Replies

The criticism misunderstands Pope Francis’s remark. In fact, he is, like his predecessor Benedict XVI (from the point of view of us Orthodox Christians, the best Pope of Rome in living memory by far, and perhaps the best Pope of Rome since the schism of the Patriarchate of Rome from the Church) moving back toward Orthodox theology.
Francis expresses himself badly on the point (unless he explained more of what he meant than was quoted) but he is speaking in the manner of the Cappadocian Fathers and St. Dionysius the Areopagite’s “On the Divine Names”. It is neither God’s divinity nor His ominpotence, Francis was denying, but conceiving of God as a mere being, or seeing His activity as the activity of a mere being like a magician (or, for that matter an engineer). God is the very ground-of-all-being, prior to even the distinction between existence and non-existence, and no created binary distinction is applicable to Him.

Modern atheism correctly concludes that there is no mere being with the attributes we Christan ascribe to God, but bound in the philosophical shackles of rational categories, cannot see that the God whom we worship is not a being, but the transcendent ground-of-all-being, Who transcends all the categories of thought in which the rationalist deals, transcending the distinction between unity and multiplicity, subsisting from all eternity as the All-Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God, and even the distinction between transcendence and immanence in the Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What a convoluted way of implying that the Orthodox Church has from its inception believed in Darwinian evolution.