A very rational, intellectual, masculine idea of God

There is a feeling, which I find throughout the Orthodox path, that the right brain and not the left brain is dominant. That would have been the case in England before the Reformation. Monasteries, huge painted churches, shrines, holy wells — all of it was destroyed. They took out the monastics, who are the mystical force of Christianity, and they took out the Virgin Mary, who is the feminine force. They took out the connection to place — the holy wells and the shrines and the rest of it. So we ended up with a highly masculine Christianity which always tends towards theological abstraction. You can’t talk much about Mary anymore, so you kill off the feminine aspect of the divine. You can’t have monks, who are the mystics praying for you and your country and the world; and you kill off all the small local things, like the wells and the trees and the shrines, that connect the God above to the earth. All you’re left with is a very rational, very intellectual, very masculine idea of God.

As a result the whole the thing starts to wither, and that’s what’s happened in England and the Protestant countries. Not that I want to be attacking Protestants, or making a sectarian point,  but there’s something deeply lacking in Western Christianity, and I have found that it’s not lacking in Orthodoxy.

Paul Kingsnorth via Rod Dreher