawbacks is not brought to the reader’s attention. Zaphiris is interested, apparently, in answering the question, “What can be made attractive about contraception?” There are other ways of looking at it.

There was one time I met Fr. Richard John Neuhaus; it was a pleasure, and very different from the stereotypes I keep hearing about neoconservatives here at my more liberal Catholic school, Fordham.

At that evening, over beer and (for the others) cigars I asked about the idea that I had been mulling over. The insight is that concepts ideas and positions having practical conclusions that may not be stated in any form. I asked Fr. Neuhaus for his response to the suggestion that the practice of ordaining women is a fundamental step that may ripple out and have other consequences. I said, “It would be an interesting matter to make a chart, for mainline Protestant denominations, of the date they accepted the ordination of women and the date when they accepted same-sex unions. My suspicion is that it would not be too many years.”

He responded by suggesting that I push the observation further back: it would be interesting to make a chart for American denominations of the date when they allowed contraception, and the more nebulous date when they started to allow divorce.

Fr. Neuhaus’s response raises an interesting question for this discussion. There might be greater value than Zaphiris provides in answering the question, “What are the practical effects, both positive and negative, for sexual intimacy that happen when a couple uses contraception?” There is room to argue that intimacy premised on shutting down that aspect of sharing may have some rather unpleasant effects surfacing in odd places. Fr. Neuhaus seemed to think before suggesting a connection between contraception and divorce. But this is not the question Zaphiris is answering; the question he seems to be answering is, “How can we present contraception as potentially a savior to some couples’ marital intimacy?” This is fundamentally the wrong question to ask.

Zaphiris’s foonote:

12. This spiritual union and the physical union are not opposed to one another, but are complementary. As an Orthodox theologian, I cannot treat physical union and spiritual union as dialectically opposed realities, which would result from an opposition between matter and spirit. Rather than getting trapped in this typically Western problem, I follow the theological stress of Orthodoxy; this opposition between matter and spirit is resolved through the Logis, and matter and spirit are affirmed to be in extraordinary accord and synergy.

The use of contraceptives can contribute to the possibility of a couple’s having a permanent physical and spiritual union. The practice of contraception can contribute to the harmony between the man and wife which is the sine qua non of their union. Furthermore, the practice of contraception can facilitate a balance between demographic expansion on our planet and cultivation of its natural resources. This is absolutely essential if we are to prevent future misery and human degradation for future generations. Furthermore, the church itself, which always desires to promote the economic, social, educational, psychological, and religious well-being of its members and of all persons, should permit the practice of contraception among its faithful if it is to be true to its own task.

There was one webpage I saw long ago, comparing the 1950’s and 1990’s and asking whether it was still possible to make ends meet. The author, after comparing one or two of other rules of thumb, compared what was in a 1950’s kitchen with what was in a 1990’s kitchen, and concluded, “We’re not keeping up with the Joneses any more…. We’re keeping up with the Trumps.”

St. John Chrysostom was cited in an academic presentation I heard, as presenting an interesting argument for almsgiving: in response to the objection of “I have many children and cannot afford too much almsgiving,” said that having more children was a reason to givemore alms, because almsgiving has salvific power, and more children have more need for the spiritual benefit of parental almsgiving.

Besides finding the argument interesting, there is something that I would like to underscore, and it is not simply because this would be a family size with contraception forbidden. This is in the context of what would today be considered a third world economy—what we know as first world economy did not exist until the West discovered unprecedentedly productive ways of framing an economy. An hour’s work would not buy a burger and fries; a day’s work might buy a reasonable amount of bread, and meat was a rarity. Those whom St. Chrysostom was advising to give more alms since they had more children, were living in what would be considered squalor today. Or in the West the year of Zaphiris’ publication, or perhaps before that.

Why is it that today, in such a historically productive economy, we have suddenly been faced with the difficulty of providing for a large family? Why does the first world present us with the (new?) issue of providing for as many children as a couple generates? My suspicion is that it is because we have an expected baseline that would appear to others as “keeping up with the Trumps.” The question in Zaphiris is apparently not so much whether children can be fed, whether with a first world diet or with straight bread, as whether they can be given a college education, because, in a variation of Socrates’ maxim, a life without letters after one’s name is not worth living.

I would raise rather sharply the conception of what is good for human beings: as Luke 12:15 says, a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. The Orthodox ascetical tradition has any number of resources for a well-lived life. There are more resources than most of us will ever succeed in using. The Orthodox ascetical tradition is not only for people who consider themselves rich. Is contraception really justified just because the average middle-class family cannot afford to bring up more than a few children in the lifestyle of keeping up with the Trumps?

This personal theological-moral opinion which I have outlined and which suggests that we take active human measures regarding family life and the future of society does not at all imply that I reject the full importance of the action of divine providence as important—it is probably the most important factor in the human future. On the contrary, I want to suggest the cooperation of human reason with divine providence; for the Greek Fathers, human reason itself is a participation in the divine revelation. The discoveries and inventions of humankind are themselves permitted by God who governs the human spirit through the Logos without suppressing human freedom.

Furthermore, we must not forget that the physiology of the woman is itself a kind of preventative to the occurrence of pregnancy. During her menstrual cycle, as is well known, she is fertile only part of the time. On the side of the male physiology, it is only by chance, and certainly not the result of every ejaculation of semen, that one of the millions of sperm swims to the ovum with final success so that conception occurs. I believe that the physical make-up of the reproductive system of both female and male shows that God did not intend that every act of human sexual intercourse should result in a pregnancy. Consequently, I believe that the contraceptive pill does not produce an abnormal state in woman, but rather prolongs the non-fecund period which comes from God.

Having arrived at this moral opinion which would allow the use of contraceptives by Orthodox couples, it is important to conclude by underscoring several basic points. First, as an Orthodox theologian, I feel that I must respect the freedom of a married couple to ultimately make the decision themselves after I have done my best to school them in the sacredness of marriage, the importance of their union within the saving Mystery of Jesus Christ, and their role in peopling the communion of saints.

684 Secondly, it is important, from an Orthodox point of view, to recognize in the practice of sexual continence a primarily spiritual reality. That is, sexual continence should be practiced only when a couple feels that this is being asked of them by God as a moment within their mutual growth in holiness and spirituality. Any imposition of continence as a physical discipline entered into for baser motives such as fear is not the kind of continence which is counseled to us by the Gospel.

This makes an amusing, if perhaps ironic, contrast to Humanae Vitae. Here Zaphiris more or less says that “continence” for the sake of having sexual pleasure unencumbered by children is not really continence. Which I would agree with. Zaphiris says that the pill (abortifascient, incidentally, on some accounts today) is merely regulating a natural cycle, while crying “foul!” at the Catholic claim that contraceptive timing is a spiritually commendable “continence.” The Catholic position is the mirror image of this, rejecting the idea that the pill (even if it were not abortifascient) is merely regulating a natural cycle, and classifying the pill among what Catholic canon law calls “poisons of sterility.” Both Humanae Vitae and Zaphiris make a shoddy argument for one of these two methods of contraception and cry “Foul!” about shoddy argument on the other side.

Despite the fact that Zaphiris presents himself as hostile to Humanae Vitae and rising above its faults, the two documents seem to be almost mirror images, more similar than different.

Zaphiris’s footnotes:

13. As we know, the Encratites (e.g. Tatian, Cassien, and Carpocrates) condemned marriage because they considered every act of sexual intercourse as sinful. It was sinful because it did not come from God (cf. Epiphanius of Salamine, Adv. Haer., I, III, 46). For them, sexuality was also condemned because of its supposed relationship to original sin. The fleshly union allowed by marriage only further propagated this original sin in the offspring. Thus, because sexuality was not divine, Jesus Christ came to suppress it (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, 91, 1; 92, 1). In their doctrine, through the suppression of the fleshly union, Jesus Christ opposed the Gospel of the New Testament to the Law of the Old Testament which had allowed sexual intercourse in marriage. The followers of the encratistic movement said that they did not accept sexuality, marriage, or procreation because they did not feel that they should introduce other human beings into the world and in their stead as their immediate successors in the human race since they would only endure suffering and provide food for death (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, 45, 1).

14. Cf. Joseph Fletcher, Moral Responsibility, Situation Ethics at Wori, (London, 1967), especially pp. 34ff.

Thirdly, I want to make it quite clear that I am not proposing a complete and unqualified endorsement of the practice of contraception. Rather I am trying to find that same kind of middle ground which the ancient church followed in condemning both the extremes of sexual puritanism among the Encratites,[13] who found in sex something contrary to the holiness of God, and the opposite extreme of pagan debauchery which sought to find all human meaning in the practices of sexual excess. Within this Christian context, I exhort doctors to be faithful to the individual holiness of every Christian man and woman and to shun any irresponsible practice of automatically counseling the use of contraceptives in every situation for the sake of mere convenience and dehumanizing utilitarianism. Also, I want to make it quite clear that I in no way support the “new morality” with its ethic of sexual activity outside the bounds of matrimony, which is sometimes facilitated by doctors who furnish contraceptives quite freely to the young and uninstructed.


The roots of the Orthodox teaching on marriage are to be found in St. Paul’s statement about the love between Christ and the church, and St. John Chrysostom’s view that marriage should be likened to a small church which, like the great church of 684 God, is “one, holy, universal and apostolic.” The relationship between husband and wife parallels the earthly church and the eternal church, or the relationship between the visible and the invisible church. These are not two different churches; on the contrary, there is one church with two dimensions: earthly or terrestrial, and eternal or celestial. The two are inextricably linked. Similarly, marriage constitutes for the Orthodox faith both a terrestrial and a celestial reality, for marriage is both a work of human love and a sacramental means of salvation. Moreover, insofar as every divinely created being, including man and woman, is created according to the Logos, marriage reflects the Divine Logos.

For Paul, marriage is a striking manifestation (exteriorization) of the union between Jesus Christ and his church (Eph. 5:21-33). The Old Testament prophets saw marriage as a dimension of God’s covenant with the people. A husband’s relationship with his wife is the same as the creature’s relationship with the Creator; faithfulness in one is faithfulness in the other and, as with the faithfulness (cf. Hos. 1:1-3, 5; Jer. 3:1ff.; Ezek. 16:1ff., 23:1ff.; Isa. 50:1ff., 54:1ff.), so too Paul, in the New Testament, pronounced marriage a holy means (mysterion or sacrament) of Christ’s grace. The marriage of man and woman participates in the marriage of Christ and the church.

Eastern Orthodox theologians view the relationship between God and human beings as a creative collaboration. It is our freedom that makes us co-creators with God in the world, and co-legislators with God in the moral order. As creatures, we are obliged to obey the law set down by the Creator, but insofar as our obedience is an expression of our freedom, we are not passive objects of God’s law, but rather creative agents of it. Our reason is joined to God through the Logos (the Divine Reason). When we choose to exercise our reason in the moral life, we cooperate with God’s creative work on earth. This cooperation or collaboration the Greek Fathers spoke of as synergism (synergeia). The person and work of Jesus Christ is the fullest embodiment of this synergistic union of God and humanity.

It is in the light of the synergistic union between God and humanity that the Eastern church understands and resolves the problems of contraceptives, especially the use of the pill.

I could interrupt more to ask many more questions like, “Is this what the Eastern Church should teach to be faithful to her tradition, or what Zaphiris wants the framing metaphor for the Eastern teaching to be as a change to its prior tradition?”

The question we should ask now is: Does our freedom to devise and employ contraceptives, including the pill, violate “natural law” as Roman Catholic teaching states? We are compelled to answer that the encyclical of Pope Paul VI (Humanae vitae) is lacking because it does not acknowledge the role of man and woman as God’s co-creators and co-legislators on earth. The Eastern Orthodox view of contraception, unlike that of the Latin church, is that our capacity to control procreation is an expression of our powers of freedom and reason to collaborate with God in the moral order. A human being is viewed not only as a subject which receives passively the “natural law,” but also as a person who plays an active role in its formulation. Thus the natural law, according to Eastern Orthodox thinkers, is not a code imposed by God on human beings, but rather a rule of life set forth by divine inspiration and by our responses to it in freedom and reason. This view does not permit the Eastern Orthodox Church to conclude that the pill, and artificial contraceptives generally, are in violation of natural law.

There are a couple of things that are significant here.

First the argument being made about being co-legislators is a point of cardinal importance and one that should ideally be supported by at least one footnote. There is an absolute lack of footnotes or even mention of names of authors or titles of text in this section’s quite significant assertions about the Eastern Church. (This raises to me some questions about the refereeing here. My teachers usually complain and lower my grade when I make sweeping claims without adding footnotes.)

Second, to employ a Western image, Christian freedom is comparable to a sonnet: total freedom within boundaries. Hence, in a slightly paraphrased version of one of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, “A brother asked an old monk, ‘What is a good thing to do, that I may do it and live?’ The old monk said, ‘God alone knows what is good. Yet I have heard that someone questioned a great monk, and asked, “What good work shall I do?” And he answered, “There is no single good work. The Bible says that Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him. And Elijah loved quiet, and God was with him. And David was humble, and God was with him. Therefore, find the desire God has placed in your heart, and do that, and guard your heart.”‘” (http://jonathanscorner.com/christmas_tales/christmas_tales10.html , as seen on 14 May, 2007) There is great freedom in Orthodoxy, but freedom within bounds. Things such as “Do not murder,” “Do not commit adultery,” and “Do not steal,” are boundaries absolutely consistent with the Desert Fathers saying above. There is great freedom within boundaries, and in fact the boundaries increase our freedom.

What Zaphiris presents is a great, stirring, poetic hymn to our cooperation with the Creator as co-creators, presented as a reason not to require a certain bound. (It is my experience that sophistry is often presented more poetically than honest arguments.) Perhaps this would be a valid move if there were no serious issues surrounding contraception, but as it is, it follows the logical fallacy of “begging the question”: in technical usage, “begging the question” is not about raising a question, but improperly taking something for granted: more specifically, presenting an argument that assumes the very point that it is supposed to prove. It is begging the question to answer the question, “Why is contraception permissible?” by eloquently proclaiming, “Contraception is a magnificent exercise of Orthodox freedom, because Orthodox freedom is magnificent and contraception is permissible within the bounds of that freedom.” The whole point at issue is whether contraception is permissible; to argue this way as a way of answering that question is sophistry.

(I might suggest that it is an “interesting” exercise of our status as co-creators with God to try hard to shut down the creative powers God built into sex. Perhaps the suggestion is not indefensible, but it is in need of being defended, and Zaphiris never acknowledges that this interpretation of our status as co-creators needs to be defended, or buttress his specific interpretation.)

686 The conception of natural law in Humanae vitae contains a deterministic understanding of human marital and sexual life. According to this understanding, any and every human (or artificial) intervention into the biological processes of human being constitutes a violation of God’s law for humanity. Hence, contraception as an artificial interruption or prevention of the natural event of procreation is inherently a violation of God’s law. Humanae vitae, moreover, goes on to state that each act of coitus is, according to the law of nature, an “actus per se aptus ad generation.”

While the Eastern Orthodox Church fully acknowledges the role of procreation in the marital sexual act, it does not share the deterministic understanding of this act as expressed by Humanae vitae, which ignores love as a dimension of great value in sexual intercourse between husband and wife. Indeed, this love is viewed by the Eastern church as the marriage partners’ own response to the love of God for human beings, a human love as the marriage partners’ own response to the love of God for human beings, a human love which is also a paradigm of Christ’s love for the church. Finally, one must say that the deterministic Roman Catholic conception of marital sexuality, rooted as it is in scholastic medieval teaching, cannot very well deal with crucial contemporary problems such as over-population, food shortage, poverty, and insufficient medical resources.

The Roman Catholic position on human sexuality and procreation is based on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, and these in turn are decisively influenced by Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle’s view was that every object in the physical universe possesses an intelligible structure, a form which is composed of an intrinsic end and the means or “drive” to realize that end. When a thing is behaving, or being used, according to its end—as a frying pan used to fry fish—then that thing is acting properly or “naturally”; however, when a thing is not acting, or being used, according to its intrinsic end—as when a frying pan is used to prop open a faulty window—then that object is acting, or being used, improperly or “unnaturally.”

There is a much bigger problem than a singularly unflattering illustration of the distinction between natural and unnatural use.

Unless one counts Zaphiris’s example above of a theologian saying that marriage is intended for procreation, with footnoted clarification that this is “probably due to the influence of Greek philosophy,” the surrounding passage (about Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of whether contraception is unnatural) is the first time that Zaphiris mentions a theologian presenting an argument against contraception. And it is a Latin after the Great Schism interpreted in terms of Scholastic influence.

The following inference is not stated in so many words, but the trusting reader who is trying to be sympathetic will naturally draw an understandably wrong conclusion: “Arguments that contraception enter the picture when Aquinas as a Latin Scholastic imported Aristotelian philosophy.” Again, this is not stated explicitly, but much of sophistry, including this, is the impression that is created without technically saying anything false. (This is how sophistry works.)

This will lead the trusting reader to expect another further conclusion: since (so it appears) arguments against contraception,and especially the idea of contraception being unnatural, enter the picture with Latin Scholasticism, any Orthodox who brings such argument against contraception is under Western influence. People who have fallen under Western influence should perhaps be answered gently and charitably, but the Western influence is not something one should listen to and accept. Again, this is not stated in so many words, but it is precise the rhetoric appears to be aimed at.

Incidentally, whatever Aquinas may have gotten from Aristotle, the Greek Fathers had ideas of unnatural vice without the help of Latin Scholasticism. There is a firmly embedded concept of unnatural vices, including witchcraft as well as “unnatural vice.” Jude 7 charges the men of Sodom with unnatural lust (sarkos heteras). The salient question is not whether the Greek Fathers have an understanding of some sins as unnatural, but whether contraception is a sin and, if so, whether it is among the sins classified as unnatural. But it is not automatically due to Western influence for an Orthodox to make claims about unnatural sin.

St. Thomas attempted to synthesize Aristotle’s logic of means-ends with the biblical story of the divine creator of the universe. For Aquinas, God is the author of the intelligible structure present in each finite or earthly object. When a finite being behaves according to its intrinsic end, it acts “naturally” as Aristotle thought, but according to Aquinas it also acts in accord with the divine will for that creaturely being. So it is with human sexuality and procreation. Aquinas believed that the intrinsic end of all sexuality (human and non-human) is procreation. Procreation may not necessarily result from each act of coitus, but this does not mean that the sexual (human) partners have disobeyed God for, if their aim in sexual union was procreation, they have behaved in accord with the divine will governing this creaturely reality. But if that intrinsic aim of sexuality-procreation is subverted, either by substituting pleasure for procreation as the aim, or by introducing artificial devices or means to inhibit or prevent procreation, then sexuality is practiced “unnaturally” or sinfully, and God is disobeyed.

The wedding of Aristotle’s means-ends logic to the biblical Creator meant for Aquinas that sexuality, as every other earthly vitality, is governed by laws setting forth God’s intention for each creaturely being, which are knowable to every creature for 686 the proper conduct of its life on earth. When the law governing sexuality and procreation is disobeyed, then, according to Aquinas’ theology, the Creation itself is undermined and God’s own creative will is defied.

* * *

If a fuller anthropological understanding of human beings is advanced, such that people are viewed as free, rationally and spiritually, as well as biologically, a different judgment on contraception must then be made, one certainly different from that of the Roman Catholic Church.

Zaphiris is driving his persuasive effect further. He is driving home further the impression that if a misguided fellow Orthodox tells you that contraception is sin, he is presumably one of those poor saps, an Orthodox who has fallen under Western influence, and if this misguided fellow Orthodox perhaps specifies that this is because contraception frustrates the purpose of sex, this is someone under the spell of the Roman Church, who is to be dealt with as one ordinarily deals with the pseudomorphosis of Western influence yet again corrupting Orthodoxy.

It is the belief of Eastern Orthodox theology that only such an anthropology is consistent with the dignity the Bible bestows on humans as imago Dei.

Note that earlier some of what Zaphiris said earlier was presented as a “theological opinion,” not necessarily binding on the consciences of other Orthodox Christians even if he was trying to make a case for it. But here we seem to have shifted to something that is binding on all Orthodox Christians: “It is the belief of Eastern Orthodox theology that only such an anthropology,” apparently meaning the anthropology implied in the last section which makes at least one sweeping claim without footnotes or even the name of an author or text, that is binding on the consciences of Orthodox Christians. Earlier, perhaps the view of St. John Chrysostom might have been acceptable, at least as a theological opinion. Here it begins to look like a blunt declaration implying that Chrysostom’s position is heretical. Is the implication, “If anybody disagrees with this, let him be anathema?”

This dignity is revealed afresh by Jesus Christ who, as both divine and human in freedom, reason, spirit, and flesh, incarnates the complex anthropology of all human beings.

Speaking from this anthropological conception of humanity, we should distinguish three principle aspects in the use of contraceptives—the psychological, the medical, and the moral. From the psychological point of view, contraceptives are permissible only when their use is the result of a common decision reached by both partners. The imposition of contraceptives by one partner in the sexual act must be regarded as immoral inasmuch as it abridges the freedom and possibly violates the conscience of the other partner. Any use of contraceptives which does not respect the psychological condition of both partners and of the sexual act itself must be judged immoral. What should guide sexual partners in the use or non-use of contraceptives is their freedom and reason, their spiritual dignity as creatures of God.

Zaphiris’s footnote:

15. [Footnote not recorded in my copy.]

From the medical point of view, we have mentioned above the conditions under which contraceptives are permissible. It is important to emphasize here that moral questions are not part of the technical judgments made by medical doctors about the use or non-use of contraceptives.[15] As we have said, the use of the pill is not a permanent sterilization but a temporary state of sterility induced for reasons that may be social or economic or psychological or demographic or physiological.

Contrary to Roman Catholic teaching, the pill does not violate natural law. Its function is not to bring about a permanent state of sterilization but rather a temporary suspension of fertility. And this decision to suspend fertility, when made by both marital partners with reason and freedom and spirit, is a decision made perfectly consistent with God’s will for human beings on earth.

* * *

688 There is an authentic moral question in the use and non-use of contraceptives. It is no less true that marriage as a sacramental mystery contains a powerful moral dimension. When marital partners engage in contraception, the Orthodox Church believes that they must do so with the full understanding that the goal God assigns to marriage is both the creation of new life and the expression of deeply felt love.

Note: Love is something you deeply feel. I do not find this notion in the Bible nearly so much as in the literature of courtly love. This conception of love is (one infers from Zaphiris) not only permissible but mandatory.

Moreover, the Orthodox Church believes that the relationship of man and woman in marriage is essentially a relationship of persons. This means that sexual life must be guided by the meaning of relationship and personhood.

Though it is obvious that procreation is a physical phenomenon, the Eastern church understands the decision of the married couple to have a child to be a moral, even more, a spiritual decision. The Pope’s encyclical, Humanae vitae, in our judgment, committed a significant error. The authors of the encyclical sought to distinguish our procreative power from all other powers that make us human but, in fact, they isolate our procreativeness and set it apart from the human personality. Such an isolation does little justice to the complexity. If conjugality has as its goal per se aptitude for procreation, then this is a virtual denial that sexual is permissible during a woman’s unfertile periods. We have said, and now repeat, that conjugality can and ahould[sic] continue, whether or not procreation is a practical possibility. In contrast to Humanae vitae, Orthodox thinkers do not believe that human beings are subjects bound by “natural law” in the deterministic Roman Catholic sense, but rather persons living and acting freely in the natural world.

It now appears, at least to the uninitiate or those liable to misconstrue things, that existentialist personalism is the teaching of the Orthodox Church. And apparently not just a theological opinion: one is bound to subscribe to it.

* * *

Zaphiris’s footnote:

16. For one Orthodox discussion of the question of insemination, see the excellent book of Prof. Chrysostomos Constantinidis, Technete Gonipoiesis kai Theologia in Orthodoxia, XXXIII (1958), 66-79, 174-90, 329-335, 451-468; XXXIV (1959), 36-52, 212-230.

Eastern Orthodoxy recognizes that men and women can only truly be God’s co-creators on earth through the responsible use of freedom and reason. The question of responsibility becomes crucial in such cases as permanent sterilization, artificial insemination,[16] and euthanasia. The Eastern Orthodox Church cannot and will not legislate vis-à-vis the enormously important and complicated questions raised by these cases.

I’m at this point imagining the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in the background: “Glory, glory, Hallelujah! His truth goes marching on!” This is very stirring rhetoric, but sits ill with some of my sources and seems to be something he doesn’t document well.

These questions are regarded by the Orthodox Church as theologoumena, that is, theologically discussable issues. The Eastern church seeks always to respect one’s freedom of decision, but it also seeks through its own ethical inquiry to guide people in making responsible decisions.

There is a lot of great rhetoric for this perspective in Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes. I am suspicious of this rhetorical version of growing to autonomous adult responsibility in its Catholic forms, and I don’t see why it needs to be incorporated into Orthodoxy.

The Eastern church’s refusal to provide specific answers to some concrete moral questions is based on a fundamental theological principle—the belief that no one can specify where human freedom ends and divine will begins.

Notwithstanding that Zaphiris has done precisely that, not by forbidding contraception altogether, but by specifying multiple lines which contraception may not pass. And, apparently, specified a line where Orthodox condemnation of contraception may not pass. But this is impressive rhetoric none the less.

Synergism means the collaboration of human beings with God in the continuing creation of the world. We must struggle to understand the right and wrong uses of our freedom, guided by the divine spirit. Our freedom is a mystery of God’s own will and freedom. Therefore, no theologian—Eastern Orthodox 689 or otherwise—can specify what finally constitutes the divine-human collaboration. Practically speaking, we can know when any given act, having taken place we can never be certain of the responsible and creative use of our freedom. We cannot determine a priori the movement of the human spirit any more than we can determine a priori the movement of the divine spirit. It is certain that, unless we recognize continually the Lordship of God in the world—the Creator judging all the actions of the creatures, we cannot speak truly of a divine-human synergism.

The church is an instrument of the work of the Holy Spirit on earth, and must seek to relate the scriptural revelation of God to the moral situation in life which we constantly confront. When the church accepts this responsibility, it enables the participation of human beings in the on-going history of salvation. In this fashion, the church witnesses simultaneously to the sacred will of God and to the urgency of human moral life. Thereby the church avoids both antinomianism on the one side and the moral reductionism of “situation ethics” on the other side.

Many ethical approaches are presented as meant to steer a middle course between problematic extremes, including ones we might like and ones we might like. See an attempted middle road between forcing queer positions onto the Biblical text and forcing conservative positions onto the Biblical text in Patricia Beattie Jung, “The Promise of Postmodern Hermeneutics for the Biblical Renewal of Moral Theology,” in Patricia Beattie Jung (ed.), Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology, Collegeville: Liturgical Press 2001. I haven’t seen this phenomenon before in Orthodoxy, but it is common in the liberal Catholic dissent I’ve read. The dissenter adopts a rhetorical pose of being eager to seek a measured middle course that doesn’t do something extreme, and does not give unfair advantage to any position. But this is done in the course of agitating for change on a point where the Catholic teaching is unambiguous. Jung, for instance hopes for a versions Catholic ethics more congenial to lesbian wishes, but she always takes the rhetoric of moderate and reasonable efforts that will respect Scripture and Catholic Tradition. (Again, I am comparing Zaphiris to Catholic dissent because I have not seen what he is doing here in Orthodoxy before, but have seen it repeatedly in liberal Catholic dissent.)

Zaphiris’s footnote:

17. This is an expression used by Nicholas Cabasilas, an Eastern Orthodox theologian of the Byzantine era. The notion of God’s maniakos eros is discussed by Paul Evdokimov, L’amour fou de Dieu (Paris, 1973).

We must conclude here by saying that God’s fantastic love for human beings—maniakos eros[17]—has divinised all creation. With this divinisation, God achieves the purpose of bringing all beings to God’s own self. We play a role in this great work of salvation through the creativeness and freedom which God has bestowed on us. These dynamic capacities of our being cannot finally be identified and understood outside the scope of the Christian doctrines of humanity (anthropology), of Christ (Christology), and of salvation (soteriology). The ultimate purpose of our synergistic relation to God is our own regeneration, as the New Testament states (cf. Rom. 8:28;Phil. 2:13; I Cor. 3:9).

Zaphiris’s footnotes:

18 I Cor 2:7.

19 Rom 12:2.

Moreover, synergism has an ecclesiological dimension, and secondarily a moral dimension. Our role as co-legislators on earth with God can only fully be exercised in relationship to the church, which is the instrument of the communication of the Holy Spirit to humans in their creativeness. This means for Eastern Orthodoxy that the legislative and creative actions of men and women are a liturgy of the church itself. When we live in relation to the church’s body, we live within “God’s wisdom: a mysterious and hidden wisdom framed from the very beginning to bring us to our full glory.”[18] The ecclesio-anthropo-soteriological value of this human liturgy is contained in the relation which exists between God’s revelation and our activity. The harmonious cooperation between God and humans makes it possible for our legislative and creative acts to be “what is good, acceptable, and perfect.”[19]

We have offered these remarks in the hope that they can contribute to a common basis for an ecumenical discussion on the contemporary human problem of contraception.

Orthodox who are concerned with ecumenism may wish to take note of this statement of authorial intent.


Study and discussion questions

  1. What view concerning marriage and sexuality do we find in the Scriptures? In the early Christian writers?
  2. Discuss the author’s interpretation of the biblical and patristic views of marriage, sexuality, and procreation.
  3. What implication concerning contraception can be derived from biblical and patristic concepts of marriage, sexuality, and procreation?
  4. What are the official teachings of the Orthodox Church on contraception?
  5. How do these teachings compare with Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings?
  6. Under what circumstances does the author believe contraception to be theologically permissible? Discuss.
  7. What is synergism?
  8. How is contraception linked with synergism?
  9. How is the resulting view of contraception within Orthodoxy a contrast to the Roman Catholic view?
  10. Why does the Eastern Orthodox Church avoid concrete and decisive answers to problems such as contraception?

I have never seen Bible study/”The Secret”/book discussions questions posed like this in a refereed journal before. I suspect that these will lead people to say things that will help cement the belief that the truth is more or less what has been presented in this account. This seems in keeping with other red flags that this is doing more than just providing a scholarly account of what Orthodox believe. Perhaps this is part of why this paper’s label as a “theological opinion”—about as close as Orthodoxy gets to the idea of “agreeing to disagree” on spiritual matters—has been accepted as a statement of what the Orthodox Church believes, period.

I believe this document has problems, and if as I expect it is a major influence in the “new consensus” allowing some contraception in the Orthodox Church, this constitutes major reason to re-evaluate the “new consensus.”

There could conceivably be good reasons to change the ancient tradition of the Orthodox Church from time immemorial to almost the present day. Maybe. But this is not it. (And if these are the best reasons Zaphiris found to change the immemorial tradition of the Church, perhaps it would be better not to do so.)


Buy Mystical Theology on Amazon.

Enjoying something from legal English

A lawyer, one Dr. Sandburg, wrote The Legal Guide to Mother Goose, doing his professional best to rewrite “Jack and Jill went up the hill” with the full precision of a legal document:

The party of the first part hereinafter known as Jack
And the party of the second part hereinafter known as Jill
Ascended or caused to be ascended
An elevation of undetermined height and slope
Hereinafter referred to as hill,

And it must be conceded that the English of legal documents is rarely held up as an example of how to communicate to people without extensive legal training. However, there is one point where we would do well to pay close attention to legal English.

“Enjoy” is a word frequently used in contracts, appearing like:

4. ________ will enjoy an unlimited right to sell, redistribute, publish, make derivative works to…

And “enjoy” means something that is alike powerful and beautiful here. It does not mean—one is tempted to say “has nothing to do with”—an agreement that someone will have pleasure. Contracts like this, even when they say “enjoy”, really do not have much to say about how much fun and pleasure either party will take from the agreement. “Enjoy” is a technical term that means something like “derive the full benefits from”, so that:


means something like:

4. ________ will derive the full benefits from an unlimited right to sell, redistribute, publish, make derivative works to…

And with that view in mind, let’s take a look at the opening question of the Westminster Catechism:

Q: 1. What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

“Enjoy” may here include taking delight from God, but I would like to point something out. In this famous catechism, what is enjoyed is not a legal right. (For that matter, Orthodoxy can get along quote well without the Western obsession with rights.) What is enjoyed is not a legal right such as contracts deal in, but God himself.

“Mission exists because worship does not.”

There is something in Protestant missions I would like to look at and then deepen.

Among devout Protestants who care most deeply about mission, there is a saying, “Mission exists because worship does not.” The premise of this emphatic saying is that God has never created anyone for the purpose of missions. Every man who ever has been created has been created for one goal only: worshiping God. Or in the language of the catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him together.” And some are quick to point out that these are not two separate things: glorifying God and enjoying him are the exact same thing. No one is created for mission; everyone is created for worship. But there is a tragic reality. Some people are not in a position to fulfill the purpose for which they are made. And because some people are deprived of the glorious worship they are made for, and there is this gap in worship, the Christian Church as a whole, and some Christians in particular, should serve in missions.

There are differences between Orthodox and Protestant understandings of mission: Protestant training, such as Wheaton College’s Institute for Cross-Cultural Training, give a kickstart in both anthropology and linguistics, training people to learn languages and communicate well in cross-cultural situations. The Orthodox history of missions does not ignore language or culture, but its best mission work is to have monks who are trained in holiness go out among people and let their holiness itself speak. If one reads of a St. Herman of Alaska, whose mission work is still bearing fruit in Alaska today, the story is overall not of an endeavor to understand language and culture, but of a man pouring himself out in love for God and having successful missionary activity precisely because he followed the maxim, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his perfect righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you as well.” I’ve attended courses at Wheaton’s Institute for Cross-Cultural Training and every person I spoke with was devout. But the content of the training itself, focused on language and culture, is by Orthodox standards a secular idea of how to succeed as a missionary. The Orthodox idea that the best missionary is a monk pursuing holiness as fully as he can, and that missions work when you live among people and seek first the Kingdom of God.

Ascesis exists because contemplation does not

Ascesis, meaning the spiritual disciplines of the Orthodox walk, means an open-ended list that includes prayer, fasting, church attendance, giving to the poor, spiritual stillness, and other things. It is profoundly important in Orthodoxy. But in an even stronger sense than we can say, “Mission exists because worship does not,” we can say, “Ascesis exists because contemplation does not.” And the observation here is not that there are others who are missing the glory they were made to share. The observation is that we have fallen short of the glory we were made to share, and we need the purifying fire of ascesis. We and others need ascesis, but this is the point. We were not created for ascetical toil. We need ascesis because we have fallen away from the contemplation we were made for, the contemplation which is another name for enjoying God.

And I have wanted to speak of contemplation but find myself falling short. Of our sins and our need to be polished in ascesis it is easy to say something adequate. But for contemplation, words fail me, or at least my command of words. Contemplation is a joy and other things pale in comparison next to it: yet even to speak of it as a joy is misleading, as misleading as reading a contract and think that “enjoy” means nothing more than assuring that someone will experience pleasure. Better, perhaps, is to say that I thirst for honor, I want worldly accolades and am too ungrateful to be satisfied with the worldly honors I have. But when I taste contemplation, such honors grow strangely dim and I find myself wanting what is really good for me, thisting and sated for real honor, real achievement, real love of others, and the debris I chase after in temptation looks like… in Silence: Organic food for the soul I wrote:

…is that we are like a child with some clay,
trying to satisfy ourselves by making a clay horse,
with clay that never cooperates, never looks right,
and obsessed with clay that is never good enough,
we ignore and maybe fear
the finger tapping us on our shoulder
until with great trepidation we turn,
and listen to the voice say,
“Stop trying so hard. Let it go,”
and follow our father
as he gives us a warhorse.

And so I am left saying that enjoying God in contemplation is beautiful beyond beauty, and words fail me, and ideas too. I want to tell of God and contemplation above all else, and nothing I can say fits them.

Enjoying apples

Apples are a powerful symbol in Orthodoxy. It is not just that the Song of Songs has a lovesick bride say, “Refresh me with apples.” Apples appear again and again in the spiritual treasure housed in the lives of the saints. The saints are refreshed with apples; a priest prays to see what paradise is like, and St. Euphrosynos appears to him in a dream and invites him to take whatever he desires. He chose three apples, and the cook Euphrosynos wrapped them up. The priest awoke from the dream and was astonished to find three apples, wrapped as they had been in the vision, fragrant beyond all measure. (When he told what happened, the cook ran to flee from worldly honor.) Another story tells of an abbess, at the end of her life, being given three apples from paradise. It is perhaps a reminiscence of this that in The Magician’s Nephew, Digory is sorely tempted to steal a Heavenly apple, comes clean about his covetousness, is told of all the evils that would have flown, and then to his astonishment is commanded to take such an apple as he desired to his ailing mother. And he returns home from Narnia and its garden:

…so the fruit of that mountain garden looked different too. There were of course all sorts of coloured things in the bedroom: the coloured counterpane on the bed, the wallpaper, the sunlight from the window, and Mother’s pretty, pale blue dressing jacket. But the moment Digory took the Apple out of his pocket, all those things seemed to have scarcely any colour at all. Every one of them, even the sunlight, looked faded and dingy. The brightness of the Apple threw strange lights on the ceiling. Nothing else was worth looking at: you couldn’t look at anything else. And the smell of the Apple of Youth was as if there was a window that opened on Heaven.

Such apples are no concoction that began in a fantasy writer’s imagination, however creative. There are saints who have tasted them. But what makes the apple so astonishing is that such apples are a bit like contemplation.

A Detailed Mathematical Model

This model represents a mathematician’s second attempt at making a mathematical model, and as such is very detailed, complex, and at times hard to keep track of. It is being kept on the web primarily as a courtesy to people who are already using it. If you are not a heavy gamer, and are not used to complex mathematical models, I strongly suggest that you use this simpler model. This document may still be useful, as a wealth of detail about mechanical devices and other creations, but newcomers are warned that using this as an actual model for game play may be difficult.

Section I: General model

Section I A: Getting Started

The parts of this document are as follows:

Another document, “From zero”, introduces the concept of role play and deals with all of the non-numerical parts of getting started; this document tells how to deal with numbers and dice.

For basic introduction and getting the feel for the model:

Section I B attempts to explain some of the basic concepts. Section IV develops a sample character sheet, a sheet used to store basic information useful to play; it demonstrates what a player goes through in order to set things up. Section II F gives some numbers to use as reference points, for questions like “What should be the difficulty for thus-and-such?” Section III gives a quick key to abbreviations used throughout the work.

For developping a character sheet:

Section II A tells how to generate a character’s attributes — numerical ratings that tell how talented a character is in various areas — and section II B tells how to adjust them for age, gender, and race. Section II D gives the basic list of skills and tells how they are to be adjusted by attributes. Section II H gives starting experience, and section II G tells how much experience it takes to raise a skill to a certain level.

For modelling play:

Section II I tells how, when a character attempts an action, to roll dice to decide whether the character, with skill A, succeeds at an action with difficulty B. Section II J deals with combat and damage. Section II K deals with random encounters of animals and people, and describes what animals are in the world. Section II L deals with equipment.

Optional rules and Other:

There are several optional rules which may be used to enhance play and give it more detail. Section I C is the first such section, dealing with skills ratings. Section II C gives miscellaneous numbers about the races. Section II E gives numbers referenced in II C. Section II M gives rules about the time taken for various actions, and performing actions simultaneously. Section V comments on the model.

Section I B: The Basic Idea

This is essentially a skill-based model, a modified version of another model to use dice. It requires the use of two six-sided dice of different colors — for the sake of simplicity, the two dice will be referrered to as r (red) and b (blue), and read as producing numbers ranging from 1 to 6. For example, 6*r+b would be read as ten times the number on the red die, plus the number on the blue die, which would in effect produce a random number from 7 to 42. It is, while not necessary, helpful in some cases to have two ten-sided dice.

In general for skills, attributes, ratings, etc., a 0 is average, and the number (positive or negative) tells how far above or below average that creature is. The scale is exponential; 10 points correspond to doubling/halving. So someone with a strength of 20 and a dexterity of -10 would have a strength of 2*2=4 times average, while someone with a dexterity of -10 would be half as dexterous as the average person. The game generally uses the attributes in the form given — essentially, how to adjust an average ability — and doesn’t really deal with an absolute scale.

A character’s skill will have an av (adjusted value), equal to the bs (base skill), minus the skill’s dl (difficulty of learning), plus the character’s al (ability to learn), plus the gaa (governing attributes addend). When the character attempts an action, the skill’s difficulty will be subtracted from the av, and then dice will be rolled to see if the attempt was successful.

If an action is being taken against another character (for example, haggling), that person’s av is the difficulty.

Section I C: Additional Rules

Some skills are related to each other by an ld (learning difference). If skill X and skill Y are related by an ld of 5, then a character’s bs (exclusive of experience) in skill x is at least the number five less than his bs in skill Y. So a character who had a bs of 15 in skill X would have a minimum bs of 10 in skill Y. The ld’s are additive (if X and Y have ld 5 and Y and Z have ld 10, X and Z have ld 15), but explicitly listed differences supercede the values that are calculated from additivity. If there are two or more ld’s contributing point values to a specific skill, and/or a nonzero untrained base, the total is not the sum of the point values. It is the maximum.

Learning may take place under a tutor who has a skill of at least the skill level that the character is training to; in that case, the learning is at half price. The experience given starting characters takes this tutelage into account.

Section II: Charts

Section II A: Attributes

Several random numbers generated as r – b: the number on the red die, less the number on the blue die.

These values are numbered n1 through n36.

The attributes are read roughly as how far above or below the average they are: a +10 would be a fair amount above average (twice the average), while -10 would be moderately below average (half the average), with zero being average. The maximum possible is 25, and the minimum -25.

Here are the calculated attributes:

ag (Agility)		n1+n2+n3+n4+n5
al (Ability to Learn)	n1+n6+n7+n8+n9
ch (Charisma)		n1+n6+n10+n11+n12
co (Constitution)	n13+n14+n15+n16+n17
de (Dexterity)		n1+n2+n3+n18+n19
in (Intelligence)	n1+n6+n7+n20+n21
kn (Knowledge)		n1+n6+n7+n22+n23
me (Memory)		n1+n6+n7+n24+n25
pe (Perception)		n1+n6+n26+n27+n28
sp (Speed)		n1+n2+n29+n30+n31
st (Strength)		n13+n14+n32+n33+n34
wi (Wisdom)		n1+n6+n7+n35+n36

Section II B: Attribute Adjustments

All adjustments are addends: they are added to a character’s base attribute. All adjustments are 0 unless otherwise specified.

Attribute:     ag  al  ch  co  de  in  kn  me  pe  sp  st  wi

Race: Nor’krin 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 5 0 0 5 0 Tuz 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 0 Urvanovestilli 0 0 2 0 5 5 2 3 0 0 -10 0 Yedidia 0 0 5 0 0 3 0 0 10 0 0 0 Jec 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Shal 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 -5 0 5 Janra 20 0 5 0 0 4 0 0 2 5 5 0

Gender: Male 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 Female 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 5 0 -5 0

Age: Child 5 10 2 10 0 -8 5 0 10 10 -4 -10 Young Adult 5 5 0 5 5 0 -4 0 5 5 5 0 Middle Aged 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 Old -4 -4 0 -4 -4 -3 5 -3 -4 -4 -4 5 Extremely Old -10 -10 0 -10 -10 -5 5 -8 -10 -10 -10 10

Section II C: Racial Non-Attribute Statistics.

A character’s actual lifespan is calculated by multiplying the racial base by his constitution (constitution not adjusted for race, gender, or age), except for the border between child and young adult, which is not adjusted. For example, a Janra with a non-adjusted log of constitution of .8 would become a young adult at 16, middle aged at 41, old at 73, and extremely old at 89. A character will die of old age at an age of his maximum adjusted lifespan times the square root of x1, where x1 is uniformly distributed over [0,1].

Age:		Child	Young Adult	Middle Aged	Old	Extremely Old
Nor'krin	0-15	16-30		31-60		61-90	91-120
Tuz		0-15	16-25		26-40		41-50	51-60
Urvanovestilli	0-30	31-100		101-300		301-400	401-500
Yedidia		0-20	21-50		51-120		121-160	161-200
Jec		0-15	16-30		31-60		61-90	91-120
Shal		0-50	51-200		201-600		601-800	801-1000
Janra		0-15	16-50		51-90		91-110	111-120

Speed of movement is given in both miles per hour and feet per second. A character’s speed of movement is equal to the racial base multiplied by his speed, adjusted for age and gender but not race. Females suffer a 10% speed penalty.

Speed: mph:	Walk	Jog	Sprint	fps:	Walk	Jog	Sprint
Nor'krin	2	4	14		2	5	21
Tuz		1	2	8		2	3	12
Urvanovestilli	3	5	20		4	7	29
Yedidia		2	3	12		2	4	18
Jec		2	4	14		2	5	21
Shal		1	2	6		1	2	9
Janra		5	7	30		7	11	44

Adult height is normally distributed with mean m and standard deviation s.

Height:	Male:	m	s	Female:	m	s
Nor'krin	6'6"	3"		5'8"	3"
Tuz		4'6"	2"		4'3"	2"
Urvanovestilli	5'2"	1.5"		4'8"	1.5"
Yedidia		5'4"	2.5"		4'6"	2"
Jec		5'6"	2.5"		5'2"	2"
Shal		5'6"	2"		5'2"	1.5"
Janra		6'0"	3"		5'6"	3"

As is adult weight:

Weight: Male:	m	s	Female:	m	s
Nor'krin	200#	29#		150#	25#
Tuz		200#	28#		150#	22#
Urvanovestilli	100#	9#		70#	7#
Yedidia		150#	22#		100#	14#
Jec		130#	18#		110#	13#
Shal		145#	16#		125#	11#
Janra		150#	23#		130#	22#

Section II D: Skills

Here is a listing of skills/areas of knowledge/abilities. It is meant to be illustrative rather than exclusive. (Partially borrowed from AD&D)

Following most skills are: untrained base (general, and then with values for specific races following, separated by commas if need be: (N)or’krin, (T)uz, (U)rvanovestilli, (Y)edidia, Je(C), (S)hal, and (J)anra); dl; base time (s=seconds, m=minutes, h=hours, d=days; w=weeks; y=years. A hyphen (‘-‘) for untrained base means that an untrained character is incapable of attempting that skill. A trailing c means that an action is continuous and must be checked with that frequency — for example, moving silently); gaa elements.

An untrained attribute of 0 does not mean that a character is incapable of performing that action. It means that he has no special training above what is common.

The gaa element is the number of times that an attribute is to be added. For example, st 2, co 1 would mean that the gaa is twice the character’s strength plus his constitution.

(Other comments may follow as appropriate.)

Acquisition, 0, J 10; 0; 1d; ch 1, pe 1
Acrobatics/Tumbling 0, Y 10, J 20; 0; 2 s; ag 1, st 1
Acting 0; 0; 30 m; ch 1
Ambidexterity costs 5 points
Animal Handling 0, Y 20, C 10; 0; 5 m; ch 1
Animal Lore 0, Y 20; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Animal Training 0, Y 10; 0; 3 w; –
Anatomy 0, U 10, Y 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Anthropology -, U 10; 0; 1 m; in 1, kn 1, me 1
Appraisal 10, U 20; 0; 1 m; pe 1
Artistic Skill (Specific Medium) 0; 0; 1 d; in 1
Attack (Specific Weapon) 0, N Axe 10, N Knife 10, N Longbow 20, T Crossbow 10, T Dagger 20, J Dagger 10; 0; Axe 2 s, Crossbow 30 s, Dagger (Hand to Hand) 2 s, Fist 1 s, Halberd 8 s, Lance 15 s, Longbow 5 s, Longsword 5 s, Mace 7 s, Rapier 3 s, Shortsword 3 s, Two-Handed Sword 10 s; Hand to Hand de 1, sp 1, st 1 (Lance strength of mount), Missle de 1, sp 1 — Note: Hand to Hand and Missle are each generalizations of attack; if a character wishes to generalize to all weapons, the cost is dl 15 instead of 10.
Balance 0, J 20; 0; 1 s; ag 1
Biology 0, U 10; 0; in 1; 1 m; kn 1, me 1
Blacksmith 0; 0; 1 h; de 1
Blind Action 0, Y 10, S 20, J 10; 0; pe 1 — if a check is made for blind action, an action may be taken blind at twice the normal difficulty.
Bowyer/Fletcher 0; 0; 1 d; de 1
Brewing 0; 0; 1 w; –
Building 0; 0; 5 w; de 1
Carving 0; 0; 30 m; de 1
Carpentry 0; 0; 1 w; de 1
Catch 0; 0; 1 s; de 1
Ceremonies 0, U 10; 0; 1 h; kn 1
Charioteering 0; 0; 5mc; ag 1
Chemistry 0, U 10, Y 10; 0; 30 m; in 1, kn 1, me 1
Climbing 0, J 10; 0; 1 m(c); ag 1, st 1 — this must be checked every 20 feet.
Clockwork Device Craftsmanship/Engineering 0, U 20; 0; 1 d; de 1, in 1
Cobbling 0; 0; 1 h; de 1
Cooking 0; 0; 1 h; –
Cold Tolerance 0, N 20, C 10, J 10; 0; 1 wc; co 1
Cultures (specific culture) 0, U 5, J 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Dancing 0, U 10, Y 20, J 15; 0; 5 mc; ag 1
Dodge 0, Y 10, J 10; 0; 1 s; ag 1, sp 1 — if a character attempts to dodge in the middle of an action, that action is lost. Dodging may, of course, be executed concurrently with other actions with both actions at double difficulty. The difficulty of hitting a dodging creature is the difficulty of normally hitting the creature plus the creature’s dodge value.
Doublejointedness costs 5
Endurance 0, N 20, T 10, J 10; 0; 15mc; st 1, co 1 — if a character fails an endurance check after fifteen minutes of vigorous activity, he is exhausted and will have all actions at double difficulty until he has rested (not sleep necessarily — sitting or other inactivity) for twice the duration of the exercise. If a second endurance check is failed, all actions are at four times normal difficulty until aforementioned rest time is taken; if a third check is failed, the character falls asleep and sleeps for five times the duration of activity.
Engineering 0, U 10; 0; 1 h; in 1
Etiquette 0, U 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Farmer 0, C 20; 0; 1 y; kn 1
Fencing (specific weapon) 0, U rapier or possibly other weapon 20; 5; as per attack/parry (dodge); as per attack/parry (dodge)
Fire-Building 0; 0; 15 m; de 1
Fisher 0; 0; 1 h; pe 1
Gambling 0, U 10, Y 10; 0; 5 m; pe 1
Gardening 0, Y 20; 0; 5 w; –
Gem Cutting 0; 0; 1 h; de 1
Geography 0, U 10, J 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Guess Actions — guess from looking at a person what he will do next. 0, U 10, Y 20; 0; 2 s; pe 1
Haggling 0; 0; 5 m; ch 1, pe 1
Hear Noises — hear almost silent noises. 0, Y 20; 0; 1 m; pe 1
Heat Tolerance 0, T 20, Y 10, S 20, J 10; 0; 1 w; co 1
Heraldry 0, U 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Herbalism 0, U 10, Y 15; 0; 15 m; kn 1
Hide 0, Y 10, J 10; 0; 10 s; ag 1, pe 1
History 0, U 10, J 5; 0; 5 m; kn 1
Hunting 0, N 20, T 20, Y 10; 10; 1 h; pe 1
Illusionism 0; 0; 1 m; de 1
Improvisation (Musical) 0, Y 20, J 10; 0; 5mc; in 1
Incense Making 0, Y 10; 0; 1d; –
Janra-Ball — incomprehensible to members of other races. -, J 20; 0; 10 mc; ag 1, al 1, de 1, in 1, me 1, pe 1, sp 1, st 1
Jewelry Work 0; 0; 1 d; de 1
Juggling -; 0; 1 mc; de 1
Jumping 0, J 10; 0; 2 s; ag 1, st 1
Jury-Rigging 0, J 10; 0; 5 m; in 1
Keen Eyesight 0, U 20, Y 10; 0; 5 s; pe 1
Languages (Specific Language(s)) 0, J 5; 0, U 10, C -10; 1 mc; kn 1 — of course, the language(s) the character grew up speaking are free with a native proficiency.
Leadership 0, U 10; 0; 1 d; ch 1
Leather Working 0; 0; 1 h; de 1
Literature 10, U 20; 0; 15 m; kn 1
Mapmaking -; 0; 1 d; kn 1
Massage 0, Y 10, S 20; 0; 10 mc; de 1
Mathematics -, U 20; 0; 15 m; in 2
Mediation 0; 0; 1 h; ch 1, in 1, pe 1
Medicine 0, U 10, Y 10, J 10; 0; 10 m; kn 1
Mining 0; 0; 1 d; –
Move Silently 0, Y 10, S 10, J 10; 0; 1 mc; ag 1, pe 1
Musical Composition 0, Y 10; 0; 1h; in 1
Musical Instrument (Specific Instrument) 0, U 10 (one specific), Y 10 (one specific); 0; 5mc; de 1
Navigation 0; 0; 1 d; pe 1
Open Locks -; 0; 5 m; de 1, pe 1
Persuasion 0; 0; 30 m; ch 1, in 1
Philosophy 0, U 20; 0; 10 m; in 1, kn 1
Physics -, U 10; 0; 10 m; in 1
Poetry Composition 0; 0; 1 h; in 1
Pole Vault 0, J 10; 0; 10 s; ag 1
Pottery Making 0; 0; 10 m; de 1
Public Speaking 0, U 10, J 10; 0; 30 m; in 1, ch 1
Pyrotechnics -, U 10; 0; 1 h; in 1
Reading/Writing -, U 20; -10; 10 mc; in 1
Read Emotion 0, Y 10 (+5 to both Yedidia and non-Yedidia females); 0; 15 s; pe 1
Repair 0, U 10; 0; 30 m; in 1
Riding (Specific Animal) 0, U Horse 20, Y All 20; 0; 10 mc; ag 1
Rope Use 0; 0; 20 s; de 1
Sailing 0; 0; 1 d; –
Search 0; 0; 5 m; pe 1
Shouting — shout loudly and prolongedly without tiring vocal chords. 0, T 10; 0; 5 mc; –
Singing 10, Y 30; 0; 10 mc; ch 1
Smell Creature — smell what creatures are around and have passed by. 0, Y 10; 0; 10 s; pe 1
Sports 0, T 10, J 10; 0; 30 m; ag 1, st 1
Stonemasonry 0; 0; 1 d; –
Storytelling 0; 0; 1 h; ch 1, in 1
Strategy Games 0; 0; 1 h; in 1
Swimming 0, Y 10, S 10, J 20; 0; 15 mc; ag 1, st 1
Symbolic Lore 0, N 20, U 10, C 20; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Tactics 0, U 10; 0; 1; 10 m; in 1, pe 1
Tailoring 0; 10 1 d; de 1
Technology Identification 0, U 20, J 10; 0; 1m; in 1, kn 1
Technology Use 0, U 20, J 10; 0; 1 m; in 1, kn 1
Theology 10, U 20; 0; 10 m; in 1, kn 1
Throw 0; 0; 3 s; de 1
Tightrope Walking 0, J 20; 0; 10 sc; ag 1, sp 1
Tracking 0, T 10, Y 20; 0; 5 mc; pe 1
Trivia 0, U 20, J 20; 0; 1 m; kn 1
Ventriloquism -; 0; 15 sc; –
Weather Sense 0, Y 10; 0; 5 s; pe 1
Weaving 0; 0; 1 h; de 1
Wilderness Survival 0, N 20, T 15, Y 20, J 10; 0; 1 dc; pe 1
Withdrawing/Meditation -, S 20; 1; 1 h; wi 1
Woodlore 0, Y 20, S 10; 0; 1 m; kn 1, wi 1
Wrestling 0, T 20, J 10; 0; 1 mc; ag 1, sp 1, st 1 — a wrestling match can have three states — neutral, one character has advantage, one character has pinned. It starts out neutral, and each minute it goes one increment in favor of the character who wins the check.

Section II E: Learning Differences

Learning differences are an optional rule which players may take advantage of to gain higher skills. Calculating every possible attribute is not necessary; players may simply use what they choose to look for and find in order to gain higher effective skills.

Below are lds for skills, in dictionary order. Unlisted pairs of skills have no ld except as possibly calculable through chains.

The format is skill, skill, ld.

Acquisition, Persuasion, 15
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Balance, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Climbing, 25
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Dancing, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Dodge, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Fencing, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Jumping, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Move Silently, 25
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Pole Vault, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Riding, 15
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Swimming, 15
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Tightrope Walking, 10
Acrobatics/Tumbling, Wrestling, 10
Acting, Public Speaking, 10
Acting, Storytelling, 5
Anatomy, Massage, 15
Anatomy, Medicine, 10
Animal Handling, Animal Training, 15
Animal Lore, Wood Lore, 10
Anthropology, Cultures, 10
Attack, Attack (other weapon which is also hand-to-hand/also missle), 10
Attack, Balance, 10
Attack, Dancing, 10
Attack, Hunting, 15
Attack, Riding, 15
Attack, Tightrope Walking, 10
Attack, Wrestling 10
Balance, Charioteering, 10
Balance, Climbing, 15
Balance, Dancing, 15
Balance, Pole Vault, 15
Balance, Riding, 10
Balance, Tightrope Walking, 5
Balance, Wrestling, 15
Biology, Herbalism, 15
Biology, Medicine, 10
Blind Action, Hear Noises, 10
Bowyer/Fletcher, Carving, 15
Bowyer/Fletcher, Carpentry, 15
Building, Carpentry, 10
Building, Masonry, 10
Carving, Carpentry, 15
Catch, Juggling, 25
Ceremonies, Heraldry, 15
Chemistry, Herbalism, 10
Chemistry, Pyrotechnics, 10
Climbing, Dancing, 15
Clockwork Device Craftsmanship, Engineering, 10
Cultures, Languages, 35
Dancing, Dodge, 10
Dancing, Fencing, 10
Dodge, Wrestling 10
Engineering, Mathematics, 10
Etiquette, Heraldry, 15
Fencing, Balance, 10
Fencing, Riding, 15
Fencing, Tightrope Walking, 10
Fencing, Wrestling, 10
Fisher, Hunting, 25
Gambling, Guess Actions 10
Gambling, Strategy Games, 15
Gem Cutting, Jewelry Making, 15
Guess Actions, Haggling, 15
Guess Actions, Read Emotion, 5
Herbalism, Incense Making, 10
Herbalism, Medicine, 10
Hide, Hunting, 15
History, Literature, 15
History, Trivia, 10
Hunting, Move Silently, 15
Hunting, Tracking, 10
Hunting, Wilderness Survival, 15
Improvisation, Musical Composition, 10
Juggling, Throw, 25
Jury-Rigging, Repair, 15
Keen Eyesight, Search, 10
Map Making, Navigation, 15
Massage, Medicine, 15
Philosophy, Theology, 10
Public Speaking, Storytelling, 10
Search, Tracking, 10
Strategy Games, Tactics, 10
Tailoring, Weaving, 15

Section II F: Skill Levels and Sample Difficulties

An unadjusted skill is as follows:

Untrained: 0
Just beginning: 10
Dabbler: 20
Moderately skilled: 30
Proficient: 40
Expert: 50
Virtuoso: 60
Exceptional: 70
World Class: 80
Greatest Alive: 90
Greatest of All Time: 100

The following are examples of actions of specific difficulties for archery, hiding, languages, rope walking, and wilderness survival. They are intended to serve as a guide to setting general difficulties for actions. Common sense should be used to apply to other skills; throwing, for example, will not have anywhere near the range and accuracy of archery.

Very easy: -40
Archery: shooting a barrel 20 feet away.
Hiding: hiding in a darkened storeroom full of miscellaneous garbage, while clad in black.
Languages: “Hello.” Greetings, numbers, etc. Extremely thick accent.
Rope walking: walking across a plank a foot wide.
Wilderness survival: surviving in a Yedidia orchard.

Easy: -20
Archery: shooting a barrel 20 yards away.
Hiding: hiding in a darkened forest, while clad in black/brown/green.
Languages: “Where is the bathroom?” Basic phrases (phrase book style). Accent that can be moderately easily understood by someone used to dealing with foreigners.
Rope walking: walking across a plank half a foot wide.
Wilderness survival: surviving in a Yedidia forest, where fruitful trees and water are reasonably easy to come by, but there are no hostile inhabitants.

Moderate: 0
Archery: shooting an unsuspecting boar 20 yards away.
Hiding: hiding in a forest in normal daylight, while clad in black/brown/green.
Languages: “I don’t want this one. I want that one.” Short sentences using very simple vocabulary. Normal accent which does not hinder comprehension.
Rope walking: walking across a plank three inches wide.
Wilderness survival: surviving in a Jec forest, where there is nothing hostile, but food and water are not so easy to come by, and the forest may get cold at night.

Difficult: 40
Archery: shooting a running boar 20 feet away.
Hiding: hiding in a forest at dusk, while clad in clothing that does not blend in.
Languages: “I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling better. Do you have any idea how the snake got into your house?” Slightly slowed normal sentences using words that would be in the vocabulary of a child. Accent which only shows itself occasionally, or is generally present but faint.
Rope Walking: walking across a tight rope.
Wilderness survival: surviving on the border of the Tuz forest, where the creatures are potentially hostile.

Very Difficult: 80
Archery: shooting a running boar 20 yards away.
Hiding: hiding in a forest in full daylight, while clad in clothing that does not blend in.
Languages: Free, accentless conversation as a native speaker would, using an adult’s vocabulary.
Rope walking: walking across a slack rope.
Wilderness survival: surviving in the heart of the Tuz forest, where creatures tend to be hostile and tough.

Extremely Difficult: 120
Archery: shooting a flying bird 20 yards away.
Hiding: hiding in a low cut field or a bare room, fully lit, wearing clothing that does not blend in. Concealing yourself where there aren’t any obvious hiding places.
Languages: Technical discussions using complex sentence structure, unusual grammatical features, and vocabulary that most adults wouldn’t know. Conversing with some Urvanovestilli philosophers.
Rope walking: sprinting across a tight rope.
Wilderness survival: Surviving in the Ice Peaks in the middle of winter, where the temperature is frigid and wild animals and other food is almost impossible to find.

Section II G: Experience Gains

The basic unit of adventure is the quest. Upon completion of a quest, each character will receive 2 experience points, adjusted as follows (minimum of 0) for role playing, skill use/adventuring competence/party helpfulness, and moral virtue:

Exceptionally poor: -2 Poor: -1 Normal: 0 Good: +1 Exceptionally good: +2

A bonus of 1 point is awarded for an action that solves a substantial part of the quest.

So a character who had role played well, used his skills clumsily, and had shown exceptional heroism and virtue would receive 2 + 1 – 1 + 2 = 4 ep for the quest.

(No animal may gain experience.)

Experience may be devoted to some small subfield of a specific skill: specialization. Learning a specialization costs half as much (has half the ldf (learning difficulty factor)) as/of learning the whole skill. Learning the rest of a skill, up to an area less than or equal to the level of specialization, costs half as much as learning from scratch. There are also generalizations of skill (for example, languages as a generalization of a specific language, or musical instruments as a generalization of a specific instrument), which have twice the ldf of the specific skill. A generalization of a skill already learned would cost half as much as learning the generalization from scratch, IE exactly as much as the skill cost. (This applies, of course, only to as many ep as were placed in the specific skill beforehand). A generalization must be a specific and closely related group of skills; a “combat skills” generalization which included anatomy, archery, dodge, horseback riding, and longsword would be inappropriate.

Experience points may be used to increase skills as follows: a current skill’s base skill’s exponent is looked up (see section II I). To raise a skill to a new level: look up the exponent of the desired new base skill. The experience point cost is the difference. For example, let’s say that a character has a current skill bs of 34 and 2 ep. The exponent of 34 is 11. He adds the 2 experience points, bringing the exponent to 13. The log of 13 is 37, so he has a new skill bs of 37. (It would have cost him 1 point to make the same increase for a specialization, or 4 points to do so for a generalization.)

Section II H: Starting experience

Initial experience is devoted with the character’s al adjusted for everything but age.

Age:		Child	Young Adult	Middle Aged	Old	Extremely Old
Points:		20	30		40		50	60

Here are starting experience allocations for the 10 roles outlined in the general description. 10 ep will be distributed; multiply by 2 for a child, 3 for a young adult, 4 for a middle aged person, 5 for someone who is old, and 6 for someone who is extremely old. If there is/are one or two races given for a role, the experience allocation assumes the untrained bases for that race(s). (A character may have experience devoted any way that is desired; this is an example.) Most starting characters will be young adults.Acrobatic Scout: Hear Noise 1.5, Hide 2, Move Silently 2, Open Locks 2, Rope Use .5, Search 2.

Archer: Archery 10.

Bard: Geography 1.5, Hero’s Tales 1, Mediation .5, Musical Instrument 2, Persuasion 2, Singing 1, Storytelling 1, Trivia 1.

Hunter: Attack (one missle weapon) 2, Hunting 5, Tracking 2, Woodlore 1.

Interpreter: Acquisition 1, Etiquette 1, Haggling 1, Languages 6, Persuasion 1.

Jack-of-All-Trades: Attack .4, Blind Action .4, Climb .4, Dodge .4, Endurance .4, Fire-Building .4, Guess Actions .4, Haggling .4, Hide .4, Hunting .4, Jump .4, Jury-Rig or Repair .4, Languages 2.4, Move Silently .4, Open Locks .4, Rope Handling .4, Search .4, Smell Creature .4, Tracking .4, Wilderness Survival .4.

MacGyver Chemistry 1, Engineering 1, Hide 1, Jury-Rig 5, Move Silently 1, Search 1.

Perceiver Blind Action 1, Guess Actions 3, Hear Noises 1, Keen Eyesight 1, Read Emotion 1, Search 1, Smell Creature 1, Tracking 1, Weather Sense 1.

Scholar Geography 3, History 3, Languages 3, Literature 1.

Wayfarer Acquisition .3, Attack (one weapon) .2, Blind Action .2, Climb .2, Dodge .2, Endurance .2, Etiquette .3, Fire-Building .2, Geography .5, Guess Actions .2, Haggling .4, Hero’s Tales .3, Hide .2, Hunting .2, Jump .2, Jury-Rig or Repair .2, Languages 2.4, Mediation .1, Move Silently .2, Musical Instrument .3, Open Locks .2, Persuasion 1, Rope Handling .2, Search .2, Singing .3, Smell Creature .2, Storytelling .2, Tracking .2, Trivia .3, Wilderness Survival .2.

Woodsman Animal Handling 1, Animal Training 1, Hunting 1, Tracking 1, Wilderness Survival 1, Woodlore 5.

Section II I: Dice and Basic Tables

The first table given will be the exponential table. The left column gives the (approximate) log of the right, and the right column gives the exponent of the left.

-	0

-50 .03 -49 .03 -48 .04 -47 .04 -46 .04 -45 .04 -44 .05 -43 .05 -42 .05 -41 .06 -40 .06 -39 .07 -38 .07 -37 .08 -36 .08 -35 .09 -34 .09 -33 .10 -32 .11 -31 .12 -30 .13 -29 .13 -28 .14 -27 .15 -26 .16 -25 .18 -24 .19 -23 .20 -22 .22 -21 .23 -20 .25 -19 .27 -18 .29 -17 .31 -16 .33 -15 .35 -14 .38 -13 .41 -12 .44 -11 .47 -10 .50 -9 .54 -8 .57 -7 .62 -6 .66 -5 .71 -4 .76 -3 .81 -2 .87 -1 .93 0 1.0 1 1.1 2 1.1 3 1.2 4 1.3 5 1.4 6 1.5 7 1.6 8 1.7 9 1.9 10 2.0 11 2.1 12 2.3 13 2.5 14 2.6 15 2.8 16 3.0 17 3.2 18 3.5 19 3.7 20 4.0 21 4.3 22 4.6 23 4.9 24 5.3 25 5.7 26 6.1 27 6.5 28 7.0 29 7.5 30 8.0 31 8.6 32 9.2 33 9.8 34 11 35 11 36 12 37 13 38 14 39 15 40 16 41 17 42 18 43 20 44 21 45 23 46 24 47 26 48 28 49 30 50 32 51 34 52 37 53 39 54 42 55 45 56 49 57 52 58 56 59 60 60 64 61 69 62 74 63 79 64 84 65 91 66 97 67 104 68 111 69 119 70 128 71 137 72 147 73 158 74 169 75 181 76 194 77 208 78 223 79 239 80 256 81 274 82 294 83 315 84 338 85 362 86 388 87 416 88 446 89 448 90 512 91 549 92 588 93 630 94 676 95 724 96 776 97 832 98 891 99 955 100 1024 101 1097 102 1176 103 1261 104 1351 105 1448 106 1552 107 1663 108 1783 109 1911 110 2048 111 2195 112 2353 113 2521 114 2702 115 2896 116 3104 117 3327 118 3566 119 3822 120 4096 121 4390 122 4705 123 5043 124 5405 125 5793 126 6208 127 6654 128 7132 129 7643 130 8192 131 8780 132 9410 133 10,086 134 10,809 135 11,585 136 12,417 137 13,308 138 14,263 139 15,287 140 16,384 141 17,560 142 18,820 143 20,171 144 21,619 145 23,170 146 24,834 147 26,616 148 28,526 149 30,573 150 32,768

Here is the basic check table. When a character attempts an action, the success index is calculated as the difficulty subtracted from his av, and the two dice (red and blue) are rolled. The check value is (6*r)+b: six times the number on the red die, plus the value on the blue die. The following table gives the minimum value this result must have for the character to succeed at the attempt.

For example, if a character with an av of 57 attempts a skill of difficulty 23, he has a success index of 34. The red die yields a 1 and the blue die yields a 6, so the check value is (6*1)+6 = 12, which by the table requires a minimum success index of 25. His success index is greater than or equal to what it needed to be, so he succeeds at the check.

Check Value	Success Index
7		Roll again, with success index 61 higher.
8		45
9		37
10		32
11		28
12		25
13		22
14		19
15		17
16		15
17		13
18		11
19		9
20		7
21		6
22		4
23		2
24		1
25		-1
26		-2
27		-4
28		-6
29		-7
30		-9
31		-11
32		-13
33		-15
34		-17
35		-19
36		-22
37		-25
38		-28
39		-32
40		-37
41		-45
42		Roll again, with success index 61 lower

Section II J: Combat

All characters* have a maximum health value of co+st+ag+an, where an is one half the character’s adjusted anatomy skill, rounded down. Skills and attributes of an injured creature function at a penalty equal to the difference between their maximum health value and their current health value. So, for example, an animal with a maximum health value of 55 and a current health value of 31 has skills functioning at a penalty of 24 points.

All creatures take damage as follows: the damage is looked up on the log/exponent table, and its exponent (the value that occurs to the right of the damage) is looked up. The same is done for the creature’s current health value. The exponent of the damage is subtracted from the exponent of the current health value. If the value is zero or less, the creature loses consciousness or dies at the game master’s discretion. If the value is more than zero, its log is taken and becomes the creature’s new health value (rounded up).

So, for example, if the animal mentioned with a current health value of 24 points takes an 8 point damage wound, the exponent of 24 is 5.3, and the exponent of 8 is 1.7. They are subtracted to yield 3.6; the log of 3.6 is 18, so the creature’s new health value is 18.

Damage* for a successful attack is inflicted at a value of r+st+wa+de+an+po, where r is the value show by rolling the red die, wa is the weapon addend of the weapon, and po is the poison value of the poison (if any) or other special attack. (Damage for a successful backstab, catching the target unaware, is r+st+wa+de+(2*an)+po.) If a creature is injured in the course of taking an action, it may complete the action at skill and attribute values for when the action was begun, and the injury will take effect on skills and attributes when the action is completed.

An injured creature will regenerate at a rate of -50+(2*co)+st+ms per day, where ms is the medical skill of the creature or other caretaker. The regeneration works as the exact opposite of a wound.

An unarmed character has a wa of -10.

* A creature which has no anatomy skill does not receive agility or anatomy adjustments to health value, or anatomy or dexterity adjustments to damage.

Section II K: Animals and Random Encounters

With many of the rolls, the number is a random number 1-10 or 1-100. Common sense should tell which is appropriate where. If 10-sided dice are not available, 1-10 can be generated with red and blue as will be given below; 1-100 can be generated using 1-10’s for each digit, or as below with an additional die, yellow (‘y’):

1-10: roll (6*r)+b-6:

1-10: read as is. 11-20: subtract 10. 21-30: subtract 20. 31-36: reroll.

1-100: roll (36*r)+(6*y)+b-42:

1-100: read as is. 101-200: subtract 100. 201-216: reroll.

In many cases, one of the possibilities indicated is “special”. Special means that either

1: the game master should decide something special, which is preferable, or 2: if the game master can’t or doesn’t want to, he should reroll for another outcome.

Roll for whether an encounter occurs, and what kind:

			N	T	U	Y	J	S
Encounter occurs	1	1-5	1-3	1-5	1-2	1-4
Encounter is	1	animal	animal	animal	animal	animal	animal
2			animal	animal	animal	animal	animal	animal
3			animal	animal	animal	animal	animal	animal
4			animal	animal	animal	animal	animal	person
5			animal	animal	animal	person	animal	person
6			animal	person	person	person	animal	person
7			person	person	person	person	person	person
8			geographical feature	geographical feature
9			weather	weather	weather	weather	weather	weather
10			special	special	special	special	special	special

Percentile Roll Chart for Random Animal Encounter (N designates the Nor’krin land, and so on):

				N	T	U	Y	J	S
1: Acid Slime Mold			1
2: Acid Spitter				2
3: Anteater				3	1-2	1-2		103
4: Bear					4-5			1
5: Behemoth				6
6: Boar					7	3-5	3	2-3
7: Bulette				8	6
8: Caribou			1-10				4-5
9: Carnivorous Log			9
10: Carnivorous Tree			10
11: Cobra				11
12: Colorspray						4-6	6	4-7
13: Crocodile				12-13
14: Cuddler					7	7-11	7	8-11
15: Deer			11-15	14	8-12	12-13	8-17
16: Dog					15	13	14	18
17: Duck					14	15-16	19-28	12-14
18: Fog Thing				16-17
19: Furred Serpent			18	15-16	17-18	29-30	15-16
20: Garter Snake				17	19-20	31	17
21: Giant Aphid				19
22: Giant Firefly			20		21-22
23: Giant Land Lobster			21
24: Giant Scorpion			22-23
25: Giant Viper				24
26: Giant Walking Stick			25
27: Giant Wasp				26
28: Giant Webthrower			27
29: Glower						23-25		18-20
30: Gorilla				28		26		21
31: Griffon				29	18		32
32: Hawk				30	19	27	33-34
33: Hedgehog				31	20-21	28-29	35	22-24
34: Hnakra				32
35: Horse			16-25	33-34	22-24	30-31	36-37
36: Hoverfeather			35	25-26	32	38	25
37: Hummingbird					27	33	39	26
38: Iceflyer			26-39
39: Icestriker			40-49
40: Ironram			50	36-37	28
41: Jewel Serpent			38	29
42: Jumpcling					30	34-35		27-30
43: Jumper				39-40	31	36	40	31
44: Kriit			51-41	41	32		41
45: Land Octopus			42		37		32-33
46: Lavishnatim				43	33	38-39		34
47: Leviathan				44
48: Mile Long Snake			45			42
49: Milshh					34	40-42		35-38
50: Mimic					35	43-46	43-44	39-42
51: Miroir					36-37	47		43
52: Mishraim				46-47		48	45-46	44-47
53: Monkey					38	49	47	48-49
54: Mouse					39	50	48-52	50
55: Muckdweller				48-49
56: Obstructor				50
57: Ostrich				51	40		53-55
58: Owl					52	41	51	56-58
59: Panther				53
60: Parrot					42	52	59-60	51-55
61: Platypus					43	53	60-61
62: Poison Quilled Porcupine		54-55
63: Porcupine				56	44	54-55	61-62
64: Prairie Dog					45	56	63
65: Rabbit			55-74		46-55	57	64-73	56-59
66: Ram					57-58	56-57	58	76-78
67: Ricochet				59	58	59	79
68: Roc					60
69: Rock Crusher			61
70: Rock Thrower			62
71: Rodent of Unusual Size		63-64	59		80
72: Sand Trapper			65
73: Sea Serpent				66
74: Shocker				67
75: Skunk					60-63	60	81	60
76: Sloth						61		61-70
77: Soft Rolling Stone				64-65	62	82-83	71-74
78: Sparrow					66	63	84	75-77
79: Spinstar				68	67	64		78
80: Stegosaurus				69-70
81: Stinging Insect			70-71
82: Stoneshell				72		65
83: Strider				73	68-71	66
84: Swamp Thing				74
85: Tail Spikethrower			75
86: Tar Baby				76
87: Terrask				77
88: Thousand Legged Roller		78	72-76	67	85	79-80
89: Ticklebug						68-72		81
90: Torpor Beast			79-80
91: Translucent Frog			81	77-79	73-74	86	82-83
92: Trin				82	80	75	87	84
93: Turtle				83-84	81	76	88-90	85-88
94: Tyrannosaurus Rex			85
95: Warm Fuzzy					82-83	77-80	91	89-92
96: Water Sprite					81
97: Wind Hummer				86	84-85
98: Wolf			75-84	87-88	86	82-83	92
99: Wyvern				89-90	87		93
100: Game Master's Creation	85-88	91	88	84-85	94	93-94
101: Nor'krin Encounter			92	89-90	86-87	95	95
102: Tuz Encounter		89-90		91-91	88-89	96	96
103: Urvanovestilli Encounter	91-92	93		90-92	97	97
104: Yedidia Encounter		93-94	94	92-93		98	98
105: Jec Encounter		95-96	95	94-95	93-95		99
106: Shal Encounter		97-98	96	96-97	96-97	99
107: Encounter, Doubled Attributes 99-100 97-100 98-100	98-100	100	100

Animal behavior at an encounter is as follows; a number generated in the range of 1-10 tells how it behaves (‘special’ indicating that the game master should either create a special behavior on the part of the animal, or else simply reroll):

#  Feisty	Herbivore	Pet		Predator	Small Predator
1: attack	attack		attack		attack		attack
2: attack	attack		curious		attack		curious
3: attack	curious		curious		attack		flee
4: attack	flee		flee		curious		flee
5: attack	flee		flee		flee		flee
6: curious	friendly	friendly	friendly	flee
7: flee		ignore		friendly	sneak attack	friendly
8: ignore	ignore		friendly	sneak attack	sneak attack
9: sneak attack	ignore		friendly	sneak attack	sneak attack
10: special	special		special		special		special

Animal age and sex are rolled separately: 1-2 child, 3-6 young, 7-8 middle aged, 9 old, 10 very old; 1-5 male, 6-10 female.

Animal Descriptions

All animals have the following skills: attack 30 (1 s; de 1, sp 1, st 1), blind action 20, dodge 30, hear noises 20, hide 30, move silently 30, and smell creature 20. All predators and small predators can hunt 30, smell creature 30, track 30. Name, attributes, behavior type (feisty, herbivore, pet, predator, small predator), descriptions, comments, and special abilities follow.

Constitution, in some cases, may not indicate exceptional health on the part of the creature, but rather some sort of natural armor.

The attributes are (no is number appearing, a * next to po represents a nonpoisonous special attack):

1: Acid Slime Mold
no	po	wa	ag	co	de	pe	sp	st
1	20*	0	20	10	10	10	20	10
Predator, 4-8' long, not injured by cutting or bludgeoning.  Special damage is
acid.  (It looks like a pale green blob)

2: Acid Spitter no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20* 0 20 20 20 10 10 30 Predator. 5′ high. This creature has a thick torso and head on four stumpy legs, and a tough black hide. Its special damage is acid.

3: Anteater no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 0 Herbivore. As in real life.

4: Bear no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 20 30 10 -10 0 40 Feisty. Grizzly in the Tuz land, polar in Nor’krin land, black elsewhere.

5: Behemoth no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 30 20 -10 -10 70 Herbivore. As in Job.

6: Boar no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 20 10 10 10 10 25 Feisty. As in real life.

7: Bulette no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 0 30 10 10 10 30 Predator. 8-10′ long. Land shark. A tough, sharklike creature that burrows through earth and has short, strong legs. The hide may be sold for 500 au.

8: Caribou no po wa ag co de pe sp st 30 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 30 Herbivore. As in real life.

9: Carnivorous Log no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 20 10 0 10 30 Predator. An animal that looks like a large fallen log. When stepped on, large tentacles will shoot out and drag towards teeth and jaws.

10: Carnivorous Tree no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 20 10 10 10 40 Predator. Like a carnivorous log, but uses branches instead of tentacles.

11: Cobra no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 -10 10 10 10 10 30 -10 Predator. As in real life.

12: Colorspray no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0* -20 10 10 10 10 10 -10 Pet. A short, 2′ football shaped, multicolored creature with several orifices on its back. A very affectionate pet which will spray brightly colored paints on someone it likes.

13: Crocodile no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 30 10 10 10 30 Predator. As in real life.

14: Cuddler no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -40 10 0 10 10 0 -20 Pet. A soft, 1′ black, furred, round creature that cuddles like a Shal and will occasionally squirt water.

15: Deer no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 30 10 10 20 10 20 Herbivore. As in real life.

16: Dog no po wa ag co de pe sp st 10 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 20 Predator. As in real life.

17: Duck no po wa ag co de pe sp st 5 0 -20 10 10 10 10 10 -20 Herbivore. As in real life.

18: Fog-Thing no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 20 10 10 10 10 40 Predator. a 10′ tall beast which emits dense fog, obscuring vision in its vicinity.

19: Furred Serpent no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 0 Pet. 2-20′ long, with soft, sometimes brown fur.

20: Garder Snake no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 -50 Pet. As in real life.

21: Giant Aphid no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 30 10 10 10 30 Predator. 8′ tall if unearthed, in a depressed sand trap hidden by a thin camouflaged cover.

22: Giant Firefly no po wa ag co de pe sp st 20 0 -30 10 10 10 10 10 0 Herbivore. 4′ tall, Fly 5.

23: Giant Land Lobster no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 50 10 0 -10 50 Feisty. 20-30′ long.

24: Giant Scorpion no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 10 10 30 10 10 10 20 Feisty. 5′ long.

25: Giant Viper no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 0 10 10 10 20 10 50 Predator. 50′-200′ long.

26: Giant Walking Stick no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20* 0 0 10 10 0 10 -10 Small Predator. 3′ long, 2′ tall. Poison does not cause damage, but hinders for one day as if damage had occurred.

27: Giant Wasp no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 Feisty. 18″ long.

28: Giant Webthrower no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20* 0 10 20 10 20 20 25 Predator. A 10′ long spider; special attack is throwing webs which do not injure but impair physical action as if injury had occurred.

29: Glower no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 20 10 20 Pet. A phosphorescent half sized bear.

30: Gorilla no po wa ag co de pe sp st 10 0 0 25 10 10 10 10 30 Herbivore. As in real life. Climb 10.

31: Griffon no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 25 20 10 20 20 30 Predator. 8′ long. Half eagle (Fly 10), half lion, loves horsemeat.

32: Hawk no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 10 10 10 10 0 Small Predator. As in real life.

33: Hedgehog no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 -10 Herbivore. As in real life.

34: Hnakra no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 25 30 10 25 20 50 Predator. An aquatic creature (Swim 10), a great armored shark/sea serpent 50-100′ long. As in C.S. Lewis’s _Out_of_the_Silent_Planet_

35: Horse no po wa ag co de pe sp st 30 0 0 20 10 10 10 10 30 Herbivore. As in real life.

36: Hoverfeather no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 20 10 10 10 10 0 Herbivore. A 3′ ball of eyes and feathered wings (golden, black, brown, or white).

37: Hummingbird no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 30 10 20 25 40 -50 Herbivore. As in real life.

38: Iceflyer no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 10 10 10 10 0 Predator. A 6′ white arctic bird of prey (Fly 10).

39: Icestriker no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20* 0 10 10 25 20 10 10 Predator. A toothed, clawed 20′ acid spitting bird of prey (Fly 10).

40: Ironram no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 0 20 10 0 10 40 Feisty. A 15′ long, piglike furred beast that rams with its bony head.

41: Jewel Serpent no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 40 0 25 20 10 10 10 30 Predator. A red, 5-20′ serpent with an immense red jewel between its eyes which has a phosphorescent glow that lasts until an hour after its death. The gem is worth 5,000 gold, or 10,000 if it is still glowing.

42: Jumpcling no po wa ag co de pe sp st 2 0 0 10 20 20 30 10 -30 Pet. A 6″ beast with many paws that will jump and cling to a person.

43: Jumper no po wa ag co de pe sp st 20 0 -10 50 10 10 10 10 30 Herbivore. A 4′ long beam with two opposite feet that it jumps and bounces off with. (Jump 10)

44: Kriit no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20* 0 10 10 30 20 15 0 Predator. A 5′ tall, long-armed beast that spits acid from behind trees.

45: Land Octopus no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0* 0 10 10 10 10 10 20 Feisty. 8-20′ spread. Like an octopus, but squirts ink — can temporarily blind.

46: Lavishnatim no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -20 25 10 20 10 10 -10 Pet. An incredibly curious, 2′ rodentlike creature.

47: Leviathan no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 40* 0 20 40 10 -10 10 80 Feisty. As in Job. Special attack is breathe fire.

48: Mile Long Snake no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 80 Herbivore(-like). A 20′ high snake a mile long

49: Milshh no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -20 20 10 10 30 20 -20 Pet. A short, 18″, round, eyeless catlike creature with long, golden fur, and eight short legs ending in round paws.

50: Mimic no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 10 10 25 10 -20 Pet. A monkeylike creature that will follow and imitate a person.

51: Mirior no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 0 10 10 10 0 Herbivore. A humanoid form with mirrorlike skin.

52: Mishraim no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 10 10 0 10 30 Pet. Like a giant 5′ anteater, but with a shorter snout.

53: Monkey no po wa ag co de pe sp st 10 0 -30 20 10 20 10 10 -10 Herbivore. As in real life.

54: Mouse no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 10 10 10 10 10 -50 Herbivore. As in real life.

55: Muckdweller no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 30 10 10 10 10 30 Predator. A black, tentacled, four legged beast that waits in the muck and then draws things down in order to drown and/or eat.

56: Obstructor no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 30 20 20 20 0 50 Predator. A giant (20′) eight armed apelike creature which will use branches, rocks, etc. to form a barrier around prey before throwing rocks at it.

57: Ostrich no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 -10 0 0 0 30 25 Herbivore. As in real life.


59: Panther no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 30 10 20 30 10 30 Predator. Climb 5. As in real life.

60: Parrot no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 20 10 10 10 25 -30 Pet. Fly 5. As in real life.


62: Poison Quilled Porcupine no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 0 10 10 10 10 10 0 Herbivore. Like a real porcupine, but three feet long, and, if struck hand-to-hand without appropriate armor, will automatically hit attacker. (When it attacks, its attack does not do poison damage.)

63: Porcupine no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 -20 Herbivore. As in real life.

64: Prairie Dog no po wa ag co de pe sp st 10 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 -15 Herbivore. As in real life.

65: Rabbit no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 20 10 10 20 25 -30 Herbivore. As in real life.

66: Ram no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 10 10 10 20 Herbivore. As in real life.

67: Ricochet no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 30 10 10 20 40 20 Herbivore. A fast, 12 legged (equally spaced) 1′ red-brown creature that quickly bounces off trees and everything else if threatened.

68: Roc no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 0 10 10 20 -20 70 Predator. 100′ tall. A giant bird of prey (Fly 10) that eats panthers.

69: Rock Crusher no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 -10 30 0 0 -20 80 Herbivore(-like). A giant (40′) creature with stony skin that sits and eats rocks.

70: Rock Thrower no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 20 20 10 20 Feisty. A beast with four legs alternated with four arms, throwing rocks.

71: Rodent of Unusual Size no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 300 10 10 20 25 10 Predator. As in The Princess Bride.

72: Sand Trapper no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 20 10 30 30 Predator. 10-15′ high. Lives in sand and shoots up a green tentacle to drag in prey.

73: Sea Serpent no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 20 20 10 10 0 40 Herbivore(-like). 20-40′ long, swim 10.

74: Shocker no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 40* 10 20 20 10 10 10 30 Predator. An immense (10′) deep green to blue lizard with slimy black tentacles that deliver a powerful electric shock, capable of throwing many creatures. Any creature hit by a shocker and taking over 10% damage will be disrupted in the action it was completing, drop what it was holding, and forget what it was doing/be momentarily disoriented. Thick clothing may function as armor against a shocker’s attack, as the electrical damage only takes place if electrical contact occurs.

75: Skunk no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0* -10 10 10 10 10 10 -20 Herbivore. As in real life. (Special attack, as in real life.)

76: Sloth no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -20 10 10 10 10 -20 -15 Pet. As in real life.

77: Soft Rolling Stone no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -30 0 20 0 -30 -10 -30 Pet. A rolling creature that looks like a round, mossy stone. Warm and friendly.

78: Sparrow no po wa ag co de pe sp st 20 0 -20 20 10 10 10 10 -50 Herbivore. As in real life (Fly 10).

79: Spinstar no po wa ag co de pe sp st 50 0 0 30 10 10 10 10 -30 Pet. A blue (tinged with red) 9″ land starfish which whitish feet at the end of each limb and a feeding orifice on one side. Moves by rolling.

80: Stegosaurus no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 0 40 -20 -30 -10 50 Herbivore. As in real life.

81: Stinging Insect no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1000 30 -50 25 25 10 25 20 -30 Feisty. A swarm as in real life.

82: Stoneshell no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 80 10 10 10 10 Herbivore. A creature with a stonehard shell, 10′ tall.

83: Strider no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 25 25 10 10 30 20 Predator. 7′ tall. A predator which moves incredibly quickly (85 mph). It is jet black, has long, strong, thin legs, and will try to run prey into trees.

84: Swamp Thing no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 20 10 10 10 10 50 Predator. A huge malodorous mass of beast. 20-50′

85: Tail Spikethrower no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 20 0 10 20 20 10 10 30 Predator. 9′ long. Like a scorpion, but throws poisoned spikes.

86: Tar Baby no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 -30 30 10 10 0 10 Feisty. A black, tar-covered beast. Any weapon or limb which strikes it will stick and require an hour to free.

87: Terrask no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 80 10 10 10 100 Feisty. An immense, dinosaurian creature (200′ tall), pale grey to black at different spots.

88: Thousand Legged Roller no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 25 10 10 20 30 30 Herbivore. Great multi-colored 6′ ball covered with legs, by which it rolls.

89: Ticklebug no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 10 10 30 30 10 -30 Pet. A little, 6″ furry creature (white, gold, tan, orange, calico, grey, brown, red, or black) with long whiskers, fond of touching other creatures very lightly.

90: Torpor Beast no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 40* 0 10 10 10 10 10 10 Predator. A beast with four limbs and a spiked trunk — spikes inject a potent sleeping poison.

91: Translucent Frog no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -10 25 10 10 10 10 10 Herbivore. An animal such that you can see into its body to look at its inner workings.

92: Trin no po wa ag co de pe sp st 30 0 -20 30 10 10 10 10 -10 Herbivore. This beast is short, round, and flat, with tan fur.

93: Turtle no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 -10 60 0 0 -30 10 Herbivore. As in real life.

94: Tyrannosaurus Rex no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 0 -10 10 10 0 -10 60 Predator. As in real life.

95: Warm Fuzzy no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 0 -30 10 10 10 30 0 -20 Pet. Same colors as a ticklebug, round, 8″, with very long, very soft fur. Can climb (Climb 2) very comfortably and snuggle for hours. Used like teddybears.

96: Water Sprite no po wa ag co de pe sp st 25 0 -20 50 10 10 10 10 -10 Herbivore. An extremely shy and beautiful form that comes out once a year to dance in the moonlight.

97: Wind Hummer no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 0 50 10 10 10 20 -40 Feisty. 1′ tall. A quick, translucent (Dodge 50, Fly 40), stinging creature.

98: Wolf no po wa ag co de pe sp st 20 0 0 10 10 20 10 10 20 Predator. As in real life.

99: Wyvern no po wa ag co de pe sp st 1 30 0 20 20 10 10 10 25 Predator. A flying (10′, Fly 10), red-brown stinging reptilian predator.

100: Game Master’s Creation

Random Person Encounters:

In general, 1-10 people will be encountered. (Hermits will always be encountered alone.) Several factors/scales are given (race, profession, Myers-Briggs personality type, etc.); the GM need only generate as much information as he needs to get an idea of how to play it.

Random personal encounters are, in essence, an opportunity to role play social interaction, and should be played as such. While there are other possibilities, such as trading for equipment or information, the game master should focus on making the encounter an interaction with interesting people who will make play more interesting.

These tables are for encounters out in the wild — generally, parties of people who are mostly adventurers. Encounters in a city or village should be different.

Character race and roles	N	T	U	Y	J	S
1: Janra Acrobat		1	1	1	1	1	1
2: Janra Acrobatic Scout	2	2	2	2	2	2
3: Janra Actor			3	3	3	3	3	3
4: Janra Archer			4	4	4	4	4	4
5: Janra Bard			5	5	5	5	5	5
6: Janra Dancer			6	6	6	6	6	6
7: Janra Hermit			7	7	7	7	7	7
8: Janra Homemaker		8-12	8-12	8-12	8-12	8-12	8-12
9: Janra Hunter			13	13	13	13	13	13
10: Janra Idiot			14	14	14	14	14	14
11: Janra Interpreter		15	15	15	15	15	15
12: Janra Jack-of-all-Trades	16	16	16	16	16	16
13: Janra Juggler		17	17	17	17	17	17
14: Janra MacGyver		18	18	18	18	18	18
15: Janra Masseuse		19	19	19	19	19	19
16: Janra Perceiver		20	20	20	20	20	20
17: Janra Scholar		21	21	21	21	21	21
18: Janra Singer		22	22	22	22	22	22
19: Janra Storyteller		23	23	23	23	23	23
20: Janra Wayfarer		24	24	24	24	24	24
21: Janra Woodsman		25	25	25	25	25	25
22: Jec Archer			26	26	26	26	26	26
23: Jec Baker							27
24: Jec Bard			27	27	27	27	28	27
25: Jec Blacksmith						29
26: Jec Cobbler							30
27: Jec Farmer							31-35
28: Jec Fisherman						36-37
29: Jec Hermit							38
30: Jec Homemaker						39-48
31: Jec Hunter			28	28	28	28	49	28
32: Jec Idiot							50
33: Jec Merchant						51-52
34: Jec Sage							53
35: Jec Stonemason						54
36: Jec Storyteller						55
37: Jec Wayfarer		29	29	29	29	56	29
38: Jec Weaver							57
39: Jec Woodsman		30	30	30	30	58	30
40: Nor'krin Archer		31-33	31	31	31	59	31
41: Nor'krin Bard		34-36	32	32	32	60	32
42: Nor'krin Hermit		37
43: Nor'krin Homemaker		38-47
44: Nor'krin Hunter		48-50	33	33	33	61	33
45: Nor'krin Idiot		51
46: Nor'krin Wayfarer		52-53	34	34	34	62	34
47: Shal Bard				35	35	35	63	35
48: Shal Farmer						36		36-37
49: Shal Gardener					37		38-40
50: Shal Hermit								41
51: Shal Homemaker					38		42-51
52: Shal Idiot								52
53: Shal Masseuse					39		53
54: Shal Poet								54
55: Shal Sage						40		55-56
56: Shal Woodsman		54	36	36	41	64	57-59
57: Tuz Archer			55	37-39	37	42	65	60
58: Tuz Blacksmith			40-41
59: Tuz Hermit				42
60: Tuz Homemaker			43-52
61: Tuz Hunter			56	53-55	38	43	66	61
62: Tuz Idiot				56
63: Tuz Scout			57	57-58	38	43	66	61
64: Tuz Stonemason			59
65: Tuz Woodsman		58	60-62	40	48	68	63
66: Tuz Wrestler			63
67: Urvanovestilli Archer	59	64	41	49	69	64
68: Urvanovestilli Artist			42
69: Urvanovestilli Bard		60	65	43	50	70	65
70: Urvanovestilli Dancer			44
71: Urvanovestilli Dual Profession 61	66	45	51	71	66
	(roll twice, ignoring non-Urvanovestilli rolls.)
72: Urvanovestilli Goldsmith			46
73: Urvanovestilli Hermit			47
74: Urvanovestilli Homemaker			48-57
75: Urvanovestilli Hunter	62	67	58	52	72	67
76: Urvanovestilli Idiot			59
77: Urvanovestilli Interpreter	63	68	60	53	73	68
78: Urvanovestilli Jack-of-all-Trades 64 69	61	54	74	69
79: Urvanovestilli Noble			62
80: Urvanovestilli Renaissance Man 65	70	63	55	75	70
81: Urvanovestilli Repairman			64
82: Urvanovestilli Scholar	66	71	65	56	76	71
83: Urvanovestilli Servant			66
84: Urvanovestilli Specialist			67
85: Urvanovestilli Wayfarer	67	72	68	57	77	72
86: Urvanovestilli Weaver			69
87: Yedidia Animal Handler		73	70	58-59	78	73
88: Yedidia Bard		68-69	74	71	60-61	79	74
89: Yedidia Herbalist			75	72	62-63	80	75-76
90: Yedidia Hermit					64
91: Yedidia Homemaker				73	65-74		77
92: Yedidia Hunter		70	76	74	75-76	81	78
93: Yedidia Idiot					77
94: Yedidia Jack-of-all-Trades	71	77	75	78	82	79
95: Yedidia Masseuse				76	79		80
96: Yedidia Perceiver		72	78	77	78	82	79
97: Yedidia Singer				78	82		82
98: Yedidia Woodsman		73	79	79	83-84	84	83-84
99: Roll once to determine race, then a second time to determine profession
				74	80	80	85	85	85
100: Special			75-84	81-90	81-90	86-95	86-95	86-95
101: Nor'krin Encounter			91	91	96	96	95
102: Tuz Encounter		85-86		92-94	98	98	98
103: Urvanovestilli Encounter	87-91	91-94		98	98	98
104: Yedidia Encounter		92-93	95-97	95-97		99	99
105: Jec Encounter		94-99	98	98-99	99		100
106: Shal Encounter		100	99-100	100	100	100

Myers-Briggs Personality Type:
Shal: 1-3 Extrovert, 4-10 Introvert; Other: 1-7 Extrovert, 8-10 Introvert 1-6 Sensing, 7-10 INtuitive
Male: 1-6 Thinking, 7-10 Feeling; Female 1-4 Thinking, 5-10 Feeling. 1-5 Judging, 6-10 Perceiving

Handedness: Janra 01-75 left, 76-95 ambidexterous, 96-100 right; other 01-94 right, 95-99 left, 100 ambidexterous

Birth Order: 1-3 first, 4-6 middle, 7-9 last, 10 only

Section II L: Equipment, Devices, Chemicals, Herbs, and Money

In the monetary system, 1 gold sovereign (au) = 2 electrum sceptres (el) = 8 silver crowns (si) = 64 copper pennies (cu) = 256 iron tips (fe). Price is variable; a device could easily be sold for twice or half its listed cost here. All coins are of the same weight; 64 of them weigh a pound.

Adventuring equipment as a rule is scarce and difficult to acquire. The ad (acquirement difficulty) given for equipment is e (easy), m (moderate), d (difficult), vd (very difficult), and ed (extremely difficult). The races in whose homeland the items are easily found are designated by first initial (‘J’ denoting Jec rather than Janra, as the Janra have no homeland); items may be found in other lands, but at a difficulty one notch higher (so difficult becomes very difficult, etc.).

The following are illustrations of devices and equipment available. Other equipment in the same spirit (as described in the game master’s introduction, section IV) is encouraged with game master discretion. Each device is slightly different; they may well have modifications (such as a tiny hidden compartment). There should ideally be thousands of unique devices, of which the listed examples are but a tiny hint. Chemical prices, unless otherwise specified, are per fluid ounce, and herbs per ounce. Chemicals which temporarily affect attributes do *not* affect st and co contributions to health value.

Armor made not out of steel but out of special alloys may be found, at one notch higher ad and ten times the price, with all the protection but only half the penalties. When armor reduces damage by a fixed percentage, it should be read as the exponent of the damage which is reduced.

Animals (trained or otherwise friendly) may be acquired at a difficulty of the sum of the squares of their attributes, for half the ad if their behavior type is pet, ad for behavior type herbivore, twice the ad for behavior type small predator, three times the ad for behavior type predator, and four times the ad for behavior type feisty.

What is listed is specifically equipment which will be useful to adventurers. There are an infinitude of other objects which exist — clockwork devices which are built up to perform various tasks (such as play music or be a moving model of the solar system) much as a computer programmer assembles instructions to make a program; herbs which act as spices, or which, when drunk as a tea, have a mild narcotic effect (which herbs are carefully and temperately used, just like alcohol), or chemicals which, when mixed, turn a complex rainbow of scintillating colors — and they would take forever to list. Here is a simple example of what may be useful to adventurers, to give the game master a feel for the spirit of creation.

Devices and Equipment

Cost	ad	Name
5 au	m	Axe/Hatchet (wa 0) (N, T, U, Y, J, S)
3 au	d	Backpack (T, U, Y)
20 au	d	Belaying Device, automatic — a springloaded box with a harness
		at one end, a crank on the side, and which shoots out a
		grappling hook.  This device catches a climber who falls,
		preventing injury, and allowing him to try again if he slips a
		grip (thereby effectively doubling climbing skill).  (U)
4 au	d	Camouflage cloak — usually forest green, dark grey, or black,
		occasionally brown, these can lower the difficulty of hiding by
		one notch (T, U, Y, C)
8 au	d	Cat's Claw — an angled iron or steel clawed boot attachment
		and glove which is highly effective at attaching to climbing
		surfaces; someone wearing a Cat's Claw has a climbing skill
		increased by 10.  (T, U)
50 au	d	Chain Mail: -20 to sharp damage suffered, and -5 to blunt
		damage; 5-st penalty to ag, de, sp; -20 to Move Silently.  (U)
		(For instance, a character with st -5 would suffer a penalty of
		10 to ag, de, sp).
500 au	vd	Chain Mail, "feather": -15 to sharp damage and -3 to blunt
		damage; -10 to Move Silently.  (U)
5-20 au	m	Chest, Locked, Reinforced — size varies with price (T, U, J)
5 au	d	Cloth tape — 50 yards (U)
400 au	vd	Collapsible rowboat — skeleton of iron bars and joints, and
		oil skin surface, when taken apart and packed away, fit in a
		large back pack.  (U)
3 au	d	Compass (U)
10 au	m	Crossbow (wa 0 Urvanovestilli, 10 Tuz; strength difficulty to
		load 0 Urvanovestilli, 10 Tuz) (T, U)
200 au	vd	Crossbow, Pump-Action — a pumping action loads the next bolt
		so that the time to load and shoot is 5s instead of 30s.  (wa
		0, loading requires action of strength difficulty 0)
400 au	vd	Crossbow, Spray — a cup on the front of the bowstring holds
		20 bolts which, when fired, fan out in a spray.  wa 10, and
		effectively increases firer's skill/accuracy by 10.  (But
		cannot be gainfully used with a telescopic sight)
3 cu	m	Crossbow Bolt (T, U)
1 au	d	Crossbow Bolt, Exploding (+20 to wa) (U)
1 au	d	Crossbow Bolt, Harpoon — a fine wire or silk cord is coiled
		inside the shell, and an end can be attached to the crossbow or
		other anchor.
1 au	d	Crossbow Bolt, Poison Injecting (U)
5 au	d	Crowbar (T, U)
2 au	m	Dagger (wa 0 hand to hand, -10 thrown) (N, T, U, J)
80 au	vd	Dagger, Obsidian, Razor-edged (wa 5 hand to hand, -5 thrown)
40 au	vd	Dagger, Poison Injecting (wa 0) (U)
60 au	vd	Directional mechanical listening device — a pair of binoculars
		for the ears.  It has a sight and a hard parabolic surface with
		a tube which goes to the ears at the focus — incoming sound
		from the direction it faces is echoed into the tube and heard
		with exceptional sensitivity.
15 au	d	Earhorn — effectively doubles hear noises skill
2000 au	ed	Firestar — a longsword with a hollow, insulated handle and a
		network of veins inside the blade leading to a porous surface
		which will be covered in burning oil (po 20, hotter oil doing
		more damage possibly available upon searching).
25 au	d	Fishing Rod, collapsible (U)
6 au	d	Goggles, Waterproof (U)
2 au	d	Grappling Hook (T, U)
1 el	d	Gunpowder (U)
30 au	d	Halberd (wa 15) (T, U)
200 au	d	Hang Glider (U)
600 au	vd	Hang Glider, Collapsible — can collapse to backpack size and
		pop out at the push of a button (U)
60 au	d	Herbal/Chemical Medicine kit — medicines allow an injured
		character to heal faster.  (Easy medical skill check to avoid
		causing damage (prevents healing that day), difficult medical
		skill check to double rate of healing) (U, Y)
3000 au	vd	Hot Air Baloon (U)
150 au	d	Hummer — a small device which emits a high and low pitched hum
		(inaudible to humans) which is 90% likely to repel wandering
		animals.  (U)
1000 au	vd	Jack/Rabbit Tool — This device has two hardened steel prongs,
		each shaped like a flattened chisel, and a crank which, when
		turned, will slowly (over the course of a few minutes) cause
		the prongs to push apart with very powerful force (100 times
		the strength of the using character), sufficient to easily
		force most doors and chests open.  (U)
10,000 au ed	Juggernaut — a movable room and armored vehicle, capable of
		going over all sorts of terrain at the average jog speed for
		the party inside, which seats 4-8.  A very good place to sleep
		in a Tuz forest.  (U)
1 au	e	Knife (wa -3 hand to hand, -8 thrown) (N, T, U, Y, J, S)
120 au	vd	Ladder, Collapsible — expands at the push of a button, and
		can be collapsed to an object 18"x8"x4".  (U)
40 au	d	Lance (wa 3) (T, U)
5 au	e	Lantern (T, U, J)
10 au	d	Lantern, parabolic mirror — beam of light comes out focused in
		one direction.  (U)
10 au	e	Leather Vest: -7 to sharp damage, -3 to blunt damage, no
		penalties (N, T)
5 au	d	Lighter — like a cigarette lighter, but with a wick and oil
		instead of butane.  (U)
30 au	d	Lock Picks (U)
10 au	m	Longbow (N, T, U)
1 si	m	Longbow Arrow (N, T, U)
10 au	d	Longsword (wa 10) (T, U)
5 au	d	Mace (wa 5) (T)
1000 au ed      Manual of Skill (specific skill) — A Manual of Skill contains
		instructions and insights into one particular skill, so that
		after a month's usage a character will gain five experience
		points in that skill.  Unless the game master explicitly
		specifies otherwise, all manuals of skill when found will be
		in extremely poor condition and will fall apart and be
		completely unusable after one character has used it once. (U)
80 au	d	Medical Kit — allows a character's medical skill to function
		in caring for the healing of another. (U)
10 au	d	Periscope (U)
2 au	m	Pickaxe (T, U, J)
100 au	d	Plate Armor, heavy: -30 to sharp damage, -20 to blunt damage,
		penalties 20-st to ag, de, sp; -20 to Move Silently.  (T, U)
200 au	vd	Plate Armor, light: -15 to sharp damage, -10 to blunt damage,
		5-st penalties to ag, de, sp; -20 to Move Silently.  (U)
50 au	vd	Pneumatic-Powered Liquid Sprayer, glass coated inside.  Some
		are powered by compressed gas cartridges; some are powered by
		pumping to build up pressure.  (U)
15 au	m	Rapier (wa 5) (U)
500 au	vd	Reference Manual (specific skill) — A reference manual, when
		consulted, allows a character to make a skill check as if he
		had five ep more (adjusted for gaa but not al) after one
		hour's consultation in preparation for that specific check,
		and as if he had ten ep more after one day's consultation.
1 au	d	Robe, many-pocketed (U, Y, J)
1 au    m       Rope, 50' (N, T, U, Y, C) 50
50 au   d       Rope, 50', silk (much thinner, smaller, and stronger than a
		normal rope).  (U)
350 au	vd	Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (U)
100 au	vd	Sewing Machine, portable (U)
10 au	d	Shield — its usage skill (block, works exactly like dodge) has
		dl .5.  (T, U)
3 au	m	Slide Rule (U)
3 au	d	Snorkel (U)
2	d	Soft cloth/leather boots/shoes — effectively increases
		wearer's move silently skill by 10.  (U, Y, S)
10,000 au ed    Spider Silk Robe: -30 sharp damage, -5 blunt damage; no
		associated penalties.  (U)
30 au	d	Springboard — with running start, doubles jump skill.  (U)
300 au  vd      Staff, Rocket Launching — launches rockets that explode in 5
		yard r+50-damage fireball)  (U)
50-200 au d	Swiss Army Knife (U)
1 au	vd	Syringe (U)
10 au   d       Telescope, 10x magnification (U)
100 au  64      Telescope, 100x magnification (U)
500 au  vd      Telescope, zoom, 10-250x magnification (U)
50 au   d       Telescopic Crossbow sight — allows for a shot taking twice the
		time and prone to have accuracy increased by 50 if installed on
		Urvanovestilli crossbow and adjusted with a difficult clockwork
		device craftsmanship/engineering check.  (U)
200 au	vd	Tent, framed — collapses to fit inside a moderately sized
		backpack.  (U)
1 au    e       Tinderbox (N, T, U, Y, J, S)
20 au	e	Tool Kit (U)
50 au   d       Two-handed sword (wa 20) (T, U)
10 au	m	Watch (U)
1 au	m	Waterskin (N, T, U, Y, C, S)
15 au	m	Winter Clothing — lowers cold tolerance difficulties one
		notch.  (N, U, C)
1	d	Wire, steel, 5 yards
10 au	d	Wire Saw (U)

Non-Herbal Chemicals

500 au	ed	Adrenaline serum.  One ounce of this hormone per hundred pounds
		of body weight will affect attributes with the following
		adjustments: ag+5, al+15, ch-10, de-5, kn-8, me-8, pe+8, sp+10,
		st+15, wi-15.  At the time of being injected, the injectee must
		make one constitution check, of difficulty equal to ten times
		the number of ounces of adrenaline injected per hundred pounds
		of body weight.  If this check is failed, then the hormone
		causes him to run in fear from any threat until it wears off.
		(Note that this reduces wisdom as quickly as it increases
		strength; a character with wisdom reduced to .1 or less is no
		longer under the control of the player.)  Also, adrenaline
		causes an injured creature (as long as it's still alive) to
		function as if not injured.
100 au	ed	Anabolic steroids.  One ounce of this, appropriately diluted
		and spread over a year with vigorous exercise, will increase
		strength by 2.  (After the year, no further steroid use of that
		level will bring increase.  Increased steroid use will act on
		the base strength, unadjusted by steroids).  The *cube* of the
		number of ounces is subtracted from constitution.
1 au	d	Docility Drug (po 10) — this and other drugs take effect when
		the drug "damage" combined with actual damage brings an animal
		below zero health value (U)
5 au	64	Docility Drug (po 20) (U)
25 au	vd	Docility Drug (po 30) (U)
125 au	1024	Docility Drug (po 40) (U)
625 au	ed	Docility Drug (po 50) (U)
1 si	d	Glue (U)
1 au	vd	Glue, exceptional strength (if allowed to set, is usually
		stronger than the materials it has bonded together) (U)
8 au	vd	Nitric Acid — comes in a glass container (one of few
		substances it will not eat through), with a tiny eyedropper.
2 au	vd	Compressed Gas Cartridge (U)
1 cu	e	Lantern Oil (T, U, J)
1 el	d	Lantern Oil, Extra Bright — when burnt in a lantern, can
		illuminate a room as brightly as daylight. (U)
1 au	d	Poison (po 10) (U)
5 au	64	Poison (po 20) (U)
25 au	vd	Poison (po 30) (U)
125 au	1024	Poison (po 40) (U)
625 au	ed	Poison (po 50) (U)
2 au    d       Roman Candle (U)
1 au	d	Sleeping Drug (po 10) — this and other drugs take effect when
		the drug "damage" combined with actual damage brings an animal
		below zero health value (U)
5 au	64	Sleeping Drug (po 20) (U)
25 au	vd	Sleeping Drug (po 30) (U)
125 au	1024	Sleeping Drug (po 40) (U)
625 au	ed	Sleeping Drug (po 50) (U)
1 au    d       Smoke Bomb (U)
10 au	vd	Thermite — a mixture of powdered rust and aluminum which will
		when ignited with a magnesium fuse (generally available
		wherever thermite is available), burn through nearly anything
		— steel, sand, asbestos...).  (U)

Herbs and Herb Derivatives — some herb effects derived from the net.book on herbs. Herbs, in raw form, may be acquired using the herbalism or woodlore skills as well as acquisition, in which case they are obviously free.

1 sp m Aloe Vera — when rubbed over sunburnt skin, alleviates pain and causes healing to occur at four times the normal rate. 50 au ed Angel’s Hair — this herb, when dried, powdered, and mixed with water to make a viscous fluid, will, when drunk (one dose per day) reduce aging by 1/4. 1 sp m Coffee — one silver piece’s worth per hundred pounds body weight will bring adjust pe*1.1, sp*1.1, cube of silver piece’s worth per hundred pounds body weight will adjust de*.98, in*.98. Lasts one hour. (U) 1 au d Cofisa Tea — a tea with strong herbal extracts that focuses and intensifies nervous system impulses to the muscles. Adjusts st*1.1, cube adjusts pe*.98. Lasts 15 minutes. 4 au vd Desp — when an extract of this herb is injected, it causes the person to continue strenuous exercise for ten times the normal duration, after which he will fairly quickly fall asleep. 1 au d Docility Drug (po 10) — this and other drugs take effect when the drug “damage” combined with actual damage brings an animal below zero health value (Y) 4 au 64 Docility Drug (po 20) (Y) 16 au vd Docility Drug (po 30) (Y) 64 au 1024 Docility Drug (po 40) (Y) 256 au ed Docility Drug (po 50) (Y) 1 cu d Ficop — A liberal distribution of a paste made of this herb, held on with dressings, (one pound per square foot), will cause burns to heal at four times the normal rate. 1 au m Gentian Violet — this herbal extract, when applied to a bleeding wound, will cause it to rapidly slow, scabbing unless it is a major vessel. 1 au d Hallucinogenic Mushroom Extract — this and other drugs take effect when the drug “damage” combined with the actual damage brings an animal below zero health value. An animal in combat who hallucinates has a 50% chance of being scared off by hallucinations, and, if not scared, has a 50% chance of attacking hallucinations rather than threats (po 10) (Y) 4 au 64 Hallucinogenic Mushroom Extract (po 20) (Y) 16 au vd Hallucinogenic Mushroom Extract (po 30) (Y) 64 au 1024 Hallucinogenic Mushroom Extract (po 40) (Y) 256 au ed Hallucinogenic Mushroom Extract (po 50) (Y) 2 sp d Hedisc — when rubbed on scars daily (one ounce can cover one square inch of scar for one week), causes scars to heal fully within a month (Y) 50 au d Herbal Medicine Kit (Y) 5 au vd Heslriana — when made into a tea and drunk, this adjusts pe+5 noncumulatively for ten minutes. (Y) 1 el d Hofiu — anti-nauseant (Y) 20 au vd Kedlidi — diminishes by half the effect of alcohol (non-cumulatively). (Y) 1 sp d Locriat Tea — This includes a variety of teas which, a day after drinking, will begin to color the drinker’s skin (and, in some cases, hair); the colors will wear off with discontinuation after about a month to half a year (depending on how much has been consumed); possible resultant colors may be described as any color which may be obtained by rubbing a non-opaque dye onto a person’s skin. (Y) 2 au m Nesrit — When burned in a fire, the resulting smoke will leave an odd scent in the air which will repel insects and snakes for one hour (Y). 3 au d Plei Kr’t Sha — this herb, when taken orally, will in ten minutes cause a person for an hour to be aware of painful stimuli but not feel them as pain, and not to be nauseated by grotesque sights or thoughts; used frequently in surgery (Y) 1 au d Poison (po 10) (Y) 4 au 64 Poison (po 20) (Y) 16 au vd Poison (po 30) (Y) 64 au 1024 Poison (po 40) (Y) 256 au ed Poison (po 50) (Y) 1 au d Poison Antidote — Poison antidotes are specific to the plant, and/or creature from which the poison originated. There are three or four common poisons of each strength and several uncommon poisons of each strength (price and ad up by a factor of four) (po 10) (Y) 4 au 64 Poison Antidote (po 20) (Y) 16 au vd Poison Antidote (po 30) (Y) 64 au 1024 Poison Antidote (po 40) (Y) 256 au ed Poison Antidote (po 50) (Y) 1 au d Sleeping Drug (po 10) — this and other drugs take effect when the drug “damage” combined with actual damage brings an animal below zero health value (Y) 5 au 64 Sleeping Drug (po 20) (Y) 25 au vd Sleeping Drug (po 30) (Y) 125 au 1024 Sleeping Drug (po 40) (Y) 625 au ed Sleeping Drug (po 50) (Y) 2 au d Solvi — causes internal blood clots to dissolve (Y) 2 au m Stiv Tea — causes neurons in the eye to fire once per photon detected instead of once every seven, thereby causing a person to be dazzled in bright light, see in dim light as if it were bright, and see in very weak light (moonless starlight, indirect candlelight) as if it were dim. 5 au d Talinor Tea — adjusts in+2, pe-1, sp-1, wears off in one hour (U, Y)

Section II M: Speed and Simultaneity

This section is optional:

The exponent of a creature’s speed is looked up in the log/exponent table, and actions are shortened in duration by that divisor. For example, a creature of speed 10 has an exponent of 2, so he does things twice as fast (he takes half as long to do things).

Creatures may voluntarily speed up or slow down actions, affecting the difficulty as follows: let’s say that a character wants to perform an action 4 times as fast. The log of 4 is looked up in the log/exponent table: 20. This number is added to the difficulty of the action: it is 20 points more difficult to perform the action at 4 times normal speed. Creatures can benefit from slowing down to perform actions, up to a difficulty 10 points lower by taking twice as long.

A character may perform n actions simultaneously with the difficulty for each increased by the log of n: 10 points for 2 actions, 20 points for 4, etc. Common sense should be applied to what can be done simultaneously; archery and horseback riding are sensible concurrent activities, while archery and juggling are not. Running while doing other activities does not require an ability check, but does count as a simultaneous activity (increasing the difficulty of the other activities performed).

Section III: A Quick Key to Abbreviations

Here is what each abbreviation means. It may be convenient to print out this page to have on hand until the abbreviations become familiar.

ad	acquirement difficulty
ag	agility
al	ability to learn
an	one half anatomy skill, rounded down
au	gold
av	adjusted value
b	number resulting from rolling the blue die
bs	base skill
ch	charisma
co	constitution
cu	copper
d	difficult
de	dexterity
dl	difficulty of learning
e	easy
ed	extremely difficult
el	electrum
ep	experience point(s)
fe	iron
gaa	governing attributes addend
in	intelligence
kn	knowledge
ld	learning difference
m	moderate
me	memory
ms	medical skill 
pe	perception
po	poison
r	number resulting from rolling the red die
si	silver
sp	speed
st	strength
ub	untrained base
vd	very difficult
wa	weapon adjustment
wi	wisdom

Section IV: A Sample Character Sheet

Here are parts of a sample character sheet being set up, in order to make the model perhaps easier to understand. I am demonstrating using my stopwatch as a ten-sided die (starting and stopping it, and then looking at the place for hundredths of seconds), and a simple four function calculator. The number of decimal places kept track of is somewhat arbitrary, but I will use two.

First, I decide the character’s race, age, and gender (young Yedidia female). We’ll call her Ocula. (We should also have an idea of what kind of skills she will have — I’ll say a perceiver, although her 30 ep may be devoted any way I want.) Second, I generate 36 numbers as r-b (I roll the red and blue dice, subtracting the value on the blue die from that on the red die — if the red says ‘3’ and the blue says ‘5’, then the number is 3-5, or -2):

n1: 4; n2: 3; n3: 2; n4: -1; n5: -3; n6: 0; n7: 3; n8: -2; n9: 1; n10: 0; n11: 4; n12: -3; n13: -1; n14: 5; n15: 2; n16: 2; n17: 3; n18: 0; n19: -1; n20: 1; n21: -1; n22: -1; n23: 0; n24: -5; n25: 1; n26: 2; n27: -1; n28: 4; n27: -2; n28: 1; n29: -3; n30: 4; n31: 1; n32: -1; n33: 0; n34: -1; n35: 0; n36: 2

Now, using those 36 random numbers, I calculate her attributes as given in section II A, and adjust them as given in section II B:

Attribute		Racial	Gender	Age	Adjusted
ag: 4+3+2-1-3=5		+0	+0	+5	10
al: 4+0+3-2+1=6		+0	+0	+5	11
ch: 4+0+0+4-3=5		+5	+0	+0	10
co: -1+5+2+2+3=11	+0	+0	+5	16
de: 4+3+2+0-1=8		+0	+2	+5	15
in: 4+0+3+1-1=7		+3	+0	+0	10
kn: 4+0+3-1+0=6		+0	+0	-4	2
me: 4+0+3-5+1=3		+0	+0	+0	3
pe: 4+3+2-1+4=12	+10	+5	+5	32
sp: 4+3-3+4+1=9		+0	+0	+5	14
st: -1+5-1+0+1=4	+0	-5	+5	4
wi: 4+0+3+0+2=9		+0	+0	+0	9

For all unadjusted attributes, 0 is average, and how far above or below 0 the character’s attribute is is how far above or below average the character is in that attribute.

Ocula is above average in virtually everything; this is unusual even for a heroine. (If the player does not like the first attributes generated, he may generate new ones — while Ocula is unusually gifted, heroes should be above average.) Ocula is, as compared to other young Yedidia women, mentally sharp, moves quickly, healthy, and exceptionally perceptive.

Now it is time to allocate initial experience. Ocula has 30 points to distribute on skills (above and beyond her untrained bases as a Yedidia female). Using one of the given roles, she will be a perceiver (her experience devoted, as listed in section II H, are blind action 3*1=3 ep, guess actions 3*3=9, etc.).

Now, for a daily encounter check. Will there be an encounter? 1. Encounter. What kind of encounter? 2. Animal. What animal? 19. Duck. How will it be/behave? 3. It is curious.

Upon seeing the duck, she will guess actions to see what it will do. Now we will calculate her guess actions skill.

Her untrained base for Guess Actions is 20. She has 9 ep devoted, so we calculate her bv as follows, consulting the log/exponent table: the exponent of 20 is 4. 4+9=13, so this is what her experience does. The log of 13 is 37, so she has a base skill of 37 for Guess Actions. Her al is added to this (11), and her gaa as well (32). Her av (adjusted value) for guess actions is 80.

Guessing actions for a person under normal circumstances would be of moderate difficulty; guessing the actions of a nonhuman animal is difficult (difficulty 40). Her success index is 80-40=40. The dice are rolled; red yields 4 and blue yields 1. (6*4)+1=25, and looking at the table, she needs a success index of at least -1. Ocula succeeds in guessing what the duck is going to do, namely try to figure out if she is going to attack and, if not, if she is safe to approach.

Later, a young Urvanovestilli man, in his wanderlust, comes through to visit. He has a pianoforte music box which entrances her. He is a bit of a maverick, and tells her that he will bet the music box against a well aged bottle of strawberry wine that he can beat her in a gambling game. She agrees.

He is a good gambler (gambling 30), and has an unadjusted perception of 3, adjusted 8. His al is 5, so his gambling skill is 43.

Ocula is not particularly skilled at gambling, but she can guess actions well — a skill closely related to gambling — and guess actions and gambling have an ld of 10, so she can gamble 70. Skill against skill; she has a success index of 27. Red rolls 5, blue rolls 2, for a roll of 32. She needed a success index of -11 or higher to win, so she won.

Ocula completes a quest, gaining two experience points. She decides to devote both of them to guessing actions. Her bv is 37, which has an exponent of 13. Adding the two experience points make it 15, which has a log of 39. With this two point increase, her new av is 82. (If she had trained with a tutor of sufficiently high av (84 or more — which would have been found on an acquisition skill check of difficulty 84), she would have gotten double benefit out of her experience, adding 4 to the exponent instead of 2, yielding 17 with a log of 41, so her new av would have been 84.)

Ocula’s initial character sheet (without experience from the quest) is as follow:

Ocula Yedidia Female Age: 33

Attribute		Racial	Gender	Age	Adjusted

Health Value: co+st+ag+an=48

Skill		ub	ep	bv	gaa	av
Anatomy		10	0	10	2	18
Animal Handling	20	0
Animal Lore	20	0
Blind Action	10	3
Dancing		20	0
Dodge		10	0
Endurance	0	0
Fire-Building	0	0
Gardening	10	0
Guess Actions	20	9	37	32	80
Haggling	0	0
Hear Noises	20	3
Herbalism	15	0
Hide		10	0
Hunting		10	0
Improvisation	20	0
Jumping		0	0
Massage		0	0
Medicine	10	0
Move Silently	10	0
Keen Eyesight	10	3
Musical Instrument (Recorder)	10	0
Navigation	0	0
Philosophy	0	0
Read Emotion	15	3
Search		0	3
Smell Creature	10	3
Theology	10	0
Weather Sense	10	3
Wilderness Survival	20	0
Woodlore	20	0

Inventory Herbal medicines Pet puma, young male, named Liki n1: 5; n2: 0; n3: 0; n4: -4; n5: 0; n6: 2; n13: 2; n14: 0; n15: 0; n16: -3; n17: 2; n18: 0; n19: 1; n26: -4; n27: -1; n28: 2; n29: 4; n30: 3; n31: 1; n32: 1; n33: 5; n34: -5 unadjusted species gender age adjusted ag: 5+0+0-4+0=1 30 0 5 36 co: 2+0+0-3+2=1 10 0 5 16 de: 5+0+0+0+1=6 20 0 5 31 pe: 5+2-4-1-2=0 30 0 5 35 sp: 5+0+4+3+1=13 10 0 5 28 st: 2+0+1+5-5=3 30 5 5 40 Health Value: 56 Damage: r+40 Skill Points gaa av Attack 30 99 129 Blind Action 20 35 55 Climb 20 76 96 Dodge 30 64 94 Hear Noises 20 35 55 Hide 30 71 101 Hunt 30 35 65 Move Silently 30 71 101 Track 30 35 65 Purse (4 silver pieces, 3 copper pieces, 8 iron tips) Recorder

Section V: Notes and Properties

These are my comments about the model — about properties that I see as desireable and undesireable, plus miscellaneous comments.

It is a discrete, integer, dice-oriented translation of a continuous, real-valued model having the following properties:

Miscellaneous: The model (or, more properly, the racial and age attribute adjustments and racial base skills) is not balanced. I intentionally placed realism above balance in model design.

Undesireable properties:

Desireable properties:

The model is continuous and real-valued.

Related attributes are correlated in value.

What attributes are, and their impact, is appropriate.

Adjustments take the form of multiplicands, rather than addends.

Adjustments make a substantial impact on individual checks, rather than just being a subtle and minute increment.

Attributes adjust skills.

Experience devoted to skills produces an appropriate law of diminishing returns — it takes a little while to learn a little, and a long while to become a virtuoso.

Related skills apply to each other.

The model is simple and unified — one model fits all — and can be easily programmed into a scientific calculator.

Once a character’s skills are calculated, there is no more calculation for a while.

I like the way it handles time and actions.

Having listed other little virtues that this model possesses, I wish to delineate one virtue which I consider cardinal.

This model is small and incomplete; it possesses a limited domain.

It is the wide concensus of gamers that r-o-l-e-play is infinitely superior to r-o-l-l-play; this model is a miniscule thing which governs a timy part of play, and calls for contrainte in use. It governs certain natural abilities and certain developped skills; I would like to point out two major areas of play that it doesn’t touch.

The first is something which is traditionally a part of play and which mathematical models are kept out of: tole play: who a character is, what his personality is, what makes him tick, what his spiritual state is. It is something which is governed by an understanding of how things are done that cannot be reduced to rules and algorithms. On this point, I don’t feel the need to explain further.

The second is something which is traditionally a part of play in some form or other and which is traditionally governed by mathematical models, much to the detriment of play. It consists of things like the motion and gifts of the Spirit, the prayer of faith, divine intervention, etc.

In D&D, a cleric’s prayer power is reduced to another form of mechanized spell casting: a cleric gets such and such many prayers of the following power levels per day, as a function of his wisdom and the number of creatures he has killed. Star Wars is no better: using the Force is just one more skill which happens to be accompanied by some more rules about conduct. Neither is GURPS.

God is good and he is reliable, but he is not safe and not tame, and certainly not predictable enough to reduce to a model. While God is not predictable, incorporating a great deal of randomness in a model won’t cut it. God, when listening to prayers, weighs the petitioner’s faith and motives, the situation, and then makes a decision that, while unpredictable, is governed by infinite love and wisdom. This is, if anything, less, not more, reducible to algorithms than personal interactions. This calls for the GM to pray, rely on the Spirit, and think. God’s action must be handled as the most challenging and delicate role to portray, and it takes a game master created in the image of God to do.

QUICK! What Is Your Opinion About Chemistry?

Cover for The Seraphinians: "Blessed Seraphim Rose" and His Axe-Wielding Western Converts

QUICK! What Is Your Opinion About Chemistry?
A Christmas tree built using chemistry's instruments.

Readers who also read the popular usability author Jakob Nielsen may have read him give a popularized version of “the query effect,” which is essentially that even if people don’t have an opinion on something before you ask, if you ask their opinion they will very quickly come to an opinion, share the newly formed with you, and walk away thoroughly convinced of the opinion they just shared.

I haven’t actually done this, but if I were to waste people’s time and perhaps get in trouble with clergy by taking a survey at church and ask them what their opinion of chemistry was, I would expect some hesitation and befuddlement, people being perhaps a bit uncertain about where the question was coming from or my motives for asking, but given a bit of time to answer, something like the following might be expected:

Read it on Kindle: part of the collection, The Seraphinians: “Blessed Seraphim Rose” and his Axe-Wielding Western Converts

  • It’s hard.
  • It’s boring.
  • It’s fascinating.
  • I think it’s really cool that a chemist can take two beakers full of clear liquid and pour them together and have it turn colors.
  • Our lives are so much better for things that need chemistry for us to be able to manufacture them.
  • Chemistry is foundational to how we as a society have raped the environment.
  • What difference chemistry makes depends on how you make use of it.
  • Chemistry came from alchemy—I’m a bit more curious about alchemy!

Now what about an answer of “There are not hundreds of elements, e.g. hydrogen, helium, lithium, etc., but the original four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Chemistry is intrinsically atheistic, and no Orthodox should believe it.“?

Most readers may be even further confused as to where I may be going this, and suspect that the source of the opinion is occult, or deranged, or on drugs, or some combination of the above. But in fact that is the position of Church Fathers, although I will only investigate one of the Three Holy Heirarchs. In St. Basil’s Hexaëmeron (Homily 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), in which we read:


Now a chemist who communicated well would be hard pressed to summarize chemistry (not alchemy) better in so few words as the opponents’ position as summarized by St. Basil. Even if modern chemistry is developed in a great deal more detail and scientific accuracy than St. Basil’s opponents. Compare the words of Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman, in the Feynman Lectures which are considered exemplars of excellent communication in teaching the sciences, in words that might as well have come from a chemist trying to explain chemistry in a single sentence:


Feynman and St. Basil’s summary of his opponents are saying the same thing, and almost with the same economy. St. Basil’s description could be used as a pretty effective surrogate if Feynman’s words here were lost.

If that is the case, what should we make of it? Well, let me mention one thing I hope doesn’t happen: I don’t want to see even one pharmacist (or as is said in the U.K., “chemist”), weeping, make the confession of a lifetime, stop using chemistry to ease the sick and the suffering, after the sobbing confession, “I thought I was an Orthodox Christian, but it turns out I was really an atheist all along!

A sane reading of the Fathers would take a deep breath—or simply not need to take a deep breath—and recognize that something other than legalism is the wisest course for dealing with occasional passages in the Fathers that condemn chemistry, just like with the passages that claim a young earth.

Just like the passages that claim a young earth?

People in the U.S. who are not connected with Hispanic culture will often wonder that Mexicans, either in Mexico or the U.S., do not really celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and probably make less of a hubbub of what is assumed to be the the Mexican holiday. But, as my brother pointed out, “Cinco de Mayo legitimately is a Mexican holiday, but it’s not on par with the U.S.’s Independence Day; it’s on par with [the U.S.’s] Casamir Pulaski Day.”

It is helpful in dealing with passages from the Fathers to recognize what are genuinely Independence Day topics and what are only Casamir Pulaski Day topics. Independence Day topics include repentance, theosis, Grace, hesychasm, and there tend to be numerous treatises devoted to them. Casamir Pulaski Day topics like rejection of chemistry as atheistic, or insisting on a young earth, may be agreed on, but I have not read or heard in thousands of pages of patristic writing where either topic is front and center. So far I have only found brief passages, generally among other passages condemning various opinions in ways that, when they touch scientific subjects, are a bit scattershot—much as when one is proceeding the wrong way—as regards contributing to any useful and coherent way of evaluating modern science.

I’m not going to condemn believing in a young earth as it is a very easy conclusion to reach and it is shared among many saints. But I will suggest that even the conceptual framework of having an origins position is strange and not helpful, as it is spiritually really not that helpful to weigh in on whether chemistry makes you an atheist. We’re making a really big deal of a Mexican Casamir Pulaski Day, much to the confusion of those connected with Méjico!

Mainstream origins positions

Let me briefly comment on the mainstream origins positions held by Orthodox. Some things are non-negotiable; among them being that God created the world and that the human race is created in the image of God. Atheism, naturalism or materialism is not acceptable, with or without connection to evolution. The Ancient Near East and pagan Greek philosophy hold to various opinions which are not to be accepted: among these are that a hero or god fought a dragon or demon and ripped her body in half, making half into the sky and half into the earth; that the universe was created by divine sexual activity in a fashion that need not be described to Orthodox Christians; that the world has always existed and is as uncreated as God; and that the world is an emanation from God (divine by nature in a diluted form), in classical pantheistic fashion. All of these are to be rejected, but I am not aware of a camp among today’s Orthodox, nor have I encountered a single Orthodox follower, for these kinds of positions. And none of these seem to really overlap any mainstream position.

Among mainstream positions, let me enumerate the following. This excludes being completely not sure, finding the whole question messy and hesitating between two or more basic options (where I am now), and a few others. As far as I know, this list covers all encounters where I have seen a definite position taken by Orthodox. (Some or all of these positions may admit varieties and clarification.)

1: The saints believed in a young earth and that’s how I read Genesis.
If you believe this, and don’t go further or mix it with anything non-Orthodox, this is fine.
2: I believe in an old earth where God miraculously intervened by creating new life forms over time.
This position is now backed by intelligent design movement texts, such as Philip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial. The downside, at least as explained to me by two very hostile Orthodox theistic evolutionists who shut me down before I could make my point instead of letting me make my point and then refuting it, is that the new intelligent design movement was concocted by the Protestant creationist Discovery Institute to attract people not attracted by young earth creationism’s handling of science. Like the position that follows, most of its followers don’t jackhammer people who disagree.
3: I’m not a scientist, but I believe God could have done it through evolution.
This option, theistic evolution, is perfectly permissible, but I wince as it usually means “I’m coming to terms with the science of a hundred years ago.”

One hundred years ago, evolution was a live option in the academy. Now people still use the term, but its meaning has been gutted and any belief that life forms slowly evolve into different life forms has been dead so long that it has long since stopped even smelling bad. The evidence (the “evolutionary” term being “punctuated equilibrium” or “punk eek”) is that the fossil record shows long periods of great stability without real change in what kind of organisms there, abruptly interrupted by geological eyeblinks and the sudden appearance and disappearance of life forms. Or as my “University Biology” teacher at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy said, “Evolution is like baseball. There are long periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of intense excitement.

This option registers to me as a genuinely comfortable assent to science, but without awareness that the science in question has changed profoundly in the past hundred years.

But I wish to underscore: theistic evolution is (usually) an “I won’t drop the hammer on you” signal, and that is an excellent kind of signal.

4: I am a scientist, and I believe God probably worked through evolution.
My experience with this has not been the most pleasant; in one case behind the open hostility and efforts to shut me down from arguing (and rudely stop me before I could make my point at all instead of letting me make my point and then explain its flaws) may have lurked an uneasiness that I represented enough authority that I was intrinsically a threat to their certitude that scientific evidence pointed to “evolution” (as the term has been redefined in the sciences of today).

With that stated, I have known several Orthodox physicians, and I expect some of them after extensive evolution-laden biology classes would lean towards theistic evolution. However, I’m not sure as they generally seemed more interested in knowing, for instance, if I was having a nice day, than convincing me of their views about origins.

(I don’t remember any clergy or heirarch who was above me bringing up origins questions, although they have been willing to offer their thoughts if requested; “I’m not a scientist, but I believe God could have done it through evolution” is the most frequent opinion I’ve seen even among conservative clergy. Priests seem to be focused on bigger questions, like “What hast thou to confess?“)

All four opinions above are at least tolerable, but there is one additional common opinion that takes “problematic” to a whole new level:

5: God created a young earth and we know because Creation Science proves it.
I am perhaps biased by my frustrating experience with this crowd. I’ve had people offer to straighten out my backwards understanding of science whose understanding of science was so limited that I could not lead them to see when I was making a scientific argument, as opposed to just arbitrarily playing around with words. I have an advanced degree from a leading institution and a lot of awards. I am not aware of any of the people who sought to do me the favor of straightening out my backwards views on science as having a community college learner’s permit associate’s degree in any of the sciences.

The assertion is made that Creation Science is just science (after all, how could it not, if it has “Science” in its name?). A slightly more astute reader might listen to artificial intelligence critic John Searle’s rule of thumb that anything with the word “science” in its name is probably not a science: “military science,” “food science,” “Creation Science”, “cognitive science.” My best response to people who think Creation “Science” is science in the usual sense of the term, is to say that “Creation Science is real, legitimate science” is wrong, in the same way, for the same reason, as saying “Pro-choice Catholics are real, legitimate Catholics”. Pro-choice “Catholics” do not understand, appreciate, respect, or accept what it means to be a Catholic; Creation “scientists” do not understand, appreciate, respect, or accept what it means to be a scientist. Not only do Scientists and Catholics not accept the obnoxious intrusion, but arguing is pointless and brings to mind Confucious’s warning, “It is useless to take counsel with those who follow a different Way.

The problem with Creation Science is not that it is not science. It is painfully obvious to those outside of the movement that it is a feature of the Protestant landscape, perhaps a Protestantism of yesteryear rather than Protestantism today: Wheaton College, which is quite arguably the Evangelical Vatican, has something like three young earth creationists on its faculty, and I have never heard the one I know even mention Creation Science—he only claims to accept a young earth from reading and trusting the Bible), and the origin and nature of Creation Science are well described by a leading Evangelical scholar of Evangelicalism, Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Kiddies, if you’re going to take one feature of Protestantism and incorporate it into Orthodoxy, take Bible studies, or My Utmost for His Highest, or some other genuine treasure that tradition has produced. It would be better to do neither, of course, but those are better choices. Taking Creation Science from Evangelicalism is like robbing Evangelicalism in a blind alley, and all you take away is its pocket lint!

More than one person who have held this last position have called into question whether I should be calling myself an Orthodox Christian at all because I didn’t believe in a young earth. And I really think that’s a bit extreme. In twelve years of being Orthodox, I have on numerous occasions been told I was wrong by people who were often right. I have been told I was wrong many times by my spiritual father, by other priests, and by laity who usually have had a little bit more experience, and I suspect that future growth will fueled partly by further instances of people pointing where I am wrong. However, when I was newly illumined and my spiritual father said that what I had just said sounded very Protestant, he did not thereby call into question whether I should be calling myself an Orthodox Christian. The only context in the entirety of my dozen years of being Orthodox that anybody has responded to my words, faith, belief, practice, etc. by directly challenging whether I should be calling myself an Orthodox Christian at all, was Seraphinians who were exceedingly and sorely displeased to learn I did not share their certain belief in a young earth. This seems to say little about my weaknesses (besides that I am the chief of sinners), and a great deal more about an unnatural idol that has blown out of all proportions. The Casamir Pulaski day represented by the theologoumenon of a young earth has completely eclipsed every Independence Day question on which I’ve been wrong, from my early ecumenism (ecumenism has been anathematized as a heresy), to a more-inappropriate-than-usual practice of the Protestant cottage industry of archaeologically restoring the early Church. In both cases my error was serious, and I am glad clergy out-stubborned me as I did not give in quickly. But they refrained from casting doubt on whether I should be calling myself an Orthodox Christian; they seem to have seen me as both a nascent Orthodox and wrong about several things they would expect from my background. Really, we do need Church discipline, but isn’t dropping that sledgehammer on people who don’t believe a young earth a bit extreme?

I’ll not return the insult of casting doubt on whether they’re Orthodox; I don’t see that this option is acceptable, but I believe it is coherent to talk about someone who is both Orthodox and wrong about something major or minor. I believe that Creation Science is a thoroughly Protestant practice (that it is not science is beside the point), and militantly embracing Creation Science is one of the ways that the Seraphinians continue a wrong turn.

The position of Creation “Science” in relation to genuine science is the same as the relation between a non-canonical jurisdiction and the Orthodox Church. Even (or especially) if they have the word “Genuine” written right into their name!

But quite apart from that, the question of origins as I have outlined it is itself a heritage from Protestantism. Evangelicals once were fine with an old earth, before Evangelicals created today’s young earth creationism; the article Why young earthers aren’t completely crazy talks with some sympathy about the Evangelical “line in the sand;” Noll tells how it came to be drawn. The fact that it can be a relatively routine social question to ask someone, “What is your opinion about origins?” signals a problem if this Protestant way of framing things is available in Orthodoxy. It’s not just that the Seraphinian answer is wrong: the question itself is wrong, or at least not Orthodox as we know it now. Maybe the question “Did God create the entire universe from nothing, or did he merely shape a world that has always existed and is equally uncreated with him?” is an Independence Day question, or something approaching one. The questions of “Young or old earth?” and “Miraculous creation of new species or theistic evolution?” are Casamir Pulaski Day questions, and it is not helpful to celebrate them on par with Independence Day.

One friend and African national talked about how in her home cultural setting, you don’t ask a teacher “What is your philosophy of education?” as is routinely done in the U.S. for teacher seeking hire who may or may not have taken a single philosophy class. In her culture, that question does not fit the list of possibles et pensables, what is possible and what is even thinkable in that setting. (This whole article has been made to introduce a concept not readily available in the possibles et pensables of our own cultural setting, that having a modern style of “origins popsition” at all is not particularly Orthodox; and that some positions, even or especially among conservatives, are even more problematic. A transposition to chemistry helps highlight just how strange and un-Orthodox certain positions really are.) And let us take a look at Orthodox spiritual fathers. As advised in the Philokalia and innumerable other sources, if you are seeking a spiritual father, in or out of monasticism, you should make every investigation before entering the bond of obedience; after you have entered it, the bond is inviolable. I don’t know exactly how Orthodox have tried spiritual fathers, but I have difficulty imagining asking a monastic elder, “What is your personal philosophy of spiritual direction?” Quite possibly there is none.Even thinking about it feels uncomfortably presumptuous, and while theological opinion does exist and have a place, defining yourself by your opinions is not Orthodox.

If I were to ask someone in the U.S. “What are your family traditions for celebrating Casamir Pulaski Day?” the best response I could get would be, “Cas-Cashmere WHO?

And now I will show you a more excellent way

I feel I may be sending a very mixed message by the amount I have written in relation to origins questions given that my more recent postings keep downplaying origins debates. Much of what I have written has been because I don’t just think certain answers have flaws; the questions themselves have been ill-framed.

But that isn’t really the point.

These pieces are all intended to move beyond Casamir Pulaski Day and pull out all of the stops and celebrate Independence Day with bells on. They may be seen as an answer to the question, “Do you have anything else to discuss besides origins?” If you read one work, Doxology is my most-reshared.

1. Doxology
How shall I praise thee, O Lord?
For naught that I might say,
Nor aught that I may do,
Compareth to thy worth.
The Glory for whom all glory is named,
2. A Pilgrimage from Narnia
Wardrobe of fur coats and fir trees:
Sword and armor, castle and throne,
Talking beast and Cair Paravel:
From there began a journey,
From thence began a trek,
Further up and further in!
3. God the Spiritual Father

I believe in one God, the Father, Almighty…

The Nicene Creed

All of us do the will of God. The question is not whether we do God’s will or not, but whether we do God’s will as instruments, as Satan and Judas did, or as sons, as Peter and John did. In the end Satan may be nothing more than a hammer in the hand of God.

C.S. Lewis, paraphrased

4: Akathist to St. Philaret the Merciful
5: A Pet Owner’s Rules

  2. Don’t drink out of the toilet.
6: The Orthodox Martial Art Is Living the Sermon on the Mount

A look at India in relation to my own roots and formation

My live story up until now would be immeasurably impoverished if the various ways in which India had entered my life would simply be subtracted. I appreciate Indian food, even if I eat it in a non-Indian (Paleo) fashion. And that is not trivial, but there are deeper ways I’ve been enriched by that great nation. One of these relates to pacifism, where one of India’s giants, one certain Gandhi, is perhaps the best-known person in history as I know it for the strength of pacifism.

7: Silence: Organic Food for the Soul
We are concerned today about our food,
and that is good:
sweet fruit and honey are truly good and better than raw sugar,
raw sugar not as bad as refined sugar,
refined sugar less wrong than corn syrup,
and corn syrup less vile than Splenda.
But whatever may be said for eating the right foods,
this is nothing compared to the diet we give our soul.
8: Repentance, Heaven’s Best-Kept Secret
9: Why This Waste?
“Why This Waste?” quoth the Thief,
Missing a pageant unfold before his very eyes,
One who sinned much, forgiven, for her great love,
Brake open a priceless heirloom,
An alabaster vessel of costly perfume,
Costly chrism beyond all price anointing the Christ,
Anointing the Christ unto life-giving death,
Anointed unto life-giving death,
A story ever told,
In memory of her:
10: The Transcendent God Who Approaches Us Through Our Neighbor


11: Open
How shall I be open to thee,
O Lord who is forever open to me?
Incessantly I seek to clench with tight fist,
Such joy as thou gavest mine open hand.
12: The Angelic Letters
My dearly beloved son Eukairos;

I am writing to you concerning the inestimable responsibility and priceless charge who has been entrusted to you. You have been appointed guardian angel to one Mark.

Who is Mark, whose patron is St. Mark of Ephesus? A man. What then is man? Microcosm and mediator, the midpoint of Creation, and the fulcrum for its sanctification. Created in the image of God; created to be prophet, priest, and king. It is toxic for man to know too much of his beauty at once, but it is also toxic for man to know too much of his sin at once. For he is mired in sin and passion, and in prayer and deed offer what help you can for the snares all about him. Keep a watchful eye out for his physical situation, urge great persistence in the liturgical and the sacramental life of the Church that he gives such godly participation, and watch for his ascesis with every eye you have. Rightly, when we understand what injures a man, nothing can injure the man who does not injure himself: but it is treacherously easy for a man to injure himself. Do watch over him and offer what help you can.

With Eternal Light and Love,
Your Fellow-Servant and Angel

Happy Independence Day! Enjoy the fireworks display.

Jonathan’s Canon

Below is the corpus of writings that I have read so far and would most quickly recommend to others, on a basis of theological or philosophical merit and personal impact. The books, series, etc. are alphabetized by title (not author), and exclude two areas: first the Bible, because that Canon is prior to and infinitely greater than my canon, and second, my own writings, which I believe others should be the judges of. The boundaries are hazy — I’m sure that your favorite book not on the list is better than your favorite book on the list. All entries should be assumed to be books unless stated otherwise.

Looking for a good book, for me, is a quest a little like a detective’s searching for clues: anything that can be anticipated is not it. It is like a good surprise birthday present: you know it when you see it, but anything you can anticipate is not it. (In that regard, it is like a foretaste of Heaven: eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor any mind conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.) The list should grow longer as time progresses.

I told a friend once that I thought that some things would be a lot better if theologians would do all the apologetics, and apologists would do all of the theology. I’m not sure how to explain that remark (beyond asking people to think about it and let it sink in), but I often get more out of lesser works than greater. I am not including Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae on the list, for instance, because I got less out of reading it (in abridgment) than out of reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and less out of reading parts of Dante’s Divina Commedia than C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Maybe when I have matured more I will be ready to read some of the greater works, but now I usually learn best at the hands of the lesser masters. My judgment has certainly bothered people; the aforementioned friend was quite surprised when I gave high acclaim to Titanic, and he eventually said, after seeing what I saw in it, that my reading was so beautiful of a reading that he almost hesitated to attribute it to Kirk Cameron. Many of these works are lesser classics; I am aware of the greater classics, but have not learned much from most of them. Readers who enjoy this list may also like to see my favorite haunts on the web.

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
An excellent and concise description of what Western culture is trying to do, and what will come of it.

Abortion: A Failure to Communicate.
On Saturday Night Live, the announcer said, “Kenny G came out with his new Christmas album. [pause] Happy birthday, Jesus. I hope you like crap!”

Being aloof from popular artists, it took me a while to realize that Kenny G is not a Christian artist. Most of what goes by the name of Christian is intellectually and artistically worthless, in a sense a blasphemy against the Creator who lovingly and lavishly created no two blades of grass alike. In looking through Christian this and Christian that on the web, it was a very refreshing pearl amidst a desert of sand. This was the first good Christian article I found in a long while.

Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts, by Franky Schaeffer
This book provides an excellent analysis of bad philosophy as it leads to an impoverished culture — dealing with how utilitarianism (leaving the obvious critique related to pursuing only means and never ends) has nearly killed one aspect of the imago dei in our culture. A good and accessible read to anyone concerned with philosophy, art, or culture.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman
After I read this book (a quick read, in contradistinction to Jerry Mander’s weightier and slower Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television), I’ve never looked at a TV the same way again. This would be a good candidate for the first book on this list to read, because once you’ve read this one you’ll find it easier to break away from television’s accursed spell and read other books and otherwise experience life.

There’s something that must be said for television. It must be said, because it cannot be printed.

All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections, by Gandhi
This book, and in particular the chapter entitled, “Ahimse or the way of nonviolence,” provided a large part of my real beginning in understanding peacemaking, and the loose prototype for Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Real Peace through Real Strength. It’s largely a collection of excellent quotes, and well worth reading to anyone asking the questions concerning violence and peace.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson
C.S. Lewis said that children’s books should be good enough for adults, and that childrens’ books which aren’t good enough for adults won’t be any good for children, either. All of the best children’s literature is good for adults, and this book in particular is interesting, funny, and truly profound. (Something similar, incidentally, might be said for Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)

The Book of Heroic Failures, by Stephen Pile
This book I debated putting in, but I decided for: first, because when I read it I laughed so hard I cried and could barely talk, and second, because it does help to come to terms with a side of being human that most of us find a smidgen embarrassing.

Changeling: the Dreaming
Reading about this game (which I could not play in good conscience, incidentally), was one of the things I did that most pierced me with a glimpse of Heaven, as did Pilgrim’s Regress and other places. To quote from the web site:

We are changelings, the forgotten ones, neither fully fae nor wholly mortal. The last of our kind on Earth, we have built ourselves an invisible kingdom. We are everywhere, yet you have never seen us. We hide, not behind some fragile Masquerade, but in plain sight, with the power of our Glamour. We exist within a real world of make-believe where “imaginary” things can kill, and “pretend” monsters are real.

This is an exquisitely beautiful description of the spilled religion that is Romanticism, and someone who drinks those drops may well imbibe deeper from the Chalice than someone who is careful to have his lips touch the chalice, but makes no effort to take in the Drink inside. We are indeed members of an invisible kingdom, hidden in plain sight by the power of grace and prayer, and believe many things that the Kingdom of Darkness now calls imaginary. Reading this inspired a part of one of my writings:

On the web, I found a place set up by a woman who believed she was a fairy. At first, it weirded me out — but, the more and more I think about, the less it strikes me as strange. I don’t mean that it’s not wrong — I mean rather that it is far less wrong than many beliefs about which we’ve become blase’. The essential idea of a person who is really a fairy, and a world of wonder, a nature of beauty, and of magic, is in some ways very close to the truth of imago dei, of God’s magnificent creation, and of prayer. It has its definite errors and omissions, but it is far closer to true than the idea of a person as only a material body, of nature as only a particular configuration of subatomic particles, of the supernatural as only a figment of human imagination and superstition. The beliefs around fairies would make the basis for an excellent parable, of which a crude rendition is as follows:

Once upon a time, there was a village of men, that was on the border of fairy-land. And some people saw faries, but some lived lives that were dull and dreary.

And the god of nature, who was the prince of the gods, entered this village and began to take men and women into his arms, embracing them and kissing them. And when he kissed them, he made them into fairies. And he took them, and taught them to dance, a wild, merry, pagan dance with the trees and stars and rivers and lakes and flowers.

And the god cut through what was dull and mundane, and the leaders whose interests were in all that was dull and mundane were enraged and killed him. And yet all of their rage and unbelief and violence, even death itself, could not keep him. Before he was killed, he gave the fairies to eat his flesh and drink his blood, that he might live in them and they in him, and after he was killed, he rose in a surge of the indestructible life that was within him.

And now, he has left that he might be everywhere — in men, in the stars, in the trees, and enchant them with his magic, that they might dance also, and he abides and is found inside each fairy, and empowers them to kiss others with his kiss and draw them into the circle of life, that they also might become fairies, living the life of the nature god, weaving his magic by which the entire universe pulses with life, carried about by song and wonder, and dancing the great dance.

And he has designs yet unveiled — to bring an even greater perfection to the nature, the fairies, the magic, the dance, the embrace.

And the story is unfolding even now.

Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World, by Dorothy Sayers
An excellent collection of essays, beginning with a beautiful satire entitled, “The Pantheon Papers”

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
These seven books are excellent children’s literature, and storytelling that tells the most beautiful story through fantasy. I have always been drawn to fantasy, because it draws out the wondrous and beautiful truths about our world — “The better you know another world, the better you know your own,” (George MacDonald, Lilith) — and because good fantasy is a reflection of our world.

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, by Steve C. McConnell
All of the really good books, in any field, are books of philosophy. This book is a book of philosophy in computer programming, but it is widely applicable outside of that field. Its central point is that computer programming is an activity done by humans instead of just an activity using computer, and as such it is not enough to know the computer’s strengths and weaknesses, but also to know your own strengths and weaknesses. Some of its immediate content — how to choose variable names and lay out procedures so that you’re less likely to run into certain bugs resulting from your short-term memory failure in designing the program — is only relevant to programmers, but macroscopically it would be valuable to anyone. A must-read for software engineers, and a should-read for everyone else.

The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This is an excellent book; it is a good competitor to Experiencing God for the place of #1 recommendation, or more appropriately a good companion volume. This book shows what sola fide really means in terms of works, and the monumental importance of good works in a context of faith. Bonhoeffer repeats, as a refrain, “Only those who believe can obey, and only those who obey can believe.” Works are like a sacrament — not human means of making ourselves worthy, but physical conduits of God’s blessing. Show Bonhoeffer your faith without works, and this martyr and mensch will show you his faith through his works.

Darwin on Trial, by Phillip Johnson
Shortly after reading Abortion: A Failure to Communicate, I earnestly read all kinds of articles at Leadership University, happy to find high-quality Christian articles… and my estimation of the site dropped several notches when I saw articles with titles like “Darwin on Trial.” It seemed that here, after a lot of mature thought, was a kneejerk conservative backsliding into fighting to restore six-day creationism and otherwise fight what good science said. One day, I actually read one of these articles I detested, and it blew me away.What followed after that was a crisis, followed by a loss of faith — not in God, but rather in academia. I came to believe something I had long resisted — that Darwinism was established dogma, not because of its support in the evidence (existing scientific evidence being extremely hostile to any form of Darwinism that is both recognizably connected with Darwin’s theory, and within spitting distance of being called a scientific theory), but because it provides an excuse for an explanation of how life could come to be without a Creator.

Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe
Darwin on Trial gives a broad overview of scientific evidence concerning Darwinism. Darwin’s Black Box provides a focused and in-depth look at one very specific biochemical mechanism. I didn’t find it quite as fascinating as the former, but it’s definitely worth reading for people who like intricate clockwork and complexity. An engineer should like it.

The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
This classic of satire contains a number of extremely funny definitions (my personal favorite defined rum to be “generically, fiery liquors which produce madness in total abstainers”), and is poignantly insightful as to the shortfallings of American Christianity. It was the basis, and provided the model, for Hayward’s Unabridged Dictionary. Its cynicism is something to be wary of, but beyond that it is a classic of wit and refreshingly blunt honesty.

The Disappearance of Childhood, by Neil Postman
I plan on re-reading this book if and when I get married, have kids, and my eldest child reaches the age of three. It deals with the themes of other books, plus a harmful blurring of the line that separates children from adults. If you care about children having a real childhood, you should probably read this.
The Empty Self: Gnostic Foundations of Modern Identity, by Dr. Jeffrey Burke Satinover
Gnosticism is the most ancient of heresies, and one of the deadly poisons infesting the Church. (I am using ‘heresy’ in its ancient sense of “a fatally flawed idea that is as damaging to the believer as is a belief that arsenic is healthy food”, not in the modern sense of “an excellent idea which narrow-minded society benightedly condemns.”) This provides an excellent introduction by which to know and avoid it.

Experiencing God: How to Live the Full Adventure of Knowing and Doing the Will of God, by Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King
This book articulate deep lessons about listening to God and obeying him. It comes highly reccommended.

Fairy Tales: At The Back of the North Wind, The Complete Fairy Tales, The Day Boy and the Night Girl, The Golden Key, The Light Princess, The Lost Princess, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, by George MacDonald.
C.S. Lewis said that he fancies he never wrote a story that did not in some way borrow from MacDonald, and it was MacDonald who served as his mentor in The Great Divorce. These different fairy tales are profound, moving, and some of the deepest literature I know. They are rare gems equally appropriate to children and adults.

Father Arseny, 1893-1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father : Being the Narratives Compiled by the Servant of God Alexander Concerning His Spiritual Father
This book shows how the light of Heaven shines in the darkest situations. Father Arseny was a survivor of the brutal “special sector” death camps of the Stalinist regime, and is the kind of person who can light a candle in the darkest corner of Hell. One comes away from this book feeling, not the atrocity inside and outside of the brutal Stalinist death camps, but a good that could shine even in those circumstances. I highly reccommend it.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey.
This book, written by a doctor, explores the beauty and power of the human body, and by analogy the body of Christ. Chapters 15 through 18 awakened me to the goodness of touch — hugging me used to be like hugging a board, but I now have a very present and powerful touch. It was because of them that I wrote A Treatise on Touch. A very beautiful and thoughtful book.

First Things: A Journal of Religion and Public Life
This journal is about putting first things first, as described in the opening editorial. It has substantial and intellectually mature treatments of many of the issues of our day. If you like it, you might consider subscribing.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, by Jerry Mander
Neil Postman presents one good argument as to why television is not the bestthing since sliced bread. Mander presents four, developped at greater length. There is less of a lively pace, and the argument gets weird some of the time, but it still produces thought-provoking and serious arguments as to why television should be eliminated. Among the excellent comments may be found, “The programming is the packaging; the advertising is the content.” If you watch more than an hour of TV a week, take half an hour of your regular TV time and devote it to reading this book.

45 Effective Ways of Hiring Smart! How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game, by Pierre Mornell, et al. (Author has also written another excellent title, for job hunters: Games Companies Play)
Written for people who hire others, this is a book on how to read people. It seems to me to do a good job of living up to its rather large title.

Foundations of Cognitive Science, ed. Michael A. Posner
This is my favorite textbook; it presents an interdisciplinary field, cognitive science, and is fascinating reading.

Galileo, Science, and the Church, by Jerome J. Langford
I make it a personal rule not to reccommend a book I haven’t read, and this book justifies breaking that rule.

I, and I suspect you, have heard in science classes a moral fable about a heroic natural philosopher named Galileo who was martyred by the evil, oppressive, and censorious Church. It is a beautiful story — showing, as well as any morality play, that being a scientist is good, and the Church and its concept of orthodoxy are demonspawn (sentiments that are echoed in, for example, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy having an entry for persecution of philosophers, but no reference to persecution by philosophers — not the faintest reference to the bloodbath that culminated the siecle des lumieres with cleaning ladies and eight year old children guillotined as much as clergy and statesmen, with patriots standing at the foot of the guillotine to be sprayed by the blood of the unfortunates and then eat their still living flesh; nor any reference to the hundred million lives lost, and the blood that has flowed like a river every single time people have taken Marx’s philosophy as a good basis for a political order). But the Galileo fable has no connection with fact.

Among other points may be mentioned that Galileo scientifically produced garbage — no experimental data and no particularly good interpretation of those results — that Galileo was friends of the Pope but alienated him and made a number of enemies by being a jerk, and that Galileo was preceded in his heliocentrism by nearly half a century, and that by a cardinal. The only reason the story is told is as part of the process of brainwashing people to worship science and despise the Church.

The Game (movie)
Q: What do the following three things have in common?

  • A joke.
  • A Zen koan.
  • The book of Job.

A: They all share something with The Game, and the effect in that movie is stunning.

Gather (hymnal)
This is a lively, modern hymnal of the sort that achieves several dishonorable mentions in Why Catholics Can’t Sing. That stated, it has a number of songs that I cherish and that were new to me, including “Canticle of the Sun,” “Gather us in,” and “The City of God.”

This is the songbook used by Koinonia at the Newman Foundation at the University of Illinois, and for that reason I cherish it — I purchased a copy when I had almost no money, just to be able to have those songs. I used a few of its songs to improvise on in my second recorded tape.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher et al.
This is, as far as I know, the best book for dealing with conflicts where another party and you can’t yet agree on something. I don’t think that this is the substance of life, but conflicts are bound to happen, and knowing this book will be immeasurably helpful in dealing with some conflicts.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas E. Hofstadter.
This book is one of the most stunning displays of intellectual fireworks I have read. It relates art, music, stories, and mathematics, along with wit, witticism, and clever dialogues. It started out as a little pamphlet, and Hofstadter soon realized he was writing more than just a pamphlet explanation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
This is just a great book, useful for nurturing the reader in Christian wisdom — and one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read. I got a lot more out of this than out of the parts of La Divina Commedia that I’ve read.

Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers, by James T. Webb et al.
Being very smart does not just mean more of the same kind of intelligence most people possess; it means possessing a different kind of mind. When I first read this book, it seemed to me to be part of the cult of giftedness; my estimation has since changed to recognizing a special needs population, with its strengths and weaknesses, and providing insight into things such as an unusual sense of humor and special moral concerns.

Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, by Peter Kreeft
Hebrews catalogues what a few giants of faith did, and then says (11:13-16, RSV):


Christians have historically placed a major emphasis on Heaven and the hope that is there, and today Orthodox believers give a high place to bringing Heaven down to earth. For beauty’s sake, I wish to quote another passage, one that is very close to my heart (Rev. 22:1-5):


Kreeft’s book could as well be entitled, “Heaven: The Heart’s True Home.” I consider it to probably be the most profound and one of the most beautiful books on this list, and would deeply recommend it. It both speaks of Heaven — the sort of reason why, on a young adult retreat where a getting-to-know-you question was “If you could visit one place, where would it be?”, I answered in perfect seriousness, “Heaven,” giving not a physical ‘where’, but an infinitely greater spiritual ‘where’. It also tells how to listen with your heart — something very, very important in life.

Heretics, by G.K. Chesterton
A part of being in a culture means a kind of blindness, a “How else could anyone think of it?” Heretics unmasks the blindness.

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, by Francis Schaeffer.
This book is on par with The Abolition of Man, providing a much more culturally in-depth treatment of how Western thought is falling. It is a deep and extensive writing, as well as a fascinating read. It deals with the interior schism between head and heart, something well worth escaping.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
The title sounds positively Machiavellian, doesn’t it? Don’t let that deceive you. I prefer to talk with people who are trying to follow the principles in this book. It tells a lot about how to be a person others will genuinely enjoy being with.

I Saw Gooley Fly, by Joseph Bayly
This book is a collection of short stories; the first one, from which the book takes its title, is about a college freshman who is a complete klutz, gets into all kinds of accidents, and can fly. Not fly an airplane or hang glider or kite, mind you; he can jump out of his third-storey window and sail over to the dining hall.

I read that story after my best friend Robin, who is quite busy, took the effort to type it up and posted the whole printout to a forum wall. It struck a deep enough chord that I poked around until I purchased one of two available copies from a suggested book dealers’ network, by a friend who works at a used and rare bookstore. I recently read it, and am glad to have gone to the trouble to find it.

What’s so impressive about this book? In a word, creativity. The stories are as creative as Dorothy Sayers’ “Pantheon Papers”, but it’s not just one work like that in a book of essays (which are insightful and quite often creative, but do not fill the same literary niche). Someone who likes the creativity shown in my different writings may find I Saw Gooley Fly to be a rare treat.

Best odds for getting a copy? Probably inter-library loan.

Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, by Dinesh D’Souza
This book helped me make sense of some of my own experiences, and offers an alternative analysis of racial tensions besides, “Continue with what we’re doing, only more of it and faster!”

In Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster
This book was given to me when I was baptized in Malaysia, and I am glad to have read it. It guides the reader on a spiritual journey inward, upward, and outward, in four disciplines each:

Part I: Meditation, Prayer, Fasting, Study
Part II: Simplicity, Solitude, Submission, Service
Part III: Confession, Worship, Guidance, Celebration

The note on the first page reads:

Presented to MR. JONATHAN HAYWARD on the occasion of his baptism on 13 JUNE 1993, by the Petaling Jaya Gospel Hall.

—Ephesians 3:16-19—

Ephesians 3:16-19 RSV reads:


Introduction to Eugenics, booklet
This booklet, which struck me as too weird to be true until I actually did some research, is something I haven’t been able to find online, but I believe there are probably some good books on. Nutshell is that the eugenics movement is alive and well, appearing under various masks such as Planned Parenthood: Margaret Sanger, the organization’s founder, being openly and actively interested in reducing the number of black babies born — though her successors are much better than that, and instead work on having abortion clinics situated well to take on charity abortions (‘situated well’ meaning ‘in minority neighborhoods’). The belief in a population explosion (which is a bit absurd, if you think about it: why should population growth in third world countries suddenly meet such astronomical growth after being more or less stable for millenia, and why is apocalyptic overpopulation still approaching despite repeated and careful predictions for the doomsday which have come and gone) is listed as a major eugenic success.

The Joy of Mathematics, by Theoni Pappas
When I tell people that I’m a mathematician, the reaction is usually some mixture of one or more of awe, fear, and pity. They’ve had a couple of bad math classes, and therefore they figure that a math major experiences a concentrated form of such torture. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and this book explains to a non-mathematician what joy and beauty lie in such a profession.

Kevin Trudeau’s Mega Memory, by Kevin Trudeau
Long ago and far away, people had memories that were prodigious by our standards; in Somalia, a large minority of educated men have memorized the Koran—without knowing Arabic. There is a proficiency in using memory that is mostly neglected here, and it can be useful. As I write, I’m using the basic technique to keep with me about twenty distinct points in an hour-long speech.

I’m at a disadvantage using these skills; they work best for a concrete mind rather than a very abstract one like mine. You may well find it easier to use the techniques than I do, and I still find them useful. Kevin Trudeau’s book is one of several practical how-to books, and knowing even some of it is useful.

Labyrinth (movie—out of print, check an older rental store)
This fantasy movie is visually exquisite, and has the penultimate scene in M.C. Escher’s “House of Stairs”. Morally, it is the only movie I can recall seeing whose villain really tempts someone instead of shooting at him; the story goes on and has more and more things fall apart; the heroine keeps saying, “That’s not fair!” — and finally says in her heart, “It’s not fair, but I’m going to give it my determination and my elbow grease. I can identify with that; I have met difficulties I would not have imagined possible, and yet still I follow God — all the more powerfully, if anything. The term ‘eye of the tiger’ refers to a soldier who has been wounded and then returns to battle; there is no warrior so fierce as the eye of the tiger. I am in spiritual warfare the eye of the tiger, and this movie means a lot to me.

Leadership Is an Art, by Max DePree
I was calling random recruiters to send a resume… one of them was AC Recruiters, and (having seen many meaningless acronyms) did not guess that the AC stood for ‘air conditioning’, and was meant to place air conditioning repairmen etc. So I called, and had a pleasantly relaxed conversation, and he happened to know one guy in Homewood, “the best boss you’ll ever have.” He passed on my resume, and Lou (the head of the company) wanted to meet me. I asked him, “What’s the title of that book he’s so enthusiastic about?”, and when he told me “Leadership Is an Art”, checked out a copy to be able to read it and be prepared for the interview… and checked it out, and found that it was solid gold. It is the most humane and moral — not to mention effective — form of capitalism I have yet seen, and I would like to work under it. Lou, acting out the principles in this book, had a sign at the front door saying, “Welcome Jonathan Hayward”, and we talked for over an hour.

This little book could be summarized as the Sermon on the Mount applied to business.

Leadership University
This site is an anthology of a lot of the best stuff on the web; it is worth at least a week of reading. It was where I found Abortion: A Failure to Communicate, and other gems.

The Lefthander Syndrome, by Stanley Coren
Apart from trying to make left-handers into another angry minority (a cure which is worse than the disease), this is a fascinating book about left-handedness.

Listening, A Practical Approach, by James J. Floyd
The art of communicating well consists far more in being a good listener than in being a good speaker. Few people want someone to talk to them; many people want someone to listen, and then share a something afterwards. A short and valuable read.

Love is Stronger Than Death, by Peter Kreeft
This book looks at love first as a stranger, then as an enemy, then as a friend, then as a mother, then as a lover: each mask worn must be looked into and embraced until it dissolves and shows the next mask. The last mask to come off reveals the face of God. This is an excellent companion to Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing; we live in a pain-killing culture that is terrified of facing death, and this book provides a mature and thoughtful invitation to come, and see what death is. I found it to be very moving.

My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
A classic.

Never Alone: A Personal Way to God, by Joseph Girzone
This is a gentle book, that may introduces spirituality to people who cannot see God because of pain caused by perversions of religion.

An Orthodox Prayer Book
I wish I could put the print version of a prayer book like this. Alas, this book is hard to find in print.

The Orthodox Way, by Kallistos Ware
This describes the Christian faith with fingerprints on it. It has the kind of beauty of a very personal touch, not only because of the mystical author, but much more because the author brings in the fingerprints of his tradition.

Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith, by G.K. Chesterton
After Chesterton wrote Heretics, someone asked him, “If that is what we shouldn’t believe, what should we believe?”

After a moment, he said, “I am going to write a book about that.” So he wrote Orthodoxy

Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis
This is an enjoyable read about a fantastic journey to another world.

Participant Observation: Step by Step, by James P. Spradley
This is an anthropology text, but some of its concepts have broader application.

Pensées, by Blaise Pascal

Qu’est-ce donc que nous crie cette avidite et cette impuissance, sinon qu’il y a eu autrefois en l’homme un veritable bonheur dont il ne lui reste maintenant que la marque et la trace toute vide, qu’il essaye inutilement de remplir de tout ce qui l’environne, en cherchant dans les choses absentes le secoures qu’il n’obtient pas des presentes, et que les unes et les autres sont incapables de lui donner, parce que ce gouffre infini ne peut etre rempli que par un objet infini et immuable?

What then does this avidity and powerlessness cry out to us, if not that there was once in man a true happiness of which nothing remains save the quite empty mark and trace, which he futilely tries to fill with everything around him, looking in what he does not have for what he does not find in those he does have, and which either one is incapable of giving him, because this infinite void can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object?

Pascal knew a haunting romance as well. Food for thought.

Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis
The sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, this describes the main character brought to a sinless world to be his representative as the sinless Eve was being tempted.

Phantastes, by George MacDonald
This is a faerie romance for adults. It was my favorite book for a time, and reading it let me know that I could write A Dream of Light.

The Pilgrim’s Regress, by C.S. Lewis
This allegorical defense of Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism was Lewis’s first writing after his conversion: a little rough around the edges, but a good writing. Lewis knew romance’s haunting as well.

Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence, by David Kiersey
I have read both Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II on the suggestion of a reader, and thought considerably about whether one of these texts should be included. The case for inclusion is that they offer an invaluable enrichment to interpersonal understanding, and for reasons I explain below, one beyond the benefit offered by standard descriptions of the sixteen Meyers-Briggs personality types. The case against it is that it is woven through and through with a very destructive philosophical error, one that appears humane and reasonable on the surface and at the core is a far worse poison than racism. If I knew an alternative, a book that would offer the same insight without mingling it with poison, I would include that; not knowing of any such alternative, I think I will reccommend it with a warning.

The idea of the sixteen personality types based on four personality dimensions is one of the best things to come out of Jungian psychology — the only one, for that matter, that I have encountered which is separable from Jung’s Gnosticism — and Meyers and Briggs created a tool that allowed most people to get a good quick-and-dirty result that would help them to understand themselves better. The good thing about a book about the sixteen personality types is that it allows people to read about their own types, and quite probably come to understand themselves better. The bad thing about such a book is that it provides too much information to be assimilated or navigated by the casual, nonspecialist reader. The reader’s type, read with interest, is quite probably the one personality type that will be remembered. Maybe one more for spouse, if the reader is married — but not sixteen. Sixteen are too many to keep track of.

Enter Please Understand Me. This book provides a road map, connecting Meyers-Briggs personality types with the four classical temperaments. Each temperament is a cluster of four similar personality types, and the four temperaments provide a much more manageable learning feat. I at least walked away from both books with a clear understanding of all four temperaments, not just my own. The books do treat all sixteen personality types, but within the context of a coherent and manageable framework. The reader is likely to walk away from either book with a far better picture of human variation than from any straight description of the sixteen personality types.

That’s the good news. What’s the bad news?

Errors often come in diametrically opposed pairs — such as legalism and libertinism. C.S. Lewis said that the Devil always sends us errors in pairs — he wants our extra hate for one to pull us into the other. The pair of errors I am concerned with here is as follows:


There are no legitimate personal variations. Every difference is a matter of right or wrong. Everybody should strive to adhere to every standard I want to adhere to. There are no matters of right or wrong. Every difference is a legitimate personal variation. No person should apply any of his standards to anybody else.

I am not going to tell you which of these errors is worse; I am not going to say which is the real error to be aware of. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, that’s exactly what the Devil wants. He wants us to be so focused on how bad one of those errors is that our extra hate for it will suck us into the opposite — like the pickpocket duo where one member urgently warns you about a spilling cup of coffee so that you won’t notice that the other has stolen your wallet. Like extreme heat and extreme cold, they are quite different from each other, but both extremes produce the same undesirable result: they make you quite thoroughly dead.

I am not going to tell you which of these errors is worse, but Kiersey is. He succumbs to the temptation. Kiersey bewails one error and uses its awfulness to lure the reader into the other. From a theologian’s perspective — or from a demon’s, for that matter — it doesn’t particularly matter which is which. In this case Kiersey bewails the error on the left, luring the reader to embrace the error on the right. He makes no distinction between preferences in matters keeping to a schedule vs. open-ended playing by ear, or keeping a neat vs. creatively disorganized house, and choices in matters such as embracing faith vs. delving into the occult, or chastity vs. lust.

The treatment of sexual practices in Please Understand Me II deserves particular note. I was going to say that the text makes no distinction between sexual purity and promiscuity — but then I realized that that is not quite correct. It is certainly true that one temperament’s tendency towards sexual promiscuity is described in respectful, nonjudgmental terms — and that two other temperaments’ tendency to do what they choose whether or not contemporary society approves (that is, whether or not it violates the concensus of the Natural Law shared by innumerable times and places — save that the choice of loaded language leads the reader to regard these standards as arbitrary and parochial). When, however, one temperament at least tries to be abstinent before the wedding and faithful after, it is described in language that appears to be neutral, nonjudgmental and “just the facts, Ma’am” — and somehow manages to describe this purity in what I consider to be the most degrading language in the text. It calls to mind the maxim, “Where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.” Chastity isn’t exactly proscribed, but it is a mark of talent to be able to appear to be impartially and nonjudgmentally reporting the facts and still paint a picture that’s that unflattering. There is no hint in the text — in the chapter on mating or anywhere else — of the freedom and joy of sexual union between a husband and wife who offer each other their virginities on their wedding night and choose to be faithful thereafter.

I would like to elaborate a little more about what I said about this being a worse poison than racism. I wasn’t just making a poetic exaggeration, like someone who comes in during the summer and says, “It’s hotter than Hell out there!” I was making a literal statement. I am a white male — and if racism is not defined as “the prejudice of whites against blacks and other minorities”, then my tenure as an American in a non-Western nation at a time when anti-American sentiment was running strong, my experience of (for example) having a careful and respectful question met with an angry rant, and other experiences of getting only the dregs left after those in power had considered how to meet the needs of those types whom they considered worth caring for, gives me at least a limited basis to know, by experience, that racism is nasty. Even after this, I do not believe that racism is the one unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost, that it is presently made out to be. It is as if a person may be dishonest, may be coldhearted, may be arrogant and lazy, and he is like everyone else an imperfect person — but establish that he is really, genuinely, and truly racist, and then he embraces the unacceptable. You think I exaggerate? For the next week, as you go about your life, count the number of times you encounter a communication from some group working “against racism,” and the number of times you encounter a communication from some group working “against coldheartedness.” I will be surprised if the ‘working against coldheartedness’ tally totals to a tenth as many as the ‘working against racism’ tally. For that matter, I will be surprised if the ‘working against coldheartedness’ tally is not zero.

It makes sense to say that a person is a smoker and is relatively healthy. Cigarettes do damage to any person’s lungs, but it is possible to regard a person as being overall healthy despite the very real damage caused by smoking. In the same sense, it makes sense to say that a society is openly racist and relatively healthy. Not by any means that the racism is harmless — it causes real and significant harm. But that harm can coexist with other areas of health. A society can be openly racist, can nurse grudges against other ethnicities, be they minorities or the denizens of other nations — and live on for centuries, alive and kicking. It is poison, but not all poison, not even all strong poison, is lethal. The same cannot be said for poison found in Please Understand Me. As a member of the host of ideas Lewis analyzes in The Abolition of Man, no society can long embrace such ideas without destroying itself. Societies have taken such “progressive” views before — and then fallen apart. In addition, this idea appears a reasonable and enlightened idea, one that a person should be respected for holding — to say that you are for racism, on the other hand, is to instantly forfeit all claim to be taken seriously. Poison that appears to be food will harm far more people than poison in a bottle clearly labelled, “Poison”. For these reasons, I mean quite literally that one of the fundamental ideas woven throughout the text is worse than racism.

Having made this critique, I wish to say that Please Understand Me is a book worth reading, even with such a massive flaw — and I believe that the danger is lessened to a reader who has been forewarned. That I would list anything I believe to justify such a warning is meant as a reccommendation.

There are two editions of the book: Please Understand Me, published in the 1970s, and Please Understand Me II, published in the 1990s. The second book is about twice as long, and talks about differences in kind of intelligence found in temperaments and personality types; the first book gives a very good feel for what people are like — experience of the world and actions. I am not exactly going to reccommend one book over the other, so much as provide a helpful question: “Do you specifically want to know about mental competencies enough to read twice the length of material, or would you prefer a shorter piece that gives the same insight into most aspects of personhood but does not significantly treat intelligence?”

(Side note: I would not endorse Please Understand Me II as a resource for understanding multiple intelligence theory. It does not ask the question of “What are the basic kinds of human intelligence?” so much as “What are the temperaments and personality types, and what kind of intelligence may be associated with each of them?” It’s kind of like a book on academic departments asking, “What are the academic departments in a university, and what kinds of intelligence may be associated with each of them?” That would be a good resource on academic departments, but it’s the wrong place to look if your goal is to understand multiple intelligence theory.)

Prayer, by Richard Foster
An in-depth treatment of one of the most foundational areas of the Christian life. Giants of faith have said things like, “I am so busy that I cannot get on with less than two hours of prayer a day.” This book is worth reading and following.

The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, by Shih Chao-Chou
This provides a collection of profound koans (illustrative stories), not concerned primarily with moral cleanliness, but with something that will sharpen and challenge almost any mind. It was after reading them that I wrote Christian Koans.

Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Law, Science, and the University, by Phillip Johnson
Darwinism is the cutting dullness of the sword being wielded against Christianity; the sword is named ‘naturalism’. Johnson here provides a good and broad view that is well worth reading, especially for Christians in an academic context.

Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements, Thomas Oden
About how modern theology has gone sour; interesting and quite honest. A must-read for anyone going to seminary.

Saint Francis of Assisi, by G.K. Chesterton
This book is full of “magic from another real world;” it does a good job of telling the story of one of the most colorful saints in history.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll
“The scandal of the Evangelical mind,” Noll writes, “is that there’s not much of an Evangelical mind.”

This deals with the tragic story of how many people who really love the Lord and yet who are very far from loving God with all of their minds. An Evangelical equivalent to Why Catholics Can’t Sing.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey
This is a practical and popular book, and it is practical and popular precisely because it does something deep.

Sources of the Self, by Charles Taylor
This book provides a good history of the philosophers whose work has shaped our modern sense of identity. It’s ponderous reading; I thought I hadn’t gotten anything out of wading through it until I found myself referring to its concepts in a conversation.

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein was a sex-crazed libertine, anti-Christian, and deliberately wrote to be offensive. Stranger is the most monumentally flawed book I have read which I would even consider reccommending to another person — and I have. This book is a deeply interesting book. I identify a lot with Michael Valentine Smith, and Charles Wallace in A Wind in the Door.

Tales of a Magic Monastery, by Theophane the Monk
I’ve given away a couple of copies of this book. Its stories are short, simple, and profound.

Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu
Written millenia ago in China, this book is a collection of 81 poems (and the inspiration for me to write The Way of the Way). There are a number of insights about slowing down and growing still, relying on God’s grace, and other things…

Technopoly, by Neil Postman
This book could be summarized in a single question: “Was technology made for man, or man for technology?” It has a number of valuable insights, and I would like to see a new edition published with an appendix about the Web. His insights about the detrimental side effects of technology, and the sorceror’s bargain involved in each. I wish Postman would write a book entitled, The Luddite’s Guide to Technology, which would analyze different technologies and the advantages and disadvantages of using each, to help people decide when and where to buy what technological items — and suffer from the sorceror’s bargain as little as possible.

That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis
The conclusion of Lewis’s space trilogy, and a good fairy tale for adults.

Three Philosophies of Life, by Peter Kreeft
This book explores three philosophies of life: life as empty vanity, as developed in Ecclesiastes, then life as redemptive suffering, as developed in Job, then life as love and joy, as developed in the Song of Songs. It is a fascinating book, and the onethat (after being lent to me) motivated me to check out other Kreeft books.

Truth is Symphonic, by Han Urs von Balthasar
A fascinating theological read about the beauty of diversity in the created order.

Two-Way Prayer, by Priscilla Brandt
Reading this book helped me desire a prayer that is listening as well as speaking. People who like Experiencing God might like it.

What Color Is Your Parachute?, by Richard Bolles
This book is practical by remembering what people forget when they try to be practical. There’s something shining that often dies in people; Bolles has helped me pursue work where that something shining is alive.

Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, by Thomas Day
A Catholic equivalent to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. This deals with truly awful Catholic music, and is of relevance to a whole lot more people than just Catholics.

Why Go to Mass?
A short article dealing with why consumer-oriented services are not a substitute for services designed ad maior Dei gloriam.

A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine l’Engle
This book is special to me, both because of its imagination, beauty, storytelling, depth, imagery, description of kything, etc., and because I identify with Charles Wallace — in needing to adapt while remaining wholly myself, and in other things.

Die Wolkenreise, a picture book by Sis Koch, with illustrations by Sigrod Heuck
This children’s book was given to me by a very good friend after her trip to Germany, and it is one of the most beautifully tragic books I have read. Here is the rough paraphrase translation she gave me (as best I can reconstruct it from memory, the pictures, and a very rough knowledge of German — the pictures are exquisite, and the reason I am reccommending the book):

Once the wind said to a cloud, “Come with me, let me blow you about, and show you the world!

“I will show you woods, hills and fields, and plains with wild horses and fields, cities, and even deserts, seas and mountain islands. I’ll show you desert islands, coral reefs, and even more, all around the world.”

The cloud said to the wind, “I can’t do that. I have to go and make it rain.”

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine l’Engle
The book introducing the characters in A Wind in the Door.

An Orthodox Looks at a Calvinist Looking at Orthodoxy

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A Calvinist Looks at Orthodoxy

Jack D. Kinneer





The Appeal of Orthodoxy






The Shortcomings of Orthodoxy








A Concluding Assessment




Reprinted from New Horizons of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, as posted at http://www.opc.org/new_horizons/calvinist_on_orthodoxy.html. Used with permission.

I wrote the following reply:

Dear Dr. Kinneer;

































But the way to understand this is less analysis than worship.

An Orthodox Bookshelf

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The Greatest Treasures

These are some of the greatest treasures around to read, and there’s a lifetime worth of reading in them. I may be critical in some of my reviews, but I only list books I think are worth reading, and the pieces I criticize are probably worthy of a more charitable spirit.

The Orthodox* Study Bible (Kindle)
In this Orthodox bookshelf, a decisive pride of place goes to The Orthodox* Study Bible. I have felt more comfort in reading it than any other Bible, and it gives a real sense of reading the Bible, not privately, but in community with the saints across the ages. The footnotes are decisively better than the Bible de Jérusalem / New Jerusalem Bible, and those responsible for The Orthodox* Study Bible decisively understand that the proper use of footnotes in a text is not to speculate about how a text came together across the ages, but to illumine the Bible as the ultimate work of practical, spiritual, and mystical theology, with footnotes oriented towards practical, spiritual, and mystical theology.

Then why have I put an asterisk in The Orthodox* Study Bible?

The Orthodox* Study Bible shows signs of a group of converts who have described as trying to do too much, too fast. Their selection of saints for commentary is limited to the first millenium (have no nineteenth century saints already stood the test of time?), and the introduction harps on the ancient Church.

If harping on the antiquity of the Church doesn’t seem strange, think about how we are all the continuation of the royal, ancient bloodline of His Majesty King ADAM and Her Majesty Queen EVE. Poetry and meaning are alike profound when, to quote a Protestant author, C.S. Lewis has Aslan proclaim “Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve.” Such a thing may be poetic to note, and quaint, but it would be a strange thing to harp on and say that you respect other people primarily as carriers of an ancient bloodline. Most of the respect we have, or should have, for other people is not for the antiquity of our bloodline, but because they are fully human, however we may understand being human, because they are made in the image of God and can be transformed into the likeness of Christ. It may be a useful thing to remember that a beggar or a person we can’t stand is ultimately family to us, but very little of the language of respect for the human person, whether Orthodox, other religious, or secular, states that we are the fullness of the ancient bloodline of our first parents. And, notwithstanding that eagerness to re-create the ancient Church was foundational to the Reformation and can still be found in Protestant influences, the basis of respect for Orthodoxy is not that it is Ancient Orthodoxy, but that it is Holy Orthodoxy.

Though The Orthodox* Study Bible introduces its material by talking about the authentic continuity of the Orthodox Church (without so much as a brief passing mention of our antiquity as the authentic continuity of the bloodline of Lord Adam and Lady Eve), I have never heard such harping on the ancient Church among cradle Orthodox. Admittedly the Orthodox Church is the same living organism as the ancient Church, but in the altar at my parish, most of the books are ancient in character (service books, Gospel books, a Greek New Testament), not one of them is labelled as ancient: no service book touts “the ancient Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.” ‘Ancient’ is not the point.

And there are other things like that are written to “smooth things over” at the expense of truth in The Orthodox* Study Bible. For one instance, the note on Creation on page 2 says like a politico, “Regarding scientific questions about the scientific accuracy of the Genesis account of creation, and about various viewpoints concerning evolution, the Orthodox Church has not dogmatized any particular view.” This is misleading disinformation; origins questions may well be among the many areas “not dogmatized”, but there is a near-universal consensus among the Church Fathers, including the Church Fathers of the first millenium that The Orthodox* Study Bible returns to, that the earth was created in six days about six thousand years ago. This may be inconvenient to point out, and it might be easier to help people get along if we say that several views are legitimate, but this is twisting facts for the sake of convenience. (And for the recdord, I believe in a billions of years old earth and legitimate disagreement over how God created the world), although the world was created 3:00 PM, March 25, 28 AD.)

With all that stated, The Orthodox* Study Bible has a number of helpful and edifying notes in an overall tenor that provides guidance in reading the Bible, and nothing better has come to fill its place.

Perhaps another work will come along that is not trying to do “too much, too fast,” but The Orthodox* Study Bible has left behind a pretty big pair of boots to fill, and there is much profit in it whether you know the Bible well or are just beginning to dive into it.

The Philokalia (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4), (Kindle)

The Philokalia is a library of practical theology, and there is nothing else like it. It is a collection about the science of spiritual struggle, and though entries can vary substantially from each other, they are very edifying and can orient us to what is truly important in life.

The Philokalia is best viewed, not as a book, but as a library of classics, and the intent is that people would read specific works as selected by a clergy member. I can attest that simply reading it cover to cover is a second-best solution.

Many Orthodox give The Philokalia first place outside of the Bible.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent
The Ladder of Divine Ascent is a work addressed to monastics, and is read each Lent in monasteries. However this is far from being a treasure only useful to monastics. It is a jewel of the Orthodox Church as a whole, and all kinds of people have read The Ladder of Divine Ascent to great spiritual profit.

The Prologue of Ochrid (Volume 1, Volume 2 (Daily selections online; Old Calendar)
The Orthodox Church has a great tradition of biography as theology: one grasps holiness by reading the lives of the saints. A rich sampling of these lives is found in the daily readings of the Prologue, which tells of all the saints commemorated on a particular day.

The Jordanville Prayer Book
Praying the prayers of the Church is a great help along the way, and The Jordanville Prayer Book (or any other good prayer book) is like the script to a play: it is not primarily meant to be read silently while sitting in a chair, but spoken aloud, brought to life, preferably from a standing position.

Prayers, with fasting, are an area to work out with one’s priest or spiritual father. They come alive when they are practiced as part of the life of the Church.

Akathists (links to many good Akathists; note that the website, Orthodox Wiki, should be taken with a little grain of salt).
St. Romanos the Melodist is said to have miraculously received the prayer of the Akathist to the Mother of God. Since then there is a tradition of Akathist prayers; the term “akathist” means “not seated,” i.e. standing to deliver the prayer. The first Akathist, and many of the ones that follow, are beautiful and powerful prayers.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 1, Series 2) collections (Read online)

The Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers provide the standard reference translations to a great many Church Fathers. This collection receives its own asterisk because while the texts are Orthodox they were translated by Anglicans grinding a massive axe against Rome. Hence a condemnation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide by St. John Chrysostom is turned into a condemnation of abortion and infanticide alone; Augustine may be allowed to condemn Natural Family Planning, but there is an axe that is ground in the texts and is even more explicit in the accompanying notes and introductions.

Still, this does not stop a great deal of glory from the Fathers; read, for instance, St. John Chrysostom’s Treatise to Prove that No One Can Injure the Man Who Does Not Harm Himself. The collection, for all its deficiencies, is still a great treasure.

St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Kindle), Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, etc.
I have picked these two examples of works that it is work to read. I read them, not because I have grown enough that they seem easy and natural to read, but because they stretch me and challenge me to enter into a larger space. Fr. John Behr said, “The only thing worse than not reading the Fathers and reading them systematically;” in a similar fashion, the Fathers are of the most value to us, not when we find an endorsement of what we have always believed, but when we are challenged and invited to grow. I am challenged by these works, and I pick out these two as representative examples of innumerable works that challenge me to grow bigger and unpleasantly challenge me to enter a larger world.

Lesser Classics

This is a collection of lesser greats, limited in number by the limitations of what I am familiar with. Note that this does not include a lot of popular authors, such as Fr. Seraphim (Rose), or Met. John (Zizioulas); in the latter case, I answered the question, “Is John Zizioulas an existentialist in disguise?” by asking, “Where’s the disguise?” However, there is some good work produced recently, and I’ve even read a little of it.

The Orthodox Way
The standard print introduction to Orthodoxy is His Eminence Metropolitan Kallistos’s The Orthodox Church, but what captivated my attention was not that more systematic work but the less systematic and more mystical The Orthodox Way. It is an excellent introduction to Holy Orthodoxy.

The Way of the Pilgrim (Kindle)
The Way of the Pilgrim is a glimpse of one pilgrim for whom the Philokalia unlocked the treasures of the Gospel. The author, whose name is lost, would today be considered a vagrant; that was the form taken by his pilgrimage. Along the way the Jesus Prayerunfolds in his heart. The book is a lesser classic, but it is a classic.

External Influences

One queer postmodern theologian speaking in class spoke of how the Fathers used “the best philosophical resources of their day,” the implication being that we should use the postmodern resources fashionable today. To that I might reply: the best philosophical resources available to the Fathers were neo-Platonism, and the best philosophical resources available today are neo-Platonism. That may sound harsh, but the Church that said “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” used philosophical resources without limiting themselves to them as captives. Neo-Platonism was at once the air the Fathers breathed and the opponent they struggled against; in today’s terms, slightly clumsy to apply to them, they strove for a critical reception of neo-Platonism, or developed (or rather preserved) a counterculture.

These books are not exhaustive; but they serve to point to an area that is worth reading. But perhaps this section of this Orthodox bookshelf is less important than one might think.

Note here that there is one category I have deliberately excluded: Gnostic and other heretical writings. Gnostic writing is spiritual pornography and I regret I have ever set eyes on it. I thought it would provide perspective to help me understand Orthodoxy. It did not, and I would rather have read any Orthodox resource than that form of spiritual poison.

Plotinus: The Enneads (Kindle)
A central work of neo-Platonism, and possibly the best single resource in philosophy from outside the Church into what the Fathers drew from when they drew from pagan philosophy, in the image of one Church Father, “like a bee that goes straight to the sweetest nectar and ignores all else.”

Plato: The Republic (Kindle)
A seminal work that was the first domino that would build to neo-Platonism. There are parts of the work that seem strange today; Derrida called it “the world’s oldest, longest, and least funny political joke”. I would amend that to “the world’s oldest, longest, least funny, and least intentional political joke.” The treatment of sexuality reads like something plagiarized from Monty Python today, but viewed in relation to historical context (in books I shouldn’t have read), it does not seem nearly so provocative a stance against currents of its own day as in currents of our own day. It sets forth one of the oldest radical political ideologies, but for all that it is a seed of many important things, many good things, and I lightly adapted its most famous passage in Plato: The Allegory of the…Flickering Screen?.

Almost last, and certainly least,

I would at least like to mention my own offerings, not because there is any conclusion that they are classics, but because I cherish them and they are what I have to offer. They are in:

The theology section at Jonathan’s Corner.

I invite you to visit my collection of theology Kindle eBooks!

The “Big Room”

Programmer slang uses “the Big Room” for outside, the “room” one is in when one is not hunched over a computer indoors. And there is something profound to looking beyond books and learning from life.

Monasticism has a maxim, “Your cell will teach you everything you need to know.” And the precept holds whether or not one is a monk; staying in one’s place and learning things is powerful. Most monks have been illiterate and not owned books; the maxim is not simply “Your bookshelf will teach you everything you need to know,” but “Your cell will teach you everything you need to know.” The here and now that God has put you in, that you are tempted to escape by real or virtual means, will teach you everything you need to know.

The Blacksmith’s Forge: An Extension of Euclidean Geometric Construction as a Model of Computation

Models of Computation: The Church-Turing Thesis and Geometric Construction

The Church-Turing Thesis posits that the equivalence class that includes the Turing machine, and is also the basis for modern digital computing, is the most powerful model of computation. And it hasn’t been proven, but when people have checked out other models of computation, every one has turned out to either be equivalent to the Turing machine, or become lesser.

Quite probably it may be impossible to construct some useful computer by this model; quite possibly for that matter its greatest usefulness may come through simulations by digital computer, in which case its simulations will automatically not exceed Turing machines or digital computer by its power. However, even if is a failure at scaling some of the highest peaks, it seems an interesting and provoking possibility to explore.

Standard Euclidean geometric construction is a model of computation. It is not usually presented as such, but you start with a diagram and all that may be inferred from it, and you have two tools, a compass and straightedge, as well as a pen or other implement to draw with. And the solution to a construction is to come back with an algorithm that will go through computational steps that start with its initial state represented in a diagram, and use your three tools to create the desired end result.

Both models figure into the model of computation discussed here, but the model of computation is different.

The model of computation described here is like a blacksmith’s forge. I have read that one of the first things a blacksmith makes, is a pair of real tongs. And a blacksmith is not just turning out nails and other things for other people, but tools used in the forge. The core insight here is that a blacksmith can create tools, much as a computer programmer may make customized tools for their own work. This is at its core a geometric model of computation, with a more obvious debt to geometry, although the tools should be sufficient to implement a Turing machine. One person made the interesting suggestion that it is applying recursion to geometric construction.

The blacksmith’s forge

The main tools the blacksmith’s forge works with are as follows; the first three are taken from geometric computation:

  1. A compass, that can be used to draw circles.
  2. A straightedge.
  3. A marking implement.
  4. A jigsaw. The geometric plane is conceived not to be one point thin, but a uniform distance thick. When the blacksmith’s forge has constructed the closed outline of the shape, the shape can be cut out.
  5. Pins, equal in length to two or more (whole) times the thickness of the plane. If one pin goes between two shapes one on top of the other, and the shapes are not otherwise constrained, they will be able to pivot around the pin with respect to each other. If two or more pins go through, then the two positions will be rigid in how they are joined.
  6. Pieces cut out with the jigsaw, possibly joined by pins.

Idealized Physics in the Blacksmith’s Forge

The blacksmith’s forge has an idealized physics. The pin and jigsaw are parts of this idealized physics, but another part of the physics is that pieces do not tip over: any number of stackings that would immediately fall over in the real world are assumed to simply stand upright, the pieces resting on top of any other piece immediately beneath them for some positive areas. There is friction, and pieces pushed to where one entity crosses another, for instance, will immediately stop moving if they are no longer being pushed. Items touching each other can be pushed past each other, but only so far as they are pushed. This does not exhaust the physics, but if you think of the physics of ordinary geometric construction, you should be close to the mark.

Three Classic Problems

Trisecting an Angle

Consider the following diagram:

That is half of it. Take another one, rotate it by one notch and pin it to the bottom one, and you have forced equality for the angles between adjacent arms:

Take this constructed device, rotate it so point A is at an angle’s vertex, B is in the angle’s clockwise side, and expand or contract the accordion-like device so that C is at the angle’s other side. Angle DAB is now one-third of the (trisected) original angle.

Doubling the Cube

Consider the following modification of the previous diagram:

Take a circle, and draw a concentric circle at twice the radius. Then place the constructive device so point A is at the center, and expand out or collapse in so that B is on the initial circle. Then collapse or expand the device so that it is on the the new “double radius” circle. Point E will have a distance to the center equal to the original radius times the cube root of two.

Squaring the Circle

Cut out two circles, and a tall, thin rectangle. Put the circles snugly and squarely so that the line between them and the rectangles is perpendicular to the rectangles’ long dimension. Put pegs through the circles’ centers through the perpendicular rectangle, and mark (A) both the first circle and the rectangle where they meet. While holding the first circle squarely, push on the outer circle until it wraps the long rectangle around the first circle, and mark on the tall rectangle where it touched the circle’s mark.

You now have a distance marked out on the tall rectangle that is 2π times the radius of your circle. Getting the square root of π is not terribly difficult; you can draw two subsegments of a line segment, one equal to the original circle’s diameter in length and one equal to circle’s circumference, and then draw a long line segment perpendicular to the first segment starting where the two meet. Take one of the corner-like squares above, place it so that it touches both endpoints of the line segment, and while continuing to hold it tight to the ends of the segment, move it so its inner corner lies on the perpendicular line segment. The distance from that point along the line segment to the center is equal to the square root of π times the length of the original circle’s diameter:

(And though this would be laborious, I see no reason why such calculations could not emulate a Turing Machine.)

You’re Using Extra Privilege!

I am indeed using extra privilege, but may I point something out?

There is a bit of a historical difference between now and ancient Greece. We now have a number of branches of mathematics, and though there may be likes and dislikes, it is something of an outsider’s question to ask, “Which is right: real analysis or modern algebra?” There is a general sense that as with board games, if you want to play chess you play by the rules of chess and if you want to play go you play by the rules of go.

The three questions neatly and easily answered are the standard three famous problems which it was subsequently proven to be impossible to construct with Euclidean geometry. And these were not simply mathematical chess problems; I don’t know the stories for all of them, but legend has it that there was a plague killing many people and an oracle stated that the plague would be stopped if a cubic altar were built that was twice the volume of an original cubic altar. This was not one where people only used Euclidean construction because they decided they could only play by the rules of Euclidean geometry. This was a “by any means necessary” matter, and it should be understood as much. The attitude of “This is the set of rules for this particular game” is anachronous; people would be very glad to have an extension to Euclidean construction that would allow solution of at least one of these problems.

And it is not clear to me whether this is any sense of useful model of computation. (I personally think, out of my second master’s thesis, that the human brain can do things no Turing-approximant style of computers can do. Some people have said, “A year spent in artificial vision is enough to make one believe in God,” and there are some basic things, like making sense of an I can read book, that most humans do well but are so far insurmountable to computers; one writer wrote of an embodied AI robot “Cog,” “The weakness of Cog at present seems to be that it cannot actually do very much. Even its insect-like computer forebears do not seem to have had the intelligence of insects, and Cog is clearly nowhere near having human intelligence.”

But I think this model of computation is interesting, whether or not it proves useful.